by Tim Heald
The ship lunged lightly, reminding them, as she did from time to time, that she was a ship and not a grand hotel. It was such a strange phenomenon, this salty escape which was in its way a self-imposed imprisonment. Hell was gentlemen hosts, he mused. Or other passengers. Or nothing to do but eat and drink and be fried lobster-pink by sun, sea and wind. After a day or so it took him ten minutes to decide whether to have a gin and tonic or a Tom Collins.
‘May we join you?’
It was Vultur and Irmgarde, fresh from bonfire night.
They were both clutching coffee cups and liqueur glasses and looking blackened but unbowed.
‘I apologize,’ said Doctor Umlaut, ‘for the earlier diversion. It must have been upsetting for everybody.’
‘Not as much as for you,’ said Tudor politely.
‘It is nothing,’ he said, as they sat down heavily. Tudor and Elizabeth’s table was a four, laid for two, but with a quartet of chairs, ‘but whether a mistake or something more sinister, well... ’ He grinned. ‘Occasionally I feel times at sea are in need of a little enlivening. Storm perhaps. An outbreak of stomach sickness. A man overboard. Don’t you agree?’
‘Up to a point,’ said Tudor. ‘But on the whole people come on the Duchess to get away from that sort of unpleasantness. It’s like country-house weekends. People didn’t go away expecting to find a body in the library, a suspicious butler, an adulterous hostess and Miss Marple or Monsieur Poirot asking a lot of impertinent questions and coming up with some embarrassing answers. They just wanted to play billiards and croquet, drink champagne and flirt. Same with being on board the Duchess. Passengers come for a quiet life – eat, drink, be quietly merry, tango with a gentleman host or a beautiful passenger and generally escape unpleasant reality.’
‘My turn to say “up to a point”,’ said Doctor Umlaut, smiling, ‘and to observe that life isn’t like that. A truism verging on a cliché. There is a sense that a great ship is a microcosm of the greater life in the world outside. Not unlike the country-house you describe. And if reality should rear its ugly head it is much more difficult to escape its clutches on board ship than on dry land. Perhaps that is a paradox too.’
He’s trying to tell me something, thought Tudor, but he’s being so elliptical that I’m not sure what he means. He wasn’t altogether sure that Umlaut himself knew.
‘What I mean to say,’ said the little man, seeming to sense the lack of comprehension and the ambiguity that had caused it, ‘is that nothing is ever what it seems and never more so than in an isolated, hot-house atmosphere such as this, from which, for a while at least, there is no escape. But you will know this from your academic studies. Forgive me. I am presuming too much, encroaching on an area of expertise which is foreign to me just as it is familiar to you.’
Tudor nodded his head but said nothing.
‘And,’ Doctor Umlaut abruptly changed the subject, ‘talking of academic interests. I thought your talk on HMS Bounty most interesting. What is your next subject please?’
‘Piracy,’ said Tudor. ‘Tomorrow at eleven.’ Doctor Umlaut inclined his head. ‘I have often wondered,’ he said, ‘about the exact distinction between privateers, buccaneers and pirates.’
‘It can be a perilously thin line,’ said Tudor, ‘but in essence an act of piracy is when a ship is seized out of control of her legal master and crew by those who have boarded the vessel in disguise as passengers. When captured they were hanged in chains on prominent headlands as a warning to others. Or staked to the ground at Execution Dock in Wapping to be drowned by the rising tide.’ Mrs Umlaut let out a little yelp of disgust but her husband seemed quite amused.
‘The last pirate was executed in England in 1840,’ added Tudor, ‘but the United States executed one in 1862.’
Doctor Umlaut shook his charred head and smiled.
Tudor half-expected him to say ‘Ach so!’ which was almost exactly what he did, adding the single line, ‘History is so often an act of repetition, don’t you think? Even at sea there is nothing new under the sun.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
Angus Donaldson’s cabin shook, trembled and rattled causing Tudor to quite involuntarily do much the same.
‘We seem to be making good speed,’ said Tudor.
‘Aye,’ said Donaldson, who was a man of few words save when cracking ancient jokes over the Tannoy. He hailed from the Kingdom of Fife and was loose-limbed and bearded. His family were all fisher-folk and his brother and nephews still manned a small herring trawler in the town of Anstruther. Angus had come south and been with Riviera Shipping most of his adult life.
‘Should be in New York on schedule if not before,’ said Tudor conversationally.
‘Happen,’ said Donaldson.
They were both standing and Donaldson suddenly and awkwardly motioned his guest to sit. They both did so. The Staff Captain’s cabin had two armchairs, upright and not particularly comfortable. Donaldson did not offer his guest any refreshment. Instead he said, ‘I’d like to extend the company’s thanks in the matter of apprehending the ruffians who attempted to hijack the vessel.’
He was not only a man of few words, he had a funny way with them.
There was a black and white masked ball in the Great Hall that evening and Tudor was already wearing his black tie and dinner jacket which seemed a marginal cop-out but could hardly be more black and white. His bog-standard black mask, purchased in the ship’s boutique was in his pocket. For the time being he was instantly recognizable.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Tudor. ‘Thank you.’
The Staff Captain flashed an official smile of acknowledgement and then said, a touch ominously, ‘But.’
The monosyllable hung in the air between them for what seemed like a long time. Then Donaldson repeated it making it seem even worse second time round.
‘That will be all. It was Ms Goldslinger’s initiative to embroil you in the unpleasantness that occurred earlier and I’m afraid she exceeded her authority. No harm done fortunately, but from now on the proprieties will be observed and Riviera Shipping will take care of things in the normal way.’
‘You can’t behave “in the normal way”,’ protested Tudor, ‘when events just aren’t normal.’
The Staff Captain shrugged. ‘Riviera Shipping is prepared for every eventuality,’ he said, as if reciting from an instruction manual.
Tudor shrugged back but could think of no immediately sensible riposte. It was abundantly clear that the company was not prepared for every eventuality. The Irish had taken it by surprise: Tudor had saved its bacon. Now the captain was off sick believed missing, and the ring-leader of the pirates had escaped. A key passenger had almost been incinerated. An empty lifeboat had been recovered with hundreds of thousands of pounds-worth of gold ingots and possibly a blood-stain. Ashley Carpenter had planted an obituary notice of his good self. There was nothing normal in any of this and, as far as he could see, the official response had been non-existent. No wonder Donaldson shrugged. A collective shrug seemed to be the official reaction. Not good enough in his estimation.
‘Anyway,’ said Donaldson, ‘while thanking you for your valuable assistance I must point out, again on behalf of the company, that you are engaged solely as a guest speaker so that while we appreciate your continued efforts in that capacity we must ask that you in no way exceed or deviate from the terms of your contract.’
‘Say again,’ said Tudor, in the vernacular he had picked up from the crew’s communication. No one in the navy seemed ever to use the word ‘repeat’.
‘I say again,’ said Donaldson, ‘stick to what you’ve been hired to do. Lecture the passengers. Understood?’
He made it sound very like a threat and Tudor finally took the hint, made only the flimsiest pretext of an excuse, and left.
* * *
The masked or was it ‘masqued’ ball that followed was as surreal an affair as he had expected and feared. He and Elizabeth had bought the most basic Venetian-style masks
from Ye Shoppe situated aft on the boat deck. Ye Shoppe had obviously bought a job lot of such things from a manufacturer with an obscurely Middle Eastern sounding name in Skegness. The masks were heavily sequinned and came in two kinds. One was a sort of permanent business of the type airlines provided to shut out light when attempting to sleep and came with elastic bands which fitted over the ears. These not only left your hands free for dancing, or whatever, and would have been useful for gentleman hosts attempting to prevent their leaning partners from toppling over. They also ensured that the disguise did not slip. The other kind came on sticks like sartorial lollipops. They were cheaper, meant that at least one hand had to be kept clutching it and were imperfect at hiding one’s identity. In other words these masks slipped.
Music was provided by the ship’s resident band, the Dukes of Dixie, an elderly gaggle of jazz musicians who had originally played together in the far-off days of Radio Luxemburg. Transferring to the later pirate radio ship, Caroline, moored for a while in the middle of the North Sea the Dukes had rather taken to the ocean wave so that when she was launched the Duchess was, in every way, made for them. Once svelte, lean and darkly handsome, the Dukes had become grey, tubby and mildly seedy, but they could still hold a tune and belt it out satisfactorily. Their lead singer who called himself Hiram G. Billy, but whose real name was something quite different, could have rasped a bronchial rap with George Melly who must have been much the same age.
The dancers seemed, on the whole, to have some difficulty keeping up with the Dukes but that didn’t really matter much. Meanwhile, waiters shimmered about the ballroom with sparkling drinks of uncertain provenance and the ship rolled.
‘If Mom and Dad could see me now,’ muttered Elizabeth, as she led Tudor round the floor and peeked over the top of her hand-held mask.
‘I know what you mean,’ said her partner, perspiring. It seemed awfully hot to him though not, apparently, to everyone else.
From time to time passing dancers waved, bowed or in other ways made themselves known to Tudor and Elizabeth. This was polite but tantalizing since without exception they appeared to have masks which worked and which in many cases seemed to have come from more exotic and expensive places than Ye Shoppe or Skegness.
Much of this dress was decidedly fancy so that Tudor in his regulation dinner jacket and Elizabeth in her almost equally regulation little black dress felt ill-prepared and out-of-place. They were not real cruisers in the sense that the majority of the Duchess’s passengers clearly were. They lacked the wardrobe and they grew restless with too much indolence and pleasure. Most of the disguised dancers, however, were having a ball.
‘Who are all these people?’ asked Elizabeth, as they shuffled round the small and undulating floor. ‘I mean have we, like, been introduced?’
The Dukes seemed to accelerate their syncopations as if to emphasize their difference from the paying passengers. Quick, quick, slow seemed to become fast, fast, quick but it made little apparent difference to the gentlemen hosts, their partners and those who followed. They stuck to their own time and beat which was, of course, a great deal more leisurely than the Dukes’ geriatric frenzy. Sticking to their own time and beat was, Tudor reflected, what passengers did best. The Duchess had guidelines which needed to be adhered to but within these confines her clientele did pretty much as they pleased in their own distinctive fashions. It was, up to a point, the purpose of cruising.
From time to time fellow-revellers bumped into Tudor and Elizabeth or they into them. Because, however, they were masked neither Tudor nor his partners knew who they were. This, Tudor supposed, was another of cruising’s golden rules. One was always bumping into people. You were seldom sure who they were and the odds were that you would never see them again. This didn’t matter for they were ships that pass in the night. Or to be precise, they were on ships that pass in the night. Or to be even more precise, they were like ships that pass in the night.
‘Ouch!’ exclaimed Elizabeth. ‘You just trod on my toe.’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Yes, you were,’ she riposted. ‘Thinking too much. You may not be the niftiest dancer ever known but you’re not a foot-treader. Penny for them.’
‘What?’
‘The thoughts.’
The band was playing something Tudor thought dimly was by Gershwin though one Dukes’ melody sounded pretty much like another. They were that sort of band and made that sort of noise. Syncopated muzak. Rentabilk.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I was all over the place.’
‘Including my feet,’ said Elizabeth with feeling, though less feeling than a few moments earlier when Tudor had first stepped on them.
One of Prince Abdullah’s wives cannoned off them and bounced away at around forty-five degrees giggling coquettishly. She was, surprisingly, locked in a stiff embrace with an obvious gentleman host in a vaguely Mexican-eagle head-dress and mask. The Aztec eagle had the hallmarks – tottering dexterity, louche innocence – of Ambrose Perry but then so many of the gentlemen hosts were similar walking oxymorons. The girl might not have been one of Abdullah’s brides but she wore a jellaba – which obviated the need for a mask – and Tudor was so influenced by the cliches of shipboard life that he had begun jumping to conclusions he would never have reached on shore. Whatever, the girl had dancing eyes and seemed familiar. Tudor had an odd sense that the Prince’s harem was increasing every knot. It was as if they were multiplying by some strange osmotic reproductive process. This could have been an illusion.
The band seemed to be playing ‘The Eton Boating Song’ souped up. Presumably a Humphrey Lyttleton adaptation created perhaps for a Beaulieu jazz festival of the 1950s. It was like all the other noises made by the band but somewhere in among the farty-brassy stridences you could just about make out the plangent notes of the old rowing number with its references to jollity and togetherness which seemed apt and to ‘feathering’ which didn’t.
Mandy Goldslinger slunk past, facially disguised but instantly recognizable on account of her constricted and cantilevered carcass entubed in sequins and lame and doing something mildly South American with a black-masked figure in the uniform of a ship’s doctor. She waved a touch too gaily. The game Doctor and Frau Umlaut, recognizable by their singes, limped past forlornly. Prince Abdullah sat on a sofa surveying the hordes, smoking implacably.
‘Mass murderers,’ said Tudor. ‘Looking around here I’d say they might all have done it.’
‘That’s silly,’ said Elizabeth.
‘Maybe,’ said Tudor. ‘But it’s life and death as well. Nearly everyone prancing around this room is capable of murder.’
‘So what?’ Elizabeth had to shout in to his ear as they shuffled round the Great Hall, ‘We’re all capable of murder. Ashley taught me that and you say the same. But as you also say, the fact that we’re capable of murder doesn’t make us all murderers. We could all commit all sorts of crimes but that doesn’t turn us into criminals. Civilization is about the suppression of instinct. If we all did what we could and, more importantly, if we all did what we’d really like then life would be impossible. We’d all be killing each other, nicking each other’s possessions, having sex with each other’s partners and Christ knows what.’
The band had moved on to ‘Amazing Grace’. Strange how they managed to make the same noise all the time and yet underlay it with a just recognizable tune.
‘I still think the room is full of potential killers,’ said Tudor, as they cannoned off a couple who had the ample paunch and posterior of the Goronwy Watkyns. Whoever they were they made no acknowledgement of acquaintance but waddled off, wiggling, more or less in time to the music.
‘That’s silly too,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I think you’ve overdone it. I think you should go to bed.’
‘I do feel tired,’ said Tudor. ‘It’s been a rough old day. But I still think there’s more murder and more crime at sea than most people admit. Which means that there are plenty of
criminals afloat. And plenty right here all round us, thinly disguised or not.’
‘Bed,’ she said, ‘definitely time for bed.’ And for a fleeting moment Tudor thought he caught a whiff of double-entendre.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Once more he slept fitfully. This actually meant that he tossed and turned and had trouble breathing when on his back and even more when he turned over and tried lying on his stomach. The ship was noisy and the ride bumpy but neither of these was the problem. He slept well on ships, even in storms and this wasn’t a storm in the accepted sense. He was dog-tired as well so sleep should have come easily, but somehow it didn’t. Once or twice he got up and peered out of the port hole, awed as usual, by the vast expanse of white capped nothingness of the mid-Atlantic.
Donaldson’s words bothered him. In a sense they were not new. He had been living with the strictures of hard-bitten professionals for the whole of his working life. Back home, his old mucker Trythall was permanently on his shoulder, a copper’s copper now holding the exalted rank of Detective Chief Inspector in the local constabulary. Trythall had always taken an avuncular view: OK sonny, abstract theories are all very well in your ivory tower, but when it comes to real life you should leave it to real men like me – people who’ve actually been out on the beat., felt a few collars, witnessed nature red in tooth and claw, been there and done that. You stick to your books and papers, your lectures and tutorials. You’re fiction: we’re fact.
He sighed up at the ceiling. Dawn was breaking through the night outside and forcing lightness through the porthole. Newer ships had square windows and balconies. The Duchess belonged to a different generation when seaworthiness was the first consideration in ship-building. She was almost defiantly old-fashioned and seaworthy. A professional to her fingertips.