by Peter Rimmer
The ship, and Lily White alike, were free of their umbilical cords.
"There's nothing more exciting than the unknown," said Albert Pringle as he joined her at the rail. "You ever thought how many Englishmen left these same shores. First America and Canada, now Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. As a race seems we're never satisfied… You ever been on a ship before?"
"Never."
"Me neither. One of the seamen says the Biscay's as smooth as a baby's bottom. Be nice not to be seasick. Woman all right in your cabin? Bloke seems okay in mine. Just to sleep, see, so it's not too bad. They try to put the same ages together. Lucky not to be travelling third. Sleep in bunks inside the ship they do. No portholes. Least we both got portholes though I can't open mine. Too close to the water line. Only the toffs in first can open their windows, like. You ever thought about being rich, Lily?"
"All the time," she said turning round to look down at the sea. The gulls were flying close to the water, screaming all the time in a long series of plaintiff cries.
"Me too. Just be nice not to have to suck up to people. Never to have to think about money. That must make a man very happy."
Lily began to laugh. She had a good, deep chuckle of a laugh. "I hope we're right," she said. "About the happiness. All Jack moans about is having too much money and not enough to do."
"He can give me some."
"I wonder if we are all destined never to find what we think we are looking for."
"Cheer up, Lily. Tell you what, Mr Merryweather gave me an allowance to look after you, seeing the circumstances. There's a bar back there I just passed."
"Can ladies drink in public?"
"Who cares? We're on board ship. The rules are different. Don't you feel different now we've left Blighty? Now we's all English away from home. What's your tipple, Lily?"
"Gin. I'll have a gin. Do you despise me, Albert?"
"Course not. Why should I? We both serve his purposes but in different ways… You and I are going to enjoy our first voyage. Come on. They've got a thing called deck quoits. That's after the gin, mark you. We'll get one of them seamen to show us how to play. Deck quoits! Has a nice ring to it don't you think? Who's for deck quoits," he said in his most lah-di-dah imitation. Then he took his eyes off Lily White's bosom and led her to the small bar next to the second-class swimming pool. There was a strong smell of the wide-open sea.
From the first-class rail that looked down on the second-class swimming pool, Jack Merryweather guardedly tinkled his fingers at Lily White who did not seem to see. The rail ran along the centre of the ship with steep steps from the second class up to a locked gate on the first-class rail. The classes had been separated permanently for the rest of the voyage.
Slightly miffed, Jack turned away as his servant led his mistress under the first-class deck to what Jack suspected was a bar. For a brief moment, he was almost jealous.
"Ah, Mr Merryweather!"
"Ah, Mrs Barker."
"This is a surprise. You do remember my daughter Sallie. We thought you saw us earlier on but were not sure. You remember that delightful restaurant and our cousin Ernest Gilchrist? He waved us goodbye from the dock. Such a well-mannered young man. Do you know anyone on the ship?"
"Not a soul," lied Jack.
"What a coincidence to see you here. Are you going to South Africa?"
"I rather hope so, unless the captain has changed his mind."
"Do you go on business?"
"I do not have a business, Mrs Barker. I am not in trade. Hunting is my predilection at the end of this voyage. But then we are all hunting, Mrs Barker, Miss Barker, I rather think. How long are you staying in the Cape Colony? They say the winter begins quite soon there in the Cape. The Cape of Storms. Well, this is a pleasure. It is so nice to see a familiar face in unfamiliar surroundings. We shall meet again."
"Do you know your table in the dining room?" asked Mrs Barker.
"I shall be dining with the captain."
"How fortunate."
"Depends rather on the captain and his guests."
Behind her mother, Sallie Barker's dark eyes were twinkling at Jack and both of them were trying not to laugh.
"This really is a very enormous coincidence," said Mrs Barker, knowing everyone knew it wasn't. "Until we meet tonight at the captain's welcome glass of sherry. Or do they serve rum on a ship?"
"No, I rather think the rum is reserved for the Royal Navy."
Jack, on his way down to his cabin, had a sneaking suspicion that before the voyage was out he would have an uncontrollable urge to throw Sallie Barker's mother into the sea.
There was a saying in the family, passed down to them from his great-great-grandfather. 'A man with money is easy prey.' But if they wanted to waste their last pennies on a sea voyage, who was he to stop them? They would probably have done better on a fishing trip to India, a pretty girl like Sallie Barker. And she was pretty, he said, as he let himself into the cabin.
He walked across and closed the porthole. There was a cold wind off the English Channel, even though he loved fresh air. Well, it seemed he wasn't going to be bored. He hoped she was going to show her black ringlets for the captain's party. They were pretty.
Captain Hosey, commanding the SS King Emperor, felt like a stuffed dummy in his monkey jacket and rued the day he had agreed to captain a passenger ship. To make it worse, he was forced to cut his beard to make himself look more like the philandering king who at last had succeeded his mother, Queen Victoria, to the throne of England. King Edward liked to be photographed in his naval uniform when he wasn't pursuing the wives of his subjects.
Captain Hosey was a Manxman, born and bred on the Isle of Man and had always lived in sight of the sea. He was a rough seaman and not a man for boosting first-class passenger's egos. And to make it worse tonight, there was going to be a toffee-nosed grandson of The Captain sitting at his table. If there was one thing Captain Hosey hated most it was people spending other people's money. The Captain, founder of the line, had earned his money, even if some people had called him the Pirate.
Not even trying to hide his Manx accent, he greeted his first-class passengers one by one. The ship was neither rolling nor pitching which was uncommon in the Bay of Biscay for the time of year. Through his feet he could feel every throb of her engines, and knew his old shipmate, Jim Green, was doing his job. The sea was always an enemy, never to be taken for granted.
Personally, before his ship sailed, Captain Hosey had inspected every part of the SS King Emperor, even climbing up into a lifeboat to make sure the water cask contained fresh water. He was known as fussy Hosey to his crew, and liked the name. The more he fussed, the more he could push the dangers away from everyone on board his ship.
A girl with black ringlets that hung past her ears drew every man's eyes even before she joined the queue to meet the captain. Comfortable in the knowledge of his wife in the small house in Castletown with the last of their brood, young Jim, his only son, he let his eyes rest on the perfection of a beautiful woman.
"This is Mr Harry Brigandshaw, Captain," said the purser.
Harry, having seen Sallie Barker for the first time a fraction earlier, saw the direction of the captain's eyes and smiled as he put out his hand for the man to shake. He was almost sure the captain gave him a wink that had nothing to do with his grandfather. Then the purser was introducing The Honourable Robert St Clair just loud enough for Mrs Barker to prick up her ears.
"Anything is possible," said Mrs Barker as they lined up to join the queue.
"What is, mother?"
Putting her mouth close to her daughter's ear she whispered. "Every man in the room is looking at you. That young man shaking the captain's hand is an Honourable. His father has to be a peer of the realm."
Sallie, more interested in the young man in front of what she suspected would be an honourable twit, watched the other man take a glass of sherry from a ship's steward. His skin was someh
ow dark from living out of doors, but she rather hoped he was an officer in the Royal Navy. With willpower, Sallie concentrated on the back of Harry Brigandshaw's head. Then, just as he turned to take a sip of sherry, he looked up across the twenty yards that separated them, his piercing blue eyes sinking deep into her soul. She was so dumbstruck she was unable to give even a flicker of a smile in return. Then the eyes turned away, leaving her sick in the pit of her stomach.
"So there is such a thing as love at first sight," she said to herself.
Three crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling of the first-class dining room, crowning the flower of England with a celestial light. The heavy silver cutlery shone at their places on the pure white damask tablecloths, eight passengers in evening dress at each table except the captain's, where there were twelve including the captain and the chief purser. There were no flowers on the tables for fear of the ship rolling with the swell; the legs of the tables were clamped to the deck. From a raised platform designed to look like Juliet's balcony, two fiddlers expertly scraped their bows over catgut, making a pleasant sound that lingered with the well-bred genteel conversation and the flow of stewards carrying silver dishes under silver domes to people who had never been hungry in their lives. There was a self-satisfied air of ownership in nearly every face, the face of a race of people who had reached the pinnacle of the greatest empire ever seen on earth, people certain of their heritage who feared no one, with a Royal Navy twice the size of the next four sea powers put together. The Boer War had merely been an irritation, a colonial war, a necessary use for a small portion of the treasure of the British Empire. Maybe if some of them had taken the time to count the number of ships being built by the Kaiser in Germany and the government of the United States, they would not have been so complacent.
The captain had just explained to Lady Worthington-Hall how he had begun his career at sea before the mast as a cabin boy. The lady had deliberately and slowly replaced her soup spoon in the bone china soup bowl from Royal Doulton. Then she stared at the captain for long seconds saying not a word. The captain slurping his asparagus soup with relish, his head bent to the bowl, ignorant of the horror in the eyes of the lady who found herself dining with a man who had once been a cabin boy, however long ago.
Harry, stifling a smile, received a glare of his own that told him clearly the lady knew his grandfather had been in trade. From his right, Jack Merryweather gave him a slight dig in his ribs and made him spill the soup from his spoon that was halfway from the bowl to his lips. From his left, Robert St Clair was desperately trying not to giggle. Across the white-clothed table, a man with a monocle, a bald head, and two rows of campaign ribbons stitched to the breast of some kind of colonial uniform, widened his eyes in disapproval at the three reprobates, causing his monocle to drop to his chest, just stopped from the soup by a purple cord that hung around a scrawny neck. The meaning of the look was clear. The three of them should be sent straight back to the nursery where they belonged.
"I sailed twice with your grandfather before he went ashore," Captain Hosey said to Harry across the table. "He was a great man."
"I never knew him despite the fact he died when I was in my teens. Fact is, when my mother and father ran away to Africa he never mentioned my name or that of my father ever again."
The captain had pushed his soup bowl away with satisfaction and was waiting for the fish. If Captain Hosey didn't like passengers on the ship, he appreciated the food which came with the inconvenience. Then he let his mind go back many years. There had once been a rumour about The Captain's youngest son running off with the eldest son's wife. Put a ladder up to her bedroom and carried her off with her little son and the boy's nurse. Old Captain Boyle had told the story with too much gin in his belly, when both of them were ashore on leave in Liverpool, before he had caught the weekly package to Douglas and the Isle of Man. The next day Boyle had told him never to repeat the story.
"I don't know the whole story," the boy was saying to him, "but now my father is dead, I intend asking my mother and my maternal grandfather for the truth."
"Maybe some things are best unanswered," said Captain Hosey. "I didn't know about your father. I'm sorry, son."
"Elephant. An elephant," said Harry letting it hang in the air as the misery washed over him.
For the rest of the fish course no one spoke at the captain's table.
With his mind on a problem that had vexed him all his life, Harry ate his way through the poultry, the meat course and a large bowl of ice-cream, letting the prattle of conversation go on around him without joining in. Some of the other passengers, sensing the bad undercurrent, talked polite trivia for the rest of the meal.
Harry was sure he was a bastard. There had been a church wedding of his parents at the end of the Anglo-Boer War, performed by his missionary uncle in his uncle's great new church that was to lighten the darkness of darkest Africa. They had all said the wedding ceremony was a re-avowal of a much earlier civil ceremony as, at that time, there were no Christian churches in Rhodesia. Uncle Tinus and Aunt Alison, who had once been Harry's nurse, had trekked all the way to Cape Town and a Dutch-Reformed Church just in time before Barend was born. For a while, he had tried to wheedle out the year of his parent's civil ceremony from his grandmother Brigandshaw, who had finally come on a visit from England, and his Grandfather Manderville, who had lived with them in Elephant Walk for as long as Harry could remember, but to no avail. There was no other question he could ask any of his family that caused such a rapid change in the conversation.
"Am I your son?" he had asked his father before he left for his three years at Oxford University.
"Oh, yes. Don't you worry about that one, Harry. That's one thing you will never have to worry about."
"Then how was it that my mother was married to my Uncle Arthur?"
"Who told you that nonsense Harry? Arthur was a swine. And that's a fact no one will ever deny. I have to check the gang building the weir down by the river."
"Why won't you tell me the truth?" he had said to his father's receding back. For a moment, his father stopped in his tracks and seemed about to turn round and answer his question. Then he had walked on. And now his father was dead, his grandmother Brigandshaw was living with her paid companion and the Pekinese dog in London, and everyone at the house refused to talk. Maybe someone would tell him the truth in the end.
He rather thought the captain of this ship knew the answer to his conundrum but it was not the right thing to wash the family linen in front of an employee of the family company. And then the thought came to him like a flash of light. If Uncle Arthur was the eldest son of the Pirate, sometime called The Captain, and he had been born when his mother was married to Uncle Arthur, he was the heir to Colonial Shipping, not his Uncle James. He could still be his father's son and the legal heir to the second largest shipping line in all England. Then his thought of Robert and Jack knowing he was a bastard sent cold shivers down his spine. Then there was Madge and young George if the civil ceremony had never taken place. Being born illegitimately in England was worse than being born with one eye in the centre of the head. No gentleman would dare marry Madge if Barend did not fulfil their childhood pledge. And with Barend run away, to where no one not even his mother knew, that was unlikely. Madge would be a spinster for the rest of her life. As a bastard, the chances of ever being accepted in the first-class section of a ship were less than nothing. Captain Hosey might well be right. 'Some things are best unanswered.' But a man had to know. No man could ever go through life without knowing who he was where he really came from. It would not be fair to his children or his children's children. And he was going to have children as without a family there did not seem to be very much in this life for Harry to make him content.
They all left the dining room to take their coffee in the lounge. With so much on his mind he was not looking properly where he was going and would have bumped into the girl with the dark ringlets had not Jack put out a rest
raining hand. His reverie was rudely interrupted by the grating voice of the ringlet girl's mother.
"Good evening, Mr Merryweather. Why, what a nice idea. Let us all take our coffee together. So nice for you to make new friends, and the food was so good. Perfect, some would say. Sallie and I are so impressed you are sitting at the captain's table. You must introduce Sallie to your new friends, Mr Merryweather. Mr Merryweather is an old friend of the family," she finished to no one and everyone.
"Mrs Barker, Miss Barker, may I introduce you to Mr Harry Brigandshaw of Rhodesia and the Honourable Robert St Clair of Corfe Castle. Gentlemen, Mrs Barker and Miss Barker."
"The Castle, I am afraid, was knocked down by Oliver Cromwell," said Robert.
"And where then do you live, Mr St Clair?" said Mrs Barker accusingly.
"In Purbeck Manor."
"Sounds complicated to me to come from a castle that doesn't exist."
"Life, Mrs Barker, usually is," said Jack Merryweather placating her.
'More by far than you can ever know,' thought Harry, smiling politely at the old battle-axe while he touched her outstretched gloved hand, his mind again hearing his father's voice.
'Before you marry, my son, always look at their mothers first; in the end they all turn out like their mothers. It's the way nature's made.' But when he touched Sallie's ungloved hand he had to pull back quickly, there was so much static electricity.
"I'm so sorry," she said. "I have just removed my gloves."
There was something wrong that Harry was unable to put his finger on. The electricity had repelled him from the girl at first touch.
Then they were all swept along into the lounge, and to what later on became three good rubbers of bridge.
The mother, said Harry when he had taken himself off to his cabin, was a right pain in the arse, but giving credit where credit was due he admitted to himself she was a damn good bridge player. Harry, not being very good at cards, had lost one pound, seven shillings and thruppence. To make it worse, Harry had had to slip Robert's losses to him under the table. The big winner that night was Mrs Barker.