Soon it was Mrs Cornelius’s turn to resort to Captain Quelch’s medicine chest. One by one the passengers fell to the terrors and miseries of a heaving Atlantic. One by one they accepted the cures of the generous old salt’s Red Cross cabinet. It supplied them with a variety of soporifics. Wolf Seaman found the morphine to his taste while Mr Mix, who, like myself and Quelch, was not hugely affected, chose to avail himself of what in those days was called ‘Tunisian tobacco’. This was actually Mexican in origin. He shared a taste for it with Harold Kramp, the ship’s mutton-chopped, half-caste Chief Engineer, son of a Dutch mechanic and a Javanese girl, with whom he had formed a friendship. They would talk together for hours while passing the brass pipe back and forth. With the exception of myself, Captain Quelch and the somewhat abstemious O.K. Radonic, it would be fair to say that almost the entire company and crew crossed the raging Atlantic in a state of complete and cheerful euphoria. Captain Quelch and I preferred to keep our minds sharp and happily his ‘refuelling stop’ in Haiti had provided us with a good supply of best-quality Colombian ‘Frost’. I have to thank that god-given miracle-drug for bringing us so close together and making the trip, for me at least, both an education and a pleasure. Such male friendship is of the highest quality, as the great Oxford philosopher Lewis tells us, though he himself, of course, was chiefly interested in the prepubescent, at least as subjects of literature and photography. We are not discussing here those European grotesques who inhabit the squalid bars and bals exotiques of Tangier and Tripoli, or who seek out the wretched freaks for which Beirut is famous, but the best type of homme de bien: physically and mentally healthy, of whom Röhm’s poor, murdered young men were so frequently the exemplars. Another crime laid at the door of the German leader, another accusation which led him, in his final years, to take the disastrous steps towards defeat which, had he been supported rather than attacked at such crucial times, might never have occurred. I am no apologist for Hitler’s excesses, or Röhm’s either, but most will agree there is a balance which has been lost. Those were not holiday camps, I am the first to admit. Nobody claimed that they were. Sacrifices had to be made or, as Goering said to me in a moment of intimacy, ‘wir werden keine die Zukunfte haben.’ What was Hitler expected to do when faced with such a fait accompli? Betray his own people? It was a terrible dilemma. No puedo esperar. Could any of us have handled it better? This is the stuff of noble tragedy, of Wagner and May. Alle Knaben. Alle seine Blumen. Ayn solcher mann! Und alle guten Knaben. Viele guten Knaben. Vor longer Zeit. Sie hat sich verändert. Captain Quelch would have understood this better than anyone. Sadly, by 1933 he was a ruined victim of French colonial politics and, I suspect, Spanish perfidy. He had, if anything, an excess of courage. He trusted his fellow-creatures far too much. That was why the older man so quickly became my mentor, a veritable Charon, kindly and full of practical wisdom, to ferry me across an especially agitated Styx, which after more than a week of gales, in which our little steamer behaved with wonderful precision and steadiness, made even me somewhat squeamish. All I needed to restore myself was a glass or two of Captain Quelch’s special laudanum, after which I was happy to join Esmé in the land of dreams whose beauty and strangeness was hardly a match for the tremendous realities of Nature which, night and day, continued to hurl our steamer about as casually as a mayfly in a mill-race. But even those forces could not distract her by more than a few miles from her chosen course. With all his other qualities, Captain Quelch was also an instinctive navigator who frequently took over the wheel himself. It was this, I think, which made his laskars so loyal to him. Together with Chief Kramp (to whom our Hindoo sailors referred sardonically as ‘Sri Harold’, in reference to his visionary leanings) they had sailed with him from the South China Seas, through the Malay Straits, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and the Atlantic and now they sailed with him into the Mediterranean. Christopher Columbus or Francis Drake never had a better nor more loyal crew than was commanded by that unsung hero of a hundred daredevil ventures, truly a reborn Elizabethan navigator, his blood that blood of the gentlemen of England who sailed to defeat the mighty Spanish galleons which would make Romans of them once more. That mixed bunch of heathen Chinese, Malays, Dacoits, Muslim and Hindoos from the sinkholes of the Far Orient would have followed no one else save Satan Himself. They and ‘Sri’ Harold would have sailed with Captain Maurice Quelch across the fiery oceans of Hades if that was where he took a cargo.
A glass of brandy in one hand, a book of verse in the other, he would stride sure-footed up to his bridge and there drawl out his orders. Only his Second Officer, a feeble, pasty-faced individual by the name of Samuel Bolsover, seemed in any way critical of him. But Bolsover was of that typical British petite bourgeoisie which agonises so frequently about status and righteousness, and spends so much of its time squatting on a toilet straining for a bowel movement, that it has all but forgotten the unavoidable actualities of life. For him any mild sensation was like a spiritual experience. Also, as I pointed out to him one morning when only the two of us were left at breakfast, if he set so much store by the mores of the Boy’s Own Paper, he should have remained in the Merchant Navy. This remark was perhaps a little unfair, since I happened to know he was a morphine addict wanted for the murder of a whore in Maracaibo. (Yet all the more reason, I should have thought, to keep his moralistic BOP hypocrisies to himself.) His reply, given at length, amounted to telling me that my opinion was worthless since I was foreign.
When Captain Quelch took his ‘private time’, I would have Mix set up the projector and show me my escapades in plane and on horseback, a daring transplanted son of the Steppe. I told Esmé she should join me to watch Buckaroo’s Code, my finest. She would be proud of me. Instead she became agitated.
Between her periods of sickness and her laudanum-slumber, I had little chance to know from Esmé what upset her most. By now, my darling was despairing of everything. From a spider-web of ruined mascara she wailed about her unhappy fate, convinced she would never get back to Hollywood, would never become a motion-picture star and was doomed to die in some nameless ocean. Her little fists pounded on the walls of her cabin like Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms. I reassured her that the Atlantic had a name and that the ship was wonderfully seaworthy.
We should return home in triumph. The critics would celebrate her presence in The Bride of Tutenkhamun (Goldfish’s final suggestion for a title, wired to the ship in the Gulf of Mexico).
‘Celebrate what?’ she asked, lifting her pale, pouting, delicate head from the pillows. ‘My employment as a lady’s maid? I could have got that job, Maxim, without going further than fucking Pera.’
‘A flag of convenience. Once in Egypt, you’ll have your chance. I am altering the script even now to give you a larger part. You will be Cleopatra.’
At this she revived a little. ‘The Queen of Egypt?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘eventually.’ Actually the part was for a Greek slave-girl who becomes Tiy’s rival. The plot would pivot on this triangle. The suggestion was not mine but a man named Thalberg’s. He was a friend of Seaman’s and Mrs Cornelius and had some experience with scenarios. A German of the best sort, he later went on to direct Gone With the Wind with my own mentor Menzies. I think Mrs C. met him through one of her actress friends. I was not sure Esmé would be objective enough, at that time, to appreciate the irony of her final fate (although it did offer the chance of a sequel). I contented her with some elaborate sketches of herself on top of one of the smaller pyramids, framed by a huge rising sun, flanked by palm trees. She would be clad in gold and jade and lapis lazuli and in one hand she would hold the rose of life, in the other, the rose of death.