Graham Masterton
MAIDEN VOYAGE
Passengers will remember how romantically the glowing phosphorescent waves curled back in the ship's wake, falling forever in flakes of diamond and pearl. They will remember how readily the damsel of their choice could be persuaded to a secluded spot in order to observe this poetic phenomenon. They will remember quite a lot of things, we have no doubt.
ONE
She tog cinnamon toast in the kitchen, quite naked except velvet dippers and a pink velvet hair riband, when they came the house to give her the news that her father had died.
Nigel came into the kitchen in his purple and turquoise dressing-gown, and said seriously, "You'd better pop on. Mr. Fearson's outside and says it's rather drastic."
That was probably her last ever carefree moment, her last completely carefree moment, and Nigel would remember it for years even when he was married and living in Oxfordshire with a wife called Penelope, three Shetland ponies, a duck, and a pair of overweight twin daughters with Fair Isle sweaters and freckles. He would see it as an illuminated picture postcard: Catriona standing by New World gas stove, her white face already turning towards him, and those slightly slanted eyes already beginning to cloud, her dark curly hair tied back with the riband, and the long bare curve of her back lighted by the eleven o'clock sunlight. Eleven o'clock morning on Thursday, June 12,1924: what a time and a day to be twenty-three years old and in love, especially with Catriona. She had her mother's height and her mother's figure, tall and unfashionably large-breasted for 1924, but with narrow hips. And she was easily the most devastating girl that Nigel had ever known, even more of a goddess than Rosebud Wilkinson; and he eyed her nakedness possessively as she walked across the kitchen, lifted her pink satin robe from the back of the kitchen chair, and slipped it on.
"Cat, old girl," said Nigel, grasping her shoulders. He was conscious of the slight sway of a heavy breast beneath slippery satin. "I do hope it's nothing frightful."
She nodded, but didn't say anything. Nigel hesitated for a moment, his lips pursed indecisively, then he opened the door wider to let her through into the passage. He held back for a second or two, but then he followed her, clawing quickly at his blond marcelled hair to smarten himself up. He knew the news was serious, and he felt inexplicably ratty. Chaps had no right to come knocking on a chap's door with serious news, not when a chap was just about to have breakfast.
As he passed the foot of the stairs, Nigel could hear the phonograph in the bedroom still squawking out the last few lines of "My Rambler Rose". He had bought the record for Rosebud, but in the past few weeks it had become the song that would always remind him of Catriona's body and Catriona's spirit. He suddenly felt that he might never play "My Rambler Rose" on his phonograph again; might not be able to bear to.
Mr. Fearson was waiting in the cocktail room and so was Mr. Thurrock. Against the snazzy black and gold wallpaper with its pattern of tipsy highball glasses, they looked unrelievedly staid and discomfited, visitors from another age and another morality, before short skirts and bobbed hair and fox trotting had ever been imagined, even in the most indecent of fantasies. Neither Mr. Fearson nor Mr. Thurrock had sat himself in either of the armchairs that Nigel had offered them: in one of the armchairs was a discarded peach-coloured camisole, and in the other was a dirty bread and butter plate on which someone had crushed out a purple cigarette.
"Well?" asked Catriona, her hand still on the door knob. "I'm surprised to see you."
Mr. Fearson's black morning coat was buttoned tightly over a chest that was as solid as the boiler of a small riverboat, and his cheeks were still ruddy from his kipper breakfast. He said, in a blurting voice, "It's not what you think, miss. It's not The Pop." The Pop was what she and Mr. Fearson had irreverently christened those occasional visits that Mr. Fearson was called upon to make whenever company business brought him down south from Formby. "Your father said I should just pop in to see how you were." Because in spite of all their arguing; in spite of their constant clashes over clothes, and smoking, and going out with fast friends, Catriona's father had always prized her and protected her, and wanted to know that she was safe. The newspapers a days were full of stories about cocaine, and white slavery, and unprincipled mashers.
Catriona looked at Mr. Thurrock, but Mr. Thurrock could do nothing more than remove his spectacles, fold them, and stare shortsightedly back at her out of eyes like pale-blue marbles.
"We came down on the first train," said Mr. Fearson. "We thought of the telephone, or a telegram, but your mother thought it wiser to tell you in person. It's bad news, I'm sorry to say. Your father died, just gone midnight last night, of a heart attack. Had he lived, Dr. Whitby said, he would have lived the life of a vegetable."
"A cabbage," put in Mr. Thurrock, as if it were necessary to specify which variety of vegetable.
"He's dead?" said Catriona. She was still holding the doorknob. "I don't understand you."
"Cat, my dear girl," said Nigel and attempted to take her arm, but she tugged it away. She could feel the tears in her eyes but somehow they didn't seem to do anything but blur her vision and turn Mr. Fearson and Mr. Thurrock into dark dancing outlines. The tears didn't relieve the rising lump of grief in her ribcage, nor explain why these two solemn men had suddenly appeared to give her this hateful news on a sunny June morning when it seemed nothing so tragic could possibly have happened. There were blue skies outside those curtains, and birds, and motor-car horns parping in the street. How could her father have died?
"Your mother would like it very much if you could come back with us," said Mr. Fearson. He sniffed in one nostril, and looked very unhappy.
"The rest of the family are coming tomorrow, like," added Mr. Thurrock. "Your cousins, and all."
"Was it quick?" asked Catriona.
Mr. Fearson blinked. He didn't quite know what she meant.
"Was it quick?" she repeated. "The heart attack?"
"Oh, quick," said Mr. Fearson. "Oh, yes, quick." He snapped his fingers and then obviously wished that he hadn't. "Quick as a candle snuffed out, that's what Dr. Whitby said. With us one second, and in the bosom of the Lord the next. Not even time for last words."
Catriona touched the tears in her eyes with her fingertips. "I don't suppose he would have wanted any last words," she said. "He always said that deeds made talking redundant."
There was a long silence. Then Mr. Fearson said, "I'm very sorry, miss. You do have my sympathy. It's a very sad loss."
"Well, yes, it is," said Catriona. She looked at him and gave him a tight, puckered smile. "I suppose the worst of it is that the last time I saw him, we argued."
"They say that fathers and daughters only clash because they're like each other," said Mr. Thurrock. "Same as magnets, you know. Opposite poles attract. Like poles repel."
"Yes," said Catriona. Her voice was as soft as a sheet of tissue-paper, falling from between the leaves of a photograph album. And the photograph she would always recall, whenever she thought of her father, was the one of them walking side by side through the sandhills at Formby, when she was only eight; and both of them, she and her father, had their hands clasped obstinately behind their backs, as if to make absolutely certain that they would not hold hands with each other, not for anything.