"She's coming along on the maiden voyage, isn't she?"
"That's right. She's a very attractive young girl, I'm sure you'll get on famously. A little wayward, her father always used to say, but I think he respected her for it, too."
"You sound as if you knew Stanley Keys pretty well."
Philip shrugged. "On and off. He wasn't a particularly easy man to get close to."
They passed Apsley House, the former residence of the Duke of Wellington, and parted company at Hyde Park Corner. As they shook hands, Mark said, "I'll keep in touch. You can expect a call from my company secretary tomorrow morning."
"Oh, well, don't worry about that. I'm coming along on the Arcadia, too."
"Sounds as if it's going to be a regular party."
"I am sure it is," said Philip. "Well, cheer-no."
"Cheer-ho," replied Mark self-consciously.
As he began to walk back to his hotel, however, he began to feel that in spite of all the British bonhomie of their encounter, Philip had only allowed him to be privy to part of the story. He frowned as he walked, trying to work out what it was that hadn't quite fitted together.
A newsboy yelped out, "Pape-ear, pape-ear, famous shipping magnate dead, pape-ear!"
He dug into his pocket for a penny, and bought the Evening Standard.
FIVE
He was staying at Brown's, on the Albemarle Street side, in a suite of rooms which cost seven pounds the night. As he entered the lobby, the porter called, "Messages, Mr. Beeney!" and hurried across with a sheaf of envelopes.
Mark sorted through the messages quickly, then tipped the porter half a-crown, although a florin would have been enough. The porter said, "Obliged, Mr. Beeney, sir," and retreated to his cubbyhole. Mark walked along the corridor to his suite, tearing open the messages one by one, feeling unusually despondent. Or perhaps it wasn't despondency at all; perhaps it was just that unsettling sensation that the world of shipping had somehow changed, and changed forever, now that one of its pivotal personalities had so suddenly disappeared.
"Mr. Beeney, sir, glad to have you with us," said the assistant manager, gliding past him on the left-hand side like a ballroom dancer.
Mark opened the door of his suite and stepped inside, kicking the door closed behind him with his foot.
"Damn it," he said aloud. Philip Carter-Helm had really aroused his curiosity, and he hated curiosity, especially his own.
Something tumultuous must be happening at Keys: not only within the Keys boardroom but within the Keys family itself. Carter-Helm had given him one version of it, but there had to be others. Was it true that Stanley Keys had left a quarter of his voting stock to his twenty-one-year-old daughter? Was it true that most of the small shareholders and insurance companies wanted Keys to remain independent? It was crucial to Mark if they did, because he coveted the Arcadia more than any other vessel in the world. She was the ship he would have built as his own flagship, if the board of American TransAtlantic hadn't so consistently counselled him to hold back. They agreed in principle with the idea of building or acquiring a new express flagship; but did it really have to be a gilded barge, like the Arcadia? The future of travel lay not with the first-class passenger, whose tastes and expectations required prodigious numbers of trained staff and extraordinary feats of catering; but with the second-and third-class passenger, who required only a bed, a chair, a little deck space, and plain good cooking. One director had even suggested that transcontinental aeroplanes could soon take over from the giant liners, and that in ten years" time the grand shipping companies would all be out of business.
That, of course, was somewhat far-fetched. As another American TransAtlantic director had retorted, "Your first-class passenger wouldn't contemplate crossing the Atlantic without his full quota of luggage and at least some rudimentary entertainment en route. By the time you've loaded an aeroplane with a hundred pieces of Swaine, Adeney and Brigg luggage and a Steinway grand piano, where's the room even for one passenger, leave alone hundreds?"
Mark had been torn. He recognised that tourist-class fares were going to bring American TransAtlantic the steady profits of the next decade; and he was modern-minded enough to accept that air travel might one day cream off some of the business trade. After all, there were many passengers who would be prepared to sacrifice luxury for speed. But he still believed that American TransAtlantic needed a glittering flagship; a ship which would carry the company name into high social currency all over the world, and which would lure passengers to travel American TransAtlantic in the same way that the Mauretania's glamour attracted passengers to travel Cunard.
He stripped off his tweed coat, and tossed it onto a chair. Just then his manservant Wallis appeared, buttoning up his vest. "Mr. Crombey has been waiting for you for some time, sir," he said, collecting up Mark's coat, and folding it neatly over his arm. "He's back in his room now, sir, and asks if you could be kind enough to call him when you come in."
Wallis was a grey-haired Louisiana negro whom Mark's father had met on board the Mississippi steamer Alonzo Child in the 1880s. He had been a deckhand then, but Joe Beeney had taught him the rudiments of social grace, and Chloe Beeney had eventually turned him into one of the best black butlers in Boston.
Mark's father often used to say that when he met Mark's mother, "the whole damned Western hemisphere trembled'. There was no doubt that Mark was the product of one of the most passionate collisions of wilful and headstrong people that the nineteenth century had ever witnessed; and his father often used to compare his meeting with Mark's mother with the poem that Thomas Hardy had written to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic by an iceberg.
Alien they seemed to be
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event.
Mark's mother, Chloe McKeown Amery, had been the daughter of one of Boston's noblest and wealthiest families. When Chloe's father had earnestly complained at a public luncheon that he was taxed ninety-two per cent, one wag in the audience had shouted out a he would certainly like to try to live on the remaining eight per cent. The Amery's money was in property, in railroad stocks, in mercantile insurance, and shipping; and it was through the shipping side of their business that Chloe had accidentally come to meet Joshua Marblehead Beeney, the captain of one of the Amery's largest vessels, Seraphic. Chloe had always been an obstinate girl, and when she had been dispatched to Switzerland at the age of eiteen to "finish', her mother had entrusted her into Captain Beeney's personal custody; little realising that this blunt, rugged, oddly becoming man would promptly and insatiably fall in love with Chloe, and that she would just as promptly and with equal ferocity fall in love with him. When he had found out about their affair, Chloe's father had thrown a fit of rage close to the epileptic, but Chloe had been as persistent as ever, and in the same way that she had persuaded her father to buy her a rocking horse when she was four, she had persuaded him to let her marry Joe Beeney. Part of her dowry had been a sizeable interest in Amery shipping; and after the death of Chloe's father in 1893, Joe Beeney had taken over the entire company. Tragically, he had died himself only four years later, drowned while sailing his yacht off Point Gammon, Massachusetts. And so, at the age of twenty-three, Mark Beeney had inherited a shipping line that was second only to United States Lines, and an incalculable fortune in property, stocks, paintings, racehorses, and land. It was hardly surprising that he was considered to be one of the world's most eligible young men.