Philly wrinkled up her nose. She was one of the free and rebellious young jazz babies, one of the dancers in the dark, but she didn't like her morals to be taken for granted. She wasn't what her grandmother would have called "a scarlet harlot."
Harry took out a cigarette. "There's a century in it for you, if we pull it off. How does that sound?"
"A hundred?"
"You're hearing me."
Philly said, "Well, okay. But only for distracting, right? Nothing else. I'm not losing my purity for a lousy hundred."
"Your purity?" asked Harry. "What do you think we were doing the other night, washing out our smalls and singing spirituals?"
"We didn't do anything," said Philly. "Just because a girl plays around a bit, that doesn't have to mean that she's deflowered, does it? I had a good time, that's all. You can't blame a girl for having a good time. But I'll still go to the altar pure. That's when I do go to the altar."
"So you'll tell your fiance you're a virgin?"
"Of course I will."
"So what's it eventually going to take to deflower you?" Harry asked. "'Dynamite?"
Almost immediately, he wished he hadn't said that. It was the kind of circumstantial evidence that juries adored, especially since the yellow press had made everybody, housewives and roof-painters and janitors alike? into shrewd legal experts. "Anarchist talked of dynamite before luxury liner blast." Mind you, he thought, it was doubtful if anybody would survive the sudden sinking of the Arcadia, himself included. If he ever appeared in any kind of court, it would probably be in Purgatory.
Philly pouted. "You don't really care for me at all, do you? You're the kind that just uses a girl, then throws her away like a cigarette butt. Dynamite, indeed. The nerve!"
"I'm sorry," said Harry, bunking behind his spectacles. "I didn't mean to be sarcastic."
"You're really sure you can pay me a hundred?"
Harry nodded. "As soon as I get paid for the liquor. If you give me your address, I'll mail you a certified cheque."
"Well... it would help with schoolbooks."
He took her hands, and squeezed them. "You're terrific. I knew you'd understand."
They went up in the lift to the bridge deck. Philly was nervous about entering the exclusive and perfumed domain of the cabin-class passenger, but Harry put his arm around her waist and reassured her. "I'm a hero. They'll let me do anything."
He led her along to Monty Willowby's office. Monty (although they couldn't have known it) had just returned from an unsuccessful foray to Baron Zawisza's stateroom, in an attempt to unscrew her lavatory seat. To his chagrin, he had been interrupted by Krysia, her maid, who had returned to the stateroom to fetch the baroness her freshwater pearl earrings (the baroness often changed her jewels four or five times a day). Monty had blustered out the excuse to Krysia that he was checking a complaint about noises in the plumbing, and rapidly left, his round stomach bobbing up and down like a beachball at an English seaside resort. He wasn't in a very good humour when Harry knocked at his door.
"Ah, our gallant hero," he said, snappily. "Not at breakfast? Grand breakfast this morning. Something worth dressing up for."
"Um, I was just wondering if it would be possible for me to take this young lady into breakfast," said Harry.
Monty said, "What? This young lady? From steerage, is she?"
"I do think the company prefer to call it third class these days?" Harry told him.
Monty glanced at him with an expression that plainly meant, Don't get clever with me, squire. You may be a hero, but you're steerage, and if I want to call you steerage, then I will.
Out loud, though, he said, "I don't think that's going to be possible, squire, on account of the catering arrangements."
"Oh, I'm sure they'll have enough bacon and eggs to go round," said Harry. "She doesn't eat much, do you, love?"
Philly tittered. Harry thought, God, I told you to be vampish, not squirm and giggle around like a nine-year-old.
Monty said, "It's a question of seating, squire. And timing. And it's a question of dress, too. First-class ladies were asked this morning to dress in white or pink, to suit the decor. White or pink. Whereas him young lady—" he looked Philly up and down, eyeing the cheap emerald frock and bedraggled feather hat, as if she had worn them on purpose to offend him—"well, this young lady is in green. Very distinctly green."
Harry was looking around the office for keys. He wasn't sure, but he thought he could glimpse a varnished wooden key board on the wall of the small office at the back, where the ship's safe and deposit boxes were kept. He could see the gleam of metal through the crack in the door, and what looked like part of a name tag.
"Green?" he said to Monty Willowby. "Well, I can tell you something. If there's one thing this young lady isn't, it's green."
Either Monty didn't see the humour in this remark, or else he didn't want to. He picked up a heap of papers, shuffled them noisily, and then looked up at Harry and Philly as if he couldn't understand why they were still there.
"It's not on, you know, squire. I'm sorry. It's not me, nor the management. We wouldn't object. It's the other passengers. They don't pay first-class fares to sit next to third-class people."
Philly, trying to be coquettish, said, "Couldn't you make a teentsy-weentsy exception, just for me?"
Monty shook his jowls in a treble negative.
Philly perched herself on the edge of Monty's desk, so that her skirt, already scandalously short by the standards of 1924, rose above her knees and revealed several pale inches of inner thigh. "You're such a cutie," she said, and let out a high-pitched giggle. "If I thought you weren't already surrounded by adoring women, do you know what I'd do?"
Monty stared up her skin with eyes as suspicious as a hermit crab. "I don't know," he said, "What would you do?"
"Why, I'd smother you all over with kisses," giggled Philly, and leaned forward to stick a large bow-shaped kiss of fresh sticky lipstick on Monty's forehead.
Monty looked up at her, startled. The kiss seemed to have awakened him, like the Frog Prince. "You can't do that, miss," he said, clamping his hand over his forehead in horror.
"What do you mean, I can't? I just did!"
Monty said, "Listen, this is all very well. But rules are rules. And it doesn't matter what you do—"
Philly giggled again, hopped down from the table, and immediately sat herself in Monty's lap. "You're so sweet!" she told him, plinking the tip of his nose with her fingertip. "How come you have to worry about regulations, a sweet guy like you?"
Monty tried to wrestle her off his lap without actually touching her anywhere embarrassing. But all she did was cling around his neck, kick her legs in the air, and shriek with laughter. Harry, meanwhile, smiling and nodding with as much innocence and dumbness as he could manage, sidestepped his way around to the back of Monty's chair, towards the open door of the inner office. As Philly plastered Monty's cheek with another kiss, and another, he quickly glanced behind him and saw that the ship's keys were indeed all hanging there, scores of them, and each one labelled.
"Miss, please!" exploded Monty. "Listen, please! Listen, get off!"
"She's quite incorrigible, Mr Willowby, isn't she?" said Harry, in him slyest, most cretinous-sounding Bootle accent. "Can't do a thing with her.'
But Monty, at last, gripped hold of both of Philly's wrists and managed to prize them free from his neck. He stood up, and she rolled off his lap on to the floor, where she sprawled with her skirt right up to her frilly pink step-ins. With an exaggerated expression of stage chivalry, Monty averted his eyes while she collected herself.