"Hallo," said a voice by Harry's elbow. He looked around, and it was Lucille Foster, dressed in pink, as the Sugar Plum Fairy.
"Hallo," said Harry. "I didn't know you were allowed up so late. You look marvellous."
"Mrs. Hall said I could stay until half past ten, as a treat. Mind you, mother always used to let me stay up until midnight. She said what did it matter what time children went to bed? If they're tired, she said, they'll sleep."
"Well, I suppose there's some sense in that," said Harry, whose own mother, a small plain woman who had always seemed to smell of lavender, had insisted that he was in bed by seven; so that he had often lain there under his cheap maroon blanket with the sun shining through the curtains, his younger brother fast asleep beside him, but his friends playing noisily in the street outside.
Lucille unselfconsciously linked arms with Harry and said, "You had think I'm a terrible person, do you?"
"No," said Harry. He didn't laugh at her for asking. There were times in everybody's life when they needed to know the answer to a question like that. "I think you're very thoughtful, and very nice; and besides all of that, I think you're very pretty, too."
"I suppose I'm too young for you to think of marrying me."
Harry looked down at her through his round spectacles, and there she was so rich and so young, with a way of life that Harry couldn't even start to imagine, in pieces all around her. She had drunk highballs in Paris, dressed in silk, eaten ortolan, and walked along the pathways of the Palace of Versailles in white organdie summer dresses. For a mother, she had once been blessed or cursed with one of the most fashionable and outrageous women of the 1920s. And here she was, at this noisy fancy-dress ball on the Arcadia, talking of marriage. To him, to Harry Pakenow.
He said, in a voice which was slightly hoarse, "I couldn't marry you, Lucille. I wish I could. I think you're the most beautiful girl on earth. You made a friend of me when nobody else would. You trusted me. You believed in me, too; and that's a lot more than most married people do."
Lucille stared up at him. "Mother always used to say that you can tell a good friend in the first minute you meet them."
"Mother was right. But I can only be your friend, nothing more. We don't belong in the same world, you and me. I've got other things to do with my life, apart from drinking champagne and dancing the fox-trot."
Lucille said, "I have, too. But sometimes I don't know what they are."
"You'll find out," Harry told her gently. "That's if there are any other things of course. There may not be. Some people are born to fox-trot, and nothing else. In which case, you'll have to kick up your heels, enjoy yourself, and make the best of it."
"You could come with us," said Lucille seriously.
"What do you mean?"
"Well... you could come with us to the Halls. They have a huge house. They're bound to need some extra help there. Then we could be together."
"I couldn't do that."
"Why not? They'd pay you well. I know Mrs. Hall is a bit funny sometimes, but she's quite nice really. Do say you'll come."
Harry thought of his thirty unexploded sticks of dynamite in the trunk of Mark Beeney's Marmon. He thought of his Socialist friends in New York, the Communists and the Wobblies. He thought of Janice, and the flat in Bootle, with the washing flickering through the hammered-glass window like a motion picture, except that it had sound. The sound of children playing in weedy Victorian gardens. The sound of electric trams, grizzling along the metal tracks to Liverpool. The sound of Janice singing.
He understood then that the rich had won. They would always win. They had won because they ruled the world in ways he had only been able to guess at. If you were too poor to be admitted to the right social and political clubs, if you were too poor to play checkers with the Mellons or dine with the Rockefellers; if you didn't have a mansion on Long Island and a string of thoroughbred racehorses in Kentucky; if you didn't own a Dodge motorboat or a Buhl Air-Sedan, then you were licked. A whisper in the right ear at the right club would always have a far more devastating effect on world affairs than the largest bomb. It didn't matter what you blew up. You could demolish the Woolworth Building, and Woolworth's would still go on making profits at their 1,200 five-and-dimes throughout the country. You could blow up the Arcadia, and luxury liners would still continue to cross the Atlantic. You could affect the way that rich people thought about life letting off bombs, certainly. You could frighten them. But their a resources of money made them adaptable beyond anything that the poor could dream of. If London was unsafe, they could always go and live in Paris. If Paris burned, then Biarritz.
Harry said to Lucille, "I don't know what I'm going to do."
"I wish you'd come," said Lucille. "You could always leave if you didn't like it. But I know you would."
"Do you think Mrs Hall—"
"Leave Mrs. Hall to me."
"Lucille—" said Harry, but she was already skipping off through the crowds with a wave of her fairy wand. Harry watched her disappear, and then snapped his fingers at a steward to bring him another glass of champagne. He felt ashamed as he took the glass; and the way the steward said obsequiously, "Thank you, sir," made him feel even worse. He felt like tugging the man's sleeve and saying, Don't call me sir. I'm just Harry. I'm the same as you. All right? But he knew that he would only make the steward feel worse, and make a fool of himself. He went over to one of the tables and took a blue cocktail cigarette out of a crystal holder. A steward instantly came across and lit it for him.
As he blew out smoke, he thought, I'm lost. And it was only when Sabran stared at him over his shoulder that he realised that he had spoken out loud.
The fancy-dress ball was an extravagant success. Before dinner, there was a parade in which everybody linked arms and strutted around the floor of the Grand Lounge to show off their costumes while the orchestra played Strauss marches, and the young girls who had danced at breakfast appeared in flower costumes and tossed over four hundred pounds' worth of purple orchids over them. Then the passengers went through to dinner, a fifteen-course, four-hour banquet that included consomme Fleury, deviled crabs a la creole, boiled cod in oyster sauce, samis of wild duck, boned capon truffee, ham with champagne sauce, broiled quails on toast, and strawberry Bavaroise.
Somehow, dressing up in fancy costumes made the first-class passengers all the more flirtatious, and even Sabran (who was dressed in scarlet tights, as a demon, with papier-mache horns and a silver-painted pitchfork) found enough courage to desert the baroness for twenty minutes and dance the apache with the prettiest of the blacked-up steppers. Ralph Peel, wearing furry donkey's ears, as Bottom, was escorting Louise Narron, in eight layers of white muslin, as Titania, in a manner which sob sister Marjorie Driscoll described in the Los Angeles Examiner as 'coochy'.
Edgar Deacon was dressed as a buccaneer, with a shabby black tricorn hat and a patch over his eye; Percy Fearson, hi a yellow silk turban, was Ali-Baba; and Claude Graham-White appeared in white cardboard armour as Parsifal. Lady Diana FitzPerry, apparently undaunted by her unsuccessful attempt to blackmail the Keys Shipping Line out of 6,000 pounds, made a stunning entrance in an extremely diaphanous pink organdie dress, with a coronet of golden leaves around her head, and a rather flaccid asp around her neck. Behind her, looking mournful and chastened, Lord Thomas FitzPerry wore only his formal supper dress.