"Are you ready, darling?" her mother asked. "I think Edgar's becoming a little restive."
"I suppose I'm ready," said Catriona. "If anyone is ever really ready, then, yes, I suppose I am."
him a lovely dress, you know," said her mother. "The grey silk and the white lace edging. Very respectful, but so becoming. And your hair!"
Catriona touched her short-cropped head. "I don't know," she said. "I think I rather miss my hair."
"But you look perfect. So pretty! Haven't they made your eyes up well? Oh, my darling, I so wish that your father could have seen you."
Catriona came over and took her mother's hands. "Mother," she said, "if father had been alive to see me now, I wouldn't have been here. It's one of those dreams that never could have happened, not even in dreams."
Her mother's eyes winced a little, and then she looked away. "You don't despise me, do you, for wanting you to do this?" she asked, in a reedy voice.
"Why should I? He was my father, as well as your husband. We both loved him, in our different ways."
"Did you love him, Catriona?" her mother asked, urgently.
Catriona smiled, although her smile was a little vague. "I think I did. I must have done."
Her mother took her hands away, like someone who has been forgetting herself. "We're going to bury him tomorrow," she said. The moment that the Arcadia starts out over the open sea, at three tomorrow afternoon, we're going to bury him."
Catriona went to her dressing-table and came back with a small gold locket. She pressed it into her mother's hand. "Tomorrow," she said gently "can you throw this on his coffin for me?"
Her mother's eyes blurred with tears. "What is it?" she said. "I don't think I've ever seen it before."
"I bought it in London, with money that father sent me for my birthday."
Fumbling because she couldn't focus through her weeping, Catriona's mother opened the locket. Inside was a small photograph of Catriona on a summer's day in Cambridge, taken a year ago. There was a lock of her hair, too, tied with ribbon. Then there was a carefully-cut oval of paper, on which Catriona had written, "To My Beloved Father, In Memory Of All The Happy Times We Had Together, And All The Times We Didn't, But Should Have, Your Only Daughter."
Catriona's mother closed the locket and then held her very tight. "I know that you'll make him so proud," she sobbed. "I know that, wherever he is, you'll make him proud."
Dottie knocked hesitantly at the door again, and said, "Miss? Are you nearly ready? Mr Deacon's getting worried that you might miss your Press appearance, and he says it's ever so important."
Catriona kissed her mother on the forehead, and then brushed her mother's tears with the tip of her finger. "I'll make him proud," she said, although behind those words her uncertainty was as vertiginous as a lift descending down a bottomless shaft.
Edgar Deacon was waiting tightly in the hallway in a black suit and a stiff white collar, his hat held behind his back. Catriona came down the stairs twice as slowly as she normally would have done, allowing the billowing sleeves of her dress to flow down all around her. She thought to herself: if Edgar is going to make me a queen, then I'm darn well going to behave like one.
"We have to be going," said Edgar, with a grimace of impatience. "This whole Press reception is timed like clockwork and I want to make sure it happens like clockwork. Besides, we have a little detour to make on the way."
Isabella appeared from the sitting-room, wearing a hat that covered her head like a black cooking-pot, and a lifeless dress of black rayon.
"It's about time," she said. "You really can be the most inconsiderate of people at times. I suppose you think you can keep God waiting on Judgement Day?"
Catriona smiled at her. "Aunt Isabella, when they exalt you into even a minor deity, I promise that I'll be more punctual."
"Baggage," snapped Aunt Isabelle, and bustled out of the front door so quickly that Edgar Deacon scarcely had time to open it for her.
"You look beautiful," said Edgar, although he sounded clipped and objective, as if he were complimenting an Anglo-Indian burra-mem begonias. "I'm sure the Press will love you."
"Well, we'll see," said Catriona. She waited while Lattice brought her coat, a black belted wool coat with a spray of diamonds on the lapel.
They left the house and walked across the gravel drive in the warmth of the evening. A laurel-green Rolls-Royce tourer with red coaching stripes was drawn up by the ornamental fountain, its engine warbling. Isabelle was already sitting in the back, her profile lifted in haughty disapproval. Edgar ushered Catriona inside, and then nodded to the chauffeur.
As they drove away from the family house down the long curving him, Catriona turned and looked back at the elegant grey 1860s facades, the grey Gothic chimneys, and the rows of bay trees like children's green lollipops.
"It's funny, you know," she told Edgar. "I never thought of this house as my home, but now I do."
Edgar, holding on to the braided silk hand-strap, smiled and said, "You were too much of a kind, you and your father, don't y'know. Too competitive. Now he's gone, I think you'll probably find that just about everything in your life will be very much more straightforward."
"Well, that's not a very nice thing to say," protested Isabelle.
"I wasn't trying to be nice, my dear," Edgar told her. "Just truthful."
Isabelle turned away, but managed to remark, "I still don't see why Tony couldn't at least have been asked to help."
"Believe me," said Edgar, "if the Arcadia had been a haberdasher's shop or a hardware store instead of an ocean liner, I would have called on Tony at once. But I had to select only those people who were suitable."
"If you think Catriona's suitable, you must regard the Arcadia as a floating house of ill repute', snapped Isabelle. Then immediately, flustered at herself, she said, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I'm just overwrought. What with your mother's weeping fits, and Tony ringing up all the time to ask what's going on, I'm afraid it's all got on top of me."
Catriona took Isabelle's hand and held it between hers. It was thin and scaly with eczema, like the claw of a bird. "You've done wonders, Aunt Isabella. Don't get ill, and spoil it all."
Isabelle took her hand away immediately. "I hope you don't think I'm ill. I'm not ill."
Edgar glanced at Catriona and gave her an almost imperceptible shake of his head, as if to say that she should leave Isabelle alone with her jealousy and her tantrums and her inexhaustible grievances against the Keys family. Catriona sat back on the soft velour seat as the Rolls-Royce carried them swiftly through the suburbs of Liverpool to the docks, and didn't try to speak to Isabella again.
On an angled sunlit corner, as they passed, Catriona glimpsed two barefoot children sitting on the curb, their cheeks fat with gobstoppers. A woman in a straw hat was just coming out of the doorway of a small shop, where posters in the window advertised Pear's Soap, Player's Navy Cut and Monkey brand soap -which was a sharp reminder to Isabelle of her husband's shortcomings.
"Now," said Edgar to the chauffeur, leaning forward in his seat.
"Down Breeze Hill, sir?"
"That's it, then right at Stonecroft Terrace, and pull up."
"We don't have much time, sir."
"We have time for this."
The Rolls-Royce drove down a steep cobbled hill, then turned into the top of a sloping street of narrow stone-fronted houses. These were the "backs', the small tied houses where so many of Keys employees lived: stokers and deckhands and fitters and welders. Edgar said, "Stop here, please," and the Rolls-Royce drew into the curb with a squelch of tyres.