Catriona said nothing, but waited by the open car door for Edgar to finish.
"The thing is, you see," said Edgar, "if we do have to sell Keys Shipping, we must think of families like the Colehills. If we sell it off piecemeal, then the Colehills and all the other people who live in these backs will be out of work. You have seen for yourself what a hard existence they have. Unless we make sure that Keys remains intact, and that the company keeps running, we will be condemning each and every one of them to indescribable misery."
Catriona said, "You never gave me the impression before that you cared very much about the shipyard workers. Didn't you once call them "the next worse scourge to rust"?"
Edgar gave Catriona a very thin smile, thin as a celluloid collar. "Just because your common dockside labourers are difficult men to deal with; untrustworthy, most of them; and none of them past wholesale thieving; that doesn't mean that one doesn't have a moral obligation to take care of them. Stanley, your father, saw Keys Shipping as a family, and in every family there are delinquents. That, however, does nothing to make it any less of a family, nor any less deserving of being kept together."
"We'd better leave now, sir," put in the chauffeur. "I'd hate to have to speed the last couple of miles, begging your pardon."
"Quite right," said Edgar. Then, to Catriona, "Shall we? I think it's time for the great adventure to begin."
"Peter Pan said that to die would be a great adventure," said Catriona.
"Well, that's J.M. Barrie for you," Edgar remarked, obtusely.
"I always saw myself as Wendy, as matter of fact," put in Isabelle.
"Wendy," said Edgar, "was skewered by an arrow." He gave Isabelle a bland and unreadable smirk. "Hardly a fate deserved by the most personable lady in the entire family."
"Hm," purred Isabelle, and looked across at Catriona to see what she thought of that.
NINE
They arrived at last at the landing stage, and the chauffeur nudged the Rolls-Royce through the tangle of taxis and wagons and jostling people until he reached the entrance to the terminus. A police constable opened the car door for them, and they stepped out on to a wide red runner. There was a smattering of applause from the pressing crowds all around, although few of them had any idea who Catriona was, or what she was doing here. Most of them were waiting to see Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Five or six Press cameras popped and flashed, and Edgar gripped Catriona's arm and muttered, "You have to smile. You have to look as if you're enjoying yourself."
Catriona managed a wave and a nervous smile. Then she was pushed unceremoniously through the terminus building to the main concourse, where there were flowers, and even more crowds, and a silver band playing "Goodbye, Dolly Gray'. Edgar led her forward to a cluster of stout smiling dignitaries, and there was the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, with his fur-trimmed robes and his chains, and he grasped her hand in his sweaty chipolata fingers, and raised it to his lips.
"I have to tell you how proud we are of the good ship Arcadia," he said. "Wherever she goes in the world, she'll carry on her stern the name of Liverpool—a fine ship from a fine city."
There was more applause, and the band tore into Land Of Hope And Glory as if they were trying to finish it in under a minute. Someone released a shower of coloured balloons, which filled the inside of the terminus and clung to the glass-roofed ceiling, although one or two of them escaped through a skylight, and fled into the bright summer sky. More cameras dazzled and flashed, and Catriona found that she was suddenly being rushed to the covered gangway that would take her aboard the Arcadia.
"Miss Keys!" the photographers kept shouting, holding up their plate cameras. "Miss Keys, this way please! This way!"
She was aboard the Arcadia before she knew it. She suddenly found herself being hurried up a wide staircase of sweeping semicircular stairs, lit by bronze statues of dryads with Lalique torches in their hands. The noise and the bustle were utterly confusing. Edgar stayed close by her side, but her vision seemed to be nothing more than a kaleidoscope of intense, excited faces, both men and women, and cameras, and running feet.
"Miss Keys!" they shouted at her. "Miss Keys, please!"
For a moment she was out on the promenade deck, and the warm evening wind was blowing in her face. But then Edgar had propelled her to her stateroom, and the door was closed on all those flashes and pops and all those eager, bright-red faces. There were two or three knocks, and something of a scuffle, but when Edgar shouted, "Go away! Miss Keys will be out in ten minutes!" the commotion seemed to die down.
Edgar came away from the door, his hands in his trouser pockets, smiling. "Well," he said, "what do you think? This is where the queen of the Atlantic begins her reign."
"I'm completely bewildered," said Catriona. "What happened down there?"
Edgar walked across the thick aquamarine carpeting to the inlaid walnut cocktail cabinet. "Would you like a drink?" he asked her.
"A gin-and-bitters."
He took ice out of a silver ice-bucket, and clinked it into two handmade Lalique glasses, with frosted stems in the shape of stylised nudes.
"What happened down there was your official civic reception."
"But it was like a whirlwind. I didn't even get the chance to say you."
"I didn't want you to have the chance to say thank you. I'm trying to make you into a queen, not the Lady Mayoress. You don't give speeches and you don't say thank you. You don't mingle. You take it for granted that you're the glittering star that all of these people want to see. Come on, that's how Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow do it. They keep that little bit distant from their public. They make people thirst for even the slightest glimpse of them."
"I see," said Catriona, taking off her hat, and laying it down on a polished onyx table next to her. Edgar brought over her drink and she swallowed half of it in one ice-cold gulp.
"This is all about mystique," Edgar said, in his most matter-of-fact voice. "You have a lot of it already, so you must know what I'm talking about. But at the moment, your appeal is what one might call a kind of "jazz-baby" cuteness. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not trying to be rude, it's very attractive in its way, and it sets a lot of chaps back on their heels. But you're going to have to develop yourself from there... give yourself more aloofness and style. Think to yourself that you're a queen, and you'll start behaving like one."
"When do we go to meet the captain?" asked Catriona.
Edgar smiled. "That's exactly what I was talking about. You don't go to see the captain, the captain comes to see you. After all, twenty-five per cent of the ship will soon be yours."
"Do you have some music in here?" asked Catriona.
Edgar raised a finger. Then he went across to what looked like a bureau. He slid out the front panel, and inside was a gramophone, balanced on gimbals so that it could be played even in rough weather. "What takes your fancy?" he asked her.
"Something soothing," she said.