While the thin clarionet warbling of Johnny de Droit filled the room, Catriona had a chance to look around. There were 385 first-class staterooms on the Arcadia, and every single one of them was decorated according to a different theme. Catriona's suite was "The Wind', and two entire walls of the sitting-room had been veneered with a ribboned pattern of bird's-eye maple and Cuban mahogany, to represent streamers flying in a breeze. There was a bronze sculpture by Bruno Zach in the centre of the long modern sideboard, a girl with her hair blowing out behind her. The furniture was all strictly modern, though eclectic: Italian-designed chairs upholstered with patterns of clouds, French tables in three different shades of blue glass, and a writing-desk of inlaid ebony, yew, and box, by Gordon Russell. On the wall was a Cubist print of "A Windy Day in Paris" by Gino Severini.
"You should see "The Jungle" stateroom," smiled Edgar, who had been watching her. "It has bamboo furniture, bronze palm trees, and a whole collection of porcelain monkeys."
"This is extraordinary, said Catriona. "I was expecting gilt and plush and stuffy old-fashioned furniture."
"That was what most of the Keys directors wanted," said Edgar. "You know what they're like. All tweed waistcoats and old-fashioned ways. But your father insisted that we should bring in the most advanced interior designers we could. This is the ship of the future, he said, we don't want it to be out-of-date before it starts. He didn't like half of the staterooms, not himself. They weren't to his taste. Most of them aren't to mine, either. But he recognised brilliant design when he saw it. He used to say, how can you expect a flapper in a short skirt to sit in a Louis Quatorze chair?"
Catriona put down her drink and walked through to the bathroom. There was a huge bath of solid Sicilian marble, as well as white velvet draperies, gold-washed faucets, and a multi-coloured mirror on the wall showing white mirror clouds blowing over a range of softly-curving blue mirror hills.
"I think it's amazing," she said. "You would hardly believe that you're on board a ship at all."
Edgar took out his pocket-watch and squinted at it. "The press should be ready for you in about ten minutes, if they're not queuing up outside already. I expect we'll have quite a few people from the shipbuilders and the company, too. Do you want to get changed now? I can send your maid in."
"Not just yet," said Catriona. "I just want to wallow for a while." She peered out of one of her portholes at the sparkling reaches of a Mersey estuary. The reedy jazz music made her feel like dancing around and around. She felt as if she must be dreaming, or drunk. There was a brisk knock at the stateroom door, but it was only the florist with a huge bunch of fifty white roses to symbolise the Arcadia's maiden voyage, and then more sprays of red and yellow roses and freesias, and orchids, than she could count. The sofa and the floor were knee-deep in flowers, Catriona could have waded in them, and their perfume was so heavy that she had to ask Edgar to open the porthole.
The telephone rang. Edgar picked it up and said, "Miss Keys" suite?" Then he covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said, "It's Sir Peregrine. He hopes you're comfortably settled in your stateroom, and he wants to know if he might come up to present you with his compliments?"
"Tell him to come up straightaway," said Catriona. "I feel like another drink before I get changed, anyway."
Edgar cautioned, "You shouldn't keep the press waiting for too him long."
Catriona lay back amongst the flowers, Ophelia amongst the orchids, and stretched her arms luxuriously. "Surely that's all part of this mystique you're trying to cultivate in me, being unpunctual. All the top film stars are late on the set. You know that."
Edgar gave a tight, impatient shrug, "It's up to you. As long as you don't overdo it."
It took Sir Peregrine Arrowsmith only four or five minutes to reach Catriona's staterooms from the bridge deck below, but in that time the restless newspaper reporters had managed to force open the door at least half-a-dozen times, and several of them had even tried to pop off "candid" photographs of Catriona as she sat drinking her cocktail. There had also been a ceaseless in-and-out traffic of beige-jacketed stewards, carrying in boxes of candies tied up with ribbons, bottles of Chanel and Guerlain perfumes, sugared plums, more flowers, jeroboams of Irroy champagne, silver trays heaped up with greetings, telegraphs, and a china doll dressed in the gold-buttoned livery of Keys Shipping Lines.
At last, Sir Peregrine elbowed his way in, and while Edgar forcibly closed the door on the newspaper reporters behind him, he stood tall and dignified as an old stork, brushing the gold-braided sleeves of his uniform. "A menagerie," he said, with trembling disapproval.
Catriona had met quite a variety of elderly men recently, mostly with Nigel. Theatrical producers, bankers, impresarios, and ageing princes of the footlights. By now, she'd grown accustomed to the nakedness of elderly men's fears. Unlike the young men she knew, who had all of their lives before them, and hadn't yet scraped the keel of their ambition on the unexpectedly shallow bottom of their own shortcomings, men like Sir Peregrine had become all too familiar with the precise measure of their limitations, and how little time was left to them. They betrayed their desperate anxiety that they might never be able to achieve anything worthwhile like signal flags.
She could tell that Sir Peregrine was considerably discomfited by having to leave the bridge and come up to her stateroom to welcome her, and that it rocked the security he felt in the traditions of the sea. On board a liner, the captain was the Absolute Presence, and even Catriona's father wouldn't have expected a man of Sir Peregrine's stature to have to jostle his way through crowds of reporters to a passenger's stateroom—whether the passenger was heir to the whole shipping line or not.
Sir Peregrine was numbered amongst those legendary liner captains like Sir James Charles, of the Aquiiania, and Sir Arthur Rostron. Sir James was a man of Brodignagian proportions who ran his dining table like Henry VIII, insisting on evening dress and full decorations at every meal, and directing the ship's orchestra to play Elgar while he led full-blooded assaults on citadels of pastry with moats of turtle stew. Sir Arthur, on the other hand, who had commanded the Carpathia when she picked up the survivors of the Titanic disaster, presided over a table which was noted for its severe regard of all the maritime proprieties, and its chilly lack of affability.
Handsome in the hollow-cheeked, cadaverous way that very thin men can be when they reach the age of sixty, Sir Peregrine was the last surviving son of the Marquis of Walburton. From babyhood he had irritated his father so much that at the age of fifteen he had been sent off to Portsmouth and apprenticed in sail. Unabashed, he had worked his way to his master's certificate and his extra master's certificate on the violent seas of Cape Horn and the Indian Ocean. He had joined Keys Shipping as fourth officer before the War, after seven years with Cunard, and had commanded the liner Samaria when she was a troopship. For the way in which he had sailed his vessel right into the Greek coast under fierce enemy fire in 1916 he had been knighted. Only his first officer had known that he was devastatingly drunk at the time; although when he was given the command of Keys Shipping's best liner, the Aurora, his determined way with bottles of Old Haitian rum had gradually become more noticeable—first to the management, and then to the passengers.
There had been two near-collisions, and then a frightening night when he had refused to heave-to against a storm that had wrecked half of the Aurora's superstructure and drowned three passengers. One morning he had failed to give a clear instruction from the bridge, and the Aurora had rammed the Keys Shipping Line pier at New York harbour at three knots, reducing its length by forty-one feet.