"You mean he might cheerfully allow the Arcadia to be damaged, and the lives of its passengers put at risk—just for the sake of showing you up in a bad light?" asked Catriona.
"It is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility," said Sir Peregrine, uncomfortably. He was aware that when they were phrased as bluntly as Catriona had phrased them, his insinuations against Rudyard Philips came close to the brink of absurdity. He looked to Edgar for some masculine support, despite what he felt about him; but Edgar did nothing more than smile into his drink, as if a witty remark had been written on the bottom of his glass. The spectacle of the apoplectic and seIf-righteous Sir Peregrine being hotfooted by a twenty-one-year-old flapper had made Edgar Deacon's day; he could have gone to bed without attending a single one of the pre-departure parties that were need for this evening, and slept content.
Now there was more band musk from the landing stage, and cheering, and the press started beating on the door of Catriona's stateroom with renewed urgency. "Come on, Miss Keys, we're going to miss the morning editions! We've got a train to catch with these pictures!" And so a Peregrine bowed to her, and kissed her hand with all of the respect that a seadog with all of his thousands of nautical miles and all of his hundreds of empty bottles of old Haitian rum might justifiably have accorded any pretty young girl with bobbed hair, big breasts, and long legs, and left the stateroom on an even keel.
"He's magnificent," said Catriona, really quite impressed, when he had gone.
Edgar was still squeezing the door closed against a reporter's arm. "Of course he is. It's his job to be magnificent. But he's also the biggest drunk on the seven seas."
"Ah," said Catriona; and it was then that the Press at last broke in and rushed to kneel before her with their notebooks and their flashing cameras and their excited questions, as if she were truly a newly-crowned queen. Dazzled, she looked at Edgar over the bobbing trilbies and the brilliantined heads, but all he did was raise his glass to her, and bow to his new memsahib.
TEN
After the reporters and the photographers had left, Isabelle came into Catriona's stateroom, unsteadier but happier from the effects of two vodka martinis, and from the compliments of a steward who had told her that she had the best legs he had come across since leaving Galway.
"That's what Tony always used to like about me," she said, sitting promptly on the sofa and blinking at Catriona from beneath the black rim of her cooking-pot hat. "My legs."
Edgar had been on the telephone for ten minutes, and at the end of his call he excused himself. "Apparently there's a problem with one of the turbines. Nothing that can't be solved, but I want to take a look. I'll call for you at ten, shall I, just before the reception party starts?"
Catriona went to the door with him. As he put on his hat, she said, "Is there more to you, Mr. Deacon, than meets the eye?"
Edgar looked back at her with a touch of a smile at one corner of his mouth, but his expression was really giving nothing away. "I'm not any more than I seem to be, if that's what you're trying to suggest. You're the queen and I'm your loyal and energetic subject. Also, I have a shipping company to run."
"But where does your sense of style come from? That's unexpected, in a businessman."
"My mother's side, I expect. My father was an engineer, my mother was a painter."
"So. You're a Leonardo da Vinci. Engineer and artist."
This time his smile spread wider. "I'd hardly say that. More like an Albert Ballin."
"Who on earth was Albert Ballin?" asked Isabelle, who had been leaning sideways on the sofa so that she could eavesdrop on their conversation.
"The creator of the old Hamburg-Amerika line," said Edgar, without taking his eyes off Catriona.
"He was very rich, Aunt Isabelle, and very dynamic, and quite unscrupulous," Catriona added. "I knew a man in London who had once played cards with him."
Edgar nodded to Catriona in mocking respect. "You're ahead of your years, Miss Keys."
"You're forgetting that I've spent most of the year with actors," she replied.
When Edgar had gone, Catriona rang for the steward to make them some more drinks, and for the maid to lay out her party dress for her, and draw her bath.
A steward on a luxury liner like the Arcadia virtually became for the duration of the voyage a first-class passenger's personal servant, and before the liner sailed tomorrow morning, Catriona would give him her full instructions for the following four days: when to wake her, when to bring her breakfast, what cocktails to provide and when, what parties and receptions she would be holding in her suite. Her maid she would give complete details of all her clothes, which gowns to lay out, how she liked her bath, how to arrange her dressing-table, which shoes to put out.
The steward turned out to be a brisk talkative man with black brilliantined hair as shiny as a painted newel post and the extraordinary gliding walk of someone who has been trying to keep trays of mulligatawny soup on the horizontal for more tilting, rolling, wallowing, and pitching sea miles than he can remember. His name was Trimmer, and he had served on Keys liners for nine years; before that, White Star. Before that, he had been a private In the Boer War, although he had shot nothing more spectacular than a pregnant hartebeest.
The maid was called Alice, after Queen Victoria's great-granddaughter, and was as small and pink-cheeked as a china shepherdess. She had worked in "several houses of note', she kept telling Catriona, "houses where the coals on the fires had to be set in your perfect pyramids, or else they'd make you take them to pieces and start all over again'.
"Has madam had a hopportunity to hinspect the vessel?" inquired Trimmer, pouring out Isabelle's third vodka martini with consummate skill.
"Not yet," said Catriona. "The inside of this stateroom is all I've seen so far."
"Well, if I might hexpress my hown hopinion, this vessel is a vision of loveliness," said Trimmer. "I don't think in all of my years hafloat that I never saw hanything so helegant."
"I'm looking forward to seeing it hall, I mean all, for myself," smiled Catriona, and then couldn't stop herself from giggling.
Once Trimmer had closed the door after him, she said to Isabelle, "I can't bear it! By the end of the voyage I'm going to be saying heverything with a haitch hon!"
Isabelle raised her martini. "It's the military, that's what it is. The military always speak like that. It's something to do with making yourself heard on a parade-ground."
Alice the maid came through from the bedroom and announced in her tinkly voice that Miss Keys" bath was drawn, and that Miss Keys" gown was laid out, and would Miss Keys be requiring the white silk stockings or the dove-grey or the pearl, but respectfully she herself would recommend the pearl, bearing the particular gown in mind.
"Aren't you going to go and get ready?" Catriona asked Isabella. "I mean, they have given you somewhere to change, haven't they?"
Isabelle's head tilted as if she were already at sea, instead of tied up at Liverpool's landing stage. "Yes, I've been given somewhere to get ready," she said. "A dinky little room with a washstand. But I'm not going yet. There's plenty of time for titivation. Plenty. Tony always says that I spend too long titivating. "For goodness" sake, Belle," he shouts at me, "stop that titivatingi You'll titivate yourself stupid, you will!" That's what he shouts at me."
Catriona glanced at Alice, but Alice had been trained in houses of note where the coals were set in perfect pyramids, and so her face registered nothing at Isabelle's outburst, neither approval nor mirth nor condemnation, but instead a kind of beatific preoccupation with life's busy little details.