Although Stanley Keys had been a very prosperous man, and the Keyses had always kept a reasonable array of servants—a chauffeur, a cook, three or four maids, and occasionally a butler—Catriona had never had a maid so completely to herself before, and never a maid who seemed to regard the slightest exertion on Catriona's part to be utterly out of the question. As soon as the bedroom door was closed, Alice began fussily to unfasten Catriona's buttons and to slip down her dress. Then, she gently but authoritatively ushered Catriona to the bedroom chaise-longue so that she could roll down her stockings. She seemed surprised that Catriona wore so little underwear. It was hardly the thing to wear nothing at all under one's cocktail dress but georgette step-ins. But, after all, Alice wasn't used to dizzy young girls from London. Her particular training was in the comprehensive corsetry of rich and gradually widening American ladies; or in the chemise-pantalons and voile pyjamas of indolent and fashionable Italiennes.
Alice slipped a silver silk peignoir around Catriona's shoulders and led her through to the steamy perfumed bathroom. There, for almost half an hour, Catriona floated and wallowed in constantly-replenished hot water, while Alice soaped her all over with pure white scentless French soap, rinsed her, and scoured the hardened skin on her heels (those pretty but shoddily cut shoes of hers!). Then, Alice towelled her, led her back to the bedroom, and laid out a manicure table.
"You can open the door now," said Catriona. "I'm sure my aunt's becoming rather tired of sitting out there on her own. And perhaps you could ring for the steward, so that we could have some champagne."
"Yes, Miss Keys," said Alice, and opened the door. There, on the sofa, her shoes kicked off, her legs hanging over the chromium sides, her eyes closed and her mouth wide open, lay Isabelle, asleep.
"I think the excitement's got the better of her," said Catriona, doubtfully.
"Is she travelling, Miss Keys?" asked Alice, completely unruffled.
"She's only staying on board tonight, for the reception parties," Catriona told her. "
"Well, that's probably just as well. She has the look, I'm sorry to no, of a poor sailor."
"Are you a good sailor, Alice?"
Alice sat down and took Catriona's hand in hers, examining the nails for overgrown cuticles and splits. "Sailing, Miss Keys, is like else in life. As long as it is approached with sufficient moral equilibrium, and a certain measure of liver salts, it can be borne."
Catriona watched Alice as she pushed back the softened skin of her cuticles one by one. "I'm intrigued," she said. "What else in life can usually be borne with the aid of moral equilibrium and liver salts?"
Alice looked up at her and batted her eyelids once. "Men," she said.
This evening, from ten o'clock until the first strains of dawn, there would be seven parties held all over the Arcadia in honour of her builders, her designers, and the men who had financed her (including a tall waxen-faced man in a wing collar from the Government, which had laid out nearly a million pounds for the building of the Arcadia on Stanley Key's assurance that in case of war she could immediately be brought into use as a troopship). Catriona, as the new head of Keys Shipping Line, would have to visit all seven parties, from the champagne fountain and seventy-piece orchestra in the main ballroom, to the beer-and-sausages bash that was being thrown in the third-class dining hall for the dockers" representatives and the boilermakers and the suppliers of Bisto gravy browning and cream crackers.
She had chosen a dress that was as original as it was erotic: a thin tracery of make-believe spiderwebs, sparkling with silver thread. A diamond encrusted spider clung to her left breast, and all the rest of the webs radiated from it. Its French designer, Antoine Claude, had described it as "a gown of shadows and suggestions, and nothing else, except perhaps a sudden unexpected revelation when you are least expecting it!"
Alice lifted the gown over Catriona's head as if she were lifting a cloud of smoke. The fine-textured fabric settled around Catriona's shoulders, and she twirled in front of the mirrors in the bedroom as Alice tried to scuttle around after her and fasten her hooks.
Catriona knew she was in a dream now. She had never seen herself look so startling. Her eyes were made up to make them look even darker and more slanting and more vampish than ever, her hair was glossy and bobbed like a wave of varnish. And the cobweb gown floated around her naked body like a mystery turned magically into a dress—concealing her one moment in layers of grey-on-grey, and then subtly showing the curve of an arm, the pinkish tint of a nipple, even a fleeting triangular shadow of curly hair.
She had always liked to dress to startle. She remembered when she was thirteen, coming downstairs to meet the bow-tied, party-frocked juveniles at her birthday tea with her dress tugged down to bare her shoulders in provocative imitation of Ethel Barrymore. Her father had been furious, but she had never forgotten the stir she had made.
"I must say," admitted Alice, in that curious unfinished dialect of the English domestic, "but it's hardly a mourning dress."
"I know that, I know that," said Catriona, turning around and around so that the gown hovered about her hi a smoky circle. "But my father wouldn't want me to mourn him, not tonight. He would have been as happy as a sandboy, himself, if he'd been here."
At a quarter after ten, Edgar came back to Catriona's stateroom, in full evening dress. He looked strangely less convincing in tails than he did in his normal business suit, as if he had recently arrived from Ooty hill station hi the 1890s; but charming, too. Isabelle had at last been persuaded by Alice to go to her little changing room on E deck, and so Catriona was sitting on her own, smoking, when Edgar arrived.
"I need scarcely tell you that you look ravishing," he said. "If I had wanted to dream up a queen of the Atlantic in my mind, I couldn't have done better. You're beyond imagination."
Catriona smiled. "I'm just myself, Mr. Deacon."
"Why don't you call me Edgar?"
She drew at her Craven-A, and then stubbed it out, still smiling. "I won't call you Edgar, because you're one of the employees of Keys Shipping. I wouldn't want people to think we were too familiar, would you?"
Edgar gave her a small shrug of acceptance, but she could tell that she had annoyed him. They were beginning to test each other's strength now, and Catriona knew that she was going to have to establish her authority quickly, or else he would use her as he had obviously intended to use her, as nothing more than a pretty puppet.
"Are we ready?" asked Catriona. "I think it's time I met everybody, don't you?"
Outside on deck, the outlines of the Arcadia had been traced in white necklaces of lights, and her bunting flapped in the warm coastal wind. A band on the quay was playing "The Floral Song', and the landing stage was jammed with glossy black limousines,—Humbers and Daimlers and Rolls-Royces. Beyond the docks, the whole of Liverpool sparkled in the summer night.
"I thought you might like to know that we've received a message of congratulation and God-speed from His Majesty," said Edgar, as he led Catriona to the doors that would take them to the Arcadia's grand staircase. "He also wished us to accept his deepest sympathies on the death of your Father."
"I should like to see that later, that message," said Catriona.
The promenade decks were packed with local dignitaries in white tie and tails, and their "lady wives" in long gowns and turbans and ostrich feathers. For the moment, however, the guests were all being discreetly held back from the staircase by red velvet ropes. Edgar nodded to the Keys Shipping officer who was politely but decisively heading off anyone who tried to slip down to the Grand Lounge for a surreptitious first taste of the champagne and smoked salmon, and the officer lifted the rope for them.