Nigel took a clean linen handkerchief out of his coat pocket, shook it open, and wiped Catriona's eyes, as gently as he would have wiped a child's eyes. "You're probably right," he told her. "But the trouble is that I simply can't come with you, and you're not making it any easier for me to leave."
There was a sharp knock at the stateroom door. Trimmer's voice said, "Hit's breakfast, Miss Keys."
"All right," called Catriona, in a blotted sort of a voice.
Nigel said, "Do you want me to hide?"
She shook her head. "Don't be ridiculous. Come in, Trimmer."
Trimmer entered the stateroom straight-backed, wheeling a trolley that was draped in napkins. From underneath the trolley, he produced a bedtray, which he set up over Catriona, and which he proceeded to lay with an embroidered linen tablecloth, a silver vase containing a huge and fragrant Belle Blonde rose, silver knives and forks, a linen napkin, and then a plate of minced spring lamb and pickled walnuts, as well as tea and brandied marmalade and toast.
Nigel stood stock-still during this procedure, as if he were waiting upstage in Act Two of Emperor Jones. Trimmer passed him by as if he did not exist, the discreet and tactful servant. Catriona glanced at Nigel, but Nigel did not look back at her. Nigel was not actually hiding, but he was definitely playing the part of the unwelcome guest who had no lines to speak for at least another seven pages.
Just as neatly, however, Trimmer whipped away the ashtray and notepad from a small onyx-topped table beside the bed, snapped out a circular linen cloth, and set the table with knives, forks, tea, and another breakfast; and added, since Nigel was a gentleman, a copy of The Times, sharply folded.
Nigel reached into his tailcoat, took out his wallet, and without changing the utter anonymity of his expression handed Trimmer a pound. Trimmer bowed his head to Catriona, and said, "Henjoy your breakfast, Miss Keys. Helevenses in the Palm Court later." Then he retreated from the stateroom and closed the door behind him.
Nigel and Catriona looked at each other, and burst out laughing. "He's wonderful," said Nigel, lifting up his tails so that he could sit on the side of the bed and eat his breakfast. "The day we marry, and set ourselves up in a country mansion, I promise you that I'll hire him as butler."
Catriona was smelling her rose. "That's not a proposal, is it?" she asked him. Her voice was touched with sharpness.
Nigel reached into the breast pocket of his coat, took something out, and tossed it on to the cream-coloured bedcover.
"I was going to," he said. "But I've seen for myself that it won't work. Well, it was going to be my ploy for getting you back."
Catriona reached across the bedcover and picked up a diamond ring. It was only a small one, the kind you could buy in a chain jeweller's for less than twenty-five pounds. She examined it carefully, and the feeling of sadness inside a was almost painful, but somehow liberating as well. By proposing, Nigel had tied up all the doubts and anxieties and unanswered questions of their affair into one single question: a question which a single answer could decide.
When she answered, he nodded, as if he couldn't have expected her to say anything else, and picked the ring out of her fingers like a man plucking a forget-me-not.
ELEVEN
During the morning, while Catriona slept, the celebrities began to arrive. A sleek black Rolls-Royce with silk blinds at the windows brought Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford from Lime Street Station, and a beige Rolls-Royce with a chocolate touring roof brought Princess Xenia.
The newspapers, as usual, had been given the full passenger list, and the boarding ramps were crowded with photographers in wide-brimmed hats. Douglas Fairbanks told reporters that he considered it "a great thrill" to sail on the Arcadia on her maiden voyage, and that she looked like "a swell boat'. Miss Pickford, in dark glasses, was feeling tired.
Claude Graham-White came storming on to the ship with five porters struggling behind him with the oddest collection of brown paper bags and tartan shooting-sacks and tattered valises. And there were plenty of other famous people for the press to harass: Dame Clara Butt, who was accompanied by a yapping circus of seven small hairy dogs, each of which was named after a different colour of the rainbow—Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, etcetera—and each of which wore an appropriate ribbon to identify it; Madge Bellamy, in a glamorous silk dress of powder-blue, and a powder-blue mink stole to match; Jack Dempsey, in a bad mood and a blue suit with loud stripes; and almost last, when the Arcadia had already let out her long farewell whistle to the Port of Liverpool and thrashed the waters of the Mersey into a yellowish foam with her four four-bladed screws, Mark Beeney, the young and eligible owner of American TransAtlantic. The reporter from the Daily Mirror managed to ask Mark Beeney why he was sailing on the maiden voyage of a luxury liner that was inevitably going to put the best of his own American TransAtlantic fleet in the shade.
Mark Beeney grinned as he stepped on board and said, "You don't think Caesar tried to lick Cleopatra without checking her barge out first, do you?" Like everybody else in England on Tuesday, June 17th, 1924, he had read in his morning paper about "Catriona Keys, the Flapper Queen of the Seas'.
At 11:00 am, the walkways and gangplanks were taken away, the ship's rails were closed, and the mooring lines were let go. Passengers cheered and waved and sang as the Liverpool Municipal Brass Band played "God Save The King" and "There'll Always Be An England',and hundreds of coloured paper streamers were thrown from the boat decks and the promenade decks onto the landing stage below. Two hundred red, white and blue gas balloons were let go, and flooded eastwards over Liverpool.
On the third-class deck, the collar of his brown tweed jacket turned up, a cigarette burning untasted in his mouth, Harry Pakenow watched the landing stage slowly turn away from him, and the last to streamers break and trail across the river. Beside him, almost apoplectic with excitement and grief, a middle-aged man in a cheap overcoat was waving goodbye to somebody on the landing-stage, somebody dear who had to stay behind. A pretty girl in a cloche hat was standing with her hands over her mouth, crying loudly and without shame. Harry thought to himself: you only get sorrow like this in third-class, the rich can afford to take their loved ones with them, or come back as often as they wish.
He was wrong, although he had no way of knowing it. In her first-class suite, Mademoiselle Louise Natron, the opera singer, was sobbing into the pillow of the bed which she would share with no one. She had left behind in England the well-known cellist Raymond Walters, who was sitting at his home in Greenwich at that very moment with his wife and two small children, trying to concentrate on a recording of Dvorak's cello concerto while thinking about the Arcadia slowly moving away from the Liverpool landing-stage.
Harry Pakenow may have been scornful about upper-class unhappiness, but grief was just as vivid on promenade Deck A as it was on lower Deck E.
Catriona opened her eyes to feel the ship shuddering beneath her. Then she sat up, unsure for a moment if she was in London, dreaming that she was on board ship; or on board ship, dreaming that she was in London.
"My God," she said to herself, "it's actually going, and they haven't told me!"
She scrambled out of bed and reached for her peignoir. Then she went to the porthole and looked out. Liverpool was already a grey and shimmering mirage of itself, and a wide stretch of chumed-up water now separated the Arcadia and the landing-stage. As if to confirm to Catriona that the liner was really on her way, a dozen tugs let out a chorus of excited whoop-whoops, and the Aquitania, which was moored a little further along the pierhead, gave a bellowing bon voyage which echoed as far as Bootle and Blundellsands. Janice Bignor heard it faintly as she waited by the bus-stop on her way to work, her eyes still blurred from crying, Harry's crumpled letter in her purse.