"Mr. Beeney is coming with us," announced Catriona, as Rudyard came up and saluted her.
"How nice," said Rudyard, and shook hands. Further along the deck, in the Palm Lounge, the band was playing "There's Yes Yes In Your Eyes." In Edgar Deacon's eyes, as he watched Catriona and Mark and Rudyard make their way along to the first-class stairway, there was nothing but disturbance. A thunderstorm in the making.
FOURTEEN
A half-hour before the coastline of Ireland came into view, Harry Pakenow was sitting on the end of a crowded bench on shelter deck C, trying to compose a letter to Janice. In the note that he had left her on the kitchen table in Bootle, he had been blunt to the point a of cruelty. But he knew that if he had written what he truly felt for her, he would have found it five times more painful to go. When the Arcadia had sailed clear of Liverpool Bay, and the long hazy shores of England had finally merged into the sea, Harry had understood with a deep wave of unexpected grief how much he had actually loved Janice, and how much he was going to miss her. He had faced out to sea with tears clinging to the lenses of his spectacles, and his throat so tight with unhappiness that he could scarcely swallow.
Now he tried to write down what he had always failed to tell her, but it was more difficult than he could have imagined. "I love you" wasn't enough. What he needed was some way of expressing his gratitude for every one of her silly little jokes, and her childish kisses, and every plate of black pudding and bacon she had brought him. What could he tell her about those rainy Sunday walks through the cobbled streets of Bootle? What could he tell her about the evening she had danced the Charleston naked in the bedroom, little breasts bouncing, bead necklace swinging, bare toes stubbing on the threadbare rug?
Ordinary Janice Bignor. England was crowded with girls like Janice Bignor. Yet in her very ordinariness she had been cute and trusting and more lovable than Harry could have told anyone, ever.
He wrote,"... never in my whole life ..." but the wind snapped down the corner of his page, as if it didn't want him to attempt any more. Next to him on the hard varnished bench a grossly fat Estonian woman with a worn-out carpet-bag on her lap was steadfastly devouring a whole salami sausage as if it were an act of penance. Three Hungarian Jews with beards and long curly payess were playing violins and singing. But few of the third-class passengers were as poverty-stricken nor as ethnically colourful as they had been in the past, in the days of open immigration. This year's Johnson-Reed Act had cut America's immigration quota, already restricted, down to two per cent of the foreign-born population of the United States according to the census of 1890. The raised rear deck was promenaded not by Poles and Lithuanians but by college students, schoolteachers, priests, shop assistants, and members of the South Wales Glee Club.
Harry, as he sat on deck in his shabby tweed jacket and his tweed cap, his pants tucked into his Fair Isle socks, had the look of a typical steerage passenger. Like everyone else in third-class, he had paid 40 pounds return Liverpool-New York-Liverpool, although in his case he had only purchased a round-trip ticket as part of his alibi. Like everyone else in third-class, he shared a cabin with five others, enjoying the facilities of an upright foldaway wash-stand, two clean towels a day, and use of the third-class bathrooms at anytime at all. There were fifteen different foods on the third-class breakfast menu, including porridge, chopped chicken livers, and kippers. The days when the third-class steward of the Lusitania had reported to his head office in consternation that "quite a number of the third-class passengers ... inquired for sheets for the beds" were long gone.
Standing up against the freshening wind, Harry crammed the pages of his half-written letter into his jacket pocket. He was about to go inside for a drink when, as if in an odd dream, a small figure in a pink dress came sailing through the air from the rail of the first-class promenade deck above him, and landed on the white-scrubbed boards. He bent over and picked it up. It was a doll, with blonde ringlets and a rather sulky-looking china face.
Harry squinted up against the sun. Up by the first-class rail was a girl of about twelve or thirteen, in a pink cloche hat and an expensive pink coat with a fur collar. She waved to him, and he lifted the doll up in his hand. "I'll bring it back up to you!" he called.
He went inside, to the linoleum-covered stairway that led up to the second-class deck. A fat man was sitting halfway up smoking a pipe and reading My Golfing Life by the golf queen Glenna Collett. He shifted his bottom over as Harry came up the stairs, without once taking his eyes off his book. But Harry was just about to step through the open door that would have taken him onto the second-class deck when a snappy little steward with a clipped moustache blocked his way.
"Sorry, mate, you can't come up here. This is second-class."
Harry held up the doll. "A little girl dropped this from the first-class deck. I was only going to give it back to her."
"You're not allowed up here, I'm sorry. If you give the doll to me, I'll make sure she gets it."
Harry licked his lips. He felt that familiar breathlessness in his chest, the feeling he had felt when he had stowed the dynamite in Mark Beeney's limousine. And the same feeling he had felt when he had driven that horse-drawn wagon four years ago right up to the corner of Wall Street.
"I'd prefer to give it back personally, if you don't mind," he said.
"I'm not going to stay up there, and I'm not going to get in anybody's way. Now, will you let me through?"
"Not a chance," said the steward. "You think those folks in cabin class pay two thousand quid a trip to mix with riff-raff like you?"
Harry, furious, grabbed the steward by the lapels of his beige Keys jacket, and shook him. "You think you're any better than me, just because you're serving on a second-class deck? What's the matter with you?"
"You let go of me!" panted the steward, frightened. He swung his arms around like a windmill, and hit Harry on the shoulder, but both of them were too scared and excited to hurt each other much. They were still shoving and pulling at each other's clothes when Mr. Willowby appeared, a stately vessel in his own right, all watch chain and glittering vest buttons. He was leading by the hand the small pink-coated girl from the first-class deck.
"Anything amiss here, gentlemen?" he asked.
The second-class steward straightened his necktie. Harry, panting with anger, leaned back against the bulkhead, still clutching the doll.
"This bloody madman tried to force his way into second-class," gasped the steward. "He's mad! He shook me about all over the place!"
"Well, perhaps you deserved it," said Mr Willowby warmly. Then, to Harry, "You do realize, squire, that your third-class ticket does not entitle you to access to the second- or first-class accommodation? I mean, you do understand that?"
"I wanted to return this doll to the little girl," said Harry breathlessly. "That was all. Nothing more. And I object to being treated like some kind of sub-human species, just because I paid forty pounds for my ticket instead of two thousand pounds."