They probably collided on purpose. It was one of those romantic little accidents that are so eye-poppingly obvious that even the people involved in it can't really believe that it actually happened by mistake. Catriona stepped forward, but then Mark stepped forward and collided with her again; and then, at the third collision, they got it right. Mark held her very quickly and strongly in his arms, and lowered his face towards hers, his lips slightly parted and his eyes as intent as a baseball player who knows that his last pitch has just got to be his best-ever.
Catriona said, "This is mad. This is just like the pictures." But she gripped the sleeve of his blazer as he held her tighter, and when he kissed her, gently at first, but then harder, and more greedily, she did nothing to resist him. The lift doors closed just as Rudyard Philips was turning around to see why they weren't following him; and then they were borne upwards again with a warm electric hum, alone in their compass-decorated cubicle. Middle deck F, upper deck E, saloon deck D.
Once she was actually in his arms, Catriona found Mark's masculinity to be overwhelming. His body, through the softness of his beautifully-cut wool blazer, felt uncompromisingly hard and athletic. His chin was shaved perfectly smooth, and was aromatic with some lemony, grassy, cologne. He kissed with a controlled fierceness which she thought, in the first few seconds,1 would be resistible; but then she found that the inside of her head was echoing with vibrant and unexpected desire, and that the seam of her camisole was adhering damply between her thighs, like the wings of a butterfly caught in a summer storm.
"My God," she said, wrestling his arm away. "Mark."
He stood straight, grinning, a smudge of her Red Neon lipstick on the side of his mouth, quite unabashed by her struggling.
"You know something?" he asked her. "You are the softest, most fragrant, most feminine thing afloat. Do you know what you've done to me?"
She held her arm protectively across her breasts. She could feel her own nipples through the thin blue silk, as tight as buttons. "I don't care what I've done to you.*
The doors of the electric lift hummed apart, and there stood two first-class passengers in wide white ducks, smiling at them inanely. Mark said smoothly, "Excuse us," and piloted Catriona out onto the saloon deck. It was tea-time now, and the passengers were gravitating towards the Grand Lounge for cucumber sandwiches and Belgian gateaux and hot scones with strawberry preserve and clotted cream. The Arcadia's jazz band was playing "Ain't We Got Fun" among the frondy palms.
"Will you join me for tea?" asked Mark.
Catriona shook her head. "You go and rescue your girlfriend from the beauty parlour. I feel like a cold swim."
Mark lifted his straw boater. "It's been a pleasure."
Catriona couldn't help smiling. "It usually is," she said. "And thank you for the necklace. It's perfect."
"Do you want me to comment on that?" said Mark.
"No," said Catriona, and pressed the lift button to take her back to promenade deck A.
SIXTEEN
The Arcadia dropped her anchors off Dun Laoghaire, south of Dublin Bay, twenty-five minutes earlier than expected. The bay was crowded with dinghies and lighters and pleasure-boats, tooting their whistles and letting off firecrackers. The giant liner was 300 feet too long to be negotiated into Dublin harbour itself, and all her mail and passengers would have to be brought aboard by cutter, but that hadn't discouraged the Irish from giving her a noisy and cheerful welcome.
Sir Peregrine would have preferred not to stop in Ireland at all, but apart from being a political courtesy, the visit had been made imperative by the simple fact that Keys Shipping owed the Eire Credit Bank more than 400,000 pounds. Much of the Arcadia's steel plating had been bought with Irish money, on the understanding that she would dock regularly on her way to and from New York at Queenstown or Dublin. Some of the Irish bankers had actually tried to persuade Edgar Deacon to terminate the Arcadia's Atlantic run at Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, where ambitious investors of the 1860s had constructed a huge and lavish hotel in the hope that all transatlantic crossings would depart and arrive at Galway Bay. The hotel still stood, massively out of proportion to the small rundown town which clustered around it, but Edgar Deacon, with the blunt support of Catriona's father, had firmly resisted any suggestion that Keys Shipping might create a precedent and make use of it. "We might as well sail from bloody Oslo," Stanley Keys had growled.
Dick Charles stood by the rail as the Keys cutter, varnished and polished and flapping with celebratory bunting, came bucking and spraying out across the bay. On the Arcadia, by way of greeting, the brass section of the ship's orchestra had been mustered on the raised foredeck, and were playing "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" into the gusty breeze. The shadows of cumulus clouds moved across the sea like memories, and hi the far distance, over the dappled and densely green hills of Dublin and Wicklow, a half-rainbow rose as if by magic.
There was no seafaring tradition in Dick's family at all, and it always rather surprised him that he had become an officer on an ocean liner. He had been brought up near the sea, in Deal, on the south Kent coast, but his father had been a grocer, and his older brother Robert had gone into the Army catering corps. Dick had been a lonely boy, lonelier because of his impossible stutter, and the two most lasting impressions he carried of his childhood were of sitting on two biscuit tins in the dark hidey hole behind the counter in his father's shop drinking ginger beer out of a stone bottle and reading Tiger Tim's Weekly, and of walking out all on his own across the breezy marshes in his galoshes and his mackintosh to look for herons" eggs. The galoshes (which had been Robert's) had been far too big for him, and he had sometimes pretended that he was the giant in the seven-league boots.
Dick had been advised to go to sea by a senile careers master who had smelled strongly of urine, chalk, and bottled India ale, and who had lost all three of his sons in 1909 on the British steamer Waratah, which had disappeared on its way from Sydney to London with three hundred people aboard. Perhaps the careers master had seen Dick as a reincarnation of one of his boys. Dick never knew. But he had known that he didn't want to be a grocer, and so he had written to Cunard, White Star, and Keys, asking what he had to do to become a ship's officer.
He liked the Atlantic run, because in spite of his stutter and his bashful appearance, he was very sociable, and he always enjoyed the company of giggly young girls with too much champagne in them, and the loud bonhomie of wealthy and overindulgent businessmen. I Life on an ocean liner might be artificial—a community of two thousand strangers dancing and drinking and romancing and telling ridiculous lies to each other for four-and-a-half days—but it was a life in which Dick felt important and even glamorous. He wasn't as overtly lustful as most of the officers, who used to line the gangway at the beginning of each voyage, ostensibly to welcome the passengers on board, but in reality to size up their bunk companions for the coming few days. One White Star officer had already described the de luxe Atlantic liners of the early 1920s as "floating fuck-atoria'. But Dick had been through four or five quite seemly little affairs with girls he had met on board, and two of them still wrote to him. One, a dark-haired little co-ed from Creighton University in Omaha, always ended her letters by printing a scarlet kiss at the foot of the page.