There were thirty sticks of dynamite in the trunk of Mark Beeney's Marmon in the hold below the Arcadia's waterline, and to Harry that was the only political statement it was necessary for him to make. One bomb was worth a million leaflets.
With most of the steerage bumping and winding their way around the dining-tables in the conga, Harry went out on to shelter deck C and leaned against the rail with a bottle of Worthington and a cigarette. Although there was a south-westerly breeze blowing across the ship, the night was warm and unusually clear, even for midsummer, and the sky was bedecked with its own jewellery, the stars. To first-time travellers across the Atlantic, it was the sight of the stars at night that was the most breathtaking. They seemed so sparkling and so near that you could almost reach up your hand and feel them prickle against your fingers. And the ocean was so calm that, as the stars set, they were bisected by the horizon before they finally disappeared around the curve of the earth.
Harry leaned his back on the rail and looked up towards the first-class promenade, where young Lucille Foster had stood that afternoon to wave to him. He hoped that when the bomb went off, Lucille would find herself in the care of someone who wouldn't panic, someone who would take her immediately to the lifeboats. There was a high risk, of course, that some of the passengers would drown, but he very much didn't want one of them to be Lucille. He sucked at his cigarette until he was down to the raw hot smoke at the end; then he flicked it over the side.
He heard giggling in the darkness. He didn't take any notice at first, but then Philly came tripping out from the shadow of the electric winch which stood at the side of the deck, tugging along behind her a small blonde-headed girl with a button nose and wide brown eyes. "Oh, it's you," he said, with half a smile. "And this is your mate Lydia, I suppose."
"Didn't I tell you?" said Philly to Lydia. She was wearing a silver shimmy-dress, and as she giggled and wriggled the silver braid shone like Christmas decorations, or the fringes round a birthday-cake. "Isn't he cute? Lydia, don't you think he's just too cute?
Lydia held out a soft, damp little hand. "I guess he is," she said cheekily, and then burst into uncontrollable giggling again.
"I had you were seasick," Harry said to Lydia, swigging at his bottle of beer.
"I was," said Lydia. "It was too awful. Upchuck, upchuck, upchuck. I thought I was going to die. But I'm much better now. I think it him meat pasty I ate on the boat train. I don't know what the British put into their pasties. Minced dog, I guess. Well, maybe minced horse. But anyway, every thing's hotsy-totsy now."
"You girls should be dancing," said Harry.
"Oh, we don't care for the conga," Philly told him. "We only care for starlight strolls around the deck, you know the kind of thing. I guess you could call us natural romantics."
Lydia said to Harry, "You have a real runny accent, you know?"
"I've been living in England for four years, that's why," Harry explained. He finished his beer, and wiped his lips with the back of his sleeve. "It's a Liverpudlian accent, scouse they call it. It rubs off on you without you realising it. Same as their sense of humour. Do you know what they call coloured people? Smoked Irishmen."
Lydia giggled again. Harry held up his empty bottle and said, "Maybe we ought to write a message and toss it into the sea. Then some poor shipwrecked mariner on a desert island somewhere can swim through reefs and surf and schools of sharks to open it up, and find out what a good time we're having on this voyage."
"Didn't I tell you?" said Philly, rhetorically. "He's absolutely copacetic."
"Why don't you go join the party?" Harry told them. "All I'm going to do is watch the stars, drink another bottle of beer, and then go to bed. I don't think I have the same stamina those first-class people do. Maybe it's something to do with the first-class diet. Maybe caviar really is better for you than steak and kidney pudding. Or maybe they put something in the third-class beer so that we won't stage a mutiny."
Lydia said, "Hee-hee-hee-hee," as if she were a character in Little Orphan Annie, the new strip cartoon which had just started in the American funny papers. But Philly said, "Why don't you come down to our cabin? We have a bottle of giggle-water we bought in Calais, France. Real French grape brandy. We could play rummy and get spifflicated."
"Don't you have anybody else in your cabin?"
"There was another girl, Lorna, but she wanted to go share with her friends. They're all in the Perm State ladies" swimming team, or something like that. I guess they want to spend their time chewing the fat about swimming hats, or how to do the backstroke without drowning."
Harry thought for a long moment. What else was he going to do? Drink another bottle of warm beer? Go back to the cabin which he was sharing with two Lithuanian students and a German musician who seemed to carry all of his personal effects around with him in loosely-tied brown paper parcels? Return to the dining-saloon and dance the conga with all of those sweating choristers and cheap-suited shoe-salesmen and lady philosophy students with the curse? He felt inexplicably anti-social, unexpectedly critical of his fellow proletarians. How could they actually hope to overthrow the establishment when they were so easily pleased, when they were happy to dance the conga in a badly-ventilated lounge at the very bottom of the passenger decks, while up above them, in halls of glittering mirrors, the rich and the famous swept around to the harmonious sound of a whole orchestra? He took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose. He could already feel the dull ache of tomorrow's hangover.
"All right," he told Philly and Lydia. "Anything's better than doing the conga."
The three of them linked arms, and made their way across the gently-rolling deck. In the corners and shadows, couples were already intertwined, murmuring like doves before dawn; and on one of the hard varnished benches, with his arm around his black-haired wife, the French Communist schoolteacher was smoking a Caporal and earnestly denouncing Hegel. One man, who looked to Harry like a deserter from the Foreign Legion, stared out at the ocean and whistled a plaintive tune through his broken nose. He had the appearance of someone who has punched a great many people, both men and women, extremely hard, and might easily do so again.
There were four wooden bunks in Philly's cabin, as well as an upright washstand, which folded away when it wasn't in use, and a folding table which could be erected between the two lower bunks on the stiltlike leg. Three large pipes ran from one side of the ceiling to the other, and Philly was sure that one of them came from the second-class bathrooms, because every now and then it gurgled inside grew very hot. On the cream-painted wall, Lydia had stuck with chewing gum a black and white photograph of a grinning young man with very protruding ears and enormously wide trousers.
"Take off your coat," said Philly. "You might as well make yourself at home." She dug around under the mattress of her bunk and at last produced a half-bottle of pale brandy with the label Les Trois Mers. "Here it is," she said, unscrewing it, "although God knows why they call it the Three Mothers."
Lydia kicked off her shoes, hiked up her pale blue satin dress, and sat on the bunk with her legs crossed, like a little blonde elf. "I vote we drink the brandy, and then play spin-the-bottle."
"Who's the guy with the flappy pants?" Harry asked, hanging up his tweed sports coat behind the door.
"Oh, him. Lonnie McBride, one of my boyfriends. Isn't he spiffy?"