"It needs wind, of course," she had been chattering. "It's no use at all without wind, but then dear Lord What's-his-name always had such dreadful wind. You can't sit on the Woolsack all day or whatever it is without suffering from some flatulence, can you?"
Dick had stared at her in silent desperation. "No," he had told her, in a voice like someone agreeing to have their dog put down.
Lady Diana had climbed onto the gilded counterpane on all fours, with her wide bottom cocked into the air and her elbows spread like a chicken. "All we need is a champagne cork... and only a champagne cork will do, mind you ... and a little cold cream ... and then ... ahh ..."
Dick had frowned at her intently. "Now what happens?" he had asked her.
"Well, you're supposed to do it as well. It's a kind of game. The person who shoots the cork the furthest is the winner."
"W-what do they w-win?"
"Well, I don't know. What do you think they ought to win?"
"I d-don't know."
Nothing had happened for almost five minutes. Lady Diana had remained in her peculiar crouching position, her bottom still raised, expression on her face that could only be described as The Considerable Inconvenience of St Theresa. But then, without warning, there was a ripping kind of a noise, and the champagne cork popped across the bedroom and landed somewhere on the white merino rug.
"There!" Lady Diana had clapped. "A good four-footer, at least!"
Dick Charles had sat up straight. He had suddenly caught sight of his face in the mirror on the dressing table, and he had never seen himself looking so drawn or so perplexed. "Four-footer?" he had queried.
"One of the best I've ever done!" cried Lady Diana. "Do you want to try? I bet you could beat me, if you really put your mind to it! Try for a five-footer, at least!"
The rest of the morning had been a jumbled collection of laughter, rolling on the bed, and strange disconnected conversations. He could remember Lady Diana recounting in some detail a picnic she had once attended, with the Greys, who had been relatives of the Viceroy of India, or some such; and how the Hon. Arabella Timmons had shown the assembled company what unusual tricks could be accomplished with hard-boiled eggs. All this talk of the landed classes being pillars of England's morality were rot. Utter rot. They were the most licentious assembly of people on God's earth, and what lusts they were unable to satisfy on horseback, they promptly extinguished in the loins of the nearest maidservant, like plunging a red-hot poker into a bucket of water. Then... Lady Diana had discussed at length the comparative merits of dukes and baronets, and how the baronets that she knew, although they were largely not as energetic as the dukes, were largely larger. This conclusion provoked gales of laughter, and a lot of ankle-thrashing, and it took several large drafts of champagne to settle Lady Diana down again.
The extraordinary thing was Dick couldn't remember, even impressionistically, how the morning had ended. He could vaguely recall pouring another drink for them both, but after that, hardly anything at all, except perhaps, a remote argument about champagne corks and cold cream. He had been nuzzling up to Lady Diana's naked side, he could remember that, and laughing about something silly.
But then nothing— except waking up in his own quarters, with a crashing hangover.
He went to the washstand, fumbled it open, and filled up the basin with tepid water, which he splashed into his face in an ineffectual attempt to revive himself. In the oval minor on top of the washstand, he looked like a photograph of a death mask by Madame Tussaud. God knows what Sir Peregrine would say when he turned up on the bridge for duty. "Need the padre, do you, Number Four?" he would say, in that stiff, buzzardlike croak of his. "Expecting to get a free burial at sea?"
"N-no, sir," Dick said to his reflection in the mirror.
He dressed slowly, and with increasing thoughtfulness. Surely, a woman like Lady Diana could have had her pick of any one of twenty aristocratic young men who were travelling on the Arcadia. There were two peers of the realm on board, too, so why not them? Instead, she had chosen him, Fourth Officer Dick Charles, for no reason that seemed to make any sense. Well, he knew he was moderately good-looking, and that in spite of his stutter he was quite a personable young man. He could row quite well, and he didn't drop his aitches. He even ate his fish with two forks, instead of a fish knife, which among young ocean liner officers these days was one of those refinements of etiquette which had almost completely died out. He could speak French, bad Cantonese and a smattering of Portuguese.
Still, why had Lady Diana so carnivorously picked on him, when there was such an abundance of upper-class prey for her to snatch? And if she was the kind of woman who enjoyed slumming, well, there were scores of well-sculpted young men in steerage—much lower class and much better looking.
He opened three drawers in his locker before he found a clean pair of underpants and a short-sleeved undervest. He tugged them on uncomfortably, as if they belonged to someone else. Then he pulled on a pair of calf-length navy-blue socks, and fastened them with sock suspenders. It was then that he rang for his steward to bring him a pot of treacly black coffee, three aspirin, and a corned-beef sandwich spread a quarter-of-an-inch thick with hot English mustard.
At the same moment that Dick Charles" steward poked his ginger short-back-and-sides around the cabin door and said, "Ready for brekker, sir?" Edgar Deacon was round on the far side of the boat deck, rapping at Sir Peregrine's quarters. Percy Fearson stood beside at Sir Peregrine's quarters. Percy Fearson stood beside him, grim and stocky-shouldered, his hair standing on end in the morning wind.
Sir Peregrine's voice called, "Come," with a slight thickening of phlegm, and this was followed by a noisy throat-clearing.
Edgar opened the door and stepped inside. It was hot in the commodore's sitting-room, with that particular stifling heat that you only came across on ocean liners, smelling of baked paint, diesel oil, fuel oil, and stuffed upholstery. Edgar said, "Good morning, Sir Peregrine," with the flat carefulness of a man who cannot trust himself to hold back his temper. "You slept well?"
At this unexpectedly solicitous remark, Sir Peregrine lifted his skeletal head, and stared at Edgar with one eye open and one eye tightly closed, as if he were finding it difficult to focus. "Well, Mr. Deacon," he said, "you too?"
Sir Peregrine was sitting in his armchair, which he had dragged to the middle of his sitting-room, with all the stiffness of an elderly and unpopular monarch. He was still wearing his crested bathrobe and his leather slippers, and his reading spectacles were suspended by a thin chain that had tangled itself around one of his ears. He had been reading Vanity Fair, and the book was now spread open over the arm of his chair, like a ridge tile, to keep his place. He had reached chapter thirteen, and he had been relishing Thackeray's comment that "whenever he met a great man he grovelled before him, and my-lorded him, as only a free-born Briton can do'. The sarcasm, of course, was quite lost on Sir Peregrine, who quite seriously believed that he himself was a great man, and that grovelling from both his crew and his passengers was what he rightly and properly deserved.
The problem was that since the war, it wasn't easy to get people to grovel. The war had made the hoi-polloi too cocky, too damned "equal'. Take this overbearing office-wallah Edgar Deacon, as a gross example. A professional bloody nuisance of the first water.