Harry took off his sou'wester. His spiky hair was already wet, and stuck to his scalp. "The sooner we get started, the sooner we'll get her down," he said. "That line you've tied round the lower end of the jib there, can you get the other end up here, onto this deck?"
"Well, sure," said Mark. "But we've already tried to swing across to the crane from here. In fact, it was Douglas Fairbanks who tried, and if Douglas Fairbanks can't do it—"
Harry sniffed and took off his glasses. "Do you think you could just, you know, do it?" he asked.
Mark stared at him and then at Catriona and then at Derek Holdsworth. "All right," he said, "if that's what you want. Mr Holdsworth?"
"If that's what he wants," shrugged Derek Holdsworth.
"By the way," said Harry, lifting up his oilskin so that he could wipe his spectacles on his trousers. "The name is Pakenow, pronounced Pak-eh-nov. All right? Not Pack 'em off."
"Sure," said Mark, distractedly. He was used to dealing with employees.
The line which Douglas Fairbanks had used for his ill-fated attempt to swing across to the crane's upright was hurled up from the deck below to the second-class promenade. Harry told Derek Holdsworth to lash it fast to the railing; and then without any posing or delays, he climbed over the railing and started to monkey-swing, hand over hand, from the promenade to the crane.
Several times, the Arcadia heeled over so violently that he had to hold on tight, and wait until the roll was over. But it took him less than a minute to reach the crane, and once he was there, he fastened his legs around its wet steel upright, waited for a moment to catch his breath, and then started to climb up to the joint where the jib connected with the main pillar. Catriona watched him in fascination. It seemed as if his determination that something had to be done to rescue Lucille Foster had completely overcome the fact that it was impossible. He hadn't even asked how they had tried to rescue her before. He didn't need to learn by anybody else's mistakes.
Soon Harry was astride the jib, and working his way up to the pulleys where Lucille was crouching. He was soaked, and he was sweating, but as he shuffled his way up the twenty-degree angle of the precarious jib, he felt more determined and more excited than he had for years. And there, clinging to the tip of the crane, drenched in spray, shivering with cold, was this unhappy little rich girl who hadn't been able to befriend anybody on board the Arcadia except him. It took him about ten minutes to climb right up to her. She was wet and bedraggled, and her lips were mackerel-blue with cold. When he reached out for her, and grasped her chilly little hand, she shuddered and shook and burst into tears.
"Lucille," he shouted, in the gentlest shout he could manage. "Lucille, I love you."
She sobbed and she shivered and she couldn't stop. Harry hadn't seen a face so vulnerable, a face so injured, since the funeral of a labour leader in Queens, in 1919, when the dead man's daughter had knelt by his coffin and silently expended her grief in half an hour of tears. Grief, dammit, was classless. Because this girl Lucille, who was richer than anybody he had ever known, richer than all hell, was as desolate and as lonesome as that labour leader's daughter, and younger, too. And for the first time in his life, Harry began to wonder what the hell it all meant, all this class struggle, all this bombastic oppression, and all this talk of revolution. The repudiation of both capitalism and Communism was right here, to be caught in the open palm of an understanding hand. The answer to them both was tears.
"Lucille," said Harry, clutching her tight. "What the hell are you doing up here?"
"I climbed," she bleated.
"In a storm like this, you climbed?"
"It wasn't so bad when I first climbed up. But then it got worse, and I was frightened."
"I'm not surprised," said Harry. "I'm frightened now. Do you see that sea out there? That's rough!"
"I wanted to die," said Lucille, miserably. "I was going to throw myself off into the ocean."
"Are you really as sad as all that?"
Lucille's shoulders, in Harry's arms, seemed as frail and bony as an injured bird's. "I don't know," she said. "I thought that if Mommy and Daddy were in Heaven, I could join them. I can't bear being left behind."
Harry said, "Lucille, there isn't any Heaven. Your mommy and daddy are gone. They lived their lives, they enjoyed themselves, and they loved each other. But now they're gone. Do you see what I'm getting at? That's why we don't want you to throw yourself into the ocean, because then you'd be gone too, and you wouldn't have lived even half the life your mommy lived, would you?"
Lucille said, "I'm so unhappy."
"Of course you're unhappy," Harry told her. 'You've lost your mommy and your daddy, and that's absolutely the unhappiest thing that could have happened to you. But what do you think your mommy would have said if she could have seen you now? 'Lucille!', she would have said, 'come down off that ridiculous crane at once!' Your mommy loved you, Lucille. Your mommy was Gala Jones, and she was famous. She wouldn't want you to die, not for anything. How is anybody ever going to remember how beautiful and how nice she was, if you don't stay alive to tell them?"
There was a long silence between them, two or three minutes. Lucille clutched Harry tight, and the spray blew around them as they sat on their precarious perch, like flecks of snow. Harry thought of the words he had read in Bootle Public Library, one rainy afternoon when Janice had gone to see her mother. "And we forget because we must, and not because we will." He didn't know who had written them. Someone who had been obliged to cling on to the realities of real life, like he had.
"Are you going to come down now, chuck?" Harry asked Lucille, in that soft encouraging tone that fathers in Liverpool could use with their daughters.
Lucille said, "My dress is caught in the wires."
THIRTY-THREE
Towards evening, the seas began to subside, and the gale-force wind began to blow itself out. At half-past seven, the skies to the southwest cleared away, and the passengers of the Arcadia were treated to a summer sunset on the scale of the Last Judgement—dazzling chords of light that played on a sparkling grey sea, and mountainous banks of cloud that were gorged with crimson, purple and smoky gold, and topped with cream. In the smoking room, where he had lost something very close to 600 pounds in large white fivers to Maurice Peace during the course of the storm, Sir Terence Harding-Crump stood by the porthole observing this glory for almost five minutes before remarking, "You think they'd tone it down a bit. This is a British ship, you know."
Maurice Peace, his mouth chockful of club sandwich, scooped in 250 pounds more, and said, "You're right, Sir Terence. It's in very squalid taste. God was supposed to be an Englishman, not a Broadway set designer." Then he smiled benignly at the gentleman opposite, whom he had now fleeced for the sixth successive game. But Maurice never cheated. Well, not very often.
The gentleman opposite was one of those odd coves who always stirred up a whirlwind of rumour on voyages like these. He was very tall, and he habitually wore perniciously small sunglasses, and a white silk scarf around the lower part of his face. His large head was topped by a dense thatch of peppery hair, a toupee so blatantly false, right down to the canvas backing which showed through the parting, that Baroness Zawisza had concluded that it could not possibly be worn by a man who was actually bald. "It is a disguise," she had declaimed, "not a cosmetic improvement. If a man were bald, and had to wear a toupee like that, he would die of embarrassment." The rest of the first-class lady passengers had at first supposed that the man was a ruined Russian prince, travelling incognito. But Princess Xenia soon scotched that idea. She knew all the Russian princes, especially the ruined ones, and even behind those menacing spectacles he was nobody that she could place. Then the ladies had wondered if he were a celebrated motion-picture star, hideously burned in an accident in Europe, travelling back to Hollywood for plastic surgery. Yet all the most famous motion-picture stars seemed to be accounted for. Douglas Fairbanks was on board, and hobbling bravely about with a bandaged ankle. Rudolf Valentino was filming The Eagle. John Barrymore, The Great Profile, was taking a vacation in Honolulu. And whoever it was under that thatch, it wasn't Charles Farrell or John Gilbert. Perhaps the mystery man was a great millionaire, returning to the United States after a tragic love affair. On the other hand, perhaps he wasn't.