Peter Tonkin
Mariner's Ark
For Cham, Guy and Mark, as always.
And with thanks to John Kiehle of Aeroscraft and Captain Andy Dogherty for their help and advice.
ONE
Robin Mariner woke into the last good day at an unusually early hour for her. She did so not because she knew things would grow worse and worse after today until her own life and those of many she cared for would be at risk — or even suspected that this could ever happen or happen so soon. Not because of the morning noises from the adjoining suites, the stirring of stewards busily delivering room service along the endless corridors outside, or because of the intensifying beams of sunshine bursting into her accommodation. Not even because it was coming up to teatime in her jet-lagged head.
She woke simply because her back was cold enough to make her shiver, and that was enough. Or nearly so.
It took Robin a moment to realize that the chill along her spine running from her shoulders to buttocks was what had disturbed her, and an instant more to work out what was causing it. She had a hazy memory of falling asleep in a tangle of bedclothes stark naked, with her equally bare-skinned husband Richard curled against her, their bodies fitting together like a pair of spoons. She was still nude now and the bedding remained in a mess, but Richard was missing — and his absence caused chilly tremors powerful enough to wake her.
She blinked, opening her grey eyes wide, though it cost her some effort to do so. She untangled her right arm from the bedclothes and felt behind her, discovering more icy vacancy. ‘Oh, you bloody man,’ she grumbled. ‘Where in heaven’s name have you gone to now?’ But even in her half-awake bleariness, she knew the answer to that one: the only thing capable of dragging her loving husband away from a bed she occupied in her current state was a different sort of female altogether.
And this one’s name was Mary.
After a moment’s sleepy indecision, she rolled on to her back and sat up, pulling the bedclothes into some sort of order, wriggling her hips and digging her heels into the mattress until her derrière slid up the bottom sheet and the pillows gathered into a backrest behind her shoulders. At least the friction warmed things up a little, she thought. Enough to stop her shivering, at any rate, and smooth the goosebumps that had risen along her arms and legs. A moment’s further reflection established that her sleepy head was clear — nothing lingering from the jetlag or the wine she’d consumed rather too freely last night. She sighed with relief. Then she looked around blearily.
And caught her breath.
For Robin found herself sitting in a sizeable if tumbled double divan at the heart of the Art Deco perfection of a long-vanished age, in the midst of a suite of rooms that might have graced the old Savoy or Strand Palace hotels in London during the years between the two world wars. It was as though she was Mrs Simpson, recently returned with her freshly abdicated Edward, still impressed by how that nice Herr Hitler was organizing things in Germany. Or, given where she was, like Daisy Buchanan coming to after an illicit night of passion with the mysterious Jay Gatsby.
Immediately opposite her, well clear of the foot of the bed, was a built-in unit of honey-coloured wood with drawers, closets and a make-up table, behind which stood a mirror, its crystal surface filled with the reflection of the almost identical fittings that surrounded the head of her bed. In the centre of the bed sat her own temptingly tousled reflection, like one of Russell Flint’s nudes painted as president of the Watercolour Society after 1936. Bang on time with the decor, in fact, she reckoned. Without further thought she pulled the Egyptian cotton sheet up over the all-too-perky coral tips of her breasts, which had not smoothed down with the goosebumps, ran a hand through the jumble of her golden curls and looked away with a sigh that tacitly admitted that the mother of two university-age children — twins, no less — would be unlikely to catch the eye of Sir William Russell Flint. Sir Peter Paul Rubens was looking more and more likely, she thought darkly. He of the adjective Rubenesque, meaning ‘plump, voluptuous …’
To her left, the king deluxe suite stretched inward above a modest prairie of blue, fan-patterned carpet, past more honey-coloured wardrobes towards the main door leading out into an apparently endless corridor beyond the bathroom, from which issued the unmistakable aroma of her errant husband’s Roger and Gallet aftershave. To her right, across Richard’s deserted half of the bed, the suite stretched through a doorway panelled in pale golden wood into a reception room with a table and chairs beneath a pair of portholes whose curtains stood wide, through which the sun was pouring in as it rose distantly above Bixby Park, Grissom Island and the outwash of the Los Angeles River as it ran into Queensway Bay.
Robin blinked again as her memory slipped more clearly into place. She was in an exclusive superior suite aboard the legendary North Atlantic cruise liner Queen Mary in her anchorage at Long Beach, California. Built in the John Brown shipyards on the River Clyde and commissioned by the Cunard line in 1936, it was famously the first of their queens whose name did not end in ‘ia’. Holder of the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing between Europe and America from the late thirties to the early fifties and now, the better part of eighty years after her maiden voyage, it was one of the top hotels in Los Angeles and Long Beach. Her interior spaces represented the acme of late thirties Art Deco after the fashion of Messieurs Bouwens and Expert in the Normandie, presenting the pinnacles of work by artists and designers such as Gilbert Bayes, Alfred Oakley and Agnes Pinder Davis, whose legendary but long-vanished carpeting had once graced these very decks. Not that Robin wouldn’t have been just as happy wallowing in the steely stark twenty-first century ambience of the Hyatt or the Westin up in LA. Or even the Renaissance out at LAX.
But to be fair, Robin decided at last, she was quite satisfied. Satisfied in more ways than one, in fact. She glanced down the length of the gently curvaceous body outlined by the tangled sheet like an Egyptian mummy in its wrappings, and gave a sensuous little wriggle of her hips which were anything but mummified. In spite of the temptations of twenty-first-century luxury, her relentlessly romantic husband Richard had found the promise of the bygone elegance Queen Mary offered irresistible. So here they were.
Or, at least, here she was — but where the hell was he?
Richard and Robin had arrived on BA flight 283 at LAX yesterday, touching down at 16.30 local time and piling into a limousine just before 18.00; one a.m. in London and in their heads. The limousine, a Lincoln Town Car, had been booked by Richard in spite of the fact that their business partner and friend, Nic Greenbaum, had offered his company chopper. Instead, the American limousine had whisked them down highways 405 and 710 in sufficient comfort for Robin to power nap. And, as she was eight hours behind London time, that had been the least she required, for she had already been up and about for nearly twenty hours.
They’d arrived at the Queen Mary at 19.30 and gone straight to their suite to unpack. They’d showered one at a time in the dual purpose bath and shower — Richard finding the shower head a little low for his six-foot-four-inch frame, though it suited Robin’s more svelte five foot eight inches fine. Then they had changed into the closest thing they had packed to eveningwear. They’d been booked into the Sir Winston restaurant at 21.00, an hour before last orders, their table beside the windows with breathtaking views across Long Beach; just a couple of decks, in fact, above the portholes in their suite.