‘Where’s Rosemary?’ he asked in a low voice.
Pat turned to Cubby in surprise. She stared at him, her mouth half-open, but didn’t answer.
‘Is she okay?’ Cubby demanded.
Pat shook her head slightly. Her freckled face was pinched with the cold. She looked frightened. ‘No. She’s—’
Luella Hennessey, now aware of Cubby’s presence, took Pat’s arm and pulled her away before she could say anything more. Cubby called after her, but apart from a last glance over her shoulder, Pat was helpless. Cubby leaned on the rail, biting his lip in frustration as he watched them disappear into the crowd.
As Manhattan turned west, Commodore Randall was on the bridge, his binoculars to his eyes, watching the horizon.
‘Heard the news from France, George?’ he asked his first officer.
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘If France falls, the Germans will control the Atlantic coast from Brest to Bordeaux. They’ll be hundreds of miles closer to Allied shipping lanes. They’ll build airfields and U-boat bases all the way along the Channel.’
‘It’ll be the end of Southampton, Plymouth and Portsmouth. The south coast ports will be far too dangerous to use. Shipping will have to use Liverpool or even Glasgow instead.’
‘And what’s more, the Germans will be perfectly poised for an invasion of Britain.’
George Symonds nodded. ‘It’s a bad lookout, Commodore.’
Randall grunted like a walrus, lowering his binoculars. ‘I’m retiring at the end of this trip. I don’t mind telling you, I’m damn glad to be getting out, too.’
Arturo Toscanini was at Manhattan’s stern, looking down at the ship’s wake.
He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and took out the sheaf of letters that Carla had brought him from Kastanienbaum. Ada’s letters, bound together by a length of purple ribbon, the ribbon from her slip which he’d begged her to give him after they’d made love for the first time.
He had read them all over the past two days, often with his heart pounding. So much passion! So much feeling!
Toscanini relaxed his fingers slowly. There had been others before Ada. But she—
She had been the love of his life. Ah, that cliché on the lips of every cheap Romeo. The love of my life. But when you considered it, when you really understood it, it was a sentence pronounced by the most terrible of judges, echoing down the barren years that remained.
He raised the letters to his nose, trying to catch the scent of Ada’s perfume over the salty wind that buffeted him. There! The faintest, sweetest trace of violette di Parma. He inhaled it deeply into his lungs, and then with a groan threw the sheaf of letters away from him. The purple knot unravelled; the letters tumbled in the wind like dying doves, spiralling down into the churning maelstrom of the liner’s wake. For a moment there was a flash of purple silk in the foam, a scattering of dainty envelopes; and then the correspondence was sucked into the deep and gone forever.
Carla Toscanini was in her little cabin, breakfasting off toast and coffee. She had never adopted the Anglo-Saxon custom of a cooked breakfast; and in any case, there was her figure to think of. If she put on any more weight, she would have nothing to wear. And she couldn’t be bothered to go back into corsets.
She hadn’t seen her husband for two days, though the stewards told her he tramped the decks ceaselessly. That frenetic engine inside Artú beat with greater energy than ever; but the housing was growing frailer, and one day the engine was going to shake it all to pieces, and that would be the end of Arturo Toscanini.
Why had she not suspected Ada, thirty years younger than Artú, and with all the right qualifications? Perhaps because Ada’s husband had been young and handsome, and Italy’s foremost cellist. She should have remembered that Artú could conquer any woman, and feared no rival, no matter how young and handsome. Mainardi must have known. Perhaps he had been compliant, even complicit? The tyrant Toscanini subjugated men as easily as women. He was demoniac.
The word genius, so often thrown carelessly at Artú, had a dark shadow that few people considered. To the ancients it meant the god that ruled each person’s life and passions and appetites. The greater the genius, the greater the appetites. And the more implacable the rule. Artú’s genius was a monster. If one were to see it as it really was, it would not be a little man with white hair. It would be a towering, horned thing, rampant, destructive, mad.
That was perhaps what his adoring public really worshipped, if the truth were known. Not the music, but the madness.
The children, of course, knew more than she did. They saw what she preferred to close her eyes to. As one of them said, ‘Papà casts his net wide.’
Did Artú have no scruples? There had been a line in one of Ada’s letters that had stuck in Carla’s mind:
You write that your conscience is always fighting with your will, that you hate yourself, are disgusted with yourself! But my darling—
Perhaps he felt remorse, from time to time, when the horned thing was exhausted. But not enough to bring him back to sanity. And one could not live with a madman.
She was sixty-two now. At sixty-two, her own mother had been an old woman, already dying. But times had changed. A woman of sixty-two these days was not yet old. There was still enjoyment left in life, for all the tragedies that had beset her – the death of her own child and those of her sister, the ravages among the family of drug addiction and cancer.
Out from under Artú’s shadow, she could live a little before the end came. Enjoy what was left of her life. Take refuge from the storm. And find some peace.
Fanny Ward, the Perennial Flapper, had eaten nothing as yet, though her hamper still contained most of the cold chicken and half the game pie. She had remained in her bunk, with the silk sheets (she had brought her own on board) pulled over her head during the noisy departure from Southampton. She hadn’t wanted to see or hear any of it. It was far too painful.
She got up now and went to her window, opening the curtain cautiously. She peered out, anxious that she might still catch a glimpse of the country she was leaving with so much sorrow. To her dismay, there was still land to be seen: chalky white cliffs gleaming in the watery sunshine, with a sparse green topping; chalky white rocks sticking out of the sea like a few last teeth; a chalky white lighthouse, painted with fading red stripes.
She stared blankly at these things, feeling the dull ache in her heart. At least there were no towns, no signs of humanity to be seen. She was leaving behind half her life, and she had a deep foreboding that she would never return to it again. All her lovely things, some of them priceless, now stored in a sandbagged basement. Her friends, her life, her peace, all gone.
Sighing, she drew the curtains closed and set about the long task of preparing herself to face the day.
Young Teddy Kennedy was fascinated by the little people. They were called Hoffman’s Midget Marvels. There were eight of them, and they were holding court in the Observation Lounge, seated in a group on a banquette so they could be photographed. They were all dressed fashionably, four miniature ladies and four miniature gentlemen, and their miniature suitcases had been arranged around them for extra effect. None of them were any bigger than Teddy himself, and he was only seven. The smallest was so tiny that their manager, Mr Harry Hoffman (in a jacket with very wide shoulders and smiling very widely) was bouncing him on his knee. Although he was tiny, you could see that he was really quite old, older than the manager, with a face like a wizened apple, and he looked cross at being bounced, which made everyone laugh even more.