‘She sounds very interesting.’
‘She’s a brilliant musicologist. She was assigned to me as my music theory tutor in my first year. I hadn’t paid her too much attention at first – I was a sulky girl in those days, and stared at my shoes most of the time. But the first time we were alone together in her room, I saw her properly at last. She seemed to me like—’
‘Like what?’ Masha demanded as Rachel hesitated.
‘Like a perfect, unopened seashell that one finds on a beach. I couldn’t take my eyes off her while she talked about pitch, duration, rhythm and tempo. She noticed me staring at her. I saw her face suddenly flush to a deep pink, like a musk-rose. It was the most extraordinary transformation. Her eyes became liquid. I saw her lips swell and grow moist. She had become beautiful in a moment. And I, for my part, felt I had come alive for the first time in years.’
‘I’ve had that feeling,’ Masha whispered. ‘So you knew at once?’
‘I knew,’ Rachel agreed. ‘But we continued in the same way for a few weeks, I sitting there staring at her, she enduring my stare with her colour coming and going every few minutes. The tension was unbearable. And yet I was deliriously happy inside. And it was I who made the first move.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I waited until the end of the tutorial one day, and then I said to her, “I’ve been longing to kiss you since the moment I saw you.”’
Masha leaned forward breathlessly. ‘You were so bold! Did she allow you to kiss her?’
‘Not then. After all, she was older and wiser – and far more cautious – than I. She had a great deal more to lose. Her position, her reputation. I was eighteen, and ready to burst out of my skin. She simply gathered her books and hurried out of the room.’
‘How disappointing!’
‘Not altogether. I’d seen the look on her face. And I wasn’t about to give up. Once I set my heart on something, I usually get it.’ Rachel smiled. ‘I am a lioness, after all.’
‘You pursued her?’
‘I pursued and stalked and laid in wait. I left flowers on her desk. I told her what I wanted with my eyes. I sat close to her in the concert hall. I followed her everywhere, up the marble staircases, in the cloisters, in the refectory. I pushed my bicycle behind her in the street. It was autumn, and she wore a long, English houndstooth coat that drove me wild with desire. The smell of burning leaves is forever associated in my mind with that period. She fled from me, but she looked over her shoulder. And at last—’
‘At last—?’
‘At last she was mine.’
‘What was it like, the first time?’ Masha demanded.
‘As to that, my dear, you will have to use your imagination.’
‘You can’t stop there!’
‘I can and I will. And you are exhausted. You need to sleep.’
‘How do you expect me to sleep now?’ Masha complained.
‘I think you’ll find it easier than you think.’ She held out her arms.
Masha, still protesting, sank against her cousin’s breast and was enfolded. And despite her reluctance, as Rachel had predicted, sleep came on swift wings.
Cubby Hubbard had thought it over and thought he had a pretty good idea of what ‘your cock, my tail’ had meant, and it wasn’t very nice; but whatever it meant, it meant that Mr Nightingale was an easy-going sort of guy who could be approached with a proposition. He grabbed the steward’s arm as he flitted past.
‘Say, Mr Nightingale—’
‘Yes, Mr Hubbard?’
‘If I needed to get a message to a passenger, could you deliver it?’
The steward put a manicured finger archly to his cheek. ‘That depends on the passenger.’
‘It’s Miss Rosemary Kennedy. She’s in First Class.’
‘And why would you be sending messages to Miss Kennedy?’ Mr Nightingale asked suspiciously.
‘We’re engaged to be married. We’re crazy about each other. But her family don’t approve of me. They don’t think I’m good enough for her. They’re trying to keep us apart. I know she’s on board, but I haven’t seen her once since we left Southampton. I’m pretty sure they’re keeping her locked up in her cabin. She’ll be desperate to hear from me. If I could just get a note to her, telling her I love her, and that we’ll see each other in New York—’
Mr Nightingale’s guarded expression had softened during the recital of this fairy-tale account. ‘Well, Mr Hubbard, I have to say that’s very romantic and all, but…’ He paused as Cubby discreetly slipped the note he’d written, plus a five-dollar bill into his top pocket. ‘But now that you come to mention it, I’m going to be in First Class this afternoon. I’ll see what I can do. Leave it with me.’
Carrying hundreds of extra passengers as she was, Manhattan was slow to feed her charges. Dinner began early and finished late. In the First Class dining room (which was panelled in American oak, and studded for some reason with the huge heads of buffalo, elk, moose, grizzly bear and caribou) the tables were still crowded, though it was close to midnight.
Families with children and the elderly had eaten early and gone their ways. As the evening progressed, the dining room filled with more glamorous diners. Men in evening jackets and women in long gowns came in from the bar, laughing, trailing the scents of expensive perfume and cigars, sparkling with diamonds. These were passengers of the upper crust, people who moved in the same circles, knew each other, and knew what was what.
At the Commodore’s table, in the centre of the dining room, the crème de la crème had gathered. The party included Fanny Ward, the Eternal Beauty, Mrs Joseph Kennedy, the wife of the American ambassador; and Madame Quo Tai-Chi, the plump and pretty young wife of the Chinese ambassador.
The two ambassadresses, of course, were well acquainted with one another, though there was not a great deal of warmth between them. Mrs Kennedy privately considered Madame Quo Tai-Chi rather a coarse little woman, though she had supposedly written a book on Chinese art. In London she had presented a fulsomely inscribed copy to Mrs Kennedy, which Mrs Kennedy thought showed far too many airs and graces.
Nor had she forgiven Madame Quo for the public humiliation of a gala dinner given at the mansion in Portland Place, at which Chinese dishes had been served – with chopsticks. After watching Mrs Kennedy struggling with these primitive implements, Madame Quo had scuttled round the table and – with everybody laughing and applauding, including the malicious Russian Ambassador, Maisky – assisted her to eat, positively ladling noodles into her mouth like a mother with a messy child.
For her part, Madame Quo regarded the entire American administration, and most particularly its representative, Joseph P. Kennedy, as a gang of loathsome hypocrites. Savaged for a decade by Japanese aggression, which had wrested away the vast resources of Manchuria, China had been begging America and Britain in vain for help. Even now, her husband was pleading with His Majesty’s government to stop selling guns and planes to the Japanese, guns and planes which had already killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese.
‘What an enchanting outfit, Madame Quo,’ Mrs Kennedy said.
Madame Quo’s cheongsam was pale pink, piped in crimson and embroidered all over with silver thread. ‘It required six months to make,’ Madame Quo said, accepting the tribute with a gracious nod. But she did not return the compliment. That was one up to Madame Quo. Mrs Kennedy was aware that she’d made a mistake with the black dress tonight, which showed her shoulders; once she’d taken off her stole, she felt dowdy, cold and skinny. ‘You’re travelling with your children, Mrs Kennedy?’
‘With three of them.’