‘How are your cabin-mates?’ Stravinsky asked her.
‘Ghastly,’ she said with a shudder. ‘They’re a pair of New Jersey widows who were caught by the war while spending their late husbands’ life policies on a European holiday. They intend to stay drunk until they reach New York.’
‘At least they have a plan.’
Katharine turned to the boy, barely disguising her repugnance. ‘I hope you are being considerate towards Monsieur Stravinsky, Thomas?’
‘He smoked a cigarette in the cabin and coughed up blood, at least a tablespoon.’
‘You are a little informer, Thomas,’ Stravinsky said.
‘Oh, Igor,’ Katharine said in dismay. ‘You promised you wouldn’t start again.’
‘Nonsense.’ Stravinsky waved her concern away petulantly.
‘He says he is writing a symphony in C,’ Thomas said. ‘He says the C stands for Cigarettes.’
‘Perhaps,’ Katharine said grimly, ‘it stands for Coffin.’
The Cabin Class dining room was an amazing confection of glittering Americana, as though Marie Antoinette had built a palace in Wyoming and had it decorated by the Comanche. High in the lofty ceiling, crystal chandeliers illuminated colourful murals depicting redskins hunting the mighty buffalo, or greeting the white man with gifts of pumpkins and corn. Braves on mustangs galloped across a prairie framed between heavy velvet curtains. Cowboys waved their Winchesters aloft among gilded rococo swags. A sea of snowy linen and gleaming silverware covered the three dozen tables below, each one of which seated six and had a softly glowing lamp as a centrepiece.
The Commodore’s table was set in the centre of the huge room, where everyone could see it and envy those invited to dine at it. Toscanini, in the place of honour beside Commodore Randall tonight, had put on his spectacles to peruse the menu. Commodore Randall, impeccable in his mess-jacket, leaned towards Toscanini like an amiable grampus. ‘I recommend the live boiled lobster, Mr Toscanini, followed by the Boston sole meunière.’
‘As a student at the conservatory in Parma,’ Toscanini replied in his heavy Italian accent, ‘I ate only boiled fish for three years. Since then, I eat nothing that comes from the sea.’
One of the other passengers, a plump woman from Topeka named Mrs Dabney, travelling with her largely silent husband, tugged at her immense pearls to draw attention to them. ‘How romantic that you rose from poverty to pre-eminence, maestro!’ she exclaimed.
‘Poverty is in no sense romantic, Signora,’ Toscanini retorted.
‘What about Rodolfo and Mimì in La bohème? That’s romantic, isn’t it?’
‘La bohème is an opera,’ Toscanini pointed out. ‘After dying of hunger, the performers get up and cash their cheques.’
Mrs Dabney laughed gaily. ‘Dear maestro, do you think Mussolini will bring Italy into this war?’
‘Mussolini is capable of any brutality. Only Britain can stop him.’
‘We had to pull the Brits out of the fire last time,’ said Dr Emmett Meese, a prominent New York surgeon. ‘Why do they keep starting wars if they can’t finish them? We should just let things take their course.’
‘And let fascism consume Europe?’
‘We have nothing to gain by getting our fingers burned.’
‘It’s not what you have to gain,’ Toscanini commented dryly, ‘it’s what we have to lose.’
‘It’s not our fight. I say America first and to hell with the rest.’
‘Mussolini offered to make me a senator,’ Toscanini said. ‘I told him, the emperor Caligula made his horse a senator, but I am only a donkey that you like to beat. Do you know why I hold my head like this, to one side? When I refused to play the Fascist Hymn at La Scala, Mussolini sent his men. They beat me in the street. They beat me to the ground with clubs. Ever since then, I live with the injuries. Sometimes I have to cancel engagements, because I cannot lift my arm. That is fascism.’
‘Have you heard Hitler’s latest?’ someone said. ‘He’s ordered the extermination of all mental defectives in Germany.’
‘The Führer gets a bad press,’ said Dr Emmett Meese, ‘but stopping these kinds of folks from breeding can only have a beneficial effect on the human family.’
‘It would certainly have had a beneficial effect on your family,’ Toscanini growled.
The surgeon polished his horn-rimmed glass earnestly. ‘I can’t say I disagree with him on the issue of the Jews, either. They’ve had it coming for a long time.’
‘The Jews are harmless, surely?’ Commodore Randall replied.
‘Not in my view. And this ship is already carrying far too many of them,’ Dr Meese said. ‘I believe that fully half our passengers are in that category. Everywhere you look there’s a hook nose or a crafty eye. Why should we be taking what Hitler doesn’t want?’
‘If Hitler doesn’t want Albert Einstein or Yehudi Menuhin,’ Randall said, ‘then I reckon we can have them.’
‘Our nation is bulging at the seams with riff-raff. There are hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants roaming around the country. Not to mention the Negroes, the Italians, the Japanese and all the rest. We should pack them up and send them all home.’
‘I cannot eat,’ Toscanini said, pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. ‘I have no appetite.’
He strode along the deck, muttering to himself. He had no intention of going back to his cabin, which he was compelled to share with five imbeciles and their assorted imbecilities. Exhausted as he was, he could neither eat nor sleep. He would rather pace the ship. The surging energies he had been born with had never permitted him to be comfortable seated or recumbent. At the Conservatory, he had even detested the instrument assigned to him, the cello, because it had to be played seated. He had never been more happy than when he’d been able to exchange the cumbersome instrument (he’d pissed in the damned thing once) for a baton.
And now, between sleeplessness and hunger, every nerve in his body crackled. Carla had not appeared. Carla was nowhere. Le Havre was dark tonight, dark as the pit, all lights extinguished in a blackout to foil German bombers. Only the stars danced dimly in the black water of the harbour.
The endless night of human stupidity! The darkness of human folly, ignorance, madness! How small a light of wisdom shone and how easily it was extinguished by the beating of leathery wings.
He took off his hat and bowed his white head on to the railing, groaning loudly to himself in the darkness.
In the Tourist Class dining room (low-ceilinged and plain) Igor Stravinsky studied the menu with a disgusted expression. The options were unappetising: vegetable soup or melon to start, fried flounder or stewed mutton to follow. There was only one sweet – rice pudding. The smells of these dishes, greasy and faintly rancid, percolated through the crowded dining room.
‘We have truly left France behind us,’ he remarked to Katharine ironically. The German boy sat silently beside them, his nose in a book, uninterested in food. The others at their table, who had the beaten look of refugees, discussed the menu anxiously in some foreign language.
‘Would you like to go ashore and find a restaurant?’ she suggested.
‘I’m too tired,’ he replied. ‘Besides, I have to learn to be frugal.’ He laid down the menu. ‘I have become a character in a cartoon.’
She winced. Stravinsky’s dire financial status – a perennial problem in his career – was reflected in his desperate sale of The Rite of Spring to Walt Disney, to be used in an animated film called Fantasia. ‘Don’t think of it like that.’