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“Nonsense, Larry,” answered Mother. “There isn’t anything they can do to spoil a boiled egg.”

She was wrong. When the eggs arrived (two of them, which were put before her ten minutes later), not only were they hard but they had been carefully deprived of their shells by loving but unwashed fingers.

“There!” exclaimed Larry. “What a treat? Cooked to a turn and covered with fingerprints that Sherlock Holmes would have found irresistible.”

Mother had to conceal these strange avian relics in her bag and then throw them overboard after breakfast when she was sure no one was looking, for, as she observed, we didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

“There’s one thing to be said for it,” said Larry, watching Mother casting the eggs upon the waters. “Three days on a diet of nothing but red-hot ouzo will render us slim as minnows and we’ll all be as convivial as Bacchus by the time we land.”

But he was wrong too.

The evening meal was, by Greek standards, almost epicurean. There were three courses, the first of which was cold by intention, being an hors d’oeuvre, and the other two cold because they were served on cold plates accompanied by the usual altercation between the waiters. However, everything was edible and the only imbroglio was caused by Margo discovering a baby cuttlefish’s eye in her hors d’oeuvre . We unwisely drank far too many bottles of Domestika and arose from the table unsteadily and benignly.

“You go night-cloob?” asked the Purser, as he bowed us out.

“Why not,” said Larry, struck by the idea. “Let’s go and have an orgy among the palms. Do you remember how to do the Lancers, Mother?”

“I’m not going to make an exhibition of myself,” replied Mother with dignity. “But I will have a coffee and perhaps a small brandy.”

“To the evil depths of the palm enshrouded night-cloob, then,” said Larry, steering Mother rather unsteadily along the deck, “where who knows what opium titillated oriental maidens await us. Did we bring a jewel for Margo’s navel?”

As we had lingered over our meal, we found that the night club was in full swing. Our three fat ladies, and an assortment of other passengers, were, to the strains of a Viennese waltz, jostling for position on the minute square of parquet, like fish crowded in the tail end of a seine net. Although all the luxuriously uncomfortable chairs and sofas and tables appeared to be occupied, an eager steward materialized at our elbows and showed us to the most illuminated and conspicuous table and chairs in a place of honour. They were, we were told to our alarm and despondency, specially reserved for us by the Captain. We were just about to protest that we wanted a dim and obscure table when, unfortunately, the Captain himself appeared. He was one of those very dark, romantically melting Greeks, slightly on the fleshy side but giving the impression that this made him more nubile and attractive, in that curious way Levantines have.

“Madam,” he said, making it seem like a compliment, “I am enchanted to have you and your most beautiful sister on board our ship on her maiden voyage.”

It was a remark that, had the Captain known it, was calculated to offend everyone. It made Mother think he was what she always used to call darkly “one of those sort of men”, while one could see that Margo, though fond of Mother, felt that there was some difference between her seventy-odd summers and Margo’s well-preserved thirties. For a moment the Captain’s fate hung in the balance; then Mother decided to forgive him as he was, after all, a foreigner, and Margo decided to forgive him because he was really rather handsome. Leslie judged him with suspicion, obviously feeling that the hole in the bows proved his nautical standards to be of a low order.

Larry had reached that benign state of intoxication when everyone seemed tolerable. With the suavity of a professional head waiter, the Captain arranged us round the table, seating himself between Mother and Margo, and beamed at us, his gold fillings twinkling like fireflies in his dark face. He ordered a round of drinks and then, to Mother’s horror, asked her for the first dance.

“Oh, no!” she said. “I’m afraid my dancing days are quite over. I leave that sort of thing to my daughter.”

“But, Madam,” implored the Captain, “you’re my guest. You must dance.” So masterful was he that, to our astonishment, Mother — like a rabbit hypnotized by a stoat — rose and allowed him to escort her out on to the dance floor.

“But Mother hasn’t danced since Dad died in nineteen-twenty-six,” gasped Margo.

“She’s gone mad,” said Leslie gloomily. “She’ll have a heart attack and we’ll have to bury her at sea.”

Being buried at sea had been her last choice anyway. Mother spent much of her time choosing places in which to be buried.

“She’s more likely to he trampled to death, with those three enormous women about,” observed Larry. “Fatal to attempt to get on to that floor. It’s like entering an arena full of rogue elephants.”

Indeed, the floor was so packed that the couples were gyrating at an almost glacial slowness. The Captain, using Mother as a battering ram and aided by his broad shoulders, had managed to fight his way into the solid wall of flesh and he and Mother were now embedded in its depth. Mother, owing to her diminutive size, was impossible to see but we caught an occasional glimpse of the Captain’s face and the twinkling of his teeth. Finally, the last liquid notes of “Tales from the Vienna Woods” crashed out and the gasping, panting, sweating dancers left the floor. Mother, crumpled and purple in the face, was half carried back to our table by the beaming Captain. She sank into her chair, too breathless to speak, and fanned herself with her handkerchief.

“The waltz is a very good dance,” said the Captain, gulping his ouzo. “And it is not only a good dance but it is good exercise also for all the muscles.”

He seemed oblivious to the fact that Mother, gasping, and with congested face, looked like someone who has just returned from a near fatal encounter with King Kong.

It was Margo’s turn next but being younger and lighter on her feet and more agile than Mother, she survived rather better.

When she returned, Mother offered effusive thanks to the Captain for his hospitality but said she thought she ought to be getting to bed as she had had rather a busy day. She’d actually spent the day wrapped in blankets in a rickety deck chair complaining about the cold wind and the choppy sea. So she made a graceful retreat and was escorted to her cabin by Leslie. By the time he returned, Margo, using all her undoubted charms, had persuaded the Captain that, although Viennese waltzes were all right as a toning-up exercise, no Greek ship worthy of its name (and certainly not one on her maiden voyage) could ignore the cultural inheritance of Greece as embodied in her national dances. The Captain was much struck by both Margo and the scheme and, before we had orientated ourselves to the idea, had taken control of Greece ’s national heritage. He strode over to the septuagenarian band and demanded of them in loud tones what fine old cultural Greek tunes they knew. Tunes of the peasantry, of the people. Tunes that brought out both the wonders of Greece and the valour of her people, the poignancy of her history and the beauty of her architecture, the subtlety of her mythology, the sparkling brilliance that had led the world, tunes that would conjure up Plato, Socrates, the glory of Greeks past, present and future.

The violinist said they only knew one such tune and that was “Never on Sunday”.

The Captain came as near to having an apoplectic fit as anyone I’ve ever seen. With veins throbbing in his temple he turned, threw out his arms, and addressed the assembled company. Had anyone, he asked, rhetorically, ever heard of a Greek band that did not know a Greek tune?

“Ummm,” said the crowd, as crowds do when presented with something they don’t quite understand.

“Send for the Chief Officer!” roared the Captain. “Where is Yanni Papadopoulos?”