“Dear God!” breathed Larry.
“She’s appalling,” said Leslie, the more nautical member of our family. “Look at that list.”
“But it’s our boat,” squeaked Margo. “Mother, it’s our boat!”
“Nonsense, dear, it can’t be,” said my mother, readjusting her spectacles and peering hopefully up at the boat as it loomed above us.
“Three days on this,” said Larry. “It will be worse than the Ancient Mariner’s experience, mark my words.”
“I do hope they are going to do something about that hole,” said Mother worriedly, “before we put out to sea.”
“What do you expect them to do? Stuff a blanket into it?” asked Larry.
“But surely the Captain’s noticed it,” said Mother bewildered.
“I shouldn’t think that even a Greek captain could have been oblivious of the fact that they have, quite recently, given something a fairly sharp tap,” said Larry.
“The waves will get in,” moaned Margo. “I don’t want waves in my cabin. My dresses will all be ruined.”
“I should think all the cabins are under water by now,” observed Leslie.
“Our snorkels and flippers will come in handy,” said Larry. “What a novelty to have to swim down to dinner. How I shall enjoy it all.”
“Well, as soon as we get on board you must go up and have a word with the Captain,” decided Mother. “It’s just possible that he wasn’t on board when it happened, and no one’s told him.”
“Really, Mother, you do annoy me,” said Larry irritably. “What do you expect me to say to the man? ‘Pardon me, Kyrie Capitano, sir, but did you know you’ve got death-watch beetle in your bows?’ ”
“Larry, you always complicate things,” complained Mother. “You know I can’t speak Greek or I’d do it.”
“Tell him I don’t want waves in my cabin,” insisted Margo.
“As we are due to leave tonight, they couldn’t possibly mend it anyway,” observed Leslie.
“Exactly,” said Larry. “But Mother seems to think that I am some sort of reincarnation of Noah.”
“Well, I shall have something to say about it when I get on board,” said Mother belligerently, as we made our way up the gangway.
At the head of the gangway, we were met by a romantic-looking Greek steward (with eyes as soft and melting as black pansies) wearing a crumpled and off-grey white suit, with most of the buttons missing. From his tarnished epaulettes, he appeared to be the Purser, and his smiling demand for passports and tickets was so redolent of garlic that Mother reeled back against the rails, her query about the ship’s bows stifled.
“Do you speak English?” asked Margo, gamely rallying her olfactory nerves more rapidly than Mother.
“Small,” he replied, bowing.
“Well, I don’t want waves in my cabin,” said Margo firmly. “It will ruin my clothes.”
“Everything you want we give,” he answered. “if you want wife, I give you my wife. She . . .”
“No, no,” exclaimed Margo, “the waves . You know . . . water.”
“Every cabeen has having hot and cold running showers,” he said with dignity. “Also there is bath or nightcloob having dancing and wine and water.”
“I do wish you’d stop laughing and help us, Larry,” said Mother, covering her nose with her handkerchief to repel the odour of garlic, which was so strong that one got the impression it was like a shimmering cloud round the Purser’s head.
Larry pulled himself together and in fluent Greek (which delighted the Purser) elicited, in rapid succession, the information that the ship was not sinking, that there were no waves in the cabins, and that the Captain knew all about the accident as he had been responsible for it. Wisely, Larry did not pass on this piece of information to Mother. While Mother and Margo were taken in a friendly and aromatic manner down to the cabins by the Purser, the rest of us then followed his instructions as to how to get to the bar.
This, when we located it, made us all speechless. It looked like the mahogany-lined lounge of one of the drearier London clubs. Great chocolate-coloured leather chairs and couches cluttered the place, interspersed with formidable fumed-oak tables. Dotted about were huge Benares brass bowls in which sprouted tattered, dusty palm trees. There was, in the midst of this funereal splendour, a minute parquet floor for dancing, flanked on one side by the small bar containing a virulent assortment of drinks, and on the other by a small raised dais, surrounded by a veritable forest of potted palms. In the midst of this, enshrined like flies in amber, were three lugubrious musicians in frock coats, celluloid dickies, and cummerbunds that would have seemed dated in about 1890. One played on an ancient upright piano and tuba, one played a violin with much professional posturing, and the third doubled up on the drums and trombone. As we entered, this incredible trio was playing “The Roses of Picardy” to an entirely empty room.
“I can’t bear it,” said Larry. “This is not a ship, it’s a sort of floating Cadena Café from Bournemouth . It’ll drive us all mad.”
At Larry’s words, the band stopped playing and the leader’s face lit up in a gold-toothed smile of welcome. He gestured at his two colleagues with his bow and they also bowed and smiled. We three could do no less, and so we swept them a courtly bow before proceeding to the bar. The band launched itself with ever greater frenzy into “The Roses of Picardy” now that it had an audience.
“Please give me,” Larry asked the barman, a small wizened man in a dirty apron, “in one of the largest glasses you possess, an ouzo that will, I hope, paralyse me.”
The barman’s walnut face lit up at the sound of a foreigner who could not only speak Greek but was rich enough to drink so large an ouzo.
“Amessos, kyrie,” he said. “Will you have it with water or ice?”
“One lump of ice,” Larry stipulated. “Just enough to blanch its cheeks.”
“I’m sorry, kyrie, we have no ice,” said the barman, apologetically.
Larry sighed a deep and long-suffering sigh.
“It is only in Greece,” he said to us in English, “that one has this sort of conversation. It gives one the feeling that one is in such close touch with Lewis Carroll that the barman might be the Cheshire cat in disguise.”
“Water, kyrie?” asked the barman, sensing from Larry’s tone that he was not receiving approbation but rather censure.
“Water,” said Larry, in Greek, “a tiny amount.”
The barman went to the massive bottle of ouzo, as clear as gin, poured out a desperate measure, and then went to the little sink and squirted water in from the tap. Instantly, the ouzo turned the colour of watered milk and we could smell the aniseed from where we were standing.
“God, that’s a strong one,” said Leslie. “Let’s have the same.” I agreed. The glasses were set before us. We raised them in toast:
“Well, here’s to the Marie Celeste and all the fools who sail in her,” said Larry, and took a great mouthful of ouzo. The next minute he spat it out in a flurry that would have done credit to a dying whale, and reeled back against the bar, clasping his throat, his eyes watering.
“Ahhh!” he roared. “The bloody fool’s put bloody hot water in it!”
Nurtured as we had been among the Greeks, we were inured to the strange behaviour they indulged in, but for a Greek to put boiling water in his national drink, was, we felt, carrying eccentricity too far.