Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [12]
‘My mouth,’ Scurra said, ‘is the result of a discourse with a macaw while walking through a department store in Cape Town–’
‘Forgive me,’ I stammered. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘I was but six years old at the time. My mother was intent on buying material for a dress. She had let go my hand and walked on ahead. The bird had eyes like marbles. I reached upwards to stroke it –it was so close I smelt the sawdust on its unused wings. All is not lost, it croaked, and I cockily replied, What has gone missing? One should always attempt to understand what is being asked of one, don’t you think? . . . at which, hopping along its perch it swooped down and pecked my mouth. I have been told my blood spouted out like liquid from a teapot.’
He replaced his spectacles, stood up with a mock sigh and taking the fat man by the elbow announced it was time for a turn on deck. The fat man seemed to be in some sort of trance; he said not a word as he was led to the elevator.
I tried to find out from J.S. Seefax what Scurra did for a living and in what way he might be acquainted with my uncle. The old man was vague. ‘I think we met in Boston . . .’ he said, ‘or perhaps it was Paris. One goes to so many places.’
‘And who is the man he was with?’
‘What man?’ he asked, and that was as far as I got.
I returned to my stateroom, rang for the steward and instructed him to call me at five thirty. He enquired whether I would require lemonade to revive me on waking, or something stronger. Stung, I ordered tea.
My room was done out in the style of Louis XVI; there was a feeble engraving of the Bastille hung on the picture rail above the writing desk. On an impulse I removed it from its hook and replaced it with the painting of my mother.
I stretched out on the bed and hoped she would watch over me, but her eyes looked at some point beyond my head. Absent to the last, I thought, and slipped into sleep.
Dinner that evening was a boisterous affair. Ours was a small world and between the soup and the fish we were all constantly bobbing up and down to acknowledge people we knew; but for the intermittent and minute flickerings of the electric lights we might have been dining at the Ritz in Paris. The Theyers stopped at our table, the Daniels, Mrs Snyder, the Speddens of Tuxedo Park, Colonel Gracie, jolly Mrs Hogeboom with the excessively rich and eccentric Mrs James Brown, her bridge crony from Denver, in tow. As usual, the latter was dressed inappropriately and wore a gigantic hat across whose brim languished an entire stuffed bird. Colonel Astor and his young bride passed by without a nod, leaving Ginsberg on his feet with hand held foolishly out. He said he knew Vincent, the Colonel’s eldest son, and had often fenced with him.
‘Verbally or with foils?’ asked wicked Molly Dodge, but he ignored her.
The new Mrs Astor was pale and tall like her husband, and both looked as if they’d barely finished a thundering row. They’d been travelling Europe for months, waiting for the scandal of his divorce to die down. They joined Captain Smith’s party, alongside the Strauses and Bruce Ismay, and sat as though exhausted, he nearing fifty, his long gloomy nose nudging his moustaches, she barely nineteen, her flower head drooping on the stalk of her neck.
Benjamin Guggenheim had come aboard at Cherbourg with his mistress, Kitty Webb. I’d danced with Kitty once at some charity ball and found her touching; she’d confessed to biting her nails. She had pouting blue eyes, a small mouth and a mother, so it was said, who had hoed corn. Guggenheim had picked her out of the