Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [16]
‘I was with Melchett,’ I told her. ‘We made a tour of the lower decks. It was quite an experience. Perhaps tomorrow you’d like me to show you below. As a member of Mr Andrews’ design team I can go anywhere I want.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said, without enthusiasm, and something, some illumination of the soul, died in her eyes and soon after she turned away and gave her attention to Molly Dodge.
Aggrieved, I took myself off to the smoke-room where I found Charlie Melchett making calculations on the back of an envelope. Ginsberg had come up with the idea of making a book on the time of our arrival in New York. Apparently the steerage passengers had rigged up a blackboard on the third class promenade down on the stern of Cdeck and were taking money quite openly.
‘We can’t lay bets,’ said Hopper, ‘till we’ve studied form. We have to know average speed and take weather conditions into consideration.’
‘Twenty-four knots,’ Charlie ventured, and was shouted down by Ginsberg who knew for a fact that we couldn’t go beyond twenty-one or twenty-two. ‘We haven’t the coal to go full speed. I reckon we’ll do no more than twenty, and that only if we’ve got the weather on our side.’
Someone tapped my shoulder; it was the fat man I had seen earlier in the company of Scurra and old Seefax. He said, without preamble, ‘Where is she?’
‘She?’ I said.
‘Is she with him?’
‘Him?’ I said.
His eyes were enormous, like an infant’s, and lachrymose. There was a vacant chair against the wall and he pulled it forward and sat heavily down. I thought that showed cheek, but there was something in his expression, a mixture of hope and extreme resolve, that held me.
‘I think you are a friend of his,’ he said. ‘I would like your opinion of him.’ He had a curious accent which for no immediate reason I found familiar. His intonation was Jewish, of course, but his vowels were oddly flat.
I said, ‘I haven’t the least idea who you’re talking about.’
‘The man disfigured in a fencing duel.’
We stared at one another.
‘The man with the dent in his mouth,’ he urged, patting his lip with one podgy finger. ‘The man with the gift of the gab.’
I almost smiled, it being such an apt description. All the same, I protested I scarcely knew Scurra and had only learnt his name that afternoon.
‘But you have formed an opinion?’ He actually seized my arm, which startled me.
‘I can’t help you,’ I said.
‘You must pay attention,’ he urged. ‘I have no time for subterfuge. I am a man of strong passions.’
‘You surprise me,’ I said, looking pointedly down at his hand.
He released me at once. ‘I have made a mistake,’ he muttered. ‘You are, after all, too young to be curious.’ Yet he still transfixed me with those moist and sentimental eyes.
‘Morgan,’ interrupted Ginsberg, a glass in either hand, ‘I gather the purser’s the fellow to ask about average speeds. What say you and I go in search of him?’
I rose immediately and followed him into the revolving doors which spun us out into the foyer. From the Palm Court came the strains of jazz-time.
He said, ‘You seemed to be having trouble with our stout friend, Rosenfelder.’
‘You know him?’
‘Scurra introduced me.’
‘You know Scurra?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, and left it at that. For a man who continually played the fool he was remarkably astute, from which I concluded he was not quite straight. I’m capable of making such a judgement, being often not entirely straight myself.
The information we wanted, the purser told us, would be available tomorrow, once we had left Queenstown. He agreed with Ginsberg that they wouldn’t be pushing the ship this trip. ‘Perhaps 500 miles a day,’ he estimated. ‘Maybe more, maybe less.’
‘But you reckon we’ll reach New York Tuesday?’ pressed Ginsberg, and the purser replied, ‘Tuesday night, yes. Barring accidents,’ at which they both laughed.
The office was cosy from the warmth of an electric fire. Above the desk was pinned a photograph of an infant scowling beneath the shadow of a summer bonnet. ‘A fine little chap,’ Ginsberg remarked.