Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [47]
‘It won’t be like that,’ I shouted.
‘At best your generosity will be thought of as patronising and at worst no more than a rich man’s attempt to enter the kingdom of heaven. A reasonable assumption, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t believe in heaven,’ I muttered. ‘Only justice.’
He was still chuckling when a figure emerged from the underhang of the life-boats. It was Riley. He thanked me, belatedly, for the tip I had sent him via McKinlay. ‘Civil of you, sir,’ he said, ‘but then, you’re a real gentleman.’ The sarcasm was ill-concealed.
Scurra asked if it was true we wouldn’t now dock in New York until Wednesday morning. ‘I gather our speed is below what was expected,’ he said. Riley replied this was so. He wasn’t sure whether it was on account of conserving coal or because the ship had logged six ice warnings in the last twenty-four hours.
We went indoors shortly afterwards. The bone above my eye had begun to throb. Scurra’s handshake was not quite steady when we parted for the night. I put it down to the cold.
FOUR
Saturday, 13th April
It was something Rosenfelder said, and the diatribe that followed, that further brought home to me the confusion of my life and necessity for change. I had known it all along, of course, but had decided time or circumstance, such as my experiences in Belfast, would nudge it into order. It was as though the tailor had prior knowledge of the disaster about to overtake me.
At daybreak I had woken feeling distinctly uneasy. I had slept without dreams or none that I remembered, yet something troubled me. After mulling over the events of the previous day I reasoned it was no more than to be expected considering the turmoil of my thoughts since meeting Scurra. I dressed and went up on deck. The sun had climbed above the slate-flat sea and streaked the sky with rose. It was bitterly cold and deadly calm; even the huge ship beneath my feet seemed but a plank of driftwood inert upon the unfathomable depths of that vast and silent ocean. I felt more uneasy than ever, which made me melancholy. Thinking that exercise would cure me, I went down to the swimming baths and found Rosenfelder kicking his heels in the passageway. We were forced to wait until the attendant arrived with keys a half-hour later.
The conversation turned to Scurra and the attraction he held for us. He was such a stimulating fellow, deep without being obscure, cultured yet devoid of cant. Neither of us were sure of his profession. I plumped for his being a lawyer but conceded that with his range of acquaintances and his knowledge of pictures, economics and politics he could be any one of a number of things. We remembered the way he had so adroitly dealt with Adele’s fainting fit. Possibly he was a medical man, and then again he might be the proprietor of a newspaper. Rosenfelder had seen him dining with Mr Stead in the a` la carte restaurant.
It was after we had swum three or four lengths and were temporarily beached on the tiled steps, Rosenfelder exhaling like a whale, that I remembered the several explanations given for Scurra’s scarred mouth.
‘That first time we spoke,’ I said, ‘when you took hold of my arm and asked who Scurra was . . . you seemed to think he’d been in a duel.’ ‘So he had. It accounts for his lip.’
‘He told me he was bitten by a parrot in South Africa. And Archie Ginsberg thinks it was a blow from a rifle.’
‘Bird, gun . . . who cares?’ said Rosenfelder. ‘It makes for interest,’ and he plunged into the water and sank upright, the bulge of his bathing cap bobbing like a lily-pad. Thrashing to the surface again, he asked, ‘The people you mix with . . . you find them amusing?’
‘Some more so than others.’
It was then he said, ‘Does it not occur to you that none of them are normal?’
At first I put up a defence, mostly because I feared I was included in their number, but soon fell silent. Nothing he said could be disputed. My friends, he argued, were not living in the proper world. Their wealth, their poorly nurtured childhoods, their narrow education, their lack