Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [9]
I don’t think the womenfolk on either side of me were conscious of the danger, indeed, judging from their redoubled squeals and the abandoned manner in which the parasol swirled about my head, the incident appeared merely to provide that missing element of showmanship.
The tugs having got lines on her, the New York was nosed out of our way. All the same, it took an hour or more, at the end of which the Titanic’s bugler, sounding a delayed serving of the midday meal, rose from deck to deck blowing ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’. Melchett and I, neither of us being hungry, went on a tour of the ship.
An hour later we had got no further than the smoke-room. As Melchett drolly remarked, we had plenty of time and the ship was unlikely to go anywhere without us. That geek Ginsberg was there; fortunately he was engaged in conversation with one of the Taft cousins and kept his distance. Quite suddenly I felt immensely cheerful, and it had nothing to do with the lager beer we were drinking. The feeling took me by surprise as up until then I hadn’t known I was miserable. One moment it had been the hardest thing in the world to attempt the faintest of smiles, and the next there was this almighty rush of well-being that had me grinning inanely. I expect it had much to do with being in Melchett’s company. I didn’t know him as intimately as I knew Hopper, which meant there was none of that carelessness bordering on contempt usual between friends of long standing. All at once, it struck me he was the sort of fellow one could confide in.
He was enthusing over the magnificence of the ship, comparing it in concept and visionary grandeur to the great cathedrals of Chartres and Notre Dame. ‘A cathedral,’ he reiterated, waving his cheroot in the direction of the stained glass above the bar, ‘constructed of steel and capable of carrying a congregation of three thousand souls across the Atlantic.’
‘I took a picture from my uncle’s house,’ I said. ‘That’s why you couldn’t find me this morning.’
‘Just think of it,’ he crowed. ‘All this mass and speed and yet she moves so gracefully she doesn’t even tilt the drink in one’s glass.’ He thumped the arm of his chair at the wonder of it.
‘I moved into a hotel because I stole a picture, Charlie,’ I said, and immediately regretted the correction.
For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me. He sat there, one side of his blond head darkened by the ruby glow of the mahogany wall, eyes bright with pleasure. ‘What picture?’ he asked.
‘Of my mother. Painted before I was born.’
‘It wasn’t a painting,’ he said. ‘Just a photograph. You insisted on passing it round after we caught up with Van Hopper at my club. You spun a yarn about it having been given you by some poor chap who ended up dead in a barber’s chair. We couldn’t get any sense out of you.’
‘There was a dead man—’
‘And it couldn’t have been your mother . . . not unless she was Japanese.’
At that, I felt more cheerful than ever, for while I’d eased my conscience I’d miraculously avoided censure. All the same, there was a corner of me that wished he had listened.
Shortly after, Melchett ordered champagne to toast the start of our voyage. ‘To being alive,’ he said, thrusting his glass towards the ceiling. ‘To being young, to being lucky enough to be here at such a time.’ Following this outburst of sentiment, he grew pink; he was, after all, British.
I own I felt protective of him; he was such a boy. I’d never had a brother, any more than I’d known a mother or a father. Women can nurture anything small enough, including animals, but I reckon men need someone of their own sex to arouse an instinct free of possessiveness. Charlie was nineteen years old and I twenty-two, and those three years might have been thirty if a gap in innocence could be measured.
We drank just enough to heighten our perceptions, so that when we began our inspection of the ship I fancy we’d loosened that grey veil of sophistication common to