The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [252]
Once Arnold had paid their bill—having checked the little row of figures presented to him three times before he was willing to part with another travelers’ check—he hailed a taxi and instructed the driver to take them to the quayside. The longer than expected journey, in an ancient car with no air conditioning, did not put Arnold into a good humor.
When he first set eyes on the Princess Corina, Arnold was unable to mask his disappointment. The ship was neither as large nor as modern as it had appeared in the glossy brochure. He had a feeling his chairman would not be experiencing the same problem.
Mr. and Mrs. Bacon ascended the gangplank and were escorted to their cabin, which to Arnold’s dismay consisted of two bunks, a washbasin, a shower and a porthole, without even enough room between the bunks for both of them to be able to undress at the same time. Arnold pointed out to his wife that this particular cabin had certainly not been illustrated in the brochure, even if it had been described on the tariff by the encomium “de luxe.”
The brochure must have been put together by an out-of-work estate agent, he concluded.
Arnold set out to take a turn around the deck—not a particularly lengthy excursion. On the way he bumped into a solicitor from Chester who had been innocently strolling with his wife in the opposite direction. After Arnold had established that Malcolm Jackson was a senior partner in his firm, and his wife, Joan, was a magistrate, he suggested they should join up for lunch.
Once they had selected their meal from the buffet, Arnold lost no time in telling his newfound friends that he was a born entrepreneur, explaining, for example, the immediate changes he would make to improve efficiency on the Princess Corina had he been the chairman of this particular shipping line. (The list, I fear, turned out to be far too long to include in a short story.)
The solicitor, who had not had to suffer any of Arnold’s opinions before, seemed quite content to listen, while Deirdre chatted away to Joan about how she was hoping to find a new dinner service on one of the islands. “The Greeks are famous for their pottery, you know,” she kept saying.
The conversation didn’t vary a great deal when the two couples reunited over dinner that evening.
Although the Bacons were tired after their first day on board, neither of them slept for more than a few moments that night. But Arnold was unwilling to admit, as they bobbed across the Aegean in their little cabin, that given the choice he would have preferred the two-star hotel (two Greek stars), with its lumpy mattress and brick-hard pillows, to the bunks on which they were now being tossed from side to side.
After two days at sea the ship docked at Rhodes, and by then even Arnold had stopped describing it as a “liner.” Most of the passengers piled off down the gangway, only too delighted to have the chance of spending a few hours on land.
Arnold and Malcolm beat a path to the nearest Barclays Bank to cash a travelers’ check each, while Deirdre and Joan set off in the opposite direction in search of a dinner service. At the bank, Arnold immediately informed the manager who he was, ensuring that both he and Malcolm received a tiny improvement on the advertised rate of exchange.
Arnold smiled as they stepped out of the bank, and onto the hot, dusty, cobbled street. “I should have gone into futures trading, you know,” he told Malcolm as they sauntered off down the hill. “I would have made a fortune.”
Deirdre’s quest for a dinner service didn’t turn out to be quite so straightforward. The shops were numerous and varied in quality, and she quickly discovered that Rhodes boasted a great many potters. It was therefore necessary for her to establish which of them was the most highly regarded by the locals, and then find the shop that sold his work. This information was gained by talking to the old women dressed in black who