The Game - Laurie R. King [21]
“Topees make me feel as if I’m speaking inside a bucket,” I said.
She giggled. “Does your mother nag you, too, or does that stop as soon as you’re married?”
“My mother’s dead,” I told her.
Her expressive face crumpled. “Oh, I am so sorry. How stupid of me, I didn’t—”
I interrupted before she burst into tears. “Don’t worry, it’s been a very long time. So tell me, have you decided to be a Kewpie doll or a harem dancer?”
The fancy-dress ball was to be the following night, and the ship quivered with the thrill of anticipation, the ship’s tailors working round the clock, sworn to secrecy. Holmes and I planned on taking advantage of the evening’s empty cabins to begin juggling clubs. Wooden belaying pins when dropped make quite a noise.
My distraction worked. Sunny clapped her hands and leant towards me as if there might be spies lurking on the other side of the crate to ask, “Have you ever been to the cabarets in Berlin?”
I reared back to stare at the child, speechless. A Berlin night-club was not a thing I’d have thought Sunny’s mother would have allowed her daughter within a mile of.
“Er, yes.”
“Well, I haven’t seen one” (Thank goodness for small mercies, I thought.) “but Tommy told me about one girl who dances on stage with a big snake. And that made me think about the snake charmers in India, and, voilà!”
“Where are you going to get a snake?” I asked. Did snakes perhaps not come under the P. & O.’s pet-exclusion clause?
“Not a real snake, silly!” Sunny’s eyes danced. “I’m having the durzi make up a snake for me—durzi’s what they call tailors in India—and I’ll wear it around my shoulders. And I have a dress that matches its skin. Won’t that be fun?”
I thought that it might be more fun than she was prepared for, considering the number of young men on board. “It sounds . . . exotic. But, Sunny? Perhaps you shouldn’t mention Berlin in relation to the costume. Those night-clubs might be considered somewhat . . . risqué for a girl your age.”
“Okay. But what do you think of the snake idea?”
“I think you’ll have every young man on the ship slithering along the decks after you,” I said.
She giggled.
However, later that evening as we were dressing for dinner, Holmes astonished me as well. He chose a moment of weakness on my part, as he was brushing my long hair.
“Russell, I think it might be a good idea to go to this costume ball.”
“Holmes!” I jerked away from his hands to look up at him. “Are you feverish?”
“Russell, I did not say that I intended to go.”
“Oh no. If I have to go, so do you.” I took the hair-brush from him and turned to the looking-glass. “But why on earth should either of us wish to dress up with a room of drunken first-class passengers wearing bizarre clothing?”
“Thomas Goodheart.”
Holmes had continued to cultivate the young man’s acquaintance—I cannot call it a friendship, precisely—and the two spent a part of every day either lounging on the deck or in the depths of the all-male enclave of the smoking room, playing billiards, whist, or occasionally poker. My husband’s uncharacteristic sociability with the supercilious young American might have puzzled me had I not overheard some of their conversations, and known that, more often than not, the Communist Party and the politics of India were the chief topics of Holmes’ casual enquiries. Still, to Mr Goodheart I was clearly beyond the pale. Educated, free-thinking women were not his cup of tea, and he made no attempt at concealing that fact.
“Is Goodheart going? I shouldn’t have thought his convictions would permit him the frivolity of a fancy-dress ball.”
“His mother assures me that he will be attending.”
To observe the enemy, or to convert the bourgeoisie to earnest Bolshevism? “But why should his presence or absence at a fancy-dress ball be of the least interest to you?”
“I have found the lad peculiarly . . . self-contained. Remarkably so—I’ve seldom seen a man who gives away as little as this one. I believe he knows more than he tells.”
I considered the statement