Singing in the Shrouds

‘Coffee essence, more like.’

‘Might as well try it when I get back. Behave yourself now.’

He pulled a steel-grey felt hat down almost to his ears, put on a belted raincoat and, looking rather like the film director’s idea of a private detective, he went ashore.

Mrs Cuddy remained, anxious and upright on her bunk.

Aubyn Dale’s dearest friend looking through the porthole said with difficulty: ‘Darling: it’s boiling up for a pea-shuper-souper. I think perhaps we ought to weep ourselves away.’

‘Darling, are you going to drive?’

‘Naturally.’

‘You will be all right, won’t you?’

‘Sweetie,’ she protested, ‘I’m never safer than when I’m plastered. It just gives me that little something other drivers haven’t got.’

‘How terrifying.’

‘To show you how completely in control I am, I suggest that it might be better to leave before we’re utterly fogged down. Oh, dear! I fear I am going into a screaming weep. Where’s my hanky?’

She opened her bag. A coiled mechanical snake leapt out at her, having been secreted there by her lover who had a taste for such drolleries.

This prank, though it was received as routine procedure, a little delayed their parting. Finally, however, it was agreed that the time had come.

‘ ’Specially,’ said their dearest male friend, ‘as we’ve killed the last bottle. Sorry, old boy. Bad form. Poor show.’

‘Come on,’ said their dearest girl friend. ‘It’s been smashing, actually. Darling Auby! But we ought to go.’

They began elaborate leave-takings but Aubyn Dale said he’d walk back to the car with them.

They all went ashore, talking rather loudly, in well trained voices, about the fog which had grown much heavier.

It was now five past eleven. The bus had gone, the solitary taxi waited in its place. Their car was parked farther along the wharf. They stood round it, still talking, for some minutes. His friends all told Dale many times how much good the voyage would do him, how nice he looked without his celebrated beard, how run down he was and how desperately the programme would sag without him. Finally they drove off waving and trying to make hip-hip-hooray with their horn.

Aubyn Dale waved, shoved his hands down in the pockets of his camel-hair coat and walked back towards the ship. A little damp breeze lifted his hair, eddies of fog drifted past him. He thought how very photogenic the wharves looked. The funnels on some of the ships were lit from below and the effect, blurred and nebulous though it now had become, was exciting. Lights hung like globes in the murk. There were hollow indefinable sounds and a variety of smells. He pictured himself down here doing one of his special features and began to choose atmospheric phrases. He would have looked rather good, he thought, framed in the entrance to the passageway. His hand strayed to his naked chin and he shuddered. He must pull himself together. The whole idea of the voyage was to get away from his job: not to think of it, even. Or of anything else that was at all upsetting. Such as his dearest friend, sweetie though she undoubtedly was. Immediately, he began to think about her. He ought to have given her something before she left. Flowers? No, no. Not flowers. They had an unpleasant association. He felt himself grow cold and then hot. He clenched his hands and walked into the passageway.

About two minutes later the ninth and last passenger for the Cape Farewell arrived by taxi at the docks. He was Mr Donald McAngus, an elderly bachelor, who was suffering from a terrible onset of ship-fever. The fog along the Embankment had grown heavier. In the City it had been atrocious. Several times his taxi had come to a stop, twice it had gone off its course and finally, when he was really feeling physically sick with anxiety the driver had announced that this was as far as he cared to go. He indicated shapes, scarcely perceptible, of roofs and walls and the faint glow beyond them. That, he said, was where Mr McAngus’s ship lay. He had merely to make for the glow and he would be aboard. There ensued a terrible complication over the fare, and the tip: first Mr McAngus under-tipped and then, in a frenzy of apprehension, he over-tipped. The driver adopted a pitying attitude. He put Mr McAngus’s fibre suitcases into their owner’s grip and tucked his cardboard box and his brown paper parcel under his arms. Thus burdened Mr McAngus disappeared at a shambling trot into the fog and the taxi returned to the West End of London.

The time was now eleven-thirty. The taxi from the flower shop was waiting for his fare and PC Moir was about to engage him in conversation. The last hatch was covered, the Cape Farewell was cleared and Captain Bannerman, Master, awaited his pilot.

At one minute to twelve the siren hooted.

PC Moir was now at the police call-box. He had been put through to the CID.

‘There’s one other thing, sir,’ he was saying, ‘beside the flowers. There’s a bit of paper clutched in the right hand, sir. It appears to be a fragment of an embarkation notice, like they give passengers. For the Cape Farewell.’

He listened, turning his head to look across the tops of half-seen roofs at the wraith of a scarlet funnel, with a white band. It slid away and vanished smoothly into the fog.

‘I’m afraid I can’t board her, sir,’ he said. ‘She’s sailed.’

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_41649e59-63e0-59e1-92f7-62d656062b2e)

Departure (#ulink_41649e59-63e0-59e1-92f7-62d656062b2e)

At regular two-minute intervals throughout the night, Cape Farewell sounded her siren. The passengers who slept were still, at times, conscious of this noise; as of some monster blowing monstrous raspberries through their dreams. Those who waked listened with varying degrees of nervous exasperation. Aubyn Dale, for instance, tried to count the seconds between blasts, sometimes making them come to as many as one hundred and thirty and at others, by a deliberate tardiness, getting them down to one hundred and fifteen. He then tried counting his pulse but this excited him. His heart behaved with the greatest eccentricity. He began to think of all the things it was better not to think of, including the worst one of all: the awful debacle of the Midsummer Fair at Melton Medbury. This was just the sort of thing that his psychiatrist had sent him on the voyage to forget. He had already taken one of his sleeping-pills. At two o’clock he took another and it was effective.

Mr Cuddy also was restive. He had recovered Mr Merryman’s Evening Herald from the bus. It was in a somewhat dishevelled condition but when he got into bed he read it exhaustively, particularly the pieces about the Flower Murderer. Occasionally he read aloud for Mrs Cuddy’s entertainment but presently her energetic snores informed him that this exercise was profitless. He let the newspaper fall to the deck and began to listen to the siren. He wondered if his fellow-travellers would exhibit a snobbish attitude towards Mrs Cuddy and himself. He thought of Mrs Dillington-Blick’s orchids, heaving a little at their superb anchorage, and himself gradually slipped into an uneasy doze.

Mr Merryman, on the other hand, slept heavily. If he was visited by dreams of a familiar steward or an inquisitive spinster, they were of too deeply unconscious a nature to be recollected. Like many people of an irascible temperament, he seemed to find compensation for his troubles in the profundity of his slumber.

So, too, did Father Jourdain, who on finishing his prayers, getting into bed and putting himself through one or two pretty stiff devotional hoops, fell into a quiet oblivion that lasted until morning.

Mr Donald McAngus took a little time to recover from the circumstances that attended his late arrival. However he had taken coffee and sandwiches in the dining-room and had eyed his fellow-passengers with circumspection and extreme curiosity. His was the not necessarily malicious but all-absorbing inquisitiveness of the Lowland Scot. He gathered facts about other people as an indiscriminate philatelist gathers stamps: merely for the sake of adding to his collection. He had found himself at the same table as the Cuddys – the passengers had not yet been given their official places – and had already discovered that they lived in Dulwich and that Mr Cuddy was ‘in business’ though of what nature Mr McAngus had been unable to divine. He had told them about his trouble with the taxi. Distressed by Mrs Cuddy’s unwavering stare he had tied himself up in a tangle of parentheses and retired unsatisfied to his room and his bed.

There he lay tidily all night in his gay crimson pyjamas, occupied with thoughts so unco-ordinated and feckless that they modulated imperceptibly into dreams and were not at all disturbed by the reiterated booming of the siren.

Miss Abbott had returned from the call box on the wharf, scarcely aware of the fog and with a dull effulgence under her darkish skin. The sailor at the gangway noticed, and was afterwards to remember, her air of suppressed excitement. She went to bed and was still wide-awake when the ship sailed. She watched blurred lights slide past the porthole and felt the throb of the engines at dead slow. At about one o’clock in the morning she fell asleep.

Jemima Carmichael hadn’t paid much attention to her companions: it took all her determination and fortitude to hold back her tears. She kept telling herself angrily that crying was a voluntary physical process, entirely controllable and in her case absolutely without justification. Lots of other people had their engagements broken off at the last minute and were none the worse for it: most of them without her chance of cutting her losses and bolting to South Africa.

It had been a mistake to peer up at St Paul’s. That particular kind of beauty always got under her emotional guard; and there she went again with the man in the opposite seat looking into her face as if he’d like to be sorry for her. From then onwards the bus journey had seemed intolerable but the walk through the fog to the ship had been better. It was almost funny that her departure should be attended by such obvious gloom. She had noticed Mrs Dillington-Blick’s high-heeled patent leather shoes tittupping ahead and had heard scraps of the Cuddys’ conversation. She had also been conscious of the young man walking just behind her. When they had emerged from the passageway to the wharf he said:

‘Look, do let me carry that suitcase,’ and had taken it out of her hand before she could expostulate. ‘My stuff’s all on board,’ he said. ‘I feel unimportant with nothing in my hand. Don’t you hate feeling unimportant?’

‘Well, no,’ Jemima said, surprised into an unconventional reply. ‘At the moment, I’m not minding it.’

‘Perhaps it’s a change for you.’

‘Not at all,’ she said hurriedly.

‘Or perhaps women are naturally shrinking creatures, after all. “Such,” you may be thinking, “is the essential vanity of the human male.” And you are perfectly right. Did you know that Aubyn Dale is to be a passenger?’

‘Is he?’ Jemima said without much interest. ‘I would have thought a luxury liner and organized fun would be more his cup-of-tea.’

‘I understand it’s a rest cure. Far away from the madding camera and I bet you anything you like that in no time he’ll be missing his spotlights. I’m the doctor, by the way, and this is my first long voyage. My name’s Timothy Makepiece. You must be either Miss Katherine Abbott or Miss Jemima Carmichael and I can’t help hoping it’s the latter.’

‘You’d be in a bit of a spot if it wasn’t,’ Jemima said.

‘I risked everything on the one throw. Rightly, I perceive. Is it your first long voyage?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t sound as excited as I would have expected. This is the ship, looming up. It’s nice to think we shall be meeting again. What is your cabin number? I’m not being fresh: I just want to put your bag in it.’

‘It’s 4. Thank you very much.’

‘Not at all,’ said Dr Makepiece politely. He led the way to her cabin, put her suitcase into it, made her a rather diffident little bow and went away.