Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  Crossing the barrack square and not looking where she was going, Ann found herself in the centre of a squad of soldiers. It was very difficult. When she was actually outside the market, the hat did blow off, rolling along giddily, and rescued by a street urchin. The short ends of her hair blew up over her head, and she felt that she looked like a caricature. It dismayed her.

  The little boy came up with the hat. ‘Penny,’ he said brazenly.

  Years of Sunday-school teaching came to Ann’s head. ‘You shouldn’t ask for money,’ she said impressively as she searched in her purse.

  He said again more definitely, ‘Penny.’

  In her fluster she gave him sixpence. Anything to get back the hat and to perch it on her head. She thought she would never get to the ship. Now she did not care how she looked. Why should she?

  VIII

  The Allando had weighed her anchor, and in her cabin Ann sat staring gloomily at the bulkhead. Why had she ever had her hair cut? What madness had tempted her to make such an utter fool of herself? It was so desperately final, something she could not possibly undo. Now it frightened her. The ship was cool. No longer was she wrapped in that terrible sticky heat, and it did not reveal itself as an additional excuse. The hairdresser’s glass had been flattering; now she was sure that she looked a fright, and could do nothing to change it. She told herself that she could not possibly go down to the dining-saloon like this, even the stewards would laugh at her. They had all seen her with long hair and must notice the difference.

  Facing Cuthbert and Eleanor and Gloria would be nothing like so bad as facing the dining-saloon full of criticizing people. For a moment she wished that she had never attempted this silly cruise at all. Then pictures precipitated themselves into her mental vision. The Alameda, rich in colouring, filled by the tender and languid heat, the old woman like something already half dead, and the crimson glory of geraniums, the cacti with the whiteness of the lilies. They stood out in contrast to the drabness of her own life at home. Mrs. Puddock’s and the allotted nights for ironing and for washing. The problem of the disallowed electric iron, and the difficulties of cooling it off. The office with little Gelding and her flirtation with bad Mr. John which had to be winked at. It was all like some hideous machinery; you fed it at one end with the raw material, and it champed and champed, and then delivered you the finished object at the far end. She knew that there was no chance for you once the machinery of life caught you in its ceaseless grind. You came out at the other end ‒ dead. There was no escape.

  Only by the aid of a miracle had she got away from it all, and she would have to go back. The very need for money would drive her back remorselessly, there was no getting away from that. This was a phase, a fleeting, flashing holiday phase, that had for a moment changed all her being. It could not last. It was like a dream, and there would be the awakening. Unfortunately the shingled head was not like a dream, that was the real thing, and wake with it she must. That was what disturbed her.

  She looked so strangely young. She felt so naked about the back of the neck. She wasn’t herself at all. She would have to go down to dinner, and quite probably someone would remark on her hair, and then she would cry. She felt most unhappy about it. Slowly, very slowly indeed, she began to change.

  Chapter 2

  I

  Ann did not believe that she would ever go down to the saloon. She stood before the mirror, combing the refractory hair this side and the other, arranging it in ways in which it would not arrange, and distracted by the ways in which it would arrange. She was full of doubts and dilemmas. Finally she gave it up in despair, and crept out into the alleyway like a child ashamed of itself.

  One of the ship’s officers met her. She had seen him before; he was, she believed, the second officer, dark, with deep-set eyes and long lashes.

  ‘Hello,’ said he, ‘just joined?’ and then, recognizing her, ‘Sorry, for the moment I didn’t see who it was.’

  She crimsoned and went on. She would not for the world have told him that no man had ever spoken to her like that before. Just for the moment romance had glittered on her horizon. She felt a new thrill and was instantly ashamed of it. Ashamed that she had had her hair cut; ashamed that she had aroused that interest in some man, and much more ashamed that she liked it.

  Mrs. Duncan and Ethel were already at the table. They were usually quick on their meals. They had been shopping and were occupied with the bargains they had bought.

  The Spinkses arrived, large and pompous.

  ‘Good evening, everybody,’ from Mrs., and, ‘Well, and how did you find Gibraltar?’ from Mr.

  They were not so full of their bargains as of the immense sums of money they had paid for things. That was the besetting sin of the Spinkses. They wanted everybody to know that they had money to spend. You might have thought that Juan les Pins would have taught them the folly of it, but they had forgotten Juan les Pins now, and were starting all over again in the ship. They had been ashore and they had paid a fortune for a shawl, but after all what did a few pounds matter either way? They had bought perfume in a black glass bottle, like a goblet.

  ‘Five pounds for a bottle of perfume,’ said Mr. Spinks; ‘just think of it!’ He pursed his lips violently. When he pursed his lips the enormous moustache jerked like Harry Tate’s. It gave him a queerer, more prawnish appearance than ever.

  So far no one had noticed Ann’s head. They were much too full of their own doings. Ann was of no interest to them. The Frenchman had bought green figs, baskets of them; he had a passion for them as he had for most foods. He ate heartily and masticated with a frightful noise.

  ‘I’m dancing on B deck,’ said Ethel to all whom it might concern.

  ‘And there was a bedspread,’ went on Mrs. Spinks, who was not in the least interested in the dancing on B deck, ‘made by the nuns at Seville, he said, but I had my suspicions. I thought it was too cheap. Only fifteen pounds. You can’t expect much for that, can you?’

  Evidently other people could! Ann most certainly expected a great deal for fifteen pounds. It was far more than she would have spent on any bedspread, or any bed either for the matter of that, and she wanted to tell Mrs. Spinks so, only she daren’t.

  Fergus Simmonds was late. He was furious. It was queer, but during the whole of his term of service he had never been mistaken for a doctor, very seldom for an officer. Now, to-night, a woman had leapt out upon him in a state of undress, and, snatching at his arm, had demanded, ‘Steward! Bring a cloth quickly, I’ve upset a bowl of water all over my cabin.’ Coldly he had replied, ‘Madam, I am not a steward,’ but she had not withered. She had only said that he looked like one, and that he ought not to go about looking like one and not being one; it was most misleading. He had not recovered from this fracas, when he found himself swallowed up in the Spinkses’ bragging.

  He felt that he would like to hit somebody.

  He hated these cruises. The mail run was bad enough, when the first fortnight you loved everybody, and the next you loved them not quite so much, and the last launched you into a definite hate. But this …! This …! People who had never been in a ship before; who had, he felt, no right to be in one now, and who he hoped, for the sake of all shipping companies and all respectable passengers, would never be in a ship again. People who mistook officers for stewards, and probably the other way about for all he knew. One old bounder who had worn a bowler hat on deck, and the fates (which are never discriminating) had not seen fit to blow it overboard.

  He chose fish ‒ starting at fish made the meal go quicker!

  Then he saw Ann sitting there, and for the first time he became aware of her finely shaped head, and of a new girlishness about her. Why, he had thought her old.

  ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’ he asked.

  There was the faint tremor of tears in her voice. ‘I’ve had my hair cut short. Isn’t it awful?’

  ‘No, it makes you look a different person. I like it. It’s a good thing you had it done. I
believe in women making the best of themselves.’

  Ethel Duncan, listening with lowered eyes, looked up furtively, and for the first time she realized that there was a difference in Ann. She leant forward. She was annoyed with Ann for attracting Fergus’s attention, Ann who was old and ordinary and dreadfully old-fashioned and dull.

  ‘Fancy you having your hair cut!’ she said, and there was something aggressive about her.

  ‘I think it is a great improvement’ ‒ from Fergus.

  And then the Spinkses: ‘Forty-three pounds he was asking, not much I thought, but what was the good of a carved bidet to me?’

  Only Monsieur Vallé did not interfere. He had paid four thousand francs for this tour, and he meant to have four thousand francs’ worth of food out of it. What was the good of spending all that money if you did not get something back for it, and how could you get something back if you chattered hard all through the meal-times? Social amenities did not appeal to him. He was not attracted by beautiful views, nor by the idea of travel, but, like the lady who had unfortunately lost her artificial dentures on the first night at sea, he had heard that the food on this particular line was excellent, and that was what he had come for. He put his heart into the engrossing business of eating. There was the noisome accompaniment of mastication and gulping.

  II

  Dinner was over.

  Coffee had been served by the stewards in the lounge. The gentle Mediterranean heat had tempted Ann out on to B deck, where she walked to and fro. The ship was settling down to life at sea now. Faces were becoming familiar. The sick were no longer afflicted. The people who had saved up for this one marvellous holiday of their lives and who had been at first a little over-awed by the luxury and the efficiency of the ship, were beginning to feel at home.

  One daring old gentleman had actually breathed to the steward that he preferred tea to coffee after his meals ‒ he always had it at home. The steward had conveyed with a single look that he certainly would not have it here.

  In another day or two they would warm completely. The strangeness would wear away. They would be one enormous family of friendly people at home in this wonderful floating hotel. And then the hates would start. Not being able to stick that woman in brown. Not standing Mrs. So-and-So. And all the rest of the fierce savage hates that emerge at sea.

  As Ann walked up and down she saw a young man in a blazer that only a suburban tennis club could have devised, and capped by a beret, his arms fondly entwined about the slender body of a girl whom four days previously he had never even met. It was sea-fever. The beginning of a romance at sea; it was the strangely subtle atmosphere of a great liner urging forward, bent on pleasure; it was the wonder cruise.

  There was a quiet sea, palely blue, with little lines like smears of milk across its translucent face. On the horizon, land, dim as clouds, the undulating coast-line, and rising out of a mackerel sky a moon which seemed to Ann’s imagination to be far larger and of a more golden hue than that old friendly moon she had so often seen rising over Onslow Gardens, shedding beams that were dimmed by the lights in Sussex Place.

  The ship sighed and whispered as she steamed along. The throb of her engines was so distant and indistinct as to be merely remotely audible. From either side came the sound of water, crushed into a heavy tide, split into two great waves by the giant bows of the S.S. Allando.

  As Ann stood there she heard someone come up from behind, and felt him standing there. It was Oliver Banks.

  ‘Looking at the moon?’

  ‘Yes. Lovely, isn’t she?’

  ‘She grows a great deal lovelier further along.’

  ‘How can she? It is the same moon really,’ she smiled a little, ‘it’s the Pimlico and Putney moon at heart.’

  ‘No, not quite the same. Nothing is the same at sea. Haven’t you realized the danger of the atmosphere? The subtle, indescribable danger of a ship?’

  Ann did not understand. She only associated danger with shipwrecks and with lifebelts, with fire drill and alarm. He saw instantly that she did not follow his meaning. ‘No, not that. I was thinking of the false glamour, the new gaiety of flirtation that this place gives us.’

  She thought of the old woman in the Alameda. ‘Make much of life while you are still young, look at me …’ And now she had almost forgotten the hair cut short. Perhaps that also had been glamour and the atmosphere.

  ‘It gets us all in time,’ he said, ‘wonder cruise, sea-fever. What do we get out of it? Just something to remember.’

  She turned and faced him. ‘Why are you talking like this to-night? Has anything happened?’

  ‘I got a letter at Gib. It worried me.’ There came a silence, and she felt that it was an inquiring silence, so after a moment she said:

  ‘Would it help you to tell me? Sometimes it does help a little to tell a stranger.’

  ‘You aren’t a stranger. You seem to me to be like a friend. Years ago I married, it was one of the impulses of my boyhood. In Bermuda. There was this atmosphere there. The lilies and the palms, lime cocktails. It goes to youth’s head, inflames his senses, and I believed that I was in love. Later, but too late, I found that I wasn’t.’

  Ann was profoundly shocked, but curiosity lit her imagination. Somehow she felt that he ought to have told her that he was a married man. A respectable married man ought not to have spoken to a strange woman in Kensington Gardens. Then perhaps he wasn’t respectably married! He went on.

  ‘We separated almost at once. No good doing anything else. If we had gone on trying to make the best of a bad job we might have had children. They complicate life dreadfully.’

  She did not know what to say. It was a difficult conversation for one only used to the extremely ‘nice’ remarks of Cuthbert and Eleanor and Mr. Robert, and the perhaps quite not so nice remarks of Mrs. Puddock. Cuthbert had always kept up the difficult pose of believing that God, and God only, was responsible for birth, which in the face of the definite establishment of Gloria with Cuthbert as her father was more than a little absurd. Mr. Robert would never have mentioned such things; he would have considered them crude. Mrs. Puddock only referred to them when she mentioned the agonies of a lady friend in labour. Mrs. Puddock liked agonies. She would have believed it indecent to connect consummation with conception, but quite decent to discuss the more ghastly details of first and second stages, of instruments and stitches.

  To Ann it was startling to hear a man discuss quite casually the facts of birth and beginnings. In her confusion she could not think of any way of stopping him.

  ‘We split. I paid up. It was the only decent thing that I could do to acknowledge my responsibilities. Lilia has not had anything to complain of there! Now I’m a bit staggered. She is thirty-seven, and after having been married, or rather separated, all these years she wants a divorce.’

  ‘How dreadful,’ said Ann.

  A young couple sharing the same deck chair just behind them, imagining the conversation to be engrossing, grew louder in their caresses. ‘I’m mad about you, plumb crazy,’ said the young man. ‘Oh, go along,’ said the girl …

  ‘Let’s move our pitch,’ suggested Oliver. They went further down the taffrail. ‘It isn’t really dreadful. Ordinary, I suppose, only Lilia seemed to be getting on. I never thought she would want an affair of her own. She went on a pleasure cruise on a luxury liner, the American ones are pretty snappy I can tell you, and she has met someone. She wants me to give her her freedom.’

  ‘But divorce! It is so wicked,’ said Ann. It was Cuthbert’s teaching. Those whom God hath joined together. Naturally it was like breaking a promise, the sort of thing no gentleman ever did. There were indiscretions in divorce, frightful scenes, you could not think of them.

  ‘I don’t know about it being wicked,’ said Oliver, ‘it is more likely our system of marriage that is wicked. So absurd tying people up, looped together in chains like prisoners. That’s wicked if you like it.’

  Ann was vaguely uneasy, yet the loveliness of t
he surroundings drew her along with them. She felt that no decent man should talk like this, and yet in her heart she was sure that he was decent. Perhaps he was a little drunk. Spirits being out of bond and all that. It did go to people’s heads. She felt it was a mistake having spirits on board at all. She glanced at him nervously. No, he did not look drunk; he wasn’t flushed. His face was palely cut against the background of sea and sky, and the tender, gleaming loveliness of moonrise. He was certainly not drunk.

  ‘I think,’ said Ann sententiously, ‘that it is your duty to go to your wife and talk to her about it.’

  ‘You think divorce wrong? You’ve been taught to think it wrong. Isn’t this a case when we should think for ourselves?’

  For a moment she wondered if he were making improper overtures to her, and then banished the thought, angry with herself for allowing it to cross her mind. Perhaps for the first time in her life she was aware that people had different ways of thinking, quite nice people too. Cuthbert, and the dogma which was Cuthbert, insisted on dividing people into two herds, the people who abominated divorce, and the adulteresses who revelled in it. Sheep and goats, nicely labelled. For the first time there merged on the horizon of Ann’s thought a third herd, a herd that dare think for itself and which refused to be labelled. Instantly she knew that she had never dared to think for herself, but had allowed her father and Cuthbert to mould her views and set their own opinions in her mind, like little flags pinned to a map to denote the route. She had never formed a single opinion of her own, and it dismayed her.

  Because she could see sense in what Oliver Banks was saying, she could see sanity in a sea of insanity. It might be that marriage was wrong in its definite need of divorce. It might be that her whole method of thought had been wrong, and that she herself had been nothing but a mirror, reflecting the unlovely images of her father and of Cuthbert. And they were unlovely too!