Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  Fergus sat there surveying her. She looked very young, he thought, and yet she had once looked so old. Or had he thought about her differently then? He was not sure. He said, ‘I wish I had been free after lunch and could have taken you out to San Antonio gardens. It is lovely there, and you ought to go, only I have to be back at work.’

  ‘I suppose I couldn’t go alone?’

  ‘Oh yes, you could. Malta is a safe little island, it is not like Naples in that way. Here you can go about quite well.’

  ‘Then I’ll get a cab of some sort and drive out to it.’

  ‘I’ll fix that up for you.’ He eyed her across the rim of his glass. ‘You’re liking it?’

  ‘I’m loving it.’

  She finished the lime and lemon, and glanced across at him. To him this must all be ordinary and usual, to her it was a fairy tale come true.

  ‘Funny,’ she said, ‘but I am most terribly hungry, just like a kid …’

  ‘Right. Then come in and have some lunch.’

  They went into thedining-room together.

  II

  Most of the ship seemed to have collected into that dining-room. The waiters were flying about at express speed, they were extremely willing and extremely capable. Ann approved their white drill suits and their canvas shoes.

  Ethel and Mrs. Duncan arrived with a young man in tow, who looked as if he had developed jaundice and was not too happy about it. Ann recognized him as having been seen most of the cruise so far through the windows of the ship’s cocktail bar.

  He had an Hon. attached to his name, she had learnt from the passenger list, and apparently Mrs. Duncan had learnt that too. An Hon. was her idea of bliss.

  There was the blazer and beret brigade, and some who had already bought the dark spectacles on sale in the streets; there were the three girls who had worn flannel trousers ever since they had left Marseilles, and their bathing-dress tops, and had actually come ashore in them. ‘All very well for the swimming-bath and sun-bathing,’ said Fergus, ‘and even then it’s dangerous with figures like that.’

  The unexpected throng caused no little disturbance in the hotel; even the chef ‒ though he had, according to the certificates hung on the wall, first and second class diplomas ‒ had got flustered. There was, so Fergus told Ann, keen competition between this hotel, which was the only one in the island under English management, and the other one further down the same street where a certain Serene Highness had at one time laid his weary body for a night’s repose. Ann could not help thinking that Mrs. Duncan had not heard of the Serene Highness, else why was she here? Nobody, Fergus said, had ever decided whether it was better to go for the English management and so lessen more than considerably the fear of food poisoning which was so prevalent in the island of sunshine and romance, or to bask in the aristocratic privilege of having slept under the same roof as a certain Serene Highness.

  Fergus put his money on the food.

  ‘The island is full of disease and poison,’ he said, ‘and here I do know the food is properly cooked.’

  ‘It seems very good.’

  How different from the usual lunches, the Miss Thomas lunches when they ‘treated’ each other. The usual steak and ‘kid.’ and one veg. Or, on hard-up days, the poached egg and the glass of milk. How would she ever go back to all that? She refused to think of it. She pulled herself up with a jerk.

  The worst elements of the cruise continued to pour in through the dining-room door. The Spinkses large and perspiring. The Frenchman noisy and insistent ‒ he had obviously come for the first and second class diplomas ‒ he demanded to see the menu before he sat down, and then, having misjudged the time, found there was nowhere to sit. (‘And serve him right,’ said Fergus.) Strange costumes, the sort of costume that the Englishman abroad believes to be cool but which is not. Ann felt that it would be but a short step to handkerchiefs over the head, securely knotted at the corners.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll put you into a car for the San Antonio gardens,’ he said.

  There was some difficulty in getting a car. The festa was the excuse. Drivers surveyed Fergus with a complete lack of interest. When he hailed them either they continued to stare, or they shrugged their shoulders with complete indifference, and murmured the single word which appeared to be their be-all and end-all ‒ ‘Festa.’

  Then, just as they were wondering what to do, a large car came down Strada Mezzodi, and drew up at the door of the hotel. Inside was Oliver Banks. Ann had thought that when she saw him again she would be covered with confusion, but now, in the heat and flurry of the moment, and the irritation caused by the infernal festa, she was almost relieved.

  ‘She was just going to San Antonio gardens,’ Fergus explained, ‘only there is a dreadful bobbery about getting a taxi to-day. They’ve got some beano on.’

  Oliver grinned. ‘Festa,’ he said.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘I’ll take you.’ He held open the car door. ‘You pop in here beside me. You’ll never get a car if you wave your arms about the streets for hours. They are simply taking no notice.’

  The Mediterranean was queer in that way. Odd things happened there. You could not go through the day without it changing on the sudden. Here she was, mutely, for she could think of no excuse, getting into the car and sitting down by Oliver’s side. Fergus was walking away from the hotel. There was no waving of good-byes, the thing just happened. Could anything be more awkward? she asked herself. And all because of a festa, with little boys dripping candle grease down Strada Reale, and a pious-looking gentleman bearing an omnipotent umbrella strutting behind, and the penitents struggling with a pink plaster effigy in the rear.

  Fate had taken a hand.

  They drove out through the Porta Reale, with the island lying before them, and the Citta Veccian hills beyond. She saw a crimson bougainvillea growing beside a purple one, mingling their wild wine of blossom together on a stone wall.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done this,’ she said.

  ‘Why not? We’re friends, aren’t we?’

  She wanted to say ‘Yes, but after last night …’ only she couldn’t. How could anyone? She was annoyed that he was not embarrassed and she was. Yet it did perhaps make it easier to know that he could be natural about it. ‘Of course we’re friends,’ she agreed, and the loveliness of the island suddenly came over her, and the warm beauty of the afternoon. Anyway let them be friendly for the moment, and blow the conventions.

  The pastoral, agricultural part of the island lay before them, with the red clover growing wild and rampant and in full blossom dyeing the fields with its Tyrian purple. Here or there was the dim blue of cypresses, or the straggling yellow-green of fig trees already growing dusty. On the right, whenever you looked, there was always the dim thin line of sea on the horizon, clasping close the island which lay like a ruby in a claw setting.

  ‘Glad you came?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s marvellous.’

  A lizard zig-zagged up a crumbling wall, a vivid streak of green against the grey of the stone.

  ‘You’ll love San Antonio.’

  ‘I believe I’m in the mood to love anything,’ she said, and she resigned herself to her fate. (What were conventions, anyway?) After all, she had never known Lilia. If Oliver remained unembarrassed, why shouldn’t she? She told herself that she would make the most of the precious moment, whatever happened. They drove on, along a road thick with dust, which flew behind the car. They passed through villages, fly-blown and indescribably filthy, with the figs growing close to the houses, and the old, old women looking out from under green-black faldettas. There were children everywhere. They played in the gutters; they were herded along in those strange carts belonging to the more affluent Maltese, which have mattresses laid on the bare floor, where the occupants sprawl at full length.

  They arrived at the Melita hotel, which stands by the Governor’s summer palace in a grateful greenness that is all its own. And after the glar
e of the road, and the burning whiteness of the island ‒ save where it was red with clovers ‒ Ann was glad. Again the cold tessellated hall, and beyond the glimpse of a little garden through an archway. The garden was unlike the rest of Malta that she had seen, the island stripped stark, for this was verdant and green. Blue plumbago in blossom twined about a marble pool where golden carp swam. An orange tree, white with blossom and gold with fruit, gave them shelter. There was the scent of hot orange flowers, of red roses and nicotiana, all at one and the same moment, and over it all the resinous essence of a tall cedar.

  ‘It is a joy to eat marmalade home-made from their oranges,’ said Oliver.

  ‘You’ve been here before?’

  ‘Yes, twice. Everybody who comes to the island comes here, it is one of the spots.’

  ‘I wish I could never leave it again.’

  ‘Yes, you always feel it when you first come here. But really it is dull, you’d get sick of it.’ He poured out the tea with elaborate care. On the wall of the house where a vine trailed its tendrils, a caged bird began to sing. ‘It is funny,’ he said, ‘but they have no birds in Malta save in a cage or a pie. That is the Maltese idea of the place for them.’

  ‘Poor thing! I wonder that it has the heart left to sing,’ and though the silence was only broken in the far distance by the jingle of carozzi bells, above it came the song of the caged bird.

  ‘Yet,’ said Oliver, ‘lots of men and women, also caged, still sing. I am sometimes astonished at the bravery of people, the courage with which they fight the most ghastly odds.’

  She glanced at him with interest. ‘You’ve had a difficult life?’

  ‘Oh no, better than I deserved, I daresay. It has been odd, nothing really difficult about it.’

  He thought for a moment of telling her about Uncle Alfred, and dear Grandma and Auntie Miggs. He thought of laughing with her about the consumptive tendencies of Aunt Daisy. Then it all seemed to be too much of a joke; too much of a hotchpotch; Ann was not used to the different phases of human nature, she might not understand. She had run in a rut. The workmen in the village at home, the ploughboy complex, and the perhaps a little snobbish, certainly a little narrow, influences of her father and Cuthbert. How could she understand that colourful tangle which had been Oliver’s life? People as the poles apart, minds vividly contrasting. She couldn’t. He did not dwell on his roving, nomadic childhood.

  ‘Your mother was nice?’ she asked.

  ‘I never knew her.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘I never knew him either. Relations brought me up, I was shuttlecock to their battledores.’

  She sympathized, for to Ann the stable certainty of home had meant a lot. Yet although she did not know it, it had extracted a great toll from her, she was only just beginning to escape its greedy demands on her.

  Perhaps they were on the brink of confidences, perhaps they were standing on the edge of secrets, when they saw a car load of people disembarking outside the hotel. The lady who had so unfortunately lost her teeth at the very onset of the trip and who had lived on slops ever since. A young man in a blazer of such stripes that no respectable school would have flaunted, his arm round the waist of a young woman in flannel trousers. The Jewess lady with a new ‘boy friend’, old and solid in appearance, but unmistakably with cash. The Jewess always saw to that, else what was the good of the barber’s shop? And oh my, how that man charged! Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself, really he ought, only there wasn’t anywhere else to go. And if you didn’t make these boys cough up when the going was good, they didn’t cough up at all. They just hopped it, always a quarrel or something. It was downright aggravating. Really it was.

  ‘If you have finished we might as well walk round the gardens in the palace,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, can we get inside?’

  ‘Certainly we can, and it is rather beautiful. Different from the rest of the island.’

  They went out together and in at a wide gateway. Her heart beat faster as they entered the gardens themselves, with their long walks, and their abundance of flowers. A peacock crossed their path, trailing a bronze tail after him, making ripples in the dust. The sun tipped the bronze into gold in places, and all the little feathers on his head shone and glistened. He crossed the path itself, and disappeared into some bushes, where great yellow globes of breadfruit hung.

  ‘Oh look!’ she exclaimed excitedly.

  ‘Breadfruit.’

  ‘Does it taste good?’

  ‘No. It is really very dull.’ He turned and smiled down at her. ‘You’re very childlike, aren’t you? You’ve got all a kid’s enthusiasms, at heart you are nothing but a kid really.’ She laughed. It was nice to be thought like a child. For so long now she had been responsible, definitely responsible, reliable Mr. Robert would have called it, that it was a relief to find somebody thinking of her as just a child. She realized the attraction of Oliver, something that drew her to him. The whimsical mouth which smiled so much, the grey eyes full of dreams, the hair with the darts of silver in it, like the darts of gold that the sun had found in the peacock’s tail and breast.

  Spontaneously she cried, ‘I’m glad that we met, and that we can go on being friends. It is rather lovely, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s grand. The best thing that ever happened to me.’ Quite naturally he lifted her hand and placed it on his arm, and so guided her through the garden. There were white lilies like those which had blown in the Alameda; there were yellow flags standing stiffly in the stone fountain, against whose swordlike greenery and yellow weight of blossom the water dripped mechanically. There were avenues of trees, and under the grateful shadows they walked happily enough.

  ‘But it is terribly hot,’ she admitted. She had meant to buy a bathing dress in Naples, and then somehow she had forgotten. She had been carried away with Pompeii, and with the white city rising in tiers up the hill. She had had that touch of the sun too, and that had made the difference.

  He said, ‘We ought to have brought bathing gear with us.’

  ‘Yes, I’d have loved a bathe.’

  And instantly she thought of Worthing, where she had bathed from the little huts that smelt of salt, and heat, and rubber caps. She had dried herself on brown and prickly towels, as lent by the Corporation (price twopence) and stamped all over W.U.D.C. just in case you might be tempted to keep them. All her bathing had been spoiled by her extreme modesty, and Cuthbert’s very frank opinions about young women who bathed in dresses which disclosed that they were young women. She had had to be so dreadfully decent about everything, that her thoughts had become entirely indecent. She had been quite frightened that something might show ‒ she did not quite know what ‒ or that Cuthbert might have been shocked.

  ‘Where do you bathe here?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, Tigné is where the smart people bathe. There are sunbrown competitions and that sort of thing, but really there are possibilities anywhere around the island. A steward told me that Cala Mistra was the place, and I went there last time. We can get a car and go there to-morrow.’

  ‘But I haven’t a bathing-dress.’

  ‘I’ve got a couple. One is a bit open-work, but then there isn’t anybody to see, so it won’t matter.’

  His ‘free and easiness’ attracted her. It made her feel at home; it made her feel that nothing mattered. She wished that life could go on like this. It was so smooth-running. Oliver accepted the whole bathing party as being settled, and at the moment she was incapable of argument. It was lovely and lazy in the heat, with the shadows falling between the oleanders, and the warm smell of lilies rising in waves. The very impossibility of bathing from any beach alone with a man, debarred it. She just took it as a piece of foolishness. She would not think of it. She preferred to walk, her arm linked pleasantly in his, listening to the conversation which was so completely natural that it enchanted her. To think that she had never dared to be natural before! To think that she had always had to pretend, and that what she really
thought about things had had to be hidden behind what the world would like her to think about things! She did not ask more of life at the moment, and the morrow was not disturbing.

  At last he said, ‘We ought to be getting back,’ and she turned quite reluctantly. The sunlight and the shadow of the sweet garden seemed to enfold them still. As she stepped into the car which was to bear her away she felt quite sad about it.

  ‘It was so beautiful.’

  ‘You have much more beauty lying ahead, though you may not know it. What about Venice?’

  ‘Yes, I know. Venice must be heavenly.’ And she lapsed again into silence in contemplative appreciation of Venice. They drove back through the Porte des Bombes. They had to slow down for a carozzi, ambling along in the middle of the road and refusing to make way for them. At last, with oaths and yells, the chauffeur managed to press them to their proper side. When they had passed, both Oliver and Ann turned to look at the sallow-faced Maltese who was driving; and as they did so, they saw the two strange occupants of the carozzi itself. Miss Bright was sitting there, very alert and upright, her enormous gold watch lightly drumming on her virginal breast. And by her side sat a monk in a brown habit.

  III

  It seemed impossible that a monk had ‘picked up’ Miss Bright, and had taken her for a drive. It seemed equally impossible for Miss Bright to have selected a monk, though the island teemed with them.

  ‘You never know,’ said Oliver, ‘these old woman are like that. They never realize what they are getting at, and then yell for help when they find things are getting embarrassing.’

  ‘But a monk?’ persisted Ann.

  ‘Monks are more willing than most, I imagine. We will rag her about it later.’

  When the car drew level with the Custom House steps, Ann felt happily tired. Carozzis were tearing to and fro, for the festa was over. The penitents had performed their penance and were safely absolved, with the result that they could go to the devil again for a whole year quite happily and satisfactorily. The little boys who had dripped tallow up all Reale, had thereby insured a position in the heavenly spheres when their time should come. It was all extremely convenient. Bells were clashing, in the regardless, haphazard way of Maltese bells. A last firework spun up to the sky, and startled the carozzi horses grouped together around the Custom House steps.