The Widow's Cruise

by Nicholas Blake

  “Met him on the train,” confided Bentinck-Jones. “Delightful fellow. No side at all ... Ah, Street, let me introduce you. Mr Jeremy Street. Miss Clare Massinger. Mr Nigel Strangeways.”

  The three murmured politely at one another.

  “It’s a great pleasure to meet you,” said the newcomer to Clare. “I saw your last exhibition. Such strength and delicacy. That ‘Madonna’ particularly. The earthy touched with the divine—as it should be.”

  Jeremy Street’s voice was almost too melodious, his respectful yet manly tone almost too perfectly suitable. A faint qualm of distaste, perceptible only to Nigel, came and went on Clare’s face.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” carolled Ivor Bentinck-Jones. “Another celebrity on board. You’re a painter, Miss Massinger?”

  “Sculptor.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the fountain-head of European art,” he proclaimed.

  “So I’m told,” said Clare.

  “‘The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sang’,” continued Mr Bentinck-Jones, his pudgy face convulsed with enthusiasm. “What inspiration! But it is not your first visit, I am sure.”

  “Yes. My first visit.”

  “Well, well. And under what better auspices than those of the renowned Jeremy Street?”

  The renowned Jeremy Street glanced apologetically at Clare, his mobile mouth twitching at one corner. There was a limit, perhaps, to his capacity for being lionised.

  “And may we expect another translation from your pen in the near future?” inquired Mr Bentinck-Jones.

  “I’ve just finished the Hippolytus.”

  “Ah. One of Sophocles’ most noble works.”

  “Euripides, actually.”

  “Euripides, of course. What an absurd slip of the tongue.”

  Nigel asked, “What text have you used? E.K. Ambrose, I suppose.”

  The question could hardly have been more innocuous. But Nigel was instantly aware that, somehow, it had given offence. The wrinkled, young-old face went tight, with a huffy, defensive look.

  “Ambrose was very sound,” he said, “but somewhat lacking in imaginative sympathy. One wonders sometimes if these classical academics have the faintest idea what goes on in a poet’s mind.”

  “There’s an Ianthe Ambrose on board,” said Nigel. “I wonder if——”

  “What? I.A.?” The words seemed to explode out of Jeremy Street before he could check them.

  “You know her?”

  “Not personally,” answered the lecturer with repressive hauteur, and shortly bade them au revoir.

  Nigel was left with two impressions: that the unfortunate Ianthe Ambrose must have the gift of making enemies; and that Ivor Bentinck-Jones had not merely sensed Jeremy Street’s discomposure at her presence on board, but had obscurely relished it. No doubt, as with most busybodies, there was a streak of malice in his make-up.

  “I suspect they’re both phoneys,” Clare was murmuring.

  “Phoneys? Who?”

  “Our Jeremy and our Ivor. Jeremy is vain as a peacock but probably harmless. Ivor, on the other hand——”

  “Well? What’s wrong with him?”

  “He thought the Hippolytus was written by Sophocles. And did you notice how he was pumping us? If we knew what was going on behind that jolly façade, I’m not at all sure we should like it. And his eyes are too small.”

  Whatever Mr Bentinck-Jones’s propensities might be, Jeremy Street was soon to appear in an unexpected light. Clare had gone below to fetch her sketching-block, and Nigel was strolling along the promenade-deck. As he passed a window of the reading-room, which adjoined the B saloon aft, his eye was caught by a figure within. It was Jeremy Street. Something warily insouciant in his pose reminded Nigel of a shop-lifter he had once spotted in the act. Street’s back was turned to the window: his hand went out to a beige-covered magazine which lay on the table before him and whipped it inside his coat. That beige cover was not unfamiliar to Nigel. Why, he wondered as he moved on, should a distinguished lecturer on classical subjects possess himself, in so guilty a fashion, of The Journal of Classical Studies? There seemed to be only one answer: unless the man was a straight kleptomaniac, he had taken the Journal away from the reading-room to prevent fellow-passengers reading it. An ineffective precaution surely, though, for on a cruise of this sort it was pretty certain that some passengers would have brought copies of their own. Nigel made a mental note to procure a copy of the quarterly: he had already formed a theory as to why Jeremy Street should have abstracted it, but he liked verifying his conjectures.

  III

  Dinner in the A saloon was nearly over. Nigel and Clare had been assigned to a table whose other occupants were the Bishop of Solway and his wife, Mrs Hale. The Bishop’s white Vandyke beard, which had made them mistake him for an R.A., wagged as vigorously over his food as his wife’s tongue wagged over their fellow-passengers. Already, in a few hours, she had somehow accumulated several dossiers; and where her actual knowledge was deficient, her imagination readily filled the gaps.

  “My dear Tilly,” her husband had protested at one point, “Miss Massinger will think you’re a terrible gossip.”

  “I never gossip, Edwin. I am gossiped to. It all comes of looking so fat and comfy and normal. I’m a Mum figure—everyone coughs it up in my lap.”

  “Little do they know your real nature,” remarked the Bishop darkly.

  Mrs Hale did indeed resemble a vivacious roly-poly at first sight; but there was a smouldering, sardonic glint in her eyes which should have warned the unwary.

  “Have you met Beauty and the Beast yet?” she asked, glancing across to the table where Mrs Blaydon and Miss Ambrose sat.

  “No,” said Clare. “They are sisters, aren’t they?”

  “Yes. Miss Ambrose is a school-teacher—classics. She’s had a nervous breakdown and her sister has brought her on this cruise to convalesce. I should think it’d rather cramp Mrs Blaydon’s style, having the woman around all the time.”

  “Cramp her style?” inquired Nigel.

  “Melissa Blaydon is the Merry Widow de nos jours——”

  “Actually a widow?”

  “Yes. And it’s quite apparent to me that she has only one interest in life. Men. They’ve started to swarm round her already. But Ianthe Ambrose positively growls and bares her teeth at them. I can’t see Mrs. Blaydon getting much shipboard romance.”

  “My dear Tilly,” remarked the Bishop. “Only a contortionist could commit misconduct in these packing-cases they call cabins here.”

  “My husband does not talk like this at diocesan conferences,” his wife reassured them.

  The Bishop of Solway gave a sharp bark of laughter, his blue eyes twinkling. “You’ve no idea how I talk at diocesan conferences.” He beamed at his wife with great affection.

  “How do you know all this about Mrs Blaydon?” Clare asked.

  “She happened to be sitting next me on the boat-deck before dinner, and a podgy little man called Bentinck-Jones got into conversation with her.”

  “Ah ha,” said Clare. “She told him about her sister? He’s got a quite insatiable curiosity about other people’s lives, I suspect. You’d better watch out.”

  “Oh, my life’s an open book,” Mrs Hale declared.

  “An open book,” said her husband, “filled with improper pictures. You would hardly credit how luxuriant an imagination my wife has, Miss Massinger. It comes of the humdrum life she has to lead with me in the palace.” He patted his bearded mouth with his napkin, and glanced mischievously at his wife. “Their father and I were Fellows of the same college in the old days. There’s nothing I can’t tell you about the Ambrose sisters, when they were children.”

  “Well, really, Edwin! Why have you been keeping this from us?”

  The Bishop’s expression changed. “It’s rather a sad story. I don’t intend to rake it up, even for you, Tilly.”

  “They remind me of a poem by Edwin Muir,” said Nig
el, after a pause: he had been covertly eyeing the sisters. “It’s about two creatures, inveterate enemies, which have to fight each other, over and over and over again. One is ‘the crested animal in its pride, arrayed in all the royal hues’. The other is—how does it go? —‘a soft round beast as brown as clay ’—‘a battered bag he might have been’. Muir dreamt about them, I believe, while he was being psycho-analysed.”

  “And which won?” the Bishop’s wife asked.

  “The beautiful crested animal always wins, but it can never kill its enemy.”

  A queer little silence came over their table. Nigel was conscious of the Bishop’s eyes upon him.

  “You’re right about one thing,” said the latter at last. But what Nigel was right about did not emerge, for at this moment a loud, metallic voice silenced all conversation in the saloon.

  At the far end, a man was speaking through a microphone.

  “My name is Nikolaides. I am your cruise-manager. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Greece and the Menelaos. I hope you shall all have a mighty fine cruise.”

  The man paused to distribute dazzling smiles to the customers, and Mrs Hale was heard to mutter, “The Billy Butlin of the Aegean. He’ll be calling us ‘lads and lasses’ any moment.”

  Mr Nikolaides resumed, speaking fluently in an American accent. He told them where his office was, announced the plans for to-morrow’s expedition at Delos, urged them to bring any complaints to him personally, and begged them all to call him Nikki.

  He was a broad-shouldered man of medium height, with a swarthy, clean-shaven face, flashing white teeth, black oiled hair that shone like a tarmac road after rain, and a personality whose magnetism could be felt the whole length of the saloon.

  “And now,” he concluded, “has anyone any questions to ask me?”

  “Yes. What time is this ship actually going to start?” The questioner was, of all people, Ianthe Ambrose. Her voice was slurred, deepish, peremptory; and though the question was not in itself offensive, she contrived to make it sound thoroughly disagreeable. The tension in the woman communicated itself to all the diners, who shifted uncomfortably in their chairs, avoiding one another’s eyes. Only Nikki seemed unaffected.

  “In a couple of hours’ time,” he said. “We are delayed because the oil-tanker arrived late. But do not worry. We shall catch up with our schedule O.K.”

  He walked now from table to table, greeting the passengers individually. At the table where Melissa and Ianthe sat, he paused rather longer: he spoke reassuringly to the latter, but while he did so his eyes kept returning to her sister. One can almost see a spark in the air where their glances meet, thought Nigel. Melissa Blaydon’s profile, set off by the Indian headscarf she wore, was ravishing in its purity of line. The little tableau was broken up by a movement of Ianthe’s hand—an abrupt, seemingly involuntary movement which knocked over a wine-glass. Nikki snapped his fingers, a steward hurried to the table, Ianthe’s sallow face darkened unbecomingly.

  When he came over to their own table, Nikki greeted the Bishop of Solway and his wife respectfully, then bowed over Clare’s hand, his eyes alight with a frank, almost animal admiration. There was an innocence about it, a sort of pagan joie-de-vivre in his whole face, which disarmed one; and though his manner was deferential, it lacked any trace of obsequiousness.

  “What nice eyes he has,” said Clare when Nikki had moved away. “Like prunes soaked in electricity.”

  The Bishop gave his sharp grunt of laughter.

  Mrs Hale said, “A bull. A shining bull. He was almost pawing the ground.”

  “Well, as long as he doesn’t paw me,” Clare murmured.

  “Extraordinary—how the Greeks have kept their old tradition of independence,” said the Bishop. “Poor but proud. Look at the stewards. Not like waiters at all. Free men. It’s in their bearing, and stamped on their faces.”

  “Something to do with the austere way of life they have to live?” suggested Nigel. “It makes for simplicity, for staying unspoilt. Nikki, for instance: he’s built on simple lines, I’d say: like a Homeric hero.”

  “I don’t much like their Homeric coffee,” said Mrs Hale, sipping distastefully. “Whatever can it be made of?”

  “Grumble, grumble, grumble,” her husband remarked.

  IV

  They were sitting on the after-deck, under the arc-lights and the stars. From a café beyond the quays, a loud-speaker bellowed dance music, drowning the murmur of conversation all round them. Passengers sauntered up and down, or leant over the rail, waiting for the ship to start.

  Clare put her hand on Nigel’s, sighing. “I’m glad we’re here, darling.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I like the Bish. and Mrs. They’re a good advertisement for marriage.”

  “We’re lucky to have them for table-mates. Have you come across your cabin companion yet?”

  “Yes. Quite harmless. She teaches Greek somewhere—some university. She’s brought quite a library of books and magazines with her. Funny, coming to Greece to read.”

  “Well, you might borrow the current number of The Journal of Classical Studies from her, if she has it. Don’t forget.”

  “All right. Why?”

  “I could fancy a read of it at breakfast to-morrow. Hello, who’s this?”

  A small girl—she might have been ten years old—had drifted along the deck and come to anchor opposite them. Her fattish, shapeless body struck Nigel as being a replica, in miniature, of Ianthe Ambrose’s. She wore an embroidered blouse and a serge skirt, over which hung what appeared to be a sporran. She had a notebook in her hand as she stood there, regarding them expressionlessly through thick-glassed spectacles.

  “Well, and who are you?” asked Nigel.

  The child advanced till she was all but standing on Nigel’s feet, before replying, in a clear, pedantic tone,

  “My name is Primrose Chalmers. Who are you?”

  “I am Nigel Strangeways, and this is Clare Massinger.”

  The child paused to record the information in her notebook.

  “Are you married?” she then inquired.

  “No.”

  “Living together?”

  Nigel reached out and pretended to snip off the child’s nose between first and second fingers.

  “Castration-symbolism, that is,” the child bleakly announced.

  Nigel withdrew his hand as if he had been stung. Clare giggled.

  “What on earth do you know about——?”

  “My father and mother are lay analysts,” said Primrose Chalmers.

  “Well, isn’t that nice!” Clare remarked. “Are they travelling with you?”

  “Yes. I have been in analysis myself for seven years.”

  “I’m not surpr—” Clare bit it off. “That’s a long time. You must be madly normal by now. And here you are in Greece, at the source of the Œdipus complex.”

  Primrose scowled at her, and made an entry in the notebook.

  “Hey, hey! There’s a chiel amang us taking notes,” came the voice of Mr Bentinck-Jones from nearby.

  “What do you write in your book?” asked Nigel.

  “I am compiling data about the passengers, with a view to an essay on group-psychology,” the formidable child answered.

  “Crikey! Don’t you ever take a holiday?”

  Primrose deemed this question unworthy of reply. Turning to Ivor Bentinck-Jones, she began the questionnaire.

  “I think, if you’re going to Gallup-Poll me, young lady,” he said with a wink at Nigel, “it had better be done in private.”

  “It’s not a Gallup-Poll,” Primrose severely corrected him. But, putting away notebook and fountain pen in her sporran, she walked off with the obliging Bentinck-Jones.

  “Well, what next? Poor wretched child.”

  “Two children,” said Clare, surveying the retreating backs of Ivor and Primrose. “A couple of inquisitive children. They’ll get on famously.”

  “That’s what worries me. Shan�
�t be long, love.” Nigel pulled himself out of his deck-chair and sauntered slowly after the figures of Primrose Chalmers and Ivor Bentinck-Jones. Nigel’s passionate curiosity about human beings was accompanied by a deep distrust of persons who, outside their professional capacities, manifested the same curiosity. Experience had taught him that such curiosity is seldom disinterested. Bentinck-Jones, for instance: he might just be the fulsome, pathetic lonely-heart he appeared to be; or a genuine child-lover whose heart was big enough to include even the rebarbative Primrose. Or again, he might not.

  At a respectful distance, Nigel followed the pair along the port side of the boat-deck. They climbed a ladder up to the bridge-deck. When Nigel arrived there, they had disappeared. On his left was a row of deck-houses, the quarters of the Menelaos’s officers. He passed between them and a ship’s-boat into an open space of deck forward of the bridge and beneath it, and walked round to the starboard side. Here too a single ship’s-boat was accommodated. Passengers were sitting or strolling here, but not the two he had followed. Perhaps they had gone into the radio-room, aft of the Captain’s cabin. Nigel peered in. The room was empty. They must have gone up the port side ladder only to descend the starboard one. But then, why should Bentinck-Jones have brought Primrose up here at all?

  Nigel had reached the head of the starboard ladder again when he heard a low voice. Bentinck-Jones’s. It came from the far side of the ship’s-boat. The man must have found a space between the boat and the rail, where he and Primrose could have a private confabulation. He was speaking in a whisper now, so that Nigel missed a good deal of what he was saying. But what Nigel did hear was sufficiently intriguing.

  “. . . you can help me. I’m in the Secret Service . . . Two Eoka agents on board — don’t know which of the passengers . . . might be a woman . . . Nobody would suspect you . . . Keep your eyes and ears open . . . anything anyone says or does . . . suspicious . . . agents may try to make contact with . . . Write it down in your notebook . . . Anything that strikes you as odd, in the way people behave or . . . you never know what . . . pieces of jigsaw puzzle. Got the idea?”