“Lady Cunard should feel at home,” said van Groot, the first officer.
“We have to do something,” van Hoorn complained. “We can’t steam into New York harbor this way.”
“If the passengers crowd the rail, as they always do, it will be even worse,” said the captain. “I fear it’s those new ballast tanks they installed, the ones that were supposed to prevent the ship from rolling.” A bit of merriment came into his reddened eyes. “Ingenious, those tanks.”
“They weren’t my idea, Captain.”
“They were someone’s. Don’t worry, mijnheer. I’ll shift some of the cargo and get as much fuel oil into the port-side tanks as possible. Maybe that will help. But the main thing is to complete the crossing. And anyway, mijnheer, the Imperator was very popular. What’s a little idiosyncracy?”
Flushed and happy as a little girl on her birthday, Nora Gwynne cheerfully welcomed Spencer into her suite, though she kept a careful distance from him.
“How do I look?” she asked. She was wearing a long, low-cut green satin gown, with long green gloves.
“Incomparable. You’ll be the most beautiful woman there.”
“I can’t believe they asked me. I can’t believe this is happening. Think of it. The Prince of Wales. I’m going to have dinner with the Prince of Wales!”
“He’s just a little middle-aged man, hardly as aristocratic, really, as Ronald Coleman.”
“He’s the real thing, Mr. Spencer. I’ve never met a real prince before, and this one’s going to be King of England. I wish I could tell people. I’d love to tell my mother.”
“Tell your mother. Everything he does gets out sooner or later. I don’t think he really cares.”
“I promised to say nothing. I don’t lie to princes.”
She looked into a mirror and pushed at her hair, then picked up her green evening bag. Her breasts bulged slightly against the bodice of her dress as she leaned closer to the glass.
“Well, I’m excited,” she said, standing straight. “I’m goddamn thrilled, to be truthful about it. My holiday is finally turning out like I hoped.”
“We’ve four more days to go, and your friend Duff Cooper’s still aboard.”
“But now I have a gallant escort,” she said, putting her arm in his. “It’s so funny that you should turn out to be my protector. If I can really trust you.”
“You can ask Chips Channon. I’m an honorable man.”
Edwina herself greeted them at the door, as friendly to Spencer as she was to Nora, no communication of any kind visible in her eyes. He could have been the President of France, or a postman. It seemed all the same to her. He pressed the pearl earring she had left in his cabin into her hand discreetly. She took it without a pause.
“How nice to see you again, Lieutenant Spencer. I’m so pleased that you could join us, Miss Gwynne.”
Chattering on about the weather and the ship’s peculiar list as they stepped into the noisy room, she brought them to her husband, Lord Mountbatten, who was wearing a dress naval uniform.
“Wonderful to have you aboard, Miss Gwynne,” he said, “I saw one of your films today. Top ho.” The commander’s demeanor went from boyish to correct as he turned to Spencer. “You’re Chips’s friend. Lieutenant Spencer, the aviator.”
“That was a long time ago, on both counts.”
“Yes, well. Edwina’s told me quite a lot about you. I gather you were one of the more illustrious aces of the war.”
“Not at all. I only downed three aircraft, though I killed every man I hit.”
Nora, who’d been looking about at the others in the room, gave him a startled glance, as if it had never occurred to her that those in the war killed each other.
“Well, you and Edwina seem to have hit it off jolly well. Miss Gwynne, do you know our good friend Noel Coward?”
Before she could reply, Chips Channon came up, acting the host even here in the Mountbattens’ suite.
“You must come meet His Royal Highness,” he said, beaming.
“I’m going topside,” Mountbatten said, “and see if I can’t do something about this idiotic list. If the Grand Fleet had been commanded this incompetently, we all should have perished at Jutland.”
“I didn’t know you were at Jutland, Dickie,” said Lady Cunard, coming up to them in a long yellow dress that matched the color of her hair. She introduced herself, eyeing both of them speculatively, as if restrained only by the prince’s presence from making some pithy, ripping remark. Instead she spoke next to Chips. “This dinner party seems a trifle large, don’t you think?” She glanced pointedly at the young Mr. and Mrs. Parker who were seated on a couch, content to be awed spectators.
“They’re Wallis’s idea,” said Chips. “She insisted when she learned he’s from Baltimore. Now, come along, Jamieson. His Royal Highness awaits.”
The prince and Mrs. Wallis were standing in the far corner, he dressed in a Scottish kilt, she in a long, powder-blue evening gown with her wrists and neck swathed in jewels. Nora gripped Spencer’s arm tightly.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said, in a nervous whisper. “How do I act?”
“Don’t act. Just be your charming self. He’s supposed to initiate all conversation and physical contact. Call him ‘Your Royal Highness’ the first time. After that, ‘sir.’”
“Do I curtsy?”
“No. You’re an American. And remember, so is she.”
“Come,” said Chips. “They’re waiting.”
Nora did curtsy, anyway, in wobbly fashion. Mrs. Simpson showed her disdain for this awkwardness with arched brows and lowered lids, but the prince was using his working manners and was all impeccable charm. He mentioned the titles of three of Nora’s films and discussed her co-stars as if he knew them. In practiced royal fashion, he seemed deeply interested in everything she had to say. Spencer supposed it was the exactly the same with jobless Welsh coal miners and visiting maharajas.
Edward was even more striking in person than in photographs, actually more beautiful than handsome—a girl’s face with a man’s physique. For all the quick smile and chipper mien, his eyes had a troubled melancholy to them. His visage seemed oddly illuminated from within, a religious light. Spencer felt uncomfortable looking at him.
Mrs. Simpson struck him as at once hard and rough and coolly elegant. Her voice was light and slightly Southern, but decidedly cool. She extended her hand, almost as if he should kneel and kiss it.
Instead he shook it politely, then quickly reached for a glass of champagne from a tray carried by a passing servant. If this was a breach of protocol, it was fine with him.
“We’re so very pleased you could join us, Mr. Spencer,” she said. “His Royal Highness is very fond of Americans.”
“So I’ve noticed. And thank you for calling me ‘mister.’ Others in your party have been calling me ‘lieutenant.’”
“Whatever for?”
“I used to be an aviator in the military.”
Something about this bothered her. She turned to attend to what the prince was saying. Spencer lingered a moment, then slipped away, wanting to talk to Edwina. Instead Chips virtually leapt to his side.
“Jamieson!” he said, in seething, whispered rebuke. “You don’t walk away from His Royal Highness while he’s speaking! Must you be the Chicagoan all your life?”
Before Spencer could reply, Edwina appeared, taking him by the arm. He thought it was to draw him aside for a quick few private words, but instead she brought him to the handsome German couple.
“I want you to meet the Count and Countess von Kresse,” she said. “As fliers, you must have much in common.”
The count bowed slightly, stiffly. The woman, smiling in recognition, extended her hand to be kissed. He complied, then recalled their morning encounter. When the Germans spoke, the man did so with a surprisingly American accent, his speech almost Southern. She spoke English well and crisply, but sounded exactly what she was, a Prussian aristocrat.
“I have not flown since the war,” Spencer said.
“Nor I. It was certainly enough.”
“You were the seventh-ranking German ace. I remember your name well.”
“Tied for seventh. All that is unimportant now.”
“You killed forty-four men.”
“Forty-four aircraft, Mr. Spencer.” Von Kresse sighed and shifted his weight painfully. “I don’t know how many men died in them. It was too many.”
“Mostly British?”
“We never flew patrols in a French sector. It doesn’t matter. They were brave men, whoever they were.”
“Maybe. I only shot down three planes. Two of the times, they were trying to get away. Observation planes, without escort.”
He recalled the observer of one, rising from behind his machine gun with the impact of Spencer’s heavy bullets, standing and flinging his arms out Christ-like.
“It was war, Mr. Spencer. We all did something like that, or worse.”
“The Richthofen Jagdgeschwader perhaps especially. So many victories.”
“The war was such a long time ago,” said Dagne. “We shouldn’t be talking about it. Now we are all friends.”
“Mr. Spencer,” said the count. “It was a regrettable war for all concerned.”
“Goering was one of your squadron leaders, wasn’t he? That explains a lot. There were atrocities, as I recall. Especially after the breakout from Cambrai. The cold, highly skilled, bloody-minded hunters of the Flying Circus. I remember one report about school children being strafed.”
The count’s face went ashen, the muscles about the mouth and jaw clenched hard.
“You know nothing about it, Mr. Spencer. You were not there.”
Nora came to Spencer’s side. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “He’s just wonderful!”
“Permission to come aboard the bridge?”
Van der Heyden was surprised to see Lord Mountbatten at the entrance curtain, surprised more to see him wearing a naval uniform.
“Yes, Lord Mountbatten. Certainly. We’re just trying to deal with this damned list to starboard. It’s proving rather stubborn.”
Mountbatten stepped into their midst, halting with legs close together and hands clasped behind his back. His voice was pleasant and friendly, but his demeanor was that of someone in command.
“Did you ship a lot of water in the storm, Captain?”
“Pumped it all out some time ago,” said van der Heyden. “No, this list is an old friend. It first showed up in sea trials. The company sent the Wilhelmina back for refitting to get rid of it, but now it’s back.”
“We encounter this problem occasionally in destroyers.”
“No doubt, sir,” said van Groot, leaning over a large plan of the ship’s interior that was spread out over the chart table. “But the Wilhelmina is not a destroyer. She’s five times the size of a destroyer.”
“Size is irrelevant. The physical principles are the same. Have you tried shifting fuel and cargo?”
Van der Heyden coughed, and not too gently. “We are in the process of doing exactly that, Lord Mountbatten.”
Dickie nodded approvingly. “You should also drain your ballast tanks.”
“These ballast tanks are especially designed to prevent roll, sir,” van Groot said. “How can emptying them reduce the list?”
“I’m quite familiar with this new system,” Mountbatten said. “I’ve read about it exhaustively. It’s not quite perfected, now is it? It fails in really heavy weather, as your system did this morning. But now it’s working, too well. It’s preventing recovery from the list.”
Van der Heyden and van Groot looked at each other, not happily.
“Go ahead and flush your tanks,” Mountbatten said, giving them his best smile. “If it doesn’t work, pump them full again. But I’m deuced sure it will work. Soon everything will be all tickety-boo.”
With Lord Brownlow and Fruity Metcalfe absenting themselves to attend to duties, official and private, there was ample room for everyone else on the invitation list to dine in the prince’s suite. Wallis’s cleverness was evident in the table and seating arrangements. She and Edward were at either end. To her left was the young Parker boy from Baltimore, whose mother had once snubbed Wallis at a garden club luncheon in Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park—an offense she’d now have reason to forever regret, as Wallis would tactfully make clear.
Seated along that side of the table after him were Emerald Cunard, the crippled but very aristocratic Count von Kresse, Edwina Mountbatten, Chips’s friend Jamieson Spencer, and the actress Nora Gwynne. Wallis thought this juxtaposition of Spencer and those two attractive women altogether wonderfully clever. The evening would not flag.
On her right, Wallis put her entertaining champion, Chips Channon, with the rest of that side of the table taken up by the young Mrs. Parker, Duff Cooper, the blond and mysterious Countess von Kresse, Dickie Mountbatten, and Diana Cooper. The prince would have on his immediate right the most beautiful woman of the evening, Nora Gwynne, and to his left the most conversationally gifted and charming, Diana Cooper. Dickie would be both near his royal cousin and directly opposite Edwina and her lover, Spencer. Duff would have two new pretties to paw, while being kept a useful distance from Miss Gwynne, whom the morning gossip had made clear was very offended by his pawing. Emerald, of course, would have another handsome German with whom to flirt.
Wallis took much pride in all this. Hers was an unsurpassed social talent. She was truly born for the society in which she now moved.
With bagpipes skirling, the prince led the procession from the Mountbattens’ down the passageway to his own suite and the dinner table, with Fruity, Brownlow, and Inspector Runcie blocking off the corridor at both ends until all were inside and seated.
All had accustomed themselves to the steep list, but the servants and stewards still had trouble with the pouring. When one splashed a few drops of wine on the linen table cloth near Wallis, she called him an ugly name. The others ignored this, beginning their various conversations as if on cue.
Spencer was left much to himself. The prince continued to expend his charm on Nora, and she responded with something akin to rapture. Edwina attended only to the count, talking about French and German painters and refusing even to look at Spencer. Diana and Dickie Mountbatten were engaged in debate over the Abyssinian crisis. The Prussian countess tried to flirt with Duff, who disliked Germans and was having none of it. But he seemed bored with Mrs. Parker, as well. Chips and Emerald performed as brilliantly as always, but this was lost on the young Mr. Parker, who was little interested in the bejeweled Baltimore lady who was his hostess, particularly as she went on interminably about all the Virginia Montagues in her family and how she had been presented to society at Baltimore’s famous Bachelors Cotillon, notable, among other things, for the cherished tradition of its officially misspelled name.
Parker had dated many girls who could make this claim. He was much keener on being at the other end of the table with the prince.
Finally Lady Mountbatten looked down at her plate as the count turned to answer a question from Emerald.
“Edwina,” Spencer said, quietly. “You haven’t spoken ten words to me today. What in hell is wrong?”
“Well, you spoke enough last night, didn’t you, Lieutenant?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I thought I’d made it magnificently clear that I was in a thoughtful mood, not in a mood for amour. Yet you responded with the most persistent insensitivity.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Too right, Lieutenant. And then you told me that perfectly hideous tale about that poor Arab woman staked out naked in the desert. What unmitigated horror that was. How could you?”
“I’m sorry. It’s something that’s stuck in my mind.”
“Well, it’s something that stuck in my mind all bloody night, Lieutenant Spencer. Every time I fell asleep I’d see her, that wretched creature, moaning and writhing as she
baked and froze to a crisp. I’d see me, and wake up terrified. Good God, I spent the night with Dickie!” Her eyebrows flared as she stared hard at Spencer, then turned to Count von Kresse. “You were telling me about Egon Schiele.”
“Oh, yes,” said von Kresse. “A magnificent painter. Like so many of our best young people, he perished in the war. He was only twenty-eight.”
“He was German?”
“Austrian. But it’s all the same. These countries and empires come and go. There was no Germany until sixty-five years ago. There are only Germans. And most Germans, like me, are in large part something else.”
“You’re not pure Prussian?”
“There is no such thing. Certainly not in East Prussia, where I come from. We’re all at least a little Polish. I’m American, as well. My mother was from Virginia. And who knows what else lies back in the centuries? Norse Vikings exploring the Baltic Sea and raiding the coast and rivers. The dark hordes riding out of the East.” He smiled at her for she seemed interested and approving. “There are no nations. No pure races. Only culture and language. Those are what survive, what must survive.”
“Dickie’s part Polish,” Edwina said.
“Yes? One of the czarist Polish families?”
“Oh, he’s czarist enough. His aunt was the unfortunate czarina. His great-uncle was the Czar Alexander II. But his grandmother on the Battenburg side, the wife of a prince of Hesse, was a Polish commoner named Julie Hauke. Dickie’s grandfather met her in St. Petersburg, where he was serving as an officer in the Lancers. He eloped with her to Warsaw and then married her in Breslau. It’s the most wonderful thing about his family, I’ve always thought. Though he never talks about her. He’s most tediously inexhaustible in his recountings of all the others.”
“Our Führer is German,” said an eavesdropping Dagne, “but was born in Austria. Martin is right. It’s all the same. Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.”
“Entschuldigen sie, bitte,” said Duff, from across the table. “But at last report, Austria was a sovereign nation. Nothing at all to do with your Reich. Or has something transpired since we left Le Havre? Some military maneuvers? No, no. I’ve got it quite wrong. The Rhineland comes first, then Austria. Nicht wahr?”
Dance on a Sinking Ship Page 27
