by Michel Déon
A hand was laid gently on his shoulder.
‘You’re not thinking of ending it all, are you?’
Elizabeth had put her reefer jacket on over her suit. As she leant forward to gaze at the ship’s wake that was fascinating Arthur, the wind plucked her sailor’s cap off her head. They watched it skim away for a second across the breaking crest of a wave before it vanished from sight.
‘Adios!’ she said. ‘I liked that cap. Not my favourite, luckily. So when’s your suicide scheduled for?’
‘I’m not really very tempted. I read, I can’t remember where, that every would-be suicide, even the most determined, leaves themselves a chink of hope that they won’t succeed. Maybe no more than a chance in a hundred, but at least one, in the not entirely vain hope that some immanent intervention will erase everything – the cause or causes of their suicide – and grant them resurrection in a world purged of despair. If I were to throw myself into the ocean, those one in a hundred odds would become one in a million, particularly at night. No, I have absolutely no desire to commit suicide. What about you?’
‘Let’s go in, I’m freezing. The wind’s very boring. And I’ve drunk too much champagne. Yes, once or twice I’ve toyed with the idea. Last year. Not for a very edifying reason. A casual fuck, as you French put it so elegantly. I phoned Madeleine from New York and she burst out laughing when I told her, which made me laugh too. We never talked about it again … My cabin’s at the far end. I’m not going to ask you in, though I’d quite like to. But one shouldn’t do such things unthinkingly. I’m being honest. However, that doesn’t mean I’m ready to go all the way with you, particularly since you’ve already fallen hook, line and sinker for Augusta’s charms.’
She brushed Arthur’s cheek with a quick kiss and headed down the passageway, her arms held wide to balance herself against the rolling of the ship. In front of her door she turned round and, before disappearing, gave him a little wave. Arthur’s own stateroom had no porthole, and the ventilation shaft carried with it, as if from some monstrous beast, the dull panting of machinery and, at irregular intervals, the shudders of the ship’s enormous steel hull whenever a wave made it pause in its rhythm. Sleep refused to come, or rather Arthur surrendered to a half-sleep visited by images and ripples of laughter and lulled by the sound of a falsely innocent voice that left him simultaneously clear-headed and on the brink of a dreamlike delirium. For no apparent reason he saw Getulio at the tiller of a lifeboat, counting out the rhythm (‘One, two, three, four’) to twenty or so octogenarian oarswomen dressed for a garden party and wearing panama hats decorated with flowers. Exhausted, they died one by one, and then Augusta appeared, standing tall at the prow, unfastened her sari, and let the wind fill it, speeding the lifeboat all the way to the port of New York where a fleet of hearses awaited the desiccated corpses of the old ladies, still clinging to their oars.
The Queen Mary’s hull shook at the impact of another concrete-like wave, the sort that had once snapped in two her timber predecessors with their cargoes of gold ingots and china from the East India Company. Arthur switched on his bedside lamp and Augusta disappeared. She was unaware that she had this gift, but those who found her haunting their dreams or their waking reveries all marvelled at how she could be so present and so absent at the same time. Arthur put the blame on the champagne and the confusion Elizabeth had sown in his mind. In a less rational world he ought to have dived overboard to retrieve her cap before the liner’s wake carried it away; she would have run to the captain; the Queen Mary would have gone full speed astern; he would have been fished out of the boundless ocean, a block and tackle lifting him back aboard; Elizabeth would have comically replaced her cap on her head, water dripping down her face and neck; he would have been a hero. He got out of bed, drank tepid water from the tap, and tried to read a history of the United States that bored him so much he switched the light off again and let himself drowse in a half-sleep, rocked by the liner’s steady progress. After the last concrete wave, the Queen Mary seemed to be continuing on its course as if over a sea of oil. The crimson rose pinned to Augusta’s décolletage now irradiated the cabin’s darkness, haloed by a pale trembling light like that viscous ectoplasm supposed to emanate from the bodies of mediums during a trance. Arthur stretched out an arm and clutched at nothing, just as a puff of Augusta’s perfume exploded and vanished in the cabin. Or it might have been Elizabeth’s perfume. He didn’t know any more …
Professor Concannon was rowing energetically, not because the ship’s turbines had broken down, he explained, but to detoxify himself from the excesses of the previous day. His face beetroot red, forehead streaming with sweat that pearled into glistening drops in his black eyebrows, a towel around his neck, wearing enormous leather gloves and disappearing inside a voluminous grey wool tracksuit top with ‘Yankees’ written on the back, he shot furiously backwards and forwards on the gym’s rowing machine. Pausing, he mopped his face with the towel and smiled at Arthur, who was pedalling gently on an exercise bicycle.
‘The great malaise of the civilised members of our species is that they are imbeciles and snobs in their avoidance of every opportunity to work up a sweat. Little by little they build up blood levels of arsenic, mercury, quinine and urea which eventually poison them. The first thing to be done is to clear the openings of the ducts from the sudoriparous glands. Always use an exfoliating glove, there’s nothing better. The day, dear Mr Morgan, you understand that sudoral excretion is an essential requirement for your physical, moral and intellectual health, your life will change completely.’
Apart from themselves, at this early-morning hour, there was only a short, thickset and muscle-bound man in long leggings who was lifting weights with astonishing ease. Concannon winked at Arthur.
‘I’ll tell you about him later.’
They had breakfast together at the buffet. It was all extremely tempting.
‘Here,’ Concannon said, ‘is where we must show fortitude. These cakes and pastries are unworthy of a man. America has hardly suffered at all from the war, unlike Europe, which had to go on a diet lasting five years. In twenty years’ time we’ll be a nation of fatties.’
‘… and alcoholics!’ Arthur blurted out.
‘Might you be saying that for my benefit?’
‘For no one, or for all of us.’
Concannon could have taken this badly. He slapped Arthur on the back.
‘You’re right! The consequences would be tragic if I didn’t eliminate the toxins regularly. Then a cold shower, to free the mind. I thought about you this morning. What an idea, to study business law in the United States! You’ll lose your European intuition and you’ll never acquire an American one. By the time you realise that all our virtues are learned, and in no way originate from some mystic and absolute source, it’ll be too late. In other words, those virtues – precisely because they’re codified – are rigid, and therefore easily circumvented. Consider our anti-colonialism: entirely manufactured to serve a political purpose. On that weighty matter, our so-called “sensitivity” is cause for a wry smile. Perhaps one American in a thousand is descended from somebody who fought in the War of Independence. The other nine hundred and ninety-nine are new blood. But just listen to them … they “drove the British out”, as your Joan of Arc put it, and the French into the bargain, because everyone’s so fabulously ignorant. What a wonderful opportunity to preach morality to everyone else! Give up your colonies that make you as powerful as us, the New Nation, Saviour of the modern world. Go home, leave Africa, leave Asia, take no notice of the vacuum left behind after your ignominious departure: never fear, we Americans are on our way, hands on hearts, with our crates of peaceful consumer goods. You’ll be hornswoggled, and it’s you who’ll be accused of being dishonest.’
Concannon was in his element. The dining room was filling up, and a queue was forming in front of the buffet where two chefs in white hats were cooking eggs and bacon or pancakes and waffles with maple syrup.
‘Hor
nswoggled? Who by?’ Arthur asked sceptically.
‘Aren’t you one of those for whom personal experience, however dearly bought, is preferable to the experience of others?’
‘I haven’t decided yet.’
Concannon placed his hands flat on the tablecloth. They were transparent, their skin glazed and dotted with bruises and red patches.
‘I guess you know the air we breathe is saturated with practically undetectable bugs, ready to attack us the moment we show the slightest sign of weakness. Open your mouth, and they’ll swarm into your body in their millions. Touch anything, and they’ll climb up your arms and legs, get into your debilitated organism, and block up your pores. Terrifying, don’t you think?’
Arthur agreed that by comparison the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were pinpricks. He was starting to like this lunatic.
‘Yet however terrifying it is,’ Concannon went on, holding his hands in front of him as if he was working a pair of puppets, ‘it’s nothing compared to the machinations that await men of your age and the traps they fall into, yelling – too late – that they won’t be fooled again.’
Arthur listened attentively, but could not help being distracted by the latecomers arriving, some still pale from the pitching and tossing they had suffered since leaving Cork the day before, others eyeing the buffet with a sparkling, greedy stare. Neither Augusta, Elizabeth nor Getulio deigned to appear.
‘They won’t come,’ the professor said, well aware of Arthur’s waning interest in him. ‘The entitled, brought up to a life of entitlement, they’ll be having breakfast served in their cabins. Such treatment is granted to very few. On the subject of Getulio …’
Concannon paused, drank his coffee, and lit a cigarette.
‘I shouldn’t smoke, because of my throat … yes … my throat is extremely sensitive, but the first cigarette of the day is so good …’
After the third puff he stubbed it out in the butter dish.
‘I’m listening,’ Arthur said.
‘What was I saying?’
The crafty devil. He knew perfectly well.
‘You said, “On the subject of Getulio …”’
‘Oh yes, on the subject of Getulio … but really it’s nothing to do with me.’
A horrified waiter cleared away the butter dish.
Arthur said, ‘But if it was to save me from some kind of bad experience?’
‘Oh … nothing … It’s just a thought, you know. If I were you, I wouldn’t play cards with him.’
‘He lost heavily last night.’
‘He always loses at the start of the crossing. This is the third time we’ve taken the same boat. Suddenly there’s a moment when his luck changes. The day before we hit New York he’ll make it all back, and plenty more …’
Arthur regretted having his eyes opened so soon: he had thought Getulio above such financial duplicity.
‘Oh, he is! At least I believe him to be, but maybe he also has some bad patches when his schemes don’t work out, or possibly he’s just amusing himself by testing his powers of attraction. Do you recognise that little fellow with the tanned face and the glistening pate?’
In a bottle-green suit and pink shirt, the short man who had been hoisting enormous barbells in the gym with such ease was making his way towards the buffet, poked and shoved by a bony woman who was a head taller than he and wearing an Italian straw hat.
‘She treats him like hell,’ Concannon said. ‘Which is funny, when you realise the influence he has over President Eisenhower. He’s the President’s éminence grise in security matters and the entire White House quakes at his footsteps, but to his dear wife he’s a useless dummy who can’t even manage to sneak to the front and get the best sausages. Never get married, Mr Morgan. Not even as a joke.’
‘I haven’t been tempted in that direction yet.’
Arthur became convinced during the course of the morning that an Atlantic crossing on a liner like the Queen Mary would be unconscionably boring if you didn’t have the good luck to come across some eccentric personality like Professor Concannon or some delicious princesses like Elizabeth and Augusta. The passengers’ lives appeared to be ruled and dominated by the next tea or coffee service, the next bell announcing the opening of the dining room. Concannon, locked in his cabin, worked on his opening lecture and, knowing himself all too well, lived on mineral water and sandwiches until dinner. Arthur was looking forward to seeing the two young women and the Brazilian at lunch and was deeply disappointed when the maître d’hôtel stopped him at the entrance to the dining room with the words, ‘You are Monsieur Morgan, are you not?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Mr Allan Dwight Porter invites you to join him.’
‘There must be a mistake, I don’t know anyone of that name.’
‘Mr Porter says he knows you.’
‘I prefer to lunch with my friend Senhor Mendosa—’
‘Senhor Mendosa’s table is full … Albert, please show Monsieur Morgan to Mr Porter’s table. He is expecting him.’
The waiter led Arthur to the table of the short man with the sunburnt face and the shining bald head, who stood up and held out his hand.
‘I very much wanted to meet you, Monsieur Morgan. Allow me to introduce you to my wife, Minerva.’
From lunchtime onwards Minerva Porter had recourse, it seemed, to sacks of kohl to emphasise the shape of her eyes, darken her eyelids, thicken her eyelashes and apply a thick line across the place where her plucked eyebrows had once been. The light-hearted straw hat she had worn at breakfast had given way to a turban of Indian silk held in place by a large pin with a head of imitation pearl.
‘Sit on my husband’s left side,’ she told Arthur. ‘That’s his good ear. Within a year he’ll be completely deaf, and will have to wear one of those ghastly little devices that start whistling most inappropriately when you’re at a concert, a wedding, a funeral. Take no notice of me, by the way. I’m used to being ignored as soon as my husband starts talking.’
‘But, my dear, no one is ignoring you.’
‘A miracle! He heard me. I hope you don’t smoke, Mr Whateveryournameis. I hate it when people smoke between courses and with their coffee. There are smoking rooms set aside for that purpose. Let me also say at once that the smell of fish disgusts me. I have asked for us to be spared today’s turbot. In any case, one always eats too much.’
‘That’s a pity, I love turbot,’ Arthur said, surprising himself by his nerve in the face of this shrewish woman, who paid no further attention to him, having turned away to summon the maître d’hôtel and demand her table be served first.
Mr Porter, like his wife, had changed for lunch. His bottle-green suit and pink shirt were breakfast attire. At lunchtime President Eisenhower’s special adviser dressed sportily: flapping golfing trousers over Argyle socks, a tweed jacket the colour of faded heather, a striped shirt, and a tartan tie. He would have looked clown-like but for his face, which regularly broke into bursts of unrestrained laughter, and the twinkle in his eye that revealed his appetite for life’s pleasures: wine, good food, and even attractive women, whom he studied openly whenever Mrs Porter was not watching. Initially disconcerted by the man’s self-assurance, Arthur was rapidly charmed and intrigued.
‘I had them look for you in tourist class, where you ought to be travelling,’ Mr Porter said, in excellent French, ‘and you finally turned up in first, which I’m obviously delighted about for your sake. The restaurant is very good. The chef ’s French. No one has ever seen – yet – an Englishman who knows how to cook. The gym where we saw each other briefly this morning is the best Cunard has. And this ship has plenty of space, which is good for someone like me, who needs to walk in order to think. Two and a half thousand years ago I would have been a peripatetic … One’s always behind in something. That old broad who just sat down opposite my better half is the wife of the mayor of Boston. They’re as mean as each other, and more snobbish than chamber pots – as you say in
French – a comparison that always charms me.’
‘Excuse me,’ Arthur said, ‘but I can’t quite see why you particularly requested to have me at your table.’
‘I noticed,’ Porter said, ignoring the question, ‘that you very quickly made friends with Professor Concannon. Great mind. A little crazy … You know what it is: the drop of Irish blood that often makes the cup spill over. You’ll have him for two hours a week in your first year. Some original views on modern history, not very politically correct it has to be said, but interesting for their ability to stir up controversy. His coverage of the Nuremberg trials is his most polished performance. He describes the trials, then puts Stalin, Molotov and Beria in the dock alongside the other accused. To start with the three Russians are a little standoffish towards the Germans, but soon get pally with them. Beria and Himmler argue good-naturedly about which of them has killed the largest number of gypsies, Jews and Christians in their camps; Ribbentrop and Molotov, old acquaintances from the days when they signed risible treaties together, break open the sparkling wine that the German used to export before the war; Stalin and Göring exchange stories about broads. You’ll definitely have that class: it comes complete with his analysis of the indictments, dissection of the defence speeches, legality of the verdicts. It’s wacky, but as sharp as you like. One day I had it recorded, without Concannon’s knowledge, and the President thoroughly enjoyed it. He played it back three times. That said, Concannon’s not without his enemies in the university administration. Young Americans, who hardly know who Hitler was, have complained about his highly liberal interpretation of history. It all happened so far away from them already, in space and time too! Ten years! But as a native of the old, sick Europe, Arthur, I promise you, you won’t be bored. I’ll call you Arthur, okay? I know your file so well, I feel we’re like old friends.’
