Every Man for Himself (7 page)

‘Mr Macy,’ I told him, ‘is on board. Or rather the present owner of the store. His name is Isador Straus.’

‘Here? On this ship?’ He fairly gawped at me.

‘He’s an elderly gentleman with a beard, travelling with his wife.’

‘You think I should speak to him?’

‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘If you choose your moment. He’s a good man, a philanthropist. Like you, he started with nothing.’

And then, because I was curious, though indeed he had accused me only the night before of not being old enough, I mentioned the tall woman in the South Western Hotel. ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I couldn’t help noticing the way you looked at her.’

‘Ah,’ he breathed, and crumbled the toast on his plate. For once, he was at a loss for words.

‘It was my impression,’ I prompted, ‘that you were sweet on her.’

‘I had never set eyes on her before in my life,’ he said, and launched into an explanation concerning the contents of the oblong box I had seen him so zealously guarding, namely a garment which, on account of it being designed for a window display, had been cut larger than life and doomed merely to drape the celluloid contours of a shop dummy. That is, until the woman in the hotel got up to leave.

‘She rose like a tree,’ he cried. ‘An English oak. It could have been made for her.’

I said, ‘I thought it was desire you felt.’

‘And so it was,’ he insisted. ‘The desire to see my dress on a creature of flesh and blood.’

I brought up Scurra’s name. In Rosenfelder’s opinion he was an educated man with a near spiritual grasp of human nature. ‘Do you know what he told me? Listen –
one day the world will recognise the tailor as the hierophant and hierarch, even its God
. I look in the dictionary, you understand, to make him out.’

‘One would need to,’ I said. ‘I take it you know him well?’

‘Not at all. I observed him talking to the tall goddess and I think to myself, here is a man to confide in.’

‘And did you?’

‘But, of course. He advises me not to approach her until after we have left Queenstown. She was to have met a gentleman friend at Southampton. He did not show up. He is her protector, if you follow me. Nor did he appear at Cherbourg, at which she becomes so distraught she threatens to throw herself overboard. Scurra has persuaded her to wait until we reach Queenstown. Her friend may yet turn up. She has left London with her ticket, the clothes she stands up in, a small suitcase and two pounds in her purse.’

‘How very unfortunate,’ I said.

‘For her, yes. For me, who knows what will be the advantage?’

‘Has Scurra known her long?’

‘That’s for him to say.’

I would quite happily have passed the morning with him if he hadn’t had an appointment with the barber; there was a miracle lotion advertised, guaranteed to straighten ringlets.

I spent two hours in the library, wrestling to compose another letter to my uncle. I had first tried the writing room – it had a stock of paper embossed with the White Star crest – but found it full of women, including Molly Dodge. She said I’d been a disappointment to her last night, sloping off like that. I didn’t have to lie to Molly so I confided I’d felt blue.

‘You missed the fun,’ she said.

‘I’m tired of fun.’

‘If I didn’t know you better,’ she replied, ‘I’d think you were playing a part.’

I got no further with my letter than I had the night before. It now struck me as unnecessary to tell my uncle about my mother’s picture. Beyond suggesting I might have told Jack what I’d done, I doubted he’d give a button. After all, he had enough paintings to fill the Louvre and though irascible was neither grasping nor censorious. He hadn’t the need. Unlike his millionaire associates on Wall Street he’d inherited wealth, not clawed his way up from poverty. It was power that motivated him rather than money, and a belief that he alone could set America straight.

I reckon I was, still am, ambivalent towards my uncle. It would have helped my cause if he had been more of a rogue. True, he was a hypocrite, not least in his shenanigans with women – he had once put a stop to a production of
Salomé
at the Metropolitan Opera House, on the grounds that the reasons for chopping off the Baptist’s head were downright salacious – but then, he knew he was. A cynic, he was fond of quoting the maxim that a man has two reasons for the things he does, a good one and the real one.

What was more urgent, I realised, as I lolled yawning over the library table, was to figure out a way to tell him what I intended to do with my future. Since I was nineteen my uncle had been trying to fix me up with employment. How often had I heard him thunder that it was the duty of the wealthy to work? A poor man without a job, he held, was less despicable than a rich man who remained idle.

Under pressure I had undergone six months in a merchant bank in Paris, a miserable three weeks in a backwater branch of the Union Pacific Railroad Company, a year in the library run by his one-time secretary and mistress, Bella da Costa Greene, and a further year in the offices of Harland and Wolff. That last momentous year had propelled me towards the crossroads of my life and shown me the path I must take. Unfortunately for my uncle, it led more towards destruction than construction and had nothing whatever to do with draughtsmanship or naval architecture.

It wasn’t the financing of my plans that bothered me. Even if my uncle stopped my allowance, which wasn’t likely, my aunt had money of her own and would chuck me the moon if I asked. It was my conscience that niggled, for I’d been treated with great generosity by one who owed me nothing. We were linked by events, not blood, and he viewed me as if through a microscope, the
infusoria
of his long-gone past wriggling before his magnified gaze.

I was about to doze off when Hopper and Melchett swept in and dragged me away to the gymnasium. Colonel Astor was there, morose as ever, sitting in the row-boat machine, clad in a white singlet. The boxing gloves were missing but we took turns, bare-knuckled, at the punch-bag. Hopper was terrific at it, taking almighty swings and ending up scarcely puffed. Every time Melchett made a hit he cried out ‘Ouch’ and ran about with his hand tucked under his armpit. Astor never looked up.

Just after noon we tumbled out on deck. The sun shone so brilliantly that a small boy standing only five yards distant dissolved into whiteness, the top he was whipping gyrating at the toes of his all but invisible boots.

Slowly we approached Queenstown, the green fields spreading back from the cliffs. In time I could make out the glint of windows beyond the harbour wall, the white moon of a municipal clock. On Spy Hill a church spire speared the mild sky. Tethered to the quay, bobbing like apples, two squat tugs rode the water. Presently, the screws churning up brown sand, we stopped engines and waited for the pilot to come out.

I thought of the day, three months after my arrival in Belfast, when I’d met Tuohy on my way to the draughtsmen’s huts. It was raining and I’d taken a short cut through the alleyway on Harland Road. It was springtime and the pussy-willows were coming into bud. Ahead of me strode a working man with his tucker box under his arm. All of a sudden he staggered and fell down. Men were often laid off because they’d taken alcohol before the dawn shift, and I thought he was drunk. I would have side-stepped him if his box hadn’t burst open, spilling two slices of bread into my path. I couldn’t bring myself to tread them into the puddles. Looking down I saw the man was white as milk and there was froth bubbling at the corner of his bloodless lips. Kneeling, I shook him and after a moment he recovered and struggled upright. He said he’d had a fit, which was not uncommon to him, and asked me not to tell his foreman. He didn’t beg me to keep silent or wheedle in any way; indeed, he spoke to me as if we were equals. ‘My name is Tuohy,’ he said and shook my hand. Taken aback by his authoritative manner, and as he remained the colour of chalk and none too steady on his feet, I offered him my arm. I remember fretting about his dinner bread soaking up the wet. Three weeks later I attended my first meeting. The following month I visited his home.

That first time I had been foolish enough to think it would be me who would put his family at their ease. I took his mother flowers; she received them without a word, but her eyes flashed contempt. She wore a man’s cap on her head and men’s boots on her feet.

At half-past twelve two tenders ploughed towards the
Titanic
, bringing out mail and passengers. Bearing in mind Rosenfelder’s woman, I was about to walk astern to look down on the steerage space when a commotion broke out further along the deck. Following the crowd who were now flowing in that direction and coming within view of the dummy funnel which served as a ventilation outlet, I saw a black face emerging from the top. It was only a stoker who had climbed up as some sort of practical joke, or possibly for a bet, but several silly women, including Mrs Brown of Denver, taking it for an apparition shot up from the very flames of hell, screamed in alarm and declared it an omen.

An hour later the engines started again and we turned a quarter-circle to point along the coast, the pigmy ships in the harbour hooting our departure. The fellow with the bagpipes was standing on the poop blowing a melancholy farewell to old Erin. I don’t doubt the ghastly wailing of his instrument was construed by the women as yet another omen.

The ship was followed by a storm cloud of gulls drawn by the remains of lunch pouring out of the waste pipes. Hopper, with hopes of slinging them out of the sky, tried to borrow the small boy’s whip. Snatching up his top the child ran squealing for his mother. Hopper roamed off in search of a long pole and didn’t return.

All afternoon we steamed along the coast, the sea-birds still dipping and screaming in our wake, the green hills and fields fading to grey as the light began to seep from the day. Melchett and I stayed on deck until dusk, until the coast curved away to the north-west and the last mountains melted into darkness.

At seven o’clock that evening, as arranged, I met Charlie Melchett in the main lounge for a drink before dinner. Earlier, we’d agreed to dine in the a` la carte restaurant so as to avoid Ginsberg. Melchett didn’t like him. He agreed Ginsberg was cleverer than he let on but reckoned he’d a malicious streak. He said it was all right for the likes of Hopper to be friendly with him – as he was equally cynical no harm could be done – but by and large it didn’t do for less sophisticated men to be exposed to that kind of influence. I was touched by his erroneous view of my character. As it happened, I didn’t care where I dined just as long as I didn’t have to sit at the same table with teasing Wallis Ellery.

Melchett had been cornered by Lady Duff Gordon, who greeted me by name and claimed she’d been looking for me since breakfast. She spoke with eyes lowered and head tilted to one side, addressing my shirt front. ‘I’m having a small dinner party this evening and would adore you to be present. Eight o’clock sharp. I’ve invited your friend Van Hopper, and Charlie, of course, so do say you’ll come.’

‘It’s very kind of you,’ I began, but before I could add another word she had turned away, one hand fluttering the air to attract the attention of a new arrival.

‘She’s nicer than she seems,’ Melchett said, reading my expression. ‘And she’s not idle. She runs a very successful business . . . as a couturier.’

‘I doubt I can wait until eight o’clock,’ I protested. ‘We did without luncheon, don’t forget.’

I felt a little less irritable after my second glass of champagne and experienced only a slight stab of despair at the entrance of Wallis and her sister Ida. I was lucky, I consoled myself, not to know the constraints of requited love. Love, I reasoned, stripped a man to the bone. After which thought I got to my feet and sought out Lady Duff Gordon. She was in the company of a buffoon with an eyeglass who was guffawing so loudly I had to bellow to make myself heard.

‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I promised to dine with a friend, a Mr Rosenfelder. I’m afraid I can’t break the arrangement.’

She responded as I had expected, ‘Then I insist you bring him with you.’

When I returned to Melchett he was swivelled round in his chair, staring in the direction of the foyer doors. I was in time to see Wallis leaving on the arm of Scurra.

‘Who is that man?’ Melchett asked. ‘He seems to know everyone on board.’

‘To hell with him,’ I growled. ‘To hell with all of them.’ I was hungry enough to eat a horse and my upper arms were hurting like the devil from my exercise at the punch-bag. Melchett, looking concerned, attempted to jolly me up.

‘I met a man this tea-time who used to know you at St Mark’s. I didn’t catch his name. He works in his father’s business in Boston . . . something to do with dry goods. Tall and clean-shaven. Rather shy in manner . . . not the pushy sort . . . would you know who I mean?’

‘No,’ I snapped. In that floating room whose mirrored walls duplicated the crowd milling back and forth beneath the trembling chandeliers, the familiar, similar reflections raced like demons across the embellished glass.

‘He said you were frightfully good on the tennis courts and had once lent him money when he was in a jam.’

‘For God’s sake,’ I burst out. ‘The world consists of men who know us. Look around you. This place is chock-a-block with people who went to the same schools, the same universities, attended the same fencing classes, shared the same dancing masters, music teachers, Latin tutors, tennis coaches—’

‘Morgan,’ Melchett said. ‘You’re shouting.’

‘I could pick out fifty or more I’ve known half my life and Lord knows how many others I’ve shared a dinner table with in half the capitals of Europe. There isn’t a photograph taken from here to the Nile that doesn’t feature twenty or more of us lined up to watch the dicky-bird.’

‘If you say so,’ he murmured, hoping to calm me.

‘Why, half the older men here have even shared the same mistresses.’