One other guest was there before her when Vi found her table in the Alexandria, an elderly man with a weathered face and a pepper-and-salt beard, rather more salt than pepper. He looked so like a retired sea captain that she couldn’t help feeling smug when it turned out that she had hit the mark.
‘Captain Ryle, ma’am. I used to be master of one of the line’s ships. They can’t keep me away.’
Vi allowed her hand to be gripped, somewhat painfully on account of the massed rings.
‘Violet Hetherington.’ The captain’s large freckled hand was unexpectedly soft. Noticing him glance at her left hand, where the solitary diamond glinted, she added, for his sake rather than from any need to confide, ‘My husband died last year. This is my first holiday alone.’
Captain Ryle’s leathery face crumpled into comprehension. ‘My wife left me five years ago. Still not got over it.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She understood that it was death and not any domestic fracture that had removed his wife’s company.
‘I miss her every hour of the day.’ The captain blew his nose unselfconsciously into his table napkin. ‘Still, mustn’t complain. Kathleen wouldn’t approve. She was always one for life, Kath.’
‘Yes?’
‘She wouldn’t have wanted me moaning on. Here.’ He thrust at Vi a basket of breads—really, more of a miniature bakery so exotic was the choice. Vi took a roll, changed her mind and then, not liking to put it back, took another.
‘Good grub,’ the captain said, nodding approvingly at her two rolls. ‘Always get good grub on this line.’
A couple of Americans were being shown to the table: a long-limbed black man with heavy-rimmed glasses and a small, older-looking woman who might have been taken for his mother had she not been white. The man, in a grey suit and a cream shirt, gave an impression of easy elegance. The woman’s hair was done up in an untidy loose bun and her evening suit was a shade of pink which did not suit her pinkish complexion. Side by side, they made a somewhat ill-matched couple.
The woman introduced herself as Martha Cleever and her husband as Dr Balthazar Lincoln.
‘Balthazar as in the Three Magi?’ Vi asked, and was rewarded with a smile so winning that she at once fell a little in love with him.
‘I am generally known as Baz. No one manages the other, except my mother.’ Leaning across Vi, he helped himself to a roll and she detected in his aftershave a pleasing scent of limes. ‘My mother belongs to a mad sect which holds that the “wise men” were angels from Babylon. May I trouble you to pass the butter? She likes to claim she saw an angelic presence hovering over my father’s head when I was conceived.’ Baz, buttering his roll, afforded Vi again the smile that suggested the conspiracy of long friendship.
Encouraged by this, Vi asked, ‘Didn’t your father mind?’
‘If that is who he was. It might easily have been some other chancer. But the man I knew as my father was a patient man (he has passed away now) and he was devoted to my mother. She would not be swayed in any conviction. She is a very stubborn woman, my mother. I am stubborn too, so I know.’
‘Baz is one of seven and his mother’s favourite.’ Martha’s tone was mostly indulgent. She explained that she was an attorney in general litigation and her husband had been on a six-month sabbatical at the London School of Economics. They were returning home by boat as he had acquired so many books that it was cheaper for them to accompany the books home by sea. ‘Baz just adores books. He wouldn’t care what in the world we lost provided his library was saved.’
‘Better hope the ship doesn’t go down then!’
Two newcomers had joined the table. The man who had spoken introduced himself and his wife as Les and Valerie Garson. Until last year, they had run a garage with a Toyota franchise in Hampshire. They had been promising themselves this trip as a retirement present for he didn’t know how long.
‘It’s ever so exciting, isn’t it?’ Valerie asked. She looked, Vi thought, a little depressed.
Her husband had several complaints. ‘No room to swing a cat in our cabin, never mind the wife! Daylight robbery when you think what we’re paying for this. Have you seen the price of the booze?’
‘Baz doesn’t drink,’ Martha said, ‘so I tend not to much either.’ She turned to Vi. ‘How about you?’
‘I drink like a fish,’ Vi said and was rewarded by another dazzling grin from Baz. ‘Did you never drink?’ she asked.
‘My mother’s religion forbade it but, you know, when I got to college and it seemed that at long last I could defy her I found I didn’t like the taste after all.’
‘Did you tell your mother?’
‘He did and she said “The Lord works in mysterious ways”,’ Martha said.
Captain Ryle was confiding to no one in particular that until he met his wife his mother had been his rock and stay, when another couple, Greg and Heather, who had left their four-year-old, Patrick, asleep in the cabin, joined the table.
‘There’s a baby alarm,’ Greg explained. He was still under the delusion that everyone was as captivated by his child as he was. ‘It goes through to a central minding station and if there’s any crying they come and let you know. At least we hope they do.’ He laughed nervously.
‘He’s usually very good.’ In the absence of any interest from the other diners, Heather took up the baton of parental concern. ‘Only we were worried that the movement of the ship might wake him, you know, in a different environment…’
Vi said that she felt that the rocking of the ship might induce rather than hamper sleep. Patrick’s mother looked grateful. The other diners ignored this exchange, supposing, perhaps correctly, that if a stand was not taken from the start the topic of childrearing could take over.
The table was set for eleven but only eight guests appeared.
‘D’you think they cancelled?’ Valerie Garson asked, over her seared yellow fin tuna.
‘They won’t have got a refund,’ Les assured the rest of table. ‘I looked into it when it looked as if Val’s mother might fall off the branch.’
Captain Ryle was tucking into a lamb chop. Years of being at sea had given him an understandable aversion to fish. ‘They’ll be at one of the other restaurants.’
‘Can you eat just anywhere, then?’ Valerie Garson pursued. Les had been advising their friends in Liss that the Alexandria was the most superior of the several dining possibilities.
The captain explained that if she fancied a change, then there were several other first-rate venues. He also explained, to anyone who cared to listen, what ‘first-rate’ meant while Vi, who knew this already, affected interest.
‘Still, it’s nice to dress up once in a while,’ Valerie Garson said, looking doubtful.
‘She’s packed for Bloody Britain. Different fancy dress for every night. Nearly broke the bank!’ Les announced. He had ordered a bottle of one of the cheaper champagnes.
Martha said, ‘Oh dear, I’ve only brought one long dress. Do you think it matters?’
‘Of course not,’ said Vi, impatient with all this fuss. ‘If I have to dress up each night I shall certainly not bother to dine here.’
After dinner, Les became expansive and invited everyone who cared for a postprandial nip to join him at the bar. The captain asked Vi if he could show her round the ship.
‘There’s a champion little show on at the theatre tonight. Kiss Me Kate. It’s a company from Exeter. Kath had a cousin, a second cousin, to be precise, in Exeter.’
Vi excused herself with a fictitious