Мариус Габриэль - The Ocean Liner

Todt continued. ‘This war, Hufnagel, is not being waged for profit or land. We are Teutonic knights, going to war against an enemy who spreads his tentacles right around the globe. If we allow infection to spread here, under our very armour, then, Hufnagel, we are beaten before we begin.’ He scratched his crotch, looking more closely at the board. ‘I see I have made bad moves.’

‘One or two, Captain. All is not yet lost,’ Hufnagel said, contemplating making a bad move of his own so that Todt could recover the initiative.

‘You still have not answered my earlier question.’

‘What question was that, Captain?’

‘How you could have brought yourself to have intercourse with a Jewess.’ Todt raised his hollow eyes to Hufnagel’s. ‘It’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard. It makes my gorge rise.’

‘Yes, you said as much before.’

‘Was she very hirsute?’ Todt’s lean cheeks flushed as he asked the question. ‘I have heard that Jewish women have an abnormal quantity of bodily hair, particularly in the reproductive regions. It reaches to the knees in some cases. It’s said that this can be used to identify a Jewess, even if she attempts to conceal her race.’

‘I am unable to comment on that,’ Hufnagel said icily.

‘But surely your experience—’

Hufnagel cut in. ‘My experience is not one which I choose to share. It is a private matter.’

Todt’s eyes flicked from the board to Hufnagel’s face. ‘You still entertain feelings for this Jewess, then?’

‘I refuse to discuss it.’

‘Then you are not to be trusted, Hufnagel. You have been corrupted, as all are corrupted by contact with Jews.’

‘That is nonsense,’ Hufnagel replied tersely.

‘In the moment of crisis, you will fail the Fatherland. That is inevitable.’

Todt moved his queen, another bad move. Hufnagel now had his opponent in his sights, and victory was more or less inevitable. Todt, if he was any sort of a player, could see that. And Hufnagel now had no intention of losing the match.

Fanny Ward, now aboard the Manhattan , had not gone to dinner. She had provided her own nourishment in the form of a little hamper from Fortnum & Mason. Since Dotty’s death last year, she did not care for public appearances. The press conference she had given in the hotel had to be endured because one endured such things as part of one’s profession. But the death of a child changed one. One no longer wanted to see so much of the world. Or be seen by it.

The lovely Commodore Randall, whom she knew well, had made sure she’d got a cabin to herself, even if it was a tiny one. Such a gentleman, for all his saltiness. She appreciated such courtesies all the more now that fewer and fewer people knew who she was, The Eternal Beauty, The Perennial Flapper. The Girl Who Wouldn’t Grow Old.

But she had grown old.

She sat at her dressing table, pulling her rings off. There was something about fabulous diamonds on gnarled fingers that made one shudder. But that was what one was reduced to. The bare bones.

Some of those reporters had been laughing at her, she was sure of it. Not the laughter of delight, but mocking laughter. Did they know what she had been? That men had lost their reason over her, that she had been the most fashionable woman in London for a time, that she had been directed by Cecil B. DeMille? A few, perhaps.

As one aged, one entered a funnel. One’s circle of acquaintance shrunk, there were fewer people each year who had shared one’s life, who knew who one was. But the loss of a child was the most terrible thing of all.

Fanny removed her wig of chestnut curls and stored it carefully in its box. Her own hair, secured by a net, was now too sparse to bother dyeing, and lay lank and white across her skull.

At least Dotty had died a glamorous death. She had raised Dotty to understand the importance of glamour. And no death could be more glamorous than perishing beside one’s husband, the sixth Baron Plunkett, in a plane owned by William Randolph Hearst, on one’s way to stay as a guest at San Simeon. It would be talked of for years.

Of course, one didn’t like to dwell on the details. Dotty and Terence, trapped in the plane’s cabin, engulfed in flames. It didn’t do to look at the details of anything, really.

Fanny pulled off her false eyelashes carefully, her lids stretching into watery pouches as she did so. Of course the children would be well taken care of, raised by Lord Plunkett’s sister and brother-in-law. It simply hurt, that was all, to be left with the last years to fill, and no Dotty. Her love-child. The child of her great love.

Fanny wiped off her lipstick. The cupid’s bow vanished, leaving a thin, bitter gash. Running back to America was humiliating, but one was terrified of the bombing. Simply terrified. The last war had been bad enough. She’d come to London at the turn of the century, when things had got rather too hot for her in New York, and the last three decades had been marvellous, simply marvellous. But now they were over.

She didn’t expect that she would ever be back. Or that London would survive Hitler’s bombs. But one couldn’t say that, of course.

She wiped away the powder and rouge, watching in the mirror as her own face emerged, washed-out, haggard, unhappy.

For years they’d been asking her, what’s your secret, Miss Ward? Is it surgery? Do you eat monkey gland? Usually she told them it was a secret facial treatment passed on to her by Gaby Deslys, and available (for a substantial outlay) at her salon in Paris, in six weekly sessions.

The truth, of course, was that it was all simply an illusion, carefully maintained, and possible only because those charming gentlemen of the press participated in the conspiracy, printing photographs of her that were twenty years old, retouching negatives, lavishing lies on her. She hoped they would continue the conspiracy. It would be too tedious to have to grow old in public, as well as in private.

She rubbed cream into her face and hands. In the cruel light of the vanity mirror, this made her face gleam like a skull, her hands appear even bonier. Putting away her potions, she rose and removed her dress. With it came the strategically-sewn padding that had given her body its youthful curves. She hung the garment in the closet, and wrapped a dressing gown around herself.

Gaunt, frail and almost hairless, she opened the Fortnum’s hamper and investigated the contents. A game pie, a bottle of port, a cold chicken. She picked at the food with skinny fingers. She would take her teeth out after supper.

Alone in her own cabin, Carla Toscanini had also been thinking about the death of a child. But her Giorgio had died at the age of six, not in adulthood. Diphtheria had choked the innocent life out of him before he could even open his wings.

She had been four years married when she’d had Giorgio. Not yet twenty-three. And Arturo was already unfaithful to her.

She had discovered it through his carelessness, his arrogance. He had been receiving the woman’s love letters under a clownish assumed name at the local post office. It hadn’t taken Carla long to identify the woman: Rosina Storchio, the handsome young soprano whose vivid personality was propelling her to operatic stardom at that time.

But Arturo had not been interested in Rosina Storchio’s larynx. His interests had been in another organ altogether. The letters made that clear. Carla had confronted him with his treachery, screaming. It was a scene to be repeated many times over the course of their marriage, but this had been the first time, and she’d had a lot to learn. She’d still thought she could stop him.