Bones of the Buried Read Free Page A

depression was at last
raising its dead hand from British industry. Among the passengers wagers were given and taken on whether or not it would wrest the Blue Riband from the Normandie which, ever since it had
made its first transatlantic crossing the previous year, had been hailed as a miracle of engineering and the acme of luxury.
    Edward supposed the first-class passengers were, for the most part, good enough people but, to his jaundiced eye, they appeared a seedy set – American millionaires, their women decorated
like Christmas trees, and every kind of mountebank and charlatan. He recognised one South American card-sharp he had punched in the face on a railway train out of Valparaíso three years
before. Edward watched him playing poker with a Hollywood producer and his girlfriend and, as he was pondering whether or not to warn them that they were about to be fleeced, the man caught his eye
and had the gall to give him a wink. Edward supposed he ought to advise the company that there were sharks on board even if there were none in the ocean, but how to distinguish the predators from
their victims? He decided he did not care enough to work it out. One evening, at dinner in the art deco glory of the first-class Café Grill, a little actress, her hair unnaturally blonde and
her lips coated in vermilion – attached, he thought, to a German businessman of quite staggering corpulence – offered herself to him for dessert and he had suddenly felt disgusted with
himself and the company he was keeping.
    Yes, it was good to be home. He loved New York. It invigorated him; the skyscrapers, the noise, the bustle, even the sight of the policemen, dressed up to look like postmen, gave him an
electrical charge. Each evening, as he walked down Fifth Avenue in the direction of Broadway, he found himself whistling. He had made a host of friends there. He had been elected an honorary member
of the Knickerbocker, the city’s most exclusive club, which he privately thought was even duller and more hidebound than the Athenaeum, but it was in the night-clubs, long after working New
Yorkers had taken to their beds, that he and Amy dined and danced till there was light in the sky. Amy Pageant, the girl on his arm, was Broadway’s newest, brightest star, and the couple had
been fêted in a manner which would have turned him into a conceited ass if he had not realised that their popularity, pleasant though it was, was so much hooey.
    The dream could not last. Six months after Amy had flung herself into his arms in her dressing-room at the Alvin Theatre, they had regretfully come to the conclusion that they were not, after
all, in love with one another. There had been nothing so tacky as his finding her in flagrante delicto with her leading man, but he was wise enough to see that she was indeed on the point of
falling for a wealthy sprig of New York society. Better to bow out gracefully than be ejected from her apartment after some slanging match in which both parties said things they did not mean but
which left genuine hurt. No, Edward had kissed her, told her she would always have a place in his heart – that they would share some very special memories. She, for her part, had wept,
whispered tender regrets in his ear but, in the end, had not tried to shake him in his resolve to return to England and find something to do which might stretch him.
    ‘I’m not cut out to be a lotus-eater, darling,’ he had told Amy. ‘I’m getting lazy and that turns me into a dull dog. You are already a great star, but you still
have a world to conquer and it wouldn’t be right for me to hang on your coat-tails like some stage-door johnny until we hated the sight of each other.’
    ‘Never that!’ she exclaimed. ‘You and I discovered each other before any of this . . .’ She waved her arms vaguely at the bed with its pink silk sheets, the champagne
bobbing in the silver ice bucket, the vases of flowers that bedecked every available