Every Man for Himself Read Free

evident regard for birth and position.
    Later we’d crossed swords at a picnic beside the Thames on the occasion of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. When the first boat sank he let out a roar of delight, and upon the second taking on water he ran up and down the bank, crowing and flinging his boater into the air. I told him to keep quiet but he wouldn’t, at which I challenged him to put his fists up, only to have him flopping down in the grass and waving his legs about like a beetle. I guess he was drunk.
    Van Hopper said I looked pretty well done in, though he himself was unshaven and his boots in need of a blacking brush. He demanded to know what had happened to me the night before; apparently he and Melchett had spent a good three hours waiting for me to show up at the Café Royal.
    I was fond of Hopper, though distrustful. However close, one should always be wary of those with a different perspective on the past. My sense of injustice is . . . was . . . sharper than his and I believe in retribution. Nor do I mistake the limits of my own horizons for those of the world. Van Hopper’s round eyes and pink cheeks give him away; he has . . . had . . . the face of a child.
    ‘I was there,’ I told him.
    ‘The head waiter thought he saw you, or someone very like. You were clutching a bunch of dead pansies and warbling the chorus from The Barber of Seville .’ He turned to his beetle friend smirking at his shoulder. ‘I believe you’ve met Archie Ginsberg.’
    ‘It can’t have been me,’ I protested. ‘I was in no mood for singing.’
    Hopper’s people and mine were connected by marriage, and equally disconnected in that all our lives our respective father figures had preferred to spend time with women other than their wives. It was worse for Hopper, of course, seeing I had no mother who could be betrayed. It’s only recently that my uncle has discovered a sense of family unity – old age is remarkable for its lurch towards sentimentality – and in childhood Hopper and I had spent most part of every summer at the house of his maternal grandmother in Maine. When I see Hopper in my head, it is with knees drawn up to his chest, swinging out on the weeping branches of the dusty willow that grew in the shallows of the lake at Warm Springs.
    Grown, we’d roomed together at Harvard and I had hoped he and Sissy might make a go of it, although he was too much the loafer and she a sight too serious-minded for it to come to anything. She’s only a girl, yet her intelligence is formidable. They’d spent a lot of time battling it out on the tennis court, often in moonlight, but she was never enamoured enough to let him win. In my view her husband Whitney is more of a slouch than Hopper. Against that, I have to take Sissy’s word for it he has the sort of eyelashes to set a girl’s heart pounding.
    If Van Hopper had been unaccompanied I would willingly have stayed at his side; as it was, I took advantage of the crush on the platform to slip away and board on my own. Several times I was greeted by people I knew, lastly by the Carters of Philadelphia who stood at the foot of the first class gangway supporting a swaying J.S. Seefax at either elbow.
    ‘Morgan,’ Mrs Carter called out when she saw me, waving her free hand imploringly.
    ‘What fun,’ I cried back, and clambered upwards, damned if I was going to be saddled with helping the old dodderer to his stateroom.
    As it happened, I wouldn’t have been able to, not without map and compass. I had worked as an apprentice draughtsman in the design offices of Harland and Wolff for eleven months prior to the launch of the ship, but only on a section of E deck aft, and she had eight decks, each in excess of eight hundred feet in length. Unfamiliar as I was with the general layout of the huge vessel, it was with considerable difficulty and after many wrong turnings that I found my berth. Entering amidships on B deck and foolishly avoiding the Grand Staircase,