Every Man for Himself Read Free Page B

left me. I took the painting from my coat and propped it on the dressing table. The girl’s eyes were less searching than when gazing from the wall of the corridor at Princes Gate. Nor did she seem as pretty, her nose a shade too tilted, her jaw-line a little too heavy. I looked for a likeness in my own face in the glass, and found none.
    The steward returned with bath-towels. He said two young ladies had arrived to take up the adjoining stateroom. ‘Daughter of a baronet.’ he confided, ‘travelling with a companion. Both on the excitable side.’
    I laid the painting on the bed and went in search of Melchett.
    It was some minutes to noon when I made my way up the ship by means of the Grand Staircase. Judging by the number of people hurrying downwards, departure was imminent. I was nearly knocked off my feet by Mr Ismay who fairly ran past trailing three pale children. Behind, wearing the melancholy expression habitual to men assured of the fulfilment of cherished hopes, loped Thomas Andrews, managing director and chief designer of the White Star Line.
    Although Andrews didn’t stop, he hailed me by name, followed by the flung observation that it was good to see me and we should talk later. Immensely hard working and reserved to a fault, he had more than once paused beside my desk on one of his fleeting visits to the draughtsmen’s shed at Queen’s Island. The work I’d been put to was hardly worthy of comment, let alone praise – my uncle had a regrettable belief in the harmful effects of nepotism and I was engaged in specifications concerning wash-basins in the third class accommodation areas – but Andrews had never failed to convey appreciation. It was only to be expected, of course, that he should take a special interest in my progress, seeing I was nephew to the owner of the shipping line, yet I fancied he liked me for my own sake.
    Gratified at the encounter I came out on A deck and by dint of persistence managed to secure a position at the rail some yards below the bridge. I was wedged between two ladies, one wielding a parasol, the other laughing.
    There was now but one gangway remaining, at the foot of which the master-at-arms was preventing a dozen or more working men from boarding. I guess they had dallied too long in the nearest public house and arrived too late to sign on. One of them flung his kit upwards, and, attempting to duck under the officer’s arm, was sent staggering from a shove to the chest.
    ‘Shame,’ murmured the woman with the parasol, and then she too began to laugh.
    From where I stood I could see Captain Smith talking with the quartermaster on the deck above. I liked Smith, though I wasn’t sure I got his measure. I was sixteen when I first met him, the time my aunt had taken me to Europe on the SS Adriatic , then under his command. He’d owned a drooling dog which I took to exercising each day, throwing it ginger biscuits on the promenade deck. Being young and in need of sensation I often hoped the biscuit would skitter overboard and the dog leap to follow, though had it done so I expect I would have howled with the best of them. Smith came up one morning and caught me at play. He said nothing but I know he rumbled me because that night at dinner he hooked the dog’s lead over my chair. On the same voyage six of the crew were caught looting the first class baggage hold. My aunt reported a lost vanity case which had belonged to her mother. Everyone said how ugly such behaviour was and how an abuse of trust harmed the perpetrator almost as much as the victim. My aunt held that the rich, having a heightened sense of property, were bound to feel such betrayals more keenly than the poor. Later she discovered she’d left the case at home.
    As I watched, the quartermaster put up his hand to grasp the lanyard. A unified wail of anticipation rose from the quayside, to be drowned in the ship’s awesome boom of farewell as steam gushed from the giant whistles half-way up the forward