Алистер Маклин – The Golden Rendezvous (страница 6)

It was the chairman of the Blue Mail, Lord Dexter, who had obviously kept all his brains to himself and refrained from passing any on to his son, our current fourth officer, who had thought it up. It was, as all his competitors who were now exerting themselves strenuously to get into the act admitted, a stroke of pure genius. Lord Dexter concurred.

It had started off simply enough in the early fifties with an earlier Blue Mail vessel, the s.s. Brandywine. (For some strange whimsy, explicable only on a psycho-analysts’ couch, Lord Dexter himself a rabid teetotaller, had elected to name his various ships after divers wines and other spirituous liquors.) The Brandywine had been one of the two Blue Mail vessels engaged on a regular run between New York and various British possessions in the West Indies, and Lord Dexter, eyeing the luxury cruise liners which plied regularly between New York and the Caribbean and seeing no good reason why he shouldn’t elbow his way into this lucrative dollar-earning market, had some extra cabins fitted on the Brandywine and advertised them in a few very select American newspapers and magazines, making it quite plain that he was interested only in Top People. Among the attractions offered had been a complete absence of bands, dances, concerts, fancy-dress balls, swimming pools, tombola, deck games, sight-seeing and parties—only a genius could have made such desirable and splendidly resounding virtues out of things he didn’t have anyway. All he offered on the positive side was the mystery and romance of a tramp ship which sailed to unknown destinations—this didn’t make any alterations to regular schedules, all it meant was that the captain kept the names of the various ports of call to himself until shortly before he arrived there—and the resources and comfort of a telegraph lounge which remained in continuous touch with the New York, London and Paris stock exchanges.

The initial success of the scheme was fantastic. In stock exchange parlance, the issue was over-subscribed a hundred times. This was intolerable to Lord Dexter; he was obviously attracting far too many of the not quite Top People, aspiring wouldbe’s on the lower-middle rungs of the ladder who had not yet got past their first few million, people with whom Top People would not care to associate. He doubled his prices. It made no difference. He trebled them and in the process made the gratifying discovery that there were many people in the world who would pay literally almost anything not only to be different and exclusive but to be known to be different and exclusive. Lord Dexter held up the building of his latest ship, the Campari, had designed and built into her a dozen of the most luxurious cabin suites ever seen and sent her to New York, confident that she would soon recoup the outlay of a quarter of a million pounds extra cost incurred through the building of those cabins. As usual, his confidence was not misplaced.

There were imitators, of course, but one might as well have tried to imitate Buckingham Palace, the Grand Canyon or the Cullinan diamond. Lord Dexter left them all at the starting gate. He had found his formula and he stuck to it unswervingly: comfort, convenience, quiet, good food and good company. Where comfort was concerned, the fabulous luxury of the state-rooms had to be seen to be believed: convenience, as far as the vast majority of the male passengers was concerned, found its ultimate in the juxtaposition, in the Campari’s unique telegraph lounge, of the stock exchange tickers and one of the most superbly stocked bars in the world: quiet was achieved by an advanced degree of insulation both in cabin suites and engine-room, by imitating the royal yacht Britannia inasmuch as that no orders were ever shouted and the deck crew and stewards invariably wore rubber-soled sandals, and by eliminating all the bands, parties, games and dances which lesser cruise passengers believed essential for the enjoyment of ship-board life: the magnificent cuisine had been achieved by luring away, at vast cost and the expense of even more bad feeling, the chefs from one of the biggest embassies in London and one of the finest hotels in Paris: those masters of the culinary world operated on alternate days and the paradisical results of their efforts to outdo one another was the envious talk of the Western Ocean.

Other shipowners might, perhaps, have succeeded in imitating some or all of those features, although most certainly to a lesser degree. But Lord Dexter was no ordinary shipowner. He was, as said, a genius and he showed it in his insistence, above all, on having the right people aboard.

Never a single trip passed but the Campari had a Personage on its passenger list, a Personage varying from Notable to World-famous. A special suite was reserved for Personages. Well-known politicians, cabinet ministers, top stars of the stage and screen, the odd famous writer or artist—if he was clean enough and used a razor—and the lower echelons of the English nobility—travelled in this suite at vastly reduced prices: royalty, ex-presidents, ex-premiers, ranking dukes and above travelled free. It was said that if all the British peerage on the Campari’s waiting list could be accommodated simultaneously, the House of Lords could close its doors. It need hardly be added that there was nothing philanthropic in Lord Dexter’s offer of free hospitality: he merely jacked up his prices to the wealthy occupants of the other eleven suites, who would have paid the earth anyway for the privilege of voyaging in such close contact with such exalted company.

After several years on this run, our passengers consisted almost entirely of repeaters. Many came as often as three times a year, fair enough indication of the size of their bankroll. By now, the passenger list on the Campari had become the most exclusive club in the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, Lord Dexter had distilled the aggregate elements of social and financial snobbery and found in its purest quintessence an inexhaustible supply of gold.

I adjusted my napkin and looked over the current gold mine. Five hundred million dollars on the hoof—or on the dove-grey velvet of the armchair seats in that opulent and air-conditioned dining-room: perhaps nearer 1,000 million dollars, and old man Beresford himself would account for a good third of it.

Julius Beresford, president and chief stockholder of the Hart-McCormick Mining Federation, sat where he nearly always sat, not only now but on half a dozen previous cruises, at the top right-hand side of the captain’s table, next Captain Bullen himself: he sat there in the most coveted position in the ship, not because he insisted on it through sheer weight of weal, but because Captain Bullen himself insisted on it. There are exceptions to every rule, and Julius Beresford was the exception to Bullen’s rule that he couldn’t abide any passenger, period. Beresford, a tall, thin, relaxed man with tufted black eyebrows, a horseshoe ring of greying hair fringed the sunburnt baldness of his head and lively hazel eyes twinkling in the lined brown leather of his face, came along only for the peace, comfort and food: the company of the great left him cold, a fact vastly appreciated by Captain Bullen, who shared his sentiments exactly. Beresford, sitting diagonally across from my table, caught my eye.

“Evening, Mr. Carter.” Unlike his daughter, he didn’t make me feel that he was conferring an earldom upon me every time he spoke to me. “Splendid to be at sea again, isn’t it? And where’s our captain tonight?”

“Working, I’m afraid, Mr. Beresford. I have to present his apologies to his table. He couldn’t leave the bridge.”

“On the bridge?” Mrs. Beresford, seated opposite her husband, twisted round to look at me. “I thought you were usually on watch at this hour, Mr. Carter?”

“I am.” I smiled at her. Plump, bejewelled, over-dressed, with dyed blonde hair but still beautiful at fifty, Mrs. Beresford bubbled over with good humour and laughter and kindness: this was only her first trip but Mrs. Beresford was already my favourite passenger. I went on: “But there are so many chains of islets, reefs and coral keys hereabouts that Captain Bullen prefers to see to the navigation himself.” I didn’t add, as I might have done, that had it been in the middle of the night and all the passengers safely in their beds, Captain Bullen would have been in his also, untroubled by any thoughts about his chief officer’s competence.

“But I thought a chief officer was fully qualified to run a ship?” Miss Beresford, needling me again, sweet-smiling, the momentarily innocent clear green eyes almost too big for the delicately-tanned face. “In case anything went wrong with the captain, I mean. You must hold a master’s certificate, mustn’t you?”

“I do. I also hold a driver’s licence, but you wouldn’t catch me driving a bus in the rush hour in downtown Manhattan.”

Old man Beresford grinned. His wife smiled. Miss Beresford regarded me thoughtfully for a moment, then bent to examine her hors d’œuvre, showing the gleaming auburn hair cut in a bouffant style that looked as if it had been achieved with a garden rake and a pair of secateurs, but had probably cost a fortune. The man by her side wasn’t going to let it go so easily, though. He laid down his fork, raised his thin dark head until he had me more or less sighted along his aquiline nose and said in his clear high drawling voice: “Oh, come now, Chief Officer. I don’t think the comparison is very apt at all.”