‘Let us not waste time by dwelling upon the obvious, Caroline,’ Uncle said coldly, which was pretty ungracious of him as the idea had never even entered his head until I had put it there four hours previously. ‘The point is – what is to be done? Islay to Skye is a pretty big area. Where does this get us?’
‘How much weight can you bring to bear to secure the co-operation of the television and radio networks?’
There was a pause, then: ‘What do you have in mind, Caroline?’ Uncle at his most forbidding.
‘An insertion of an item in their news bulletins.’
‘Well.’ An even longer pause. ‘It was done daily during the war, of course. I believe it’s been done once or twice since. Can’t compel them, of course – they’re a stuffy lot, both the B.B.C. and the I.T.A.’ His tone left little doubt as to his opinion of those diehard reactionaries who brooked no interference, an odd reaction from one who was himself a past-master of brookmanship of this nature. ‘If they can be persuaded that it’s completely apolitical and in the national interest there’s a chance. What do you want?’
‘An item that a distress signal has been received from a sinking yacht somewhere south of Skye. Exact position unknown. Signals ceased, the worst feared, an air-sea search to be mounted at first light to-morrow. That’s all.’
‘I may manage it. Your reason, Caroline?’
‘I want to look around. I want an excuse to move around without raising eyebrows.’
‘You’re going to volunteer the Firecrest for this search and then poke around where you shouldn’t?’
‘We have our faults, Annabelle, Harriet and I, but we’re not crazy. I wouldn’t take this tub across the Serpentine without a favourable weather forecast. It’s blowing a Force 7 outside. And a boat search would take a lifetime too long in those parts. What I had in mind was this. At the very eastern tip of Torbay Island, about five miles from the village, there’s a small deserted sandy cove, semicircular and well protected by steep bluffs and pine trees. Will you please arrange to have a long-range helicopter there exactly at dawn.’
‘And now it’s your turn to think I am crazy,’ Uncle Arthur said coldly. That remark about the sea-keeping qualities of his own brainchild, the Firecrest, would have rankled badly. ‘I’m supposed to snap my fingers and hey presto! a helicopter will be there at dawn.’
‘That’s fourteen hours from now, Annabelle. At five o’clock this morning you were prepared to snap your fingers and have a helicopter here by noon. Seven hours. Exactly half the time. But that was for something important, like getting me down to London to give me the bawling out of a lifetime before firing me.’
‘Call me at midnight, Caroline. I hope to God you know what you are doing.’
I said: ‘Yes, sir,’ and hung up. I didn’t mean, Yes, sir, I knew what I was doing, I meant, Yes, sir, I hoped to God I knew what I was doing.
If the carpet in the Shangri-la’s saloon had cost a penny under five thousand pounds, then old Skouras must have picked it up secondhand somewhere. Twenty by thirty, bronze and russet and gold, but mainly gold, it flowed across the deck like a field of ripe corn, an illusion heightened both by its depth and the impediment it offered to progress. You had to wade through the damn’ thing. I’d never seen an item of furnishing like it in my life except for the curtains that covered two-thirds of the bulkhead space. The curtains made the carpet look rather shoddy. Persian or Afghanistan, with a heavy gleaming weave that gave a shimmering shot-silk effect with every little movement of the Shangri-la, they stretched all the way from deckhead to deck. What little of the bulkheads that could be seen were sheathed in a satiny tropical hardwood, the same wood as was used for the magnificent bar that took up most of the after bulkhead of the saloon. The opulently upholstered settees and armchairs and bar-stools, dark green leather with gold piping, would have cost another fortune, even the trade-in value of the beaten copper tables scattered carelessly about the carpet would have fed a family of five for a year. At the Savoy Grill.
On the port bulkhead hung two Cézannes, on the starboard two Renoirs. The pictures were a mistake. In that room they didn’t have a chance. They’d have felt more at home in the galley.
So would I. So, I was pretty sure, would Hunslett. It wasn’t merely that our sports coats and Paisley scarves clashed violently with the decor in general and the black ties and dinner jackets of our host and his other guests in particular. It wasn’t even that the general run of conversation might have been specifically designed to reduce Hunslett and myself to our proper status of artisans and pretty inferior artisans at that. All this talk about debentures and mergers and cross-options and takeovers and millions and millions of dollars has a pretty demoralising effect on the lower classes, but you didn’t need to have the I.Q. of a genius to realise that this line of talk wasn’t being aimed specifically at us; to the lads with the black ties, debentures and takeovers were the stuff and staff of life and so a principal staple of conversation. Besides, this wish to be somewhere else obviously didn’t apply only to us: at least two others, a bald-headed, goatee-bearded merchant banker by the name of Henri Biscarte and a big bluff Scots lawyer by the name of MacCallum were just as uncomfortable as I felt, but showed it a great deal more.
A silent movie picture of the scene would have given no clue as to what was wrong. Everything was so very comfortable, so very civilised. The deep armchairs invited complete relaxation. A blazing if superfluous log-fire burned in the hearth. Skouras was the smiling and genial host to the life. The glasses were never empty – the press of an unheard bell brought a white-jacketed steward who silently refilled glasses and as silently departed again. All so urbane, so wealthy, so pleasantly peaceful. Until you cut in the movie soundtrack, that was. That was when you wished you were in the galley.
Skouras had his glass refilled for the fourth time in the forty-five minutes we had been there, smiled at his wife sitting in the armchair across the fire from him, lifted his glass in a toast. ‘To you, my dear. To your patience with putting up with us all so well. A most boring trip for you, most boring. I congratulate you.’
I looked at Charlotte Skouras. Everybody looked at Charlotte Skouras. There was nothing unusual in that, millions of people had looked at Charlotte Skouras when she had been the most soughtafter actress in Europe. Even in those days she’d been neither particularly young nor beautiful, she didn’t have to be because she’d been a great actress and not a beautiful but bone-headed movie star. Now she was even older and less good-looking and her figure was beginning to go. But men still looked at her. She was somewhere in her late thirties, but they would still be looking at her when she was in her bath-chair. She had that kind of face. A worn face, a used face, a face that had been used for living and laughing and thinking and feeling and suffering, a face with brown tired wise-knowing eyes a thousand years old, a face that had more quality and character in every little line and wrinkle – and heaven only knew there was no shortage of these – than in a whole battalion of the fringe-haired darlings of contemporary society, the ones in the glossy magazines, the ones who week after week stared out at you with their smooth and beautiful faces, with their beautiful and empty eyes. Put them in the same room as Charlotte Skouras and no one would ever have seen them. Mass-produced carbon copies of chocolate boxes are no kind of competition at all for a great painter’s original in oils.
‘You are very kind, Anthony’ Charlotte Skouras had a deep slow slightly-foreign accented voice, and, just then, a tired strained smile that accorded well with the darkness under the brown eyes. ‘But I am never bored. Truly. You know that.’
‘With this lot as guests?’ Skouras’s smile was as broad as ever. ‘A Skouras board meeting in the Western Isles instead of your blueblooded favourites on a cruise in the Levant? Take Dollmann here.’ He nodded to the man by his side, a tall thin bespectacled character with receding thin dark hair who looked as if he needed a shave but didn’t. John Dollmann, the managing director of the Skouras shipping lines. ?
??Eh, John? How do you rate yourself as a substitute for young Viscount Horley? The one with sawdust in his head and fifteen million in the bank?’
‘Poorly, I’m afraid. Sir Anthony.’ Dollmann was as urbane as Skouras himself, as apparently unconscious of anything untoward in the atmosphere. ‘Very poorly. I’ve a great deal more brains, a great deal less money and I’ve no pretensions to being a gay and witty conversationalist.’
‘Young Horley was rather the life and soul of the party, wasn’t he? Especially when I wasn’t around,’ Skouras added thoughtfully. He looked at me. ‘You know him, Mr Petersen?’
‘I’ve heard of him. I don’t move in those circles, Sir Anthony.’ Urbane as all hell, that was me.
‘Um.’ Skouras looked quizzically at the two men sitting close by myself. One, rejoicing in the good Anglo-Saxon name of Hermann Lavorski, a big jovial twinkling-eyed man with a great booming laugh and an inexhaustible supply of risqué stories, was, I’d been told, his accountant and financial adviser. I’d never seen anyone less like an accountant and finance wizard, so that probably made him the best in the business. The other, a middle-aged, balding, Sphinxfaced character with a drooping handle-bar moustache of the type once sported by Wild Bill Hickock and a head that cried out for a bowler hat, was Lord Charnley, who, in spite of his title, found it necessary to work as a broker in the City to make ends meet. ‘And how would you rate our two good friends here, Charlotte?’ This with another wide and friendly smile at his wife.
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’ Charlotte Skouras looked at her husband steadily, not smiling.
‘Come now, come now, of course you do understand. I’m still talking about the poor company I provide for so young and attractive a woman as you.’ He looked at Hunslett. ‘She is a young and atractive woman, don’t you think, Mr Hunslett?’
‘Well, now.’ Hunslett leaned back in his armchair, fingers judiciously steepled, an urbanely sophisticated man entering into the spirit of things. ‘What is youth, Sir Anthony? I don’t know.’ He smiled across at Charlotte Skouras. ‘Mrs Skouras will never be old. As for attractive – well, it’s a bit superfluous to ask that. For ten million European men – and for myself – Mrs Skouras was the most attractive actress of her time.’
‘Was, Mr Hunslett? Was?’ Old Skouras was leaning forward in his chair now, the smile a shadow of its former self. ‘But now, Mr Hunslett?’
‘Mrs Skouras’s producers must have employed the worst cameramen in Europe.’ Hunslett’s dark, saturnine face gave nothing away. He smiled at Charlotte Skouras. ‘If I may be pardoned so personal a remark.’
If I’d had a sword in my hand and the authority to use it, I’d have knighted Hunslett on the spot. After, of course, having first had a swipe at Skouras.
‘The days of chivalry are not yet over,’ Skouras smiled. I saw MacCallum and Biscarte, the bearded banker, stir uncomfortably in their seats. It was damnably awkward. Skouras went on: ‘I only meant, my dear, that Charnley and Lavorski here are poor substitutes for sparkling young company like Welshblood, the young American oil man, or Domenico, that Spanish count with the passion for amateur astronomy. The one who used to take you on the afterdeck to point out the stars in the ægean.’ He looked again at Charnley and Lavorski. ‘I’m sorry, gentlemen, you just wouldn’t do at all.’
‘I don’t know if I’m all that insulted,’ Lavorski said comfortably. ‘Charnley and I have our points. Um – I haven’t seen young Domenico around for quite some time.’ He’d have made an excellent stage feed man, would Lavorski, trained to say his lines at exactly the right time.
‘You won’t see him around for a very much longer time,’ Skouras said grimly. ‘At least not in my yacht or in any of my houses.’ A pause. ‘Or near anything I own. I promised him I’d see the colour of his noble Castilian blood if I ever clapped eyes on him again.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘I must apologise for even bringing that nonentity’s name into the conversation. Mr Hunslett. Mr Petersen. Your glasses are empty.’
‘You’ve been very kind, Sir Anthony. We’ve enjoyed ourselves immensely.’ Bluff old, stupid old Calvert, too obtuse to notice what was going on. ‘But we’d like to get back. It’s blowing up badly to-night and Hunslett and I would like to move the Firecrest into the shelter of Garve Island.’ I rose to a window, pulling one of his Afghanistan or whatever curtains to one side. It felt as heavy as a stage fire curtain, no wonder he needed stabilisers with all that topweight on. ‘That’s why we left our riding and cabin lights on. To see if we’d moved. She dragged a fair bit earlier this evening.’
‘So soon? So soon?’ He sounded genuinely disappointed. ‘But of course, if you’re worried -’ He pressed a button, not the one for the steward, and the saloon door opened. The man who entered was a small weatherbeaten character with two gold stripes on his sleeves. Captain Black, the Shangri-la’s captain. He’d accompanied Skouras when we’d been briefly shown around the Shangri-la after arriving aboard, a tour that had included an inspection of the smashed radio transmitter. No question about it, their radio was well and truly out of action.
‘Ah, Captain Black. Have the tender brought alongside at once, will you. Mr Petersen and Mr Hunslett are anxious to get back to the Firecrest as soon as possible.’
‘Yes, sir. I’m afraid there’ll be a certain delay, Sir Anthony.’
‘Delay?’ Old Skouras could put a frown in his voice without putting one on his face.
‘The old trouble, I’m afraid,’ Captain Black said apologetically.
‘Those bloody carburettors,’ Skouras swore. ‘You were right, Captain Black, you were right. Last tender I’ll ever have with petrol engines fitted. Let me know as soon as she’s all right. And detail one of the hands to keep an eye on the Firecrest to see that she doesn’t lose position. Mr Petersen’s afraid she’ll drag.’
‘Don’t worry, sir.’ I didn’t know whether Black was speaking to Skouras or myself. ‘She’ll be all right.’
He left. Skouras spent some time in extolling diesel engines and cursing petrol ones, pressed some more whisky on Hunslett and myself and ignored my protests, which were based less on any dislike of whisky in general or Skouras in particular than on the fact that I didn’t consider it very good preparation for the night that lay ahead of me. Just before nine o’clock he pressed a button by his arm rest and the doors of a cabinet automatically opened to reveal a 23-inch TV set.
Uncle Arthur hadn’t let me down. The newscaster gave quite a dramatic account of the last message received from the T.S.D.Y. Moray Rose, reported not under command and making water fast somewhere to the south of the Island of Skye. A full-scale air and sea search, starting at dawn the next day, was promised.
Skouras switched the set off. ‘The sea’s crowded with damn’ fools who should never be allowed outside a canal basin. What’s the latest on the weather? Anyone know?’
‘There was a Hebrides Force 8 warning on the 1758 shipping forecast,’ Charlotte Skouras said quietly. ‘South-west, they said.’
‘Since when did you start listening to forecasts?’ Skouras demanded. ‘Or to the radio at all? But of course, my dear, I’d forgotten. Not so much to occupy your time these days, have you? Force 8 and south-west, eh? And the yacht would be coming down from the Kyle of Lochalsh, straight into it. They must be mad. And they have a radio – they sent a message. That makes them stark staring lunatics. Whether they didn’t listen to the forecast or whether they listened and still set out, they must have been lunatics. Get them everywhere.’
‘Some of those lunatics may be dying, drowning now. Or already drowned,’ Charlotte Skouras said. The shadows under the brown eyes seemed bigger and darker than ever, but there was still life in those brown eyes.
For perhaps five seconds Skouras, face set, stared at her and I felt that if I snapped my fingers there would be a loud tinkling or crashing sound, the atmosphere was as brittle as that. Then he turned away with a laugh and said to me: ‘The little woman, eh, Petersen? The little mother – only she
has no children. Tell me, Petersen, are you married?’
I smiled at him while debating the wisdom of throwing my whisky glass in his face or clobbering him with something heavy, then decided against it. Apart from the fact that it would only make matters worse, I didn’t fancy the swim back to the Firecrest. So I smiled and smiled, feeling the knife under the cloak, and said: ‘Afraid not. Sir Arthur.’
‘Afraid not? Afraid not?’ He laughed his hearty good-fellowship laugh, the kind I can’t stand, and went on cryptically: ‘You’re not so young to be sufficiently naive to talk that way, come now, are you, Mr Petersen?’
‘Thirty-eight and never had a chance,’ I said cheerfully. ‘The old story, Sir Anthony. The ones I’d have wouldn’t have me. And viceversa.’ Which wasn’t quite true. The driver of a Bentley with, the doctors had estimated, certainly not less than a bottle of whisky inside him, had ended my marriage before it was two months old – and also accounted for the savagely scarred left side of my face. It was then that Uncle Arthur had prised me from my marine salvage business and since then no girl with any sense would ever have contemplated marrying me if she’d known what my job was. What made it even more difficult was the fact that I couldn’t tell her in the first place. And the scars didn’t help.
‘You don’t look a fool to me,’ Skouras smiled. ‘If I may say so without offence.’ That was rich, old Skouras worrying about giving offence. The zip-fastener of a mouth softened into what, in view of his next words, I correctly interpreted in advance as being a nostalgic smile. ‘I’m joking, of course. It’s not all that bad. A man must have his fun. Charlotte?’
‘Yes?’ The brown eyes wary, watchful.
‘There’s something I want from our stateroom. Would you –?’
‘The stewardess. Couldn’t she –?’
‘This is personal, my dear. And, as Mr Hunslett has pointed out, at least by inference, you’re a good deal younger than I am.’ He smiled at Hunslett to show that no offence was intended. ‘The picture on my dressing-table.’