She was close to tears. As she rose to leave, she saw victory playing around the edges of Hacker’s whiskery lips. Well, the old buzzard got her revenge all right.
Eleanor strode out of the room, onto the deck, and around the corner to look for the quietest spot she could find, which was in between two lifeboats. She leaned against the rail, hidden from view. Most of the team were training on the sunny side of the ship.
She wanted to scream. Her father, with his righteous speeches and-once she felt guilty enough-his damned forgiving smile. Now Brundage. She felt whacked between these men like a hockey puck.
All she wanted to do was dive into that pool and win.
T wo days later the Manhattan docked for a few hours at Cobh in southern Ireland. Team members of Irish descent crowded the ship’s rails to see the colourful terraced streets along the waterfront and the towering cathedral, their young eyes rheumy with nostalgia for a country they’d never set foot in. That evening the ship sailed into the English Channel to dock for the night at Cherbourg.
‘Nothing again today, ma’am.’ The radio telegraph operator checked through the telegrams in his in-tray. ‘Sorry. Does your husband have the correct ship’s name and code?’
Eleanor had called by the small telegraph office on each day of the voyage. She had received messages from well-wishers in New York and one from her parents, expressing a hope that she was behaving, but not a word from Herb, despite her cabling several notes she thought were lighthearted and conciliatory enough not to make him feel upstaged. What a stubborn child he could be.
Last night and again this evening Mrs Hacker was standing near her at dinner, like a prison warden, the dull gravity of her presence sucking all the fun out of the atmosphere. She wore a black pleated dress with cavalier cuffs and collar. Her hair was scraped back into a knot. Where the hell did they get her? She could be Bela Lugosi’s mother.
At first Eleanor thought the old crow was simply keeping an eye on her, but tonight the chaperone’s malevolent glances in her direction convinced her she was being goaded. Go ahead, try your luck, my dear, the whiskery smile seemed to be saying. You’ll be expelled from the enchanted kingdom and sent home in a pumpkin.
A round of applause. Some of her teammates had decided to put on a show, and Eleanor looked over to see Olive taking the stage dressed as Shirley Temple, with a large bow in her hair. She did a childish curtsey and began singing in her squeaky voice ‘Animal Crackers in My Soup.’
Eleanor closed her eyes. That does it, she thought and threw down her napkin. She got up, walked between the tables to the door, out of the dining room, and onto the deck. It was an overcast night threatening rain. The harbour lights of Cherbourg threw unnatural colours onto the oily seawater, and the port looked grim and unenticing. She wandered along the deck, with snatches of Olive’s whiny song following her on the damp breeze.
One last time, she thought, and stopped by the door of the telegraph office. What will it be tonight? A telegram from President Roosevelt, but nothing from Herb?
‘Oh, Mrs Emerson.’ The radio operator seemed to avoid her eye. He wasn’t supposed to peruse the content of passengers’ telegrams, but he took the messages down. He retrieved an envelope from his tray and handed it to her. She opened it in front of him and knew she had trouble when she saw the sender’s name, Louella Parsons, LA queen of the gossip columnists. The message read:
ACTRESS VELMA DELMONT PHOTOGRAPHED LEAVING YOUR HUSBANDS HOTEL ROOM SANTA MONICA THIS MORNING STOP PLEASE CABLE REACTION STOP
The operator had found a hole-puncher to empty.
‘Well,’ she said tartly, reading the words a second time, ‘I guess that explains his cable-shyness.’ She crumpled up the piece of paper and tossed it into his waste-paper basket. ‘Good night.’
She strode into the hallway where the main stairs led down to D deck, a fury rising inside her. The lousy, childish, jealous, cheating shuckster. The dirty, worthless, two-faced-
‘Eleanor, bed in half an hour, please. It’s nine-thirty.’
She looked round to see a bald-headed AOC official with a bow tie who had been present during her coffee room encounter with Brundage.
‘Oh, take a jump overboard,’ she shouted without stopping.
She had never heard of Velma Delmont, but the fact that Louella Parsons had seen the need to put ‘actress’ in front of the name meant she was either a showbiz nobody or a streetwalker.
‘Herb, my man, I hope you got everything you deserve. Velma Delmont has VD written all over her.’
In her darkened cabin Eleanor shut the door and slumped against the wall, seeing the faint disc of light from the porthole begin to blur. For a long while she stood there reddening, her teeth bared, her face streaking with tears.
‘Damn it,’ she whispered, the breath juddering in her chest.
In a corner of her heart perhaps she’d known he was no good. Perhaps she’d even known that he didn’t love her. She’d been a fool. His music had captivated her. And that night at Radio City when they’d first met, his pomaded hair a touch too long, his patterned tie with a diamond pin, she’d seen his potential for shocking her parents. She was young and rich, and he’d married her. Why wouldn’t he? It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried to make it work. But the more she’d done to win his affections the worse his behaviour seemed to get. And for the first time in her life she’d been vulnerable.
Where does it go from here? she thought.
She wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands and told herself that she refused to cry. She absolutely refused.
At the end of her corridor she put her head round the steward’s door and found the cabin boy, Hal, dozing with his feet on a stool, a Lone Ranger comic book across his lap. She shook him gently.
‘So,’ he said, opening his eyes, ‘we’re alone at last.’
‘Kid, do me a favour. Go find out if there’s a return party for Mr and Mrs Charles MacArthur on A deck?’ His eyes bulged when she showed him a silver dollar.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Minutes later she was half changed into a gown when Hal knocked on the door and handed her a note.
My dear, what’s keeping you? Humdinger of a party up here!! Put your dancing shoes on. Charlie
Much later, when she tried piecing together the fragmentary memories of the evening, she wasn’t sure if it was Herb’s betrayal or the certain knowledge of consequences from Brundage that made her drink even more than usual. Either way, the champagne flowed and she had raised her glass with no thought for tomorrow. When the band had played ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance,’ she’d heard an omen and a direct appeal.
She remembered Paul Gallico stepping through the throng to greet her.
‘Darling, do you have a match?’ she asked him.
‘Have you been crying?’
She mingled with Charlie, Helen, and John Walsh before dancing with Hearst Jr to ‘Let Yourself Go.’ Throughout the evening Charlie brought over people eager to meet her. It seemed she’d become something of a celebrity for defying Brundage-who, she learned, was unloved among the great and the good-and her exchange with Hacker at the MacArthurs’ party had become the best piece of gossip on A deck. This is probably what had emboldened her to further indiscretion.
In the final throes of the party, with the few loyal revellers-in-arms still standing, she had a memory of inventing an uproarious new dance called ‘the Avery,’ which involved making jerky, chickenlike steps, arms flapping and rear ends stuck out, in a burlesque parody of the Charleston.
Sometime in the early hours, Paul Gallico had carried her down to D deck and had found Mrs Hacker blocking the corridor to Eleanor’s cabin. The chaperone, in her bathrobe and hairnet, cocked her head as she saw them approach, relishing the moment of Eleanor’s vanquishing.
‘The cabins on this corridor are for females only,’ she said.
‘You can carry her yourself if you like,’ Gallico said. At this, Eleanor tried standing but listed towards the corridor wall.
‘Are you slithering around after me again?’ she slurred to Hacker, with a dangerous look in her eye.
‘I knew you would disobey Mr Brundage’s orders to-’
‘Why are you still up? Let me ask you that, why are you still up… you sneaking, snitching old witch?’ Eleanor
