When Eight Bells Toll

On the port bulkhead hung two Cezannes, 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. AH 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 due 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 sound-track, 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 sought-after 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 boneheaded 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 blue-blooded 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 risque 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, Sphinx-faced character with a drooping handle-bar moustache of the type once sported by Wild Bin 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. Pm 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 attractive 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 worstcameramen 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 Aigean.' 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,