Nicky shook his head. “We’re full up.”
Harry looked around. “But there are four spare seats in this compartment, and all the others are the same.”
“Sure, this compartment seats ten on a daytime flight. But it only sleeps six. You’ll see why when we make up the bunks, after dinner. Meanwhile, enjoy the space.”
Harry sipped his drink. The steward was perfectly polite and efficient, but not as obsequious as, say, a waiter in a London hotel. Harry wondered whether American waiters had a different attitude. He hoped so. On his expeditions into the strange world of London’s high society, he had always found it a bit degrading to be bowed and scraped to and called “sir” every time he turned around.
It was time to further his friendship with Margaret Oxenford, who was sipping a glass of champagne and leafing through a magazine. He had flirted with dozens of girls of her age and social station, and he went into his routine automatically. “Do you live in London?”
“We’ve got a house in Eaton Square, but we spend most of our time in the country,” she said. “Our place is in Berkshire. Father also has a shooting lodge in Scotland.” Her tone was rather too matter-of-fact, as if she found the question boring and wanted to dispose of it as quickly as possible.
“Do you hunt?” Harry said. This was a standard conversational ploy: most rich people did, and they loved to talk about it.
“Not much,” she said. “We shoot more.”
“Do
“When they let me.”
“I suppose you have lots of admirers.”
She turned to face him and lowered her voice. “Why are you asking me all these stupid questions?”
Harry was floored. He hardly knew what to say. He had asked dozens of girls the same questions and none of them had reacted this way. “Are they stupid?” he said.
“You don’t care where I live or whether I hunt.”
“But that’s what people talk about in high society.”
“But you’re not in high society,” she said bluntly.
“Stone the crows!” he said in his natural accent. “You don’t beat about the bush, do you!”
She laughed, then said: “That’s better.”
“I can’t keep changing my accent. I’ll get confused.”
“All right. I’ll put up with your American accent if you promise not to make silly small talk.”
“Thanks, honey,” he said, reverting to the role of Harry Vandenpost. She’s no pushover, he was thinking. She was a girl who knew her own mind, all right. But that made her a lot more interesting.
“You’re very good at it,” she was saying. “I would never have guessed you were faking it. I suppose it’s part of your modus operandi.”
It always baffled him when they spoke Latin. “I guess it is,” he said without having the faintest idea what she meant. He would have to change the subject. He wondered what was the way to her heart. It was clear that he could not flirt with her as he had with all the others. Perhaps she was the psychic type, interested in seances and necromancy. “Do you believe in ghosts?” he said.
That drew another sharp response. “What do you take me for?” she said crossly. “And why do you have to change the subject?”
He would have laughed it off with any other girl, but for some reason Margaret got to him. “Because I don’t speak Latin,” he snapped.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“I don’t understand words like modus andy.”
She looked mystified and irritated for a moment; then her face cleared and she repeated the phrase, “Modus operandi.”
“I never stayed at school long enough to learn that stuff,” he said.
The effect on her was quite startling. She flushed with shame and said: “I’m most dreadfully sorry. How rude of me.”
He was surprised by the turnabout. A lot of them seemed to feel it was their duty to stuff their education down a man’s throat. He was glad that Margaret had better manners than most of her kind. He smiled at her and said: “All forgiven.”
She surprised him yet again by saying: “I know how it feels, because I’ve never had a proper education, either.”
“With all your money?” he asked incredulously.
She nodded. “We never went to school, you see.”
Harry was amazed. For respectable working-class Londoners it was shameful not to send your children to school, almost as bad as having the police round or being turned out by the bailiffs. Most children had to take a day off when their boots were at the menders’, for they did not have a spare pair; and mothers were embarrassed enough about that. “But children have got to go to school—it’s the law!” said Harry.
“We had these stupid governesses. That’s why I can’t go to university—no qualifications.” She looked sad. “I think I should have liked university.”
“It’s unbelievable. I thought rich people could do anything they liked.”
“Not with my father.”
“What about the kid?” Harry said with a nod at Percy.
“Oh, he’s at Eton, of course,” she said bitterly. “It’s different for boys.”
Harry considered. “Does that mean,” he said. diffidently, “that you don’t agree with your father in other things—politics, for instance?”
“I certainly don’t,” she said fiercely. “I’m a socialist.”
This, Harry thought, could be the key to her. “I used to belong to the Communist party,” he said. It was true: he had joined when he was sixteen and left after three weeks. He waited for her reaction before deciding how much to tell her.
She immediately became animated. “Why did you leave?”
The truth was that political meetings bored him stiff, but it might be a mistake to say so. “It’s hard to put into words, exactly,” he prevaricated.
He should have realized that would not wash with her. “You must know why you left,” she said impatiently.
“I guess it was too much like Sunday school.”
She laughed at that. “I know just what you mean.”
“Anyway, I reckon I’ve done more than the Commies in the way of returning wealth to the workers who produced it.”
“How is that?”
“Well, I liberate cash from Mayfair and take it to Battersea.”
“You mean you rob only the rich?”
“There’s no point in robbing the poor. They haven’t got any money.”
She laughed again. “But surely you don’t give away your ill-gotten gains, like Robin Hood?”
He considered what to tell her. Would she believe him if he pretended he robbed the rich to give to the poor? Although she was intelligent, she was also naive—but, he decided, not that naive. “I’m not a charity,” he said with a shrug. “But I do help people sometimes.”
“This is amazing,” she said. Her eyes sparkled with interest and animation, and she looked quite ravishing. “I suppose I knew there were people like you, but it’s just extraordinary to actually meet you and talk to you.”
Don’t overdo it, girl, Harry thought. He was nervous of women who became too enthusiastic about him: they were liable to feel outraged when they found out he was human. “I’m not that special,” he said with genuine embarrassment. “I just come from a world you’ve never seen.”
She gave him a look that said she thought he was special.
This had gone far enough, he decided. It was time to change the subject. “You’re embarrassing me,” he said bashfully.
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. She thought for a moment then said: “Why are you going to America?”
