yet!
Trisha had given a yelp of laughter and said, ‘That’s all right. Anyway, I’m your mum. What you think’s your “Mum” is your grandma. Did you never guess?’
He hadn’t guessed. And now there was no one to whom he could confess that the news made him cry.
Aunty Trish, who had so confusingly turned out to be Des’s mother, went on to tell him about his father. Des had taken this as a chance to change his name. On the basis of his mother’s, now even hazier, recollection of the coach driver, Des became ‘Dino’ and with the change of name went, as is often the way, a change in character.
He picked up Italian easily and became quite extroverted, even a bit of a flirt. In Rome, he found a dance partner, Sam, a determined brunette from Bradford, and for a while they performed a dance double act round the clubs. But Sam nursed ambitions to settle down. She finally ran off with a Roman priest who had left the Church over the loss of the Latin Mass.
Without Sam’s purposeful character to drive him, Des drifted, making a living with seasonal hotel work, where his manner made him popular. One slack evening, chatting to a customer, he learned about crewing on the ships.
‘It’s a great deal,’ his confidante told him, ‘everything found, food, accommodation, the lot. And the best thing is if you’re out of the country for a year you pay no tax. I’ve saved up the deposit for a flat.’
Des wrote to several shipping lines’ offices asking about bar work. His handwriting was neat and his bar references correct if not enthusiastic. In the end, it was his dancing accomplishments which landed him a job.
‘There are rules, mind.’ The well-groomed woman who interviewed him spoke with tired authority. ‘The passengers—we call them “guests”—will want you to sleep with them. If you do, and we find out, you are put off the ship at the next port.’
‘What age are the “guests” then mainly?’
The woman looked at Des as if there were no depths of behaviour to which she did not expect him to sink.
‘Mostly old with no men. There are younger ones too, but they more easily find other people to sleep with. It’s the old ones who cause trouble.’
‘Don’t worry. I won’t have any trouble.’
‘Are you gay? We have trouble with men too.’ His interlocutor turned an appraising, skilfully made-up eye on Des.
‘I don’t sleep with people I don’t like.’
Disbelief registered in the perfect scimitar eyebrows. ‘Like them or not, we throw you off.’
‘I understand.’
‘And tips. They will offer you tips. You take tips only if they add it to their account so it goes through our books officially. No cash tips or you are off the ship before yesterday. Understand?’
‘I understand.’
‘Good. Report on Monday week, please. Here is the list of things you must get for yourself. Underwear is not provided.’
Des, no longer sure how he should address his family, wrote a postcard: Dear All, Glad to say have got a berth on a round the world cruise liner, Queen Caroline, as a dance host. Should be fun! Will keep you posted. Cheers, Des.
By now, Trisha had been married and divorced and was back living at home. She read the card and tossed it across the kitchen table to her mother.
‘Looks like our Des’s fallen on his feet.’ Her frankness, the day Des shared his plans for leaving home, had been her sole effort towards maternity.
Her mother read the postcard and then turned it over to inspect the picture of the liner, like a child’s white toy on an improbably blue sea.
‘D’you think he’ll be safe?’ She was frightened he might drown but dared not let her only daughter see how badly she missed the boy she had raised as her own.
‘Oh, Des’ll be all right. I don’t expect we’ll hear much of him from now on.’
Trisha, taking revenge on her mother for her preoccupation with her lost daughter, had given nothing to her own son other than her knack of sensing what mattered to people, and thus where they were most vulnerable.
Vi would never have set foot in the King Edward Lounge if it hadn’t been for Renato. She had wandered back to her room before lunch and found him busily spraying the TV screen. When she wiped her eyes and blew her nose he had turned sulky.
It is foolhardy to quarrel with someone in a position to make one’s daily life uncomfortable. Vi, taking stock, asked, ‘Where was it you said there was dancing, Renato? I might take a look after lunch.’
Renato brightened and made a token wipe over the TV screen with a damp cloth. ‘Deck Seven, same one as the spa. You come back doing the cha-cha-cha. You see, the cha-cha-cha not difficult for a lady like you.’
Of the many tyrannies which constrain us, Vi thought, it is extraordinary how pervasive are those that persuade us to follow other people’s notions of what we want rather than our own desires. It was easier to give in to Renato than to resist. But that had been her life’s strategy; it was no one’s fault but her own.
She settled herself in an out-of-the-way table by a window in the King Edward Lounge. A waiter with unnaturally blue eyes came over and rapidly recited the repertoire of available teas. She ordered a pot of Darjeeling and rejected the offer of sandwiches and pastries.
At the other end of the room, the band was assembling and she watched as a man with thinning hair extracted a trumpet from its case. Stooped over, his back straining the seams of his jacket, he looked a discouraged figure. Once, she thought, he had probably had musical ambitions and now he was reduced to playing in a third-rate band.
The waiter, whose badge disclosed that he was called Boris, brought her tea and asked her name.
‘Do you need it for the bill?’ His eyes were such an extraordinary blue that she wondered if they could be contact lenses.
‘I ask to be polite, madam. There is no charge, of course.’
Vi decided they were not lenses and, rather unwillingly, gave her name. Not that it was hers anyway. When all was said and done it belonged to Ted.
Ted. How he would have enjoyed drinking tea in the King Edward Lounge. All the years they were married she had been aware, even when she pushed it to the back of her mind, that he longed for her to say something like ‘Let’s go on a cruise together’—or ‘Let’s sell up and go and live in Corfu’. Anything to show that she saw their life together as that of a couple.
But you cannot make yourself a couple, or anything real, by willing it.
Other members of the band had arrived and were unpacking their instruments. The sax player, a young man with a shaved head and a wealth of necklaces, was joshing the trumpeter and she could hear from his tone that the trumpeter was answering back with good-tempered
