“I don’t suppose it is, sir,” I acknowledged. Captain Bullen refused to address him as “Your Grace,” and I’d be damned if I’d do it either. “But the best I could think up on the spur of the moment.” He nodded as though satisfied and returned to attack his hors d’oeuvre. Old Beresford eyed him speculatively, Mrs. Beresford half-smilingly, Miss Harcourt the cinema actress — admiringly, while Miss Beresford herself just kept on treating us to an uninterrupted view of the auburn bouffant.
There’s little enough to do during off-duty hours at sea, and I watching developments at the captain’s table would make a very entertaining pastime indeed. What promised to make it even more entertaining was the very considerable interest being taken in the captain’s table by the young man seated at the foot of my own table.
One of the passengers who had joined at Carracio. Tony Carreras — my guess that he was Miguel Carreras’ son had been a correct and far from difficult one — was by any odds the most extraordinarily handsome man who’d ever passed through the dining-room door of the Campari. In one way this might not have signified much as it takes many years to amass sufficient cash to sail on the Campari even for a weekend and young men were in a tiny minority at any time, but nevertheless there was no denying his impact. Even at close-up range there was none of that weakness, that almost effeminate regularity of feature so often found in the faces of many very good-looking men. He looked for all the world like a slightly Latinate reincarnation of a younger Errol Flynn, but harder, tougher, more enduring. The only flaw, if one could call it flaw, lay in the eyes. There seemed to be something ever so slightly wrong with them, as if the pupils were slightly flattened, giving a hard, bright glitter. May be it was just the lighting at the table. But there was nothing wrong with them as eyes; he had twenty-twenty vision all right and was using it all to study the captain’s table. Miss Beresford or Miss Harcourt, I couldn’t be sure which; he didn’t look the kind of man who would waste his time studying any of the others at that table. The courses came and went. Antoine was on duty in the kitchen that night, and you could almost reach out and feel the blissful hush that descended on the company.
Velvet footed Goanese waiters moved soundlessly on the dark grey pile of the Persian carpet; food appeared and vanished as if in a dream; an arm always appeared at the precisely correct moment with the precisely correct wine. But never for me. I drank soda water. It was in my contract. The coffee appeared. This was the moment when I had to earn my money. When Antoine was on duty and on top of his form, conversation was a desecration and a hallowed hush of appreciation, an almost cathedral ecstasy, was the correct form. But about forty minutes of this rapturous silence was about par for the course. It couldn’t and never did go on. I never yet met a rich manor woman, for that matter of it who didn’t list talking, chiefly and preferably about themselves, as among their favourite occupations. And the prime target for their observations was invariably the officer who sat at the head of the table. I looked round ours and wondered who would set the ball rolling.
Miss Harrbride, her original Central-European name was unpronounceable — thin, scrawny, sixtyish, and tough as whalebone, who had made a fortune out of highly expensive and utterly worthless cosmetic preparations which she wisely refrained from using on herself? Mr. Greenstreet, her husband, a grey anonymity of a man with a grey sunken face, who had married her for heaven only knew what reason, for he was a very wealthy man in his own right? Tony Carreras? His father, Miguel Carreras? There should have been a sixth at my table, to replace the Curtis family of three who, along with the Harrisons, had been so hurriedly called home from Kingston, but the old man who had come aboard in his wheel chair was apparently to have his meals served in his cabin during the voyage, with his nurses in attendance. Four men and one woman; it made an ill-balanced table.
Senor Miguel Carreras spoke first. “The Campari’s prices, Mr. Carter, are quite atrocious,” he said calmly. He puffed appreciatively at his cigar. “Robbery on the high seas would be a very fitting description. On the other hand, the cuisine is as claimed. You have a chef of divine gifts. It is perhaps not too much to pay for a foretaste of a better world.”
This made Senor Carreras very wealthy indeed and was old hat to me. Wealthy men never mentioned money, lest they be thought not to have enough of it. Very wealthy men, on the other hand, to whom money as such no longer mattered, had no such inhibitions. The passengers on the Campari complained all the time about the prices. And they kept coming back.
“From all accounts, sir, ‘divine’ is just about right. Experienced travellers who have stayed in the best hotels on both sides of the Atlantic maintain that Antoine has no equal in either Europe or America. Except, perhaps, Henriques.”
“Henriques?”
“Our alternate chef. He’s on to-morrow.”
“Do I detect a certain immodesty, Mr. Carter, in advancing the claims of the Campari?” there was no offence meant, not with that smile. “I don’t think so, sir. But the next twenty-four hours will speak for themselves — and Henriques — better than I can.”
“Touche!” he smiled again and reached for the bottle of Remy Martin — the waiters vanished at coffee time. “And the prices?”
“They’re terrible,” I agreed. I told that to all the passengers and it seemed to please them. “We offer what no other ship in the world offers, but the prices are still scandalous. At least a dozen people in this room at this very moment have told me that — and most of them are here for at least their third trip.”
“You make your point, Mr. Carter.” It was Tony Carreras speaking and his voice was as one might have expected slow, controlled, with a deep resonant timbre. He looked at his father. “Remember the waiting list at the Blue Mail’s offices?”
“Indeed. We were pretty far down the list and what a list. Half the millionaires in Central and South America. I suppose we may consider ourselves fortunate, Mr. Carter, in that we were the only ones able to accept at such short notice after the sudden departure of our predecessors in Jamaica. But don’t forget that to catch the boat we had to make a hurried four-hundred-mile dash from the capital to Carracio by air and road. And what roads!” Senor Carreras obviously didn’t share the Carracio agent’s respectful terror of the revolutionary government.
I wondered how a man of Carreras’ obviously aristocratic background had been able to retain his obvious wealth in the face of the forces of change that had overcome and completely wiped out the old order — and why, if money was so desperately short on the island, he was allowed to convert very large sums of it into dollars to pay for this cruise, or how and why he had been able to leave the island at all. But I kept my wonderings to myself. Instead I said, “You’re still a long way off the record, Senor Carreras. Last trip we had a family from Santiago and two men from Beirut, both of whom had flown to New York specially for the round voyage.”