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Roxburgh.
    So much so, he was moved closer to his wife, laughing without constraint, and pinched her on the chin. She might have been a child, not theirs, certainly (he would have been more guarded in the presence of their own) but a sympathetic substitute who would not grow up to accuse him, however mutely, of the folly of bringing her into the world.
    ‘I can’t express my feelings adequately,’ Mr Roxburgh blurted.
    That was obvious enough as he teetered with a joy and relief to which he was unaccustomed, the long, fastidious hands inspired to gestures equally foreign to them. The husband had never danced with his wife, yet at the moment, she sensed, they almost might have begun. Given more suitable conditions, she would have guided him through a few judicious steps guaranteed not to unbalance his importance or his dignity. Nobody must see him without those.
    Instead Mrs Roxburgh made the effort to control her own obstreperous exhilaration. ‘Quietly! Quietly, though!’ she advised. ‘You might bring on one of your attacks.’
    ‘My attacks!’ he snorted.
    At his moments of extravagance he wanted no one to present him with the bill; he was wealthy enough to ignore reason when it suited him.
    ‘When you are so much improved,’ she remarked perhaps imprudently.
    Austin Roxburgh was so far provoked that he pouted. To be coddled was intolerable; on the other hand, to be ignored might have struck him as worse.
    ‘Do you know where your drops are?’ she persisted in her role of solicitous wife.
    ‘Of course,’ he snapped, yet was in sufficient doubt to start working a couple of fingers around inside a waistcoat pocket.
    Mrs Roxburgh touched him to dispel an anxiety she could see rising. Her own eyes were filling and frowning at the same time; she too may have felt in need of some drug, tenderness rather than digitalis. But whatever the illness from which either suffered, the interior of the wooden ship shimmered an instant with stimulated hopes and tranquillized fears.
    When footsteps were again heard, of a flatter, more slithery persuasion than before. The ‘fellow’ who waited on them had taken advantage of the captain’s absence to ease a bunion by leaving off his boots. The horny feet slapping the boards gave out a sound not unlike that of a razor in conjunction with the strop.
    Spurgeon the steward (cook too, Mrs Roxburgh fancied) was a somehow disappointed character whose reactions were on the mournful side. His attempts at cleanliness failed to deceive, yet in spite of it all, they had grown attached to him, and it amused Mr Roxburgh, if not Spurgeon, to tease the fellow out of himself.
    ‘Well, Spurgeon, we’re about to embark on the next stage of our Odyssey,’ the gentleman launched his evening joke. ‘When we reach the island I trust you’ll find your Penelope has waited for you.’
    Spurgeon had long since given up expecting sense from any member of the educated classes, so did not bother to rack his brains, but grumbled in undertone to satisfy the superiors he was unable to avoid. The cloth he flung billowed an instant from his fingertips before settling miraculously on the table, its chart spread for further inspection. Many an imaginary voyage had Mrs Roxburgh traced round the continents and archipelagos of the saloon table-cloth.
    Sight of the familiar, grubby cloth inspired her to fresh attempts at winning their steward’s approval. ‘Look, Spurgeon, my flower is still alive’ she indicated the teasel in its jar as though it were the symbol of some conspiracy between them.
    ‘I wouldn’ know that,’ he replied without deigning to look. ‘There’s a lot in this part of the world that looks alive when it’s dead, and vicey versy.’
    He continued absorbed by a problem of cutlery until somebody stuck his head through the doorway.
    ‘Hey, Mr Spurgeon,’ a boy called in what he might have hoped a voice the passengers would not hear, ‘the chook’s all but fell apart.’
    Spurgeon