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brilliant as glass, were cutting through my dreams. I said I’d been sent over to supervise the transportation of my uncle’s European art collection now that American import duties had been abolished. It wasn’t quite the truth. Jack was in charge of that sort of thing, though I had signed papers on the Trust’s behalf.
    ‘You mean to tell me,’ she cried, ‘that all those wonderful Rubenses and Rembrandts are down in the hold this very moment?’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘There was a postponement due to the miners’ strike. The shipment will follow later.’
    ‘And will you come back again to keep an eye on things?’
    I said I rather thought I wouldn’t. There followed a dreary interlude in which she pressed me to explain what import duties entailed. I wasn’t clear myself and tried to change the subject, mentioning I had been working for the previous year on the design of the Titanic , though leaving out my involvement with plumbing.
    She seemed loath to drop the subject of my uncle’s paintings, or rather the difficulties surrounding the consignment, which was both puzzling and disappointing. I had thought our conversation was developing rather differently and had even been getting up steam to suggest a stroll on deck.
    ‘It’s a fearful responsibility,’ she said. ‘being in charge of such valuable works of art.’
    ‘Or would have been,’ I said.
    ‘But then, of course, you have your associates aboard.’
    ‘What associates?’ I said. ‘I haven’t any associates.’
    ‘I thought I saw you with someone in the foyer . . . earlier, before we anchored off Cherbourg.’
    ‘I was with Melchett,’ I told her. ‘We made a tour of the lower decks. It was quite an experience. Perhaps tomorrow you’d like me to show you below. As a member of Mr Andrews’ design team I can go anywhere I want.’
    ‘Perhaps,’ she said, without enthusiasm, and something, some illumination of the soul, died in her eyes and soon after she turned away and gave her attention to Molly Dodge.
    Aggrieved, I took myself off to the smoke-room where I found Charlie Melchett making calculations on the back of an envelope. Ginsberg had come up with the idea of making a book on the time of our arrival in New York. Apparently the steerage passengers had rigged up a blackboard on the third class promenade down on the stern of Cdeck and were taking money quite openly.
    ‘We can’t lay bets,’ said Hopper, ‘till we’ve studied form. We have to know average speed and take weather conditions into consideration.’
    ‘Twenty-four knots,’ Charlie ventured, and was shouted down by Ginsberg who knew for a fact that we couldn’t go beyond twenty-one or twenty-two. ‘We haven’t the coal to go full speed. I reckon we’ll do no more than twenty, and that only if we’ve got the weather on our side.’
    Someone tapped my shoulder; it was the fat man I had seen earlier in the company of Scurra and old Seefax. He said, without preamble, ‘Where is she?’
    ‘She?’ I said.
    ‘Is she with him?’
    ‘Him?’ I said.
    His eyes were enormous, like an infant’s, and lachrymose. There was a vacant chair against the wall and he pulled it forward and sat heavily down. I thought that showed cheek, but there was something in his expression, a mixture of hope and extreme resolve, that held me.
    ‘I think you are a friend of his,’ he said. ‘I would like your opinion of him.’ He had a curious accent which for no immediate reason I found familiar. His intonation was Jewish, of course, but his vowels were oddly flat.
    I said, ‘I haven’t the least idea who you’re talking about.’
    ‘The man disfigured in a fencing duel.’
    We stared at one another.
    ‘The man with the dent in his mouth,’ he urged, patting his lip with one podgy finger. ‘The man with the gift of the gab.’
    I almost smiled, it being such an apt description. All the same, I protested I scarcely knew Scurra and had only learnt his name that afternoon.
    ‘But