The Hope (20 page)

The next day, at his wife’s urging, he sent a note of apology to every member in which he agreed to let them play any sort of music they wished as long as he could remain conductor.

The old state room proved an ideal ballroom. It had been virtually unused since the launching of the
Hope
. People sauntered through it now and then to admire the grand chandelier and the gold-leaf patterns swirling around the ceiling, and then, worn out after so much sauntering, they would perch for a minute on the gilt chairs. Word of mouth about the room’s new purpose spread fast, and the opening-night celebrations were protracted and enthusiastically attended. If you asked Bellini now, he would tell you it had been his intention all along to establish a popular institution.

“You need to know what people want,” he would say, “and fulfill that particular need. That is the way to success,
mio amico
.”

It came as a surprise to the orchestra when, on the evening after Bellini’s fourth sleepless night in a row, just before the dancing was due to begin, the important conductor suggested a midnight rehearsal afterwards in his cabin for the brass section. The greatest element of the surprise was not the time of the rehearsal but the very idea of rehearsing at all. They had been playing the same stuff for over twenty years now. The horsehair of their bows had grown thin on these pieces. Their reeds had split and their brass had tarnished from the repetition of familiar tunes. No one needed his or her score any more, although some put it out on the stand for old times’ sake (and to play Hangman with their neighbours in the breaks between numbers). To rehearse? Was Signor Bellini feeling unwell? Straight away, a vote was called for. Their brass-playing brethren would surely not tolerate the unconstitutional demands of their conductor.

Then Bellini perverted the course of democracy by indicating that he wanted to see, in the privacy of his cabin, how loud the brass section could play. He felt they were not pulling their weight. The brass section immediately resolved that rehearsal was not such a bad thing after all, they were a little rusty and it would do them good to go over their parts without the rest of the orchestra. So, the matter was decided.

All things considered, Maria took the midnight intrusion of two trumpets, a French horn and a trombone extraordinarily well. In her billowing nightgown she raved at her husband and threatened all kinds of terrible things, but in the end it took him only ten minutes to pacify her, using all the tenderest nicknames at his disposal –
scimmietta, olocausta, scoppia.
He knew she was pacified because she merely shut the bedroom door on him rather than slamming it.

Bellini arranged the brass section around the cabin, chose a ponderous waltz for them to play, exhorted them to blow for all they were worth, waved his baton, counted them in…

Arnold Montgomery’s father, David Montgomery, had always sworn he would die from choking on a fishbone.

“Since they got rid of that chappie in the kitchens, the one who killed old George Barnes with a poisoned fish – and not just George, mark you, but nearly half the upper decks – the standard of food in this place has dropped appallingly. That chef might have been a psychopath but he could cook damned well! Never have thought of him as the killer-type, but there you are. It’s always the quiet ones, eh? Take a look at this. Fillet? Ha! It’s a mass of bones, I tell you. One day, I’m going to choke on one of these.”

So saying, he would hold an inch-long bone up for inspection, and Arnold would offer to check the fish over for him.

“Leave it alone, my boy. When I die, I want it to be either while I’m eating or while I’m screwing.”

In the end it turned out to be, as he had often predicted, while he was eating. In the middle of a tirade against the violence of youths on the lower decks, David Montgomery made a gargling sound, fell back in his seat, napkin flying, and jabbed a finger at his mouth. A large proportion of the other diners shrieked and ran out of the hall to stick two fingers down their throats, fearing a repeat of the food poisoning that had accounted for twenty-three of their acquaintances a year ago, but Arnold boldly ran round behind his father’s chair and tried to introduce two fingers into his father’s throat. He felt blunt teeth and slobbering tongue around his knuckles. He reached in further. His father raised several strong objections to this treatment, lips struggling to form words around his son’s hand while his face turned red and then blue and then purple.

Arnold seemed to take a very long time extricating the fishbone. His thoughts, in fact, were not intent on saving the life of his dear old dad but on the old man’s delightful cabin, a far cry from the hovel he and Tracy shared on M deck; on the number of times he had tried to persuade his father that he would be happier living on M deck, and that Tracy and he were thinking of starting a family and wanted somewhere nice and large for David’s grandchildren to be brought up; on the insistence with which his father maintained they would have to wait until he was well and truly dead.

For anyone watching this domestic drama closely, it might have appeared that at this crucial juncture Arnold balled his hand into a fist inside his father’s mouth, but surely it could not have been his intention to cut off the old man’s air supply? Ridiculous! Fortunately, none of the other diners was interested enough to watch. Those that were not running outside to induce spontaneous vomiting were keeping their heads down thanking God they had ordered the corned beef. And if Arnold had tried to suffocate his father … well, he was only speeding up nature’s course a tiny bit. And besides, he was all tears at the funeral and many of his friends commended him on his efforts to save the old man.

Arnold and Tracy were delighted to move, at the Captain’s request, into David Montgomery’s cabin the following Monday. Immediately they sorted out the old man’s personal possessions, dividing them into things that seemed to be of value and things that did not. They took the rubbish and the valuables downstairs. The rubbish went on the nearest convenient tip, the valuables to Bart’s, where a good bargain was struck. At least, Bart thought it was a good bargain. Arnold had been born into a wealthy family, so he had never had much of a head for figures.

In their transport of grief (or excitement), the Montgomerys overlooked one thing. The old man had been an inveterate hoarder of food. He used to go down to Bart’s frequently and buy black market tins, planning for the day when the
Hope
finally ran out of food. The Montgomerys threw several boxes on to a rubbish tip on P deck in the belief that they contained books or something equally useless. The boxes contained tins of food, and all but one was scavenged within an hour. The last, containing ham, peas, carrots and raspberries, was accidentally buried beneath the surface of the tip and waited a whole day to be found.

Arnold and Tracy celebrated their first night in their new cabin with a bottle of champagne from the old man’s private stock, chased down with a spot of strenuous family raising. This practice continued unabated for the next three nights, despite the poor condition of dear departed David Montgomery’s old bed and the intrusion on the fourth night by that fat Italian from below. Likewise, this evening – the same evening that Signor Bellini decided to hold an informal brass gathering – Arnold had suggested a bit of provisional child-rearing and Tracy was quick to agree.

Roughly halfway through attempt number three, a sound came from beneath them like the heavens opening and the Trump of Doom blaring and God’s mighty hand reaching down to earth. It fair put Arnold off his stroke.

The fanfare continued for a full hour with only occasional breaks. For the most part it was musical gibberish, hinting at the tunes of the popular dances, but more significantly it was deafeningly loud musical gibberish. Clamour rose throughout the deck area and a deputation went down to bang on Bellini’s door. Naturally, they could not make themselves heard and so went miserably back to bed and pulled the covers over their heads, praying for it to stop. At last it did and an apocalyptic hush descended. Even the ship’s engines appeared to have quietened themselves down in respectful awe.

Then a still, small voice spoke from one of the cabins: “That bloody fat bastard!”

Signor Bellini raised his baton for the third number of the evening, that perennial favourite “The Blue Danube”. There was a particularly good turnout tonight. Although that beautiful lady was missing, the one who often complimented him on his excellent conducting and smiled on him like an angel, several young couples had inexplicably decided all at once to observe and participate in the noble art of ballroom dancing.

If they are serious, said Bellini to himself, I shall have to think about setting up dancing classes. They look quite well-to-do. There will have to be a small subscription fee, of course.

He felt encouraged that the ballroom might have a secure financial future. Not having met Arnold and Tracy Montgomery face to face, he did not recognise them in the crowd, and he could not have known that the young couples were the Montgomerys’ friends. Had he done so, he might have smelled the proverbial rat and been on his guard.

Four bars into the waltz, he realised that the violins were a semitone sharp and the trumpets were a semitone flat.

If you can imagine a hundred cats in a room where the floor was wired up to a generator supplying 250-volt shocks in three-four time, you might have some idea of the quality of the Bellini Orchestra’s rendition of “The Blue Danube”. You might prefer to have listened to the crashing scratches and jumps of the music at the Neptune’s Trident.

The dancers were torn between outrage and epileptic hilarity. The former gradually gave way to the latter, and the ballroom was filled to the chandelier with elegantly dressed guffaws. Bellini banged his baton on the rostrum to no avail. The orchestra carried blindly on, themselves trying not to dissipate into a giggling heap. For one flautist it was all too much. She blew a shrill peep into her instrument and doubled over in her chair, gasping and crying with laughter. The music continued in perfect dissonance.

Bellini chose to ride it out.

I am a dolphin on the wave, he thought.

His baton waving grew quite energetic as the red of his face deepened to scarlet and then burgundy, and his body doubled in size. The laughter behind him threatened to drown out the orchestra and it was all directed at him, the conductor. After all, when things went wrong you did not laugh at a group of people, you did not laugh at violinists or trumpeters, you laughed at the conductor, the important one, the man in control.

Bellini was thankful Maria had refused to come tonight, among the many other things she had told him this morning she refused to do as a consequence of the midnight rehearsal. Furthermore, he hoped Montgomery considered however much he had bribed the orchestra as money well spent.

“It is war, my
prodigalita
,” Bellini told his wife when he returned to the cabin after the evening’s debacle. The young couples had departed swiftly after “The Blue Danube” while the older folk tried to regain a semblance of dignity and order, although it was difficult for them to avoid the odd smirk. As for the orchestra, they played for the rest of the night with innocent precision, as if nothing had happened. Out of tune? Them?

“Yes, Gian,” said Maria in the manner in which she had been speaking to him for the past day, unenthusiastically.

“Out-and-out war,” he continued, dipping his legs into his pyjama bottoms. “We are families at war. I, even Paolo, wherever he is, we are at war with the Montgomerys. I have been insulted.”

“Do not bring Paolo’s name into this.”

“I find it hard to mention that ingrate’s name at all.”

“Ingrate! Who was it who threw him out of the cabin?”

“I admit I did, but it was only so that you and I might have some privacy, and Paolo must learn to fend for himself.”

“And he must be grateful to you for that?”

“Exactly.”

“Sometimes I do not believe I know you at all.”

“There is much to know about me,” said Bellini smugly.

“Yes, Gian. Turn the light out and go to bed.”

He obeyed. On the way back into the main cabin where he had been consigned to sleep on the floor, he remarked to her: “It is like
Romeo and Juliet
.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“I shall take the play out from the library tomorrow. I shall see if it has any message for me as to how to deal with those
bastardi
.”

Bellini knew the story of
Romeo and Juliet
from the opera by his better-known namesake, but the Shakespeare version which he borrowed from the library the next day did not shed new light or open new doors for him, partly because he found the English hard to understand and partly because, as Maria had implied, the plot bore little relevance to his situation. The conclusion, however, with the lovers dead and entombed together, struck a resonant chord in his scheming brain. He slept on it, in as much as he was allowed to sleep.

Signor Bellini’s movements during the following morning could best be described as furtive and mysterious. The furtiveness was that of a humiliated man scared to show his face in public. The mystery lay in the nature of the places he visited.

The night before, the orchestra had behaved themselves and the only dancers had been the regulars, but Bellini went home quickly when the dances were over, not daring to meet anyone’s eye. Very early the next morning he went down to Bart’s before it officially opened and persuaded Bart by waving a sum of money beneath his nose to allow him to make some private purchases. Bart was not a man to ask questions unless he was establishing whether a customer’s credit was good and he discreetly supplied the s
ignor
with everything he needed.

With his purchases bundled under his coat, Bellini visited the individual members of his brass section and spent a short time with each, leaving with a handshake and a wave. It took him the best part of the morning to complete his rounds, up and down decks, travelling dozens of walkways and gangplanks and companionways until he was quite out of breath.