King of the Sea

Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Not that she understood it, that strange magic which held the sexes in t****l to one another, often against their better judgement and self-interest. (Though happily such degrading mutual s*****y was not the case with her and Francis.) She was not sure she even wanted to understand it. She regretted those necessary little rituals by which men refurbish their adoration and the race renews itself. Ever since Daphne Troughton, as she then was, had whispered the Awful Truth to her, the day they flew their kites on Highbury Fields, she had been terrified of marry ing a man who was not of the very finest type - by which she meant one who would trouble her as infrequently as possible; her family's connections with shipping had naturally made the choice of a seafaring man doubly desirable, given her feelings on the matter.

Francis had been very good about it. And she had rewarded him with three fine children - or young sters they were by now. In fact, Neil, at twenty, was really a young man; and as for Lawrence, why it seemed only yesterday he had started shaving and here he was, eighteen next month already. How swiftly childhood fled, even though some particular days of it had dragged like centuries!

They had even arrived in the order she had plan ned: two boys and a girl Neil and Lawrence, the apples of their father's eye, and Catherine, her mama's own little darling... For some reason her contemplation of her perfect little family (such a sensible number for an intelligent couple to have, such an example to the poor) failed to bring its usual glow of satisfaction.

Clouds were beginning to intrude upon that hitherto sunstruck scene.

Neil should not have been quite so reluctant to take up his cadetship on the Orestes. That had wounded Francis, though he hadn't said so openly. Orestes was the flagship of the Union Line and Neil's father and grandfather had put their own credit in the balance to get him the position; in the circumstances he might have shown just a little more gratitude. (Also, to be fair, the Union Line could have shown just a little more understanding. True, Neil's mistakes had been costly, but a beginner can't be expected to get every thing right from the word go, can he?)

When it came to filial gratitude, Lawrence had behaved little better. All his life he'd known he was intended for the Baltic; one day he'd be chairman there, too, like his grandfather - just as Neil would one day inherit his father's reputation as the finest of masters in the Mercantile Marine. It was all very well for Daphne to wax philosophical and say airily,

""twas ever thus ... ever since the Ancient Greeks, anyway." (Oedipus, was it? Daphne had spent far too much of her youth reading the most unsuitable literature and still did, come to that.) One more episode like last Saturday, when Lawrence and his unsavoury chum Billy Attwater had spent the after. noon in the dinghy they'd built, racing the Hansa one more down to Tilbury (the very ship whose manifest Law rence ought to have been tallying!) drama like that and Lawrence would be out on his ear. What was so difficult about being at your desk at the appointed hour on the appointed days and carry ing bids to agents and owners and bringing back their replies and keeping proper records of every thing? Yet to hear the lad talk about it you'd think they were asking him to leap over St Paul's every day and twice on Sundays.

Thank God for daughters! Catherine at least was the one nugget of unalloyed gold among her children. She had more faculty than both her brothers put together, if truth were told and why should it not be told in this day and age, Hilda wondered? There seemed to be nothing the girl could not pick up once she set her mind to it. In fact, the difficulty with Catherine the only difficulty was in steering her away from unsuitable things for a girl to pick up, like navigation when Neil had all those difficulties in understanding it, or obscure systems of weights and measures when Lawrence had come home complain ing about "tons-tallow and tons-cubic and tons-my eye-and-Mrs-O'Grady."

 You only needed to watch her looking up things like that in Parnall's Handy Household Reference and you could actually see her eyes darting here and there about the page, sorting it out at a rate of knots, like a card player's eyes when arranging a new-dealt hand. She always beat her brothers at cards, too, because she had memorized all the mathematical chances of getting this or that winning combination until Lawrence had twig ged, of course. Now he usually scooped the kitty.

And yet, for all her cleverness, Catherine remained so modest and biddable, so unspoiled, such a sensible girl, as everybody said of her. Not even Daphne, who always thought the jovial worst of everyone, could fault Catherine. She had to content herself with vague warnings like, "one day that girl will confound us all. Wait till she turns sixteen!"

Only three months to go now! But Daphne was wrong. Catherine wouldn't change. Yes, thank God for Catherine. And thank God, too, that the remainder of her girlhood vision was intact: the fine home, the loyal servants, the good friends.

Highbury had been a natural choice for the Mor gans, quite apart from the fact that Hilda herself had grown up there. For some reason, without anyone on the Baltic convening a committee and deciding it should be so, this particular village on the fringe of London had attracted large numbers of people "in shipping." Not Old Highbury, where Daphne and Brian Dowty lived up around Highbury Fields. That area had enjoyed its heyday a century earlier and was now past it, a little raffish, in fact. Not absolutely raffish, of course, or not even Daphne would live there, but relatively so, when contrasted with the extremely respectable people who lived in Highbury New Park. 

It was a wonderful sight on a warm Sunday in summer to see them all parading to and from St Augustine's to hear that fine preacher, the Rev. Prebendary Gordon Calthrop preach his impressive sermons. Up and down they went, with their tall toppers ironed and polished, their black tail coats brushed and brushed again, their lovat-grey trousers still warm from the press, set off by the blinding white of their ties and waistcoats, and their yellow or mauve gloves spotless, their black boots vying to outshine the silver knobs of their canes, and the flowers in their buttonholes fresh snipped from the conservatory on their way out. it was a brave and beautiful sight. One wag had called it, "the Baltic at prayer."