My shirt was no longer a shirt, but just a limp and sticky rag soaked with sweat. My feet ached from the fierce heat of the steel deck plates. My forehead, under the peaked white cap, ached from the ever-increasing constriction of the leather band that made scalping only a matter of time. My eyes ached from the steely glitter of reflected sunlight from metal, water, and whitewashed harbour buildings. And my throat ached, from pure thirst. I was acutely unhappy. I was unhappy. The crew was unhappy. The passengers were unhappy. Captain Bullen was unhappy and this last made me doubly unhappy, not because of any tenderness of feeling that, I entertained towards the captain, but because when things went wrong with Captain Bullen he invariably took it out of his Chief Officer. I was his Chief Officer. I was bending over the rail, listening to the creak of wire and wood and watching our after jumbo derrick take the strain as it lifted a particularly large crate from the quayside, when a hand touched my arm.

Captain Bullen again, I thought drearily; it had been at least half an hour since he’d been around last to talk to me about my shortcomings, and then I realised that, whatever the Captain’s caprices, wearing Chanel. No. He wasn’t one of them. This would be Miss Beresford. And it was. In addition to the Chanel, she was wearing a white silk dress and that quizzical, half-amused smile that made most of the other officers turn mental cartwheels and handsprings but served only to irritate me. I have my weaknesses, but tall, cool, sophisticated, and worldly young women with a slightly malicious sense of humour is not one of them.

“Good afternoon, Mr. First Officer,” she said sweetly. She had a soft, musical voice with hardly a hint of superiority or condescension when talking to the lower orders like myself, just enough to show that she had been to the best school and college in the east and I hadn’t. “We’ve been wondering where you were. You are not usually an absentee at aperitif time.”