Page 146 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

The last few days of any voyage always seem interminable; this was no
exception. I seemed to spend a lot of time with Sally, whom I decided was pleasant
but a bit of a flibbertigibbet; she was very keen to be with me on the rather flaccid
Calypso Night, but a subsequent visit to my cabin resulted in talk and very little
else, and by that time I rather felt myself to be beyond touchy-feely.
Two days later we berthed in Le Havre. Oddly enough, this was in reality
the most ‘foreign’ port on the voyage, even after a trip that encompassed some
unusual spots. For a start, relations between the two nations were frosty, as they
long had been (Churchill is often quoted as saying, “The hardest cross I have to
bear is the Cross of Lorraine”, almost certainly words of another wrongly ascribed
to him, but pithily apposite), the locals had no desire to communicate in English,
and de Gaulle was pressing hard to exclude UK from European affairs; he wished
to divorce France from the Anglo-American hegemony, and was doing so by
exerting his political endeavours towards French rapprochement with Germany.
Secondly, it hardly seemed worthwhile to stop in France; there were virtually
no passengers leaving the ship, and cargo was of little moment (one could only
conclude that the destination had historical justification; when Arcadia and others
were operating as originally planned, each could have held several thousand tons
of meat and dairy, but Oriana simply wasn’t in that trade).

But this was all quite insignificant in relation to things that really mattered.
Late in the evening I bumped into Karen, fortuitously, or so I thought, and she
invited me to a midnight liaison in her cabin. Naturally I was not going to refuse
such an offer and was delighted to see upon entry that Vicki was nowhere to be
seen. However, this was plainly not to be a smooch or a sexual dalliance; she
evidently wished to become better acquainted. I realised after a fairly brief talk
that I had been a complete ass, misread obvious signs, and completely ‘missed the
boat’. This was an intelligent girl, had worthwhile opinions on almost everything,
though her predilection for poetry was not one that I shared, and with whose
company the voyage from Vancouver could have been far more enjoyable. All I
could do was exchange UK addresses and leave her cabin feeling quite the fool
(an emotion with which I was becoming all too familiar).

The vagaries of the mail were such that I received in Le Havre a letter from
David, a bit silly as we were due in Southampton the following morning. He had
little to report other than that he had hitched up with a certain Louise. This girl
I knew, but vaguely; our respective mothers had many years before been great
friends and the two of them had given birth on the same day, one to David, the
other to Louise. The families had grown apart, and we had last seen them some
ten years before; of Louise I had no recollection. However, he reported her to be
rather nice; more to the point, she lived close to the Docks. Of this I made a note;
in the interim I had a pleasing day off at home.

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