Sunday, September 30, 2012.
New England-Canada Cruise Journal, Day Ten: At Sea.
I have the perfect book to read during a passage on a British ocean liner. The Franchise Affair is a 1948 mystery novel by Josephine Tey, the pen name of a Scottish author who wrote a fair number of successful books from the 1920s into the 1950s. She was so reclusive that not much is known about her. The book involves a somewhat crusty, unmarried, middle-aged gentleman's attorney whose firm only deals with wills and other upper-class stuff. Suddenly, he finds himself involved in a case of kidnapping. I'm about halfway through it and have no idea where it's going, but the setting and the language fit perfectly with the milieu aboard the Queen Mary 2. I read a few chapters of it while wearing a tuxedo.
The Britannia dining room, where most passengers have their meals, has been culinarily unimpressive throughout this voyage. But a few items have been excellent, and consistently so. One of those is the French toast at breakfast. The bread they use for it is basic white, cut it about two inches thick, soaked generously with the custard mixture. I think they bake it rather than grill it. In any case, I now find myself ordering it most days. As I do the "English sausage," a thick, short link with a crackly skin and an herbal flavor.
A Code Alpha announcement went out in the predawn. Code Alpha means that someone on the ship is seriously ill. This is inevitable with over five thousand people aboard the ship for ten days--especially when a large percentage of them are elderly.
But this patient was a crew member, and only in his forties. He couldn't be roused this morning, and was in a coma. The drama that ensued underlined everything else happening on the ship today. The ship detoured toward the New Brunswick coast, where a Canadian clipper ship would take the man to the hospital. Everything about the plan was complex, taking the QM2 seven hours out of its way. The two boats would meet in thick fog and rough seas.
Among the trivial dislocations caused by this emergency was the moving of the venue where passengers would have auditioned for tonight's talent show. That room was needed for the rendezvous of the ship and the clipper. Not a big deal, because only two people turned up for the audition: a lady who said she'd rather not appear if only a few people were in the show, and me. They sampled my version of Night and Day twice anyway. A dozen or people in the Chart Room listened with passing interest. So I got what I wanted, sort of.
Mary Ann's dislike of foggy sea days was further degraded by sudden, really bad cold symptoms. She stayed in the room most of the day. Meanwhile, the winds were whipping up, and the ship was trying to make up lost time. This gave the vessel more rock and roll than we had experienced on this voyage. I suspect that they pulled the stabilizers in to get more speed. It wasn't really bad, but MA's threshold for ship motion is low.
She missed the best dinner the Britannia would serve. I guess they were showing off on this, the restaurant's final formal night. My opening order was for a half-dozen escargots bourguignonne. Then a perfect, hot (it would have helped MA's cold) consomme. Chateaubriand marchand de vin with bearnaise sauce next. For dessert, both baked Alaska and a vanilla soufflee were available; I had both. ("Why not? Same price!" said a waiter on one of our earliest cruises.)
In addition to all the above, this was lobster night. Good as that sounds, these were the generic cold-water lobsters that come from New Zealand, Australian, and South Africa--tails only, because they have no heads of claws to speak of. A few people ordered two of those and said they were decent, but I didn't want to sully the memory of those fantastic Canadian crustaceans we had a few days ago in Nova Scotia.
Spent the rest of the evening in the Chart Room with Mark Hodgson's marvelous jazz trio. When he wrapped up his final set with the Johnny Mercer song "Dream," he suggested to me that if I showed up tomorrow night late, he would consider letting me sing a number with him. At least I wouldn't have to worry about offending the audience. Not many of the passengers on this ship at this time of year keep after-midnight jazz-club hours. Heck, I can barely do it.
