Professor Henry Longworth checked his bow tie to make sure it was exactly in place. Although the dress code for tonight was casual, he had no interest in wearing an open-neck shirt. He simply didn’t like them. They reminded him of the shabby clothes he had worn during his rough and tumble boyhood in the slums of Liverpool. Even at age eight he had been shrewd enough to know that the only hope for his future would be achieved through education. After school, when other boys were playing football, or as the Americans call it, “soccer,” he was studying.
At age eighteen he was awarded a scholarship to Cambridge. When he arrived there, his Scouse accent had been the subject of amusement to his fellow students. It had taken unceasing effort to completely eradicate it by the time he graduated.
Along the way he had developed a passion for Shakespeare, and eventually became a professor at Oxford, teaching that subject until his retirement. He knew his colleagues at Oxford had joked that when he died he would be laid out in his casket wearing a white tie and tails. But he didn’t care.
The tie was straight and in perfect position under his shirt collar.
He put on his jacket, a lightweight plaid perfectly suitable for mid-September weather, and glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes before seven. Punctuality is the politeness of kings, he thought to himself.
His suite was on the concierge floor, and he had been pleasantly surprised that on this new liner the amenities were substantially more luxurious than the ones on older ships. Of course it was a joke to use the word “suite” for a bed/sitting room, but so be it. He walked over to the long mirror on the bathroom door and took a full-length glimpse of himself to be sure there was nothing amiss in his appearance. His reflection showed a thin sixty-year-old man, of medium height, wearing rimless glasses over intense brown eyes, with a bald head and a fringe of gray hair around it. He nodded approvingly, then went to the dresser to look over the passenger list again. Not surprisingly, celebrities from different walks of life were aboard. I wonder how many of them are complimentary guests of Castle Line. Quite a few, he imagined.
Since his retirement he had become a frequent lecturer on the line and was very popular with the cruise director. Six months ago, after reading the advance publicity of the maiden voyage of the Queen Charlotte, he had contacted the booking office and indicated that he would be pleased to be a guest lecturer on that voyage.
And here he was. With a warm feeling of satisfaction, Professor Henry Longworth left his cabin to go to the Queen’s cocktail lounge and mingle among the most important passengers on board.