"I don't think so," Maurice told him. "We're going to wait until we've won it. We've only got twelve hours to wait before noon tomorrow, in any case. Then we'll know."
"Twelve hours," Harry repeated.
Maurice bent over him, his hands on his knees, and looked worriedly into his face. "Are you sure you're feeling all right, my dear boy? Maybe you should lie down."
But Harry shook his head and irritably pushed away the cup of Bovril that the steward had just brought him on a tray. Now, because of the ridiculous whims of these wealthy gamblers, he was faced with the prospect of setting off his bomb in mid-Atlantic or not at all. There was no choice left to him. The Arcadia was going a to have to go down in deep water, and that would mean that she would undoubtedly take hundreds of her passengers with her. His act of revolutionary war had been forced on him before he was ready, and he was going to have to carry it out almost at once, without hesitation and without mercy.
He took off his spectacles and blinked at the blur of faces and black and white dinner suits. He almost wished that he knew how to pray.
FORTY-FOUR
At one o'clock in the morning, out on the smooth reaches of the summer Atlantic, Rudyard Philips became Louise Narron's lover for the second occasion. This time, however, everything was different. This time, her cries were like those of a warbling vireo, sometimes throaty and slurred, sometimes high-pitched and excited. This time, her hips rose up to meet him with strength and urgency, and she clasped his head between her hands and pressed it between her huge breasts until her cleavage was as humid with his panting breath as a hothouse at Kew. This time, she struggled and cried, and even sang, and when they were finished, she refused to release him, refused to let him leave her, and held him on top of her white cushiony body for what seemed like hours.
"I was such a fool," she whispered. "I saw only my own sorrow, my own right to be loved. I forgot that you needed to be loved as well. I wanted a hero from the opera to stride onto the stage of my life and sweep me away in his arms. Why is he so hesitant? I thought. Why is he so anxious? But you needed rescue too, my love. You too were hurt and bewildered and unsure. Also, I realised after the storm that to act like a hero, simply for the sake of it, is to act like a clown. All the names engraved on the world's monuments are the names of idiots."
"I will have to get back to the bridge shortly," said Rudyard.
"But you'll come back before dawn?"
"I'll try."
She kissed his forehead, his eyes, and the wings of his nose. "You have that wonderful English melancholy. Do you think that we will always love each other as much as we do tonight?"
"Well, I suppose so. I mean, yes, of course."
"You don't have to wait until tomorrow, you know. There doesn't have to be any formality between lovers. You don't even have to wait for a ring.'
Rudyard lifted himself up, and looked at her in the Atlantic moonlight. Beneath them, the bed creaked and vibrated like a living beast, as the Arcadia's turbines drummed at full speed. She was making twenty-seven-and-a-half knots now, and the foam from her bows glittered and sparkled with phosphorescence.
Louise Narron's eyes glistened as brightly as the spray. Her red hair spread out all around her on the pillow. Her skin was as white as nougat. Rudyard had the disturbing feeling that he had somehow been enlisted into a theatrical romance of Louise's own creation, except that the lines he was expected to speak next were going to commit him for real, and for life. She was, wasn't she, directing him to say that he would marry her?
"Isn't it strange," said Louise. "Two people, lonely and rejected and afraid, how they can find each other in this way? How they can discover that they wish to spend all of eternity together, as lovers and as passionate friends?"
Rudyard said, in a voice which would have been more suitable for addressing a Boy Scout church parade, "You said last time that it was sad and useless. Our lovemaking, I mean. I can't understand how you've managed to change your mind so dramatically."
"Can't you, my love? Well... perhaps last time I was looking for too much. Perhaps I was looking for the wrong thing. More than likely, I had drunk too many Poppea cocktails, and they always make me vexatious, even though I adore them. They would make St. Ursula vexatious! There now, I've blasphemed for you. Can't you see that that I would do anything for you? For ever and ever?"
"I'm still married, you know," said Rudyard.
"Of course you are. But to what? To memories? Your marriage has burned to ashes. You must make sure that you use those ashes to fertilise the seeds of your new life, and your new love."
"Louise—"
She reared up, her breasts jouncing, and threw back her head. Then, to Rudyard's horror, she sang a high C, so loud and so long that the chandelier began to ring.
"Louise! Please!" he shouted. There was a thunderous knocking from the adjacent stateroom. The last thing that a first-class passenger on the Arcadia wanted was to be woken up in the small hours of the morning by a shrill blast from Tannhauser.
"Tell me you adore me," she said. There were jewels of perspiration on her upper lip.
"I," he said, "adore you."
"Tell me you love me."
"I love you."
"Kiss me."
He kissed her. Her perspiration tasted like seawater.
"Promise me that you will love me for all eternity." She pronounced it in a very French way—"eternite." Somehow, pronounced like that, it sounded even more eternal than plain old English eternity.
Rudyard hesitated. A great weight constricted his chest. He found it extremely difficult to speak, as if he had eaten his third dry digestive biscuit in succession. Then, in a gabble, he managed to blurt out, "I-promise-to-love-you-for-all-eternity."
She kissed him, and then pulled him back on to the pillow beside her. "You have such beauty," she said. She raised her left arm towards the porthole, through which they could see the solitary moon, rising and dipping as the Arcadia rolled. She extended her wedding-band finger so that it eclipsed the moon, and then she whispered, "The moon can be our ring for now. Now that you have promised."
Rudyard, hesitantly, kissed her neck. Then he reached across and cupped her weighty left bosom in his hand. He did, in fact, love her. At least he was infatuated by her. She was trembling and weak, and yet domineering at the same time. She could gasp at the thrusting of his loins, as submissive as a dizzy young girl; and yet she could also make him say whatever she wanted him to say, against his will. She smelled of flowers. Sweet Williams, he thought, from his garden.
His hand strayed across the pillowy continent of her stomach, until his fingers found themselves ambushed in damp fur.
"I love your melancholy," she whispered, staring at the ceiling.
FORTY-FIVE
Although it was one o'clock in the morning, Mark knocked at the door of Catriona's stateroom; and when Alice answered, he asked if she was awake, and if he could see her. Marcia had gone on ahead to slip into silk pyjamas, refresh her make-up, and spray herself with perfume. She imagined that Mark, too, was getting himself ready, and collecting a bottle of cold Perrier-Jouet for them to crack.
Alice said, "She's awake, but I don't know whether she'll want a visitor. She's been having nightmares, you know."
Mark passed a sharply folded five-pounds note through the gap in the door. "Tell her that it'll do her good to talk to somebody friendly."
Alice stared at the money for a moment; and then, by that extraordinary sleight-of-hand in which all domestics of the 1920s were expert, caused it to vanish from Mark's fingers and reappear in the pocket of her frilly apron. "I'll try, Mr. Beeney," she said. "I can but try."