"Mark?" she whispered.
He drew a chair across. Catriona sat on the end of the bed.
"I'm here," he said. "How are you feeling?"
"Unreal," she slurred. "I'm not sure if I'm dead or if I'm alive."
"You're alive, believe me. I didn't know you could swim like that."
"Was I really swimming? I can't think why. I thought drowning would be easy. But once I was in the water, I kept thinking, Swim. I could hear my old games mistress calling out, Swim, gel, swim! And so I swam."
Catriona said, "You were lucky somebody saw you. There were only two or three people out on deck."
"Lucky?" said Marcia. She turned towards Catriona for the first time. "Well, I suppose I am, if you can call it lucky to survive when you've lost everything you've ever wanted."
"I'm sorry," Catriona told her. "I wasn't trying to crow."
"You don't have to apologise," said Marcia. "It isn't your fault that Mark loves you more than me. It's just the way of the world, isn't it?"
Mark held Marcia's hand. "Don't even think about it. Just get yourself well first."
Marcia gave him a fleeting, regretful smile. She kept closing her eyes for longer and longer intervals each time, and it was obvious that she was almost asleep.
"That officer who saved me..." she whispered. "Is he all right?"
Mark looked towards Catriona. Catriona said, "He's quite well, as far as I know."
"He said something strange to me... when he reached me... Do you know what he said?"
Catriona shook her head, but then realised that Marcia couldn't focus on her any longer, and said, "No. What did he say?"
"He said ... 'You were quite right, this is the way to go'... I couldn't think what he meant."
She slept, her mouth slightly open. She stirred for a moment, and said, "Mark... it can't be true that you're..." and then she slept. After two or three minutes, Mark and Catriona got up and went out of the room on tiptoe.
Dr. Fields was in the anteroom, making neat illegible notes with a tortoiseshell Waterman pen. Mark told him, "She's sleeping now." Catriona gently linked her arm with Mark's, and Mark covered her arm with his own. The way they were standing, they could have been bride and groom standing before a registrar. Dr. Fields screwed the cap on his pen and looked up at them.
"Well," he said, "it's always very difficult to say anything about an attempted suicide, particularly to those most closely involved. One has to work out for oneself how responsible one should be for the welfare of others. Are you, Mr Beeney, responsible for Miss Conroy's life because you courted her and then rejected her? Are you your sister's keeper, as it were? These are difficult questions, hard to answer."
Mark said, "Do you really think she'll try it again?"
"That's impossible for me to judge,' said Dr Fields. "She's chronically depressed about your abandoning her. It appears from what she told me that you never made her any romantic pledges; but that she had always assumed from your conduct towards her that one day you might ask her to marry you."
"I'm afraid that's an assumption that I did nothing to foster,' said Mark. "I never promised to marry her and I never would. I don't think for a moment that we'd be suited."
"You couldn't even carry on your relationship at—shall we say—the same distance as before?"
"I don't think so. Not since I've met Miss Keys."
Dr Fields stood up, and with the air of a stage magician, produced from his breast pocket a white handkerchief the size of a small bedsheet. He blew his nose two or three times, and then folded it back again.
"There's nothing more that we can do, then, except to keep her under supervision; to feed her with tranquillisers; and to make sure that even if she feels unwanted as a prospective wife, she doesn't feel unloved as an individual human being. It's asking a lot of both of you, I know. But in your own different ways—as far as one person can ever be responsible for the health and safety of another—you owe her at least the opportunity to live.'
Afterwards, Mark took Catriona up to the Orchid Lounge, where he ordered for himself a large Peter Dawson on the rocks, and for Catriona a Bellinger mimosa. They sat silently for quite a while, until Catriona said, "You're thinking about jilting me, aren't you?"
He looked up quickly. "Of course not. What gave you that idea?"
"It would be easier, wouldn't it? You wouldn't have to feel guilty about Marcia any more. And you wouldn't have to feel guilty about me, either. If there's one thing I've learned about you, it's quite simply that you don't know how to mix business with romance."
Mark leaned back in his mauve wickerwork chair. "I wish you'd tell me the secret."
"There isn't any secret. Not as far as I can make out, anyway. It just seems to me that if you want to do business, you have to do business, and that if you want to make love, you have to make love. But you can't do both. Business has a hopelessly brutalising effect on love, and love has a hopelessly confusing effect on business."
Mark took out his cigarette case. "I guess I can't argue with that. You've just had the experience firsthand, after all."
Catriona gazed at him for a moment, trying to find the courage to say what she had planned to say next. She was the Queen of the Atlantic, and when you were a queen, you had royal pride. You had personal pride, too. Pride that made it a matter of importance that men never jilted you—you always jilted them. Even men you really cared about, the way that Catriona had grown in the past two days to care about Mark.
At last she managed to say, "I think we'd better call this off, you and I. I think we're going to end up hurting everybody, including ourselves and perhaps our businesses as well."
Mark frowned at her. "Are you serious?" Then, looking at her more closely, he said, "You're serious."
She prayed that she wasn't going to cry. She could feel her mouth tightening as she tried to suppress the ache in her throat. In a voice a sounded almost like a ventriloquist's doll, she said, "It's no use, Mark. It isn't going to bring us anything but heartache. Let's just pretend we never met."
Over in the corner of the Orchid Lounge, the ship's pianist began to play romantic and nondescript tunes, like "Days of Desire" and "Moonlight Promenade". They were silly songs, written for banal singers, but somehow Catriona thought of the words of "Moonlight Promenade" and the tears slipped from her eyes like liquid mercury running through her fingers.
Mark took her hand, grasped it tight. "Catriona," he told her. Catriona, listen to me. How many times in my life do you think I've fallen in love? I mean, really fallen in love, as if I've been struck a lightning. The answer is twice. Once, when I was twenty, I fell in love with a girl who used to pose for Broadway Magazine calendars. Her name was Eunice, and my mother hated her. And the other time was you. But between Eunice and you, there hasn't been anybody. Flirtations, maybe. Affairs. But nobody who's hit me over the head the way you have."
"'What about Marcia?" Catriona asked, wiping her eyes.
"As far as Marcia's concerned, I'm going to do just what the doctor asked me to do. Be friendly, make her feel wanted. But I'm not going to make any promises. The only promises I'm going to make are to you."