The baroness frowned at Catriona, and then blew out her cheeks, making the feathers of her collar puff up like the tail of an irritated cockerel. "Poof!" she said. "What is it when I have to leave Sabran outside, like a pet dog? Even worse than a pet dog. The dog is allowed inside the pool because the dog is a bitch."
"I think you can bring Sabran inside if you want to," Catriona told her. "There's only me in the pool at the moment, and Sabran doesn't look very threatening."
Sabran, who had been slouching against the side of the door, suddenly stood up straight, and stuck out his chin, and tried his best to look very apache. Catriona touched the steward's arm, and said gently, "If you get any trouble from Mr. Willowby, just refer him to me."
"Yes, Miss Keys," nodded the steward. "And, thank you, Miss Keys."
Followed by her small entourage, Baroness Zawisza swept into the pool, circling around every now and then to show off the beautiful fall of her Worth cape. "We always used to swim on our estates at Wizajny when I was a girl. My father was magnificent, a broad-shouldered hero in blue and white striped wool, diving from the bridge into the lake! He made us all swim, my five brothers, myself, my four sisters. He said to swim is to live for ever. Mind you, I think he was a little eccentric about health. He used to believe in electric shocks, for the galvanization of the body and then the two little ones would each have to pick up the bare terminal of an electric battery. How we all jumped! But I don't suppose it did us any harm."
Catriona said, with the slyness that only a pretty young girl half the baroness" age could have got away with, "It seems to have preserved you marvellously."
"Well," replied the baroness, tartly, "just because I can remember Poland before the War, that doesn't actually make me a certifiable antique. Krysia! My cape, I think I'll swim. Sabran, go to the bar and order champagne. I hate champagne," she confided in Catriona, "but unless you drink it all the time, and very conspicuously, people begin to suspect your heritage. Such a nuisance. Will you swim with me?"
One of the baroness" maids, a round-faced Polish girl who didn't appear to speak a single word of English, unfastened the rhinestone-decorated clasp at the baroness" neck, and released the cape. Underneath, the baroness, who was as slender as a fashion-plate, wore a black vee-necked bathing costume trimmed in silver, with daringly loose legs that came halfway down her white thighs like cami-knickers.
Sabran, on his way to the bar, where a beige-jacketed stewardess in a jaunty cap was on hand to serve cocktails and wines, turned on one Cuban heel and applauded the baroness as she walked with aristocratic stateliness to the shallow end.
The baroness turned out to be a surprisingly good swimmer, propelling herself with effortless grace around the pool, changing smoothly from backstroke to butterfly-stroke to a long-legged breaststroke.
"I think that's enough," she said, after ten minutes. "Father always used to say that you shouldn't allow yourself to become waterlogged."
Her maid Krysia brought her a towel, and then a loose white Japanese wrap. Catriona, in her own silk robe, followed her to the small circular table by the cocktail bar where Sabran was sulkily sipping his champagne and tossing cashew nuts into his mouth with the aggressive expertise of someone who has spent many hours of his life waiting for rich women.
"Sabran goes to enormous lengths not to look kept," said the baroness, waving her fingers vaguely in the gigolo's direction for a cigarette. "He believes that it is against the fundamental laws of nature, or some such nonsense like that. I shouldn't have let him go to see Her Gilded Cage, I don't think. But I always say to him, don't I, Sabran, that to be kept is no disgrace, why should it be, and in any case it's very hard not to look kept when you're moody and thin like he is, and walk around everywhere in those ridiculous pants. Can you imagine trying to earn any kind of a living in pants like that?"
"You're a she-cat," said Sabran, in a thick Gascony accent. He lit two Da Capos at once, puffing them furiously until the tips were aglow Like bonfires, and then passed one to Baroness Zawisza.
"I don't really believe that one person can keep another," said Catriona. "Financially, yes; but not emotionally."
The baroness looked at her through the pungent smoke of her cigarette. "You have a love, is that it? A love you have recently parted?"
"I don't know whether we've parted for ever."
"Nobody parts for ever, my dear, not even when they're dead," said the baroness. "Death is a veil, that's all. That's what my mother used to tell me. In her younger days, before she married my father, she had a lover called Killinkoski, from Finland. He fell through the ice one winter on the lake we call Jezero Mamry, and drowned. But he visited her as a ghost for the rest of her life. Several times, she said, he even made love to her."
"I never hear such bunk," said Sabran.
The baroness smiled indulgently. "Sabran is trying to speak like an American. That's part of the reason we're sailing on the Arcadia. He wants to be a motion picture star in Hollywood. Can you imagine? They'll take one look at his pants and scream with laughter."
"These pants are spee-fee," Sabran retorted.
"Oh, my God, isn't he marvellous!" shrieked the baroness. "It's spiffy, my gorgeous young hound. Spee-fee, can you imagine? Oh, my God, I think I'm going to choke."
Catriona said, "Have you known each other for long? I've never thought of a woman keeping a man before."
"Well, that's because you're still young, my dove," said the baroness, more serious now. "When you're young, you're resilient enough to put up with all the despair and the passions, the ups and downs, the heartbreak and the sheer damned inconvenience. But when you get—well, when you've lived as full a life as I have, in a comparatively few number of years, you begin to look for intimacies that are more controllable. And so what better than a young cowboy like Sabran?"
The baroness sipped champagne, sneezed, and then said in a loud whisper, "Besides, he's a marvellous lover. I can't tell you. He sends shivers down my spine. Not that I'd ever tell him that, of course. He'd become too arrogant. He's arrogant enough now. Look at him! If he curls his lip any more it'll disappear up his nose."
"Do you love him?" asked Catriona. In normal circumstances, and to the sort of ladies that Catriona had known in London, to ask a question like that right in front of the lover himself would have been unthinkable. But somehow the baroness had made it quite clear that Sabran was her trained animal, that he did what he was told, and that if he argued with her he would be in danger of losing everything.
"Love?" queried the baroness, raising an eyebrow that had been plucked as thin as the curved edge of a razor-blade. "How can I talk of love? I used to know what it was, once. Now, I have more doubts than answers."
While she was saying this, the stewardess behind the bar happened to drop a highball glass and smash it. Catriona turned towards the bar to see what was happening, and to her shocked fascination she saw not only the stewardess but what was reflected in the buffed-up nickel steel that formed the curved art-deco counter.
Underneath the small circular table at which they sat, Sabran had quietly slipped off one of his Cuban-heeled shoes, and rolled off his sock. He had then lifted his foot and, with his toes, carefully peeled the wet leg of the baroness" swimming-costume away from her thigh, baring the moist curls of her vulva. Even as they chatted of love and Finnish ghosts and gigolos, Sabran was steadily thrusting his big toe in and out of the baroness, to the accompaniment of a sticky little noise that was almost completely masked by the bubbling of the fountain and the slapping of ripples in the pool. It was impossible to make out what Sabran was doing in great detail, because of the mistiness of the nickel, but Catriona could see that his toe was disappearing completely; and the hazy impression of wet black satin and white skin was overpoweringly provocative.