Catriona felt a prickling sensation around the scalp, and a sense that this conversation had suddenly lost touch with reality. "Love," she said, trying to remember what they had been talking about.
"You are the right age for love," replied the baroness, drinking more champagne and never once sparing even a glance for Sabran. "You have exactly the right chemistry—beauty and poise—and just the right measure of faintly soiled innocence. Also, you are still capable of knowing what love really is. One can lose this capability as one grows... well, as one learns more. Tell me about your lover."
"I'm not sure of his name," said Catriona.
"You don't even know who he is? Is he so mysterious?"
"No ... I'm not sure which he is."
"Aha... you have left one lover behind, and now you believe that you may have come across another! Well, that is splendid! You must give yourself as you think fit. Love is one reason for giving yourself. Money is another. Still another is to hut."
"You think I might want to hurt a boy, by falling in love with him?" asked Catriona.
"Of course. You're what—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one? That's the age of maximum conceit in a girl, and minimum sentiment. You don't have to look so much like a bewildered waif with me, you know. I know just what you're up to. Ohh, doucement, Sabran, for God's sake."
Catriona tried to ignore the baroness" little gasp of pain. She drank her champagne and watched the baroness" dark deep-set eyes as if they were the eyes of an oracle. Perhaps the oracle could tell her what she ought to do about Mark Beeney. Perhaps, on the other hand, the answer was already formed, even before the question had been fully phrased.
"Boys, anyway," said the baroness, "boys are always getting hurt. They enjoy it. There's nothing a boy likes better than a good mope."
"He's a man, really."
"A man? Hmm, I see from your expression that he is. Well, men can be just as easily hurt as boys; but the problem with men is that sometimes they retaliate, and hurt you back. Quite desperately, on occasions. When you're least expecting it."
For a moment, Baroness Zawisza closed her eyes, and the sharp lines of her Slavic cheekbones were hectically flushed. She seemed unconscious to everything around her, not for very long, only the time it would have taken to squeeze the bulb of a plate-camera, and for the lens to click, and for the photographer to emerge from his cape with the amused announcement that he had taken a candid portrait of her in the middle of a deep but powerfully disciplined orgasm.
"Men," said the baroness, opening her eyes again as if nothing had happened, "men are only interested in three things. Automobiles, fighting, and their own semen. In normal circumstances, the simplicity of these interests makes them laughably easy creatures to handle. But sometimes, they get all three interests confused, and that is when you have to be careful of your own self, and your own soul, not to mention your four-thousand-franc dresses."
Catriona was silent for a long time. Not because she was perplexed or depressed, but because the relentless cynicism of Baroness Zawisza's attitude towards men had restored her confidence in herself. That had been partly what was wrong with her relationship with Nigel. She had allowed herself to be carried along in a bright social whirl, all parties and cocktails and silly undergraduate stunts; and the brightness of the whirl had kept her from seeing how shallow and inconsequential her love affair actually was. Nigel had been fun, and she knew that he had loved her, and probably loved her still, but dancing the Charleston on the table-tops in the Trocadero and throwing streamers out of open Austins wasn't exactly the stuff that great romances were made of. In her mind, she was now approaching Mark Beeney as a woman, not as a girl. She tried to think of her own strength, her own willpower, her own independence. This was going to be something fierce and real, one ego clashing with another ego just as strong. This was going to be the kind of passion that burst like a thunderclap, like the passion between Rudolph Valentino and Alia Nazimova.
"A thousand zlotys for your thoughts," smiled the baroness.
Catriona slowly shook her head. "I was only thinking about something that happened a long time ago."
"How long?"
"Two years."
The baroness tightened up her wrap. "Yes," she said, "I suppose, to you, that would be a long time ago."
EIGHTEEN
By seven o'clock, it had grown prematurely and spectacularly dark. A bank of thundery cumulus had risen from the south-western hills like the dust of an approaching multitude, and a few minutes before seven a sudden wind had sprung up, damp and warm and smelling of rain. The surface of Dublin Bay had grown grey and restless, and a few of the smaller craft which still bobbed around the sheer black walls of the Arcadia's sides had headed for Dun Laoghaire, or further to the north, to Howth Head.
"The great forces of nature, Mr Philips," Sir Peregrine said, with undisguised irritation. "Damn and blind them."
"Thundery showers were forecast, sir," said Rudyard, as the first fat drops of rain splattered on to the windows of the wheelhouse.
"Forecast? Forecast? Don't know what the devil that's got to do with it. Just because they were forecast doesn't mean I've got to like them, does it?"
"No, sir," said Rudyard, trying to be reasonable.
Sir Peregrine took out his watch and peered at it disapprovingly, as if he were in half a mind to throw it out of the wheelhouse window. There was a marine chronometer on the wheelhouse wall, accurate to within thousandths of a second, but Sir Peregrine would only trust his own watch. His papa had given it to him, on the first day he went to sea, from Harwich. He had never seen his papa again (Hodgkin's Disease), and that memory of his papa, standing on Parkeston Quay in his tall black hat, not smiling, not waving, was the only memory of him that Sir Peregrine had. Why hadn't papa waved? he sometimes thought. He could, at the very least, have waved.
"Are we ready to go, Mr Philips?" asked Sir Peregrine. "All passengers aboard, all lines clear? Got rid of all those Irish hooligans, have we?"
"We're ready to leave on time, sir," said Rudyard flatly. "Twenty-hundred hours precisely."
"Twenty-hundred hours," growled Sir Peregrine. "Another hour of lolly-gagging about, just to please those mad ginger-haired Fenians. I would rather hare anchored off Semarang, in the middle of the fever season. At least the bloody Javanese don't go mad on purpose."
"Yes, sir," said Rudyard, with considerable patience. He had knocked at Mademoiselle Narron's stateroom earlier on, but there had been no reply. Perhaps she had been shopping, or promenading, or taking tea, but whatever it was, he was now going to have to spend six or seven hours more in stifled uncertainty, before he would have the time or the opportunity to face her again.
The sky was now so thunderous that Sir Peregrine ordered all the ship's deck lights lit, as well as the decorative lights that outlined the masts and the funnels and the rigging. Somebody on shore must have taken this as a signal that the Arcadia was preparing to get under way, because almost instantly there was a distant crackling and popping, and a sparkling array of red and gold fireworks were set off on the shores of Dun Laoghaire.