"In those pants, and with those ears, he looks like a strong wind might carry him off at any moment."
Lydia giggled. "You don't have to be rude. Well, not that rude. You ought to see him dance the Black Bottom."
Philly took the toothbrushes out of the glasses by the washstand and half-filled them with brandy. "Salut!" she said, lifting her own glass, clinking it against Harry's, and swallowing a huge mouthful. Then, watery-eyed, gasping, she said in a squeaky voice, "That's how they say cheers in France, did you know?"
Harry sipped his brandy more slowly. He didn't like it very much, but it warmed him more than beer. "At the rate you're drinking it, we should be playing spin-the-bottle in exactly'—he checked his watch—"three and a half minutes."
"Sit down," Philly told him, and then came and perched herself on his knee, tugging her shimmy dress up until he could see the lace trim around the hem of her knickers. "I just love your cheaters," she said, and kissed the lenses of his spectacles, leaving a bright pink a imprint of lips on each one. She was warm and she was wearing some cheap flowery perfume that Harry found, in spite of himself, to be unusually arousing. He didn't know if she felt him stirring beneath her, but she kissed him again, and then again, and the second time she kept on kissing him and wouldn't stop. Her tongue wriggled between his lips like a pink baby seal and lapped at his teeth. Gently, but provocatively, he bit it. Philly said breathlessly, "Ow."
"I hope you two don't think you're going to have all the fun," complained Lydia. "That's why I suggested spin-the-bottle. At least it's fair."
"All's fair in love and war," said Philly, greedily kissing Harry again. Brandy and saliva ebbed and flowed from Harry's mouth to Philly's mouth and back again, like the tide.
Bending forward, Lydia reached behind her and unhooked her gown, five hooks, one after the other. Then she struggled it off over her head, and threw it across the cabin. With a shriek of laughter, dressed in nothing but her camisole and her rolled-down stockings, she threw herself on Harry and started kissing him and nipping at his ears. Harry shouted, "Ah! That tickles! Get off! That tickles! Lydia, get off!" The three of them collapsed on the floor of the cabin in a struggling heap.
Laughing, protesting, he fought back. But it was a fight that he was too breathless and too tensed up to want to win. In the end, with whoops of triumph, the two girls unbuckled his leather belt (from the store where Janice worked) and dragged his pants off him. His dark red erection was already rearing from the fly in the front of his knee-length cotton-mixture undershorts. "Eureka!" cried Philly.
What followed took several hours: until the porthole was filled by first blue light of sunrise, as pale and as sensitive as the flags that grow in the water-meadows of Minnesota. It happened, for the most part, silently, like the flickering pictures in a zoetrope, and although it was erotic and sometimes plain dirty, it had a grace of its own which left Harry feeling tranquil and at peace with himself, and even at peace with what he had done, and was about to do. Lydia clambered on to him first, while Philly kissed him and bit him and unbuttoned his shirt. Under the arch of Philly's armpit he saw Lydia pull aside the leg of her camisole, and press his crimson erection against the damp blonde curls of her pubic hair. Then, with her own fingers, she slipped him inside her, and although she was as tight as a duck, she was also warm and wet and irresistible, and he let his head drop back on the rug, his eyes closed, while she bucked up and down, panting softly under her breath, a breathy hymn of practical ecstasy. Then Philly was at him, licking away with her furrowed tongue the juices of his struggle with Lydia, probing in places where no woman had ever probed him before, until he didn't know whether to be shocked or delighted. He thought to himself, who was it who talked about the rigid morality of the working classes? And then Philly was sucking at him so hard that he could scarcely stand the pain of it, the sheer thrill of it, the abandonment of it. There was more: Lydia insinuating herself towards him at four o'clock in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, the cheeks of her bottom spread wide apart in her own clutching fingers. Philly rousing him yet again and biting at his shoulder as he lay on top of her in a crowded few minutes of sweat and perfume, and was to prove the last ejaculation that he could manage. And then both of them cramming themselves into the bottom bunk with him, all thighs and breasts and bottoms, while he slept, or attempted to sleep, and the Arcadia rolled—hesitated—rolled beneath them.
But they were not alone, of course. They were not the only lovers. At that iris-blue sky was lighting up the windows and the glass roof of the Grand Lounge, Mark Beeney was dancing the last waltz of the evening with Catriona, slowly and elegantly stepping around the floor that was scuffed by dancing shoes and sticky with spilled champagne, amidst empty tables and trailing streamers and crushed flowers.
There was no sign of Marcia Conroy. An hour ago, she had gone back to her stateroom, swallowed three aspirin, and buried herself in her bed, too drunk and too stunned even to cry. Nor was there any sign of George Welterman. Discreetly, after one stiff dance with Catriona, and another with Princess Xenia, he had excused himself and withdrawn to his cabin. He had not gone straight to bed, though. At two-thirty in the morning, he had rung for his steward and asked for a glass of hot malted milk. At four, he had asked for more writing paper. As Mark and Catriona were waltzing around the Grand Lounge together, he was standing by one of the portholes in his stateroom, dressed in a maroon bathrobe, and smoking a cigar in an amber holder. His face appeared to be even more deeply engraved with lines than ever.
TWENTY-TWO
There had been many other encounters during the night: some fateful, some trivial, some downright ludicrous, but all, in their own way, dramatic. The inflated promotional brochures that Keys Shipping had handed out to the passengers of the Arcadia had made them quite aware of how much they were making social and maritime history; but all of them wanted to make personal history, too, to do something that they would want to remember for the rest of their lives.
"I remember the time I sailed on the maiden voyage of the Arcadia; I met this gorgeously handsome tennis player from Phoenix. We had four days and four nights of absolute heavenly passion. I sometimes wonder what became of him ... whether he ever won Wimbledon, or anything like that."
"I drank more champagne on that voyage than I ever drank in my whole life, before or since. I had champagne for breakfast, champagne for elevenses, champagne for lunch, champagne for tea. I even washed my teeth in champagne. After we docked in New York, I had a hangover that lasted for two weeks."
"I fell in love on the Arcadia. The man I fell in love with was your father. His Christian name was Jack. I forget his other name."
Mr. Joe Kretchmer, the president of the Wisconsin & Agricultural Insurance Company, a short, bald, good-humoured man with an hilarious line in Wisconsin Polack stories, fatefully became acquainted with Mr Duncan Wilkes, a newspaper owner from Anderson, Indiana. Mr. Wilkes was six foot four tall, slow-talking, with blond eyelashes like a large white pig, and fleshy ears that shone scarlet when the sun got behind them. His newspapers were crowded with columns of flower shows, funerals, and small advertisements. "You sell a newspaper to a small community by telling that small community all about itself," he remarked. "If you printed nothing more than the electoral register every week, you'd have a steady guaranteed sale."