"Mademoiselle Narron—Louise—"
She ran her hand through her wild gingery hair, and threw back her head. "Oh, how much I like Englishmen! Always so cold, always so polite! Don't you know how much that drives me crazy, that coldness? It inflames me! I say to you, "Kiss me! please kiss me!" A Frenchman would have been lying beside me in the blinking of an eye, in an instant, plastering me with kisses! But you say, "I beg your pardon?" so polite, so stand-office!"
"Offish, actually," corrected Rudyard, grateful to have the opportunity to change the subject.
"What? What did you say?" questioned Mademoiselle Narron.
"It's not stand-office. It's stand-offish. "Ish" is an English ending that means "sort of". As, for instance, in "greenish"."
"Greenish? What is "greenish"? Like "Greenish Mean Time"?"
Rudyard perched himself on the aim of oat of the chairs. "If you were feeling seasick, mal-de-mer, and if your cheeks were looking rather green, I'd say, "My dear Louise, you look a bit greenish". Or, it's like "peckish", meaning hungry."
"Ah," said Mademoiselle Narron, nodding in comprehension. "And also like "radish"?"
"Well," said Rudyard, with an abrupt laugh. But then he realised that Mademoiselle Narron's attention was fixed exclusively on his face, and that she was devouring him alive with her eyes. "Well," he said, less confidently, "sort of. Yes, sort of like radish."
"But you still have not kissed me," she protested, her voice throaty. "You have taught me "ish". But you can teach me "ish" from the other side of the room. You can teach me "ish" by letter. To kiss me, you will have to come closer."
"Louise—"
"Aaah!" she shrieked, a perfect middle A. "Come closer! Oh, you're so cold! Even Raymond was never as cold! It thrills me! Don't you see what you're doing to me? You're so cruel!"
With a melodramatic flourish, like a tragic heroine quaffing poison in the last act of a Wagnerian opera, she drained down her gin-and-brandy cocktail. Then she swung her arm and lobbed the empty glass across the stateroom. It landed unbroken in a half-open desk drawer. Rudyard stared at her in utter surprise as if she had thrown it so accurately on purpose.
"I am a woman on fire!" Mademoiselle Narron declaimed. "I am a woman on fire and you are a pillar of ice! How can I melt you unless I embrace you?"
She rose to her feet and she was as red and as inexorable as a column of erupting lava rising from Mount Etna. Fiercely, she jerked off her evening gloves, and hurled them to the floor. Then she tugged open the buttons of her evening gown, and wrestled it off over her head. While she was temporarily blinded inside her upraised gown, Rudyard said, "Louise, I'm not sure that this is really the way to—"
"What did you say?" she cried in a muffled voice.
Rudyard stood up. It seemed inappropriate to be sitting cross-legged on the edge of an armchair white Mademoiselle Narron was struggling so enthusiastically out of her clothes. It made him feel even more like the Reverend Philips than ever. He put down his whisky glass, but then he picked it up again and drank the whole lot down in one swallow. For some peculiar reason he began to think of the time when he had been selected to go in to bat for the school cricket team when they were seventy-five for six wickets against Dulwich College, and when only an heroic batting effort could possibly have saved them.
"Listen, Louise," he began. "I can't say that you don't attract me. I You do, like the devil. You're a remarkable woman."
She didn't give him the chance to say any more. She emerged flushed from her tangled evening gown and tossed it onto the sofa. "I knew you were tender from the moment you first looked at me," I the said. "That one, my heart sang! That one, he is for me! Balm to the spirit, comfort for the soul!"
Dressed in nothing more than her pink underslip, beneath which her huge breasts bounced in a complicated two-step, and in pink silk stockings, over the top of which her heavy white thighs wobbled in rhythmical accompaniment, Louise Narron advanced across the crimson rug with her arms open wide for Rudyard to embrace her. Rudyard stared at her for one giddy moment: at her wide green eyes, at her irrepressible red hair, at her pink pouting lips which wanted nothing more than to suck and nuzzle at his unprotected flesh. And he thought, God, I'm scared.
He could have funked it, of course, with a quick salute and a hurried good night. He could have pushed her away. He could even have pretended to faint. But then how could he have endured the rest of the voyage, seeing her four or five times a day on the promenade deck, and at dinner? He would have ended up slinking around his own ship like a fugitive.
Besides, although he was frightened by her, she did excite him. She made his brains feel as if they were effervescing in champagne, and the blood between his legs boil like giblet gravy. And it was his fear of her, as much as anything, that electrified him.
He said, "Louise, we ought to—" but then she grasped his face in her hands and kissed him soundly on the lips.
He wondered if this was what it was like when you drowned. Louise Narron's mouth was clamped so tightly to his that he was unable to breathe, and after the first thirty seconds the room seemed to go dark and the stars appeared to come out. He thought of Toy, and about that silly cricket match against Dulwich, but he also found it impossible to ignore the huge bosoms that were squashed against his mess jacket, and the Amazonian thigh that was working its way up between his knees. Then he felt the greedy fingers that were twisting open his buttons, and the grasping hand that was forcing its way into his trousers, and he understood with considerable clarity and also with some relief that he was being raped.
As for Louise Narron herself, her disappointment and her hurt both needed quenching so thoroughly and so urgently that she was not ashamed of what she was doing. Usually, in spite of her operatic physique, she was a shy and very feminine woman. Coquettish, sometimes. For Raymond had always taken the initiative when they had made love together, and Raymond had always treated her as if she were a gentle and sensitive creature, a butterfly or a bird. He had adored her sheer fleshiness, of course. That had been the stuff of his desire for her. He had loved to enfold his penis in the rolls of her stomach, or between her breasts. But he had always treated her fat as if it were ethereal, as if it were nothing more substantial than the billows in a Rubens painting, and he had always given her wings. Except on that last day, when the ethereal had suddenly been exposed as being heavily corporeal; and Louise Narron had discovered that she could no longer fly.
Raymond had been the latest and the most painful in a lifetime of rejections. Louise's parents had been rigid bourgeoisie and puritanically suspicious of anything theatrical. Her father, a magistrates" clerk, had once tanned her for singing a trill on theSabbath. Her mother had disapproved of everything she did, andhad thrown two terms of school crochet-work on the fire because Louise had been "too proud" about it. Only the efforts of a sympathetic Ursuline sister at the convent where she was educated had allowed Louise to carry on with music lessons; and even when she was chosen to sing with the Metropolitan Opera Company her parents had refused to attend because her opening performance was in Le Nozze di Figaro, and her mother had once been annoyed by an Italian lodger.
Her success in opera had been meteoric. Her voice, in the words of the opera critic for Le Figaro, was like "the core of the sun'. But in her private life there had been one disastrous affair after another. Guido Carlo, the operatic producer; Charles Feldman, the producer; and then Raymond. Perhaps her lovers, mistaking her success on for supreme confidence, and her statuesque body for a a personality, had always expected her to take the initiative. Perhaps, contrarily, she had needed them too much. Whatever it was, she was determined to be aggressive with Rudyard. She was determined that she would never wait again by a telephone that never rang, or in a dingy hotel room for somebody else's husband who never showed up.