Yet Mark, with both hands, spread her thighs wide apart and carefully draped the diamond and emerald necklace in her blonde pubic hair, which she always kept closely trimmed with nail scissors. The emerald itself he laid with his fingers between her opened lips, vivid green on vivid pink.
"You wear it like a queen," he told her with a crooked grin. His dark eyes were sparkling with delight. His shoulders were so suntanned that Mania's fingers looked in contrast as if they had been fashioned by Michaelangelo out of flawless white Carrara marble.
They made love in absolute silence. The Arcadia rolled and swayed and dropped beneath Marcia's bed, but somehow it only added to a rhythm of their joyful and friendly copulation. Afterwards, Mark went through to the sitting room to pour them more champagne and to light them a cigarette each, one turquoise and one black.
"You still want her, don't you?" asked Marcia, sitting up in bed, her small breasts squashed against the quilt.
"Who?"
"You know damned well who. Miss Catriona Keys. The puppy-fat flapper of 1924. You won't rest until you've thoroughly dishonoured her."
"You think that going to bed with me is dishonouring?"
"I think that going to bed with you is delightful. But that's another story altogether. We aren't talking about the same thing."
Mark lay back on the large pillows, smoking his black Russian cigarette. His suntan was cut sharply in half by the white outline of his thigh-length shorts and by his white feet. Absentmindedly, the way men do, he played with his softened penis, unconscious of how Marcia was watching him. It was so different from the gentle long-fingernailed way in which she touched him. He squeezed it and rolled it, and stroked the dark dividing line between his balls with his middle finger, quite innocently, thinking of nothing else but how relaxed he was, and how much he enjoyed lying here next to Marcia while the Arcadia plunged herself into a summer storm.
Marcia said, with a faint hint of regret, "I could watch you all day."
"All day every day?" asked Mark.
Marcia said, "You're not that fascinating," and couldn't understand it when Mark burst out laughing.
TWENTY-NINE
It was against the rules of their contest that either of them should make way for more food by deliberately inducing vomiting; although, after a testy argument, it was agreed that seasickness, being involuntary, was allowable. And so it was that at ten minutes past eleven, after a breakfast of Wiltshire bacon rashers, scrambled eggs, cold pheasant, a brace of kippers, smoked ham, toast, deviled beef-bones, smoked chipped beef in cream, and roast Norfolk gosling, Mr. Joe Kretchmer and Mr. Duncan Wilkes were already sitting in the first-class smoking room, each with a large whisky and soda, while the stewards brought them ham sandwiches, cheese, giant black olives, and platefuls of mushrooms on toast.
They had started their eating marathon as mild friends. But it had taken last night's dinner and this morning's breakfast, by an unpleasantly tilting deck, to reduce their relationship to determined grumpiness. They had said good morning to each other, but very little else. Most of the communication that was necessary between them was carried on by their self-appointed seconds: Henrietta Chibnall, for Mr. Kretchmer, because she believed that he was going to be most wonderfully sick; and Grace Bunyon, the actress, for Mr. Wilkes, because she thought that he had the look of a classical hero about him, like Hercules. She was particularly taken by the blond hair which grew out of his ears.
The rest of the passengers watched with guarded amusement as the bald-headed Mr. Kretchmer picked up a large ham sandwich and established his first crescent-shaped bite in it. Mr. Wilkes ate an olive first, fastidiously spitting the pip into his hand.
"That's just the stone, I hope, Mr. Wilkes?" asked Henrietta Chibnall. "You're not palming anything you shouldn't?"
Mr Wilkes opened his hand to reveal the well-chewed olive pip. His face was a picture of testy misogyny. "That's all right, Mr. Wilkes," said Henrietta brightly. "One olive down and nine to go."
With his natural instinct for a contest, Maurice Peace sidled into the smoking room and stood by the door with his hands in his pockets watching the two men stuffing their mouths with food. "Not another eating competition?" he remarked, to nobody in particular.
"I'm afraid so," said the tall man standing next to him. "On every voyage some American tries to get more than his money's worth by choking down absolutely everything on the menu. It wouldn't surprise me if one of them kills himself."
"You're a doctor?" asked Maurice Peace.
"I'm the Arcadia's doctor, Dr Cumberland Fields," the tall man replied.
"Oh, how do you do. Pleased to make your acquaintance," said Maurice Peace. "My great-uncle used to be a doctor, in the Civil War. He says he sawed seven legs off at Chancellorsville. Confederates, of course."
Dr. Fields, in his grey suit and his old-fashioned upright collar, gave Maurice Peace a distant smile. Being British, he didn't have the slightest idea why Maurice had said "Confederates', or even why he had said "of course', but it was company policy to humour passengers in all things, and so he automatically smiled.
"You don't think there's really any danger, do you?" Maurice asked him.
Dr. Fields blinked. "I beg your pardon. Any danger of what?"
"Any danger of what you said. Of one of those fellows killing himself."
"Well, the human body is an extraordinary machine," said Dr. Fields. "It will tolerate all kinds of reckless abuse, including the sudden ingestion of large quantities of rich food. But that tall fellow, Mr. Wilkes I believe his name is, I'm not so sure about his constitutional ability to be able to survive such eating."
"You're not?" asked Maurice, interested.
"He has the florid appearance of a man who suffers from high blood pressure, and possibly heart disease. He could be committing suicide—albeit by the most luxurious means available."
"Hmm," said Maurice.
"I really think the captain ought to persuade them to give this contest up," said Dr. Fields. "It's really frightfully offensive, if nothing else. I mean, one can hardly describe the sight of a ham sandwich being forcibly crammed into a fellow's mouth as aesthetic, can one?"
"Noo," Maurice agreed. But his mind was already working on the possibilities of opening a book on the two marathon eaters, and in the light of Dr. Fields" expert assessment of Mr Duncan Wilkes" state of health, there was a very reasonable chance of cleaning up quite a few thousand pounds. Very reasonable indeed.
It didn't occur to Maurice that there could be anything ghoulish in betting on the likelihood of Mr Duncan Wilkes" sudden demise from over-eating. It wasn't as if he himself had incited either contestant to test his intestinal tract so challengingly. Maurice was simply a better on odds, a gambler on likely outcomes. He never saw himself as a participant in everyday life, only as an interested outsider. After all, he was the only first-class passenger on board who didn't have a ticket. "I feel like a ghost," he had once told an almost insensible wino as they sat side by side on the painted horses of a deserted steam carousel in Paragould, Arkansas, while dawn appeared behind the tulip trees.
He elbowed his way through the small circle of passengers, and laid his hand with a flourish on Mr. Kretchmer's shoulder. Then he turned his head this way and that, to make sure that his gesture had caught everybody's attention, and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, not forgetting any peers of the British realm, if there are any present, I protest at the way this contest is being carried on! Protest most vigorously!"