He handed me my drink. He watched me a moment, his mouth curved in what was not quite a smile, gentle, but a little wry.
“Yes, I suppose I was a fool. What I feared would offend”—he stopped and made an appealing gesture of confession—“was exactly what was needed.”
“I wanted to be loved,” I admitted, still feeling it in the nature of confession, half-ashamed, because it was to Joel that it was being made. “I wanted to be touched and kissed as well as talked to. D’you think that was bad?”
“Bad,” he said. “Bad. What would the Isa Welsh intelligentsia have to say if they heard you say a thing like that?” But when our laughter died away, he said: “Often and often, I used to feel, now I’m going to kiss her, now I’m going to lift up that hair and kiss the nape of her neck — Many times; but I never did.”
“That’s just exactly what I felt. Sometimes I felt myself making you want to kiss me, and then I’d stop myself, because I was afraid. I had the idea it would never be the same again. … So”—I suddenly became a little embarrassed, and was flippant to cover it—“other people kissed me.”
He said seriously: “You had to be kissed.”
I looked at him steadily across the table. “Yes.”
“When I took you home,” he said, “I knew it. When I went to your home. I try to explain it to myself; I think I can, now. The difference of nationality — between us — as it existed in the minds and emotions of our parents, mind, not as we conceived it — was a kind of unconscious taboo. Friendship was all right, it took place in the mind, in the interchange of speech and the world; but touch, an embrace between you and me — emotional contact reaches back into the family. It’s very old, very deep, very senseless; and harder than you think, to overcome.”
I said to him when we were dancing again: “What an odd place to talk like this in. Is it just a sort of softening in the maudlin atmosphere, d’you think, and we’re letting down our hair and we’ll be sorry?”
“No,” he said, “it’s because we aren’t anywhere, Helen, you and I. There’s a time, before people go away, when although they still walk and talk among familiar things in a familiar way, they have already left. The ship has sailed, for you. You’ve left it all behind you already, all the things you want and fear and have thrust away from you.”
A kind of light sadness came over me, and translated itself into the terms of the shadowy, swaying place. It found expression in the small hoarse voice of the girl who sang with a melancholy intonation borrowed, like her accent, from America; in the smoke-wreathed privacy of the half-dark; and in the warm body of Joel, embodied all that I should put my arms about in leave-taking.
I felt I should apologize for it and said to him: “I think I do feel a little maudlin, after all.”
Chapter 37
The yellow marble bird had a dribble of real water running from his beak. A band was playing on the dais. The yellow brocade settees were completely hidden by people; people sitting on the cushions and on the arms, people clustering round those who were sitting. The little bar was lively with people, and the Italian stewards raced briskly round.
The whole ship was like a stage-set where the lights and the curtain have at last gone up.
Joel and I had two little seats crammed against the bar on one side, and the side of the dais where the white piano was, on the other. The band played, unheeded, and over and over again, “Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup” and a rather peculiar version of “Sarie Marais.” Joel said something, but I could not hear. “What’s that?” He leaned over. “I said I understand that they double up as stewards, when they’re not playing.” I nodded, smiling, smiling. The atmosphere was curiously like that of a large midday wedding reception, where you are dazed by the heat and the crowd in their best clothes, the pageantry of the wedding retinue, which somehow seems to belong under electric light rather than the sun, and the intoxication of champagne drunk at a time when other people are banging hammers and pushing pens.
I leaned across and shouted: “It’s hard to believe that this is something the ship experiences over and over again, year in and year out. It seems to take it as such an occasion.” He nodded fiercely, and shrugged at the impossibility of conversation. But a minute or two later some people got up from a group of chairs near the door and we pushed our way quickly toward them. We sat down promptly and those chairs we were not occupying were immediately whirled away over our heads with eager apologies. The band and the talk were no longer deafening; we were beside the doorway and could see the deck and feel the sharp heat of the day outside, instead of the stuffiness of perfume and wine. The four people whose table we had taken were being photographed against the rails by a press photographer. We watched them compose the instant at which they would be fixed in the social pages of the paper tomorrow, a Durban businessman and his family, the wife in her new hat and floral silk dress, chosen, no doubt by the daughters, the daughters holding their hats — one small and feathered, the other large and white — against the wind, with gloved hands. Just as the camera clicked the one could not resist, and did what she must always have been disciplining herself not to do: smiled too broadly and gave her too-prominent teeth a victory.
“What time is it?” I asked. “Another hour, still,” Joel said. He had a way of smiling at me, reassuringly, every time he felt me looking at him, as if I were the one who was about to sail, nervously excited at the departure.
“I’m rehearsing for Monday,” I said.
“But you’ll have the other role, then,” he said. “It’s easier to go than to be left behind. Shall we have another drink?”
“I don’t think so. … I’m slightly dizzy already — the glare more than anything, I think. — You know that really does fit exceptionally.” He moved his shoulders in the new linen jacket we had chosen for him in the town earlier in the morning; it is extraordinary how difficult it is to find something to do in the hour or two before a leave-taking.
I said to him, leaning forward on my elbows on the table: “I keep getting a feeling of urgency. My mind races. I’m afraid there are so many things I want to say to you that I’ll only discover when you’re gone. Don’t you always feel like that when you’re saying good-by to someone?”
“What things?”
I smiled and sank back. “When you ask me, I don’t know. I’m just sure that when you’re gone …”
“Write them to me.”
“Yes, I know.” But I could not rid myself of this acute consciousness of time; time, which was like a growing volume of sound in my ears; and would cease. Every movement in the people who crowded the lounge and passed and repassed across the deck, every time a man swallowed from his glass, or a woman turned to touch the cheek of a child, gestured time that length further on. Joel fetched two more glasses of gin and lime for us and then we sauntered aimlessly about the deck, where everyone stood about as we did, and groups burst into small explosions of excited laughter. The sun and the gin seemed to clash in my head; we made quite thankfully for the lounge again, and found a seat for ourselves.
“And yet it seems much longer?” I appealed. He nodded consideringly. “—You couldn’t credit it’s really only two days since Thursday?”
He smiled. “Timeless, I told you. Because we aren’t anywhere.”
“Oh, there is something,” I said, remembering. To ask him something, anything, would still this feeling I had of being unable to shape questions that were vital to myself, that would, in some way I could not articulate or understand, help me to read my bearings if the desire to drift on a current should prove more confining than freedom of choice. “When I asked you, the other night, why you didn’t try to give me some sort of inkling of the disillusion I was heading for with John and Jenny and the others — you said you’d tell me another time.”