The man took me to the purser’s cabin, down a step from the deck into a dim stuffy passage, into a biscuit tin of a room crammed with a vast desk. He consulted with the man behind it, over a passenger list, and at last said in English, “Ah-ron. Mister J. Ah-ron. Is second class, number 197,” and ushering me back into the passage, left me to the ship. I did not know whether he meant that Joel was already aboard, or whether he was merely confirming the fact that the name I had told him was, indeed, on the passenger list. As I stumbled about the curious, narrow intricacies of the ship’s internal disposition, I thought it less and less likely that Joel was aboard; no one else seemed to be; at least no one who looked as if he might be a passenger, although in one or two of the cabins into which I peeped, I saw a sort of homely disorder, as if people recently had lain on the bunks. But the whole ship seemed to be in a state of semidesertion, hazy untidiness. It was dark and unbearably stuffy, and a smell of cooking faithfully followed all the convolutions, stairs, doors, hatches and barriers of the various classes, of which there was a bewildering number. I knocked against an insect spray and a broom, picked my way round pieces of canvas-covered baggage, and once found myself brought up short in the darkest, smallest lavatory I had ever seen. Outside in the comparatively brightly lit passage — one bleary globe burned in the ceiling — there was a notice suggesting that passengers should wear a woolen band round the stomach, as a precaution against stomach troubles prevalent in East African ports.
I went from first to third class and back to first again, quite inexplicably, but on the way I saw a dining room decorated with sporting painted dolphins to distract the passengers’ attention from the scrubbed wooden boards at which they were evidently to sit, and a lounge furnished with brocade settees, a little yellow marble fountain in the form of a bird gargling into a shell, some potted ferns, a dais with a white piano and some music stands, and a neat little bar at which a solitary man sat, working out something on a piece of paper. A fat woman (she must have been a stewardess) smiled “Scusi” as we edged past each other into another passage and I found at last that I was suddenly in the second-class section. All the cabins seemed to be empty and the doors were open, except one, which was closed, and from behind which there came a low growling and a high-pitched giggle. The door of 197 was open, too, at the same angle as all the others, but I put my head in, just to see what Joel’s particular cabin was like. He was lying there on the bunk and the sight of him, Joel, unmistakable, real, gave me a ridiculous start of fright.
He got up in slow astonishment. Frowning, he said: “No. Helen?” We collided with each other in the tiny space and we kissed, quite simply, as if we had always done it, for the first time in our lives. I never could have imagined I should be so happy to see him. And because it was Joel, I could say it to him: “I never could have believed it would be so wonderful to find you here. You don’t know how glad I am. I don’t know myself how glad I am.” He was standing back from me, looking at me and shaking his head, smiling. “I can’t imagine why you’re here. … I don’t know what you’re doing here.”
I felt excited, soaring. The whole excitement of the fact of my going away, the loneness, the strangeness, suddenly made me drunk, like a potent liquor that requires certain conditions before it begins to show its effects. I boasted about my progress over the ship and puzzled and amused him by references to the woolen band I hoped he was wearing round his belly, and though he was eager to ask, he was content to wait for an explanation of my presence. He sat down on the edge of his bunk as if it were all a little too much for him, and listened to me. — There it was again, instantly, the way it always had been; nobody ever listened to me quite the way Joel did. Some part of me noted this even while I was chattering; he sat there with his knees spread and a little tuft of dark hair showing through his half-buttoned shirt, his broad dark face resting its gaze on me. He loves to hear me talk. So I talk better. I have more to say, it comes out of me more succinct and livelier.
I was so animated now that I did not sit down, and as I moved about the tiny cabin, I had to steady my big hat with one hand. He smiled at this, very slowly, gently, not to offend, the warmth of the smile bringing a glow to his face which was sunburned too dark, and giving to his eyes, by contrast, a clear liquid lightness which seemed to take color, from the line of green water showing through the porthole. (His cabin was not on the dock side of the ship, but faced across the harbor.) I broke off as if to consider myself in his eyes. “Very elegant,” he said, smiling. We both laughed. “But a bit too garden party,” I admitted. “—No, don’t take it off. We’re not going to stay in this little pen. I’ll try and dress up to match and then perhaps you’ll consent to be seen in the town with me.”
“Joel,” I said, “I’m going to England.”
“Ah, of course, that explains it. You’re going to be presented in that hat. Miss Helen Shaw, one of the South African debutantes seen leaving Buckingham Palace after the presentation to the King and Queen yesterday afternoon. She is the daughter of Mr. George Shaw, for many years an official of the Albion-African Group.
“So you’re going to England.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
I gestured with my head. “In the one next door. The Pretoria Castle. Sails on Monday.”
“Mine sails Saturday. What’s today, Thursday? — Come on, Helen, you don’t want to hang about here, do you? I can hardly offer to show you over the Ostia, you’ve seen her from port to starboard, bow to prow. Let’s go and have some tea.”
Now I sat down on the bunk and watched him, while he scooped the trickle of cold water from the tap over his face, found a stiff, starched towel with Ostia embroidered in red along the border, put on a tie and a linen jacket that was hanging behind the door. “Who told you I’d be here?” “Well, Isa, in a way. She said you were going to Israel in an Italian ship.” And talking we went along the passages and up out into the sun of the deck in no time at all, now that I had someone to show me the way. The officer at the top of the companionway watched us go down, as moodily as he had seen me come up.
As we turned onto the dock, Joel said to me: “You are alone, here — Helen?” And I said, my face hidden by the hat: “Oh, yes, quite alone.”
We spent an afternoon of happy inconsequence. Our long easy intimacy in the past, unconnected — because we had seen each other so rarely and then not at all, during the past eighteen months — with that period of my life which lay so perilously close behind me; the pleasant anonymity of a background strange to both; the complete severance of the present from the burden of the future, because, for both of us, a journey intervened — made us gay. We sat drinking tea in the curiously decorous atmosphere of the tearoom of a Durban department store, and then we walked slowly, and with many stops to look at things — I remember a bookshop, a florist’s window magnificently splotched with poinsettias, a native curio shop hung with masks from the Congo, and Zulu shields — all the way down West Street to the sea, and the Marine Parade, where my hotel was. We discussed each other’s plans, mine for England and Europe, his for Israel, but in a purely practical fashion; we did not touch upon reasons or motives, his or mine.