5
After dinner, an unmistakable air of lethargy pervaded the Alcestis, the nine hours of intermittent drinking since lunch-time meant that afternoon hangovers had now reached their peak, and the ship's steady rolling induced sleep, prudent inactivity, a comfortable sense of well-being—everything but energy. Wexford, the Assistant Purser, who was running the first bingo game of the voyage (there would be at least fifty others) was having a hard time injecting life into the time-honoured pattern of jollity.
All the traditional jokes fell flat; and the new ones, which might develop during the voyage, were not yet born. Wexford, Tim Mansell who was helping him, and the steward who was producing the numbers from the wire cage, all beamed universally upon the customers; but the customers were not yet ready to be wooed. "Legs—eleven!" called out Wexford, with an air of epigram; and "Doctor's orders— number nine!" and "Any way up—sixty-nine!" and "Life begins at—forty!" But there was no reaction, no confederate giggling. When, on the third game, the prize of thirty-eight dollars was carried off by Master Barry Greenfield, who called out "Bingo!" with a piping malevolence which won him very few friends, it was obvious that al change of pace was needed.
"Better pack this up," said Wexford, out of the side of his mouth. "We're never going to get it off the ground."
"Orchestra?"
"Orchestra."
Presently the orchestra filed in—six players in dinner-jackets which had a seedy, somewhat rented air. Their first few bars of "On the Street Where You Live" were enough to produce an inescapable suspicion that their instruments might be rented also. They sounded terrible.
"Oh God!" said Tim Mansell, back at the officers' table. "Have we had union trouble again?"
"They need practice," said Fleming, the Engineer Officer, who was ln a generous mood.
"They need shooting," said Wexford. He looked round the half-filled room, and the space which had been cleared for dancing in the middle. "Is this going to take, do you think?"
"Like yellow fever."
Mr. Cutler the Purser, passing their table on his way to the bar, looked down at them with mock sternness.
"Gentlemen, do your duty," he commanded.
"Do we have to?" asked Beresford, the young apprentice. "This band is worse than the last lot."
"Nonsense," said Cutler, who had hired them. "Three of them are straight from the Palladium."
"The police must have moved them on."
Tim Mansell also looked round the room. He saw that the only girl he wanted to dance with, Kathy, was not at the moment in view, and might have gone to bed already. The other girl, the dark one with the sit-up-and-beg figure, was circling the floor with her uncle, or whatever he was. Mansell sighed, conscious of bereavement, and of duty not yet fulfilled. The band, launching out into "Time On My Hands", hit a clinker which made even the bass-player wince. Wexford stood up.
"All right, boys," he said bravely. "We dance. . . . You take the one with the squint, Tim, and I'll have a crack at the six-footer."
Later, after talking idly with Carl, Diane Loring danced with three of the young officers. At this stage, she performed sedately, holding her partners at arm's length, setting her figure in well-defined profile, exhibiting her wares within a cool, self-evident vacuum. For her, it was a practice run, using these uniformed children as pace-makers. But presently it paid off: a man whose name she did not catch—a middle-aged, middle-weight, middle-definition man— came up and asked if he might dance with her. On the second turn around the floor, to the music of "Begin the Beguine", the man, who up till then had been rather drunk, gave her waist a small, speculative squeeze. Diane responded with a movement which, as she phrased it later, nearly made him jump out of his underwear. Within a few moments, looking thoughtful, they disappeared in the direction of the boat-deck, while Carl, noting that Kathy was not in view and that Louis, busy on the dance-floor, was not disgracing himself, made for the Tapestry Bar. It was possible that Diane was moving too fast, but he was prepared to take that chance. Their first night on board was not an appropriate occasion for cracking the whip.
Kathy was not moving too fast; on this first evening, she was scarcely moving at all. The mood of enchantment had persisted, inducing a sense of deep contentment; tomorrow would bring its problems and its manoeuvres, but tomorrow was still over the horizon, tomorrow could keep its place. Tonight she would, and could, be solitary. She had watched the bingo game briefly, but it had seemed a forced and silly enterprise; then she had set out on a slow, wandering tour of the ship, down the long alleyways lined with cabins, through the near-empty public rooms, up to the deserted sun lounge under the stars.
She met a few people, wanderers like herself, she smiled at stewardesses, she watched, from outside an uncurtained window, four people playing cards with slow, ridiculous absorption. Deep down in one of the B-deck corridors, an old steward asked: "Are you lost, miss?" and she answered: "Yes," and they had both laughed with the same delight. Then she had climbed up to the sun lounge again, and sat in a deep chair, her head back, and watched the mast and funnels rocking through their slow majestic arc against a canopy of a million cold stars. For a brief moment she wanted to cry, and then she wanted to sit there for ever, lapped in this private heaven.
Much later, a movement near by disturbed her, an intrusion; two people—and one of them was Diane—out on the boat-deck, closely entwined, writhing in preliminary skirmish. So soon, so early? She could not watch them; this was the task of tomorrow, and was not yet due. She walked slowly back to her cabin, and presently lay in her bed in the half-darkness, still private, still uncommitted, still dreamily happy. She was waiting for Carl, and she loved him; but if he did not come to her tonight, it would not matter, il
Louis Scapelli said: "Would you like to dance?" and the oldish woman who had caught his eye in the dining-room looked up, unsurprised but slightly flustered, and answered: "That would be very nice." She put aside her petit point evening bag, and stood up. She was small and, in spite of tremendous aid from science, almost shapeless.
Within the first few moments they agreed that the band was awful, but might improve; they agreed further that there were difficulties about dancing on a floor which shifted its position rhythmically at every third step. Then it was time for the introductory confidences, and nearly all of them came from her, in a free-flowing stream. She was Mrs. Stewart-Bates, she told him; it was her third voyage in the Alcestis; she knew the Captain very well, but this time she was sitting at the Purser's table, really (with a laugh) so as to give somebody else a chance. She lived in Connecticut, near Georgetown; she had lost her husband, a banker, three years earlier; she was absolutely crazy about travelling. She always had been. It really did broaden the mind—didn't he agree? Of course, there were difficulties now. A woman travelling alone. . . . When her husband was alive it had all been different. He had taken care of everything. They had been ideally matched, too, in every way. He had been interested in physical culture. Now it was often so lonely.
Louis listened carefully, taking in the facts, estimating the right speed of advance, pacing himself to match it. The old bag was obviously nuts; a woman of fifty pretending she was thirty-five, acting up like an old movie, stretching out and asking for it; she probably hadn't been laid for ten years, and then it was just for Christmas. But the rocks were really something—diamond rings, diamond bracelets, drop ear-rings, the lot. It would be worth closing his eyes for. ... He came out of his daydream to hear her asking: