"Good evening, Mrs. van Dooren."
"Hi, there!" she answered vaguely, and then, focusing her eyes, she said: "Oh, it's you," on a much less flattering note. When he did not immediately pass on, she asked: "What's on your mind, sonny?"
"Nothing. I thought you might like to dance."
"Dance!" She enunciated the word with measureless scorn. "Are you crazy? I never dance. Dancing's kid stuff. It's for people who can't go to bed together. Didn't you know that?"
"Well—" he began.
She waved her arm. "Sit down, for God's sake," she commanded. "You're giving me a crick in the neck." As he took the nearest chair she leant forward and asked, with a sort of hazy directness: "What's going on? Are you making a switch?"
He smiled, and said: "Yes," and took it from there; it seemed silly to respond in any other way. By ten o'clock they were in cheerful accord, and by eleven they were in bed.
Even at that stage, he should have taken warning. For some reason—something he had heard, something he had read—he had formed a conviction that women who drank too much were likely to be frigid; this extraordinary notion led him to adopt some odd manoeuvres, picked up in God-knows-what sexual gutter, in order to satisfy her. It was another mistake. Presently he found that she was staring at him in critical appraisal, and then she asked, in a voice both cold and sober:
"Are you actually enjoying that?"
He decided that he was not going to accept the rebuke; he had had enough of female superiority from Mrs. Consolini. Equally forthright, he answered:
"No. I was doing it for you."
"Well, don't bother. Where do you think I was brought up? In a circus?"
"I don't know where you were brought up."
"On Easy Street."
After that, they got on much better.
Indeed, they got on too well. She had a compulsive appetite for making love. The alcohol had been a substitute; now she rationed the one in favour of the other. At first he enjoyed it; he was reestablishing his manhood after an unhappy holiday, while she flowered into a fierce and flattering sensuality which put a positive glow upon her whole body. They would spend hours in her cabin; sipping slow drinks, taking baths, falling into bed again. She was never really satisfied. At each final good-night, still brisk as a spring lamb, she would say: " 'Bye now! But don't forget—come back real soon!"
They had no financial arrangement. After forty-eight hours she gave him a thousand dollars. When he went through the motions of protesting that it was too much, she said: "O.K., lover-boy. Earn it!"
He was the first to tire; it was inevitable; a prolonged effort, particularly in this area, had never been his strong point. On the third evening he said: "I guess I'll take an early night tonight. I'm feeling kinda bushed."
Lying on the bed, taking off her ear-rings, she shook her head. "Don't be chicken. What's the matter with you? We've only just started."
Something in her voice stirred his misgivings; it was an echo of an earlier servitude. "But I'm tired."
"Snap out of it, then. Take a drink. Do some setting-up exercises." After a moment she added, with seeming irrelevance: "I heard about you from Mrs. Consolini."
"What do you mean?"
"She said you were an awkward bastard."
"What else did she say?"
"That she paid you five hundred a week, and you didn't deliver. So you were fired."
"That's a lot of bunk!"
"I'm not so sure. . . . What do you want me to say about you?"
He frowned, disliking—even fearing—the way the conversation was going. "I don't want you to say anything about me. Jesus, don't you want this to be a secret?"
She shrugged. "I don't mind. I'm not shy. . . ." Then suddenly she was staring at him, and her eyes were dead level, not at all vague. "Look, Romeo, let's get this straight. I drink all the time, and I'm not ashamed of it. If I make love all the time, I'm not ashamed of that, either. I do exactly what I like, and I just don't give a damn. You can't scare me like you scared that poor old dame. And you can't hold out on me, like you held out on Belle Consolini."
His sulky expression was a mask for much uncertainty. "You seem to know it all."
"You bet I know it all! Do you want me to start telling it all?"
"No. Of course not."
"Well, behave yourself, then."
He decided to play it safe. "Hell, I was only fooling. I'm not tired." He approached her bed, and relapsed into their personal jargon. "Baby wants it?"
"Baby wants it eight times. . . ."
He did not leave baby till four o'clock in the morning; at noon, a note enclosing a hundred-dollar bill summoned him again. He did not dare to disobey; he was sure that shewould talk, and talk loudly and shamelessly, if she did not get her way. She knew or guessed too much, and she was tough enough to use all of it.
So it went on, seemingly for ever; he had fashioned himself a nympho neck-tie which he could not discard. When he hung back, she laughed at him, or threatened; when he did what she wished, all she said was: "More."
Nearing Cape Town, utterly exhausted and unnerved, he knew that he must somehow escape.
About two hundred miles west of the African coast-line, on the last day's run, the Alcestis began to move uneasily, as they edged towards the bad weather system which for a week had been lying in wait for them.
The Captain knew all the symptoms, as a doctor knows a difficult patient, or a man his quarrelsome wife. The glass had been dropping swiftly, and the wind, veering, now blew stiffly from the south-east; as the long South Atlantic swell developed a cutting edge, the Alcestis began her traditional misbehaviour. With the wind ahead, she had never been a good sea-boat; there was some flaw in the sheer of her bows, or the length of her keel, which started her butting and pitching while other ships could still shoulder their way smoothly ahead. Now, with the wind getting up, and the sea beginning to run against her in good earnest, the Alcestis showed what she could do when, like a girl unwillingly talked into a picnic, she took a dislike to the weather.
The Captain had been called to the bridge at midnight; on his way up—he had been watching a film show, three decks below— he listened to the sounds of his ship, and knew what was in store for her. She was working and creaking loudly, as all old ships did; down the long corridors, a dozen groaning sounds came to meet him as he made his way towards the main companion ladder. She was already pitching heavily, rolling more than a little—the wind must be on the starboard bow, as the forecast had warned them. Even as he mounted the bottom step of the ladder, he heard and felt the first solid crunch as her bows slid down an enormous switchback to land squarely in the trough of a wave.
Now, wedged in a corner of the bridge, accustoming his eyes to the darkness, he weighed their prospects. It was likely to be a southeasterly gale—the traditional Cape weather—and it was likely also to last a couple of days. Faced with this, he could either alter course slightly to the northwards, and press on towards the shelter of the coast-line ahead; or he could hold his course, and make the best progress he could into the eye of the wind. Even as he considered their choice, the Alcestis came down heavily again, with a huge solid crash, and he heard from far below the tinkle of broken glass. That must have caught the bar off balance. . . . But it meant that he would now have to ease off, whatever course they were steering; the Alcestis was too old, and too much loved, to be punished like this. He turned abruptly, and called to the officer of the watch.
"Second!"
"Sir?" came a voice out of the darkness, somewhere beside the quartermaster.