So he drove like the wind, but his arm was often about her, and she would lean across and kiss him when he asked her to. Her thoughts were chaotic, and yet secure; none of this made sense, part of it was unworthy, part almost wicked, but she could not wish to change any of it. When he said: "I adore you—I wish I could stop the car," she felt swamped by a tender longing, as real as his body had been.
On that return journey, they drove for nearly an hour towards a fantastic Karroo sunset, streaked with orange and red and green and purple; she had never seen anything like it before. "It's the dust in the air," he said: "it filters the light or something." She believed him; she would have believed him if he had said that it was controlled by the F.B.I. There was a moment when she had a fierce urge to tell him everything—all about Carl, all about the gang; it might free her, partially, from the deadly sense she had had lately, of being trapped in evil, so that she would end her days as the kind of woman one saw in old gangster movies, dyed, dilapidated, crying into her beer as the leader slapped her down or deserted her for younger, fresher meat. . . . But the moment passed; confession did not seem necessary; when they were in this mood of sensual release, when they had made love so well and so wonderfully, she could not be trapped by anything except an extreme of gratitude.
They had had their day; it had been heaven; he had taken her by the hand, and she had re-entered with him a young world of innocence and ardour, a world she had lost, a world she had never known. That was today, and it had been set apart. Things were still to be done in the right order. If there were tears in their future, they could not dry them now.
Going down the long hill into Cape Town, he suddenly said:
"I'll be able to sit for my mate's ticket, in about three years' time."
It seemed to her, at that moment, the happiest, the most comforting prospect in the whole world.
4
Carl Wenstrom was coming out of the smoking-room when she and Tim stepped over the top of the gangway on to the "square" of A-deck, blinking at the lights overhead. One look told her that he was absolutely furious, with her and perhaps with a lot more besides. He stared at her, and then from her to Tim, and asked very curtly: "Where have you been all day, Kathy? Do you realize it's nearly midnight?"
"Don't we know it!" She laughed, careless of his mood, and turned to Tim. "You left that sprint a little late, Ben Hur."
"I told you we'd make it." Tim stretched, luxuriantly stiff; then he intercepted a speculative glance from the gangway quartermaster, and straightened up. "It's a good road, isn't it?" he ended, on a much more formal note.
"Where have you been?" Carl asked again.
"We went for a drive. A picnic." She waved her hand vaguely; she was overwhelmingly tired, and it was the most wonderful tiredness she had ever felt. A day which had started with Tillotson had somehow escaped its shoddy origins, and ended in Paradise. " 'Way up there."
"You should have told me," said Carl. "You should have left a message."
Tim broke in. "I'm afraid—" he began.
Carl, insultingly, took Kathy's arm and drew her to one side, without looking at Tim. He knows, she thought: he knows already, or he guesses, and I do not care, either way. . . . Over his shoulder, Carl said: "Good night, Mansell," and almost propelled her down the corridor towards their room, leaving Tim, red-faced, to swallow his hurt as best he could.
When the door was shut behind them: "That was terribly rude, Carl," said Kathy. "He's been so sweet to me, and we've had an absolutely wonderful—"
"Shut up!" said Carl, suddenly snarling. He was angry, fantastically so, she realized; his face was pale, and the veins at his temples fluttered uncontrollably. "We'll take up what you've been doing later on. I hope you'll be proud of it, when we do. . . . Right now, you'd better realize that I've had enough for one day. I've had one hell of a session with the Captain. He seems to know everything! About Diane. About the poker game. About the Professor making an idiot of himself all over the ship. And that's not all." He stared down at her, his eyes smouldering. He knows, she thought again; but at the moment it was, for Carl, only a little thing, compared with something else he knew. She could not guess what that something else might be, until he said, with extreme loathing in his voice:
"I think Louis has taken off."
Carl had good reason to be angry; it had been a most ominous day, one which had seemed to threaten their whole undertaking. They were under suspicion—so much had been made clear, in an interview with the Captain which had left him nervous and irritated at the same time; and the suspicion involved the future as well as the past. If, as the Captain obviously suspected, they had been "operating", it was, from the disciplinary point of view, so much water over the dam; as of that moment, it was in the past, there had been no specific complaints, it was just a black mark in a ledger which did not greatly matter. But if they now tried to continue on the same lines, they would do so under an official microscope which would make profitable operation very difficult indeed.
He could not but admire, even in his annoyance, the swiftness and competence with which the Captain had drawn the lines of battle to his own exact taste. It had been mid-morning when the Captain, summoning Carl to his cabin, had greeted him immediately with the words:
"Mr. Wenstrom, I've been hearing some funny things about you and your family."
Carl had not displayed any reaction, either of guilt or fear; he was not that sort of man. "Well now," he had answered, with the easy condescension of the big man towards the small, "I don't think we need to—"
The Captain, noting and disliking the manner, had not hesitated to kill it stone dead. He had held up his hand, with undeniable authority. "Just a minute!" he said, sharply. "At this stage, I'll do the talking."
"He was damn' right, he did the talking!" Carl now recalled to Kathy. He was walking up and down the day cabin, in unusual, indeed unprecedented agitation: it was mostly a build-up of anger, Kathy judged, but on top of it was an uneasy sense of vulnerability, as if he had been brought face to face with the astonishing idea that he might have met his match. "He hasn't much to go on, and he was guessing quite a lot, but he certainly did a good job of presenting the evidence."
"What sort of evidence?" asked Kathy. She was still half-way between two worlds, and she was very tired; it was an effort to take this seriously, to feel herself involved in things which, for the space of a whole day, had retreated out of sight. Did she have to come back to this ridiculous circus? . . . She knew that she was being fundamentally disloyal to Carl; but many things were now in flux, things which for six years she had treated as part of an immutable universe. Love was changing—had already changed—to independent appraisal and activity: she was tied to Carl by a hundred strands, of gratitude, appreciation, and memory, but physical love was no longer part of this weaving, and she could not now pretend, even to herself, that it still figured as an entry in their joint account.
"What sort of evidence?" she repeated, as he did not answer. "What does he know?"