She took the soothing draught, savoured it, allowed it to warm her. She turned from the window, slim against the pale light, and said:
"All right—I just wanted to know. . . . Why does Diane needle Louis like that, all the time?"
He took the obvious cue from her, content to follow her down this different, safer, better-buoyed channel. "I think she has doubts about his virility. And that's what he's been hired for, after all."
"Do you doubt it?"
"Well, he's not my first choice. . . . That's literally true, as you know; I wanted to get Brownell, but Brownell isn't available. However, Louis will be all right, with the correct kind of encouragement. He has basic good looks: he can be improved on; we will improve on him, with a kindly hint here and a brisk kick there. And women in search of youth—his designated targets—are not too particular, anyway. How can they be?" He mused, chin in hand. "Of course, Louis's basic trouble is signalized by his elevator shoes. He wants to be taller all over. . . . You know those small men who send you long-stemmed roses? The symbolism is positively degrading. But it supplies the clue."
"But suppose he—"
"Oh, he will be effective enough. And if not, the ladies will think it's their own fault. There is often fantastic humility in that area. I know something of it myself. ... So they will simulate, they will pretend an antique lust—"
She looked down at him. "Carl, you really are awful, you know."
"I have to be. . . . Why did you put on slacks, Kathy?"
"My declaration of independence." She stretched her arms above her head, sensuous, luxuriating. She felt beautiful once more; she was beautiful; his glance upon her lifting breasts was an authentic signature to this. "But that was an hour ago. I don't want it now."
"What do you want now?"
"To be with you. To pick up the pieces."
He sighed, in grateful relaxation. "Let's do that, together. Put on some music, Kathy. Shall we go out to dinner?"
"No."
She shuffled through their stock of records, chose one, put it on the record-player. It was Chopin again, but of a different mood: a polonaise, slow at first, rising to martial triumph and ardour, the dancers leaping, the frogged uniforms catching the torch-light. . . . He sat back, at ease, content to close one account for the day, to open another if the mood favoured them.
"How did you guess?" he asked presently.
"Guess what?"
"The music."
"I know you. Are you tired, Carl?"
"A little." He wished it were not so, but in their shared confidence it did not matter. He grinned suddenly, boyishly, his face shedding on the instant twenty infamous years. "All I really need, my darling Kathy, is a long sea voyage."
PART TWO
"Your travelling companions are like you—gracious, fun-loving, eternally young at heart"
1
Captain William George Harmer, master of the Alcestis, sat at his desk in the cabin high above the foredeck, dealing with the thing he liked least in the whole world—his pre-sailing paper-work.
Ashore or afloat, in uniform or street clothes, he could not have been anything but a sailor. He was small, and broad, and tough; his skin was wind-roughened and sun-tanned from one end of the year to the other; he had walked with a roll since he was six years old. The habit of command sat easily in his face, and in the way he moved his head, chin up, when he had to face a man or a situation. He was fifty-five, not far from retiring-age; he had been facing men and situations, in war and in peace, for all his working life. To take charge, to deal with, to dispose of—all the hallowed names of action —were by now so much second nature that he could not have imagined any other alternative.
If his ship were in hazard, he pulled her out; if a pilot proved inefficient, he was tapped on the shoulder and told to get out of the way. If a man got drunk, he was punished; if one of his officers botched a job, he was shown how never to do it again. When passengers grew obstreperous, they were quietly reminded that they could, within the law, be locked up indefinitely at the captain's sweet will. If a woman overstepped the permissible limits of misconduct, the fact was pointed out to her in crude terms which seldom proved ineffective.
Men liked him because they felt safe in his hands; women, because they did not. But the women could not have been more wrong. He was good-looking still, and, like most sailors, deeply sentimental; but William George Harmer was only sentimental about one person— his wife—and the rest of the sex existed only as fare-paying passengers who either did, or did not, behave themselves.
Before him on his desk was a mound of papers, some important, some nonsensical, fed to him in an unending series by the First Officer, the Chief Steward, the Purser, the booking agents, and the various officers in charge of stores, baggage, charts, catering, entertainment, security, and hygiene. Mostly they only needed his signature; sometimes they needed attention; occasionally they needed memorizing. None of them needed action; the only action required from him would be in two hours' time, when he would take his ship down river, Past the Statue of Liberty, past Sandy Hook Light, and due south-east towards Bermuda.
The ship's noises, now loud, now subdued, were comforting; they meant efficiency, organization, smooth-running order. The shadow of a derrick moved across the carpet at regular intervals; that was the last of the stores coming aboard. The dull clattering, more distant, was the hand-baggage trolleys running up the after gangway. The whining rise-and-fall was a pump somewhere (what pump? a compression engine—something to do with the heating); the steady hum of a generator, one deck below, meant that the radio office was open for business.
He signed his name four more times—"W. G. Harmer, Master" in firm large script—and then he threw down his pen and walked across to the shore-side porthole.
The view was of the grey customs sheds of Pier 26, and above them the skyline of New York on a drab winter afternoon. It was a skyline he could never quite believe in; and he did not like it anyway. In truth, he did not really like anything except certain isolated parts of the South Atlantic, and the small house in distant Birkenhead which he knew as home. Anything else was either the sea, the element he earned his living on, or simply land— to be avoided, visited only when necessary, and left behind as soon as possible.
He turned, crossed to his desk, and rang his bell. In answer, his cabin steward appeared, with that promptness which, in stewards, could only seem suspicious.
"Sir!" said the steward, whose unlikely name was Brotherhood.
"Brotherhood!" barked Captain Harmer, and pointed.
He was pointing towards a side-table on which were ranged the various bottles necessary to a ship's captain who, working through his invitation list, must be ready to entertain anyone, from the president of Specific Motors to a Bolshoi Theatre ballerina. There was whisky (Scotch, rye, and Bourbon), gin, sherry, vodka, rum, vermouth, Dubonnet, Kina Lillet, and Angostura bitters. There was not, however, any ice, and this was what had caught his eye.
As Brotherhood, trim and spotless in his white uniform, assumed the professionally injured air of a man certain that he could have forgotten nothing, the Captain said:
"Ice!"
"Sorry, sir," said Brotherhood promptly. "I thought you'd ring."
"God damn it!" said Harmer. "I always need ice. You know that."
"Yes, sir," said Brotherhood, and withdrew.
Left to himself, Captain Harmer frowned, but only at his own irritation. Of course, he always rang for ice when he needed it, and so far none of his visitors had rated a drink of any kind. Brotherhood would never make this, or any other kind of mistake; he was the best steward in the ship, otherwise he would not have held down his honourable and highly influential job, nor would he have been trusted, as he was, to garner for the Captain's benefit appropriate titbits from the ship's most efficient grapevine—the body of two hundred stewards and stewardesses who, with access to every cabin, kept tally of everything from the number of drinks served before 10 a.m. to the number of people in any one bed at any one time.