Kathy, drinking her morning coffee, shook her head. The picture was ugly enough, but it seemed faked also, based on lies or half-truths, invented for the purpose of making brutality seem to be justice. "I doubt that, Carl. There are lots of other things. And you won't cure any of them by hitting the Professor, will you? Is he all right?"
"I don't care if he's dead and buried," answered Carl, and at that moment of continued fury it was the plain truth. Sulky and vicious, he looked down at her as she sat in her armchair, cool and elegant in slacks and a pink-checked shirt. She was always beautiful in the mornings. Beautiful and suspect. "So what have you been doing, Kathy?"
She looked up, surprised at the extraordinary borrowed falsity of his tone. "My dear Carl, what do you mean, so what have I been doing? You sound like Louis practising the dialogue for Guys and Dolls."
He stared back at her in cold fury, and said: "That doesn't really answer my question, does it?"
She had been in the mood for gentleness, for friendship; but something about his tone—unpleasant, basically hateful—provoked her to the same response, the same careless cruelty.
"You would really like to know?" She dropped another lump of sugar into her coffee cup, and stirred it deliberately. "I have to decide between two proposals, Carl. You must really help me to make up my mind. . . . One is for marriage—or it could be, very easily. The other is to go to bed with someone. Just once. For five thousand dollars. Or ten. Or any number. . . ." Now she was looking at him, and for the first time for many years she felt that whatever he said, in whatever tone of voice, he could not affect her decision, by the breadth of one hair; her next words were thus merely formal. "If you were in my place," she said, levelly, even sarcastically, "would you lie down for love, or for ten thousand dollars? Or would you not lie down at all, for any man on earth?"
"I can't," she said to Tillotson, later that day. It was twilight, twilight off the coast of Africa; the Alcestis was ploughing steadily through the fantastic phosphorescence of an Indian Ocean night, with the Southern Cross beginning to beckon them over the last horizon in the world; it was an excellent moment for decisions, however crazy, however harmful. "I thought I could—I wasn't just fooling—but now I can't."
"What is now!" asked Tillotson, picking out the weasel word. As always, he was calm and competent; all he had done was to walk near her as she sat in a chair by the deserted pool, smile, and say: "Referring to our recent communication . . ." At some other time, in some other life, she had thought, he would have been quite a man. . . . But these present times were out of joint, by many a crooked mile; and Tillotson seemed, most subtly, to realize this when he said: "What's happened in the last forty-eight hours, to change it? Did I leave it too long? Surely we were agreed."
"Oh yes."
"Then?"
"A man," said Kathy.
"Ah, that's different." As usual, he was smoking a cigar, and the ash flicked over the side of the ship in a broad curving arc. "That's a development I can understand. I thought maybe it was something I could deal with."
She smiled; this was the most civilized person she had talked with today. "What can you deal with?"
"Most things involving organization. Things that come up. . . ." He looked sideways at her. "Something could have scared you, for instance. I've heard a few rumours flying around. . . . You can be quite sure that you and I wouldn't be getting our names on any Captain's list of undesirables."
She could not guess how much he knew; it seemed best to assume that naturally he knew everything. "It's not that," she answered, shaking her head. "I've nothing to be afraid of, so far as I know."
"Except that you belong to this rather unusual family."
"Are we unusual?"
She could hear a smile in his voice as he answered: "I think it's a very fair word to use." And then, more soberly: "Ah well, these are speculations—you said it was a man, anyway. That must mean a young man."
"Yes."
"I am jealous." But he said it, once more, very calmly; he might have been saying: I am Tillotson. He was in a curious mood, a mood which coupled exploration with acceptance; perhaps that was part of his strength, that he could gauge quickly and, if need be, abdicate gracefully. "When did this happen?"
"It didn't really happen." She did not want to talk about it at all, but she felt that she owed him more than a few sentences of banal rejection. "It's more of an idea, really."
After a long silence, he said: "The idea being that you should reform."
Astonished, both at him and at herself, she answered: "Yes. That's it exactly."
"Now we know." He leant across and laid his hand on her arm; its only message was one of encouragement. "I am in the best position to tell you," he said ruefully, "that such a reformation is perfectly possible. . . . Did my wife make you feel ashamed?"
"A little."
"She is a very clever woman."
"Darling, I can't," she told Tim Mansell, about midnight that same night. They were in his cabin, a slim box of a room with a single berth, a curtained wash-basin, and a desk covered with papers; it looked out, bleakly, on to the derricks and hatch-covers of the foredeck.
"But I only wanted to kiss you," said Tim. It was almost true; though he continued to hold her slim body encircled, his own was not yet urgent. "This is the only chance we've had. Why don't you want to?"
"It's no good in the ship. It doesn't feel right. It feels kind of mean, and sneaky."
"It feels wonderful to me."
But she was not at all in that sort of mood; she was ready to be irritated. On board, in his fresh-pressed white uniform, he was so damned young again. ... "I must go," she said briefly, turning away.
"What's the matter, Kathy?"
"Nothing."
"But it was so wonderful last time. Wasn't it?"
"Of course it was." She felt she had to destroy this; she did not want it, after all—not yet, anyway, or not on these terms. It was as bad as the idea of Tillotson, the idea of Carl. "That was what we made the trip for, wasn't it?"
"Kathy!"
She had not wanted to shock him, and the sight of his face hurt her. But something was making her continue, a compulsion to put him back in his place.
"Oh Tim, don't be such a baby! That's what people do on picnics. Didn't you know that? They eat, and then they make love. Don't tell me you didn't have that in your mind from the very beginning!"
"But it was different," he answered helplessly. "Of course I hoped that we might. . . . But you didn't have to—I wasn't going to make you—"
"It's not a question of making anyone do anything. I was in the mood, that's all. And so were you." Kathy did not know why she was doing this to him, except that too many things had been closing in on her today; she wanted to clear a space round her, she wanted to push Tim away, just as she had pushed Tillotson, and breathe some free air. "Of course we made love. What do you think we were there for?"
"Kathy, why are you spoiling it all?"
"Spoiling it all. . . ." It annoyed her more than ever that he had found the precise word. She was spoiling it; making herself forget or disparage his tenderness, his ardour, his flat stomach; the sunlight through the leaves dappling their naked bodies; the world that moved. "I think you've got the wrong idea, young man," she went on, in a voice which disgusted her even as she used it. "That wasn't deathless love, you know, it was a good run-of-the-mill open-air lay." The phrase was Diane's, and she searched for another one in the same explicit terms, without success. She should have listened to Diane with more attention. . . . "What had you got in mind, anyway?—" she tried another tack, "—that we should settle down in some slum in Liverpool until you passed some kid's examination for—"