They looked at each other.
‘Did you ever notice his eyes?’
‘Of course! His eyes!’
They looked away.
At that moment the sun rent the slate-coloured awning stretched between world and sky, and at once the waves were decked with an evening panoply of gold and hyacinth.
Margs asked, ‘Would you sleep with a man now that you’re engaged to another?’
‘If I did, I’d keep something back for marriage. Marriage is another matter,’ Angie nobly replied.
‘How right you are! Exactly how I feel!’
Soon afterwards the girls relinquished the rail and went down to dress for dinner.
After taking his clothes off, he lay down on sheets slatted with light, which surrendered their cool all too soon to a sweating body. A couple of days out of Colombo the bunk was as stable as a bed on this motionless sea, its monotony broken only by a random shark’s fin; the flying-fish, growing languid, elected to stay below. His own languor did not prevent him forcing himself at his discipline of interrogating La Rochefoucauld, the words tasting musty to a furred tongue, the thought rising like baroque remains in a tropic jungle.
Nos vertus ne sont le plus souvent que des vices déguisés …; when according to his own experience the reverse was true.
His book tumbling floorwards, he dozed off, and was soon spanned by the protective wings of this great eagle, who should have been vicious, but wasn’t. He could have cried out for the delight they were sharing if he hadn’t become otherwise caught up in the stratagems of men, floundering in mud, failing to disentangle himself from the slime and blood of human bowels.
He awoke whimpering, twitching, yelping like a limp puppy.
The steward, a decent little bloke with the scar of an ancient boil visible on a cropped nape, was picking up the fallen book.
‘French, eh?’ It might have been his batman Pritchett. ‘Not dressing up for the fancy ball?’
‘Tired of dressing up …’ Not only in the carnation robe, the pomegranate shawl, but the webbing, the mud leggings, and starting out through the carnival of gunfire and Verey lights.
‘Go in the altogether, sir,’ the pseudo-Pritchett suggested. ‘Give ’em an eyeful.’
He laughed down his nose. ‘Tired of undressing too.’
‘Pritchett’ joined in with a snigger. ‘Suffering from the old accidie, are we?’
He opened his eyes. ‘Could be. What do you know about accidie?’
‘Only what a priest told me.’ As though released by an invitation the pseudo-Pritchett sat down on the edge of the bunk.
‘The priest was suffering from it?’
‘Not on yer life! ’E was working it out of ’is bloody system — take it from me — only too successfully.’ The steward could not resist slapping the passenger on the thigh.
Oh God, not another! (You didn’t mean it exactly like that, when you could have kissed the crater of the extinct boil. Poor bloody Pritchett!)
Recovering himself, the steward had risen and started on a dithering voyage of tidying. ‘Only want to encourage you — Lieutenant Twyborn — to join in whatever’s offerin’. We’re ’ere, aren’t we? so why not?’
‘Cut out the Lieutenant.’
‘But we want to honour yer — in some way.’ The poor bastard almost in a state of bubbling tears.
‘Thank you.’ It sounded so dry, pompous, poopish — insincere, from one who was sincerely grateful. (A situation for La Rochefoucauld.)
‘Well, good-night, sir. Thank you.’ There was not quite a click of heels as the batman-steward withdrew.
Turning a cheek against the hot pillow, Eudoxia Twyborn wept inwardly, for the past as well as a formless future.
The Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean had been slowly cajoling the worst out of shipboard relationships; life was lived in a fever which only Fremantle would reduce. Until then, ex-colonels were ready to engage dangers less explicit than those they had survived; the more adventurous among their no longer seasick wives embarked on recces through the steerage and even into the engine-room. Girls grew breathless from expectation. Youths in sandshoes hovered, trousers hoist above hand-knitted ankles. All of them wanted to express something, but didn’t. With the result that he in particular never mastered the part they expected him to play.
It was the girl with the creamed sunburn who dared blurt at the one they needed as protagonist for their legend. ‘We all know you’re Lieutenant Twyborn, so why shouldn’t I introduce myself? I’m Angela Parsons of Salisbury, Wilts. Does it sound too American put like that?’ Here she giggled and clasped her hands together on the rail. ‘I’m going out to my fiancé—Doug Yeomans — who’s farming near Brewarrinna.’
It was his turn to expose himself, as she had every right to expect, standing twisting the small sapphire she was wearing on her engagement finger, the desert light flashing on her slightly buckled teeth.
But he could not oblige her.
So she went off into a recitative of gush, ‘It’s so so so … the DSO … we’re so so … Well, real courage is not for every mortal to achieve.’
By now quite desperate, he replied, ‘Courage is often despair running in the right direction.’ And stalked off.
The other one, her friend, who tackled him not much later, was the more serious proposition in that she represented extrovert Australia.
‘Aren’t you one of those Twyborns?’
‘Which?’
‘Well-Edward the Judge.’
‘He’s my father.’
‘And Eadie, Eadie’s a friend of Mummy’s. Not intimate, but a friend.’
She encouraged the son with a bland smile in a tan which had returned since her stint of nursing at Lady Ifield’s Sussex mansion.
‘How excited your parents must be to know you’re coming.’
‘They don’t know.’
‘Oh? But haven’t you written?’
‘Not in years.’
There was nothing she could say to that, only reflect her own parents’ opinion of Eddie Twyborn’s disappearance on the eve of his marriage to nice Marian Dibden, who had done much better for herself in the end with Ken Anstruther the chartered accountant (top of his year).
He saw to it that there was not another encounter until the two acquaintances Margs Gilchrist and Angie Parsons bailed him up by what looked like deliberate accident during the Aden-Colombo run. Planted in the glaring, holy-stoned deck they barred the way. He could feel the sweat trickling down his legs inside crumpled duck.
‘Won’t the ball be fun?’ gushed Miss Parsons. ‘What are you going as, Mr Twyborn? Or is it a secret?’
‘Going as myself.’
‘Oh, no! Oh, Eddie!’ Margs protested. ‘How elderly!’
He could only wince and hope to escape.
They couldn’t bear it, and when, as they afterwards agreed, he was looking his most divine.
‘I know!’ It was Angela’s brainwave. ‘What if we dress you up as one of ourselves? You’d be a riot!’
Margs could only shriek in agreement.
‘Might run you out of business.’ He did not mean it to sound as sour as he knew it did, although he could see they hadn’t heard it as more than a ‘scream’.
He got away soon afterwards.
After finishing his dinner of half a leaden kromesky and a few splinters of frozen pheasant, and detaching himself from the colonial aristocracy (the genuinely kind ladies who would have liked to nurse him back from some obscure sickness he was obviously suffering from, and their more suspicious home-made husbands, creaking and sweating in the dinner jackets enforced on them) he did look in on the ball for a little, and spotted his two friends, the one a hearty improvised sultana, her yashmak stuck to the buckled teeth, the other an athletic pierrette in a costume she must have brought along. The latter’s sinewy tanned arms were permanently tensed as though for a volley at tennis. The not inappropriately black pompoms revived the metaphor of an infernal game, which his memory loathed, yet mourned as the occasion of his downfall, the confession of his deficiencies.