The three of us sat for a little by the empty dance floor — my wife was full of schemes by which, without impoliteness, we could move to another table in the dining-room. ‘It’s crazy to go to the restaurant,’ she said, ‘and pay extra for exactly the same dinner. Only film people go there, anyway. I don’t see why we should be made to.’
Presently she said: ‘It’s making my head ache and I’m tired, anyway. I’m going to bed.’
Julia went with her. I walked round the ship, on one of the covered decks where the wind howled and the spray leaped up from the darkness and smashed white and brown against the glass screen; men were posted to keep the passengers off the open decks. Then I, too, went below.
In my dressing-room everything breakable had been stowed away, the door to the cabin was hooked open, and my wife called plaintively from within.
‘I feel terrible. I didn’t know a ship of this size could pitch like this, she said, and her eyes were full of consternation and resentment, like those of a woman who, at the end of her time, at length realizes that however luxurious the nursing home, and however well paid the doctor, her labour is inevitable; and the lift and fall of the ship came regularly as the pains of childbirth.
I slept next door; or, rather, I lay there between dreaming and waking. In a narrow bunk, on a hard mattress, there might have been rest, but here the beds were broad and buoyant; I collected what cushions I could find and tried to wedge myself firm, but through the night I turned with each swing and twist of the ship — she was rolling now as well as pitching — and my head rang with the creak and thud.
Once, an hour before dawn, my wife appeared like a ghost in the doorway, supporting herself with either hand on the jambs, saying: ‘Are you awake? Can’t you do something? Can’t you get something from the doctor?’
I rang for the night steward, who had a draught ready prepared, which comforted her a little.
And all night between dreaming and waking I thought of Julia; in my brief dreams she took a hundred fantastic and terrible and obscene forms, but in my waking thoughts she returned with her sad, starry head just as I had seen her at dinner.
After first light I slept for an hour or two, then awoke clearheaded, with a joyous sense of anticipation.
The wind had dropped a little, the steward told me, but was still blowing hard and there was a very heavy swell; ‘which there’s nothing worse than a heavy swell’, he said, ‘for the enjoyment of the passengers. There’s not many breakfasts wanted this morning.’
I looked in at my wife, found her sleeping, and closed the door between us; then I ate salmon kedgeree and cold Bradenham ham and telephoned for a barber to come and shave me.
‘There’s a lot of stuff in the sitting-room for the lady,’ said the steward; ‘shall I leave it for the time?’
I went to see. There was a second delivery of cellophane parcels from the shops on board, some ordered by radio from friends in New York whose secretaries had failed to remind them of our departure in time, some by our guests as they left the cocktail party. It was no day for flower vases; I told him to leave them on the floor and then, struck by the thought, removed the card from Mr Kramm’s roses and sent them with my love to Julia.
She telephoned while I was being shaved.
‘What a deplorable thing to do, Charles! How unlike you!’
‘Don’t you like them?’
‘What can I do with roses on a day like this?’
‘Smell them.’
There was a pause and a rustle of unpacking. ‘They’ve absolutely no smell at all.’
‘What have you had for breakfast?’
‘Muscat grapes and cantaloupe’
‘When shall I see you?’
‘Before lunch. I’m busy till then with a masseuse.’
‘A masseuse?’
‘Yes, isn’t it peculiar? I’ve never had one before, except once when I hurt my shoulder hunting. What is it about being on a boat that makes everyone behave like a film star?’
‘I don’t.’
‘How about these very embarrassing roses?’
‘The barber did his work with extraordinary dexterity indeed, with agility, for he stood like a swordsman in a ballet sometimes on the point of one foot, sometimes on the other, lightly flicking the lather off his blade, and swooping back to my chin as the ship righted herself; I should not have dared use a safety razor on myself.
The telephone rang again.
It was my wife.
‘How are you Charles?’
‘Tired.’
‘Aren’t you coming to see me?’
‘I came once. I’ll be in again.’
I brought her the flowers from the sitting-room; they completed the atmosphere of a maternity ward which she had managed to create in the cabin; the stewardess had the air of a midwife, standing by the bed, a pillar of starched linen and composure. My wife turned her head on the pillow and smiled wanly; she stretched out a bare arm and caressed with the tips of her fingers the cellophane and silk ribbons of the largest bouquet. ‘How sweet people are,’ she said faintly, as though the gale were a private misfortune of her own for which the world in its love was condoling with her.
‘I take it you’re not getting up.’
‘Oh no, Mrs Clark is being so sweet’; she was always quick to get servants’ names. ‘Don’t bother. Come in sometimes and tell me what’s going on.’
‘Now, now, dear,’ said the stewardess, ‘the less we are disturbed today the better.’
My wife seemed to make a sacred, female rite even of sea-sickness.
Julia’s cabin, I knew, was somewhere below ours. I waited for her by the lift on the main deck; when she came we walked once round the promenade; I held the rail; she took my other arm. It was hard going; through the streaming glass we saw a distorted world of grey sky and black water. When the ship rolled heavily I swung her round so that she could hold the rail with her other hand; the howl of the wind was subdued, but the whole ship creaked with strain. We made the circuit once, then Julia said: ‘It’s no good. That woman beat hell out of me, and I feel limp, anyway. Let’s sit down.’
The great bronze doors of the lounge had torn away from their hooks and were swinging free with the roll of the ship; regularly and, it seemed, irresistibly, first one, then the other, opened and shut; they paused at the completion of each half circle, began to move slowly and finished fast with a resounding clash. There was no real risk in passing them, except of slipping and being caught by that swift, final blow; there was ample time to walk through unhurried but there was something forbidding in the sight of that great weight of uncontrolled metal, flapping to and fro, which might have made a timid man flinch or skip through too quickly; I rejoiced to feel Julia’s hand perfectly steady on my arm and know, as I walked beside her, that she was wholly undismayed.
‘Bravo,’ said a man sitting nearby. ‘I confess I went round the other way. I didn’t like the look of those doors somehow. They’ve been trying to fix them all the morning.’
There were few people about that day, and that few seemed bound together by a camaraderie of reciprocal esteem; they did nothing except sit rather glumly in their armchairs, drink occasionally, and exchange congratulations on not being seasick.
‘You’re the first lady I’ve seen,’ said the man.
‘I’m very lucky.’
‘We are very lucky,’ he said, with a movement which began as a bow and ended as a lurch forward to his knees, as the blotting-paper floor dipped steeply between us. The roll carried us away from him, clinging together but still on our feet, and we quickly sat where our dance led us, on the further side, in isolation; a web of life-lines had been stretched across the lounge, and we seemed like boxers, roped into the ring.
The steward approached. ‘Your usual, sir? Whisky and tepid water, I think. And for the lady? Might I suggest a nip of champagne?’
‘D’you know, the awful thing is I would like champagne very much,’ said Julia. ‘What a life of pleasur
e — roses, half an hour with a female pugilist, and now champagne!’
‘I wish you wouldn’t go on about the roses. It wasn’t my idea in the first place. Someone sent them to Celia.’
‘Oh, that’s quite different. It lets you out completely. But it makes my massage worse.’
‘I was shaved in bed.’
‘I’m glad about the roses,’ said Julia. ‘Frankly, they were a shock. They made me think we were starting the day on the wrong foot.’
I knew what she meant, and in that moment felt as though I had shaken off some of the dust and grit of ten dry years; then and always, however she spoke to me, in half sentences, single words, stock phrases of contemporary jargon, in scarcely perceptible movements of eyes or lips or hands, however inexpressible her thought, however quick and far it had glanced from the matter in hand, however deep it had plunged, as it often did, straight from the surface to the depths, I knew; even that day when I still stood on the extreme verge of love, I knew what she meant.
We drank our wine and soon our new friend came lurching towards us down the lifeline.
‘Mind if I join you? Nothing like a bit of rough weather for bringing people together. This is my tenth crossing, and I’ve never seen anything like it. I can see you are an experienced sailor, young lady.’
‘No. As a matter of fact, I’ve never been at sea before except coming to New York and, of course, crossing the Channel. I don’t feel sick, thank God, but I feel tired. I thought at first it was only the massage, but I’m coming to the conclusion it’s the ship.’
‘My wife’s in a terrible way. She’s an experienced sailor. Only shows, doesn’t it?’
He joined us at luncheon, and I did not mind his being there; he had clearly taken a fancy to Julia, and he thought we were man and wife; this misconception and his gallantry seemed in some way to bring her and me closer together. ‘Saw you two last night at the Captain’s table,’ he said, ‘with all the nobs.’
‘Very dull nobs.’
‘If you ask me, nobs always are. When you get a storm like this you find out what people are really made of’
‘You have a predilection for good sailors?’
‘Well, put like that I don’t know that I do — what I mean is, it makes for getting together.’
‘Yes.’
‘Take us for example. But for this we might never have met. I’ve had some very romantic encounters at sea in my time. If the lady will excuse me, I’d like to tell you about a little adventure I had in the Gulf of Lions when I was younger than I am now.’
We were both weary; lack of sleep, the incessant din, and the strain every movement required, wore us down. We spent that afternoon apart in our cabins. I slept and when I awoke the sea was as high as ever, inky clouds swept over us, and the glass streamed still with water, but I had grown used to the storm In my sleep, had made its rhythm mine, had become part of it, so that I arose strongly and confidently and found Julia already up and in the same temper.
‘What d’you think?’ she said. ‘That man’s giving a little “get together party” tonight in the smoking-room for all the good sailors. He asked me to bring my husband.’
‘Are we going?’
‘Of course…I wonder if I ought to feel like the lady our friend met on the way to Barcelona. I don’t, Charles not a bit.’
There were eighteen people at the ‘get-together party’; we had nothing in common except immunity from seasickness. We drank champagne, and presently our host said: ‘Tell you what, I’ve got a roulette wheel. Trouble is we can’t go to my cabin on account of the wife, and we aren’t allowed to play in public.’
So the party adjourned to my sitting-room and we played for low stakes until late into the night, when Julia left and our host had drunk too much wine to be surprised that she and I were not in the same quarters. When all but he had gone, he fell asleep in his chair, and I left him there. It was the last I saw of him, for later — so the steward told me when he came from returning the roulette things to the man’s cabin — he broke his thigh, falling in the corridor, and was taken to the ship’s hospital.
All next day Julia and I spent together without interruption; talking, scarcely moving, held in our chairs by the swell of the sea. After luncheon the last hardy passengers went to rest and we were alone as though the place had been cleared for us, as though tact on a titanic scale had sent everyone tip-toeing out to leave us to one another.
The bronze doors of the lounge had been fixed, but not before two seamen had been badly injured. They had tried various devices, lashing with ropes and, later, when these failed, with steel hawsers, but there was nothing to which they could be made fast; finally, they drove wooden wedges under them, catching them in the brief moment of repose when they were full open, and these held firm.
When, before dinner, she went to her cabin to get ready (no one dressed that night) and I came with her, uninvited, unopposed, expected, and behind closed doors took her in my arms and first kissed her, there was no alteration from the mood of the afternoon. Later, turning it over in my mind, as I turned in my bed with the rise and fall of the ship, through the long, lonely, drowsy night, I recalled the courtships of the past, dead, ten years; how, knotting my tie before setting out, putting the gardenia in my buttonhole, I would plan my evening and think at such and such a time, at such and such an opportunity, I shall cross the start-line and open my attack for better or worse; ‘this phase of the battle has gone on long enough’, I would think; ‘a decision must be reached.’ With Julia there were no phases, no start-line, no tactics at all.
But later that night when she went to bed and I followed her to her door, she stopped me.
‘No, Charles, not yet. Perhaps never. I don’t know. I don’t know if I want love.’
Then something, some surviving ghost from those dead ten years — for one cannot die, even for a little, without some loss made me say, ‘Love? I’m not asking for love.’
‘Oh yes, Charles, you are,’ she said, and putting up her hand gently stroked my cheek; then shut her door.
And I reeled back, first on one wall, then on the other, of the long, softly lighted, empty corridor; for the storm, it appeared, had the form of a ring; all day we had been sailing through its still centre; now we were once more in the full fury of the wind and that night was to be rougher than the one before.
Ten hours of talking: what had we to say? Plain fact mostly, the record of our two lives, so long widely separate, now being knit to one. Through all that storm-tossed night I rehearsed what she had told me; she was no longer the alternate succubus and starry, vision of the night before; she had given all that was transferable of her past into my keeping. She told me, as I have already retold, of her courtship and marriage; she told me, as though fondly turning the pages of an old nursery-book, of her childhood, and I lived long, sunny days with her in the meadows, with Nanny Hawkins on her camp stool and Cordelia asleep in the pram, slept quiet nights under the dome with the religious pictures fading round the cot as the nightlight burned low and the embers settled in the grate. She told me of her life with Rex and of the secret, vicious, disastrous escapade that had taken her to New York. She, too, had had her dead years. She told me of her long struggle with Rex as to whether she should have a child; at first she wanted one, but learned after a year that an operation was needed to make it possible; by that time Rex and she were out of love, but he still wanted his child, and when at last she consented, it was born dead.
‘Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally,’ she said. ‘It’s just that he isn’t a real person at all; he’s just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn’t there. He couldn’t imagine why it hurt me to find two months after we came back to London from our honeymoon, that he was still keeping up with Brenda Champion.’
‘I was glad when I found Celia was unfaithful,’ I said. ‘I felt it was all right for me to dislike her.’
‘Is she? Do you? I’m glad. I don’t like her either. W
hy did you marry her?’
‘Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she’s the ideal wife for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian.’
‘You loved him, didn’t you?’
‘Oh yes. He was the forerunner.’
Julia understood.
The ship creaked and shuddered, rose and fell. My wife called to me from the next room: ‘Charles, are you there?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve been asleep such a long while. What time is it?’
‘Half past three.’
‘It’s no better, is it?’
‘Worse.’
‘I feel a little better, though. D’you think they’d bring me some tea or something if I rang the bell?’
I got her some tea and biscuits from the night steward.
‘Did you have an amusing evening?’
‘Everyone’s seasick.’
‘Poor Charles. It was going to have been such a lovely trip, too. It may be better tomorrow.’
I turned out the light and shut the door between us.
Waking and dreaming, through the strain and creak and heave of the long night, firm on my back with my arms and legs spread wide to check the roll, and my eyes open to the darkness, I lay thinking of Julia.
‘…We thought papa might come back to England after mummy died, or that he might marry again, but he lives just as he did. Rex and I often go to see him now. I’ve grown fond-of him… Sebastian’s disappeared completely…Cordelia’s in Spain with an ambulance…Bridey leads his own extraordinary life. He wanted to shut Brideshead after mummy died, but papa wouldn’t have it for some reason, so Rex and I live there now, and Bridey has two rooms up in the dome, next to Nanny Hawkins, part of the old nurseries. He’s like a character from Chekhov. One meets him sometimes coming out of the library or on the stairs — I never know when he’s at home — and now and then he suddenly comes in to dinner like a ghost quite unexpectedly.
‘…Rex’s parties! Politics and money. They can’t do anything except for money; if they walk round the lake they have to make bets about how many swans they see…sitting up till two, amusing Rex’s girls, hearing them gossip, rattling away endlessly on the backgammon board while the men play cards and smoke cigars. The cigar smoke. I can smell it in my hair when I wake up in the morning; it’s in my clothes when I dress at night. Do I smell of it now? D’you think that woman who rubbed me, felt it in my skin?