‘But you swim faster,’ she complained, slipping off her shoulder straps and turning into a prone position; ‘Mezhdu prochim (by the way), is it true that a sailor in Tobakoff’s day was not taught to swim so he wouldn’t die a nervous wreck if the ship went down?’

‘A common sailor, perhaps,’ said Van. ‘When michman Tobakoff himself got shipwrecked off Gavaille, he swam around comfortably for hours, frightening away sharks with snatches of old songs and that sort of thing, until a fishing boat rescued him — one of those miracles that require a minimum of cooperation from all concerned, I imagine,’

Demon, she said, had told her, last year at the funeral, that he was buying an island in the Gavailles (‘incorrigible dreamer,’ drawled Van). He had ‘wept like a fountain’ in Nice, but had cried with even more abandon in Valentina, at an earlier ceremony, which poor Marina did not attend either. The wedding — in the Greek-faith style, if you please — looked like a badly faked episode in an ‘old movie, the priest was gaga and the dyakon drunk, and — perhaps, fortunately — Ada’s thick white veil was as impervious to light as a widow’s weeds. Van said he would not listen to that.

‘Oh, you must,’ she rejoined, ‘hotya bï potomu (if only because) one of her shafer’s (bachelors who take turns holding the wedding crown over the bride’s head) looked momentarily, in impassive profile and impertinent attitude (he kept raising the heavy metallic venets too high, too athletically high as if trying on purpose to keep it as far as possible from her head), exactly like you, like a pale, ill-shaven twin, delegated by you from wherever you were,’

At a place nicely called Agony, in Terra del Fuego. He felt an uncanny tingle as he recalled that when he received there the invitation to the wedding (airmailed by the groom’s sinister sister) he was haunted for several nights by dream after dream, growing fainter each time (much as her movie he was to pursue from flick-house to flick-house at a later stage of his life) of his holding that crown over her.

‘Your father,’ added Lucette, ‘paid a man from Belladonna to take pictures — but of course, real fame begins only when one’s name appears in that cine-magazine’s crossword puzzle. We all know it will never happen, never! Do you hate me now?’

‘I don’t,’ he said, passing his hand over her sun-hot back and rubbing her coccyx to make pussy purr. ‘Alas, I don’t! I love you with a brother’s love and maybe still more tenderly. Would you like me to order drinks?’

‘I’d like you to go on and on,’ she muttered, her nose buried in the rubber pillow.

‘There’s that waiter coming. What shall we have — Honoloolers?’

‘You’ll have them with Miss Condor’ (nasalizing the first syllable) ‘when I go to dress. For the moment I want only tea. Mustn’t mix drugs and drinks. Have to take the famous Robinson pill sometime tonight. Sometime tonight.’

‘Two teas, please.’

‘And lots of sandwiches, George. Foie gras, ham, anything.’

‘It’s very bad manners,’ remarked Van, ‘to invent a name for a poor chap who can’t answer: "Yes, Mademoiselle Condor." Best Franco-English pun I’ve ever heard, incidentally.’

‘But his name is George. He was awfully kind to me yesterday when I threw up in the middle of the tearoom.’

‘For the sweet all is sweet,’ murmured Van.

‘And so were the old Robinsons,’ she rambled on. ‘Not much chance, is there, they might turn up here? They’ve been sort of padding after me, rather pathetically, ever since we happened to have lunch at the same table on the boat-train, and I realized who they were but was sure they would not recognize the little fat girl seen in eighteen eighty-five or — six, but they are hypnotically talkative — at first we thought you were French, this salmon is really delicious, what’s your home town? — and I’m a weak fool, and one thing led to another. Young people are less misled by the passage of time than the established old who have not much changed lately and are not used to the long-unseen young changing.’

‘That’s very clever, darling,’ said Van ‘— except that time itself is motionless and changeless.’

‘Yes, it’s always I in your lap and the receding road. Roads move?’

‘Roads move.’

After tea Lucette remembered an appointment with the hairdresser and left in a hurry. Van peeled off his jersey and stayed on for a while, brooding, fingering the little green-gemmed case with five Rosepetal cigarettes, trying to enjoy the heat of the platinum sun in its aura of ‘film-color’ but only managing to fan, with every shiver and heave of the ship, the fire of evil temptation.

A moment later, as if having spied on his solitude the pava (peahen) reappeared — this time with an apology.

Polite Van, scrambling up to his feet and browing his spectacles, started to apologize in his turn (for misleading her innocently) but his little speech petered out in stupefaction as he looked at her face and saw in it a gross and grotesque caricature of unforgettable features. That mulatto skin, that silver-blond hair, those fat purple lips, reinacted in coarse negative her ivory, her raven, her pale pout.

‘I was told,’ she explained, ‘that a great friend of mine, Vivian Vale, the cootooriay — voozavay entendue? — had shaved his beard, in which case he’d look rather like you, right?’

‘Logically, no, ma’am,’ replied Van.

She hesitated for the flirt of a second, licking her lips, not knowing whether he was being rude or ready — and here Lucette returned for her Rosepetals.

‘See you aprey,’ said Miss Condor.

Lucette’s gaze escorted to a good-riddance exit the indolent motion of those gluteal lobes and folds.

‘You deceived me, Van. It is, it is one of your gruesome girls!’

‘I swear,’ said Van, ‘that’s she’s a perfect stranger. I wouldn’t deceive you.’

‘You deceived me many, many times when I was a little girl. If you’re doing it now tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’

‘You promised me a harem,’ Van gently rebuked her.

‘Not today, not today! Today is sacred.’

The cheek he intended to kiss was replaced by her quick mad mouth.

‘Come and see my cabin,’ she pleaded as he pushed her away with the very spring, as it were, of his animal reaction to the fire of her lips and tongue. ‘I simply must show you their pillows and piano. There’s Cordula’s smell in all the drawers. I beseech you!’

‘Run along now,’ said Van. ‘You’ve no right to excite me like that. I’ll hire Miss Condor to chaperone me if you do not behave yourself. We dine at seven-fifteen.’

In his bedroom he found a somewhat belated invitation to the Captain’s table for dinner. It was addressed to Dr and Mrs Ivan Veen. He had been on the ship once before, in between the Queens, and remembered Captain Cowley as a bore and an ignoramus.

He called the steward and bade him carry the note back, with the penciled scrawl: ‘no such couple.’ He lay in his bath for twenty minutes. He attempted to focus on something else besides a hysterical virgin’s body. He discovered an insidious omission in his galleys where an entire line was wanting, with the vitiated paragraph looking, however, quite plausible — to an automatic reader — since the truncated end of one sentence, and the lower-case beginning of the other, now adjacent, fitted to form a syntactically correct passage, the insipidity of which he might never have noticed in the present folly of his flesh, had he not recollected (a recollection confirmed by his typescript) that at this point should have come a rather apt, all things considered, quotation: Insiste, anime meus, et adtende fortiter (courage, my soul and press on strongly).

‘Sure you’d not prefer the restaurant?’ he inquired when Lucette, looking even more naked in her short evening frock than she had in her ‘bickny,’ joined him at the door of the grill. ‘It’s crowded and gay down there, with a masturbating jazzband. No?’

Tenderly she shook her jeweled head.

They had huge succulent ‘grugru shrimps’ (the yellow larvae of a palm weevil) and roast bearlet à la Tobakoff. Only half-a-dozen tables were occupied, and except for a nasty engine vibration, which they had not noticed at lunch, everything was subdued, soft, and cozy. He took advantage of her odd demure silence to tell her in detail about the late pencil-palpating Mr Muldoon and also about a Kingston case of glossolalia involving a Yukonsk woman who spoke several Slavic-like dialects which existed, maybe, on Terra, but certainly not in Estotiland. Alas, another case (with a quibble on cas) engaged his attention subverbally.

She asked questions with pretty co-ed looks of doelike devotion, but it did not require much scientific training on a professor’s part to perceive that her charming embarrassment and the low notes furring her voice were as much contrived as her afternoon effervescence had been. Actually she thrashed in the throes of an emotional disarray which only the heroic self-control of an American aristocrat could master. Long ago she had made up her mind that by forcing the man whom she absurdly but irrevocably loved to have intercourse with her, even once, she would, somehow, with the help of some prodigious act of nature, transform a brief tactile event into an eternal spiritual tie; but she also knew that if it did not happen on the first night of their voyage, their relationship would slip back into the exhausting, hopeless, hopelessly familiar pattern of banter and counterbanter, with the erotic edge taken for granted, but kept as raw as ever. He understood her condition or at least believed, in despair, that he had understood it, retrospectively, by the time no remedy except Dr Henry’s oil of Atlantic prose could be found in the medicine chest of the past with its banging door and toppling toothbrush.