There was complete silence except for the faint whirring of the fan and now and then a muted clanging sound from somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship. Suppose he didn’t come? How the hell was she going to get through the night like this, sleeping pills or no sleeping pills? Sometimes she could bring herself to orgasm by thinking about it, but she couldn’t always depend on it, and going that far without the final release always left her half crazy. She started twisting on the bunk again, but at that moment the door opened quickly and he was framed in it for an instant against the lighted passageway. It closed, and the darkness was complete again.
He said nothing. She flicked on the lighter and reached for a cigarette with a show of nonchalance she was aware didn’t fool him any more than it did her. With no more than an amused and condescending glance in her direction, he unbelted and slipped out of the seersucker robe which was the only thing he had on aside from the slippers. The flame cut off, but she could still see him in her mind’s eye, a bony middle-aged man with a sharp face and thinning blond hair combed diagonally back over a bald spot. She’d told him once that he reminded her of a ferret, to which he’d merely laughed and said it took one to know one; ferrets and mink were of the same family.
He walked over and stood naked beside the bunk, only a pale blur in the darkness. She put out a hand, touching his hip, and slid it diagonally downward. God, who would ever believe it? She took another shaky puff of the cigarette, fighting herself, and asked, with beautifully simulated indifference, ‘Why are we stopped?’
‘That shaft bearing again,’ Barset replied. ‘So the chief says.’
‘Whatever a shaft bearing is,’ she said idly. With another movement of the hand, she murmured, ‘You’re so accommodating, darling.’
‘Have you decided yet?’ he asked. ‘Whether it’s me or not?’
‘I’m not annoying you, am I, Steward?’ She couldn’t resist the ‘Steward’, even though it was risky. Once he’d merely turned and gone back to his own cabin, leaving her in torment, knowing she would apologize the next day for whatever snotty remark she’d made, that she’d crawl if she had to. But how much of that lordly condescension could you take? ‘I assure you I’m filled with all the awe to which you’re accustomed, but this is the only way I can express it. Being by nature shy and inarticulate—’
‘Turn it off,’ he said.
We cone to bury Caesar, not to praise him, she thought, but didn’t say it. The chances were he’d not only never heard the joke, but hadn’t even heard of Shakespeare. He lay down beside her and slid a hand between her thighs to spread them.
‘And put out that stupid cigarette,’ he added.
She stubbed out the cigarette with a shaky hand, hurriedly, scarcely able to breathe now. The widow, she thought, of a man who was eleventh in his class at the Academy and commanding officer of a cruiser when he retired. Oh! Oh! Oh, God!
* * *
In Cabin D, Karen Brooke had been asleep, but she awoke when the engine stopped and the ship’s vibration ceased. She lay for a moment wondering what had happened, but decided it probably wasn’t serious. Her door was on the hook and the porthole open, and she could hear no running footsteps or voices which might indicate an emergency of some kind. She could remember her father telling her when she was a little girl that a ship’s engines stopping at sea, while rare, wasn’t particularly alarming, but if she ever heard them go abruptly from full ahead to full astern to get on deck and away from the bow as fast as she could. No doubt it was just another breakdown in the engine room; there had been two stoppages, one for twelve hours, since their departure from Callao six days ago.
She had the wind-scoop out the porthole, but now that the ship had come to rest it picked up no air at all and it was suffocatingly hot inside the cabin, even with the whirring of the fan. It would be some relief to take off the cotton pajamas she was wearing, but that would mean drawing the curtains over the porthole. They scrubbed down the deck outside very early in the morning, and five feet seven of sleeping nude blonde might cause God knows what havoc among seamen wielding forgotten fire hoses. Even a thirty-four-year-old blonde, she thought; sailors a week at sea were notoriously generous critics.
She heard a door open and close, and then a murmur of voices, one of them male, just beyond the bulkhead in Cabin D. She winced. Oh, no, not again! Not tonight! You’d think that now the ship stopped, in this complete silence without the throb of the engine and the vibration to lend at least an illusion of privacy to their lovemaking, they might be a little more discreet.
She felt trapped, embarrassed, and angry. The first time it happened, the night they sailed from Callao, in her revulsion at being a captive audience to the impassioned grapplings and ecstatic shrieks from beyond the bulkhead, she had buried her head under her pillow and suffered through it. Mrs. Lennox was aware that she occupied Cabin D, so it was obvious she just didn’t realize how sound-transparent that flimsy bulkhead really was. The next day, when she was sure the other woman was in her cabin, she had gone bustling around her own, singing fragments of song, dropping a book, creating other small sounds which should carry the message without being too obvious about it. It had done no good at all. The next night was a repetition of the first, and the following was even worse, with the result that by now she was afraid to make any sound in her cabin at all. Just once, it could be assumed without too much embarrassment on either side that she’d been asleep, but that was impossible now, after nearly a week of it. She wasn’t certain that even Mrs. Lennox herself was aware of some of the things she cried out in her transports, but any recognition between them now that they’d been overheard would be mutually humiliating to the point their one desire would be never to see each other again. Which would be somewhat awkward under the circumstances; the old freighter was a small ship, they were the only women on it, and it was a long way to Manila.
With the initial moan from the other cabin she sat up wearily and reached for her robe. The only escape was in flight, but she was damned if she’d get dressed again. Belting it around her, she dropped cigarettes and a lighter in the pockets, located her slippers in the darkness, and went out, softly closing the door behind her. Her hair was a mess, and she had on no makeup, but she was too angry to care. The worst of it was that by leaving her cabin she was committed to staying away until she was certain the man, whoever he was, would have left. It would be embarrassing in the extreme to meet him in the passageway coming out of Mrs. Lennox’ cabin at this hour of the morning.
She’d thought once or twice of asking the steward or captain if she could move to another cabin, but always ran into the unanswerable question of what excuse she could give. Besides, it would have to be a double cabin, and she’d paid only for a single. While there were only four passengers aboard and the Leander had accommodations for twelve in four double cabins and four singles, they were all people travelling alone, so only the doubles were unoccupied.
Her cabin was the last one aft in the starboard passageway. There was no one in sight. She turned into the thwartships passageway, went on past the entrance to the dining saloon on her left, and stepped out on deck on the port side. This level, referred to in the usual grandiose language of travel brochures as the promenade deck, contained the eight passenger cabins, the steward’s cabin, and the passenger dining and smoking saloons. On the next deck below were the crew’s quarters and messrooms, while the deck officers and engineers occupied the one directly above, along with their messroom and the wireless room. Passengers were encouraged to stay in their own area, except that they were allowed on the boat deck, the uppermost one, as long as they kept clear of the bridge.