Ingram paused in his pumping. “Do you have to do that?”
She wondered herself. She’d always held a dim view of the therapeutic value of catharsis or confession and regarded all breast-beating and cries of mea culpa as being more vulgar exhibitionism than anything else. If you’d bought it, you lived with it as well as you could and with as little fuss as possible. But on the other hand, if you’d wronged another human being, you at least owed him an explanation.
“You wanted to understand, didn’t you?” she asked curtly. “I’ve never been greatly addicted to the use of euphemisms and evasions, and if I thought you were responsible for something I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you. To be any good, it has to work both ways.”
“I know. But aside from the fact I don’t think it’s true—”
“Thank you. You are nice, Mr. Ingram. But you haven’t heard the story.”
“No.” He resumed pumping. “But there’s more to it than his thinking you tried to kill him. Why is he so afraid of water?”
“Because he thinks that’s the way we tried to kill him, by drowning—”
He shook his head. “No. It’s still not that simple.” He told her briefly of Rae’s throwing the whisky bottle overboard and of Warriner’s reaction to watching it sink.
She nodded. “Yes. I know about that part of it.” She was silent for a moment, thinking. “I’m not sure I can explain it myself, except that I think it’s a fear of drowning carried to the point of phobia. You know what acrophobia is, of course?”
“Yes. A morbid fear of heights. But it has nothing to do with water.”
“I know. But in his case I think it does.” She nodded toward the sea around them. “When you look out there you see nothing but the surface. So do I; so does everybody. We realize vaguely that two miles down there’s a bottom, but we never think of it, even if we’re swimming in it—probably even if we’re in trouble in it. It makes no difference whether you drown in seven feet of water, or seven miles; you still drown within a few feet of the surface. But you’re in the water; I think he imagines himself rather precariously suspended on the surface of it, as if it were a film of some kind, ten thousand feet above the bottom. In other words, I get the impression he sees it all the way down. Hence, acrophobia. As I say, I’m only guessing, but how else can you account for that horror when he sees something sinking below him? To him, it’s not sinking; it’s falling. And, like all people with acrophobia, he imagines himself falling with it.”
Ingram nodded, though still not convinced she was right. “But he wasn’t always like that?”
“Oh, no. He was an excellent swimmer. And skin-diver. It’s simply because of what we did to him ten days ago. But you have to understand what happened before, and what the situation was. Explosive is a good one-word description. To begin with, not one of us was competent to take a yacht across the Pacific, and incompetence multiplied by any number up to infinity is still incompetence. Four people who don’t know what they’re doing—”
“Are simply four times worse than one,” Ingram said. “So nobody was in charge?”
“No. Not after things started to fall apart. Hughie, as legal owner of the yacht and the only one with any sailing experience at all, should have been in command, but you can’t force a man to command, to fight back, to accept responsibility, if the only responsibility he’s ever had in his life was to be acceptable and pleasing to a succession of overprotective women who took care of him. And if you happen to be in love with him and have to stand there helplessly day after day and watch this disintegration under pressure, this thing you can’t do anything about, eventually your own frustration may goad you into doing something stupid and cruel and unforgivable. But I didn’t intend to make excuses, and I’m getting ahead of the story anyway.”
12
“Hughie,” she went on, “has always been obsessed by a feeling for the greatness of Gauguin, and it’s been a lifelong ambition of his to go to Polynesia and live among the islands as he did, escape from the rat race the same way, paint the same subjects, experience the same things. So, when we were married in Europe almost a year ago, I let myself be persuaded, in spite of the fact I had some misgivings about it. In the first place, there’s no escape from our so-called civilization any more; the twentieth century is something we’re locked into and there’s no way we can get out; when we got to Papeete we’d probably find the same jukeboxes, the same headlines, the same cocktail parties, the same jet service from here to there, the same Bomb, and the same exhortations to embrace the finer life by buying something. And in the second place, I was more than a little doubtful of our ability to sail a boat down there. But at heart I wanted to be persuaded, and I was. From my point of view there were several things in favor of it. No doubt you can guess what some of them were, but in the interests of clarity they might as well be included in this confession. I’m considerably older than Hughie, and when I met him I was a widow, a fairly wealthy one. You know what he looks like. The picture is trite to the point of banality, except that in this case it’s not true at all. He’s no glorified beach-boy, and we were genuinely in love with each other. And while I bleed very little over the opinions of other people, I didn’t want him regarded as something he wasn’t—at least, not yet, by the grace of God. I have a small but very good collection of paintings, and I know the work of talent when I see it. I wanted to help him, and in Hughie’s case one way of helping him—and me—was to keep him out of the reach of all that gaggle of soi-disant benefactresses and panting patrons of the arts who couldn’t keep their hands off him.”
She broke off with an impatient gesture and then went on. “But enough of that. Hughie bought and studied all the books he could find on yachting and navigation. We chartered a yacht, with a professional crew of two, for a cruise in the western Mediterranean, from Cannes down to the Balearics, to learn as much as we could from practical experience. We came back to the States last winter, bought Orpheus, and began getting ready.”
She smiled musingly. “Then I think we were betrayed. No doubt you remember the old ploy of crooked gamblers, letting the sheep, the intended victim, win the first few hands in order to increase the stakes. It was as if the Pacific Ocean, or fate, did it deliberately. The passage from Santa Barbara down to La Paz was ridiculously easy. Nothing went wrong at all. The weather was perfect, Hughie’s navigation was seemingly accurate enough, the couple with us, who were old friends of mine from San Francisco, were congenial, and we were never at sea long enough for the confinement and too close association to cause any friction, because we made stops at San Diego and Ensenada. If anything had gone wrong in that first leg of the trip we would have been brought face to face with our own inexperience and incompetence, and we’d have had sense enough to give it up. But nothing did, and we were far too overconfident and cocky by the time we reached La Paz.
“Then the other couple had to abandon the trip there and go back to San Francisco because of illness. We lay at anchor in the harbor for nearly three months.”
“Were you living aboard all the time?” Ingram asked.
“No. We came back to California, by plane, for several weeks, and part of the time we lived ashore at a hotel. Why?”