"Is someone ill?" she demands of Frisky, stopping him in his path.
Frisky's manner is no longer deferential, if it ever was. "Why should there be?" he says pertly. The tray aloft. One-handed.
"Then who's eating slops? Yoghurt, chicken broth ― who's that for?"
Frisky affects to notice for the first time what is on his tray. "Oh, that's Tabby, that is, miss." He has never in his life called her "miss" before. "Got a bit of the toothache, Tabby has. Had a wisdom tooth out in Antigua. Lot of bleeding. He's on the painkillers. Yeah."
She has begun to work out who visits him and when. It is an advantage of the rituals that control her that the smallest irregular movement on the ship is her concern; she knows by instinct whether the pretty Filipino stewardess has slept with the captain or the bosun or ― as happened briefly one afternoon while Caroline was sunbathing on the afterdeck ― with Sandy Langbourne. She has observed that it is Roper's three trusties ― Frisky, Tabby and Gus ― who sleep in the cabin above the private stairway to what she now believes is Jonathan's cell. And that the German-Argentineans across the gangway may suspect but do not share the secret. And that Corkoran ― the new, puffed up, officious Corkoran ― makes the journey twice a day at least, setting out with an air of circumstance and returning churlish.
"Corky," she beseeches him, trading on past friendship. "Corks, darling, please ― for God's sake ― how is he? Is he ill? Does he know I'm here?"
But Corkoran's face is shaded by the darkness he has visited. "I warned you, Jed. I gave you every chance," he retorts huffily. "You wouldn't hear me. You were wilful." And goes his way like an offended beadle.
Sandy Langbourne is also an occasional visitor. His chosen hour is after dinner during his evening prowl of the decks in search of more diverting company than his wife.
"You bastard, Sandy," she whispers at him as he saunters past her. "You utter spoilt bloody shit."
Langbourne remains unaffected by this onslaught. He is too beautiful and bored to care.
And she knows that Jonathan's other visitor is Roper, because Roper is unusually pensive when he returns from the forward area. Even if she has not seen him go there, she can tell by his manner when he reappears. Like Langbourne, he favours evenings. First stroll on deck, chat to the skipper or call one of the many stockbrokers, currency dealers and bankers round the globe: how about taking a flier on Deutschies, Bill? Swissies, Jack? the yen, the pound, the escudo, Malaysian rubber, Rus-diamonds, Canadian gold? Then gradually, by these and staging posts, he is drawn as if by magnetic attraction the forward part of the boat. And vanishes. When he reappears, his expression is overcast.
But Jed knows better than to beg or weep or scream or make a scene. If there is one thing that makes Roper dangerous it is a scene. It is the unwarranted invasion of his self-esteem. It is bloody women snivelling at his feet.
And she knows, or thinks she knows, that Jonathan is doing what he tried to do in Ireland. He is killing himself with his own courage.
* * *
It was better than Herr Meister's cellar, but it was also far, far worse. There was no going round and round the black walls. But that was because he was chained to them. He was not neglected; his presence was known to a succession of attentive people. But these same people had stuffed his mouth with chamois leather and taped it with adhesive, and although there was an understanding that they would remove these inconveniences whenever he gave the signal that he wished to talk, they had already demonstrated to him that if he gave the signal frivolously there would be consequences. Since then, he had developed a firm policy not to talk at all, not even a "good morning" or "hullo," because his terror was that ― since he was somebody who tended on occasion to confide, if only in his character as hotelier ― this tendency would become his undoing, and "hullo" would turn into "I sent Rooke the numbers of the containers and the name of the boat," or whatever other stray confession sprang to mind in the agony of the moment.
Yet what confession did they want from him? What more did they need to know that they didn't know already? They knew he was a plant and that most of the stories about him were invention. If they did not know how much he had betrayed, they knew enough to change or abort their plans before it was too late. So why the urgency? Why the frustration? Then gradually, as the sessions grew more ferocious, Jonathan came to recognise that his confession was something they felt that they were owed by right. He was their spy. They had unmasked him. Their pride demanded a contrite statement from the gallows.
But they were reckoning without Sophie. They didn't know about his Secret Sharer. Sophie who had been there ahead of him. And was there now, smiling at him over her coffee, please, Egyptian. Forgiving him. Amusing him: seducing him a little, urging him to live by daylight. When they beat his face ― a prolonged and careful beating, but a devastating one ― he wryly compared faces with her, and for a distraction he told her all about the Irish boy and the Heckler. But nothing maudlin; she was utterly against it; they never went in for self-pity or lost their sense of humour. You killer this woman? she teased him, lifting her plucked dark eyebrows and laughing her mannish laugh. No, he hadn't killered her. They had put that discussion behind them long ago. She had listened to his account of his dealings with Ogilvey, she had heard him out, now smiling, now frowning in distaste. "I think you did your duty, Mr. Pine," she declared when he had finished. "Unfortunately there are many kinds of loyalty, and we cannot serve them all at once. Like my husband, you believed you were a patriot. Next time you will make a better choice. Perhaps we shall make it together." When Tabby and Frisky worked on his body ― mostly by chaining him in attitudes that produced prolonged and excruciating pain ― Sophie reminded him how her body had been broken too: in her case, clubbed until it was destroyed. And when he was deep down and half asleep and wondering how he would make it back to the top of the crevasse, he regaled her with accounts of difficult climbs he had made in the Oberland ― a north face of the Jungfrau that had gone seriously wrong; bivouacking in a hundred-mile-an-hour wind. And Sophie, if she was bored, never showed it. She listened with her great brown eyes steadfastly upon him, loving and encouraging him: I am sure, that you will never again give yourself away so cheaply, Mr. Pine, she had told him. Our good manners can sometimes disguise our courage from us. Have you something to read on the plane back to Cairo? I think I shall read. It will help me to remember that I am myself. And then, to his surprise, he was back in the little flat in Luxor, watching her pack up her overnight bag, one object at a time and very deliberately, as if she were selecting companions for a much longer journey than the trip to Cairo.
And of course it was Sophie who had encouraged him to keep his silence. Had she herself not died without betraying him?
When they had pulled off the adhesive and removed the chamois bung, it was on Sophie's advice that he asked to speak to Roper personally.
"That's the way, then, Tommy," said Tabby, out of breath from his exertions. "You have a natter with the Chief. Then we can all have a nice beer together like the old days."
And Roper in his own good time strolled down to see him, dressed in his cruise gear ― including the white buckskin shoes with crepe soles that Jonathan had noticed in his dressing room at Crystal ― and sat on the chair across the room from him. And it passed through Jonathan's mind that this was now the second time that Roper had seen him with his face in a mess, and that Roper's expression on both occasions had been identicaclass="underline" the same wrinkling of the nose, the same critical assessment of the damage and of Jonathan's chances of survival. He wondered how Roper would have looked at Sophie if he had been around while they were beating her to death.