“He’s having a party—”
“It’s only a radio,” he guessed.
They were hailed—a huge white-haired man in a white suit looked down at them, calling:
“Do I recognize the Divers?”
“Boat ahoy, Margin!”
Their boat moved under the companionway; as they mounted Golding doubled his huge frame to give Nicole a hand.
“Just in time for dinner.”
A small orchestra was playing astern.
“I’m yours for the asking—but till then you can’t ask me to behave—”
And as Golding’s cyclonic arms blew them aft without touching them, Nicole was sorrier they had come, and more impatient at Dick. Having taken up an attitude of aloofness from the gay people here, at the time when Dick’s work and her health were incompatible with going about, they had a reputation as refusers. Riviera replacements during the ensuing years interpreted this as a vague unpopularity. Nevertheless, having taken such a stand, Nicole felt it should not be cheaply compromised for a momentary self- indulgence.
As they passed through the principal salon they saw ahead of them figures that seemed to dance in the half light of the circular stern. This was an illusion made by the enchantment of the music, the unfamiliar lighting, and the surrounding presence of water. Actually, save for some busy stewards, the guests loafed on a wide divan that followed the curve of the deck. There were a white, a red, a blurred dress, the laundered chests of several men, of whom one, detaching and identifying himself, brought from Nicole a rare little cry of delight.
“Tommy!”
Brushing aside the Gallicism of his formal dip at her hand, Nicole pressed her face against his. They sat, or rather lay down together on the Antoninian bench. His handsome face was so dark as to have lost the pleasantness of deep tan, without attaining the blue beauty of Negroes—it was just worn leather. The foreignness of his depigmentation by unknown suns, his nourishment by strange soils, his tongue awkward with the curl of many dialects, his reactions attuned to odd alarms—these things fascinated and rested Nicole—in the moment of meeting she lay on his bosom, spiritually, going out and out. . . . Then self-preservation reasserted itself and retiring to her own world she spoke lightly.
“You look just like all the adventurers in the movies—but why do you have to stay away so long?”
Tommy Barban looked at her, uncomprehending but alert; the pupils of his eyes flashed.
“Five years,” she continued, in throaty mimicry of nothing. “MUCH too long. Couldn’t you only slaughter a certain number of creatures and then come back, and breathe our air for a while?”
In her cherished presence Tommy Europeanized himself quickly.
“Mais pour nous héros,” he said, “il nous faut du temps, Nicole. Nous ne pouvons pas faire de petits exercises d’héroisme—il faut faire les grandes compositions.”
“Talk English to me, Tommy.”
“Parlez français avec moi, Nicole.”
“But the meanings are different—in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can’t be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too. That gives me an advantage.”
“But after all—” He chuckled suddenly. “Even in English I’m brave, heroic and all that.”
She pretended to be groggy with wonderment but he was not abashed.
“I only know what I see in the cinema,” he said.
“Is it all like the movies?”
“The movies aren’t so bad—now this Ronald Colman—have you seen his pictures about the Corps d’Afrique du Nord? They’re not bad at all.”
“Very well, whenever I go to the movies I’ll know you’re going through just that sort of thing at that moment.”
As she spoke, Nicole was aware of a small, pale, pretty young woman with lovely metallic hair, almost green in the deck lights, who had been sitting on the other side of Tommy and might have been part either of their conversation or of the one next to them. She had obviously had a monopoly of Tommy, for now she abandoned hope of his attention with what was once called ill grace, and petulantly crossed the crescent of the deck.
“After all, I am a hero,” Tommy said calmly, only half joking. “I have ferocious courage, US-ually, something like a lion, something like a drunken man.”
Nicole waited until the echo of his boast had died away in his mind—she knew he had probably never made such a statement before. Then she looked among the strangers, and found as usual, the fierce neurotics, pretending calm, liking the country only in horror of the city, of the sound of their own voices which had set the tone and pitch. . . . She asked:
“Who is the woman in white?”
“The one who was beside me? Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers.”—They listened for a moment to her voice across the way:
“The man’s a scoundrel, but he’s a cat of the stripe. We sat up all night playing two-handed chemin-de-fer, and he owes me a mille Swiss.”
Tommy laughed and said: “She is now the wickedest woman in London— whenever I come back to Europe there is a new crop of the wickedest women from London. She’s the very latest—though I believe there is now one other who’s considered almost as wicked.”
Nicole glanced again at the woman across the deck—she was fragile, tubercular—it was incredible that such narrow shoulders, such puny arms could bear aloft the pennon of decadence, last ensign of the fading empire. Her resemblance was rather to one of John Held’s flat-chested flappers than to the hierarchy of tall languid blondes who had posed for painters and novelists since before the war.