History of a Pleasure Seeker

Part Two — THE EUGÉNIE

Piet Barol did not hope for comfort from his father and did not confide his transgressions or their humiliating exposure. For eleven months he had thought of Herman Barol only with gratitude for being away from him. He considered this as they shook hands in the sitting room full of furniture his mother had chosen, now woefully rearranged. It had been Nina’s teaching room and the heart of her territory. In the seven years since her death her spirit had gradually leaked from it. Now, though the pretty little chairs and discerningly chosen lamps remained, there was nothing of her left but her portrait, which still hung above the piano.

Piet resembled this painting too closely to be received with anything but suspicion by the woman with dandruff and chilblains who for many years had been his father’s housekeeper and was now his fiancée. Herman announced his imminent nuptials over breakfast as Piet was contemplating the sight of Marga’s chapped fingers on his mother’s tea service. He wished them joy. He doubted he would see his father again after sailing on the Eugénie and felt easier to know he would be cared for.

Indeed, Marga Folker cared for Herman Barol with an absorption that brooked no competitor for his affections and was glad to know that her beautiful stepson would not long remain with them. Herman did nothing whatever for himself except dress. Marga cooked and scrubbed and polished and swept and organized the ledgers that in earlier years it had been Piet’s task to fill with methodical accounts of undergraduate perfidy. She was not favored with external charms and this had left her with half a lifetime’s pent-up love. The spectacle of her showering it on Herman, who accepted it without remark, was distasteful to Piet.

He embraced them both and took a boiling kettle from the stove, to which he added icy water from the well in the backyard. The tin tub the Barols used for a bath was in its usual place behind the kitchen door. He took it upstairs. It was not long or deep enough to permit the simultaneous wetting of balls and knees and he washed as quickly as he could. He was out of practice and had added too much cold water.

The discomforts of this procedure reminded him forcefully of the circumstances of his youth and the necessity of breaking free of them. He dried himself, dressed, and went into the bedroom that had once been his parents’. Nina had brought the mattress with her from Paris at her marriage and had often stayed in bed until eleven o’clock in the morning. It was from this bed that she had dispensed to him a wisdom that ran wholly contrary to her husband’s view of life. It was here, too, that she had nursed away his childhood illnesses and sung to him arias from Bizet and Mozart — who were, she said, the only composers who understood women.

Nina Michaud had decided to marry Herman Barol at the end of a painful love affair and had imagined that she could make for herself a companion as diverting as he was steadfast. His Dutch reserve had made a marvelous contrast to the glossy seductiveness of the rakes who pursued her in Paris, and she had left behind the dangerous delights of that city with relief. It had taken her months to understand that Herman was quite unlike the man she had imagined him to be, and years to accept she could not change him. Disillusion, when it came, hit her hard. Nevertheless, she did her best to refrain from complaining of her husband to their son and slipped into doing so only by imperceptible degrees. It was when the eight-year-old Piet began to imitate Herman for her amusement that she understood she had gone too far to bother with stopping. The child caught to perfection the heavy tread of his father as he clumped to the chamber pot to relieve himself. Since Herman did so two or three times every night, at a volume to wake any sleeping soul, she and Piet found his impersonation intoxicatingly amusing. So, too, Piet’s imitation of Herman’s snoring and sudden sleep gruntings, his monotonous exhortations to errant students.

Nina had done all she could to educate her son for the life she had glimpsed, and lost. To have ended his first sally into the great world so dismally seemed to Piet a betrayal of all she had sacrificed for him. He stood in her bedroom, shivering and wishing he could confess and seek her guidance. But here too her spirit had vanished.

Christmas and New Year’s Eve came and went. Having been deprived of his fine clothes Piet attempted to stock his wardrobe from the pawnshops of Leiden; but Christmas money had allowed all but the neediest to redeem their best suits and he found only two shirts, both with stains under the arms.

As his departure neared, his dissatisfaction with himself intensified. He thought with amazement of his duplicity in Amsterdam and started to hate himself for injuring a family who had only ever shown him kindness. Egbert weighed horribly on his conscience. He had coaxed the boy into the world of human feeling and become his first friend. To have left without so much as a good-bye was dastardly. Twice he sat down to write him a letter and gave up only because he could think of nothing to say.

Piet did not know that Maarten’s evident delight in his wife had convinced even the skeptical Louisa that she was wrong. Nor did he know that Jacobina’s appearance in an identical apple-green dress, four days after Piet’s departure, had made her daughter burst into tears at breakfast and confess her hatred of him, and the true reasons for it, and beg her mother’s forgiveness.

This scene was excruciating for Jacobina but she did not shrink from the hypocrisy it required. She was extremely sharp with Louisa and rebuked her for drinking in public. Then she said, “Let us hear no more about it,” and later, in a kinder voice, “I forgive you, my darling.” As she spoke she looked at her husband, and the love in his eyes allowed her to forgive herself also.

None of the Vermeulen-Sickertses would ever forget Piet Barol, but as soon as he had left them they began to think of him much less often. It was he who could not shake himself free of them. Their shades pursued him in his dreams, and on the third day of the New Year they were joined by Nina in a ferocious nightmare. He had shared everything but his amorous adventures with his mother. Now her outraged ghost knew all and told him he had failed her.

He woke from this dream in a fit of self-disgust that would not lift. He wanted to hurt himself and slammed his fist against the wall — impulsively, at two-thirds of his full force. The pain was stunning. It made him understand that he did not really wish to break his hand. A more profound expiation occurred to him: to renounce all he had been and start anew. He inched from the wall the loose brick behind which he had stored his treasures as a boy. All that remained in this cavity was a French passport in the name of “Pierre Barol,” which Nina had obtained for him in Paris nine years before and about which Herman Barol knew nothing. With the sense that he was exchanging his soiled identity for a fresh one, he packed it in his trunk and went downstairs.

Piet took the sleeper for Paris on the sixteenth day of the New Year and arrived early on a dreary morning, while the brass lamps were still burning beneath the vast glazed roof of the Gare du Nord. His trunk was intended for people with porters at their disposal. As he dragged it through the starched, elegant crowds, he began to hate it.

The boat train for Le Havre left the following day after lunch. He had come a night early, despite the expense of a Parisian hotel, because he could find no way to say good-bye to his mother in the house now so scrupulously scrubbed by Marga Folker. They had been in the city once together nine years before, when he was fifteen and she thirty-five — ostensibly to visit one aunt and attend the funeral of another. In fact Nina had hoped to leave her husband and escape with her child to France. It had taken years to gather the courage to conceive this plan and implement its first stage. It took tante Maude Michaud twenty minutes to destroy it with the opinion, pronounced as fact, that Herman would pursue her for the boy and wrest Piet from her forever.

In the end Nina had not dared. Instead she spent sixteen years of savings on five days of sophisticated hedonism with her son and returned to Leiden defiant. They stayed in a rickety pension on the rue des Martyrs, beneath the blinding white marble of the Sacré Coeur. Nina had chosen Montmartre so that Piet might observe the perils of la vie bohème at first hand; also so that he could imagine the horrors of the Commune and see the church built to atone for them. They went to tante Henriette’s funeral and made a day’s worth of family calls. Otherwise they were entirely alone, immersed in each other as in a love affair.

Nina chose three restaurants. The first was a back room with bare wooden benches and crates of lobsters delivered from the patron’s brother in Normandy. Here she taught Piet how to drink a carafe of Chablis over a lunch of shellfish while entertaining a pretty woman (herself in an adorable new hat), without feeling giddy or unwell or talking too loudly. The next she chose for its rabbit, which was everything a simple country meal should be. The last was a grander establishment close to the Palais Royale where they ate timbale de sole stuffed with chopped truffles.

This meal cost so much that nothing was left for tickets to the opera. They walked through the Louvre and along the pale white paths of the Tuileries, humming together the great duets of Halévy, Gounod and Bizet. It was a night for French composers, Nina said. They reached the Place de la Concorde and paused before the traffic on the Champs Elysées. They had two francs over and Nina knew just the place to spend them. She led Piet up the rue de la Paix, past a perfumier whose scents were so potent neither their crystal vials nor the shop’s closed doors could contain them. “You must face the world as an equal,” she said, drawing him on and climbing the shallow, blue-carpeted steps of the Ritz Hotel with her arm in his.

The doorman did not question them. They had a coffee at the bar and watched the crowds of élégants. After some time, a gentleman with curled whiskers invited them to a matinée the following day.

“He takes me for a demimondaine,” she whispered when the man had retreated, his invitation refused. “It’s because I’ve nursed my coffee so long.”

“What’s a demimondaine, Mummy?”

“Come, I’ll show you.”

They strolled to the Place de l’Opéra and stood beside the steps of the Garnier as the evening’s audience arrived. With great precision, Nina pointed out the leading courtesans of the day and the subtle but significant ways they distinguished themselves from their lovers’ wives.

Piet spent the night wandering the pale, magnificent city, lost in memories of her. With his mother he might have shared his misdeeds at Herengracht 605. Her absence left him to bear his regret unaided, and its burden was so heavy he did not join the conversation on the boat train the next day but hid behind a newspaper feeling profoundly alone.

He cheered briefly at sight of the ship. One could not feel entirely deflated on a crowded quay before her. The Eugénie had a black hull and a superstructure of dazzling white, repainted for the tropics. A strip of scarlet showed just above the waterline; she had four funnels, black with scarlet bands, and above her anchor gleamed the golden shell and crossed Ls of the Loire Lines.

High above him on a private gangway, the first-class passengers were entering the ship. He could hear their band’s sparkling music. To his left, the long lines queuing for third class and steerage looked so much happier than he was that he could not feel superior to them. He thought of the sum he had spent on his own ticket and tried to be optimistic, but the tourist-class vestibule, carpeted in violent swirls of green and red, dismayed him. So did the stewards’ demeanor. As one led him to his stateroom with the air of doing him a distasteful favor, the pleasures he had renounced in Amsterdam recurred painfully to him.

“Votre cabine, monsieur.” The steward opened the door, handed him a receipt for his trunk, and departed with it.

At the Loire Lines offices in Amsterdam Piet had not thought to ask for the specifications of his accommodation. Now he saw he had been unwise not to. His cabin had no porthole and was very hot. Intended originally as third-class quarters, it had been converted to tourist class to cater for additional demand. But its superficial comforts — a mahogany washstand, monogrammed linen, a copied Fragonard in oils — could not disguise its proximity to the engines. As these were fired it shook violently.

Piet sat down on his bunk, aggrieved. Fifteen minutes later, the door opened and a stocky young man with florid cheeks and slick-backed blond hair entered, complaining in a loud English voice. “It will not do. I was promised — Yes, I jolly well will speak to the purser.” He shook Piet’s hand forcefully. “Percy Shabrill. An honor. Do excuse me.” Percy Shabrill left again and began shouting in the corridor. Piet hoped he and his voice would find another berth, but it was not to be. He reappeared as the departure bells sounded, his cheeks redder than they had been before. “Damned Frenchies.” He flung himself onto the opposite bunk. “They’ve given us the worst cabin on the bloody boat. Hope you don’t snore, old fellow. I take a dim view of snorers.”

“So do I.”

They went up together onto the tourist-class promenade deck to watch as the ship left the harbor for the open ocean. The wind and the engines drowned the string quartet, but Percy’s voice carried well over the competing noise. “That’s me out of Europe for some time. I won’t be back till they’ve invented an air balloon. I’m not mad keen on the sea.” Percy was going to South Africa to join his brother at Johannesburg. His faith in his prospects emphasized to Piet how drastically his own confidence had dwindled since the day he had sold Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts’ silver man. Perhaps he should have kept him for luck. Percy leaned closer. “You ask how I’m going to get rich.”

Piet had asked no such question.

“What’s wrong with Africa? You tell me. It’s bloody hot and there are too many darkies standing about with nothing to do. Well, I can fix all that. Chum of mine, dashed clever chap, had an idea about refrigeration. I bought the rights off him. There’s a fortune to be made.”

As they went back to their cabin, Percy expanded on this theme. “You build a cube out of chicken wire, then a bigger cube around it. Fill the gap with charcoal. Get a darkie to pump water over the charcoal on the half hour. As the water evaporates, the space inside the smaller cube cools. Quite good enough for most foods.” He began to sketch this invention for Piet. He was not a talented draftsman. Soon the paper was covered in squiggles and arrows. Percy’s eyes were shining with a convert’s conviction. “See?”

Piet said that he did see.

“Can’t fail, won’t fail.”

It was a relief to Piet that Percy’s interest was wholly self-focused. When they went to dinner two hours later, he was still talking. Like their cabin, their table was small and inconveniently situated just behind the swing doors. The two other passengers assigned to it were an English lady named Miss Prince, going out to teach at a mission school, and a German widow whose recent bereavement appeared to have left her buoyed and cheerful. Their common language was English, since this was all that the two English people spoke. Piet’s was proficient, Frau Stettin’s less so, which meant that the burden of conversation with the others fell on him.

A wicked look or smile at the hideousness of it all from Miss Prince might have lifted Piet’s spirits, but in fact she seemed rather impressed by Percy Shabrill.

He was sitting with his back to the wall and had a full view of the dining room. There were no bare boards, as in third class. There was a carpet and electric light, but for all that it was dingy and overcrowded and for some structural reason its roof was supported by pillars every few feet, which made it claustrophobic and cramped. His fellow passengers were dressed with the careful pretension of the rising middle class. They seemed greatly pleased by everything, as he might have been had he never met the Vermeulen-Sickertses or grown accustomed to their way of life.

But he had, and this robbed him of the naïveté necessary to delight in the second rate.

Other disadvantages swiftly emerged. Piet yearned for solitude, but this was not available to a man in a shared cabin on the Eugénie. Percy’s constitution was delicate and he spent much of each day in bed. A full complement of 450 tourist-class passengers left the public rooms crowded, as the decks were too except in the foulest weather; and an unwritten convention entitled anyone to strike up a conversation on the slenderest pretext.

Frau Stettin was the least unbearable of his new acquaintances, because she was artless and sincere and happy to talk with very little prompting. Her cheerful voice, rambling on irrelevancies, was a soothing distraction from his self-reproach, and Piet exerted himself to inquire after her grandchildren and to remember their names and ages, with something of his old attentiveness. Miss Prince’s moods were highly erratic. Only a disciplined childhood in a Warwickshire vicarage had trained her to present to the world a façade of calm, conventional womanhood. This façade expertly achieved, her conversation contained nothing to snag Piet’s interest and meals eaten at her side passed slowly. He spent one afternoon expressing polite approval of the textbooks with which she intended to teach native children English. It appeared that she and her father had devised them and paid for their printing. “One so wants to help the kaffirs to be useful. Deep down, that is what they wish for themselves,” she said, opening a section titled “Phrases for the Home” which included the constructions May I direct you to the drawing room? and Her ladyship is indisposed.

“It would be hard for a kaffir to manage without such knowledge,” he observed, thinking how unjust it was that this woman should have the freedom denied to Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts. Miss Prince detected nothing at all ironic in his tone and prattled on, warming to her theme of native self-improvement. As he listened to the stories of her colonial acquaintances’ troublesome servants, and the importance of training their children to do better, he searched the room for someone to share and appreciate the ghastliness of his situation, but confronted nothing but well-scrubbed faces beaming good cheer.

Percy Shabrill’s voluble self-certainty, even when gripped by seasickness, sapped Piet’s remaining reserves of optimism. It seemed a dangerous folly to be crossing the world without an idea of what he would do at the other side, and this thought preoccupied him as he played bridge with Frau Stettin or listened to Miss Prince’s theories on education. Though he had vowed to spend no money on board, restraint was difficult in practice. Only the food was included in the price of passage. When a steward appeared after dinner with a tray of brandies, already poured, it was embarrassing to refuse. He accepted one, and when the others exclaimed over its excellence he did not tell them how awful it was.

On the third day out there was a violent storm. The impact this had on Percy was briefly cheering. It pleased Piet to see him laid so low and for once the reading room was empty after lunch. But the next day, as they passed through the Bay of Biscay, the seas calmed and the crowds returned. He woke early, roused by the rattling of his cabin. The ship was picking up speed and with each knot the vibrations grew more violent. One of the shelves was inadequately screwed to its bracket and clattered unendurably.

He dressed and went to breakfast, followed by his grumbling cabinmate. The eggs were fried in the English manner and had been left too long in the warming tray. As he sawed into one he observed that Percy and Miss Prince had taken a close interest in each other, and their clumsy flirtation was as irritating as the rubberized yolk. Piet spent the morning playing piquet for low stakes and losing. Then he went to his cabin. It was mercifully empty. He lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes.

Piet had not cried since his childhood, but when Percy opened the door ten minutes later he felt briefly as though he might. Percy was speaking of Miss Prince in low, ardent tones. He gave every sign of taking Piet into his confidence until lunch. Piet excused himself and went on deck, past the ranks of deck chairs, the shuffleboard players and strolling couples. At the aft section was a spiked trellis, separating tourist from the roomier portion assigned to first class. He went there and leaned over the rails, staring at the sea. His expression was so tragic that a bold little girl asked if he was all right.

“Thank you,” he said. “My eyes are just stung by the wind.”

And then he heard his name.

Like a wish granted by a fairy godmother, Didier Loubat had materialized not two feet away. In a tailcoat with the line’s shell and crossed Ls on the lapel, he was standing on the other side of the barrier. His hair was shorter than he had worn it at Herengracht 605. He looked older and more glamorous.

“Don’t show you know me.” He took a soft cloth from his pocket and polished a spot of rail. “You look awfully glum.”

“I am.”

“Life on board not up to your standards?”

Piet turned out to sea, as if unconscious of his friend’s presence. “It’s dreadful in every possible way. I should have gone steerage and saved my money.”

“I can change your mind about that.” Didier returned the cloth to his pocket. “You can’t see any part of steerage from first class, and it has no open deck. If you’d been in there I’d never have found you. As it is, I’ve been freezing my balls off hoping to catch sight of you.” He began to fold up a deck chair, pretending to have trouble with it. “Now listen carefully. The tourist-class reading room will be empty while everyone’s at lunch. If you go through the service door outside it in twenty minutes, you’ll find yourself in a corridor with a grille gate at one end. I’ll meet you there. Go to your cabin and put on a better tie.”

“What if we’re caught?”

“You’ll be set off the ship at the next port. I’ll be dismissed. There are worse places to be stranded together than Madeira. Believe me, first class will be much more to your taste.”

Piet shook his head, still looking out to sea. “You’ve already lost one place because of me. Unlock the gate and disappear. I’ll come through alone. That way only I end up in Madeira if things go wrong.”

This was not at all the outcome Didier sought. However, the conversation had lasted too long already. “All right. Once you’re through the grille, slide it closed behind you but leave it off the latch. Walk down the corridor. Open the door, go up the main staircase. I’ll be in the Winter Garden at the top. It’s fairly quiet until four.”

Half an hour later, wearing one of his two good shirts and feeling more cheerful, Piet Barol slipped into the deserted corridor behind the tourist-class reading room and let himself through the open grille at its end. He was about to open the baize door to first class when a steward came through it.

“May I help you, sir?”

Piet was aware that the faintest trace of nerves would betray him and imagined Constance Vermeulen-Sickerts waiting upstairs. This allowed him to say “I was exploring. How big is the ship?” with convincing naturalness.

Maurice Moureaux had spent twelve years working on liners and knew his business. It was not uncommon for passengers in other classes to attempt intrusions into first class, if for no other purpose than to steal an ashtray and earn a colorful boast. He took personal delight in seeing these men (they were always men) thrown off at the next port. He was unerringly accurate in spotting an invader, which meant that he wholly trusted his instinct in the matter of the gentleman standing before him, encountered though he was in a service corridor.

“Almost twenty-four thousand gross tons, sir.” His tone was an expert counterfeit of enthusiasm. “Seven hundred and thirteen feet long, seventy-five wide. We’re at a full complement of two thousand and twenty-six passengers in four classes.”

“What’s she like to work on?”

“A privilege.” In fact the crew accommodations on the Eugénie vibrated unbearably, and Maurice Moureaux had far preferred his previous ship. As he looked at Piet Barol, however, he thought that this voyage might have its compensations.

Piet saw his look and understood it and was not embarrassed, which made Moureaux bolder.

“There are almost three miles of passageways and the noise below the passenger decks gives you some idea of the power of the engines. Would you like to see the staff quarters, sir?”

It was thus — subtly, unmistakably — that a range of services not mentioned on any menu were referred to between the staff of a Loire Lines ship and a select circle of passengers. All the first-class stewards were attractive and Maurice was no exception. He was in his midthirties, wiry and youthful, with a sharply defined face he could bring to life with a dazzling smile when he chose. He chose to do so now, since the chance to enjoy himself had arisen so naturally.

“At another time, perhaps.” Piet, who had read all of this, smiled with polite regret. “But I am meeting a friend in the Winter Garden.”

“Of course, sir.” Moureaux bowed. “Permit me to escort you there.”

Didier Loubat was pleased that his first encounter with Piet Barol should take place in a woodland glade traveling across the waves at twenty-four knots. He liked the Winter Garden’s cool, white pillars; the ranked masses of greenery positioned for maximum discretion. Gilt birdcages hung from the ceiling, the doves inside as white as the walls. Their cooing made it possible to speak in absolute privacy.

Unlike Piet Barol, Didier Loubat was not accustomed to taking charge of his own destiny. In the days after leaving the Vermeulen-Sickertses he had tried to resign himself to never seeing Piet again, tried and failed, and so conceived this bold plan of a rendezvous in midocean. Because he had never yet applied himself to intervening in the narrative of his own life, he was not prepared for the euphoric rush this first success unleashed.

The standards of service in first class were in every way superior to those in tourist, and Maurice Moureaux found nothing remarkable in the rapturous smile with which Piet was greeted by the Winter Garden’s duty steward. He said good-bye warmly and left them, wondering who would have him. It was well known that there was “someone for everyone” on a Loire Lines ship.

Didier led Piet to a corner table, pulled out his chair and slid it beneath him, unfolded a napkin and placed it on his lap. In the undertone of an expert waiter, audible only to the person addressed, he said, “Everything’s free. Would sevruga and blinis please you, Mr. Barol?”

Piet nodded. Didier brought the caviar in a silver dish above a tower of crushed ice, and as the black eggs popped between his teeth the despair that had threatened to overwhelm him retreated. “How on earth do you come to be here?”

“Just a job. Difference is I wake up in a new place every day.” Didier had prepared this explanation and delivered it nonchalantly. “Whatever spell you cast on Mevrouw Vermeulen-Sickerts worked. Her reference was like a love letter. I always thought she disapproved of me.”

“Obviously not.”

“Were they sad to say good-bye to you?”

At this moment a passenger signaled for Didier, who went at once to attend to him. By the time he returned, Piet had considered candor and decided against it.

“They had a dinner for me and gave me a trunk. Nightmare to carry it, since I can’t afford porters, but I was very touched.”

“How much of the money have you gone through?”

“Too much.”

“Well you can save here. Passengers only pay for alcohol, and I’ll slip whatever you want onto someone’s bill.” Didier inclined his head. “Permit me to fetch you the wine list, Mr. Barol.”

In contemplation of this catalog of treasures, Piet’s mood improved further. The room was filling now and Didier more regularly engaged. Piet tried not to be caught staring as he drank his way through an excellent bottle of Petit Chablis. On the ceiling above him three pretty nymphs were caressing one another. Between two pillars on the opposite wall a woodland bacchanal was taking place.

“They’re not afraid of bare flesh,” he remarked, when Didier next returned.

“No. And neither are the passengers.”

“Randier than the guests at the Amstel?”

“Much. There’s nothing to do all day on a ship but scheme and flirt.”

The natural and immediate restoration of their old banter stilled Didier’s nerves. He fetched a duck soufflé and boasted of his opportunities for sexual intrigue, feeling mildly ashamed to begin their encounter with a half-truth. Though he described an engaging series of female conquests, in fact it was the line’s male passengers who had shown him approving attention. Didier had accepted a judicious selection. There had never been any question of payment for these encounters, but though his presence had been voluntary he had not sought the intimacy of a second meeting; he had given his heart already. “This is only my third voyage, but I’ve already lost count,” he said. “People do as they please in the middle of the ocean.”

“These women invite you to their cabins?”

“While their husbands have a massage or a swim. But the ship is full of nooks and crannies. It was designed for mischief.”

“Lucky devil.”

Didier grinned. “Let me get you an ice, then you’ll have to be off. Monsieur Verignan will be along shortly and you’re at his table.”

Jay Gruneberger had spent a very pleasant half hour watching the gorgeous young men, one dark, one blond, flirting with each other on the opposite side of the room, pleasant even though he was beginning to feel old and their bloom confirmed it. He was forty-two, in committed good condition, his arms and shoulders still well muscled though his trousers, once a favorite pair, were biting painfully. His face was almost ugly, with full sensual lips and a hawk nose; he would never again have the thoughtless slenderness of youth. Though his expression was one of a man lost in abstract thought, he was watching the young men intently.

When the dark one rose to leave Jay stood to follow. He was surprised to see that the blond one led the dark one. Had they agreed an assignation? It was clear that some intimacy existed between them. He reached the door a discreet distance behind them, keen to learn its nature, but his escape was blocked by a torrent of effusive greeting.

Albert Verignan, founder and chairman of the Loire Lines Company, was a man of influence on both sides of the Atlantic: a plotter who achieved his ends with a guile that did not endear him to Jay Gruneberger, who in all but his sexual life was as straightforward and honest as good manners permit. They greeted each other with noisy amity. With a regretful glance at Piet Barol’s retreating back, Jay allowed himself to be detained in one of his host’s characteristic tête-à-têtes.

Verignan was deftly complimentary. He praised the cut of Jay’s suit and the genius of his wife. “I have never known anyone with such an eye for spectacle, for beauty, for detail, as Rose!” he exclaimed, though he meant that he knew of no one besides himself with such rare talents. “She has chaired the committee superbly — though she might bankrupt me yet, mind you.” He looked down modestly, as he always did when introducing the subject of his own generosity. “She has insisted on having a five-hundred-foot terrace blasted by dynamite from the rock. The line’s timetable has been overthrown and a new route to South Africa added. Really, I should be very cross. But how can one resist her?”

“You have acted wisely not to try.”

Verignan laughed good-naturedly. He knew that Jay Gruneberger did not like him and was determined that he should. Verignan had been a young man when the Prussians invaded France in 1870 and had witnessed the end of the Second Empire on the battlefield at Sedan. The destruction wrought by their advancing armies had left him with a virulent hatred of Germans, which decades of rivalry with the Hamburg-America and Norddeutscher Lloyd Lines had greatly concentrated. He approved of the entente cordiale with Britain, but though Georges Clemenceau seemed a decent patriot he could not forgive him his attempts to impose an eight-hour workday and an income tax. Verignan had lost hope that democracy, with its compromises and debate, its half measures and delays, would rise to the kaiser’s challenge. He had made a fortune by following his instinct and it told him now that an unchecked Germany spelled disaster for France.

The hour called for a hero. And every hero has his maker.

Verignan had chosen his man already, an ambitious young deputy named Colignard. He should be elected democratically and seize power when he had control of the army, as both Napoleons had done. Verignan doubted very much that France could meet the German threat alone, whoever led her. A grand alliance of France, Great Britain, Russia, Poland, perhaps even the United States, would be necessary to check the kaiser’s ambitions. Bringing it about was just the sort of challenge Verignan relished. He understood the seductions of glamour and had devised the voyage to introduce the elites of his favored nations in a setting as conducive as possible to the forging of friendship — a setting, moreover, that would remind them of the priceless contributions France had made to the world. He intended that the ball he had planned should be reported in every illustrated newspaper on earth.

Verignan had chosen St. Helena so that clever journalists might detect a symbolic Anglo-French reconciliation almost a century after the Battle of Waterloo. Its extreme remoteness was a further attraction. The idea of showing five hundred people who thought they had seen everything something they had never seen satisfied his feeling for publicity. So did the notion of transporting them miraculously from the depths of winter to a scented summer’s night. Since he himself was paying for the three hundred waiters, the eighty chefs, the four thousand bottles of champagne, the fireworks, the orchestra, and the dynamiting of a hollow in the rock where the dancing could take place if the weather was fine, the enormous sum raised could be spent directly on needy, photogenic children in each of the countries that formed his imaginary alliance.

These plans shimmered in the air as he remarked how pleasant it was to be with a ship full of friends, and Jay Gruneberger thought wistfully of the men Verignan’s arrival had prevented him from following. He emphatically preferred the dark one.

Noting his abstraction, Verignan remembered hearing that his companion was vulnerable to certain kinds of blackmail. He preferred to gain his ends by charm but was prepared to resort to darker strategies if necessary, since Jay Gruneberger was listened to in quarters whose support would be vital. Whatever must be done for the peace of Europe, he thought.

Auguste Colignard was brought over to be introduced. He was square jawed and inspiring, his manner subtly flirtatious: a man for posters. Jay was compelled to drink a cup of tea with him and spent the afternoon roaming the ship in search of the dark beauty he had missed.

But he had quite disappeared.

Over the next five days, Didier Loubat’s long-mounting infatuation with Piet Barol became a roaring love. They met every morning and were not once challenged. Sometimes they spent six or seven hours together before Piet’s return to tourist class, longer than they ever had in Amsterdam, and the pleasure Piet took in his company made Didier wildly happy. He was a junior steward, assigned as needed. The bounties of the earth were available to first-class passengers at any hour, and wherever he went he took his love and rained delicacies upon him.

“You never speak of your parents,” he observed on the sixth day out as Piet sprawled in the depths of a smoking room sofa, nursing a twenty-five-year-old brandy though it was only eleven a.m. It was an overcast day with an unsteady sea and the paneled room with its cozy fire was almost empty. A copy of Winterhalter’s portrait of the Empress Eugénie presided over the fireplace, her gown rather more revealingly cut than in the original.

“With the Vermeulen-Sickertses to absorb us, it never occurred to me.”

“Will you miss your father?”

Piet contemplated the liquid in his glass. “I don’t suppose so.”

“Not miss your own father?”

“He’s not a very sympathetic man.”

“Is he a drunkard?”

“Heavens no. He’s not vile in that way. In fact, he doesn’t approve much of indulgence in any form. My mother used to say he lacks the gift of joy.”

Didier loved his parents and was well loved in return. That Piet should have no mother, and a father who never embraced him, made him want to care for him forever. Monsieur and Madame Loubat were well accustomed to their son bringing handsome friends home for the holidays. They treated them with great kindness and put them in Didier’s bedroom without remark. As he led Piet from the Renaissance through the reigns of Louis XV and XVI, following his roster from smoking room to salon to the veranda café, he grew ever surer that his mother would love Piet as her own and imagined telling her of him without shame.

The unifying theme of the ship’s decoration was the sea, and Verignan’s decorators had not missed a single opportunity to allude to it. While Didier worked, Piet sat in a haze of contented drunkenness and counted how many gilt shells and crossed Ls he could see. It was an extremely pleasant form of self-sedation. Sometimes a single fireplace yielded as many as twenty. In the panels of a double door in the salon he counted eighty-three. It made him feel sophisticated to disapprove of this fussiness and of the embroidered antimacassars, the too-showy reliance on gilt, the ostentatious hats of certain female passengers. But the effect was undoubtedly arresting, and its splendor helped to dull his memories of the Herengracht.

Both young men were so absorbed in each other and themselves that neither noticed the regular presence of a worldly, well-built male passenger in his forties, with a neat beard and a hawk nose. Jay Gruneberger wondered whether the dark one was a poor sailor, because he never appeared at meals — but no, he was eating with great delight whenever he saw him. He could find no explanation for his regular absences. Nor for the blond and the dark always and only appearing together. He watched them and saw the look on the steward’s face when his friend spoke. More than once he was tempted to intrude on their conversations and introduce himself, but he was too well known and too happily married to initiate contact until he could be certain of their discretion.

On the ninth day of the voyage, Didier was on lifeguard duty at the first-class indoor swimming pool. He had put a pair of bathing trunks on a passenger’s bill and given them to Piet, who looked magnificent in them. The pool was one of the glories of the ship, decorated in the stylized motifs the first Napoleon made fashionable after his Egyptian campaign; as grand and shadowy as a Pharaoh’s tomb.

The sight of Piet Barol in bathing drawers heightened Didier’s sense of urgency. They had only eight more days in this world-no-world on the ocean; the approaching shore threatened everything. It was a calm day. Ropes and swings had been attached to the ceiling to be climbed up and dived from. Piet made rather a display of himself, climbing hand over hand halfway to the roof, the muscles in his back writhing like serpents; knotting the rope around his feet; diving down again.

His performance drew applause. He had a steam in the Turkish hammam and then a dip in the iced plunge pool. By the time he reentered the changing room, his body was red and tingling. He was aware of his skin, a pleasant tautness in his limbs, and then, abruptly, of having had no contact with another human being since his last delicious afternoon with Jacobina. He needed to piss and went to the urinal, wondering how he might get some of what he needed. He had just pulled his vest down to free himself when Didier entered the room.

Didier went to a locker and undressed quickly, knowing that if he were caught in the passenger changing room he would be dismissed. The impulse to be naked near his friend was imperative; it dimmed all risk. Piet glanced round and saw Didier facing away from him, changing from one bathing suit into another. He turned back to the wall, but at the reaches of his vision he was aware of the lightly muscled body he knew so well. It brought to mind their first conversation; the flicker of instinct that had told him Didier might be persuaded to ease certain intimate frustrations.

He had desisted on that occasion and not thought of it again. He had never combined such things with deep affection. For the first time he understood that it was possible to do so if one dared. Didier had stopped moving. Piet felt himself watched and looked down at his prick, now stiff and insistent in his hand. He was embarrassed but also afraid — because he did not want to have a love affair, and he understood that Didier would do nothing for him except out of love. Nevertheless he could not piss. He waited, trying to calm himself, and a door opened.

A well-built man with a neat beard and a hawk nose entered. At this intrusion Didier came to himself, collected his trunks, and went through the door into the stewards’ room. The bearded man went to a sink and washed his hands. When he had gone, Piet went into a lavatory stall and dealt with himself vigorously.

That night, Didier stood by a silver-gilt dessert trolley thinking of the afternoon. The room in which he was stationed was two decks high, a miniature theater in gold and turquoise and red velvet. Where the seats and boxes would have been on land were tables with shaded electric candlelights. An entire opera was staged on each voyage, generally on the second-last night at sea. On this journey the performance was scheduled for the following evening to avoid clashing with the Bal de la Gloire on St. Helena.

It was Didier’s responsibility to serve wafer-thin slices of cake without disturbing audience or performers. Tonight’s dancers were making so much noise this required no concentration. A middle-aged lady beckoned and he went to her, deep in thought. Passengers occupying suites were placed closest to the stage. The English couple staying in the Henri de Navarre did not care for music; their table was empty almost every night. If Piet came after dinner and it was empty again, he would be safe for the rest of the evening.

Didier conveyed his plan the next morning as he served his friend coffee in the veranda café. “Wear the tailcoat the Vermeulen-Sickertses gave you and your gold-and-onyx studs.”

“But what if they come to their table?”

“Dinner’s served before the music starts. If they’re not there for that, they won’t be coming at all. I’ll open the grille for you at ten.”

Percy Shabrill was in their cabin when Piet returned to it. “Nineteen orders so far and still five days to go. I must say, there’s a good crowd on this ship.” He was entering details into a ledger, self-consciously. Piet’s extended absences had begun to disconcert Percy, who suspected his cabinmate of having an entrée not available to him. It made him louder and more boastful, and his thundering conviction tugged on Piet’s spirits.

As Percy told him that he had already done enough business to pay for half his passage, Piet could only admit that he had employed his time much less profitably. It was amusing to sit all day in a sumptuous room, talking to a friend and eating and drinking more lavishly than he could ever afford to do again, but Percy’s vigor made him ashamed of retreating from his responsibilities.

“And what will you be doing in South Africa?”

It was the first personal question Percy had asked him, and Piet had no answer. “I’ll see what’s needed when I get there.”

“Confident devil. You mean to say you’ve no concrete plans? No connections?” Percy chuckled, secretly unnerved. “You’re a braver fool than I.” He went back to his ledger, but the word “fool” hung in the humid air of their cabin and seemed to Piet to be precisely what he was. He lay down on his bunk and pretended to read. Percy’s purposeful bustling depressed him further. He watched Percy dress in silence and said he was seasick and could not eat. The dinner bell rang. At last he was alone — but at Percy’s departure his inner furies turned on him and made the hot, expensive, rattling room a little hell.

At nine o’clock he took out the tailcoat he had worn to Constance Vermeulen-Sickerts’ birthday party and the box of studs Egbert had given him hours before the final catastrophe. He washed and put them on without joy. When he was dressed, the discrepancy between his inner and outer selves troubled him. Confronting him in the mirror was a young man in glorious good health, apparently favored by nature and fortune. His glowing face gave no hint of the self-disgust within; neither did his clothes suggest the alarming truth that he had no funds to keep them. They would have to be pawned as soon as he reached Cape Town.

He went to the reading room. It was empty; so was the service corridor behind it. As he went through the baize door into first class, he was struck by the total silence. The rattling of his cabin had seeped into his bones; its sudden lifting was a miracle. He was standing in a corridor hung in pale blue brocade embroidered with waves and shells. He went down the passage, his leather soles sliding over the thick carpets, and as he passed the reading room a steward emerged and bowed. “The singing’s just starting, sir, if you were hoping to catch it.” He opened the door into the staircase hall. “Lift or stairs?”

Piet did not trust the notion of an elevator. “I’ll walk, thank you.”

The staircase was flanked by pillars of painted marble. Across the ceiling nymphs with very little on were being pursued by muscular Tritons. At intervals in the balustrade the line’s shell and crossed Ls were pricked out in gold. The ship was empty, and the absence of chatter and clattering heels heightened the impact of its magnificence. Piet paused on the second landing under the great gilt clock. As it struck the hour, he climbed the last flight to find Didier waiting for him, flushed but grave. He nodded and led Piet beneath a dome of turquoise and gilt to a table set for one by the stage.

The Eugénie’s director of music believed in taking his audience by surprise. The instant the last dessert plate was cleared, while the room was still full of talk and laughter, he lifted his baton and plunged it into darkness. Piet had never seen Carmen, but knew it from the first high-spirited leap of the overture. A surge of gaiety swept the room. Accustomed to provincial orchestras heard from the cheapest seats, Piet had no notion that a group of musicians might make a sound as rich and subtle as that achieved by the Eugénie’s band.

The stage filled with handsome men in uniform. Albert Verignan employed well-known singers for the solo roles, but stewards with musical training doubled as members of the ship’s chorus. Piet recognized some of them from Didier’s tours of duty. A young woman appeared in a blue dress with dark plaits over her shoulders. He could not see her face as the soldiers surged round her, lustful and impudent. They were touching her and pulling at her dress; for a moment there was danger beneath the music’s catchy jollity. “Who are you looking for, my beauty?” sang their leader.

“Me?” She had an exceptional voice. When the crowd parted Piet saw that she was about his age, with a finely wrought face and devilish eyes. She announced that she was looking for a brigadier named Don José.

It was Stacey Meadows’ habit to address this line directly to one of the gentlemen sitting closest to the stage. She offered no intimate favors but was not above accepting devotion and pawnable trinkets from the men who occupied the Eugénie’s grandest suites. To be met by the bold, delighted stare of Piet Barol separated this night from the many others on which she had reprised the role of Micäela, a country girl too innocent to interest her, sent by an officer’s mother to give him a message and some money and a kiss. As the soldiers begged her to stay with them, she resisted with dazzling indignation. They threatened. One singer pressed his body against her, in contravention of the limits imposed at her insistence during rehearsals, and she freed herself emphatically while delivering a blazing B flat.

Piet Barol was transfixed. He watched her flee the stage, and the vague desire that had been mounting for days flared explosively. To touch a young woman! To use all he had learned from Jacobina on someone his own age! The possibility ignited his senses. He was suddenly aware, more deeply than he had been before, of the marvelous room; of the enthralled, well-dressed crowd, as it slipped beneath the music’s sorcery. How splendid to be where he was!

He knew the opera’s piano reduction intimately. To hear it played by musicians of distinction was a revelation. A crowd of children appeared, to general applause — so extravagant, so typical of Verignan, to bring fifteen adorable infants halfway around the world for a few scenes in an opera. Then the girls from the cigarette factory sauntered on, barely dressed, limbs and necks glistening with oil. A crowd of young bucks pursued them as a number of male passengers intended to do directly after the curtain call. Carmen’s entrance unleashed a roar of recognition and welcome. Germaine Lorette was in her late forties, squat and thickset, with a large nose and a voice of astonishing, undulating power. She moved with such arrogance there was nothing ridiculous in the handsome youths begging her to love them.

Piet had accompanied many amateur mezzo-sopranos as they tried their hands at “L’Amour Est un Oiseau Rebelle.” Lorette’s insolence was riveting. She picked a flower from her corsage and tossed it at Pierre Lauriac, the tenor playing Don José. He was twenty years younger than she and as in awe of her as the crowd was. The promise of sex filled the room; radiating from Carmen’s scorching glance, reviving the audience’s recollections of the cigarette girls’ smooth, oiled limbs, and their exquisitely made-up mouths singing of sweet cigar smoke and the transports of lovers.

An unspoken “when at sea” rule was taken for granted by all but the strictest watching moralists, and a glorious lasciviousness took hold of them, preserved from vulgarity by the music’s sophistication. Across the darkened room knees pressed against neighboring knees, hands clasped beneath tables. Even couples who had been married twenty years smiled at each other and were charmed by one another’s faces, lit by the soft red light of the shaded lamps.

Sitting at the captain’s table, bored by his fashionable companions and glad to be silent at last, Jay Gruneberger saw with pleasure that the strapping young man who never came to meals had made an exception tonight. He shifted his chair to get a clear view of him. Piet’s lips were slightly parted and the rosy light made his cheeks shine like a farm boy’s. Jay looked for the blond one and found him staring at his dark friend. Didier’s face had forgotten its professional neutrality. Oh to be young and in love, Jay thought.

Didier hardly heard the music and took no interest in the figures on the stage. He was in a state of quiet ecstasy. To have followed Piet on his adventure and rescued him from tourist class, to have brought him here and given him the gift of an opera, made him immensely proud. His gaze flickered occasionally over the tables, but no one had the temerity to interrupt Germaine Lorette’s first aria. Otherwise he looked only at Piet.

Stacey Meadows returned. During her brief absence from the stage she had artfully heightened her makeup, and when she reached for Don José, she was standing several feet to the left of where she was meant to be, right before Piet’s table. “Your mother sent me,” she said.

“Tell me of my mother!”

The duet began, tenor and soprano standing alone on the empty stage. Unlike Germaine Lorette, Stacey Meadows did not overpower her partner. As she told him she was his mother’s faithful messenger, Piet had to look away. Nina had sung him to sleep with these words as a child. “Tell him his mother dreams of him night and day, that she misses him and hopes for him,” Stacey sang. “She forgives him and is waiting for him.” Her voice soared over the shimmering violins as she promised to give Don José the kiss his mother had sent him.

But Piet did not see her deliver it.

He was in tears.

Pierre Lauriac took a deep breath. “I see my mother!” Sharing the stage with Germaine Lorette had unnerved him. He was trying too hard and the tightness in his throat made every leap perilous.

Piet’s shoulders began to shake. He had chirruped the part as a little boy, but only as a man had he come close to achieving its true beauty. “Even from afar my mother protects me.” Lauriac was close to Piet’s age and standing not five feet away. The words summoned Nina, pale but frivolous in the hours before her death, making light of the pains in her chest. Piet’s eyes met Stacey Meadows’, who was pleased to see that the power of her performance had made this handsome stranger weep. It added sensitivity to his outward advantages. She turned to Don José, annoyed to have an imperfect partner at such a moment, and smiled so reassuringly that his singing dramatically improved.

“Tell her her son loves her and venerates her.” Piet’s lips followed Lauriac’s as they sang. “He repents today.”

The bright figures on the stage sparkled and lost their distinctness. Stacey Meadows turned from Don José, her eyes on Piet’s — and deep within his mourning was the exhilarating knowledge that the woman on the stage was not his mother. Indeed, she was just the sort of messenger Nina would have chosen. He looked back unflinchingly, and it was as though they sang of cherished memories to each other, and for each other alone.

Didier watched this exchange and found it highly arousing. That the man he loved could seduce a pretty opera singer simply by staring at her made him proud. Perhaps they might share her, as Piet had refused to do with the Amsterdam whores. He did not require Piet to abjure women; merely to accord him the rights and status of First Friend.

Didier was better able to understand Piet’s tears than Stacey Meadows. Piet was alone in the world, his mother dead, his father indifferent. And yet he was not alone! As Didier watched him struggle to master himself, he knew that the moment had come to tell him so. He had dreamed of it and feared it; now he felt confident in the face of it. In his pocket were the keys to the first-class swimming pool, purloined from the board in the purser’s office. Beneath one of its loungers was a bottle of green Chartreuse and a cashmere blanket, taken from a stateroom. It would not be missed now that they were in the tropics. They would have the pool all to themselves until five a.m. They could plan what to do in South Africa and fall asleep side by side. (He had taken care to provide only one blanket.) Perhaps they might honor the possibilities of their stroll home from the Karseboom. In the right circumstances Didier had persuaded many men to kiss him. He waited impatiently for the interval, relieved that the minx in the blue dress did not return. There would be time for her later.

Tonight belonged to him and Piet.

The second act ended with an explosive finale in which Germaine Lorette made the crystal shake with her advocacy of the wandering life and the intoxications of la liberté. Piet took it as a resounding affirmation of his decision to leave all he knew behind. He was not superstitious, but only the coldest, least imaginative rationalism could fail to be moved by the message of maternal forgiveness he had received. He felt radiant with well-being. In his dreams Nina had cursed him; now she had blessed and absolved him.

When Didier appeared, bearing a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket stamped with the line’s shell and crossed Ls, he wanted to rise and embrace him. Instead he looked away and lowered his voice when he said: “You’re the best friend a fellow could have.”

Didier uncorked the bottle. “I saw you and the girl with the plaits making eyes at each other. Promise not to keep her all for yourself.”

“I never make promises about women.”

Didier poured. “I get off duty at one, and I’ve got the swimming pool keys. There’s more drink there. I hid it this afternoon with foie gras sandwiches and iced cakes.” He set his shoulders back. Do it now. “We can spend the rest of the night together. No one will find us.” As he spoke, he held the bottle very close to Piet’s glass, and their knuckles touched.

This contact gave the words their full meaning. Piet had sensed its possibility as they stood in the changing room together, felt an animal answer in himself and chosen not to confuse it with love. Now he understood that his friend had done the opposite. It took the edge off his joy. He had a slight, pulsing erection, but it was not Didier’s presence that had caused it but the thought of removing Micaëla’s tight blue dress and unplaiting her braids. For a moment Piet could think of nothing to say. He did not wish to injure his friend, but it seemed the time for euphemisms was past. “We know each other too well for that,” he said gently.

“Of course.” Didier bowed and retreated. He went to his post at the sweets trolley and busied himself slicing a tarte aux pommes. An overweight lady of sixty, strictly observing her nutritionist’s injunction to have “just a little of what you fancy,” summoned him and asked for a tiny slice: her eighth since lunch. He served it to her and bowed.

“Are you not well?” She was a sympathetic person, with a grandson about Didier’s age.

“I’m quite all right, madam. You are kind to inquire.”

But Didier was not at all all right. He left the room, went through the kitchens and out onto a stretch of open deck where the empty bottles were stored. He wanted urgently to be alone. When he was, he hid himself behind a vat of scraps as a large rat ran from the rail into the kitchen. The pain was ferocious. He did not know how to escape it. It choked him, made him bend double. He began to cry. What had he based his confidence on? Nothing. Piet was his friend. His graciousness, when others might have taken offense, confirmed his affection.

But affection is not the same as love, and it was love Didier Loubat wanted from Piet Barol. Sex too, if possible, but love first and foremost. Now Didier knew he would get neither. He felt pathetic and embarrassed and then brutally sad. Life would now return to snatched encounters, diverting in themselves but conducted without feeling. This could never again be enough.

He dried his eyes. He could not have Piet. The sooner someone else took him the better. He opened a bottle of fizzing mineral water and splashed his eyes with it. Then he patted his face with a tablecloth, took the goods elevator down three decks and emerged opposite the reading room. He opened the baize door and went down the corridor to the grille he had so often opened for Piet. There was no vindictiveness in what he did; only the conviction that it was better to suffer completely on this night already so full of sadness. He knew Piet Barol would not be caught. He would find his way into someone’s bed and escape being cast off, a branded stow-away, on a piece of rock a thousand miles from any other. There was a vein of stoicism in Didier. In this time of peril his sensitivities turned to it and he resolved to do what must be done.

He closed the grille and locked it.

The curtain call was sublime. Don José had fortified himself with three excellent cognacs backstage and they mixed in his blood with the elation of having somehow seen the evening through. Germaine Lorette was contrite for having overshadowed him so completely. As he went to bow she told him he was the best Don José she had ever worked with. She kissed Escamillo, who was an old friend, but said nothing to the little slut playing Micaëla, who was altogether too gifted and too thin to merit praise. When she heard the cheer that greeted Stacey Meadows she strode onto the stage before it had even half died and sank to her knees with the grace of a child, though her joints were arthritic and she weighed sixteen stone. This trick of sudden fragility had driven audiences wild for thirty years. She remained in the depths of her curtsy, eyes downcast, until every person in the room was standing and applauding her.

Piet Barol led them from the center of the first row. Jay Gruneberger watched his hands as he clapped and was glad. A steward tapped Piet on the shoulder and gave him a slip of ship’s notepaper, on which the words Follow the man who brings this were written. “From Mademoiselle Meadows, sir. You’ll want to come now, before the crush. May I guide you?” Piet looked for Didier, to show by a smile that there need be no awkwardness between them. He was not there. For several moments he hesitated, hoping he would return, but the thought of refusing this invitation did not enter his head.

He rose and followed the man through a side door.

A large crowd of male passengers was making the same pilgrimage. Though the backstage dressing rooms were formally out of bounds, access to them could be achieved by a discreet tip, and those with permanent mistresses in the chorus had nightly invitations. Piet was borne along with a boisterous crowd of the richest men on earth, which he took as an excellent omen of his own prospects. They reached a steel door and made a show of forcing it. Inside, in their flimsy costumes, gypsies and cigarette girls were smoking and undressing. They feigned horror at being disturbed, but in fact most of the invaders were known to them and welcome, and those who were not hoped to be and were scrupulously charming. After the first intrusion the door opened constantly, admitting flowers and champagne and flush-faced men.

Piet stalked the crowd looking for a blue dress. It was often said of the chorus girls on the Eugénie that they looked as good in person as they did onstage. He passed through them admiringly but was not distracted.

She made him wait twenty minutes. When she entered, she was wearing a wrap of pale pink silk and her dark curls were free of their braids. Both of them were pleased with how the other looked, relieved that the music and the low lights had not caused an embarrassing misjudgment.

He went to her and bowed, raised his eyes to hers and smiled.

“Do say you speak English.”

“I speak English.”

“Very good. All this French talk makes me so tired.” She went to a rack of clothes, and for a moment he thought she meant to change in front of him. Other girls were undressing; he tried not to see them or to hope that she would. She did not. She took a scarlet dressing gown from a hanger and said, “You might as well get us something to drink.”

There was plenty to drink. They stood beside an open bottle of champagne, delivered to another passenger and forgotten when his lady summoned him.

“Do tell me you aren’t a gigolo.”

“Of course I’m not.”

“It’s just that your clothes are so new and so chic. The effect is marvelous but not authentic.”

Stacey Meadows was wary of too-perfect strangers, though she was also drawn to them. She was now twenty-six. Three years earlier, over tea in a New York hotel during a visit to that city with her mother, she had met a French vicomte with adorable manners. This charming gentleman, just touching fifty, had offered to show them the sights. By the afternoon of their second day together he had roundly banished Stacey’s virginity and left her thrilled with words of love. He had promised to marry her and given persuasive reasons why she should not tell her parents of his intentions; had paid for her passage to Paris and a suite at the Grand Hotel. Three days before her boat docked he had married a Belgian railway heiress. She learned of it soon after her arrival and in a flaming rage took herself to a music hall and got a job and thanked God for sparing her a pregnancy with that man’s child.

Stacey’s voice had been much praised in the front parlors of small but comfortable Chicago houses. It found instant favor in Paris too, and she got a teacher who knew what to make of her gifts. She neither spoke to the vicomte again nor took his money. As she became better known, she felt glad to have been flung so far from her respectable life in the Midwest. She wrote to her parents and told them she was well but did not apologize for running away, and it was only to her brother Fred that she gave a forwarding address. The day she posted this letter she went to an audition at the Opéra Comique and was accepted into the chorus. Barely two seasons later she had a soloist’s part on a highly publicized voyage on a famous ship, with Germaine Lorette in the title role. “So you are well dressed and self-made and you cry during affecting scenes at the opera,” she said. “I do approve.”

“My mother and I sang your duet together. You gave it so well I felt she was speaking to me.”

“You should be scolded, not forgiven. I can quite see that.”

Elsewhere in the room girls were sitting on men’s laps, squealing as their corsets were unlaced. Piet did not wish to seem unsophisticated, and Stacey’s presence after three hours of tantalizing imagining inspired him to follow the example of the other men. He leaned forward and kissed her neck.

The sting in his cheek made him gasp. Stacey rose. It was best to impose discipline from the beginning; otherwise all was chaos. Since the decisive shattering of her illusions she had had no patience with sentimentality, but the vicomte’s expert induction had left her with a very great liking for clean-smelling men with beautiful lips. Having encountered just such a one, she felt that a little anticipation would make their first embrace infinitely sweeter. She decided to postpone it. “You may call tomorrow after tea to repent. I have a quiet hour while my braids are plaited. We can talk without this mayhem.”

“I’ll do my best to come.”

“I’m sure your best will be enough.”

But the chorus dressing rooms were not accessible from tourist class. “If I don’t come, you must know that I wished to but was detained. May I see you in Cape Town?”

“I will be there as long as the ship.”

“Permit me to look you up, then. What is your name, mademoiselle?”

“Stacey Meadows.”

“I shall find you, Miss Meadows.”

“And I shall let myself be found.”

Observing the exit of Piet Barol, Jay Gruneberger did his best to extricate himself from his conversation with Mrs. Cornelius Schermerhorn. He had unwisely told this lady, who was a passionate amateur botanist, that his wife grew several rare species of bromelia in the hothouses of their estate on the Hudson River. Mrs. Schermerhorn had gone to great lengths to get Bromelia balansae to flower, and never once been successful, and she was halfway through a detailed account of each effort (continued in Jay’s ear throughout Germaine Lorette’s standing ovation) when Piet disappeared. Jay did his best, but the subject was close to Mrs. Schermerhorn’s heart. It was fully three minutes before he could get away.

By the time he had done so, there was no sign of the stranger with the patrician profile. Jay was considerably annoyed. The Eugénie would dock at St. Helena the next day, and his wife would join him, having gone out on Albert Verignan’s yacht a fortnight earlier to oversee the final arrangements. By fashionable standards the Grunebergers’ marriage was a deeply contented one, and Jay felt for Rose a tender affection that would not countenance seductions she might observe. She was the child of his parents’ oldest friends; he had known her since she was six and would not wound her. This meant that his opportunities to follow his own inclinations were limited. When the craving was insuperable he satisfied it hastily and opportunistically, generally in the male lavatories of railway stations and other insalubrious venues. Some of the men he met in these places asked him to pay them, and once or twice he had succumbed to this temptation and emerged from a dingy hotel two hours later, his overcoat pulled over his face, feeling soiled and regretful. For several days he had been imagining a seduction of an altogether more discriminating kind, conducted in the superb comfort of his accommodations on the Eugénie. To have the possibility presented and then snatched away seemed unjust. He went to the landing above the grand staircase, which offered an excellent vantage point.

Once again the lad had vanished.

Though Jay and Rose Gruneberger figured prominently in lists of “New York’s most invited,” and were always described as “popular” and “in demand” by the society press, Jay had no close friends. Twice at Yale he had confided his attraction to his own sex, and both times his confidant’s revulsion had withered their intimacy as surely as salt poured on a snail will kill it. The boys who had fallen in love with him at his New England prep school were now married fathers and when they met made no mention of earlier realities.

Jay’s pride did not permit self-pity. He kept his loneliness in quarantine, confined in a vault reinforced by unsentimental discipline. He was able to ignore its existence for months at a time, but tonight he felt it seeping from its confinement. He went out onto the promenade deck. It had rained during dinner and the teak boards were slippery. Now the air was exotic with the scents of the tropics. The moon was a night off its fullness and sent an orange summons across the waves towards him. It was absurd to spend such a night without a lover. He escaped its beauty and went indoors, but the band’s merry music made him sadder.

Jay Gruneberger’s business associates admired his capacity to engineer a situation to his satisfaction. The foundations of this ability were intelligence and persistence. He had felt certain he could speak to the fellow at least and ascertain from this encounter whether more might be hoped for. Now he abruptly lost the energy to mount another useless search. He went instead to the salon and ordered a cocktail. They would either meet or they would not. He left it in the lap of the gods.

Piet left the chorus girls’ dressing room smitten. He was not depressed by his failure to achieve a more instant union with Stacey Meadows. Delay could only heighten their coming together and he admired her strictness wholeheartedly. As he walked down the corridor he felt euphoric. A year before he had been a junior clerk in Leiden, obliged to sleep in a musty alcove and shit in an outhouse. Now the most powerful men in the world took him for one of their own. He thought sympathetically of Didier and wondered whether he should find him at once and make things all right. He decided against it. His friend would feel patronized by immediate sympathy. He would look for him tomorrow and laugh their awkwardness away.

Piet had a great gift for experiencing the present. It seemed a waste to burden it now with thoughts of the future or the past. He had the run of the world’s finest ship and the clothes and manners to enjoy this glittering world undetected. Who knew when such a situation might arise again? He resolved to drink the cup of pleasure deep and hurried on.

The grand staircase was crowded. He had not had dinner and was pleasantly light-headed with hunger. He sauntered down the stairs, thinking of food, and looked into the smoking room where sandwiches of rare roast beef could be obtained at any hour. But the fug of a hundred postprandial cigars made his head spin. He left by a door in its west wall and found himself in a broad passage he had never been in before. The marble here was not painted. It was cut in vast slabs and covered floor, walls, and ceiling: a frothy cream jagged with shots of blue. At its summit was a gilt elevator and a menu stand embossed with the words GRILL ROOM.

He pressed the button firmly.

With an elegant whirring the cage came down — lined floor, walls and ceiling in marble. It did not seem that the chains that pulled it could support such weight, but the presence of a respectful attendant prohibited a display of nerves.

“You’ll want to hurry, sir. Last orders are in fifteen minutes.”

Piet stepped onto the platform and the doors slid shut. The lift began to rise. Up and up they went, through three decks, then four: each was crowded with people. It stopped on the fourth and a gay group joined him, the ladies in magnificent jewels. He was aware of their approving notice, and when one dropped her fan he retrieved it and was prettily thanked. The doors opened onto a vestibule painted like an afternoon sky, the rays of a gilt sun pointing towards the grill room’s entrance. The party with him were greeted rapturously and led to their table.

“May I have your cabin number, sir?” Maurice Moureaux held his pen above the register. “There is a supplementary charge for the grill room. It will be added to your bill.”

Over his last six transatlantic voyages, Maurice Moureaux had formed an understanding of some convenience with a plongeur in the first-class kitchens, a cocky Marseilleise of no education but great wit, with an immense prick. The purser disapproved of shipboard liaisons and had transferred Jean-Anton to the Joséphine two days before the Eugénie’s departure, leaving Maurice with no erotic companion. He was fastidious. Since encountering Piet Barol in the reading room’s service corridor he had found no one to his taste. To be able to ascertain his cabin number struck him as a piece of great good fortune. He repeated his question.

“My cabin number?”

“Or the name of your suite.” Moureaux smiled his glossy smile and stood as tall as he could; he worried about being short.

For an instant Piet faltered, confronted by the decision between retreat and advance. He decided to advance. “The Henri de Navarre.”

“And your name, sir?”

“Van Sigelen. Frederik van Sigelen.”

“Come this way, Mr. van Sigelen. Will you be dining alone?”

Piet nodded.

“What a pleasure to see you again.” Moureaux took a leather-bound menu and led him to a table by the window. In the long oval mirrors an orange moon glowed. The ceiling was glazed; Piet had never seen such stars. It was the most expensive room on the oceans, a private concession run by César Ritz. Only dishes that had been served to the kings at Versailles were offered here, and the amounts beside them were among the largest he had ever seen in print.

Moureaux unfolded his napkin and placed it on his lap. There was a dance floor at the far end of the room, surrounded on three sides by waves and stars. “I shall send the sommelier at once, sir.”

A flutter of subsiding adrenaline made Piet shiver. He had dared and won — again! He felt triumphantly alive. Moureaux bowed and retreated; but moments later, as Piet weighed the merits of quail and turbot, the steward returned.

“I’m sorry, Mr. van Sigelen. The register has Mr. and Mrs. Rossiter in the Henri de Navarre Suite.”

“Did I say Navarre? I meant Marie Antoinette.”

“Of course.” Moureaux hoped that the handsome young passenger had made this error to ensure that they spoke again. He asked Piet whether he had explored the ship to his full satisfaction.

“She’s a glorious machine.”

“I should be happy, at any moment, to show you over her.”

“I’ll remember that.”

The band began to play the Waltz of the Flowers. It was a piece of music that summoned for Moureaux the glory of his youth in St. Petersburg, when he had been the most admired waiter at its composer’s favorite restaurant. As the clarinet swirled, he was again twenty-two and incontrovertibly desirable. He bowed and returned to the register. When Piet stood and followed him his heart beat faster.

It was clear to Piet Barol that he should not be present for much further examination of the passenger list. “I’ve left my cigarettes in my cabin,” he said nonchalantly. “I’ll just go and get them.”

“Permit me to have a packet sent to your table immediately. Which brand may I obtain for you?”

“I have them hand-rolled in England. I’ll get them myself.”

It was possible to deduce a great deal about a person’s inclinations from the contents of his wardrobes. Moureaux was glad to have this opportunity to conduct a discreet examination. “Allow me to fetch them for you.”

“They’re in a locked case. I’ll go.”

The gaiety of the music inspired daring. “I could accompany you, if you wish.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Very well, sir. The kitchen will be closing shortly. I shall ask the chef to wait for you. May I take your order?”

“The turbot.”

“Thank you.”

Piet went to the elevator and pressed the button.

Moureaux began to prepare his bill and to wonder how he might contrive to bring him breakfast in bed one morning. He felt dreamy and romantic and could not find the name van Sigelen anywhere on the passenger manifest. He scanned the lists of suites. Catherine de Médicis. Henri de Navarre. Joan of Arc. Louis XIV. Marie Antoinette. By this entry were the words: Schermerhorn, Mrs. Cornelius. Coffee should be iced after Malta.

“One moment, sir.”

The lift doors opened and Piet stepped into the car. He turned as the trellis shut, and in his glance were both insolence and fear.

Abruptly, Moureaux knew.

He was temporarily anesthetized by shock. As Piet sank out of sight he opened his mouth but made no sound. He, Maurice Moureaux, had fallen for a stowaway! It made him breathless, then furious. There was a ship’s telephone on the desk; he lifted it and dropped his voice. “Alert bleu. Male. Midtwenties. Evening dress. Of good stature. Dark hair.” As he gave this description he was aware of its inadequacy. “Send word to the stewards’ mess. He has just gone down in the grill room elevator. Watch all exits. I shall come at once and identify him.”

But by the time the operator had transferred this information and the grill room elevator had returned to take Maurice on his quest, Piet Barol had passed through the smoking room and found a staircase to take him down two decks. He moved efficiently and calmly. He did not make a stir. On this fine night the reading room and the corridor that led to it were empty, but as he walked towards the green baize door a group of men appeared. He slowed until they had gone. When they had, he slipped into the service corridor and began to run.

As he reached the grille the narrowness and brilliance of his escape struck him forcefully. In a state of extreme self-congratulation he pulled the latch.

It was locked.

Piet threw his full force against it. The gate remained impervious. He rattled the barrier ferociously, but human ferocity was no use against cold steel. For the first time the consequences of his illegal escapade became quite real. He would be expelled from the ship on an island hundreds of miles from any other, with no reputation and hardly any money. At all costs he must avoid that.

Who would help him? He could not ask it of Didier. The idea of throwing himself on the mercy of Miss Stacey Meadows was more diverting and his confidence returned. She would be amused by his predicament and think more not less of him for his audacity. The idea that she might hide him in her cabin, perhaps in her bed, planted the seeds of triumph in this disaster.

But first he must find her.

Piet went back through the baize door. He had paid more attention to his fellow dressing room pilgrims than to the route they were following. He could only hope to remember it by returning to the starting point of the journey, which meant traversing the main foyer of the ship. He thought of Machiavelli’s advice to act boldly with Lady Fortune and walked down the corridor towards a sound like a waterfall.

At the foot of the grand staircase, as if at a cocktail party in Paris, two hundred people were being amused by one another. From high above them came a sultry waltz, performed only on nights when the sea was calm and the breezes warm. He slipped into the throng feeling safer.

By the time he reached the main elevator, he was master of himself again. He took it up three decks and tried the theater’s quadruple gilt doors. They were locked. He followed the corridor round, trying for access to the service labyrinth. There appeared to be no other way in. The only doors led to staterooms, their shell-shaped handles gleaming in the low light. He began to hurry. Everywhere he turned were rows of doors, barred to him. He went from one corridor to the next, the waves on the pale blue brocade walls repeating like the bars of a fanciful prison. He had begun to sweat and slowed down. It was essential to look untroubled. At last he found a door that gave onto the deck and went outside into the balmy night.

Of course. He should climb the barrier into tourist class. Where was it? He looked over the rail. Below him was the first-class promenade deck, full of strolling stargazers. It was darker where he was, a place for illicit couplings. He walked quickly aft, past the lifeboats. From beneath their covers came gruff panting sounds and the occasional gasp or laugh. He crossed the wet deck, looking for the portion of it assigned to his own class. He hesitated at the barrier. It had been designed specifically to deter such adventures and stretched sixteen feet towards the heavens, with no place for a foothold. Only by climbing right over the ship’s back rail and somehow clawing himself round its farther edge could an assault be attempted.

Piet Barol was not a coward. Equally, except when goaded by Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts, he did not seek out situations of physical danger. He had always felt a gentle contempt for men who could think of no other way to prove themselves. He looked over the edge. The great propellers churned the water far below, sending a trail of froth a mile long behind them. He did not relish the thought of hanging by one hand above them. The spokes of the gate were wet and would be slippery. He looked over his shoulder. He was unobserved. If he were to act, he should act now. But his body had ceased equivocating and was shaking its answer: No.

St. Helena was better than death.

He went inside. He remembered being led down a flight of stairs on his way to the chorus girls’ dressing room. Perhaps from the deck below he would have a better chance of success. He found his way back to the elevator and took it down to the main landing, which was packed with revelers.

Ten feet away stood Maurice Moureaux.

Piet stepped sharply down the stairs away from him. Moureaux was with two other men. One of them descended the opposite branch of the staircase to cut him off on the next landing. Piet went more quickly, but without drawing attention to himself. It seemed that the stewards were also unwilling to make a scene. He reached the landing several steps ahead of his pursuers and extended his lead on the flight below. Now he was in a white panic. He thought of the rooms he had idled in with Didier. None would be empty now. None possessed the sort of furniture into which one might climb and quietly spend the night. He should have tried the lifeboats, but the way back was barred. Ahead of him were the doors to the salon. He went through them and flung himself behind a screen that sheltered a cluster of armchairs.

A well-built man with a neat beard and a hawk nose looked up from a copy of the Gentleman’s Journal. “Do join me,” he said. “I’m drinking alone.”

Jay Gruneberger believed in luck. It was impossible to thrive without it. Sometimes he saw his inconvenient desire for other men as the price he must pay for being so favored by the Fates in other respects. He felt extremely lucky to be married to Rose, who was wittier and kinder than anyone he had ever met. He was lucky on the Stock Exchange and on the golf course. Two years before, on the day of his fortieth birthday, he had hit a hole in one in front of three hundred people who knew him well. He had felt great exhilaration on that occasion. It was nothing by comparison with what he felt now.

Piet Barol sat down. In moments he would be hauled from the room and publicly disgraced. He thought of Percy Shabrill watching him being taken onshore in a tender. He and Miss Prince would talk of nothing else for the rest of the voyage.

“Is something wrong?” The man with the beard had a deep, kind voice and an American accent.

“I’m not feeling very well.”

“Seasick?”

It was at this moment that Maurice Moureaux put his hand on Piet Barol’s right shoulder, his long fingers digging deep into the muscle. Another steward took charge of his left one in a similar fashion and a third stood behind his chair. They were slightly out of breath. Moureaux kept his voice low, not wishing to alarm the female passengers. “This man is a dangerous stowaway, Mr. Gruneberger.”

Piet stood up. His bravado was spent.

Jay smiled. “On the contrary, he is my private secretary. I have known his family for thirty years.”

“I am under orders to escort him to the brig.”

“I’m afraid I can’t spare him. Would you bring us a menu?”

“His name is not on the passenger list, sir.”

“I needed someone at the last moment and there were no cabins. He’s making do with the sofa in my sitting room.”

Maurice Moureaux knew Mr. Gruneberger was lying, and he also knew why. That he could do nothing about it was frustrating in the extreme. The junior stewards were silent, watching for his lead. “Fetch Mr. Gruneberger a menu, Laurent,” he said at last. “I am so sorry to have disturbed you, sir. And you, Mr. van Sigelen. Forgive my error.”

“Think nothing of it,” said Piet.

The three stewards bowed and retreated. Laurent returned with a menu.

“Mr. van Sigelen will have the turtle soup. Bring it with a bottle of Sancerre.”

“At once, Mr. Gruneberger.”

Finally they were alone. Subsiding adrenaline and hunger and the gentle rocking of the ship made Piet half delirious. When he could speak he said: “I am greatly in your debt.”

“Then you’re an honorable fellow after all. Are you dangerous, as they say?”

It did not seem to Piet that there was anything to be gained from lying to his unexpected benefactor. “I broke into first class to see a friend who’s a steward,” he confessed. “We used to work at the same house in Amsterdam.”

“You both left to come on the ship?”

“He lost his place because of me. Then I lost mine. We ran into each other on deck.”

Jay Gruneberger suspected that this encounter had not been wholly coincidental, but he did not propose to direct the talk towards a potential rival. “What did you do to lose your position?”

“I’m too ashamed to say.”

“Then you must keep your counsel, Mr. van Sigelen. Though in my experience confiding a burden can ease it. I promise you discretion.”

“My name is Barol, not van Sigelen.”

“Glad to hear it. The van Sigelens I know are vile.”

The waiter came with the wine.

“Drink it quickly. A glass will calm you.”

Piet did as he was told and they shook hands. “At least tell me how you were exposed, Barol.” Jay spoke as if requesting the day’s gossip at his club. “Often the denouement is more interesting than the details of what led to it.”

“I tried to eat in the grill room. I didn’t know you had to give a cabin number.”

“I don’t mean on the ship. I mean in Amsterdam.”

Piet hesitated. “Someone said something that was true. No one had thought of it before she said it.”

“About you?”

“About me and someone else. A lady.”

“A relative of the speaker.”

Jay said it as casually as if he had heard the story days before. His precision was disconcerting and Piet drank another glass of Sancerre. When it was finished, he said: “Her mother.”

“And I presume that you and this lady’s mother …”

“Only once.”

“You were caught at the first attempt? How very unresourceful.” Gruneberger smiled. He never minded if a fellow did not like other fellows. In some ways he preferred it, since recollection made infinite embroideries possible. It was often better than an unsatisfactory half hour concluded in mutual embarrassment.

Piet did not wish to seem wholly incompetent. “We met often. It was the last time that gave us away.”

“I thought it only happened once.”

“We only once did everything one might do.”

“I see.” Jay had a calm, authoritative way of asking questions that elicited answers. At shareholder meetings, men who had spent years honing the art of subtle evasion found themselves lulled by his calm, courteous pursuit of knowledge. Piet Barol had not had a candid conversation for so long that the lure of one was strong. Under the influence of a stranger’s gentle prompting he found that there was much he longed to share. He did not mention the Vermeulen-Sickertses by name or give any details that might establish their identity, but he told Jay all that had happened on the Herengracht.

The experience was immensely relieving. When the Sancerre was finished they had a cognac and by now the room was noticeably emptier. The most worldly person Piet had ever met was Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts, who was as conservative as a medieval monk by comparison with his new confessor.

Like the rest of fashionable New York, Jay Gruneberger was never sincerely shocked. He took Piet carefully to the epicenter of his drama, guiding the narrative to the details of what exactly he had done with his employer’s wife. Being told this story by an engaged and passionate Piet Barol, leaning forward in his chair, the scent of sweat rising from him, a cognac balloon in his vast hands, was to Jay Gruneberger a form of pleasure so heightened, so rare and refined, that it far excelled the merely erotic. He had a mind capable of considering many perspectives, so while he absorbed every detail of Piet’s story he was also able to float into a vaguer place, where all he heard were the low notes of his voice and all he saw were his face, glowing and happy again, and his thick neck and his dark blue eyes.

At length a regretful steward told them that the salon had closed.

“You’d better take the sofa in my sitting room.” Jay made the suggestion in the tone he used when offering a colleague a ride home from the office. “There’s no way of getting you back before morning.”

“I don’t know how I’ll ever get back.”

“My cabin steward will be on duty at breakfast. I’ve known him fifteen years. He’ll take you to your own part of the ship and no one will be any the wiser.”

“They’ll do an inspection and find me.”

“That won’t happen now I’ve vouched for you. That’s the Loire Lines’ great thing. They never embarrass one.”

“Then I accept with gratitude.”

They left the room and went down a wide corridor. “I take this suite because it’s quiet. The disadvantage is it’s a damned slog when you’ve had a few and there’s no private deck.”

Jay had waited in his secluded corner of the salon as long as he could, hoping that his friends would have gone to bed by the time Piet Barol accepted his hospitality. He was relieved to encounter no one he knew — though he was ready to introduce his new assistant with aplomb, should he be required to. In the end he was not. They stopped outside a pair of double doors flanked by four pillars. Above them, beneath the line’s shell and crossed Ls, were the words CARDINAL RICHELIEU.

The decorative centerpiece of the Richelieu Suite was a copy of the famous portrait by Philippe de Champaigne, from which the room’s predominant colors were also borrowed. Champaigne’s Richelieu was ruthless. The Eugénie’s copyist had caught his robes of rose and gray but softened his expression, the better to complement the atmosphere of the ship. He surveyed the room like a discreet and approving voyeur. It was wonderfully quiet, with dark mahogany paneling to chest height. Piet and Jay sat down on a sofa upholstered in pale blue velvet and their talk ran on. Having relieved himself of his story, Piet had developed a sincere interest in his rescuer.

Jay Gruneberger was not used to self-revelation, having had cause to master the habits of discretion. But their unusual introduction and the frank cordiality it led to allowed a spontaneous trust to arise between them. Piet’s questions were as perceptive as his own had been. He found himself describing his childhood in Cincinnati, his meeting with his wife when she was six and he eight. He had often told the story of how he and Rose had climbed trees together long before falling in love. What he did not often say was that his father and mother had despised each other and used their only child as a foot soldier in their strife. He confided this in Piet Barol and learned a great deal about Herman and Nina in return.

“You should have chosen New York!” he said with feeling, when their talk reached Piet’s plans for his new life.

“That was my first thought. I decided on Cape Town when I knew the boat was coming here. I wanted to sail on her.”

“If you’d seen New York once, you’d not have changed your mind. It’s worth a thousand times this tacky little ship.”

As he listened to Jay’s descriptions of a city he would never know, Piet Barol found himself thinking about Stacey Meadows and the challenges and advantages of being loved by her. “Where’s your wife?” he asked.

“Rose has been on St. Helena this past fortnight. She’s the chairwoman of the ball committee and doesn’t hold with delegation.”

“You must miss her.”

“Immensely. She’s coming on board tomorrow afternoon. I’ve had to bring her gown from New York.”

“What’s the theme?”

“La gloire. Choice of a man named Verignan.”

“Who are you going as?”

“I’ll show you.” Jay stood up and opened the door to the bedroom. After half a bottle of Sancerre and a cognac he was no longer as content as he had been merely to look at his new friend. Neither was he so moved by the alcohol, the lateness of the hour, the fullness of the moon, as to abandon all caution. If the boy doesn’t come in, he thought, I’ll leave it at that.

But Piet did come in.

Jay took his costume from a mahogany cupboard. Rose had had it made for him and every detail showed the attention and care he so valued in her. She had chosen the uniform of a union colonel in the Civil War and personally supervised six fittings. Jay had a sudden urge to show Piet Barol how good he looked in it. Very matter-of-factly, he took off his tailcoat and his collar and began unbuttoning his shirt. “One always eats too much on a ship. I’d better make sure it still fits.”

Piet did not know whether he should return to the sitting room or honor the sudden intimacy of the evening by staying where he was, as he would have done with a friend. He compromised by sitting on a chair at the foot of the bed, from which they could continue their conversation without facing one another directly. The first-class suites on the Eugénie had windows, not portholes, and the glass reflected the room. Piet tried not to watch as his savior took off his shirt. He had often been naked with fellows his own age but had never seen a much older man with his clothes off except his father; and Jay Gruneberger looked nothing like Herman Barol.

Jay boxed and ran and played tennis and every morning lifted forty-pound dumbbells until his arms ached. He was broad shouldered with a densely hairy chest. Though thickening in his midsection he looked superb in a room lit by soft lamps and an orange moon.

Jay knew that there are moments in life when risks must be taken or failure accepted. He was not ready to accept failure. He looked at Piet, wondering how to touch the boy without alarming him. Then he went to his chair, gripped his shoulders, and pressed his thumbs gently but firmly into the knots beneath them.

The effect on Piet Barol was paralyzing. Not three hours before he had contemplated hanging by one hand above the engines, and the tension of this untaken decision remained deep in his muscles.

“I see a wonderful Russian three times a week in New York. I’d happily share his expertise with you, Barol. Or I’ll call a steward and have the sofa made up next door. Absolutely as you wish.”

Since earliest adolescence, Piet’s body had demanded pleasure of him and rewarded his efforts to seek it. Now it answered on its own behalf with a long relieving sigh.

“I thought as much. You’ve had a trying day.”

Watched by the knowing cardinal, who was not at all deceived, Jay went to the bed, drew back the coverlet, and with four plump cushions made a resting place for Piet’s head. “It’s better if you’re lying down with your clothes off.” He was careful to sound indifferent. “That’s how I always have it done.”

Piet hesitated. Then he stood up and took off his tailcoat, his waistcoat, his tie and his collar. His shirt as he unbuttoned it smelled of sweat and fear, an olfactory reminder of the evening’s adventures. The room was the ideal temperature for nakedness. As he pulled off his shoes, a deep weariness crept over him.

“If you put your head between the pillows, you should be able to lie almost flat. It doesn’t do to twist your neck.”

Piet did so. The linen smelled of roses and was deliciously soft. Jay stood over him, remembering his first sight of his back and giving thanks for his freedom to touch it now without fear. Piet had kept his drawers and his socks on. These last Jay removed. He had a secret passion for feet, and the smell of Piet Barol’s caught in his nostrils and heightened his alertness. He surveyed the young man just as Jacobina Vermeulen-Sickerts had done, wondering where to touch him first. Though this was not at all his Russian masseur’s practice, he swung himself over Piet and planted his knees on either side of his body. Then he applied the knuckles of his index fingers to his uppermost vertebrae.

It was the first time Piet had encountered physical pain that held the possibility of pleasure. He gasped at the intensity of it. “Breathe out very slowly,” said a deep voice above him. Jay’s hands were strong, and his back had so often been the focus of an expert’s attention that he knew his way unerringly over Piet Barol’s. Piet breathed out as instructed. Tendrils of fire singed his skin. He had never yet been in the care of a connoisseur.

As Jay moved up and down Piet’s back, his hands never leaving his body, a wholly wordless and yet precise and attentive communication began to open between the two men. The ship had met a swell and was rising with it and falling, as if timing itself by Piet’s breaths. This motion, and the darkness, and the scent of roses, and the rich combination of pain and its relief sent Piet Barol into a state whose existence he had not imagined.

When Jay lifted his legs and pulled his drawers down them and over his ankles, Piet barely registered this boldness. Certainly it did not offend him. He was in a place far beyond all questions of propriety. Now Jay put his elbows to work, setting them over the warmed knots of muscle and by infinite gradations placing greater and greater weight on them, so that Piet was almost crushed but at the same time lifted far above the aches in his body. These began to flow down his arms to his fingers and his legs to his toes and then to leave him entirely, as if they had never been.

When Jay’s elbows reached his buttocks, they located precisely the store of a lifetime’s spinal tension. As they pressed down, implacable and relentless, so Piet’s cock was pressed into the firm mattress and an element of erotic pleasure began to twist through the tranquil darkness that enveloped him. Jay’s elbows retreated, were replaced by fingers that gripped his thick legs, his calves, his ankles, and then — it sent goose pimples all the way to his neck — a warm, scratchy tongue ran over the soles of his feet.

This did intrude on Piet’s formless blackness. But Jay acted with such confidence he did not resist, and his instinct to do so was dampened by the knowledge that the situation that now presented itself — in the middle of the sea, in the middle of the world, in the middle of the night — would never arise again. He said nothing when Jay kissed the back of his legs, his bearded chin sending shivers across his skin. And when Jay’s tongue reached his balls he let out a low ecstatic murmur.

Other boys had played with his prick or sometimes sucked it but had never touched him there; and the women he had seduced had been far too well bred to think of doing so.

Just when it seemed impossible that these sensations could improve further, Jay pulled Piet’s buttocks apart and flicked his tongue over his arsehole. This piece of daring lit a deeply buried circuit in the young man’s pleasure sensors. He opened his eyes. Rose-scented darkness and the outlines of two square pillows confronted him. He tried to speak but could find no words. Jay’s tongue pressed farther and the electric connection between them, so far transmitted by knuckles and elbows, blazed through this new synapse. Piet thought of all he had done for Jacobina, without thought of reward. It seemed he was to be repaid after all.

He was. As the orange moon sank into the sea and the sun extinguished the stars, Jay Gruneberger’s tongue overthrew the last of their mutual inhibitions and explored the unvisited places of Piet’s body to its owner’s full satisfaction. Both men, at once intimately joined and quite alone, alive in their own beings, entered into a state of rapture more profound than either had ever known.

It was light when Piet could bear it no longer, and the violence of his ejaculation was most satisfying to Jay Gruneberger. He wiped Piet down with a towel and rejoiced in what he had accomplished. Then he took off his uniform and lay down beside him.

Without exchanging a single word they fell asleep.

Jay’s cabin steward kept an extensive record of the preferences of the hundred or so passengers who requested him personally on each voyage they took and knew not to bring Mr. Gruneberger’s breakfast until rung for. Jay was woken by the heat of the sun, and for a moment his exploits hung in his consciousness like a marvelous dream. He opened his eyes. Beside him, fast asleep on his side, lay Piet Barol.

Jay got up and put on a dressing gown. The sound disturbed his companion, who stretched to his fullest extent, yawned loudly, scratched himself, and woke.

Jay’s stomach tightened. He could not bear to betray all they had shared by parting awkwardly. “Morning, Barol,” he said cheerfully. “Sleep all right?”

There was a moment’s silence. Then they both smiled and all uncertainty evaporated. Jay handed Piet a dressing gown and poured him a bath. Piet took it while breakfast was ordered and emerged to find a linen suit laid out for him beside a table set for two. He was taller than Jay, and the trousers were too short, but with a belt to hold them at the top of his hips and a sweater to disguise this arrangement he looked every inch a first-class passenger dressed for a day of elegant lounging.

“We’ll have you back in your cabin before lunch, with no one the wiser.” Jay lit a cigar. “But what of your life plans, Barol? Do you have connections in Cape Town?”

“None, I’m afraid.”

“So what will you do?”

“That question weighs on me.”

“What are you good at?”

“I can draw. It’s not much of an accomplishment.”

“That depends on how well you do it.” Jay was looking at Piet’s hands. He wanted to see them at work before they parted. “Sketch something for me.”

“What would you like?”

“A memento of our evening together.”

Piet thought for a moment, then took a sheet of ship’s notepaper and in ten minutes had caught the mahogany bed with its twisted sheets and the wily prelate who surveyed them. He signed it and gave it to his host.

“You should be an artist.”

“No money in it.”

“Then sell people things. There aren’t many who can express themselves in words and pictures, as you can. What would you like to make, or have made, that other people might like to buy?”

“Furniture, perhaps.”

“Then that’s settled. If you do it right, you can make a fortune. My wife’s decorator certainly does. Let me tell you how to make a name for yourself.”

Percy Shabrill was lying on his bunk when Piet returned to their cabin, locked in a violent interior tussle between curiosity and resentment. Resentment prevailed. He forbore from asking Piet where he had been in case this should give him an opportunity to boast of an enviable adventure. Instead he told him with studied unconcern that he had secured a further three orders for his refrigeration system. “We’ll be within sight of St. Helena by teatime,” he remarked when he had finished. “Miss Prince tells me there was a prison full of filthy Boers there during the South African War.”

“And now there’s to be a party.”

“Not for us. Harbor’s too small to dock at apparently. I’m just about sick of this bloody ship.” He yawned. “It’s only first class who’re getting off at all. Should be a jolly view if it’s not too rough.”

“Wake me to see it.” Piet turned to the wall and closed his eyes.

Piet woke just before sunset, dressed and went on deck. Percy had spent the afternoon with Miss Prince and had not thought to rouse him. Nervous with envy, clumps of tourist-class passengers were talking over the frail sound of a string quartet sent to console them. Frau Stettin had worn her best dress, which was pink and white and altogether too young for her. “Ah, the memories of my youth!” She gripped Piet’s arm to steady herself. She appeared to have drunk a quantity of champagne.

A flotilla of small white boats, each identical, was making for the ship from a long, low piece of volcanic rock floating in an endless ocean. Above it a sky shot with amber and vermilion swirled like a toreador. “Oh look!” cried Miss Prince, as the first of the sloops approached.

Jay Gruneberger gave his wife his arm. He was intensely proud of her. The spectacle of the white crafts bobbing on the sea with the sunset behind them would live on in the memory of every witness. The cheers from the third-class and steerage decks made this as plain as the sullen silence of tourist class. Even the first-class passengers, well versed in worldly delights, felt pleasant tingles of anticipation at this tantalizing overture.

Rose had interpreted la Gloire altogether originally and come as Water: glory itself, the giver of life. Her dress was a bewitching blue, deep and shifting against the expanse of the ocean with pearls sewn like bubbles in its folds. Together the Grunebergers stood out emphatically from the throng of gaudy empresses and Napoleonic generals.

Jay had long since ceased to savor the privileges of his life, but the risks Piet Barol had run in order to sample them made him appreciate them afresh. It was, after all, agreeable to be invited to a party that the world would discuss for weeks. It was agreeable always to have one’s name remembered, to be made way for, and included, and flattered, and quoted. To dance under the stars with Rose tonight and exert himself on her behalf would be splendid. He felt profoundly calm and happy.

He was turning his attention to Elizabeth Schermerhorn when he saw the blond steward who had been Piet’s constant companion. Didier was operating the tiller of a nearby cutter, his features taut and controlled. In his eyes Jay recognized at once the anguish of rejection. He was familiar with unrequited adoration and it was clear Piet might inspire it. The question was: had he returned it in this case? He thought of the young men’s familiar intimacy with each other; then of the ease with which he had persuaded Piet to spend the night in his cabin.

Jay Gruneberger had a fine instinct for human motivation, but it was obvious from Piet Barol’s stories that his matched it.

Who had been playing the more convincing game?

He had promised himself he would not look for him, but the fireworks exploding above the ship gave him the excuse to turn and he could not resist. Piet was at the very front of the crowd on the tourist-class promenade deck, between a rather plain young woman and an old lady in a bizarre confection of pink and white. He waved.

Everyone on the little white yachts was scrupulously ignoring the two thousand people watching them and Jay could not return this greeting. For a moment their eyes saluted one another. Then Jay poked his tongue an inch through parted lips and turned away.

Piet was woken at first light by the laughter of revelers returning to the ship. At once he thought of Didier. He dressed and went to the trellised barrier where they had first met. His friend was often on early duty at the veranda café, which opened onto the first-class promenade deck. He would find him and behave quite naturally.

Not a soul appeared. Verignan’s party had gone off exceedingly well and none of his guests had gone to bed before dawn. Piet waited an hour by the barrier, to no purpose. He was about to go to breakfast when a woman in a floaty white dress appeared and sank gracefully onto a lounger on the other side.

It was Stacey Meadows.

The heightened sensuality of the last few days roared over him. She was staring out to sea, superbly self-possessed. He watched her furtively, having no means of reaching her. As he contemplated the defiant set of her chin against the vast ocean he thought of Don José’s fatal mistake: to bind himself to a person who did not understand him and never would. It was the same error his mother had made. He considered his amorous adventures thus far, not one of which was worth a lifetime’s devotion. Then he thought of the note Miss Meadows had sent him, which suggested an intelligence as self-determining and imaginative as his own.

He went to breakfast beset by an insistent desire that nothing — not Frau Stettin’s conversation nor the amorousness of Percy Shabrill and Miss Prince — could tame.

The last days of the voyage passed with agonizing slowness, the physical imperatives of Piet’s body competing with a mounting anxiety to which he had no answer. His sleep was fitful and he barely ate. What on earth would he do in Cape Town? He could think no further than his encounter with Miss Meadows, in which alone of all the uncertainties he faced he had the utmost faith.

On the morning of the final day, Table Mountain came into view through swirling mists. Despite the earliness of the hour the decks were crowded. Percy had proposed to Miss Prince the evening before and been accepted. He had kept Piet up all night talking of rings and houses and the style in which he intended to keep his wife.

Piet avoided them as best he could, having offered his congratulations over breakfast. The mountain ahead humbled him. It seemed the altar of a god or a deity itself: above the impudence of human contemplation. He returned to his cabin to find his bill waiting. Since his expulsion from first class he had found its habits hard to break and had resisted less and less the insidious pressure to buy things. Now he saw that he had been persuaded to consume eight cocktails and four brandies. He had had his tailcoat laundered in anticipation of its sale, and the amount charged for this service was many times greater than any sum he could hope to raise on it. He took from the safe the black steel box he had brought with him from Amsterdam and found its wad of notes far thinner than he remembered. At first he thought he had been robbed, but a few minutes with a pencil and a scrap of notepaper confirmed otherwise.

He recalled Didier telling him that a stroke of luck is not the same thing as being rich. The extravagance of his ticket, a night at the Karseboom, the sleeper to Paris, his hotel there, taxis to transport his wretched trunk, and now his wasteful expenditure on the ship had drastically depleted Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts’ gifts. For a horrifying moment Piet thought he might not be able to pay the account. What ignominy to have to borrow from Percy! He counted the notes with dread, and when he had separated what he owed only three remained.

He went on deck again. A blazing heat had incinerated the mist. Ahead of him was a chaotic port — foreign and energetic and wholly indifferent to him. He could barely survive a fortnight on his remaining reserves. What then? He did not know and could not think.

He found a deck chair and sat heavily in it, hiding from the daunting view. He heard the anchor break the water and a bell ring. With a shudder that made the ladies sway, the engines went into reverse and the boat stopped. His anxiety intensified. He knew that confidence alone could save him, but his capacity to manufacture it had deserted him. The band began to play “La Marseillaise.”

“At long bloody last. Land!” Percy Shabrill was upon him, absurdly dressed in a tweed suit and plus fours — as if for a golfing holiday in the north of England. Having sold eighteen refrigeration systems and seduced a woman right beneath his cabinmate’s nose, he was inclined to be generous with Piet Barol. “As soon as Dotty and I are settled, you must visit us.”

Piet knew that this might be his only refuge from the doss-house and the realization was bitter indeed. Nevertheless he thanked Percy and took down his brother’s address in Johannesburg.

“Just look at all those darkies. Enough to give you nightmares.”

And with that Percy was gone.

The decks began to clear. Heat and fear made Piet dizzy. At length he went below. A steward appeared. “Letter for you, sir. Stand by for disembarkation.”

Piet did not wait. He felt that another encounter with Percy Shabrill would break him. He pushed his way to the vestibule doors, glad that Didier had written to him. He was badly in need of a friend. As he stepped onto the gangway he saw Didier standing on the quay, directing the first-class passengers towards the customs shed. “Loubat!” His voice carried over the swell of noise.

Didier recognized it and turned deliberately towards its source, as if putting his hand into a flame. Years of training allowed him to keep his face absolutely expressionless as he looked for the last time at Piet Barol. Then he shook his head and went into the shed.

The swell of the crowd could not be restrained. It carried Piet to the end of the gangway and onto land that rocked disconcertingly after nearly three weeks at sea. Only the alchemy of friendship might have transformed this disaster into an adventure. The sudden revocation of Didier’s was crushing. Piet joined the throng at the passport window and took the letter from his pocket. Perhaps Didier had explained. But the note inside the vellum envelope was not from Didier Loubat. It read: Find elegant premises in the best district. Take a room at the Mount Nelson hotel and introduce yourself widely. Exploit your European glamour. Good luck. J.G. and was accompanied by a check for a thousand pounds.

I hope it’s not a love letter you’re reading with such radiant concentration.” Stacey Meadows was standing beside him in a dress of peppermint-green satin. “I should be rather jealous if it were, though I’d forgive you if you’d let me join the line. I was late getting off and I’ve lost my parasol. I can’t stand in the sun with this mob.”

“It would be an honor, Miss Meadows.” He offered her his arm.

“You do look pleased with yourself.”

“Only delighted to run into you.”

“My invitations are not often ignored.”

“I tried to come but was prevented. May I explain over luncheon?”

They went together to get their luggage. Stacey had a great deal more than Piet. A Loire Lines porter took it for them to the customs hall where an official asked for their papers, taking them for man and wife. Piet handed over the passport his mother had given him long ago. Stacey Meadows presented hers. When both had been stamped she said: “I couldn’t possibly lunch with you. I don’t even know your name.”

“Well, that is easily solved.” He took her hand and kissed it. “My name is Pierre Barol.”

The consuls of France, Great Britain, the United States and Russia were waiting on the quayside to welcome the Eugénie’s first-class passengers, the Polish representative having been delayed on his train from Johannesburg. Verignan had hired every spare automobile in the city and had them repainted and stamped with the line’s shell and crossed Ls. The last was leaving the port when Piet and Stacey emerged from the customs shed into a jostling horde. Black porters were heaving trunks onto their backs. Indian boys in fezzes and gaiters asked for tips and picked pockets when they could. One or two dark-skinned gentlemen were examining the contents of the Eugénie’s hold in suits as smart as any Piet owned, and this sight shocked him most of all. He had expected to find the natives in appropriately exotic dress.

The same impulse that made Piet Barol mistrustful of elevators and other novelties now expressed a strong preference for a driver who resembled the cabmen of Europe. Stacey waited in the shade while he obtained the only remaining vehicle driven by a white man, a barouche upholstered in burgundy velvet, slightly frayed, and drawn by a pair of high-stepping grays. Its driver was a helpful and dapper Cockney who took them for persons of the greatest quality. Once lifted in and comfortably ensconced, Miss Meadows said: “I did enjoy watching you get the best carriage, Mr. Barol.”

Stacey Meadows did not intend to rot her life away in the chorus of the Opéra Comique and was well aware of the fate of girls in her position who made no plan before losing their looks. She refused, absolutely, to strike the Faustian pact of the courtesan. For some time she had been on the lookout for an alternative insurance against the indignities of middle age in the demimonde. She had rarely encountered a mate as suitable as the heroic figure at her side, his glance so smoldering she barely noticed the blazing yells, the street cries and gay colors of this city at the far end of the world. She decided to address his likely disadvantages immediately. “I see from your passport that you are French. I suppose that makes you as unreliable as you are diverting.”

The carriage turned into Adderley Street, a thoroughfare lined with buildings as handsome and solid as any in Amsterdam. Piet had imagined roads of mud, but the avenue was well paved and dissected by tramlines. Among the seething crowds were people as elegantly dressed as Sunday strollers in the Vondelpark. Much was reassuringly familiar, but the diamond-sharp brightness, the smells of spices and salt water, the vast mountain guarded by a rock in the shape of a watchful lion, declared the newness of this world and its possibilities. His courage revived, and with it his conscience.

“It is not my real passport, Miss Meadows.”

“Indeed?”

“You may rest easy. I am Dutch by birth and we are a most dependable race. My mother was French. I traveled on papers she once obtained for me.”

“Are you a fugitive from the police?”

“From myself, only.” The thrill of sitting beside a clever woman with a large check in his pocket did not override Piet’s distaste for the subterfuges of the life he had left behind. He decided not to begin with a lie. “I was not a first-class passenger on that ship. A friend of mine was a steward and let me in to see the opera because he knows I care for it so.”

Stacey’s face fell. “Do you mean to say you have no money?”

“This morning I had barely sixty guilders to my name. Now I have a thousand pounds.”

“So you are a thief!”

“Far from it.” Piet showed her Jay’s letter and told the story of his discovery, his flight from the stewards and his rescue by a passenger of means, who had invested the capital to start him off in business.

“You must have been very persuasive with this American gentleman.” Stacey Meadows looked at him skeptically. The moral certainties of her Chicago upbringing had been thoroughly overthrown during two seasons at the Opéra Comique, which had taught her a great deal about the range of human inclination. She knew many men who preferred their own kind, more or less openly, and had long lost the habit of disapproval. But the animal part of her nature was disappointed and slightly surprised to learn that her companion might be one of them. His poverty allowed her to be direct. “I don’t mind the slightest bit — but tell me — what did you do to earn such a sum? I know very well why moneyed men take an interest in people like us.”

Piet, who never did so, blushed deep scarlet.

“I thought as much. Did you enjoy it?”

He hesitated. “In a novel sort of way. The alternative was being put off the ship at St. Helena and spending my life there. I looked for you first, you may be sure.” He told her of his desperate hunt for her cabin. When he had finished she was smiling, despite herself, and he snatched her wrist and kissed it.

The fervor with which he did so reassured Stacey Meadows, who decided to overlook a desperate act. Though she withdrew her wrist she was very pleased.

The carriage trundled beneath an ornamental arch and entered the Company Gardens beside a palace of rose brick and blinding stucco. Ahead of them stretched a shaded avenue from which paths twisted seductively into lush vegetation. A Greek temple faced the mountain, brilliantly white against the sky. Wherever they looked were flowers they had never seen — explosions of purple on long, swaying stems, trees hung with fanfaring trumpets in pink and red. They were both silent at the wonder of it, and in that silence Stacey Meadows thought quickly.

She had assumed that her companion’s income matched his beauty and was disconcerted to find this was not so. His candor, however, even on the most delicate topics, set him apart from the smooth-talking beaux who usually pursued her. She thought of the way Germaine Lorette had sabotaged her curtain call and a longing to escape the cutthroat competition of artistic Paris seized her. To do so with a worthy collaborator might be more diverting than marriage to a magnate who would doubtless have objectionable female relatives.

She turned her subtle, strategic mind to the situation at hand. “It is wise to pretend to be French if you wish to make furniture and gain a rich clientele. You should exploit, as your friend suggests, your European glamour. What about Monsieur de Barol, monsieur le baron? A title would suit you admirably, and since you are starting afresh …”

“If one does that one might as well be a vicomte.”

“An excellent suggestion.” Stacey withdrew from her purse the little platinum band her first seducer had given her in New York and slipped it onto the wedding finger of her left hand. She felt that her embrace with this delicious young man had been delayed quite long enough, and that once it had taken place she would be clearer in her mind. They proceeded up Government Avenue in tingling silence, her invitation well understood by them both. They passed the prime minister’s house and a museum of natural history that resembled a French château, crossed the traffic on Orange Street and entered the fragrant grounds of an imposing hotel built on the foothills of the mountain.

The drive was thronged with the vacated motors of the Eugénie’s first-class passengers, and the sun struck their eyes so sharply that both of them emerged from the barouche with lids half shut. A doorman appeared immediately with a sun umbrella. In a lobby full of the sweet scents of luxury Stacey wrote The Vicomte and Vicomtesse Pierre de Barol in the visitors’ register. This, and the quality of the Louis Vuitton trunk the bellboy brought in, inspired the manager to issue instructions for a suite on the first floor to be prepared rather than the room with bath that Piet had engaged. He begged them to take a glass of champagne punch on the terrace while it was being made ready.

The Mount Nelson’s garden was decked in the flags of France, Britain, Russia, Poland and the United States. Jay Gruneberger had been keeping watch at the fountain for an hour, wondering whether Piet Barol would follow his advice and come to the hotel. He half wished not, but had been unable to resist making the suggestion and providing the young man with the means to act on it. He saw Piet as soon as he appeared on the terrace with a young woman in a peppermint-green dress and knew at once that there would be no repeat of their shipboard revelry. He was more relieved than regretful. His hand stopped shaking and he turned to Albert Verignan, who had been attempting all morning to wheedle from him a repeatable pronouncement on the international situation.

“There will be no European war,” he said, partly for the pleasure of annoying his host. “Anyone can see it would mean the end of the world.”

Piet and Stacey were shown upstairs to a private parlor that opened onto the largest bedroom Piet had ever seen. It was wonderfully light and pretty, with a paper of pink and blue spring flowers and a bath in which it was possible to lie at full stretch without touching the ends. Beneath their windows the city beckoned like a temptation. “We will plan your assault on this colony after lunch,” said Stacey, removing her hat. “But first things first.”

Three days of rapturous lovemaking followed, during which the Vicomte and Vicomtesse Pierre de Barol spent twenty-seven pounds of Jay Gruneberger’s money and drank an awful quantity of champagne. The girth and enduring solidity of Piet’s cock were attributes of which Stacey made full and inventive use. As he watched her lower herself onto him, squealing as she found the angle she wanted, he thought how infinitely preferable this was to the froideur with which Jacobina Vermeulen-Sickerts had treated him.

He used the expertise he had gained from that lady to excellent effect, and the frankness of Stacey’s compliments redoubled his eagerness to please her. It was the first time either of them had had such opportunities for uninterrupted pleasure and as the days and nights slipped into one another their ecstasies became tender. In calmer interludes Piet learned the story of Stacey’s vicomte, her flight from her family and her hatred of Germaine Lorette. At her prompting he confided the circumstances of his childhood and his expulsion from Herengracht 605. This perilous honesty forged a bond that sex — in bed, in the bath, on the sofa of the sitting room, over the desk as its crystal inkwell rattled — cemented and confirmed.

By the morning of the fourth day Piet’s cock was red and swollen, thoroughly chafed by its addictive exertions.

“I’m bound to be pregnant,” remarked Stacey to the jasmine-scented breeze as they sat over breakfast on their balcony.

“Then we must marry at once.”

“I rather hoped you’d say that.” She reached for a silver pot of hot chocolate and turned to him with a serious expression. “To be practical for a moment. You must foreswear all other women. You may flirt as much as you like. Indeed it may be necessary for you to do so. But you are never to touch beyond the wrists.”

“Agreed.”

“And men too. St. Helena or no St. Helena.”

“I promise.”

“Certain people will dislike you on principle. It is the disadvantage of being charismatic and good-looking. Many more men will hate you than women. They will be my special responsibility. Instead of holding you back, they will be decisive in our success. I do not see how we can possibly fail.”

“We will certainly do better together than apart.”

“Of that,” she murmured, taking his hands in hers and kissing them, “I have no doubt at all.”

To be continued