Maiden Voyage

SEVENTEEN

Catriona was swimming alone in the Arcadia's heated pool while Denis O'Hara and his lady wife were being welcomed aboard. It was peaceful and still, in the pool, with only the faintest slopping of the water against the gold mosaic tiles and the distant echo of the brass band; an arched sanctuary of palm trees and marble pillars and mosaic tiers. At the far end of the pool, a bubbling waterfall, lit with orange lights, coursed effusively down seventeen steps before splashing into a kidney-shaped whirl-bath; and by the windows, a curved nickel-plated cocktail bar offered champagne or fresh fruit juice to swimmers who had finished swimming, or swimmers who really preferred to stay quite dry and simply show off their new French bathing-costumes. It was still very risque to bare one's upper thighs, after all. Only two years ago, in Chicago, a whole bevy of bathing belles who had dared to swim in short bathing-suits had been manhandled into a paddy-wagon for alleged indecency and fined.

Catriona's bathing costume was in pink silk, designed by Madeleine Vionnet in a style which she called "La Rose de L"Infante', because of the Spanish roses around the short ruffled skin. The costume was an unusual combination of the demure and the erotic: the pink silk top clung like a second skin, transparently revealing Catriona's nipples as she bathed, whereas the skirt was as coy as a frill round the leg of a piano. To cover her bobbed hair, Catriona wore a tight pink cap of treated silk, sewn with patterns of seed pearls.

She had asked Edgar Deacon if she should be up on the boat deck to greet the O'Haras, but Edgar had told her that it really wasn't necessary. He didn't want to trouble her with the tedious formalities of shaking hands with an Irish banker and his lady wife; nor a golfer in funny socks; nor a would-be heroine of the Broadway stage. Besides, he preferred to produce her at tonight's banquet as a glamorous and glittering surprise, all dressed up like a fashion plate from La Gazette du Bon Ton.

There was another reason: he didn't yet want to have to introduce her to the tall fiftyish man in the long summer overcoat and the broad-brimmed hat. He wanted her to meet him later, in more controllable circumstances, and for a very particular purpose.

As Catriona languidly floated on the surface of the swimming pool, kicking her legs now and then, and looking up dreamily at the bronze-clad arches of the ceiling, she thought of Mark Beeney.

He disturbed her, and attracted her, as he must have attracted almost every girl who came within the radius of his smile. After all, she thought, he's handsome, and charming, and any man who gives you a diamond and ruby necklace worth thousands of dollars without asking for more than a peck on the cheek in return must have some sort of style. Yet, there seemed to be very much more to him. He wasn't just an American cake-eater with too much money and a gift for undermining a young girl's honour just when she thought she was clinging on to it the tightest. There was a complicated remoteness about him which made her feel as if he had something on his mind apart from necking. He was an interesting man, even a dangerous one. So dangerous that, as she circled around the pool, she found herself thinking about him as if they were lovers already.

Suddenly, she heard the sounds of an argument echoing loudly from the pool's entrance hall. A woman's voice first of all, high and histrionic and very foreign; and then the voice of the steward who was assigned to keep a discreet watch on the doors during lady's hour, to keep away peekers.

"This is quite absurd!" the foreign woman was shrilling. "The pool is practically empty, and how can you say that Sabran is anything but a decoration! He comes with me wherever I go! And if I wish to go to the pool in the lady's hour, then he shall come with me to the pool at lady's hour, also!"

Catriona swam to the steps at the shallow end of the pool and climbed out. Alice, who had been sitting on a narrow bentwood chair in the corner reserved for servants, brought her a huge white Turkish towel, and wrapped it around her shoulders. "What's going on?" Catriona asked her.

"It's Baroness Zawisza, Miss Keys. I think she's trying to bring her young man into the swimming bath."

Catriona put her feet up one after the other on to the chair so that Alice could dry them. Then she slipped on her pink silk mules and walked, still wrapped in her towel, to the entrance. Alice followed at a respectable distance behind.

By the door, accompanied by two uniformed maids, one of whom was carrying an incredibly fluffed-up white poodle, stood a tall defiant woman in a floor-length cape of scarlet marocain, a study in bright-red fury and bright-red wool. The cape was trimmed with a plumed collar of brown speckled feathers in which the woman's magnificent Slavic head, white as alabaster, with deep-set black eyes and black hair which had been scraped back and fastened with scarlet combs, nestled like an animated death-mask.

Beside the woman, indifferently smoking a Da Capo cigarette, slouched a bony youth in a white silk shirt and voluminous black silk Oxford bags.

"You are completely without imagination!" the baroness was snapping at the poor steward, who by now had turned extremely red. "You are a peasant, not fit to dig out potatoes! Tell him!" she said, suddenly turning to Catriona.

"He's only doing what he was ordered to do," said Catriona, gently.

"He was ordered to make a fool of me?" demanded Baroness Zawisza.

"He was ordered to keep men out of the pool during the lady's hour, that's all," Catriona told her. "You wouldn't want to see him lose his job, would you?"

"I demand to see Sir Peregrine!" cried the baroness, dramatically. "I demand! I demand! I demand!"

"I don't think there's any need to disturb the captain," smiled Catriona. She was rather enjoying this. "I'm Catriona Keys, and this whole shipping line belongs to my family. Don't you think I could help you?"

The baroness frowned at Catriona, and then blew out her cheeks, making the feathers of her collar puff up like the tail of an irritated cockerel. "Poof!" she said. "What is it when I have to leave Sabran outside, like a pet dog? Even worse than a pet dog. The dog is allowed inside the pool because the dog is a bitch."

"I think you can bring Sabran inside if you want to," Catriona told her. "There's only me in the pool at the moment, and Sabran doesn't look very threatening."

Sabran, who had been slouching against the side of the door, suddenly stood up straight, and stuck out his chin, and tried his best to look very apache. Catriona touched the steward's arm, and said gently, "If you get any trouble from Mr. Willowby, just refer him to me."

"Yes, Miss Keys," nodded the steward. "And, thank you, Miss Keys."

Followed by her small entourage, Baroness Zawisza swept into the pool, circling around every now and then to show off the beautiful fall of her Worth cape. "We always used to swim on our estates at Wizajny when I was a girl. My father was magnificent, a broad-shouldered hero in blue and white striped wool, diving from the bridge into the lake! He made us all swim, my five brothers, myself, my four sisters. He said to swim is to live for ever. Mind you, I think he was a little eccentric about health. He used to believe in electric shocks, for the galvanization of the body and then the two little ones would each have to pick up the bare terminal of an electric battery. How we all jumped! But I don't suppose it did us any harm."

Catriona said, with the slyness that only a pretty young girl half the baroness" age could have got away with, "It seems to have preserved you marvellously."

"Well," replied the baroness, tartly, "just because I can remember Poland before the War, that doesn't actually make me a certifiable antique. Krysia! My cape, I think I'll swim. Sabran, go to the bar and order champagne. I hate champagne," she confided in Catriona, "but unless you drink it all the time, and very conspicuously, people begin to suspect your heritage. Such a nuisance. Will you swim with me?"

One of the baroness" maids, a round-faced Polish girl who didn't appear to speak a single word of English, unfastened the rhinestone-decorated clasp at the baroness" neck, and released the cape. Underneath, the baroness, who was as slender as a fashion-plate, wore a black vee-necked bathing costume trimmed in silver, with daringly loose legs that came halfway down her white thighs like cami-knickers.

Sabran, on his way to the bar, where a beige-jacketed stewardess in a jaunty cap was on hand to serve cocktails and wines, turned on one Cuban heel and applauded the baroness as she walked with aristocratic stateliness to the shallow end.

The baroness turned out to be a surprisingly good swimmer, propelling herself with effortless grace around the pool, changing smoothly from backstroke to butterfly-stroke to a long-legged breaststroke.

"I think that's enough," she said, after ten minutes. "Father always used to say that you shouldn't allow yourself to become waterlogged."

Her maid Krysia brought her a towel, and then a loose white Japanese wrap. Catriona, in her own silk robe, followed her to the small circular table by the cocktail bar where Sabran was sulkily sipping his champagne and tossing cashew nuts into his mouth with the aggressive expertise of someone who has spent many hours of his life waiting for rich women.

"Sabran goes to enormous lengths not to look kept," said the baroness, waving her fingers vaguely in the gigolo's direction for a cigarette. "He believes that it is against the fundamental laws of nature, or some such nonsense like that. I shouldn't have let him go to see Her Gilded Cage, I don't think. But I always say to him, don't I, Sabran, that to be kept is no disgrace, why should it be, and in any case it's very hard not to look kept when you're moody and thin like he is, and walk around everywhere in those ridiculous pants. Can you imagine trying to earn any kind of a living in pants like that?"

"You're a she-cat," said Sabran, in a thick Gascony accent. He lit two Da Capos at once, puffing them furiously until the tips were aglow Like bonfires, and then passed one to Baroness Zawisza.

"I don't really believe that one person can keep another," said Catriona. "Financially, yes; but not emotionally."

The baroness looked at her through the pungent smoke of her cigarette. "You have a love, is that it? A love you have recently parted?"

"I don't know whether we've parted for ever."

"Nobody parts for ever, my dear, not even when they're dead," said the baroness. "Death is a veil, that's all. That's what my mother used to tell me. In her younger days, before she married my father, she had a lover called Killinkoski, from Finland. He fell through the ice one winter on the lake we call Jezero Mamry, and drowned. But he visited her as a ghost for the rest of her life. Several times, she said, he even made love to her."

"I never hear such bunk," said Sabran.

The baroness smiled indulgently. "Sabran is trying to speak like an American. That's part of the reason we're sailing on the Arcadia. He wants to be a motion picture star in Hollywood. Can you imagine? They'll take one look at his pants and scream with laughter."

"These pants are spee-fee," Sabran retorted.

"Oh, my God, isn't he marvellous!" shrieked the baroness. "It's spiffy, my gorgeous young hound. Spee-fee, can you imagine? Oh, my God, I think I'm going to choke."

Catriona said, "Have you known each other for long? I've never thought of a woman keeping a man before."

"Well, that's because you're still young, my dove," said the baroness, more serious now. "When you're young, you're resilient enough to put up with all the despair and the passions, the ups and downs, the heartbreak and the sheer damned inconvenience. But when you get—well, when you've lived as full a life as I have, in a comparatively few number of years, you begin to look for intimacies that are more controllable. And so what better than a young cowboy like Sabran?"

The baroness sipped champagne, sneezed, and then said in a loud whisper, "Besides, he's a marvellous lover. I can't tell you. He sends shivers down my spine. Not that I'd ever tell him that, of course. He'd become too arrogant. He's arrogant enough now. Look at him! If he curls his lip any more it'll disappear up his nose."

"Do you love him?" asked Catriona. In normal circumstances, and to the sort of ladies that Catriona had known in London, to ask a question like that right in front of the lover himself would have been unthinkable. But somehow the baroness had made it quite clear that Sabran was her trained animal, that he did what he was told, and that if he argued with her he would be in danger of losing everything.

"Love?" queried the baroness, raising an eyebrow that had been plucked as thin as the curved edge of a razor-blade. "How can I talk of love? I used to know what it was, once. Now, I have more doubts than answers."

While she was saying this, the stewardess behind the bar happened to drop a highball glass and smash it. Catriona turned towards the bar to see what was happening, and to her shocked fascination she saw not only the stewardess but what was reflected in the buffed-up nickel steel that formed the curved art-deco counter.

Underneath the small circular table at which they sat, Sabran had quietly slipped off one of his Cuban-heeled shoes, and rolled off his sock. He had then lifted his foot and, with his toes, carefully peeled the wet leg of the baroness" swimming-costume away from her thigh, baring the moist curls of her vulva. Even as they chatted of love and Finnish ghosts and gigolos, Sabran was steadily thrusting his big toe in and out of the baroness, to the accompaniment of a sticky little noise that was almost completely masked by the bubbling of the fountain and the slapping of ripples in the pool. It was impossible to make out what Sabran was doing in great detail, because of the mistiness of the nickel, but Catriona could see that his toe was disappearing completely; and the hazy impression of wet black satin and white skin was overpoweringly provocative.

Catriona felt a prickling sensation around the scalp, and a sense that this conversation had suddenly lost touch with reality. "Love," she said, trying to remember what they had been talking about.

"You are the right age for love," replied the baroness, drinking more champagne and never once sparing even a glance for Sabran. "You have exactly the right chemistry—beauty and poise—and just the right measure of faintly soiled innocence. Also, you are still capable of knowing what love really is. One can lose this capability as one grows... well, as one learns more. Tell me about your lover."

"I'm not sure of his name," said Catriona.

"You don't even know who he is? Is he so mysterious?"

"No ... I'm not sure which he is."

"Aha... you have left one lover behind, and now you believe that you may have come across another! Well, that is splendid! You must give yourself as you think fit. Love is one reason for giving yourself. Money is another. Still another is to hut."

"You think I might want to hurt a boy, by falling in love with him?" asked Catriona.

"Of course. You're what—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one? That's the age of maximum conceit in a girl, and minimum sentiment. You don't have to look so much like a bewildered waif with me, you know. I know just what you're up to. Ohh, doucement, Sabran, for God's sake."

Catriona tried to ignore the baroness" little gasp of pain. She drank her champagne and watched the baroness" dark deep-set eyes as if they were the eyes of an oracle. Perhaps the oracle could tell her what she ought to do about Mark Beeney. Perhaps, on the other hand, the answer was already formed, even before the question had been fully phrased.

"Boys, anyway," said the baroness, "boys are always getting hurt. They enjoy it. There's nothing a boy likes better than a good mope."

"He's a man, really."

"A man? Hmm, I see from your expression that he is. Well, men can be just as easily hurt as boys; but the problem with men is that sometimes they retaliate, and hurt you back. Quite desperately, on occasions. When you're least expecting it."

For a moment, Baroness Zawisza closed her eyes, and the sharp lines of her Slavic cheekbones were hectically flushed. She seemed unconscious to everything around her, not for very long, only the time it would have taken to squeeze the bulb of a plate-camera, and for the lens to click, and for the photographer to emerge from his cape with the amused announcement that he had taken a candid portrait of her in the middle of a deep but powerfully disciplined orgasm.

"Men," said the baroness, opening her eyes again as if nothing had happened, "men are only interested in three things. Automobiles, fighting, and their own semen. In normal circumstances, the simplicity of these interests makes them laughably easy creatures to handle. But sometimes, they get all three interests confused, and that is when you have to be careful of your own self, and your own soul, not to mention your four-thousand-franc dresses."

Catriona was silent for a long time. Not because she was perplexed or depressed, but because the relentless cynicism of Baroness Zawisza's attitude towards men had restored her confidence in herself. That had been partly what was wrong with her relationship with Nigel. She had allowed herself to be carried along in a bright social whirl, all parties and cocktails and silly undergraduate stunts; and the brightness of the whirl had kept her from seeing how shallow and inconsequential her love affair actually was. Nigel had been fun, and she knew that he had loved her, and probably loved her still, but dancing the Charleston on the table-tops in the Trocadero and throwing streamers out of open Austins wasn't exactly the stuff that great romances were made of. In her mind, she was now approaching Mark Beeney as a woman, not as a girl. She tried to think of her own strength, her own willpower, her own independence. This was going to be something fierce and real, one ego clashing with another ego just as strong. This was going to be the kind of passion that burst like a thunderclap, like the passion between Rudolph Valentino and Alia Nazimova.

"A thousand zlotys for your thoughts," smiled the baroness.

Catriona slowly shook her head. "I was only thinking about something that happened a long time ago."

"How long?"

"Two years."

The baroness tightened up her wrap. "Yes," she said, "I suppose, to you, that would be a long time ago."