“Oh yes. Any time with you. Now. Now. Oh yes. Now.”
“Really now?”
“Oh yes. Believe me now.”
Afterwards they stood there and the lights were much closer and the bank of the canal and the distance beyond was still sliding by.
“Now are you ashamed of me?” she asked.
“No. I love you very much.”
“But it’s bad for you and I was selfish.”
“No. I don’t think it is bad for me. And you’re not selfish.”
“Don’t think it was a waste. It wasn’t a waste. Truly not for me.”
“Then it wasn’t a waste. Kiss me, will you?”
“No. I can’t. Just hold your hand against me tight.”
Later she said, “You don’t mind how fond I am of him?”
“No. He’s very proud.”
“Let me tell you a secret.”
She told him a secret that did not come to him as a great surprise.
“Is that very wicked?”
“No,” he said. “That’s jolly.”
“Oh Hudson,” she said. “I love you very much. Please go and make yourself comfortable in every way and then come back to me here. Should we have a bottle of champagne at the Ritz?”
“That would be lovely. What about your husband?”
“He’s still playing bridge. I can see him through the window. After he finishes he will look for us and join us.”
So they had gone to the Ritz which was at the stern of the ship and had a bottle of Perrier-Jouet Brut 1915 and then another one and after a while the Prince had joined them. The Prince was very nice and Hudson liked him. They had been hunting in East Africa, as he had been, and he had met them at the Muthaiga Club and at Torr’s in Nairobi and they had taken the same boat from Mombasa. The ship was a round-the-world cruise ship which made a stop at Mombasa en route for Suez, the Mediterranean, and eventually Southampton. It was a super luxury ship where all the cabins were private suites. It had been sold out for the world cruise as ships were in those years but some of the passengers had left the ship in India and one of those men who know about everything had told Thomas Hudson in the Muthaiga Club that the ship was coming in with several vacancies and that passage on her might be had quite reasonably. He had told the Prince and Princess, who had not enjoyed flying out to Kenya in those times when the Handley Pages were so slow and the flight so long and tiresome, and they had been delighted with the idea of the trip and the rates.
“We’ll have such a jolly trip and you’re a wonderful chap to have found out about it,” the Prince had said. “I’ll ring them up about it in the morning.”
It had been a jolly trip, too, with the Indian Ocean blue and the ship coming out slowly from the new harbor and then Africa was behind them, and the old white town with the great trees and all the green behind it, then the sea breaking on the long reef as they passed and then the ship gained speed and was in the open ocean and flying fish were splitting out of the water and ahead of the ship. Africa dropped to a long blue line behind them and a steward was beating on a gong and he and the Prince and the Princess and the Baron, who was an old friend and lived out there and was really wicked, were having a dry martini in the bar.
“Pay no attention to that gong and we’ll lunch in the Ritz,” the Baron said. “Do you agree?”
He had not slept with the princess on the ship although by the time they had reached Haifa they had done so many other things that they had both reached a sort of ecstasy of desperation that was so intense that they should have been required by law to sleep with each other until they could not stand it another time simply for the relief of their nerves, if for no other reason. Instead, from Haifa they made a motor trip to Damascus. On the way up, Thomas Hudson sat in the front seat with the chauffeur and the two of them sat in back. Thomas Hudson saw a small part of the Holy Land and a small part of the T. E. Lawrence country and many cold hills and much desert on the way up, and on the way back they sat in the back and the Prince sat in front with the chauffeur. Thomas Hudson saw the back of the Prince’s head and the back of the chauffeur’s head on the return trip and he remembered now that the road from Damascus to Haifa, where the ship was anchored in the harbor, runs down a river. There is a steep gorge in the river but it is very small as it would be on a small-scale relief map and in the gorge there is an island. He remembered the island better than anything on the trip.
The trip to Damascus did not help much and when they had left Haifa and the ship was headed out across the Mediterranean and they were up on the boat deck, that was cold now with a northeast wind, that was making a sea that the ship was beginning to buck slowly, she said to him, “We have to do something.”
“Do you like understatement?”
“No. I want to go to bed and stay in it for a week.”
“A week doesn’t sound very long.”
“A month then. But we have to do it right away and right away we can’t.”
“We can go down to the Baron’s cabin.”
“No. I do not want to do it until we can do it really without worrying.”
“How do you feel now?”