Free Swimming to Ithaca by Simon Mawer Page B

deck after dinner last night – after they had all signed each other’s menus and promised to meet up again once they had landed. He had put his arm round her waist and she hadn’t stopped him. It had been warm in the night air, with a cool breeze that only came with the way of the ship. The water rustled like silk along the sides of the hull and there was a moon, of course there was a moon, hanging low in the night sky and burnishing the surface of the sea. They had stopped in the shadow of a lifeboat and he had pulled her towards him and bent to kiss her on the mouth.
    ‘Damien! What are you doing?’ The papery touch of his lips. Very fragile they had seemed, while he was big and strong and smelling faintly of cologne and cigarettes. ‘Damien, please.’
    He had released her. ‘I’m sorry. I really don’t know …’ Apologies and embarrassment. ‘I thought perhaps you—’
    ‘I what?’ She hadn’t been angry. Flattered slightly, but also something else: ashamed.
    He had regained his composure, taken out a cigarette case from inside his jacket and offered her one before lighting uphimself and staring out into the darkness. ‘I thought perhaps you liked me. I’m sorry that I was mistaken.’
    ‘But I do like you, of course. Just not in that way.’
    ‘You must think me a cad.’
    And she had laughed. She couldn’t help it. The word ‘cad’. She’d never heard it outside the cinema. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude.’ But the laughter was still there, bubbling up inside her breast.
    ‘Don’t you have cads in Sheffield? I’ll bet there are lots. Yorkshire cads.’
    ‘It’s not that.’ She had looked away into the night, at the phosphorescent wake streaming out behind the ship, at the faint brush-strokes of silver cloud lit by the moon. It was almost impossibly beautiful, more beautiful than the moonlight on Ladybower Reservoir, more beautiful than anything she had known. She had so few reference points. The bloody Pennines. She’d never
say
that, ‘bloody’. Instead she said, ‘I’m thirty-three years old; I’ve got a daughter asleep in our cabin, a son away at boarding school and a husband waiting for me in Cyprus. It’s all that. And you’ve got a wife and children as well.’
    ‘You mean if it weren’t for all that—’
    ‘It
is
rather a lot.’
    He laughed. She watched the glow of his cigarette as he inhaled. ‘But still, I’d have had a chance. I think I’m falling in love with you, you see.’
    Her laughter was sympathetic now, under control. ‘You don’t
know
me. You don’t know what you’d be letting yourself in for. It’s just a silly shipboard infatuation.’
    ‘That’s the literal Yorkshirewoman speaking, is it?’
    ‘Don’t keep going on about that.’
    ‘But it’s there in your voice. I love it.’
    ‘Don’t be daft.’
    ‘There you are. “Daft”, not “darft”.’
    ‘Well, I wish it weren’t.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because it labels me.’
    ‘There are other things that label you.’
    ‘What are those?’
    ‘Your beauty.’
    ‘Flattery.’
    ‘Your Yorkshire prudery.’
    ‘There you go again.’
    ‘Your legs.’
    ‘You can’t tell much by the shape of a woman’s legs.’
    ‘Oh yes, you can.’
    She was not quite sure on what terms they had parted. He’d bent to kiss her chastely on the cheek, and squeeze her hand, and whisper ‘Good-night,’ and then they’d gone to their separate cabins – Paula was still fast asleep, Marjorie was nodding over her book – and that had been that. Dee had undressed and lain in her narrow bunk for a long time awake, thinking. Of Edward, of Damien, but of other things, too. The excitement of the coming morning. The heat. The plain fact of her body, damp with sweat; her daughter in the bunk across the tiny box of a cabin; and her son, all those miles away in some anonymous prep-school dormitory. And Charteris. Before Edward there had only been Charteris. Charteris had gone away to the war, on the