“You do not. I’ve no desire to make a fool of myself, talking daft to my ship’s complement.”

A fresh breeze had sprung up and was blowing through the starboard porthole. It caught the memorandum that the Captain had just completed. The paper fluttered, turned over, and was revealed as a passenger’s embarkation notice for the Cape Farewell.

Staring fixedly at Alleyn, the captain said, “I used it yesterday in the offices. For a memo.” He produced a curiously uncomfortable laugh. “It’s not been torn, anyway,” he said.

“No,” Alleyn said, “I noticed that.”

An irresponsible tinkling on a xylophonic gong announced the first luncheon on board the Cape Farewell, outward bound.

CHAPTER 4

Hyacinths

Having watched Alleyn mount the companionway, Brigid Carmichael returned to her desolate little verandah aft of the centrecastle and to her book.

She had gone through the morning in a kind of trance, no longer inclined to cry or to think much of her broken engagement and the scenes that had attended it or even of her own unhappiness. It was as if the fact of departure had removed her to a spiritual distance quite out of scale with the night’s journey down the estuary and along the Channel. She had walked until she was tired, tasted salt on her lips, read a little, heard gulls making their B.B.C. atmospheric noises, and watched them fly mysteriously in and out of the fog. Now in the sunshine she fell into a half-doze.

When she opened her eyes it was to find that Doctor Timothy Makepiece stood not far off, leaning over the rail with his back towards her. He had, it struck her, a pleasant nape to his neck; his brown hair grew tidily into it. He was whistling softly to himself. Brigid, still in a strange state of inertia, idly watched him. Perhaps he sensed this for he turned and smiled at her.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Not sea-sick or anything?”

“Not at all. Only ridiculously sleepy.”

“I expect that is the sea. They tell me it does have that effect on some people. Did you see the pilot go off and the arrival of the dark and handsome stranger?”

“Yes, I did. Had he missed the ship last night, do you suppose?”

“I’ve no idea. Are you going for drinks with Aubyn Dale before lunch?”

“Not I.”

“I hoped you were. Haven’t you met him yet?” He didn’t seem to expect an answer to this question but wandered over and looked sideways at Brigid’s book.

“Elizabethan verse?” he said. “So you don’t despise anthologies. Which is your favourite — Bard apart?”

“Well — Michael Drayton, perhaps, if he wrote ‘Since There’s No Help.’ ”

“I’ll back the Bard for that little number every time.” He picked up the book, opened it at random and began to chuckle as he read aloud.

“Isn’t that a thing, now? Leering Cupid! They really were wonderful. Do you — but no,” Tim Makepiece said, interrupting himself, “I’m doing the thing I said to myself I wouldn’t do.”

“What was that?” Brigid asked, not with any great show of interest.

“Why, forcing my attentions on you, to be sure.”

“What an Edwardian expression.”

“None the worse for that.”

“Shouldn’t you be going to your party?”

“I expect so,” he agreed moodily. “I don’t really like alcohol in the middle of the day and am far from being one of Mr. Aubyn Dale’s fans.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve yet to meet a man who is.”

“All jealous of him, I daresay,” Brigid said idly.

“You may be right. And a very sound reason for disliking him. It’s the greatest mistake to think that jealousy is necessarily at fault. On the contrary, it may very well sharpen the perception.”

“It didn’t sharpen Othello’s.”

“But it did. It was his interpretation of what he saw that was at fault. He saw, with an immensely sharpened perception.”

“I don’t agree.”

“Because you don’t want to.”

“Now, look here—” Brigid said, for the first time giving him her full attention.

“He saw Cassio doing his sophisticated young Venetian act over Desdemona’s hand. He saw him at it again after he’d blotted his copy-book. He was pathologically aware of every gallantry that Cassio showed his wife.”

“Well,” Brigid said, “if you’re pathologically aware of every attention Aubyn Dale shows his however-many-they-may-be female fans, I must say I’m sorry for you.”

“All right, smartie,” Tim said amiably, “you win.”

“After all, it’s the interpretation that matters.”

“There’s great virtue in perception alone. Pure scientific observation that is content to set down observed fact after observed fact—”

“Followed by pure scientific interpretation that adds them all up and makes a nonsense.”

“Why should you say that?” he asked gently. “It’s you that’s making a nonsense.”

“Well, I must say!”

“To revert to Aubyn Dale. What about his big thing on TV? Advertising women’s bathing clothes—Pack Up Your Troubles. In other words, ‘Come to me, everybody that’s got a bellyache, and I’ll put you before my public and pay you for it.’ If I were a religious man I’d call it blasphemy.”

“I don’t say I like what he does—”

“Still, he does make an ass of himself good and proper, on occasions. Witness the famous Molton Medbury Midsummer Muckup.”

“I never heard exactly what happened.”

“He was obviously plastered. He went round televising the Molton Medbury flower show with old Lady Agatha Panthing. You could see he was plastered before he spoke and when he did speak he said the first prize in the competition went to Lady Agatha’s umbilicus globular. He meant,” Timothy explained, “Agapanthus umbellatus globosus. I suppose it shattered him because after that a sort of rot set in and at intervals he broke into a recrudescence of spoonerisms. It went on for weeks. Only the other day he was going all springlike over a display of hyacinths and said that in arranging them all you really needed was a ‘turdy stable.’ ”

“Oh, no! Poor chap. How too shaming for him!”

“So he shaved off his fetching little imperial and I expect he’s taking a long sea voyage to forget. He’s in pretty poor shape, I fancy.”

“Do you? What sort of poor shape?”

“Oh, neurosis,” Timothy said shortly, “of some sort. I should think.”

The xylophonic gong began its inconsequent chiming on the bridge-house.

“Good Lord, that’s for eating!” Timothy exclaimed.

“What will you say to your host?”

“I’ll say I had an urgent case among the greasers. But I’d better just show up. Sorry to have been such a bore. Good-bye, now,” said Tim attempting a brogue.

He walked rapidly away.

To her astonishment and slightly to her resentment Brigid found that she was ravenously hungry.

The Cape Company is a cargo line. The fact that six of its ships afford accommodation for nine passengers each does not in any way modify the essential function of the company. It merely postulates that in the case of these six ships there shall be certain accommodation. There will also be a chief steward without any second string, a bar-and-passengers steward and an anomalous offsider who may be discovered by the passengers polishing the taps in their cabins at unexpected moments. The business of housing, feeding, and within appropriate limits, entertaining the nine passengers is determined by the head office and then becomes part of the captain’s many concerns.

On the whole, Captain Bannerman preferred to carry no passengers, and always regarded them as potential troublemakers. When, however, somebody of Mrs. Dillington-Blick’s calibre appeared in his ship, his reaction corresponded punctually with that of ninety per cent of all other males whom she encountered. He gave orders that she should be placed at his table (which luckily was all right anyway because she carried V.I.P. letters), and until Alleyn’s arrival, had looked forward to the voyage with the liveliest anticipation of pleasurable interludes. He was, he considered, a young man for his age.