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But after a while Eva preferred to watch the gulls in the wireless masts and the slow slide of the roll-top sky. Most of the passengers looked silly with their movie cameras that they had all rushed to get and now didn’t know what to use for, but the sailors painting the lifeboat stanchions were quiet and beaten and sympathetic, and probably wished, as she did, that the voyage was over.

Butterworth sat down on the deck beside her chair.

‘They’re operating on one of the stewards this morning. Must be terrible in this sea.’

‘Operating? What for?’ she asked listlessly.

‘Appendicitis. They have to operate now because we’re going into worse weather. That’s why they’re having the ship’s party toni
ght.’

‘Oh, the poor man!’ she cried, realizing it must be her steward.

Adrian was showing off now by being very courteous and thoughtful in the game.

‘Sorry. Did you hurt yourself? … No, it was my fault… You better put on your coat right away, pardner, or you’ll catch cold.’

The match was over and they had won. Flushed and hearty, he came up to Eva’s chair.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Terrible.’

‘Winners are buying a drink in the bar,’ he said apologetically.

‘I’m coming, too,’ Eva said, but an immediate dizziness made her sink back in her chair.

‘You’d better stay here. I’ll send you up something.’

She felt that his public manner had hardened towards her slightly.

‘You’ll come back?’

‘Oh, right away.’

She was alone on the boat deck, save for a solitary ship’s officer who slanted obliquely as he paced the bridge. When the cocktail arrived she forced herself to drink it, and felt better. Trying to distract her mind with pleasant things, she reached back to the sanguine talks that she and Adrian had had before sailing: There was the little villa in Brittany, the children learning French–that was all she could think of now–the little villa in Brittany, the children learning French–so she repeated the words over and over to herself until they became as meaningless as the wide white sky. The why of their being here had suddenly eluded her; she felt unmotivated, accidental, and she wanted Adrian to come back quick, all responsive and tender, to reassure her. It was in the hope that there was some secret of graceful living, some real compensation for the lost, careless confidence of twenty-one, that they were going to spend a year in France.

The day passed darkly, with fewer people around and a wet sky falling. Suddenly it was five o’clock, and they were all in the bar again, and Mr Butterworth was telling her about his past. She took a good deal of champagne, but she was seasick dimly through it, as if the illness was her soul trying to struggle up through some thickening incrustation of abnormal life.

‘You’re my idea of a Greek goddess, physically,’ Butterworth was saying.

It was pleasant to be Mr Butterworth’s idea of a Greek goddess physically, but where was Adrian? He and Miss D’Amido had gone out on a forward deck to feel the spray. Eva heard herself promising to get out her colours and paint the Eiffel Tower on Butterworth’s shirt front for the party tonight.

When Adrian and Betsy D’Amido, soaked with spray, opened the door with difficulty against the driving wind and came into the now-covered security of the promenade deck, they stopped and turned toward each other.

‘Well?’ she said. But he only stood with his back to the rail, looking at her, afraid to speak. She was silent, too, because she wanted him to be first; so for a moment nothing happened. Then she made a step towards him, and he took her in his arms and kissed her forehead.