“No. And neither are the passengers.”
“Randier than the guests at the Amstel?”
“Much. There’s nothing to do all day on a ship but scheme and flirt.”
The natural and immediate restoration of their old banter stilled Didier’s nerves. He fetched a duck soufflé and boasted of his opportunities for sexual intrigue, feeling mildly ashamed to begin their encounter with a half-truth. Though he described an engaging series of female conquests, in fact it was the line’s male passengers who had shown him approving attention. Didier had accepted a judicious selection. There had never been any question of payment for these encounters, but though his presence had been voluntary he had not sought the intimacy of a second meeting; he had given his heart already. “This is only my third voyage, but I’ve already lost count,” he said. “People do as they please in the middle of the ocean.”
“These women invite you to their cabins?”
“While their husbands have a massage or a swim. But the ship is full of nooks and crannies. It was designed for mischief.”
“Lucky devil.”
Didier grinned. “Let me get you an ice, then you’ll have to be off. Monsieur Verignan will be along shortly and you’re at his table.”
J
ay Gruneberger had spent a very pleasant half hour watching the gorgeous young men, one dark, one blond, flirting with each other on the opposite side of the room, pleasant even though he was beginning to feel old and their bloom confirmed it. He was forty-two, in committed good condition, his arms and shoulders still well muscled though his trousers, once a favorite pair, were biting painfully. His face was almost ugly, with full sensual lips and a hawk nose; he would never again have the thoughtless slenderness of youth. Though his expression was one of a man lost in abstract thought, he was watching the young men intently.
When the dark one rose to leave Jay stood to follow. He was surprised to see that the blond one led the dark one. Had they agreed an assignation? It was clear that some intimacy existed between them. He reached the door a discreet distance behind them, keen to learn its nature, but his escape was blocked by a torrent of effusive greeting.
Albert Verignan, founder and chairman of the Loire Lines Company, was a man of influence on both sides of the Atlantic: a plotter who achieved his ends with a guile that did not endear him to Jay Gruneberger, who in all but his sexual life was as straightforward and honest as good manners permit. They greeted each other with noisy amity. With a regretful glance at Piet Barol’s retreating back, Jay allowed himself to be detained in one of his host’s characteristic tête-à-têtes.
Verignan was deftly complimentary. He praised the cut of Jay’s suit and the genius of his wife. “I have never known anyone with such an eye for spectacle, for beauty, for detail, as Rose!” he exclaimed, though he meant that he knew of no one besides himself with such rare talents. “She has chaired the committee superbly—though she might bankrupt me yet, mind you.” He looked down modestly, as he always did when introducing the subject of his own generosity. “She has insisted on having a five-hundred-foot terrace blasted by dynamite from the rock. The line’s timetable has been overthrown and a new route to South Africa added. Really, I should be very cross. But how can one resist her?”
“You have acted wisely not to try.”
Verignan laughed good-naturedly. He knew that Jay Gruneberger did not like him and was determined that he should. Verignan had been a young man when the Prussians invaded France in 1870 and had witnessed the end of the Second Empire on the battlefield at Sedan. The destruction wrought by their advancing armies had left him with a virulent hatred of Germans, which decades of rivalry with the Hamburg-America and Norddeutscher Lloyd Lines had greatly concentrated. He approved of the entente cordiale with Britain, but though Georges Clemenceau seemed a decent patriot he could not forgive him his attempts to impose an eight-hour workday and an income tax. Verignan had lost hope that democracy, with its compromises and debate, its half measures and delays, would rise to the kaiser’s challenge. He had made a fortune by following his instinct and it told him now that an unchecked Germany spelled disaster for France.
The hour called for a hero. And every hero has his maker.
Verignan had chosen his man already, an ambitious young deputy named Colignard. He should be elected democratically and seize power when he had control of the army, as both Napoleons had done. Verignan doubted very much that France could meet the German threat alone, whoever led her. A grand alliance of France, Great Britain, Russia, Poland, perhaps even the United States, would be necessary to check the kaiser’s ambitions. Bringing it about was just the sort of challenge Verignan relished. He understood the seductions of glamour and had devised the voyage to introduce the elites of his favored nations in a setting as conducive as possible to the forging of friendship—a setting, moreover, that would remind them of the priceless contributions France had made to the world. He intended that the ball he had planned should be reported in every illustrated newspaper on earth.
Verignan had chosen St. Helena so that clever journalists might detect a symbolic Anglo-French reconciliation almost a century after the Battle of Waterloo. Its extreme remoteness was a further attraction. The idea of showing five hundred people who thought they had seen everything something they had never seen satisfied his feeling for publicity. So did the notion of transporting them miraculously from the depths of winter to a scented summer’s night. Since he himself was paying for the three hundred waiters, the eighty chefs, the four thousand bottles of champagne, the fireworks, the orchestra, and the dynamiting of a hollow in the rock where the dancing could take place if the weather was fine, the enormous sum raised could be spent directly on needy, photogenic children in each of the countries that formed his imaginary alliance.
These plans shimmered in the air as he remarked how pleasant it was to be with a ship full of friends, and Jay Gruneberger thought wistfully of the men Verignan’s arrival had prevented him from following. He emphatically preferred the dark one.
Noting his abstraction, Verignan remembered hearing that his companion was vulnerable to certain kinds of blackmail. He preferred to gain his ends by charm but was prepared to resort to darker strategies if necessary, since Jay Gruneberger was listened to in quarters whose support would be vital. Whatever must be done for the peace of Europe, he thought.
Auguste Colignard was brought over to be introduced. He was square jawed and inspiring, his manner subtly flirtatious: a man for posters. Jay was compelled to drink a cup of tea with him and spent the afternoon roaming the ship in search of the dark beauty he had missed.
But he had quite disappeared.
O
ver the next five days, Didier Loubat’s long-mounting infatuation with Piet Barol became a roaring love. They met every morning and were not once challenged. Sometimes they spent six or seven hours together before Piet’s return to tourist class, longer than they ever had in Amsterdam, and the pleasure Piet took in his company made Didier wildly happy. He was a junior steward, assigned as needed. The bounties of the earth were available to first-class passengers at any hour, and wherever he went he took his love and rained delicacies upon him.
“You never speak of your parents,” he observed on the sixth day out as Piet sprawled in the depths of a smoking room sofa, nursing a twenty-five-year-old brandy though it was only eleven a.m. It was an overcast day with an unsteady sea and the paneled room with its cozy fire was almost empty. A copy of Winterhalter’s portrait of the Empress Eugénie presided over the fireplace, her gown rather more revealingly cut than in the original.
“With the Vermeulen-Sickertses to absorb us, it never occurred to me.”
“Will you miss your father?”
Piet contemplated the liquid in his glass. “I don’t suppose so.”
“Not miss your own father?”
“He’s not a very sympathetic man.”
“Is he a drunkard?”
“Heavens no. He’s not vile in that way. In fact, he doesn’t approve much of indulgence in any form. My mother used to say he lacks the gift of joy.”
Didier loved his parents and was well loved in return. That Piet should have no mother, and a father who never embraced him, made him want to care for him forever. Monsieur and Madame Loubat were well accustomed to their son bringing handsome friends home for the holidays. They treated them with great kindness and put them in Didier’s bedroom without remark. As he led Piet from the Renaissance through the reigns of Louis XV and XVI, following his roster from smoking room to salon to the veranda café, he grew ever surer that his mother would love Piet as her own and imagined telling her of him without shame.
The unifying theme of the ship’s decoration was the sea, and Verignan’s decorators had not missed a single opportunity to allude to it. While Didier worked, Piet sat in a haze of contented drunkenness and counted how many gilt shells and crossed
L
s he could see. It was an extremely pleasant form of self-sedation. Sometimes a single fireplace yielded as many as twenty. In the panels of a double door in the salon he counted eighty-three. It made him feel sophisticated to disapprove of this fussiness and of the embroidered antimacassars, the too-showy reliance on gilt, the ostentatious hats of certain female passengers. But the effect was undoubtedly arresting, and its splendor helped to dull his memories of the Herengracht.
Both young men were so absorbed in each other and themselves that neither noticed the regular presence of a worldly, well-built male passenger in his forties, with a neat beard and a hawk nose. Jay Gruneberger wondered whether the dark one was a poor sailor, because he never appeared at meals—but no, he was eating with great delight whenever he saw him. He could find no explanation for his regular absences. Nor for the blond and the dark always and only appearing together. He watched them and saw the look on the steward’s face when his friend spoke. More than once he was tempted to intrude on their conversations and introduce himself, but he was too well known and too happily married to initiate contact until he could be certain of their discretion.
O
n the ninth day of the voyage, Didier was on lifeguard duty at the first-class indoor swimming pool. He had put a pair of bathing trunks on a passenger’s bill and given them to Piet, who looked magnificent in them. The pool was one of the glories of the ship, decorated in the stylized motifs the first Napoleon made fashionable after his Egyptian campaign; as grand and shadowy as a Pharaoh’s tomb.
The sight of Piet Barol in bathing drawers heightened Didier’s sense of urgency. They had only eight more days in this world-no-world on the ocean; the approaching shore threatened everything. It was a calm day. Ropes and swings had been attached to the ceiling to be climbed up and dived from. Piet made rather a display of himself, climbing hand over hand halfway to the roof, the muscles in his back writhing like serpents; knotting the rope around his feet; diving down again.
His performance drew applause. He had a steam in the Turkish hammam and then a dip in the iced plunge pool. By the time he reentered the changing room, his body was red and tingling. He was aware of his skin, a pleasant tautness in his limbs, and then, abruptly, of having had no contact with another human being since his last delicious afternoon with Jacobina. He needed to piss and went to the urinal, wondering how he might get some of what he needed. He had just pulled his vest down to free himself when Didier entered the room.
Didier went to a locker and undressed quickly, knowing that if he were caught in the passenger changing room he would be dismissed. The impulse to be naked near his friend was imperative; it dimmed all risk. Piet glanced round and saw Didier facing away from him, changing from one bathing suit into another. He turned back to the wall, but at the reaches of his vision he was aware of the lightly muscled body he knew so well. It brought to mind their first conversation; the flicker of instinct that had told him Didier might be persuaded to ease certain intimate frustrations.
He had desisted on that occasion and not thought of it again. He had never combined such things with deep affection. For the first time he understood that it was possible to do so if one dared. Didier had stopped moving. Piet felt himself watched and looked down at his prick, now stiff and insistent in his hand. He was embarrassed but also afraid—because he did not want to have a love affair, and he understood that Didier would do nothing for him except out of love. Nevertheless he could not piss. He waited, trying to calm himself, and a door opened.
A well-built man with a neat beard and a hawk nose entered. At this intrusion Didier came to himself, collected his trunks, and went through the door into the stewards’ room. The bearded man went to a sink and washed his hands. When he had gone, Piet went into a lavatory stall and dealt with himself vigorously.
T
hat night, Didier stood by a silver-gilt dessert trolley thinking of the afternoon. The room in which he was stationed was two decks high, a miniature theater in gold and turquoise and red velvet. Where the seats and boxes would have been on land were tables with shaded electric candlelights. An entire opera was staged on each voyage, generally on the second-last night at sea. On this journey the performance was scheduled for the following evening to avoid clashing with the Bal de la Gloire on St. Helena.
It was Didier’s responsibility to serve wafer-thin slices of cake without disturbing audience or performers. Tonight’s dancers were making so much noise this required no concentration. A middle-aged lady beckoned and he went to her, deep in thought. Passengers occupying suites were placed closest to the stage. The English couple staying in the Henri de Navarre did not care for music; their table was empty almost every night. If Piet came after dinner and it was empty again, he would be safe for the rest of the evening.
Didier conveyed his plan the next morning as he served his friend coffee in the veranda café. “Wear the tailcoat the Vermeulen-Sickertses gave you and your gold-and-onyx studs.”