where Barclay and Barfield had drowned. The current was setting us back when we weren’t under way.
She loved it all. That was the thing that made it finally complete. I had thought at first she might merely tolerate it because I liked the sea and boats and sailing and because it was our only escape, but she took to it as naturally as the Vikings she was descended from.
She was watching me take a sight one noon. “I’m so happy,” she said. “We’ll remember this always, as long as we live, won’t we?”
I glanced at her. “Sure. But don’t forget, this is only the beginning.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Of course.”
We were lying becalmed again the next afternoon when the rain squall hit us. She was sun-bathing on the forward deck in the half bathing suit and I was reading aloud to her from a paper-bound edition of The Heart of Darkness I’d had in my gear when we saw it darkening to the eastward. We both ran below. I left the book and took off my dungarees and shoes. It burst over us without too much wind but with a tropical deluge of rain. As soon as it had washed the salt from the deck I blocked the scuppers and opened the filler cap to the fresh water tank and let it run full. When I had topped it off and put the cap back on, I turned, and she was coming forward again with a small bottle of shampoo in her hand, grinning at me through the deluge.
“Here, let me help, too,” I said.
We gravely sat down in opposite directions on deck, as if in a love seat, and unpinned the roll of ash-blond hair. Rain fell over us in sheets. I poured some of the shampoo into my hands and we rubbed it on her head, trying to work up the foam against the beating of the rain. She was naked from the waist up, and well tanned now, and she looked like an Indian in a white turban. Our eyes met and she started to laugh. Soap ran down her face. I kissed her and got soap in my mouth. We held onto each other and strangled with laughter while the rain rinsed her hair clean. We could never pin down afterward what had been so funny about it.
When the sun came out we sat in the cockpit with towels, drying it. It gleamed like freshly burnished silver against the smooth, tanned skin of her face and shoulders. If I live until I’m ninety and never see anything beautiful again, they don’t owe me a thing.
That night when we prepared dinner she changed into the white dress again, and when she came out of the forward end of the cabin she had a small bottle of perfume in her hand and was touching the glass stopper to the lobe of an ear.
She smiled, a little shyly. “I know it’s ridiculous,” she said. “But it was there in the things I sent aboard—”
“No,” I said. “It’s not ridiculous. On this ship the mate comes to dinner every night with just a suspicion of Tabu behind her starboard ear or she’s logged a day’s pay. Put it in the night order book.”
“Night order book?” she asked, and it was the first time I had ever seen that particular roguishness in her eyes. “Things are simplified on ships, aren’t they?”
We were ecstatically happy, and we didn’t care how long it took us to get into the Yucatan Strait. But twice more I awoke at night with that strange feeling she was going through some hell of her own there beside me. She would be lying perfectly still, staring up at the sky, as rigid and tense as someone petrified with fear.
I couldn’t get to it. Whatever it was, she never let me come near it.
Sixteen
She liked to swim, and had no exaggerated fear of sharks. I coached her to get her out of the dog-paddle class, and she improved tremendously. She was a natural. She was in no sense an athlete, but then neither are most really hot girl swimmers. You don’t have to be lumpy-muscled and bony to get around in water.
We spent hours at it, lots of times even when there was enough wind to have been under way. This was paradise and we were so wonderfully alone it was impossible to be concerned with headway or making a schedule or taking advantage of every capful of wind.