an echo,’ he said in sudden passion. ‘I said a lot, a great deal, about this being the very mouth of death itself. And you come here and bellow Coo-eee!’
She gleamed at him and he saw how his anger thrilled her. It was his defeat in the game she had been playing with him. She had caught him on the raw and thus she had won.
‘Ooo!’ she said. ‘Oooo! Pardon me for breathing!’ She turned to her husband. ‘He snapped me head off, didn’t he?’ she asked. George nodded, looking reproachfully at him. ‘All I said was Coo-eee. Testing for the echo. And he snapped my head off.’
‘I’ll have a word,’ George said lugubriously. ‘With the purser or the captain. Crew can’t talk to passengers like that.’
The lecturer turned away, his face burning, he bent to pick up his microphone and looked towards the back of the boat where the wake twisted in the narrow blue channel like a silver corkscrew. Hopeless to try and invoke the dark magic of Charon for these people. Hopeless to try to give them a sense of the fear and the longing for the River Styx. Pointless to talk to them about the belief that once you crossed the river you remembered nothing – for what did she remember anyway?
‘I am sorry the microphone is out of order,’ he said shortly, and retreated behind the steering wheel where she mouthed: ‘Cheer up, it might never happen!’ at him.
That night at dinner, as bad luck would have it, she was seated at his table. Officers and lecturers were rotated around the dining room so that guests had a chance to enjoy their company on every night of their voyage. He found he could hardly speak to her with anything resembling civility. He had already had a brief interview with the purser who told him that a complaint had been made by a guest about his inadequacy as a teacher, and worse – his personal rudeness. Pointless to defend himself by saying that the woman was a barbarian; she was a guest on the cruise, her whims must be accommodated. He spent the evening trying to humour her and found himself treated to a lecture on Indian erotic art.
‘Mucky buggers,’ she said with delight. ‘You should see the things we saw on the temple carvings, and smiling all the time like butter wouldn’t melt. We were very surprised, George and I, not thinking of Indians like that. As you don’t. But I said to George, it just goes to show that it’s the quiet ones that are the worst. But I shan’t look Mr Patel at the bottom of our road in the face again, I can tell you. Not now I know what I know.’
‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘More wine?’
He had a fancy that the only way to stop this unending flow of the trivial and the obscene was to pour things down her throat. Already she had eaten a huge five-course dinner with coffee and brandy and now he was encouraging her to drink more. If George would only take her to their cabin! But George was muttering about a nice game of cards and she was declaring that she thought she’d have a bit of a dance, and he could see that she would ask him to dance with her and he would have to accept.
‘I think I’ll call it a Ladies Excuse Me,’ she announced and rose to her feet. ‘Because I’m no lady, and I hope you’ll excuse me.’
He could feel himself rising, driven by the rigour of good manners, against his will, against his instinct. He could feel his miserable face setting in a rictus of a polite smile. He knew in the very depths of his aching bones that the moment they arrived on the dance floor two equally awful things could happen: either, the band would play a slow dance and he would receive the full weight of her into his arms, and she would thrust her thigh between his legs and press against him, and tickle the back of his neck with her long fingernails, and lean back and smile at him knowingly, supremely confident that he was aroused by this assault instead of miserably longing for the privacy of his bed. Or – and perhaps worse – the band would burst into the Birdie Dance and he would have to flap his arms like wings and wiggle his bottom like a hen while she, the author of his discomforts, would scream with laughter and shout her mantra: ‘I love a laff, me.’
But just as he opened his reluctant arms to receive her she checked. Her bronze-stained face went suddenly white, as if with a shock. She recoiled and her hands went to her throat as if she were choking. She let out one honking cry and she fell backwards, tipping up the table and pulling down the tablecloth in a shower of drinks and glasses.
‘Fetch the doctor!’ he shouted, and knelt to loosen her clothing. It could not be done. Her gown was so low-cut as to be non-existent to the middle of her cleavage. But still she plucked at her throat and cawed like a fallen crow.
The doctor was at her side, taking her pulse, listening for a breath. He started emergency respiration and the band, not knowing what they should do, started a foxtrot, thought better of it and staggered to a stop. The first-aid team came running in with a stretcher, and the doctor and George got either end of her and lifted her like a slumped gaudy sack.
The lecturer followed, like a ghost drawn behind her, longing to know what the end might be. He waited outside the medical centre, smoking a cigarette cadged from a passing crewman, and heard them trying over and over again to start that fatty heart beating in that lazy body. In the end the door opened and the doctor emerged, yellow light spilling out behind him.
‘We lost her, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘She’s sailing down the river.’
And the lecturer, who had never had an unkind thought nor said an unkind word in his life before, threw his head back to the slip of the white moon and called to her soul as she crossed the River Styx:
‘COO-EEE.’
‘Lady Ygraine?’
She stopped at the whisper from the doorway. ‘Who’s there?’ she asked sharply.
A man stepped out of the shadow. Brown hair, brown eyes, a warm appealing smile. ‘Me,’ he said.
‘David,’ she said coolly. ‘What is it you want? I am on my way to the hall.’
He nodded. Everyone in the castle was invited to feast with the lord and his lady on this night before the tournament. The fighting men would drink deeply, laughing heartily at jokes that were old, at jests which were not funny, hiding from each other the deep coldness of fear that gripped their bellies.
‘I wanted a word with you,’ he said. ‘Several words.’
He put his hand out to draw her towards the doorway where they would be out of sight of the big double doors leading into the hall. She stiffened and drew back.
‘David St Pierre, I am not lingering with you on stairways or in darkened doorways,’ she said. ‘I have to go to dinner. My lady mother will be looking for me and if I am late I will be whipped. You do me no favour by keeping me here.’
He dropped his hand at once and stepped to the side, out of her way.
‘I would not have you hurt, sweetheart,’ he said quickly.
She gasped at the endearment. ‘I’m not your sweetheart,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘Never will be. David, you know this full well. Why d’you keep tormenting me and teasing yourself with this? You’re the poorest knight in the country. Your horse is a laughing stock. Your castle is some tumbled-down ruin God knows where. My lady mother and my father look a good deal higher for me than some poor knight on the Border marches. And you know it.’
He nodded. ‘I know it,’ he said. ‘But I feel…’
‘Feel!’ she said abruptly. ‘What have you or I to do with feelings! When I am wed and have three heirs in the cradle I will have time for feelings. But for now I must know obedience to my mother’s will and nothing else.’
‘You’re very young,’ he said softly. His voice held a world of tenderness. ‘Very young and very lovely. I don’t want to see you married to some great lord who will use you, and beat you, and breed sons on you.’
Ygraine