Five Passengers from Lisbon, page 15
But Mickey leaned back against the bulkhead and shoved his hands in his pockets. “It’s foggy out,” he said.
Still for an instant Gili waited. Then, as Mickey did not move, she bit her lip, opened the door, said: “I’ll be on the boat deck...”and left the cabin, closing the door hard behind her.
Marcia said: “But she—Mickey, she wanted you to go with her!”
“Nonsense,” said Mickey, lounging back and staring absently at the bulkhead.
“But she—she almost demanded it. As if...” She was about to say, puzzled and quickly, “As if she had a right to demand it.” She stopped the words on her lips. And Mickey said, still staring at the bulkhead, in an absent, careless tone: “Oh, Gili’s always that way.”
Something was in Marcia’s throat, swelling and beating. She waited for a moment, looking at Mickey, who still stared absently at the bulkhead.
“Always...” said Marcia finally.
And Mickey said: “Always quick-tempered. Always going off on tangents. Hard to manage...” He stopped abruptly and his clear gray eyes focused and sharpened. He turned to Marcia quickly. “That is,” he said, “she seems so to me...” he stopped.
Marcia said: “How long have you known her, Mickey?”
His gray eyes, almost as gray as the fog but very clear around the sharp, black pupils, opened wider. “Gili?”
“Yes. Tell me, Mickey—exactly.”
“But you know. She was in Lisbon. What do you mean?”
She swallowed hard. “Tell me the truth, Mickey. She has your cigarette case. She called you Mickey.”
“I don’t know what you mean! Don’t be a fool! I don’t know Gili at all, except on that damned little ship, and before that I saw her around the bars in Lisbon. If she’s got my cigarette case she...” he shrugged. He got up and stood above her his hands thrust in his pockets, his eyes angry now, bright and wide in his thin face. “She may have taken it, borrowed it, I don’t know. I don’t remember. If she knows my name, you told her.”
“No, no, Mickey, I didn’t....”
“What did she say? Did she call me Mickey? Then she’s heard you call me Mickey. I’ve begged you not to.”
“She said...” Her voice sounded tight and harsh; she made herself go on. “She said that you came back to me because I had some money, enough for you and Gili.”
His eyes were suddenly bright and fixed with anger. He did not speak for a moment, only stood there looking down with that angry brightness. Then he cried: “You believed her! Marcia, how could you? Have you questioned her?”
“Questioned Gili?”
“You’ve been shut up here all night together. You’ve had time and opportunity to talk.”
“This is between you and me, not Gili....”
His face cleared. He cried: “You were right, darling! You are always right. Gili doesn’t matter.”
She said slowly: “Mickey, you spoke as if you knew her well. As if you’d known her a long time. As if the things she said could have been true.”
“Marcia, listen to me. Answer me. Do you believe me or Gili?”
She did not reply. He added suddenly, watching her: “You’ve known me for five years—Gili about five days. And you’d take her word against mine?”
She put back her head and met his eyes. She said directly: “Are you in love with her?”
“In love with Gili!” cried Mickey, and laughed. He took her hands and kissed them lightly. “You’re jealous. You’re a silly child. You know that I love you. I came back to you. Nothing, nobody else means anything to me. I love you.” He straightened up and looked straight down into her eyes with his own clear, gray gaze and said: “You do believe me, don’t you? Never mind, my darling. I’ll get Gili. I’ll make her take back whatever silly things she has told you.”
“No, no...”
“Yes, yes, I will. I’m not going to have her upsetting you with any such nonsense.”
“Mickey, why would she say anything like that?”
He stared at her for an instant and then shrugged and smiled. “Gili doesn’t need a motive. Surely you can see what kind of a woman she is. She did it out of—I don’t know what—mischief, malice. Because she likes men, and at the risk of sounding as if I like myself, perhaps she settled on me!” He laughed and said: “After all, you like me. Perhaps she thinks she might, if she could get me detached from you. Not that she’d have a chance...Oh, Marcia, darling, don’t look so serious. I’m only joking. A bad joke,” said Mickey sobering swiftly. “But she isn’t worth a serious thought. Believe me, my darling. I’ll go and get her....”
“No.” Marcia got up and faced him directly and angrily. “No. If I believe you, Mickey, I believe you. I don’t want to talk to her.”
“But, Marcia...”He looked bewildered and then smiled again. “Darling, you’re very sweet when you are angry. Although I don’t know what I’ve done...”
“Forget it,” said Marcia so briefly it sounded curt. She caught her breath and made herself speak more coolly and naturally. “If we’ve been released, Mickey, let’s get out on deck. I feel as if I’d been in this cabin for a month.”
“Right,” he said. “It’s a relief to have the thing settled. I mean Urdiola.”
She found her coat, and he took it from her hands. “Suppose he didn’t do it,” she said unexpectedly.
Mickey frowned. “Don’t suppose any such thing. Besides, there’s no doubt of his guilt. That diamond is a huge and, I should say, a very valuable stone. Shall we go?”
He held open the door. The seaman on guard had gone. It seemed suddenly extraordinarily pleasant to be walking along free to come and go, without restraint. They reached the lobby with its glimpses of the busy life of the ship, nurses, doctors, little clusters of lounging patients. They emerged on deck and it was still foggy and cold and the foghorn smote raucously upon their ears. It stopped and Mickey said suddenly: “Of course, I can’t help remembering that other nonsensical story Gili told us. You know, about the Cateses being Nazis. But undoubtedly that was just another of her notions, Marcia. Must have been. You...” He reached for cigarettes and held the package toward her and did not finish until he had held a match too, for her light. Then he said: “You didn’t tell anyone about it, did you?”
“No. I didn’t believe it.”
He smiled and gave her a glance of reproach. “Yet, you believed Gili when she told you all that stuff about me! Marcia, Marcia!” He shook his head gaily. “Nevertheless, it flatters me. But you were right about the Cateses. An accusation like that is a very unpleasant one; it sticks. Denial never catches up with accusation; it’s one of the laws of life. I never knew them, but I knew of them. Everybody knows of them. I don’t believe that they were Nazis. I think,” said Mickey earnestly, “that we should just forget Gili’s little story. Never tell anybody.” He took a long breath of smoke and added: “And, darling, remember too, will you, not to call me Mickey.”
She turned to him swiftly: “Mickey, we’ve got to tell the truth about that. We’re going home. We can’t enter America with a false name and false passport. We’ve got to tell them and explain and...”
Unconsciously she had placed her hands on his arm. With a brusque motion he shook them off. His eyes were blazing suddenly, his face white. “No,” he cried. “No...”
“Mickey...”
“I said not to call me that.”
“But you...”
“Marcia, you’ve got to promise me never to tell anyone that I’m Michel Banet. Promise me now.”
“No...”
“You must...”
“Mickey, I can’t.”
He waited a moment while the foghorn sounded again, its desolate, dreary wail coming back at them in echoes from the surrounding fog. She looked up, bewildered, half frightened, into his white and angry face. Naturally he felt bitter. Naturally he was nervous and taut and quick to anger. Yet something inside her insisted stubbornly that she was right; that he must be made somehow to see that rightness for himself and for her. She tried to speak and the foghorn blared again and suddenly Mickey took her hands and held them, quickly to his lips and then whirled around and left her standing there at the railing. She cried: “Mickey,” and the foghorn drowned the sound of her voice and he disappeared quickly into the ship.
She started after him, to reason with him, to do anything that would make peace again between them. But after the first step or two she stopped. He’d get over his anger; he’d come back; he’d talk to her, reasonably and quietly.
She told herself that and did not quite believe it. She glanced along the deck—B deck on the same level with her cabin. Aft, under the stairway, the previous day she had found the body of Manuel Para.
Nothing was there now and again as on the previous day the deck was deserted by patients and nurses and doctors. She did not wish, however, to pass the place where Para had sprawled so horribly, looking up at nothing with those blank dark eyes, so she turned in the opposite direction, toward the bow. And then she saw Josh Morgan.
He was ahead, leaning against the railing. His coat was slung over his shoulder and his cap pulled low, yet immediately she recognized the set of his shoulders silhouetted against the pearly-gray fog, the line of his head, the tilt of his cap. She wondered how much of the scene between herself and Mickey he had seen or guessed at.
As she thought that he turned abruptly and called, “Hello,” and came toward her.
For a moment or two as they approached each other the foghorn was silent and there was only the wash of water along the sides of the ship and the quiet sound of their footsteps.
Then they met. It was actually at a sheltered turn of the deck. Only the blank, glistening white bulkheads could overhear anything that was said.
But neither of them spoke. Josh’s face looked rather white in the fog, his eyes very grave and dark. He carried a lighted cigarette which he tossed over the railing. Then without a word he put his arm around her and held her close against him. And Marcia, as if another woman had got into her body, as if she could not have helped it, moved closer within his embrace and still blindly, still without willing it, turned her face upward so his mouth met her own.
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She did not intend to move as she had done; she must draw away.
This was a man she scarcely knew; a man she did not love; a man who was nothing to her.
Except his mouth was so hard and warm and strong upon her own that she could not move, she could not think. She was not herself, she was nothing that she had ever known or understood, and all her body was charged with that newness and strangeness—too new, too strange, too bewildering just then to conquer.
Josh actually drew away first. He lifted his head, looked down at her and laughed a little, and said: “I love you, Marcia. And I remember now where I saw you. For I did see you, you know. So I’ve loved you really for five years. Only I didn’t know it was you.”
Still the woman who was not Marcia, who had no right to be in his arms, nevertheless possessed her body. She leaned against him and looked up into his eyes without reservation, and said, half-whispering, utterly candid as if there were no barriers between them: “I never saw you before. I’d have remembered you.”
“We didn’t meet. But I remember now. It was at a concert in Paris. During the entr’acte. You were with some people. Americans. I saw you and I watched you. It was in October. It had been a warm, sunny day. That night was starlit and cold. I know because I walked home and I kept thinking about you, and I sat on the little balcony outside my room and looked at the stars and smoked and kept on thinking about you. So whenever I see you now you’re against the stars. One of them,” he said and laughed again rather unevenly.
“There in the Captain’s cabin, you didn’t know me. You didn’t recognize me....”
“No, I didn’t. Except, well, I told you that yesterday. I said I wanted to kiss you the first instant I saw you, and I did. And I felt as if we ought to know each other, but a lot of things have happened to me, and to everybody since that October night. I never knew your name. I never saw you again. I never knew anything about you. And about that time I got involved in—well, never mind that. Do you want to know what you wore that night? I’ll tell you. You had your dark hair done up high with a pompadour; you wore a white dress, sort of thin and long. And it fitted so well I was afraid you were very rich! Are you, darling?”
“No!”
“Good. And you had some red stuff around your waist that went down in a sort of fold all the way to your feet and your mouth was very beautiful and red, just the color of the sash thing, and your eyes very blue, and I loved you.” He held her again so her head came against his shoulder. “My star, all done up in red, white and blue, very fancy, very dignified, very beautiful. How was I to recognize you in a nurse’s uniform, in the middle of the Atlantic, with your hair in a little wad on your neck, after a night spent in a lifeboat? Nuts. Petrarch wouldn’t have recognized Laura in a Mother Hubbard.”
“This is not a Mother Hubbard!”
“Then you see, last night, I realized it was you. The girl I’d been in love with all that time.”
“You can’t have been! You...”
“Well, I wanted to be in love with you! I think I was, really. At least I was exposed to it, so it only took a second look five years later to make it come alive. My figures of speech are mixed, but I’m not. Look, Marcia, I’m talking a lot of nonsense. But”—he held her so he could look deeply into her eyes—“but I do love you. It, well, it just happened. Like that. That meeting that wasn’t a meeting five years ago doesn’t really have much to do with it except that I liked you right away, the first instant I saw you, standing there at the concert. That’s been a long time and a lot of things have happened and in some ways I suppose we are different people. But that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is you and me and the people we are now.”
That sunny, long-ago October in Paris, concerts on chill fall nights—and Mickey.
Mickey the one she was going to marry, the man she’d waited for and loved. Loved? she thought suddenly. But that had nothing to do with love! That was, well, what? And it didn’t matter; she couldn’t analyze it, for now she knew all in a minute about love and the quality of love. The new Marcia had informed her; every drop of blood in her body, hammering in her pulses had informed her.
And she was to marry Mickey.
He saw the change in her face.
“What is it? What’s wrong? Tell me...” and then he guessed. “You’ve remembered André.”
She must have made some gesture of assent, for his face changed subtly; it became older, harder, uncommunicative. He took his arm away and got out cigarettes. “I see. André...Help me light this blasted thing, will you? I can manage, but...”
She took the lighter and held it for him until the cigarette between his lips showed red. He did not meet her eyes though when she looked up. “Thanks,” he said, and took the lighter and dropped it in his pocket. “This crazy arm of mine.”
She glanced at the white sling supporting his right arm. “You were in combat?”
Yes.” His face had no youth or gaiety or tenderness; even his voice was remote and impersonal. “I stayed around Paris that first winter. It was a”—he paused and smoked and said, looking out over her shoulder into the fog—“it was a busy winter. One way and another. Then in the spring when the Germans came...” Again he paused; there was also a hiatus in his story, for he said finally: “I eventually got home by way of England and into uniform. I was sent back to England and then to Brittany. From there my story is just the same as everybody’s, except I didn’t get a scratch until just before the war was over. Then I got a piece of shrapnel in my shoulder. They dug it out and it is healing. Well, the story of my life again.” Without a change in face or voice, he said: “What are you going to do about this—André?”
Mickey, not André. Mickey who needed her, who had come back to her.
She moved away from Josh, not realizing she had moved. The deck under her feet was real. The railing, wet and cold under her fingers, was real, too. Not this world she had so lately and bewilderingly discovered in the embrace of the man who walked across, following her, and leaned against the railing.
Josh said again, but as if a long time had elapsed, as if something had changed since he had spoken: “What are you going to do about André?”
She would not look at him. “I’m going to marry André.” “Why?” said Josh quietly.
“Because...” She stopped. It was as if the memory of Josh’s kiss had the power to press upon her lips, silencing them. Josh said evenly: “You were going to say because you love him. Do you?”
She had to break through the strange and lovely spell upon her lips. She said, unsteadily, staring down at the black water rushing away from the ship: “I’ve told you. We were to be married. He was sent to a German concentration camp. I stayed there, in France, waiting. Hoping...Then finally he came back. As you see him. His hands...You heard what he said....”
“I’ve heard,” said Josh Morgan rather grimly, “what a lot of men have said and experienced. Is that why you are marrying him? From pity, I mean?”
Pity? She said, after a moment, stiffly: “He came back to me. I’m the only thing he has left from a life of...” She checked herself, on the verge of telling Joseph of Mickey, and of all the glow and triumph that life had given him and promised him before the Nazis took it away.
And Josh said coolly: “What about Gili?”
Gili?
“That was nothing.”
“Don’t try to lie to me, Marcia. You can’t get by with it. What exactly did she do to you yesterday? It was something about André, wasn’t it? Had she staked out a claim upon him?”
“No. That is, it was not true. She happened to be at the same hotel in Lisbon, while we were waiting for a passage on the Lerida. He never saw her before that.”
