most unseasonal plum pudding, looked alarmed. Mr Borrodaile was not deterred.
Oscar and Lucinda were both burning red, as if they were parties to an adultery. Mr Borrodaile stood with his back to the mirrored pillar, grinning idiotically. He gave the ends of his moustache a little tweak. He adjusted his shirt cuffs like a baritone about to sing. He was drunk, of course. He composed his face, but his face was not the point. The point was this: Mr Borrodaile would 'do' a walk.
He clasped his big hands together on his breast. He inclined his upper body backwards from the vertical. He sucked in his ruddy cheeks and raised his eyes like a choirboy in procession. He walked. He was a wooden doll with tangled strings. His legs jerked sideways then up. The upper body swung from side to side like the mainmast of a brig at anchor in a swell. The hands unclasped and clasped and then flew apart to grasp at-at what? A butterfly? A hope? A prayer?
Mr Borrodaile perambulated, undulated, swayed and smiled for the
204
Montaigne
entire length of the dining room, weaving daintily where architecture
— dictated.
The purser scraped back his chair and those in second class who had previously complained of Borrodaile's 'shenanigans,' now looked towards the officer expectantly, but he was not moving back his chair to arrest him, but rather to applaud. Mr Borrodaile was walking exactly like the red-haired clergyman, no, not 'exactly.' He was not like the chap at all, and yet he had its essence. His walk was to the original as a jiggling skeleton is to a dancing boy. Mr Borrodaile's big dimple-chinned face was red with pleasure. He strode along. He put his head back. He swung his arms. The applause was quickly general.
Oh, what a bully he must have been as a boy, thought Lucinda, seeing this most accurate performance, a performance which, in spite of her resolve to the contrary, made her smile. But she would not applaud it. Its intention was too cruel-to make all that was good and kind in the young man appear to be weak and somehow contemptible. She was ashamed of her smile and was therefore surprised, when she at last allowed herself to look at the subject of this mockery, to see that he was not only smiling broadly, but applauding as enthusiastically as the bullies at the purser's table.
He took her breath away. How confident he must be with himself. She resolved there and then that she would like to know him better.
'Well, well,' said Oscar who was not as confident as Lucinda imagined but was, rather, protected by a curious blindness about himself. He could not avoid seeing what was comic and grotesque in Mr Borrodaile's walk, and yet it did not occur to him, not even for an instant, that these might be elements of his own physical self. He would never perceive himself as odd and could only see Mr Borrodaile's mannerisms as theatrical devices intended to convey an inner reality. Thus he saw the clasped hands merely as symbols to represent him as unworldly, the jerky legs as enthusiastic, the idiotic smile as kindly. And he was not displeased. Indeed he was touched that Mr Borrodaile should so readily perceive those qualities in his clay that he had so laboured to strengthen.
'Well, well,' he said, leaning back in his chair and cracking his knuckles. 'It would seem we cannot keep our hearts secret from those who observe us keenly.' He looked up at Mr Borrodaile who had come to stand, smirking, above his shoulder. 'My congratulations, Mr Borrodaile, it is a great gift.'
Mr Borrodaile could not help but feel irritated. He leaned forward
Oscar and Lucinda
and 'borrowed' the parson's glass of wine and stood there smiling and sipping it without apology.
'A great gift,' said Oscar, twisting his long neck so he might speak directly to Mr Borrodaile while, at the same time, avoid the portholes which ran along the wall behind him. 'And I do not mean your performance-I am pretty well uneducated in theatrics and cannot judge it.' Mr Borrodaile was discomforted. He replaced the parson's wine glass and moved to take up his proper seat and it was then that Oscar caught sight of what he had hirtherto succeeded in avoiding.
The sickening silk sheet of sea made a gagging ball in his throat.
He stopped speaking.
'Not the performance,' prompted Mr Smith while Mr Borrodaile, realizing that he was at least being spoken to in a respectful and cornplimentary style, now took his seat politely and leaned forward attentively to hear what his victim had to say.
'I cannot judge it,' said Oscar, calming the panic in his gagging throat with a little dry bread.
'But your sensitivity to the inner man, to those parts which we do not readily show the world, indeed which we often take great care to hide-this perspicacity, Mr Borrodaile, it is really admirable.';l
Mr Borrodaile looked very pleased.
Lucinda hid her delight in her water glass.
'This is a gift,' said Oscar, leaning forward, gesturing as if to hold a casket of some weight. 'It is something which should not be used merely to amuse passengers on a long voyage. It is something a Christian should use in life.'
As he spoke, Oscar became bigger and more eccentric than even Mr Borrodaile's impersonation might have allowed. He was, with excitement, embarrassment, a little wine, more of the character that WardleyFish loved, more like the schoolmaster sixty boys from Mr Colville's school would still remember in their dotage. He was animated. His long arms waved across the table, missing burgundy glasses and hock bottles, but only because his fellow diners removed them from the radius of his arms. His voice beame higher and took on the famous fluting tone. He looked from one face to the next, drawing them into the bubbling pot of his enthusiasm until they, too, felt that what they had witnessed was not a cruel mockery but an affirmation, an insight, a thing of much greater moment than they had at first realized. They polished it in retrospect, buffed, varnished it until it shone in their imaginations as a precious thing and its perpetrator-the rude and
7f1A
Phosphorescence (1) contemptuous Mr Borrodaile-was made, at least temporarily, into something fine.
Lucinda, who had begun by thinking Mr Hopkins merely clever, was, when she saw there was no guile in this enthusiasm, so moved by his goodness that her eyes watered. Mr Borrodaile was also moved, but in a different way, and for a little while-half an hour or so-he was a different person. He showed an interest in the feelings and opinions of his fellow passengers. And his eyes, when they looked at Lucinda Leplastrier, no longer showed those cold instruments, like surgeons' tools, that he had displayed so nastily (snapping open the case: There!
See!) so short a time before.
There was phosphorescence beside the ship. It was announced by the head steward, and there was a scramble for the deck where the spectacle could be properly enjoyed and that was how Oscar, not wishing the party to break up, turned the full blaze of this enthusiasm to the subject of phosphorescence without ever once looking over his shoulder at the glowing vision which filled the portholes of the dining room.
53
Ph^iorescence (1)
He could see which way his conversation would lead his dinner cornpanions: surely, inevitably up the stairs and into the warm night to which his phobia denied him access. The more he held them with his descriptions, his explanations, the more he was ensuring that they would finally leave him so they might witness this miracle he was so
brilliantly evoking.
To Miss Leplastrier (she spoke with the delectable top lip and bright and curious eyes) he spoke most of all and when, at last, the push of his enthusiasms joined with the pull of his phenomenon, and they rose in a body from the table, he also rose. And although he did not
Oscar and Lucinda
promise he would accompany them up on to the deck, neither did he indicate that he could not, and whilst a court of law would declare he had not misled the party as to his intention, the courts of heaven would not be so easily deceived.
At the bottom of the grand slippery staircase which led to the upper deck, he quietly left the noisy company and felt himself like a sad and ugly creature in a fairytale, one for ever exiled from the light and cornpelled to skulk, pale, big-eyed, sweat-shiny in the dark steel nether regions.
