She was silent for a moment. How did you explain Hughie to a man who’d seen only the wreckage after he’d been shattered by the Pacific Ocean, by Bellew’s contemptuous bullying, and by her own misguided attempts to help him? How make him see the wit, the charm, the sensitivity, the genuine talent behind the beach-boy good looks?
Strangely enough, when she’d first met Hughie, a little over a year ago, he’d been living on a yacht. It was on the island of Rhodes, snuggled up under the Turkish coast on almost the opposite side of the world from where she was now, and the yacht, a glittering and obviously expensive yawl registered under the Panamanian flag, appeared to be more or less permanently moored in that harbor astride whose entrance the Colossus had towered two thousand years before. Hughie was living aboard it alone, and he was painting.
Oh, it wasn’t his yacht, it belonged to a friend who was only letting him live on it, he’d disclaimed with a refreshing and boyish honesty that couldn’t help appealing to a woman who’d known her share of phonies on two continents. It wasn’t until somewhat later—too late, in fact—that she learned his frankness had been a little less than complete, that the friend was female, a wealthy American divorcee living in Rome, and that Hughie’s relationship to her was one for which “protege” was as good a euphemism as any. By that time she was—as she would have put it if she’d still been in any condition to view the thing with her old self-honesty and clarity of thought—hooked herself.
She saw him as a talented but too-beautiful boy who was being ruined by a continuously self-renewing matriarchy of lionizing sponsors, benefactresses, patronesses-of-art-at-the-source, surrogate mothers, and rapaciously protective beldames who started out wanting to adopt him and wound up by sandbagging him with the flushed and hectic urgencies of some autumnal reflowering and dragging him off to bed. And by the time she should have begun to suspect the weakness in his character she had made the further discovery that he wasn’t a boy at all, that he was twenty-seven instead of the twenty she had thought, and she was hopelessly in love with him.
She was forty years old then and widowed nearly two years, no longer a victim of the grief and numbness of loss but only of its emptiness, the feeling that she must have been left over for something if she could only discover what it was. She’d come to Europe again. Since she belonged to a set to which the jet flight across the Pole was only a commute hop, she had friends in London, Paris, Antibes, Florence, and God knew where else, but she had avoided them, going on instead to Istanbul and then back to Athens and Corfu and a footloose and unscheduled wandering through the Dodecanese, searching for she knew not what. She’d arrived in Rhodes around the middle of July for a four-day stay. She’d met Hughie, and the four days had become a week, and then two, and finally a month.
“He’s a painter,” she went on. “A good one. And, given a chance, he might have become a great one. It wasn’t his fault that women could never leave him alone—”
“If I’m not mistaken,” Ingram broke in,
She nodded somberly. “To some extent, that’s true—if oversimplified. But there are reasons for it.”
“I’m not knocking it. Probably a very comforting philosophy, as long as you can keep from having to sign for the mess sometime when there’s nobody around to hand it to.”
“It’s the way he was raised,” she said. “He’s never had a chance. Even his childhood was against him. He’s seen his father only once, and very briefly, in the past seventeen years. Though he’s never said so directly, I gather he either hated him or was afraid of him, and probably at least some of it must have been his mother’s fault. Certainly the picture that comes through from the few things he has said is one of such utter crudity and brutality it seems a little too one-sided to be quite true.
“His father was—or is, rather—the editor and publisher of a small daily newspaper in Mississippi, an ex- football player at one of the Southern universities, and from all accounts a man whose only passions apparently were drinking, random and indiscriminate affairs with very sordid women, white supremacy, and shooting quail. That plus bullying Hughie because the boy showed more interest in sketching animals than in killing them. It could be that all of this is literally true, in spite of its familiarity, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility of a certain amount of editing by the doting mother and embittered ex-wife. At any rate, when Hughie was eleven his parents separated and were later divorced. His mother, who had a little money of her own, took him to Switzerland. He went to a private school in Lausanne but lived with her all the time in the villa she rented there so they wouldn’t be separated. She never remarried. You can see the pattern, of course, the possessiveness, the overprotection, the you’d-never- leave-Mumsy-would-you-after-all-she’s-done-for-you rubbish. After the school in Switzerland he attended the Sorbonne for two years and then began studying art, also in Paris, and also still living with his mother. She died five or six years ago. There was a little money left, but not enough to keep him going until he could get some kind of recognition as a painter. However—” She smiled with a tinge of bitterness, and went on. “Europe is crawling with middle-aged women eager to help the struggling young artist, especially if he’s charming and decorative and well mannered and has no social liabilities like cutting off his ears or wasting too much time painting.”
She broke off then with an impatient gesture, as though annoyed at herself. “I’m sorry. You asked me about the accident. As I said, it’s difficult to explain how it could have happened. Fortunately you know the interior layout here, which will help. Hughie and I occupied the after cabin, and Mr. and Mrs. Bellew the forward one—”
Ingram interrupted. “But first, who is Bellew, anyway? Somehow, I don’t place him in this. Is he a friend, or a neighbor of yours in Santa Barbara?”
“I’m not from Santa Barbara,” she replied. “San Francisco. We just bought the boat in Santa Barbara and sailed from there in the beginning.” She shook another cigarette out of the pack and held the latter up toward Ingram at the pump.
“No, thanks,” he said.
“You don’t smoke?”
“Only cigars.” He wished he had one, but among the other things he was wishing for at the moment it didn’t have a very high priority. “But about Bellew?”
“He’s a writer.” Then, catching Ingram’s look of surprise, she smiled faintly. “No, he
“Wait.” Ingram frowned. “Bellew? Russell Bellew? I think I’ve seen some of his stories. Marlin fishing, and hunting sheep in Mexico. With some beautiful photography, as I recall.”
“His wife did the photography. She was an artist with a camera.”
Ingram stopped pumping for a moment and walked past her to the open hatch to look down into the cabin. In spite of his continuous pumping, the water was still rising. His face was somber as he walked back to the pump.
She lit the cigarette and carefully blew out the match. “Still gaining?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. She was a cool one, he thought; and so, for that matter, was Bellew. That was something, anyway; at least he didn’t have a couple of screamers on his hands. Of course there was no telling how they’d take it later on. But then, he added grimly, there was no telling how he’d do, either; it was something you couldn’t forecast.
“But we can still hold it by bailing too, can’t we?”
“Yes,” he replied. “We can now.”
“But not for long?”
“Just how long, I don’t know. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not going to get any better, but it is going to get progressively worse, with this rolling. And in a bad squall, as I told you, she could come apart like a bale of shingles. But forgetting the squall, which we can’t do anything about anyway, she might last for a week yet…” His voice trailed off.
She glanced up questioningly. “There’s something else?”
There was no reason to try to hide it from her, he thought. “Only this—even if we do keep her afloat for another week, after tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest, it’s not going to do any good anyway. There’s not a chance in a million we’ll be sighted by a ship, not where we are. And even if one happened to pick us up on radar, there’s nothing to indicate we’re in distress.
“So, as you said, the only thing that could change it is if Rae is still on there and is able to cope with your husband. She might even be able to talk him into coming back. If she does, we’ll probably be all right. The second possibility is that she may be able to get control of the boat some way. He’ll have to sleep sometime, or …” He
