The Colonel paused at the rail, looking down at the beautiful supple body with ungrudging approval. Noticing him, Beatrice pulled off her sunglasses, then tightened the loose back-straps of her bikini under her arms. Her eyes glinted quietly.
“All right, you two, get on with it. I’m not a strip show.”
Riggs chuckled and trotted down the white metal stairway, Kerans at his heels, wondering how he was going to persuade Beatrice to leave her private sanctuary.
“My dear Miss Dahl, you should be flattered that I keep coming to see you,” Riggs told her, lifting back the awning and sitting down on one of the chairs. “Besides, as the military governor of this area”—here he winked playfully at Kerans—“I have certain responsibilities towards you. And vice versa.”
Beatrice regarded him briefly with a jaundiced eye and reached out to turn up the volume of the radiogram behind her. “Oh God…” She muttered some further, less polite imprecation under her breath and looked up at Kerans. “And what about you, Robert? What brings you out so early in the day?”
Kerans shrugged, smiling at her amiably. “I missed you.”
“Good boy. I thought perhaps that the gauleiter here had been trying to frighten you with his horror stories.”
“Well, he has, as a matter of fact.” Kerans took the magazine propped against Beatrice’s knee and leafed through it idly. It was a forty-year-old issue of Paris Vogue, from its icy pages evidently kept somewhere in cold storage. He dropped it on the green-tiled floor. “Bea, it looks as if we’ll all have to leave here in a couple of days’ time. The Colonel and his men are pulling out for good. We can’t very well stay on after he’s gone.”
“We?” she repeated dryly. “I didn’t know there was any chance of your staying behind?”
Kerans glanced involuntarily at Riggs, who was watching him steadily. “There isn’t,” he said firmly. “You know what I mean. There’ll be a lot to do in the next forty-eight hours. Try not to complicate things by making a last emotional stand.”
Before the girl could cut back at Kerans, Riggs added smoothly: “The temperature is still going up, Miss Dahl, you won’t find it easy to stand one hundred and thirty degrees when the fuel for your generator runs out. The big Equatorial rain belts are moving northward, and they’ll be here in a couple of months. When they leave, and the cloud cover goes, the water in that pool—“he indicated the tank of steaming, insect-strewn fluid—” will damn’ nearly boil. What with the Type X Anopheles, skin cancers and the iguanas shrieking all night down below, you’ll get precious little sleep.” Closing his eyes, he added pensively: “That is, assuming that you still want any.”
At this last remark the girl’s mouth fretted slightly. Kerans realised that the quiet ambiguity in Riggs’ voice when he asked how the biologist slept had not been directed at his relationship with Beatrice.
The Colonel went on: “In addition, some of the human scavengers driven northward out of the Mediterranean lagoons won’t be too easy to deal with.”
Beatrice tossed her long black hair over one shoulder. “I’ll keep the door locked, Colonel.”
Irritated, Kerans snapped: “For God’s sake, Beatrice, what are you trying to prove? These self-destructive impulses may be amusing to play with now, but when we’ve gone they won’t be so funny. The Colonel’s only trying to help you—he doesn’t really give a hoot whether you stay behind or not.”
Riggs let out a brief laugh. “Well, I wouldn’t say that. But if the thought of my personal concern worries you so much you can just put it down to duty.”
“That’s interesting, Colonel. I’ve always understood that our duty was to stay on here as long as possible and make every sacrifice necessary to that end. Or at least”—here the familiar gleam of sharp humour crossed her eyes—“that was the reason my grandfather was given when the Government confiscated most of his property.” She noticed Riggs peering over his shoulder at the bar. “What’s the matter, Colonel? Looking for your punka-wallah? I’m not going to get you a drink, if that’s what you’re after. I think you men only come up here to booze.”
Riggs stood up. “All right, Miss Dahl. I give in. I’ll see you later, Doctor.” He saluted Beatrice with a smile. “Some time tomorrow I’ll send the cutter over to collect your gear, Miss Dahl.”
When Riggs had gone Kerans lay back in his chair, watching the helicopter circle over the adjacent lagoon. Now and then it dived along the water’s edge, the down-draught from its rotor blades beating through the flapping fronds of the fern-trees, driving the iguanas across the rooftops. Beatrice brought a drink from the bar and sat down on the chair at his feet.
“I wish you wouldn’t analyse me in front of that man, Robert.” She handed him the drink and then leaned against his knees, resting her chin on one wrist. Usually she looked sleek and well-fed, but her expression today seemed tired and wistful.
“I’m sorry,” Kerans apologised. “Perhaps I was really analysing myself. Riggs’ ultimatum came as a bit of a surprise; I wasn’t expecting to leave so soon.”
“You are going to leave, then?”
Kerans paused. The automatic player in the radiogram switched from Beethoven’s Pastoral to the Seventh, Toscanini giving way to Bruno Walter. All day, without a break, it played through the cycle of nine symphonies. He searched for an answer, the change of mood, to the sombre opening motif of the Seventh, overlaying his indecision.
“I suppose I want to, but I haven’t yet found an adequate reason. Satisfying one’s emotional needs isn’t enough. There’s got to be a more valid motive. Perhaps these sunken lagoons simply remind me of the drowned world of my uterine childhood—if so, the best thing is to leave straight away. Everything Riggs says is true. There’s little hope of standing up to the rainstorms and the malaria.”
He placed his hand on her forehead, feeling her temperature like a child’s. “What did Riggs mean when he said you wouldn’t sleep well? That was the second time this morning he mentioned it.”
Beatrice looked away for a moment. “Oh, nothing. I’ve just had one or two peculiar nightmares recently. A lot of people get them. Forget it. Tell me, Robert, seriously—if I decide to stay on here, would you? You could share this apartment.”
Kerans grinned. “Trying to tempt me, Bea? What a question. Remember, not only are you the most beautiful woman here, but you’re the only woman. Nothing is more essential than a basis for comparison. Adam had no aesthetic sense, or he would have realised that Eve was a pretty haphazard piece of work.”
“You are being frank today.” Beatrice stood up and went over to the edge of the pool. She swept her hair back off her forehead with both hands, her long supple body gleaming against the sunlight. “But is there as much urgency as Riggs claims? We’ve got the cruiser.”
“It’s a wreck. The first serious storm will split it open like a rusty can.”
Nearing noon, the heat on the terrace had become uncomfortable and they left the patio and went indoors. Double Venetian blinds filtered a thin sunlight into the low wide lounge, and the refrigerated air was cool and soothing. Beatrice stretched out on a long pale-blue elephant hide sofa, one hand playing with the fleecy pile of the carpet. The apartment had been one of her grandfather’s pieds à terre, and Beatrice’s home since her parents’ death shortly after her birth. She had been brought up under the supervision of the grandfather, who had been a lonely, eccentric tycoon (the sources of his wealth Kerans had never established: when he asked Beatrice, shortly after he and Riggs stumbled upon her penthouse eyrie, she replied succinctly: “Let’s say he was in money”) and a great patron of the arts in his earlier days. His tastes leaned particularly towards the experimental and bizarre, and Kerans