Full Tide by Celine Conway Page A

someone had said, they would pass Madeira. Lisa wished they were stopping there . She wanted to prolong the voyage into eternity, because she had a groundless yet inescapable feeling that it was the biggest thing which would ever happen to her in the whole of her life.
    Jeremy did not appear for lunch. Nor did Astra. Puzzled, but not put out, Lisa ate alone, and afterwards she went to the cabin for a quiet read. The sunshine slanted through the port-hole, the curtain lifted and bellied, the faint creaking of the bulkheads and the muffled, distant throbbing of the ship’s heart were a b e nign a c companiment to the Sabbath quietude.
    It lasted till four-thirty, when Jeremy, quite pale for h im, his wheat-colored hair untidy, knocked and walked in. “Oh,” he said, momentarily stunned, as though Nancy’s presence were totally unexpected. With a visible lift of his shoulders, as if he were performing the bewildering task known as pulling oneself together, he added, “I must talk to you, Lee. We’ll have to go to the lounge, unless ...”
    Nancy, recumbent on the rug with a book—not the one about ponies—yielded nothing. To use her own expression, Jeremy could go fishing. She didn’t like him, and she didn’t want to like him.
    Lisa said, “We might as well have tea up there. I’ve had a gloriously lazy afternoon.” She turned to Nancy. “Are you staying in here, darling?”
    “Yes, please.”
    “All right. I’ll send you orange squash and biscuits. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve had tea.”
    Jeremy, it seemed, was worn and almost distraught. As they walked the corridor and mounted the wide, flower-decked staircase, he held on to her arm like a man clinging to a spar in erratic seas. He chose a corner of the lounge which was screened from the few other tea drinkers, saw Lisa seated and then sank down into his own chair, facing her across the table and letting out a sigh of both excitement and disaster.
    “Gosh,” he breathed, “What a day! They say the turning points in a man’s existence steal upon him unawares. This one has come to me with a blare of trumpets.”
    “Have some tea,” Lisa advised him soothingly, pushing across the neat blue and white cup. “They’ve brought your favorite marble cake, too.”
    But Jeremy’s digestion was temporarily paralyzed. He ignored the cake, dropped several lumps of sugar into the tea and stirred so abstractedly that the liquid poured over into the saucer.
    But he managed a slightly winning smile. “First I must apologize for more or less lying to you this morning. I longed to tell you at breakfast that I’d promised Astra Carmichael to spend an hour or two on a test in her cabin, but ... we ll , I didn’t.”
    “A test for what?”
    A faint access of color made his sherry-brown eyes look like polished topaz. On a comic note of despair he said, “She thinks I have it in me to be an actor.”
    L isa absorbed this for a long moment. “Seriously?” she asked at last.
    “She’s serious enough,” he returned almost grimly . “ How that woman can work ! ”
    “ So you had the test? ”
    H e nodded, and got out his handkerchief to wipe a brow still damp from exertion. “She gave me a part to read—explained it all first and told me to forget my own identity and assume hi s . After a couple of false starts I got going, with her taking the other two parts . She’s magnificent, Lee. So beautiful and sensual, and yet acting the whole time r . Try to imagine her lying there in a chair...”
    “It doesn’t need much imagination,” she interposed dryly.
    “She didn’t bother to move even a hand; i t was all done by inflection. When it was over I voted we call it a day. But not she! We tried another part, and then another. For lunch we had Scotch and soda and dry biscuits, and it was then that she told me she could train me to work with her in Johannesburg. Fantastic, isn’t it?”
    For a while Lisa had no comment to offer. Had Jeremy been less serious she