“But if we have a baby I’ll be glad. He wants a baby very much and we never have one. I’ll sleep with him right away and he’ll never know it is ours.”
“I wouldn’t sleep with him right away.”
“No I suppose not. But the next night.”
“How long since you slept with him?”
“Oh I sleep with him every night. I have to, Hudson. I get so excited I have to. I think that’s one reason he plays bridge until so late now. He’d like me to be asleep when he comes in. I think he is getting a little tired since we have been in love.”
“Is this the first time you have ever been in love since you married him?”
“No. I am sorry. But it is not. I have been in love several times. But I have never been unfaithful to him or even considered it. He is so good and nice and such a good husband and I like him so much and he loves me and is always kind to me.”
“I think we had better go down to the Ritz and have some champagne,” Thomas Hudson had said. His feelings were becoming very mixed.
The Ritz was deserted and a waiter brought them the wine at one of the tables against the wall. They kept the Perrier-Jouet Brut (1915) on ice all of the time now and simply asked, “The same wine, Mr. Hudson?”
They raised their glasses to each other and the Princess said, “I love this wine. Don’t you?”
“Very much.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“You.”
“Naturally. All I think about is you. But what about me?”
“I was thinking we should go down to my cabin now. We talk too much and fool around too much and do nothing. What time have you?”
“Ten after eleven.”
“What time have you?” he called to the wine steward.
“Eleven-fifteen, sir.” The steward looked at the clock inside the bar.
When the steward was out of earshot, he asked, “How late will he play bridge?”
“He said he would play late and for me not to stay awake for him.”
“We’ll finish the wine and go to the cabin. I have some there.”
“But Hudson, it is very dangerous.”
“It will always be dangerous,” Thomas Hudson had said. “But not doing it is getting to be a damned sight more dangerous.”
That night he made love to her three times and when he took her to her cabin, she had said that he shouldn’t and he had said it would look much sounder if he did, the Prince was still playing bridge. Thomas Hudson had gone back to the Ritz, where the bar was still open, and ordered another bottle of the same wine and read the papers that had come aboard at Haifa. He realized that it was the first time he had had time to read the papers in a long time and he felt very relaxed and very happy to be reading the papers. When the bridge game broke up and the Prince came by and looked into the Ritz, Thomas Hudson asked him to have a glass of wine before he went to bed and he liked the Prince more than ever and felt a strong kinship with him.
He and the Baron had got off the ship at Marseilles. Most of the others were going on for the rest of the cruise, which finished at Southampton. In Marseilles he and the Baron were sitting at a sidewalk restaurant in the Vieux Port eating moules marinés and drinking a carafe of vin rosé. Thomas Hudson was very hungry and he remembered that he had been hungry most of the time ever since they had left Haifa.
He was damned hungry now, too, he thought. Where the hell were those servants? At least one should have shown up. It was blowing colder than ever outside. It reminded him of the cold day there on the steep street in Marseilles that ran down to the port, sitting at the café table with their coat collars up eating the moules out of the thin black shells you lifted from the hot, peppery milk broth with hot melted butter floating in it, drinking the wine from Tavel that tasted the way Provence looked, and watching the wind blow the skirts of the fisherwomen, the cruise passengers and the ill-dressed whores of the port as they climbed the steep cobbled street with the mistral lashing at them.