I smiled weakly at the Major as he went prancing by, but I didn’t pull back. I wanted to see him again. There was something rather admirable about the way he was galloping round and round the deck with no clothes on at all, something wonderfully innocent and unembarrassed and cheerful and friendly. And here was I, a bundle of youthful self-consciousness, gaping at him through the port-hole and disapproving quite strongly of what he was doing. But I was also envying him. I was actually jealous of his total don’t-give-a-damn attitude, and I wished like mad that I myself had the guts to go out there and do the same thing. I wanted to be like him. I longed to be able to fling off my pyjamas and go scampering round the deck in the altogether and to hell with anyone who happened to see me. But not in a million years could I have done it. I waited for him to come round again.
Ah, there he was! I could see him far away down the deck, the gallant galloping Major who didn’t give a fig for anybody, and I decided right then that I would say something very casual to him this time to show him I was ‘one of the gang’ and that I had not even noticed his nakedness.
But hang on a minute! … What was this? … There was someone with him! … There was another fellow scooting along beside him this time! … As naked as the Major he was, too! … What on earth was going on aboard this ship? … Did all the male passengers get up at dawn and go tearing round the deck with no clothes on? … Was this some Empire-building body-building ritual I didn’t know about? … The two were coming closer now … My God, the second one looked like a woman! … It was a woman! … A naked woman as bare-bosomed as Venus de Milo … But there the resemblance ceased for I could see now that this scrawny white-skinned figure was none other than Mrs Major Griffiths herself … I froze in my port-hole and my eyes became riveted on this nude female scarecrow galloping ever so proudly alongside her bare-skinned spouse, her elbows bent and her head held high, as much as to say, ‘Aren’t we a jolly fine couple, the two of us, and isn’t he a fine figure of a man, my husband the Major?’
‘Come along there!’ the Major called out to me. ‘If the little memsahib can do it, so can you! Fifty times round the deck is only four miles!’
‘Lovely morning,’ I murmured as they went galloping by. ‘Beautiful day.’
A couple of hours later, I was sitting opposite the Major and his little memsahib at breakfast in the dining-room, and the knowledge that not long ago I had seen that same little memsahib with not a stitch on her made my spine creep. I kept my head down and pretended neither of them were there.
‘Ha!’ the Major cried suddenly. ‘Aren’t you the young fellow who had his head sticking through the port-hole this morning?’
‘Who, me?’ I murmured, keeping my nose in the cornflakes.
‘Yes, you!’ the Major cried, triumphant. ‘I never forget a face!’
‘I … I was just getting a breath of air,’ I mumbled.
‘You were getting a darn sight more than that!’ the Major cried out, grinning. ‘You were getting an eyeful of the memsahib, that’s what you were doing!’
The whole of our table of eight people suddenly became silent and looked in my direction. I felt my cheeks beginning to boil.
‘I can’t say I blame you,’ the Major went on, giving his wife an enormous wink. It was his turn to be proud and gallant now. ‘In fact, I don’t blame you at all. Would you blame him?’ he asked, addressing the rest of the table. ‘After all, we’re only young once. And, as the poet says …’ he paused, giving the dreadful wife another colossal wink … ‘a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’
‘Oh, do shut up, Bonzo,’ the wife said, loving it.
‘Back in Allahabad,’ the Major said, looking at me now, ‘I make a point of playing half-a-dozen chukkas every morning before breakfast. Can’t do that on board ship, you know. So I have to get my exercise in other ways.’
I sat there wondering how one played this game of chuckers. ‘Why can’t you do it?’ I said, desperate to change the subject.
‘Why can’t I do what?’ the Major said.
‘Play chuckers on the ship?’ I said.
The Major was one of those men who chewed his porridge. He stared at me with pale-grey glassy eyes, chewing slowly. ‘I hope you’re not trying to tell me that you have never played polo in your life,’ he said.
‘Polo,’ I said. ‘Ah yes, of course, polo. At school we used to play it on bicycles with hockey sticks.’
The Major’s stare switched suddenly to a fierce glare and he stopped chewing. He glared at me with such contempt and horror, and his face went so crimson, I thought he might be going to have a seizure.
From then on, neither the Major nor his wife would have anything to do with me. They changed their table in the dining-room and they cut me dead whenever we met on deck. I had been found guilty of a great and unforgivable crime. I had jeered, or so they thought, at the game of polo, the sacred sport of Anglo-Indians and royalty. Only a bounder would do that.
Then there was the elderly Miss Trefusis, who quite often sat at the same dining-room table as me. Miss Trefusis was all bones and grey skin, and when she walked her body was bent forward in a long curve like a boomerang. She told me she owned a small coffee farm in the highlands of Kenya and that she had known Baroness Blixen very well. I myself had read and loved both Out of Africa and Seven Gothic Tales, and I listened enthralled to everything Miss Trefusis told me about that fine writer who called herself Isak Dinesen.
‘She was dotty, of course,’ Miss Trefusis said. ‘Like all of us who live out there, she went completely dotty in the end.’
‘You aren’t dotty,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, I am,’ she said firmly and very seriously. ‘Everyone on this ship is as dotty as a dumpling. You don’t notice it because you’re young. Young people are not watchful. They only look at themselves.’
‘I saw Major Griffiths and his wife running round the deck naked the other morning,’ I said.
‘You call that dotty?’ Miss Trefusis said with a snort. ‘That’s normal.’
‘I didn’t think so.’
‘You’ve got a few shocks coming to you, young man, before you’re very much older, you mark my words,’ she said. ‘People go quite barmy when they live too long in Africa. That’s where you’re off to, isn’t it?’