I turned into some of the halls of the ship, which were huge without any splendour, as though they had been designed for a railway coach and preposterously magnified. I passed through vast bronze gates on which paper-thin Assyrian animals cavorted; I trod carpets the colour of blotting paper; the painted panels of the walls were like blotting paper, too – kindergarten work in flat, drab colours – and between the walls were yards and yards of biscuit-coloured wood which no carpenter’s tool had ever touched, wood that had been bent round corners, invisibly joined strip to strip, steamed and squeezed and polished; all over the blotting-paper carpet were strewn tables designed perhaps by a sanitary engineer, square blocks of stuffing, with square holes for sitting in, and upholstered, it seemed, in blotting paper also; the light of the hall was suffused from scores of hollows, giving an even glow, casting no shadows – the whole place hummed from its hundred ventilators and vibrated with the turn of the great engines below.

‘Here I am,’ I thought, ‘back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity. Quomodo sedet sola civitas’ (for I had heard that great lament, which Cordelia once quoted to me in the drawing-room of Marchmain House, sung by a half-caste choir in Guatemala, nearly a year ago).

A steward came up to me.

‘Can I get you anything, sir?’

‘A whisky and soda, not iced.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, all the soda is iced.’

‘Is the water iced, too?’

‘Oh yes, sir.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter.’

He trotted off, puzzled, soundless in the pervading hum.

‘Charles.’

I looked behind me. Julia was sitting in a cube of blotting paper, her hands folded in her lap, so still that I had passed by without noticing her.

‘I heard you were here. Celia telephoned to me. It’s delightful.’

‘What are you doing?’

She opened the empty hands in her lap with a little eloquent gesture. ‘Waiting. My maid’s unpacking; she’s been so disagreeable ever since we left England. She’s complaining now about my cabin. I can’t think why. It seems a lap to me.’

The steward returned with whisky and two jugs, one of iced water, the other of boiling water; I mixed them to the right temperature. He watched and said: ‘I’ll remember that’s how you take it, sir.’

Most passengers had fads; he was paid to fortify their self-esteem. Julia asked for a cup of hot chocolate. I sat by her in the next cube.

‘I never see you now,’ she said. ‘I never seem to see anyone I like. I don’t know why.’

But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms of long and unbroken intimacy.