‘Well, we’ve finished dinner and set a fine example of British phlegm,’ said my wife. ‘Let’s go and see what’s on.’

Once, on our way to the lounge, we had all three to cling to a pillar; when we got there we found it almost deserted; the band played but no one danced; the tables were set for tombola but no one bought a card, and the ship’s officer, who made a speciality of calling the numbers with all the patter of the lower deck – ‘sweet sixteen and never been kissed – key of the door, twenty-one – clickety-click, sixty-six’ – was idly talking to his colleagues; there were a score of scattered novel readers, a few games of bridge, some brandy drinking in the smoking-room, but all our guests of two hours before had disappeared.

The three of us sat for a little by the empty dance floor; my wife was full of schemes by which, without impoliteness, we could move to another table in the dining-room. ‘It’s crazy to go to the restaurant’, she said, ‘and pay extra for exactly the same dinner. Only film people go there, anyway. I don’t see why we should be made to.’

Presently she said: ‘It’s making my head ache and I’m tired, anyway. I’m going to bed.’

Julia went with her. I walked round the ship, on one of the covered decks where the wind howled and the spray leaped up from the darkness and smashed white and brown against the glass screen; men were posted to keep the passengers off the open decks. Then I, too, went below.

In my dressing-room everything breakable had been stowed away, the door to the cabin was hooked open, and my wife called plaintively from within.

‘I feel terrible. I didn’t know a ship of this size could pitch like this,’ she said, and her eyes were full of consternation and resentment, like those of a woman who, at the end of her time, at length realizes that however luxurious the nursing home, and however well paid the doctor, her labour is inevitable; and the lift and fall of the ship came regularly as the pains of childbirth.

I slept next door; or, rather, I lay there between dreaming and waking. In a narrow bunk, on a hard mattress, there might have been rest, but here the beds were broad and buoyant; I collected what cushions I could find and tried to wedge myself firm, but through the night I turned with each swing and twist of the ship – she was rolling now as well as pitching – and my head rang with the creak and thud.

Once, an hour before dawn, my wife appeared like a ghost in the doorway, supporting herself with either hand on the jambs, saying: ‘Are you awake? Can’t you do something? Can’t you get something from the doctor?’

I rang for the night steward, who had a draught ready prepared, which comforted her a little.

And all night between dreaming and waking I thought of Julia; in my brief dreams she took a hundred fantastic and terrible and obscene forms, but in my waking thoughts she returned with her sad, starry head just as I had seen her at dinner.