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thing. Let it be discovered by some underpaid local correspondent and all hope of privacy had gone.
    I had wondered, too, whether I should have made the attempt to reach Rum alone. But how to shake off Michael, when I had no tale to tell but the truth? Michael would never allow me to meet Kenneth, or to travel alone. And even if I had no Michael to contend with, I might still be recognised, and what of the news stories then?
    When you are well known there is no certain way to do these things. This, with its chance at least of a private encounter with Kenneth, offered the best hope. And I was, at the same time, keeping an ally in Johnson and having painted a portrait which would be invaluable in my career. I said nothing to Johnson about Kenneth’s presence on Rum. The fewer I had to trust now, the better. Until I knew what part in all this Kenneth had played.
     
    At the Clubhouse, my room and Rupert the mate were found without difficulty. Johnson, it seemed, was in the bar. Large, giggly and golden, Rupert steered me in there to find him.
    For dining with Johnson, I was wearing a Princess Galitzine trouser suit in Bangkok quilted silk with a little bow on the bottom. Rupert wore a white Navy sweater under a blazer from Rugby. Johnson, when we located him, was dressed in immaculate dungarees and talking to a thin man in a pixie cap and a tarry sweater four inches above the knee. Rupert said: “Oh Christ,” under his breath; and conveying me up to the bar called: “Hallo, Ogden. Hallo, Skipper.” He eyed Johnson’s attire.
    “What’s packed it in? The engine? The cooker? The heads?”
    “None of them. So far,” said Johnson; and turned, solemnly welcoming.
    Rupert said: “Good; I’ll stay then,” and unbuttoned his blazer. “Madame Rossi, what’ll you drink?”
    It was not the Aegean. The queue for the one-armed bandits, hunting for sixpences inside their jerseys, did not appear to be Financial Times readers. Neither did the two small rotund persons, one male, one female, who now passed within an arm’s length of me, both wearing gum boots, big jumpers and thick knitted hats, with their arms full of tonics.
    To these last two, Rupert waved. “Binkie,” he remarked in explanation. “My God: that wee wife isn’t tanned, she’s jolly well cured.” He relayed our orders and continued to Johnson: “Then why dungarees?”
    “To keep me pretty for dinner.” Unzipping the dungarees carefully, Johnson simultaneously introduced the thin man beside him. Inside the dungarees was the same green pullover and brown flabby suit that Johnson wore while in Edinburgh. Underneath his companion’s pixie hat was a long, melancholy face with a chin like the end of a dog bone. This was Cecil Ogden, owner-skipper of a cutter called Seawolf, who would be racing against us tomorrow, “if we can fish up his port navigation light in time. The string broke,” said Johnson, explaining.
    Rupert, it seemed, had to smother emotion. “Did it? Did you have it tied on with string, Cecil?”
    “I had a lot of string,” said the man called Cecil Ogden, without a trace of a smile. His voice was English, and cultured, with no regional accent I could trace.
    “Ogden built Seawolf himself single-handed from nothing practically but a half-rotten keelplate. A jolly good show, actually. He’s still building it, aren’t you, Cecil? A few bits to do. But he entered for the Club cruise last year and did pretty well.”
    Two patches of red appeared above the long ribs of Ogden’s jawbone and cheeks. “She was caulked in wet weather,” he said sulkily. “The planks always spring when they dry out. The bloody Britannia leaks in dry weather.”
    “I’m sure you’re right,” said a new, genial voice. “But I don’t expect she’d find herself pooped through the seams from the wake of the Greenock car ferry.”
    It was Hennessy. He kissed my hand, all neat, corrugated head and dimple and European suave gallantry: why did I feel like