On The Beach

He laughed. "I sure have. He showed it to me. I'd say he's showing it to everybody that will come and look at it. It's a mighty nice car."

"He's absolutely mad," she said. "He'll kill himself on it."

He sipped his cold consommé. "So what? So long as he doesn't kill himself before we start off on this cruise. He's having lots of fun."

"When are you starting off on the cruise?" she asked.

"I suppose we'll be starting about a week from now."

"Is it going to be very dangerous?" she asked quietly.

There was a momentary pause. "Why, no," he said. "What made you think that?"

"I spoke to Mary Holmes over the telephone yesterday. She seemed a bit worried over something Peter told her."

"About this cruise?"

"Not directly," she replied. "At least, I don't think so. More like making his will or something."

"That's always a good thing to do," he observed. "Everybody ought to make a will, every married man, that is."

The grilled steaks came. "Tell me, is it dangerous?" she asked again.

He shook his head. "It's quite a long cruise. We shall be away nearly two months, and nearly half of that submerged. But it's not more dangerous than any other operation would be up in northern waters." He paused. "It's always tricky to go nosing around in waters where there may have been a nuclear explosion," he said. "Especially submerged. You never really know what you may run into. Big changes in the sea bed. You may tangle with a sunken ship you didn't know was there. You've got to go in carefully and watch your step. But no, I wouldn't say it's dangerous."

"Come back safely, Dwight," she said softly.

He grinned. "Sure we'll come back safely. We've been ordered to. The admiral wants his submarine back."

She sat back and laughed. "You're impossible! As soon as I get sentimental you just-you just prick it like a toy balloon."

"I guess I'm not the sentimental type," he said. "That's what Sharon says."

"Does she?"

"Sure. She gets quite cross with me."

"I can't say that I'm surprised," she observed. "I'm very sorry for her."

They finished lunch, left the restaurant, and walked to the National Gallery to see the current exhibition of religious pictures. They were all oil paintings, mostly in a modernistic style. They walked around the gallery set aside for the forty paintings in the exhibition, the girl interested, the naval officer frankly uncomprehending. Neither of them had much to say about the green Crucifixions or the pink Nativities; the five or six paintings dealing with religious aspects of the war stirred them to controversy. They paused before the prizewinner, the sorrowing Christ on a background of the destruction of a great city. "I think that one's got something," she said. "For once I believe that I'd agree with the judges."

He said, "I hate it like hell."

"What don't you like about it?"

He stared at it. "Everything. To me it's just phony. No pilot in his senses would be flying as low as that with thermo-nuclear bombs going off all around. He'd get burned up."

She said, "It's got good composition and good colouring."

"Oh, sure," he replied. "But the subject's phony."

"In what way?"

"If that's meant to be the R.C.A. building, he's put Brooklyn Bridge on the New Jersey side, and the Empire State in the middle of Central Park."

She glanced at the catalogue. "It doesn't say that it's New York."

"Wherever it's meant to be, it's phony," he replied. "It couldn't have looked like that." He paused. "Too dramatic." He turned away, and looked around him with distaste. "I don't like any part of it," he said.

"Don't you see anything of the religious angle here?" she asked. It was funny to her, because he went to church a lot and she had thought this exhibition would appeal to him.

He took her arm. "I'm not a religious man," he said. "That's my fault, not the artists'. They see things differently than me."

They turned from the exhibition. "Are you interested in paintings?" she asked. "Or are they just a bore?"

"They're not a bore," he said. "I like them when they're full of color and don't try to teach you anything. There's a painter called Renoir, isn't there?"

She nodded. "They've got some Renoirs here. Would you like to see them?"

They went and found the French art, and he stood for some time before a painting of a river and a tree-shaded street beside it, with white houses and shops, very French and very colorful. "That's the kind of picture I like," he said. "I've got a lot of time for that."

They strolled around the galleries for a time, chatting and looking at the pictures. Then she had to go; her mother was unwell and she had promised to be home in time to get the tea. He took her to the station on the tram.

In the rush of people at the entrance she turned to him. "Thanks for the lunch," she said, "and for the afternoon. I hope the other pictures made up for the religious ones."

He laughed. "They certainly did. I'd like to go back there again and see more of them. But as for religion, that's just not my line."

"You go to church regularly," she said.