That evening the setting sun made a path across the water. The sea was quiet enough for us to hear the squeak of the wind in the bunched bananas, now mottled by seawater, on the rigging. We talked of atolls and coral reefs and the joys of snorkelling. I supposed the Bounty passengers, in these same waters, had times of joy and well-being, of plain sailing in sunshine, of being dry and fed and clean. I thought how like an eighteenth-century sailor Kurt perhaps was, so close to the ocean and the sky, alert to danger, seeking always for an unknown destination.
The moon came up and the world was a clear circle. We played Lady Myre’s wretched Dingo game, with many counters that belonged to Murder on the Orient Express. Her confused and mystifying rules veered from hunting with Aborigines in Tasmania, to finding Mr Ratchett’s killers on a snowbound train. Kurt became tendentious over what were the real rules, but the only important one was that Lady Myre should win. I willingly lost with all grace, and her delight in victory was strange.
I had only slight apprehension about sharing a bed with her for one more night. The mood of the sea and the sky and on the boat had so changed. I felt that, though we were none of us friends, we were united by our common journey. It seemed we’d arrive at Rikitea, Mangareva’s port, the following evening without more shared challenges to face. I had my letter of introduction for the Chinese shopkeeper. Soon I hoped to be alone in sunshine, absorbing the colour and life of a true Polynesian island – the scent of jasmine, stephanotis and hibiscus, garlands of flowers and shells, swimming in clear water, the tensions of Pitcairn and raging seas fading into the confusion of memory.
Lady Myre was in bed before me, the sheet under her chin. ‘Hasn’t it been heaven?’ she said as I turned away modestly to get into my nightie.
I was unsure what she meant. ‘It’s certainly been memorable,’ I said. I so wondered at her uninflexional mood on this journey and how it contrasted with her hysteria on Pitcairn when she’d feared she might not get her way. It was as if she had only two dimensions: contented or disturbed. She was as serene now as when half-dead with seasickness, or as when the rudder had broken in a force eleven gale and we all seemed destined for the ocean bed, or when she’d been making sexual overtures to me, a far from perfect stranger.
‘I’ve never been so happy,’ she said. ‘Of all my holidays I’ve enjoyed this trip to Picton best.’
‘Pitcairn,’ I corrected her.
‘Pitcairn,’ she said. ‘Oh yes.’
I clambered up to the bed. To my consternation she was naked. She’d rubbed her face with Elizabeth Arden eight-hour cream and she glistened in the moonlight.
‘I so hope we can make it tonight’ she said. ‘It’s such an opportunity, we’d be fools to miss it.’ I began to say that I was frightfully sorry, but that it all made me feel frightfully awkward, and that embarrassment was a very strong emotion. ‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘It’s hardly under-age sex.’ And that made me laugh because she was fifty-five and I was old enough not to want to say how old that was.
‘It has to be consensual, though,’ I said. ‘Not like Pitcairn.’
‘Well all right,’ she said. ‘Let’s just have a little consensual snog.’
And so I found myself surprised by the comfort of her light and tender kisses, the fresh sweet smell of her skin, and the ease and consolation of her enfolding arms. ‘It’s not like Pitcairn, is it,’ she whispered, and I had to agree that it was not, though I couldn’t overlook an underlying sense of this being worse than odd. But then the whole adventure had been rather odd.
All was calm as we approached Mangareva the following day. Mangareva means ‘floating mountain’. Through her monocular Lady Myre saw birds feeding on a shoal of fish, diving and shaking their feathers, so we knew we’d soon see land.
A long silhouette of broken islands then appeared, with vegetation flowing down to the water’s edge. The lagoon was turquoise and a fringe of white waves warned of the barrier reef. Bearing posts guided us for the delicate manoeuvre through the reef and into the protected bay. The ocean was now truly pacific, dappled with silver sunlight, and we could see coral in the clear water.
A dinghy with an outboard motor and two waving figures came speeding towards us. It was Kurt’s yachtie friend Wilhelm, with Claudia, his Brazilian girlfriend for the year. They all hugged and there was much excited exchange in Portuguese and German. They rolled a spliff and Kurt breathed it deep. Kurt asked Lady Myre and me if we wanted to stay on his boat in Mangareva until the air flight to Tahiti in four days. He’d only charge us fifty dollars a night.
I said I had an introduction to a friend of Rosie Christian’s and that I wanted to be on land.
‘And I can’t stay alone with you,’ Lady Myre said to him. ‘I’m not a yachtie’s moll and anyway it would compromise my husband.’ She gave me her smile. ‘You and I must continue our journey together,’ she said and it felt like a threat. But I didn’t see how I could forbid her to accompany me on shore, so I looked towards the lagoon and palms and motu, the little bay of Rikitea and the coral towers of the Cathedral of St Michael, and tried to resign myself to another island’s tale.
V
OTHER ISLANDS
The benign indifference of the
