Hank had prayed for us in the storm. His next sermon might dwell on how prayer saved our lives. It was a curious notion – a god who made the waves then turned them to the murderous disadvantage of those with whom he was displeased. God the serial killer, the despot, the mass murderer. Yet I felt the generosity of Hank’s hopes: Dear God, let those lesbians in peril on the sea be safe.
I expected Lady Myre to spend hours rationalising her luggage, as she was leaving most of it in Kurt’s boat. But she randomly picked two pieces and seemed reconciled to parting from her possessions. One of the two, an embroidered holdall, was filled with artefacts she’d collected from Pitcairn’s shore and claimed had belonged to the Bounty: a rusty washer, sixteen old nails, a gnarled piece of wood charred at one end, a broken waffle iron and various pebbles that she said were cannonballs and adzes. She also had three sprouting coconuts, a quantity of candlenuts and a large piece of obsidian. In the other case was an assortment of shoes and hats. It seemed she now had nothing to wear. ‘I acquire,’ she said ‘and I discard. Every loss is an opportunity. I’ll dress like Gauguin’s girls.’ I supposed she meant bare breasts and scanty skirts and I wondered about the days ahead.
Kurt ferried us to the airstrip on the far side of the lagoon. He and Lady Myre hugged, kissed and vowed to remeet in Tahiti, Samoa – wherever. She’d reclaim her luggage, she’d sail with him again. Her life, she said, was in his cabin. I wondered what he’d do with twelve cases of her clothes and things. He shook hands with me and wished me bon voyage.
The officials had turned into South Sea tourists, in shirts adorned with palm trees, their hair bleached by the sun, their luggage neat. Their journey had been calm and mine violent. I felt an irrational qualm of culpability: the storm happened because I shouldn’t have gone to Pitcairn.
The plane was late from Tahiti and the heat intense on the dusty runway.
‘Have you packed these bags yourself?’ the French official asked Lady Myre as we checked at the airport desk.
‘Of course not,’ she replied. ‘I wouldn’t dream of packing my own bags. I’m Lady Myre.’
The contents of both bags were tipped out, the stones, detritus and coconuts confiscated. She was led away, over her shoulder she gave her subversive smile. She returned after about half an hour, the official had his arm round her and they were laughing.
She seemed exhilarated to be continuing her journey with only a bag of shoes. ‘What a wonderful opportunity to start all over again,’ she said, and I thought of the bountiful earth, feeding its creatures so that they might be fed on, again and all over again.
I looked down at islands circled by lagoons and reefs, dwarfed by the sea and distance. I could imagine how gaps occurred in the great plates grinding below the ocean bed, how magma spewed up to form these mounds of land that cooled and sank and created reefs. I thought of the Bounty with its methodical rigging, and how, if a prescient crewman had told Bligh about thermodynamics and digital radio and said wait two hundred years and you’ll fly to Tahiti in sixteen hours in a bird-like winged machine, and you’ll tell the Admiralty, voice to voice via an orbiting satellite, about Christian’s transgression, he’d’ve thought it more fanciful than the Second Coming of Christ. I wondered what transformations there’d be two hundred years on from now: extra-corporeal travel perhaps and interplanetary harm.
Lady Myre’s hand searched for mine. ‘Are you scared?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I answered. ‘Why should I be scared?’
‘It seems strange to be hurtling through the air,’ she said, ‘after all that ocean. But if it crashes we’ll go together and what a comfort that will be.’
40
In the cool of Tahiti’s airport lounge, observed by the Braveheart visitors, I slipped the envelope of dollars to the Chinese shopkeeper’s daughter. The crowd was dense, but we easily met, alert to each other’s expectation. She was urban and elegant. In a large Renault she took Lady Myre and me to the Sofitel hotel and tried to book us in at the discounted residents’ rate.
The receptionist wouldn’t agree to it, but when Lady Myre declared her title she adorned her with a garland of frangipani and accorded us a king-size bed in a luxury room with a view of the ocean. The counter was strewn with gardenias and hibiscus flowers, front-of-house allegiance to past time. Lady Myre bagged handfuls of them. All things free she squirrelled away: paper screws of sugar, hotel stationery, shells from the seashore, twigs.
Her rank and the self-assurance that went with it would have served her in eighteenth-century Tahiti. Bligh consorted with the high chiefs, the arii – the nobles. He didn’t hobnob with the lowborn manahune. The high chief of a tribe was revered and deferred to. Land, title and hereditary prestige belonged to him. He was carried on his servants’ shoulders, food was fed into his mouth, he wore a girdle of red or yellow feathers, he could command human sacrifice.
There were many tribes, their land demarcated by the V-shaped valleys and the mountain ridges. The house of the highest chief was not luxurious, he made no display of personal possession, his servants ate the same food. Birth counted for everything, wealth for very little. The enduring symbol of a high-born family was the marae, the open-air stone-and-coral temple that spoke of permanence and transcended the transience of life. The gods were secondary, to do with sunlight, wind, birdsong, the sea. All the maraes on Mangareva had been destroyed by Laval.
The Sofitel was to a standard. The room had a huge bed with plumped pillows, a minibar, brochures about Tahitian pearls and tours, a TV in a cabinet, a view from the window of palm trees
