Lady Myre lay on the bed, her arms splayed wide. ‘Civilisation,’ she said. ‘A bed, a proper lavatory, a television.’
I said I favoured life without television and considered it a barrier to meaningful experience.
‘Then come and have a meaningful experience with me,’ she said. ‘You can keep your head down while I watch the chat shows.’
I ignored her and made a display of sorting my papers.
‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘Stop being a spoddy twerp. Let’s have a candlelit bath, order normal food and wine, hire a video and indulge ourselves after our ordeal.’ She fancied Spartacus. Didn’t I just love Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons? I probably knew Laurence Olivier was a bit of a woofter but so were most of those Romans if the truth be known. She topped up her Sprite bottle with rum from the minibar and considered the room-service menu.
I told her my plans. I wanted to see Matavai Bay where the Bounty had anchored, make a tour of inland Tahiti to imagine the tribal settlements where Bligh had collected breadfruit saplings, then go to an exhibition about the Polynesian canoe at the Tahiti Museum. After that I’d fly to the island of Tubuai to see Fletcher Christian’s Fort George settlement, then get a plane to London.
‘Whither thou goest I will go,’ she said, but there was rebuke in her demeanour. She wanted sex and I wasn’t complying. I wondered what she was like when she didn’t get what she wanted.
‘You’re an awkward little Mousey,’ she said. Stubborn.’ Then she said I wasn’t safe on my own and that she’d read of a Tahitian custom called mafera, where young men climbed through open hotel windows and had sex with women while they slept. I should watch out for anything untoward in the night, and unless I was certain it was her, I should call reception. She took a gardenia from behind her ear, tore it in two, gave me half and said I should do the same for her: it was a Tahitian sign of reciprocal fidelity. I pointed out I didn’t have a gardenia. She told me there were all sorts of signs to make, if I was up for intercourse. The Belgian yachtie had told her about them. I should hold up the right finger of my right hand then hold my right wrist with my left hand. That would do it. Or if I bent all my fingers and wiggled them and laughed heartily …
I suggested she phone Sir Roland and tell him the good news of her safe arrival.
‘I’ve quite forgotten poor Roley,’ she said, ‘now I’ve got you.’ She suggested we order champagne and seafood risotto and mango à la Sofitel.
I told her to choose what she wanted for herself. I’d eat downstairs and see her later.
‘Are you playing hard to get?’ she asked as I left the room, and there was warning in those clear blue eyes.
In the foyer I used the webmail facility. Three messages from Verity were friendly and informative. She wanted to hear from me. Where was I? Was I all right? What were my plans? She’d found a flat in Colchester. She’d felt melancholy as she packed but was now busy settling in. Wasn’t it strange, she said, how one spent so long in a place then moved and scarcely thought of it again? Mother’s house too had been sold and her possessions auctioned, though she didn’t know this. All available money was needed to provide for her care. She might live for a decade in this twilit state. She was over-sedated, kept falling, and spent her time scrabbling in a drawer looking for things she couldn’t find. I sent messages of my whereabouts and safety and said I’d had a stormy journey from Pitcairn to Mangareva.
They seemed so tentative, these frail links to a receding world. It was true what Verity said: we move on, we forget. For eighteenth-century travellers the past could vanish. The Bounty crew fathered children on Tahiti. Peter Heywood had a fine house there with an avenue of trees. He had a partner and a child and was working on an English-Tahitian dictionary. Then Captain Edwards came in the Pandora and took him away in chains to shipwreck and judgement.
The dining room looked out over a swimming pool, the sham beach and coconut palms. No cutter would come to this harbour to herald wonder. I ordered cheese, fruit and wine. A stray dog scrounged the tables with a depressed look in his eyes. I gave him a crust of bread, then he wouldn’t go away. He’d’ve stayed with me for ever. He sat and stared, ate bits of mango and custard apple but preferred the cheese. Here was the hunger of the world. No culinary fads, just a need for calories – any old fuel to stave off death for a while.
At an adjacent table an oriental-looking woman cleaned her knife and fork on a napkin, again and again. A jacket was draped on the back of the chair opposite her, so I assumed she had a companion. In American English she ordered one meal, two plates and a jug of hot water. She cut a plate of steak, then put it on the opposite place mat. She cut up salad, seemingly for herself, asked for ketchup for the chips, ate only a bread roll and drank the hot water, which she poured into a glass. The dog didn’t bother with her. He knew she’d give him nothing. Again and again she bent to the floor, threw a ten-cent coin, and peered to see which way up it landed. To break her encapsulation, I asked if she was American. Her family was from China but had moved to San Francisco – she had a brother and a sister there.
