‘Oh bravo bravissimo,’ called Lady Myre. ‘Gosh, what a dish,’ she said to me. I was unsure what she meant.
He waded slowly from the sea with no display of pride beyond his innate demeanour of pride. He gestured we should follow him and we wheeled our bicycles to his house. It was built of bamboo with walls woven from coconut leaves. There was a lean-to cookhouse beside it. A canoe rested on the ground. He had built it all himself. He had his own water hole, he cooked on stones set in a bed of ashes, he wove his baskets and mats, made traps for snaring birds, grew vegetables and herbs, he crushed bark and leaves to soothe grazes.
In a mix of French and mime he told Lady Myre that his wife had died in childbirth a year ago. The fish was for his five children’s supper. He wrote his name, Tahuaiare, in the sand and drew a heart. He said he had many names. She gave her name as ‘Silver’. I wondered if she was mad. He said she was to call him Tahu and that he was looking for a wife. A boy, Muti, brought a mat for her and me. Tahu put two garlands of flowers round her neck. Another child brought a basket of yams, bananas and pineapple. Tahu prepared a fire beneath the stones to get them hot. His eldest daughter, Yolande, seasoned the fish. She was seven.
Lady Myre admired the many rings in Tahu’s ears. He’d pierced them with a thorn from a lemon tree. He offered to do the same to hers. He told her of a cannibal woman, Hina, who lived in a cave high on Mount Taitaa, and used a net to catch her victims. He talked of the time when Tubuai was ruled by a king and there were chiefs of all the districts. All the time he talked he watched. He watched the sea, noting its colour and the apparent direction of currents. He watched for birds, for particular cloud formations, for the colour of the sky and the direction of the wind.
He had an accordion and while the stones heated, he serenaded her. She started singing, ‘Bali Hai will call you, any time any day.’ The children banged stones together to accompany her. I left them to it. I said I’d agreed to eat with Melinde and that I wanted to see more of the island before it got dark. As I cycled off, I marvelled how she went straight to the heart of wherever she was. Then subverted it.
I followed the coast road. Every hundred yards there was a sign: Silence. Culte. Then a church built by Mormons, Latter Day Adventists, Catholics, all keen to save the Polynesians from their own gods and known imagination. The buildings were well-tended but lifeless and not intrinsic to the island.
Melinde gave me fish, potatoes and bananas. I told her Lady Myre had met a friend and was having a picnic by the sea. She said she supposed that would be Tahu, and that he was a nice man who would look after her. She talked of the island: how there used to be crops of coffee, vanilla, manioc, copra; how the islanders would thatch their houses with coconut leaves and burn coconut oil perfumed with grated sandalwood in their lamps. She said now French Polynesians were like fledglings in a nest with their mouths open. If France, the mother bird, didn’t feed them, they’d starve. The crops were gone, the land eroded. ‘The French gave us the bomb,’ she said. ‘If you live in Normandy, you ask, “Why should we pay taxes to subsidise French Polynesia?” I answer, “Why didn’t you let off the bomb in Normandy? You could never pay us enough.”’
Lady Myre didn’t come back to Melinde’s that night. Lying awake in another strange bed, I missed the comfort of her arms. I thought of the way she sang and danced and smiled and how I never knew what she was going to do next. And then I thought of my mother and how I didn’t know how to contact her. She was like a spectre, dead within life, and I couldn’t help her. I felt my journey was over and that it was time to return, though I didn’t know quite what that would mean, or what I’d come for, or what I’d achieved.
In the morning I cycled back to where I’d left Lady Myre. She was standing in the lagoon with Tahu, both of them statuesque with spears raised. I watched, wondering if they’d catch a fish, hoping they wouldn’t for the fish’s sake. After a while she turned and saw me and waded towards me. She said she was very all right and she’d wed Tahu like a shot if it wasn’t that Roley was such a darling. He was teaching her to spear fish and she’d already caught a mahi mahi. He’d given her a little house all to herself. He was a perfect gentleman and he wooed her with gardenias and oyster shells. She said she’d found the heart of Polynesia.
I told her I was returning to Tahiti the following day and then to London.
‘You must do what you want to do, Mousey,’ she said.
‘Are you coming with me?’ I asked. That was as near as I could get to saying I hoped she would. She said she wasn’t ready, that this was an adventure and she wanted to live it.
Then she told me I was a disappointment to her. She felt I’d gone cold on her and I never said anything nice about her. And it bored her rigid the way I went on about the mutiny on the Bounty and chaos theory. She said I used this stuff as a barrier to keep life out. It was now that mattered not the eighteenth century. At first she’d thought I was cute and up for it, but I should
