I took my bicycle back to the hire shop then sat by the shore and looked out to sea. The horizon sixteen miles away was the limit of our vision, so Captain Dutt had said. It shimmered and invited, though there were no ships on it. Go the sixteen miles and there’d be another sixteen miles. No end to the limitation of it. I wondered what my journey would have been if I hadn’t met Lady Myre sitting on her pot noodles at Tauranga harbour. More focused perhaps but as adrift as I now felt.
I thought of Bligh and Christian and how they hadn’t made the best of whatever feeling was between them. I imagined the mutineers scanning the horizon beyond the reef, dreading the ship of retribution yet expecting it too. In the afternoon I packed my Eagle Creek bag and caught the plane back to Tahiti.
45
And then a car to Tahiti airport, in transit, wanting to be on my way. Harold Wing had again rearranged my flights. I’d change planes in Los Angeles, then to London and then … There’d be waiting at airports, but waiting in a departures lounge wouldn’t be much different from waiting somewhere else. I extravagantly tipped the taxi driver. He looked like Chief Otoo with a halo of black hair. I’d no more need of Pacific francs. He gave me a large black bead in appreciation and said it was a pearl.
The ritual of check-in and boarding gates didn’t seem like travel: a disembodied voice announcing delays and closing of gates, the checking of papers, emptying of pockets, the scrutiny of baggage. I asked for an aisle seat near the front of the plane.
I waited to fly over the knocked-about world, to go through time zones, two Wednesdays, so many Wednesdays, and then no more. Local time, estimated arrival time. The names of places on a screen: Kupang, Malang, Banjarman. The names of those long-gone much-raped pretty girls: Mauatua, Vahineatua, Teio, Faahotu …
I thought of Bligh and those starving men. At the edge of life and death. Drenched with rain and seawater, guided by the stars the sun and the moon, battered by waves, wringing out their tattered clothes, dividing a morsel of bread, a captured bird, into eighteen equal pieces. ‘Who shall have this?’ Gate 28 now closing.
I wondered where she was, that Lady Myre. Had she married Tahu, or met up again with Kurt, or Garth the step-brother? Had Sir Roland sent a ship to collect her? I scanned the waiting passengers and thought I saw her, that straight back and rolling walk, that modulated embarrassing voice: ‘Drivah you’re going too fast.’ I wondered why I missed her, she was so unsuitable, it wasn’t rational love. But her indifference to uncertainty had allayed my confusion, and she was so good at the thrill of the moment, the fruits of the day.
Images of a journey: her singing on the coach to Tauranga, seasick on the deck of Kurt’s catamaran, wasps swirling round her, gardenias in her hair – all of it gone. Thanks for all your generous love and thanks for all the fun. The words of some song. And such a yearning on my part for something I’d never find. Did she collect things because of the elusiveness of the moment – the stones from the beach, travellers that passed by – whereas I let it all slip away? Would passengers please proceed to Gate 34, now boarding.
As she stood in the lagoon at Tubuai, a spear in her hand, in her mind’s eye she was a Polynesian fisherwoman. Or dancing with Captain Dutt, how amused the sailors seemed. The chaos of her sermon on Pitcairn, her calm in the storm. The storm was so much more than any violence in my heart but it hurt me to remember the silkiness of her skin, the comfort of her arms, the sweetness of her kisses. We shared a journey, it ended, we went our separate ways. I wondered if she too in a way was seeking home.
You have to be so close to one person only, to hear the beat of a heart. A catamaran with a broken rudder, the crack of huge waves against the boat. Her cries too, and mine. Beyond the fear I’d rather have died by drowning in those seas, in her arms, on that night, than in the old people’s home.
But the morning came and the danger passed and the sea was calm and the sun shone. And so again goodbye. Goodbye to the crew of the Tundra Princess, to Verity, to mother, to the moon and the Pole Star and the wasps in the hymnal. Goodbye to my brothers, to Jackie the tame frigate bird, to those who chose to go to sea but didn’t choose to drown. And goodbye to the journey and the elusive moment, for there is no stillness in the turning world.
In a discarded English newspaper at Los Angeles airport I read a letter from a distant relative of William Bligh’s, Maurice Bligh of Sittingbourne. Hollywood film-makers, he wrote, blamed his ancestor William Bligh, RN, FRS, for the mutiny on the Bounty. They should realise there never was a mutiny, only a ‘piratical seizure’. There was no evidence that Bligh was a tyrant. ‘Fletcher Christian wasn’t an aristocrat like Marlon Brando seemed to think, but a sweaty, faceless, badly educated poor boy from a bankrupt family. If he looked like the only known portrait of his son Thursday October Christian he had problems.’
This later Bligh was partisan about his great-great-great-uncle, thrice removed, whom others called Bounty Bastard Bligh. I wondered about the favours Bligh gave and took from Christian and Heywood both. Heywood had connections in high places, so
