The Day the Floods Came

“But how do I get there? It seems miles.”

“Walk,” he said, and he and his companions laughed heartily.

They disembarked at a quayside. The pretty little girl tugged Agatha’s sleeve and led her towards a Jeep. “We get a lift,” said Agatha with relief. But the relief was short-lived.

The Jeep set off up a mountainous dry river bed of a road, lurching and bumping, swinging round to hang off the edge of a cliff, and then plunging down a steep gradient and roaring up the other side almost at the perpendicular. I’ll kill Sue when I get back, thought Agatha, and then realized with a little shock that from the airfield to this scary journey to the hotel, she had not thought of James once.

To Agatha’s relief, the hotel was beautiful. There was a huge lounge with picture windows looking out over the bay. Her room was very small, but the bed was comfortable. Outside the lounge was a deck with easy chairs. She searched through her luggage and put on a T-shirt with a long-sleeved blouse over it.

She went out onto the deck and ordered a glass of wine from an attentive waiter. It was warm in the sun and the air was like champagne. An odd feeling of well-being began to permeate her body. What a strange place, she thought. She could almost feel the darkness lifting out of her.

Her spirits rose even further at dinner, when as a starter she was served with one of the biggest lobsters she had ever seen. She tackled it with gusto and then looked round at her dinner companions. The pretty girl was there, but not the bearded man. The central table was dominated by a large family, speaking in Spanish. They were made up of an obviously married couple, thin and athletic, with three children – beautiful little girls – a middle-aged woman, and a young man. To Agatha’s right, a husband and wife sat eating lobster in silence. Some of Agatha’s old misery crept back. She did not know any Spanish. She was marooned on Robinson Crusoe island and condemned to silence for the rest of her stay.

The middle-aged woman, who had been casting covert glances at her, suddenly rose and came over to Agatha’s table.

“I hear from the staff you are English,” she said. She had a plump, motherly face and little twinkling eyes. “I am Marie Hernandez and I am here with my daughter and her husband and my son, Carlos. The hotel does not hold many guests. Perhaps we should all sit together?”

Agatha happily agreed. She joined the Hernandez family, as did the pretty girl, but the silent couple in the corner merely shook their heads and stayed where they were. All the Hernandez family, from Santiago, spoke English, apart from the small children, and they translated for the young girl, who said her name was Dolores. They all said, like Agatha, that they had expected a tropical island. Marie said she had a spare sweater in her luggage and would lend it to Agatha.

Marie told Agatha that the island was a national park. Her son, Carlos, proceeded to give Agatha a lecture on the history of Alexander Selkirk. He had been a seaman aboard the Cinque Ports, a privateer, and he had complained all the way around Cape Horn about the accommodation and the food on board. When the ship reached Juan Fernandez to take on fresh water, he had demanded to be set ashore with a musket, powder, and a Bible. But when he saw the captain was actually going to go ahead with it, Selkirk said he’d changed his mind, but the captain had had enough of the grumbling seaman and so he was left. Most castaways would have shot themselves or starved, but Selkirk was saved by goats, introduced by the Spanish, which he hunted down, using their skins for clothes and their meat for food. He survived for four years, until 1709, when his saviour arrived: Commander Woodes Rogers of the privateers, Duke and Duchess, with famed privateer William Dampier. When Selkirk returned to London, he was a celebrity.

Agatha, not used to making friends easily, found at the end of the meal that she felt as if she had known this family for a long time. Dolores seemed to be picking up words of English with amazing rapidity.

When Agatha finally made her way to bed, she glanced curiously at the couple who had not joined them. The woman was blonde, dyed blonde, but very attractive in a baby-doll way, and the man, dark and Spanish-looking. They were sitting side by side on one of the sofas in the lounge. The woman was whispering to him urgently and he patted her hand.

Agatha felt there was something wrong there. Perhaps the journey had made her tired enough to give her odd fancies. She went to bed and plunged down into the first dreamless sleep she had experienced for a long time.

¦

At breakfast the next day, Marie said they planned to walk up to Alexander Selkirk’s lookout. She indicated the silent couple. “I’ll ask them if they would like to go.” She approached their table and plunged into rapid Spanish. But it appeared the couple did not want to go.

They all went down the cliff steps from the hotel after breakfast, where one of the staff relayed two lots of them in a rubber dinghy over to San Juan Bautista, the only settlement on the island. “High Noon,” said Dolores who, it transpired, had an English vocabulary confined mostly to film titles. She looked down the wide and dusty deserted main street and they all laughed as she drew and twirled an imaginary pistol. They began to climb, first up shallow steps leading up from the township, then onto an earthen track. The stream below them was surrounded by various varieties of wild flowers. Then they entered the silence of a pine forest. Agatha’s legs began to ache, but she felt she could not give up while plump Marie soldiered on and even the little girls showed no signs of flagging. On and up they went until Agatha stopped and exclaimed at a flash of red. “What was that?”

“Hummingbirds,” said Carlos. They waited and watched. Green-and-red hummingbirds whirred about. There was something about the beauty of them that caught at Agatha’s throat and she suddenly sat down on a rock and began to cry. They gathered around her, hugging her and kissing her while Agatha poured out the whole story of her divorce. When she had finished, Marie said, “So you begin a new chapter, here on Robinson Crusoe Island. A great place for beginnings, no?”

Agatha gave her a watery smile. “Sorry about that, but I feel miles better.”

“We’ll have our packed lunches now,” said Marie comfortably, “and take a rest. Before you arrived at breakfast, I was wondering about the couple that would not come with us. They are Concita and Pablo Ramon, also from Santiago. They are on honeymoon.”

“Something odd there,” said Agatha, unwrapping a sandwich. “They don’t look like a honeymoon couple.”

“No. She is very much in love with him, I think. But he looks at her as if he’s waiting for something.”

“Perhaps he feels he has made a mistake,” volunteered Carlos.

They finished their lunch and though no mention was made of Agatha’s outburst, she felt enfolded in a warm blanket of friendship and sympathy.

To get to the lookout involved a final climb, up sheer rock.

Agatha and Marie said they would wait below with the children while the more athletic ones made the ascent. “Are you Catholic?” asked Marie.

“No,” said Agatha. “Not anything, really. I go to the village church – that’s Church of England – because the vicar’s wife is a friend of mine.”

“And your husband? Was he Catholic?”

“Before? No.”

“But I do not understand. How can he become a monk if he was divorced and not even Catholic?”

“He didn’t tell them when he first went there.”

“But they surely know now.”

“Maybe because I am not a Catholic, they do not consider it to have been a real marriage. Let’s talk about something else,” said Agatha quickly.

Marie’s attention was taken up then with the children. Agatha looked out at the vast stretch of the Pacific and was hit by a sudden thought. What if James had not really planned to take holy orders? What if he simply wanted to be rid of her and had found the monastery a convenient excuse? They had gone through an amicable divorce. They had talked about safe things – village gossip, James’s plans to sell his house, but not once had he discussed his newfound faith.

¦

Like the rest of the guests, Agatha had only booked into the Panglas for a week. The following few days took on a dreamlike quality of fresh air and exercise. They went to Robinson Crusoe’s cave, they tramped the hills,