Rushing to Paradise Page 16

  The confrontation on the beach had unsettled him, exposing the many rivalries at the sanctuary, but here in the quiet deeps he felt it peace, on the dark edge where the volcanic crater shelved into dc abyssal chill.

  Twenty feet from him, sitting in a small glade of sponges, was ‘ii” barnacled shell of a French patrol boat, its torpedo tubes like the claws of a giant lobster.

  The craft had assumed a coralline life of its own, its rails and ladders transformed into encrusted versions of themselves. Beyond it the fuselage of a drowned aircraft lay between its broken wings, the rear turret presiding over the lagoon, a deserted observation cage.

  Curious to see the aircraft more closely, Neil released the flagstone and rose towards the surface, shedding the spangled air from his lungs into the startled faces of the watching fish. He climbed into the dinghy and rested for half an hour among the heavy stones, then shipped the sea-anchor and rowed the few oar-lengths to the aircraft’s position.

  His second descent carried him down to the plane, a two engined bomber of unfamiliar design. Fending off a small reef shark, Neil watched the fuselage rise towards him. Through the open canopy he could see the pilot’s barnacled seat and controls.

  It occurred to him that the French might have called off their nuclear tests after the bomber’s crash, and that the aircraft was in some way implicated in the programme of atomic trials.

  Neil released the cement building block and seized the tail plane above his head, pulling himself to the empty turret. Lying on the seat in this steel bower

  were the remnants of an armoured vest and flying suit, seams unravelled by generations of searching fish. Whether the suit’s owner had escaped from the bomber with the rest of the crew he could only guess, but as his bursting lungs swept him towards the surface he seemed to glimpse a clutch of bones lying below the seat. A few vertebrae or detached ribs, they resembled the remnants of a meal laid out for Neil, one course in that banquet of death that had filled his boyish mind.

  He broke the surface and clung to the bows of the dinghy, realizing that all the waters of the lagoon had passed through the filter of those bones.

  Soon after Neil’s discovery of the drowned bomber the members of the expedition fell ill with a recurrent dysenteric fever. Kimo was the first to succumb. Cutting palm logs on the hillside above the plant terraces, he collapsed over his axe, racked by cramp.

  He rested and returned to work, but fell to his knees again and was helped to his tent by Neil and Canine. He lay there shivering for three days, barely able to hold Dr Barbara’s thermometer between his teeth.

  Professor Saito and Monique were next to be affected. Mrs Saito found her husband lying among the seedling orchids in the plant laboratory. After a feverish night he ate a bowl of tepid tapioca, which set off another bout of vomiting and diarrhoea.

  By then Monique had failed to cook the expedition’s breakfasts, and Dr Barbara found her in the cemetery beside the prayer shack, calling for her father and rambling to herself over his soiled grave.

  Trudi and Inger set about boiling all the pans and utensils in the kitchen.

  Dr Barbara ordered Neil to destroy any eggs that the hens might lay, and for the next days they lived on the few fish ‘53 bat Neil could catch and the dwindling stocks of canned food in lie storage tent.

  Neil was impressed by the way in which Dr Barbara rose to He challenge of this mysterious fever, even when displaying the rrst symptoms. She insisted on doing her rounds of the sick, as roe sweat greased the cold wax of her forehead, and supervised roe digging of new latrines.

  Fearing that in some way all the fish in the lagoon had been boisoned by his dreams of nuclear explosions, Neil felt a rowing guilt that he had brought on the sickness. He tried to ll Dr Barbara of the bones he had glimpsed in the drowned l)omber, but she was too exhausted to listen to him.

  ‘Ask David to keep an eye on Trudi and Inger-they may have brought something nasty with them from the Marquesas. Then help Mrs Saito to wash her husband. You’ll have to boil the Heets. Thank God, you’re the strongest of us, Neil.’

  ‘Dr Barbara - the skeleton I saw… part of a skeleton, any-ay. The lagoon may be poisoned.’

  ‘Nonsense. If there is a skeleton the poor man’s bones were picked clean twenty years ago. This isn’t a time for superstition, Neil.’ Fortunately, Professor Saito soon discovered the source of the h: ver. As they all suspected, the hippies had infected the sanctu ary. Rousing himself from his sick-bed, the botanist tested samples from the water-purifier beside the reservoir. A huge concentration of coliform bacteria had overwhelmed the filters, and his further analysis of the liquid in the aqueduct confirmed, hit the camp’s water supply was contaminated by faecal matter.

  Neil remained sceptical, but everyone agreed that Werner and Wolfgang had taken a perverted revenge for what they saw as the abduction of their womenfolk. A last punitive expedition was set for the following night when Carline and Mrs Saito would lead a raiding party that would drive the Germans forever from Saint Esprit.

  Still exhausted by his fever, Professor Saito assembled a temporary distillation system that provided a small but secure supply of sterile drinking-water. Dr Barbara, pierced by a deep chill and irritated by the fractious cries of the baby, lay inside her wearying cries from the clinic, as the American rowed rrongly through the dark surf, eager to seize the beach and burn clown the modest shacks.

  But Carline was after a more tempting target. Neil watched the waves beyond the beach, where a canopy of flame enveloped the sinking sloop. Exploding gasoline

  drenched the hull of the Pirsfal, crazing the psychedelic patterns. The rigging fell from the mast, ropes coiling like catherine wheels.

  Wolfgang leapt naked from his shack and sprinted down the beach into the water, but the yacht was already capsizing, its cabin glowing like an incandescent lantern. As they watched trom the shore even Kimo and Mrs Saito seemed startled by the craft’s destruction. Carline rowed through the burning waves, his oars scooping up pockets of flame, grinning owlishly to himself like a drunken parent at a deranged children’s party.

  Turning his back on them all, Neil crossed the runway and set oft for the lagoon. Below the beach hut the surf sluiced across the ashy sand, overrunning the remains of the barbecue where he had fed the two women and played with Gubby. The last of the grouper’s bones were withdrawing into the deep, eager to join the sleeping eminence of the lagoon.

  When he returned to the caiiip an hour later the embers of the burning yacht had faded as the gutted hulk settled to the ocean floor. Saint-Esprit was dark again, lit only by the albatross circling the alarmed sky and by the sea rinsing the black shores like a tireless washerwoman of the night.

  Monique! Trudi!’ Forch-beams flared from the windows of the clinic. Inger was ohbing on the steps, comforted by Mrs Anderson, while Kimo paced around the door, calming himself like a compassionate policeman at a tragic roadside accident.

  Roused by the noise, professor Saito stepped from the plant laboratory, buttoning his shirt around his narrow shoulders.

  Had Dr Barbara died? Neil felt the runway slip beneath his feet. He imagined her body borne in state along the pale coral to the cemetery beside the prayer-shack. Saint-Esprit, its fluted cliffs and its albatross seemed to slide into the lagoon as he ran towards the clinic and stepped past the weeping Inger, trying to read Kimo’s solemn face in the swerving torch-beams.

  Major Anderson stood beside Dr Barbara’s bed, his hand raising the mosquito net as if releasing the death-spring of a trap.

  He shone his torch into the white bower where Dr Barbara rested on her sweat-swollen pillow, blonde hair caked to a damp peruke. Her eyes rolled in the torch-beam, and for a moment she seemd to be far out to sea in the burning Pars fal.

  ‘Dr Barbara…’ Neil pushed past Major Anderson and knelt beside the bed.

  ‘It’s Neil, Dr Barbara. Don’t die..

  Monique drew him away, refusing to meet Dr Barbara’s gaze.

  W
hen she embraced Neil he could feel her heart beating through her breasts.

  ‘Dr Barbara is not dead,’ she assured him. ‘Her fever is down.

  Sadly, there is a death..

  Mrs Anderson stood beside the baby’s cot, and lifted the large pillow that covered Gubby’s face. The child lay still, hands forced behind his back, pupils unmoving in the veering lights.

  Mrs Anderson placed her hand under Gubby’s stony head, lifting it so that everyone could see the vacant gaze.

  But Neil was staring at the pillow. The damp cotton was marked with vomit, like Monsieur Didier’s pillow-slip after his death, and stained with the same bloody imprint of a mouth.

  ‘57 12 Fever in the Blood WRINGING A CRY from the air, an albatross soared past the Summit, its black wing-tips outstretched as if trying to strike Neil’s face. He rested against the plinth of the radio mast and waved at the solitary creature restlessly hunting the wind. Bored by the sky, the sea-birds sat at the cliff’s edge like passengers ielayed forever at an unknown terminal, a nomadic tribe mis placed by time.

  Thousands of albatross now gathered at Saint-Esprit, the one undoubted success of Dr Barbara’s sanctuary dream. While Neil roamed the island, searching the forest paths and swimming to the outlying sand-bars of the atoll, he would hear their monoto nous voices crying to the white-haired woman who had abandoned them.

  Neil walked along the cliff, scanning the wooded slopes above the plant terraces. Viewed from the summit, all seemed at peace in the camp beside the runway, an impression taken back to Papeete by the few light aircraft that

  photographed the island. Smoke rose from the kitchen fire, where Monique was preparing breakfast. Inger and Trudi had already spent an hour at the washing tub, and a line of sheets hung between the trees.

  In the pantry behind the plant laboratory Mrs Saito was curing fish and pickling the sea-fruit she found in the rock-pools below the cliff.

  None of the men had stirred. It was past ten in the morning, but Kimo and Carline still lay in their tents, already tired by the prospect of a day spent pounding taro and hunting for yams.

  Later, Canine would amble over to the burnt-out radio-cabin and tinker with the dials and microphone as he mused upon the fate of his marooned airport. Kimo, even more disoriented than Neil by Dr Barbara’s absence, found companionship of a kind among the endangered inmates of the animal enclosures, though he had allowed several of the rare birds to escape. In the afternoon Professor Saito would emerge from the plant laborat ory, blinking at the sun, and join Mrs Anderson for an hour’s work, weeding and watering the overgrown plant terraces while Major Anderson sat stern-faced in the cockpit of the sloop, reluctant to step onto Saint-Esprit’s blighted sand.

  All seemed well, but without Dr Barbara the sanctuary had lost its compass-bearing. Neil missed her keenly, and even now, three weeks after her disappearance, found it difficult to grasp that she no longer stood on the steps of the clinic, scolding him as he dawdled around Inger and Trudi before setting off to fish. He assumed that she had fled the island, accepting a lift from a passing yacht, aware that the French authorities would soon be investigating the child’s death.

  No-one was certain that Dr Barbara had killed the baby, but they all behaved as if they could still see the blood-stained pillow in her hands. Neil remembered how she ignored the expedition members as she sipped her tea the next morning, shaking off the last of her fever. Kimo had played with his callused fists, weighing and re-weighing this little death, before going off to the cemetery to dig a furious grave. Professor Saito and his wife retreated to the sanity of the plant laboratory, minds flicking at an impossible moral abacus, while Monique hunched over a photograph of her father, clearly suspecting that he too had been deliberately killed. Only Carline seemed unmoved, smiling tightly as he watched Dr Barbara with a kind of fearful admira tion.

  The Andersons, however, had decided to take action. Dis gusted by Gubby’s death, they prepared their sloop for the voyage to Tahiti, ready to sail on the first tide, and determined to report their suspicions to the prefect of police within an hour of docking. They Joined Neil and the four grieving Germans as Kimo carried the baby to the cemetery in the small coffin that he had nailed together from an empty toy crate. Angry with ‘59 ” Nc!! shovelled the black sand over the box.

  ‘That’s enough.’ Major Anderson waved Neil away. ‘We on’t fuss over it. The lad isn’t going anywhere.’ Mrs Anderson held Neil’s hand when they walked from the cinetery, leaving Werner and Wolfgang to comfort the young omen. The attack on the beach shacks and the destruction of the Parsfal had been forgotten after the discovery of the dead baby. Carline had even offered his sympathies to the two hippies, managing to turn the burning of the yacht and Gubby’s dcath into the unhappy consequences of an over-intense collegi, itC game. But Mrs Anderson was well aware that Dr Barbara was playing to stricter rules.

  ‘Neil, you’ll be sure to watch yourself? Be careful of Dr Uarbara.

  Perhaps you should come with us.’

  ‘I’ll be all right, Mrs Anderson. Dr Barbara won’t hurt me.’

  ‘Don’t be certain of that. Poor Gubby, I know how much you liked him. He wasn’t the first and he may not be the last.’

  ‘Mrs Anderson… no-one saw Dr Barbara kill Gubby.’ Frying to stem the slide of suspicion that threatened to bury Dr h, irbara, Neil watched her walk head-down towards the clinic, apparently oblivious of Saint-Esprit, the sanctuary and the albatross circling above her. ‘They’rejust making her a scapegoat because they’re tired and want to blame someone. We knew the sanctuary would be hard work.’

  ‘We didn’t know that people would be killed.’ Mrs Anderson listened to

  Trudi’s crying carried on the wind. ‘First Monique’s finher and now Gubby. Who’s next, Neil?’

  ‘Monique’s father wasn’t killed. He died of a stroke.’

  ‘I’m sure he did.’ Major Anderson seemed puzzled that Neil should defend Dr Barbara, as if suspecting that he had aided her.

  ‘Suffocation can do hateful things to the brain. Dr Barbara claimed she found him the next morning. Yet we saw her inside ti w clinic soon after midnight, closing the mosquito net.’

  ‘And again at two o’clock,’ Mrs Anderson added. ‘What was iic doing, Neil?

  We’d like to know.’

  ‘She was helping him to sleep,’ Neil insisted stolidly.

  ‘That’s what we feared. But what kind of sleep?’ i—o Neil tried to argue Dr Barbara’s case, but the old couple were determined to take their suspicions to the French authorities. He was pushing their dinghy into the waves, resigned to seeing them sail from Saint-Esprit, when Canine caught up with them.

  He strode into the water, ignoring the surf that surged around his thighs, and seized the dinghy’s tiller. His shirt still reeked of the gasoline that had spilled from his incendiary bomb, but for once he was resolute. The others had been confused by the events of the night, but Neil realized that for Carline the death of the child had clarified everything.

  ‘You’re leaving, Major?’

  ‘Not soon enough. Though I dare say we’ll be back. You’ll be expected to give a statement.’

  ‘I’ll speak as honestly as I can.’ Carline’s candid smile met the Andersons’

  stony faces. ‘Think about it, Major. If you call in the French it’s all over. The sanctuary will be as dead as little Gubby.

  Everything you’ve done, every hour of hard work, will be wasted.’ Major Anderson pointed to Dr Barbara, who stood hands on hips in the doorway of the clinic, as if challenging anyone to enter her parlour. ‘That woman killed the child. Even you can’t ignore the fact. Now, we need to get aboard.’ Carline tried to calm the waves, his long arms steadying the dinghy. ‘No-one saw her, Major. We can settle the matter ourselves, and keep the sanctuary going. Think of all the work you’ve done.’

  ‘We’ll live with that. It was given freely.’

  ‘Then think of the albatross.’ As Major Anderson raised hi
s oar, ready to strike Canine in the chest, the American seized the blade. ‘And think of Neil.’

  ‘The boy will be well. She won’t harm him.’

  ‘Maybe not in an obvious way. Who knows what she has planned? You’ve heard the rumours, Mrs Anderson…

  This brutal appeal at last persuaded the reluctant Andersons to remain for the next few weeks, giving them time to question Dr Barbara and convince Neil to join them on the voyage to Tahiti. ioi 1.. IL ( C.1cCflflJIUII I’ prccrvc ii,, sanctuary, brought about a curious change of heart. For all the anger, no settling of accounts with Dr Barbara took place that day. To Neil’s surprise, the women were the first to come to terms with the child’s death. Mrs Saito ushered her lightheaded husband back to the plant laboratory, and Mrs Anderson steered the Major to the cooler altitudes of the cultivated terraces.

  Everyone, even Werner and Wolfgang, realized that the survival of Saint-Esprit depended on their silence.

  One by one, they returned to their tasks. They worked slowly, now and then lowering their hoes and machetes to stare at the silent camera-towers, as if sensing that their complicity in a crime was being invisibly filmed. Dr Barbara retreated to the clinic, and remained all day behind the locked door of her office.

  The next morning, when the Andersons demanded to speak to her, they found that she had gone.

  Were the albatross aware of their reprieve? Leaving the cliff, Neil made his way down the forest path, while the huge birds clustered shoulder to shoulder on their rocky perches, wary eyes on the changing wind. A single albatross soared along the beach, drawn to the stream where Dr Barbara had strolled with the skipper

  of the Croix du Sud. It swerved to and fro, unsettled by soiiiething it had seen beneath the forest canopy.

  A line of wet footprints glistened on the black sand, and led to. i narrow trail overgrown with ferns and cycads. The dewy spoor climbed the steep hillside towards an abandoned weather-station a hundred feet below the cliff. Neil had explored the trail soon after arriving at Saint-Esprit. The unmanned station, once packed with radio and barometric gear, was a dank concrete cell built into the mouth of a small cave, little more than a narrow Slims in the bony face of the cliff.Neil left the path and made his way towards the weather station, sliding through the scree of loose pumice that sloped from the tree-line. When he reached the trail he found the tootprmts were still damp, as if the forest visitor had bathed fully clothed in the stream. The cliff fell away to the rocks below, volcanic rubble. Neil crouched behind the tamarinds that crowded the narrow path, listening to the demented bird. The rocky slope was strewn with bones and feathers, a gaudy copper houses. pouring into a metal tin. A pale-haired woman in a damp shirt in her hand. She picked her strong nose and watched the excited the rocks below.