Rushing to Paradise Read online

  Others languished in the unexpected heat and humidity, infertile but protected by their own inedibility.

  Several of the plant terraces were now given over to kitchen gardening, but a substantial range of endangered trees and plants survived with varying success.

  There were dragon trees from the Canary Islands, rajah pitcher plants from Borneo, the camellia like Franklinia that was a Georgia neighbour of Neil’s mother, peacock moreas from Cape Town and spiral aloes from remote Lesotho. When an army friend of Colonel Stamford in Honolulu visited Saint-Esprit he was sufficiently impressed to report that Neil was thriving on the island, and had matured into a self reliant young man displaying the kind of animal husbandry skills that would lead to a useful agri-business career. He failed to notice the one form of husbandry and stock-rearing with which Neil was most closely involved - the three pregnant women and urged Neil’s mother to let him stay a further year on Saint Esprit. The regime, he concluded, was spartan and high-minded, qualities that Colonel Stamford admired above all.

  In fact, there was something almost too idyllic about the sanctuary. Neil rested in the shade of the camera-tower beside the runway, looking at the blockhouses that ringed the lagoon.

  He rarely noticed them now, and his adolescent dreams of nuclear tests and their black annunciation had been vanquished by the abundant life of the sanctuary.

  Yet one endangered group had not been defended by Saint lisprit - the male sex. Now that so many of the women were pregnant much of the work on the island was done by men.

  Professor Saito had been forced to leave the plant laboratory and apply his botanical skills to the kitchen gardens, where he contracted a soil-borne infection. Kimo worked under Mon ique’s direction at the cooking stove and sink, and with his sarong and long untidy hair had begun to resemble an obese transvestite. David Carline, after hours of hunting for wild yams, retired exhausted to his tent and brooded over the pistol that Dr Barbara had commandeered.

  Musing on their decline, Neil climbed the steps of the clinic.

  He listened to Dr Barbara stalk around the sick-room, reproving Professor Saito for tearing the mosquito net. Her sharp voice and its open lack of sympathy quelled the bedridden botanist.

  Without thinking, Neil cupped his hands over his genitals, aware that his semen alone lay between himself and the sick-bed.

  ‘Well done, Neil. I’m proud of you…’ Dr Barbara rose from her desk and embraced Neil with the formality of a general welcoming a soldier back from a dangerous war zone. ‘You’ve come up trumps, again.’

  ‘I did my best, doctor,’ Neil told her. ‘Are you sure it’s a girl?’

  ‘Absolutely. What else could it be?’ Dr Barbara held him at i86 arm’s length and brushed a single tear from her cheek, a jewel glistening like a prop placed there by a stage-hand. She wore a man’s safari suit and had trimmed her hair to the bone, though at times of emotion a few filaments would spring forward as if in memory of a more feminine phase of her life. The year on Saint Esprit had hardened her - she was too brisk with herself, Neil often felt, rationing her smallest gestures. She sat on an unpadded chair and slept on a board-like bed like the

  mother superior of a strict-regime convent.

  ‘We’ll drink a toast to you, Neil. You deserve it.’ She opened her medicinal cabinet and drew out a bottle of communion wine left by a pious but naive priest, Father Vergnol, who had come from Papeete to re-consecrate the graveyard. Neil had wanted to tell him about the bones of the dead observer in the drowned aircraft, but the waters of the lagoon were too deep for this artless priest to ponder.

  ‘A toast, Neil - only a small one because there’s something I want you to do.

  Trudi tells me she’s already thought of a name.’

  ‘Gudrun? Brunnhilde?’ Neil sipped slyly at the communion wine, thinking of the violent Norse heroines Trudi had described to him. He enjoyed being drunk, but Dr Barbara kept the alcohol locked away from him. ‘I’d like a son one day - is it important that it’s a girl?’

  ‘It is important, Neil.’ Dr Barbara nodded with deep emphasis.

  ‘The sanctuary needs more women if it’s to be secure, more sisters and daughters.’ She pondered this happy prospect, and added with the arch humour that frequently unsettled Neil. ‘Besides, you want any child of yours to live a long and healthy life..

  ‘I do. Won’t a son be just as healthy? You’ve always said I’m strong.’

  ‘You are, Neil.’ Dr Barbara turned to survey him, running her eyes frankly from his shoulders to his groin. ‘I knew that when I first saw you in Waikiki.

  Doctors have an instinct, a sixth sense. I was certain you’d make a healthy father.’

  ‘Then my sons will be healthy too?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Dr Barbara helped herself to a second glass of communion wine. Already her face and neck were flushing, and she ignored the feverish ramblings of Professor Saito in his mosquito net. ‘The world is a hard place for men. Look at David and Kimo, and poor Professor Saito. They’ve all been ill. I don’t think they’d survive if they were left to themselves.’

  ‘They worked too hard,’ Neil told her. ‘You never let them rest.’

  ‘They didn’t work sensibly.’ Dr Barbara gestured with her glass. ‘They didn’t pace themselves. Worst of all, they didn’t work together. There were too many elaborate schemes.’

  ‘Like David and his stockade? Or Professor Saito’s fish farm?’

  ‘Wonderful ideas, but totally impractical. Women know how to cooperate and get on together. We have our feet on the ground, we’re not competing with each other all the time.’ Dr Barbara frowned at the sound of Professor Saito’s quavering cries. ‘I only wish I’d recruited more women before we left Honolulu. Perhaps we should open the sanctuary to a new wave of volunteers. You’d be happy with that, Neil?”Of course. I’ll have to leave eventually - like David and Kimo. You’ll need more help, doctor.’

  ‘There are so many fine young women waiting to join us.’ Dr Barbara touched the pile of letters on her desk, delivered by a passing cruise liner, and shuffled through the portrait photo graphs. ‘Strong young women, eager to help with our work here.”And strong men. You’d have the pick of the best.’

  ‘No. We don’t need more men, not even if they’re strong. One strong and healthy male is enough, and we have you, Neil.’ Dr Barbara touched Neil’s beard, running a formalin-scented finger across his lips, but he hesitated to embrace her.

  Starved of the women’s company, he had begun to hang around the clinic, emptying Professor Saito’s bed-pan and changing his blood stained linen, in the hope that Dr Barbara might absent-mindedly take him to her bed again. When she cleaned and stitched a deep coral wound on his shoulder she caressed him with a mother’s warmth for her son. But the time of sexual passion had gone.

  He watched Dr Barbara laying out the photographs like a set of tarot cards, her cracked nails tapping at the friendly, open faces - a blonde dentist from Stockholm, a thirty-year-old croupier from Atlantic City, members of a lesbian cooperative in Sydney, south London schoolgirls, a Sorboime physics gradu ate, a Florida cocktail waitress, two nuns.

  ‘I’ll teach them everything I know,’ he assured her. ‘When Inger and Trudi have their babies I’ll get them to spear-fish.’

  ‘I was thinking of something else.’ Dr Barbara gathered the photographs together and tossed them into a drawer. ‘Time, Neil, is the heart of the problem -

  the human breeding cycle is so stretched. If only nature had given us a shorter pregnancy period, I’d hot-house the future into existence and fill the sanctuary with women.’

  ‘A sanctuary for women?’ Neil reflected in an even tone. ‘The sort of women who dislike men?’

  ‘Women don’t dislike men.’ Dr Barbara seemed deeply shocked by the notion.

  ‘We bring them into this world and spend the rest of our lives helping them to understand themselves. If anything, we’ve been too kind to them, letting them play their dangerous ga
mes. I’m not criticizing you, Neil, you’ve been the most loyal of all, right from the beginning. It’s thanks to you that Inger and Trudi are pregnant.’

  ‘And Monique.’

  ‘Monique, too - and that’s quite an achievement. I never thought you’d make it. We need as many daughters as we can bring into the world. Now, there’s one other woman on Saint Esprit. I want you to visit her.’

  ‘Who?’ Neil stepped forward, already noticing the narrow bed behind the desk.

  ‘You, doctor?’

  ‘No…’ Dr Barbara turned her back to Neil. ‘Sadly I’m too old for child-bearing. I mean Mrs Saito.’

  ‘Professor Saito’s wife?’ Neil stared through the window at the plant laboratory. Mrs Saito moved among the rare plants with her insect spray, firing punitive bursts at their tender leaves. This small, prim woman, devoted to Professor Saito’s every whim but ruling him with an iron hand, would never let Neil anywhere near herself. ‘Dr Barbara? Mrs Saito won’t agree, not even if the professor dies. I know Mrs Saito…

  ‘I know her too.’ Dr Barbara smiled down her long nose.

  ‘We’ve spoken about everything together, and she accepts what she has to do.’

  Neil tried to protest, and then remembered that Mrs Saito had recently spent far less time nursing her sick husband than she would have done a few months earlier. A significant change in the relationship between the two botanists had occurred, and Neil even suspected that Professor Saito had been negotiating with Captain Garfield for his return passage to Japan. He had caught the botanist in the beach hut after dark, reading his letters with a torch.

  ‘Doctor, I still can’t believe she’ll - ‘Don’t wake Professor Saito.’ Dr Barbara unlocked her safe uid withdrew a potted bonsai tree. She handed it to Neil.

  ‘Go and see her now, and give her this. She’s expecting you… Volunteers Twenty

  �

  minutes later Neil stood on the steps of the plant laboratory and listened to the mosquito door snap shut behind him. Mrs Saito was already dressed and had returned to the care of her plants, her tongue clucking as she moved around them.

  With a wristy jerk she opened a transom window, breaching the climate-control system in order to vent any lingering trace of Neil’s scent.

  The briskness of the sexual act between them had startled Neil.

  Still breathless, he touched the bruises on his shoulders where Mrs Saito had gripped him with her strong hands. He looked out at the silent camp, disturbed only by a bleating macaque that echoed Professor Saito’s moanings. An experiment with death had once been planned for Saint-Esprit, and in turn Dr Barbara was planning an equally bizarre experiment with life.

  For the first time Neil sensed that the two experiments were closer than he had imagined. He felt his tender testicles, still aching from the pressure of Mrs Saito’s fingers. ‘Lazy boy. lazy…’ she had murmured as she manipulated him towards orgasm in the same way that she had forced the involuntary climaxes of the breeding peccaries. When he arrived with the bonsai tree - a signal, he assumed, previously agreed by Dr Barbara and Mrs Saito - she treated Neil to a smile that opened and closed with the swiftness of a camera shutter. She took the tree from his hands and directed him to the laboratory, where he lay naked on the mattress

  between the malignant-smelling fungi, almost expecting her to bring her battery charger and electric ejaculator.

  ‘9’ Leaving the door unlocked, she undressed like a conjuror, revealing the body of a breasted child, and immediately set to work. Her white face hovered over him, hiding a world closed to the emotions. She stared at Neil as if he were a rare creature snared in the depths of the lagoon and now to be relieved of his vital spawn, as precious as the roe harvested from a royal sturgeon.

  Aware that he had been ruthlessly milked, but accepting his real role on Saint-Esprit, Neil walked past the silent tents towards the runway. The ground coral was as blanched as Mrs Saito’s face, and seemed to leach all pigment from the surrounding trees. The camera-towers and bunkers had withdrawn into the forest as the island reincorporated death within itself, intimidated by Dr Harbara’s will to life. A high-pitched whoop sounded from the pathway to the summit, the cry of a bird baffled by the topography of the atoll.

  David Carline strode through the ferns towards Neil, carrying out his ceaseless search for Werner and Wolfgang. Soon after Dr Barbara’s return to her command of the sanctuary, the two German hippies had vanished, abandoning their women to Neil and taking passage to Papeete on a passing yacht. But David was convinced that they were still hiding on Saint-Esprit, waiting to wreak their revenge on the sanctuary.

  Neil watched him wade through the deep ferns, tattered panama hat in one hand, an expensive walking stick in the other, triking the palm trunks as he tried to flush the lurking Germans tram their secret lair. The past year had transformed the shy Bostonian and amateur missionary into the restless constable of Saint-Esprit. He was forever warning off unwelcome yachts men, barely tolerating the Greenpeace and animal rights delega tions who came to pay their respects to Dr Barbara.

  With his long, pale hair pinned to his forehead by a red bandeau, his sleeveless French camouflage fatigues and army boots he resembled an eccentric headmistress playing a weekend war-game. Even his wife had failed to recognize him when she arrived with Captain Garfield, her skin whiter than the seaplane.

  Carline embraced her enthusiastically, eager to enrol her in his onc-nlan militia, and proudly showed her all the achievements of the sanctuary.

  He promised her that he would return to Boston within three months, but Neil was sure that he had no intention of leaving Saint-Esprit as long as Dr Barbara remained. She had confiscated his chromium pistol, but Canine was committed to her, ready to accept whatever vision she chose to impose on the island. All the self-criticism and dissatisfactions of the years before his meeting with Dr Barbara had been banished by his decision to follow her to the end.

  ‘Neil! Your eyes are sharper than mine. Did you see anything?’ He stared at the summit, which the albatross were circling in a cloud of black-tipped wings.

  ‘Someone’s unsettled them.’

  ‘It’s you, David. You’re banging your stick.’

  ‘They like that. It keeps them awake.’ Carline raised the walking stick and waved cheerfully at the birds. ‘You look after the monkey house and I’ll look after the albatross. Keep your eyes peeled for any fires.’

  ‘They’ve gone, David. Wolfgang and Werner left six months ago.’

  ‘Neil…’ Patiently, Carline picked the loose fibres from his Panama. The hat was his sheriff’s badge, which he would loan to Kimo and Neil whenever they greeted visitors. ‘Let me tell you something - the Germans are here. I worked with them in the Congo. They’ll go to ground and hang on as long as it takes.’

  ‘Saint-Esprit isn’t Stalingrad.’

  ‘Well… in some ways it might be, more than you realize.

  The women are coming at us in human waves. So how is Trudi -are the ladies still keeping you busy?’

  ‘She’s expecting - Dr Barbara’s confirmed it. She’s having a girl.’

  ‘Good for you, Neil. You’ll soon have more daughters than! do.

  A girl, eh? just what Barbara ordered. It’s a pity she can’t mount those

  little fillies herself, but I guess that’s one thing we still have to offer.’ He patted Neil’s head in an admiring but kindly way. ‘In my experience daughters can bring a lot of problems…

  ***

  Leaving him to continue his search, Neil walked past Kimo’s hut. The Hawaiian lay asleep, exhausted by the long hours of work and troubled by the stomach ulcer that Dr Barbara had diagnosed. Neil was careful not to disturb him. The darkened tent was hung with independence banners and framed photo graphs of King Kalakaua and Queen Kapiolani, the last Hawaiian monarchs, decorated with lilies and frangipani. Kimo had warned him not to touch the dead blooms, a memory of his early months on Saint-Esprit when he had been the strongest member of th
e expedition.

  Next to Kimo’s tent was a bamboo chalet that he and Neil had helped the Andersons to build. Empty since their departure from Saint-Esprit, it now served as a cr che awaiting the new arrivals.

  �

  While Kimo convalesced from his first heavy haemorrhages he wove a set of basket cribs for Trudi, Inger and Monique. For all his ribald leg-pulling, Kimo was proud of Neil and his swelling paternity, and his huge hands lovingly spliced the raffia that Neil brought from the forest.

  The sight of the cr che, meticulously swept and disinfected every day by Dr

  �

  Barbara, always unnerved Neil. He preferred to remember the happy evenings he had spent with the Andersons in their cheerful den as they brewed tea and set him his algebra and trigonometry exercises. They never mentioned Trudi or Inger, and refused to speak to Monique, disgusted by the way in which Dr Barbara was using Neil in a tasteless experiment. He was sorry when they finally decided that they could no longer remain at Saint-Esprit.

  Hoping to change their minds, he worked with them to repair the sloop, which lay on the beach beside the pier, draped in its scorched rigging, the cabin open to the rain and wind. An uneasy truce had existed after Dr Barbara’s descent from her hill-top exile, but someone had taken revenge on the old couple, suspecting that they had alerted the French gendarmes with a secret radio hidden aboard their little craft.

  As the Andersons slept in their hut, determined to stay close to Neil and perhaps shame him out of his visits to the women’s tents, a fierce blaze lit the night lagoon, rousing everyone from their sleep. Neil rowed the Andersons to the burning sloop and ‘94 helped them to extinguish the fire. They beached the craft beside the pier as the last flames curled around the mast-head. For days clouds of steam rose from the hull, staining the sky over the lagoon.

  Fortunately Major Anderson had completed his makeshift repairs before falling ill with an attack of enteritis, the ‘island fever’ that seemed to appear at will.

  Mrs Anderson openly accused Dr Barbara of poisoning her husband, but Carline and Kimo calmed her and helped to rig the jury sails, floating the scarcely seaworthy sloop into the waves. Major Anderson sat fever-mouthed in the stern, one hand clinging to the tiller, while his wife embraced Neil. He guessed that they had decided not to offer him a place aboard the sloop only because they feared for the craft on the long voyage to Tahiti.