Authors: Will Adams
Of course Emilia and I dare not say anything to her. She is so close to snipping even the slender threads of communication we have that we cannot risk giving her an excuse. One day she will be ready, and she will let us know. At least, that’s what I tell myself. But there are times I fear she will never forgive me. Why should she? My anger with her was unforgivable, and I will never forgive myself. True remorse doesn’t seek forgiveness anyway. It seeks expiation. You made me vow to you, when you told me your secret, that I would never reveal it to Rebecca. But you believed then that I was a good man, capable of self-control. I cannot imagine that you would have wanted it to tear our family apart like this. I cannot imagine that. I want to tell her, Yvette. I want to explain myself to her, to have her at least understand. I need her forgiveness. Please, my darling; you must find some way to let me off my vow, or she’ll be paying for it all her life.
The sins of the father, indeed.
It was too much for Rebecca. She stood and hobbled to the front door. Outside, a warbler was singing its heart out. It took her back vividly to a childhood afternoon, pestering her father with that hackneyed yet fundamental question: nature or nurture? She’d asked such questions
less from curiosity than because it had given Adam such intense pleasure to answer them, and making him happy had still been her greatest joy.
Typically, Adam had answered her question with an experiment. Never tell when you can show. Together with Emilia, they’d purpose-built a huge aviary in the forest, then they’d pillaged eggs from some nearby Thamnormis warbler’s nests, had hand-reared three male chicks. The local adult warblers sang
tew-tew-tew-tee-tew-tee-tew-tew-tee-tee.
Rebecca had known their song well; you couldn’t escape it during the mating season. If their captive warblers sang this, it would show that song was innate. If they remained silent or sang something different, then the song was learned. It had taken many months for her question to be answered, when their captive warblers had finally broken into song, a truncated
tew-tew-tew-tee-tew-tee.
Behaviour was nature and nurture fused.
Outside her window the warbler continued to sing, as though it simply had too much life to contain within its breast. It seemed cruel in retrospect to cage such vibrant and exultant birds for an answer Adam could have told her in a minute. It hadn’t seemed so at the time. The world had grown absurdly sentimental. You couldn’t tread on a cockroach these days without some hippy yelling in your face. And you’d never be permitted to experiment with humans, of course. Yet life sometimes
threw up serendipitous examples: identical twins separated at birth; fostered and adopted children, the offspring of illicit affairs. You could learn a great deal about nature and nurture through cuckold children, who were far more common than many people thought. Genetic sampling showed that perhaps as many as one in ten children born within seemingly stable relationships were in fact the products of infidelity.
One in ten!
Sometimes, when meeting large family groups, she’d wonder which of them might just get a shock from a DNA test. It was not a subject to broach lightly, however. Parentage was so fundamental a component of identity that when it was brought even tentatively into question, people often reacted with anger and extraordinary denial, refusing so much as to consider the possibility that they were the product of an affair, however compelling the evidence.
It never failed to amuse Rebecca, the obtuseness of some people.
Her musings were interrupted by the bawl of an aggrieved infant. She looked towards the path just as Therese arrived carrying Xandra and Michel, honouring her promise to change Rebecca’s bandages.
‘Watch what the hell you’re doing,’ yelled Boris, as water splashed yet again over their bow and on to his hip and lap.
‘Sorry,’ said Davit.
‘What use is sorry? Stop doing it.’
‘I can’t help it,’ shrugged the big man. ‘Not if you want us to make any decent progress.’
Boris glared at him; but Davit refused to back down. It was having the girl dozing in the crook of his arm, no doubt; wanting to impress her. Boris’s irritation with her was increasing all the time; but, unfortunately, so was his desire. She was wearing a knee-length white dress with nothing but knickers underneath, and every time water
splashed over her, the fabric would go a little translucent. He remembered the way she’d spurned his offer, generous though it had been, and his irritation increased another notch. She needed taking in hand, that was the truth of it. She needed to be taught who was boss.
He flapped out his map, checked their position against the low islets that lay like upturned oyster-shells upon the water. Their progress was hopelessly slow. At this rate, they’d never get to Eden by nightfall, or anywhere close. And if they weren’t going to make it there tonight, then they’d have to stop even earlier so that they could make camp before it got too dark. He put away his map again, let his eyes drift back to Claudia. The hemline of her dress had ridden up a little, showing off her thighs. He licked his lower lip.
Their bow plunged into another wave, splashing more water into his lap. He glared furiously at Davit. The big man was looking innocent as an angel, holding up a hand in apology, but Boris knew better.
He was going to enjoy taking Claudia from him. By Christ, he was.
Knox sailed out to a cluster of symbols marked at between thirty and forty metres on Adam’s chart, then
dropped anchor, checked his equipment and suited up. Diving solo on a re-breather was a bad habit to get into, but he’d be fine as long as he stuck to his disciplines, kept checking his equipment and took breaks. He tipped himself backward over the edge, exploded into the sea. The water was cold but visibility was excellent, though it grew darker as he descended. The sea-floor here was rich with brain and stag-horn corals, but there was no way to tell which in particular Adam had been interested in, or why he’d marked his map as he had. He swam in a widening spiral around the
Yvette
before deciding he’d seen enough and beginning his ascent.
The sun was high and warm. He unzipped his wetsuit, the better to enjoy it, opened a bottle of drinking water and sat on deck watching the waves breaking gently yet relentlessly upon the reefs, just as they’d done day after day for centuries now; for millennia.
The
Winterton
had spent three days upon these reefs before it had broken up.
Three days.
What a bizarre time that must have been for crew and passengers alike, praying for a berth on one of the few lifeboats that had plied back and forth to the shore, or with the native fishermen who’d come out to help, as their ship slowly fell apart beneath them. They’d tried to save it, of course; their immediate response to collision, indeed, had been
to throw everything overboard to lighten it and so float it off the reef.
He sat forward a little. It was a sailor’s first instinct, when they’d run their ship aground, to try to refloat it. Was that what had happened to the Chinese? He closed his eyes, the better to picture that leviathan on a shortcut from the Cape crunching its keel upon this reef. He could only imagine the chaos and terror. Giving orders on a ship that big was hard at the best of times, but infinitely harder in the aftermath of a reef-strike, particularly if it had happened—as they mostly had—at night or during a storm. But deckhands knew the drill even in the absence of command: toss overboard anything and everything you can to lighten the ship and make it easier to refloat. The most obvious things to jettison would have been its anchors and cannons, the very things they’d found at Cheung’s site. And if a cargo hold had been torn open, it would explain the pottery and other artefacts too.
Chinese ships had been fitted with watertight bulkheads to survive moderate hull damage. But even once they’d refloated themselves, they’d still have been stuck outside the reef, badly damaged and shipping water fast, shrouded in darkness or buffeted by a storm, facing a desperate race to find a pass before they sank.
A pass just like the one right here.
Rebecca went across to greet Therese. Michel smiled up at her as she took him in her arms, and his smile did strange things to her heart. They walked together through to the clinic, laid the infants down in matching wooden cots. ‘I don’t suppose you have medical records for Adam and Emilia?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ said Therese. ‘What for?’
‘The police found some blood on the boat. They want to see if it belongs to Adam or Emilia.’
Therese gave her a dismayed look, but she flipped through a drawer of handwritten cards without a word, jotted down the information for Rebecca. ‘Okay,’ she said, gesturing at the examination table. ‘Now show me what your boyfriend do.’
Rebecca entrusted herself to Therese’s care without a qualm. Many Malagasy struggled with Western medicine, for it was widely believed that much sickness was caused by
gris-gris;
malevolent, voodoo-like spells and curses that could only be cured by countervailing magic. But Therese had grasped the principles from the first, and had only grown more knowledgeable, intuitive and energetic with the years. ‘You do this on coral?’ she murmured, as she saw the extent of Rebecca’s injuries. ‘You away too long if you forget coral is dangerous.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why you away so long? Why you cruel to your papa and sister like this? You like to hurt your fambly and frens maybe?’
‘I never had time to come back.’
Therese snorted. ‘You hab time now, all right. Too late now. You break your papa’s heart, you know. First Mama, then you. Eb’ryone he lub go away.’ She removed the dressings on Rebecca’s palms, examined the multicoloured mess beneath. But she nodded in approval. ‘Your boyfriend’s a good nurse,’ she said. ‘Where he learn to nurse like this?’
‘He has some quite bad burns,’ replied Rebecca. ‘Maybe he learned from doing his own dressings.’
‘Burns?’ frowned Therese, taken aback. ‘Where?’
‘On his shoulders and back. Why?’
‘No reason. No reason.’
Rebecca wasn’t convinced, but she let it go, watched Therese clean her wounds, apply more antiseptic cream and iodine, dress her with fresh bandages. ‘I come back tomorrow, yes?’ she said, when she was done.
‘Not tomorrow,’ said Rebecca. ‘I’ll be away. The day after.’
Therese pulled a scolding face, but evidently knew Rebecca too well to argue. They picked up the infants again, and Rebecca walked her out, entrusting Michel once more to her care before returning to her father’s desk and his letter to Yvette.
Enough melancholy. Time for my round-up of gossip. Pierre is our most regular guest, of course, still as bemused by life and by his own nature as ever. He sits there with one eyebrow cocked as things happen around him. He ordered colour leaflets from a print shop in Tulear and now refuses to pay, if you please, because two of the pictures are slightly fuzzy! I know I should disapprove of him more, but he’s a child and entertaining company and it’s difficult to hold him responsible for the messes he creates.
Therese asks me to remember her to you. She has had her child now, too, of course, christened Xandra Yvette after you. I pray every night that this one lives. She is wonderful, Therese, completely selfless. She looks after Michel whenever Emilia and I take out the boat. And she still won’t take payment for it, or her work at the clinic, though Pierre comes around afterwards and asks for it on her behalf.
I head into Tulear more than pleases me. I would stay at Eden always if I could. I am like that tree-frog who cannot stand the croaking of its own species. Our friend Mustafa Habib inevitably finds me within minutes. His intelligence system is second to none. He even dragged me and Emilia to lunch at his wretched palazzo, then spent all day pestering me to let him invest in Eden, so that Ahdaf might
work for such a worthy venture! I keep telling him that he is talking to the wrong person, but I don’t think he believes me.
The letter ran on for three more pages, chronicling the activities of people she didn’t know or barely remembered. When Rebecca had finished, she read others in the folder, one for each anniversary of Yvette’s death. Fifteen years on, Adam’s adoration of his late wife was extraordinary and moving. As a specialist in behaviour, it was almost an accepted truth for Rebecca that love was merely an adaptation designed to bind together a male and female long enough for them to procreate and rear. As her father’s daughter, however, it was difficult to sustain such belief. There’s a species of anglerfish in which males physically embed themselves in the females, becoming entirely dependent upon them for nutrition, survival and procreation. Adam had sometimes seemed like that to her, so completely had he subsumed himself and his former career into his marriage.
As young girls, Rebecca and Emilia had pestered their parents endlessly for the story of how they met and fell in love. Adam had been a typical bachelor professor, scoffing at the idea of marriage; but then he’d come filming in Madagascar, and had found himself in need of a translator for his south-western leg. Yvette had been recommended; she’d taught languages in Tulear’s international school. The
moment Adam had set eyes on her, he’d known. He’d found talking to her so difficult, she’d thought him mentally afflicted (she’d taken his producer aside to ask why an organisation as respected and wealthy as the BBC would employ an idiot as their presenter). He hadn’t been able to sleep or eat. He’d driven his crew crazy with his mistakes. Within four days he’d asked her to marry him. She’d had a fit of the giggles, had pointed out justly that he was a funny-looking man (they’d all laughed uproariously every time he’d come to this bit; it had become their catchphrase whenever some unfortunate had turned up at the camp) and anyway she’d never leave Madagascar. Adam had returned lovesick to England, where he’d waited to get over her, as all his knowledge of the world had assured him that he would. But time had passed and his condition had only worsened. Everything had drained of meaning. Success and fame had become irrelevant. He’d fallen seriously ill. In the end, he’d given in. He’d resigned his chair, chucked in his TV career, and flown back out.