On the horizon where previously only the sky interrupted the sea everyone could see the growing patch that was the royal ship. Hardly an eye was taken from it. Conway said to Pollet: 'Christ, I hope it's not old MacAndrews in The Baffin Bay. They'll lynch him.'
'I had thought of that,' said Pollet. 'But he's not due until tomorrow. He has never been early yet.'
Davies suddenly thought: 'Tomorrow. And the next day I will be going from these strange people and this strange place. Away. Far down to Sydney and to Trellis and Jones of Circular Quay, and then home, really home, across the world to Newport. If Conway keeps his promise.'
It was not The Baffin Bay. The ship that appeared was too high out of the water, too noble, too fast. It was clear enough now, steaming far out, three or four miles away, approaching the island initially, but then, turning in her course and heading north.
'Good God,' muttered Sir William to Cooper. 'Is that the closest they're coming? I can hardly see the damn thing.'
Cooper said: 'I suppose they want her to keep well away in case of trouble, sir. Look, she's going off again. I'm afraid that is all we shall see.'
I suppose we had better stand,' suggested Sir William wearily to M. Martin. The two governors stood, facing out to where the ship remained a miniature on the huge shining sea. The crowd were realizing that the vessel was going away again, that she would come no nearer to their view. A muttering of disappointment moved across the beach. Sir William looked at Cooper. 'The National Anthem,' he breathed. The ADC signalled the conductor of the police band and his baton flicked. The band began to hump out 'God Save the Queen' and the people stopped muttering, stood to attention on the searing sand, and sang loudly, the minor breeze from the sea carrying their voices high and wide, back over their own island.
The force of it, the disappointment, and the faithful singing of the people moved Sir William to elderly tears. The fine sentiments of the anthem sounded loud and the yacht to which they addressed them was drawing away pathetically to become once more a smudge on the sun‑heavy sea. The islanders sang every verse, for every verse was always sung in the Apostles, at school, after public gatherings, after the monthly cinema show. At the end, when the vessel was hard away north, dipping below the horizon again, the Governor called for three loyal cheers and all the people of the hot, neglected, shoddy, little place, cheered loyally and loudly. Then. when there was not even a smudge to see, everybody turned and walked quietly away from The Love Beach and back to their small town and their smaller villages.
Seventeen
The beach, when the people had wandered away, was as dead as a desert. All the day's brightest flowers, in their garlands and vivid strings, were feeling the afternoon sun. Some had been pulled and trampled by the crowd. The invasion barges looked more gaunt than before and rubbish ‑sheets and scraps of paper and palm leaf which had been used for wrapping ‑ moved around the beach slowly in ritual procession with the slight breeze. The chapel they had made for the Unknown Soldier squatted shabby and sorry on the sand.
'Just like Barry Island after an August day,' observed Davies. 'Paper and rubbish all over, running along with the wind. People are the same everywhere, I suppose. They will leave their rubbish about.'
He and Bird were sitting against the remote and most rusted of the landing barges, alone on The Love Beach, viewing its desolation. 'There's one difference,' Davies went on. 'There's no newspaper here. On Barry Island it's nearly all newspaper bits they leave. But there's none here to drop.'
Bird said: 'This island you always speak of. How far from the shore is it?'
He grinned: 'It's not from the shore at all, it's joined on to the shore. There's a road and a railway.'
'Then it's not an island.' She said it petulantly, as though it mattered. 'It's a cheat.' She got up and began to walk away from him, down the strand towards the iron chapel at the far end. He followed her with his eyes. He got to his feet and walked miserably after her, his hands in his pockets.
'They just call it an island,' he grumbled. 'There's nothing dishonest about that. It was once, I expect, but they filled in the channel.'
'It's a cheat,' she repeated. 'To say you are one thing and really you are another.'
'Sometimes you can't help it,' he said, taking her hand. 'Sometimes the channel is filled in first. I don't suppose poor old Barry Island had any say in it.'
'How sad it was today,' she said suddenly. She had stopped and looked out to the wide, vacant sea. 'It was a shame Her Majesty could not come here to the islands.'
'Yes,' he dropped his head. 'It was a damned shame. All those people.'
She turned quietly and they wound into each other's arms, loosely at first, and then closer and tighter. He could feel her gentle giving body under the material of her dress. The smell of her, the full smell of a young girl of the islands no matter what her race, came to him. He lowered his face to hers and they pressed their cheeks flat and fiercely together and then kissed while the debris of the day drifted around their feet. It was late afternoon now and the stubby shadows of the invasion barges were enlarging across the sand.
'Love me here, Davies,' she said.
'I did the first time, 'he replied.
'And this is the last.'
'There's tonight,' he said with male thoughtlessness. 'The Baffin Bay won't be in until tomorrow.'
She said nothing. She did not want to dispute with him. Turning gracefully in his hold she dropped on to the beach and pulled him carefully down with her. They undressed each other as they had always done. They were like children when they were naked. She put her small hands down to his lower valley and held him cupped there. Davies kissed her lovely, sorry face and her wet eyes, her cheeks, her neck, and the bursting pink nipples of her pale breasts. He felt himself beginning to run into her lowered hands. They lay softly together then and he went to her, knowing her now after all these days, but still finding her new and strange.
Paper and bits of rubbish piled against them as they made love. Davies pushed it away at first, but, once when they rested, for they always made love for a long time before ending it, she laughed sweetly through her tears. 'It is covering us up, this garbage,' she said. 'It is ashamed of us being here like this. It is like the leaves covering the children in the fairy story.'
They continued. His hands held her small bottom like a loving cup, she stroked the triangles of his shoulder blades and sometimes, when they lay quietly again, took small handfuls of sand and sprinkled them playfully on the crease of his backside. They were near the fringe of the sea, coming in its idle run from the warm lagoon. The fingers of water kept reaching out towards them, capturing on the way some of the day's rubbish, floating it away, and then, in one ambitious grab, taking away Davies's shirt with it. They did not notice.
'Oh, Davies darling,' she whispered. 'Yes, Bird.'
'I want to converse.'
'Aren't your pieces working?' he asked close to her ear. 'They are afraid to work. Because this is the last time.'
'What would you like to talk about.'
'About today.'
'What a shame today was, Bird.' 'All through. From dawn.'
'Such disappointment.'
'Such sadness. The children...'
'You will get a letter from your mother.' 'When The Baffin Bay arrives.'
'Perhaps it will be late.'
'It will come some time.'
'This is not working, Bird.' 'To talk like this? No.'
'Why are you looking away, darling?'
'I am watching your shirt floating away on the sea.'
Davies turned and saw the white shirt moving away like an ice floe. He laughed and remained very full inside her.
'Oh, Davies, that was strange,' she said. 'What was strange?'
'When you laughed. It helped me. I felt.'
'When I laugh. Just that?'
'Yes, today perhaps I need to laugh to deceive myself.'
'Well, we can't just laugh. Just like that. Tell jokes.'
<
br /> 'I can laugh,' she said. She arched herself back and laughed, laughter full of tears. He went with her, laughing and crying at once, their bodies vibrating under the emotion, reaching a convulsive pitch where suddenly her inside bubbled and so did he and they flooded together, laughing and weeping and rolling on the little sand hills of The Love Beach.
They lay sorry and quiet after it was finished. Then he leaned his elbow into the sand and looked out over the lagoon. 'I'd better get my shirt, then,' he said. She started up. 'No, Davies, I will swim for it.'
He let her. He lay on his side on the sand and watched her, slim and naked, walk to the sand's edge and then run and dive into the brilliant green. She went easily through the basin, her brown body writhing under the skin of the water, her hair s!ow trailing. Reaching the shirt, now low in the sea, she caught it and returned with it, coming again to the beach with it hanging from her hand like a caught fish. The water ran down the channels of her fresh body, from all her grooves, and she blinked it from her eyes, and walked towards him. She stood over him and handed down his wet shirt. Davies looked up from the beach, getting a new view of her, the fine grained brown of her legs, the arrowhead and wet hair at her Join, then the flattened stomach, the white cones beneath her breasts, the slim stem of her neck and her serious deep expression. on him. The water still ran from her like small, silver express trains.
She dropped beside him and pressed his nose, his forehead, his thick hair to her nipples. 'You cannot go,' she said. 'Davies darling, you cannot.'
He pushed his face into the lumps of firm flesh. 'I'm going,' he said. 'I can't stay here. I'm going when the boat arrives.'
She sobbed against him now. 'I know all you hold dear,' she said. 'And I know they are far away. But I have never asked for anything in all my life. Now I am asking for you to stay. I love you.'
He felt guilty and sick. His hand went to her face and he pushed her tears away. 'I've thought for hours and days and weeks about this,' he said simply. 'Lying in your bed I have fought with it. And I've decided I must go.'
She stood up from him and walked to the lagoon's edge again staring at some puzzled fish, orange fish, darting undecided this way and that. She turned to him quietly.
'Go then,' she said. 'Go on, go away.'
He felt himself grow cold inside. Instinctively he knew that this was the moment to leave her, while she was angry, while she was giving him the margin. the excuse. He put on his trousers and picked up his shoes and his wet shirt. 'I will,' he answered evenly. ~I'm going.' He walked away towards the path that led to the village and then to the town.
'Go!' she suddenly screamed after him. 'Get away! We don't want you here!' He did not turn around. He walked on, his eyes dry, but ready to burst, fixed on the aching sand. Still naked she began to pursue him like a woodland wraith, darting in and out of the landing barges, calling after him, suddenly appearing above his head on the metal deck of one barge, then peeping madly around the corner of another, harrying him, taunting him.
'Go away. Go away you little married man! Go back to where you belong.'
Davies squeezed his eyes together and felt the squirt of the tears. Once he swung around on her but he could say nothing, so turned again and continued with his trudging walk up the beach. 'Married man!' she cried again. 'Go home to your house.' From shadow to shadow she darted. from corroding hull to rusty deck, pushing her face through skeins of flowers which she herself had placed there that morning.
'Go! Go! Go!' she cried after him. Then she repeated the call, but now she had disintegrated into sobs. He looked around again and she was lying face down on the sand.
Davies hesitated, went back to her and helped her up.
She looked at him with her eyes sore with her tears and knew that he had not come back to her because he had changed his mind. He had not. She shuddered but calmed herself. He retraced his walk and picked up her clothes. He gave them to her and she dressed without looking at him. He fastened the second button of her dress, far down the back of her neck because she could never reach it. She said 'Thank you' quietly, and began to walk up the beach with him. They walked apart.
When they were near the trees a long hollow hoot came from out beyond the reef. They turned together.
'The Baffin Bay,' said Bird. 'For the first time she is early.'
They spent the night moving about her big bed, wandering in bitter dreams, waking each other at times to make melancholy love. It was a hot night with a great sickly moon and no breeze. Davies woke again when it was early daylight and Bird still slept. His eyes burned sorely and his body felt like a shell. He left her sleeping and went to the hotel to pick up his suitcase. He wanted to get aboard The Baftin Bay with his belongings, to commit himself to the return voyage, before he had to look into her eyes again. That much done he felt he could carry through the thing that he had to do. He could, somehow, if he were resolute. leave her, and get away from the feeling of these islands. He could go back to Newport where it was cool and where the moon looked round and crisp over the hard streets, not so bursting full and rotten ripe as it had been all night.
It was the first grey light of the new day. The sun, the red show‑off, the great daily egoist of the islands, had not yet made its flying entrance from the lower part of the ocean. But its forerunner colours were already squeezing along the eastern sea line. Soon it would be hot again in the Apostles.
Davies told Seamus at the hotel that he would be back later to say goodbye to everyone. That he was just taking his things to The Baffin Bay early to stow them aboard. Seamus seemed to understand his motives. 'Get out at the first chance, me boy,' he said. 'Don't wait for a single minute or the minute will turn into years before you know it.' Davies smiled wryly at him and humped his suitcase into the grey street. The old Chinese shopkeeper across the road was squatting in his doorway, shaking his head at nothing, his unused picture of Mao and his patriotic flag fixed over his door. He made no sign that he had ever seen Davies in his life. A few other people were moving about, some men on bicycles came into the town from the village, riding in silhouette against the peach sunrise and the turquoise sea, flicking against the bowing columns made by the lines of tall palms along the waterfront.
Davies had the feeling that it was the beginning to a coloured film, the prelude before the titles, and that he had seen it many times before. Even the shuddering noise of the rolling shutters of the shops by the quay, flying up for the day's trading, were familiar to the split second, and along the street the now impotent flashes of Mr Livesley's neon sign blinked in the new daylight.
He could see the red roof of Mrs Flagg's bungalow, the thick green hem of trees around the Governor's house on the headland across the harbour, the trailing, sweet musky flowers along the harbour road, the Melanesian women setting out their fruit baskets on the grass by the Condominium office, the Union Jack and the Tricolour nudged by a minute breeze on the roof of the office, and the untiring waves rolling and spilling over the unwearing reef beyond the lagoon. He felt acutely aware of everything about the place, the smells, the feel of the warming air on his body, the creaking morning noises, the voices of the fruit women, the dry squeaks of the bicycles, dogs, and cockerels sounding dutifully. He felt as though he had been there for one hundred years.
Before he reached the quay Conway caught him up, a cheerfully hurrying Conway, his heavy suitcase easily on his shoulder. 'Clearing out, eh, sport,' he said. 'Good idea too. Sometimes I didn't think you'd make it. Where's Bird?'
'Sleeping,' said Davies.
'Mine too. Better than weeping, I say. Hah, there she is, the old Baffin Bay. Now don't she look great?'
'Seems like ages,' said Davies. They did not stop but carried on with their jogging trot towards the jetty and the petrol‑coloured water. The Baffin Bay was a hundred yards offshore and Abe's boat with a load of general merchandise was pushing back towards the land. They reached the steps just as he coaxed it into the side. He came up the steps to them.
'Yo
u're early,' he said, studying their expressions and their suitcases.
'We thought we'd get our stuff aboard,' grunted Conway. Then he added half apologetically: 'While it's cool.'
'I mean you're about six weeks early,' said Abe. 'That thing won't be out of this harbour until then. Pistons are all buggered up. Old Rice has been warning the skipper every voyage for the last ten years and yesterday did it.'
A strange firm hand seemed to touch Davies. He stared at Abe then glanced at Conway. The Australian was leaning forward, his tan gone a quick yellow. 'Don't joke, Abe,' he said. 'She's sailing, isn't she?'
Abe laughed at his disbelief. 'No joke,' he said. 'The pistons are all buggered up. I told you, MacAndrews tried to get here a day early ‑ so he could see the Queen.'
'See the Queen?' said Conway incredulously.
Abe looked as though it were a personal affront. 'Sure,' he jabbed his finger at Conway. 'He's entitled to see the Queen as much as anybody.'
'And he wrecked the engine trying to get here.' Conway muttered the words out, sat on his suitcase staring hatefully at The Baffin Bay. MacAndrews, Mrs MacAndrews, the engineer Rice, could be seen arguing on deck. Rice had his hands spread out.
'Rice said it was the final insult to the machinery,' said Abe.
Davies said carefully: 'Can't they mend it?'
Abe snorted: 'Anywhere else it would be a big job,' he said. 'Here it's bloody nigh an impossibility. It will take six weeks ‑ and that's the minimum.'
'No other boats coming?' asked Davies.
'There's the copra collection ship,' said Abe. 'But she's still around the Solomons somewhere. She's not due till July. She may not come at all when she finds that a third of the collection is all burned up and sunk.' He looked spitefully at Conway. 'Anyway, she'll only go to Noumea from here, so you might as well wait until this old thing is repaired.'
The Love Beach Page 27
