Pacific

by Judy Nunn

  ‘You’ll have a whole five days off, Sam,’ he said, ‘come and watch the POW stuff.’

  It was lunchtime and they were welcoming the new members of the cast with a barbecue lunch by the pool, although clouds were gathering and any minute they’d have to run for cover.

  ‘I’d like to, Brett,’ she hedged as gracefully as she could. ‘I’ll see how I go after we shoot the montage.’

  Brett cast daggers in Jason Thackeray’s direction. Jason had arrived an hour ago and was chatting to Nick by the barbecue, but Brett had noticed him in earlier conversation with Sam. Something had happened, he thought.

  ‘Yeah, well don’t put yourself out, will you?’ he muttered, and he left to join his new buddies who were all suitably impressed to be working with a Hollywood star.

  Sam had been unable to disguise her pleasure when Jason had arrived, although she’d kept her greeting casual. She hadn’t seen him since the night before last, and the kiss, which she’d found so distracting.

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ she’d said.

  ‘Fancy a drive after lunch?’ His response had been equally casual.

  ‘Great. Will I bring my bathers?’

  ‘Why not?’ A look up at the threatening clouds. ‘You like swimming in the rain.’

  There was nothing at all different in his manner, she noted, not that she’d expected there would be, but she was beginning to think she’d imagined the kiss.

  ‘Why didn’t you come out to location yesterday?’ She couldn’t help asking, although it was none of her business.

  He didn’t mind. ‘I visited some friends. We talked a lot like we always do. I didn’t get back until late, everyone had gone to bed. Did you have a good night?’

  ‘Yep,’ she nodded brightly, ‘had a great night.’

  There was a moment’s pause and she hoped he wasn’t awaiting an account of the evening’s events. She’d feel like an idiot saying her ‘great night’ was a hot shower and room service.

  But he wasn’t expecting her to say anything at all. ‘My friends are very dear to me,’ he said. ‘They’re the reason I come back to Port Vila every year. They were dear to Mamma Jane too, and I thought, perhaps, you might like to meet them.’

  Friends of Jane Thackeray’s! Did he need to ask? ‘Is that where we’re going on the drive?’ she asked eagerly.

  ‘No, I’d prefer to give them a bit more warning. They’ll want to ask us to lunch.’

  ‘I’ve got five whole days off soon.’

  ‘Good. We’ll make it a date then, shall we?’ And he’d drifted off to chat to Nick.

  Poor Brett, Sam now thought as she watched him at the bar regaling his new friends with Hollywood stories, he thought it was disloyal of her not to want to come to Quoin Hill. And possibly it was. But her loyalties lay in a different direction. She was about to meet people who had been dear to Jane Thackeray. People with a link to the past. Yesteryear was beckoning, and Sam was unable to resist. She didn’t dwell on the fact that she was also looking forward to Jason’s company.

  They left for their drive not long after the barbecue, whilst the others were packing for the trip to Quoin Hill. It was Sam’s idea.

  ‘Hate to be pushy,’ she said, ‘but why don’t we go now?’ She didn’t want Brett to see her leaving with Jason – she could live without the withering looks.

  ‘Sure.’

  She’d give her bathers a miss, she decided, it really wasn’t a good day for a swim, and she met him at the car with her wet-weather Drizabone.

  ‘Good thinking,’ he grinned, his own anorak slung over his shoulder as he waited for her.

  The shower that had threatened during lunch had broken and been brief, but the wind was picking up now, and darker clouds were rolling in.

  ‘Looks like bad weather,’ she said.

  ‘It’s always unpredictable this time of year,’ he replied. ‘If you try to wait for the right moment during the monsoon season, you could be hanging around for days. Oh,’ it suddenly occurred to him, ‘would you rather not go? You’re quite right, there might be a storm.’

  ‘A storm! Hell yes, all the more reason.’

  ‘Good. Tamanu’s wonderful in a storm.’

  Jason turned the car around and they headed off in the opposite direction to the one Sam was used to, south-east, away from Port Vila and the area of Mele Bay which she’d come to know so well.

  ‘Where did you say we’re going?’

  ‘Tamanu Beach Club. A little resort. It’s a pity we’ve had lunch, the food there’s excellent.’

  She laughed. ‘Don’t you think about anything else?’ For someone so lean and fit, Jason seemed obsessed with eating.

  He took her remark quite seriously. ‘I love good food,’ he said. ‘Quite frankly I’d rather not eat at all if the food isn’t good. It’s such a wonderful thing to share, don’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ Sam hadn’t really analysed the social aspect of eating, she just ate when she was hungry, preferably a large steak. Pity they were going to a resort, she thought, she’d have liked to have seen a different aspect of the island.

  The rain held off as they drove, but the clouds continued to gather and the sky looked ominous.

  ‘Simon’s been very lucky over the past two months,’ Jason remarked, ‘but his luck could be about to run out.’

  ‘Oh no it’s not, it’s all going his way.’ She smiled in response to his querying look. ‘Simon’s hoping the weather will be ghastly. He wants the Japanese POW camp to be a quagmire of muck. If there’d been big storms earlier, he would have altered the schedule and shot the POW stuff then.’

  ‘How adaptable of him.’

  ‘That’s Simon, he’s a genius.’

  Tamanu Beach Club was nothing like she’d expected. It was like nothing she’d seen before in her life, and Jason smiled at her astonishment, having registered her reaction when he’d mentioned the word ‘resort’.

  They’d left the road and driven along a track to a remote part of the island’s shore where, scattered amongst the hardy scrub, on a coastline of extraordinary beauty, five small cottages sat. Their tiny verandahs looked out across the sand to where low surf rolled over reefs onto a broad, white coral beach. Three of the cottages were constructed of wood, brightly painted and attractive, the other two were made entirely of coral. The small pieces of uncut coral, in their natural state of varying shapes and sizes, were cemented together, and the result was ornate and unbelievably pretty. Pandanus trees leaned in the wind, and strung between two swayed a hammock. On a grassy mound stood a restaurant, wooden-roofed and open to the elements. Tropical flowers adorned its white-clothed tables and a menu board leaned against a wooden post.

  ‘I’ve stepped into a picture book,’ Sam said. ‘This isn’t real, it can’t be.’

  ‘I thought you’d like it.’

  ‘Understatement of the year!’

  He introduced her to his friends who ran the private resort, a middle-aged Dutch couple to whom Sam took an instant liking. Jan was a burly man with twinkling eyes and a beguiling smile; his vivacious wife, Gerry, a strikingly attractive woman of Dutch-Indonesian descent.

  Gerry was appalled that Jason hadn’t brought Sam to Tamanu to dine. ‘You have eaten?’ she said with mock horror, although it was three o’clock in the afternoon, and hardly surprising. ‘Then you will stay for dinner of course.’ She clasped Sam’s hand as though they’d been lifelong friends. ‘And you must stay for the night, it is the off season, we have very few guests, and then you must have eggs benedict in the morning.’

  Sam shared a smile with Jason; he was obviously not the only one to whom food and conviviality were inextricably linked.

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t,’ Jason apologised. ‘Sam has a very early call in the morning.’

  ‘A call?’ Gerry still maintained her hold on Sam’s hand, and in her brown eyes was a look of humorous bewilderment. ‘What is this call?’

  ‘It’s movie speak,’ Sam said, finding
the woman utterly engaging.

  Jason explained that Sam was playing the lead in the film that was being shot in Port Vila, and Gerry was most impressed.

  ‘You are a movie star! All the more reason for you to stay at Tamanu. Tamanu is the perfect place for movie stars, no-one around to give you all that hassle. Isn’t this right, Jan?’

  Jan dutifully nodded agreement and gave Sam a wink, which said Gerry was being Gerry, and Sam thought what a wonderful relationship they appeared to have.

  ‘Next time, I promise,’ Jason said reassuringly. ‘For the moment I’ve just brought Sam out to show her around,’ and before Gerry could get another word in, he added, ‘and now we’re going for a walk.’

  They left Jan and Gerry unfurling the plastic walls of the restaurant in preparation for the storm that was threatening, and, donning their wet-weather gear, they walked up the coast away from the beach club.

  The sand soon turned to rocky reef right up to the shoreline, and they left the beach to wander along the well-worn track that wound through the coastal grass and shrubs. After ten minutes or so, they came to a tiny sandy inlet that led into a deep, wide well amongst the rocks, the surf breaking twenty metres beyond, a perfect natural swimming pool.

  ‘I used to come here with my parents when I was a child,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the clearest memories I have of the times we shared.’

  They sat on the patch of beach, Sam taking off her sandals and digging her feet into the coarse sand.

  ‘There were no buildings out here at all then, and the road was even worse than it is now, but Dad always indulged us. My mother loved swimming here too,’ he added. ‘She was like you, an absolute dolphin in the water.’ He smiled, breaking off midway through his reminiscence, a little self-conscious. ‘You should have brought your costume despite the weather,’ he said, ‘it’s the ideal place for a swim.’

  But Sam wasn’t interested in swimming. She was intrigued. It was the first time he’d spoken intimately of his parents. He’d mentioned them that night at Vila Chaumieres, which now seemed so long ago, but only briefly. He’d said that his father had died in an accident and that his mother had left not long afterwards, and then he’d continued with the story of Mamma Jane.

  ‘Tell me about them,’ she said, hugging her knees to her chest and leaning forward expectantly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your parents.’

  He hesitated. Did she really want to know? She’d only ever been interested in his grandmother, and how the story of Mamma Jane related to Sarah Blackston. But huddled there in the oilskin coat that seemed far too big, eyes wide, fair hair blowing untidily in the breeze, she looked engagingly childlike, and he found her eagerness gratifying. It was he whom she now wanted to know about, and the thought pleased him.

  ‘I worshipped my father,’ he said. ‘He was a man of principle, everyone respected him, but what I remember most was the fun that we had. To everyone around him, Ron Thackeray was strong, he was a leader, they listened to his opinions, but to me he was like a big kid, full of energy. God, I loved him.’ He smiled at his memories as he looked out to sea.

  ‘And your mother?’ Sam asked after a moment’s pause.

  ‘I barely knew her really. Oh I wanted to, but she didn’t seem to have much time for me. All of her life was focussed on my father. I suppose she must have loved him very much.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, she disappeared three months after he died. She didn’t say goodbye, and I never saw her again.’

  How extraordinary, Sam thought, for a woman to abandon her child like that. ‘Weren’t you angry?’

  ‘I suppose so, but I think Mamma Jane knew it was going to happen. Not that she ever told me she did, but she prepared me for it. I realised that a long time later.’

  ‘Prepared you? How?’

  ‘My mother told me she was going away for a while, I remember it quite clearly.’ He looked out to sea again as he recalled the day, still vivid in his mind. ‘She hugged me and said all the right things, that I was to be a good boy for Mamma Jane while she was gone. I believed she’d come back. There was no reason not to. Then Mamma Jane took me on a month’s trip to Brisbane and the Gold Coast. I’d never been away from the islands, so it was pretty exciting. I was to go to boarding school in Brisbane when I was twelve, just like my dad had, so she was probably preparing me for that. And she was certainly trying to distract me. I missed my father terribly. It helped, I must say. We had a wonderful time together.

  ‘But when we came home, just before the independence celebrations, my mother was still gone. I was amazed that she wasn’t going to be there for the celebrations. Even at that age I knew it was going to be the biggest thing that had ever happened on the island. “Mami’s going to miss the party,” I said to Mamma Jane. That was all I could think about,’ he gave an ironic smile, ‘poor Mami, not getting to see the fireworks and everything, typical kid. And that’s when Mamma Jane told me. I remember she was quite brutal. “Your mother’s never coming back, Jason, and you have to get used to it,” those were her exact words.’

  ‘How awful,’ Sam breathed.

  ‘Not really, she didn’t want me to live with false expectations.’ Jason grinned. ‘I told you she was tough. I asked if my mother was dead and she said no. She didn’t offer any explanation, but she said it was just us now, that we’d have to look after each other. “We’re a team, you and me,” she said. She’d said the very same thing to me soon after Dad’s death, so I think she knew right from the start that my mother would leave.’

  Sam was enthralled, but one thing remained a mystery, and she felt compelled to ask. ‘When you told me about Wolf Baker and your grandmother, you said that Wolf visited her because he’d heard about your father’s death.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But you never said how your father died.’ She hoped she wasn’t being presumptuous, but he was speaking so openly.

  Jason didn’t find the query presumptuous, but he paused for a moment’s consideration before answering. Would he tell her the truth? Yes, he decided.

  ‘It was a car accident. At least that’s what they said. Late at night, he drove off the road, into a tree. A broken neck. His death was instant. I found out later that they said he was drunk, which was strange because according to Mamma Jane, my father rarely drank. But there was grog in the car, and all over him evidently, so they said it was an accidental death. That’s how it was recorded anyway.’

  ‘They said?’

  ‘Yes, “they”. Mamma Jane told me the truth fourteen years later, not long before she died. It wasn’t an accident at all: my father was murdered.’

  ‘Murdered?’ Sam was shocked. ‘Murdered, good God, why? I mean, who? How do you know?’

  As if to mirror the drama of Jason’s story, the day had turned bleak, and the storm was about to break.

  ‘I think we should be heading back,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ She’d gone too far, she thought, she’d badgered him with questions and he found her intrusive. ‘I didn’t mean to pry, really I didn’t. I’m terribly sorry, it’s just that you were talking so …’

  Her instant concern was guileless and charming, he thought. ‘You’re not prying at all,’ he laughed, ‘I’m enjoying myself, I’m indulging in the past.’ He was, he realised. He’d never spoken to anyone as he was now speaking to Sam. ‘But the storm’s going to break any minute, we’ll get drenched.’

  ‘Bugger the storm, I want to get drenched.’

  ‘You’ll catch pneumonia and Simon Scanlon will kill me.’

  ‘You don’t catch pneumonia when you’re wearing a Drizabone, that’s what they’re for. Go on, Jason.’

  But he grabbed her hand and hauled her to her feet instead, and just as he did, a distant bolt of lightning streaked the horizon, flaring across the blackening clouds that rolled overhead.

  ‘Quick! Put your sandals on.’

  She did as she was told and together they started sprinting back along the track,
Sam still protesting.

  ‘I don’t mind getting wet, I want to hear what happened.’

  ‘You won’t be able to hear a thing in a minute.’

  He was right. They were fifty metres down the track when the storm broke in all its tropical magnificence, swift and ferocious.

  They stopped running. What was the point? Beneath their protective clothing, their chests and backs were dry, but the rest of them was drenched.

  ‘It’s wonderful!’ Sam yelled above the thunder’s roar and the crack of the lightning that so brilliantly illuminated the now black sea. She hadn’t bothered with the hood of her Drizabone, and she raised her face to the pouring rain.

  Jason again grabbed her hand. ‘Yes, yes, it’s wonderful,’ he said, ‘come on now, hurry up.’

  Fifteen minutes later, back at the beach resort, they dried off, Gerry insisting upon lending them a pair of tracksuit pants each, Jan’s swimming on Jason’s slim frame quite ridiculously. They drank steaming mugs of coffee and then they left, promising faithfully to return after the two days’ filming.

  On the slow drive home, over the rhythmic beat of the windscreen wipers, Sam was determined to pick up where they’d left off.

  ‘So what happened?’ she asked. ‘With your father?’

  He didn’t regret telling her, but how could he put it succinctly? he wondered. There was someone else who could tell it all so much better. But he would give her the background, he decided. The background that he’d heard from Mamma Jane.

  ‘My father inherited my grandmother’s love of the islanders,’ he said. ‘Well, like Mamma Jane, he was quite simply one of them. He spoke their language, not just Bislama, but several dialects, and he married an islander. Although not from Melanesia,’ he added, ‘my mother was half Polynesian.’

  Sam was surprised. He hadn’t told her that before, but it certainly explained his intriguing looks.

  ‘The local authorities, both the French and the English, didn’t much approve of my dad. It was the 1970s and the Melanesians were starting to insist they could run their own country. The French, particularly, wanted to maintain some control in the islands after independence, and Dad was too free with his legal advice on how they should go about setting up the new constitution. By the late seventies he was a positive menace.’