Aboard

by Nick Niels Sanders

  After lunch, they pulled into Lautoka and disembarked at that same pier from which they had embarked less than three weeks and seemingly years before. They were conveyed to a resort hotel that was not even close to being near downtown Lautoka, but was much more suited to their needs and inclinations. It had large grounds with gardens and a long white sand beach. Roger inquired of the management about nude exercises on the beach and was told it was forbidden.

  Over the next few days, representatives of the Australian and United States consulates visited the citizens of those countries and indicated that the process of reissuing passports was moving forward. A representative of the British consulate came to visit Marcella. The family of her late employer was taking a direct interest in her welfare. Since there was no French consulate in Fiji, the British would take care of her passport for her, and the family would purchase her ticket to London. In the meantime, she had a generous allowance for shopping.

  The press descended upon them – representatives of several news organizations flying in from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu, Sydney, Hong Kong and one bedraggled newswoman from London. The group followed through with their refusal to be interviewed as fewer than all 13 of them at once, holding four press conferences in the first days, all dressed in their Lautoka Lady costumes. James and Paul did the majority of the talking, but everyone contributed. They appeared on the cover of Time Magazine and were front page stories in a number of large circulation dailies. They saw themselves on TV, both the local channels and on international coverage through CNN and BBC. They had achieved instant celebrity and they all wanted it to go away as soon as possible.

  There were numerous trips into Lautoka for shopping. Gradually, their clothing shifted back to something more like what they were wearing on the Fiji Queen before the accident. Maria got a power cord for her computer, charged it up, was pleased to find that her journal was intact, and began carrying the computer with her everywhere, making notes as she recollected things from the time on the island and transcribing her notes from paper. Ron found a store with art supplies and got a new sketchbook, pencils and pastels. The used sketchbook went into a plastic bag, there to stay until it arrived in Sydney. Jim found a music store and bought staff paper and began making notation. The group continued to meet twice a day for tai chi and to spend time singing in the evenings.

  Five days after they landed at Lautoka, Marcella’s passport and a one-way ticket to London arrived, with a departure time set for the next day. Tearful farewells followed. She packed and departed for the airport, leaving a hole in the community. Roger and Paul received passports the following day; the Fijian Foreign Office arranged passage for them to Sydney the day after that, the day on which passports came for Ron, Jim, Ralph and Jeanne. It took three more days for the American passports, by which time Val and Shelly had moved to a different hotel, and the two west coast couples hardly saw one-another any more. Though they were on the same flight as far as Honolulu, they changed flights there, James and Maria going one way, Mark and Julia another.

  Val and Shelly had moved down the coast and upscale, renting the honeymoon suite at a luxury resort. They spent a week there, making love at all hours of the day and night, ordering room service whenever they felt hungry, swimming and sunbathing when they weren’t eating or making love. And they conversed about what to do next. They finally decided to continue seeing the world and booked a flight to Tokyo. And they too were gone.

  Roger Applebee returned home to Sydney, liquidated all of Jayne’s investments and sold his business to a venture capitalist who was interested in taking the business public. Jayne’s chest was raised from the Fiji Queen and returned to him. It contained a collection of rare coins and jewelry that was worth more than Jayne’s investment portfolio. Roger began the hunt for his step-daughter, Jodie, finding her eventually on an ashram in India. He traveled to India and spent a day with her, telling her of her mother’s passing, and presenting her with a check for half of her mother’s estate – an astounding number of dollars. Roger assured Jodie that she was welcome to do as she wished with the money, from giving it to the ashram or a charity, to living handsomely on it for the rest of her life. He assured her that he loved her and would continue to do so regardless of her choice, though he hoped that she would retain enough of it to visit him from time to time.

  Even after sharing half of Jayne’s fortune with Jodie, Roger was worth tens of millions of Australian Dollars. Returning to Fiji, Roger bought a small island and began to set it up as a nudist resort. It took over two years to install the needed infrastructure and build the needed accommodations, but within another year he was turning a profit serving excellent food and catering to people who would rather swim and sunbathe in the nude.

  Paul Moore returned to Sydney and wrote a treatise on survival on a desert island. His sensitive and knowledgeable treatment of the subject earned him an academic promotion and a prompt accession to his request to return to Fiji to study Vinasulu, the community of the naked dancers. When this study, in its turn, was published, Paul was granted tenure at his university.

  After carrying on a correspondence with Marcella for some time, he came to understand that she was not nearly as interested in him as he was in her. This was a trying discovery, but he was able to move on emotionally.

  After his studies at Vinasulu, he stopped in at Roger’s island, where he met a very tall, very beautiful woman; six months later, they were married, honeymooned at Roger’s resort and have become frequent return visitors there.

  Marcella de la Tour flew to London, where she was met at the airport by a member of the Thorpe family. She was driven in a limousine to the home in London she recognized as the one she had been in with Mrs. Thorpe before they set out to tour the world. She met Mrs. Thorpe’s oldest child, a young man named Randall, who wished to continue her employment. Marcella agreed, but asked for an advance on her pay and two months of vacation, so she could visit her family. This was agreed and within days, she was in Dijon, visiting her family, finding that, as expected, they had no idea she had been lost and did not care, finding that their lifestyle was, more than anything else, distasteful to her. After visiting for two days, she had to leave.

  From Dijon, she returned to Paris, hired a ghost writer, to whom she talked for several days, detailing the entire of the adventure in Fiji. The book was published in French about four months later and was a hit, but it was never translated into other languages because another book had been published in the meantime in English that had pre-empted the international market. Nonetheless, Marcella sold the movie rights to her book to a French movie company, which was able to produce a film that reliably portrayed the nudity of the castaways – something no American filmmaker would have dared to do.

  She returned to her employment with the Thorpe family rich now in her own right, but also eager to resume her duties as a servant to a very rich family. This employment has meant travel, excitement and protection – all of which were things she wanted.

  Ralph and Jeanne Carney arrived back in Tasmania thinking they had had the best honeymoon on record. They were emphatic that they did not wish or seek media attention, that all they wanted was to return to life as usual, and, to their surprise and pleasure, their wish was honored. Their first child was born almost exactly nine months after the stay on the island – and they liked to think she had been conceived on one of those beaches on the day they played hooky.

  They did maintain a most unusual set of correspondents. Every year, they went looking for a nudist resort so that they could be naked again together. A few years later, they received an invitation from Roger to visit him on his resort island, at no charge. They accepted, bringing all three of their children to a wonderful reunion.

  Mark and Julia Winters returned to Los Angeles, he to his job in marketing, she to her practice as a physical therapist. Her obsessive-compulsive disorder, which had considerably improved during the stay on the island, remained in remission;
she found herself happier and more fulfilled than at any time in her life. Mark continued to have knee discomfort. About a year after his return to Los Angeles, he had both knees replaced. The postoperative pain was unbearable; his excessive narcotic use led back into narcotic addiction. His behavior became erratic and at work they were investigating what to do to terminate his employment when he overdosed one Saturday afternoon and Julia found him dead the following morning. Julia’s grief was acute and overwhelming, but very short-lived. Within two weeks, she was back to work as if nothing had happened.

  Valerie St Claire called home and talked to her mother to let her know she and Shelly were OK. Mom was very concerned. Val painted a very complimentary picture of how important Shelly had been to her survival. Mom agreed, when they eventually decided to do so, to let them continue on their around-the-world tour. Michelle Jarvis called her mother, who had no idea she had been missing and was surprised to hear from her in any case.

  The two girls continued their trip, making decisions together, having a wonderful time. A year later, back in Baltimore, they agreed that they had never had as good a time as they had on the island in Fiji. Val went back to work as a registered nurse. Shelly cooked and kept house for her. When they heard that Roger’s resort was open for business, they made reservations for the first week it was open, and made a point of returning annually.

  Jim Hawthorne and Ron Haskell returned to Sydney, determined to take up where they had left off. It proved to be much more difficult than either had anticipated.

  Jim wrote a symphony based on his experience on the island, using the musical themes he had worked on with his recorder; he brought this piece to his amateur orchestra to perform; the Maestro of the Sydney Symphony came to the opening night as a courtesy and was transported; he promoted Jim to Assistant Conductor and the symphony asked permission to perform his piece, which was a sensation. The music was very good, but part of the success was due to the notoriety he had achieved as a result of the Fiji experience, and the fact that the music had been written about that experience.

  Ron scanned his sketchbook as promised and emailed the sketches to everyone. He completed a series of paintings of the time in Fiji – a series that, said the art critics, “shows, from its first painting to its last, an evolution in his understanding of his subject, and a sympathetic insight into human character not previously present in his work.” Among those works were a full-figure nude study of Maria emerging from the ocean, mask pushed back, snorkel dangling, swim fins in one hand, spear gun in the other with a fish skewered on it; and a smaller portrait of James and Roger conversing earnestly in front of Roger’s lean-to. After his exhibition of his “Fiji Series” was complete, he sent these two to James and Maria. Another painting in the series was of Lord and Lady Richard in conversation with James and Maria, on the Main Deck of the Fiji Queen. After some correspondence, he forwarded this painting to Sandra Kirkpatrick, the oldest child of Lord and Lady Richard.

  Following his exhibition, he could no longer deny to himself or others that the experience had changed him profoundly. His entire approach to portraiture had changed. Much to his delight, the people of Sydney liked what he was doing now even more than what he had been doing before – demand for his work tripled in spite of the fact that he doubled his prices in an effort to keep the demand in check.

  Over the next two years, Jim and Ron became immensely successful, both artistically and financially. When Roger’s resort opened, they found a way to spend a week there within the first couple of months it was open. They were not surprised to find that other members of the castaway group were coming there. They helped Roger to organize a reunion at the resort to celebrate the fifth anniversary of their accident in Fiji. Mark was deceased by then, but Julia came; Marcella did not wish to come; Paul came and brought his wife; all the others came. Invitations had also been extended to the Kirkpatrick children and to Susan Thorpe’s children but none of them chose to attend.

  James and Maria Fredericks returned with gratitude to their children and his practice and to settle back into small town life as if nothing had ever happened, passing their time “lost at sea” off as no big deal. There had been a furor attending their return, but their pointed refusal to accord any importance to the episode soon dampened the enthusiasm.

  Maria turned her notes into a fictionalized account of their time in Fiji. It was published about a month before Marcella’s account. The two were pretty much in accord, though Marcella’s account weighted her importance somewhat more heavily than Maria’s account did. The book was a runaway best seller, and was eagerly translated into seventeen other languages – though not into French.

  James wrote the promised article detailing the treatment and healing of Jeanne’s burns, complete with a set of Ron’s sketches. The article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and was almost completely ignored.

  James and Maria were quite perplexed what to do when Ron’s paintings arrived. It would be hard to hang them anywhere in their home without having them excite another round of conversations about their “adventure” in Fiji. They shared the two portraits with their children, who were cautioned to say nothing to anyone about them. They hung them in their bedroom on walls not visible to someone looking casually into the room through the door.

  James started searching for Sandra Kirkpatrick shortly after they returned home and soon established a correspondence with her. Sandra would not accept any instructions from him except in person, and insisted on making arrangements for them to fly to London at their earliest convenience.

  London

  Sandra Kirkpatrick looked up from her desk as the middle aged couple entered her office. They had been announced as Dr. and Mrs. James Fredericks, but she was well aware that this is just who they might well not be. Since being informed of her parents deaths, the announcement in the paper having carried all of the names of the deceased and of the survivors, she had averaged two visits a week from people claiming to be one or another of the survivors with messages from her parents. Some of these impostors had been unbelievably easy to detect, others had been harder, but to date, they had all been imposters. In the meantime, she had carried on an email conversation with someone purporting to be James Fredericks, a physician in Oregon, who was arranging to travel to London with a message from her father. She dared to hope that this would turn out to be the real thing.

  “Welcome to London.”

  “Thank you.”

  “When did you arrive?”

  “One taxi ride ago. It seemed most appropriate for us to come directly to you.”

  “Thank you. So, you state that you are James and Maria Fredericks, who survived the disaster on the Fiji Queen. You may understand that I wish to ask a few questions. I have been visited by a long string of people claiming to be survivors of the Fiji Queen – none so far have been genuine, as you may imagine. But I must be sure about you.”

  “Your father warned me both that you would have that experience and that you would insist on being certain of our identity before believing us. Please proceed.”

  “It is hard to know what to ask, since I know essentially nothing of your relationship with my parents, and you could only have known them for four or five days. This is hardly long enough for you to have established a deep friendship, especially with someone as reticent as my father. But maybe you can tell me what you knew of them”

  James and Maria alternated in telling the story of Mary’s father’s bequest, Maria concluding with “Your mother indicated that she had to talk her father into it, but he did it because of his love for both of your parents.”

  “And your father either did not know of or ignored your mother’s story, believing instead that your grandfather was a very astute observer of human nature, who determined that a husband who felt constantly in debt to his wife would breed a bad marriage, and took steps to allow his son-in-law to be independent in order to avoid this outcome.”


  “I cannot imagine any other source for that story than my parents,” Sandra beamed. “I welcome you cordially to London. Will you stay at our home with us? Let me call my sister and brother. How long will you be here?” Without awaiting a response, she turned to her telephone, reaching her siblings in rapid order, arranging supper for that night. Turning back to James, “My father spoke to you, I believe. What were his requests?”

  James handed over the penciled, folded, worn piece of paper on which he had made notes. “These charities with the indicated bequests. He also said several other things, which I hesitate to mention, but he insisted I should. He indicated that we should expect to stay with you while we are in London, to be given a tour of London and especially of the British Museum, to have our travel expenses reimbursed, and for you to make a gift in an amount of your choosing, to our favorite charity.”

  “All of that is so like Daddy. There can be no doubt it came from him. Thank you. I will defer all the rest of the questions until supper, so my brother and sister can also hear.”

  She turned to the intercom and said, “Hey, boss! The real thing this time. I’m leaving with them now. I’ll be out until…” She turned to James, “How long are you here for?”