by Will Adams
She shivered, suddenly, as she remembered Andriama warning her not to take the seeming stab wounds at face value. A sudden mental image of how that day might have gone assailed her. Adam and Emilia had never deployed their anchor near the reefs if they could possibly avoid it, because they did the coral such unnecessary damage. Typically, therefore, one of them would stay aboard while the other dived solo. The photographs showed that Adam had been that day’s diver, Emilia staying on board the Yvette. But what if Adam had somehow got tangled in this wretched netting and hadn’t resurfaced on schedule? What if Emilia had got nervous? What if she’d seen a sudden eruption of bubbles in the water, say? What if she’d panicked and suited up in such a hurry that she hadn’t even taken the time to pull on a wet-suit? What if she’d gone down herself and found her father tangled up in this fucking netting, almost out of air? Without any time for subtlety, Emilia would have hacked and hacked at that damned netting until she’d cut him free, slashing his wet-suit in the process, leaving the marks Rebecca had misread as rage. But she’d got tangled up in it herself, or maybe her efforts had brought down the rock Daniel had told her about, pinning her against the sea-floor.
Bile rose in Rebecca’s throat; she swallowed it back down. It couldn’t have happened like that. It just couldn’t. What about Daniel’s blood being on board the Yvette? Yes! She seized gratefully upon it. He was the killer after all. He had to be. She looked up at that very moment, and a first shaft of dawn sunlight slanted through the open cabin door and fell upon the photograph of Michel that had somehow remained hanging upon the facing wall, despite everything the night had thrown at it. And she remembered, then, her father’s last letter to her mother, how Emilia had brought Michel aboard the boat, how she’d fallen and both their heads had banged the deck, and ow, how Michel had only just stopped bawling.
That was where the blood had come from, the male and female both.
Above her, footsteps, mutters, Pierre’s face appearing through the hatch. Evidently Daniel hadn’t been quite so good at knots as he’d believed himself. ‘There you are!’ he scowled, rubbing the back of his head. ‘What happened? Where’s your English friend? What did you-’ But then he saw Emilia lying on the bed; his face crumpled in grief and tears sprang from his eyes.
Rebecca turned to him. ‘Why did you lie to me?’ she asked.
His face assumed that self-pitying look again. ‘I told you. Your father was going to give everything away.’
‘Not about that,’ she said. ‘I’m talking about why you told everyone that Michel was your son.’
‘Oh,’ he said. For a moment, she thought he was going to deny it. But then he saw her expression and thought better of it. He nodded at Emilia. ‘She made me.’
‘Go on.’
‘It was after she went to England to meet her salvage people, you know. She liked one of them very much. She thinks, ah, yes, this man will make a good father for her child. You know how she is about men. Always she wants to be a mother, but never to share her child. Well, this one lives in England, he has good genes, he won’t be part of the salvage. Parfait! So she takes him to her bed and assures him not to worry, that she has taken every precaution. But of course she has taken no precaution at all. At first she refuses to tell anyone who the father is, but then our country goes to shit, and the salvage is delayed, and now the father is to be part of it and Emilia is scared he will find out about his son and insist on being part of his life. She does not want him to be a part of Michel’s life, so she begs me to pretend to be the father myself. “Why me?” I ask. “Because the father is a European,” she says, “and you’re the only European here.” I don’t like this, I tell her. A man is entitled to know his son.’ He gave an expressive shrug. ‘But you know Emilia. When she makes up her mind on something…’
Rebecca bowed her head. She began to weep.
EPILOGUE
Three months later
Rebecca held Michel against her hip as she waved farewell to Titch. Her former partner did not look at all happy. He’d come to have one last go at persuading her to return to London, but he was going home alone. He couldn’t understand it; he’d kept telling her how their company was on a roll. Their US run had been a triumph. Canada and Australia had both picked up options, and she’d won some kind of award in France. The money was flowing in again. Chat-show hosts were clamouring. She was hot.
She’d tried her best to explain to him. She really had. But after a while she’d realised that he’d never get it, it went so against everything he thought about the world. He couldn’t see that his kind of success meant nothing to her any more, or that she’d gained a new and sufficient vision of herself: as a strong, stern, selfless and formidable matriarch; handsome, erect and proud; feared and loved by her Malagasy friends; admired yet considered mildly eccentric for having had everything the West could offer, then choosing to give it up. She’d appointed an agent to sell her Notting Hill house, lawyers to settle all her debts. She sweetened the pill for Titch by telling him that she intended to divide her equity among their employees; and that he’d be getting the largest chunk himself. He’d have control of the company at last. Wasn’t that what he’d always wanted?
‘There won’t be a company without you,’ he’d sulked.
‘Of course there will be. You just have to find the right talent, that’s all.’
‘You’ll be bored to tears in six months. You’ll be begging to come back.’
She’d laughed so loudly at that, he’d looked affronted; but she knew he was wrong. She had plenty here to occupy her. She’d started teaching French, biology, mathematics and history in the school. She helped Therese in the clinic. She watered the orchids around her family’s expanded tomb, and had planted more. She talked constantly on these visits, telling her sister and her parents everything that was happening in Eden. And often she’d talk out loud to Emilia, too, just walking around the village or along the beach, so that people thought she was slightly mad. Her hard certainties about death had softened. She hadn’t found God so much as rediscovered the childhood awe of nature that she’d mislaid for a time, too busy mining it for nuggets. Adam had been right: We don’t believe because we think. We believe because we love.
She’d made him a second pledge that day in the church in Tsiandamba when she’d kissed him on his brow. Eden would remain the sanctuary he’d created, whatever it took. She’d lie awake at night, watching the moon-shadows in the eaves, her hands folded behind her head, making plans to bring him honour. She still didn’t know why he’d turned on her during her teenage years, but she’d put that behind her. All that mattered was that he’d felt the shame of it, and had wanted her forgiveness. She’d given it with her whole heart.
With her renewed respect for nature had come a rekindling of her eagerness to learn. Knowledge for its own sake. Her chance to contribute something solid and lasting to the world. She planned to pick upon some obscure local endemic (a toad, perhaps, or maybe a millipede; something small and a little bit ugly) then study it intensively for the next ten years, writing papers on it that only twenty-seven people would ever read, and only fifteen would understand.
She was happy.
When Titch was gone, when even his dust trail had resettled, she took Michel down towards the beach. She was crossing the track when she saw Pierre hurrying towards her, waving for her attention, great dark pools of sweat on the underarms of his blue shirt. ‘You said voavy for the roof, yes?’
‘That’s right.’ She’d hired him to supervise the building of the new Emilia Kirkpatrick schoolroom, not least to feed him enough money that he’d leave the reef and the wreck alone.
‘Jean-Luc says cassave is better,’ he said. ‘Cheaper, too.’
‘Fine. Cassave it is.’
‘Good.’ He stood there for a moment or two, mopping his brow, gathering his breath. He crouched a little to chuck Michel under his chin, then glanced up at Rebecca. ‘More like Emilia every day.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Rebec
ca.
‘Therese ask me to give you a message,’ said Pierre. He stood to his full height again, gazed at her in a slightly unsettling way he’d developed these past few weeks. It was nothing she could rebuke him for, avuncular and fond rather than lustful, akin to the way he gazed upon his children when they’d done something to make him proud. ‘She says yes, this afternoon is no problem.’
‘Great,’ nodded Rebecca. ‘Thank her for me.’
He turned and walked away, raising his right arm in acknowledgement. Michel stirred, stretched his arms, yawned. His eyes opened briefly, then closed again, a soft smile on his lips. Her heart twisted as she looked down at him. She still hadn’t decided what to tell him about his parentage. A small part of her yearned to keep him entirely for herself, though the far larger part was ashamed that she could even contemplate such a profound betrayal of her sister.
She was far from the first to face such a dilemma, of course. An extraordinary number of people, after all, went their entire lives without ever for one moment suspecting they weren’t the biological child of the man and woman they’d always taken it for granted were their parents.
Titch had known about her gambling. That had been a surprise. Apparently everyone had known. He’d thought that maybe it was why she was so reluctant to come back, and so he’d assured her that it wouldn’t be a problem; she could join some group, get the best counselling money could buy. She’d laughed again and assured him that gambling wasn’t a problem, that she hadn’t even thought of it in weeks. And it was true.
Something cramped in her stomach. She placed her palm flat upon it. The days since her last period kept ticking by, and still nothing. And she’d felt distinctly nauseous this morning. Not sick, exactly, but certainly queasy. There was an unopened test kit in Emilia’s cabin, but it was still way too soon, she couldn’t risk losing her hope just yet. Sometimes the possibility so overwhelmed her, she had to do something to distract herself until it went away.
There was one final thing that Titch had failed to grasp, however many times she’d tried to explain it. It was this: even if she did go back, she wouldn’t be any use to him. She’d succeeded on television because the fire of evangelism had blazed within her. She’d been so certain that she knew the truth about how life worked that she’d needed to convince the world of the rightness of her vision. But the fire inside her had since gone out. It had gone out during her search for Adam and Emilia, when she’d come to realise how magnificently more complex the world was than her perception of it. And, worse, she was glad of this.
It had happened barely two hours after she’d consigned Daniel to the deeps. She and Pierre together had carried Emilia from the boat back to the lodge. Pierre had tried his best to console her, to tell her that she’d done nothing wrong, that she had to be strong for when the police came to talk to her, as they surely would, and ask what had happened to the missing Englishman. For all their sakes, she mustn’t implicate herself. What good would confession do now?
She’d known he was right, but it had been unbearable all the same, to pretend that Daniel hadn’t existed, that his life had meant nothing, that she’d have no penalty to pay. It had been too much for her; she’d run out of the lodge, out of Eden, down the track to the beach, using the heaviness of the sand to exhaust herself, make herself too weary to grieve. But then she’d glimpsed something far out in the lagoon, and yes, it had been a man swimming with long, measured strokes towards the shore, a black-and-yellow pack upon his back; and something had crumpled inside her as she’d realised that Daniel hadn’t let go of her ankle so that she might live. No. He’d let go of her to get at the re-breather and the small tank of oxygen in the dive-bag she’d tied to his ankle.
She made her way between the last of the spiny trees on to the soft white sand. The Yvette was already through the pass; she’d be back at her mooring within a couple more minutes. Daniel had been out to check the wrecksite was still secure, in preparation for the return of Miles and his other former MGS colleagues. Now that they’d secured new funds from the Chinese government and other investors, and had bought off Ricky and his triad friends, they were hoping to get in several weeks of salvage before the weather turned. He glanced shorewards, saw her, stood and waved. She waved back. He reached the mooring buoy, leapt down into the water to secure the Yvette to it. She couldn’t wait any longer, she splashed out to meet him, soaking her trousers. Michel sensed his father, he grew fractious. Rebecca passed him across and instantly he soothed.
‘Your friend left yet?’ asked Daniel.
‘Yes.’
‘About bloody time.’
He had grains of sand on his cheek. Rebecca brushed them away with her thumb. ‘How was it?’ she asked.
‘Too rough,’ he told her. ‘I’ll go back again this afternoon.’
‘Therese has promised to look after Michel. I’ll come out with you, if you like.’
His glad smile made her heart lift. ‘Great,’ he said. He put his free arm around her, his hand upon her buttock. ‘But perhaps I’d best check on the life-jackets first, eh?’
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