IV

On a whim, I have placed four books about his bed, his Milton, Shakespeare, Defoe and Thoreau. They can be his guardians this night, though I leave it to those worthies to sort out which of them has which responsibility. It surprises me that I don’t feel more uncomfortable with him lying there in the next room. Yet it is not as though he is some stranger to me. We have lived long enough together for him to be a familiar presence.

The discomfort will come when he is taken away, or buried, or whatever is to happen. He will be gone then.

And I will have the less need for my hearing trumpet.

Earlier this evening I was looking for any sign that the rain might be lifting, the clouds parting, hoping that the sun might begin to break through. That is when we see the eerie glow, yellowish into an increasingly rosy red that foretells a better morrow. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. But I could see no such prediction. Nothing to raise my hopes, nor my spirits.

Since that time, the weather has if anything worsened. The buffeting against the house has increased in its severity. This will be an evening for huddling.

Naked ladies are not the only ornaments on his walls. There are fishing spears and digging sticks and woven dillybags and the remnants of a net, and on a shelf curved bark bowls something like coal scuttles. The natives use them for carrying around anything from a piccaninny to a dead lizard, from a mound of berries to a catch of fish. There are all sorts and varieties of pearl shell fish hooks too, some incomplete, some broken, some with a length of twined hair still attached. Boomerangs, of course, and shields with patterns on the outside, two with charcoal figures drawn on the inner surface. He was proud of his collection, as proud as if he had made the items himself. In the flickering light from the lamp they look sombre, even sinister. Solidified shadows of times past.

Goodness knows how he acquired these trophies. Some he will have traded with natives who visited from time to time, whenever the mood or the season was apt. Others he will have found, either here or on other islands nearby, or over on the mainland. Some may have been given to him by passing fishermen who knew his reputation as a collector of bits and pieces. If there is a story attached to each of these, as I suppose there might be, then I don’t know it. Over the years he became reasonably friendly with the native family who camped on the island, on the next beach around, and with their acquaintances from the mainland or other islands whenever the oysters were ready to harvest, or when bird nests were ready to pillage. They would just turn up, slowly paddling across the channel in their frail little bark canoes, so low in the water you wondered that they did not sink.

We had not expected to find natives on our island. The terms of our lease said it was uninhabited; we were to be the inhabitants, exclusively. Yet when we first came here we found three or four dilapidated grass huts down at the far end of the next beach, just back by the tree line, and ashes of old fires. Near to them, a kind of bank of old oyster shells, a midden. There must have been some prodigious picnics in the past. Years and years ago the island had its own native population, with quite a fearsome reputation. They were known to be dangerously protective of their domain, where all their needs were ready to hand—turtle, dugong, fish, oysters, birds, the fruits of the forest. That palm tree. We have been beneficiaries of that plenty ourselves. They were said not to have welcomed white visitors in the old days, in fact they resisted them, standing on the beach and shouting and brandishing their weapons. There was one particular episode when a sea captain, attempting to make their acquaintance, presented them with a hatchet, resulting in his being maimed. Which led to instant retaliation, as you would imagine. The not so good old days.

What with one thing and another, the natives were subject to dispersal, both official and independent. Edward seemed to accept that this was the inevitable state of affairs. In his view the natives were patently unprogressive, and demonstrably unfit to compete in the struggle for existence. He said as much, wrote it in his books and articles. They have had to give way to a superior race. He is an Empire man, after all. He was an Empire man.

It is not an opinion I share. It feels smug to me, like the words of ‘All things bright and beautiful’. The official policy—apart from dispersal—is to smooth the pillow of the dying race. As if anyone ever gave them a pillow. Poor things, it is assumed that they are to disappear from the face of the earth, their earth, and nobody is prepared to do anything to turn back the inevitable. On the contrary, we civilised folk are to have encouraged that end. That is no better than what takes place on the coral sea beds, or in the rainforest. The way the natives have been treated does not seem at all consistent with the Missionary Society’s assurances back at home. They have found little benefit in teachings that are meant to light their way. And the best of our accomplishment is to snigger when one of the women walks around giving herself airs in an old hat, an unwashed pair of drawers, and smoking her pipe.

Just four of the local natives survived, in camps along the coast of the mainland. Dreadful. Four, only four. Too shameful to think of. And that has happened in just such a short time, perhaps twenty years. In our time. In our first years here, one young family attached itself more closely to the island than any others, though they were in turn visited by fellow tribesmen from the mainland or from other islands further up the coast, perhaps relatives, perhaps just friends. They kept to themselves for the most part, setting up camp around the point, where they had a creek of their own and shelter from the main winds. They made a kind of hut for themselves, a gunyah, like a hollow mound of palm leaves, not from the coconut palms but from a more fan-shaped tree. I never saw what supported these huts. I was not comfortable with getting too close, I was certainly not going to go inside them; and when they left to return to the mainland for the wet season, the winds began to blow them apart. They may have been in a protected spot but nothing escapes the big gales.

Edward spent time with them. He was interested to learn whatever he could about the island, and the plants here and what the reef might hold. I could not understand them at all, what with my hearing and their mumbling. I had no chance of following what they were saying by the way they moved their lips, because they hardly moved their mouths at all; and their eyes were too deep to read too. But they seemed well disposed to us, seemed to accept that we lived on the island with them. I remember that early on I had a fleeting hope they would not see anyone my size as more than a morsel. Edward was safe, he was all skin and bone.

They have long since left. We have photographs of them. I am not sure whether Edward took them or Hartley, when he brought the camera for Edward. Jimmy standing on the end of the reef, poised with his fishing spear; Jimmy glowering into the little box that was going to capture him, eat his face maybe. Jimmy looking pleased with himself when we gave him a pair of Edward’s cast-off dungarees. Fanny, a good likeness, a portrait shot. That one must have been by Hartley. Fanny digging for yams. The whole family in front of the entrance to their gunyah. Photographs of their sticks and spears, their harpoons with cords of plaited hair attached.

Edward seemed to have made himself understood to them. More to the point, he seemed to understand them, or so I gather from what he wrote, his acquaintance with their stories and their habits. Though it bothered me that he showed them to be so childish in their way of expressing themselves. He writes of them as speaking a kind of pidgin English, a rudimentary piffling way of speaking, as though that also is how they think. But is that so? Surely, to write of them like that is sadly to belittle their ways. Or if that is the way they do in fact speak, then might it not be because that is how we whites speak to them. That is the level of English we teach them. It shows we do not take them seriously, we do not expect them to tell us anything worth considering carefully.

What we two peoples say to each other is kept to the most elementary level because of this simple-minded way of talking. You can sense the contempt of the whites, ridicule at best, when they call this way of speaking ‘yabber’. You reckon that old fellow humbug you, Edward asked, when enquiring into some ancient legend handed down from an elder. Or that is what he wrote about his cross-examination. Which no doubt he thought showed him as genial, but in fact it is less than sensitive. He was unkind to insert an element of doubt, and in leading the witness.

Their artless ideas about the afterlife are likewise taken as proof incontrovertible that they are a hopelessly benighted people. When you dead, you finish. Well that is brisk and to the point. And no more misguided than the fatalist who writes out a full set of beliefs to arrive at just the same point. Who is to say that they have not simplified their theology for us, so that we might comprehend just a glimmer of what is very complex? Simplified because we do not have the language between us to explain these mysteries to each other. We speak to each other only in terms of immediate realities. And to make it all the more confusing, the people from different tribes have different languages from each other. If we were able to comprehensively understand one tribe, we would still have to begin all over again with the next.

Edward, now you dead, you finish. How do you feel about that?

Rowley has not come back. Where can that dratted dog be? He has gone off again. He is not sheltering underneath the house, or he does not come when I call. He is either under my feet and making a nuisance of himself, or he goes off walkabout and suits himself, especially when he is wanted. Right now I could do with the company, and I could do without the worry.

My own thoughts have gone walkabout too.

Jimmy and his family, his gin and his children, and his mother-in-law. Jimmy was what Edward called the custodian of the island, perhaps the last one. That does not mean he owns it, the Master insisted. Our original deeds said the island was owned by the government, and we were its lessees. Then we took ownership provided we made certain improvements over a period of time. I am not so sure about the moral rights of the case.

Jimmy’s gin came from across the water, and the two of them had different words for the sun and moon and sky, for sea and fire and water, for man and woman and the parts of the body. I saw Edward’s list comparing the two. That means you would hold different conversations with each of them, and different again with any native from a different language group again. No wonder they keep their knowledge simplified for us. Jimmy was Edward’s closest associate, his chief informant, his children my most frequent visitors. His piccaninnies, naked as the day, peeping round the kitchen door and putting out their hand for a piece of my warm bread.

Between ourselves we used to call him Jimmy Riddle because we did not know his family name. All the natives request a white name. What is bestowed upon them is usually a common Christian name, as Jackie or Billy or Charlie or George. Not, I think, to commemorate the kings of England. Most of them with a diminutive ending. It is a way of not taking them seriously. In much the same way the men here, the white men, refer to the natives as boys, regardless of their age. Edward is no worse nor no better than the rest.

Jimmy Riddle is not a dignified name, not like the names that American slaves were given, if I remember Mr Thoreau correctly. But I cannot think that the Americans were being altogether respectful. Indeed, those high-sounding names, the names of Roman emperors and senators and generals, strike me as satirical, contemptuous of the people, but I may be wrong. Thoreau warmed himself with the thought that by this means his American backwoods were being connected to history. I think it was a sham, and he was self-congratulating to avoid the sting of it.

At least there are no two ways about it here. The names we bestow give the natives a household standing. We connect them to the commonplace, the domestic. You might find a native called Archie, but never Archibald; Milly not Millicent. Yet they do not abandon their tribal names, and everyone appears to know everyone else’s real name, and where they come from, and who they are related to. So that I am led to think that these white names are contrived for us to use. And perhaps subtly to exclude us. We do not use their tribal names because we do not have access to their own native ways, their customs and their language. We are kept in the dark about such matters.

They have their own words for places and things too. Edward was very keen on this, as though it were important to know what a place is really called, meaning what it was originally called. Its name before we whites appeared on the scene. The original title. Yet I fail to see how that it is of any real significance, to us that is, to know that a particular rock somewhere along the shore, for example, has its own name. I don’t mean its geology. I mean a rock at one particular location. Sometimes we might fancy a resemblance, and call a rock perhaps Whale Rock or Turtle Rock, and perhaps to that extent we are not so very different from the natives. But I think they may acknowledge a deeper significance when they have named these natural features, when they give them their own unique name.

Living on our island, what does it matter to us what our island is named? It is our island, the island. It is our bay, the bay. My thought is different from Edward’s. The way we have lived, there is little point in knowing another place, by whatever name. We do not need names for places we are not going to visit. The bay, the island, that is all we need to know. All we know on earth, and all we need to know, is that what the poem says? We do not live anywhere else. We will not live anywhere else.

Well, Edward won’t. I do not know about myself.

He should not have died. Not now. I am not ready for this.

I don’t suppose it was very pleasant for him either.

I wonder if there is some lack in me, that I am not crying and swaying about, not tearing my hair and banging my head as the natives did when their little boy died. There seems little point in that if there is nobody here to witness it, and if I can’t hear it, or only inside my head. Deafness. It makes you undemonstrative. It does not change your feelings, it is just that others don’t see them. Does that make them any less real? Are feelings just for exhibition? I have learned to become cautious about this too, because the need for Edward to speak slowly to me gave him time to choose his words. He was an honest man, according to his own way of thinking. But I have come to think he was not always candid. Perhaps that was the writer in him. His hero, Thoreau, was busy inventing a picture of himself. Not showing how prickly he might have been, how resentful of unwanted visitors, not telling truly why he went off to live on his own in those uncomfortable woods.

Yes, that is how writers are. They choose to be out of the common way, but they also insist on having their say. They want it both ways. Living on the edge of their own lives, on the edge of their own stories. In their own margins. That is where Edward’s most energetic, most unreadable writing is scrawled.

I don’t suppose I was entirely candid either. I have grown to keep my inward thoughts to myself. To keep my own counsel. I have sung my psalms, of course, and contributed to the harmony that way. If that did not accord with his philosophy, then perhaps his philosophy was lacking a little in charity.

I wonder how things might have been different between us if he had come to Liverpool say ten years earlier? If I had married as a younger woman? Marrying when I did, I was already one to know her own mind, have her own opinions. On the other hand, that might well have been what Edward liked about me. So who can say about what might have been. He took me for better or worse. I have always done my best by him. Came away here with him, for his sake. I can have no regrets about that, it was the right thing to do. The only thing to do. Only, look at where we are now. Ah me.

But I would not have been free to marry him earlier. It was Philip who held my fancy then.

The natives were much more forthright about their grieving. The women in particular made a bigger show of it than I have. That was a sad time. Fanny cutting herself and banging her head with a stone to make it bleed, and rocking backwards and forwards. The poor little fellow, he had suffered in his stomach too. Only his was most dreadfully swollen. His bingy. Fanny and Jimmy brought him to us, but there was not much that we knew to do. He was past straining and twisting, too exhausted to protest against the pain any more, just limp and listless. Edward tried giving him a little whisky and water. Jimmy knew what whisky was, and approved. Sponging the boy’s forehead, well what good does that actually do? It may have comforted him a little, it showed that we were trying to comfort him. It showed compassion. It was something to do until, inevitably, he died away. In his mother’s arms.

Edward said that they took him back to their camp, and went on with their grieving, Jimmy taciturn as ever, Fanny utterly bereft. And later, they scooped out a grave in the sand behind their gunyah, and buried him there. Later again, Jimmy was still disconsolate. He told Edward he must go away. Carn help it, Edward reported. He bin think about that boy too much. They went back to the mainland, and as we heard a few years ago, Jimmy had gone walkabout, and drank too much, and discovered the penalty of an addiction to opium. Fanny’s end was just as sad, for she too was somehow supplied with opium, and she too has died, not so long ago, somewhere up along the coast. The last of their tribe. Neither of them with a pillow, I daresay.

What I don’t wish to know is how Edward knew that the boy had been rolled in his sleeping mat, and buried with his billy can, his plate and his mug. How soon did he carry out that investigation?

A strange, feckless people. They could be generous and laughing at one moment, and the next very cruel. The men bashing the women, the sea captain’s hand. Yet the boy’s death, Fanny’s grieving. Their grieving. And mine. A son I never had.

And now here I am again, grieving for myself.

They had their own visitors from time to time. Usually these threw together makeshift shelters, something like a bark tent. If they built a more impressive grass hut, thatched in effect, then evidently they intended an extended stay. The men used to spend their days out on the reef, spearing fish, or drifting about the bay in their boats or occasionally a bark canoe. There was very little room in these. The man would sit down towards the back of the frail little vessel, with his sticks and spears and perhaps a dog on his lap, and paddle away with a piece of roughly shaped paperbark in each hand; and if his wife were accompanying him, say if they were coming across from the mainland, the chances are that she would have had to swim for it, tethered to her husband by a length of vine.

That arrangement failed to win my admiration. Indeed, the women always seem to have the harder row to hoe. They carry their babies and their dillybags, and the children tug at them as they set about digging for roots or collecting sea food, or berries from the forest. I remember how slowly they moved about the foreshore, never hurrying, but never stopping either. Their thin sticks of legs, their great big feet. They drifted about as slowly and as aimlessly as the creatures on the sea bed, or so it seemed to me. They tended the fires while their men were out and about, made the damper while their men went beachcombing. Sometimes a little girl would come and sit by me in the kitchen garden, and let me hold her hand, and wipe her runny nose. There now, I would say, there now, that’s better. And give her a slice of bread with honey.

I did not witness their dancing, their corroborees. Those only happened when a group of visitors came across to the island. It frightened me, the idea of being out in the darkness, and with unknown natives growing wild and excited. Not to mention the mosquitoes. I doubt I would have been given a seat by the fire, and the smoke. Edward went several times. I suppose he was invited, but the absence of an invitation would not have stopped him. He did what he wanted.

By his account it was interesting but not particularly musical. I would not have minded seeing the dancers all marked out in white clay, and with birds’ down in their hair and along their body in strange patterns, the decorations picked up by the firelight. But he was bemused by the dancing itself. The boys—the men—circling about each other a lot like a dog fight, he thought, kicking sand about, flapping their elbows. Shaking their knees and stamping. In one dance he did recognise what was happening, that they were imitating the brush turkeys, pacing about, moving their head just so, scratching and pecking at the ground, and then vigorously scraping a mound together, throwing leaves and twigs back with their feet.

A draught has found its way under the verandah doors, and is stirring the papers on his desk, as well as making the lamplight dance. And there is a damp smell coming up through the floor, as I imagine, from underneath the house. The steady rain must have started to soak the ground. You can nearly always find a few frogs in residence there. But no Rowley.

The smell of the kerosene in the bedroom, and the smell of the kerosene burning in the lamp, does not quite disguise that there is now another smell beginning to make itself known in the house. I hope help comes before that grows unpleasant. For my own sake of course, but also because it is demeaning to Edward. To the memory of him. I would rather remember him for his bushy moustache, his glittering spectacles, and his big straw hat as he wandered about out there in the sunny shallows, bent over and peering into whatever was hovering about at his ankle height. Finding contentment there. Engaged in a search for whatever came by chance, not driven to find anything in particular. Beachcombing.

It was Jimmy who told Edward about the caves, and took him to one of them, over on the eastern side of the island, facing out toward the great reef. I was not invited. It might have been inappropriate for me to view paintings which Edward later described, hidden in the deeper recesses and protected from the prevailing weather. He has photographs of them, though; he keeps them in this box on his desk.

Anyway, it would have been just too difficult for me to scramble up the bare rocks. He had to use whatever holds came to hand, mostly lengths of trailing vines. In theory it is possible to get to this cave by land, but that involves a difficult struggle up a long steep slope and through the jungle, and then a good deal of clambering in among jumbled rocks and boulders. Edward declined that route, and one calm day took the boat around to the far side of the island, nosing into a tiny inlet, just wide enough for a mooring.

He reported that the cave was dry; no torrential rains had intruded over the years, no heavy run-off. The floor was dusty, and showed very few tracks. Perhaps the animals are as apprehensive of such a place as the natives are. Nobody had been there for a very long time. In the photographs, the images are crude figures, outlines applied very roughly in thick ochre, which in at least two cases have aged as far as almost to have disappeared. The ochre colour he wrote about is more faded than the black, which was probably charcoal from a burnt stick. Edward could see where long ago a campfire had been, and also a flat rock which had been used for grinding.

Decay has affected these paintings as well as the walls and roof of the cave, and it is not always easy to decipher what they might be. Boomerangs are readily recognised of course, and simple little figures of echidnas without their spines, and fish, and a bird that might be a scrub fowl. You can’t always tell from the photographs. With fading figures overlying faded figures, it is a puzzle to decipher the markings on the wall of the cave, or rock shelter as it might be more properly called.

There is a second cave. Sometimes Edward liked to say that the current generation of natives had never visited it, though they knew where it was, or more exactly, where the old men used to say it was. In his writings he himself told differing stories. In one account, Edward discovered it by himself by sheer persistence, high up in the midst of the jungle, in amongst a rocky area where boulders are all tumbled together. In another, Jimmy leads the way there, but keeps his distance, uncomfortable with entering. And in yet another reference Jimmy is able to explain to Edward a little of what the images are, and is as puzzled as Edward about making sense of the other figures.

When I consider the different versions, the striking detail is that the paintings are on the roof of a low overhanging rock. Whoever painted them would have had to lie on his back. Well, if that were so, then I doubt that Edward would have found that place unassisted; but he might have, for he was both tenacious and obstinate, especially about matters that captured his enthusiasm. Supposing Jimmy to have accompanied him, it does not seem as though there would have been room for more than one person at a time; though there might have been. Here is another occasion where, in his writing, Edward does not let exact detail get in the way of his story.

Perhaps he was right, perhaps in the end it does not matter all that much. But he liked to give the impression of being exact.

Once again, this second gallery is on the far side of the island and apparently faces the east, and yet is protected from the weather, from the storms that come from that direction. Like the one that is rattling the doors and windows at the moment. By his photographs, the paintings are no more skilful in this rock shelter than in the other. There is a lizard without a head, a turtle with the most elementary limbs—either that, or it is an enlarged depiction of a louse—a man with four fingers on one hand, three on the other, and likewise with no head, no legs yet either, though it seems there are indications where these were intended. Another figure, a complete silhouette, but just possibly wearing a hat with a brim, and with something suggestive of boot heels. Edward did not ask Jimmy about this one, and Jimmy did not volunteer any information. Another figure is a man with a sort of tail. Maybe one of their debil-debils.

My sense of these images is not of excited awe, but rather like Jimmy’s, of anxiety. Edward reported that when a frog at the back of the cave croaked, and a brush turkey loosened a fragment of granite so that it went hurtling some six hundred feet down to the sea, Jimmy took to his heels. So Jimmy was there after all. Something resented the intruders, and wished them gone. As I study these photographs, it seems to me that they all speak of that which is arrested, static, fixed forever on a slowly crumbling surface. They are figures taken from life; tranced, suspended out of their proper world. And doing nothing. That is unnerving. They are just being. They worry me. I am glad to leave them up there on the ridge, unvisited. World without end.

I have felt something of that same apprehension when I looked down on to the coral gardens. That was no place for us either.

And it is unnerving having my husband in the next room, being but not being.

Edward found another cave—a different kind of cave this time, a real cave, not a rock overhang—on the northern end of the island, and only approachable from the sea. Over the seasons he had noticed numbers of swifts flying about a curtain of vines and creepers and hanging ferns there, in amongst a clump of umbrella trees. When those are in flower, their long spikes of maroon flowers attract the wonderful blue butterflies, and the shining sunbird; and with the bronzed and golden orchids thereabouts too, he would of course have been delighted to sit and watch a while. As would I.

That was when he noticed that behind all those big glossy leaves and that thick mass of foliage was a patch of darkness, and that there were rather more swifts darting in among the greenery than would have been the case if they had been just hunting after midges. Though there are more than enough midges on the island to keep any number of swifts and swallows usefully employed.

As was his way, he followed his curiosity, and pushed and poked around in the foliage, and found his cave, deep enough to excite the imagination of a Robert Louis Stevenson. He told Jimmy about it; Jimmy of course already knew, but he also knew that the cave had a bad reputation. Suppose any fella go inside, bi’mby that fella sick, bi’mby that fella die. The old fellas bin tell ’im. That one no humbug.

Which left Edward rather to his own devices in exploring it. He came back to the house, took up a lantern, and returned to the cave. The one, I have just realised with a shock, that keeps him company right now in the bedroom. No humbug.

I remember how ecstatic he was that day, when he got back again. He was thoroughly stirred up, as much as if he had found a pirate’s treasure chest. What he had discovered was the swifts’ nesting site. I don’t suppose his discovery was all that earth-shattering, but it excited him because nobody else had ever found a nesting colony of this particular species anywhere in Australia. For me, it was pleasing, but hardly enthralling, to have worked out why the swifts stayed on the island all year, unlike the returning wood swallows and nutmeg pigeons. Our island was indeed a sanctuary for them, provided no guns were pointed in their direction.

That is where they safely weathered the big storm. The cyclone. Theirs was the only such secure haven on the entire island. Here, in this room, is where we weathered it, not so safely, under the desk. Here is where it came seeking us, winkling us out, turning everything upside down and topsy-turvy. We had become too confident in our paradise. Our fool’s paradise.

It was not our first experience of a cyclone, but it has been the worst. And Edward never really recovered from it. The first was that time in Townsville, when the fishing fleet was thrown halfway up the town, and left stranded there, the boats badly smashed. Edward was affected by the astonishing power of that storm and all the damage and disarray, and that together with his collapse led us to escape to this island. But you can’t escape to paradise. The old story is right: paradise is what you lose. It is not where you get to, it is what you might have had.

You never get it back again. Milton argued the case for it manfully. He had some strange ideas about men and women. His poor daughters, writing out his poems. I think it would have been a trial living with him too. Carrying on about the whole duty of man, living it out.

Him for God only, me for God in him? Surely not. And as for himself, I don’t think so.

We had only just built our bungalow when the second cyclone came hurling down over us. It was a testing time for the house, but it stood that test. We stood that test. Some of the outbuildings, the sheds and things, were damaged, but our own place held fast, firm and intact. We were quite relieved, pleased even. The bungalow had proved its mettle. Himself lost his boat, the livestock took a battering, and the birds did not return in any numbers for the next several years. The swifts were about in their usual numbers, but none of the others. Even the population of terns and gulls was significantly diminished. I imagine that their usual fishing grounds must have shifted. There were no flocks of them paddling out waiting for the sprats to rise, no crowds squabbling out along the sand spit. The remnants were markedly more subdued, better behaved.

The rainwater tank was overturned and tumbled down toward the beach, severely holed and dinted, coming apart at the seams you might say, and the creek was all fouled up with mud and leaves and twigs and branches. We were on tight rations for a while. Until the silt settled in the water, we scooped out what we could into our pots and pans, and then boiled and set aside to cool. People came across from the mainland to see how we had fared, and Hartley’s father arranged the terms by which Edward could buy another boat. So that one way or another, in the end we didn’t do too badly at all that time.

But there was calamity out in the bay, where the coral had not only taken a pounding from the rough seas and sand was piled up against sections of the reef, but also from the silt washed out through the creek. Chunks of coral were left high on the beach, and mounds of seaweed. It was all a great pity, but at least stretches of coral still remained, more or less intact, if sadly reduced. Enough to remind us of what had once been.

Over the years, small shoals of the colourful reef fish began to re-establish themselves, and Edward’s first interest was in monitoring the damage, and then how that little world under the sea went about repairing itself, and rebuilding something of its former wonder. Unlike the third time, the worst and most recent of those big storms.

The tides and currents shifted the sand around again, back to where it had been formerly, or near enough. The jungle and the rainforest grew again, first with the lush grass and the creepers and the undergrowth, and then soon young saplings began to reappear, and trees which had been damaged in the extreme battering put on new growth, and so gradually the whole island returned to something of its former glory. We would always notice where particular trees had been uprooted, or where they leaned at extraordinary angles, but over the years, as the canopy grew again the worst of the devastation was slowly lost from sight.

I remember how I worried that Edward might be cast down by it all; but because the bungalow had withstood the storm all but undamaged, he seemed less affected by it than I had imagined. Indeed, if anything he seemed to think that we had been somehow vindicated. He did not let himself be troubled by the thought that where there had been a cyclone, in fact two if we count the one down in Townsville just those few years previously, six or seven years earlier I suppose, then in all probability we would be visited by yet others. As turned out to be the case, for inevitably another came, the third, the biggest of them all, fifteen years later. By which time himself had all but forgotten about them.

That one is not something I am likely to forget. It was terrifying, like encountering something much too big, too big for people to bear the brunt of it on their own. A storm at night, or that is how I think of it, but it might well have been earlier. So dark. The flashes of lightning I see from time to time out of the windows now are insignificant compared with that time. Great sheets of light glaring and bulging and pulsing from behind the swift-moving mass of clouds, then the brilliantly bright cracks in the whole face of the heavens, forks of lightning, chains of it, arteries, flashing in one place and then another, splitting and piercing the storm front, and then darkness again and the winds blasting through, twisting and tearing the trees, stripping off branches and hurling them out across the bay.

If that is the wonder of His works displaying the firmament, what sort of creation is it? Not what Haydn had in mind, I am sure of that.

We took shelter, crouched underneath the desk here, Edward and I. When it struck right overhead I saw him start and wince and cower, all at the same moment. I felt the concussion above us. I could follow the cyclone’s violence by his reactions, and his arm tightening about my shoulders. Normally I hear very little at all, but that tearing and cracking and banging was so loud that yes, I did feel I heard it. It reminded me of those winter storms back in Liverpool when mama went scurrying about the house, hanging sheets over the mirrors so as not to attract the lightning, or the beginning of the wet season in Townsville, then I felt the great bolts and the shaking of the thunder—another sound I still have in my head.

We knew to expect the clouds rolling in at the start the wet season. That is the natural cycle; it comes each summer, starting with a building-up of humidity, and the heat pressing down on us like a headache in the air. Nights when my nightgown clung to me, and I longed for some breeze, gentle across the back of my hands, and between my fingers, and on my upper arms, and across my chest. And fell fitfully asleep, and dreamed of myself as one of the naked ladies up there on the wall, restless in the half shadows.

That is the time of year when the winds and then the seas build up, the warm rain falls in torrents, the mosquitoes are worse than ever, and one or other of us would come down with a fever, or with malaria, and there was nothing for it but to retreat to our bed and dose up with quinine. In the beginning there are breaks in the early rain, and days of splendid calm weather, clear skies, the sea turning that magical turquoise colour. But then the winds come back, and the clouds, and the sea goes grey, and the wet season is back for the next several months, lasting until Easter or thereabouts. Which is one way of remembering when Easter is, or near enough.

But this time, the time of the cyclone, was different. You could not fail to notice the portents that something big, something terrible, was coming. The humid days were like a trance, everything close and oppressive. We could see fires running along the ridges on the mainland, started by lightning strikes. On the island we saw frigate birds milling about, harbingers of storms, according to the old sailors. Snakes began to make their presence known about the house; and the rifle was put to ready use. Soon enough clouds began to mass into great towering woolly cliffs, violet to begin with and then bruise-coloured. High up, way way up the front of them, eagles spiralling where the air was still clear, soaring slowly around, lifted aloft by some strong upward draught. Little by little the sky filled in, the sun was obscured, and the day turned darker and darker. With it, the sea, though the growing winds began to whip up the waves and lash at their tops, so that white breakers streaked the channel, curled over the reef and, spreading along its whole length, crashed into the bay. The wind grew stronger and stronger, and twigs and leaves were being torn off the trees and sailed off across the beach and out to sea, branches were flailing about.

But then, the strangest sight of all, the sea began to withdraw out of the bay, leaving exposed all the coral and the weed and the shells and the crabs and everything that used to transfix us as we gazed over the edge of the boat; and we knew to make haste, to take shelter inside the house and barricade the doors as best we could.

When the lightning came, the great glaring flashes lit up the garden and the trees around us. Heavy rain was already splattering off the palm fronds and lilies and ferns, the ginger plants, beating them down with its force, and the water was running off them and making little rivulets in the garden beds, through the grass, down along the paths.

Usually there is a kind of stillness in the rain here, when it just falls down, not driving so much. Everything is so wet it just hangs. Even the palm fronds look sad and dejected. Nothing else matters but the steadiness of the downpour; nothing can be done until it lets up.

But that time—the cyclone crashed into our house. It burst open the doors and windows, wind and rain combined, and all Edward’s papers went swirling around the room with his collections of shells and butterflies, his naked ladies rocked about violently and fell off their hooks, his native weapons were thrown about. It did not occur to me at the time that we may very well be speared inside our own home. Everything was happening too fast, everything was being ripped and torn and shaken. Parts of the roof were wrenched off, sharp-edged sheets of iron slicing into the couch and crashing into those chairs he had made, and was so proud of. Such ferocity, such violence—and us crouched under the desk, shaken by the enormous rapidity of the destruction, awaiting whatever new surge of the cyclone was to descend upon us. It was, I have to confess, something like I imagine from the curses of the prophets, the ones we used to hear about in Sunday School, visited upon us. Something Edward’s father might have used for his sermons.

And that is where we stayed until the storm was over, and had played itself out; where we waited for daylight to come again. There was no sleeping that night. Haydn again: the night that is gone to following night.

That next day, what wreckage lay all about us. On one side of the bungalow much of the roof was gone; the timbers looked like the damaged ribs of an upturned boat. There have been too many upturned boats. All about us was in disarray, and saturated. Edward’s books had been tumbled off his shelves, spines broken, pages torn. Folders had been flung about, everything drenched, the ink entries in his diaries had splodged and run. In the bedroom, all my things were scattered about, my clothes, my brooches, little treasures I had brought with me from England, everything quite quite spoiled. The big clock still stood, but stood still, its pendulum inert, as though time itself had been shocked. As though we were out of time. All the foodstuffs had been thrown about in the kitchen, but at least we could retrieve the tinned provisions and survive on those for the time being.

Outside, more wreckage. Everywhere. A broken world. There were no doors or windows, only the empty frames, the spaces where they had been. Everything had been reduced to grey and white; the very colour of the world had been consumed. The trees had been stripped bare, and looked like so many bones. Broken bones, many of them. Or like giant sprigs of coral, as though our little island world had been turned upside down. As it had. As though the bottom of the bay was come up on to the land, the land washed down into the bay. For when we went to look later on, the coral gardens which had been exposed when the tide ran out to sea had utterly disappeared, they were completely gone. Gone, buried, silted up—they were no more, nor ever would be again. The soil from the forest, and from our gardens and clearing, now covered the floor of the bay, and the sand had come ashore, in great untidy banks. We had fragments of coral and shells in the gardens, cockle shells as in the nursery rhyme, but with nothing pretty or tidy.

There must have been a milling of surge and counter-surge to rearrange everything like that. It could never be the same again. Edward seemed to think that there had been a tidal flood after the storm had passed, and that would account for the strange exchange of sea and land.

The beach was entirely changed, the sand spit half gone. The splendour of our little island paradise was gone. We had been presumptuous in thinking we could do for ourselves, that we could step aside from the rest of the world. We were no safer than the poor wretches in Flanders caught up in the thick of all that fighting; indeed, our forest looked not unlike a terrible military campaign had been conducted right through it, a war. It was wholly devoid of life; except for insects. They were out in force. No vegetation was left, no birds. It was unrecognisable. It was no longer ours.

I remember too that until the rains let up, we had frogs everywhere, hundreds and thousands of them, big ones blinking their eyes alternately, sometimes wiping them with their large nobbled fingers, and little frogs hopping on to their back or sometimes their head and inconsiderately poking one of those popped eyes. Masses of them, like a battalion of soldiers just fallen out on a parade ground. Horrible, so many of them, glistening and squat, and looking at us. And then, it makes me feel ill again to remember this, one of the bigger ones would turn its head and swallow a smaller one. Once I had seen that, I saw it happening everywhere. Gulp, swallow, and that awful leering face. Even a hint of lips being licked. Cannibalism, like a picnic treat. And they had been under our house, and all around it, so many of them and we never knew. Ugh.

Our boatshed had gone of course, the big boat smashed, everything except a broken winch. The dinghy was never seen again. Edward’s work shed lay skewed in a distant corner of the paddock. Dead seabirds all along the beach. Our fowls, miraculously, had survived in their chicken-wire pen, but they were strangely cowed. They could be forgiven for that. The fence around the paddock had collapsed, most of the fruit trees had been uprooted. Everywhere, there was so much to be repaired, so much expense that we could not afford. And where would you start? Edward was just stunned, lost, aimless. He did not know which way to turn.

As for me, there was no question. The house had to be cleaned, and set to rights, as much of it as we could. The shelves in the study had to be replaced, cupboards reattached to the walls, and as he didn’t seem to be able to think of anything for himself, I put the hammer in his hand and held out a tin of nails. It gave him something to do, a start at least. He couldn’t just wander about, as dazed as our chickens.

He had, of course, lost his nerve. He was worried not only whether we could afford to start over again, but whether we were too old to undertake it. It was all to do again. But how? That was too big a question. Perhaps we should admit defeat. It brought on another collapse, the third time he had been so ill. The third time of anything, not just drowning, not just a cyclone—just a cyclone!—is nearly always likely to prove fatal. Now his mortal remains are in the next room; and while we survived the fury of the weather, and he had another five years before his final illness, I think that it took its toll of him. The island was never the same again, and he was never the same. His coral reefs had all been destroyed.

He looked as if he were going to founder in his despondency, when out of the blue, as the saying is, but the sea this time not the sky, around past the tip of the shortened sand spit came Hartley, with a boatload of supplies, and tarpaulins and sheets of iron and everything he could think of. And a great smile and a cheery wave; and his eldest girl too, to help out in the house or what was left of it, and with gathering up all the litter in the garden. He confessed later, down my hearing trumpet so that it was hardly a discreet confession, that he was so relieved to see us alive and well. He had not dared to let himself think of what might have happened to us.

If anyone could shake Edward out of his dejection, it was Hartley. It spoke volumes of his concern for us that he had chanced crossing the channel when the sea was still so angry and disturbed.

Edward was wondering whether he had somehow invited the disaster, brought it upon us. I wonder that too, but not in the superstitious way he was thinking. Whether it had all been too good to be true; whether we could not expect to avoid all the wars, in whatever form they might take.

Hartley of course would not hear a word of it, nor would he accept any hint of our abandoning the island. He set to at once, patching up a temporary roof, then putting up some netting to keep the mosquitoes and other insects at bay, and he went to see about the tanks. He bustled about, and pointed Edward this way and that and gradually his enthusiasm worked upon Edward, and so the necessary work got under way. How hard he worked, what a big strong fellow he is. Just the sort of man I would have wanted for a son.

The might-have-been. That never gets you anywhere. I could end up as despondent as Edward did.

I could indeed end up like Edward.

And what a good generous fellow Hartley has turned out to be. While he and Edward were out in the paddock, sinking postholes for a new fence—an odd expression that, except in swamp land—and apparently without discovering any death adders either, he worked out approximately what it might eventually cost to repair and re-establish our home, and then made a business proposal that took our breath away. He would assume all those expenses himself, and in return offered to take over half of Edward’s title, and to leave us to continue here as we were, for as long as we wished. I remember that day as clear as clear can be. The relief of it, and such a generous offer to us. It solved all our worries at one stroke. We were never going to meet the costs from Edward’s articles and his cases of fruit. Especially with three-quarters of the trees uprooted. That evening, we went down along the beach to where Hartley and his family were camped, their usual spot, and we grilled chops and sausages on their big fire, and began to take some joy in life again.

Yet when Hartley returned to the mainland, promising to bring us his son’s dinghy and for a temporary shed a playhouse no longer used in their garden, and a carpenter to measure up new doors and windows, and goodness knows what else, despite all that, when he left, Edward’s black mood came down upon him again, bit by bit. I did not know what to do. I took him out across the bedraggled garden with all its shell grit coral fragments and seaweed and flies and little brown grasshoppers, over to the edge of the clearing, and showed him where brilliant green shoots were just starting to put out again on the trees that had been left standing. Growing again. It was time to start the clock once more.

I left it to him to tackle whatever repairs he wanted. It all had to be done, and he worked hard in the mornings, before the heat became too much. I had other matters to attend to in the house, and the chickens to soothe, and the cow, which had hidden away in a tight gully at the time of the storm, when the fences went down, but had found its way back to the sweet grass once that started to sprout. I was glad to see her again too. Yes, we could get back to the way we were, even if it did take time. We had plenty of that.

But Edward did not think so. He was feeling his age. And he was deeply disappointed by what we could do nothing about, by the destruction of the coral gardens. We had only the memory of them now. I know how he felt about that. As though something precious had been stolen from him, as though some brilliance had been whisked away, vanished in a trice, like a magical illusion in the story of Aladdin’s lamp. The sunbirds disappeared too, so lively, so vital. Perhaps they were blown away by the fierce winds, or perhaps they had nothing to feed on, no nectar-filled blossoms. We both missed their confident visits.

He had more hopeful days. You would not know from one day to the next what he would be like. I delighted when he was happy again, but I soon learned that that would be followed by days of gloom. Up and down, up and down. The nutmeg pigeons returned at the proper time of the year, but not as many of them. Their old nests had all disappeared, and they had to build anew, not renovate as we were doing. Their coming was reassuring, though, that the old natural cycles were being restored. Terns began to congregate again on the shortened sand spit. The swifts survived undamaged in their granite cave of course, and were now making gluttons of themselves on the myriads of insects. Life was rebuilding.

But something was breaking, or broken, deep inside Edward, and try as he would, he just could not cope with what looked like too much of a demand on his energy. There was so much to put back together again, the extent of it defeated him before he even started. It was just like the way he collapsed in Townsville, the reason for our coming here in the first place. Only worse. He had to go back to the mainland for medical treatment.

Those terrible days. The storm itself is so vivid to me still, and then the exhaustion of putting our lives together again. When I think of those days, they seem like a bad dream, like a nightmare I am living through again, a waking dream. And thinking of them now, I realise my thoughts have gone walking about in the night, prompted by the heavy rain outside. Pacing here and there, and turning back from the door into the bedroom.

He was not away all that long, as it turned out. Hartley kept him cheered up, and the ending of the war on the other side of the world cheered everyone else. When Edward returned, the island looked more cheerful too. But, as we have found out, it remains unsettling. I can be forgiven for thinking it resists settlement. We had deluded ourselves. Edward was nearly right about that.

In the meantime, I had discovered that on the whole I was content with my own company. Just as well, too.

Those silly young women. They might find themselves evicted. Jimmy and Fanny mostly walked about with nothing on, naked as Adam and Eve, with their own version of fig leaves. Edward too, in these last few years, skinny and wrinkled, and proud of becoming tanned, more and more resembling his native brethren. For the life of me, I cannot see that was an improvement. He still looked like a foolish old man.

Oh dear. See where my thoughts have led me now. See why it has been as well to keep my own counsel. That time, down by the other creek. Before the cyclone, oh several years before then. Yes, in the afternoon, after the heat had passed. I was following butterflies, to see whether they settled, and where; skirting the rainforest. They seemed attracted to a stand of pretty shrubs in a pleasant glade, near to the bank of the creek, and I sat on a shaded rock to watch them. Watching and waiting, as I do. Hoya was trailing across rocks along the bank, dangling from them, its heavy cloying scent wafting through the undergrowth. Closer to the tree line, a smother of flowering creepers and climbing plants. Spider lilies along a sandy stretch across the creek. Here and there I saw little birds frisking about, the sun flashing on the deep blue sheen of the sunbirds’ throat, heightening their lurid yellow. Tiny orchids were tucked in among clumps of grass not far from where I was sitting.

Me sitting there a little while, not moving, utterly content in my surroundings, absorbed in them you might say, and unaware at the same time. Perhaps if I had better hearing I might not have been caught off guard. For suddenly I realised that just through the bushes was a man, a naked man, wading along the creek. I froze; he had not turned his head so perhaps he did not know I was there. I dared not move lest I drew his attention to me. The two of us, alone.

I should have moved, should have drawn attention to my presence. But once that moment had passed, it became more and more embarrassing. You may be sure I did not take my eyes off him as he moved slowly up and down. A handsome man, a big black man, one of Jimmy’s visitors, tall and well filled out. Very well, he had a handsome body, a pattern of scars on his chest from his initiation, two white cockatoo feathers in his shiny hair. I remember wondering if his chest were wet, how it would glisten in the sun. He had a small scar on his thigh too.

That was all. But I still feel uneasy about hiding and looking. It feels as though I did something dishonest. When in fact the objection is that I did nothing. I froze, I stayed where I was. And I cannot be sure he did not see me; and if he did, he would have thought I was peeking.

Edward had a photograph of him, the handsome black stranger, in one of his books. I do not need a photograph. His picture is etched in my memory.

Well, if Edward is allowed his naked ladies, why not me? And besides, he did take rather a lot of photographs of the younger native women. So I keep my memories to myself, as I keep my views.

I have been sitting here longer than I knew. Looking into my conscience. As best I can tell by looking through the windows, the rain seems to be easing off. The wind has dropped. Perhaps tomorrow will be a clearer day. Usually the night sky is magnificent, a cloud of glittering stars, and in a full moon the sea is flooded with that beautiful pale blue-white light, and the swell is silky calm, oily, out across the reef. Peace, be still, I’d breathe to myself.

I doubt whether I shall sleep so easily tonight. There has been too much disturbance.