Читать книгу Rushing to Paradise - Rivka Galchen, J. G. Ballard, John Lanchester - Страница 10

Defender of the albatross, champion of islands, and all-purpose media star, Dr Barbara Rafferty had far stranger sides to her character, as Neil discovered on the day before he left the hospital.

Among the last of his mail was an anonymous get-well card attached to the latest issue of Paris-Match, which devoted its leading feature to the saga of Saint-Esprit. Bored by photographs of himself – his mother had tactlessly released a family snapshot of Neil, aged 4, in a paddling pool – he was about to slide the magazine into the waste basket when he recognized an unexpected face. Among the images of dead birds and camera-towers beside the nuclear lagoon was a grainy close-up taken in 1982 of a younger Dr Barbara.

Dressed in a dark suit, eyes lowered to the pavement, she was leaving the London headquarters of the General Medical Council after being struck from its register of licensed physicians. A sharp-eyed journalist at Paris-Match, his memory nudged, perhaps, by the French security services, had raided the picture library and re-opened the celebrated case.

Ten years earlier Dr Barbara Rafferty had been tried for murder in the British courts. Two of her women patients, elderly cancer sufferers in a Hammersmith hospice, had been eased from their last ordeal by a massive sleeping draught. This lethal cocktail of potassium chloride, chloroform and morphine was openly administered by Dr Barbara with the agreement, she claimed, of the patients and their relatives. But not all the relatives had been consulted. Contesting the will, a sister of one of the women visited the police and brought a complaint against Dr Barbara.

The police seized the hospice’s clinical records and discovered that Dr Barbara had practised euthanasia on at least six terminal patients over the previous year. She freely admitted the charge, claiming that she had secured her patients’ consent after an extended period of bedside counselling. At their request, she had put an end to their pain, defended their dignity and their right to self-respect.

Convicted on eight counts of manslaughter, Dr Barbara was given a two-year suspended sentence. An action group of sympathetic doctors and relatives rallied support, but she lost her appeal. Interviewed outside the High Court, she stated that her further behaviour towards her dying patients would be guided by her conscience, a scarcely veiled threat that led the General Medical Council to strike her from the register. A public debate ensued, during which she appeared prominently on television, arguing her case with a passion and stridency that to some observers verged on the self-righteous. Alienated by her chilling manner, even her closest colleagues turned away from her. From then on she was unable to practise as a doctor and became a director of a fringe company designing a female condom, but after six months she resigned and went abroad. Years of exile followed, in Malawi, South Africa and New Zealand, where clandestine medical work was inevitably followed by the exposure of her past, until she came to rest in Honolulu.

Now Dr Barbara had discovered the animal rights movement, and devoted herself to life rather than death. Neil stared at her photograph propped against his pillow, almost dazed by the revelations. The slim, over-intense face of the guilty physician, shadowed by the dark tones of her suit, might have belonged to a war criminal or psychopath. Nonetheless, he felt a curious concern for this outlawed doctor. He realized that she had once been young, and wondered what the young Dr Barbara would have thought of him, or of her scatty older self and her dreams of facing down the French navy.

When she arrived that afternoon, making her last visit to the ward, Neil left the magazine open on the bedside table. Brushing past Nurse Crawford, she swept into the room with her palms raised to the ceiling, and strode to the window as if only the sky was large enough to contain her excitement.

‘Neil – astonishing news!’

‘Dr Barbara?’

‘You won’t believe it. All I can say is that dreams come true. First, though, how are you?’ She picked Neil’s case notes from the foot of the bed and ran a brisk eye over them. ‘Good, they haven’t done too much damage. Over-prescribing, as usual, and all these tests – they must think you’re pregnant. How do you feel?’

‘Fine.’ Neil found himself smiling at her. ‘Bored.’

‘That means you’re ready to leave. I warn you, there’s a lot to do and not much time.’

Neil let her hand brush his cheek. She sat on the bed, gazing at him with undisguised pleasure. When she was alone with Neil she usually turned down the volume control of her public persona, as if this teenaged boy touched some lingering need for the intimacy of private life. But today she was unable to restrain herself.

‘Listen, Neil – it’s what we’ve prayed for. I’ve found a ship!’

Neil pulled her hands from the air and pressed them together, trying to calm her. ‘That’s great, doctor. But I’m out of training – I won’t be ready for the swim until October or even later.’

‘The swim? I’m not talking about that. We’re sailing back to Saint-Esprit! We have a real ship – the Dugong. It’s moored in Honolulu harbour.’

‘Sailing back …?’ Neil felt the veins throb in his injured foot. ‘You’re going back to the island? You’ll get killed, doctor.’

‘Of course I won’t.’ Dr Barbara smoothed his sheets and pillow, as if taming the white waves. ‘It’s everything I’ve worked for. This time we’ll have the whole world behind us. The French will have to listen.’

Unable to sit still, she sprang to the window and gripped the sill, already on the bridge of her vessel. Neil listened as she told him of the billionaire benefactor who had joined the albatross campaign. This was Irving Boyd, a reclusive thirty-five-year-old computer entrepreneur now living in Hawaii. He had recently retired after selling his software company in Palo Alto to a Japanese conglomerate, and now devoted himself to wild-life causes.

Neil had seen him in a rare television interview, a bespectacled and almost schoolboyish figure with a row of pens clipped to his breast pocket, an earnest reader of science fiction who in some ways had never needed to grow up. Rare species of aquatic mammals such as the manatee were his speciality, and his marine sanctuary on Oahu contained the only breeding pair in captivity. Impressed by Dr Barbara’s poverty and dedication, he had begun to support her with cash donations, and supplied her with an office and free telephone at his Honolulu television station. His most important gift was the Dugong, a 300-ton Alaskan shrimp-trawler which he planned to equip as a floating marine laboratory.

‘But first it will take us to Saint-Esprit.’ Dr Barbara blew the blonde hair from her eyes. ‘We leave in three weeks – that’s not much time, but I want to keep everything on the boil. There should be ten of us, including you and Kimo, and Irving’s television crew. We’ll set up our sanctuary, whatever the French do.’

‘They’ll torpedo you,’ Neil told her matter-of-factly. ‘They’ll sink the ship. Look what they did to the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour.’

‘This time they won’t dare!’ Already in full interview mode, Dr Barbara inflated her lungs, nearly bursting the buttons of her safari suit. ‘Neil, the world will be watching. There’ll be a satellite dish on board to link the film crew to the TV station here. Try to imagine it – everyone will see us reclaim that dead nuclear island and give it back to the living world. The twentieth century criminally misspent itself. When the year 2000 arrives we’ll hand to the next millennium a small part of this terrible century that we’ve redeemed and brought to life again. It’s a wonderful dream, Neil, and thanks to Irving Boyd it’s within our grasp.’

Dr Barbara gazed at the distant sea, breast heaving as she caught her breath. Her eyes swept across the bouquets and greeting cards, and came to rest on the open copy of Paris-Match. Scarcely surprised, she stared at the photograph of her younger self.

‘Irving told me he’d seen this. It says everything about him that he wasn’t in the least worried. It had to come out – better now than later …’

She sat with the magazine in her hands, and then dropped it into the waste-bin, as if discarding an out-of-date calendar. Waiting for her to speak, Neil realized that she had wholly detached herself from the disbarred doctor photographed outside the High Court ten years earlier.

Seeing that Neil was still unsure of her, the sheet drawn up to his chin, she spoke calmly as if to a child.

‘I was terribly naive then, far too idealistic. I thought I could do good, but people resent that, judges and juries above all. Doing good unsettles them. Believe me, Neil, nothing provokes people more than acting from the highest motives.’

‘The dead patients …’ Neil searched for a tactful way around the question. ‘Did you really kill them?’

‘Of course not!’ Dr Barbara seemed genuinely puzzled by Neil. ‘Their minds were already dead, they’d given up long before. Only their bodies were alive, covered with sores and ulcers. All I did was put their bodies to rest.’

‘Then you did …’

‘Neil …’ Dr Barbara smiled at him indulgently. ‘Doctors have to do a lot of things that people would rather not know about. Some of these patients were only minutes away from their deaths, but cruelly the clock had stopped. I merely started it again for them. Old women deserve special care, they’re not looked after as gently as old men. Think of them – exhausted, incontinent, riddled with cancers, only able to breathe sitting up, crying out with pain if you even touched them. What I did, I did openly, because I knew it was right. Even the judge didn’t dare send me to prison …’

As if tired of having to justify herself to this moralistic teenager, Dr Barbara turned to the bouquets lying on the table by the television set. Beyond the chrysanthemums and gladioli was a visionary kingdom of her own, filtered through the scented petals, where she could walk untainted by any moral opprobrium and where the albatross would forever fly above her head. A film of moisture, as pale as hope, ran from her high forehead to the tip of her strong nose.

‘I’ve made you famous, Neil.’ She pointed to the childishly scrawled messages. ‘They all love you.’

Neil flexed his numbed foot, counting his toes under the sheet. ‘They’d love me even more if I died – that would really save the albatross, doctor.’

‘Neil …’ Dr Barbara shook her head at this mischievous sally. ‘Think how proud your father would have been. You do remember him?’

‘All the time. It’s my mother who’s trying to forget him – that’s why she’s …’

‘Drawing away from you a little? You can understand that. In bereavement there’s a time to remember and a time to forget. Sometimes they’re the same thing. When does she expect you in Atlanta?’

‘Next month. But I might stay on here for a while.’

‘Well, we leave in three weeks, Neil. You’ll have to decide. Kimo and I want you to come with us. We need someone your age who’ll encourage other young people to join the sanctuary. In time they’ll take over from us. It’s not a crusade but a great relay race. Will you come?’

‘Well … there might be a nuclear test. I’ll have to think about it.’

‘Good. I’ve always depended on you, Neil. When you’re older we’ll be very close …’

This unveiled threat, uttered in a quietly confident tone, floated through Neil’s mind during his days of convalescence at the swimming-pool. When he left the hospital, blushing through the crowd of teasing nurses, Dr Barbara drove him in the jeep to his rooming house, but she set off immediately for the docks. There were stores to be loaded aboard the Dugong, cabins and the galley to be equipped, satellite communications gear to be installed.

Neil promised vaguely that he would help, but he had secretly decided not to join the expedition. Television and press reporters were already visiting the shrimp-trawler in Honolulu harbour, describing in provocative detail the preparations for the ecological sea-raid on a military outpost of the French colonial empire. The Defence Ministry in Paris neither confirmed nor denied that nuclear tests were to re-start on Saint-Esprit, but warned that any unauthorized vessel entering the exclusion zone would be boarded and seized.

Neil returned to a quixotic mission of his own, the marathon swim across the Kaiwi Channel. The months in hospital had softened the muscles of his legs and shoulders, and his first twenty lengths in the university pool left him too exhausted to climb from the shallow end. Weeks of intense body-building and pool practice would be needed to return him to fitness. Rising at six, determined to work himself back to a hundred lengths a day, he tried not to think of Dr Barbara, Saint-Esprit or the albatross.

But memories of the disbarred physician and her passionate breath tugged like the waking nerves in his injured foot, distracting him as he mapped the currents of the Kaiwi Channel on the U.S. Navy charts. Curious to see her before she sailed, and aware that he might never meet her again, he decided to drive to the harbour to say his goodbyes. The revelation that she had killed her elderly patients lay in the back of his mind like an old newspaper in an attic, fading in a moral climate that took a more tolerant view of euthanasia and, tacitly, even approved of the process. Few of her new-found admirers had lost faith in her or stepped back for a moment to ponder her multiple murders. Paris-Match now lauded the transformation of ‘Dr Death’ into ‘Dr Life’. All lives were precious, but the albatross and manatee now outranked the lowly human being.

Moreover, Neil knew, he missed Dr Barbara, her strong will and her disconcerting coarseness and affection. He remembered how she bullied him during the voyage to Saint-Esprit, while her fingers forever ran across his chest, reading the braille of some invisible desire in his urgent skin. He thought of the thuggish French marines with their rubber truncheons, and wondered how to dissuade her from sailing to the atoll.

On the first Sunday after leaving the hospital he parked the jeep near the harbour and hid himself among the strolling tourists. The Dugong was moored beyond the inter-island ferry station, high bows already pointing towards the open sea. On a steel platform below the bridge a satellite dish cupped the sky. A military staff car stood on the quay, and men in camouflage fatigues climbed the gangway.

Neil limped forward, pushing between the tourists. He hoped that the American government, under pressure from the French, had decided to impound the vessel before it could set sail. But when he reached the staff car he found a driver with a bandit moustache and shaven head lounging behind the wheel. Transfers of a dugong, manatee and great white shark were stuck to his neck, and a rondel on the door was emblazoned with ‘Wild-Water Kingdom Inc. Live and Love—an Irving Boyd Planetary Project’.

Neil approached the gangway, stepping past a dozen crates packed with tents and camping equipment, cartons of macrobiotic and vegetarian food, a portable ocean of bottled mineral water, camera lights and silver umbrellas. Gazing calmly upon all this from the bridge was Captain Wu, the Hong Kong Chinese skipper, a small, trim figure in white shorts, knee-length socks and peaked cap. Beside him was the philanthropist and software genius, pale eyes taking in every detail through his over-large spectacles. He noticed Neil standing uncertainly at the foot of the gangway and gave a gentle wave, like an absent-minded pope extending his benediction.

‘Neil, don’t fall in!’ Dr Barbara stepped from the cabin below the bridge. She waited by the gangway and caught his arm when his numbed foot missed a worn rubber cleat. She pulled him onto the deck, surprised but glad to see him, weighing the stronger muscles of his arms like a farmer’s wife pleased with the growth of a prize bullock.

‘Neil, we’ve all missed you. Are you coming with us?’

‘Dr Barbara, I wanted to—’

‘Good. I knew you would.’ Dr Barbara stood back and then embraced him fiercely, strong hands searching his rib-cage and shoulder blades, reassuring herself that the bones of old still lay within the newly confident muscle. ‘We couldn’t have gone without you.’

‘Dr Barbara …’ Neil wiped her gaudy lipstick from his forehead. ‘What about the French navy? They’re waiting for you …’

‘Don’t worry! There’s a new wind blowing.’ She consulted her roster. ‘We’ll find a cabin for you later, but first I want you to meet Monique Didier, our very special new friend.’

She put an arm proudly around Neil as a vigorous, dark-haired woman in white overalls stepped onto the deck below the bridge and emptied a waste-bucket of soapy water into the sea.

‘Monique is a chief steward with Air France,’ Dr Barbara told him. ‘But she’s given everything up to join us. Monique, this moody chap is Neil Dempsey, champion swimmer and my right-hand man.’

‘So … of course, I saw you on TV. You’re practically a film star.’ The Frenchwoman bowed steeply, holding Neil’s hand as if touching an icon. ‘I know all about your trip to Saint-Esprit. You’re really my hero.’

Despite her ironic tone, Neil found himself reddening again. During her hospital visits Dr Barbara had often described this high-principled air hostess. Now in her late thirties, Monique Didier was the daughter of one of France’s first animal rights activists, the writer and biologist René Didier. She and her father had set up a wild-life sanctuary in the Pyrenees for an endangered colony of bears. For years they endured the abuse and hostility of local farmers angered by the bears’ sheep-killing and their sentimentalized image in the metropolitan press. All this had made Monique prickly and defensive, but she was dedicated to her campaign, brow-beating her first-class passengers on the Paris –New York and Paris –Tokyo runs. After repeated warnings, Air France had lost patience and sacked her.

Neil was already wary of her sharp tongue, but Monique seemed genuinely reassured by his arrival. He was tired after walking along the crowded quay, and wanted to sit on the platform of the satellite dish, but she hovered around him as if eager to fasten his seat-belt and slip a plastic tray onto his lap.

‘It’s excellent that you’re coming,’ she told Neil, still sizing him up. ‘We have to get ashore very quickly, and you know the secret pathways to the airstrip.’

‘They’re not really secret …’ Neil realized that Dr Barbara had been busy mythologizing the island. ‘What about Kimo?’

‘He’ll be with us, of course. But we must take care not to expose him.’ Monique rattled her bucket with a show of distaste. ‘Those French officers are so racist. One chance and they’ll shoot him down like a pig.’

‘They shot me.’

‘But not again!’ Monique’s eyebrows bristled. ‘You’re an emblem, Neil. The TV screen is your shield, no bullet can pierce you. Is that right, Barbara?’

‘Of course, Monique, though I wouldn’t put it quite like that.’ Dr Barbara tried to pacify her. ‘Let’s hope no one gets shot.’

The endless bedside interviews and television appearances had done their work, Neil reflected. He was now a talisman of the animal rights movement, to be carried shoulder-high like the stuffed head of a slaughtered bison. When Dr Barbara took him onto the bridge she introduced him with a flourish to Captain Wu and Irving Boyd, as if his appearance guaranteed her own credentials.

The computer entrepreneur greeted him with a grave bow, eyes slowly blinking behind the thick lenses like an ever-wary alarm detector.

‘We prayed for you, Neil,’ he said in a soft Texan voice, to which he listened as if the words contained a concealed code. ‘When you were shot the planet held its breath. I think even the manatees and the dugongs prayed.’

‘I prayed for the albatross, Mr Boyd.’

‘Everyone prayed for the albatross. Meanwhile, I hope you take part in the sanctuary island project.’

‘No one’s asked me – is that a TV series?’

‘Irving means Saint-Esprit,’ Dr Barbara pointed out. ‘I think we can look forward to some awfully high ratings.’

‘We want you there, Neil.’ Boyd’s eyes were fixed on Neil with all the humility of a film producer discovering a face of Christ-like pathos among a crowd of extras. ‘There’s a starring role for you.’

‘Well, maybe … I don’t know much about acting. I’m still coping with reality.’

‘Reality? That’s a public service channel, Neil. I’m planning to put up the first privately operated ecological satellite. We’ll beam you and Dr Barbara into every home on the planet …’

As Boyd outlined his prospectus it was clear to Neil that the entrepreneur saw the expedition to Saint-Esprit as little more than the reconnaissance for a television programme. But Dr Barbara bundled him down the stairway before he could reply.

‘For God’s sake, Neil! He’s lent us the ship.’

Neil was pleased to see her annoyed with him. A few minutes in Dr Barbara’s presence was more of a tonic than all the hundreds of lengths in the university pool.

‘The Dugong ’s a stage-set, Dr Barbara. Like the replica of the Bounty. For him everything turns into television.’

‘Maybe, but he still controls the off-switch. Now meet Professor and Mrs Saito. And no jokes about atom bombs.’

A young Japanese couple broke off their work in the galley to bow to Neil. Both professional botanists, they had flown in from Tokyo the previous day after abandoning their careers at the University of Kyoto and placing themselves at the service of Dr Barbara’s vision. They had brought with them two small suitcases, a plastic tent and a set of folding chairs, like overgrown children about to play on a holiday beach. They treated Neil to a pair of synchronized smiles that had scarcely faded when he left the Dugong an hour later, promising Dr Barbara to return and help with their preparations for departure.

Trying to make sense of this naive but muddled crew, Neil drummed his forehead so fiercely against the jeep’s steering wheel that he bruised the skin. Already he knew that some way had to be found of preventing Dr Barbara and her ship of fools from ever leaving Honolulu. During the next days, as he swam his lengths, he listened to the pool-side radio. Media interest in the Dugong remained high, prompted by the immense white wings which Kimo had painted along the trawler’s hull. Already a novelty designer in Waikiki had turned the striking image of wave and wing into a natty series of badges and lapel buttons.

Every afternoon Neil drove to the harbour, hoping to find that French agents had scuttled the ship. Dr Barbara was usually absent, lobbying the French consulate with a party of sympathizers and addressing the last fund-raising rallies. Captain Wu and his seven Filipino crew continued to load the stores, fuel and fresh water, watched by the solitary figure of Irving Boyd, brooding between the white wings of the ship like Poseidon lost in a dream of his oceans.

A group of New Age hippies carrying an anti-vivisectionist banner had taken up residence on the quay. Shaking their tambourines, they danced among the stall-holders selling balloons and environmentalist geegaws to the tourists. Even Irving Boyd stirred from his meditations and tapped the air to the cheerful rhythm. He invited the troupe onto the bridge, where they danced around a bemused Captain Wu and then conducted a gentle mock-religious rite beside the satellite dish.

Watching this antic ship and its antic crew, Neil was sure that they would never leave port. But a week after his meeting with Dr Barbara he met the latest volunteers to join the expedition and realized that the Dugong would not only set out from Honolulu but had every chance of sailing straight into the French guns.

A film crew of three – Janet Bracewell, the Australian director, and the camera-man, her American husband Mark, together with the Indian sound-recordist, Vikram Pratap – were to be Irving Boyd’s ambassadors to Saint-Esprit. Detached from the Wild-Water sanctuary, they would record the progress of the expedition and transmit live pictures of any hostile French action to Boyd’s TV station in Honolulu and from there to the world’s watching networks. Already they were filming the reporters and animal rights activists who roamed the Dugong, interrupting the work of the Filipino crewmen and earnestly questioning them about their attitudes to nuclear testing and the environment.

Incited by the camera’s presence, the visitors turned the shrimp-trawler into the venue of a continuous party. Passers-by pilfered the unloaded stores and helped themselves to the bottles of donated wine. By the time Dr Barbara and Monique returned in the evening they found tourists dancing on the quay to the New Age tambourines, eco-banners floating on the cool harbour air and an amiable wraith of pot-smoke lifting through the Chinese lanterns. Delighted by this festive atmosphere, Dr Barbara danced with Monique while Captain Wu paced his darkened bridge and a disapproving Kimo sat with his paint store in the high bows of the Dugong.

But Kimo was not alone in being puzzled by Dr Barbara’s failure to control her sympathizers. As he watched from the pier of the inter-island terminal Neil had noticed a tall, white-haired American in his early forties standing beside his rented car on the quay. Driven by his wife, he usually arrived in mid-afternoon, stepped from his seat and spent an uncomfortable hour gazing at the ship. The sight of the unguarded stores and the three inflatables on their trailer seemed to unsettle him. While his wife sat stoically at the wheel he would pace around the rubber craft, wiping the wine-stains with his handkerchief, and only relaxing when the Filipinos finished their interviews and returned to work. Sometimes he would shout at the milling tourists, and then break off to practise his tennis backhand, sweeping his long arm in a compulsive way, as if trying to land a difficult shot in his opponent’s court.

Neil assumed that he was forcing himself to decide whether or not he should join Dr Barbara. On his fourth visit to the quay, the American saw her arrive after her last day’s work at the children’s home. He avoided her eyes when she strode past, leaned his elbows on the window sill of the car and stared at his patient wife. Before she could speak he turned with a nervous tic of his shoulders and followed Dr Barbara to the Dugong, counting her steps aloud to himself. Holding his arms above the heads of the Japanese tourists, he climbed the gangway, his eyes clear and all his doubts apparently resolved.

Neil soon learned that this was David Carline, the last volunteer to join the expedition. The president of a small pharmaceutical company in Boston, he had been on holiday in Honolulu when he learned of Dr Barbara and her mission to save the albatross. The family firm had for decades supplied its pharmaceuticals to the third world, and Carline had frequently taken leaves of absence to join American missionary groups in Brazil and the Congo, teaching in mission schools and delivering lay sermons at the open-air church services. Intelligent, rich and eager for hard work, he was the first sane presence on board the Dugong.

Neil disliked him on sight. From the moment that Carline came on deck, swinging his expensive, travel-worn suitcase up the gangway, Neil was certain that he would restore order to the ship, concentrate Dr Barbara’s wayward mind and see that the trawler set sail as planned. Sure enough, within little more than a day Carline had assumed the deputy leadership of the expedition. Both Monique and Dr Barbara were glad to defer to someone with the management skills needed to restore order to the crates heaped chaotically in the forward hold. Captain Wu welcomed him to the bridge, recognizing a fellow spirit, and Irving Boyd happily ceded his place to Carline and returned to his television station in Honolulu.

Carline soon set about trimming the ship. First he persuaded the Bracewells to save their film footage, and affably suggested that they join the other expedition members in the job of winching the silver-skinned inflatables from their trailer on the quay. Once the camera vanished from the scene many of the tourists and New Agers drifted away, taking the stall-holders with them. The work of loading stores resumed, and Kimo descended from his perch, eager to support Carline’s brisk new regime.

Carline greeted Neil with a testing handshake, sensible enough to ignore the English youth’s hostility.

‘Neil, you’re the reason I’m here, all the way from Boston. We’re proud of you and everything you did on Saint-Esprit.’ He gestured to Mrs Carline, sitting sombrely in the car parked by the gangway. ‘Even my wife respects you – a great deal more than she respects me, I can tell you. I’d like you to meet her, she admires your guts in sailing to Saint-Esprit and taking on the French. It might help her to understand why I had to join you.’

‘Why did you join?’

‘Hard to say, Neil. I guess I need to go to Saint-Esprit to find out. Of course, I want to save the albatross, but there’s more to it than that. In a sense I want to save Dr Barbara. The world needs people like her, people with conviction and faith in the rest of us. For so long we’ve behaved as if we’re all about to leave the planet for good, as if the Earth was some kind of dying resort area. We need more Saint-Esprits. I saw you and Dr Barbara on the TV news and, do you know, I left the hotel and drove straight down here. Anyway, enough of me. Are you fit for work? Kimo’s keen to get the outboards loaded.’

For the rest of the day, as they settled the heavy motors in the hold, Neil kept a careful watch on the American, a nightmare-come-true of integrity and good humour. He reminded Neil of the chaplain at his boarding school in England – always eager and understanding, always ready to make the first rugby tackle on the practice pitch. The chaplain had resigned after an affair with the sports master’s wife, and already Neil saw Carline as his chief rival for the attention of Dr Barbara.

‘Kimo tells me you want to swim across the Kaiwi Channel,’ Carline commented as they rested in the hold, surrounded by the engines and inflatables. ‘It’s a long way. Do you think you can do it?’

‘Maybe not. But it’s worth trying.’

‘Good for you. Now that’s no day-dreamer’s philosophy. How do you feel about going back to Saint-Esprit?’

‘It’s dangerous …’ Neil said nothing of his decision to remain in Honolulu even if the Dugong sailed. ‘The French have patrol boats and a corvette.’

‘You’re wary, and it’s sensible of you. Remember, though, you weren’t frightened to face that French bullet.’

‘I was running away.’

Carline laughed at this. ‘Well, at least you weren’t frightened to do that either.’

As he helped Carline to rope down the engines, it occurred to Neil that it would be surprisingly easy to sabotage the Dugong. Captain Wu had talked to Boyd and Dr Barbara about their contingency plans if the trawler was hit by gun-fire: they would either run her aground in the lagoon or scuttle her astride the reef. The cargo-hold and engine-room seacocks were never guarded, and at night only the Saitos and the Filipino crew slept aboard the ship. Carline returned with his wife to their Waikiki hotel, and Dr Barbara and Monique to their apartments in Honolulu. The quay was patrolled by a group of French students who had flown in from Tahiti, opposed to their government’s decision to end the moratorium on nuclear testing and suspicious of the treacheries of the Deuxième Bureau. They sat around a kerosene lamp by the gangway, handing out leaflets to any midnight visitors who wandered down the quay, while a lookout monitored the waters around the Dugong in a small dinghy.

The cabin that Neil would share with Carline and the Indian sound-recordist was a narrow steel box with three hinged bunks, barely six steps from the door into the forward hold. The Filipinos slept aft in the engine-room and would hear Neil if he approached, but a single open seacock would flood the Dugong and sink it to the harbour bed.

Neil watched the news bulletins at his rooming house, waiting for the French intelligence agents in Honolulu to carry out the same act of sabotage that had sunk the Rainbow Warrior, and so save him the pain of betraying Dr Barbara. At the end of June, a week before the Dugong’s departure for Saint-Esprit, he packed a travel case with enough clothing and personal tackle to convince anyone that he meant to live aboard the ship.

He arrived at the quay by dusk, as the French volunteers sat in their deck-chairs beside the gangway, their anti-nuclear banners swaying in the riding lights of the ship. Neil stowed his bag in the cabin and tested the unlocked door into the forward hold. He joined Professor Saito and his wife in the galley, where he shared their modest macrobiotic meal. Afterwards they invited him to their cabin, where they earnestly discussed the damage to Japan’s wild-life by the post-war policy of industrialization at any cost.

A dedicated taxonomist, Professor Saito was a slim, unsmiling man who seemed barely older than Neil. The cabin was crammed with textbooks and research reports on the world’s myriad endangered species, which the botanist seemed to be classifying single-handedly. He had begun to catalogue the insect life aboard the Dugong, and had even noticed a fall in the expected number of rats in the bilges.

Mrs Saito was a small, brisk woman with strong hands that almost pulled Neil’s wrists out of joint when she greeted him. She was devoted to her husband, forever watching him like an experienced manager supervising a novice boxer. Through the flicker of her chopsticks she stared at Neil’s skin, once reaching out to touch his arm as if she expected to see his radiation burns. She told him that they travelled to Saint-Esprit as the delegates of all the nuclear casualties of World War II.

‘We can save the albatross, Neil,’ she assured him.

‘Of course we can, Mrs Saito,’ Neil replied, uncertain whether her remark was a question.

‘If we save the albatross we can help the spirit of many people in Hiroshima.’

‘The dead people?’

‘And the other people today. They live on in the albatross.’

Her husband sucked at his sake. ‘It’s England’s sacred bird?’ he asked. ‘A totemic figure?’

‘Yes, it is, in a way …’

‘It’s a beautiful bird. Is Saint-Esprit beautiful?’

‘It certainly is,’ Neil assured him. ‘It has a very strange atmosphere, you know. There are all these amazing towers.’

‘Towers?’ Professor Saito sat up. ‘Like … obelisks? Stone columns, with religious inscriptions?’

‘No. Camera-towers, made of concrete. Waiting for a nuclear explosion …’

Neil tried to calm himself, but the silence that followed his brief outburst lasted until he left the cabin and closed the door on the Saitos. He spent the next two hours on the quay, talking to an earnest American woman, a computer sciences major at the University, who prepared coffee for the French students. At midnight he climbed the gangway and went to his cabin. He sat by the open door, listening to the strange scratching sounds that emerged from the Saitos’ cabin, and watched the distant lights of Waikiki through the salt-smeared porthole.

For the first time he wondered if he had the courage to turn the seacock and sink Dr Barbara’s dreams to the harbour bottom. Even a few feet of water in the forward hold would postpone their departure long enough for Irving Boyd to have second thoughts about the voyage.

The students were drowsing in their deck-chairs, and the scent of cannabis drifted over the silent ship. Neil stepped from the cabin and eased open the door into the hold. As he turned the wheel of the seacock he vowed to work hard for Dr Barbara and somehow reinstate her as a practising physician.

Headlights flared across the hatchway above his head, illuminating the foremast which reared into the night like a crippled gallows. As the Saitos stirred in their cabin, Neil climbed the oily ladder to the deck and crouched behind the satellite dish. The students were shouting to each other and there was a panic of running feet on the gangway. A taxi approached at speed along the quay, its beams dipping and flaring as the driver braked beside the moored craft, searching for the Dugong. Dr Barbara leaned over his shoulder, pointing to the white wings that veered from the dark water.

Seeing her, Neil felt a surge of relief. He knew that he could sink the ship, but not while Dr Barbara walked its bridge. He met her on the gangway, taking her hands when she stumbled towards the deck. Her hair was uncombed, and she gasped through her smeared lipstick, as if she had just been embraced by a violent lover.

‘Neil, thank God you’re here. I knew I could rely on you.’

‘Dr Barbara? What is it – did someone attack you?’

‘They’ve attacked all of us!’ Dr Barbara stared wildly at the ship, as if unable to focus her eyes. ‘The French have informed the United Nations. Nuclear tests resume at Saint-Esprit on July 15. Neil!’

‘July 15 …?’ Neil tried to restrain her whirling hands, moving across the night air like deranged birds. ‘Dr Barbara, that means there’s no point in going. We’ll never get there.’