The Dutch Wife (19 page)

HILDA FORRESTAL COULDN’T FORGIVE
her husband. She packed her bags and went back to her own country. Forrestal, his stoop even more pronounced, remained. Rowland, haunted by guilt and by nightmares, left Quibo and moved to the coast.

The night before he left, Sanchez, the foreman, came to his apartment. He wanted to assure Rowland that he and the two other men in the party would always be grateful to him. Elena herself would have made the choice he made.

Rowland was too miserable to accept this consolation. In fact, he now wished he hadn’t acted. At least he’d have been spared his awful remorse, even if the Quiboans had suffocated. Or if they’d to cut Elena to pieces of their own accord, he’d have been able to accept it. But to have done what he did, to have initiated it, to have participated in it—that was unbearable.

Before Sanchez left, he told Rowland that he and his men were finished with this kind of work: it was clearly unwise to disturb the graves of the ancients. As he stood by the door, hesitant, ready to leave, he spoke again. “I came to tell you this,” he said, his dark eyes glistening. “The Señorita Elena . . . she had a baby inside her.”

Then he quickly left.

FOR A MONTH,
Rowland Vanderlinden was a resident in a seedy hotel near the docks at San Pedro. He felt as though he’d fallen into himself—a brief, devastating fall from which there could be no recovery. He had great difficulty sleeping and drank too much tequila to make himself senseless.

On one very muggy Saturday night he sat at one of the curb-side tables of a café in an alleyway near his hotel. At the other tables, some sailors with their girls were drinking and talking. Rowland sipped his tequila and listened to his heart beat. After a while, it wasn’t his heart he heard but the sound of drums from an approaching party of street entertainers. They stopped only a few yards away from his table.

Two of the group were drummers; they wore unpainted wooden masks with curved beaks and recessed eyes. The other two were wrapped in long, hooded black cloaks and stood perfectly still. The drums beat faster and faster. Rowland, in spite of his sadness, watched, along with the others in the café.

Now the hands of the drummers were a blur, the sound a continuous, deafening roar. They stopped. The two cloaked figures stepped forward, slowly unwound their cloaks and allowed them to fall to the ground. Rowland shrank back, knocking over his glass. For instead of the human beings he’d expected to see, the flickering street light showed two lizards, their skins green and blue, moist and warty.

Rowland’s mind, slow-witted from a diet of tequila, became conscious of hand claps and admiring calls from the other patrons of the café. He began to realize that the two figures were actually women, their bodies painted brilliantly. According to the way the street light caught them, at one moment they were gorgeous, exotic, seductive. At another they were repulsive, cold, alien.

The drumming began again; the brief show was over. The lizard-women put on their cloaks and came among the watchers, holding out wicker baskets. Rowland dropped some coins into a basket, careful to avoid the glistening, colourful hand.

“It’s not paint,” said a sailor at the next table. “They’re tattooed.” His voice was slurred. The mascaraed eyes of the woman with him glittered. “They’re from one of those islands near Vatua. The women there are all tattooed like lizards,” the sailor said.

The entertainers finished their collection and, with drums still beating, moved down the street, looking for another place to perform.

“Vatua?” Rowland said. He’d heard the name before, he couldn’t quite remember where. “Where’s Vatua?”

“It’s one of the islands in the Motamuas,” said the sailor. “The men believe their women can turn into real lizards whenever they feel like it.” He smiled at the woman with the mascaraed eyes. “Imagine waking up with a big reptile beside you.”

She didn’t smile back.

LATER THAT NIGHT
in his hotel, Rowland lay in bed listening to the thumps and yells and laughter that penetrated the flimsy walls of his room from other rooms along the spongy corridor. Through a tequila haze, he wondered if the mention of that name, Vatua, which he was certain he’d heard before, might not be a message directed especially to him. He was reaching for any idea that might keep his head above the dark water of despair. He desperately wanted to believe that though, on the surface, life seemed to be as arbitrary as a poker game, it was actually a highly complicated jigsaw puzzle, and that, with persistence, he might discover how everything was connected. Consoled by this thought and by the tequila, he fell into the deepest sleep he’d had since Elena’s death. When he awoke, late the next morning, he went down to the docks and booked passage on a ship sailing west, to the islands.

In this way, over a number of years, Rowland Vanderlinden found himself in the Motamua Archipelago, and in course of time arrived in Vatua. From there, he’d eventually settled in the Highlands of Manu, married the Consort and become a father. He’d devoted his life since then to the study of the Tarawa people, hoping, in the end, to produce a definitive account of that enigmatic culture.

– 17 –

IN CAMBERLOO HOSPITAL,
Thomas Vanderlinden became silent.

I waited for more. The low hum of the big machine outside the door, which had been like the bass accompanying his voice and every so often coming to the fore, was also silent now. I could see in Thomas’s eyes that he was still with Rowland on the train from Vancouver all those years ago. Then he looked at me.

“After he told me about the death of Elena, he was quite drained,” Thomas said. “I didn’t say anything. I just kept thinking how incredible his life had been and how I didn’t envy him in the slightest. His experiences were fascinating to listen to, but who would have wanted to undergo them?”

“Wasn’t it awful?” I said. “I mean, what happened to Elena.”

“Yes,” said Thomas. “He told me later that not a single day had gone past throughout the rest of his life that he didn’t remember it. And when he did, his heart would break all over again. He hoped their love had some meaning. He was afraid that if he ever conceded that it could be so arbitrarily wiped out—and that he’d had a hand in it—he’d go mad. Even some mysterious purpose that might always be incomprehensible to human beings was preferable . . . anything at all was preferable to believing that their love and her death were without any point at all.”

“How sad,” I said.

He shook his head. “He never got over it. Just as my mother never got over the great love of her life.” He reached for his oxygen mask and breathed for a while. Then he gave me a little smile. “You’ve been extraordinarily patient with me. What you want to know is, what happened when we got to Camberloo and he met up with my mother again, after all those years.”

Of course, I denied that. “Not at all,” I said. “It’s been very interesting.”

Thomas didn’t believe me. “I’m taking so long to bring them together, you must feel I don’t want them ever to meet,” he said. “I’m not playing games for the sake of suspense. It’s just that in life, as well as in books, certain important preliminaries have to be got through before the characters meet. So bear with me. I’m just about to come to their meeting. That’s a promise.”

At that very moment, a nurse appeared at the door. “It’s time for your visitor to go now,” she said to Thomas.

“See?” he said to me with a sigh. “Here’s another preliminary.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said.

PART THREE

T
HE
P
LAGUE

– 1 –

NEXT MORNING,
I sat in the garden, trying to work on
The Kilted Cowpoke
. But I was half thinking about Thomas Vanderlinden and some of the wide-ranging conversations we’d have over the hedge. Just a week before, he’d appeared at the gap with a little smile on his face.

“If you don’t know what you’re looking for, how will you know what you’ve found?”
he’d said to me.

I’d thought he was talking about my difficulties with my novel, but he wasn’t.

“That was Matthew of Paris’s question,” he said. “His book,
Mundus Mirabilis,
was published in the early sixteenth century when much of the world was a mystery. Sailors still thought the earth was flat and were afraid that if their ships were blown out to sea they’d sail over the edge. Matthew was one of a group of scholars called the Anti-Geographers—they were founded just after the New World was discovered. They said if they had their way, all further exploration would be declared anathema. If voyagers did stumble accidentally on a new land, they’d be forbidden under pain of death to reveal its existence to anyone else.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. Thomas barely noticed I’d spoken.

“Matthew’s reasons,” he said, “were unusual for a man of his time. They weren’t the typical theological objections—you know, the way orthodox astronomers used to argue that there couldn’t be any new planets since the harmony of God’s universe was already perfect, and that sort of thing. No, Matthew’s was an entirely human point of view. He was afraid any new parts of the earth we discovered would be as disappointing as the rest. So he believed it was much better not to look for these places, but to leave them up to our imaginations. He even encouraged those who did travel to distant parts of the known world to invent things about them that would make them more interesting than they actually were.” He looked at me with those astute blue eyes. “Maybe Matthew was right. Maybe we’ve been expending our efforts in all the wrong places. We’ve explored every nook and cranny of this earth. But as for the understanding of why we are the way we are—as for what’s in here,” he tapped his head, “there’s been virtually no progress whatsoever. In fact, there’s probably been a regression. The people driving at one hundred miles an hour, or flying overhead at thirty thousand feet, or living in apartments with all modern conveniences—do these people actually know any more about who they are than the average European four hundred years ago?”

“But back then, didn’t they believe some supernatural being was behind everything?” I said.

“Yes, indeed, most of them did,” he said. “And it’s quite understandable when you consider that survival was very precarious in those days. To drink the water was to invite E. coli; to eat a meal was to risk botulism; to breathe the air in a town like London was to expose yourself to innumerable contagions; to lie down in your own flea-ridden bed was to flirt with bubonic plague. In fact, when you think of it, to wake up alive in the morning in that era was a miracle. Yes, if ever there was a time when people needed to believe in God, or in Something that would give their lives meaning, you would have thought that was just such a time.” He nodded his head, pausing for emphasis. “But in spite of all those incentives to belief, there were some people who just couldn’t convince themselves. They thought the world was so awful that no god worthy of their respect could have made it. Have you ever come across Robertus Magister’s book,
De Periculis Invitis?
”

Naturally, I hadn’t.

“It’s still well worth reading,” he said. “Early in the first chapter he says: ‘
To ask “Who am I?” is to take a step towards the unavoidable answer “I am nothing.”’
Now doesn’t that sound very modern? Later on, he says: ‘
We can no longer remain enchanted by our dreams; nor can we further sustain our souls on the illusions of the ancients; our sole comfort in this present age is the prospect of oblivion.’”
Thomas knew the words by heart and recited them with relish.

“Sounds quite depressing,” I said. “I think I’ll skip it.”

That was another of those rare times I heard him laugh.

“You’re missing the point,” he said. “It’s the novelty of the ideas that matters. How incredible that someone should be saying such things long before our own enlightened times.” His laugh was so unexpectedly pleasant I was quite proud of myself for bringing it out of him, even though it was at my expense.

“But where do you stand?” I said. “Do you agree with this man, Robertus?”

His blue eyes gleamed.

“I’m a doubter,” he said. “If there is a God, and if he ever comes looking for an honest man, he’ll have to choose from among the doubters.”

– 2 –

I ARRIVED AT THE HOSPITAL
around one o’clock, coffee in hand. Thomas was waiting for me, full of vigour, as if it was the anticipation of telling me his story that had injected new life into him, and not the hypodermic needle.

I sat down. “Well?” I said. I wanted him to get to the point, as he’d promised: the eventual meeting of Rowland and Rachel Vanderlinden after all those years apart.

Thomas pretended to look puzzled. “Well what?” he said.

I enjoyed this little bit of playfulness from him. It seemed to crop up unexpectedly from time to time.

“Oh, now I remember,” he said. “You mean what happened when Rowland arrived in Camberloo and met Rachel again? Very well, let me think.” He composed himself for a moment; I sipped my coffee. He began to talk.