The Love Beach (6 page)

'Looks like it's all one‑way. I never thought I'd see this here, mind,' said Davies. He had thought of Newport Bridge at five o'clock with the cars and the buses choking its throat and the muddy Usk gurgling below. The warehouses cowering and cold along the coal‑coloured banks and the castle stuck like an old tooth between the road and the railway.

They started pedalling again, Bird going first. They
rode close along one kerb, while the tide of bicycles went in the other direction. 'Surely they're not all from that village,' Davies said. 'There's hundreds.'

'Oh no,' she said. 'There are four more villages on this side of the island. They all work in 'Gesima.'

He had heard people all day naturally abbreviate the capital to 'Gesima. He supposed they could hardly call it anything else. To take the first two syllables would have been ridiculous. The girl had turned along a secondary track now. away from the road and curving like a bow along by the sea again. She was very slim on the old heavy bicycle. Her feet were still bare and the gobs of mud that jumped from beneath the tyres had reddened her feet and spotted the lean backs of her legs.

There was a yawn of wind across the lagoon, as though the weather was tired after a hard‑working day. It stirred the sheeted water, now an evening grey but rouged in rounded areas with the diffuse reflection of the ballooning copper clouds still piled and climbing on the perimeter of the sky. In the shallows, mooring poles and net fixings projected from the skin of water, and reeds paddled, some bending as though to examine their own feet in the mud. A pair of casual birds flapped low across the sheen, reflected and slightly distorted twenty feet below.

A great evening clearness had come across the island. It was as though the focus had been adjusted. Davies could see squared houses and other buildings on the other arm of land, beyond the lagoon, individual tall trees, and almost against the distant sea‑line, the splendid shape of a motionless sailing ship. He could only tell it was a sailing ship and an old one too, by the shape of the hull, thick and bulky but tapering to an elegant bow. She had only one and a half standing masts, the smaller one behind like a thin boy following his thin father.

'Bird,' he said, conscious of using the odd name for the first time, 'what is that? A schooner of some sort?' She stopped her bicycle on a lip of land overhanging a primitive jetty used by native fishermen. He stopped his machine, pulling it up awkwardly with his feet because the brakes were weak.

'A hulk,' she said unromantically. 'They use it for storing the copra, you know the coconut oil, until the collection every six months. Years ago, before my parents came to the Apostles, three of them were towed up here for that use. It is good, I believe, to keep copra stored where it can do no damage if it catches fire.'

'What happened to the others?'

'They are still in the islands. Being used the same. One is at St Mark's and the other at St Paul's. The natives store their copra in them.'

It was six now and some of the thickness had been pressed out of the day. A wandering wind strengthened from the sea and ushered away the depressed dampness. The two short people stood by the shore.

'Why do they call that beach The Love Beach?' asked Davies. 'Is it one of these ancient names?'

Bird shrugged. 'It goes back to ... oh, the old customs of the first population found here.'

She laughed then. 'They had some er... strange sort of rituals.' Then primly: 'Dancing and such things, you understand.'

'And that's where they had the dancing and such things.'

She still looked out to the sea as though seeking an arriving ship. She laughed again. Some dogs were still baying in the village behind them but apart from that and the stirring of the water and the trees there was no other sound, but her laughing. 'At school,' she said, 'we used to learn all about the history of these islands and of all the South Pacific from Captain Cook's Journals. But it was a convent, you will remember, and the nuns did not like to read some of the things and would not let us read them. We lost half of history like that. But, of course, all the girls read the sections they were not supposed to know.

'There is a passage, a strange one, written by Captain Cook ‑ ... Young girls in groups of eight or ten, dancing a very indecent dance ... singing the most indecent songs and using the most indecent actions in the practice of which they are brought up from the earliest childhood. In doing this they keep time to a great nicety.' She turned to Davies. 'Do you like that?'

He was laughing. 'That's very good,' he said. 'Keeping time to a great nicety!'

'One day,' she said, 'you must watch the dancing on the
beach. Then you may understand Captain Cook.'

Davies went to his room at the South Seas Hilton, climb. ing the steaming stairs, and finding the room laden with heat despite the arrival of evening in the street. He took his paints from his suitcase. They
were in an old rugby sock, oil in little tubes. The children had bought a beginner's set for him for his last Christmas at home. He liked to think he could paint, but anyone could have told him that he couldn't. He had been to Art for Pleasure classes at Newport Technical College and he had carried his brushes, his paints, and his canvases to the Southern Pacific. After all, Gauguin had sailed there unrecognized. Davies thought he would like to paint The Love Beach if all those grotesque invasion barges were not littered there. Perhaps some girls doing that dance on The Love Beach and keeping time to a nicety.

Meeting the girl had stimulated him, not sexually really, but in some way. She had talked to him and accepted a bicycle ride alongside him and had pointed out some of the bits of the island. She was young and small and he felt more comfortable with small people. He hated to have to look up at a woman. Once he had asked a seated girl to dance at a Community Centre Social at Coogee, near Sydney, and she had looked at him quizzically from her chair as though questioning his daring. He asked again. She nodded and uncoiled from the chair, going up and up like a snake from a charmer's basket, until she hung like a threat over him. He had been trawled around for a humiliating three minutes, begging God that the musicians would stop, and finally falling from her near the exit into which he bolted as soon as the tune had ceased.

Ten months now he had been away. He wrote to Kate twice a week, doing little sketches for David and Mag at the foot of the letters, pictures of ships and bridges on the voyage, and later a kangaroo and an aboriginal, although he had never seen either. Kate's answers would sometimes take a month, but then he might get three short letters in a week apologizing for not writing, saying the children had been sick or the weather had been cold. As soon as he got really settled, perhaps if he managed to make a really successful thing of the Apostle Group sales idea, they would come to him in Australia. That was certain. In every letter he said it. On Sundays in Sydney he had gone the rounds of the estate agents' windows to see what they were offering once he had saved enough for a deposit.

He lay on the bed, feeling its natural dampness at his back. There was a gekko near the ceiling probing for a fly, and another petrified a few inches away, like tiny dinosaurs. They
were part of the hotel service, cold running gekkos in every room, two or three little lizards to each ceiling to cat the flies, and insects, or some of them anyway. His old toffee‑coloured suitcase with its stout belt around its waist was on the stone floor in the corner, flat, with his paints and brushes spread out on its lid. It was a still, practical, provincial suitcase, and there was a railway sticker on its flank, prosaic black and dirty white, which said 'High Street, Newport'.

That last day at home, the Monday after they had been to Barry Island on the Sunday, he had stood choked with sadness in their bedroom when he had gone to collect his case. He had looked out of the small‑paned window across the red and black tiles of the familiar roofs, to the saunter.ing smoke from the engine sheds and beyond that the winter grey‑green of the park. He looked for the final time into the wardrobe although he knew he had nothing left there. Something made him glance down and in one of Kate's shoes he saw the yellow cylinder end of a roll of film. They had taken some photographs of the children in the park in the late summer and they had not been developed. Taken suddenly with the idea he thought he would take the film with him, to Sydney, and then surprise them by sending the film back. He
smiled, picked
up the roll of film, and put it in his pocket.

Four

Because the Highways Department‑ had not been able to find resources to extend the St Peter's Island road as far as British Government House (although it went neatly past the front door of the French Residence), and because it was considered unbecoming that Sir William should have to take to foot or bicycle, the Governor always made the journey from his home to the town by launch.

Government House was on a point of wet, green land extending into the lagoon and sheltering the harbour. A small, dignified landing stage had been constructed below the voluptuous garden and distant Whitehall had provided an equally small, dignified pinnace to take Sir William on his journeys. It was manned by a Melanesian crew who wore white bellbottoms, matelot jackets, and the squared hats of Nelson's sailors. They handled
the launch very well and the British were proud of them. 'It gives the population some sense of pride in our armed forces,' Phillip Cooper, the Governor's liquid ADC, used to say.

Conway was waiting on the town landing stage for the launch to pick him up. He was glad the storms had moved away. The rain in the Apostles was warmer than in Sydney, but he harboured an un‑Australian feeling that rain ought to be cool if not cold. For his meeting with the Governor he had put on a dark, lightweight suit, ill‑fitting, that in the humidity seemed to be gathering itself up and crawling into his armpits and into the cleft between his legs. He wriggled and flapped his arms impotently as though to shake the thing away but, after a minor retreat, it advanced again into its former bridgeheads.

Conway had a plastic briefcase under his arm and his hair crisply parted. He had shaved twice that day. He felt altogether uncomfortable. The launch parted the flat cloth of water in the lagoon, throwing up a short, tired bow wave, pushing a chevron of ripples out to either side.
The sailors from South Hibernia Island far south of the Apostles, their black faces fixed with a picturesque patriotism, turned the nose at the exact inch. Although they had never voyaged their craft anywhere else at all, not even in a different direction across the harbour or the lagoon, they knew the five hundred yard trip intimately, the helmsman touching the wheel to port immediately the fuzzy head of the petrified bosun blotted out the vivid yellow blind of the Kai Tek Chinese Fish Shop on the distant waterfront.

They came in like some small working shuttle of a big machine, slotting into place at the jetty. The bosun saluted and the sailors bounced to attention in the pinnace. Conway was about to throw up a smart hand in acknowledgement when he remembered he was not in uniform, so the military movement became a lame raising of an apologetically crooked finger. He sat on the corded‑cushion seat, his briefcase uncomfortably upright on his knees. He felt embarrassed about anything formal, even anything as formal as a briefcase or a suit. He pulled the nosing trousers away from his crutch again like a man impatient with an inquisitive dog. The boat moved away, the helmsman watching for the red roof of Mrs Flagg's cottage, the point where he could persuade the craft to starboard and make straight for the Governor's landing jetty.

Phillip Cooper waited there, stiffly, conveying his chief's annoyance, he hoped, at this abrupt, unannounced, visit by an Australian on an official mission. From his seat in the launch Conway thought the young man looked like a wireworm in white.

'Afternoon,' said Conway formally affable as the boat lost movement and touched the poles of the Governor's jetty. Observing the rigid expression on Cooper's face he was tempted to add an exaggerated Australian 'mate' to the greeting. But he desisted.

'Good afternoon,' returned the ADC. His mouth became only a tiny hole when he spoke and his eyes raised themselves a little. Conway was sorry he had not called him ,mate', but he made up for it by pretending that he had difficulty in getting out of the launch. He extended a begging hand towards Cooper, waggling it for assistance. Involuntarily the young English official moved forward with his hand to help, then stopped, shocked and annoyed with himself and impatiently motioned one of the black sailors to help Conway from the boat.

'Us Colonials,' grinned Conway towards the wooden Melanesian. He stood firmly on the landing stage. Cooper sniffed. In England, Conway thought, the youth obviously suffered from sinus and sore, wet nostrils. He gave Cooper's hand a hard Australian squeeze and noted the wince that jumped into the unsteady blue eyes.

They turned up the path towards Government House. The rain had excited all the crowded plants making them throw their deepest, dampest, scents. Great clouds, hills and hummocks of tropical flowers thick and brilliant, congealed about the path. Silver stems of water ran from the higher trees.

'Pretty little garden,' observed Conway.

'The Governor is very busy,' sniffed Cooper. He walked very upright, staring straight ahead, moving at almost a marching pace, but, with instinct it seemed, cutting around any streams of rainwater descending from the trees.

'I'm sure he is,' said Conway, matching the youth's marching. 'There must be a lot to keep him going around here.'

Cooper did a quick right‑face, like a guardsman going by a saluting base. Conway smiled encouragingly. Cooper faced the front again. The Australian wondered whether there was a secret place in England, the sort of stud farm the Nazis used to have for producing their master race, where long, urine‑coloured young men were spawned and fostered for the British Colonial Service. He had to admit that Cooper had a certain power. Even over him. He was now carrying his plastic briefcase sideways up, hiding it around his backside and wishing it were leather.