She winces at some invisible pain as she shifts, with careful effort, in her seat. A minute goes by. She is mulling my words, and dismissing them.
‘I loved someone once. A woman. I loved her madly. Do you understand? We were together, in secret, for nearly twenty years. And we were told we couldn’t talk about that love . . . because it was dangerous. It was dangerous to love.’
I nod. I understand.
‘There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.’
I hold Mary’s hand. ‘You have helped me more than you know.’
One of the nurses comes over and asks if I want a cup of tea and I say I am fine.
And then I ask Mary, in a low voice, ‘Have you ever heard of the Albatross Society?’
‘No. Can’t say I have.’
‘Well, just be careful. Please, don’t talk about, you know . . .’
I look at the clock on the wall. It is a quarter to three. In three hours’ time I need to be on a plane to Dubai, en route to Sydney.
‘Be careful,’ I tell Mary.
She shakes her head. Closes her eyes. Her sigh sounds closer to a cat’s hiss. ‘I am too old to be scared any more. I am too old to lie.’ She leans forward in her chair, and clasps her walking stick until her knuckles whiten. ‘And so are you.’
I step outside and phone Hendrich.
‘Tom? How are things?’
‘Did you know she was alive?’
‘Who?’
‘Marion. Marion. Have you found her? Did you know?’
‘Tom, calm down. No, Tom. Have you got a lead?’
‘She is alive. She was at a hospital in Southall. And then she disappeared.’
‘Disappeared? As in, taken?’
‘I don’t know. She might’ve run away.’
‘From a hospital?’
‘It was a mental hospital.’
A postman trundles along the pavement. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ I whisper into the phone. ‘But I can’t go to Australia. I need to find her.’
‘If she has been taken . . .’
‘I don’t know that.’
‘If she has been taken you will not find her alone. Listen, listen. I will get Agnes to put her ear to the ground in Berlin. After Australia this will be our chief operation. We will find her. If she’s been taken she’ll probably be in Berlin, or Beijing, or Silicon Valley. You won’t find her alone. I mean, you’ve been in London and you haven’t found her.’
‘I haven’t been looking. I mean, I’ve been side-tracked.’
‘Yes, Tom. Yes. You finally see it. You’ve been side-tracked. That is exactly it. Now, we will sort this. But you have a flight to catch.’
‘I can’t. I can’t.’
‘If you want to find Marion, you need to focus again, Tom. You need to go and bring your friend in. Who knows? He himself might have information for us. You know how it is. Albas are the people to ask about albas. You need to get back on track, Tom. The truth is: you don’t know where Marion is. But we know where your friend is. And so does Berlin. Marion has survived for over four hundred years. She’ll still be alive for another week. Just do this in Australia and I swear – I swear – we will work together and we will find her. You have a lead, yes?’
I can’t tell him about Mary Peters. I don’t want to endanger a woman who clearly would never agree to be a part of the society. ‘I, just, I need to find her.’
‘We will, Tom,’ he says, and I hate him almost as much as I believe him. I have doubted him many times, but the truth is, I feel it too. I feel every word as he says it. ‘I can sense it. I have experienced so much past that I can sense the future. I know. I know. We are nearly there, Tom. You will see her again. But, first, if you want to save your friend, you really need to get to the airport. Omai needs you.’
And the conversation ends and, as always, I do what Hendrich wants me to do. Because he is the best hope I have.
Tahiti, 1767
I was meant to set fire to the village.
‘Light it!’ roared Wallis. ‘If you ever want a trip home you will light the savage’s hut, Frears! Then light the others!’
I held the flaming torch in my hand, my arm weak from the weight, my whole body weak from just standing up. It would have been easy to let it down, but I couldn’t light the hut. I just stood there, in the black sand, as the islander stared at me. The young man said nothing. He did nothing. He just stood in front of the hut and stared at me. His eyes were wide, and he looked at me with a mixture of horror and defiance. He had long wispy hair, down to his chest, and was wearing more jewellery than most of the other islanders. Bracelets made with bone. Necklaces too. I would have said he was about twenty years old. But I also knew, better than most, that when it came to matters of age, appearances could be deceptive.
Centuries later, watching this same man step out of the ocean in a YouTube video, I would see those eyes stare out with a similar expression. Somewhere between defiance and bewilderment.
I was no saint. I saw no shame in the discovering of new lands or the forging of empire. I was thoroughly a man of a different age, even to the one I was then inhabiting. And yet, I could not set fire to the man’s home. Whether it was the eyes, whether I could recognise in him a fellow outsider, or whether I knew the damage that was caused to the soul by the accumulation of sin in a long life, I still do not know.
But even as Wallis barked at me I walked away. I carried the torch to the smooth wet sand and let the sea take it. I walked back to the man whose hut was still standing and pulled out the pistol – given to me before treading onto the shore, by a scurvy-weakened officer – from my belt and placed it on the sand. I don’t think the man understood the pistol, or what it was for, but he understood the knife, and I put that on the ground too.
I had a small mirror in my pocket and I showed it to him and he stared at it, at his own face, with fascination.
Wallis was now right at me.
‘What the devil are you doing, Frears?’
I tried to stare at Wallis with the quiet dignity the islander had stared at me.
Luckily, Furneaux was also there. ‘If we destroy their homes, we will never be welcome here. We need to tempt them, not scare them any more than we have. Sometimes the beast only needs to roar.’
And Wallis just mumbled and looked at me and said, ‘Don’t make me regret having brought you,’ and the huts were burned to the ground anyway. And so it was that the island that would one day be known as Tahiti was first witnessed by Europeans. A mere two years later it would be used by Captain James Cook on his first voyage as the site on which he and his astronomer would observe the transit of Venus as it crossed the sun. It was indeed this reason – the convenient positioning of the island from which to observe something – that would advance not only scientific knowledge but the calculation of longitude.
While the village was ablaze the only two naturalists to survive the voyage, along with the artist Joe Webber, set about exploring the rainforest. We weren’t there to take over, we were there, in our own minds, to discover.
And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.
Dubai, now
The airport in Dubai is very bright, even though it is the middle of the night. I wander through a shop where a woman wants to spray aftershave on me.
‘I’m all right, thanks,’ I say. But the woman doesn’t believe me. She sprays the scent – Sauvage – onto a thin and perfectly rectangular strip of card and hands it to me. She smiles so forcefully I find myself taking the piece of card and walking away with it. I smell the paper. I imagine all those plants where the scent comes from. Think of how detached we are from nature. How we have to do so much to it before we can bottle it and put the name ‘wild’ on it. The smell does nothing for my head. I walk on and find myself in the airport bookshop. Some of the books are in Arabic but most are in English.