I’d been put beside Mrs. Isabel Swale. Her husband, Arthur, already sozzled when we’d arrived, had drunk himself into an aphasic stupor and followed the conversation stupidly, as a dog follows the ball during a game of tennis. Mrs. Swale badgered me with questions about the Kiona without listening to the answers, so that her inquiry was disjointed and did not create anything resembling a conversation. Her left leg, bare through a slit in her gown, came closer and closer to me and by dessert was pressed alongside my own. All of her gestures — the way she leaned her lips to my ear, knocked her head back in a sudden and inexplicable laugh, examined the black beneath my fingernails — would have indicated to others at the table that we had struck a sudden, intimate connection. Nell shot me a few direct and withering looks, and I found I was pleased to see any emotion for me at all cross her face. At the far end of the table, Fen talked quietly to Claire Iynes.
After dinner, Colonel Iynes invited the men to have a look at his collection of antique weapons, and Claire led the women off through the house for digestifs on the back patio. I lagged behind the men, heard Fen drop his voice and tell the Colonel he was in possession of a rare artifact himself, then I turned around. In a narrow passageway before the kitchen, I took Nell’s wrist and held her back.
‘You do quite well in civilization, particularly with the ladies,’ she said. ‘Much better than you have let on.’
‘Please, let’s not play at anything.’
Her face was as pale and hollowed out as when I first met her.
‘Stay with me,’ I said. ‘Stay with me and come back to the Kiona. Stay with me and come to England. Stay with me and we’ll go anywhere you like. Fiji,’ I said desperately. ‘Bali.’
‘I keep thinking of how when we first arrived we thought Xambun was a god, a spirit. Some powerful dead man. And now he is.’ She started to say something else but it got caught and she leaned against me.
I held her as she wept. I stroked her hair, loose and slightly matted. ‘Stay here with me. Or let me come with you.’
She pulled me down to kiss her. Warm. Briny.
‘I love you,’ she said, her lips still against mine. But it meant no.
She was silent on the way back down to the city, and went directly to her room without a word to either of us.
Fen held up a bottle of cognac the Colonel had given him. ‘Quick drink? Help us sleep.’
I doubted he had trouble sleeping, but I followed him to his room. I didn’t want to go, but there was some part of me that felt we could work this out. In this situation a Kiona man would offer the other fellow a few spears, an axe, and some betel nut, and then the wife was his.
Fen’s room was identical to mine but at the other end of the hallway. Same green walls and knitted white counterpane on the single bed. He poured the brandy into two glasses on a tray by the bed and handed me one.
His bags were splayed open by the window but the flute was not among them. There were no closets or wardrobes and it wouldn’t have fit in the small chest of drawers by the door.
‘It’s under the bed.’ He set his glass back on the tray and rolled the flute out a few feet. It was still wrapped in towels and tied with twine, but loosely now, as if he’d gotten tired of all the wrapping and unwrapping.
‘It’s magnificent, Bankson. Better than I remembered. Glyphs carved all over it.’ He bent down to untie the string.
‘No. Don’t. I don’t want to see it.’
‘Yes, you do.’
He was right. I did. I wanted to prove him a liar. The isolated, alienating Mumbanyo with a logographic system of writing? No. Much as I wanted to prove him wrong, I would not give him the pleasure of unveiling it to me. ‘I don’t, Fen.’
‘Suit yourself. You’ll have to wait until it’s under glass then. Claire and the Colonel think I’ll have my pick of museums, when I’m ready.’ He sat on the bed and pointed to a black chair against the wall. ‘Pull up a seat.’
The swaddled flute lay on the floor between us. I drank my cognac fast, in two sips. I planned to stand up and leave, but Fen refilled my glass before I had moved.
‘I did not steal it,’ he said. ‘It was given to me in a ceremony two nights before we left. They taught me how to care for it and feed it and it was when I was spooning a bit of dried fish to its mouth that I saw the writing etched into the wood. Abapenamo said only great men could be taught it. I asked if I was a great man and he said I was. Then Kolekamban busted in with his three brothers. He said the flute had always belonged to their clan, not Abapenamo’s, and they grabbed it. A few of Abapenamo’s men wanted to go after him but I knew it would end badly. So I stopped them. I kept the peace. Abapenamo’s son told me where they would take it and I figured I could come back. I knew I couldn’t leave the region without it. You can’t walk away from a piece of the human puzzle. But I wanted to get it back peaceably, without anyone getting hurt.’
I let the miserable failure of that plan hang in the room. I thought of how initially he’d asked me to be his partner on this mission, asked me to risk my life for his delusions. I could have been the corpse in the canoe.
‘Why didn’t they shoot at you, Fen?’
‘I told you. I used the Dobu spell.’
‘Fen.’
I could tell he wanted to convince me of this, but he also wanted to keep my attention. He was like a little boy who didn’t want to be left alone in the dark. ‘I think Xambun wanted to die,’ he said. ‘I think he tried to die.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘The first night we slept a few hours in the bush outside the village. I woke up and found him holding my revolver.’
‘Pointing it at something?’
‘No, just holding it in his hands. I don’t think he wanted to kill me. He might have been working up the courage to shoot himself. I took it away and he never reached for it again. We sorted out our route and waited till sunset. He was stealthy and quiet, probably an excellent hunter, but once we got the flute he got careless, like he wanted someone to know we were there. We were far away from the village but some dogs heard us first. I knew we could still make it to the canoe and we did, but he wouldn’t lie down. He started screaming a bunch of nonsense and I would have shoved him down but I had to start the engine and steer us out of there. I don’t get it. I promised him a quarter of the cash from this thing.’
It was hard to know how much to believe. I wasn’t sure it mattered anyway. Xambun was dead. The S S Calgaric would leave the next day at noon.
I made to get up from my black chair.
‘I saw you on the beach with her,’ he said. ‘I knew what would happen. I’m not stupid. You knew I’d go and I knew you wouldn’t stop me. But you can’t have Nell like you can have other girls. She says she’s Southern but she’s not on the Grid. She’s a different type altogether. Trust me on that one.’
He refilled my glass. We’d nearly drunk the bottle.
‘What type is she?’
‘Damned if I ever let you find out.’
This time I did get up. He stood, too.
‘I had to get that flute,’ he said. ‘Don’t you understand? There has to be a balance. A man can’t be without power — it doesn’t work like that. What was I going to do, write little books behind hers like a fucking echo? I needed something big. And this is big. Books on this thing will write themselves.’
‘In blood-red ink, Fen.’
On the way back down the hallway were the stairs to the third floor. I hesitated, and then continued to my room. I opened the door as quietly as I could, in case she could hear my movements as I could hear hers. I didn’t want to wake her and I didn’t want her to know I’d been drinking with Fen. I lay on the bed in my clothes and stared up at the white swirled plaster. It was silent. I hoped she’d managed to fall asleep. My bed felt more comfortable than it had the previous nights and despite the slight spinning, Fen had been right: the cognac was going to allow me to sleep. I drifted down into it.