The silence of the cove was shattered by the busy roar of an outboard, and the rubber dinghy came away from the LCT’s side, swinging in a tight arc, heading for the pontoon. Five minutes later I was climbing the rope ladder and Perenna was standing there, saying, ‘What happened? I was afraid you weren’t coming back.’
‘Would it have mattered?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She said it without any trace of feeling. ‘But why did you go?’ She was frowning, and in that moment I was oddly reminded of Hans, the same vertical crease between eyes that had narrowed.
‘I had to. I thought it was important. But apparently not.’
‘You’re being very mysterious. What has he told you? What did he say?’
‘Nothing.’ But that didn’t satisfy her, so I said, ‘He talked about his father’s death … I don’t know, a lot of things.’ She was still frowning, and though her eyes were looking straight at me, they had a strangely faraway look. At that moment she didn’t seem conscious of me at all, so that I was reminded of what Hans had said about her, about all of them, wondering whether it was true that there was a dark, primitive side to her nature.
She walked with me up to the bridge in a sort of daze. Jona was there. ‘Hans is staying on, is he?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Then there’s nothing to keep us here.’ And he started giving orders to man the foredeck and get the anchor up. They had picked up a brief exchange between one of the Fokker Friendships and Port Moresby. All four had landed safely on the roadway just beyond the Bovo River bridge. Cars had been waiting for them the other side of the bridge, and the first troops were already moving on their objective by the time the planes were airborne again. ‘Hans will have a lot of questions to answer.’
I thought he would, too, but all I said was: ‘What made you come out to Buka with him in the tug?’ He was looking more himself now, which was doubtless the effect of being in command of his own ship again. But he took a long time considering my question, and just as he seemed about to answer it, he was called out to the bridge wing. Luke, on the foredeck to see to the anchor, was pointing to the shore, where the houseboy stood calling for the boat to come in. He was waving what appeared to be a letter in his hand.
So we stayed there in the heavy afternoon heat, and Luke took the rubber dinghy in. Clouds were building up over Bougainville, the sun hazy now, the glare from the water very trying. I was sleepy, too, physically and mentally exhausted. Luke reached the pontoon, and I saw him talking to the houseboy. I was out on the bridge wing with Jona, trying to imagine there was a little breeze and thinking about a cold shower, when there was a sudden shout up for’ard, and then, as heads turned shoreward, a prolonged A-ah. ‘Lukluk, Kepten!’ Somebody was pointing, up beyond the palms and tall ferns, up to the house. For a moment I didn’t see it; my mind just didn’t register. I thought it was haze.
But then Luke yelled from the pontoon. ‘Fire!’
I saw it then for what it was, smoke drifting lazily above the sloping roof. Suddenly there was flame added to the smoke, flames flickering yellow tongues out of an upstairs window. The ship was still and very silent, everybody staring. We could hear the crackle of the flames now. ‘Why?’ Perenna whispered. ‘It’s such a pointless thing to do.’
And then, as though to answer her question, came a shot. It was just one crack of sound, muffled, but very distinct, as though trapped and magnified by the sultriness of the atmosphere. ‘Oh, my God!’ Perenna reached out her hand, gripping mine so hard I could feel her nails biting into my palm. ‘Did he have to do that?’
I didn’t answer, merely put my arm round her shoulders. It was one way out, and I understood now his need of companionship in those last minutes when I had been alone with him in the house, understood the drift of his talk, too, his concern about death. I was just sorry I had told him how his father had really died. But though that might have influenced the method, it wouldn’t have affected the intention. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, feeling Perenna’s hand trembling. ‘Such a waste. A man with such big ideas …’ What else was there to say except that he had been responsible for a number of deaths, including now his own.
The ship had erupted into violent activity, full of shouts and movement, so that I barely caught Perenna’s words as she said, ‘Are we all going to die — violently?’ Her eyes were wide and staring, full of fear — a fear that was inside her, part of her being. ‘Did he say anything about a curse?’ she asked. And then, more urgently: ‘Well, did he?’
‘He wanted the letter, that was all.’ And it was there in my trouser pocket, a crumpled piece of paper that was of no importance to him now he was dead.
Luke came back with the dinghy, loaded men and ferried them ashore. But even in this humid climate a few hours’ sun was enough to bake wood dry as tinder. The house burned with an unnatural fury, and nothing we could do about it with only fire buckets from the LCT and water from a rain cistern. And when the roof and the internal gallery collapsed in a roaring inferno of sparks and flame, that was the end, great billowing clouds of yellow smoke hanging over the north of the island like an enormous bonfire. In less than an hour there was nothing left of the main house but a great heap of grey ash from which a few smouldering beams and bits of buckled iron protruded. All we saved was some of the outhouses. We dampened everything down with countless buckets of water, then searched the debris. The safe was there, standing like a low tide rock in the ash, marking the position where the staircase had once been. The door was still open, everything inside it destroyed by the heat. No sign even of the little gold ingots. We found the gun, a blackened revolver, its barrel and chambers buckled by the heat. But no trace of Hans’s body, which was really what we were looking for, to give him burial.
I don’t think any of us was surprised not to find even a single bone, the heat had been so intense, the fire so furious. In the end, Jona scooped up two or three handfuls of the damp ash from the tangle of charred beams where we had found the gun, and these he took on board with him carefully wrapped in his handkerchief and there transferred them to a round chromium-plated cigarette box with rope and anchor decoration that was part of the wardroom furnishings. Then we went out with him into the middle of the cove in the rubber dinghy — just Perenna and myself with Luke at the outboard — and he read the burial service, then dropped the cigarette box into the water.
I remember thinking, as I watched the bright round metal of the box disappearing slowly from sight in the warm plant-green water of the cove, Surely that’s the end of it, the finish of what had begun so long ago with a man abandoning his partner at a place they had called Dog Weary in central Australia? I was looking at Jona then, and at Perenna. Surely the malevolent effect of it couldn’t go on for ever?
Luke had re-started the outboard. By the time we were back on board it was almost six, the sun set and the light fading. The Buka islanders were demanding to be put ashore. A gentle rain began to fall as we weighed and steamed out of the cove, out through the narrows between the Minon and Buka marker posts, past Sohano, past the jetty and the shops of Chinaman’s Quay, past the market to the Government wharf, where we lay alongside just long enough for Hans Holland’s men, still armed, to scramble ashore. Then into the channel again, with the Barreto ferry sidling over from the mainland, and down the whole length of the Buka Passage until at last we were into the Pacific. It was only then, when we had turned southeastward towards Cape L’Averdy, seeing the dark green slopes of the Emperor Range rising into a thick mist of cloud, only then, with the old ship rolling slowly to the long ocean swell and the open sea ahead of us, that I felt myself free at last of the strange, haunting and at times, it had seemed, positively evil atmosphere of Buka and the Buka Passage.