“You’re just going to abandon him?” One of the men with Lisl called after her.
“For Christ’s sake, Paul! He’s got a gun! How the hell could anything have happened to him? He’ll turn up with the girl in his own time. Now come on.”
The three of them scrambled back down the hill and Jackie let out a long, deep sigh of relief.
“I’m afraid they’ve got an awful lot of guns,” I told Jackie, “but you really should understand that I wouldn’t be alive today if I hadn’t brought a gun myself. I mean I know just how much you disapprove, but the thing is that—”
“Shut up, Tim,” Jackie said with a brusque and intense passion.
So I shut up. Jackie added nothing to her bitter command, but instead just stared into the wind and rain.
So, filling her silence, and needing to make my peace with this girl, I tried to explain myself one more time. “I don’t like guns any more than you do,” I said, “not really, but if some murderous thug is having a go at me I really do—”
“Shut up, Tim, please.” Jackie sounded very weary, as though I bored her, and I suddenly realized that I was merely compounding the mistake I had made on Antigua, because my very apologies were a stratagem of love, and, by making the apologies, I was offending her just as I had offended her by the more honest and outright declaration.
So I finally shut up properly and I stared at the house and I thought how lonely life was going to be after all.
“I told you that it wasn’t the guns that made me run off,” Jackie said suddenly.
“I know that,” I said miserably, “it was the other thing,” and I felt curdled with shame at the memory, but I made myself define the thing exactly, as though, by eating the last bitter crumbs of the humble pie, I could destroy its memory. “It was my wanting you to stay with me.”
“Yes,” she said flatly. “That was exactly it.”
I stared above the settlement to where the empty waters of the Desolate Straits lay gray and cold. Rain swept in spiteful veils across the distant hills and over the slate-colored tideway. “I’m sorry,” I said bleakly. I had already apologized more than enough, but I had not realized till now just how deeply I must have offended Jackie in the crowded Antigua street.
“It frightened me, you see,” Jackie said in a voice so soft that I almost did not hear, and when I turned to look at her I saw that she had begun to cry, “because I wanted to say yes.”
“You wanted to…” I began to echo her words, but she cut me off by shaking her head to indicate that any interruption now might make her lose the thread of her explanation.
“I wanted to say yes”—she went on more strongly—“but it terrified me, Tim. I didn’t know if I could make a decision like that so quickly. Do you know what I mean? So I thought, I’ve got to get away from you to give myself space. At least I thought that once your brother arrived, because he’s a bit overpowering. But I couldn’t really explain it to you.”
I wanted to say something, but could find nothing to say, so kept quiet.
“So I ran away,” Jackie went on, “because everything was confusing, especially with your brother there, and I felt in the way, and I thought that if I could just give myself a bit of space I’d find out what I wanted.” She stared bright-eyed and serious at me, and I wondered if ever, anywhere on God’s earth, a stranger situation had been found for two people to fall in love, and suddenly I began to dare that we were indeed falling in love. Jackie took my silence for an encouragement to speak on. “I mean it’s a big decision, isn’t it? You wanted me to give up my career, right? And live on a boat? That’s kind of a drastic life change! And if I’m going to make that kind of emotional commitment then I want to be sure that I’ve considered that commitment properly, and you’d want me to do that, too, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” I said, realizing I had forgotten just how much this girl could talk when she was nervous, “or no, perhaps,” I went on, and I saw the astonished Stephen was still listening to our every word.
Jackie shook her head in self-recrimination. “I should have explained it all to you on Antigua, but you always seemed so self-sufficient and I thought you’d probably be glad to get rid of me in the end. You see I thought you were just trying to be nice to me, and that you’d change your mind when you really thought about it…”
“You thought what?” I asked in astonishment.
“That you didn’t mean what you said, and that if you had a few weeks without me you’d think better of it. I mean I couldn’t blame you if you did, because—”
“Jackie!” I put a finger on her lips to stop her talking.
She must have thought we were in danger for she stared at me with very wide and very frightened eyes.
I kissed her tears. “I love you,” I said, and I think I was close to crying myself.
Only now it was happiness that filled me, and so I kissed her again and I felt relief surging through me as strongly as a flooding spring tide swelling over shoals to render them harmless, and I felt the same relief flood into Jackie as I put my arm about her shoulders and held her close.
Stephen gargled at us. I think he was attempting to be the first to congratulate us on our new found happiness, but I kicked him with my heavy right boot anyway, just to shut him up.
“Oh, Tim.” Jackie took a deep breath.
“Does that mean we’re sharing a boat now?” I asked her.
“I guess it does.” She smiled coyly.
“Whoopee,” I said, and just hoped I could get the boat back.
By midday the settlement was sufficiently worried about the missing Stephen to send two men to search the island’s interior on the cross-country motorbikes, while another four men, all armed with assault rifles, combed the ravines and rock piles of the high plateau, but no one thought to explore the escarpment’s crest immediately above the settlement where the three of us lay concealed. Instead the searchers all went further west, presumably on the assumption that Stephen must have pursued Jackie into the wild landscape that led toward the distant ocean. The search parties had a miserable time of it because the rain was an unending, drumming, thrashing tempest that slashed across the high country and beat the reservoir into frenzy and drowned the vegetable fields at the escarpment’s foot.
We kept dry in our crevice, and I told Jackie all I had learned about the Genesis community from Berenice and from my own exploration of the limestone workings. I told her about the Australian boat, and about the corpse I had found in the high rocks under the cold wind. I showed Jackie the passport, then ungagged Stephen to discover if he knew anything about the Australian girl’s death. When Stephen had finished gasping and making a fuss about his strained jaw muscles, I unfolded the blade of my rigging knife and pressed its sharp tip into the soft tissue under his left eyeball. “My father was a surgeon,” I told Stephen, “and he taught me that the medical term for what I’m tempted to do is enucleation.”
He whimpered, which I decided was a request for further information.
“Enucleation,” I told him, “is the operation of removing the eyeball.”
He whimpered again, which I translated as an indication that he understood me.
“So unless you want me to begin my new career as an ophthalmic surgeon right here and now, Stephen, talk to me.”