Someone was calling her.
When Molly, Kate and Joan arrived later that day, Warner was only too ready to tell them about the ‘incident’.
‘Your mother was a little unsettled during the morning. She pulled out her catheter. It was probably an accident.’
‘But she was so good when we left her last night,’ Kate answered. Good was when Mrs Travers was drugged and unconscious; bad was when the drugs wore off and Mummy indulged herself in inchoate sighs and screams and incoherent ramblings.
‘You mustn’t worry about it,’ Warner lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘It’s what happens. But she’s all right now. We’ve given her something.’
Relieved, they settled down with their knitting, magazines and boiled lollies to keep watch.
Half past four again. Why half past four?
Mrs Travers sighed to herself. The drugs du jour had worn off; ah, clarity for a while! And with it came the urge to be up and about.
Not that there was much chance of that. Even as she shifted slightly she felt a tightening at her abdomen. That’s where the catheter was for the contraption that stood beside the bed, winking at her and giving her the glad eye. She was hooked up to the silly thing — her own personal artificial kidney — continuously pumping into her a special solution to cleanse away all the waste fluids, drain them out and replace with fresh solution. Otherwise the toxins built up in her blood. And the children didn’t want them to do that. Not quite yet.
Yesterday had been a good day, lucidly speaking. She’d drifted in and out of consciousness, always aware of Molly, Kate and Joan sitting around her bed talking, knitting, reading magazines and, sometimes, sleeping themselves. She realised she startled them when she occasionally ‘woke up’; they would hurriedly ring for Warner to settle her down again. Every hour on the hour other medical staff would come into the room, check her pulse and the dialysis machine, and then make a note on the clipboard at the end of the bed: ‘Still Alive’, presumably, or words to that effect.
Dr Paterson popped in regularly to check on her. ‘Have you heard from your brother?’ he asked Molly.
‘There’s been a delay. He couldn’t get out of an urgent board meeting. He won’t be arriving for another two days.’
Money before Mummy. Sounded just like Elliot. Really, he was a disappointment. As for Molly, Kate and Joan, they were dutiful daughters, but why, oh why, had they never possessed a life of the mind? ‘Expanding our knowledge’, Father would have scolded them, ‘and using it to advance humankind is what justifies our retaining our niche as a species.’
Actually, at some time in the afternoon, while Mrs Travers’ daughters were having a light lunch in her room — they’d brought some nougat to have with their tea — she was prompted by the memory of her father to tell them about him and, in particular, the great moment of her adolescent life when she joined him in the Galapagos Islands.
‘Father was the leading herpetologist at the Schwimmer Aquarium,’ she began. ‘Mother, my sister Gloria and I were accustomed to his being away often, and we were thrilled when he was appointed to lead a scientific expedition to study one of the most intriguing of all reptiles: the giant tortoise, Geochelone elephantopus. Our pleasure turned to dismay when we discovered he’d be away for a year. I was thirteen then, Gloria eleven.
‘“But the Artemisia will be coming back here in three months with specimens,” Father said, “and I’ve arranged for you —” he was referring to my mother “— to come out to me for a month after that. You’d have to make arrangements for Essie and Gloria to stay with relatives, but please, Merle, do say you’ll come.”
‘The trouble was that, as the time drew near, Mother became reluctant. She talked to Father by ship-to-shore telephone in the Galapagos. “I really can’t make it, dear,” she shouted. “Gloria is sickly again and you know Essie, she doesn’t make it any better. She keeps harassing her sister. I really do believe the best option would be for Essie to come to you and I should stay home and look after Gloria.”
‘I couldn’t believe my luck. I skipped around the house, delighted that I was going. To make absolutely sure that Gloria stayed sickly — she had a bad heart — I kept on harassing her, especially at night when she’d weep because she wanted to go to sleep. I only stopped pinching and poking Gloria the night before I went on board the ship and knew, with absolute certainty, that nobody could stop me. Wasn’t I a naughty girl?’
At that moment, the effort of telling the story became too much for Mrs Travers. Instead she lay back among the pillows and let herself drift back to when the visit had begun.
The Artemisia approached the Galapagos Archipelago over a pearly sea. Morning mist led to sweeping showers of light rain. It was windy and cold, the clouds hanging low over black porous volcanic rock and jagged cliff formations. Along the shoreline fragmented boulders, lava flows, spatter cones, pit craters, columns of gas-driven steam, blowholes, fissures and uplifted blocks cracked against each other. Every height was crowned with the crater of a shield volcano.
‘And the birds were everywhere,’ Mrs Travers remembered. ‘I’d never seen so many before, crowding the blue vault of the sky — frigate birds, swallow-tailed gulls, albatrosses, brown pelicans, red-billed tropic birds — tribes upon limitless tribes of them. And all so beautiful, so free, that I wanted to fly with them.’
She lifted her hands, trying to follow the flights of the seabirds. Alarmed, Joan asked Molly, ‘Look at Mummy. What is she doing? What is she seeing? Do you think she’ll last long enough for Elliot to say goodbye to her?’
Waiting for her at an impressive campsite right at the collapsed caldera of an island volcano was Father.
‘Essie! Essie, my girl!’ he waved.
It was the Eden you found at world’s end.
‘Poor Cyprian,’ Mrs Travers murmured. ‘You would have preferred Mother, wouldn’t you?’
All the same, Father pretended to be happy to see her and she soon got to know his team of three assistants and four Ecuadorian seamen. The seamen gave her a name: they called her Mi Hija, ‘the child’.
It was the mating season for the seabirds, and Father straight away took her to an albatross colony at the top of a sheer sea cliff; albatrosses were balancing on the wind, coming in or leaving to feed on the fish shoals that boiled below. ‘They mate for life,’ Father told her, ‘and see how their courtship is elaborately choreographed.’ Indeed, the albatross birds courted for ages, repetitively going over the same patterned ritual. Their long bills circled each other, they made loud, castanet-like clicking sounds and high-pitched vocalisations, their necks arched, and they performed very funny sideways rocking movements — and then they would start again. She could have watched the courting birds for ever.
Father also took her to spy on a colony of blue-footed boobies. It was a different kind of wooing to the albatrosses: the male showed off his nest-building skills to attract a mate. The silly thing was that they didn’t use the sticks and twigs to build a nest; instead, they incubated their eggs on the bare ground. Both parents took turns brooding and sitting on the eggs out in the heat of the sun. Two chicks were hatched, two days apart.
‘Father showed me Mr Darwin’s natural selection in operation,’ Mrs Travers recalled. ‘The mother hatched two chicks: the second was the “just in case” egg. Once the older chick was hatched, its function was to get stronger, establish domination, and then cruelly peck the younger chick, prevent it from obtaining any food and push it further and further from the nest. The booby parents did not intervene.’