‘And neither do we,’ Father said.
But was this what Mrs Travers had done to her sister, Gloria — pushed her out of the nest — and if Mother had not saved her, would Father?
The thought bothered Mrs Travers, so she plunged quickly back into her shifting, swirling memories.
Her first swim was unforgettable. The sea was so chill, fed by the cold Peru current sweeping north from the Antarctic. It was green and so clear you could see to the end of forever.
At first she was too scared (aha, at least she wasn’t afraid to admit it) to go into deep water. She preferred to stay close by the rocks where she came across a herd of sea turtles, munching away on sunlit seaweed.
‘Don’t be timid like Gloria,’ Father teased.
That made her venture deeper. And there, the true magic opened up to her. She was as astonished at the fish life as she had been at the bird life. The sea was just a liquid sky, and tribes and tribes of fish were in dominion — angelfish, Creole fish, grunts, Moorish idols, blue parrotfish, concentric puffer fish, yellow-tailed surgeonfish, yellow-bellied trigger fish and wahoo scintillated in huge, teeming shoals.
With a gasp she saw a whole group of seals swimming swiftly towards her. She blew bubbles of fear but all they wanted to do was gambol and play, sliding their skins along her body and flirting with her.
Then, suddenly, all around her, the sea was speared by diving seabirds, particularly the blue-footed piqueros. Diving like bullets steeply into the water, their long tails like rudders, they hit the surface with tremendous force. One of them on the way back to the surface with a fish in its beak looked at her, cocking a curious eye: What are you doing here?
Far below her, schools of manta rays and sharks slipped through the dark sea like disturbing dreams.
And so Mrs Travers floated in and out of consciousness in her sea of memories. Before she realised it, night was upon her, and her daughters went home.
She lifted her head and looked out the window. Why, she felt quite light-headed.
What on earth had happened to the view? It wasn’t the usual one at alclass="underline" the sprinkle of city lights, and the familiar volcanic cone of Rangitoto. Rather, she saw a darker, altogether wilder landscape, greying with the morning. A road ran right through the middle of it. Something was moving on the horizon, coming towards her. How very strange! And was that the sound of the sea?
‘We found your mother trying to get out of her bed this morning, the naughty girl,’ Warner told her daughters. ‘Debbie was on duty and, when the alarm sounded, she instantly went to investigate. Mrs Travers was already halfway out of bed. Of course Debbie scolded her, but your mother said, “I want to go now. I want to get dressed and go.” It was quite a struggle to get her back into bed and to quieten her down.’
Molly, Kate and Joan looked at each other. ‘We noticed Mother doing some rather odd things yesterday. She was looking into the air as if there were people around her. She was talking to them — or, at least, her lips were moving.’
‘And do you remember?’ Kate asked Molly. ‘She started to grope at the air and point and follow things that were flying around the room.’
‘She’s hallucinating,’ the nurse explained. ‘It’s what happens. I’ll tell Dr Paterson. He may increase her medication.’
‘No, please don’t do that, no,’ Mrs Travers tried to say. ‘I’ll be a good girl now.’
Warner peered into her eyes. ‘We wouldn’t want you to do any damage to yourself now, lovey, would we? Not before your son gets here, eh?’
Half past four in the morning, on the dot, and Mrs Travers was awake again.
For a moment she panicked. Warner had indeed advised Dr Paterson of her behaviour, and what her silly daughters had said. As he increased her sedation she had tried to struggle and to plead with him, ‘No, I don’t want extra painkillers’, but he didn’t hear her.
Had the medication eradicated the memories that had opened up to her about … about …?
Mrs Travers moaned into the pillow. It was the same wallpaper and same window, and Auckland was outside as she knew it was supposed to be. But she didn’t want it to be Auckland. She wanted it to be that other place. Where was it? What was its name again?
She sobbed with frustration. She thrashed around in her bed, and suddenly she ripped out the tube feeding the sedating fluids into her left arm. Another lunge, and the tower holding her drip twirled away from her in a crazy dance, taking the tube with it. Oh, she didn’t even care when Debbie came running in, not at all, because in the interim she remembered —
‘You are there, aren’t you?’ she called through the window.
Thrillingly, she heard the sound again, the low, deep sigh, haunting, otherworldly, sibilant, low, somewhere between a deep hiss and moan.
And it was closer. Whoever was calling her was almost outside the window.
Father couldn’t supervise her all the time. ‘Time for you to leave the nest,’ he jested. Even so, he assigned one of the young Ecuadorian crew to look after her. His name was Felipe and he showed her sea lions lying on the gritty sand and among the rocks. The animals were so close at hand and surprisingly unconcerned by humans.
‘They won’t hurt you,’ Felipe told her. ‘You can go right up to them with a club and, bang, you have them before they even know.’
Not far from the sea lions were the lizards of the Galapagos: the marine iguanas. Mrs Travers found them hilarious. They kept on sneezing, excreting salt through special nasal glands. Their heads were encrusted with white salt crowns. They huddled in huge colonies on the rocks to keep each other warm. They were nothing to be frightened of, but they might have been were they larger. How amusing to realise that they only ate seaweed!
Then, near the end of Mrs Travers’ month-long visit, the campsite was shifted to another island. Cyprian told her they would be there for the next four days and, after that, the Artemisia would be fully laden, and she would return with it to Mother and Gloria.
Two days later Father had to lead an expedition inland, and he left her at the campsite. ‘You have some sandwiches, there’s lots to see, I’ll be back in the late afternoon, okay, Essie my girl?’
‘Can’t I come with you?’
‘No, it’s better that you don’t. I’ll be working, and you’d be in the way.’ He had an evasive tone in his voice; he was hiding something from her. ‘Don’t forget to take your sunhat. Felipe is taking you somewhere … he has a surprise for you.’
A surprise?
Felipe took her on a half-day walk. They arrived below the rim of a tall volcano. She saw a wide flat canyon studded with candelabra cactuses.
‘Look,’ Felipe said.
Far in the distance she saw clouds of dust being unsettled. Then, from out of the clouds, came giant tortoises, five feet tall, lumbering slowly towards her.
‘Did you know that some are over two hundred years old?’ Felipe asked. ‘There were once fourteen different tribes of them over all the islands; oh, millions.’ Felipe was prone to exaggeration. ‘Now, not so many.’
‘Where are they going?’
‘They’re on their way to bathe in dew ponds that form as a result of the mist,’ Felipe said. ‘We should sit down cross-legged in their path and see what they do!’
Mrs Travers wasn’t too sure of doing that but she wasn’t about to be bested by a boy, and a native boy at that. ‘All right.’
‘You are lucky,’ said Felipe suddenly. ‘I know this herd. They are the oldest on the island. And look, El Rey is among them.’
‘El Rey?’