Barbara accepted defeat gracefully. ‘Now we know what it’s like,’ she said, ‘we can fix ourselves up with an official holiday later—and no record marches.’
Avery laughed. ‘We can have a dozen a year if you feel like it—without any loss of pay.’
‘But this will still be the most precious one,’ she said. ‘The honeymoon isn’t over yet. Let’s make the most of it.’
They did—all through the long hot afternoon. Then they bathed once more in the sea, and finally made their way back to camp, tired out, and with the deliciously shared guilt of intimate conspirators. As they passed the remembered rock pool, Avery thought about his fleeting vision of a land mass across the sea. He scanned the horizon intently; but, although the air was very clear, there was nothing to be seen. Perhaps it had been a bank of cloud after all. In his present mood, it did not seem to matter greatly. It was much more important that Barbara’s hand was lying in his….
Tom and Mary looked at their faces and instinctively understood. Mary had seen them coming, and all four met on the shore. They flung their arms round each other as if they had been separated for months.
‘Well, now,’ said Tom solemnly, ‘you two look as if you have had a harrowing time—very harrowing indeed. I can see we shall have to nurse you back to health.’
‘Only back to strength,’ retorted Avery. ‘We have already demonstrated the quality of our health…. Incidentally we’ve also found where the golden people live. And we are on an island, Tom, not a very big one. How the devil we managed to avoid finding out for so long, I’ll never know.’
‘We have news for you, too,’ said Tom. ‘Mary’s pregnant. She suspected it for some time, but now she has the classic symptom.’ He grinned. ‘It operates early in the morning, just before breakfast—so that I have to do the work.’
‘Felicitations,’ said Avery to Mary. He kissed her. ‘I only hope you don’t get strange yearnings for pickled onions and that sort of thing. The nearest grocery shop is an awful long way.’
Barbara was feeling smug. ‘If I don’t join you at the clinic soon, Mary dear, the law of averages will have gone bust.’
Suddenly, Tom became serious. ‘Damned if I know what we are going to do about doctors and midwives and all that rot.’
But Mary was strangely unperturbed. ‘Stop worrying. What do you think women have been doing for about a million years?’
As they were going back to camp, Avery had a sublime thought. ‘We never drank that bottle of champagne, did we? I knew there would be a good excuse for it sooner or later.’
Tom began to hurry on ahead. ‘I’ll try to get it cooled down to blood temperature in the sea,’ he called.
TWENTY-ONE
Apart from Mary’s morning sickness—which, exasperatingly, sometimes became an afternoon sickness or an evening sickness—the next few days developed into a sort of halcyon period at Camp Two.
The first thing Avery did was draw a map of the island —although ‘map’ was far too grand a term for what was, essentially, a simple diagram based upon hazy recollections and measurements that were little more than imaginative guesswork. However, his calculations of the length of the Grand Tour, about forty-five miles, was derived from time spent actually on the move. It seemed reasonably sound, give or take a few miles.
That, then, was the perimeter of the island. He thought, though he could not be sure, that its oudine was roughly that of a Chianti bottle. On the first day and part of the second he had the impression that, allowing for local irregularities, the coast tended to curve gently in one direction only. Then it appeared to go reasonably straight until it twisted quite sharply at the Chianti bottle’s neck. By coast, he estimated that the camp of the golden people was about twenty miles away. But if his idea of the island’s shape was right, both camps were roughly opposite each other—on the wide part of the bulge. Overland, the distance from Camp Two to that of the golden people should be about eight or ten miles.
‘Now that we know roughly how near they live,’ said Tom, ‘I begin to feel a little less secure. Something tells me we are going to have real trouble on our hands, sooner or later.’
‘Possibly,’ said Avery. ‘But life has been reasonably peaceful so far—apart from that little frolic of theirs in Camp One. Maybe they, too, have enough sense not to press their luck. If we had found out earlier where they were, and retaliated, the cold war would have been a pretty hot one by now.’
‘I’d like to take a good look at their camp, all the same,’ remarked Tom. ‘You never know, we might learn something useful.’
Avery shook his head. ‘There’s too much risk of provoking them. Barbara and I were lucky. Next time—if there is a next time—the luck may run out. Eventually, we’ll try to find some way of establishing friendly contact; but it’s the sort of thing that’s best done slowly— very slowly.’
And that was how the matter was left for the time being. However, spurred on by what the golden people had achieved, Tom and Avery began to think very seriously of building some sort of permanent accommodation. In the cold fight of day, Mary’s pregnancy presented many problems. There was no serious obstacle to bringing up a baby in a tent; but it seemed, somehow, incongruous. Besides, on the assumption—which, as time passed, was growing into a certainty—that They did not intend to provide return tickets to Earth, it was clear that Camp Two could not be regarded as a suitable base for ever. A more spacious settlement would be needed; for as Tom said—only half jokingly—if they were going to found a tribe, they ought to choose a good strip of land with lebensraum.
The weather seemed to be getting steadily hotter. Mary was the one to suffer most. The heat and the morning sickness sapped her energy, and she became listless. But fortunately, about ten days after Barbara and Avery had returned, rain came—not just a downpour, but a miniature monsoon. It lasted over a week, and during that time the air began to grow cooler and fresher. Apart from necessary excursions for food and water, they spent most of the time in their tents, reading, listening to the record player or making love.
Barbara was quite delighted about the monsoon because it meant that she and Avery were thrust into close proximity most of the time, and there was still so much of him that she wanted to discover, still so many things to be shared. The only real drawback to the monsoon was that it made cooking impossible; and although there was a great variety of fruit that they could eat, after a time they began to long for meat and fish.
The rain ended suddenly at dawn one morning. They came out of their tents to find a steaming and iridescent world….
Avery began to paint. He began to paint like a man possessed—or like one who was suddenly trying to recover all the wasted years.
The paints and canvas boards had lain in his trunk for months, untouched, unwanted. But now he was suddenly and profoundly grateful for them. He was grateful that They should have provided them. Above all, he was simply grateful for being alive.
Now that the fever of painting was on him once more, he could think of hardly anything else—except Barbara. Hunting, fishing, collecting fruit, looking for a site for the camp—even swimming—all these had become annoying irrelevancies. They irritated him. The real things in life were problems of form and texture and composition. He began to look with new eyes at the alien world in which he found himself. He began to see it as if for the first time. What painter in the whole history of art had ever had such a glorious opportunity! As he worked, Avery decided that he was a very lucky man indeed.