My eyes are dry from tiredness and from seven hours on an aeroplane. I don’t like flying. It isn’t so much the being in the air that bothers me. It is the arriving in a different country, with a wholly different culture and weather system, just a few hours after you have left Gatwick. Maybe it is because I still remember the size of things. No one understands that any more. People didn’t feel the enormity of the world or their own smallness within it. When I first travelled around the globe, it took over a year, on a boat full of men, who were lucky if they made it. Now, the world is just there. All of it. In an hour I will be on a flight to Sydney, and by lunchtime I will have arrived. It makes me feel claustrophobic, as if the world is literally shrinking, like a balloon losing air.
I move to a different section in the bookshop. The section, mainly books in English or English translation, is titled ‘Thought’. It is a much smaller area than the one for business books. Confucius. The ancient Greeks. Then I see a book, face out, with a simple academic cover.
Michel de Montaigne’s Essays.
It nearly turns me to ash. I even say my daughter’s name out loud, to myself, as if I am close to her again, as if a part of us is contained in every book we’ve loved. I pick it up and turn to a random page and read a sentence – ‘Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it’ – and I begin to feel the onset of potential tears.
My phone beeps. I hastily put the book down. I check my phone. A text message. It is from Omai: ‘Been too long. Can’t wait to catch up. Have booked us in for dinner at a place called the Fig Tree restaurant at 8. Should give you time to nap off your jetlag a bit.’
Jetlag.
It seems funny him writing the word. He belongs, in my mind, to a time when the idea of humans flying was as fantastical as, to us now, humans living on Neptune. Maybe even more so.
I text back: ‘See you there.’
I leave Montaigne and the airport bookshop and head over to a large window and wait for them to announce my flight. I lean my head against the glass and stare out beyond my reflection at the infinite darkness of the desert.
Plymouth, England, 1772
After our return I stayed around Plymouth. I liked it there. As with London, it was an easy place to disappear into. A town of seafarers, ragamuffins, criminals, runaways, drifters, musicians, artists, dreamers, loners, and I was, at various points, any and all of those things.
One morning I left my lodgings at the Minerva Inn and went to the new dockyard. There was a large naval warship sitting high on the water.
‘Impressive, ain’t she?’ said a man on the dockside, seeing my awe.
‘Yes. Yes, she is.’
‘Set to find new worlds.’
‘New worlds?’
‘Aye. That’s Cook’s ship.’
‘Cook?’
Then I heard footsteps behind me. A hand fell on my shoulder. I jumped.
‘My goodness, Mr Frears, you seem a little shaken.’
I turned to see a tall lean finely dressed gentleman, smiling kindly at me.
‘Oh, Mr Furneaux . . . it is a pleasure, sir.’
His astute eyes studied me a moment. ‘You never look a day older, Frears.’
‘Sea air, sir.’
‘Fancy more of it? Want to go back out there?’
He gestured towards the horizon beyond the harbour. ‘It will be different this time. Cook has prepared things a little better than Wallis.’
‘Are you sailing on Cook’s boat?’
‘Not exactly. I am accompanying him,’ he told me. ‘On the voyage. As a commander on the Adventure. I am assembling a crew. Would you like to be part of it?’
Somewhere above Australia, now
I am on a connecting flight between Sydney and the Gold Coast, feeling tired. I have spent most of the last two days either in aeroplanes or at airports. There is a baby crying at the back of the plane. It makes me think, momentarily, of Marion, when she was teething, and how worried Rose had been, imagining the pain could be fatal. In the same way every dog is similar to every other dog, every baby’s cry echoes every crying baby there has ever been.
And, on that note, there is a young couple in front of me. A head sleeping on a shoulder. A man’s head on a man’s shoulder, the way you never used to see. It is a touching sight, I suppose, but makes me jealous. I want a head on my shoulder, like Camille’s had been on mine, just before Hendrich’s call. Is this how I had once felt about Rose, at the beginning? Or is this something different? Maybe this is a different kind of love. Did it matter?
I think about how we have barely spoken a word to each other during the last week at school. I think about an awkward moment near the kettle in the staff room. She was rummaging through the teas, looking for chamomile. The silence screamed.
My mother had told me to live. After she had gone, I had to live. It was easy for her to say, but of course she was right. And it was an understandable wish. When you die the last thing you want is for your death to leak out and infect those left behind, for those loved ones to become a kind of living dead. And yet, inevitably, that often happens. It has happened to me.
But I sense it is getting closer. Life. I sense it, just inches ahead of me. Marion is part of it. The suddenly very real idea of finding her. I sleep and I dream of Omai. I dream of seeing him standing on a South Pacific beach staring out at sunset. And when I get to him I grab his arm and he crumbles away like sand and there is someone else, someone smaller, there beneath him, like a Russian doll. A child. A child with a long braid in her hair and wearing a green cotton dress.
‘Marion,’ I say.
And then she, too, crumbles into sand, into the beach itself, and I try to keep her intact even as the water washes her away.
And when I wake up, the baby is no longer crying and I am there – here. The plane has landed, and I know that in a matter of hours I will be seeing someone I haven’t seen for centuries. And I can’t help but feel terrified.
Huahine, Society Islands, 1773
Arthur Flynn, second lieutenant of the Adventure, sunburnt, sweltering in his once white shirt, knelt on the sand, holding bright red and white ribbons in his hands and, in clumsy, emphatic sign language, mimed tying them in his hair. He smiled an imitation of a pretty girl, quite a reach given his scorched face and scalp and untamed beard.
But still, his audience of little children seemed impressed. I had travelled enough to understand that laughter was pretty universal, at least among children. Even the older islanders, standing a little more po-faced behind, were suddenly smiling at this strange red-skinned Englishman playing the fool. Arthur handed a ribbon to the long-haired girl nearest to him – she could have been no more than six years old – and, after confirmation from her mother, she took it.
Then Arthur turned, and said to me, in a voice softer than his usual, ‘Frears, do you have the beads?’
Behind them, the two ships sat like inanimate elegant beasts transferred from another reality.