At first Sir William did not believe it. The French were playing a joke, taking him for a ride. Then, as though seized with some instant madness, he dived into the mailbag and began tearing through its contents. Newspapers, personal letters, lists from Harrods and Foyles, flew about the room. His Premium Bond numbers received only a quick glance. Then he came up with the sealed envelope.
'Cooper,' he called like a boy on his birthday. 'Cooper, come and see what I've got!'
Phillip Cooper, his watery ADC, came in anxiously as though expecting Sir William to be displaying symptoms of a vile disease. He was relieved to see the Governor merely madly tearing the seal away from a big Whitehall envelope.
'What is it, sir,' asked Cooper. 'Exactly what is it?'
'Exactly, it is tremendous, Cooper!' answered Sir William, impersonating the drained voice of his assistant, an occasional lapse which Cooper disliked intensely.
'Tremendous, sir,' said Cooper. 'Exactly how, sir?'
Sir William was shuffling through documents, papers, letters. The look of the hunter was in his eye again. 'We, dear boy,' he said, slowly now as though to make the relish last, 'are going to have a visit from Her Majesty. It's very sudden. On her way back from Australia she is coming in here. What about that, Cooper! What about that!'
A spot of colour appeared on each of Cooper's small cheeks. 'Exactly, sir,' he chortled. 'What about it!'
Sir William was hopping about on one leg. 'The Queen,' he breathed. 'Our Gracious Queen. Here in the Apostles. Hah! Now we'll tell those Frogs what they can do with their piffling gunboat.'
When Bird rolled up the shutters of her shop the rain had cleared for a while, leaving the sky clean and immediately very hot. The street outside her establishment, The Parisienne Hair Style and Beauty Parlour, was glutinous red mud for the entire rainy season and a trench of rising dust at any other time of the year. She had always tried to affect a little chic in her business, hair driers from Australia, the best French lotions and sprays, her two Melanesian assistants in fetching pink pinafores, and coffee in the daintiest cups. The effect, however, was undoubtedly spoiled by the fact that the customers either came in layered with mud like soldiers from the trenches or with dust, red and potent as pepper, lying on them. Even when they arrived by car or taxi there was an area, a sort of no‑man's‑land, between the actual street and the shop which needed to be crossed and, if anything, this was muddier or dustier than even the street itself. Madame Butol, wife of one of the French Government officials, always made her native chauffeur carry her across the trap.
Bird was three months short of eighteen. She had been
born on St Luke's Island, one of the minor members of the group, where her Australian father was a planter. He had died and her mother had returned to Sydney having sold the house and plantation. Bird loved the islands, wet or dry, and would not leave. So her mother went without her, leaving her enough to buy the shop and begin her career. She was dainty and dark with magnificent long hair and nose too broad but a suitable pedestal for her bursting brown eyes. She had a tooth missing, but it did not show unless she laughed widely, so she usually merely smiled which made some people think she was deep and enigmatic.
Her Australian parents had called her Nola after an aunt in the Dandenongs, near Melbourne, and Betty after her father's mother. Fortunately the naked pidgin‑speaking natives on St Luke's Island had better taste and re‑named her as
'Little‑narrow‑one‑who‑make‑hop‑hop‑in‑the‑earlymorning‑and‑calls‑like‑tree‑bird‑until‑she‑tired‑and‑cries'. This was decently abbreviated to Bird and by that name she had been known ever since. She had been educated at the French Convent on St Peter's and had there caught a strange low‑spoken half‑Gallic accent. She played the guitar and sang folk songs on Saturday nights in the Angelique Café off The Love Beach Road.
Having dealt with the shutters Bird looked directly over the estuary‑like road to the orange‑coloured shop of Bhu Vin Lee, an aged Vietnamese who had a cracked face and a dead beard hanging on to it. She did not like him very much because he frightened her every afternoon by sitting just inside his doorway, half concealed by shadow, and staring across at the Parisienne Hair Style and Beauty Parlour. He had never done anything but stare, except on one occasion when he actually picked his way across the street to suggest to her that they ought to organize a petition about the state of the road. Nothing had come of that, however, and Bhu Vin Lee had retreated into his private shadow and continued staring.
A Melanesian woman, all hips and hair, came out of the shop, which was a general grocer's, carrying a paraffin can and a packet of washing powder. Bird remembered that
The Baffin Bay
had arrived which meant that all the shops would be stocked up for a while and that her consignment of curlers, lacquer, beauty creams, and magazines should be coming up the road that morning.
Some men, Mr Hassey, the mad planter, Mr Kendrick, who kept the cycle shop, John Livesley, who had the only neon sign for a thousand miles above his baker's shop shouting 'Bread' in three alternating colours, and some others were sitting under the umbrellas at the café.
The café was next door to Bird's salon, with its apron of flagstones projecting out to the street. The men were on their first drinks of the day, taking the break in the rain to meet, the steam from the last shower rising about them. They looked as though they were sitting in the middle of some inferno or grouped fantastically inside a large cannibal cooking pot. She knew them all well, from childhood. Mr Livesley who was immensely proud of his neon sign which could be seen flashing for two miles out to sea. BREAD ‑ BREAD ‑ BREAD it went in red, then white, then blue, across the Pacific night. Dahlia, a girl who had come to work at the Angelique, lived in the flat over the shop and her rent had been reduced by Mr Livesley because her cur32
tains were only muslin and the flashing colours of his advertisement gave her nightmares.
Mr Kendrick she remembered because he was the first person to ever attempt to assault her indecently. It happened when she was twelve and her father had come over to St Peter's to buy her a bicycle. They had gone to Mr Kendrick's shop, which always prospered because a bicycle was the best way to get about the island, and her father had gone across for a drink while she selected her present. Mr Kendrick, who was a very clean‑looking man, had put his hands all over her bottom and other places while he helped her on the cycles. She chose a really strong machine and three days later ran over Mrs Kendrick's blue Persian cat killing it with one powerful thrust of her front wheel. She had taken it to the shop and laid it solemnly, silently, across the counter, like some sort of offering or sacrifice, which it was in a way, looking steadily into the sanitary eyes of Mr Kendrick as she did so. Mr Kendrick had burst into terrible tears, much to Bird's surprise and pleasure, because he was wretchedly afraid of Mrs Kendrick who, in turn, was passionately attached to the cat. Bird had turned triumphantly and left. Outside, as she mounted her cycle, she could see Mr Kendrick wailing over the stretched cat, trying to shake some life back into it.
Evervone knew Mr Hassey was mad, but Bird liked him. He had arrived in the Apostles thirty‑eight years ago for a two‑week visit. 'I had only come to ascertain the fucking natives,' she had once been fascinated to overhear him say. 'Then I thought I'd ascertain the other islands. And here I am. Still ascertaining.'
Bird's initial customer that morning was to be Mrs Flagg who, with her husband Bert, spent months of the year among the gentle St Mark's natives, studying their untroubled paganisms, ancestor worship, and collections of skulls. The St Mark's tribe had the picturesque custom of wrapping the male sexual organ in a great covering of banana leaves until it assumed huge proportions and was then tucked into a leather thong tied around the waist like a girdle. Bird had seen the tribe at different times and when she was very young she had always imagined that each man had a pet hedgehog or raccoon, or some such creature, which hung on to its master around the waist.
Mrs Flagg was always cheerfully punctual. Her husband's Land‑Rover squelched down the street and she jumped down, clad in Wellington boots, denim trousers, and a shirt in lumberjack check. She was a bulky blonde, red cheeked, in her thirties, striding and strident. She entered the shop on her massive rubber boots like a hippopotamus quitting a watering place, giving the Parisienne Hair Style and Beauty Parlour its first muddy splattering of the day.
Bird sighed. Mrs Flagg took off her boots, sat in the chair with men's socks stuck out in front of her, and said boisterously: 'Righto, Bird, my dear, give it a good scrub. Those fleas on St Mark's don't get any better.' Bird grimaced mildly at the tangled scalp. Mrs Flagg said: 'Just imagine, dear, what happened this time?'
'What happened, Mrs Flagg?' asked Bird dutifully beginning to lather the screwed hair.
'We've got Tom Ya‑Ya, the chief, to agree to six of his chaps coming over to stay at our house so that we can really study them at first hand over a long period. Isn't that bewitching!'
'Bewitching,' agreed Bird. 'Are they going to put any clothes on themselves? All the natives here on St Peter's wear
something.'
'A delicate point, dear,' admitted Mrs Flagg from under the froth. Lumps of tree and creeper, other jungle debris, and an insect with a million legs, had already emerged from her hair. 'Bert said they should wear shorts. But I say they are quite decent enough. a trifle exotic of course, but that is why they are so worth our study. They have their baloots, their banana wraps, you know, and these do quite effectively cover them up. As I said to Bert, we would never get shorts that would fit them around the waist while they retained their baloots, and they most certainly would not abandon them, even if we wished it.'
Bird switched on the radio. Like everyone else in the archipelago she sensed that it was ten o'clock and reached to hear Radio Apostle which had only enough power to broadcast for two hours a day, an hour in English and an hour in French. George Turtle read the English news, local and international, the latter sometimes nearer history, and then played some record requests before going home to Minnie for lunch.
On days when
The Baffin
Bay arrived there was a good deal more news than usual because Captain MacAndrews brought the Sydney papers with him, so George broadcast an extended bulletin. There was no other station in the Pacific strong enough to reach Sexagesima, except Honoraria in the Solomons when freak receiving conditions were prevailing.
The station always played itself in and out with the two National Anthems. This always embarrassed Bird a little but she encouraged her customers to remain seated, particularly if they were under the hair drier, unless they insisted on doing so. She more or less knew the ladies who liked to stand to attention, and there was a small determined group of them, pre‑war dual colonists for whom the monarch, or the president, the flag, and the anthem, were more important to life than even dry gin. Mrs Flagg, despite her name, was not one of these and she remained round and bowed under Bird's working hands while the various small travellers from St Mark's evacuated her hair like animals leaving a blazing forest.
But Bird heard the scraping of the chairs in the cafd forecourt outside and knew that Mr Hassey, Mr Livesley, and Mr Kendrick were stiffly standing, the rain steam still rising about them, looking squarely in the general direction of London, and ready to raise their morning glasses to Her Majesty the moment the radio record ground to a stop.
Today they were surprised by the music being snatched away far more quickly than usual, while their eyes were still far away and their glasses only ready at the waist. George's voice rushed on to the air before The Queen was properly remembered and toasted. Mr Hassey looked at the red plastic‑covered transistor radio on the table with some disagreeable surprise.
'This is Radio Apostle broadcasting on 243 metres,' gabbled George Turtle. 'And here, immediately, is the news. Some special news. I ‑ that is, we ‑ have just received a message from Sir William Findlay‑Stayers, the Governor, that a special meeting of the Amglo‑French Condominium for the islands,
and
the Sexagesima Town Council, has been called for this evening at seven o'clock in the assembly building. The meeting will be open to the public. The Governor has an important announcement to make.'
No one around the damp little table heard any more. The three men regarded each other like card players who have simultaneously turned up six aces. Mr Hassey stuttered first: 'They've sold us,' he said. 'S‑sold us, the rotten buggers. I've already ascertained the situation. Sold us to the French.'
'Or the Japanese,' suggested Mr Kendrick.
'G‑God, don't say that, said Mr Hassey. 'Even in joking.'
Mr Livesley said: 'I think it's an H‑bomb test. Right here. They'll blow everything to dust, or mud. And I've just got my sign up.'
Inside the salon Bird rubbed at Mrs Flagg's scalp. 'What could it be?' she said.
'Perhaps,' said Mrs Flagg with a sincere gurgle, 'they've heard about our natives coming over.'
Three
There were three violent, ten‑minute rain storms during the afternoon, and a session of thunder and vivid lightning during which the roof of a hill house was struck while a committee were discussing the next display of the Sexagesima Scottish Folk Dance Society. The committee, mostly ladies, were considerably shaken by the explosion and the sinister smell of smoke that followed it. Some thought it might be something to do with the imminent announcement the Governor was due to make, a premature attack perhaps in a war they had as yet heard nothing about. There was always that risk when you were tucked away in a fold of a large ocean. But when the smoke had cleared and the houseboys had inspected the minor damage it was generally realized that it was, after all, just another wet season thunderstorm, and the meeting proceeded.