A Boat Load of Home Folk (22 page)

“Wasn't it?” he urged rather pitifully.

“Ah, for God's sake!” she had cried. “Give us a light, will you?”

He was hurt and lifted his head high, looking down his nose, a lump not built for superiority.

“It's funny how things go,” he mused after a while. “I came on this trip undecided—Kathleen was becoming—insistent, I suppose you'd call it. There was a sort of
impasse.
I couldn't bring myself to hurt her.”

“Chum,” Marie said. “Chum! You are so thick. I mean you deny any woman's right to be insistent. They have it. I have it. I don't exercise it because I happen never to have been moved that way. But, believe me,
should all the cadences of human relationship play the sort of tune that might make me, I would. But not with you.”

“Go,” Bishop Deladier was saying at the precise moment of hostile rapture between spouses, “go. The Mass is ended.”

While Stevenson sat involved with his painful guest in the backroom of the Port Lena Co-operative; while Lake shot, without a backward glance, up the plane steps, and the Seabrooks and Miss Paradise followed like acolytes; while Greely made a burping post-communion thanks beside a grovelling Mulgrave and the natives, touched only on the very fringes of their souls by the mystery, shuffled to their feet; while Miss Trumper was wallowing in oblivion, host and victim, captured by the green strands of sea that gave her flesh now more comfort than human hands ever had; while all these things drew into their oneness and aloofness, Deladier had turned to the congregation with his hands forming a blessing that should embrace them all and unite.

This is the last postcard of all:

They mount the steps; the door closes.

A native on the shellstrip spins the blades and, as the motors threaten, hands flutter black and white in front of the customs block and the Glare Bar.

Miss Paradise does not want to talk as the plane swoops over the lagoon cocoon that clutches her friend and Lake obliges by swigging from his whisky flask.
Miss Paradise is having her first swigs of guilt. She will be addicted for life, now, and cannot bear the sullen rocking water below that beds down the once-lovely Trumper. Refusing to think, the Seabrooks stuff themselves with magazines.

The Bishop is captured
et in aeternam
in this final flick of the shutter, with his hands raised, bony, veined, trembling, over the black and white faces, all troubled by disaster and mollified by ritual, that have already begun to turn away.

“Go,” he says, “go. The Mass is ended.”