III
Eden. What else would you call the garden paradise of Adam and Yvette? Rebecca had always found her father’s sense of humour suspect. The reserve comprised some fifty hectares of spiny forest, including eight kilometres of coastline, but its heart was this natural clearing in the forest, accessible by a short drive from the coastal track. It was dark and empty and smaller than she remembered, but otherwise unchanged.
To her right was the lodge, a large and sturdy one-storey building of whitewashed stone that housed her father’s office, the clinic, the dining area and a few other rooms. Her father’s old Jeep was parked in front of the veranda, along with the track-bike he’d used to reach places even the Jeep couldn’t go. Ahead of her, chairs and tables surrounded the outside cooking area, while a clothesline doubled as a badminton net. And, to her left, the generator annexe and cabins raised on stilts to keep them dry during the occasional fierce rains. Adam had built pretty much all of it himself, with modest help from the local villagers (the world’s least reliable workforce: they’d drop tools in a heartbeat whenever the fish started running). Her father had loved such work, fitting stones together like jigsaw pieces, learning the different properties of the local woods, the hard cassave for houses and masts, the light farafatry for boats. His eyes would glitter as he’d demonstrate how to twist faraihosy bark into rope or tap babo for fresh water.
She went over to the lodge, but it had a new steel front door, perhaps in response to the recent coup. There were new steel shutters too, closed and bolted, denying her access. She’d just have to wait until morning, borrow keys from Therese. The cabins were unlocked, however. Her father’s was closed only on a latch. There was a white candle by his bed. She lit it, held it up. The place was filled with poignant reminders of him: silver hairs caught in a comb; a black-and-white family photograph of them all together; drawstring blue pyjamas beneath his pillow.
She went back out. The night had grown perceptibly cooler and the stars had all vanished. Bad weather was on its way. She was tempted to head back to Pierre’s, but she needed to see Emilia’s cabin first. Michel’s cradle was by her bed, brightly coloured mobiles of reef-fish dangling low above it. Her heart gave a twist as she recalled the morning, a year or so ago, when Emilia had phoned to let her know that she was pregnant. She’d tried to offer congratulations, but her words had come out strangely hollow. Afterwards, too dazed to work, she’d left the office and had walked for hours. In a bookshop, she’d picked out a paperback on motherhood, had made a wall of her back to hide it from the CCTV cameras, as though it were the most lurid pornography. It had been a rush just to cradle it in her palm: the sharp-edged springiness of its leaves, the creak of its spine, that intoxicating scent of newness. Every day for a week, she’d visited a different maternity store, running her hands over the displays, the silk and satin trickling like fine sand through her fingers. It had been madness. She’d been too well known. Shoppers had murmured with staff; rumours had begun to circulate. An ambitious morning TV presenter with glittering eyes had asked her flat out whether she had exciting news to share. Rebecca had had to tell her about Emilia. It was the first time she’d volunteered information about her family on television, and because her father had once been a TV presenter himself, her childhood had suddenly been in play.
‘What was he like, your father?’ the woman had asked.
Rebecca had simply frozen. How to answer such a question? Was she supposed to talk about the gentle, wise man he’d been before the leukaemia had taken her mother? Or the sporadic drunk he’d then become, the red-faced ranting machine who’d yelled at her and threatened her with his fists? Was that the man she was being asked about?
His abuse had lasted years. He’d felt wretched after each episode, had vowed never to lapse again. But he always had. And, anyway, it hadn’t been the yelling or the threats that had most upset her, it had been the knowledge of the hatred that underlay it, not least because she hadn’t the first idea what she’d done to deserve it, and he’d never said. And while part of her had been glad that Emilia had been spared his wrath during these outbursts, another part of her had bitterly resented the manifest unfairness of this, and so she’d begun in turn to pick on her younger sister, something for which she’d come to hate herself.
In the end, they’d colluded on the solution. Adam had pulled strings with his old Oxford colleagues to get Rebecca a place to read zoology. Distance had allowed her heart to heal, but the scarring still remained. For years afterwards, Rebecca had refused any direct contact whatsoever with her father. But Emilia had eventually brokered a wary truce, a first tentative exchange of letters, emails, even the rare phone call. But whenever either Emilia or Adam suggested anything more, Rebecca would freeze up, the process would be set back months.
In the bottom of a chest of drawers, Rebecca found a home pregnancy kit and a packet of domperidone, a lactation stimulator. Rebecca smiled. Emilia had been planning for motherhood all her life. Where other girls had wanted breasts to titillate the boys, Emilia had only ever wanted them to gorge her babies. Where others had fantasised about their life partners, Emilia’s dream man had always been one who’d get her pregnant and then leave.
—Pierre! How could you choose Pierre?
—A woman needs to be held.
—But Pierre!
—A child needs a father.
—As if your choices are so much better.
Outside, she heard an engine. She went to the door, saw headlights through the rain that had started falling. Pierre back from Antananarivo, no doubt. But then the lights went out and a pickup truck lurched with unnerving stealth up the drive. She stepped back out of sight, blew out her candle. The pickup swung around; its engine stilled. Both doors opened and two men jumped down, faces concealed by baseball caps and scarves. They hurried through the rain to the lodge. To Rebecca’s shock, they unlocked the front door and vanished inside, making her wonder whether they’d taken keys from her father and Emilia, and had come here to plunder the place while they knew it would be deserted. She watched the pale fireflies of torchlight flutter around the edges of the shutters as they moved through the various rooms. It would be madness to go challenge them by herself, but there was no reason not to check out their pickup, make a note of their licence plate. Her T-shirt was a treacherous bright white, however, so she tiptoed quietly over to Emilia’s chest of drawers and began searching for something dark.