SIX

As the ship sailed further south, and the weather became endlessly warm and sunny, there was no time for contemplating the pros and cons of my prize. I was distracted by the scenery, the unfolding panorama of the islands, and Mathilde was constantly on my mind.

I had not really expected to meet someone on the ship, but from the second day I thought of almost nothing else. Mathilde, I think, was glad of my company, and flattered by my interest in her, but that is as far as it went. I found that I was pursuing her with such single-minded intent that even I became self-conscious about it. I soon ran out of excuses for being with her, because she was the sort of woman who made excuses necessary. Every time I approached her I had to think of some new device: a drink in the bar?, a stroll around the deck?, a few minutes ashore? After these minor excursions she always slipped away with an excuse of her own: a short nap, hair to be washed, a letter to write. I knew she was not interested in me in the way I was interested in her, but that was no deterrent.

In some ways it was inevitable we should spend time together. We were the same age group—she was thirty-one, two years older than myself—and we came from the same sort of Jethran background. She, like me, felt outnumbered by the retirement couples on board with us, but unlike me made friends with several of them. I found her intelligent and shrewd, and, after a few drinks, possessed of an unexpectedly bawdy sense of humour. She was slim and fair-haired, read a lot of books, had been politically active in Jethra (we found we had a friend of a friend in common) and on the one or two occasions we were able to leave the ship briefly, she revealed herself knowledgeable about island customs.

The dream that started it all was one of those rare lucid dreams that are still comprehensible after waking. It was extremely simple. In a mildly erotic way I was on an island with a young woman, readily identified as Mathilde, and we were in love.

When I saw Mathilde in the morning I felt such a surge of spontaneous warmth that I acted as if we had known each other for years, rather than just met briefly the day before. Probably out of surprise, Mathilde responded with almost equal warmth, and before either of us realized it a pattern had been set. From then I pursued her, and she, with tact, firmness and a generous amusement, eluded me.

My other main preoccupation on the ship was my discovery of the islands. I never tired of standing at the rail of the ship to watch the view, and our frequent calls at ports on the way were all rich visual experiences.

The shipping line had fixed an immense, stylized chart on the wall of the main saloon, and this showed the entire Midway Sea and all the principal islands and shipping routes. A first reaction to the chart was the complexity of the Archipelago and the sheer quantity of islands, and amazement that ships’ crews could navigate safely. The sea carried a lot of shipping: in a typical day on deck I would see twenty or thirty cargo ships, at least one or two steamers like the one I was on, and innumerable small inter-island ferries. Around some of the larger islands there was traffic of privately owned pleasure boats, and fleets of fishing boats were common sights.

It was generally said that the islands of the Archipelago were impossible to count, although upwards of ten thousand had been named. The whole of the Midway Sea had been surveyed and charted, but quite apart from the inhabited islands, and the larger uninhabited ones, there was a multitude of tiny islets, crags and rocks, many of which appeared and disappeared with the tides.

From the chart I learned that the islands which lay immediately to the south of Jethra were known as the Torqui Group; the main island, Derril, was one we called at on the third day. Beyond these to the south lay the Lesser Serques. The islands were grouped for administrative and geographical reasons, but each island was, in theory at least, politically and economically independent.

In simple terms, the Midway Sea girdled the world at the equator, but it was larger by far than either of the two continental land masses lying to north and south of it. In one part of the world, the sea extended to within a few degrees of the South Pole, and in the northern hemisphere the country called Koillin, one of those with which we were presently at war, actually had part of its territory crossing the equator; in general, though, the continents were cool and the islands were tropical.

One of the anecdotal facts taught in schools about the Dream Archipelago, and one which I heard the other passengers repeat many times, was that the islands were so numerous and so close together that from every single island at least another seven could be seen. I never doubted this, except to think it was probably an understatement; even from the relatively low eminence of the ship’s deck I could frequently see more than twelve separate islands.

It was extraordinary to reflect that I had spent my life in Jethra without awareness of this totally strange place. Two days’ sailing from Jethra and I felt I had travelled to another world, yet I was still closer to home than, say, the mountain passes in the north of Faiandland.

And if I continued to travel, south or west or east through the Archipelago, I could sail for months and still see the same unfolding diversity, impossible to describe, impossible even to absorb when seeing it. Large, small, rocky, fertile, mountainous and flat; these simple variations could be seen in an afternoon, to just one side of the ship. The senses became dulled to the scenic variety, and the imagination took over. I began to see the islands as designs on a painted cyclorama, one hauled smoothly past the ship, endlessly inventive, meticulously fabricated.

But then came our ports of call, confounding the fancy.

Our brief visits to islands were the real regulators of the ship’s day. Ports disrupted everything. I soon learned this, and gave up trying to eat or sleep by the clock. The best time to sleep was mid-voyage, because then the ship had a steady rhythm to it, and the food in the restaurant was also better, because then the crew was eating.

The ship was always expected, whether we docked at noon or midnight, and its arrival was obviously an event of some importance. Crowds were generally waiting on the quay, and behind them stood rows of trucks and carts to take away the cargo and mail we brought. Then there was the chaotic exchange of deck passengers, and as they came or left there were always arguments, greetings or farewells, suddenly remembered last messages shouted to the shore, disrupting our otherwise placid existence. In the ports we were reminded that we were a ship: something that called, something that carried, something from outside.

I always left the ship when I could, and made brief explorations of the little towns. My impressions were superficial: I felt like a tourist, unable to see beyond the war memorials and palm trees to the people beyond. Yet the Archipelago was not meant for tourists, and the towns had no guides or currency exchanges, no museums of local culture. On several islands I tried to buy picture postcards to send home, but when at last I found some I discovered that mail to the north could only be sent by special permit. By trial and error I worked out a few things for myself: the usage of the archaic non—-decimal currency, the difference between the various kinds of bread and meat on sale, and a rule of-thumb guide to how prices compared with home.

Mathilde sometimes accompanied me on these expeditions, and her presence was enough to blind me to surroundings. All the time I was with her I knew I was making a mistake, yet she continued to attract me. I think we were both relieved, although in my case it was a perverse kind of relief, when on the fourth day we came to Semell Town and she disembarked. We went through the motions of making an arrangement to meet again, even though her voice was glib with insincerity. When she was ashore I stood by the ship’s rail and watched her walk along the concrete wharf, her pale hair shining in the sunlight. A car was waiting to meet her. I saw a man load her bags into the back, and before she climbed in she turned towards the ship. She waved briefly to me, then she was gone.

Semell was a dry island, with olive trees growing on the rocky hills. Old men sat in the shade; I heard a donkey braying somewhere behind the town.

After Semell I began to tire of the ship and its slow, devious voyage through the islands. I was bored with the noises and routines of the ship: the rattle of chains, the constant sound from the engine and the pumps, the voluble dialect conversations of the deck passengers. I had given up eating on the ship, and now bought fresh bread, cooked meat and fruit whenever we stopped at an island. I drank too much. I found the few conversations I had with other passengers repetitive and predictable.

I had boarded the ship in a state of extreme receptivity, open to the new experience of travel, to the discovery of the Archipelago. Now, though, I began to miss my friends at home, and my family. I remembered the last conversation I had had with my father, the night before I left Jethra: he was against the prize and feared that as a result of it I would choose to stay on in the islands.

I was abandoning much for the sake of a lottery ticket, and I still questioned what I was doing.

Part of the answer lay in the manuscript I had written a couple of summers before. I had brought it with me, stuffed into my leather holdall, but I had packed it without re-reading it, just as I had never re-read it since leaving the cottage. The writing of my life, of telling myself the truth, had been an end in itself.

Since that long summer in the Murinan Hills overlooking Jethra I had entered a muted phase of life. There had been no upsets, few passions. I had had lovers, but they had been superficial relationships, and I had made a number of new acquaintances but no new friends. The country had recovered from the recession that put me out of a job, and I had gone back to work.

But writing the manuscript had not been a wasted effort. The words still held the truth. It had become a kind of prophecy, in the pure sense of being a teaching. I therefore had a feeling that somewhere in those pages would be some kind of internal guidance about the lottery prize. It was this I needed, because there was no logical reason for refusing it. My doubts came from within.

But as the ship moved into hotter latitudes, my mental and physical sloth increased. I left my manuscript in my cabin, I postponed any thoughts about the prize.

On the eighth day we came to open sea, with the next group of islands a faint darkening on the southern horizon. Here was one of the geographical boundaries and beyond it lay the Lesser Serques, with Muriseay at their heart.

We made only one islandfall in the Serques before Muriseay, and by the early afternoon of the next day the island was in sight.

After the confusion of islands behind us, arriving off Muriseay was like once again approaching the coast of a continent. It seemed to stretch forever into the distance beyond the coast. Blue-green hills ran back from the coastline, dotted with white-painted villas and divided up by winding, curving highways that strode across the valleys on great viaducts. Beyond the hills, almost on the horizon as it seemed, I could see brown-purple mountains, crowned with cloud.

At the very edge of the sea, following the coastline, was a ribbon development of apartments and hotels, modern, tall, balconied. The beaches below were crowded with people, and brightly coloured by huge sunshades and cafeterias. I borrowed a pair of binoculars and stared at the beaches as we passed. Muriseay, seen thus, was like the stereotype of the Archipelago depicted in films, or described in pulp fiction. In the Faiandland culture the Dream Archipelago was synonymous with a leisured class of sun-loving émigrés, or the indigenous islanders. Depictions of the sort of small islands I had been passing were rate; there was more plot material in a heavily populated place like Muriseay. Romantic novels and adventure films were frequently set in a never-never world of Archipelagan exotica, Complete with casinos, speed-boats and jungle hide-outs. The natives were villainous, corruptible or simple; the visiting class either wealthy and self-indulgent, or scheming madmen. Of course, I recognized the fiction in this fiction, but it was nevertheless potent and memorable.

So in seeing at last an island of real economic substance I viewed it with a kind of double vision. One part of me was still receptive and involved, trying to see and understand everything in objective terms. But another part, deeper and more irrational, could not help but see this concrete-slab coastline of Muriseay with the received glamour of popular culture.

The beaches were therefore crowded with the indulgent rich, tanning themselves in the golden sunshine of Muriseay’s legendary heat. Everyone was a tax-exile, philanderer or remittance man; the modern yachts moored a short distance offshore were the scenes of nightly gambling and murder, a place for playboys and high-class whores, corrupt and fascinating. Behind the modern apartment blocks I visualized the squalid hovels of the peasant islanders, parasitic on the visitors, contemptuous of them, yet servile. Just like the films, just like the cheap paperbacks that filled the bookstalls of Jethra.

Thorrin and Dellidua Sineham were on deck, standing beside the rail further down the ship. They too were gazing interestedly across at the shore, pointing at the coastal buildings, talking together. The tattily romantic version of Muriseay faded, and I walked down and lent them the glasses. Those villas and apartments would be mostly occupied by decent, ordinary people like the Sinehams. I stayed with them for a while, listening to them talk excitedly of their new home and life. Thorrin’s brother and his wife were already here, and they were in the same village, and they had been getting the apartment ready.

Later, I went back to my place alone and watched the terrain change as we moved further south. Here the hills came down to the sea, breaking as cliffs, and the blocks of flats were hidden from view; soon we were passing shores as wild as any I had seen in the islands. The ship was close inshore, and through the glasses I could see the flash of birds in the trees that grew to the edge of the cliffs.

We reached what I first assumed was the mouth of a river, and the ship turned and headed upstream. Here the water was deep and calm, a stupendous bottle green, the sun shafting down through it. On either bank was dense jungle of monstrous aroids, unmoving in the humid silence.

After a few minutes in this airless channel it became clear that we had turned inland between an offshore island and the mainland, because it opened out into a vast, placid lagoon, on the far side of which was the sprawl of Muriseay Town.

Now, with the end of the long voyage imminent, I felt a strange sense of insecurity. The ship had become a symbol of safety, the object that had fed me and carried me, that I returned to after venturing ashore. I had grown used to the boat, and knew my way about it like I knew the apartment I had left in Jethra. To leave it would be to take a second step into strangeness. We impose familiarity on our surroundings; from the deck of the ship the scenery merely passed, but now I had to disembark, set foot in the islands.

It was a return to the inner-directed self I had temporarily lost when I boarded the ship. Unaccountably I felt nervous of Muriseay, yet there was no logical reason for this. It was just a transit, a place to change ships. Also, I was expected in Muriseay. There was an office of the Lotterie-Collago here, and the next leg of the journey was one they would arrange.

I stood in the prow of the ship until it had docked, then went back to find the Sinehams. I wished them luck, said goodbye, then went down to my cabin to collect my holdall.

A few minutes later I was heading up the quay, looking for a taxi to take me into town.