his loins, with the nightly pleasure he took in his wife. Everything was present and correct, but he had to admit a moment of disappointment. He would have preferred a son; a daughter was too vulnerable to predatory men. He was a man who did not like to worry, and he could feel worry tighten in him already.
“Well done, my darling,” he said, kissing his wife on the forehead. She smiled at him, happy he was pleased with her, happy the ordeal was over, that her wayward body had brought their daughter safely to the shore of the world.
* * *
Underneath, the dragon that underlies life shifted, almost imperceptibly, it’s true, yet just enough to open up a rent in the fabric of things – a rent large enough for a woman to fall through. Two days after the birth, Angelique sickened, and despite the doctor’s best efforts, she turned to worse, burning up in the middle of her white hospital bed like a forest fire, her chest crackling with the heat, her eyes bright with sparklers, her dry breath a desert wind.
Two days after that, she died.
Outside the storm continued, unconcerned. Squalls of rain beat against the windowpanes, against the fluffed and oily backs of the millions of skua, petrels and albatrosses nested in a myriad mosaic on Impossible Island, also against the bridge of a Chinese fishing vessel lurching about in the sea to the northeast.
Work at the crayfish and fish factory came to a halt; no one could put to sea in this weather. The workers took the time to wash down the tanks and tables and floors. The fishermen mended nets indoors and felt for the weather changes that started in their bones; they tapped their barometers in a gesture as natural and familiar as breathing. A few villagers sheathed themselves in their all-weather gear and waded out through the gale to tend the turnip, pumpkin and potato fields, but most kept indoors, waiting for the impersonal rage of the storm to dash itself to pieces. In homesteads and in the tavern, they waited in the still glow of hearth warmth that dotted the village: islands of comfort surrounded by the mayhem of weather. They mustered around their paraffin stoves and wood fires, preparing food, drinking tea and home-brew, and talked about this and that, and especially about the goings-on at the hospital: would she live, would she die? Whose fault was it? And why? The theories circulated, eddying from cottage to cottage, sucking in a fresh tributary here, spitting out dead wood there. Some said it was bound to happen after what he did to Sophia – didn’t he realise who he was dealing with? A woman who brought in the living, healed the sick and ushered out the dead. Others said maybe, but that doesn’t make it right. Another said to stop this superstitious nonsense, this dead-old-wives’ tale. Here the conversation fractured: that was an unfortunate thing to say, it’s a wife we’re talking about here, she wasn’t even old, and who knows how ill-considered words carry fate on the wind, to where it is sniffed out by the hungry old dog that waits for us all? They didn’t know yet that she was already gone, sucked out of the tempest of her body, held loose and light in the eye of the storm.
In her stone cottage near the fields, Sophia spread pumpkin seeds out on a tray before the fire to dry. She could feel the shift coming, the one foretold in thrown bones. The birth of this child was a portent of the turn of the tide, a change of phrase that would alter the rhythm of things. There was a tightening in her, too, for the bones had had an awkward lie, and she knew no one on the island would escape the change unchanged.
* * *
The doctor sat a moment at his wife’s bedside, tracing with his eyes her last exhaled breath, feeling the great insulated door of the freezer of his chest swing closed. What had happened, what had gone wrong? He had been the top obstetric student in his final year, he had won a prize for his fifth-year essay on “The Use and Abuse of Antibiotics: Keeping the Upper Hand in the War between Man and Microbes”. His CV ran to several pages and he’d had as many options for his career path as there were fingers on both hands. He hadn’t had to come and toil in this godforsaken windswept corner of the world, he could be advancing to professorship in a top academic hospital, he could be flying all over the world to conferences, delivering scientific papers on vaccinations for malaria, AIDS, prosthetic heart valves or proton-pump inhibitors. He had come here for a short adventure and had stayed for love, love of this woman now gone, now snatched away, this burnt cinder of his love still warm on the bed in front of him.
Sister Veronica closed Angelique’s eyes, washed her hands, and left the room quickly to break the news to Frieda, asleep next door. She so badly wanted to rest her hands on the poor doctor’s shoulders, to lift from them the weight that bore down so heavily. She wanted to take him into her arms and comfort him, to let him weep into her breast, to stroke his dark cropped hair. It isn’t your fault, she wanted to tell him. She could’ve told him about Frieda’s native stupidity, about how his wife had been exposed to wind and rain, she could have pointed fingers, and she did consider this. But she knew the fault lay with her alone and she would never be able to tell him why, never. She had trained at the best hospital on the mainland, there was nothing wrong with her technique or her hygiene or her knowledge, oh no. It was her thought that had spirited the young, unsuitable wife away. She would make it up to him, she would.
Orion could not look at his dead wife. His eyes instead traversed the hills and vales of the counterpane, travellers in search of rest, his very centre buffeted by the wretched commotion out of doors. Whoever would choose to live in a place like this? Angelique, that’s who. She had persuaded him to stay and marry by falling pregnant, all against his desire, it now seemed, all against his best intentions to be successful, to travel, to shine, to be a name remembered. Ghastly, that sudden word leaping to his aid, a word he could not remember ever having used before: ghastly, the sudden horror of his name remembered in this fashion, associated with death and error, with loss and disgrace.
His gaze had climbed the wall in a separate act. While his brain was firing rounds of blame, ammunition going off uncontrolled in the horror chambers of his mind, his eyes had climbed the white hospital wall as though detached, coming to rest upon the Virgin Mary, whose eyes stared accusingly back down at him. The sight shocked him into action, a bolt of recognition shooting through his terror and confusion, threading his thought and will and body together onto one long string. He stood up, took the image off the wall, threw it into the bin and left the room. He instructed John Peters, the porter and general cleaner who, weak with shock, was leaning on his broom outside the tearoom, staring at a crack in the cement floor, to turn the mortuary fridge on. On no account, he added, was John to let Sophia in, with her superstitious ways and her supercilious smile. He could not bear to think of her hands on his wife’s body; he would not stand to let her look down on the evidence of his failure. Nelson Peters, John’s cousin, could arrange the funeral. He would have no other.
John nodded, not finding any word to fit his lips, and shuffled away to do his bidding.
The doctor went home and shut himself in his bedroom.
Chapter Two
Two islands, covered by mosses, fungi and ferns, by grasses and shrubs and stunted trees all set at the angle of the prevailing wind, and cultivated with potatoes, carrots, turnips and pumpkin, also a grove of apple trees. Two islands populated by three hundred and sixty-seven inhabitants, all of them living on Ergo (the population stable with the birth of one, death of another), the majority of the employable adults working at the crayfish and fish factory owned by Jerome Peters. Only seven surnames (not including those belonging to Doctor Prosper or Minister Kohler, who were still considered mainlanders): Peters, Bagonata, Bardelli, Schoones, Pelani, Mobara and Tamara. Four fisherman’s cottages on Impossible Island, eighty-three buildings on Ergo, including cottages, the schoolhouse, the mayor’s office, the community hall, the shop, the church, the tavern, the lighthouse, the dairy and the co-op. All of them – except the hospital, the boat sheds, the police station and the factory – built of hewn volcanic rock and salvaged pieces of shipwreck and topped by toupees of thatch made from island grasses. Eighteen fishing boats kept in Ergo’s harbour, twelve kilometres of gravel track in the village and a half-kilometre
