Chapter One 5 p.m., on the island
Chapter One
The sun was too bright, the sea was too blue, but the hand of the young man waiting to help Maggie Martin step off the rocking wooden fishing boat into the azure shallows, bathwater warm on her calves, was reassuringly steady.
‘Welcome to Mémoire,’ the young man said. ‘I will be escorting you to your accommodation. I am Amine.’
‘Thank you, Amine,’ Maggie said. She didn’t expect Amine welcomed many lone female travellers – aged sixty-one, in shorts and a Hotel California vest top, with a camera slung around their neck and a boat boy’s Man United bucket hat – to Mémoire Island.
She clung on to Amine’s hand like she never wanted to let it go.
‘Where is your luggage?’ he asked her.
‘Here!’ called out Salou from the boat, the mischievous barefoot boy who had pelted her with unanswerable questions about Premiership football all the way from Le Digue and had laughingly plonked his hat on her head as the boat first loped into the miraculously clear waters of the port there.
‘Don’t burn your head, my lady!’ he had exclaimed before coiling up the mooring rope, and she had laughed too, but she was more worried about getting her fingers burnt here on the island.
Salou reached over the idling and silent driver at the boat’s stern, hooked up her orange rucksack by his thumb – the rucksack that made her feel like an overgrown, over-aged backpacker, but had been a practical choice – and swung it to Amine.
‘Travelling light,’ Amine commented with a smile, as he caught it.
‘Hardly,’ muttered Maggie. She felt the baggage of her past permanently slacking off her like a deflated lifebelt.
‘See you tomorrow, my lady!’ Salou shouted.
Maggie took off his hat and threw it back to him, squinting now behind the sunglasses she had bought at London City airport.
They were not dark enough for the dazzling butter-yellow sun glancing off the turquoise Indian Ocean.
They didn’t provide enough protection. She wanted to get back on the boat.
Then the other boat. The ferry to Praslin.
The smaller aeroplane. The big aeroplane.
She wanted to be back in London, in her neat little flat with its heavy furniture, its worn brown leather sofa with the folded green blanket at one end, her record collection and her books; the rain drumming on the dirty window that looked blankly down on the street below.
Instead, still holding Amine’s hand, Maggie scooped through the water to the shore, her espadrilles in her hand and the undulating sand cool and silky beneath her toes.
‘Bungalow Marguerite is over there,’ said Amine, as they emerged from the gentle surf and her toes became buried now in the dry sand, almost pearlescent pink, of a never-ending beach.
‘See?’ Amine released his hand from hers and pointed along the verdant slip of palm trees and vegetation flanking the beach.
She could just make out, at the furthest point, a jutting elbow lipped by golden sand and scattered with pale cottages.
‘Wonderful,’ she said, repeating what Simone, her editor at Supernova magazine, had said after uncharacteristically booking Maggie’s accommodation herself, so intrigued had her friend been by the tiny island of Mémoire.
‘Quaintly beautiful, my dear, if a little basic,’ Simone had added as she handed Maggie a printout with a photo of a crumbling yellow cube of a bungalow, topped with a pitched thatched roof and fronted by a veranda hitched together by bamboo canes.
‘And from what I read online, you’ll probably be the only tourist, apart from you know who.
Whoever would have thought,’ the younger woman had concluded, shaking her silky black bob prettily at Maggie before gliding back to her office, ‘you’d wind up on a remote desert island like Mémoire for your last ever job? ’
An island like Mémoire . . . It certainly was remote.
It had taken Maggie twenty hours to get here.
And it was definitely beautiful. Maggie was in a picture postcard scene: the sea, the sand, the palm trees, the sun .
. . and the heat was miraculous to her for January, when in London she’d be shivering her socks off.
But her last Where Are They Now? profile for Supernova was going to be memorable for all sorts of reasons, and the remote and beautiful setting would be the least of them.
Amine set off up the beach, Maggie’s limp rucksack slung over his shoulder.
Maggie followed, squinting. The sand was deep and scalding hot.
She wanted to put her espadrilles back on, but Amine was striding ahead.
He and the rucksack disappeared into the pretty mesh of palm trees and tropical foliage, and she had to trot inelegantly to catch up with him on the canopied scrubby path.
It wound between the scaly trunks of palm trees and the smoothly viscous tangle of roots.
‘Mind yourself, Miss Marty,’ said Amine, as, espadrilles back on, she navigated a low-hanging branch camouflaged by palm leaves the size of small cars.
It was too late for that, she thought. She was already here. She wanted to get on and off Mémoire as quickly as possible. She wanted to get what she had come for and run.
They walked. They avoided low-hanging branches.
Finally, the dense grove of giant green leaves and dappled, sandy earth opened out and the path morphed into something more pedestrian – and recently and resolutely brushed.
There was a rusty sprinkler keeping idle and near-silent time on a spiky teardrop of grass.
Five rough-hewn bungalows nestled in a cluster.
On the veranda of one leant an old bicycle.
In the doorway of another, a small girl was poised on one foot, like a crane, in a faded red sundress.
‘These homes belong to islanders,’ said Amine, ‘but Pa Zayan is happy to move out of his to accommodate the occasional visitor . . .’ He led her past the first two bungalows and to the third, whose veranda looked like it had just been doused with water.
‘Welcome,’ he said, as he stepped on to the veranda and opened the door for her. ‘I hope you like Bungalow Marguerite.’
‘Oh, it’s lovely,’ Maggie exclaimed, and she immediately felt bad for Pa Zayan, who she hoped had temporarily moved in with a kindly daughter not too far away.
The bungalow was cute. There was a small bed with pale blue bedding, tepee-d by a gauzy mosquito net.
A bamboo bedside table with an upside-down book on the top (fiction?
she wondered. She didn’t read fiction any more.
She’d devoured slim volumes of Fran Leibowitz and Joan Didion essays on the plane).
A table and two wooden chairs tucked into each other on a swept terracotta floor.
And to the rear was a white bathroom, simply tiled.
‘Only cold water,’ said Amine apologetically, showing it to her. ‘But it’s very warm on the island so . . .’
‘Cold water is fine,’ said Maggie.
Amine placed her rucksack carefully in the corner of the room.
She could imagine the letter at the bottom, nestling under her make-up bag whose edge was bulging against the canvas.
She was strangely reminded of being pregnant with Eloise: a foot jutting from under a rib, an elbow attempting to stretch out of what had once been her waist. That letter at the bottom of her rucksack was a message in a bottle she had been asked to deliver – if the hours and the man allowed.
‘Thank you, Amine,’ Maggie said. Amine looked surprised and delighted to be tipped.
As he turned to leave, she asked him, ‘Do you happen to know where I might find a man called Ed Cavanagh on the island? At this hour?’ she added, amused at sounding like a stilted Jane Austen character in an Eagles vest top.
‘Mr Ed? Sure.’ Amine grinned. ‘He’ll be down on the beach, west of where your boat came in,’ he said.
‘West, as in, to the right?’ she clarified. Mr Ed?
‘To the right, yes. He’ll be there with his boat. Just past the little jetty. Blue boat, yellow mast.’
‘He has a boat?’
‘Yes. Goes out in it every morning.’ Amine nodded his head. ‘Enjoy your stay, Miss Marty.’
She still didn’t bother to correct him. ‘Thank you, Amine.’
Once Amine had gone, Maggie showered in cold water, unrolled a raspberry batik maxi dress and retrieved flat leather flip flops from her rucksack, then made herself up to look decent but not as though she had made a great effort.
She headed out of the bungalow, walked back through the shaded grove and down to the beach, where the sun was low in the sky but still fiercely hot.
Setting off to the right, she slipped off her flipflops to walk barefoot in the cooler-now sand.
Soft waves were breaking lackadaisically on the shore.
A gull, swooping on the horizon, took off towards the sun, and lone clouds drifted with no particular place to be.
She passed a small jetty, two young boys at the end, fishing lines and dangling bare legs in the water.
There was a boat, in the distance, bobbing on the turquoise water.
It looked like a blue boat with a yellow mast.
Maggie stood and watched it for a while, her heart an anxious prisoner behind her ribs, her nerves a jailor’s jangle of keys.
Finally, she saw him, a figure who came to stand at the mast. Was it him?
Her missing person? She raised an arm, wondering if he could even spot this stick figure on the beach, waving hello.
They were so far apart, she thought. She was sixty-one, worn around the edges, voluntarily detached from life. A woman who needed to work on both her posture and her regrets. He was Ed Cavanagh, and likely to turn the boat around and sail away once he saw her.
They had known each other for so long, but now didn’t know each other at all.
They had first met a stone’s throw from another coastline, one that couldn’t be more different, where the sea was a grey-green sludge flanked by a pebble beach and a host of glaring seaside attractions, and where nothing much ever happened – not to her, anyway – until the hot August afternoon when she finally spoke to Edward Neville Craddock.