Rushing to Paradise

Nevertheless, Neil found himself increasingly committed to the great white bird. Chanting ‘Save the albatross’ gave an unexpected focus to his life. When, two months after their first meeting, Dr Barbara told him that she and Kimo had decided to sail to Saint-Esprit, Neil took for granted that he would be a member of the crew.

As the last of the helium balloons floated towards the sea, the sounds of the protest rally drummed at the windows of the hospital room. Neil forced his head into the pillow, trying to ignore the pains that played their hourly medley across the strings of his leg. He watched the silent television screen and the closing moments of Dr Barbara’s speech. Jaw-bones straining from her cheeks, blonde hair forgotten in the wind, she raised her elbows to reveal the damp armpits of her safari suit. She seemed happier and more determined than Neil had ever seen her. Was she genuine or a fraud? In some way she transcended the question of her own authenticity, and was able to believe sincerely in the threatened bird while manipulating the emotions of her audience.

All along, Neil assumed, she had hoped that the French soldiers on Saint-Esprit would seize them, while Kimo escaped with the video-camera and its precious footage. The Hawaiian had hidden for a few last moments among the waist-deep ferns, and had filmed Neil being shot down by the sergeant, a scene endlessly replayed on television across the world. The existence of the camera, a present from Colonel Stamford, had probably prompted their mission to the island. The French government insisted that it had no plans to resume nuclear testing on Saint-Esprit, but Dr Barbara and the albatross were launched and airborne. A defence committee was formed while Neil and Dr Barbara were held at Papeete, and protesters demanding their release marched through London and Paris. Donations flowed in, and environmentalists argued her case from a hundred pulpits and lecture platforms.

By the time of her return to Honolulu, two weeks later, Dr Barbara was the new heroine of the ecological movement. Yet her real motives, like his own, remained a mystery to Neil.

3 (#ulink_395e4756-1ed9-5cc9-bdf7-25360f2afd4b)

The Dugong (#ulink_395e4756-1ed9-5cc9-bdf7-25360f2afd4b)

Defender of the albatross, champion of islands, and all-purpose media star, Dr Barbara Rafferty had far stranger sides to her character, as Neil discovered on the day before he left the hospital.

Among the last of his mail was an anonymous get-well card attached to the latest issue of Paris-Match, which devoted its leading feature to the saga of Saint-Esprit. Bored by photographs of himself – his mother had tactlessly released a family snapshot of Neil, aged 4, in a paddling pool – he was about to slide the magazine into the waste basket when he recognized an unexpected face. Among the images of dead birds and camera-towers beside the nuclear lagoon was a grainy close-up taken in 1982 of a younger Dr Barbara.

Dressed in a dark suit, eyes lowered to the pavement, she was leaving the London headquarters of the General Medical Council after being struck from its register of licensed physicians. A sharp-eyed journalist at Paris-Match, his memory nudged, perhaps, by the French security services, had raided the picture library and re-opened the celebrated case.

Ten years earlier Dr Barbara Rafferty had been tried for murder in the British courts. Two of her women patients, elderly cancer sufferers in a Hammersmith hospice, had been eased from their last ordeal by a massive sleeping draught. This lethal cocktail of potassium chloride, chloroform and morphine was openly administered by Dr Barbara with the agreement, she claimed, of the patients and their relatives. But not all the relatives had been consulted. Contesting the will, a sister of one of the women visited the police and brought a complaint against Dr Barbara.

The police seized the hospice’s clinical records and discovered that Dr Barbara had practised euthanasia on at least six terminal patients over the previous year. She freely admitted the charge, claiming that she had secured her patients’ consent after an extended period of bedside counselling. At their request, she had put an end to their pain, defended their dignity and their right to self-respect.

Convicted on eight counts of manslaughter, Dr Barbara was given a two-year suspended sentence. An action group of sympathetic doctors and relatives rallied support, but she lost her appeal. Interviewed outside the High Court, she stated that her further behaviour towards her dying patients would be guided by her conscience, a scarcely veiled threat that led the General Medical Council to strike her from the register. A public debate ensued, during which she appeared prominently on television, arguing her case with a passion and stridency that to some observers verged on the self-righteous. Alienated by her chilling manner, even her closest colleagues turned away from her. From then on she was unable to practise as a doctor and became a director of a fringe company designing a female condom, but after six months she resigned and went abroad. Years of exile followed, in Malawi, South Africa and New Zealand, where clandestine medical work was inevitably followed by the exposure of her past, until she came to rest in Honolulu.

Now Dr Barbara had discovered the animal rights movement, and devoted herself to life rather than death. Neil stared at her photograph propped against his pillow, almost dazed by the revelations. The slim, over-intense face of the guilty physician, shadowed by the dark tones of her suit, might have belonged to a war criminal or psychopath. Nonetheless, he felt a curious concern for this outlawed doctor. He realized that she had once been young, and wondered what the young Dr Barbara would have thought of him, or of her scatty older self and her dreams of facing down the French navy.

When she arrived that afternoon, making her last visit to the ward, Neil left the magazine open on the bedside table. Brushing past Nurse Crawford, she swept into the room with her palms raised to the ceiling, and strode to the window as if only the sky was large enough to contain her excitement.

‘Neil – astonishing news!’

‘Dr Barbara?’

‘You won’t believe it. All I can say is that dreams come true. First, though, how are you?’ She picked Neil’s case notes from the foot of the bed and ran a brisk eye over them. ‘Good, they haven’t done too much damage. Over-prescribing, as usual, and all these tests – they must think you’re pregnant. How do you feel?’

‘Fine.’ Neil found himself smiling at her. ‘Bored.’

‘That means you’re ready to leave. I warn you, there’s a lot to do and not much time.’

Neil let her hand brush his cheek. She sat on the bed, gazing at him with undisguised pleasure. When she was alone with Neil she usually turned down the volume control of her public persona, as if this teenaged boy touched some lingering need for the intimacy of private life. But today she was unable to restrain herself.

‘Listen, Neil – it’s what we’ve prayed for. I’ve found a ship!’

Neil pulled her hands from the air and pressed them together, trying to calm her. ‘That’s great, doctor. But I’m out of training – I won’t be ready for the swim until October or even later.’

‘The swim? I’m not talking about that. We’re sailing back to Saint-Esprit! We have a real ship – the Dugong. It’s moored in Honolulu harbour.’

‘Sailing back …?’ Neil felt the veins throb in his injured foot. ‘You’re going back to the island? You’ll get killed, doctor.’

‘Of course I won’t.’ Dr Barbara smoothed his sheets and pillow, as if taming the white waves. ‘It’s everything I’ve worked for. This time we’ll have the whole world behind us. The French will have to listen.’

Unable to sit still, she sprang to the window and gripped the sill, already on the bridge of her vessel. Neil listened as she told him of the billionaire benefactor who had joined the albatross campaign. This was Irving Boyd, a reclusive thirty-five-year-old computer entrepreneur now living in Hawaii. He had recently retired after selling his software company in Palo Alto to a Japanese conglomerate, and now devoted himself to wild-life causes.

Neil had seen him in a rare television interview, a bespectacled and almost schoolboyish figure with a row of pens clipped to his breast pocket, an earnest reader of science fiction who in some ways had never needed to grow up. Rare species of aquatic mammals such as the manatee were his speciality, and his marine sanctuary on Oahu contained the only breeding pair in captivity. Impressed by Dr Barbara’s poverty and dedication, he had begun to support her with cash donations, and supplied her with an office and free telephone at his Honolulu television station. His most important gift was the Dugong, a 300-ton Alaskan shrimp-trawler which he planned to equip as a floating marine laboratory.

‘But first it will take us to Saint-Esprit.’ Dr Barbara blew the blonde hair from her eyes. ‘We leave in three weeks – that’s not much time, but I want to keep everything on the boil. There should be ten of us, including you and Kimo, and Irving’s television crew. We’ll set up our sanctuary, whatever the French do.’

‘They’ll torpedo you,’ Neil told her matter-of-factly. ‘They’ll sink the ship. Look what they did to the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour.’

‘This time they won’t dare!’ Already in full interview mode, Dr Barbara inflated her lungs, nearly bursting the buttons of her safari suit. ‘Neil, the world will be watching. There’ll be a satellite dish on board to link the film crew to the TV station here. Try to imagine it – everyone will see us reclaim that dead nuclear island and give it back to the living world. The twentieth century criminally misspent itself. When the year 2000 arrives we’ll hand to the next millennium a small part of this terrible century that we’ve redeemed and brought to life again. It’s a wonderful dream, Neil, and thanks to Irving Boyd it’s within our grasp.’

Dr Barbara gazed at the distant sea, breast heaving as she caught her breath. Her eyes swept across the bouquets and greeting cards, and came to rest on the open copy of Paris-Match. Scarcely surprised, she stared at the photograph of her younger self.

‘Irving told me he’d seen this. It says everything about him that he wasn’t in the least worried. It had to come out – better now than later …’

She sat with the magazine in her hands, and then dropped it into the waste-bin, as if discarding an out-of-date calendar. Waiting for her to speak, Neil realized that she had wholly detached herself from the disbarred doctor photographed outside the High Court ten years earlier.

Seeing that Neil was still unsure of her, the sheet drawn up to his chin, she spoke calmly as if to a child.

‘I was terribly naive then, far too idealistic. I thought I could do good, but people resent that, judges and juries above all. Doing good unsettles them. Believe me, Neil, nothing provokes people more than acting from the highest motives.’

‘The dead patients …’ Neil searched for a tactful way around the question. ‘Did you really kill them?’

‘Of course not!’ Dr Barbara seemed genuinely puzzled by Neil. ‘Their minds were already dead, they’d given up long before. Only their bodies were alive, covered with sores and ulcers. All I did was put their bodies to rest.’

‘Then you did …’

‘Neil …’ Dr Barbara smiled at him indulgently. ‘Doctors have to do a lot of things that people would rather not know about. Some of these patients were only minutes away from their deaths, but cruelly the clock had stopped. I merely started it again for them. Old women deserve special care, they’re not looked after as gently as old men. Think of them – exhausted, incontinent, riddled with cancers, only able to breathe sitting up, crying out with pain if you even touched them. What I did, I did openly, because I knew it was right. Even the judge didn’t dare send me to prison …’

As if tired of having to justify herself to this moralistic teenager, Dr Barbara turned to the bouquets lying on the table by the television set. Beyond the chrysanthemums and gladioli was a visionary kingdom of her own, filtered through the scented petals, where she could walk untainted by any moral opprobrium and where the albatross would forever fly above her head. A film of moisture, as pale as hope, ran from her high forehead to the tip of her strong nose.

‘I’ve made you famous, Neil.’ She pointed to the childishly scrawled messages. ‘They all love you.’

Neil flexed his numbed foot, counting his toes under the sheet. ‘They’d love me even more if I died – that would really save the albatross, doctor.’

‘Neil …’ Dr Barbara shook her head at this mischievous sally. ‘Think how proud your father would have been. You do remember him?’

‘All the time. It’s my mother who’s trying to forget him – that’s why she’s …’

‘Drawing away from you a little? You can understand that. In bereavement there’s a time to remember and a time to forget. Sometimes they’re the same thing. When does she expect you in Atlanta?’

‘Next month. But I might stay on here for a while.’

‘Well, we leave in three weeks, Neil. You’ll have to decide. Kimo and I want you to come with us. We need someone your age who’ll encourage other young people to join the sanctuary. In time they’ll take over from us. It’s not a crusade but a great relay race. Will you come?’

‘Well … there might be a nuclear test. I’ll have to think about it.’

‘Good. I’ve always depended on you, Neil. When you’re older we’ll be very close …’

This unveiled threat, uttered in a quietly confident tone, floated through Neil’s mind during his days of convalescence at the swimming-pool. When he left the hospital, blushing through the crowd of teasing nurses, Dr Barbara drove him in the jeep to his rooming house, but she set off immediately for the docks. There were stores to be loaded aboard the Dugong, cabins and the galley to be equipped, satellite communications gear to be installed.