All the Voices Cry by Alice Petersen Page B

had recently been granted tenure in the English department at Rook University. Colin claimed to be misunderstood, but in fact she knew him very well. He was a good boy, but in danger of becoming like his father. And what else did she do? When it came down to it she couldn’t think what she had been doing.
    In the meantime, Charles turned the way they met into a dinner-party joke. It was her supervisor in food science who introduced us. You’re studying the Browning Reaction? I said. Yes, she said, you know, to heat. Oh, I said, Brownings in Italy. No, she said, browning in turkeys. She could see Charles now, snorting
at his joke, tugging at his turtleneck. She should have stopped right there, at the Snowflake Do. But she had gone on with it, and the path had led here, to Tahiti, and this groping along the beach, looking for a sea cave where a long-dead writer might have had a rendezvous with a woman not his wife.
    Soon they arrived at the edge of a garden where the trunk and limbs of a vast tree stretched along the ground like some great animal at leisure. Nailed to the tree was a sign in Tahitian. Tabu, the sign said, keep out, but not just in a trespassers will be prosecuted kind of a way. It was more sacred than that. Tabu was keep out or something will get you. Around about, thick banks of water fuchsia flourished unchecked in the humid air, the dark pattern of their leaves studded with scarlet flowers. Black crabs picked through the remnants of a balloon fish stuck on a fence post to dry, sidling sideways through a cloud of gnats. Penelope called ahead to Charles.
    â€œI don’t think we should go any further.” She pointed at the post. “These crabs give me the creeps.”
    â€œDo you like this garden, is it yours?” asked Charles.
    â€œWhat?” she said.
    â€œLowry, Under the Volcano.”
    â€œOh, that. This looks like private property.”
    â€œYou’re a bit scared, aren’t you?” Charles tipped his hat back on his head. “Mistah Kurtz, he dead,” he said.
    â€œDon’t mock me Charles.”
    â€œMiss-tah Kurtz,” Charles said with more sibilance. Penelope turned her back.
    â€œI heard you the first time,” she said.

    â€œWhere are you going, Penn? Look, we’ve passed the peak and here’s the end of the cove. This has to be the place that Stevenson refers to in the poem. The cave must be just around the corner.”
    â€œCharles, we have a plane to catch.”
    â€œCome on Penny, be a sport.”
    â€œI’ll wait here for you.”
    Penelope sat in the green gloom swiping at mosquitoes. Once they might have walked to Stevenson’s sea cave together. She would have laughed at Charles’s obvious discomfort at having his trousers rolled up, he would have quoted somebody, and she would have thrown a piece of seaweed at him or threatened him with a crab. Now Penelope was glad that she would never find the sea cave, so that she would not have to hear the quotation with which Charles would adorn the view. Charles’s mouth was a sea cave, with words rushing in and out of it, flecked with foam.
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    Charles hit the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, gleeful and shouting over the diesel engine.
    â€œMagnificent, it was magnificent,” he cried. “There’s a hole in the cave roof, fringed with ferns. It’s a natural pantheon. I stood there and recited the whole poem. The words just boomed and rolled about. I’m more convinced than ever. No one in the world knows that Stevenson ever came here, except the two of us. Certainly not his precious Fanny. Hah!”
    Penelope sat silently, submitting to the roar. Poor Fanny. She was tired and she wanted to get on the plane.
    â€œLet’s see if there’s anywhere to cut across,” said Charles.

    They drove up into a new subdivision where the houses sat on red earth blocks gouged out of the mountainside. One big rainfall and the