It is an offer she cannot refuse. On the morning of 10 December she joins the ship in Christchurch harbour. Her cabin, she finds, is small but otherwise quite satisfactory; the young man who coordinates the entertainment and self-development programme is respectful; the passengers at her table at lunchtime, in the main retired people, people of her own generation, are pleasant and unostentatious.
On the list of her co-lecturers there is only one name she recognizes: Emmanuel Egudu, a writer from Nigeria. Their acquaintance goes back more years than she cares to remember, to a PEN conference in Kuala Lumpur. Egudu had been loud and fiery then, political; her first impression was that he was a poseur. Reading him later on, she had not changed her mind. But a poseur, she now wonders: what is that? Someone who seems to be what he is not? Which of us is what he seems to be, she seems to be? And anyway, in Africa things may be different. In Africa what one takes to be posing, what one takes to be boasting, may just be manliness. Who is she to say?
Towards men, including Egudu, she has, she notices, mellowed as she has grown older. Curious, because in other respects she has become more (she chooses the word carefully) acidulous.
She runs into Egudu at the captain's cocktail party (he has come aboard late). He is wearing a vivid green dashiki, suave Italian shoes; his beard is spotted with grey, but he is still a fine figure of a man. He gives her a huge smile, enfolds her in an embrace. ' Elizabeth!' he exclaims. 'How good to see you! I had no idea! We have so much catching up to do!'
In his lexicon, it appears, catching up means talking about his own activities. He no longer spends much time in his home country, he informs her. He has become, as he puts it, 'an habitual exile, like an habitual criminal'. He has acquired American papers; he makes his living on the lecture circuit, a circuit that would appear to have expanded to encompass the cruise ships. This will be his third trip on the
Each of the entertainment staff is expected to give a short public talk. 'Just to say who you are, where you come from,' explains the young coordinator in carefully idiomatic English. His name is Mikael; he is handsome in his tall, blond, Swedish way, but dour, too dour for her taste.
Her talk is advertised as 'The Future of the Novel', Egudu's as 'The Novel in Africa '. She is scheduled to speak on the morning of their first day out to sea; he will speak the same afternoon. In the evening comes 'The Lives of Whales', with sound recordings.
Mikael himself does the introduction. 'The famous Australian writer,' he calls her, 'author of
'The Future of the Novel' is a talk she has given before, in fact many times before, expanded or contracted depending on the occasion. No doubt there are expanded and contracted versions of the novel in Africa and the lives of whales too. For the present occasion she has chosen the contracted version.
'The future of the novel is not a subject I am much interested in,' she begins, trying to give her auditors a jolt. 'In fact the future in general does not much interest me. What is the future, after all, but a structure of hopes and expectations? Its residence is in the mind; it has no reality.
'Of course, you might reply that the past is likewise a fiction. The past is history, and what is history but a story made of air that we tell ourselves? Nevertheless, there is something miraculous about the past that the future lacks. What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded – God knows how – in making thousands and millions of individual fictions, fictions created by individual human beings, lock well enough into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.
'The future is different. We do not possess a shared story of the future. The creation of the past seems to exhaust our collective creative energies. Compared with our fiction of the past, our fiction of the future is a sketchy, bloodless affair, as visions of heaven tend to be. Of heaven and even of hell.'
