He watched her as they moved along the yacht. Her eyes had widened as they had entered the main cabin, but he could see the slight rise of her eyebrows that showed that she was amused rather than impressed by the luxury.
He had bought this yacht, as he had done almost everything else in the last few years, because it was the furthest thing that he could imagine from how they’d travelled around the islands when he had been on St Antoine before. He hadn’t wanted to remember her boat. Hadn’t been able to think about going out on it with her. That was why he had taken the speedboat to meet her on Le Bijou. It was only when he’d seen that she had that unfamiliar glass-bottomed boat that he had finally decided that he would go out on the water with her.
They arrived at the cabin and he hesitated at the door. Crossing the threshold of her private cabin was a line both literal and metaphorical that he wasn’t prepared to cross.
‘You can change in here,’ he told her. ‘The stewards will get you anything you need.’
He turned to go, but the sound of Meena’s voice pulled him back.
‘This yacht is very impressive, Guy.’
Of course it was. It was all part of the image. He owned a string of luxury resorts. His billionaire customers expected to see the owner playing the part. More important, they expected to be wined and dined by him occasionally, and the yacht was a part of the deal. It was all for show. So why did it bother him that she saw that? That she saw through the image that he had constructed?
Why did that ironic crook of her eyebrow unsettle him?
‘I’ll meet you on the lower deck. The equipment is all down there, but there are wetsuits in the wardrobe here. Choose whichever you prefer.’ He turned away so that she couldn’t read his face. He hadn’t expected her still to be able to read him. He’d assumed that that had been lost along with her memories. But he had the uncomfortable feeling that there was still something there, some understanding of who he was.
He headed to his own cabin and changed into his swim shorts before he headed down to the deck where the dive gear was kept to change into his wetsuit and wait for Meena to arrive. As he pulled the neoprene over his legs, working the tight fabric up his body, he steeled himself for the sight of Meena in hers. He had seen her in a rash suit just a few days ago and, though he had averted his eyes as much as possible, the sight of her body in that skintight material had brought back more memories than he could comfortably handle.
He heard bare feet padding up behind him and turned to see Meena walking along the side deck towards him. It was good that he had prepared himself because, even with trying to keep his eyes locked somewhere over her shoulder, his peripheral vision couldn’t miss the fact that the wetsuit emphasised the sumptuous curves of breasts, waist and hips.
Once, his hands had known those curves as well as they had known his own body. Over the course of that summer, they had explored her body together until he hadn’t known where he had ended and she’d begun. He would lie with her in his arms, her limbs entwined with his, feeling the rise and fall of her breath as if it had been his own.
As one of the stewards showed Meena where the various masks, fins, air tanks and other equipment were stored, Guy kept his gaze fixed firmly out on the water, aware that he was being rude. But that was infinitely better than the alternative, which was turning to look and talk to her, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to keep his feelings under control. He couldn’t allow that to happen.
He pulled on fins and his gas tanks, feeling their protection like a charm. It was impossible to find someone anything other than funny in full scuba equipment, and he was counting on that to see them through today. He concentrated on the dive plan as she talked him through it, impressed by her attention to detail. Though he had no reason to be surprised. She had taught him to dive, after all. He knew how good she was. He checked his watch and with a final nod at Meena tipped himself backwards from the side of the boat.
As the water engulfed him, he took a second to orient himself in the whiteout of bubbles and then surfaced to look and see that Meena had followed him into the water.
He gave her the okay sign as the water settled around her as the ocean adjusted to their presence.
The reef started just a few metres away, and he put his face under the water, marvelling as he always did at that line between the above and the below—the reflective mirror of the surface that hid the wealth of life underneath the surface. As he watched, schools of neon fish darted past in flashes of yellow and blue, and as he relaxed below the surface, his breaths slowing into the familiar huff of the regulator, he began to take in more—anemones swishing in the current, the slow crawl of a hermit crab down on the sand.
He looked over at Meena, who signed that they should dive deeper, and he gave her another okay sign. It was a long time since he’d dived, and he’d forgotten the otherworldly feeling of being beneath the water, his soundscape reduced to the slow, steady rhythms of his own breath and heartbeat, light restricted to those rays that struggled through the body of the ocean, growing fewer and dimmer the deeper that they dived.
He followed Meena’s fins through the water, looking when she turned and pointed out something on the reef that he hadn’t noticed. A tiny crab, a sea snake, a lion fish guarding its territory, spines erect and fearsome. They skirted away from that last one, giving it plenty of room, not wanting the underwater emergency of a nasty sting even through the neoprene of their wetsuits.
The yacht was a dark shadow on the surface of the water, growing more distant as they rounded another side of the reef. Meena stopped again and
pointed her index and middle fingers in a V at her mask, divers’ sign language for ‘look’, and then pointed into a dark nook of the reef. He didn’t want to risk damaging the coral with his fins by getting too close, so he stayed as still as he could, calling to mind everything he had learned about buoyancy in order to be completely immobile above the reef. Mask below fins, breathing slowly and steadily, he didn’t even need to adjust his buoyancy control to keep him in position.
He followed where Meena was pointing to what seemed like a stony piece of coral. But as he watched longer, buffeted only slightly by a gentle current, he realised that he was looking at a stone fish. Something he never would have noticed if he hadn’t been with Meena. Something he would have swum straight past if he hadn’t been with someone who knew these reefs like they were a part of her. He looked up, the regulator in his mouth making it impossible to smile, but from the expression on Meena’s face his excitement must have been showing in his eyes.
He slowly swam up from the reef until he could gently kick his fins without risking touching the coral. As they continued on around the reef, Meena taking photos and pointing out where new pieces of coral had been cemented or tied into place, he lost count of the number of species that he saw. The contrast with the reef at Le Bijou, where they had snorkelled together, was astonishing. And he knew that he would do anything that he could to restore the reefs there. Seeing that it could be done, that it had been done here, was more moving than he could have expected.
Through perseverance, stubbornness and her meticulous research, Meena had found a way to turn the clock back here. To undo the damage wreaked by careless tourists and the inexorable warming of the seas; to bring life back to this barren reef. He could have watched it all day. Watched the fish darting and the anemones swaying, and Meena click, click, clicking away with her camera. Always looking for more information, more ideas, more ways to help return this ecosystem to its former glory.
When she was finished with her camera she glanced at her watch and then with a thumbs-up sign suggested that they return to the surface. He signalled okay and kicked his fins as they swam straight up. They hadn’t dived deep enough to need more than a quick safety stop, so they kicked up through the water, his fins an extension of his body propelling him gently, as if he were a creature of the ocean rather than the interloper that his gas tanks and wetsuit proved him to be.
As they broke the surface, Guy looked over to make sure Meena was still with him. They had surfaced away from the yacht but he knew that his crew would be watching for him. Would bring the speedboat over to collect them if he gave them the signal. But the sea life beneath them was so tranquil, so delicately balanced with the new coral transplants and the recently returned marine life, that he didn’t want to disrupt it by bringing the boat closer and scaring away the fish.
Or maybe it was that he didn’t want to disrupt this, he thought as Meena pulled off her mask and smiled at him. Under the water, there had been no place for complications. No thoughts about their past, or what they had been to each other before. Diving together, they were responsible for keeping one another safe. It was important to be in the moment. To communicate. There were enough barriers between them, with not being able to speak to each other beyond simple hand signals, to prevent anything to distract them.
But now that they were back above the surface, back in the real world, those doubts came flooding back. He never should have mentioned that they had known each other before. He had seen how she had reacted to that. How she had started to wonder whether she had the full story. Had tried slotting that new piece of information into her memories and seeing if it stirred up anything else.
He was suddenly struck with doubt that he was doing the right thing by keeping their past from her. But he couldn’t see a way of telling her without hurting her. He had loved her then, and she him, but he didn’t—couldn’t—love her any more.
What if she had questions? How could he tell her what he had done, who he had become? No. He had been right the first time round. Telling Meena could only lead to more pain for them both. Knowing what they had shared, what they had lost, felt like a knife in his chest every time that he saw her. Every time he remembered what they had hoped for in their relationship, and how pitiful the reality had turned out to be. He couldn’t spare himself that pain but he could spare her. And he would. He owed her that.