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have simultaneously turned up six aces. Mr Hassey stuttered first: 'They've sold us,' he said. 'S‑sold us, the rotten buggers. I've already ascertained the situation. Sold us to the French.'
    'Or the Japanese,' suggested Mr Kendrick.
    'G‑God, don't say that, said Mr Hassey. 'Even in joking.'
    Mr Livesley said: 'I think it's an H‑bomb test. Right here. They'll blow everything to dust, or mud. And I've just got my sign up.'
    Inside the salon Bird rubbed at Mrs Flagg's scalp. 'What could it be?' she said.
    'Perhaps,' said Mrs Flagg with a sincere gurgle, 'they've heard about our natives coming over.'
     
    Three
     
     
     
    There were three violent, ten‑minute rain storms during the afternoon, and a session of thunder and vivid lightning during which the roof of a hill house was struck while a committee were discussing the next display of the Sexagesima Scottish Folk Dance Society. The committee, mostly ladies, were considerably shaken by the explosion and the sinister smell of smoke that followed it. Some thought it might be something to do with the imminent announcement the Governor was due to make, a premature attack perhaps in a war they had as yet heard nothing about. There was always that risk when you were tucked away in a fold of a large ocean. But when the smoke had cleared and the houseboys had inspected the minor damage it was generally realized that it was, after all, just another wet season thunderstorm, and the meeting proceeded.
    When the third storm had rolled out over the sea, Davies took his hired bicycle from the porch outside the South Pacific Hilton Hotel and rode along the chocolate road to the sea. The Hilton was the only hotel on the island. It had been established in 1933 by Cornelius Hilton, an escaped Irishman, and had been operated by his son Seamus ever since it was recovered from the military after the war.
    Seamus, a fine fungusy young man who spent his time inventing new drinks and playing his own fruit machine, had written a bold letter to the other Hilton Hotel Group protesting that his family had been in the business for more than forty years and did not intend to be usurped for any late starter.
    The hotel had begun life as a pleasantly white building, topped with wood and local concrete which meant that by the end of the first rainy season of its existence it was letting in water at every pore. It had mothered many miscellaneous extensions over the years, a little here and a
    little there, but the prevailing damp spread throughout these additions also and sometimes one would fall down. The rubble was simply left untouched ‑ unless, of course, human beings were trapped under it ‑ and the little dead structures leaned and piled against the main building. This itself had sighed and settled, drooped and discoloured, over time, and the day that Davies arrived the hotel resembled a pale grey stodge like a bread poultice.
    Davies rode his bicycle uncertainly along the gummy road, noting as he went the shops he intended to visit on the following day. They were set up on a wooden side‑walk clear of the road, like the buildings in a Western film. There were some European‑owned but most were run by Chinese or Vietnamese who had wandered the Pacific looking for somewhere not overpopulated with other Chinese and Vietnamese shopkeepers. The windows of their establishments were small and crammed like dustbins. Gross flies sat on the inside of the panes and blinked at the hard sun that had followed the rain. Dogs and children squatted in new warm puddles in the road. High above the children, bending and moving rhythmically like manipulations of marionettes, were the tall Pacific palms, and beyond them the recently reformed sky, smiling and innocent.
    The shops and the town ended with the road. It then became a sauntering path through congregating trees, past giant bushes thick with rainwater and sweet orange flowers. Steam was moving about the roots and the lower trunks of the palms as Davies