Fraternity. He is challenging her, trying to get a rise out of her before these strangers. But she is suddenly too sick of it all to take up the challenge. Not fellow writers, she thinks: fellow entertainers. Why else are we on board this expensive ship, making ourselves available, as the invitation so candidly put it, to people who bore us and whom we are beginning to bore?

He is goading her because he is restless. She knows him well enough to see that. He has had enough of the African novel, enough of her and her friends, wants something or someone new.

Their chanteuse has come to the end of her set. There is a light ripple of applause. She bows, bows a second time, takes up her balalaika. The band strikes up a Cossack dance.

What irritates her about Emmanuel, what she has the good sense not to bring up in front of Steve and Shirley because it will lead only to unseemliness, is the way he turns every disagreement into a personal matter. As for his beloved oral novel, on which he has built his sideline as a lecturer, she finds the idea muddled at its very core. A novel about people who live in an oral culture, she would like to say, is not an oral novel. Just as a novel about women isn't a women's novel.

In her opinion, all of Emmanuel's talk of an oral novel, a novel that has kept in touch with the human voice and hence with the human body, a novel that is not disembodied like the Western novel but speaks the body and the body's truth, is just another way of propping up the mystique of the African as the last repository of primal human energies. Emmanuel blames his Western publishers and his Western readers for driving him to exoticize Africa; but Emmanuel has a stake in exoticizing himself. Emmanuel, she happens to know, has not written a book of substance in ten years. When she first got to know him he could still honourably call himself a writer. Now he makes his living by talking. His books are there as credentials, no more. A fellow entertainer he may be; a fellow writer he is not, not any longer. He is on the lecture circuit for the money, and for other rewards too. Sex, for instance. He is dark, he is exotic, he is in touch with life's energies; if he is no longer young, at least he carries himself well, wears his years with distinction. What Swedish girl would not be a pushover?

She finishes her drink. 'I'm retiring,' she says. 'Good night, Steve, Shirley. See you tomorrow. Good night, Emmanuel.'

She wakes up in utter stillness. The clock says four thirty. The ship's engines have stopped. She glances through the porthole. There is fog outside, but through the fog she can glimpse land no more than a kilometre away. It must be Macquarie Island: she had thought they would not arrive for hours yet.

She dresses and emerges into the corridor. At the same moment the door to cabin A-230 opens and the Russian comes out, the singer. She is wearing the same outfit as last night, the port-wine blouse and wide black trousers; she carries her boots in her hand. In the unkind overhead light she looks nearer to forty than to thirty. They avert their eyes as they pass each other.

A-230 is Egudu's cabin, she knows that.

She makes her way to the upper deck. Already there are a handful of passengers, snugly dressed against the cold, leaning against the railings, peering down.

The sea beneath them is alive with what seem to be fish, large, glossy-backed black fish that bob and tumble and leap in the swell. She has never seen anything like it.

'Penguins,' says the man next to her. 'King penguins. They have come to greet us. They don't know what we are.'

'Oh,' she says. And then: 'So innocent? Are they so innocent?'

The man regards her oddly, turns back to his companion.

The Southern Ocean. Poe never laid eyes on it, Edgar Allan, but criss-crossed it in his mind. Boatloads of dark islanders paddled out to meet him. They seemed ordinary folk just like us, but when they smiled and showed their teeth the teeth were not white but black. It sent a shiver down his spine, and rightly so. The seas full of things that seem like us but are not. Sea-flowers that gape and devour. Eels, each a barbed maw with a gut hanging from it. Teeth are for tearing, the tongue is for churning the swill around: that is the truth of the oral. Someone should tell Emmanuel. Only by an ingenious economy, an accident of evolution, does the organ of ingestion sometimes get to be used for song.

They will stand off Macquarie until noon, long enough for those passengers who so desire to visit the island. She has put her name down for the visiting party.

The first boat leaves after breakfast. The approach to the landing is difficult, through thick beds of kelp and across shelving rock. In the end one of the sailors has to half help her ashore, half carry her, as if she were an old old woman. The sailor has blue eyes, blond hair. Through his waterproofs she feels his youthful strength. In his arms she rides as safe as a baby. 'Thank you!' she says gratefully when he sets her down; but to him it is nothing, just a service he is paid dollars to do, no more personal than the service of a hospital nurse.

She has read about Macquarie Island. In the nineteenth century it was the hub of the penguin industry. Hundreds of thousands of penguins were clubbed to death here and flung into cast-iron steam boilers to be broken down into useful oil and useless residue. Or not clubbed to death, merely herded with sticks up a gangplank and over the edge into the seething cauldron.

Yet their twentieth-century descendants seem to have learned nothing. Still they innocently swim out to welcome visitors; still they call out greetings to them as they approach the rookeries (Ho! Ho! they call, for all the world like gruff little gnomes), and allow them to approach close enough to touch them, to stroke their sleek breasts.

At eleven the boats will take them back to the ship. Until then they are free to explore the island. There is an albatross colony on the hillside, they are advised; they are welcome to photograph the birds, but should not approach too closely, should not alarm them. It is breeding season.

She wanders away from the rest of the landing party, and after a while finds herself on a plateau above the coastline, crossing a vast bed of matted grass.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, there is something before her. At first she thinks it is a rock, smooth and white mottled with grey. Then she sees it is a bird, bigger than any bird she has seen before. She recognizes the long, dipping beak, the huge sternum. An albatross.

The albatross regards her steadily and, so it seems to her, with amusement. Sticking out from beneath it is a smaller version of the same long beak. The fledgling is more hostile. It opens its beak, gives a long, soundless cry of warning.

So she and the two birds remain, inspecting each other.

Before the fall, she thinks. This is how it must have been before the fall. I could miss the boat, stay here. Ask God to take care of me.

There is someone behind her. She turns. It is the Russian singer, dressed now in a dark green anorak with the hood down, her hair under a kerchief.

An albatross,' she remarks to the woman, speaking softly. 'That is the English word. I don't know what they call themselves.'

The woman nods. The great bird regards them calmly, no more afraid of two than of one.

'Is Emmanuel with you?' she says.

'No. On ship.'

The woman does not seem keen to talk, but she presses on anyway. 'You are a friend of his, I know. I am too, or have been, in the past. May I ask: what do you see in him?'

It is an odd question, presumptuous in its intimacy, even rude. But it seems to her that on this island, on a visit that will never be repeated, anything can be said.

'What I see?' says the woman.

'Yes. What do you see? What do you like about him? What is the source of his charm?'

The woman shrugs. Her hair is dyed, she can now see. Forty if a day, probably with a household to support back home, one of those Russian establishments with a crippled mother and a husband who drinks too much and beats her and a layabout son and a daughter with a shaven head and purple lipstick. A woman who can sing a little but will one of these days, sooner rather than later, be over the hill. Playing the balalaika to foreigners, singing Russian kitsch, picking up tips.

'He is free. You speak Russian? No?'

She shakes her head.

'Deutsch?'

'A little.'

'Er ist freigebig. Ein guter Mann!

Freigebig, generous, spoken with the heavy g of Russian. Is Emmanuel generous? She does not know, one way or the other. Not the first word that would occur to her, though. Large, maybe. Large in his gestures.

'Aber kaum zu vertrauen] she remarks to the woman. Years since she last used the language. Is that what the two of them spoke together in bed last night: German, imperial tongue of the new Europe? Kaum zu vertrauen, not to be trusted.

The woman shrugs again. 'Die Zeit ist immer kurz. Man kann nicht alles haben! There is a pause. The woman speaks again. 'Auch die Stimme. Sie macht daß man – she searches for the word – 'man schaudert]

Schaudern. Shudder. The voice makes one shudder. Probably does, when one is breast to breast with it. Between her and the Russian passes what is perhaps the beginning of a smile. As for the bird, they have been there long enough, the bird is losing interest. Only the fledgling, peering out from beneath its mother, is still wary of the intruders.

Is she jealous? How could she be? Still, hard to accept, being excluded from the game. Like being a child again, with a child's bedtime.

The voice. Her thoughts go back to Kuala Lumpur, when she was young, or nearly young, when she spent three nights in a row with Emmanuel Egudu, also young then. 'The oral poet,' she said to him teasingly. 'Show me what an oral poet can do.' And he laid her out, lay upon her, put his lips to her ears, opened them, breathed his breath into her, showed her.