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         This short story was first published in German by Random House, Germany, in 2001, and has not yet appeared in print in English. I wrote it partly in tribute to the love story of Hinemoa and Tutanekei, which also forms part of my paper given at the July 2005 RWA conference in Reno. 

                WHEN SHE FIRST entered the water it shocked her, like frigid hands wrapped around her waist, and she believed she would have to take a breathless plunge to manage the swim at all. But as she walked in deeper the feeling came back into her limbs and the lake reformed itself around her, the superfine beads of smooth stone and pumice between her toes, the whisper of ripples on the shore, the strong arms of the enclosing hills, and the island, sketched in black over broad strokes of charcoal, beckoning her across.
          It was a secret night with no moon. Her hands slid just below the surface and she recognised the tamed heat of the day waiting to welcome her. Her arms reached into it, her shoulders followed, and she glided, flexed, embraced the lake with scarcely a disturbance in the wide, enveloping stillness. And as her chin parted the water and her breasts tingled with the cold beneath, there came the far-off sound of the flute.
          Her breath caught then, and a white fire flashed in her head, blinding her with fear and exultation. She took another stroke, closed her eyes and opened them again, and her head cleared. Glancing to each side she could see she was already well out into the lake. Her body, stretching out in a long, supple glide, had already made the fatal choice.
          The flute trickled and bounced like uneven raindrops, too faint as yet for her to really calculate its direction. She swam instead for the high point of the island, matching her breaststroke to the hiss of her own breath rather than the distant piping.
         When she had picked up the mobile telephone minutes before, he had simply said, ‘I’m here.’
‘I’m coming.’
          They could—probably should—have said more. When she locked the mobile phone and her clothes into the car on the deserted bank she might have left a note on the dashboard, but she did not. So no one would know, until his friends came back with the boat to fetch him in four hours’ time. He hadn’t told them why he was on the island alone, but they’d taken him there anyway, because everyone always did what he wanted, with unquestioning good humour; she was used to that.
          He and she had originally hatched this together as a fund-raising stunt, enacting their own slightly different version of an old New Zealand Maori love story on this not too dissimilar lake. But the summer music festival had come and gone and the symphony and choir had achieved their financial targets, and still neither of them had spoken to anyone about the plan. It was entirely theirs, as intimate and dangerous as the pact of Hinemoa and Tutanekai, long ago.
          He knew how well she swam, because he had come to the finals of the swimming competitions the month before, when she was racing. She had arranged for him to have a seat on the sunny side of the Olympic pool, and he had insisted on being in the first row, close enough to get splashed. ‘So I get a piece of the action. I want to make sure you can really do this thing.’
          Her hands thrust forward, scooped down into the colder level, and the water curled and slipped over her shoulders, caressing her calves and ankles as it slid away behind her at the finish of each stroke. So far, the lake was an ally, as it had been in her childhood. As Hinemoa’s lake had been to her, when her tribe decreed she could never have the man Tutanekai.
          The sound across the water ceased. She trod water, trembling. She was a pinhead on the great disc of the lake, a speck in the vast universe of water. She spun, the splash of her hands on the surface as startling as a fish jumping. They had chosen this side of the lake because it was closest to the island. It was also the least populated. The only lights she could see were the windows of isolated farmhouses in the hollows of the hills, an orange-yellow haze in the sky from the town on the far shore behind the island, and the cold, diamond-bright, indifferent stars.
          Then came a long, pure call, following by rapid notes like a scattering of pearls across the dark water. Mozart. The silence had merely been a gap between pieces. She gave a gasping laugh, spat out a mouthful, resumed swimming. She had plenty of energy left.
          He always paused for longer than most musicians between tunes, even in the piano bar where she had first met him. She had never watched and listened to anyone with such fascination, with the two senses functioning as one. He held his head slightly inclined towards the keyboard, the eyes downcast, the black lashes and eyebrows the exact colour of his hair, as though someone had used the same glossy, thick crayon to draw them against the ivory smoothness of his skin. She hesitated about going up to him, she was almost frightened of consuming him with her own intensity. But it was easy to talk, because the moment she announced her presence he grinned, in a way that combined mischief and self-mockery and an extraordinary promise of joy, held inside, like music waiting to burst out.
          She joined him again during his break and they had a drink together. He was still at the piano, and he touched the lid lightly with one hand and said, ‘This isn’t quite the whole me, you know,’ and the remark had made her instantly nervous.
          All he had meant, as it turned out, was that he was not primarily a musician. Having heard him, though, once and for ever, she could not share this view. A few weeks ago, she had said unguardedly to her mother, ‘He can play anything.’ And realised, far too late, what an enormous admission this was.
          Her mother, who was always one to see hurdles ahead, had been talking about his legal studies. ‘He seems sure to get a first. But what then—can he really make a career out of it?’ She frowned. ‘I must admit, darling, he is frighteningly intelligent.’
          She had said dryly, ‘I think I can cope with that.’
          ‘And also’—her mother paused, struggled for words while the air crackled with the unsaid—‘and also very, very ambitious.’
          She had thought for a split second of entering into confidences, but it was not the time and there were things to prove first—to herself, mainly. So she just smiled into her mother’s eyes and said, ‘So am I.’
          The flute was clearer now, virginal and remote. She had been swimming half an hour but the island seemed no closer and not a single light shone in the opaque mass ahead. In childhood she used to go fishing with her parents over this stretch at dusk, trolling across the sleek, cool expanses with silver barbs spinning behind the runabout, the engine barely turning over, muffled by the dying breeze. She used to feel the calm, peaceful pull of the horizontal in the lines of ducks wavering over the far reaches of the lake towards the reeds, the low flight of a shag or a long-legged heron swooping home, as sunset subtly stole its colours from the surface like silk nets drawn away towards the horizon.
          But here in the dark she was seized now by the frisson of the vertical, suspended between the black fathoms of the lake, too deep for weed or shoal, and the bottomless sky. And all at once she allowed herself to know that he had—that he really could not have—any genuine idea of what she was undertaking.
          To kill the panic she listened, as never before, as Hinemoa must have strained to hear Tutanekai’s flute, played cunningly near the water’s edge while his own people slept or told stories around the fireside in their island village.
          She had asked him if he was going to learn the nose flute like the old Maori, but he had laughed and said no, she would have to listen for his own one, warbling Handel. And just as she recalled his soft, ironical voice saying the words, her favourite sonata began, the notes spinning like hooks across the surface towards her naked body.
          She swam on, and the island began to sort itself into perspective, so that she could make out the blanket of bush, tufted with massive trees near the top, tasselled with pampas grass where narrow gullies ran down to the shore. There was still no light, except for the flickering tongue of the flute.
          The water was unequivocally cold now, dragging over her skin, but her body pulsed with warmth. She recalled the cool touch of the sheets when they got into his bed the night before, the glide of his hands, the fire that glowed in her chest and the sound he made as they lay down together for the very first time. It had not happened by chance, it was an assignation, planned like this one—planned as the sine qua non of this one. But, unlike this, it had been interrupted.
          There had been only an hour to see him, between his last lecture at university and her choir practice, and she wondered briefly beforehand what had made them choose such a precarious time. Then they touched and everything else slid away, doubts and wishes and words. Until they heard the knocking on his studio door and his father’s cheerful voice.
          She was lying across him and he had one hand between them and the other in her hair. She said, ‘Oh, God,’ into his shoulder and he flung his head back against the pillow and let out a sound of disbelief between his teeth.
          ‘Rescue package!’ His mother too had a lovely voice. They were both outside; she and his father had the habit of popping round with useful boxes of food, always unannounced and usually welcome.
          She slid off him, out of his hands. While she threw on her clothes he stayed there, one arm over his face, making a gasping sound that she eventually realised was laughter. By the time he got around to letting his parents in, there could have been no doubt in their minds about what was going on, but they greeted her in their friendly way and they all managed to make conversation. She sat there frustrated, raw and tingling with new, wondrous life, then went off to choir.
          The swift notes beckoned now and tantalised, skimming the surface like birds. Hinemoa had reached Tutanekai’s island in the dark, found him on the shore, and won his people over as well with her courage and love. Tonight the land itself looked forbidding, and there was no beach to set foot on. He was meant to have clambered down as near as he could to the edge, with the bag of towels and food and warm clothes and wine, and positioned a big torch to guide her in.
          Then the slope of the island loomed close, she swam a few more yards and the flute rang out like a clarion within the arms of a little cove. It was spiked with fallen rocks, and a giant tree hung over one end, its roots gripping the stone like pale, gnarled hands. The smell of the land reached out to her; the scents of tea tree and soft earth, the brackish whiff of weed on the margins. Colours welled up: the dark olive stain of the bush, blue-black shadows where the canopy swept low, the burnt umber line of a path leading down from the hilltop.
          The flute was high and imperious, like a peal of bells. As she sought it, she floated past a jagged monolith and saw the light of the torch. She lowered her feet to the bottom, touching grit and small stones and the edges of shells, and with the music cascading around her she waded in, her legs wobbly, stumbling against invisible obstacles fringed in feathery weed.
          He stopped playing. The cove ached with silence, until a breeze threaded through the trees above and an insect recommenced its regular, percussive call, like a tiny triangle ringing in the leaves. Water slipped from her arms and breasts, rustling into the lake.
          The torchlight was all but obscured, tipped on a sharp angle so that it was shining over worn pebbles, illuminating only the edge of a blanket and one bare foot. As she reached the rampart of rocks the foot drew back and he sprang up, a ghostly shape against deeper grey, the flute gleaming like a rapier in his hand.
          ‘It’s you!’ His voice pierced her.
          The gentle wash of the lake sucked around her feet as she put her hands on the nearest rock, fingers seeking a purchase.
          ‘It is you, isn’t it? Christ, we were mad to do this.’ She heard the anguish in his voice, the clatter as the flute fell to ground.
          ‘I’m coming,’ she said.
          Then she closed her eyes. And kept them closed.
          There were baby freshwater snails under her fingers, hard and closely grouped. She felt beyond them to where furry lichen grew.
          ‘Can you see me?’ he said. ‘Can you see the torch?’
          He must have put it up high and turned it on after he had picked his way down. It must have dropped later, without his hearing it.
          She heard him moving towards her, the slither of his legs and feet, his quick breathing. She was over a larger rock, feeling for the next, but he was still above her somewhere. One foot slid into a crevice and she freed it, swaying, and had to put out a hand to steady herself. Miraculously her fingers met something, a firm substance that felt grainy, like clay.
          An image came into her mind, of a man she had seen once on television in France, who had worn a sheer silver band across his eyes that flashed at the interviewer like a relentless mirror. He had said, ‘She left me, in the end. She was beautiful. And she knew, however many years she stayed with me, I would never see her beauty.’
          She put both palms against the rock, her face against her hands. Her whole body shivered, but inside her head, behind the sealed eyelids, a flame burned. She felt with one hand around the boulder, found a hold, stepped through and up, found another. He was nearer, his breathing more rapid. She came to a sloping rock face pitted by wind and rain, with a few little ferns clinging in the cracks.
          Then his voice came from just above her. ‘Here’s my hand.’
          She reached up and their fingers locked. She found footholds, scrambled to the top. Their bodies and faces collided, they collapsed together in a tangle of limbs and then she was crushed in his arms.
          She never asked, she was never to know, whether he guessed that she had come to him blind across the last barriers. But he knew what it meant to her to place her hands on each side of his face, kiss his eyelids and say his name, and press her lips to the mouth from whence the music came.