They wandered for some little time over the gentle swell of grassy park, until they were far out of sight of the women. The landscape was not empty, but the few men scattered about seemed to be taking rest, sitting under trees with their arms folded on their knees, gazing into the middle distance.
Seeing some landmark, Muriel stopped, and said that they had got into the palace grounds, where they should not be. She pulled Peregrine back, but he did not want to go, his attention was fixed forward. Ahead of them on a shadowed path lay a shadowy shape. As they looked, the shape began to move. A rock or boulder moving—how strange. Oh! It was an enormous turtle, quite a yard high.
“It is the Tu‘i Malila,” Muriel said. “The oldest tortoise in the world.”
Kay took a step toward it.
The turtle’s head lifted, pointed and tiny. Its narrow eye regarded her.
After a moment, it blinked. One wrinkled stump of a leg lifted, and it took a step toward them.
“It is hurt! Look, the marks on its back?”
“No, that is very old. Captain Cook carved his initials on it, they say, when he gave it to the Tu‘i Tonga— No, no, Peregrine, come away!” Muriel caught at Peregrine’s hand and pulled.
Kay expected the boy to complain, but he did not. It was a very strange tortoise. Perhaps it frightened him a little, as it did her.
Muriel came back and plucked at Kay’s sleeve. “Come, come away, I am sure you will see him again, he is the king of Malila, the oldest tortoise in the world. He was given to the king very long ago. When you go to the palace later, you will hear all about him.”
As Kay lingered, wishing to go closer, the tortoise took another step. It was a moving hill, red and black, a bulge in the fabric of the earth. As old as the stones at the edge of the sea.
* * *
—
Francis was busy aboard ship, taking advantage of their stop for painting and refurbishing, mending sails torn in the great storm, and all the domestic duties that had been waiting his attention. Kay was glad Thea did not decide it was time to turn out the saloon as well, so they could come ashore every morning and spend the last days with Mr. Brimner; except that they did not see enough of him, because Mr. Hill commandeered him.
On their last day, Mr. Hill arranged an excursion out to a famous landmark, a standing stone like Stonehenge, but (Mr. Hill said) “not so ancient, but still very old for this part of the world.” They drove out two carts; Kay went with Miss Winifred and Lisia in their cart.
It was a relief to Kay to be alone with them. Not only because she had tired of Mr. Hill, who was a tedious gabster, but because—because Thea walked everywhere, in every company, as the most superior person in the room. It was not egotistical of her, it was simply her perception of the reality of things, her calm understanding of the strength of her character and education and the protection of her religion. Kay thought it odd that she herself had not received that same certainty from Father, spending so much time in his company. Her sense of her own position in the world seemed to come out as—not lower than other people, precisely, but off to one side.
Kay had once or twice seen Thea’s sense of superiority registering with Miss Winifred, kind as she was and accommodating to the foreigner’s odd opinions. Travelling alone with them, Kay could enjoy Miss Winifred and Lisia, could talk to them and listen to them talk together of people they knew and new babies and the king and other interesting matters.
They drove past groups of drowsy men sleeping on the side of the road or anywhere a little shade could be found, out some distance to the village of Niutoua. At last, there it was: a great lintel and doorway standing in a field.
It was very large, certainly. They all got out of the carts.
Mr. Hill had the facts at his fingertips. Thea did not seem to mind listening to him, though most likely he had been talking ceaselessly during the whole journey.
“Ha‘amonga ‘a Maui—the Burden of Maui! Constructed from three limestone slabs, nearly twenty feet high,” he told them. “Built at the beginning of the thirteenth century under the eleventh Tu‘i Tonga Tu‘itātui, for some purpose of determining or celebrating the solstice, or as the gateway to his royal compound.”
Kay wished he would be quiet.
The thing was large, fine. Made of spongy stone, like a lintel for a temple—mainly interesting because the lines of the interior were so straight, after all those centuries. What she liked better was the strange slab stuck into the ground farther down the slope, in a little grove. The throne.
“This is the ‘esi maka faakinanga, stone to lean against,” Miss Winifred said. She too had wandered away from Mr. Hill’s lecture, perhaps having heard it many times before, or knowing more about it all than Mr. Hill did, since she had grown up here. She set the palm of one large, smooth hand against the green-black rock, higher than her head.
“They say we were giants in the olden days. They say this was the old Tu‘i Tonga’s throne—his name, Tu’itātui, means King Strike the Knee. With his back to this great stone, he was safe from assassins from behind, and with his long stick”—she lunged at Kay!—“he would strike out at the knees of every enemy in front. In the oldest times, they say, they burned the bushes, so that from this place he would be able to see enemies coming from over the sea.”
She had said we were giants. Was Miss Winifred a Tongan, then, too? She had dark hair and strong bones; she did not look like Lisia, but perhaps that did not matter.
Kay never knew what one ought to do in the presence of old things. She touched the rock. A man had once sat pressed against this rock, in fear of assassins—and had lashed out with a stick and broken some knees.
She tried to feel if the Tu‘i Tonga’s ghost still sat there, but could not sense it. But it was, all the same, her favourite thing she had seen all this time in Tonga: its flat, unembellished surface, out in the little grove that had grown up around it, hidden away from the world because the places that enemies came from had changed.
In the early afternoon they travelled on to Fùa, the village where Mr. Brimner was to serve, and the people there laid out a welcome feast for them on tablecloths of palm leaves: roast pig and chickens and white yams, wrapped in more leaves. Some girls brought round the packages of food, and some girls danced.
Lisia took Kay close to the dancing floor, where a girl was being dressed for the dancing. “My cousin Lotoa,” Lisia murmured in Kay’s ear.
“She is beautiful,” Kay whispered back.
Lisia stroked her arm, tenderly agreeing. “All my family is beautiful.”
An old woman crept around Lotoa’s feet, anointing them with some substance—Lisia said it was coconut oil, mixed with fragrance—smoothing the oil on Lotoa’s calves and shins and on her legs, far up, even under her tapa cloth skirt, until they were glossy. Rising to her feet with no seeming effort, the old mother oiled Lotoa’s arms and shoulders. Lotoa spread it on her neck and bosom and across her upper arms, smiling to herself as she became the shining one. Kay felt it in her own arms and breast, cool oil sliding down the front of her own chemise.
All the girls were burnished with coconut oil by their mothers until their arms glistened in the dance, which was both modest and immodest: the girls kept their legs at all times carefully close together, bent at the knees in a docile crouch, but they swayed intoxicatingly, and moved their shining hands in a complicated series of meaningful gestures (which Kay invented translations for, all ocean voyages and pledging allegiance and yielding to love). The dancers were accompanied by two old men and an old lady, singing at one side of the dance floor in cracked, almost shouting voices that were nevertheless very sweet.
There was always singing. Late at night, even in her cabin on the Morning Light, Kay heard the singing carrying from the shore. Men’s voices and women’s, so close-blended that she could not tell if they were singing harmony or all the same notes but in dif
ferent shades of voices. Church went on all the time too, all night it seemed. It was a strange country, but more real to her than other places she had been. The people were not setting their best face to the water, pretending for guests. The whole island, as far as she had ridden by cart and pony trap, was the same, people living exactly as they had lived for a very long time, except with more churches.
That day, Bishop Willis made harbour from Christchurch. When they returned from the village feast, he was awaiting them, an elderly, bony, straggle-bearded man, large hands and feet out of proportion to the amount of meat left on him. Kay disliked him strongly. Perhaps he had some flavour of Father in his knitted, protruding brow. He was all rigged out in black, ancient black gaiters coming down over his boots in frog-pads, and he wore a balked expression. As if ripe to do some balking of his own.
Beside him sat a small, neat man with a brown Vandyke beard, so tidily combed it looked false. Kay had an urge to pull it. In a tone of gloomy triumph, the bishop introduced this fellow as Mr. Piper-Ffrench, late of Christchurch, New Zealand, and the new incumbent for Fùa.
But that was the village where they had just been feted—Mr. Brimner’s new parish. Kay did not understand.
On the dining table the bishop set a thick paper, with printing and writing on it. “There is yet a niche for you, Brimner, never fear,” he intoned, as if reading the litany. He pushed the paper across, saying, “Your new orders, my dear sir.”
Mr. Brimner bent to examine the sheet, taking out his spectacles and polishing them as his eyes raced over the page. He did not need his glasses for close work, Kay knew, only for time to think.
“Spare me your recriminations,” the bishop said, holding up one knob-knuckled hand.
Mr. Brimner had made none.
“The island archipelago of Ha‘apai has been underserved, although the worthy Mr. Fruelock has established a school on the main island, Pangai. Dr. Barnes of Christchurch believes it will be wise to expand our diocese into the islands nearby. Ha‘ano is the island he suggests, and he has travelled there often enough to be sure you would be welcome. The Society has purchased a rudimentary house, with an outbuilding suitable for renovation into a school, which we will consecrate in the spring, once you have made the desired changes.”
Seeing Kay’s attention, Mr. Brimner slid the sheet over so she could read it. The parchment was signed at the bottom with a huge flourish: Alfred Tonga.
Kay looked up, questioning. Not moving his eyes from his reading, Mr. Brimner murmured, “That is how bishops sign, using their See as their name.”
Pomp and ceremony unfolded in Kay’s mind like a shabby velvet carpet rolling out to a set of marble steps. She squinted up the steps into the expanding darkness of one kind of universe—then turned her mind away from all that, because it was a sham. In her experience God was interior, or vastly exterior, not bothered with position or hierarchy. But some poor silly folk did think it mattered.
Thea was disappointed on Mr. Brimner’s behalf, but proud of their friend. His courtesy never faltered, upon being informed that he had arrived too late to take up the post he had been promised. Was the bishop using the royal we? In his old-fashioned black gabardine, he looked to Thea like a great mangy vulture, squawking. Like that vile Mr. Drummond who came to Blade Lake, visiting the school and demanding a reduction of their budget…
She stopped, her attention turned inside. She had begun to feel uncomfortable during the ride back to Nuku‘alofa, and now a strong interior cramping made her forget Mr. Brimner’s trouble in her own.
Dodging through the back kitchen and down the moonlit garden to the outhouse, Thea lifted her skirts and sat just as a wave took her over. Oh, she thought. Oh my dear.
And then a flooding out. The pain was nothing, no more troubling than was ordinary for her courses. She almost wished it had been more, to register the fact of it. Two months’ delay—she had been allowing herself to believe that God had forgiven her.
It felt like the bottom had dropped out of everything. But Mrs. Hill had left a basket of rags there, and after some time of spasmodic flow it was possible to clean herself and rig a wadding for her underclothes, to avoid stain or discovery. She did not like to think of the tiny homunculus down there in the cesspit, but since there was no help for it, she pushed that from her mind, and also whether the child already had a soul, and whether she should pray, and why she could not do so.
She did not cry. After a few minutes to compose herself, she walked back to the house, the bright moon making it easy to see the path. It was over, that was all.
At the wharf, Francis came over with the tender. He was surprised to find Mr. Brimner returning in the trap with them, but quick to put a kind face on it. “Sailing on, eh? Ha‘apai—well, well, that lies on our way, not more than a hundred miles north,” Francis said, at Thea’s hand on his arm. “Farther to travel, eh, Mr. Brimner? It is often the way.”
After these several days’ delay, Francis was impatient to be on their way, but not at all ill-tempered with it. Thea pressed his arm and resolved never to tell him of the—the newly lost. A little clot of blood, that was all.
The full moon shone so ferociously from the heavens that the night was bright as day. Mr. Brimner was down below unpacking, readying for the next thing.
Kay kicked the leather ball again for Pilot, who raced down the deck to catch it before it went into the scupper. He overshot the mark, and his nose went smack into the metal ditch, but he shook his head and caught the ball in his sharp white teeth, and trotted off to take it to someone else, as was his annoying habit, flag-tail waving at the prospect of another chase.
She looked after him down the length of the ship, hoping it was not Arthur Wetmore he aimed for, because that might make Francis cross.
Mr. Brimner materialized out of the not-darkness beside her. “What a moon,” he said. “σελήνη—Selene,” he said. “And on a night like this, πανσελήνη—”
“Pan-selene,” Kay said. “All-moon—full moon?”
“That’s it.” He pulled out his tobacco pouch and lit a cheroot, which he saved for special occasions. “Your progress has been splendid, my dear Kay. I have no qualms about abandoning you to work alone. But I wonder if from time to time you would perhaps write me a letter, perhaps in the original Greek, so that I can enjoy your further progress?”
Kay felt her mouth stretching, that kind of smiling that is more like pain.
When they emerged on deck into the bright morning, Lifuka lay before them, the largest island of Ha‘apai, reached during the night. Francis had already sent a boat to the wharf at Pangai town with a message for Mr. Fruelock, to whom Mr. Brimner was to report, and had had word back inviting all who cared to visit Pangai to come ashore. Kay wanted to go, of course, and after the restorative tea Thea agreed; she too was curious to meet Mr. Brimner’s colleague.
He was waiting on the wharf—easily recognized, a black crow in the crowd of white-tunicked men, wearing stovepipe trousers rather than a mat round his waist, with a very wide vicar’s hat. He looked almost Tongan, so brown was his skin from sun. He had the black hair that goes with an olive complexion, and looked a good deal healthier and more reliable than Mr. Hill, Thea was glad to see.
Mr. Fruelock shook hands generally and welcomed them all to Ha‘apai, and to the village of Pangai, and begged them to set forth with him on a short walk.
“My wife is at the school but will break off when we arrive, for she is eager to meet you, Mr. Brimner. Mr. Hill has sung your praises these many months, and we are delighted to have a scholar of your proportion, although you may find little exercise for the mind at first, beyond learning the new tongue. Do not be astonished if you find pupils who can engage to— Ah! here we are, and here is my dear wife. Dorothy! Come and meet Mr. Brimner, and of course Mrs. Grant and Miss, um, her sister…”
They had arrived at a low-walled house on a qu
iet lane removed from the main road. The woman at the door wore a welcoming smile on her broad, clever face. She came out to greet them and took Thea’s arm in a friendly way, exclaiming that they had never thought to have such a treat today, a visit from a captain’s wife!
Thea pressed Kay’s hand, and she slipped behind Mr. Brimner to let him greet Mrs. Fruelock, who was as tall as he—a good deal taller, standing on the step.
“So this is Mr. Brimner!” she said, looking down in a satisfied way. “We are fortunate, and I hope you will count yourself to be so too, once you have found your feet here. I hope your voyage was supportable—are you a good sailor? I am not, myself—the voyage here was misery, I tell Eric I will never make another…”
Still talking, she led them into the interior darkness and along a tiled hall to a large sitting room. There were actual chairs. Clean and airy, white-curtained, the room had a comfortable feeling, and made Thea feel well-disposed to Mrs. Fruelock. Mr. Fruelock saw to his guests’ disposition while his wife poured water into tall glasses; the day was hot enough to make that very welcome. Three girls emerged, each with a plate of biscuits and cut fruit, which they set down carefully before curtsying to the newcomers.
“Back to school now, girls,” Mrs. Fruelock told them. “We will come in a few moments, to see how well the children are coming on, and then we will have some singing.”
Kay stayed standing by Thea’s chair, perhaps a little shy of the girls. One looked to be older than Kay, Thea thought, and the others a year or two younger.
“Let me congratulate you, sir, on your assignment to this diocese, and to this mission,” Fruelock said formally, and shook Mr. Brimner’s hand all over again. He sat, stood, bustled a little, rummaging for a paper, and sat again. “Well! Here is a map to show you— Oh, you have? Well, no need to look again, then.” He set the map aside. “You are on a two years’ gift, I believe—the bishop has no doubt told you that this is a mission post?”
The Difference Page 13
