So he would have an excursion to look forward to; Kay was glad to think that.
“Not to convert the old person—of course not,” Mr. Brimner added. “Nor to school him. I suppose he must have learned everything he needs to know already about how to live in these parts.”
Seaton pushed his frowsy head up out of the lifeboat behind them, saying, “There’s some as have not enough to do and must rouse workingmen too early.”
Mr. Brimner touched Kay’s arm to bring her attention back, and pointed out over the sea. “There,” he said.
She looked. Nothing. The water was calm, a mirror for the sky.
Jacky Judge came pelting down the deck on silent feet, waving an arm. He reached them and pointed too, mouthing there!
Again she turned to the sea, and waited.
The volcano in the distance, the quiet motion of the ship. Nothing.
And then, there.
A huge shape melted upward out of the water, and another behind it, melted into air and back into water in a rounded, elongated gleam of wet black skin.
Nobody spoke.
Two of them, one large, the other immeasurable. Black gloss in blue gloss.
Kay looked and looked, until her eyes were stretched.
Out of the nothing, out from under the ship and out into the water that was all the water always, up came another great shape in a thundering rise, twisting into white underside, falling into a great foam—breaching—breaching, that was the word.
“Are you afraid?” asked Jacky Judge, and Kay looked scorn at him.
Francis, coming to watch, told her, “I started out on a whaler, twenty years ago—lucky to come safe out of it.”
“But they are so—gigantic, so beyond our ordinary scale, I do not see how the first person decided to kill a whale.”
“Fear! Some are afraid of anything larger than themselves, and want therefore to kill it. The world is full of bad apples,” Francis pronounced, and went back to his work.
* * *
—
The women in Ha‘ano had made a special mat for Mr. Brimner, of white straw with the word T E A C H E R spelled out in darker fibres. They were standing at the stone jetty when the Morning Light sailed into view. How had they known to come out? Someone must have been keeping lookout for the stranger arriving.
The stone jetty was just thirty feet long, and as they followed the welcoming people up the slight rise beyond, they saw that the village held only a sprinkling of little houses. Straw roofs, tiny windows, garden plots around them. One house near the shore was a little larger; beside it, a long, low building stood with windows open to the air. That was the building that was waiting to be the school, but it had no tables or desks yet. The floor was dusty, and in one corner a broken crate bled sea-swelled Bibles. Every book, every piece of paper in that place was salt-damp, soft and swollen, almost unreadable.
Kay stood in the doorway while the women showed Mr. Brimner over his house—two plaster rooms, with a small roof out back over a cooking place. A dirt floor, but the sandy dirt was well packed down. The first room held a table and a chair, and the women were evidently very proud of them.
They opened the door to the other room, revealing a long bed, fit for a Tongan, with a long white net over it to cheat the mosquitoes. It was clean and pretty. This would be his place, for as long as the bishop said so. The wooden step outside the door was covered with slippers. The women had taken theirs off as they went in. Only Kay and Mr. Brimner still wore their boots.
They all went back out to the schoolhouse, where more women and men had gathered, bringing food. Always food when somebody visited, in this place. Children kept appearing round the corner of the house or climbing the low stone fence, interested, and trim in worn, well-laundered white shorts or dresses. Ten or fifteen of them, and a trickle more. With ceremony, the gift mat was pinned to the schoolroom wall.
There would be some difficulty, living in a place where nobody spoke your language and you did not yet speak theirs.
Mr. Brimner gave a short speech anyway, mounting the one step to the long porch of the school building. “Mālō e lelei, mālō aupito,” he said (they laughed with pleasure at this brave attempt). “I am sorry not to speak your language yet. I am told there is a man in another village—Fakakakai, or perhaps in Pukotala?—who speaks English, having lived in New Zealand. But we will not rely on him. I have my Tongan dictionary and am eager to learn. I am fortunate to have come home to this place, mālō, mālō aupito.”
The little crowd clapped their hands, although they could not have understood him very well, and then they ate, and drifted away into the fields again about their usual business. Each person a person as much as Kay was, as much as Mr. Brimner was. Each one thinking his own thoughts or singing an unknown song inside her head. Maybe, in the two years he spent there, Mr. Brimner would come to know what the people were thinking, maybe he would find someone else to teach Ancient Greek to, or to teach him Ancient Tongan.
The sailors brought Mr. Brimner’s trunks up to the house. The last mothers shooed the children out and helped unpack; even though each item must be exclaimed over, it was quickly done. The women looked at the neat house with satisfaction and left them alone.
Mr Brimner hung his plain silver-and-ebony crucifix on a nail on the wall, and set four or five books, including Meditation and Mental Prayer, on the table.
“I will keep most of the books stored away until I need them,” he told Kay. “Having seen the damp-damage at the school.”
The house door hung a little awry, but he shut it carefully behind them anyway and latched it with the rotating piece of wood, and walked with Kay down to the little stone jetty. The boat had gone back to the ship to take back the sailors, so they stood there, silent, alone together in this odd place. Ha‘ano.
Well. Arranging her pinny behind her so as not to muss her dress, Kay sat on the edge of the jetty, little stones pressing into her legs and rump. She would have pebbled dimples on the back of her legs from the rough concrete.
“Keep up your derivations list,” he said absently, scanning the variations in colour in the shallow sea.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“This is a pleasant haven where I find myself,” he said. He turned to look back at his house, and the other houses laid out along the interior road, and the forest of palms that reached almost to the ocean, along a thin edge of sanded beach. “It will only be lonely at first.”
The boat was crawling across already from the Morning Light. Kay stood and fluffed her dress around her again. “I will write to you,” she said. “I promise I will.”
The boat bumped up against the jetty. Mr. Best was waiting. She held out her hand, and Mr. Brimner took it gently and shook it with grave attention. He doffed his hat.
In the boat she sat facing the shore so she could wave to him again. His long, thin legs, his round body, his large head and smoked spectacles. He stood on the stone wharf, waving his handkerchief. Then, so that she could leave, he turned and wandered off down the beach, pale-grey jacket flapping a little behind him.
10
Ask and You Shall Have
As the ship moved over the deep sea and her bunk moved likewise, beneath her and supporting her, Kay dreamed and dreamed. She could not wake from dreaming of Blade Lake; it seemed she dreamed for days, years, the whole length of her life. She turned away again and promised not to see or speak of the children in their lines, shivering in the long, deep shudder of winter in the North, wrapped in grey blankets torn in half, ice on their eyelashes, standing in the snow for fire drill. That was a good thing, though: Father instituted the drills after a school in Saskatchewan burnt down, and many children died.
Many children died. Standing in lines again to be tested for TB, turning their heads to watch the snick of Miss Ramsay’s knife, making no cry. Thea told them she was proud of their co
urage.
Kay hated her saying that. It hurt them just the same—it was not all right to hurt them, because they were brave! Some were too afraid to cry out, some of them hushed the others. John did not like the cut, but Annie pinched him to be quiet, and then he went out to do the evening milking after all, since it was Rota C that day. And Thea sent Annie back up to scrub the ward floor, because she was still being punished.
That was Kay’s fault. She had run faster than Miss Ramsay’s approaching heels, and let Annie take the blame for being in the pantry. It was true that Miss Ramsay would blame Annie even if Kay stood there with a mouth full of bread, molasses on her chin. But she should have run back to say, to shout, that it was her, it was her all the time, taking what she wanted, it was not Annie at all. But she did not.
Worse than that. In the study she had let her head nod when Miss Ramsay told Father that Annie was stealing bread. She was afraid, was she, of Father?
She could not look at herself for that, she could not think about it. She had been staring at what he would do to her that she had seen him do to others. The big strap slashing down or a furious shaking or a long time in a cold, dark, confining place. She could not make her mouth move to tell.
Nor could she come out of the dream. In four o’clock twilight Miss Ramsay stood over Annie with the pointer from the upper classroom, and when Kay said no, no, she swung harder again and this time with the many-pronged five-chalked music-line-drawing stick, scoring five dark-red lines into Annie’s winter-pale arm when it clawed down with long brass fingers.
Then Kay did wake. She pulled herself out of the dream and climbed up through twisted sheets into the close-wrapped wood of her bunk, breathing in rhythm with the slap-slap of the waves on the side as they ploughed through the long sea up to Fiji.
She knew where she was now.
It was because they had left Mr. Brimner at Ha‘ano that her nightmares were back. She could not be left.
Mr. Brimner would not claw anyone, he never would. At the worst he might look at them questioningly. Ha‘ano was too small for the children to be kept from their parents. They would run home even in the middle of the day for their dinner of fish soup and taro. If the teacher beat them—but Mr. Brimner would not beat them—but if anyone ever did, any other teacher, like Mr. Maitland, or some Mr. Fruelock or other, the children would tell, and a large father would walk over the field and pick up the cruel teacher with one big fist and shake him like you might shake a misbehaving cat, only until he was dead.
Since Thea had not come to wake her, she must not have cried out with the dream. She had not cried out in life either, watching Miss Ramsay slash at Annie’s arm.
In her bare feet she stole up on deck and found Pilot curled tight in his box close by the stove vent, and buried her cold hands in his fur. In the distance, Mr. Wright called quietly to a seaman, and the seaman answered. The only sound in the world. The ocean was quiet and there was no moon. She picked Pilot up and carried him down to her bunk, which was not allowed.
* * *
—
Even then, she dreamed again. Perhaps because of being at sea again, after a break of several days. Miss Grace Ramsay, black dress, staring owl eyes—four strong slaps back and forth, and a pause, and when Annie does not give in and cry, she slaps again, one-two-three-four, and again, and again, until Father comes and stops her, Thea running in the hall outside and Miss Ramsay stiff neck and eyes still staring, utterly right right right right.
Kay forced herself to lie back down. Pilot had curled on the floor on her discarded dress, but he looked up and then bounded back onto the bunk, where he turned six times around his own tail and nestled again into her knees, and with that steadying weight she could lie still, thinking and remembering, but at least not dreaming.
At breakfast, unable to contain her thoughts, she asked Thea, “Why did Father first go to Blade Lake?” That was a thing she thought she was allowed to ask.
“To bring succour to the Indians, of course,” Thea said, frowning. “As was his duty. He had worked hard at Fort à la Corne, and to be offered the school was an honour, proof that his efforts were recognized, that the bishop saw his success with the community there.”
“But why was the school there at all, why did they not just have schools of their own, with their own people to teach them?” After Tonga, the schools and churches there, and men like Mr. Fruelock and Mr. Hill, Kay now saw the whole arrangement as false, wrong—silly men, caught up in ambition.
Impatient, Thea said, “You forget, they asked us to come, it was part of the treaty! Why do you always forget that part? They understood that their children needed education, in order to be part of the white man’s world, to be part of civilization. And they needed medicine and treatment.”
“The children did not want to be taken away,” Kay said, into her collar. The medicine did not do them any good, she did not say.
“That is a very common thing, all over the world. Father was sent away too, you know that. In England, it is the privileged classes that are sent away.”
Didn’t do him any good either, Kay thought. Once, when he had drunk more port wine than Thea liked him to, he told Mr. Maitland a story about when he was fag (which meant a kind of servant that the younger boys were to sixth form boys) to a much bigger boy who tormented him. A tic fluttering at the edge of his eye crease. “That fellow is now in Parliament. Hartlingford!” He spat into the stove, not looking like himself at all. Kay did not know whether Hartlingford was the name of the boy or the name of his seat in Parliament. Sometimes the name came to her in the middle of the night, with blotches around it.
Thea watched Kay carefully, the first days out of Tonga, in case she was missing Mr. Brimner too keenly. She was disturbed, clearly—caught up again in useless thoughts of the old days. But she continued to do her work, Pilot on her lap or curled at her feet, covering notebook pages with (blotched, yes) declensions, lists of derivatives and crossed-out, struggled-through translations. In Shanghai or Hong Kong, Thea had promised Mr. Brimner she would find a Greek-English dictionary, the smallest Liddell & Scott, or the next one up. He had entrusted her secretly with a five-pound note for the purchase, saying, “The Great Scott is beyond my purse, but the Middle Liddell, or even the Little Liddell, will do perfectly well.” It was kind of him to think of it.
They all missed him, in fact. Francis was busy on deck most of the day and tired by eventide; even at supper, he and Mr. Wright made very little conversation without Mr. Brimner’s gentle prompting. Kay was silent by nature, and Thea was tired. She ought not to be! This life, with the luxury of Liu Jiacheng’s quiet service, was practically a rest-cure compared with the unending physical labour at the school, with Miss Ramsay too patrician to ever lift a pinky in the kitchen or, God forbid, the barn, so that a good deal of the rough work fell to Thea.
A lassitude had settled over them with Mr. Brimner’s departure, that was all. In the mornings they still sat at the deck table under the awning, but Kay (bent over her papers, working alone in a concentrated, crabbed way that reminded one of Father) had blue shadows beneath her eyes. If that did not mend soon, Thea would insist on a liver dose.
Kay did not give much conscious thought to Mr. Brimner. Except sometimes at night, to wonder what his little hut was like, now that he truly lived there—the way that places become your own and are then entirely different. The ship, for instance, had seemed first like a pretty toy, and then a kind of factory almost; as she came to know its nooks and crannies and to live her life here, it expanded to become the world.
The two rooms of Mr. Brimner’s house would have expanded and filled with his presence by now. He would have more books on his table, but perhaps he’d still keep the very best wrapped in oilcloth against furring from the damp salt air. He would be sitting in his one chair, but he might have carried it out onto the little tamped space at the back, to look out over the ocean and watch
the sun setting, as they had always used to do on board the Morning Light. And then he would fold up his book and knock his pipe against the door frame, and wash the cups in his kitchen before the village woman came to cook. He had never liked to leave a mess for Lena Hubbard or for Jiacheng, and always made Kay help to set the room to rights at the end of their working time. She would continue that orderliness, in his honour.
On deck in the morning heat she thought of him too, when Jacky Judge sped by with a wink, and Mr. Brimner was not there to call some responding jest after him; when Arthur Wetmore came to sit by her for a moment, because she seemed lonely. Not that she could ever be lonely, having grown up in Blade Lake—she was used to her own company for long hours and days; used to people who did not talk to you (Father) or disdained speech (Miss Ramsay) or were too busy to talk, like Thea, or not allowed, like all the rest of them.
Arthur called her to the side, where he stood peering down. “Look, look,” he said, and she looked where his finger pointed, to the black sleekness rising from the wave.
She could never have her fill, however many. A group of humpbacks this time, four or five of them. The ship flew on above, the whales flew on below—they would collide! Except the whales easily shifted their trajectory and played tag away from the moving shadow of the ship. But the smallest of them came alongside, curious, looking up from the depths, and Kay saw it was only a baby, the size of a dolphin.
Arthur said, “Aww, reminds me of my baby sister Kitty,” and Kay laughed out loud, because she had met that little Kitty and she did have a very long, flat face and a curious eye.
You could not be lonely in a ship, surrounded all the time by thirty others—and in the ocean, living and breathing, the beautiful, responsive creatures of the deep.
The Difference Page 15
