Then they were off, away from bustling, feverish cities, headed for the open seas again, provisioned for the next long leg, round the Horn and up the right side of the Americas to New York. That evening, Thea allowed Aren and Kay up on deck for an airing. The steamer Egremont Castle passed close by and the men on board waved to them where they lay bundled up in wicker chairs at the rail.
Kay felt sorry for the passengers swarming the deck, who had to travel by steam instead of in the lovely rush of air. She felt a quickening in her midsection, the giddy sense of going forward. A relief to feel it, after all this tedious sickness.
Thea nursed Kay carefully, but was privately more afraid for Aaron. Or Aren, as he and Kay had decided the name should be spelt; Thea saw no point in arguing with them in this fever. Her experience with consumption in Blade Lake had left scars, not on her lungs (she was luckier than poor Mr. Maitland, who died that last hard winter with the children) but on her spirit. She searched for signs of infection in both, although Kay had proved resilient in the old days, but could come to no conclusion. The coughing, which had been hard to bear, tapered off, and when the fever abated, a little colour came back into Aren’s cheeks, but he was listless.
Even Francis was affected by the change in him, saying quietly to Thea after looking in on him one evening, “Such a bright spark just last week! Terrible to see what it’s done to the poor sprogget.”
Aren was flagged out by this fever; but there was no blood in the sputum, and he did not complain of pain. He had enough fluency in English to let her know where it hurt, and he did not hold his chest or show weakness that Thea could see. She relaxed her vigilance, and rather than fearing the worst, as the complaint worked its way through the men below decks, blamed one sailor or another for bringing back a hacking cold from shore leave.
Seeing the children still flat-spirited, Thea decreed a bath day to revive them. Instead of setting up the hip bath in the saloon, she asked Jiacheng and Mr. Best to prepare a barrel bath on deck for Kay to hop into. A good soaking would revive her interior mood as well as cleansing her exterior. Riding the last wake of illness, Kay was ornery, but Thea persisted, and she did at last consent to strip down to her shift and climb into the barrel.
Mr. Best had set the barrel close to the railing, for ease of emptying later, and had hung a jib sail at both sides of the barrel for a modesty drape.
Shucking off her blouse and skirt, Kay stepped up onto the little stool Jiacheng had thoughtfully brought up from the galley, and into the barrel. She shrieked a little, saying too cold! but after a moment allowed it to be refreshing. Relaxing, she turned this way and that so her shift ballooned in the water and made pleasing patterns. Enjoying the coolness, she let Thea scrub her back and give her hair a good wash, with more water from a jug to rinse it. Wanting vinegar for the last rinse, Thea went to the companionway to call down to Jiacheng.
She looked back to see Kay standing with eyes closed, dripping but content, dreamy in the pleasure of coolness, and close by, up on the railing, Aren. What did he hold—
He was inching along the rail, one hand above in the ropes to steady himself and one arm and hand wrapped around a wriggling little— Oh dear. He had one of the piglets.
He had almost reached her now…Kay was turning, she would see. But her eyes were closed. Ought she to have some warning?
Francis, behind Thea with his Brownie camera, put his hand gently across her mouth in case she might call out. She could feel him behind her, shaking with silent laughter as Aren crept along, somehow keeping the piglet quiet, until ploop! into the barrel went the pig.
The squealing was enough to raise the dead from the bottom of the sea.
Kay lifted off, a shrieking seabird rising from the wave, three-quarters out of the bath before the piglet touched bottom and scrabbled its way back up.
And all the time Francis was clicking and forwarding the film, as well as he could for guffawing. Men were such children!
The sailors watching from behind the jib screen laughed—Arthur Wetmore, Jacky Judge and Mr. Best, even sober Mr. Wright—and Francis louder than anyone, and Thea could not help but join them, hoping Kay would not take one of her fits of umbrage.
Now she was up on the barrel’s edge and out of it, still shouting, shift plastered around her—crying “What? What?” like a banshee, and now she turned to stare into the barrel, where Aren was laughing so much he almost fell overboard, and Jiacheng leapt in to haul the piglet back out of the water before it drowned.
“You!” Kay shouted at Aren. “You! What?”—as if she had lost the gift of language.
“You!” he cried back. “You you you you! You, pig, surprise! I surprise you!”
Thea rushed forward with a towel to put round her, and held her tight, still laughing, until Kay could laugh too, and put out a hand to tickle the poor little pig, the replacement for Mr. Dennis.
“I’ll make sausage out of you,” Kay swore, but in good humour again she lunged to grab Aren’s ankle and dump him into the barrel in turn. Then they were all wet, and the barrel fell over, of course, and everyone on deck got well splashed, even Francis, before Jiacheng caught the pig and carried it off to restore it to its siblings in the peaceful pen.
A little slice of piglet hoof made a moon-shaped scar on Kay’s arm. After it healed over, she liked the pirate look of it.
14
A Passenger
In early April, the Morning Light berthed again in Suva for a couple of days, to take on water and supplies and to give the men a last shore leave before the long leg round the Horn. Suva was a safe place to do that, Francis said, being small enough that none of the men could lose themselves. Jacky Judge and Arthur Wetmore got roaring drunk, and rolled home at three in the morning to wake first the watch and then the rest of the ship with their singing and roistering, but that was nothing to write home about.
Next day, looking pale about the gills and emitting occasional muted groans, they holystoned the deck near where Kay and Aren sat at their books. Arthur told Kay earnestly that he’d never do such a thing again in his life, or if he did, it would be in better company than Jacky and at a better establishment, where the vile drink would not poison a man. Then Thea came up to work with Aren, and Arthur evaporated back into silent swabbing. Jacky, less badly off, twinked Kay’s boot toe as he swabbed by and gave her a sorry kind of grin.
Aren had progressed from the baby school of learning his letters to writing words and simple sentences, and wanted to do more, but they’d found no primary-school books for him in Singapore, so Thea carried on in her own way, drawing pictures for him of anything he asked for, and then setting him to write the name of it below: a coconut palm, a bat, a church, the Morning Light. Then he would write a story describing the thing, and the stories were sometimes very amusing to Kay for what he had got wrong. “Bird of night with arm wings,” for the bat—in Singapore they had been startled by a sudden exodus of goose-sized bats from a warehouse as they walked by. She shivered, remembering their arm wings. And then shivered again, thinking of the bats in Pangai, flitting in the darkening leaves while she waited for Mr. Brimner outside the Fruelocks’ house. Before they even knew Aren.
He wrote, “What we climb and drink and eat, it is very tall,” for the coconut, and for the church, “The house of the god who saves us.” Thea corrected him to use G for the one true God, and he looked at her sideways.
Kay thought he might be wondering what made one god God and all the others gods but did not have the vocabulary yet to ask that. She was just as glad, preferring not to listen to Thea, as she had to Father, on the innate superiority of Christianity over all other religions.
“What is this?” Thea said, pointing to scribbles on the side of Aren’s work paper.
“Jiacheng teaches me Chinese,” Aren said. “I teach him ABC, he teaches some Chinese letters me. I teach Kay,” he offered, in case Thea might be angry wi
th him.
Kay looked over. “What is this one?” A funny little square, with a peak and a squiggle.
“House, pig inside, see? It is home.”
She laughed. “Or bathtub!”
Francis had had his photographs developed in Suva. Kay did not like the way her hair looked streaming wet, but even she could see the joke now—her leaping up out of the barrel open-mouthed, like a whale breaching, and the poor piglet scrambling his sharp hooves at the other edge, desperate to get away.
Aren put his hand over the pig-house letter. “No more joke.”
Kay patted his arm lightly, to show that she forgave him. “It was funny.”
She remembered the exhaustion of listening to another language, watching the rows of children at the school suffering the sharp barrage of English from Miss Ramsay. Nowhere for the ear to rest, nothing to hook onto. She remembered their bird voices, their dusty-dirty hands moving as they spoke, and Thea coming and calling the class back to order, the voices halting, reciting un-English English in rote and rhythmical voices, reeling off a long line of poetry about an incomprehensible English landscape. Men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever…She remembered being glad to go into the study with Father because it was silent.
Aren did not seem to feel that weariness; it was a game to him, one he was good at. The way she was good at Greek and Latin, at solving that puzzle.
Thea was still examining the Chinese characters ranging down the side of the page.
“Jia,” Aren said, pointing to home. “One-th part of Jia-cheng, his name.”
“First part. Yes, I see,” Thea said. She traced the house, and the pig inside.
* * *
—
It being Easter, they went ashore on Sunday to go to the cathedral in Suva, and there they found a great surprise: Mr. Brimner, assisting with the service.
As the clergy processed in, Kay saw him, and the surprise was so great that she jumped up, and Thea had to pull on her elbow to make her sit again. She could not even whisper to Aren what the great thing was, but spent the rest of the service anxiously jiggling, unable to bear the wait. If it had not been Easter, if Thea had not been sitting right beside her, she might have called to him or run up to greet him, her friend!
At Communion she knelt at the rail, hands held out, the right palm properly above the left, but she could not close her eyes for long. Following after the celebrant, who had the Host, Mr. Brimner came along the rail with the cup. His best chasuble swirled about his knees, the one embroidered by the nuns at Wantage, near Oxford, that his dear friend Prior’s mother had given him for his missionary posting. Birds and vines and holy insects on figured gold damask. Kay looked up and held the edge of the gold cup, gold all around her, and God alive again today, in a sudden veil of joyful piety—and Mr. Brimner smiled down without surprise, because of course he had seen them in the congregation. He spoke the usual blessing without ceasing from smiling at her. She wanted to point to Aren, who knelt on the other side of Thea with his arms crossed for a blessing because he was not yet confirmed, but that would have to wait. She said Amen and took a great gulp of wine by mistake, but did not choke.
After the service, there was tea in the hall. Thea would not be hurried, but Kay managed to thread them a way through the great crowd of every-coloured people to where Mr. Brimner had come out of the sacristy, now in his ordinary grey suit again. Every part of him agreeably ordinary and the same, all these months later: his pale, bony forehead, the slight bulge of his eyes, the comprehending warmth of his whole unselfconscious being.
She took his hand and held it, as the other people were doing with the other priest, but could not think of anything to say.
“Ave, quondam pupil,” he said, speaking for her. “What joyful news to be met with your shining face below me as I came to read the Lesson! Dear Mrs. Grant, a great pleasure—you will be wondering what I am doing here. I have not been passed along to Fiji as a reject, I was only sent by the bishop to be locum tenens, the interim replacement for Canon Crake, who was sent to Auckland for a restorative holiday. My duty ends today, and I will be back with my own people at Ha‘ano by the end of April, if I can get a ship before too long.”
Aren stood beside Thea, one hand grasping the folds of her violet skirt. Mr. Brimner looked down and asked Thea to introduce him to her young friend, and then Francis came with two cups of tea and found them a flimsy table. On her flimsy chair Kay tried to sit still, in an agony of anticipation and frustration.
“Aren, say good morning to Mr. Brimner,” Thea prompted, and Aren did so.
“God bless you,” Mr. Brimner said seriously, setting a hand on his head as the priest had done at Communion, and Aren looked as if he was not certain about any of this.
Francis, going back for more tea, snapped his fingers to Kay to come and help. “We’ll leave Thea to tell the tale of her purchase of this little fellow.”
At that, Mr. Brimner’s eyes snapped up to Francis’s face, as if he checked for a jape or jollity, but he schooled his expression quickly to one of objective interest.
Thea drew Aren into her arm so that he leaned against her, saying, “One could not credit how desperate the people were…” as Francis pulled Kay away.
If only they had known Mr. Brimner was here, she thought, they could have been talking to him all these last four days. It made tears rise behind her eyes to think how she had wasted those days. And the saddest thing of all—they might not have seen him at all, for the Morning Light had been loaded by Friday, only ships never leave on a Friday, especially not on Good Friday. Then Thea had asked to stay for Easter service, but they must definitely leave on the early tide tomorrow.
Francis handed Kay a plate of cake, lifted two more cups and made a channel for them through the crowd like a tugboat in Shanghai harbour.
“Francis,” she said, hurrying to catch him up. “Francis!”
He turned with his head cocked to one side. “Mm?”
She could not remember asking him for anything before. She did not have the courage to ask now. “Never mind,” she said.
His stern, lipless mouth twitched in amusement. “Never mind, yourself.”
When they had settled at the table, and as Mr. Brimner addressed himself to cake, Francis leaned across and said, “Now, Brimner, you’re in need of a passage home, and I have need of a Greek tutor for a few days. Shall we do a trade?”
Mr. Brimner’s mouth was cake-full, but he nodded, beaming without his usual prodigious display of teeth, and behind his handkerchief said that nothing could suit him better, if the Morning Light could let him off at Pangai without divagating too far from their route. Thea said she was very happy too, and Mr. Brimner rose to prepare for second service. He regretted that he could not dine on board that evening, being unavoidably shackled to the bishop for the Easter feast, but would come faithfully at first light with his baggage. “Only a valise, I promise!”
* * *
—
So Mr. Brimner’s stick legs and grey linen coat and battered hat strolled the deck of the Morning Light again, as they ran out to sea on a light breeze, Francis saying that if this kept up, they might make Ha‘ano in four days rather than five. Which made Kay hope that it would not keep up.
Without the slightest ripple, she and Mr. Brimner settled back into their routine, three chairs pulled up to the table now rather than two, with Aren set to copy all the words he knew in a fair hand. Once Thea had sharpened his pencil for him again (he had a way of pressing very hard on the leads that soon wore them to nubs), she went down to turn out Aren’s things and set the upper berth for him in Kay’s cabin, to give Mr. Brimner back his own.
Kay showed him how far she had got in the Odyssey, and turned the leaves of her notebook over and over to try to find some really good translation.
Mr. Brimner saw through her. “Fresh fare is what you need. Anyone
tires of a diet of dark wine and fire-seared lamb. You need some lighter fare. I have with me Lucian’s Vera Historia, his Hellenistic novel, parts of which are often set as excerpts for young scholars. Other parts of it are laughably unsuitable, but you may safely explicate the Voyage to the Moon.”
Kay worked all the afternoon, employing her Middle Liddell with industrious abandon, and before sunset was able to present Mr. Brimner with her translation, which she read out loud for his approval. On the step beside the hammock, Aren crouched to listen; between whiles he pushed the rope to rock Thea gently to and fro where she lay reclining, a little wilted after the long, hot, still day.
“For seven days and as many nights,” Kay read, “we sailed through the air, until we saw a great country like an island, shining and spherical.” She broke off to explain to Thea, who had only come up when the afternoon cooled, “They have gone to the moon, you see?”
Bending again to her paper, she read, “When we reached it and came to anchor, we disembarked. Exploring the countryside, we found it to be inhabited and farmed. That day we saw nothing more, but many more islands appeared nearby when night came on. There was a land below, with cities and rivers and seas and forests and mountains, and we supposed that it was our world.”
She looked up at Mr. Brimner. “So they can see the earth from the moon? I think you could not, or at least it would be very tiny, the way we see the moon from here.”
“You are entirely correct,” he said, and motioned her to carry on.
She read: “It seemed good to us to travel farther, and we met the Horse-Vultures. Their men ride on great vultures, and treat the birds just like horses. Learn their magnitude thus: each wing was larger and thicker than the sail of a great ship.”
Aren found this profoundly funny. He laughed, quietly, as he always did, and so much that he had to rock back and forth. All he could say, when she asked why it was so funny, was, “Horse-wing, arm-wing!” which made her laugh too, from his description of bats. He was such a good rememberer of conversations.
The Difference Page 19
