“Derived from an eclogue of Pope’s,” Julia said, confident in her American education.
“Derived from Virgil,” Kay corrected her, and then wished she had not. But she pushed doggedly on, explaining, because it was quite funny really: “An eclogue of Virgil’s celebrating the expected birth of a longed-for child who was to bring good fortune—but the baby Virgil expected was the child of Marc Antony and Octavia.”
The girls looked at her blankly.
Oh, Mr. Brimner, Mr. Brimner, you have not fitted me for ordinary chat. This interesting footnote to history made Julia and Elsie stop talking to Kay, and she deserved it. Nobody needs to know everything you know, she told herself.
She stood alone, watching New Zealand come into view. Unfolding hills rolling down, down, nudging the sea with their knees. Like the softer parts of Nova Scotia, along the south shore, but with even less barrier between land and sea.
Behind her, Elsie’s pleasant trilling voice took up the thread again and pointed out to Julia, as she wrote her notes, how the sunrise was lighting the tops of the hills with crimson, leaving the hidden parts in darkness “like valleys of mystery or death—look, the glow, creeping down, on and on, until the world is shining!”
She was such a flowery, overflowing person. At first Kay had disliked all that orotundity, but she had come to enjoy it, and would have liked to tell Elsie so. But it was impossible to tell people what one admired in them; or inadvisable, in case one’s enthusiasm put them off.
The inner harbour approached, and then they were in its shade, the bare black outlines of the hills (“crowned,” Elsie said, “with red and gold”), and then the sun came up over the tallest hill and everything was both glowing and ordinary.
Kay went below to find some breakfast.
6
Wellington
A day later, after refuelling at Lyttelton, they sailed into Wellington, on the North Island, the end of their voyage on the Constellation. Mr. Cliffe the screenwriter came up on deck that morning looking radiantly happy. Elsie asked him what had happened to make this change and he said, “Lalla Rookh!”
“Of course!” cried Elsie, and Julia said, “For us, that name will belong to you forever.”
Then it was Kay’s turn not to know things, but Elsie kindly told her, aside, that Lalla Rookh was a terrible junky Oriental-romance poem, very old and stale, that she was better off not knowing. Kay felt forgiven.
The bustle of disembarking took them all unprepared, even though they’d seen the land approaching for a day. The girls rushed down to finish packing, and Kay went after them more slowly, having less to pack. The air was sweet and clean here, and it would be good to get off this boat.
* * *
—
At the poste restante in Wellington, as well as the bank draft Francis had promised, there were letters from Nova Scotia, one for Kay and another for Aren. Thea’s blue-spiked handwriting gave Kay a deep sway of vertigo, from missing her sister, however much she dreaded opening the letter.
Dear Kay, although it pains me to call you “dear” at this moment, for I am very gravely disappointed
There she had crossed out disappointed and written Angry, with a capital A.
Angry with you. With Francis too, believe me, but I will not speak of that.
And with Aren, for agreeing to this very foolish plan, and for leaving his post in Halifax. It took considerable arranging for Francis to find him that berth and it reflects badly on him when Aren drops everything to run to the other end of the earth on a wild goose chase.
It is all so useless! you don’t know what pain you may be letting him in for, or how sad you will cause him to be, perhaps for the rest of his life. I do not know why you can never be persuaded to leave well alone but always must go prying into things and trying to discover the roots of things.
But that is not at all what I want to tell you.
Since you have done this ill-judged thing, you are to keep a close guard over Aren and never leave him, nor abandon him to the good graces of some strangers.
Kay laughed at the irony of that, and again at Thea’s furious, oblivious underlining, which had scratched right through the paper.
If I could come haring after you, I would, but I cannot leave Francis nor Roddy—and then there is Aunt Lydia, who needs sameness and quiet and good nursing.
She won’t get that from Lena Hubbard, Kay thought. But she was glad (wasn’t she?) that she had not told Thea about Lena manhandling the poor old body.
You will remember that I have been writing to Dorothy Fruelock all this time—she is back in the village of Pangai, widowed now; her daughters married one after another, and only Pansy is left to keep her mother company.
I did not mention it before, and have only mentioned it to you now, but before Rev. Fruelock passed on, they spent some intervening years in the Diocese of Papua, serving on Palau and the Sonsorol islands, one of which you will remember is Pulo Anna. She has news of Aren’s people. I have written to ask her to talk to you if you think it wise to see her.
And I do beg you to consider well whether or not it is wise. Aren has a loving family and home in us, and for good or ill we are the only family he truly remembers. We have seen him through sickness and health, and have loved him all this time.
Well, Kay would not argue with Thea about any of that. Good intent—was it enough? Kay did not think so any longer. What news could this be, that Mrs. Fruelock had?
Thea expostulated and condemned and lectured and prayed—even wept, it looked like from the blots on page three—and finally arrived at acceptance of the journey, exhorting Kay to make certain that Aren had suitable clothing and was well supplied with every ointment and remedy for malaria, coughs, fevers, bruising, et cetera. Aren had been given a similar list to supply to Kay, including making sure that she ate her greens and roughage, “for otherwise her system simply ceases to function,” and recommending Jervin’s cod liver oil for such an eventuality.
Kay wrote her sister a careful reply, promising to take every care of Aren and to make certain he knew that they were his real family—which she knew to be both wrong and true. She wrote down all the things she had been thinking as they sailed, until it seemed to her that she could write nothing more. She signed the letter affectionately, knowing it would be many weeks before Thea could read her reasoning, and hoped, in a postscript, that my dearest sister will forgive me, if I cannot agree with your thinking. And then added another, p.p.s. And that you will also forgive me if you cannot agree with mine.
Aren came in to find her in the hotel’s writing room, and handed her a sealed letter to enclose in her packet. “I have promised to keep you regular,” he said. He caught the ink-eradicator bottle she threw at him, and went off whistling.
She did not know whether or not to tell him what Thea had said about Mrs. Fruelock. She would think about that.
* * *
—
They had a week to wait in Wellington for the next steamer, the Tofua, which would take them to Nuku’alofa, then up to Ha‘apai to Pangai, to meet Mr. Brimner. If he had got Kay’s cable and was still alive, which she told herself was not sensible to think about. Doing them one last favour, Captain Hilton had cabled ahead to reserve a cabin on the Tofua for Kay; the returned fare for Aren’s passage from Halifax paid for his. He consented to a cabin, but he handed Kay fifty dollars, his pay for working on the Constellation, and would not take it back. With the bank draft Francis had sent and the money she had left, that would let them find some way onward, Kay felt sure. Although she could not yet imagine what way.
Aren had come out of the ship’s refrigerator rooms in a deeply filthy condition. The first order of business was to get him thoroughly cleaned. The little town of Wellington had proper steam baths; Kay looked him over the first time, and sent him through again.
As they were wa
lking up Cuba Street after Aren’s second time through the baths, they met Elsie and Julia.
Kay saw how surprised they were to find her with a young man, and for a flashing instant also saw, in the angled window of a shop—as if outside her body, as if through Elsie’s eyes—herself and Aren standing together on the grey street, the same height, with the same guarded expression. A compact, nicely made young man with a cap of clean black hair and a calm face, standing with a girl he knew and trusted. Her short, free hair and the quietude she had learned from him made her look like him, like someone who could be trusted.
Strengthened by that, she grinned at the girls, saying, “This is my brother, Aren—Aren, Julia and Elsie sat at my table on the Constellation. Aren worked his passage over in the engine room,” she added, daring those girls to say something wrong.
“Well, Aren!” said Elsie. “Pleased to meet you!”
“Captain Bathurst mentioned your brother on the very first day,” Julia said, smiling. “But I instantly forgot—how nice to meet you finally,” she said. She put out her hand.
All right, they had done pretty well. We can still be friends, Kay thought.
“Do you plan to stay in New Zealand for some time?” Aren asked, after the hand shaking had been accomplished.
Elsie made a face, and Julia said firmly, “Yes, we do.”
“Because Julia wants a rest from seafaring,” Elsie said, “and I have to file some copy with my paper or I’ll lose the whole reason for coming.”
“And also the payment,” Julia reminded her.
“So we’re here for a month, but then—on to Samoa!”
“We have never been to Samoa,” Aren said. “I envy you.”
“We’re going to Tonga on the Tofua, a week from tomorrow,” Kay said.
“Oh, Tonga! And Fiji too? Our ship—what is it, Julia? the Matua, I think?—stops at both islands, but we won’t stay on. We’re heading for Stevenson’s grave, you know.”
Kay did know, having been told early in the voyage what the end point was, but Aren had never heard. “Why Stevenson?” he asked Elsie.
“Oh—everything! His life, his vision, Treasure Island!”
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for me,” Julia said.
“I learned to read from Treasure Island,” Aren said.
Julia said, “It is a very good primer.” She took Kay’s arm and they all set off to walk together along the broad pounded-dirt sidewalk. “Are you staying at the Royal Oak?” That was the hotel where the Constellation’s cart had deposited passengers after disembarking.
“We must move today,” Kay said. “It is above our budget.”
Elsie clapped her hands and said, “Come with us, then! We’re moving up into the hills this afternoon, to a small inn called the Blue Moon, recommended by a woman at my paper. It’s a quarter the price and all-found, and it looks sweetly pretty, as my aunts would say.”
* * *
—
The landlady looked doubtful about a coloured guest at first, so that Kay wished to smack her face, but with Julia and Elsie’s introduction (and perhaps at a higher rate—Kay could not tell and decided not to ask) they were able to get lodging at the Blue Moon. Kay and Aren had two little rooms side by side, each almost filled by platform cots with mosquito netting, like beds in Bali. As soon as he’d dropped his sea-chest in a corner, Aren took himself off into the garden out the glass door that showed a path into the hills, and Kay let him go.
Julia and Elsie were waiting in the shadowy hall when she came out of Aren’s room.
“Mrs. Thorpe was horrible,” Julia said.
“There is a lot of that around,” Kay said. She wondered what Julia had to say about it.
“It’s worse in the States,” Julia said. “But things are going to change.”
“Oh yes?”
Elsie looked at her. “You’re prickly about it, of course. Was your brother adopted, or are you blood relations?”
Kay looked at her. “It does not matter which, but he was adopted.”
Julia said, “It does not matter which.”
And then Kay went to her own room and lay down on the little bed and thought of as little as she could for a while.
* * *
—
While they waited for the Tofua to steam down, they spent their days paddling up the small river near the Blue Moon. Elsie and Julia said it reminded them of England, overhung with willow trees and lined along the banks with wattle fence. The view along the water beneath the willow branches did look like pictures Kay had seen of the joys of punting on the Thames.
Elsie boasted of her skill with little boats, and indeed she did not upset hers. When the flatboat wallowed in a shallow stretch, a couple of small boys came out and helped Aren tow them up the rapids. On the way back, Elsie made them stop for tea (which came with hot buttered scones, as if they really were in England) in a tea house set back from the bank of the river. Most of the people they met in Wellington still called England home; yet most of those had been away from England twenty or thirty years and had no idea of going back. Used to the same sort of thing in Nova Scotia, Kay had no sympathy with this colonial view. She thought the sooner these New Zealanders got over making their country a copy of England, the better. The American girls thought it was awfully quaint.
They saw only a few Maori people. The one or two they passed walking on the roads looked to Kay like people she had known in the West. For a few nights she dreamed of being back at Blade Lake, until in one dream Miss Ramsay chased her and Annie down the upper hallway, where they found Mary—she woke then and would not think of it again nor dream again, although she could not go back to sleep.
After a while she got up and went out the glass door into the garden and walked slowly upward in the very early morning, before dawn was even picking at the edge of the mountains. The mountains loomed over everything here; that too reminded her of Blade Lake, although here they were even closer. Little, big: it was as if the mountains had zoomed in closer while she was sleeping, and had got into her dreams that way.
Aren stayed at the hotel peaceably enough, but he would not go for walks with Kay. She could not fault him for this. Here, he would not be taken for a Maori, or even for a Tongan, but for a Bornean or a Fijian—and decent clothing might not be enough to keep him from trouble.
She wished the boat would hurry up.
One afternoon, Elsie came in from a solitary row in the boat with a sad bruise on her cheek, telling a miserable story: “I’d moored at a bridge to walk up on the bank and have my tea, and just as I was getting back in to float away again, something hard hit me on the side of the head. It hurt, and I looked down—and there was a large stone in the bottom of the boat!”
Aren was angry. He wanted to go back to the bridge and find out who had hurt her, but Elsie would not let him go; she would not even tell him which branch of the little river she had been on.
“I was angry too, at first, and frightened,” she admitted. “But true pilgrims are often stoned in foreign lands.”
It was such a strange thing to have happened. Kay worried that it was because Elsie had been seen being friendly with Aren.
The day after the stone-throwing incident, the American girls decided to take the train to Auckland, planning to meet the Matua there instead. Elsie’s desire to reach the gravestone of Robert Louis Stevenson baffled Kay, however much one might enjoy Treasure Island. In a rush of affectionate embraces, both promised to write to Kay and visit “when she was back at home” whenever that vague time and wherever that place might be.
She stood on the hotel steps watching them climb into the pony trap, thinking, Goodbye, then, who cares about you. But when their luggage was all loaded in and they turned to wave, she ran down the steps and kissed each one in turn, calling, Goodbye, goodbye! as the trap sped away.
Things were more peaceful
after they left; she did not miss them after all. But she was surprised to hear herself saying things in their voices, or rising from a chair the way Julia did. She was a copycat, with no instinct for womanhood of her own.
Aren said they were good, kind girls she would do well to emulate, and would not listen when she told him how silly they often were. He wrote a long letter to Roddy with illustrations, including one of Elsie’s boat with a great hole in it from the stone, with indignant imprecations at the stone thrower, so that Kay wondered if he might have liked Elsie, and was glad he was too young for her—because how might that have gone, between them?
Finally, the morning came for their own departure. Kay woke at dawn and went for a long walk in the pretty valley, and then sat on at the breakfast table among the eggshells, smoking a thin cigarette as she had learned to do from Julia. Her suitcase and the blue valise stood in the hall waiting for the cart.
At last she heard the wheels on the driveway, and Aren came with his sea-chest, and they rode down to the docks as the Tofua steamed up the bay.
* * *
—
The Tofua had a master rather than a captain. It did not matter, though, because passengers had no reason to speak to the officers of that ship; it being a dedicated passenger ship, they were kept quite separate. Aren and Kay became acquainted with several of the men, though, because one of their old friends was on board, Jimmy Giles from Christchurch, New Zealand, who had joined the Morning Light many years ago as a boy, after Arthur Wetmore was lost, and was now second engineer on the Tofua.
In his off-hours they had a good visit with him, in his preferred spot in the saloon bar, right at the rear of the ship on the top deck. The Constellation had had no such amenities. As they talked about Aren’s work on the refrigerators, Jimmy invited them both down to the engine room to have a look around.
The Difference Page 32
