“I am sorry for him, and for you.” Kindly giving her time to stop crying, Mr. Brimner said, “In his honour, all unknowing, I went out through the forest to Piha beach yesterday. It is still very beautiful…”
Then he said, to Aren, “But why are you here? Kay’s cable gave only the bare fact that you were coming.”
Kay looked at Aren, but he said nothing. “Well, we are set for Nuku‘alofa first, perhaps looking to charter a boat from there, or from Fiji, or at least— Oh, it is so frustrating not to know, Aren! I wish you would not keep putting off…”
There was a little silence.
Steadfastly not looking at her, Aren told Mr. Brimner, “Kay decided I should go home. To Pulo Anna,” he added, to explain what home might mean. He put the last sandwich in his mouth.
That gave her a shock, hearing it stated straight out. Had he not wanted to come?
After a moment, Mr. Brimner asked it out loud. “Did you need persuading?”
“It was a good idea,” Aren said. He looked over their heads at the hotel wall beyond. “But I did not think of it.”
“Had something happened that made you wish to leave Nova Scotia?”
“I was not being a good citizen,” Aren said. He pushed his chair back and said, “I will go for a walk, I think, and stretch my legs farther than the ship allows. I’ll meet you back there at four, Kay.”
Kay and Mr. Brimner sat in silence after he left, and Kay struggled with a bloom of shame. Consciousness of having managed things, and people, swept through her. Some people required that direction, but never Aren. When people around you were quiet and accepting, you had to be doubly, trebly careful not to impinge on their independence.
Mr. Brimner took up his satchel from beside his chair. “Let me show you something,” he said.
He pulled out a padded manila envelope, and from it eased a dark-blue box sleeve. He looked at it briefly, fondly, saying, “Please note, a most elegant quarter-morocco solander box…” From that, at last, he pulled out a book with a grey cover and blue leather along the narrow spine. He passed it across the table to her.
The cover read, Poems of Charles Leland Prior · now first published · edited with notes by Rev. Henry Brimner
“You have finished it!”
“It is finished.”
A nonsensical thing struck her first: she had not known that Mr. Brimner’s name was Henry. She opened the stiff cover and admired the water-marbled end papers and the thick cream pages, and turned one or two to see the poems, set out on the page (she caught herself thinking) like in a real book.
“It is quite beautiful,” she said.
“I think so.”
“You have done justice to your friend.”
Mr. Brimner’s smile widened again, amplifying beautifully into an accepting, grateful, acknowledging beam.
The hotel clock struck, and looking up, Kay saw there was only half an hour till the Tofua left again. She handed the book back and pointed to the clock. “I am afraid we must be back at the ship soon. And you must need to return to your—” Not parish, precisely, because there was no church? “To your home.”
He smiled at her, the unfolding, understanding benediction she remembered very well. “It is my home. I would like you to see Ha‘ano again, because I know it better. But just now I will go with you and Aren, I think. It strikes me that you may need some companionship.”
“Oh.”
Her relief and gratitude was so great that Kay could not say anything more.
Then as was only practical, and not managing, she said, “Well, you must go and get your things, for the Tofua leaves at four.”
Mr. Brimner clapped his hands on his jacket and his small satchel. “All that is mine I carry with me, like Cicero’s Bias: omnia mecum porto mea. And do you know, Seneca tells exactly the same tale of Stilpon, also running from the destruction of his city, but arranges it slightly differently, which is a lesson to all us translators: Omnia mea mecum sunt…”
“All my things are with me,” Kay said. “I think that is better, and cleaner, but it may not have as nice a rhythm.”
Talking in this enjoyable way, they progressed along the pier until they came to Aren, waiting in the shadow of a baggage shed. He put an arm around Kay’s shoulder and she hugged his waist, and they were of one mind again.
Going up the gangplank, Mr. Brimner said, “I must see the purser. If there are no cabins left, I shall travel as a deck passenger. Ten years have made me a Tongan, you’ll find.”
Aren said, with a friendly air, “There is an empty bunk in my cabin. I would be honoured to have your company, if that suits you.”
Kay loved his calm courtesy, matching Mr. Brimner’s. After all, those two did not know each other as well as she knew each of them.
They found a place at the rail to look down on the city once more and the crowded quay. A momentary pause, one last shuffling and calling farewell of visitors and hangers-on, and then the engine note changed, the gangplank came up and the ropes went slithering through watery sky, and they were steaming again out of Auckland harbour.
They parted, Aren taking Mr. Brimner to the purser’s cubbyhole to arrange things, and Kay saying she would meet them on B deck before dinner.
* * *
—
It was useful to have a friend in the crew. Jimmy Giles had a word with the purser, and the purser had a word with the steward, and the upshot was that the cabin arrangement was fixed up easily; when they went in to dinner, Kay found that they had been moved to a table for six. The Misses Pike were there before them. The sixth chair had a name holder but no name; Jimmy stopped by and said he’d take his supper with them if he had time, tomorrow night.
Mr. Brimner came to dinner late, explaining as he slid his chair in that he had been caught up in a religious conversation from which it was difficult to extricate himself. “We have on board the Roman Catholic bishop of Cape Town—perhaps you have seen his entourage on the promenade deck?”
Kay laughed and shook her head.
“He keeps to the shade, I believe. He travels with several priests, mostly good fellows. Their presence gives us, according to sea superstition, promise of a good passage. It is a curious fact that, like Jonah, Anglican clergy are generally credited with bringing bad weather.”
Kay introduced Mr. Brimner to the Misses Pike. They had brightened at his approach, being quite accustomed to clergymen at table, and clearly expecting him to be a less uncomfortable companion than either Kay or Aren.
Which he was, since he gave them his unassuming and friendly smile and asked after their selves, their souls and families, each in turn, keeping himself to himself in a quiet way. They had not seen even a photograph of the school to which they were bound; Mr. Brimner, who had visited it while doing a locum in Suva ten years before, was able to assure them that it was well run and well funded, and that the students were (or at least had been ten years ago) delightful. Various teachers would have changed, more than likely, because time, like an ever-rolling stream, et cetera, but he had heard very good reports of its continued stability and success. The Misses Pike breathed a double sigh of relief and asked if Mr. Brimner would care to play a rubber of bridge, and since all the tables were being turned to that purpose, it was difficult to refuse. He winked at Kay and said that he and Kay would engage to take their money if they insisted.
He shuffled and cut the cards like a professional, and Aren pulled a hard chair over to his elbow, ready to enjoy the show. The first hand went quickly, because between them Mr. Brimner and Kay had all the trumps, so that Kay wondered if he had stacked the deck. He was a surprising person in many ways.
“And the last four hearts are ours—hard lines, Miss Pike! I call that too bad, don’t you?”
Miss Pike the younger pushed out her lips. “I did not have a single decent card.”
“Nor I,
not one,” said Miss Pike the elder.
“Are you going to deal?” Miss Vera demanded.
“I deal them like this, since I’m left-handed,” Miss Pauline said, placing each card separately onto one of four piles.
At the end of a century, she pushed the piles around the table, picked up her own packet and began to assemble them painstakingly into a fan. “Sorry to be so slow, but I really must put them in the proper order, so I can see what I’ve got…”
Another century went by as she took, placed, took, placed, her cards, the end of the fan growing. Her broad face glowed above the cards, the hundredth of the Hundred Faces fan.
At last Kay prompted, “Miss Pike?”
“Oh! It’s me…Well, let me see, one spade.”
Mr. Brimner passed.
Miss Vera said, “Now, don’t scream, Pauline—seven spades.”
Her sister screamed.
The worst of it was that since Miss Pauline had first bid spades, she was the one to play the hand, and was forever asking, “Is it dummy or me to lead?”
Patiently, Mr. Brimner would tell her, “You’re on the table, Miss Pike.”
“Oh, dear. Well, how about—” Then she would rootle in her hand, reorganizing the cards, snick, snick, snick, and finally lay a card. Saying this would drive her mad, Vera left to find more candied nuts, but Aren stayed on, watching quizzically as Miss Pike laid out every spade, one by one, to take a grand slam, which Vera returned in time to witness.
At the end of an hour, Mr. Brimner tallied the points and found—without giving exact scores, but how terribly sad—that he and Kay had only just failed to win the rubber, and therefore owed their opponents, “penny a point, let me see: forty cents.” They would have their revenge another night, he said, pulling the coins from his pocket.
The loss gave them licence to get up gracefully from the table.
“I have defrauded the poor,” Mr. Brimner said as they made their way out, “since that would have gone into the collection box.”
“But your sanity is of more value to your people in the long run,” Kay said. “I will add forty cents to the next collection box I see, to make up for the deception.”
Collecting Aren from the bar corner where he had retreated to talk to Jimmy Giles, they made their way out onto the shelter deck.
The night air was soft and fragrant, as if nearby islands sent out a faint scent. Kay felt transported in an alchemical way back to the deck of the Morning Light. If Thea and Francis came walking along, it would be perfect, she thought. And Roddy could come too. She cupped one hand from the breeze to light a cigarette.
“Will you be promoted to Nuku‘alofa one day?” Kay hoped it was not painful to ask.
“Ha‘ano is my place for now,” he said. “But the bishop is leaving us, and I may do better with the next. If not, I am content to stay with my—with the people who have been kind to me. My Tongan family. I might even refuse to be lifted up to Nuku‘alofan heights.”
Aren clasped his arm, condoling and congratulating at once.
They leaned comfortably against the railing in the silky dark while Mr. Brimner talked about his island, and the people there; adding in explanation a brief synopsis of his life before Ha‘ano, which Kay had never heard before—she had never thought to ask, in the old days on the Morning Light. His parents’ early deaths, his scholarship, his time at Cambridge reading classics, his decision to study for the priesthood at Oxford: all those led to the circumstances of his friendship with Prior. Then a curacy near Prior’s parish, and the increasing relationship with Prior’s mother, a woman he came to admire and respect, he said, almost as much as he did his friend. And her request that he be the one to edit Prior’s work.
“It was all due to poor Prior dying so suddenly. He was well, if tired from overwork, and then he was a little poorly—and the next day he died, to the great dismay of all his friends and of course the devastation of his mother. I did not have time to tell him how deeply I respected his work—none of us did! And he had no time to send the poems out into the wider world, although he meant to do so. The habit of perfection made it difficult for him to relinquish his work.”
“Why are the poems so good?” Aren asked.
Mr. Brimner leaned farther forward on the rail, outward, as if the answer was at some other shore. “He— Well! You may read my introduction for a longer answer. They are unusual, even difficult. Ahead of his time. He illuminates a different landscape, an inward, introspective view—but I find odd points of reference to this world, our world here:
God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales,
Complete thy creature dear O where it fails,
Being mighty a master, being a father and fond.
“The first few times of reading that, in Prior’s black-blotched hand, I confess I thought he was referring to some sea creature swaying kindly fish scales in the deeps—considerate scales.” He laughed a little. “I struggled to understand—you will already have realized that he is speaking of God’s thumb cheating the scales of justice in our favour.”
Being a father and fond—Kay liked that vision of God.
“And yet,” Mr. Brimner said, “it is a relief not to be expecting the next black-bordered letter, the next set of notes on my edits. I loved them both, mother and son, but they are fixed in time, caught in the week before Prior’s illness. My own vision, my ordinary life, has”—he waved an arm around him, at the ship and the sky and the ocean—“well, has transubstantiated, if that is not blasphemy. Only the appearance of me remains.”
Kay said, “Remember Arion the singer and the dolphin who carried him safely to Corinth? Reading Plutarch at last, I found this, that you told us once: To the dolphin alone, beyond all other, nature has granted what the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage… You gave that to Prior—friendship for no advantage.”
Aren leaned backwards on the rail, tilting his head to look at the starry sky. “Are you still very sad about him?” he asked.
Mr. Brimner looked surprised. “Did I seem so sad, in those olden days?”
“Well, underneath,” Kay said.
“I’m sorry to have burdened you with that. I was only conscious of responsibility. Since he had died and I was still alive.”
“You must show Aren your book! It has a half-quarto morocco cover in blue, Aren.”
“Quarter-morocco,” murmured Mr. Brimner.
Aren said, “May I only look from a distance, or is it available for actual reading?”
Waving grandly with his pipe, Mr. Brimner said it required to be read, by both of them, and he would be honoured to give them each a copy when his box arrived, when there were proper books and not just grey-cardboard pamphlets, which he trusted would be soon.
“We have already received a first review,” he added. “From the critic Theodore Maynard. Allow me to quote: A shy mid-Victorian priest has proven more modern than the most freakish modern would dare to be…the poems are the last word in technical development.”
He beamed at them again, the pleasure of having squired his friend’s work into the world almost too great for one face to contain.
Then the drinks cart went rolling by and they followed it into the saloon bar for a nightcap, which Mr. Brimner said was a toast to Prior and, besides, a shipboard habit that none of them would indulge in real life.
* * *
—
Returning to her cabin late and slightly tipsy, Kay found that the steward had left a letter from the poste restante bag in Auckland. From Thea, of course, a postscript to her first letter, sent after the first fire of her shock and unhappiness had burned down.
I did not trouble you with this at the time, because you were only a child, but it weighs heavily on my mind now. When you were both so ill, after Shanghai en route for Manila, you know, one night I went to Aren’s cabin to check
his fever, and I found him standing on his bunk looking out the port.
“When do they come?” he asked me. I asked who he meant. He stared at me, too fevered to make sense. “They come to get me,” he said. “When will they come? I must go now.”
I sat with him, but he did not want to be comforted, he only wanted to stand at the port and try to see. Francis came to find me, and he carried the little fellow up on deck to be able to see better in the air—I do not know what he told him, but it comforted Aren enough that he could sleep. I thought at the time he was delirious and perhaps referring to angels. That was what I told myself. Now I know, can admit, that he meant his parents, of course.
Of course he did. Kay turned the page—Thea’s handwriting, usually so smooth and controlled, was hard to read here.
He did not yet know the word for mother—there had been no reason to teach him that word yet. I had not intentionally left it out of our lessons, but I was never, could never be his mother, and so I did not pretend to be. He only knew “Aunt” from that book you loved so much in Corcovado, and it was you he knew as his Aunt. I still do not know what relation he thought I bore him then, but I hope that it had in it some kindness at least, and care for him.
This was a strange understanding for Thea to come to now. Kay felt sorry for her.
I was not his mother, but he was my son, and so he still is, as much as Roddy is. Last night Roddy had a fever and sat up straight in bed, asking, “When will they come back?” and my heart was crushed in my chest. He misses you, of course he does, because you are his own family, and I hope that you both will come back as soon as you are able.
Kay wrote back to Thea quickly, meaning to send it from Nuku‘alofa,
You became Aren’s mother, as you were my mother. As you are Roddy’s loving mother. I know you meant it only for good. It is not your fault that it was not right,
The Difference Page 34
