Or did not wish to look at what they had done.
Or, Kay quickly told herself, she had looked squarely at it, and knew it could not be remedied, and that the only help for Aren was to bring him up as well as she could.
“We went back to the islands, not long before Eric died,” said Mrs. Fruelock. “There was no one there at all. On Pulo Anna there are graves, great stone slabs in a glade of rhododendrons. It might be possible to find someone among the various islands who knows whose graves they are.”
She fell silent then. This was the only fragment she could offer.
Mrs. Fruelock did not seem to be in distress—at least, not that Kay could see—but Pansy poured a glass of water for her and crouched by her feet, watching her mother. Perhaps she had been dreading this visit.
Aren stood up from his chair. “I do not know what to think of this,” he said.
He took a step, as if he would walk down the garden, but checked himself and stood motionless. Kay moved then, and went to him, but was afraid to put her arm around him in case he shook her off. She stood beside him, waiting for him to think. Above them in the lacy trees, bats flitted like thoughts you could not quite remember.
Mr. Brimner picked up his hat and said, “I think we must go now. John Giles will be waiting at the jetty.”
Aren moved then, and they followed him across the flags and went back through into the house.
As they went, Mrs. Fruelock put a trembling hand on Kay’s arm. For the first time, she looked older. “I know this must be a sad disappointment to him,” she said quietly. “But I look at it as a blessing, not only that he was reared in a Christian home but that he was saved from flood and famine. I hope he may come to see it that way.”
Kay bit her tongue, until a little gush of blood welled into her mouth. She shook or nodded her head, she hardly knew which, and went.
* * *
—
Pansy helped them gather their things. She was the kindest, most companionable girl—she rounded up Dash and bundled him into the basket with a steak bone to chew on, and she found their other things without fuss, and stayed in the doorway waving until they turned the corner to the harbour.
Kay and Aren and Mr. Brimner walked down to the jetty in silence. John Giles’s boat was moored there, rocking in the low afternoon light, ready to take them to the ghost island, Pulo Anna.
Kay tried to still the frantic beating of her heart, the panic of guilt and grief that had seized her. She had been a child—she would not usurp the act of taking Aren—but now she could not bear even to have witnessed it. What had anything they had done added to his life?
She did not know. Feeling suddenly very unsettled, she turned away and was vilely sick into a ditch. Aren halted, and Mr. Brimner pulled out a handkerchief. After the heaving stopped, she straightened herself, saying, “I’m sorry—do carry on, I will be right there.”
She waited a moment to see if there was more to come, and then stumbled down the path to the pier. There was the little boat making ready to set out. But they would stop soon, at Ha‘ano, because John Giles’s wife was going to stay with her sister there. Clutching at that ordinary detail, Kay went up the little gangplank and onto the boat in a strange, unmoored state, wobbling as the deck wobbled with her added weight.
The boat seemed small and makeshift after their long journey by steamer, but they stowed their things away in two tiny slanted forward cabins with bunks, where everything was clean as a whistle, and then went back up on deck for the short sail to Ha‘ano. Dash slumped at her feet with his bone.
As they were making ready, Pansy came hurrying down the slope toward the pier, calling out to them. She held out a folded paper, an envelope. “Mother forgot to give this to Miss Ward,” she called over.
Aren stretched to take it from her.
“A letter for Miss Ward, for Kay. It came to us yesterday. In the worry, she forgot it.”
Aren handed the envelope to Kay. She turned it over in her hands, but as the boat swung, the writing did not stay still. She could not make it out, and could not force her eyes to make the effort. She put it in her pocket. “Thank her for me,” she called back to Pansy, “and thank you for catching us.”
Pansy stood waving as John Giles untied the ropes and went to the tiller.
Aren waved back, setting one hip on the rail, and rode easily as the boat swayed away from the pier. Then he leaned over to Kay, looking into her eyes to see if she was all right, and recited from their old book: “How hard the wind blows! and how the little boats rock to and fro! It must be sad for those poor men who have to earn their bread on the sea—I hope they will bring home a good net full of fish…”
So at least he did not hate her. The boat did look like the one the nursery fishermen had: two short masts, a lugger-style sloop.
John Giles’s wife, Lotoua, came up from below, where she had been organizing stores in the lazaret cupboard. Her beaming face reminded Kay of the young dancer shining with oil from long ago. Lotoua knew Mr. Brimner well, of course; they exchanged news and jokes. She was happy to meet Aren and tell him everything she knew or had heard about Micronesia, and with her laughing chatter, the boat became a little party.
While the others talked, Kay subsided onto the boards and put her head in her hands.
She hoped to be unnoticed, but Mr. Brimner came over to commiserate with her. “I have never been able to reconcile to the Tongan diet myself. A chicken, well boiled, is usually acceptable, but those are few on Ha‘ano, kept for feast days. Fish, fish stew, those I can manage. Taro is impossible. I have wished not to eat at all sometimes.”
He was very thin—she had not noticed before how thin he was. Was he ill too?
It was kind of him to comfort her, but, shivering by the side rail in a hazy blue confusion, all she could think of was what she had done by talking Aren into leaving Nova Scotia—away from Thea, from all of them, Merissa, everyone, everything he’d known for most of his conscious life—in order to stick him back here in the sand as if he was a doll. And all this time there had been no one for him to go home to.
10
Ha‘ano
Away from land, the water was very still as the afternoon blended down into evening. A breeze barely filled her sails, but the little sloop was light and slippy on the ’Auhangamea current.
Kay drifted in and out of a cloud. It was late to be setting out, but Ha‘ano was only a short sail along the coast—hardly even separated from Ha‘apai. John Giles said he’d like to stop at the village of Ha‘ano for the night, to have a visit with his wife’s sister before heading out over the long stretch to Papua, and also to find the last crew member, his brother-in-law Fokisi, who was famous for being late, having been born late, and who had missed the boat to Pangai that morning.
Sound came slipping down from the prow, where Aren and Mr. Brimner were talking. Once in a while their voices would make sense. The boat was named the Lata. Kay had seen that on the side as she came on board. No bigger than a racing schooner out of Yarmouth, but the men often went on those boats down to Bar Harbor and even to the Bahamas. It would get them to Pulo Anna.
Waking from a daze, she became aware of something odd. At length she realized it was silence. The air was so still, she had thought they might be dead. But it was only that being under sail again, there was no engine noise.
“Noise is the chief thing I notice on returning to the world,” Mr. Brimner was saying. Hearing him was why she had noticed it was silent.
“The water and the sky all through,” Aren said. She thought he said.
After what seemed like many days and nights, or an hour, they dropped anchor in the little half-moon harbour at Ha‘ano, and somehow Kay got down into the dinghy and out again onto the jetty, carrying Dash with her in his basket. Aren had fed him while they were coming over, so the puppy was sleepy again; she was grateful for that.
* * *
—
She woke in the dark and pulled on her dress, and staggered barefoot down to the scrubby beach, talking to Thea. Thea said “No no no, this is terrible, you are ill, I will book you into a hotel, there is one on the next island,” and Kay said “Oh no I must not, but if you insist, I will have a bath in a white bathtub.”
But it was just a dream, she was having bad dreams again. Thea could not speak to her here or hear her crying on the damp sand. She was alone and always had been.
And then she had to scramble into the bushes as another bout of cramping overtook her poor guts.
The moon was bright, so bright! But no, it was the sun, just rising. When she came out to the sand again, she saw two butterflies tangled in a complicated dance; they were going together, together, together, turning and tumbling in the air in a frenzied dance, mating or perhaps only quarrelling, flying apart and drawn back together.
Nothing was any use. She knew nothing understood nothing nothing made any sense. She made her way back to the bure, and into bed at last in the white cot, and untangled the mosquito netting and lay down—and as soon as she closed her eyes, Mr. Brimner’s friend Mahina came to her, looming kindly over the bed. She put a large, warm hand on Kay’s head, saying with great concern, “But you must hurry and get well! Queen Salote says you must leave if you are ill, no-one may stay on Ha‘ano if they are ill!”
And that was a dream too. But even though she understood, even in the grip of the night terrors, that it was only a dream, Kay resolved to be well. She was soaking wet in her nightdress. But if Queen Salote said she must leave unless she was well, she must be well.
* * *
—
Mr. Brimner and Aren were talking outside her door when she woke again. Aren said he did not think they could go on, with Kay in this fever, and Mr. Brimner said no, I believe you are right. So then Kay did get better.
By focusing her mind on the thing that mattered, which was Aren, she made herself come together into a clump and get up, and she put her dress on again and went out to the stoop where they sat talking in strong daylight.
They turned to look at her, surprised.
“Of course we must go,” she said. “Here is John Giles’s lovely boat all ready, and we do not want to miss the tide. I have had a very good rest and am feeling much better, only very sorry to have put you all out. I hope we can say goodbye to Lotoua, and to Mahina and her son, before we leave?”
She held herself in well. As well as if she was Thea, in fact. They all looked at her to investigate her health, and she passed inspection.
By a great exercise of will, she continued to feign fitness for travel all through the bustle of embarking. That was all right, she could keep doing that until they got to Pulo Anna. And then she could consider what to do next.
11
Onward
Rapt in conversation with Mr. Brimner, Aren sat on the fo’c’sle roof, legs dangling, looking to Kay like his young uncles had looked ten years before, off Pulo Anna. He was a man now. Bright-eyed, amused, alive—and not as spindly as his uncles had been.
The motion was doing her good, doing them all good. Forward, forward, running along the scudding tips of the waves, the pleasure of that enormous breathing in and breathing out that is the movement of ocean.
She really did feel much better. She had been delirious, on Ha‘ano. It was not her old nightmares returning, it was just a fever, and the fever had broken. She had slept for a while in the shade, leaning against the fo’c’sle wall, and she was much better now. But she would stay still for a little.
Rearranging herself on the rolled blanket Fokisi kindly found for her to sit on, she felt a crinkling in her pocket and pulled out the letter that Pansy had run down to hand them at the jetty. It was from Thea, on the thinnest overseas writing paper, the worse for wear from the last few days, but readable.
Dear Kay,
I am sending this to you because I do not know what to say to Aren.
By now you will have seen Dorothy Fruelock and you will know about Pulo Anna—please keep this note by you and give it to Aren if you think it will help him. I do not want to impose it on him if you feel it will not, but I am afraid for him. Please write when you can to let me know where you are.
I write in haste, but send my love, and from Francis & Roddy too.
I am glad you are with him.
A second note, unsealed, was tucked into the thin folds of the first.
I am sorry, Aren. I wanted to save you from hurt, but it was wrong to keep the truth from you. I am so sorry about your people. I cannot be sorry we took you, son of my heart. God bless you always, your loving Thea
Kay pulled the frail paper through her fingers, pressing the folds again, reassembling the little package in its envelope. Above her, Aren and Mr. Brimner were talking about fishing and language, about words that Aren remembered from his childhood. Which were pitifully few, but those few strongly grained, some with funny meanings that caught in the mind. Kay listened, thinking about the letter and wondering whether or when she ought to give it to Aren. She thought it might be better to show him Thea’s earlier letter, Roddy asking when will they come back? She folded Thea’s note small and put it back in her pocket for now.
“Bub,” Aren was saying, remembering another word. “It means—” He made a rough square with his two hands, fingers spread. “Not square, but parallelogram. Like in geometry at school, and it is two things: both the small fish, bright, straight-lined down one edge—”
John Giles said over his shoulder, “That’s a triggerfish, I’ll bet you.”
“And also the stars, constellation, the fish shape in the sky that we, that you, call—that is called the Southern Cross.” He made the shape again. “Small, brightly coloured fish, not very good to eat, I should think, but I don’t remember eating one.”
Mr. Brimner leaned forward, interested. “It seems you recall things connected with fishing, with the work rather than the eating. When we met long ago, you talked of learning how to fish.”
Aren looked out over the water, trying to call memory back. “At night in spring, I went with the men for flying fish. We stood in our canoes with palm torches”—he swept his arm widely—“in a circle, so, when it is dark—only stars, no moon, or the fishing will not work. The men with the nets cannot eat or drink or smoke all day, that smell might warn the fish. The signal comes, and we light the torches from a hidden—” He waited, but the word did not come, so he made a shape with his hands, a small brazier, perhaps. “And then! lights all around, and the fish come to see what is happening.”
Surprised, Kay said, “Like when the whales came to watch the eclipse!”
“It is the same curiosity, I guess!” He took up an imaginary net. “The men sweep down with their nets, and they are full of fish—flying fish, but sometimes also shark and needlefish.” Some spark of memory had started a fire in his mind. He said, “Also for needlefish, we fished with a kite.”
From the tiller, John Giles said, “I’ve seen that kite-fishing!”
“More fish with the big kite, a man out in the canoe,” Aren said. “But I have fished with the boys, using small kites from the land, with the sticky net made from spiderwebs—we cannot eat oil before it or the sticky part goes slick.” As memory came, he wavered in his tenses as he told these things, telling it now as a story, now as a thing that was still happening.
Mr. Brimner had written down the words that Aren recalled, and he read down the list, ending with bub, the constellation and the fish.
She and Aren had come here on the Constellation, Kay thought. And the name of the mission ship that ferried t
he Fruelocks around those islands was the Southern Cross.
She moved her head to stop that ringing resonance, and said, “Someone told me once—Thea, or perhaps it was Father…” She had not thought of that before; she thought she had X’ed out everything he’d told her. “Well, never mind,” she went on. “They told me that in the Cree language the word for seven means ‘enough blankets.’ I’ve lived in the kind of winter that made that word.”
“That must be how we understand any language, by living in it,” Aren said. “I first understood spring by standing in the little spring at the back of the garden on Elm Street, as the ice was melting. That it is both beginning and rising, that it is the season and the water both, life coming up.”
Mr. Brimner said, “Prior’s brother, who is studying in Hamburg, sent me a fascinating study by a German philosopher named Buber, who believes that human relation is the original unity, perhaps even is what we understand as God—the self relating to others, recognizing others as human. I find this idea satisfying, and I am far enough from bishops and doctrine to think what I like. Buber says that where we say far away, the Zulu language has a word which means—and remember that I am translating a translation here—‘the place where someone cries out: O mother, I am lost!’ ”
Kay looked over the side into the foaming lace that travelled alongside the little boat, loving Mr. Brimner with all her heart. No one in Nova Scotia talked or thought like him. The interior of his mind was watch-crystal, unmuddied by self or selfishness.
The Difference Page 37
