Stella turned and walked out into the street.
A moment later Trevor Nyall came out of the office, smiling as he walked towards her. ‘Well, my dear, and so you see …’
‘He’s here!’ She looked up at him, her face radiant.
The smile left his face. ‘I told you to stay here, to mind the car. I have important papers in my briefcase. They might have been stolen …’ He glared up and down the street.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.’ In her exultation she hardly noticed his displeasure. ‘I was right. He’s here, and he’ll go to Eola. We must find him before he goes!’
Nyall seemed disturbed, at a loss. He looked vaguely around him. To Stella he seemed less impressive, less handsome than he had before, and she thought that his good looks were based purely on his confidence, his belief that he was always right.
‘He came on my plane,’ Stella said softly, ‘and I don’t remember him. I was with him for twelve hours. I don’t remember a single face on that plane.’ She turned to him. ‘What does he look like? Describe him.’
‘I don’t remember him either,’ said Nyall. He was staring down the street at a naked child squatting in the gutter and playing with a paper cap. ‘Well, we must find him, I suppose.’
He fixed her with his most penetrating regard. ‘Do you understand?’ he said. ‘If this gets out, it will reflect on me and my department. I could be thrown out.’ He threw a wild glance to the skies as if imploring heavenly aid. ‘You don’t know what the word “gold” means in this country. You must be discreet.’
‘I understand,’ said Stella, cowering before his vehemence.
‘You’d better leave it all to me,’ he said. ‘I’ll find your Mr Jobe for you. You sit tight.’
She wanted to look for Jobe by herself, but she would not have dreamed of disobeying him. He was the inevitable extension of her father and husband.
‘You’d better go back to the mess for lunch now,’ he said. ‘Come and have dinner and meet Janet tonight. No, not tonight, I’m going out. Tomorrow.’
She thanked him. ‘Who went to Eola with David?’ she said. ‘Someone went with him.’
Nyall turned and looked at the child in the gutter, distracted. After a while he said, ‘He went alone.’
‘But he said he would take somebody with him – someone who knew a lot about the Papuans.’
‘Only Sereva, who went everywhere with him. Good boy,’ he mused. ‘Oh, I believe he did intend taking someone, but he decided not to – the less people who knew about it, the better …’
CHAPTER 7
Work in Marapai stopped at 3.30. The sun was still strong, but past its fiercest hours, and the white administration employees scattered to the beaches, to the golf course, to the tennis courts, or to lie disconsolately in their stuffy ten by ten rooms and wonder why they had ever left Australia.
It was at 3.30 that Stella, leaving the Department of Survey, made her way along the path that crossed the parade ground. She passed a group of policemen who were saluting the Australian flag, and approached a low, stone wall and a row of ragged trees, behind which, she had been told, was the Department of Cultural Development.
Over to her right by the police barracks – a low green building with a thatched roof – half a dozen Papuans were kicking a ball around, yelling and shouting with laughter. They had tucked their ramis up between their legs like loin cloths and were kicking the ball with bare feet.
The surrounding offices, after a day in the hot sun with their louvres raised to suck up any passing winds, were closing for the night. Some offices were less punctual than others. Typewriters could still be heard and Papuans were sweeping the floors, standing in doorways urging little clouds of dust on to the ground outside.
The Department of Cultural Development was still open, its louvres raised, breathing in the afternoon winds, which blew dust and the scent of frangipani flowers from across the square. Casuarinas leaned over it, the shaggy fringes of their foliage hissing on the iron roof.
Stella stood in the doorway and looked around at the office where her husband had worked. It was little different from the Department of Survey. Seven foot walls partitioned it off like a milking shed. There was office paraphernalia – tables, desks, typewriters and filing cabinets. The strange, long, animal body of Papua and New Guinea and a map of the world with the British Empire marked in red were pinned on the wall. An oil painting of a native in a feather head-dress was propped up on top of the bookcase, and there was another drawing, which might have been done by a child, pinned on the opposite wall. Littered about the table among the files and wire baskets were half a dozen tins of bully beef, a round, yellow gourd with a boar’s tusk stopper, three little wooden figures and a human skull. Down in one of the smaller offices somebody was using a typewriter.
She looked into the first office, but it was empty; the desk was tidy and the louvres behind had been closed. The second office was also empty. The third office looked and smelled like the basement of a museum. Bundles of spears and arrows were propped in corners; axes, masks and drums had been pushed under tables and on top of the bookcase; over the large, untidy desk, acting at times as paper weights for loose sheets of paper, were round, smooth stones.
At a small table in the corner sat a Papuan man. He had stopped typing and was studying a child’s elementary reader.
He looked different from any Papuan Stella had seen up to date. He wore khaki shorts and shirt with an air of ease and familiarity. His hair was parted on one side and cut like a white man’s, except that one heavy lock had been left rather long and stuck out like a cockade. His skin was light bronze and his face handsome. He had neither the flat features of the Mekeo, nor the beaked, semitic face of some of the darker men she had seen in town. He might have been southern European but for his thin wrists and long, shadowy hands. He wore sandals, and a watch, and smoked a cigarette. He stood up promptly when he saw Stella. ‘Good afternoon.’ he said. ‘Did you want to see Mr Nyall?’
It seemed an extraordinary thing to say, when Trevor Nyall was playing golf. She blinked at him, puzzled.
‘He’s not here,’ continued the man.‘I am the only one.’
‘I didn’t come to see him.’ She looked around her. ‘Perhaps you could help me.’
‘Would you like to sit down?’ He drew up a chair, offering it and then stepping back.
She sat down. No one had told her that there was a particular way to behave in front of Papuans and she was not in the least nervous. She wondered why he did not sit down, but remained standing at attention in front of her. ‘Have you been here long?’
‘A long time. I work for the government ever since I was a small boy.’
She might be at ease, but he was not. He spoke like a courteous child talking to an adult.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Hitolo, sinabada.’
It was a name she did not know. ‘Perhaps …’ she began.
‘I work for the government longer than anyone else in the village,’ he said, and smiled broadly as if she must be glad to hear this.
‘Perhaps you knew my husband, Mr Warwick.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Hitolo’s grin split wide. ‘I knew him well. I was his clerk, I used to go with him everywhere. He was a very great man. He came to my wedding – it was in a church and my wife wore a white frock and veil – and sat at the end of the table and made a speech.’ He paused, and then said joyously, ‘We had sandwiches!’
She felt a little of the difference in him then, and looked down at his hands, where this difference seemed most strongly to reside. ‘I am Mr Warwick’s wife,’ she said. It was something that he seemed not to have grasped.
‘How do you do. I am very pleased to meet you.’ Smiling still, he held out his hand.
She pressed the strange, moist, unfamiliar fingers and drew her hand away. ‘Perhaps you can tell me,’ she said, ‘where I can find a man named Sereva.’
He did not answer her but stood looking a
t her, smiling still. She waited, looking up into his face and noticed that, though his features had not relaxed, the smile had died. The life behind the eyes had gone; she might have been looking at a human skull. His lips drooped and his face became expressionless. He jerked his head around, still facing her, his cheek turned towards her but his eyes staring over his shoulder.
She had no idea what the gesture meant. Perhaps he had flicked back his head to avoid a blow, or had discovered something in her face that he could not bear to look at.
‘Do you know him?’ Something in his attitude – standing as if paralysed – disturbed her. Then a voice from the main office called out, ‘Hitolo! Who are you talking to?’
Hitolo did not answer. It might have been death for him to move. Steps sounded in the passageway and around the partition of the office appeared the man whom Stella had hoped she might never see again, the man she had mistaken for Trevor Nyall the day before.
Hitolo had moved now. He had turned his head, blinked, and his face had become composed and expectant.
‘What are you saying to this boy?’
Stella met the hostile glance defiantly. Now that she had met him she experienced a peculiar exhilaration. She felt for him some of the comforting hatred she felt for Jobe. She met his dark-ringed eyes, larger than life behind his glasses, and her pulses beat with the excitement of intense aversion. She was certain that he would attack. ‘I was asking him where I could find Sereva,’ she said.
For a moment he did not answer. Then he said, ‘Sereva is dead.’ His voice was flat and dry.
‘Dead!’ she whispered. To those who have lost someone near to them, death, any death, even a stranger’s, becomes personal, like a shadowy repetition of their own tragedy.
‘Hitolo doesn’t like to speak about it. He saw it happen and it was not, I believe, very pleasant. They were brothers.’
She glanced at Hitolo who looked quite composed. But she understood now that his peculiar attitude, neck drawn back and cheek averted, had been a gesture of grief. ‘When did it happen?’
‘What do you want to know for?’
She looked at him in surprise.
He shrugged his shoulders, picked up one of the stones on the desk and held it in the palm of his hand, looking into it as one might gaze into a crystal. ‘I suppose you’ll find out, and you’ll make something enormous out of it. He died in the field with your husband.’
‘In the field?’
‘It’s a term meaning outside. This last trip he made into the Bava valley. Sereva went with him as usual, and he died before they reached the station at Kairipi on the way back.’
Stella could scent her prey, and her eyes shone. ‘What did he die of?’
‘It’s hard to tell. There was no doctor.’ He put down the stone and looked up. ‘He was taken suddenly with some sort of convulsion and died a few hours later in great pain. I never thought to see such pleasure taken in a man’s death,’ he said quietly.
Stella, who could not know that a fanatical light suffused her face, said angrily, ‘Pleasure! How could I …’
‘I can see,’ he said bitterly, ‘that you welcome it. That you see it in some way explaining what you stupidly want to know – the reason for your husband’s suicide. It enhances this mad wish you have.’
She forgot her promise to Trevor Nyall and answered coldly, ‘David did not commit suicide.’
He lifted his hands, held them helplessly in the air and then flapped them down to his sides. ‘Ah! So that’s it!’ He turned away, his shoulders drooped, and he trailed his hand over the desk like a blind man. Her eyes followed his hand. His fingers fumbled on the smooth, round stones, and closed around a small, black coconut, carved in a white design. He picked it up and looked at it, blinking his eyes as if waking from a fit of abstraction, then turned it over and examined it minutely.
Stella looked about her at the littered table, the thick, anthropological volumes in the bookcase, the bundles of spears, the masks, the mysterious round stones. ‘You’re David’s assistant,’ she said. Her discovery was extraordinarily gratifying, and her voice rang with triumph.
He smiled ironically. ‘Is that what he called me?’
Stella attacked him furiously. ‘Now I know all about you! You hated him, you were jealous of him! And you don’t like me because I’m his wife. You don’t like anything connected with him.’
She had wanted to make him angry, but he just stood looking at her with an air of helpless sadness. ‘I forget,’ he said at last, ‘that you’re so young.’
They were the most terrible words that anyone had ever spoken to her. She felt instinctively that they threatened the whole basis of her faith. She hated him more than Jobe for destroying her husband and breaking up her life. He had implied that she was too young to love. She could only repeat, ‘You hated him because he was more successful than you!’
‘I didn’t hate him. I only said I wasn’t a particular friend.’
She loathed the gentle quietness of his manner. His attitude towards her had changed. I forget you are so deluded. This is what people meant when they said, ‘I forget you are so young.’
‘Everyone loved him!’ she replied.
‘Some did,’ he said, ‘but you aren’t among them.’
She floundered in the very heart of rage and pain. She could not speak. His face broke and blurred in the tears that started to well in her eyes.
His quiet, ruthless voice went on. ‘You expect the best of him. If you loved him you would accept the worst. You never knew him — how could you? He had no choice but to hide from you what he was.’
If I don’t love him, she thought, what am I doing here? Where is the significance in what I’m doing? ‘You’re trying to get rid of me,’ she said desperately. ‘You don’t want me to find out the truth. You know something that you don’t want people to know. You have an agreement with Jobe. You’ve arranged for him to go back to Eola and get the gold and share it with you.’
‘You don’t believe that,’ he said wearily.
‘What else can I believe? You know something. Why were they killed? What did they find in Eola? David was killed, Sereva was killed. They went to Eola and then they were killed before they could tell anyone what they saw.’ She stopped. ‘Hitolo was there.’ She looked around, but Hitolo had gone.
He shook his head.
‘But you told me yourself. You told me he saw his brother die. You lie so badly even I can catch you out. You said he was there.’
‘He didn’t go into the village. Only Sereva and Warwick went. Just the two of them. Nobody else. Nobody else. They left the rest of the patrol outside.’
‘I don’t believe you. Hitolo said he went everywhere with David. Hitolo!’
‘Hitolo’s a liar. He was only trying to be important. He was frightened and stayed behind. He’s afraid of sorcery.’
‘Sorcery?’
‘Purri purri. Eola’s full of sorcerers – vada men. All the carriers were terrified and wouldn’t go near the village. Hitolo was frightened too.’
‘I don’t believe you. He’s educated, he wouldn’t believe in sorcery.’
He laughed dryly, then looked back at the little black object in his hand and stroked it with the pad of his thumb.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said fiercely. ‘You’re only trying to mislead me. Where is Hitolo?’ She brushed past him and ran out into the main office. Hitolo was squatting down on the floor by the bookcase. He looked round quickly and stood up. ‘Hitolo, did you go to Eola?’
He smiled. ‘Yes, sinabada. I went with Mr Warwick,’
‘Right into the village?’
‘No. I stayed behind to look after the carriers. They were frightened. They don’t like the people of Eola. They are only village people, and they are frightened. Sereva went into Eola and when he came out he died.’
‘What made him die?’ she said. Hitolo’s soft, quiet voice had a steadying effect, and she spoke more calmly.
‘The peopl
e of Eola made him die,’ said Hitolo. ‘They’re bad people. They made his food bad and killed him.’
‘You see.’ The white man had followed her into the outer office and leaned now on the wall, one leg crossed over the other. ‘He thinks the vada men of Eola made purri purri on Sereva.’
‘Mr Warwick thought so too,’ said Hitolo quietly. ‘He told the boys not to eat any more of the food they brought out of Eola. He said to the boys that the vada men had made all the food bad and that was what killed Sereva.’
Stella, looking over her shoulder, spoke sullenly. ‘What happened?’
The man shrugged his shoulders. It was a gesture she was beginning to expect from him. It contributed to his air of listlessness. ‘I’m not sure, probably just what Hitolo says. Warwick had to say something to the carriers. Sereva’s death terrified them. He probably died of food poisoning; one of the tins was bad perhaps. It had nothing to do with the vada men. But the carriers thought it was purri purri, and Warwick had to tell them something they would believe and understand. They’re only primitive people, right on the border of the patrolled area. He told them that the vada men had made magic on the food and as long as they didn’t touch it they were safe. That’s the only defence against sorcery, to know you are safe. Once they get it into their heads that they aren’t, they’re quite likely to lie down and die.’ He stopped and his eyes fell on Hitolo. ‘But you ought to know better,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d got over this idea about your brother. You’re trained and educated. You’re meant to lead these primitive people, not rush about like a bird or a wild pig at the very mention of a vada man.’
‘I don’t believe in purri purri, taubada,’ said Hitolo. ‘I work for the government. Purri purri isn’t true.’
Stella turned to the door. She had nothing more to ask, had every reason to leave, but she was reluctant. Hitolo was again squatting on the floor, and the white man, still watching her, had lit a cigarette. Outside in the bright afternoon sunlight, she knew, were all the waiting demons – fear, loneliness, and the knowledge of being unloved and unwanted by any human being in the world. Here in this room she had at least been alive. She looked back. ‘Thank you, Hitolo, for what you’ve told me.’
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