Sylvia regarded her silently, then said, ‘It’s only a saying. Stella, I think you are too sensitive and fanciful for this country. Soon you’ll be seeing ghosts and believing in vada. Be careful, and if you want a confidante come to me. I don’t believe in vada, and I’m tough. I have to be.’
A week passed and Stella found out no more about Jobe until one morning Trevor brought her the news that he had left Marapai and taken a job as skipper on a small coastal boat trading between New Ireland and the mainland. No one knew when or if he would return. It was obvious that he was not going to Eola and had been frightened off Eola gold and the possibility of deportation or another term in gaol.
For the first time Stella began to doubt her convictions. Those two words of her father’s, had she heard them or imagined them? Had Sereva, after all, died of food poisoning? And had David committed suicide? They were all questions which she had never before asked herself and now they more and more insistently tormented her. She had been in Marapai for nearly a fortnight and was beginning to realise that suicide was not, after all, impossible. It was not that life here was unbearable, but it was different. People changed; they were no longer recognisable as Australians. Aberrations of behaviour seemed normal and did not startle you. Frustrations and misfortunes festered into wounds here, deranged the mind and poisoned the blood. No, suicide was not impossible.
Another question presented itself and her convictions almost entirely crumbled away. How could she be right and Trevor wrong? He had known David and the country, he had been involved in the affair with Jobe, and he was older and wiser by some thirty years. He was authority, he could not be wrong.
She woke up one morning to find that she had lost her faith. It was an experience almost as terrible as the loss of her husband, except that by now, being used to loss, she accepted it more calmly. There was no longer any reason for her to stay in Marapai. There was no reason for her being anywhere, but Marapai with its dazzling seas and brilliant flowers was the last place on earth where she wanted to be. She did not think where she would go or what she would do; just to leave was for the moment enough. Once she made up her mind, her heart lifted slightly. Her sense of urgency was now attached to her departure. It was desperately important to get away as soon as possible. Marapai had become unbearable, and she resisted its beauty with a feeling of horror.
She booked a seat on the plane for the following week. Then she met Philip Washington.
CHAPTER 10
It was a Thursday evening. Washington left his house at about 5.30 and walked down the hill to the shacks where he kept his jeep. The sea was pink and green and calm as ice. Canoes on their way home to the village hung poised, their slack sails barely moving in the intermittent puffs of wind.
He turned the nose of the jeep to face the road and allowed it to run down the hill towards the sea-front. He was just swinging out to turn at the bottom of the road when a woman stepped out from the footpath and waved her arms above her head. It was Sylvia. She was dressed in a sleeveless black silk dress, with a cluster of frangipani flowers on top of her head and another cluster over one ear. This time of the year was particularly humid and her face shone under its make-up.
Washington drew up the jeep beside her. He was tremendously pleased to see her. Apart from the visit to Anthony Nyall and a trip into the village, he had not been out of his hut for nearly a fortnight. He had been in bed most of the time with a fever, partly genuine, partly induced, and preferred in times of sickness to be left alone. Sylvia had been instructed not to visit him. He knew he looked unattractive when he was sick and it wounded his vanity to be seen in such a condition. He hailed her gaily.
‘You’re better,’ she said, and looked at him closely. ‘Oh, but Philip, you look dreadful. You should be in bed.’
‘I’m on the mend. Still can’t sleep, that’s all. And where have you been, my sweet, all dressed up to kill?’
His moments of sweetness were rare these days and she smiled gratefully. ‘I’ve been drinking tea with the upper crust,’ she said. ‘Mrs Lane, believe it or not.’
Mrs Lane was the wife of the Controller of Civil Construction.
‘Good God!’ said Washington. ‘Why on earth would she ask you?’ He had never been to the Lane’s house. They had only been in Marapai for a few months and had taken over a new block of flats on the harbour road.
‘I met her on the beach and she seemed to like me.’
That Sylvia should go to houses where he himself was not entertained was ludicrous. Sylvia was a dear but she was hopeless socially. She did not know about clothes and, in spite of her beauty, always looked a mess. ‘Well, she’s new to the place,’ he said sullenly. ‘And I suppose she just doesn’t know any better.’
‘She’s nicer than most,’ said Sylvia mildly. ‘She isn’t a cat – not yet.’
‘Not yet, she isn’t,’ said Washington. He had forgotten his pleasure in seeing Sylvia and looked at her with hostility. ‘But really, an afternoon tea – I thought at least you were going for cocktails, rigged up in that thing with the blue stuff all over your eyes. Haven’t you any idea of what’s appropriate? She’ll never ask you again. And even if it hadn’t been afternoon tea, you don’t seem to know that you should never wear black in this climate. You know what is said about the tropics? Never trust any man in braces or a woman in black.’
Sylvia only smiled and said placidly, ‘I don’t like pale colours. I know I haven’t any taste, but I dress to please myself.’
‘Obviously,’ he said sharply. ‘You couldn’t dress for anyone else. Why don’t you watch you boss’s wife? She’s one of the few women in this town who doesn’t look like a trollop. God knows where half of these men find their wives.’
Sylvia rarely fought back, but this time he had hurt her. ‘Why should I watch her? She’s a vile woman; no one’s safe from her. Not even you.’
‘What do you mean?’ he said immediately. ‘What’s she said about me?’
‘She was talking about you this afternoon,’ said Sylvia, relenting. ‘It was nothing really.’
‘What was it?’ he said. ‘Tell me. I want to know. Don’t drop hints then crawl away like a cockroach.’
Again she was hurt. ‘She said you couldn’t keep boys, that you were too familiar with them. She said it was disgusting the way you went on, and how could you expect to keep boys when you let them wear flowers and play mouth-organs and talk to you like a friend. She said they were servants and ought to be treated as such, and that people like you were ruining the country for others; that it was people like you who had caused the rise in wages and made the locals insolent and demanding and that you ought to be put out of the country.’ She stopped and was immediately ashamed. ‘The usual nonsense. She’s just a fool; nobody listens to her. They know they get just as much as soon as they go out of the room.’
‘Oh God!’ he cried passionately. ‘These women! These fat sows who think they know all about Papuans!’
‘It was Rei,’ said Sylvia. ‘He went up to her sister’s house and wanted a job as cook boy.’ She looked up at him and said gently, ‘Why did you sack Rei, Philip? Heaven knows, I don’t like natives much. I can’t understand them and I’m sure my laundry boy steals my gin, but Rei was a sweet boy. You should have kept him.’
Washington stared gloomily ahead. ‘He’s disobedient. I went out for half an hour last week and left him in charge. And when I got back he was talking to someone in the boy house and three dogs were scratching around in the rubbish bin. I won’t have dogs in my place! If he can’t keep the dogs away he can go. And he prowls around at night. I told him not to.’
‘You’re imagining things again,’ she said gently. ‘Rei loved you. I’m sure he wouldn’t take anything. You’re all on edge.’
Was it Rei? he thought. It must have been Rei. And if it wasn’t Rei who was it? What was he doing there? It must have been Rei – that man who wore no rami, who stank and who was too small by far to be Rei.
‘I’ve g
ot a better boy than Rei.’ He was feeling a little mean for having been so rude about her dress, and said with a charming smile, ‘Hop in. I’m going down to the village to pick him up, and then I’ll drive you home if you like.’
The village was about two miles out of the town. Before the war it had been a typical sea village, a collection of grass and timber huts built on piles over the water, each house reached by a narrow, rickety jetty stretching out from the land. At low tides the houses on their stilts were left high and dry, like strange grey birds, crane-legged, standing in the mud. During high tides the water rose up just below the floors of the houses. But this village had been destroyed during the war, and when the re-building started the government decided that it was better for the people if they built on the shore. So the old sea village had gone and the houses were now huddled up on either side of the main road. The villagers had not re-built in the traditional manner with walls of woven sago palm and thatched roof, for the government hinted that it would build a model village with wooden houses, tin-roofed, in the white man’s style. Unfortunately there had never been sufficient material for the few houses needed by the Europeans, and of the new model village only two houses had been constructed. The rest of the villagers had built themselves temporary dwellings from old army scrap, pieces of tin and the broken bonnets of trucks and covered the holes with odd pieces of sacking. This had all happened in the years immediately after the war and the word ‘temporary’ was now almost forgotten. There was an undeniable air of permanency about the rusty little town.
But the village still had charms. These were a fishing people and their slender log canoes with outrigger and sail still floated at the water’s edge. Their woven nets sewn with cowrie shells hung from the verandahs. Some of the women wore dirty calico and tied up their hair with Christmas paper, cheap plastic clips and diamante bows, but others squatted in the doorways, their grass skirts swelling up over their knees and their hair studded with flowers and leaves. They wandered in twos and threes down the village street, carrying wood or yams in long woven baskets, that were supported from their foreheads and dangled down over their backs. In the evenings round an open fire on the beach the young boys and girls still shuffled their feet and swayed while they sang their own songs and mission songs. And there were always the small, naked, pot-bellied children scampering after pigs and skinny dogs, or crouching in the firelight, their bodies shining and their huge, black goblin eyes ringed in china white.
There was a warmth and vitality about the village that was lacking in the European-inhabited town a mile or so away, where people were boisterous but not gay, and suffered always from a sense of incongruity.
Six months ago Washington had contemplated living here, but he had not dared. Such a step would have been to transgress unforgivably the laws of white conduct. But he always, even now, felt a sense of relief and peace here. It seemed to him that in the white town everyone was poised for departure, ill-at-ease, bewildered, longing for some other land and resentful of this one. The village people sprang from the primitive soil and were not entirely separated from it. Knowing no other life, they did not question what they had. Conflicts were only just beginning. Satisfaction was only just starting to wane and, to the onlooker, at least, they still appeared happy. Washington was not worried by the rattle of rusty tin and the flapping rags; he had long since ceased to notice them.
Sylvia, however, saw nothing else. She was passing through the inevitable stage of mourning for the grass huts. ‘I hate this place,’ she said, as they drew into the centre of the village. ‘It’s so drab, filthy and miserable.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Washington. ‘You don’t know beauty when you see it. You’ve got a silly, magazine mind. You’re wasted in this place; you ought to go to Honolulu with a lei round your neck. You only look at the sky when there’s a red sunset. You wouldn’t look up on a grey day. Papuans have to be under twenty-one for you, all done up in dog teeth and garnas with hibiscus in their hair – you wouldn’t glance twice at a woman in calico. I’ll show you someone beautiful. You wait till you see Koibari.’
He was waiting for them. Half way through the village was a large nut tree. Its leaves had turned to autumnal hues and fluttered in red and orange rosettes around the fresh, green plumes of the new foliage. Around its trunk had collected a group of Papuans with bundles and packages, apparently waiting for some transport; village boys in cotton ramis, and strangers from outlying villages wearing the necklaces, feathers and armbands of less sophisticated places. As Washington pulled up his jeep a man rose from the fringe of the group and came towards them. He walked with a stiff-jointed shuffle, slightly sideways, like a crab. His yellow face was seamed and withered; his lips had disappeared, but a few black betel-stained teeth gaped into a grin. He wore a tattered khaki rami hitched about his waist with a piece of string, and as he waddled forward a black bag that was fettered to his waist flapped against his thigh. His legs were stained with the purple scars of ulcers. His great bush of fuzzy hair started up from his forehead, and crowned his monstrous ugliness with a wreath of pink coral flowers. As he slowly moved towards them the others in the group crouched back or slid away, flashing the whites of their eyes.
‘Oh, no!’ cried Sylvia, lifting her hands in a childish gesture and pressing her fingers to her cheeks.
Washington’s face was alert and eager. ‘Isn’t he wonderful! Isn’t he superbly and diabolically evil! Look at his little mean red eyes, like a scheming pig.’
‘Oh, what do you want him for?’ said Sylvia shuddering. She did not know exactly what filled her with horror. It was not only the sight of the old man, who had stopped and stood, chewing and spitting, a little way off. She was more frightened by the look on Philip’s face.
‘All the people around here are scared of him,’ he said. ‘He’s a very powerful sorcerer. People pay him to make sorcery against their enemies. See that little black bag he has – that’s got all his stuff in it. Bits of old bones and shells and stones, and God knows what. It’s illegal. He’s been in gaol twice for sorcery. The district officer got hold of his bag last time and burnt it, but he soon made up another one.’
‘What do you want him for?’ she cried.
The excitement died out of his eyes. An expression of recognition and then reticence passed over his face. He might have been jerked back to earth wishing to disguise that he had ever been away. He smiled. ‘I’m only amusing myself. I like these old characters, they interest me. There aren’t many of them left, and they’re the only ones who can tell you what the old life was like. These boys’ – he waved a contemptuous arm around him – ‘don’t even know the songs their fathers knew; they’ve forgotten the old legends. I know more of their culture than they do. It’s just as well there are a few men like me who are willing to talk to the old men and learn about the old days before it’s too late.’ He beckoned to the old man who lurched forward in his shuffling, crablike gait. The black bag flapped at his thigh, and his strong, musty odour travelled before him, like breath.
She did not look at Philip again but huddled down in the seat beside him. Koibari was heaving his bulk into the back with strange, animal grunts.
‘Right? All fixed?’ Philip said gaily, and started up the engine. The jeep moved off, back along the harbour road. They did not speak; Washington sang, Koibari sucked and grunted. As they passed through the main street of the town, Sylvia, who had been leaning out of the window with her head in the wind, straightened, turned and spoke. ‘Philip! Take him back! I’m frightened!’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Philip, annoyed.
But she leaned across, gripped his knee, and spoke with an intensity quite unlike her. ‘Philip, why don’t you stop all this nonsense and get away. Get out of that house. Living up there on the hill by yourself, it’s not healthy. It gives me the creeps with the fireflies and glow-worms and flying foxes and the damned Keremas beating their drums all night. I’m frightened!’
He took his eyes off the road
for a moment to stare at her scornfully. ‘And where would I go, may I ask?’
‘Leave that house and go into a mess where there are other white men around you.’
A man living in a mess was to Philip the lowest of all creatures. To go to a mess was to lose utterly all distinction and claim to respect. That Sylvia should even think of him in a mess filled him with rage. He swung the car into the gutter, leaned across her and snapped open the door. At first he did not speak, but there was a pulse jumping in his cheek. When he did speak, it was with all the icy contempt of which he was capable. ‘Go to a mess! Live in a ten by ten with a bunch of drunken morons. I’ll thank you not to think up such notions for my well-being. If you can’t mind your own bloody business, you can get out and walk home.’
Sylvia got out on to the road. Tears had started into her eyes, but she spoke calmly. ‘You shouldn’t have said that, Philip. I’ve taken a lot from you, but I’ve had enough. I don’t want to see you again.’
Enraged with himself for having lost his only friend, but incapable of contrition, he threw back at her, ‘Do you imagine that breaks my heart?’
The jeep swung round and spurted off down the street. Sylvia stood and watched it go with tears on her cheeks.
Five minutes later when Stella walked up from the beach on her way home, she remained standing there. Stella recognised her from some way off, and waved her hand, but Sylvia did not see her. She stood in a peculiarly ungainly attitude, as if she had forgotten her body. Her hands hung limply at her sides and her hair, half an hour ago so immaculately smoothed and piled on her head, hung in wisps about her shoulders. Stella, approaching nearer, saw her face. ‘Sylvia, what’s the matter?’
It shocked her profoundly to see Sylvia crying. She was so collected and debonair and moved with so much assurance, and it did not seem possible to Stella that a woman like her could cry. She divided her world into the vulnerable and the invulnerable, and Sylvia had obviously belonged to those who were strong and safe.
Beat Not the Bones Page 11
