by Lydia Syson
‘Let her stay, Mrs P, now she’s here,’ said Pa, softly. ‘We’ve news that’ll please you of all people, my little Lizzie.’
He reached an arm for her, and Albert moved to make space in the chair next to their father.
‘An island, Lizzie-Jane!’ said Billy. ‘We’re going to a new island. Not like this place. An island all of our own.’
‘What kind of island? Where?’
‘A small one. A South Sea island, more or less. Hardly six miles across,’ said Pa, playing the table like a piano. ‘But a paradise, I’m told.’
He seemed to be waiting for applause.
‘We hope,’ added Ma, but she could force the corners of her mouth down no longer, and her eyes shone.
‘Is it near here?’ asked Albert.
‘Oh no. Some distance southish,’ said Pa. ‘Not so far as New Zealand, but more than halfway back that way, I believe. A few weeks’ travel.’
‘So will we keep a store there?’ asked Ada.
‘No Germans yet? It won’t be like Nuku‘alofa?’ Albert asked, keeping his voice deliberately flat to stop it squeaking and because he didn’t want to suggest criticism. Even before the bloody flux had nearly seen off Albert, The Friendly Islands had been a disappointment to his parents. Nobody could hope to prosper with such well-established competition. Coming to Samoa seemed a greasy slide from frying pan to fire. Albert’s exquisite china-blue eyes locked bravely with his father’s lighter, sharper ones, their steady focus the only sign of how much the answer mattered.
But Mr Peacock only laughed.
‘No,’ he said, surprising everyone. ‘I told you. There’s nobody there at all.’
‘Nobody?’ said Lizzie, in feigned amazement, still playing the game.
‘Not a soul. No store, no church, not even a house. Nothing … It will be ours alone, to do what we want with. If we like it and choose to stay. We can grow everything we need to live and plenty to sell too. Orange groves. Timber. Grazing.’
The children could hardly comprehend the idea of an empty island, a place that belonged to no one.
‘No savages?’ asked Billy. ‘No cannibals?’
‘No bigwigs?’ asked Harriet. She was still called Harriet then.
‘Not one. No natives at all,’ said Ma. ‘You heard your father.’
‘We don’t have to take the place from anyone?’ Albert asked, still careful, straight-backed. Just a glance at Ada.
‘What did I just tell you?’ said Pa. ‘It’s ours for the taking. If we’re quick about it.’
‘So that makes us the natives,’ said Harriet, thoughtfully.
‘Certainly not!’ her mother snapped.
‘Natives are born in a place,’ explained Ada. ‘We’re going to this island. We don’t come from it.’
Albert frowned. There was more to it than that. There was a pause while the children separately reflected on the question, and wondered exactly where they did come from. They’d all – except Gussie – been born in different parts of New Zealand. Would they always be settlers?
‘Well, Lizzie?’
Mr Peacock gripped her hands in his as if he’d squeeze out an answer, and she held on dizzily. If Pa let go, there was no telling what might happen; anticipation was glowing like a fever in her bones.
‘It’s what I’ve always dreamed of,’ she whispered. ‘Somewhere that’s only ours.’ Not borrowed, or stolen, or rented. Somewhere they could stay and build and grow. ‘For ever.’
She should never have doubted him. Of course he’d persuade Ma. Who could possibly resist Mr Peacock when he had a plan? She smiled at Pa, but he had turned his gaze to Albert.
‘And this will be the making of you, my son,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’
‘Yes, Pa.’ Albert sat up still straighter.
Ada nodded her encouragement. Albert needed strengthening, after so much sickness. Mrs Peacock was murmuring to the baby, who wriggled and twisted on her lap, having sat still too long.
‘Are we going to an island?’ Ma rubbed her own well-defined nose against Gussie’s small bump like a New Zealander, and even babied her voice. ‘Our very own island? Would you like that?’
Gussie shrieked, perhaps with approval.
‘She says yes,’ said Harriet. ‘I’d like it too. Ma, can I be the queen of our island?’
But it was Pa she watched as she spoke.
‘You can,’ said Pa. ‘We’ll crown you when we land.’
Ada and Lizzie clapped their hands and Harriet curtseyed.
‘We can have a coronation feast,’ said Ada. ‘We’ll invite the goats.’
‘Ghosts?’ Billy caught Pa’s arm.
‘Goats,’ corrected Lizzie.
‘Yes. We won’t go hungry on Monday Island, eh Queenie?’
So that was their island’s name. And now their sister had a new one.
Albert stared at the remains of his breakfast and crumbled a hunk of uneaten bread into a mass of tiny islands on his plate. His porcelain face shadowed as he sucked in his cheek-flesh, and worried it with his back teeth. Lizzie guessed his thoughts.
‘How long’s the voyage?’ she asked on his behalf, adding, below her breath: ‘Stay on deck, in the air. You’ll find your sea legs this time.’
At the mention of legs, Ma’s hand slid down to her ankles. Tropical fevers and disease were such a worry to her: hadn’t they nearly lost Albert? Her greatest horror was the elephant disease – fey-fey, or fee-fee … something like that. The limbs you saw in these parts could make a grown man weep. Vast, swollen, deformed. In fact everything here grew a sight too much for Ma’s liking. It didn’t seem right, all this unearned fecundity. Flowers that unfurled their perfume unbidden, petals and even leaves so brightly coloured they seemed brazen. Vines carelessly floating their seeds any which way and honeyed fruit that flaunted itself, then rotted, reeking where it softly fell. It encouraged indolence, all this lushness, there to pluck or plunder or simply pass by. Reward required toil to make any sense to Ma. She had never thought much of showing off.
‘What about Sal?’ asked Harriet suddenly, her voice fluting. The terrier lay in a box near the stove, three puppies attached to her teats. A fourth stumbled blindly over its mother’s legs, nosing out breakfast.
‘Joseph?’ Mrs Peacock looked at her husband. ‘We’re taking Sal, aren’t we? She’s come so far already.’
‘Of course,’ said Lizzie. ‘We’ll need Sal, won’t we. Pa?’
Mr Peacock’s eyes were on the ceiling; he was making other calculations in his head. It took him a moment to work out what was being asked.
‘We will. We’ll train her and the pups to hunt. Your job, Albert.’
‘Yes, Pa.’ Albert nodded, thoughtfully. He was good with animals, but hunting?
‘What if she jumps overboard on the way there?’ squeaked Harriet.
‘Shhh,’ said Ada. ‘She didn’t coming here.’
She could see Pa was losing his patience.
‘That’s enough nonsense! Now, drink up quickly. We need to pack.’ Pa’s energy crackled through the air like an approaching storm. ‘Come on, Albert.’
‘Now?’ He pushed back his chair and his mug tottered on the table.
‘Yes. We sail tomorrow.’
That stilled the children’s tongues. Their mother was already on her feet, clapping her hands to hurry them all. Such a perfect alignment of circumstances – it might never happen again.
‘Everything and everyone is to be on the quay by ten-thirty sharp,’ said Ma.
‘We can’t keep Captain MacHeath waiting,’ said Pa. ‘Albert, you’ll be my right-hand man, eh?’
Lizzie watched how Albert swallowed before he nodded to their father, and she sighed inside. She didn’t need to be asked a question like that. But Pa would never ask her.
‘I’ll do my very best.’ Her brother’s words were eager.
‘This island will change everything for the family,’ said Pa, firmly, steering Albert from the kitchen. ‘Land. That’s t
he important thing. That’s what a man needs to survive. To take his place in history. To keep his name. This land will be our future. Your future.’
Not just his, thought Lizzie.
BEFORE
Clearing out and clearing off.
‘What else, Ma?’ asked Lizzie. Mrs Peacock sat at the table, pencil in hand, eyes distant. ‘What shall I do now?’
Already the everyday dishes were washed and dried and packed away, and the beds not made but unmade. The lid of the heaviest trunk hung back on its hinges. Each time Lizzie snapped herself in two to stick her head into its depths – laying down a pile of freshly folded blankets, or the next bundle of linen – she surfaced with the welcome smell of upheaval in her nostrils. The cake tin Harriet was balancing on her head for a crown clattered to the unswept floor as Albert arrived, bearing the huge family Bible and Ma’s Shakespeare, and stacked on those another treasure: a pile of old illustrated newspapers, three years old, left a few months earlier by a kindly hotel guest, ‘to amuse the children’. They only knew the pictures. Ma had quite lost the habit of reading to them, now they were so many.
‘Can we take the papers too, Ma?’ he asked.
She looked at him, considering. Albert Peacock kept his eyes fixed hopefully on another Albert: Bertie, Prince of Wales, flanked by oarsmen and raising a bowler hat on a quayside as he embarked on the Royal Tour of India. There were supplements here too, wonderful ones, filled with tiger hunts and men in turbans who rode on elephants. Probably maharajahs, said Ma. Albert had not given up hope yet of making sense of the writing.
‘I suppose the girls can wrap the china in them.’ Mrs Peacock was regretful. She knew it was a waste, and how much Albert loved them. And a glimpse of the domed building in the header gave her a wistful kind of a pleasure. Look! she’d tell the children. Look at the beautiful spires and the bridges and houses and all those boats. That’s the city where I was born. London hardly seemed real to her now. ‘And maybe we can smooth them out for another day.’
‘Oh thank you, Ma!’ Summoned by another shout from Pa, Albert vanished.
For the first time in their lives, Lizzie and Ada were entrusted with The Tea Set: Copeland Spode, Blue Italian, acquired for Ma by Pa in his short-lived soldiering days in the early months of the Maori wars, when she was still a seamstress not long arrived in the colony – though already running a workshop – and he had recently proposed. He’d rescued the set from an abandoned farmhouse. Quite how and why it had been forsaken the children were never told. It would give them nightmares, Ma once admitted. Lizzie unhooked the cream jug, sticky with dust, tipped out a desiccated spider, and took her place at the draining board. Ada washed clean all the castles and ruins, all the sheep and shepherds, trees and leaves and Chinese swirls, carefully handing each piece to her sister to dry. But she was making heavy weather of it, and one cup nearly slid from her soapy fingers.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Lizzie, after a sigh so deep it begged a response. She felt her sister’s forehead. ‘You look a bit all-overish.’
‘Stop it.’ Ada twisted away from her solicitude, and Lizzie held back her questions. You needed patience for Ada to confide.
Three saucers later the older girl finally whispered: ‘Aren’t you fed up with moving?’
They had always been a roving family. It was in their blood, Lizzie assumed. Two parents, both from England, who met and married the other side of the world. This was the third time in five years the family had packed up their entire life and moved on. Pa’s discontent had surfaced within a few months of buying the Apia hotel.
‘Do you like it here?’ countered Lizzie.
‘No, of course not. And of course I want land that’s ours for ever. A place we can make something of. Like Pa says. I’m just not sure …’
‘Nobody can be sure of anything,’ said Lizzie, firmly. ‘Even Ma says we won’t know till we get there. We have to hope for the best.’
‘As usual. But I’m worried about Albert.’
‘Because of the voyage? Because you think he’s still not better?’ Lizzie shared her father’s suspicions of her brother’s mysterious aches and pains.
‘Not just that. Because of Pa. He expects so much of him. More than he does of you and me, I think. That’s why he’ll never let him be. Another change, a different kind of life entirely … it might make everything worse. You know Albert’s not like us. You two should have been the other way round. Think what a son you’d have made.’
Only Ada could say this out loud, and only to Lizzie. The two older girls had always been more practical than Albert, slower in thought but quicker in action. More resilient. Less prone to sickness. Less beautiful.
‘Maybe if you didn’t always try to protect him …’ Lizzie began to suggest, but she stopped as soon as she saw her sister’s face. She never seemed to say the right thing. So she gave up trying to help and reached up for another cup. Her thoughts turned from sheep to beans, growing before their eyes, pumpkins and melons swelling as they watched, a plump fish leaping on a line. All to themselves. And Albert would surely thrive better in a kinder climate. Lizzie couldn’t dismiss Ada’s fears, but she refused to encourage them.
‘I can’t wait to see the island,’ she said, happily. ‘We’ll have to camp to start with, while we build a house. We’ll have to build everything. And at least we can’t be stuck in a kitchen if we haven’t got one.’ She tried to enthuse Ada. ‘What will it look like, our house?’
‘However Pa wants it to,’ Ada said, dryly.
‘I know he’ll make it beautiful. Our own deserted island,’ Lizzie continued, dreamily. ‘Our very own …’
The front door banged, and a moment later Harriet rushed in.
‘They’re here,’ she hissed.
Lizzie went to look. Blind Robson was in the hallway, with a stranger. Mr and Mrs Peacock stood side by side while Robson introduced Herr Heiselbaum, a German adventurer with Pacific ambitions, lean and keen and remarkably whiskerless. He wanted to look round the hotel right away. During the inspection, the children stayed fidgeting in the kitchen. As soon as they heard the visitors step onto the veranda, Albert ran to the window.
‘He’s shaking his head,’ he reported, alarmed.
‘Let me see. No. It’s just an act,’ decided Lizzie. ‘He wants to get the price down.’
‘You’re right. Look. They’re shaking hands now.’
*
A few hours later, Mr Robson and Mr Heiselbaum returned with a fat carpet bag, and left without it. When Pa emerged, he locked the back office door behind him.
‘That’s settled then,’ he said. ‘Albert! Get the barrow. We’re going to see Herr Weber.’
Albert turned a little green, and obeyed reluctantly. It was whispered that Godeffroy & Sohn’s Pacific office manager didn’t just buy mother-of-pearl, copra and coconut oil. Herr Weber also paid good money for native skulls, and sent them back to Hamburg to sell to scientists, on ships that left under sealed orders. You might as well be eating bones, Lizzie had told Albert the last time he came home crunching on rock sugar. He spat it out, and she fished it from the midden later.
With long, rapid strides, Pa led the way along the palm-lined road that curved round the wide bay. Past the church – built of coral, built on coral, slowly blackening – past the convent school and its garden, past the chuff-and-rattle of the cotton gin, Albert hurried a few steps behind his father, wheeling the empty handbarrow with effort over the crushed coral sand. On the seaward side, above beached outriggers dragged up from the water’s edge, boys hung from trees and slung down fruit. Dotted among lush groves of palm and breadfruit on the other side, native houses, neatly thatched, stood half open to the breezes. Men lolled on mats, neither inside nor out, spitting freely. Mothers and daughters sat pounding arrowroot, tending hair, twisting coconut fibre into string, weaving clouds of the finest pandanus threads into mats as fine as linen. Babies slept or fed. Mr Peacock’s speed of movement always attracted attention and some la
ughter. Perhaps the news that the hotel was changing hands had already begun to spread.
Cool and airy, the store smelled as usual of sacking and flour and grease and metal, with just a hint of sweetness.
‘Come in, come in,’ called Herr Weber from the back office and, for the first and only time, Albert passed into the inner sanctum to stand before the agent’s mahogany desk. But today Herr Weber offered no childish treats, giving father and son an equal portion of his measured, wire-rimmed gaze. He knew everything, already. ‘Away on the tide tomorrow? Well, well. And I never managed to convince you. A shame. I’ve always said you’re the man we need to run a depot for us on one of the small islands on the Line. No nonsense with natives, or missionaries either – and in time, perhaps, young Mr Peacock may—’
Albert had barely recognised himself when Pa held up a palm.
‘Thank you, again, and most sincerely, Herr Weber, but you know I’ll work for no man but myself. And the same applies to Albert.’
Albert closed his mouth, and nodded obediently.
‘Well, if you change your mind,’ said Herr Weber, affably enough.
‘Unlikely. My son has a promising future – land of his own, a climate that will suit us all better than this one. We’re well on our way …’
When his heavy hand fell unexpectedly on Albert’s shoulder, the boy quickly straightened his narrow back to bear against his father’s weight, determined to make himself worthy. Fragments of negotiations drifted by, each purchase provoking yet more vivid possibilities in Albert’s mind – a whetstone, a saw, a fowling piece, an axe, several hoes and clasp knives and a whole box of fish hooks. A list supplied by Mrs Peacock produced more domestic necessities.
Albert and Pa left with the barrow so heavily loaded they each had to take a handle to push it back to the hotel. When she heard Billy’s ahoys, Ma abandoned the sewing machine she was oiling, wiped her hands, and came to inspect the purchases. Some bales of navy workcloth, as hard-wearing as you like, and plenty of cotton drill too. Creamy calico, which she fingered but did not unfold. The children weren’t going to stop growing, Ma said. She checked bobbins of thread, counted needles and buttons, ordered the packing of everything, and returned to the Wertheim, locking her darling’s lid and wrapping the machine tenderly in oilcloth. When she was small, Lizzie used to listen to its comforting trundle and feel grateful to the little crouching dwarf embossed on its end, hammering helpfully away. Her mother simply seemed to guide the cloth. But one day Lizzie realised her mistake. It was Ma who made the machine work; like her own children, the dwarf was merely obedient to her command.
