Mr Peacock's Possessions

by Lydia Syson

  Outrage shakes Lizzie back to her feet. She claws at the tree trunk, and hangs on, swaying, quite unable to trust her legs to take her down the cliff, unable to trust her tongue. ‘Go away!’ she screams, pointlessly. ‘Thieves! Leave us alone!’ It is like being back inside the dreams – entirely present, watching, something dissolving between her vision and herself, never able to intervene. Where is Pa to tell her what to do?

  They must be singing, for surely their mouths open and shut in time with one another. Lizzie hears only wind and surf and a kind of high-pitched ringing inside her head. Disbelief increases her uncertainty. The smallest sailor – barely taller than Lizzie, barely older perhaps than Albert – steps forward and salutes again, and he begins to haul on the rope. Up, up, up. The others sing on. God Save the Queen? A flag uncrumples. The Union Jack is dancing on their island.

  Lizzie watches, unseen, unsure, until she can bear it no longer. She cannot run all the way home, but she knows she must hurry to have any hope of warning the others. Or even of getting back before night’s steady fall. She is carrying nothing to weigh her down, and, as always, the exhilaration of speed is a release for her. She lollops back, necessarily unsteady, and also instinctively careful and determined, negotiating familiar obstacles like rocks and roots and tree trunks with little heed, saving her mind for other discoveries, pressed steadily into shape by the changing rhythm of her stride. And that’s when she decides. Whether Pa meant to free his family or himself or both together from the terrible burden of what he’d done was of no account. What he wanted no longer mattered. He had brought them all an ending, and, knowing everything that could be known, together they could now work out, all of them, what was to be done next.

  She needed the hours she’d spent alone, but now she finds herself longing for other voices, and all the comfort of skin on skin and living bones beneath it. Lizzie keeps following the ridge, dreading the point where she will see the cross again, but she’s not halfway across the island when she hears barking. Sal and Spy rush to her together, jumping up and down like puppies, falling against each other and pawing at her tunic before racing back through the trees to report on the trophy that is her finding. Who are they running back to? The sickening sensation of trapped hummingbird wings that has plagued Lizzie all day has risen higher; she feels it just below her breastbone, a keen piercing joy that lengthens her stride and feather-cools her face. Because she can see Kalala, at the top of the next slope, and although he immediately looks round to see where the others are, to tell them she is found, they must be hanging back, out of sight and earshot, and for the moment, he is alone, and there is nothing between them.

  He looks behind him one more time, and because he’s standing in the shade and twilight’s coming Lizzie cannot make out his expression, but he has the advantage of higher ground, so he is with her fast enough for this not to matter, and when he reaches her he smells of salt and fresh sweat. They face each other, both a little breathless, arms straight out, hands clasped, as if at the end of a wild polka. Of course they’ve lost the gentle ease they used to share. Of course it may never return, not exactly the same. And the morning may bring the new ship to their bay, and the ground may shift again, and worst of all, Solomona and Kalala and the rest may choose, instead of cotton, to take their pay in the coin still locked in the trunk with the bullets, and take their chances on another ship, and leave Monday Island for ever. Or they may not. So Lizzie speaks quickly.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kalala. So sorry.’

  His eyes move over her face, reading the story of the previous hours, reassuring himself.

  ‘He’s gone?’

  Lizzie nods and shudders and says yes, even as she’s also shaking her head and saying no, for who knows what kind of hauntings lie ahead? Kalala doesn’t move, or look away, but he quietly absorbs the little she has said.

  ‘Come,’ says Kalala, as Lizzie’s words pour out. There’s too much still to say, far too much to answer. It will take all night, all week, all the time they have left, however much that is. His words as well as hers. Kalala has much to decide, she knows. Solomona too. ‘Everyone is waiting. Let’s walk.’

  He keeps listening, head slightly turned as usual, so he can watch her words as well as catch them, and they both keep walking together, and when the dogs return to tell them the others are close by, they walk somewhat faster, though it’s getting harder and harder to see. Lights flicker ahead, and there’s a faint smell of burning mutton-bird oil, and at last here’s Ada with a smoke-blackened lantern, and Queenie is with her, tall and brave, and Solomona too, who comes to walk beside Kalala when the path widens, an arm across his shoulders, and all the other Islanders, and finally Billy. They’ve all come together to find Lizzie, come to bring her home, where Ma is waiting for her, and where they will have to start living all over again, and now they will know far better how that can rightly be done. Of that she is quite certain.

  Historical Note

  The collective history of nineteenth-century Oceania – as the fiction of Melville, Ballantyne, Stevenson, Jack London, and also Georges Baudoux of New Caledonia, bears witness – is a history of diaspora. Vast numbers of people of many different backgrounds and ethnicities were on the move in this ‘sea of islands’: indigenous islanders and white immigrants, whalers, traders, beachcombers, naturalists, convicts, deserters, castaways, missionaries and ‘native teachers’. Some are now labelled pioneers, others migrants. Some set sail by choice, others by force.

  For although the nineteenth century is known now as the great era of abolition and emancipation, this is only partially true. In fact the slave trade changed its name, its organisation, its victims and its locations. After the American Civil War, cotton and sugar production shifted to the Pacific. The people of the small scattered islands of the ‘South Seas’ were peculiarly vulnerable to exploitation. First the blackbirders came – initially selling their captives in Peru, cheap labour for the white colonists’ mines and plantations. Then the indentured labour recruiters arrived, often tricking or compelling workers to sign contracts they didn’t understand, plundering Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia for the benefit of the newly growing colonies of Australia and New Zealand. The Pacific Labour Trade tore families and communities violently apart. Far too many people have never been able to recover their ancestors’ stories.

  Acknowledgements

  This book began with a conversation: on a rare visit to London, Madeleine Brettkelly, my aunt by marriage, told me the story of her uncle, ‘King’ Bell, born at the end of the nineteenth century on Raoul Island (Rangitāhua) in the Kermadecs, a remote chain of volcanic islands about half way between New Zealand/Aotearoa and Tonga. Raoul was called Sunday Island when the Bell family became its only inhabitants in 1878. Monday Island is an imagined version of their home, and while the Peacocks are all entirely fictional, some of their early experiences closely echo those of the Bells – as recounted by King’s sister Bessie in her old age for Elsie K. Morton’s book, Crusoes of Sunday Island (1957). Thank you, Madeleine Brettkelly, for sharing your memories of King and his family, and even more thanks to you and Arthur and to all your children too – Tony, Jody, Sharon and Pietra – for responding so enthusiastically to the idea that I might find a novel in your family history, and for both putting me up and putting up with all my questions.

  Thank you, Pietra, for introducing me to Gregory O’Brien. Thank you, Greg, for introducing me to Steven Gentry’s comprehensive and beautifully illustrated history of New Zealand’s northernmost islands, Raoul and the Kermadecs (2013), and also putting me in touch with Bronwen Golder, director of the Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy Project’s Kermadec/Rangitāhua Ocean Sanctuary initiative in New Zealand/Aotearoa. Thank you, Bronwen, and thank you, Pew Trusts, for research support from the earliest to the latest stages of writing and thinking, and even more for finally making it possible for me to get to the Kermadecs – one of the world’s most significant and unspoiled ocean environments. Hannah Prior and the Sir Pete
r Blake Trust welcomed me on a quite unforgettable voyage, and got me as close to Raoul as was within their powers. I learned a vast amount from the entire Young Blake Expeditions crew, scientists, student voyagers and educators alike – thank you all. Thank you, Commander Matt Wray and everyone on board HMNZS Canterbury for looking after us with such warmth, good humour and efficiency. Thanks to Giselle Clark and Simon Nathan for sharing your experiences and photographs of Raoul, Giselle on board, and Simon earlier in the book’s journey.

  Islanders from Niue worked on Raoul at various times in the two islands’ histories, but few of their names have been recorded. Kalala, Solomona and their companions are all entirely fictional, but I couldn’t have imagined them, nor their English missionary, without Margaret Pointer’s Niue 1774–1974: 200 years of contact and change (2015) and the archives of the London Missionary Society at SOAS. Ioane Aleke Fa’avae, whose expertise in the language, history and traditions of Niue is vast, kindly ensured my imaginings rang true: any errors or misjudgements are my own.

  My Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellowship at The Courtauld Institute of Art allowed me time, space and an income while I wrote this book: I am very grateful to both institutions. I’d also like to thank the staff of all the libraries and archives I’ve used around the world. Sources have been many and varied. Details are on my website: www.lydiasyson.com.

  Many have been generous with advice, readings and encouragement at crucial stages: particularly warm thanks to Mark Derby, Tig Thomas, Natasha Lehrer, Antonia Byatt and Kate Summerscale. Thank you, Sarah Odedina and Naomi Colthurst for believing in the book at its birth, Eleanor Dryden for nurturing it with such insight, grace and faith, and Sarah Bauer, Margaret Stead and everyone else at Bonnier Zaffre for myriad forms of support. Thank you, Alexandra Allden and Naomi McCavitt for an exquisite cover. Thank you, Catherine Clarke and Felicity Bryan Associates. Thank you, Tory Lyne-Pirkis. And thanks beyond thanks to all my family, Martin most of all.

  For your Reading Group

  For discussion

  • Did your understanding of the book’s title change through the course of reading the novel? To what extent did any of the characters – or indeed anything else – really belong to Mr Peacock?

  • When Lizzie finally speaks to her father alone, he says:

  ‘It was to protect you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. And what could you have done with the truth? How could it have helped you to know? It would have destroyed everything we have made here. I lied for all of us. You must see that. To help us all.’

  To what extent would this have been true had the ship not arrived at the moment it did? Would the family have had the strength and will to turn on their father without the catalyst of the ship’s arrival?

  • Early in the novel, Lizzie overhears the following conversation in Mr Peacock’s bar:

  ‘You could be king of the Kermadecs,’ the speaker assured him.

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘Because it’s the truth.’

  ‘And I believe you.’

  Did Pa believe him? Lizzie wasn’t certain.

  Do you think Mr Peacock ever truly believed this?

  • After it has been revealed that the Peacock children can’t read, Lizzie thinks the following:

  She suspects Kalala pities them. Certainly he looks at them oddly. We do not meet his expectations, she thinks, any more than he meets ours.

  To what extent do you think Kalala pities them? What is the role of expectation in the novel? In what ways did the characters conform to or diverge from your own expectations?

  • When the family are discussing whether to move to the island, the following exchange takes place:

  ‘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?

  Is there an answer to Albert’s question? How do you imagine the Peacock children’s future after the novel ends? Will they ever feel they belong in a place, or will they simply come and go?

  • When Lizzie, Ma and Queenie open The Family Shakspeare, the first play they read is The Tempest. What do you think is the significance of this?

  • After Ada reveals the full extent of Mr Peacock’s treatment of Albert, Lizzie begins to blame herself:

  For days she has battled with her instinct to deny what Ada has told her, and her fury at her sister’s new evasions. Fathers were always fast with their fists when it came to sons. Weren’t they? Lizzie is no longer certain. The family has lived so much apart from others. Hard to know what was too much or not enough of anything. In her indifference, in her failure to imagine another way of being, perhaps she had been as cruel as Pa.

  Do you agree with Lizzie’s view here, that she is partly to blame and perhaps complicit? Could she have known differently, given the unusual nature of her upbringing? Could she have been expected to imagine another way of being?

  • When Mr Peacock imprisons Kalala, Kalala is puzzled as to why Solomona is not defending him:

  My fury surges back, and I think to push myself against him. Instead I turn to Solomona, who stands as astonished as the rest. I am certain he will speak at least a word for me before they leave. Yet he shakes his head and makes a movement with his hands like smoothing sand.

  Does Solomona betray his brother by not speaking out earlier? Does this change your view of him? Does Kalala see too much goodness in his brother?

  • The author gives us direct access to Kalala’s thoughts, but the passages from the point of view of the Peacocks are written in the third person. Why do you think the author decided to do this? Did it affect your reading of the novel?

  Suggested further reading on related themes

  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

  The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne

  The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

  Tapu by Judy Corbalis

  ‘The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk’ – by William Cowper in Poems, Volume II

  The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

  Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments by Edmund Gosse

  Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden

  Lord of the Flies by William Golding

  Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Our Sea of Islands’ by Epeli Hau’ofa

  The Bone People by Keri Hulme

  Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

  Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

  The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

  Rain and Other South Sea Stories by W. Somerset Maugham

  Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville

  Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

  Georges Baudoux’s Jean M’Baraï: The Trepang Fisherman, translated by Karin Speedy

  The Ebb-Tide and Island Nights’ Entertainments by R.L. Stevenson

  Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar

  Mr Fortune’s Maggot by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

  The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Zaffre

  This ebook edition published in 2018 by

  ZAFFRE

  80-81 Wimpole St, London, W1G 9RE

  Copyright © Lydia Syson, 2018

  Cover design by Alexandra Allden

  Cover illustration by Naomi McCavitt

  The moral right of Lydia Syson to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this public
ation may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-4714-0370-5

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-7857-6186-7

  This ebook was produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  Zaffre is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

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