“Now, now Wendell,” said Sweetman, tapping the edge of his soup bowl with his spoon as if calling to order the meeting of some secret fraternal order. “Let’s not trouble our guests with all that business . . . especially at the dinner table.”
Wendell shrugged, which, on an island notorious for geological instability, was probably ill-advised. “It’s just so.”
Mr. Sweetman, thrusting his neck out to its fullest extent—not unlike the giant turtles on the Galapagos—pivoted his head in a sweeping motion from guest to guest, none of whom could claim to be the exclusive recipient of his remarks. “That’s pure conjecture,” he said earnestly. “Not a shred of evidence to support any such thing. Not a shred. Just ignore him.” He waggled his spoon—which was proving to be a very versatile instrument, prompting Albert to wonder why conductors didn’t use them to direct orchestras—in the direction of the edifice opposite him. “Poor Colonel Rivens. You should be ashamed, Wendell. As if the man hadn’t enough to contend with—his wife dying like that—and to be accused by innuendo! Deplorable!” He waggled emphatically. “I’ll not have it.” Pause. “Do you hear?”
Both dimples receded from the cheeks of the wagglee, who lowered his head perceptibly, but did not stop eating.
Angela and Jeremy exchanged meaningful looks, interspersed with sidelong glances at Albert, gauging the effect upon him of the direction the conversation had taken.
Albert, who had come to suspect, in light of recent history, that people were murdering each other all around him—and probably had been all his life; he’d just been too thick to notice—simply sighed into his soup. “Even here,” he said. Who knew how long he’d been stepping over corpses, unaware?
“Well, that’s tragic,” said Angela. “But it’s nothing to do with us, Albert, so let’s not let it spoil our little holiday.”
“No!” Mr. Sweetman agreed. “By all means not! Nothing whatever to do with you.” He sat back in his chair as the maid took away his soup bowl and replaced it with a steaming plate of fish, rice, and vegetables. “Have any of you been to New Zealand before?”
“Just rooms,” said Albert. He was staring at his soup, as if expecting it to do something interesting. “Concert halls and hotel rooms.” As these venues were, apart from their acoustics, the same everywhere. He’d never really been to any of the countries he’d visited. In fact, his recent excursion to Britain aside, he hadn’t really visited any countries at all; just their concert halls, airports, reception halls, and hotels: concrete cocoons with carpet. “Just rooms.”
“Well!” said their host, with as much enthusiasm as one can inject into a single syllable. “We’ll have to remedy that, won’t we, Wendell?”
Wendell nodded, but didn’t reply. He, too, seemed to be expecting something of interest to take shape in his soup bowl—an empty bowl, in his case.
For the next half-hour or so, Mr. Sweetman—New Zealand born and bred—held forth on the glories, curiosities, enigmas, legends, geology, geography, flora, fauna, and history of the Island of the Long Cloud. “I reckon God’s a sculptor,” he concluded, “And this is His masterpiece. The rest of the world is just the bits he threw away. And you’ll not convince me otherwise.”
“Where else have you been?” Jeremy asked.
“Where else have I been!?” said the landlord. “Why would I go anywhere else?” He slapped the table. “I reckon if you’re in Paradise, you stay put, like Adam should’ve done.” And that concluded the discussion to his satisfaction. Nonetheless, he added, “One doesn’t journey, when he’s been born at the destination.”
Not, however, to Jeremy’s. “There are lots of beautiful places in the world.”
“Oh, no doubt, no doubt!” said Sweetman. He sat back, squinted at the ceiling as if he saw something there besides the ceiling, and patted his belly. “Not sayin’ there aren’t. Not at all. But there’s beautiful, and then there’s beautiful.”
Jeremy Ash inhaled to put wind behind an assault on Sweetman’s logic, but Angela stuck a pin in him. “Well, I suppose we shall have to see for ourselves . . .”
“And so you shall, won’t they Wendell?” He didn’t wait for Wendell to reply, which was just as well, since Wendell hadn’t been listening. “Tomorrow, if you like, he’ll drive you up to Parua Bay. Good a place as any to start. Righto, Wen?”
“Parua’s good. I’ve got cousins there.”
“He’s got cousins back of every bush in the country, does Wendell. Good on ya, then. Tomorrow morning after breakfast. Get ready to fall in love.”
And so it was that, sometime shortly after noon the next day, Albert and company found themselves sitting under a tree overlooking a beach of copper-colored sand. Albert had never, as far as he remembered, sat under a tree, with or without an attractive girl, a legless boy, and a large Maori. Nor, to the best of his knowledge, had he ever seen or sat on a beach. He’d seen pictures, of course, but the sand in pictures doesn’t get in your shorts, which is what Albert was wearing. Another first.
Nor was the ocean in pictures wet, which, judging by Angela’s outfit—what there was of it—it was. She had, almost immediately upon arrival at the beach, plunged into the ocean for a swim. When she emerged, a quarter-hour later, she brought a good half-cup of it with her, mostly in her hair, which she proceeded to distribute by shaking her head.
Angela had a lot of skin, and it went in and out and up and down in ways that invited observation. It was also, Albert saw as she sat beside him, very white, but not as white as his own.
He wondered if his legs had ever been out in the sun. He’d never really thought about them before. He did so now. They were covered with curly black hairs, sprinkled here and there with gray ones. His skin was not just white; it was almost translucent, revealing a network of blue veins. They were skinny and boney and, taken altogether, didn’t have a lot in common with Angela’s.
She was twiddling her toes in the sand and making contented moaning sounds, deep in her throat.
“Take your shoes and socks off, Albert,” she said.
It was his custom, except on rare occasions, to do as he was told. He did so now, revealing feet that were, if anything, whiter than his legs. He tucked his black socks into his black shoes and set them carefully aside.
Angela rubbed her toes against his. “There. That’s better, isn’t it?”
Albert had never had a damp, nearly naked girl rub his toes with . . . anything. So electrifying was the jolt that surged through him, that he wondered where she was plugged in. Almost instantly he withdrew his feet. Almost instantly. But the residue of that touch was slow in abating and only with the passing of time did the hairs on his head begin to settle back into place.
It was one of those times he felt it would be good to think about something else and, as if on cue, the breeze brought him a sudden peal of laughter. He looked up to see Jeremy Ash in his wheelchair in the surf. Beside him, Wendell sat in the gentle waves that ebbed and flowed around him the way they did around any other natural feature. Both of them were facing the ocean and contemplating something amusing in the vicinity of Wendell's feet.
The ocean was a noisy thing. Albert closed his eyes and distilled the sounds: the “hush now” of the wavelets breaking on the beach, and the long, low exhale of the sands as they chased them back to the sea’s embrace. In the interval, a muted chorus of silvery giggles as the water gathered for another assault.
The rhythm was lazy and slow, like Summertime, and the livin’ is easy.
So this is what that meant.
Beyond and beneath it all, the soft, ominous thunder of waves, breaking on the ledges outside the half-moon cove where they sat; the exultant splash of waves momentarily escaping the maternal clutches of the sea, before collapsing in sibilant surrender.
Jeremy was first to see the body.
Chapter Three
Even as he followed Angela’s footprints across the sand, Albert felt part of himself beginning to slip away, removing itself to the relative
safety of his psychological storm cellar. What remained of him walked mechanically toward the body with which the tide was playing give-and-take with the shore, about twenty feet from where Jeremy had been when his cry rang out; where Wendell still stood, distraught but unmoving, repeating, almost chanting, a single word: “Tabu! Tabu!”
The effort it had taken Jeremy to propel his wheelchair through the sand to the dead girl—for a girl, Albert could now see, it was—had exhausted him. He sat over the body, panting. “Isn’t there anything you can do?”
The question was directed at Angela who knelt in his shadow, surveying the victim who had been lying face down. She turned her over just as Albert arrived to play his part as a helpless bystander. He was cogent enough, at least, to recognize that the girl was oriental, and to be amazed at how Angela’s hands played swiftly upon various points of the body—the wrists, the neck, the eyes—as if it was a musical instrument.
No music was forthcoming.
“She’s still warm,” said Angela. “Go call the police!” She fell upon the body like a fury, pumping the girl’s chest with the heels of her hands, then pinching her nose, sealing her mouth with her own and blowing into the corpse as if it was a balloon. She did this several times, working herself into a prodigious sweat, before realizing that the shadows around her hadn’t moved.
“Albert! Go call the police!”
Albert looked at Jeremy Ash who said sharply: “Go find a store up in town, A. Or a phone booth. Call the police. Ask people.”
Albert had never called the police. In fact, they seemed to spend a great deal of time coming to him. Nevertheless it was apparent, even to him in his state, that Jeremy wasn’t able to get through the sand in his wheelchair without Wendell’s help. It was also evident that Wendell, still performing his inexplicable ritual at a distance, was not going to be performing that function anytime soon. Albert went to get help and, as he did, a voice whispered in his mind: “Albert’s going to get help.” It was an unnatural voice, its words tinged with disbelief and futility.
Nevertheless, once he had made his way to the nearest store—which sold ice cream and post cards and wood carvings of angry-looking beings—and delivered his message, which was: “There’s a dead girl on the beach,” events seem to unfold of their own accord, as if they were a cue in a play for which the rest of the actors had been waiting. Within minutes he was trailing a little army of people—policemen, medical people, even a fireman, as well as the proprietor of the ice cream shop—to the beach where they relieved Angela of whatever it was she’d been doing.
She locked eyes with Albert as he made his way to the edge of the activity. “She’s not dead, Albert.”
Sweat was dripping from her forehead into her eyes, and she blinked it rapidly away as she attempted to draw him into focus. “I think they may be able to save her.”
“By blowing into her like that?” Albert nodded at the energetic young man who was now doing what Angela had been doing, except that—every five or six times through the procedure—he tilted the girl on her side and alternately pressed her stomach and her chest. None of this had been done gently. Even now bruises were forming on the girl’s flesh.
“That’s a good sign,” said Angela, in response to Albert’s observation. “If she were dead, she wouldn’t be bruising.”
The part of Albert that had taken refuge in the storm shelter opened the door and peeped out to see if the coast was clear. Its first thought was: “You can save people by pinching their nose and blowing into them?”
Why hadn’t anyone told him this when Melissa Bjork lay dying in his arms? Why hadn’t all the dead people who littered his memory been blown back to life? Why hadn’t someone told him to blow into his mother’s mouth as she lay there in her coffin?
Maybe she’d have lived long enough to love him.
All at once the young man—an ambulance driver, it turned out—started, releasing his mouth from that of the girl and jumping back as if he’d received a shock. The girl’s response was, to Albert, no less alarming. She choked and coughed, and choked and coughed, and suddenly a little geyser of water erupted from her mouth. Her eyes flew open, and she began convulsing.
Albert waited for the hairball.
The next morning there was an article in The New Zealand Herald, which Mr. Sweetman served with breakfast. “To think what might have happened if I hadn’t had Wendell take you there! The poor thing.”
Albert wasn’t sure to which poor thing the landlord was referring, the girl or Wendell, so he just made an agreeing sound which Mr. Sweetman would have heard if he’d stop talking, which he hadn’t. “I feel like a positive hero! I mean, of course, it wasn’t me who . . . who found her. But, if I hadn’t had Wendell take you there, well, she’d be dead instead of in the hospital.”
“Only almost dead,” said Jeremy Ash, de-boning a kipper.
Angela tapped the newspaper with her forefinger. “We have to think positively. She’s alive. That’s a start. And we should be thankful.”
“‘In God’s hands now,’” said Jeremy Ash. “That’s what Mrs. Gibson would say.”
The landlord directed an inquisitive glance at the boy. “Mrs. Gibson?”
“Back home,” said Jeremy Ash. “She’s a . . . “
“His housekeeper,” Angela interrupted, nodding at Albert, who, as usual, wasn’t listening.
Sweetman seemed satisfied with the answer. “How on earth do you suppose she came to be there? That girl? On the beach like that?”
Nobody advanced a notion. Not even Jeremy Ash.
“How old would you say she was?” said the landlord, stretching his neck toward Angela.
“Eighteen to twenty-five, I’d guess. Hard to tell, really. Oriental women seem ageless, somehow.”
“Eighteen to twenty-five. Tch, tch. So very sad.” He retracted his neck and leaned back in his chair, with a dollop of oatmeal on his chin. “How very, very sad. And no idea how she got there?” The question was rhetorical. “No signs of violence or . . . or anything of that sort, according to the newspaper. Is that true, do you think?”
Albert thought of the bruises, but they were the result of the very efforts that brought her back to life, so it probably wouldn’t be helpful to say anything.
Instead, it was Angela who spoke. “Not that I could tell. But I wasn’t looking for anything like that, so I couldn’t say for sure.”
“Well dressed, it said,” said Sweetman.
That had been one of the first things Angela had noticed. “Very.”
“Odd, that.”
“Why?”
“Well, she can’t have been in the water all that long, seeing’s it was possible to bring her ’round,” Sweetman observed.
“So?”
“Well, that was a little after mid-day?”
“Yes.”
“Most folks along the coast don’t go for dressing up much this time of year. And girls her age? Well, less the better as far as they’re concerned, if you take my meaning. The Whangarei area’s thought to be the warmest place in the country. Odd she’d be dressed up like that.”
The notion hung in the air for a minute, and everyone turned it over in their minds. It was Albert, who hadn’t seemed to be listening, who spoke first. “She was at a party.”
“A party?” said all three of his hearers in such tight unison it was hard to believe they hadn’t rehearsed it.
“Something people get dressed up for in the middle of the day.” Albert himself often got dressed up, but only for concerts, and they were always in the evening. He took that as conclusive proof that the girl hadn’t been dressed for a concert. Of course, he’d gotten dressed up for his mother’s funeral—rather Abigail Grace had gotten him dressed up—in the suit he brought with him to New Zealand, as a matter of fact. Mightn’t the girl have been to a funeral?
He studied his memory of her, which was still so vivid he could pick it up and wring salt water from it. Everyone at his mother’s funeral had been dressed, m
ore or less, in black. The girl had been dressed in a . . . well, something not black. Not even a little bit.
Not a funeral, then.
“Like a birthday party?” said Jeremy Ash.
To which Angela chimed, “or a wedding?”
“Or a cricket match!” said Sweetman.
That possibility wouldn’t have occurred to Albert in a long sequence of lifetimes.
“Or an art exhibition,” said Angela. “Or a lunch date, or . . . “
That’s when Albert left the table.
“May I play your piano?”
Of all the questions, requests, and intrusions to which Retired Colonel MacAulay Rivens, a.k.a. “Mac,” was conditioned to respond when opening the door, this was not one of them. His tongue did the heavy lifting while his brain tried to figure out what to do. “I beg your pardon?” it said. And while he was surveying the person to whom his tongue was speaking, he noticed something familiar about the face. Then he remembered. It was the face in the photo in a little silver frame on his wife’s piano.
“I’m Albert . . .”
“You’re him,” the Colonel interrupted. “The man on the piano!” He jerked his thumb at something either over his shoulder or behind him.
“I am?”
“No doubt about it! Come in, come in! Can’t have you loitering about, cloggin’ up the door way.” He drew Albert inside by the hand he’d been shaking and, closing the door behind them, ushered him toward a room with large windows at the end of the hall. “It’s in here.”
And so it was, if the “it” he was referring to was a baby grand.
“Here, see!” said the Colonel, indicating not the piano, but Albert’s photo in a silver frame. He picked it up—revealing a little oblong of mahogany in the light coating of dust covering the rest of the piano’s surface—and held it out for his visitor to marvel at.
Albert glanced at the picture; it was familiar. “May I play?”
The Colonel, not so non-plussed that he couldn’t allow for the eccentricities of those forming the creative layer of humanity—his wife, Drucie, had been one such. “Please do. She’d be thrilled, my Drucie, to think—well, I don’t know what she’d think.” He opened the lid and propped it up as Albert pulled the bench from under the piano, “You turnin’ up out of the blue like that. I mean, I’d heard you were in the . . . at Sweetman’s, of course. Word gets around, don’t you know. Still, what are the odds? Eh? Damned slim, I’d say.”
Improvisato Page 3
