Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  Again, my deepest sympathy to you and yours, Frank

  Olivia! Well, there’s proof, if any were still needed, that my mother meant to tell me I’m Henderson’s great-grandchild. I see now, as I type his letter out for you, that it must have been Mother, not Jon, who hid Franks papers in the basement. They were her gift to me, a gift that brings her closer than she’s been in years.

  She locked them in that darkroom and lost the key, knowing I’d be the one to find them. (She knew her daughters, knew it wouldn’t be Lottie who’d tackle the cellar.) I believe she also meant to tell me everything she told Jon in that last letter, but put it off too long.

  As for what Frank tells his solicitor and schoolfriend, I think he may protest a bit too much about his old suspicions being unfounded. Not long ago, Bob wrote for me, on University stationery, to the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, asking what materials they might have from that period of Prince Edward’s life. The Queen’s Librarian sent the following reply: “I regret to inform you that the Royal Archives have no holdings pertaining to Prince Albert Victor Edward, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. His file has not survived.”

  Whatever Prince Eddy did or did not do, in the Pacific or elsewhere, he was erased from official history.

  How Frank’s own journals survived his wish to destroy them isn’t clear. I presume Ivry was given the papers when he died, as originally intended. Towards the end of her life she left Riverhill, with its tropical conservatory and blighted orchard, and moved back to Tilehouse Street. She outlived all the Henderson’s by a few years, and after her death the house passed to Frank’s cousin, my Wyvern grandfather.

  Poor Frank and Ivry: “without issue.” So much was hidden by that dry expression in their wills. It wasn’t Prince Eddy, or Samory, or dysentery, or even the loss of his eye that cursed Frank Henderson. It was Olivias death that broke him, that turned him from a wry adventurer to an old man fretting about fruit trees.

  Seventeen

  TAHITI

  Arue Prison

  THE POLICE HELICOPTER ALIGHTED in the gendarmerie yard. Sergeant Benoit, with genuine regret on his tall face, said that my friends had reached Tahiti and were “assisting police in their inquiries” (an expression shared by French and English). This was of course the moment at which I lost control of my life.

  The silent Marquesan constable was there, setting up pencil obelisks, knocking them down. I thought: Years ago old Kautai must have sat at that same desk.

  “The Aranui will be in port this evening,” Benoit went on. “She sails for Papeete tomorrow at noon. I have orders to put you on board. She’s a fine ship. We’ll get you a good cabin. But I must ask you to surrender your passport now. The captain will hold it. I am sorry.” His words washed over me until his hand reached out and hovered for the passport. I had to ask him to repeat what he’d just said.

  I had the rest of the day to myself, and an urgent task. I thanked him for all his help, and told how things had gone in Taipivai. Looking back now on those last hours of freedom, I wish I’d thanked more warmly. I’m sure he put off fetching me until he knew I’d seen old Tari Kautai. He’ll be higher in heaven for that.

  Faraniki was in the overgrown Protestant cemetery not far from Jon, as Kautai had said. I must have passed him on my previous visit, but he lay in the grasp of a young fig and I hadn’t been looking for Polynesian names. His grave was more elaborate, edged with hewn blocks of reddish stone from a Marquesan building. The headstone was tall and irregular; its weathered outline seemed an echo of Muake’s basalt cusp.

  F. H. Teraupoo

  1911–1958

  Officier Médical

  avec l’affection et gratitude

  du peuple de Nuku Hiva

  My two fathers. Your grandfathers. I wept there for some time, and found myself doing so again beside Jon’s rough concrete slab. He deserved better. And to have his real name; though his false identity proclaimed a trust between these men. Faraniki had kept Jon’s secrets to the end.

  Taiohae was big and brash that last Marquesan evening. Bright shops, a thumping bar, the lights of the Aranui and two or three yachts trickling red and green across the bay.

  Pierre welcomed me back with a handshake, gloomily wagging his head at my poster. The surfboarders and the Kiwi were gone, but the Work was progressing, a bloody graft of fresh tattoo taking root on his calf.

  The terrace was full of sailors from the ship, belting down beer and watching TV. I’d forgotten that winking presence in the corner: French cartoons and puppet shows all day, news at six, then Mexican soap operas dubbed into Tahitian. I did not want television to exist on Nuku Hiva.

  As soon as the Aranui docked at Papeete, two humourless types in dark blue rollnecks, sunglasses, and beige slacks marched up the gangplank and ordered me to go with them for questioning. We slid down Boulevard Pomare in a Citroen with smoked windows, through a buzz of mopeds and scooters, past anti-speeding posters showing a wheelchair: Si Ce Modele de Voiture Ne Séduit Pas. …

  They kept me at the main police station behind the Palais de Justice. It took them three days to charge me (Napoleon didn’t burden his Code with habeas corpus), adding that in a “crime of blood” bail was out of the question. I did not fall for the ruse that my former shipmates had confessed, and that if I wanted leniency I should do the same and give evidence against them. I wondered, though, how long the others had been held and what pressures had been brought to bear. And what about Lars? Was he there on the outside, poised to help—or in the slammer too?

  So I landed in the last Pomare’s old stone jail. Natalie was already here, but we were kept apart. That was the worst thing, the impossibility of talking it out with anyone. I expected deliverance at any minute. Apologies, admissions of a mistake.

  I sulked on my cot, too angry and depressed to read, gormlessly watching the little caged TV with the sound off half the time. One evening there was something unusual. A riot or massacre, a mob against a wall. A street party. Men spraying champagne, women dancing in the spume. People attacking daubed masonry with picks and chisels. It was a year-end roundup: the Berlin Wall had fallen weeks ago, and I hadn’t heard.

  The Cold War seemed to be breaking up at last, like an ice age, this hope in all the faces on the screen. But what I felt was fury—at the waste of it all, at the beggaring cost to man and nature, at two generations ridden by a fear unrivalled since mediaeval hellfire. This peace had cost the world too much.

  A week went by. Then I was taken to the visiting room, the place I now know as “the bank,” where I met the Canadian consul, Alain Tremblay. He’d already been briefed by his Australian counterpart. Simon had been picked up the day he got off the plane from Nuku Hiva. He and Natalie were jointly charged with murder and conspiracy to commit espionage. Vatu and I were accessories.

  Much of this you already know, but I should add that the police have a surprise: a photograph taken on the morning the Tui Marama sailed from Papeete, conveniently snapped by a passing “journalist”—probably a DGSE man taking routine shots because of our association with Lars. Somehow there is a woman in the picture whom none of us remembers seeing there. A young blonde, similar enough to the one we fished from the sea. Either this photo is a forgery, or some passer-by was caught at an angle that makes her appear to be one of our group. They’re too clever to give her an identity; our alleged victim is “a person unknown”—just as she still is to us. The police also claim they have witnesses who are prepared to swear that five people, not four, embarked on the Tui that day. Even so, their case is absurdly flimsy. What could have been our motive for killing her, and then documenting our crime so conscientiously?

  “It’ll be laughed out of court the minute it gets there,” Tremblay said, once he’d satisfied himself on the details. “But I’m afraid you still have to be prepared for a bit of a stay. This is what happens to foreigners in trouble here. Usually it’s drugs, and no one feels too sorry for them. The détention préventive can be so long it amounts to
punishment anyway.” He added that the spying charge against the Australians just might stick, because of samples and papers found on the boat.

  I blew up at him. Didn’t he realize how much he’d just demoralized me? How long was “a bit of a stay”?

  “Sorry. I wanted to be straight with you. You don’t look to me like the type for bullshit. I don’t know how long. …” He shrugged. “Three or four months is par for a drug charge coming to trial. But this is politics—to scare people away from their nuclear sandbox. Lars Lindqvist’s the one they’re really after. He’s been a thorn in their side for years. But he’s world famous and he doesn’t scare easy. So they hassle who goes near him. You guys gave them a chance on a plate.”

  An inevitability was building, dropping into place around me brick by brick. I wrote to Bob, not asking him to come here (I could hardly hold him to our holiday plans) but to see if he would find a realtor and put my flat on the market. I’d need the cash for lawyers.

  The dear man turned up so quickly that his reply to my letter arrived after he did. For the first of many times we held hands through the barred wicket. He was wan and jet-lagged, a creature pulled from a Vancouver winter, grey and creased like a beached whale, his voice hollow and falsely hearty.

  “Good timing, Liv! You couldn’t have picked a better moment to get arrested. I’d already bought my tickets. Here’s your mail.”

  He pushed through a bundle of letters (inspected when he came in). There were already some early Christmas cards. I thought: What about Christmas? Will he have to go back so soon? I couldn’t ask.

  “How are you, love? How are you really?” He’d never called me love before. It seemed too British for Bob.

  “Oh, I’m having a great time. I’m locked away with hookers having the DTs, and cockroaches big enough to ride on, and ghastly stinks coming up the drain in my washbasin. Can you be gassed this way? Maybe that’s the idea. No need to sharpen the guillotine.”

  • • •

  I don’t know what Bob told his wife—I never want to know the lies—but somehow he got out of Christmas. Then his work on Pierre Loti’s Mariage became so significant that he really had to stay in Tahiti (this one he did tell me because it was partly true). He bought himself a laptop, and another one for me, saying there was nothing like writing to make the time fly by.

  Later, when he’d talked about Kent State and Barbara, I saw he wouldn’t leave until I got out; Bob wouldn’t walk away from a woman in crisis ever again. He’s as haunted by his guilts as I am.

  In the mail he’d brought from home was your letter. I couldn’t have had a more wonderful or unexpected gift. I’d been thinking only of myself. Then your letter comes and opens up a door. I don’t know where it will lead, or if it leads anywhere at all, but its sheer existence is enough for now. Every word I’ve written has seemed a step towards that door. And even if you never read this, and never see me, you’ve still done something wonderful, something I don’t deserve and may never be able to repay.

  I made several attempts to unfold Mother’s letter. Bob also examined the compacted mass, concluding the only hope was to take it to a professional conservator. He doubted that anyone with the right skills existed locally, which would mean leaving it unopened until I got back to Canada. Lars, however, knew someone who did such work for the Tahiti Museum. The letter left my hands for about six weeks, while I tormented myself with hopes and fears for its survival and what it might, or might not, hold.

  When it came back I could hardly recognize it. Five sheets were sealed inside archival plastic sleeves. Their muddy colour had washed to a pale straw mottled with traces of blue-black ink that had run a long time ago. All had savage creases meeting at a hole worn in the middle, from being folded and carried so long in Jon’s pocket. The edges looked like an eroded coastline, the margins mostly gone, and deep coves eaten into the text.

  The conservator had done a good job (paid for by Lars, I gather, in remorse for getting me involved with his Australian friends), but the results were disappointing. Even in the best parts, the paper was badly decomposed. I could read nothing. But in the course of her work, with special lighting and solvents, the conservator had glimpsed a few readings. She enclosed a transcript—merely disjointed words, phrases, and broken pieces linked by strings of dots.

  I could probably make anything I want from these fragments, like the poetry people assemble from magnetic words stuck on their fridge doors. That said, I do think one question can be settled: the matter of how and where my mother met Faraniki Teraupoo. I now believe he came to Tilehouse Street. There’s the phrase “put the kettle on,” mention of a “veterans’ sanat[orium],” and, most telling of all, something about “Henderson’s spear.” It seems that Teraupoo’s poor health when he was freed from the camps detained him in Europe long after the Second World War, that his family had kept or remembered Frank’s address, and that he came looking for his English kin before going back to the South Seas. I think my mother snapped her lover’s picture and kept it in her desk with Henderson’s glass eye. That tall man in a demob suit is my Polynesian father, paled by overexposure, stooped by his war.

  It must have been August 1949 (my birthday is in May). Presumably Jon was away somewhere, though he’d left the Pacific by then. Perhaps Mother already knew that her husband was contaminated, and saw this as her only way to have another child. But now I’m just making up excuses for my own existence!

  This is all I can tell you. My other questions are still unanswered. I’ve no inkling who might have “disowned” my mother, though of course I wonder if she did have family who rejected her, perhaps because of me. I don’t know why she didn’t go to Nuku Hiva—or ask someone to—after she got Jon’s first reply to her confession, the one in the atlas. I can only assume she thought he’d be on his way home soon, and worried she might get there to find him gone—in those days it would have taken months from England. Or did Faraniki write, thinking Jon had left the island as a stowaway?

  I’ve also thought about the cigarette case. I believe Jon accepted it because he meant to send it to Hitchin, either by post or, after further persuasion, with Teraupoo. He didn’t mean to jump that day at Vaiahu. He fell. He’d intended to come back and finish writing. He was going to tell my mother that he loved her.

  Alain came this morning, bringing some floppy discs and news I hardly dare believe—as of this week, a deal is “in the pipeline.” Vatu and I could be out any day. Tomorrow this goes to Papeete for printing up, and then a big fat jiffy bag will make its way to you.

  • • •

  While I’ve been locked in here, Bob and Alain helped arrange one other thing. I gave some thought to bringing Jon’s remains to England, putting him beside my mother. But it seemed too invasive and presumptuous. I wouldn’t want anyone digging me up, not unless they had a very good reason for thinking I was unhappy where I was. So I feel it’s best to leave him where he’s been for all these years. On Nuku Hiva he found forgiveness in himself, and with that I believe he found his peace.

  Next time the Aranui sails for Taiohae there’ll be a stone on board, a slab of reddish basalt. Sergeant Benoit has offered to take care of things that end.

  Jonathan Barkley Wyvern

  1920–1953

  Group Captain, RAF

  Husband of Vivien

  Father of Charlotte and Olivia

  In Loving Memory

  Come with me one day We’ll visit your grandfathers together. And I still have a film to make.

  Now over to you. I want to know everything.

  Will you tell me?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to the following for generosity with their time and many helpful suggestions: Shirley Wright, Amanda McConnell, Mike Poole, Rose Corser, Robert Suggs, Robert Koenig, Inga Clendinnen, Greg Dening, Bengt Danielsson, Rod Vickers, Nicholas Dennys, Beryl Sims, John Leaberry, Andrea Duncan Tanner, Paul Quarrington, Cassandra Pybus, Peter Shinnie, Peter Hulme, Peter Gorrell, Rob Kay, Sandra Berg, Mic
hael Wallace, Richard Landon, Jim Galozo, Doris Cowan, Claudie Gosselin, Bella Pomer, Henry Dunow, and Antony Harwood.

  Special thanks to Janice Boddy, Claire and Farley Mowat, Louise Doughty, Anthony Weller; also to Louise Dennys and Diane Martin at Knopf Canada, to Bill Scott-Kerr and Sarah Westcott at Transworld, and to Jack Macrae and Katy Hope at Henry Holt.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES:

  This book is a fiction inspired by certain events in the life of my cousin Francis Barkley Henderson, C.M.G., D.S.O., who was born in 1859. Chapter 2 and parts of Chapter 4 are based on his own account of his capture by the Sofas in 1897, published in Jerome K. Jerome’s The Idler (London, 1898), and on his official report in the Public Record Office, Kew (reference CO 96/308). Details of the Bacchante voyage are drawn from The Cruise of H.M.S. Bacchante, 1879–1882, compiled by John N. Dalton, ostensibly from the journals of Prince Edward and Prince George (London: Macmillan, 1886). The ships logs are also in the Public Record Office (reference ADM-53-11621 ff). Henderson retired with the rank of commander in 1919, after serving in Naval Intelligence and MI5 during the First World War.

  While I have allowed my imagination free run with this material, the historical context of Henderson’s Spear, in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is as accurate as I could make it. There was, for example, a guerrilla leader named Teraupoo on Raiatea in the 1880s and ’90s; but only the existence of the spear itself (and Bacchantes exceptionally slow passage from Fiji to Japan) suggested to me the events on that island in which my characters take part. I hope Frank, Ivry, and the others will forgive me for the liberties I have taken with their lives.