And the same, next century, with the sailors, traders, missionaries, Government officers. They dropped in for a day or two, never came back, but they fitted. And the same, fifty years ago, with young MacDonnell and his partner. They arrived and announced that they owned the islet. Nobody sweated. It was all in the scheme of things.
It’s a comforting institution, that scheme of things. When the Japs dropped a bomb on the MacDonnell’s copra shed, Kailuana laughed. Not that they wanted to see the MacDonnell done out of anything, but a copra shed exploding, that was funny. No one said: ‘What about me?’
Keep thinking about time, vast stretches of time, so as not to think: ‘What about me?’ Where was I when the mountains came out of the sea. Seize hold of that moment, concentrate on it, meditate on it. Then I know where I stand with time and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Alistair, Alistair, she said, it doesn’t matter. Don’t think about it, it doesn’t matter.
MACDONNELL
The huge pink youth stared and stared at me, with the bird on my hat, and I took him for a fool, as so many of them are; but he was never a fool, only innocent, a little innocent, as he thinks I am too, and he told me so one night, on the veranda, in that very place. He stared and stared at the bird, and then the wind-burnt face opened up on the big teeth and he said: ‘Do you always wear that?’
‘Not if I can help it, old man,’ I said, ‘but he comes to have a look at the visitors and I don’t see him coming. Go away, Popu,’ I said, shaking my head, and the bird flew out screeching into the grove.
‘I am Dalwood,’ the boy said. ‘I go around with Misa Kodo doing good.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘Popu means excrement. The women named him that because of his habits in the house. I am MacDonnell. But call me Mak. Where has Cawdor gone?’
‘He is there,’ Dalwood said, and I turned and saw Cawdor at the other end of the veranda, looking down on my village, against the thicket of frangipani glowing pink in the last sun.
‘Cawdor,’ I said, ‘you haven’t introduced us, old man.’
‘Sorry,’ Cawdor said, coming back to us, his skin very dark. I used to wonder if there might be a touch of the tar-brush there, but that is not possible, he was a son of the manse, a dark Scot. ‘Tim Dalwood,’ he said, ‘the MacDonnell of Kailuana.’
‘Do you want a rinse, old man?’ I said to Dalwood.
‘Do I want a what?’ he said.
‘If you need to pumpship,’ I said, ‘do it over the veranda rail, planter’s privilege here.’
‘“Pumpship,”’ Dalwood repeated. ‘Hey, Batman, listen to the words.’
Cawdor said, looking absent: ‘Mak’s always a year ahead of Time magazine with the slang.’
‘I haven’t been off the island for seven years, old man,’ I said, ‘or out of the Territory for fourteen, and I haven’t spoken English, except to the wireless, since the Chinampa came three weeks ago, if you want to know.’
‘That’s fantastic,’ Dalwood said, and I saw his fingers playing with the strap of the camera that he had slung over his left shoulder (is it part of the uniform of the new breed?) and his eyes arranging me in some grotesque pose, and waited for him to say: ‘Do you think I could—?’
‘Do you think I could take a photo of the house?’ he said. ‘And, oh—maybe you wouldn’t mind—?’
‘Please yourself, old man,’ I said, ‘but not me, not now, it’s my time for a shower. No, you sit yourselves down at the table there, Naibusi will bring some rum. Cawdor, look after him, give Naibusi a shout.’ Then I went off to get out of my clothes, because it was six o’clock.
I heard Dalwood behind me spluttering and then choking with stupid laughter that he couldn’t swallow, and Cawdor saying, half-laughing himself: ‘Where are your manners, you ape?’ And the funny thing was that I felt rather pleased with him, the boy, for laughing at me that way, because I used to be like him at his age, and even later, when I first came to the island. But of course he couldn’t have conceived of that, no one can conceive it, except sometimes Naibusi when she stops and looks.
DALWOOD
We sat at a table with a scarred plastic cloth on it, looking down on the sea, which was changing colour, and the dimming Igau by the islet. The palms kept up a slow sweeping on the roof, and the white bird somewhere out of sight was swearing to itself in one of those instant rages that cockatoos can turn on. A pawpaw tree beside me leaned in and drooped its fruit on the veranda rail. I thought of tight green breasts.
Corny. But that was the sort of thing I thought then a lot of the time, and thought it must be the same for him, not understanding that it was not that, never simple like that.
But then he was laughing and looked at home, at ease, the way he sometimes was when we were among new faces and not at home, and I thought perhaps, perhaps when we get back to Osiwa, this time, it will be over and he’ll be like he was before, however that may have been.
He saw me looking at him, and scowled. ‘You still doing a project on me?’ he said. Then he caught sight of something behind me, and his face went sort of gentle, and he stretched out an arm.
‘O!’ he called. ‘Naibus’.’
An old woman in a blue dress, with her hair cropped to the scalp, came towards us over the veranda carrying a tray. A rather beautiful old woman, I remember thinking: very straight and young in her walk, her face worn and fine. She put down the tray on the table, and then did what I never saw any other woman do in these islands, held out her hand, and he took it and kept it for a moment, smiling into her eyes.
‘How are you, old woman?’ he said in the language. And she murmured: ‘A bwoina wa’, taubad’. I’m just fine.’
‘That is Misa Dolu’udi,’ he said, nodding my way, and she turned and bowed, taking me in for a second with deep eyes. ‘This is Naibusi, Tim, the woman of the house.’
I said: ‘Hullo, Naibusi,’ and she murmured: ‘Taubada,’ bending to the tray and beginning to put out the things on the table. I saw that there was a bottle of O.P. rum there, with glasses and sugar and water, and a withered lemon on a plate that said South Australian Government Railways.
‘But where is Saliba?’ Alistair asked her. And as soon as the name was out, something violent happened in the passage leading to the cookhouse, an explosion of shrieks and giggles, screams of: ‘Ku la, Salib’!’ Then there were sounds of fisticuffs on yielding surfaces, and one girl kept yelling out at the others. ‘Inam!’ she shouted, and ‘Wim!’ Then the force behind her had its way, and she came shooting across the veranda, still swearing, like a giggle-powered rocket.
‘Saliba!’ Misa Kodo sang out.
She was wearing all the flowers for miles around and smelt like a rich funeral, and had on arm-bands and leg-bands and red coral beads and a new skirt that seemed to be giving her a lot of trouble to control. She must have got dressed up for somebody, but it wasn’t for Misa Kodo apparently, because when she saw him opening his arms for her all she had to say was: ‘Kwim!’
‘Slut,’ he said. ‘Tim, this is Saliba.’
She turned to look me over for a moment, the big motherly teenaged bosom thrusting against the flowers, and I thought I made out in her something that was in Naibusi too, a sort of restfulness. Noisy as she was, quivering with bottled-up noise, there was a seriousness there too, in the plump blunt face and the eyes that seemed to be happy with everything they saw. I thought that somehow she was different from the rest, maybe not so pretty as the rest, but fuller, and kinder, and the only young one, probably, whose name and face I’d be able to remember when I’d gone.
Then he began to tell her something in the language about me and about the tax, how I’d come to help collect the tax, and she turned away from me and squatted down at his feet to listen, the fibres of the banana-leaf skirt parting over her thighs. But she was still thinking about me, I saw that, and it was some remark of hers to do with me that made him suddenly burst out laughing, and explain: ‘Saliba’s the clown of the house.’ The other girls were
laughing too, and began to press around us, and the hot sticky air was suddenly full of crushed sulumwoya leaves.
When the MacDonnell pushed his way through them on his way to the shower, none of the women turned or noticed.
‘Hey,’ I said. The MacDonnell was stark naked.
‘Got a drink, old man?’ he sang out. ‘Help yourself. I’ll be there in five minutes.’
‘Do you always get about like that?’ I said, taking him in. Among the brown garlanded girls he was white like a woodgrub, and something of the same texture.
‘All born in the house, old man,’ he said, waving at the girls. And he went off, with everything explained, at a jiggling trot, and disappeared on the cookhouse side.
‘Good skin, hasn’t he?’ Alistair said, looking up for a second. Then he went back to talking to Saliba, having some conversation that they must have found pretty funny, because the dark creases kept coming back to his face and she quaked all over with that gurgling laugh. Rough, boisterous, tender. I thought what a household, and what might not happen in such a household, watching the girls, feeling tight.
Now all that evening seems so far away and sharp and bright it is as if I am watching through the wrong end of the binoculars and am outside but it is still going on. I drank too much and laughed till I got laughed at over jokes in a language I don’t know. The cockatoo came home and sat on my head and cursed and screamed at Saliba, every feather on end. Mak joined us, dressed for dinner in striped pyjamas, and we ate chicken and yams and the leaves of some tree by the light of a Tilley lamp that dropped fried insects on every plate. The palms turned blue, and the sea turned mauve, lilac, violet; the islet like a lump of coal floating on it, at the side of the ghostly Igau.
When we came afterwards into this terrible, dead, no, dying room, I did not notice what it looked like, there was so much talk and light. All the women came with us, the girls and Naibusi, to smoke and sing and make garlands in the hard white glare, the fireside of this house. They sat propped against one wall with their legs stretched straight ahead, teasing the old man, giving Alistair the local news, ogling me.
‘O, sena toveaka,’ they said, making the shape of me in the air with their hands. ‘A very big man.’
‘Yes,’ I managed to say, ‘yes, truly, a very big man, me.’ Then they screamed and exclaimed, and I felt brilliant, because I was drunk with everything and still drinking.
And Alistair kept drinking too, and I saw him easing, coming to life, as if he was in his own house again after a long time away. It was when he was like that they opened up for him, they adopted him, like a clever kid or an amusing pet, with a kind of crooning. Well, they are sentimental; and I am sentimental too. We are treacherous, we sentimentalists, but I haven’t known that long.
MACDONNELL
I had stopped drinking when I noticed it was seven o’clock, but Cawdor couldn’t keep his hands off the bottle, and I wondered if I ought to do something, drop a hint or go to bed. Of course I hadn’t heard then, I hear no news, but I saw that when he seemed to relax he was actually tightening, and could tell that Naibusi felt it too, the few things she said were so soothing. I should think the prodigal son was like that at first, too eager to please. But whatever the old woman and I thought, the boy thought that everything in the world was perfect, and he sat beaming, drinking himself asleep.
‘Sunday tomorrow,’ I said. ‘No tax-gathering on the Sabbath. The idiocy. How much is it going to cost us to have you squeeze five bob a head a year out of these people? I’ll tell you something, old man, if it wasn’t for me buying copra there wouldn’t be five bob in the villages. So what would you send to Konedobu then, coconuts?’
‘It’s the principle,’ Cawdor said. ‘They’re calling it evolution towards self-government.’
I turned and spat, not that it’s a habit of mine but to make a point, through the open shutter, towards the ghostly palm-trunks that the lamplight dragged inwards from the dark. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘what are you doing tomorrow?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I thought we might go to Kaga. Tim, shall we go to Kaga?’
‘You’ll see some self-government there,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s what I wanted to talk to them about.’
‘This is great,’ the boy said, slurred. ‘This is the life. We say to Sayam: “Take us to Kaga,” and away we go. It’s as good as being a pirate.’
He laughed, and all the girls looked up at him, over their garlands and cigarettes and half-made skirts. ‘His legs,’ one of them said. ‘Wa! Like the piles of a yam-house.’
‘You watch out for Sayam,’ I said. ‘A vindictive old bugger, that one. There was an ADO at Osiwa one time, a friend of mine, very decent fellow. Sayam found he was breathing down his neck a bit too hard, so he made up a story about some funny business with Government stores. The next thing I heard, that ADO was out. That’s what Sayam’s like, old man, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘He manages the boat,’ Cawdor said, ‘I manage the rest. We don’t clash.’
‘You clash with Osana,’ Dalwood said. ‘The slimy bastard.’
‘Osana,’ Saliba said, with a bray of contempt, and the boy glanced up eagerly and laughed at the tone in which she said the name. They seemed very pleased with each other suddenly, and I thought how young these white boys are, how long they go on being young, while she, at sixteen, was already mature and would soon begin to thicken.
‘Mak,’ Cawdor said, ‘may I say something to you, you have the most extraordinary library. I can see both Kinsey Reports, and something about six inches thick called Sexual Deviations. How could you even know these things are in print?’
‘To tell you the truth,’ I said, ‘it’s because of that foreign fellow, that ethnographer, as he used to call himself, the one who wrote all the stuff about Osiwa. I forget what his name was, but he got it all wrong. So I’ve decided to write a book myself, and I can tell you this, old man, it’s going to hit the world like a bomb. I’ve read Casanova and I’ve read Frank Harris, and they hadn’t heard half of it. Of course it’s a bit late, I’m seventy-four, wish I’d thought of it earlier, but people ought to know these things, and they’re not going to unless I tell them. So that’s the reason for the racy stuff—I’m studying.’
But Cawdor was hardly listening. Saliba had begun to pelt him and the boy with frangipani flowers, and the other girls had joined in, and he was looking at them, very steadily, as if trying to work out some problem in his mind.
‘There’s a lot of study we could do here,’ he said, towards Saliba rather than to me. ‘On the megaliths, for instance. Why are they there, who put them there? Are they temples, or what are they? Do you make anything of them, Mak?’
‘Not a thing, old man,’ I said. ‘People here say their ancestors put them up, but I don’t know about that. I think it was probably a different people altogether, but I haven’t had any particular ideas about them.’
‘I think people who were fey,’ he said.
‘“Fey”,’ I said. ‘Haven’t heard that word for years. Well, you’re a Scot, too, I suppose, with a name like that.’
‘Doomed to die,’ he said, still to Saliba, one would have thought. ‘When people were fey, their character was supposed to change. Mean men became generous, changes like that. I’ve always imagined some very ordinary blokes being marooned here and realizing that they’d never get away, and changing. Starting to know things about themselves and their place in the set-up. Getting a bit desperate, probably, but also—I should think—reverent. I can see them putting up those stones as an act of worship: not of anything in particular, but just worship. And to show that they’d been here, to leave something behind. Maybe they even thought of the stones as a signal for help.’
‘Never struck me that way, I must say,’ I said. ‘Very ordinary lumps of coral rock, I’ve always thought.’
‘Oh, yes, but,’ he said, ‘they didn’t get there by themselves. And that may be the only message.’
‘All very interesting, old man,’ I said. ‘Nine o’clock, my time for bed. Are you turning in?’
‘If I have to,’ he said, turning round at me and shrugging. ‘I know the laws of the house by now.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘not such a bad place to be, bed.’ And was going on, dropping my voice: ‘I say, old chap, are you planning—’ when he brought me up short.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sleeping alone, thanks.’
‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘in your case—’
‘And so’s the kid,’ he broke in, nodding towards Dalwood. ‘Or I’ll have the bastard up in front of the ADO.’
‘Please yourself, old man,’ I said. ‘Times have changed. Many’s the ADO who’s had his outlook broadened in this house, but enough said.’
And then I was getting up to go and pumpship off the edge of the veranda, wondering what would become of the country when even the patrol officers were turning into missionaries. But suddenly all the women flew at me screaming like birds, and knocked me back on the sofa beside Cawdor again.
‘Avaka?’ I shouted at them, just as Dalwood, lurching to his feet, bounded into the middle of them.
‘Fire!’ bellowed Dalwood.
I said to Cawdor: ‘Which one this time?’
He leaned forward to see, and said: ‘It’s Saliba. Seems someone dropped a match on her skirt.’
‘O, her new skirt,’ Naibusi cried. ‘O Saliba. Never mind.’
‘Salib’,’ Cawdor called out, ‘we will buy you a skirt in Wayouyo.’
But Saliba was too busy to hear him, wrapped up in a battle which had been going on all this time between her and Dalwood. The boy was beating at the burning skirt, and she was shrieking: ‘Go away with your hands, ravisher!’
‘I think he knows, old man,’ I said to Cawdor. ‘I think he’s been there before.’
Visitants Page 5
