“I will keep most of the books stored away until I need them,” he told Kay. “Having seen the damp-damage at the school.”
The house door hung a little awry, but he shut it carefully behind them anyway and latched it with the rotating piece of wood, and walked with Kay down to the little stone jetty. The boat had gone back to the ship to take back the sailors, so they stood there, silent, alone together in this odd place. Ha‘ano.
Well. Arranging her pinny behind her so as not to muss her dress, Kay sat on the edge of the jetty, little stones pressing into her legs and rump. She would have pebbled dimples on the back of her legs from the rough concrete.
“Keep up your derivations list,” he said absently, scanning the variations in colour in the shallow sea.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“This is a pleasant haven where I find myself,” he said. He turned to look back at his house, and the other houses laid out along the interior road, and the forest of palms that reached almost to the ocean, along a thin edge of sanded beach. “It will only be lonely at first.”
The boat was crawling across already from the Morning Light. Kay stood and fluffed her dress around her again. “I will write to you,” she said. “I promise I will.”
The boat bumped up against the jetty. Mr. Best was waiting. She held out her hand, and Mr. Brimner took it gently and shook it with grave attention. He doffed his hat.
In the boat she sat facing the shore so she could wave to him again. His long, thin legs, his round body, his large head and smoked spectacles. He stood on the stone wharf, waving his handkerchief. Then, so that she could leave, he turned and wandered off down the beach, pale-grey jacket flapping a little behind him.
10
Ask and You Shall Have
As the ship moved over the deep sea and her bunk moved likewise, beneath her and supporting her, Kay dreamed and dreamed. She could not wake from dreaming of Blade Lake; it seemed she dreamed for days, years, the whole length of her life. She turned away again and promised not to see or speak of the children in their lines, shivering in the long, deep shudder of winter in the North, wrapped in grey blankets torn in half, ice on their eyelashes, standing in the snow for fire drill. That was a good thing, though: Father instituted the drills after a school in Saskatchewan burnt down, and many children died.
Many children died. Standing in lines again to be tested for TB, turning their heads to watch the snick of Miss Ramsay’s knife, making no cry. Thea told them she was proud of their courage.
Kay hated her saying that. It hurt them just the same—it was not all right to hurt them, because they were brave! Some were too afraid to cry out, some of them hushed the others. John did not like the cut, but Annie pinched him to be quiet, and then he went out to do the evening milking after all, since it was Rota C that day. And Thea sent Annie back up to scrub the ward floor, because she was still being punished.
That was Kay’s fault. She had run faster than Miss Ramsay’s approaching heels, and let Annie take the blame for being in the pantry. It was true that Miss Ramsay would blame Annie even if Kay stood there with a mouth full of bread, molasses on her chin. But she should have run back to say, to shout, that it was her, it was her all the time, taking what she wanted, it was not Annie at all. But she did not.
Worse than that. In the study she had let her head nod when Miss Ramsay told Father that Annie was stealing bread. She was afraid, was she, of Father?
She could not look at herself for that, she could not think about it. She had been staring at what he would do to her that she had seen him do to others. The big strap slashing down or a furious shaking or a long time in a cold, dark, confining place. She could not make her mouth move to tell.
Nor could she come out of the dream. In four o’clock twilight Miss Ramsay stood over Annie with the pointer from the upper classroom, and when Kay said no, no, she swung harder again and this time with the many-pronged five-chalked music-line-drawing stick, scoring five dark-red lines into Annie’s winter-pale arm when it clawed down with long brass fingers.
Then Kay did wake. She pulled herself out of the dream and climbed up through twisted sheets into the close-wrapped wood of her bunk, breathing in rhythm with the slap-slap of the waves on the side as they ploughed through the long sea up to Fiji.
She knew where she was now.
It was because they had left Mr. Brimner at Ha‘ano that her nightmares were back. She could not be left.
Mr. Brimner would not claw anyone, he never would. At the worst he might look at them questioningly. Ha‘ano was too small for the children to be kept from their parents. They would run home even in the middle of the day for their dinner of fish soup and taro. If the teacher beat them—but Mr. Brimner would not beat them—but if anyone ever did, any other teacher, like Mr. Maitland, or some Mr. Fruelock or other, the children would tell, and a large father would walk over the field and pick up the cruel teacher with one big fist and shake him like you might shake a misbehaving cat, only until he was dead.
Since Thea had not come to wake her, she must not have cried out with the dream. She had not cried out in life either, watching Miss Ramsay slash at Annie’s arm.
In her bare feet she stole up on deck and found Pilot curled tight in his box close by the stove vent, and buried her cold hands in his fur. In the distance, Mr. Wright called quietly to a seaman, and the seaman answered. The only sound in the world. The ocean was quiet and there was no moon. She picked Pilot up and carried him down to her bunk, which was not allowed.
Even then, she dreamed again. Perhaps because of being at sea again, after a break of several days. Miss Grace Ramsay, black dress, staring owl eyes—four strong slaps back and forth, and a pause, and when Annie does not give in and cry, she slaps again, one-two-three-four, and again, and again, until Father comes and stops her, Thea running in the hall outside and Miss Ramsay stiff neck and eyes still staring, utterly right right right right.
Kay forced herself to lie back down. Pilot had curled on the floor on her discarded dress, but he looked up and then bounded back onto the bunk, where he turned six times around his own tail and nestled again into her knees, and with that steadying weight she could lie still, thinking and remembering, but at least not dreaming.
At breakfast, unable to contain her thoughts, she asked Thea, “Why did Father first go to Blade Lake?” That was a thing she thought she was allowed to ask.
“To bring succour to the Indians, of course,” Thea said, frowning. “As was his duty. He had worked hard at Fort à la Corne, and to be offered the school was an honour, proof that his efforts were recognized, that the bishop saw his success with the community there.”
“But why was the school there at all, why did they not just have schools of their own, with their own people to teach them?” After Tonga, the schools and churches there, and men like Mr. Fruelock and Mr. Hill, Kay now saw the whole arrangement as false, wrong—silly men, caught up in ambition.
Impatient, Thea said, “You forget, they asked us to come, it was part of the treaty! Why do you always forget that part? They understood that their children needed education, in order to be part of the white man’s world, to be part of civilization. And they needed medicine and treatment.”
“The children did not want to be taken away,” Kay said, into her collar. The medicine did not do them any good, she did not say.
“That is a very common thing, all over the world. Father was sent away too, you know that. In England, it is the privileged classes that are sent away.”
Didn’t do him any good either, Kay thought. Once, when he had drunk more port wine than Thea liked him to, he told Mr. Maitland a story about when he was fag (which meant a kind of servant that the younger boys were to sixth form boys) to a much bigger boy who tormented him. A tic fluttering at the edge of his eye crease. “That fellow is now in Parliament. Hartlingford!” He spat into the stove, not looking like himself at all. Kay did not know whether Hartlingford was the name of the boy or the name of hi
s seat in Parliament. Sometimes the name came to her in the middle of the night, with blotches around it.
Thea watched Kay carefully, the first days out of Tonga, in case she was missing Mr. Brimner too keenly. She was disturbed, clearly—caught up again in useless thoughts of the old days. But she continued to do her work, Pilot on her lap or curled at her feet, covering notebook pages with (blotched, yes) declensions, lists of derivatives and crossed-out, struggled-through translations. In Shanghai or Hong Kong, Thea had promised Mr. Brimner she would find a Greek-English dictionary, the smallest Liddell & Scott, or the next one up. He had entrusted her secretly with a five-pound note for the purchase, saying, “The Great Scott is beyond my purse, but the Middle Liddell, or even the Little Liddell, will do perfectly well.” It was kind of him to think of it.
They all missed him, in fact. Francis was busy on deck most of the day and tired by eventide; even at supper, he and Mr. Wright made very little conversation without Mr. Brimner’s gentle prompting. Kay was silent by nature, and Thea was tired. She ought not to be! This life, with the luxury of Liu Jiacheng’s quiet service, was practically a rest-cure compared with the unending physical labour at the school, with Miss Ramsay too patrician to ever lift a pinky in the kitchen or, God forbid, the barn, so that a good deal of the rough work fell to Thea.
A lassitude had settled over them with Mr. Brimner’s departure, that was all. In the mornings they still sat at the deck table under the awning, but Kay (bent over her papers, working alone in a concentrated, crabbed way that reminded one of Father) had blue shadows beneath her eyes. If that did not mend soon, Thea would insist on a liver dose.
Kay did not give much conscious thought to Mr. Brimner. Except sometimes at night, to wonder what his little hut was like, now that he truly lived there—the way that places become your own and are then entirely different. The ship, for instance, had seemed first like a pretty toy, and then a kind of factory almost; as she came to know its nooks and crannies and to live her life here, it expanded to become the world.
The two rooms of Mr. Brimner’s house would have expanded and filled with his presence by now. He would have more books on his table, but perhaps he’d still keep the very best wrapped in oilcloth against furring from the damp salt air. He would be sitting in his one chair, but he might have carried it out onto the little tamped space at the back, to look out over the ocean and watch the sun setting, as they had always used to do on board the Morning Light. And then he would fold up his book and knock his pipe against the door frame, and wash the cups in his kitchen before the village woman came to cook. He had never liked to leave a mess for Lena Hubbard or for Jiacheng, and always made Kay help to set the room to rights at the end of their working time. She would continue that orderliness, in his honour.
On deck in the morning heat she thought of him too, when Jacky Judge sped by with a wink, and Mr. Brimner was not there to call some responding jest after him; when Arthur Wetmore came to sit by her for a moment, because she seemed lonely. Not that she could ever be lonely, having grown up in Blade Lake—she was used to her own company for long hours and days; used to people who did not talk to you (Father) or disdained speech (Miss Ramsay) or were too busy to talk, like Thea, or not allowed, like all the rest of them.
Arthur called her to the side, where he stood peering down. “Look, look,” he said, and she looked where his finger pointed, to the black sleekness rising from the wave.
She could never have her fill, however many. A group of humpbacks this time, four or five of them. The ship flew on above, the whales flew on below—they would collide! Except the whales easily shifted their trajectory and played tag away from the moving shadow of the ship. But the smallest of them came alongside, curious, looking up from the depths, and Kay saw it was only a baby, the size of a dolphin.
Arthur said, “Aww, reminds me of my baby sister Kitty,” and Kay laughed out loud, because she had met that little Kitty and she did have a very long, flat face and a curious eye.
You could not be lonely in a ship, surrounded all the time by thirty others—and in the ocean, living and breathing, the beautiful, responsive creatures of the deep.
The wharf at Suva was serious business, bustling and bright-hot. Draymen loading copra, tall women pushing barrows of brilliant fruit, freight of every kind. When they had made fast and Francis gave permission for them to go ashore, Kay and Thea walked down the street that led from the wharves to the Grand Hotel, and had tea with beautiful cakes on a white veranda overlooking the sea.
That long street, with the sea to the right and its shambling line of dishevelled and crowded shops to the left, might have been an illustration: “A Town in the Tropics.” On their way back, a sudden burst of hot rain came down in sheets, pounding down as hard as a prairie rainstorm, and they stepped into a doorway to wait it out. The rain did not wash away the strong, exciting smell of the street, but strengthened it: sea and flowers, spice and dirt, all sweet, hot, close.
The next day being Sunday, they went to the cathedral. A dull service. Kay kicked her heels very quietly beside the others, and almost did not go up for Communion, but Thea gave her an impatient look, so she kept herself in check and walked obediently up. She put her hands in place, but she did not close her eyes, and did not pray while she ate her bit of wafer-bread. Thea could not get at what went on inside her head.
During the necessary days in Suva, Thea and Francis made a practice of going for short walks ashore—at first so that Thea could show Francis the handsome hotel veranda, and then on the way home from church. They went again next day, calling it a constitutional, but Francis had an itch for curio hunting, and often as not they came back weighed down with paper-wrapped parcels tied with red string. They went by themselves, not inviting Kay to go along, and seemed to enjoy these outings as a kind of courtship spree. It was only fair that they have some time to talk to each other without the constant accompaniment of a mere child; and in fact Kay found it a relief to be out of her sister’s searching eye for once, to stay at the deck table working even while the ship went into shore mode and the swarm ran to and fro, unloading and loading. Perfect freedom, to retire to her cabin and spend all afternoon in her bunk if she liked, training Pilot to do tricks.
——
One night, in a great ruckus, a herd of cattle was loaded aboard the big steamer at the next mooring, a cattle boat bound for the islands farther on. It took all night. While the world slept, the wharves and the ships were wide awake with work. Voices shouted from the dark sheds, answered by shouts and loud laughter from the boat. Cows stamped and bellowed in the scows; Kay could not blame them, they must have been horrified and bewildered by all this turmoil. The winches screamed as they wound and groaned as they unwound, and the people on the steamer’s deck (where islanders bought cheap passage, sleeping in bedrolls in the open air) cheered as each poor creature came swinging over the side. Cheering for a future good dinner, Kay supposed.
On one swing the rope slipped, so the cow hung head downward, dangling between sea and stars, and there was such a tangle of shouts from the hold when they tried to right her that Kay feared the poor thing’s neck had broken. She vowed she would not eat beef again, and was grateful for the comparative peace aboard the Morning Light, where only Mr. Best shouted—and only when required to by Francis or Mr. Wright.
Francis found their own loading, by skilled longshoremen from the Indian contingent, very satisfactory. As they sailed away, he gave Kay and Thea a history lesson on Fiji’s Indian population, to which neither paid much mind. Thea was making a written list of the trinkets and surprises she had found in the stalls at Suva to send to the aunts at home; Kay wandered to the piano and began to play, in a dutiful and clumping way. Since she had not practised for days, or maybe weeks, she did not take offence when Thea called to her to put the soft pedal on, and to find some other tune than “Rondo alla Turca.” And please not to thump.
——
Coming up one morning as they meandered along e
astward, north of the Solomon Islands, Kay found seven giant gull-looking birds tied up under the bridge. Mollymawks, Mr. Best said they were, their wings six or seven feet in span; only a wandering albatross would be larger, as much as eleven feet, Mr. Wright said, from there to the mizzen-mast. Jiacheng had caught the mollymawks with a piece of pork on a hook, and was going to fry up their livers for tea.
When the dish arrived, Kay felt too sad to taste it, but Francis said they were splendid. “You cannot tell the difference from bullock’s liver!” he told Jiacheng, who bowed in the particular way he kept for Francis: measured, deliberate, not low.
Kay had seen him bow lower for Thea, when they had one of their tussles over the way things should be done. Sometimes he bowed to admit defeat; sometimes he bowed even lower, in ironic acknowledgement that she was the boss-lady; he bowed lower still if he had won the right of it and appreciated her understanding of that fact.
The mollymawks were splendid-looking birds. Seeing them hanging dead, spread out like that, wingtip to wingtip, Kay found a tear welling in the delicate niche of her eye, and touched it tenderly, so that it dropped down her cheek and slid into the corner of her mouth.
Another day, an albatross flew round the mainmast, too wily to be lured by a lump of pork fat. Kay thought of Mr. Brimner, and of Coleridge, and felt herself to be quite erudite.
While the ship wore on through warm, restive seas, the sailors fished from long lines to augment the dinner table. They caught a large shark, which Mr. Wright pronounced too old to eat even before Jiacheng could refuse it. It was a queer shape, like a clumsy drawing, rough and broken-skinned. Mr. Wright judged that it might be more than a hundred years old; Thea said it looked antediluvian. Mr. Best sent it overboard to feed the other fishes.
The Voyage of the Morning Light Page 15
