Yes, Thea had told her, Kay agreed. “They were all such beautiful girls, who could be surprised.” To Pansy, in companionship, she said, “I am not married either.”
“I am glad Pansy remains to me for now,” her mother said. “There were a great many young men killed out here, and of course Australians too, but she is not to be the prop of my old age, I tell her. I am not at all old, and will not be for a very long time!”
Kay agreed with that too. Pansy gave a sighing laugh and handed round the cakes.
A knock came from the inner hall, and she went to admit Aren and Mr. Brimner, far sooner than Kay had expected. Calling, “It’s Henry and Aren, Mama!” Pansy brought them out to the courtyard.
They came in laughing, and Kay saw from his intent glance that Aren was very taken with Pansy and (it seemed to her) so was she with him. She had not thought that Pansy was like her sister Rose. But she clearly was not, so maybe this was different. Who was she to say? Seeing Aren’s pleasure in Pansy, his delicate flirting as she showed him where to stow his seabag, Kay thought again that she knew nothing, nothing. And did not know what authority she’d thought she had back in Halifax either, to think that Merissa Peck was not his other half, his predestined soul—when she herself had no more understanding of these things than a cat, or a bird in a tree.
Tea was offered and refused with thanks, cakes refused in turn. Then there was a tiny silence, an expectation.
“Well. Now we can have our real conversation,” Mrs. Fruelock said. “Henry, you come in too, and I will gather my wits around me.” She took Aren’s arm and led him to the arbour. “See, here is a fine chair, come and sit.”
“See here is a fine nag,” Aren whispered to Kay, as he was led to the settee.
Mr. Brimner sat in one of the chairs near the trunk of the big shade tree, and waited.
“First let me say, my dears,” said Mrs. Fruelock, “I have had a cable from Thea, asking me to speak to you before you travelled on, and I fear you will not be glad to hear my news.”
Nobody moved or spoke, and in a moment she went on.
“You know that three or four years after Henry was installed in Ha‘ano, Mr. Fruelock went to the Diocese of Papua New Guinea. After that, for several years, the people here in Pangai were forced to endure that crawling viper Mr. Piper-Ffrench, once he was ridden off Tongatapu, but that is not to the point. Eric—my husband—quarrelled with Bishop Willis over many aspects of their calling, but the Anglo-Catholic mission to Papua was the real impetus for his change. We went to Palau, the largest island in the chain that includes Pulo Anna.”
There was something for Aren here, Kay understood, something difficult. The angle of the sun meant she could not see her brother’s face, only the stillness of his head.
“We went to Palau in 1916, in the middle of the war,” Mrs. Fruelock said. “Goodness, it seems like longer than six years ago, does it not? A lifetime ago.”
Mr. Brimner set his teacup on the little table and leaned forward, elbows on his thin knees. “Everything was confused and confusing—time seemed to stretch out during the war.”
“That was two years after the German Administration ended and the Japanese took over; and it was four years after a typhoon had washed out Pulo Anna and a nearby island, Merir. The Germans did send a boat and took some people off, I believe to Koror, but not many . . . My memory may be failing me, but in any case, it was not many people, two or three at the most. And the famine afterwards took the rest of them.” Turning to Aren, she said, with some formality, “I am so sorry, my dear.”
Aren’s fine chair sat directly beneath the orange wheel of sun lowering behind the black garden wall. His face, his eyes were hidden from Kay.
“I went with Eric to inspect the damage, and what we saw was terrible. The men sailing the boat had sleeves wet with tears they kept dashing from their eyes to see the way forward. Eric himself had to go below at one point and pray—the whole beach was littered with bodies, long dead and rotted. That was at Merir.”
Mr. Brimner moved softly, taking a cane chair to sit near Aren, within arm’s reach. He said to Mrs. Fruelock, “We are hampered by not knowing precisely what Aren’s family arrangements were, whether he had already lost his parents. Perhaps because of his long illness, he does not remember those old days properly.”
Kay wished she could go to Aren herself, but Mr. Brimner was filling the purpose and she did not matter. She sat still.
Mrs. Fruelock said, “Perhaps I can help with that, at least.”
She folded her hands again, as if praying, on the long thighs beneath her grey cotton dress, and told them that she and her husband had heard, even several years later, of a boy being taken away by a ship.
“Of course, we had no notion, hearing the tale, that it involved people with whom we were acquainted. But the story was still talked of in the islands, the boy who was taken for tobacco. The boy’s mother, her terrible scolding of the brother who had let him go, and the white people’s ship that sailed away with him.” She looked up at them. “Reng, he was called. And that boy was Aren. I wrote to Thea of it long ago, when we first corresponded and I realized what ship that must be, but perhaps she did not wish”—she paused—“. . . to cause you pain.”
Or did not wish to look at what they had done.
Or, Kay quickly told herself, she had looked squarely at it, and knew it could not be remedied, and that the only help for Aren was to bring him up as well as she could.
“We went back to the islands, not long before Eric died,” said Mrs. Fruelock. “There was no one there at all. On Pulo Anna there are graves, great stone slabs in a glade of rhododendrons. It might be possible to find someone among the various islands who knows whose graves they are.”
She fell silent then. This was the only fragment she could offer.
Mrs. Fruelock did not seem to be in distress—at least, not that Kay could see—but Pansy poured a glass of water for her and crouched by her feet, watching her mother. Perhaps she had been dreading this visit.
Aren stood up from his chair. “I do not know what to think of this,” he said.
He took a step, as if he would walk down the garden, but checked himself and stood motionless. Kay moved then, and went to him, but was afraid to put her arm around him in case he shook her off. She stood beside him, waiting for him to think. Above them in the lacy trees, bats flitted like thoughts you could not quite remember.
Mr. Brimner picked up his hat and said, “I think we must go now. John Giles will be waiting at the jetty.”
Aren moved then, and they followed him across the flags and went back through into the house.
As they went, Mrs. Fruelock put a trembling hand on Kay’s arm. For the first time, she looked older. “I know this must be a sad disappointment to him,” she said quietly. “But I look at it as a blessing, not only that he was reared in a Christian home but that he was saved from flood and famine. I hope he may come to see it that way.”
Kay bit her tongue, until a little gush of blood welled into her mouth. She shook or nodded her head, she hardly knew which, and went.
Pansy helped them gather their things. She was the kindest, most companionable girl—she rounded up Dash and bundled him into the basket with a steak bone to chew on, and she found their other things without fuss, and stayed in the doorway waving until they turned the corner to the harbour.
Kay and Aren and Mr. Brimner walked down to the jetty in silence. John Giles’s boat was moored there, rocking in the low afternoon light, ready to take them to the ghost island, Pulo Anna.
Kay tried to still the frantic beating of her heart, the panic of guilt and grief that had seized her. She had been a child—she would not usurp the act of taking Aren—but now she could not bear even to have witnessed it. What had anything they had done added to his life?
She did not know. Feeling suddenly very unsettled, she turned away and was vilely sick into a ditch. Aren halted, and Mr. Brimner pulled out a handkerchief. After the heav
ing stopped, she straightened herself, saying, “I’m sorry—do carry on, I will be right there.”
She waited a moment to see if there was more to come, and then stumbled down the path to the pier. There was the little boat making ready to set out. But they would stop soon, at Ha‘ano, because John Giles’s wife was going to stay with her sister there. Clutching at that ordinary detail, Kay went up the little gangplank and onto the boat in a strange, unmoored state, wobbling as the deck wobbled with her added weight.
The boat seemed small and makeshift after their long journey by steamer, but they stowed their things away in two tiny slanted forward cabins with bunks, where everything was clean as a whistle, and then went back up on deck for the short sail to Ha‘ano. Dash slumped at her feet with his bone.
As they were making ready, Pansy came hurrying down the slope toward the pier, calling out to them. She held out a folded paper, an envelope. “Mother forgot to give this to Miss Ward,” she called over.
Aren stretched to take it from her.
“A letter for Miss Ward, for Kay. It came to us yesterday. In the worry, she forgot it.”
Aren handed the envelope to Kay. She turned it over in her hands, but as the boat swung, the writing did not stay still. She could not make it out, and could not force her eyes to make the effort. She put it in her pocket. “Thank her for me,” she called back to Pansy, “and thank you for catching us.”
Pansy stood waving as John Giles untied the ropes and went to the tiller.
Aren waved back, setting one hip on the rail, and rode easily as the boat swayed away from the pier. Then he leaned over to Kay, looking into her eyes to see if she was all right, and recited from their old book: “How hard the wind blows! and how the little boats rock to and fro! It must be sad for those poor men who have to earn their bread on the sea—I hope they will bring home a good net full of fish . . .”
So at least he did not hate her. The boat did look like the one the nursery fishermen had: two short masts, a lugger-style sloop.
John Giles’s wife, Lotoua, came up from below, where she had been organizing stores in the lazaret cupboard. Her beaming face reminded Kay of the young dancer shining with oil from long ago. Lotoua knew Mr. Brimner well, of course; they exchanged news and jokes. She was happy to meet Aren and tell him everything she knew or had heard about Micronesia, and with her laughing chatter, the boat became a little party.
While the others talked, Kay subsided onto the boards and put her head in her hands.
She hoped to be unnoticed, but Mr. Brimner came over to commiserate with her. “I have never been able to reconcile to the Tongan diet myself. A chicken, well boiled, is usually acceptable, but those are few on Ha‘ano, kept for feast days. Fish, fish stew, those I can manage. Taro is impossible. I have wished not to eat at all sometimes.”
He was very thin—she had not noticed before how thin he was. Was he ill too?
It was kind of him to comfort her, but, shivering by the side rail in a hazy blue confusion, all she could think of was what she had done by talking Aren into leaving Nova Scotia—away from Thea, from all of them, Merissa, everyone, everything he’d known for most of his conscious life—in order to stick him back here in the sand as if he was a doll. And all this time there had been no one for him to go home to.
10
Ha‘ano
Away from land, the water was very still as the afternoon blended down into evening. A breeze barely filled her sails, but the little sloop was light and slippy on the ’Auhangamea current.
Kay drifted in and out of a cloud. It was late to be setting out, but Ha‘ano was only a short sail along the coast—hardly even separated from Ha‘apai. John Giles said he’d like to stop at the village of Ha‘ano for the night, to have a visit with his wife’s sister before heading out over the long stretch to Papua, and also to find the last crew member, his brother-in-law Fokisi, who was famous for being late, having been born late, and who had missed the boat to Pangai that morning.
Sound came slipping down from the prow, where Aren and Mr. Brimner were talking. Once in a while their voices would make sense. The boat was named the Lata. Kay had seen that on the side as she came on board. No bigger than a racing schooner out of Yarmouth, but the men often went on those boats down to Bar Harbor and even to the Bahamas. It would get them to Pulo Anna.
Waking from a daze, she became aware of something odd. At length she realized it was silence. The air was so still, she had thought they might be dead. But it was only that being under sail again, there was no engine noise.
“Noise is the chief thing I notice on returning to the world,” Mr. Brimner was saying. Hearing him was why she had noticed it was silent.
“The water and the sky all through,” Aren said. She thought he said.
After what seemed like many days and nights, or an hour, they dropped anchor in the little half-moon harbour at Ha‘ano, and somehow Kay got down into the dinghy and out again onto the jetty, carrying Dash with her in his basket. Aren had fed him while they were coming over, so the puppy was sleepy again; she was grateful for that.
Aren took the basket from her arms and said not to worry, and a woman called Mahina came down to the water with her little boy Sione, and then they were all being taken somewhere in the darkness and there was a bed.
She woke in the dark and pulled on her dress, and staggered barefoot down to the scrubby beach, talking to Thea. Thea said “No no no, this is terrible, you are ill, I will book you into a hotel, there is one on the next island,” and Kay said “Oh no I must not, but if you insist, I will have a bath in a white bathtub.”
But it was just a dream, she was having bad dreams again. Thea could not speak to her here or hear her crying on the damp sand. She was alone and always had been.
And then she had to scramble into the bushes as another bout of cramping overtook her poor guts.
The moon was bright, so bright! But no, it was the sun, just rising. When she came out to the sand again, she saw two butterflies tangled in a complicated dance; they were going together, together, together, turning and tumbling in the air in a frenzied dance, mating or perhaps only quarrelling, flying apart and drawn back together.
Nothing was any use. She knew nothing understood nothing nothing made any sense. She made her way back to the bure, and into bed at last in the white cot, and untangled the mosquito netting and lay down—and as soon as she closed her eyes, Mr. Brimner’s friend Mahina came to her, looming kindly over the bed. She put a large, warm hand on Kay’s head, saying with great concern, “But you must hurry and get well! Queen Salote says you must leave if you are ill, no-one may stay on Ha‘ano if they are ill!”
And that was a dream too. But even though she understood, even in the grip of the night terrors, that it was only a dream, Kay resolved to be well. She was soaking wet in her nightdress. But if Queen Salote said she must leave unless she was well, she must be well.
Mr. Brimner and Aren were talking outside her door when she woke again. Aren said he did not think they could go on, with Kay in this fever, and Mr. Brimner said no, I believe you are right. So then Kay did get better.
By focusing her mind on the thing that mattered, which was Aren, she made herself come together into a clump and get up, and she put her dress on again and went out to the stoop where they sat talking in strong daylight.
They turned to look at her, surprised.
“Of course we must go,” she said. “Here is John Giles’s lovely boat all ready, and we do not want to miss the tide. I have had a very good rest and am feeling much better, only very sorry to have put you all out. I hope we can say goodbye to Lotoua, and to Mahina and her son, before we leave?”
She held herself in well. As well as if she was Thea, in fact. They all looked at her to investigate her health, and she passed inspection.
By a great exercise of will, she continued to feign fitness for travel all through the bustle of embarking. That was all right, she could keep doing that until they got to Pulo A
nna. And then she could consider what to do next.
11
Onward
Rapt in conversation with Mr. Brimner, Aren sat on the fo’c’sle roof, legs dangling, looking to Kay like his young uncles had looked ten years before, off Pulo Anna. He was a man now. Bright-eyed, amused, alive—and not as spindly as his uncles had been.
The motion was doing her good, doing them all good. Forward, forward, running along the scudding tips of the waves, the pleasure of that enormous breathing in and breathing out that is the movement of ocean.
She really did feel much better. She had been delirious, on Ha‘ano. It was not her old nightmares returning, it was just a fever, and the fever had broken. She had slept for a while in the shade, leaning against the fo’c’sle wall, and she was much better now. But she would stay still for a little.
Rearranging herself on the rolled blanket Fokisi kindly found for her to sit on, she felt a crinkling in her pocket and pulled out the letter that Pansy had run down to hand them at the jetty. It was from Thea, on the thinnest overseas writing paper, the worse for wear from the last few days, but readable.
Dear Kay,
I am sending this to you because I do not know what to say to Aren.
By now you will have seen Dorothy Fruelock and you will know about Pulo Anna—please keep this note by you and give it to Aren if you think it will help him. I do not want to impose it on him if you feel it will not, but I am afraid for him. Please write when you can to let me know where you are.
I write in haste, but send my love, and from Francis & Roddy too.
I am glad you are with him.
A second note, unsealed, was tucked into the thin folds of the first.
I am sorry, Aren. I wanted to save you from hurt, but it was wrong to keep the truth from you. I am so sorry about your people. I cannot be sorry we took you, son of my heart. God bless you always, your loving Thea
The Voyage of the Morning Light Page 36
