Inheritance

by Jenny Pattrick

  ‘True, he did. But Tiresa, Samuele’s widow, and her ‘aiga claim that by taking the matai title, he was in effect abrogating his European status. They claim that his deathbed wish was that when Gertrude died, the plantation should go to Tiresa and her ‘aiga and be considered customary village land. No longer freehold. Deathbed statements are taken very seriously in Samoan custom.’

  ‘Are they in the right?’ Jeanie was more interested than concerned.

  It would be an interesting case. One would assume Gertrude was in the right. But this was in the early days of independence and there might be a shift in legal opinion. It would certainly help Gertrude’s position if she had family to inherit the plantation. One would expect her to have the right to pass on the land. It was willed to her. But there were other issues to consider: Had the deathbed wish been witnessed? Would Tiresa’s ‘aiga have some claim under the Family Protection Act?

  ‘I won’t even hazard a guess,’ I said. ‘At any rate the case will be relished by all parties. Don’t expect an early decision.’

  ‘Enough, enough!’ called Simone. ‘Let us remember please that the aunt is still alive! Hamish you are boring them to death.’

  I wasn’t. Of course I wasn’t. They needed to know. Possibly I was boring Simone to death.

  She tapped me smartly on the top of my head. ‘We must go out! There is devastation outside and you are chewing away at lands and titles. Let us find what is left of the garden and the town.’

  She had a point. The hurricane. This was two days after the storm, and still radio and power were cut. The only way to find out any news was to go on foot. John and Jeanie came with us as we picked our way over fallen trees and waded through standing water. In the distance we heard the sound of chainsaws, but our own road was still blocked by a fallen mango tree. The sun was out again and the evaporating water made the air almost unbearably humid, even for Simone and me. Jeanie’s dark hair was clinging to her cheeks. By the time we reached the waterfront, John was flushed and panting. I began to think it had been a mistake to come.

  ‘We will go into Mackenzies,’ decreed Simone, ‘to cool off. It has air-conditioning.’

  Not this day. We all gaped to see the windows of the store broken, Beach Road littered with palm leaves, banana boxes, even a canoe or two and chunks of coral flung up by the sea. Waves must have broken right across the road. Three women were sweeping water out of Mackenzies’ door. Simone went to talk to them, then came back with the translation. ‘All the stock’s ruined inside,’ she said. ‘Salt water in everything. And the banana boat so recently arrived.’ She threw her hands about in dismay, ‘Even so, there have been looters. They should know better!’

  I think she would have stayed to help guard the ruined merchandise, if I hadn’t pulled her away. Simone’s indignation gets the better of her sometimes.

  The water in the lagoon, usually crystal clear and calm, slopped and heaved, awash with debris – whole coconut palms, rubbish from goodness knows where, a couple of dead pigs. Out on the reef, the usual dull roar of breaking surf was now deafening. Normally we would see a demure frill of white foam out there. Now, two days after the storm, the ocean rollers were still immense, the spume leaping high. For once the barrier of the reef, so often a nuisance, appeared a comforting guardian.

  Most of the stores and offices were closed; the windows of the High Commission still shuttered. Town workers would be back in their villages clearing up their own homes. The thatched roof of the open market had collapsed, entombing an ancient bus lying forlorn on its side. The humidity and heat blanketed us, dragging at our spirits. John, particularly, looked ready to drop. No information to be gleaned here. Apia seemed empty. Nothing to be done but to struggle home again.

  ‘Will this be bad for the island?’ Jeanie asked as we plodded uphill.

  Simone flung an arm towards a fallen clump of banana trees. ‘Disastrous. Catastrophic! What will they eat?’ Her white hair, silvered with damp and snaking around her head like Medusa, gave her the appearance of a prophet of doom.

  ‘We don’t know yet how much of this island, or of Savai‘i has been hit,’ I said. ‘Perhaps our district and Apia suffered the worst.’ I was thinking of Gertrude’s plantation. How ironic if it was destroyed, after all her machinations.

  The next day we learned that Gertrude’s plantation had survived remarkably well, but that the old lady herself had died in the storm. Reports of her death were disturbing to say the least. It seemed Stuart had been negligent in some way. Versions of his behaviour ranged from careless to criminal. I never really learned the truth. The trouble with a small town is that everyone takes an interest and everyone has an opinion. Truth becomes distorted very quickly. One could write a paper on it.

  Certainly Roper’s behaviour later, at the reading of the will, was appalling. As Gertrude’s executor, I invited them and Tiresa over for tea at our home. The office rooms I share had been damaged in the storm. Simone laid on home-made liver pâté with breadfruit chips (I would have preferred a good date scone) and it all started pleasantly enough. Stuart had come down from the plantation the previous day. He didn’t look good. I put it down to the strain of the death and the funeral, but Simone was sure he’d been drinking.

  Gertrude had been quite cunning. She left a small separate estate – copra and a few cattle – to the Levamanaias. It was negligible as far as income went, compared to the cacao plantation, but might stand in her favour if the will were contested. The rest – the plantation, the plant and both her houses simply went to her nephew John O’Dowd.

  Tiresa, magnificent in a flowered puletasi, a necklace of cowrie shells hanging over her ample bosom, flowery woven hat perched on her pile of grey hair, grunted ominously. ‘Let me see, Hamish.’

  I handed her the document. I’m not sure the old lady read English but she studied it with great care. Tiresa was no fool. ‘That little coconut plot is worth nothing,’ she pronounced in her deep man’s voice. ‘We will contest this of course.’

  She rose, thanked Simone for the food, which she had not touched – a deliberate insult, according to Simone – and stumped out.

  I looked over, smiling, at John and handed him the document. He nodded, read it carefully and handed it back. What a formal fellow he was! At the funeral he had spoken a few quiet words, recited a piece from Robert Louis Stevenson, and then withdrawn into himself.

  ‘Let me see!’ Roper shot out a hand and grabbed at the will. His face had gone a dark red. ‘That’s not what she promised!’ he positively shouted. ‘It was to be left to all three of us jointly!’

  I put on my most formal voice. Roper’s manner was most unsuitable for this occasion. ‘My client believed it safer to leave the entire estate to one person alone.’

  ‘It’s here!’ the rude fellow ranted. ‘You’ve crossed it out. Look at my name here! This is tampering!’

  ‘My client requested the change. You will see her signature, and mine and another witness to the deletion.’ I admit I took a small pleasure in pointing out the detail. ‘And the deletion duly dated,’ I added. Simone said I was outrageously smug. Perhaps I was, but the fellow riled me. I held out my hand for the will and had to wait several stormy moments before he complied.

  Jeanie put a comforting hand on his, then turned to me. ‘He’s had a hard time recently. The plantation is damaged; there is much to do.’

  Such a small woman – so fragile to look at. And yet there was a quality in her that I found hard to pinpoint. As if a fine bright line of unbreakable steel ran through her.

  Roper calmed at her words. He was a strange man. Simone declared he needed Jeanie and loved her in a possessive kind of way. I only saw him as a self-centred bully.

  ‘But can’t you see?’ he said to her, pleading for her to take his part.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said calmly. ‘Father has inherited. It’s all in the family.’

  She might have been speaking to a child.

  Elena

  Back in We
llington, I had reports to write and meetings to attend. Project Jeanie had to take a back seat for a week or two. I thought about her from time to time though. During the slow drone of departmental meetings I would gaze out the window of our high rise office block, watch the cold waves driving up the harbour and think back to those warm, scented months in the islands when we became inseparable friends. Or were we? Obviously not, if Jeanie was prepared to break our friendship so thoroughly. Now that I had found her, I needed to know. My mind kept drifting back to those days, looking for clues.

  I remember seeing Jeanie for the first time at my impossible Great Aunt Gertrude’s welcome party. What a charade! Gertrude had never invited Tiresa, Teo or me to anything before. Not once, although our family home was only a few miles away on the coast. This time we were invited simply to view her triumph – the discovery of a family to inherit her precious plantation. Everything was arranged to make clear the divide between European status Samoans and those of us who live fa‘asamoa. Gertrude even removed the flower Jeanie had put behind her ear! Teo saw that too and egged me on to welcome her with a little siva. Provocative, but what the hell. (Hamish would call it mischievous!) And Jeanie loved it! Her big eyes alive at the sight of the two of us swaying and whooping. She was itching to join in, it was written all over her, the way her arms twitched and her feet shifted. I knew immediately that we would get on well. What was it about her? Her size, I suppose, was the first thing you noticed. So small and fine boned. I thought of a trim and delicate wading bird. Then her eyes – large and dark, not Chinese like her father’s, but a little pointed in the outer corners. Bright teardrops lying on their sides, with a fine dark brush line above. Such beautiful eyebrows! I don’t think she knew how lovely she was. I never saw her preen or flirt. But we got on well from that first day. Our physical difference was no barrier – quite the opposite. I think she enjoyed my size and solidity, as I loved her delicacy.

  Gertrude, her old, blue eyes cold as New Zealand winter, led the newcomers away towards a group of palagi. My great aunt belonged back in the nineteenth century – was born in it and never progressed out into the modern world. It made me mad to see the way she seated Tiresa and our patele on the mats with the untitled people. But then later Jeanie came and sat with us. She wanted to know more about the Samoans at the party, what we did, who we were.

  Teo looked away, wouldn’t answer. He tended to smoulder, back then, in the presence of palagi. Silly boy. He had spent the last eight years at an expensive boarding school in New Zealand, perfectly happy to socialise with well-heeled white boys, but as soon as he was back in the islands, his old inherited prejudices took over again.

  I dug Teo sharply in the ribs. Jeanie wasn’t to blame for our family’s misfortunes (twelve dead in the flu and two gunned down by New Zealand military on that infamous day during the Mau). Teo frowned at me and turned his back on Jeanie. My mother clearly approved, patted his thigh, which made him turn back again to us! Oh what a mixture he was then, my young brother! Wayward, spoiled by our mother, full of half-baked political resentments, yet under all that, a sweetness that one had to hope would eventually come to the fore.

  Soon we were all three chatting and laughing. Jeanie had that special quality of being able to draw people easily into conversation. She was genuinely interested – in the people she met, in Samoa’s history and customs, in the politics of Samoa’s new independence. My ridiculous brother forgot all his resentment and put on a great show of charm, boasting about his political science degree, offering to take her on a tour of the island in his new car, laughing in his high, silly way and slapping his thigh. Unfortunately, he was very attractive to women. Tiresa was about to lead him away when Jeanie’s wretched husband did the same to her.

  ‘You are being discourteous to Gertrude,’ he said, in a loud hectoring voice. ‘Come and take your proper place.’ No word of greeting to us. Jeanie smiled her apology and went with him – a relief to Tiresa, who had Teo earmarked for an important marriage and wanted no hint of flirtatious behaviour to be witnessed by the patele.

  Proper place, he said! Jeanie had been sitting among high-born Samoans. Stuart Roper would have to learn a few manners if he was to settle in the islands. We were an independent country now and fa‘asamoa was the proper way of life.

  Our patele, of course, made great play of the hurricane being God’s punishment on all sinners, as witnessed by the fact that the LMS pastor’s house collapsed and his survived. A triumph for the Catholics. My mother, Tiresa, joined in the orgy of incriminatory pronouncements, solemnly claiming that Gertrude’s death was a punishment from on high for her shameful treatment of her own ‘aiga at the feast.

  ‘She ignored our pule, seated us in a position not befitting. So!’ Tiresa truly believed this. She loved to make spooky proclamations about the wrath of God. Naturally, as a devout churchgoer and generous contributor to the patele’s lavish way of life, she expected the Lord’s wrath to mirror her own.

  ‘It was no accident the banana palm fell just then,’ she said. ‘The finger of God struck it down in punishment!’ Tiresa wagged her own finger at me, to make sure I took note (and renounced my sinful ways).

  It had taken two days for news of the accident to reach us. Our own village was badly hit – seven fale had lost their roofs, all the falela‘iti‘iti‘i collapsed into the lagoon, their fragile rickety walkways now an undignified heap of broken poles rising from the shallow water like the bones of a beached whale. We would have to go back to relieving ourselves in the bush and that could create its own problems. Already I was designing an education programme. But in those first days no one had time to worry about problems in other areas. We were cut off anyway – no radio, roads blocked. Nearly the entire banana crop for our village was gone. We were busy picking what we could, storing the green bunches in pits. An old matai said they used to make masi – a sort of fermented, rotted banana mush, which would last months in the ground, but none of us fancied the sound of it. How were we going to feed all the families? Most of the breadfruit trees were gone too. The taro survived, but banana and breadfruit were the staple.

  On the third day my cousin Samasoni battled his way down through our devastated banana plantation in search of me. He arrived, sweating and scratched, with the news that Gertrude was desperately ill and needed a doctor. Would I come?

  ‘Things are bad up there,’ he whispered. ‘A person like you should be there.’ This whetted my curiosity, as he knew it would.

  What a nightmare trip back inland! The track had virtually disappeared under a tangle of vines and fallen debris. Suffocating damp rose from the ground clogging our lungs. I had to stop often to lean against a tree and cough. We could have been breathing pure water. Samasoni went ahead, hacking with his bush knife, but, even so, it took three aching hours to cover what should have taken a quarter of that.

  Gertrude lay still on her bed, hardly raising a hump under a snowy sheet. The housegirl waved a fan back and forth over her body. Perhaps stirring the heavy air brought some relief, but I doubted it. The old lady looked dead. Waxy pale, scarcely breathing. I took her pulse. It was there, fluttering weakly like a trapped moth. The arm was bruised from shoulder to wrist and badly swollen below the elbow. Surely broken.

  Stuart Roper sat slumped in a chair in a corner of the room. He looked dreadful – unshaven, his clothes dirty, face haggard. A rifle was propped against his chair, which I found odd. Had he been threatened? Surely he need not keep discipline with a gun?

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  He spoke belligerently. ‘A clump of banana trees came down on her in the storm.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ I said. ‘What on earth was she doing out in all that?’ Perhaps I spoke too sharply. Of course I meant ‘How could you have let an old lady go out in a hurricane?’.

  He stood up, facing me like a cornered animal. ‘She had her own reasons I suppose. How would I know? She didn’t say. Why does everyone blame me?’

  There was fierce
anger in his words, but something desperate too. I turned back to the old lady; lifted the sheet. No external bleeding, but other parts of her body were badly bruised too. I suspected broken ribs. What could I do? I had pethedrine with me and could have injected it, but the drug might well stop that tiny heartbeat.

  As I stood, undecided, Gertrude opened her eyes. Her breath came in shuddering rasps. ‘Stuart,’ she whispered.

  He came forward eagerly, touched her hand, quite gently, I thought.

  But Gertrude’s gaze was pure hate. ‘Damn you,’ she croaked, ‘you were supposed to be helping me.’ And then added, mysteriously, ‘Hamish was quite right.’

  Those were her last words, spoken with her last breath.

  Stuart knelt by the bed and cried. He was drunk – we could all smell the whisky on him. I thought at the time he was genuinely grieving; perhaps he was. But looking back now, I would not grace him with fine feelings. I imagine he was crying for himself – his shame.

  It turned out Gertrude had been pinned for six hours under a collapsed clump of banana palms in her back yard while the storm raged and lashed. Being old and weak she could not pull free, but any able-bodied man could have rescued her. By the time a worker found her, she was close to death. Samasoni told me the sorry story. He had no love for the old lady – she was as sparing with her praise as she was with her purse – but he had a certain respect for his boss.

  ‘No way to die,’ he told me sadly. ‘Alone all that time. I heard that banana come down and thought no more of it. Trees were crashing everywhere. But where was the son-in-law? How is it possible he didn’t check on her?’

  Stuart had stayed the night in Gertrude’s house with her. Or, obviously, without her. The stupid – or criminally negligent – fellow had found Gertrude’s supply of imported whisky and drunk himself silly. He was still incoherent when the plantation workers brought her in, dripping wet and bloody, only semi-conscious.