The Pearlkillers

by Rachel Ingalls

  His children were beginning to swamp him with their idolatry. They gazed huge-eyed at him and he, who had found their womanly faces and figures such a shock at first sight, was doubly embarrassed. They fawned on him like worshipping little girls, yet also like lovelorn young women. He felt much more comfortable with his niece, Erika, in her boathouse study.

  ‘You really should do something with the sketchpads and notebooks,’ she told him.

  ‘There must be any number of books like them already published,’ he said. ‘The continent’s been open to all the nations for a very great while now: the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Germans. When I was there, I met Greeks, Frenchmen and Italians. You couldn’t move without tripping over half of Europe. They were building banks and opera houses hand over fist. I’m sure the flora and fauna have been done to death.’

  ‘Then why did you set out on your expedition?’

  ‘Oh, the interior – that’s a different story. I told you: all the notes were lost. It’s as if it never happened.’

  ‘But what you’ve got right here is fine. It’s also good about the river and how it changes. And about the different tribes. And what the other travellers have to say.’

  ‘Most of it made up, undoubtedly. It’s great country for alcohol.’

  ‘People would be interested,’ she said. ‘You know they would be. Did mother tell you – she turned away some journalist the other day, who said he’d come from the newspaper office in town? “A beady-eyed young man”, she said.’

  ‘Oh? What did he want?’

  ‘He’d heard that a dead man had come back to his home, and he thought it was a good story.’

  ‘I see.’ Anders flexed his right hand, which had begun to stiffen in the cold weather. He spread out the fingers, curved them, made a fist and relaxed. It was becoming a habit to do the exercise at odd moments.

  ‘He’s right, too. It’s a very good story. And I think if anyone’s going to print it, you should tell it yourself. Don’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

  She smiled. She wanted to encourage him – and everyone – in everything. And like most others, he responded.

  He thought at first that it could do no harm. It would keep his family quiet. And he could shut himself away in his room downstairs, where no one would disturb him because he was ‘working on his book’. But then he really did begin to compose a narrative. When he’d break off between sentences, he’d sometimes find himself looking into the fierce stare of the pagan statue. He’d grin back at it, mimicking its expression. His younger daughter, Astrid, hated it, despite the fact that it was made of gold. ‘It frightens me,’ she had said.

  ‘You shouldn’t be frightened,’ he’d told her. ‘If a bad thing is going to happen, fear won’t keep it away. Or do you enjoy being frightened? I think some people do. Perhaps it’s a habit they’re taught early.’

  ‘I just don’t like the way it looks,’ she said.

  He was frightened too, although not of the statue. He didn’t know what of. The past was more terrifying than anything he could dream up, but the past was over. He worked at his book in order to keep away the dread, to push back the sense he had when he looked outdoors or went for a walk, that the thing – whatever it might be – could fall on him suddenly from the sky above.

  *

  He worked and he planned and he scented the beginning of spring, which was followed by a spell of clear weather. It turned very cold. Erik and Haken knew for certain that the cold temperatures came straight from the Arctic. They had seen that kind of thing before, they said; they had long experience of just such weather-changes. Then the air grew warmer and the rain started. No one in the house liked that; it meant a constant changing in and out of boots and cleaning off the splashes afterwards.

  During the first week of the rains both old aunts, within forty-eight hours of each other, died; the younger one – Emmelina – first. Irmintrude didn’t begin to sicken or apparently to notice her sister’s illness until the other members of the family gathered at the bottom of the stairs to come up and pay their respects to the corpse. It was as if the loss itself took her away – as if the two had been attached to a single line of life. The only one at the funeral who was really in tears was old Ingrid, who had had such troubles with them, but who could still remember them as they had once been: young and beautiful women.

  Lina said afterwards that she wished both aunts had waited till autumn. ‘It seems wrong for people to die in the spring,’ she told him. One morning while he was working on the book, she wandered into his study and stood behind him. He turned in the chair to look around, and smiled, though his mind was still on his work and automatically he had put a hand – and then gradually slid the whole of his lower arm – over the page he was correcting.

  ‘How’s your writing coming along?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s all right. What did you want?’

  ‘Nothing, really. I was thinking about the aunts.’

  ‘A long life,’ he said. He put down his pen and hitched his chair a little to the side. ‘Stay and talk, Lina. Sit down.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to disturb you. I should find some occupation of my own.’ She continued to stand in the same place, while he held his smile and waited. Her eyes went to the statue on the desktop.

  ‘A long life,’ she said, ‘but how they changed during it.’

  ‘It’s unavoidable.’

  ‘Yes, I see that now. I’ve realized that it has nothing to do with whether you’ve been good and followed the rules or whether you’re pretty and clever, or anything at all. At the end, you become what old age makes of you. It’s like being melted by a great heat. There’s nothing you can do about it.’

  ‘It’s still a long way off from you,’ he told her. ‘And we’ll be together for it. The children would help us. It would only be really bad if you were alone. Or to be in the poorhouse, in one of those hospital wards.’

  ‘Is that what the gods are like?’ she asked. ‘Look at it: an intelligence lower than that of the animals, more brutish than beasts.’

  ‘Astrid doesn’t like it, either. But it’s got something, you know. It’s a different style of beauty, that’s all. And it’s seen me through a lot.’

  ‘When I was a child, they told us that the gods and goddesses – the Greek and Roman ones – were lovely to look at. They were like people: beautiful-looking people, like the statues and paintings of them in the museums. Even the Biblical pictures of the Old Testament characters looked wonderful and romantic. Now I can see that they were all just based on the models used by the artists: athletes, dancers, actors, ordinary people. The gods are different.’

  ‘It’s a way of representing an invisible power. They simply give it a shape. It’s like trying to draw a picture of the wind; you show the effect: the trees bending, the hat blowing away. A god of youth or beauty can be pictured in the form of some beautiful being.’

  ‘And this one?’

  ‘I still haven’t decided what this one is supposed to be, but I imagine it’s got something to do with fertility.’

  ‘Is fertility so ugly? So murderous?’

  ‘So strong: I think that must be the idea. The animal-like head is there because wild animals are strong and fast and can do things that would be miraculous if they were demanded of the natural capacities of man. And then the breasts are there, and made large, to show that there’s a source of nourishment.’

  ‘For whom?’

  ‘For the believers.’

  ‘I find these ideas disgusting.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it took us centuries to get away from them and now people are trying to pretend that there’s really some special sort of wisdom in this primitive ignorance.’

  ‘Your father was a great Darwinian.’

  ‘That’s different. I’m speaking of civilization’s progress towards moral and ethical standards that are no longer founded on superstition.�
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  ‘I remember. It was one of the subjects we talked about at dances. Out in the gardens, looking at the stars and the moon. I finally got you to agree that Christianity was like any other religion.’

  ‘But we all still go to church, even you. And you believe.’

  ‘I never believed, Lina.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘Not even when I was a child.’

  ‘I know you’ve always said that. It only means you believe in a different way.’

  He nodded towards the statue and said, ‘I can understand that this is what the gods are like.’

  ‘God is love, Anders.’

  ‘Love?’ He reached out and touched her dress. He took hold of a pinch of the material and tugged gently.

  ‘I’ll leave you to your work,’ she said.

  *

  He had no idea of publishing anything more than Erika’s improved watercolours of his already faded pencil drawings. The narrative account he worked on was to be merely for the family archives, although at Erika’s insistence he did compose a few additional notes to go with her paintings; these concerned the plants: how he had found them, where they grew, what their seasons of fruition were, and their uses; to some he had appended brief stories and snatches of folklore.

  In between bouts of writing he looked at catalogues for wallpaper, furnishing material, paints, garden landscaping equipment. Hannah and Astrid were interested in dresses. Lina and Elsie spent their time making lists for the inside of the house; and he helped to compile a series of plans for the gardens, which they were going to talk over with Louise. Everyone, especially Erika, had suggestions about what flowers would look best where, and at what time of the year. Anders and Lina were the only ones who thought of consulting the gardener, Ekdahl. And all that Ekdahl would say about the arrangements was that if they wanted to go ahead with half the things they had on their little pieces of paper, he’d need a much bigger work force. Wilhelm was a good lad, willing but not very useful – you had to tell him everything and keep repeating it all day long; they’d need to hire at least three more men. And if the mistress stuck to this proposal for new greenhouses, that would mean more still.

  Anders went to Louise and asked her to help. Her mood was improving with the warmer weather. In fact, the aunts’ funeral seemed to have brought her back to life. According to Lina, she had spent nearly a week composing a long letter to Sophie; apparently Louise had been the most vehement of the disapprovers at the time of Sophie’s wedding. And after she had sent off her letter, and rested, she stopped looking as if she cried every night. When the reply came, you could almost say she was back to normal. She began to take jaunts into town with Hannah and Astrid. One weekend they spent two days away, coming back with stories of everything they had seen and done and heard.

  He had had money distributed, invested, put aside for particular purposes, talked about, given away. He had written to Martin’s wife and arranged for a modest annuity to be handed over to her and the two children, now also – as his own were – grown up. She was another who had married, but she wrote back a letter that told him she would accept the offer because Martin would have wanted her to. On the evening after he received her letter, he sat for a long time at his desk, letting the room grow dark. He had always liked her. And she was the kind of woman, he thought, who could marry two men and be good to both of them without betraying either. Somehow she would manage to make everyone friends in the end. That was the kind of woman they needed in the diplomatic service, in the government, anywhere. But there was no method of training people to achieve those qualities. You had to be born that way.

  He didn’t worry about the others, except that he sent Sophie a letter. He hoped that they would meet soon, maybe in Paris when he joined the three girls and their mothers. Louise had relented about that too: she would travel with the party to France. Sophie had plans to visit Rome in the spring, Germany in the summer. On the way back, perhaps they’d all meet. The house was lively with voices discussing the future. Lina said she’d seen Ingrid smile for the first time in eight years.

  ‘You’re the one I want to see smiling,’ he told her.

  ‘But I do. You haven’t been looking.’

  ‘You need to get away, and come back to see everything transformed.’

  ‘Nonsense. I want to be right here to make sure the work’s done exactly the way it should be.’

  He came to what he could see was the last chapter of his book, and on the same day a letter arrived for him from a man named Petersen, who had been the author of a small paragraph in the papers about the odd fact that a man who was presumed dead could come home after ten years. The letter said that there had been such interest in the expedition ten years before, no word about it since, and didn’t he – the captain and instigator – think it was the public’s right to know what had happened?

  Petersen, Erika told him, was not strictly speaking the ‘young man’ her mother had described to the rest of the family. He was in his late thirties, had worked on a paper in the capital and had been demoted, if not actually thrown out, for something-or-other, probably political. ‘They always say it’s because of their integrity, or they got hold of some important truth that people wanted to hush up, but my experience of that crowd is that half of them are so drunk they don’t know what they’re saying; they slander and libel people without ever checking the facts, and they’ll write reviews without bothering to see the plays. That really did happen to me once: the man took me to a first night where we were given a marvellous party of champagne and little hors-d’œuvre beforehand, and we started to have such a good time that we decided to go on to dinner somewhere instead. I read his review the next morning – he said he’d just asked his friends about the plot and scribbled down something based on what they told him. I think this Petersen was like that, but he got caught doing it.’

  ‘So he wants to get back into the main stream,’ Anders said. ‘And he’s looking for a story that will put him there.’

  ‘Once you talk with him – you can if you like, but you know how it’s going to turn out. He’ll ask you, “Don’t you think such-and-such,” and you’ll say, “Maybe, but what I really believe is so-and-so,” and when you see it later, you’re saying his words, not yours.’

  He took a long, early-morning walk around the far side of the lake and into the woods. He sat for a while on the bench at the lookout point on Sightseer’s Hill. And he remembered what that first day had been like ten years before.

  The Vikings spoke about the highways of the sea; that was how he had thought of the wide stretches of water around him on that day of departure: the roads that would carry him away.

  The bands played, the people cheered, the handkerchiefs waved in the sunshine. He stalked up and down the deck restlessly, waiting for the right moment to get away from land and from the expectations of everyone still on shore. Ahead of him lay all the oceans, pulling him forward as if on a path created by his own eagerness. He turned his face away from the crowd.

  He wrote a letter to Petersen, as short as he could make it without being rude, to say that: yes, there had indeed been an interest taken in the expedition, but unfortunately the venture had miscarried. He had already written to the relatives of the men lost; as for anyone else’s right to know, the undertaking had, after all, been a private one. Perhaps some day he might write about it himself, but the years had taken their toll of him – at the moment he was simply trying to get back his strength and begin his life again.

  Petersen wrote once more, to say it was all very well to be so vague about these extraordinary events, but unless every rumour was false, the captain had returned – alone – with a vast fortune, had he not? And didn’t the captain think that he would like the world at large to feel clear about the way in which he had acquired the wealth?

  Anders let his lawyers answer. He outlined the reply he wanted them to send: a formal request for Petersen to present any proof he had in his possession that could h
ave given rise to the assumption that the captain’s wealth had not been honestly gained. They were prepared to take the matter further unless they received an apology and assurances from Mr Petersen and his employers that the captain would no longer be troubled by insinuating letters.

  Petersen was almost out on his ear after that. It turned out that the editors hadn’t known about his attentions: he’d been angling for a story on his own. Anders got the apologies. He also, he realized, got an enemy, although Petersen appeared to be one of those men one couldn’t help antagonizing – someone like a village gossip, whose envy and jealousy extended to everyone, and who was always looking for a victim; nobody would ever like him and he’d never be a success, but he’d have a great many different reasons why important people had conspired to prevent his rise.

  Anders sat at his desk, looking into the golden face of the idol that grimaced back at him. It was definitely the kind of god you’d want if you had to deal with people like Petersen.

  *

  The snows retreated. The first flowers were out, white like the snow that had been their background and protection. There was work to do everywhere, repairing fences and roads. He never saw the gamekeepers any more; they had no time to sit in their huts and drink with friends, to imagine stories of impossible encounters with animals, or to remember the real hunting in the time of their grandparents.

  He went into town a few times to hear concerts. At first he felt awkward. He couldn’t rid himself of the idea that people were staring at him, stealing looks at him and his family as soon as he turned his head. But once the music began, he forgot. His self-consciousness was lost in the flood of singing, speaking notes and it seemed to him all at once that part of the despair of his missing years had been the lack of music. He had craved it without knowing what the deficiency was. It had been like starvation: a hunger so dangerously advanced that the pain and desire had vanished. It had been like an absence of love, unrecognized for what it was.