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BOOK: A Boat Load of Home Folk
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With her enormous circular sunglasses, she looked like some fabled aphid, striped hugely with scarf and brilliantly white in the morning. She could see no movement anywhere in the port and this, too, was strange, for some glint or glitter should have shown itself. From the bridge came the tick-tick of the radio and a giant hump of moving back as Brinkman worried the controls and gadgetry Miss Paradise never troubled to understand but could use as source of male-adulating ahs. Cars, engines, even cameras, were articles of faith for her that she accepted round-eyed and gazed at phoney-innocent, a pulsating mass of wonder when salesmen spieled or male friends adjusted. It had not worked with Captain Brinkman who chose that moment to stare at her rudely, she felt, through the protective glass he kept between himself and the passengers. In defence she linked arms with her friend who was tottering a little in her way-out north-of-Capricorn footwear and feeling the effects of the heat already. Together they tumtittitummed a
nil desper-andum
back along the deck.

Their holiday joy was not actively erupting.

“Now breakfast is over—” Miss Trumper had said cryptically.

“Now breakfast is over what?”

“We're going ashore.”

“It's terribly hot. What are the Seabrooks going to do?”

“Fight, I suppose.” Miss Trumper giggled, then put a frail elderly hand to her mouth. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't really. . . .”

“It will be hotter ashore,” said Miss Paradise who had every intention of going but loved to temporize.

Miss Trumper had extracted a tiny set of binoculars from a plaited bag and before scanning rubbed a lens madly with a fresh white handkerchief.

“You missed the left one,” Miss Paradise said acidly.

“Did I?” Miss Trumper rubbed innocently and vigorously.

“Look!” she cried, all of a sudden. “Darling black baby!”

Miss Paradise ignored, trickling with sweat and complaining softly in a wordless blur. The island floated above its double and Miss Trumper dabbed again vigorously at the glass of her binoculars and put them once more to her eyes as if they might produce some succulent peep-show. There were other smaller islands in the bay behind the large one near which the
Malekula
had dropped anchor and on one of them near a discarded hulk she could just make out thatch and bamboo latticed into house. For her it was traveller's joy. Every significant ploy of the gaudy tourist folders she was determined to discover and de-juice for rapture. She was geared to receive the devices of another
people's domestic exigencies with all the wonder of a Marco Polo.

Between her gasps the Seabrooks had emerged into the sun. Stevenson had come up last and was talking to Francis Nguna, the deck-boy, who was rubbing his shy capable hands on the dirty white fragmentary shorts he wore and turning to fuss about the ship's dinghy.

“We're not going now, are we?” Gerald Seabrook asked. “I've still got to load my camera.” He did not ask his wife this, but the two elderly ladies who were still quailing before the sun.

“We don't mind,” Miss Trumper said, edging a little sideways. Some preserving force always made her avoid the directness of his very blue gaze which was accustomed to practise pleasantries with children and personable females. He was twinkling winningly at her now. By some mistake, he felt himself.

“We should set off,” he said, “before the heat. If you don't mind waiting a minute while I go below.” I hate you, thought his wife. I am tired tired of the endless charm, the plausibility, the way you work on others. He was still talking, this time to Miss Paradise, and she could catch the words “serious moisture replacement”.

“He means beer,” Kathleen Seabrook said quite harshly and moved away to the thin unhappy Stevenson hanging over the lowered dinghy. Without thinking, she put her hand on his arm to elicit a desperate
sympathy. He was not aware, then, but went on talking to the boy who was all brown grin in the rocking boat. An outrigger canoe had come upon the
Malekula
silently, a Mother-Hubbard-clad islander paddling its load of swollen strawberry mangoes and bananas. Everything Gauguinesque, Kathleen decided, and took her unnoticed hand back. The appeal had not been passionate enough to distract either the agent or her husband who had gone for his camera. When Gerald's bald head appeared above deck she observed the absurdity of her situation and began to laugh.

“What's funny?” Gerald asked, who was always afraid it might be himself.

“Nothing,” she lied as was her habit these days. “It's so still, isn't it?” She sounded querulous.

“Except for that canoe.”

“Yes. Of course. Except for that.”

Gerald always managed to prove her just that little bit wrong and she patted his arm to show he had scored again, that she knew it and did not mind.

The five of them leant on the rail. Miss Trumper fidgeted with her carry-all and tucked hankies into crevices that were never filled in the abstract sense. Stevenson had straightened his skinny body with the pain he carried like a medal for the moment in abeyance, and felt, looking across at Miss Trumper, an almost-love that, now he was older, came with a gush for the unlovely or the unendurable even. He could have been tempted to love Mr Seabrook too, but the
wife cried out tacitly for chivalric service that muddled his impulse. In her turn Miss Trumper, perceptiveness having drained away all inessentials, had a moment of urgent need to say “poor man” though she could not have said why.

Now, with his twin angels of pain and despair, he smiled and said, “Off in ten minutes, if anyone's interested.”

They made sustained choruses of thanks. He did not listen, having endured for three cabined days the antagonisms and small hatreds.

“What about the priest?” someone asked.

They all agreed they had been thoughtless and who would go to look. It was Stevenson who went down finally and found the other bent over his small suitcase, packing neat squares of underwear while all the time the sweat rolled freely under his stiff collar and stained the black stock and stank mildly and in a way benignly through his fat armpits. He was a menacing man with heavy jowls, a black voice and the lard-like complexion of someone much older. He was surprisingly gentle, although his ruthlessness had not yet had reason to show its thick blunt edge. He was not a deeply religious man despite the outward conformities his job demanded, for job it was; and he was now a rather tired businessman in his master's service, with the capabilities and many of the attitudes of a public service inspector. He had so little sense of humour and such a plenitude of stuffy attitudes he
might have been Protestant. “It's not that I'm intolerant,” he would try to explain to others. “I'm just so bored with all the corruption. I mean it doesn't even stimulate me any more, either to emulate or even disapprove. I'm not stuffy. I'm stuffed up to the neck. That's all!” And that was about as close as he got to a joke.

Stevenson watched him in the hot stillness of the little cabin.

“The others are going ashore now,” he said. “How about you?”

Greely glanced up, his eyelids hooded, his eyes vague.

“If you don't mind waiting a few minutes,” he said, “I'll be through with this.”

“May I help?” Stevenson asked not expecting he might have to.

Greely was always a surprise. “My shaving gear,” he said solemnly, “and some underpants drying in the galley. And those books.”

He packed his own crucifix into a leather bag and slipped that into his case while Stevenson gathered up the last few things. They smelled of prayer and old paper and the musk lollies that he sucked endlessly. His lips were moving quietly even now, the teeth clicking against the hard pink sugar.

“Aren't you well?” Greely asked curiously as they went slowly up the steps. Stevenson had stopped for a moment, his hand to his side.

“I'm not sure, really,” Stevenson said. “I get a bit of
pain now and again. I think it's nerves. Family stuff. You know how it is.”

Greely didn't, but made clucking noises as he heaved his body upwards, crawling into the daylight.

“There,” he said. “Forgive my delaying you.”

The others had vanished from the deck.

Looking over the side Stevenson saw their upturned faces like a savage garden swaying in the dinghy. He had missed the orgy of leg and thigh and overbalance and the wild frantic moments when Miss Trumper misjudged and splashed one sandalled foot into the harbour. The native boy was still grinning, but standing politely back holding the tow-rope and swinging it gently. He swung more than rope—it was the half-timid, half-insolent gesture of the black-white relationship. Stevenson recognized it for that and rubbed the boy's frizzy skull as he passed.

“Hold her still now,” he said. “You've two big fellers coming.”

Sky, boat, harbour, passengers rocked. The priest squeezed in beside Miss Paradise and shared the diminutive shade of her peachy frilled parasol. The boy tugged the outboard motor into life and they took to the harbour side at the end of a curve of silver. Looking back at it a variety of symbols lit each mind—crescent, circle, blade, life-source. Some were right. Some wrong.

The thermometers in all the houses that morning stood at ninety-four point three.

  
II

September

T
HE
summer Lake came to Port Lena it rained hammers of wet. All the muddy waterfront streets were punched into slush, but it was Maugham country along which he drooled and oozed. Preciously, preciously with the deep chocolate and the milk-coffee slime playing about his consecrated feet. He said Mass in a mixture of pidgin and beach-la-mar and he would ease a gluey finger around his neck and, gazing across water to the horizon where mainland lay, would pray for winter, for the mid-season, one, two degrees behind, but full of the dry, the pouring blue.

“Here, boy. Jimmy, James fella,” he would say grinning his tired fake Yank smile as he came in the mission yard. And up they'd run from the school below the church, the fellers, the brown eager fellers and the shy smaller ones who held back, and he would pat a head or a shoulder and they would grin their great toothy grins and rub the backs of their pink-palmed
hands across their broad noses or scratch their fuzzy tops. When he kicked them a ball they'd babble like chooks.

Ah God, it was good to be loved so. If it weren't so contrived, he would admit.

“Unkindness—this fella hurt that one fella,” Father Lake would say bending over his smaller parishioners, “is the worst sin of all.” He fidgeted with his cassock that he wore only to the first mass and became aware of the prickly heat creeping under his arms and the terrible itching of his feet as the heat grew more alive.

“But, father,” asked one of the younger ones whose smile blew in and out like a flame in wind, “that's only a little fella sin.”

“I get tired,” Father Lake said, “of the belief that adultery is the only sin. Oh, those endless sins of petty sex.” The brown and white eyes rolled non-comprehendingly in their sockets. The white teeth split the face apart. He was tempted to disenchant at one stroke and say
pusipusi
but he only went on. “There are others. And to me, anyway—” (“Say kiddo, I'm not the Pope,” he wanted to add in his contrived American)—he smiled instead—“deliberate unkindness is the worst sin of all.”

“Killing?”

“Unkindness.”

They laughed because they believed he was making a joke. He wasn't though. “It's very unkind to kill anybody,”
he added, staring gravely from one to the other. Giggles burst like crackers.

“Stealing?” shouted a bigger feller. “Stealing?”

“Unkindness, too.”

Their laughter was almost uncontrolled. One little boy had punched a bigger boy in the stomach with sheer pleasure at the nonsense.

“Lying, lying?” they shouted. And they all took it up. “Lying?”

“Now that is kindness to one's self, make same fella happy.”

He laughed with them. “Now that's not tolerable is it?” They didn't understand again. “That's wrong.”

The cobalt layer of sea gradated into air that seemed to split apart into yellow pips of light, and under this monstrous broadcast of heat-seed Lake sensed the paste that his body oozed trickle from under his panama down to his open shirt front, from the waistband of his trousers down his thin flanks. Jimmy and Edward Peter moved their amused polished faces away from him but not before he had patted their departing vulnerable shoulders. All kidstakes, kidstakes, he assured himself, watching them and the church and the next religious layer above that, the presbytery, and beyond that again and sedately aside, the bishop's residence. One more year before leave, he counted. Only the one. And he recalled all those other priests who had said, baffled, “But this is home. We hate to go. We don't want to. Where else is there?”

BOOK: A Boat Load of Home Folk
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