Beat Not the Bones (10 page)

Her eyes watched him frantically. Stella found her disturbing. She did not know why, but she suddenly wanted to leave, to go away and not see Janet Nyall again. Janet had touched a chord that revived a forgotten horror in her childhood.

Janet stood up and made a few uncertain steps about the room. ‘He's a good boy,' she said vaguely. ‘A nice, polite boy.'

‘Where
are
you going?' said Trevor in a tone of undisguised exasperation, and then went out calling, ‘
Kora! Kora!
'

They waited. Janet was quiet now. She sat on the edge of her chair, her hands in her lap. Stella, feeling ill-at-ease, made an attempt at conversation, but was only answered with a vague yes or no. Anthony still held his stance behind the chair. He did not speak either, but Stella felt his eyes on her face. She stared out of the open louvres at the sky into which the stars were breaking, but once she glanced up and met his eyes. She looked quickly away. She was afraid, not just of Anthony, but of Janet too. They looked to her in that moment withered, twisted and pitiful. She felt that they were united in some devious partnership, and shared together a secret that cut them off from the normal world. If she looked at them long enough she might know what the secret was. She felt that Anthony Nyall, staring at her so fixedly, was attempting to communicate it, was actually trying to draw her into their mysterious intimacy. She kept her eyes turned away. She did not want to know what message he was sending her. She had forgotten that he had smiled so gently.

When Trevor came back with a bucket of ice, she turned to him a face radiant with relief. Sanity, kindness and normality had taken over from sickness and despair.

‘You'll have to be firmer with those boys,' he said. ‘God knows you ought to be able to manage boys, you've been here long enough.'

Janet visibly brightened. ‘I can't manage boys,' she said to Stella. ‘I should be able to. I've been here too long.'

Trevor dropped a cube of ice in a glass and handed it to Stella. ‘You're all very quiet,' he said. ‘Stella expects to be entertained.'

‘Tony's having a new house built,' said Janet, drawing herself up. ‘Aren't you Tony? He's staying with us till it's finished. It's going to be very nice.'

‘Of course,' said Trevor, ‘not as big as this.' He handed a glass to his wife. She clutched it and held it tightly in her small white hand. She looked at it, raised it to her lips, glanced at her husband and put it down on the table in front of her. She clasped her hands in her lap.

‘But that's to be expected, isn't it?' said Anthony.

He's jealous of his brother, thought Stella. She fastened on this fresh reason for disliking him. No wonder he didn't like David, no wonder he didn't want David to be loved. No wonder he couldn't bear to see anyone loving David.

Trevor laughed heartily. Turning to Stella, he waved a loose arm at his brother. ‘Tony suffers from the disease of all youngest sons,' he said. ‘He thinks he always gets the short straw. He's the defender of the weak. In every successful man he sees his big brother who always had the fattest potato.' There was no irony in his words  – he spoke charmingly, with the good nature and confidence of the invulnerable, and patted his brother on the shoulder.

Anthony smiled faintly. ‘You misrepresent me,' he said. ‘I have no quarrel with successful men, only with the world that's taken in by them.'

Stella forgot her pleasure in finding him out and her anger was rekindled. He's talking about David, she thought, and about me.

‘You see, Trevor,' he went on, still smiling, ‘I know so well what it is that goes to make a successful man. He's composed for the most part of little drops and shreds of the brains and hearts of other people.'

Trevor chuckled; his eyes still smiled and his tone was kindly. ‘Well now, that doesn't only apply to successful men, does it? After all, we've all of us, haven't we, surely, had our meals off brains and hearts – some of us more immoderately than others.'

Stella did not see the expression on Anthony Nyall's face because she was looking at Janet who had stretched out a slow, apparently almost reluctant hand and picked up her glass. She lifted it to her lips, tipped it back and put it down on the table. It was nearly empty.

Stella stared at her, and a look of slow horror came over her face. She realised that Janet Nyall was drunk. She had seen women drunk before, though not often, but she knew instinctively that this woman was different. Janet drank all the time. There must be some dreadful reason.

She found she could hardly bear to sit near her. Mentally and physically, she shrank from this deranged spectacle. She left as early as she could without being rude, and as she walked down the hill with Trevor Nyall beside her, the cool, night air washed the pollution from her body, or so she felt. She reasoned with herself, feeling that there was some abnormality in the violence of her reaction. But it was useless. At the thought of Janet Nyall her mind and body shuddered. For Trevor she felt pity and admiration. How bravely he had been through it all! One would think he did not care. How lighthearted he was when his spirit must be in misery. In consideration of his troubles she did not speak again of her own.

When she reached the house it was only 10.30 and the light was still burning in Sylvia's room. She knocked on the door and entered. Sylvia was lying on her bed in her black dressing-gown, her hair in pins. She was writing a letter.

Stella sat down and stared before her. ‘I've been to dinner with the Nyalls,' she said.

Sylvia threw a glance at her pale, strained face, and smiled faintly. ‘You didn't know what to expect?'

Stella shook her head.

‘Don't look so miserable. It's not so unusual up here. Marapai is full of drunks, temporary and permanent.'

‘But why her?'

Sylvia shrugged her shoulders. ‘Philip swears Trevor beats her, but you can't rely on him. He's got a bee in his bonnet about Trevor, thinks he was done out of a job. He doesn't realise that no one in their senses would give him anything to do. He's very clever, brilliant really, but not in that way.'

Stella was not listening. ‘Do you know anything about the younger brother ‘ – she hesitated over his name and brought it out reluctantly – ‘Anthony?'

‘Not really. Only what everyone knows, the big scandal. I've always thought he seemed a decent sort of fellow.'

‘What scandal?'

‘There was a hullabulloo about a year ago. Anthony made some frightful blunder. He was terribly enthusiastic and full of bright ideas – thought everyone else very conservative – and rushed around doing things without considering the consequences. He used to say that everything was too slow, that if we didn't do something quickly it would be too late. He took some highland boys to a school in one of the coastal villages. I think there were about a dozen of them, and they all died in an influenza epidemic. Some Papuans are like orchids; they won't stand transplanting, haven't any resistance. Anthony, who didn't anticipate anything like that, was devastated. There were some Sydney reporters up here, and they got hold of the story and made headlines out of it. They said we were murdering the locals for our own foul ends. The administration was in a spot and I think would have kicked him out if it hadn't been for Trevor. I think he pulled some strings and fixed it so that Anthony was cleared of some of the blame. Anyway, he's still with us.'

‘I see.'

She had hoped for something different, and this, like the smile bent to Janet Nyall, only further confused her. She rose to leave, then hesitated. ‘Sylvia, I remembered what you said, and I looked around the room. It's beautiful, like a pavilion in a garden, but there were no geckoes.'

Sylvia regarded her silently, then said, ‘It's only a saying. Stella, I think you are too sensitive and fanciful for this country. Soon you'll be seeing ghosts and believing in vada. Be careful, and if you want a confidante come to me. I don't believe in vada, and I'm tough. I have to be.'

A week passed and Stella found out no more about Jobe until one morning Trevor brought her the news that he had left Marapai and taken a job as skipper on a small coastal boat trading between New Ireland and the mainland. No one knew when or if he would return. It was obvious that he was not going to Eola and had been frightened off Eola gold and the possibility of deportation or another term in gaol.

For the first time Stella began to doubt her convictions. Those two words of her father's, had she heard them or imagined them? Had Sereva, after all, died of food poisoning? And had David committed suicide? They were all questions which she had never before asked herself and now they more and more insistently tormented her. She had been in Marapai for nearly a fortnight and was beginning to realise that suicide was not, after all, impossible. It was not that life here was unbearable, but it was different. People changed; they were no longer recognisable as Australians. Aberrations of behaviour seemed normal and did not startle you. Frustrations and misfortunes festered into wounds here, deranged the mind and poisoned the blood. No, suicide was not impossible.

Another question presented itself and her convictions almost entirely crumbled away. How could she be right and Trevor wrong? He had known David and the country, he had been involved in the affair with Jobe, and he was older and wiser by some thirty years. He was authority, he could not be wrong.

She woke up one morning to find that she had lost her faith. It was an experience almost as terrible as the loss of her husband, except that by now, being used to loss, she accepted it more calmly. There was no longer any reason for her to stay in Marapai. There was no reason for her being anywhere, but Marapai with its dazzling seas and brilliant flowers was the last place on earth where she wanted to be. She did not think where she would go or what she would do; just to leave was for the moment enough. Once she made up her mind, her heart lifted slightly. Her sense of urgency was now attached to her departure. It was desperately important to get away as soon as possible. Marapai had become unbearable, and she resisted its beauty with a feeling of horror.

She booked a seat on the plane for the following week. Then she met Philip Washington.

CHAPTER 10

It was a Thursday evening. Washington left his house at about 5.30 and walked down the hill to the shacks where he kept his jeep. The sea was pink and green and calm as ice. Canoes on their way home to the village hung poised, their slack sails barely moving in the intermittent puffs of wind.

He turned the nose of the jeep to face the road and allowed it to run down the hill towards the sea-front. He was just swinging out to turn at the bottom of the road when a woman stepped out from the footpath and waved her arms above her head. It was Sylvia. She was dressed in a sleeveless black silk dress, with a cluster of frangipani flowers on top of her head and another cluster over one ear. This time of the year was particularly humid and her face shone under its make-up.

Washington drew up the jeep beside her. He was tremendously pleased to see her. Apart from the visit to Anthony Nyall and a trip into the village, he had not been out of his hut for nearly a fortnight. He had been in bed most of the time with a fever, partly genuine, partly induced, and preferred in times of sickness to be left alone. Sylvia had been instructed not to visit him. He knew he looked unattractive when he was sick and it wounded his vanity to be seen in such a condition. He hailed her gaily.

‘You're better,' she said, and looked at him closely. ‘Oh, but Philip, you look dreadful. You should be in bed.'

‘I'm on the mend. Still can't sleep, that's all. And where have you been, my sweet, all dressed up to kill?'

His moments of sweetness were rare these days and she smiled gratefully. ‘I've been drinking tea with the upper crust,' she said. ‘Mrs Lane, believe it or not.'

Mrs Lane was the wife of the Controller of Civil Construction.

‘Good God!' said Washington. ‘Why on earth would she ask you?' He had never been to the Lane's house. They had only been in Marapai for a few months and had taken over a new block of flats on the harbour road.

‘I met her on the beach and she seemed to like me.'

That Sylvia should go to houses where he himself was not entertained was ludicrous. Sylvia was a dear but she was hopeless socially. She did not know about clothes and, in spite of her beauty, always looked a mess. ‘Well, she's new to the place,' he said sullenly. ‘And I suppose she just doesn't know any better.'

‘She's nicer than most,' said Sylvia mildly. ‘She isn't a cat – not yet.'

‘Not yet, she isn't,' said Washington. He had forgotten his pleasure in seeing Sylvia and looked at her with hostility. ‘But
really
, an afternoon tea – I thought at least you were going for cocktails, rigged up in that thing with the blue stuff all over your eyes. Haven't you any idea of what's appropriate? She'll never ask you again. And even if it hadn't been afternoon tea, you don't seem to know that you should never wear black in this climate. You know what is said about the tropics? Never trust any man in braces or a woman in black.'

Sylvia only smiled and said placidly, ‘I don't like pale colours. I know I haven't any taste, but I dress to please myself.'

‘Obviously,' he said sharply. ‘You couldn't dress for anyone else. Why don't you watch you boss's wife? She's one of the few women in this town who doesn't look like a trollop. God knows where half of these men find their wives.'

Sylvia rarely fought back, but this time he had hurt her. ‘Why should I watch her? She's a vile woman; no one's safe from her. Not even you.'

‘What do you mean?' he said immediately. ‘What's she said about me?'

‘She was talking about you this afternoon,' said Sylvia, relenting. ‘It was nothing really.'

‘What was it?' he said. ‘Tell me. I want to know. Don't drop hints then crawl away like a cockroach.'

Again she was hurt. ‘She said you couldn't keep boys, that you were too familiar with them. She said it was disgusting the way you went on, and how could you expect to keep boys when you let them wear flowers and play mouth-organs and talk to you like a friend. She said they were servants and ought to be treated as such, and that people like you were ruining the country for others; that it was people like you who had caused the rise in wages and made the locals insolent and demanding and that you ought to be put out of the country.' She stopped and was immediately ashamed. ‘The usual nonsense. She's just a fool; nobody listens to her. They know they get just as much as soon as they go out of the room.'

‘Oh God!' he cried passionately. ‘These women! These fat sows who think they know all about Papuans!'

‘It was Rei,' said Sylvia. ‘He went up to her sister's house and wanted a job as cook boy.' She looked up at him and said gently, ‘Why did you sack Rei, Philip? Heaven knows, I don't like natives much. I can't understand them and I'm sure my laundry boy steals my gin, but Rei was a sweet boy. You should have kept him.'

Washington stared gloomily ahead. ‘He's disobedient. I went out for half an hour last week and left him in charge. And when I got back he was talking to someone in the boy house and three dogs were scratching around in the rubbish bin. I won't have dogs in my place! If he can't keep the dogs away he can go. And he prowls around at night. I told him not to.'

‘You're imagining things again,' she said gently. ‘Rei loved you. I'm sure he wouldn't take anything. You're all on edge.'

Was it Rei? he thought. It must have been Rei. And if it wasn't Rei who was it? What was he doing there? It must have been Rei – that man who wore no rami, who stank and who was too small by far to be Rei.

‘I've got a better boy than Rei.' He was feeling a little mean for having been so rude about her dress, and said with a charming smile, ‘Hop in. I'm going down to the village to pick him up, and then I'll drive you home if you like.'

The village was about two miles out of the town. Before the war it had been a typical sea village, a collection of grass and timber huts built on piles over the water, each house reached by a narrow, rickety jetty stretching out from the land. At low tides the houses on their stilts were left high and dry, like strange grey birds, crane-legged, standing in the mud. During high tides the water rose up just below the floors of the houses. But this village had been destroyed during the war, and when the re-building started the government decided that it was better for the people if they built on the shore. So the old sea village had gone and the houses were now huddled up on either side of the main road. The villagers had not re-built in the traditional manner with walls of woven sago palm and thatched roof, for the government hinted that it would build a model village with wooden houses, tin-roofed, in the white man's style. Unfortunately there had never been sufficient material for the few houses needed by the Europeans, and of the new model village only two houses had been constructed. The rest of the villagers had built themselves temporary dwellings from old army scrap, pieces of tin and the broken bonnets of trucks and covered the holes with odd pieces of sacking. This had all happened in the years immediately after the war and the word ‘temporary' was now almost forgotten. There was an undeniable air of permanency about the rusty little town.

But the village still had charms. These were a fishing people and their slender log canoes with outrigger and sail still floated at the water's edge. Their woven nets sewn with cowrie shells hung from the verandahs. Some of the women wore dirty calico and tied up their hair with Christmas paper, cheap plastic clips and diamante bows, but others squatted in the doorways, their grass skirts swelling up over their knees and their hair studded with flowers and leaves. They wandered in twos and threes down the village street, carrying wood or yams in long woven baskets, that were supported from their foreheads and dangled down over their backs. In the evenings round an open fire on the beach the young boys and girls still shuffled their feet and swayed while they sang their own songs and mission songs. And there were always the small, naked, pot-bellied children scampering after pigs and skinny dogs, or crouching in the firelight, their bodies shining and their huge, black goblin eyes ringed in china white.

There was a warmth and vitality about the village that was lacking in the European-inhabited town a mile or so away, where people were boisterous but not gay, and suffered always from a sense of incongruity.

Six months ago Washington had contemplated living here, but he had not dared. Such a step would have been to transgress unforgivably the laws of white conduct. But he always, even now, felt a sense of relief and peace here. It seemed to him that in the white town everyone was poised for departure, ill-at-ease, bewildered, longing for some other land and resentful of this one. The village people sprang from the primitive soil and were not entirely separated from it. Knowing no other life, they did not question what they had. Conflicts were only just beginning. Satisfaction was only just starting to wane and, to the onlooker, at least, they still appeared happy. Washington was not worried by the rattle of rusty tin and the flapping rags; he had long since ceased to notice them.

Sylvia, however, saw nothing else. She was passing through the inevitable stage of mourning for the grass huts. ‘I hate this place,' she said, as they drew into the centre of the village. ‘It's so drab, filthy and miserable.'

‘Nonsense,' said Washington. ‘You don't know beauty when you see it. You've got a silly, magazine mind. You're wasted in this place; you ought to go to Honolulu with a lei round your neck. You only look at the sky when there's a red sunset. You wouldn't look up on a grey day. Papuans have to be under twenty-one for you, all done up in dog teeth and garnas with hibiscus in their hair – you wouldn't glance twice at a woman in calico. I'll show you someone beautiful. You wait till you see Koibari.'

He was waiting for them. Half way through the village was a large nut tree. Its leaves had turned to autumnal hues and fluttered in red and orange rosettes around the fresh, green plumes of the new foliage. Around its trunk had collected a group of Papuans with bundles and packages, apparently waiting for some transport; village boys in cotton ramis, and strangers from outlying villages wearing the necklaces, feathers and armbands of less sophisticated places. As Washington pulled up his jeep a man rose from the fringe of the group and came towards them. He walked with a stiff-jointed shuffle, slightly sideways, like a crab. His yellow face was seamed and withered; his lips had disappeared, but a few black betel-stained teeth gaped into a grin. He wore a tattered khaki rami hitched about his waist with a piece of string, and as he waddled forward a black bag that was fettered to his waist flapped against his thigh. His legs were stained with the purple scars of ulcers. His great bush of fuzzy hair started up from his forehead, and crowned his monstrous ugliness with a wreath of pink coral flowers. As he slowly moved towards them the others in the group crouched back or slid away, flashing the whites of their eyes.

‘Oh, no!' cried Sylvia, lifting her hands in a childish gesture and pressing her fingers to her cheeks.

Washington's face was alert and eager. ‘Isn't he wonderful! Isn't he superbly and diabolically evil! Look at his little mean red eyes, like a scheming pig.'

‘Oh, what do you want him for?' said Sylvia shuddering. She did not know exactly what filled her with horror. It was not only the sight of the old man, who had stopped and stood, chewing and spitting, a little way off. She was more frightened by the look on Philip's face.

‘All the people around here are scared of him,' he said. ‘He's a very powerful sorcerer. People pay him to make sorcery against their enemies. See that little black bag he has – that's got all his stuff in it. Bits of old bones and shells and stones, and God knows what. It's illegal. He's been in gaol twice for sorcery. The district officer got hold of his bag last time and burnt it, but he soon made up another one.'

‘What do you
want
him for?' she cried.

The excitement died out of his eyes. An expression of recognition and then reticence passed over his face. He might have been jerked back to earth wishing to disguise that he had ever been away. He smiled. ‘I'm only amusing myself. I like these old characters, they interest me. There aren't many of them left, and they're the only ones who can tell you what the old life was like. These boys' – he waved a contemptuous arm around him – ‘don't even know the songs their fathers knew; they've forgotten the old legends. I know more of their culture than they do. It's just as well there are a few men like me who are willing to talk to the old men and learn about the old days before it's too late.' He beckoned to the old man who lurched forward in his shuffling, crablike gait. The black bag flapped at his thigh, and his strong, musty odour travelled before him, like breath.

She did not look at Philip again but huddled down in the seat beside him. Koibari was heaving his bulk into the back with strange, animal grunts.

‘Right? All fixed?' Philip said gaily, and started up the engine. The jeep moved off, back along the harbour road. They did not speak; Washington sang, Koibari sucked and grunted. As they passed through the main street of the town, Sylvia, who had been leaning out of the window with her head in the wind, straightened, turned and spoke. ‘Philip! Take him back! I'm frightened!'

‘Don't be silly,' said Philip, annoyed.

But she leaned across, gripped his knee, and spoke with an intensity quite unlike her. ‘Philip, why don't you stop all this nonsense and get away. Get out of that house. Living up there on the hill by yourself, it's not healthy. It gives me the creeps with the fireflies and glow-worms and flying foxes and the damned Keremas beating their drums all night.
I'm frightened!
'

He took his eyes off the road for a moment to stare at her scornfully. ‘And where would I go, may I ask?'