Inheritance (9 page)

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

She might have been speaking to a child.

Elena

B
ack in Wellington, 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.