Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (23 page)

She had learned all those things at Curtis and Co. She had been a very promising girl there. She had wanted to get on. But somehow things had not turned out very brightly. One way or another they had never quite clicked. She had started up on her own in the back room and somehow had never got out of it. The truth was you needed capital and influence to get on.

‘Now we've got it right,' she said, ‘I'll sew it on.'

Mrs Daley, wearing the hat at last, gave off a terribly troubled impression of two-fold misfortune. There was something naked and unfinished about the hat as seen from the front. Her ears protruded grossly, like two pale gargoyles deformed and wrinkled. From the back the flower seemed as if hooked to the wrong hat and then forgotten.

‘I don't think it will need altering,' Miss Manktelow said. ‘I don't think it will need a touch.'

‘I hope to goodness Joe won't hate it,' Mrs Daley said.

From the street-side window Miss Manktelow watched Mrs Daley blown beyond the bakehouse, across East Street, by the February wind. There was no sign of spring in East Street. The hat was altogether too large for Mrs Daley and seemed
to rock on her ears. In the wind Mrs Daley looked ugly and comfortless and held the hat with one hand as if feeling it was top-heavy and did not belong to her and would blow away.

Through the back window Miss Manktelow stared at the yard. The rhododendrons were stark and hideous and would have to come out this spring. She removed the naked wooden skull from the table and thought of the bakehouse at night, of Joe laughing and of the smell of bread and fire.

She turned and looked at her face in the mirror. It really wasn't a bad face, she thought. She really couldn't understand how a man like Joe could fall for a face so crushed and out of proportion as Mrs Daley's, with those enormous ears and the scraggle of bleached grey hair.

She lifted the front of her own hair with her fingers. The new streak of grey growing out from the roots was something she would have to tint in when she went to bed. How did people fall for each other? How did it come about that a man preferred one face to another?

In the yard the brown cat leapt from the fence, driven by a black tom-cat that slid like a panther behind the rhododendrons. In rage Miss Manktelow saw the flash of its reflection in the mirror and rushed to the window, beating on it angrily.

‘Psst!' she shouted. ‘Psst! You big black brute!—go home! Psst! Psst! Get out!—go home!'

That was what killed things, she thought. That's what made it impossible to have any flowers.

‘Psst!' she said. She spat with angry breath against the glass. ‘Psst! Go home, you brute!' It was no wonder you could never have anything. ‘Psst! Psst!—go home where you belong. Psst!—you great ugly thing!'

In hatred Miss Manktelow glared at the cat; and the cat, with green-proud eyes, glared back at Miss Manktelow.

They called her a schooner. She looked more than anything else like a big squat butter-churn sawn in half from end to end, painted white and roofed over with a kitchen table to protect her deck from the sun. In the middle of the deck was a sort of bung-hole, from the darkness of which rose strange engine belchings, blue clouds of oil fume and faint odours of long-dead fish.

‘She's due to sail at half-past eight,' people said. ‘Be on the quayside at ten.'

At a quarter-past ten the only passengers were two Tahitian women who lay on the decks in fright, heads covered by scarves, bare feet tucked into the skirts of their white and scarlet
pereus
. The crew, consisting of a swarthy little Frenchman in battered white peak-cap, a crumpled-looking engineer whose dark-lined yellow skin had something of the look of an ageing banana skin, and a twenty-three stone mate with a belly as broad as the schooner beam, hands like gigantic brown claws and a vast one-tooth smile.

At half-past ten they were still loading bicycles. At twenty minutes to eleven the captain walked away down the waterfront, spent some time in the offices of the Pacific Navigation
and Tourist Agency and presently came back to drink fresh coconut juice with two friends at a stall shaded by three sacks, several palm fronds and two strips of corrugated iron.

Just before eleven One-Tooth and the engineer still had to load four crates, half a dozen sticks of bananas, several sacks of flour, a pen of ducks, a stack of boxes, eight barrels of wine, two canisters of film and a horse.

Gradually, as these things were loaded on, the schooner sank an inch or two lower in the water. By the time the wine had been lowered into the mysterious spaces of the bung-hole she seemed ready to submerge. But it was when the horse was strapped to a sort of bamboo trellis on the star-board side and then began stampeding, trying to kick holes in the deck, that a real list began.

‘All we need now is One-Tooth,' I said. ‘Then she'll be awash.'

Soon after eleven we were almost ready. One-Tooth and the engineer were having a last drink of coconut juice under the shade of the corrugated iron and the captain was signing chits for six spare bicycle tyres brought by a Chinaman in a truck. The passengers now consisted of my wife, myself, the two frightened women, a mother and father with three children, a Frenchman reading
La Vie Parisienne
, two priests, an elderly Tahitian woman with a bunch of marigolds, the pen of ducks and the horse.

‘Let's be thankful for the priests,' I said.

Two minutes later One-Tooth jumped aboard and lowered her another inch in the oily waters of the harbour. The engineer followed him and disappeared down the bung-hole. One-Tooth lifted the gang-plank aboard and began hauling up the anchor. The engine burst into a shuddering roar and the captain, as if thinking that he might perhaps be short of
a passenger, a duck or possibly even a horse, took one last look round the deck, idly counting the heads.

At the same moment someone began yelling on the quayside. I looked shorewards and saw a big, magnificent, expansive Tahitian girl, a large crimson hibiscus in her hair, riding with splendid brown legs astride the pillion of a policeman's motor cycle.

With red mouth wide open and head thrown back, she was exploding in handsome laughter.

‘Tereu,' the captain said. One-Tooth stopped hauling in the anchor. ‘Tereu,' he said, laughing, ‘Tereu!' he shouted. The engineer lifted his banana-skin face from the fumes of bung-hole and laughed too. ‘Tereu,' he said. ‘Tereu!' he shouted.
‘Comment ça va
, Tereu?'

A moment later they had the gang-plank out for her and she was coming aboard. She crossed the plank in three splendid strides, jumping down on the deck between ducks, horse, priests and frightened women with what I thought were noises, half in French, half in Tahitian, of glorious blasphemy.

Hearing her, the captain, One-Tooth and the engineer roared with laughter.

‘Since when did the boat start early?' she said in French. ‘Couldn't you sleep well?'

She pushed past the horse, giving it a slap on the rump, its bony carcase trembling against the trellis-work.

‘Ballast?' she said and for a second time exploded in magnificent, handsome laughter.

A minute later we were heading out to sea. Even in the calm waters of the lagoon the schooner rolled like a butter-churn. At the gap in the reef she pitched against the great pressing wall of the incoming Pacific, jolting the ribs of the horse against the sides. Her bows rose against the long deep
swell, leaving her wallowing in blue-grey troughs capped with sun-white ocean spume. Against the towering crests of the reef she looked smaller, felt uglier and seemed more barrel-like than ever, slogging her slow way to a sky-line of island mountains.

Now and then, out to sea, a shark exploded the water surface with a great lash. But it was never a more startling sight than the sight of Tereu, golden shoulders and chest bare as far as the sweep of her sumptuous breasts, head thrown back, hair sweeping down past her hard fine hips like a black plait-less horse mane, superb smooth legs naked as far as her thighs, which she sat hugging with her hands.

All the time she kept up her running expansive fire of laughter with the captain, One-Tooth and the engineer. One-Tooth, in laughter, was like a grinning gargoyle. His vast bladder of a paunch quivered below the yellow folds of his navel-line like half-set jelly. And once, in the middle of some grosser, more explosive joke between them, I saw her slap him there with her open hand.

Somehow, in all this, she rode in the bows of the lumping schooner with dignity, like a scarlet and white figurehead with gold-leaf flesh, jet black hair and a certain nobleness about the deep brown eyes.

Two hours later we were tying up inside an island reef, at a little wooden jetty, the first of several stopping places.

On the jetty two long-haired girls in
pereus
were selling big slices of melon in two varieties, one pink, one sugar-brown. All the passengers, including the two priests, the two frightened women, and Tereu, got off the schooner and started sucking melon, leaving us alone on deck with the ducks, the bunch of marigolds and the horse. One-Tooth, the captain and the engineer unloaded three barrels of wine, six sacks of flour and
the canisters of film. Then they too went ashore to suck melon, pressing their faces into the big pink and brown black-seeded slices.

‘Hey! You're English, aren't you? Don't you like watermelon?'

It was Tereu, sucking pink water melon, laughing up at us.

‘Very much.'

‘Then why the hell don't you come down and eat some?' Her English, throaty, slightly American in accent, suddenly changed to a well-bred drawl. ‘Or don't you care to awfully much? I mean to say—not done, old boy?'

Since she mocked us, I mocked her back.

‘Not frightfully.'

‘Oh! I say,' she said. ‘Too-too. Most awfully too-too. Don't you think so?'

‘Absolutely,' I said.

‘Too gorgeous,' she said.

‘Too simply stunning,' I said. ‘I mean to say.'

She burst into laughter, choked by pink melon flesh, spitting out a mouthful of black seed which floated down through the clear crystalline blue water, where even bluer fish swam in slow shoals against the schooner bows.

‘Oh! come off it,' she said. ‘Which colour do you want?' She threw the rind of her own melon into the water. ‘Pink or brown?'

‘Brown please. It's very kind of you.'

‘Brown it is,' she said. ‘I'm coming aboard.'

She came back on board, graciously bearing us sweet wet slices of gold-brown melon. As we sucked at them I looked at her large, dark and now quite dignified eyes.

‘Where did you get that too-too?' I said.

‘Fiji. San Francisco,' she said. ‘Places.'

Now, sitting in the bows, shoulders shining in the sun, head outlined against the background of palm and mountain, she spoke easily, gracefully and with calm.

‘You're going to stay with the Longmores, aren't you?' she said.

‘How did you know?'

‘Oh! everybody stays with the Longmores,' she said. ‘Do you know them well?'

‘Not at all.'

‘Oh! that's neither here nor there in Tahiti,' she said. ‘In Tahiti you don't need introductions.'

‘Are you staying with the Longmores too?' I said.

‘No,' she said. ‘I get off before that. The next stop but one.'

In flashing sunlight, through calm blue water, we glided up the lagoon. After the next stopping place One-Tooth, the captain and the engineer began eating bread and bananas and drinking
vin ordinaire
from dark green bottles. One-Tooth opened his black gargoyle mouth, poured in a stream of wine, wiped the bottle-neck on his shirt and then held the bottle up, roaring with laughter.

‘Tereu? Huh?' he said.
‘Petit peu
?'

Tereu took the bottle and drank too, afterwards almost drowning the beat of the engines with the long throaty roll of her handsome laughter.

All the time the shores of the lagoon, white-sanded, with high curtains of palm, and above them the fantastic chimney mountains forested to the tips, floated past us, hot, profoundly still and without a sound.

‘Something along here I'd like to show you,' she said.

Two minutes later she was pointing shorewards to where, among clusters of red and yellow croton, banana fronds, orange trees and a few tangled bushes of tiare and frangipani,
a framework of roofless and fire-blackened bamboo, once a house, stood against the shore.

‘My house,' she said. ‘Was my house, I should say.'

The bamboo skeleton faded slowly away from us like a washed-up wreck.

‘Built it myself,' she said, ‘with my last fifty dollars.'

Across the lagoon a shoal of tiny fish, chased by another, rose clearer out of the water like a flock of silver birds. Still staring at the house, she did not notice them.

‘All I had left after San Francisco. Wouldn't have had that if I hadn't left it with Longmore before I sailed.'

We were coming in, now, to another white-painted jetty, glittering in the sun.

‘Nice in San Francisco,' she said. ‘Had to fall in love there too. Whale of a time. Blued everything. Every cent I had. All or nothing with me. Worth it, though. What do you say?'

‘Absolutely.'

‘Oh! absolutely,' she said. ‘Always all or nothing with me. Too terrific.' She laughed again, loud and throatily. ‘All I had was the fifty dollars. Then all I had was the house. Then one day I burnt that down.' Again she roared with laughter, her strong rich tongue quivering. ‘Too awful. Too absolutely awful don't you know. The end.'

When she got off at the next landing stage One-Tooth, the captain and the engineer waved their hands to her in fond goodbye. In return she threw kisses to the schooner, said goodbye several times in four languages, including her two sorts of English, and stood golden, sumptuous and laughing in the sun.