The Pacific Room Read online

  She had become mesmerised by the music of the words, as if they had been released from his lips by a flageolet, and then queasy at the thought that they were seeding within her, grafting onto her soul.

  Committing the words to paper, she wondered if the tapu that had been cast on Wiltshire and Uma in his story had somehow shifted through the air to settle on Vailima. Is this what paralysed them in their beds, rotting their camisoles, bringing mould to their boots? And as the medium of the story, she wondered, was she now the source of the contagion, colouring his words, taking possession of them?

  Behind the mosquito netting her stepfather is already beginning to stir. He reaches for his pyjamas, the gauze turning his flesh into tiny pinpricks of pink.

  ‘Where is Mary?’ he suddenly asks.

  Once again she can feel the photograph in her fingers, its corners curling like a question.

  ‘Mary?’ She thinks of the strange fecundity of the forest, how growing near the mountain pool in the photograph are the tree African violets, with dainty white flowers and monstrous leaves. She thinks of the natural corset shape of Mary’s tiny waist and how in a month or more it might begin to show, ripening slowly like breadfruit – something to fasten their fears onto, ‘devil-work’, the painter’s child. Something easily banished from here, on board the Lübeck, to be sent back to Sydney from whence she came.

  ‘Mary is unwell,’ she says.

  In Sydney they had coined a verb for what she had been noisily conjugating in the bathroom downstairs: to chunder.

  ‘Perhaps Mother has a cure,’ he notes wryly, motioning to her white widow’s cap taking flight on the balcony outside.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, he is already beginning to assemble himself for the portrait downstairs. He starts first with the yellow knitted socks his mother had presented on her return from Edinburgh. Pulling them up to his knees he stands before his stepdaughter, half man, half giraffe.

  She turns her back to his dressing and begins to walk towards the desk at the far end of the room, passing the widow outside as she goes.

  Quickly she must catch his words and pass them on.

  ‘Brother says there has been a sighting of an aitu,’ she says matter-of-factly, so as not to disturb the toilette of her stepfather behind her.

  She is now eye to eye with the Buddha that rests dolefully on his desk, commanding calm. As if in defiance, she looks up – first to the hulking shape of the mountain through the windows, then down across his spilling papers, a waterfall of words.

  ‘The aitu was heard singing by the mountain pool.’

  This hardly raises a murmur from her stepfather, and so she leaves the photograph on the desk, casually dropped by the blotter, as if the wind or a stream had carried it there.

  Chapter 22

  THE PACIFIC ROOM

  The library is empty. Journals and books line the walls, their spines inscribed, but something seems missing. For Lewis there is not the usual interface between the reader and the written word. No catalogue is immediately apparent: neither cabinets of index cards nor computer screens. There are no welcoming reading tables or chairs. Just a cathedral space of books open to the heavy humid air.

  This absence doesn’t quell his curiosity. If anything, it arouses him.

  At the museum the day before he’d been told how some of the Scottish writer’s first editions had been bequeathed here. Others had been turned into the local tongue, transforming in translation –O Le Motu o Oloa sounded more like a love song or lullaby than the title of the well-known boys’ adventure tale. He learnt that few had been spared the vicissitudes of the weather, their papers buckling and untethering from spines, just as his hair had seemed to lift and curl on arrival at the airport.

  It takes him a few moments to adjust to the library’s stillness before he senses that he isn’t alone. At a service bay around the corner a pair of attendants sit in a pool of gentle light. As Lewis approaches the counter he realises he doesn’t know what it is he is seeking.

  ‘Can I help you?’ a young man softly asks.

  ‘Yes please, I’m after some information,’ Lewis begins.

  ‘About what?’ Even the young man’s oiled hair seems raised in a question.

  Roberta Haynes, he wants to say. I want to find out all there is to know about Roberta Haynes. Instead he says: ‘Tusitala.’

  He hopes the name will act as a medium to bring these books to life.

  ‘What title?’

  On the wall behind the attendant is an AIDS education poster. In comic-strip form, it tells the story of a young man leading his girlfriend down a beach. The girl says: ‘No more shame-job. No condom, no way!’

  Lewis looks down at the floor where his toes squirm in their sandals, an unseemly white with dark spidery hair. He feels suddenly ashamed about what he’s doing here in the library, as if the knowledge it contains is not his, or at least should be negotiated.

  ‘I’m researching a portrait of Tusitala,’ he says, politely pausing, ‘that was painted here in 1892. Where do you keep your historical papers?’

  The attendant appears as flummoxed as the young man in the comic strip.

  ‘What title?’ he asks again.

  Lewis considers walking away when the attendant’s supervisor glides across to the counter and, smiling at Lewis, recites in a light contralto: ‘Fair Isle at Sea – thy lovely name.’

  She has a round face devoid of eyebrows, and wise brown eyes. A large hand with bronzed fingernails taps the counter.

  Orbiting her head is a pair of old-fashioned headphones, releasing into the library’s stillness an insinuation of sound. Lewis looks at her face and feels the stirring of a song, but the headphones muffle the lyrics. All he can hear is the welling rhythm of chorus and verse, an echo from a distance.

  In Aunt Agatha’s lounge room in Dunedin there was an old German record player cabinet, its powerful acoustics housed within a carapace of walnut veneer, teetering on legs as dainty as stiletto heels. Lewis would lie on his stomach on the floor, the record’s cover notes hovering on the shag pile; he could never get close enough to the songs and their lyrics.

  It all comes back to him now with the tinny faraway sound from the supervisor’s headphones in the library. The very blankness of her face encourages memory, and from the air he can summon the flourishes of the ocarina, marimba and baroque toy trumpet, and then the piano improvisations from the master himself, Burt Bacharach.

  Through the conjured crackle of his childhood, the words of Hal David come of their own accord. He had read how before meeting Burt in 1957, Hal was stationed in Hawaii during the war, and Lewis wonders if this helps explain the emotional spaciousness of their music and lyrics, their watery oneness.

  The lady behind the counter has been staring at him, daring him to blink.

  ‘Hello, I’m Wilhelmina. We met last night.’

  The contralto softness of the voice is enough to return Lewis to the night-time garden.

  Without make-up her face is like a chrysalis beginning to reveal itself. Under the brightness of the library’s fluoro lighting he can tell she knows that he’s remembering her – that she’s slowly dawning on him like the shape of the mango tree emerging through the kerosene smoke.

  ‘You didn’t tell me you worked here.’

  ‘I like to keep my mystery.’

  ‘As does this library,’ Lewis says, this time daring her to blink.

  But now that she has offered herself to him, Wilhelmina retreats once more behind her younger male assistant, back to the pages of a women’s glossy magazine behind the counter. She licks her fingertip as if to turn a page, then pauses. Without looking up, she motions to a pair of swing doors just beyond the counter.

  Handwritten above the doors is a sign: The Pacific Room.

  ‘I think you’ll find what you’re looking for in there,’ she says. ‘Leave your bag at the entrance.’

  Chapter 23

  SINA AND THE EEL

  By the toll for l
ate morning Mass she is finally ready for sleep. Just five minutes should do it, Teuila thinks. In five minutes I will sleep ten years. And later it won’t matter.

  When she rang up sick for work that morning, her boss Pauline had asked Teuila about Henry’s whereabouts. ‘Isn’t he with you?’

  He is always with me, she wanted to say, but replied: ‘When he left the church yesterday, I imagined he was going far away.’

  ‘Back to Auckland, do you think?’

  Teuila coughed uneasily and said nothing, though not even this could stem the tide of Pauline’s curiosity.

  ‘I bet the Gold Coast – what do you say?’

  Teuila thought of the furthest point he could go. She thought of Mount Vaea and the soft cleft of grass at its summit. If he’s anywhere, she thought, he’ll be waiting for me there at dusk.

  ‘I have no idea,’ she eventually said.

  Now she can feel the tic thrumming under her left eye, as if all her nerves have been reduced to this one tiny point. She remembers the distance she has travelled through the night. Yes, just five minutes, she thinks.

  But before she can draw the curtains for her nap, her eyes are lulled by the motion of the palm tree through the louvres outside. In the wavering light it flexes and waves, flexes and waves, labouring under the weight of water and wind. Its trunk glistens black, swelling like one gigantic eel swimming through the sea towards her. Its thrashing leaves make this creature oddly human.

  Teuila was six when her father told her the story of Sina and the eel. It was around this time he had noticed his child changing in sometimes unmistakable ways: wearing a pink frangipani behind the ear, or singing too loudly in church – things Teuila’s siblings never dreamt of doing. Sometimes it was just a look, the way she would dreamily stare out at the palm tree in the garden or listen intently to the distant sound of the surf.

  ‘Let me tell you what it is to turn,’ he said one day, gathering Teuila in his lap and pointing out to the very same palm through the louvres of his garden pavilion.

  Teuila cried her eyes out at the story he went on to tell her – about the beautiful young girl befriended by an eel, which she brought back from the lagoon in her water gourd. The eel was a Fijian suitor in disguise, and he responded to Sina’s daily attentions, swelling to the size of her fale, growing in status but also frightening her. So much so that Sina had her brothers haul the eel from their house – not an easy task because of the way it slipped through their grip – and place him in the local spring. When he outgrew the spring he was moved to the village bathing pool, where he took the form of a rock and only emerged in Sina’s shining presence.

  His immensity embarrassed her. And the love that engorged the eel also brought his downfall. He had become so large that it was impossible now for him to swim home across the ocean or turn back into his former self, and so, knowing Sina would never marry him, he died of a broken heart. But before he died he asked Sina for one final thing – that she have his head chopped off and planted next to the fale where she would live the rest of her days.

  ‘A tree will grow from it,’ the eel explained, ‘tall and strong. And every time you drink from its fruit you’ll be kissing me.’

  At the time her father told her the story, Teuila’s tears fell for Sina. She could think of nothing sadder than being unable to marry the man of her dreams. But with the passing of the years it is the eel she feels closest to.

  Each thrashing wave of the palm outside her window brings her closer still, as if her soul were harboured within its dark clusters of fruit. Yet Sina’s knowledge strengthens her. She knows that she will never be with Henry in a traditional sense, that marriage is beyond the simple practicalities of their lives; nor will she die of a broken heart. Instead, she dwells somewhere between knowing and hoping, in that welling state brought on by the rain.

  Teuila wishes her father were still here so she could ask him what it now means to turn. She liked the way her head rested back in the cleft of his chest so, when he spoke, she couldn’t see his face, only felt the pattern of his words.

  ‘So, what about Sosimo?’ she would ask him now. ‘Sosimo the changeling.’

  In the years since her father’s death the legend of Sosimo has grown, watered by the tears of her mother and attended daily by her siblings, as if he were a fragrant offering left on Ray Taulapapa Lesolosolou’s grave – proof that something within them all hasn’t died but flowered.

  ‘So, what about Sosimo,’ she would say again to her father, this time not as a question, but carrying something more open-ended than that, the possibility for all of them – the freedom to change.

  ‘Am I not proof of that?’ she would tell her father. ‘He’s in my blood and I can feel his soul stirring again.’

  Looking out at the tree in the garden, Teuila can feel her heart swelling to the size of the small louvred room, straining under its watery weight, unable to hold back the power of the creature bursting through.

  Chapter 24

  SMILE!

  Lewis peers in through the glass to see an old man sitting reading the newspaper at a large communal table, a walking stick resting between his legs. Lewis pauses, wondering if this is a space he can enter, then pushes through the swing doors. At once the air-conditioned coolness lifts his eyes to the cantilevered ceiling above. In the middle is a windowed wedge of raining sky.

  It feels sacred, this space, he thinks, like a small Italian chapel – as if a coin slot will somehow illuminate the scene and reveal what needs to be seen.

  Keeping vigil atop a bookshelf in the centre of the room are two small wooden sculptures – one a maiden, the other a warrior – and on the column above them a sign: SMILE! It takes more muscles to frown than to smile!

  The room has the shelf space of a small school library. There is a sense of knowledge contained. As Lewis slowly circles the books, his hands fidget over the embossing of spines, packed so tightly he imagines if one book is pulled out, the whole room will collapse in on itself, an island of quietly lapping words.

  A page of newspaper slowly turns. The old man seems to be reading every item on every page, imbibing them unhurriedly, word by word, as if by taking these stories in he is uncluttering the world. With imperceptible slowness he turns another page and gently smooths it down. Just behind his head are the three or four shelves devoted to the study of Tusitala.

  Lewis can’t bring himself to disturb the old man’s painstaking task. Instead, he gives in to it and relaxes. On display nearby is a shelf of Pacific fiction. Gently his eyes brush their spines, their titles washing up like strange driftwood in his mind. At random he picks one up, his finger slipping into its loosened spine; the book falls open:

  Not yet – not even yet – has Samoa lost her charm. In the early eighties, before the world had found her out, she was all charm, all gold …

  He thinks how this island has offered itself up like so many pages of a book, to be written over and erased and sometimes torn. He wonders what more will fall open for him.

  It’s only once the old man slowly rises from the table, placing his newspaper back on the rack, and the swing doors settle once more into stillness that Lewis approaches the shelves and gets down to his task.

  Chapter 25

  THE WIDOW

  She opens the bandbox. The small white bundles of organdie inside appear embryonic, waiting for her widow’s crown to fill them with faith, sending the transparent trail like an anchor down the straight of her back. Only then is she ready for the morning and the day ahead. At the mirror in her bedroom she allows herself but a brief pursing of the lips before she is off.

  Out onto the balcony and it is as dark and gloomy as a home November sky. The heavens are poised to open. Or so she hopes. Thinking and hoping: the two activities have become so entwined in this, her sixty-third year.

  Along the balcony she paces, her widow’s cap taking flight like the white tail of the tropicbird – or so Sosimo likes to say. And as she paces she mouths the prayer he
r son wrote for her despite giving up on God twenty years before:

  Lord, Thou sendest down rain upon the uncounted millions of the forest, and givest the trees to drink exceedingly.

  It is as though the words of the prayer have summoned the painter, for just at this moment she can see his beard bobbing across the lawn towards her. His movement is lackadaisical, as loosely unhurried as his dressing. The gentleman seems to have permanently unbuttoned flies. Slowly he salutes her with his hat.

  There had been talk of her purchasing the portrait, as something to adorn the new staircase, but progress has lagged these past weeks and months. The painter arrived in August and it is October already, and word has it that his portrait disappoints, dissipated not unlike his reputation. According to her son, the Italian has the morals of Tavernier, the artist from Hawaii, drawn to volcanoes, whose best work was shooting himself. She wonders if her son is playing with the Italian like sport, egging him on – for more writing material, she suspects. But he is not to be encouraged, this sketcher of shadows.

  Theirs is an intimacy kept safely at a distance. The first and only time they spoke she had sought to impress him with her knowledge of the paintings of the Italian Renaissance.

  ‘So tell me, maestro,’ she had begun, ‘are you planning an ascension, a descension or perhaps an adoration?’ Her experience of the galleries at the Accademia in Venice swirled around in her head. ‘For the portrait of my son.’

  The painter took his time to reply, blackening his beard with his charcoal-smudged hands. ‘Nothing quite so definitive,’ he said with an enigmatic smile. ‘I prefer to think of it as an apprehension.’

  The word made her think of Giorgione’s Tempest in Venice, in which the huddled figure of a mother and child is suddenly exposed by a lightning flash.