The Pacific Room Read online

‘Whatever the case,’ she said finally, ‘I hope it will be a good likeness – I realise my son is not easy to reproduce in any style.’

  Since that initial exchange she and the painter have been content to wave at each other from across the lawn.

  Today he dawdles. Only when he approaches the chickens milling around the croquet court does he hurry, suddenly dancing among them, so they scuttle away, their feathered pantaloons bustling in a tropical version of the cancan.

  Just before he reaches the house the downpour comes. It starts as it means to finish – with a spilling burst, the rain bouncing off the lawn, releasing with it the narcotic waft of gardenia. He runs towards the entrance and performs a little leap – perhaps just for her – before disappearing from view. She can hear the excitable opening and closing of doors below and then the house is quiet again, if silence could possibly describe the succumbing sound of rain and the uneasy calm that each sitting brings.

  Is it the rain or perhaps the portrait that sequesters them in their different parts of the house? So she wonders as the rain gathers them in their separateness under the singing tin of the roof.

  It has been weeks since Aolele emerged from her bedroom. Her American daughter-in-law has always managed to gather sickness around her like an extended family. Unmentionable is her current illness, the malady that has clung to her as tenaciously as the tuitui weed to rock in the garden. Her silent, unseen presence has threatened to turn Vailima into a sanatorium, and more recently she has been joined in the house by another invalid. Stricken by silent waves of nausea, Mary has been little seen except by Sosimo and is confined to her rickety camp stretcher out the back.

  Such tensions have been welling, waiting for a suitable point of release. To this purpose, or perhaps as a distraction, the stepchildren have this morning taken to the kitchen in a performance of sorts. There is a feast to prepare for Mata‘afa’s latest victory in the forest, and ordered specially for the occasion are twenty pigs, fifty chickens, seventeen pigeons, four hundred and thirty taro roots, twelve large yams, eighty arrowroot puddings, fifty palusamis and eight hundred and four pineapples – all to be laid out by Sosimo on banana leaves on the verandah downstairs.

  The widow paces, not to be weighed down by such secular chores. Down over the railing her mind swoops, around to the right, and just out of vision her mind’s eye rests, to hover over the building works to the west of the house. Here a tarred awning is slung like a hammock between the frames of scaffolding, rain pooling in the centre. Around the edges wooden struts reach up to her like fingers clasped in prayer. She imagines the awning drooping lower and lower, like the falling register of the French organ at the Catholic church in town, as if all around her the island is sinking, drawing her into its depths.

  She prays for these sinking souls – prays for them to rise from this drowning patch of forest. But most of all she prays for her son.

  Just the other day, finding themselves momentarily alone, she had asked what was ailing him. They had been inspecting the building works in a brief respite from the rain, her son oddly distracted.

  He paused, as if summoning a secret from over his shoulder. Aolele was the source of his discomfort, he told her finally: ‘The natives think her uncanny and that devils serve her. Dreams dreams, and sees visions.’

  ‘Do you fear she is losing her mind?’ asked the widow, not unused to the unfathomable furies of her late husband.

  ‘No,’ her son replied. ‘It is as though she has glimpsed something previously unseen in me.’

  ‘In you?’

  The widow had looked at her son then, an unfinished staircase rising in the air behind him, and wondered if what had been glimpsed was his own coming death, for at that moment he had coughed sharply into his hand, leaving there a dainty imprint of blood.

  She steps from the balcony and slips into his study. How effortlessly she floats within its pale green walls, reaching for his presence in much the same way as the Italian painter does downstairs with his brushes of hog’s bristle. Circling the room, she likes to think that her son is something graspable, like the silver-plated flageolet in its nest of tussled sheets. Back and forth she paces. Through its palimpsest of rain, the mountain outside hovers like a human head, eyeless and inscrutable. Strewn in pages across the desk is her son’s spirit. Pooled in ink pots is his blood.

  To others he exists as nothing but words floating in the air, a life of the mind. But her hips gave birth to this body of emaciated muscle and bone. Stubbornly he lives. Ever since the Casco brought them idly into the Pacific four years before, it is as if he has been slowly disappearing before her eyes. She wonders if it is a trick of the tropical light, this vanishing act of her son.

  Just as the emulsions on a photographic plate add girth to the subject’s waist, so the trade winds seem to erode his very being.

  In this way he has always been someone to be prayed for and made substantial and whole. Cummy their nanny had tried to complete him, bossing him into being. As had her late husband, the lighthouse engineer, instilling Calvinist zeal into his feeble frame. And so as a compromise to them all he had studied the law, as if to test the boundaries of what was possible and permissible. Yes, he is an idea to believe in, but also her son.

  Her eyes rake the surface of the desk. It is the most unquiet of places, with piles of papers and books marked with torn strips of unfinished manuscript wagging like tongues. All these unfinished words are sowing his hair with grey, she thinks, just as Aolele’s garden is being strangled with weed.

  She picks up a page:

  They say it scares a man to be alone. No such thing. What scares him in the dark or the high bush, is that he can’t make sure, and there might be an army at his elbow.

  When the page goes limp in her hand, she flicks it upright:

  What scares him worst is to be right in the midst of a crowd, and have no guess of what they’re driving at.

  It scares her to be so untouched by faith, marooned for a moment in this faithless Falesá. Despite the closeness of the room she shivers. With all this talk of her son’s ailments – a conversation that began in his youth, turning ever more lurid in his maturity – it makes her wonder: might it be a condition of the spirit? It is as if something is worrying away at him with silent stealth from within.

  She remembers how thirteen years ago, with blooms of a mysterious rash across his side and a Neptune’s girdle around his middle, he had been plunged into an icy bath. It was at the Shandon Hydropathic Establishment in Dunbartonshire, the gothic turrets outside piercing an overcast spring sky. She had brought him there in the hope that his memory would be cleansed of the American woman and her grownup daughter he had met at Grez three years before. She had watched the grim proceedings from the door. Around his bath had bobbed the suety faces of the medical staff, awaiting his miraculous rebirth.

  Despite it being spring, the Scottish winter had returned and the water cure had, if anything, exacerbated the concatenation of ailments that racked her son’s fragile frame. The day before the bath he had been woken at dawn and wrapped in cold wet blankets; later they had steamed him with a spirit lamp and fed him boiled mutton. He had grown limp and speechless and unable to walk. At one hundred and nine pounds and eight ounces his body could barely hold down the wooden plank that was lowered tentatively into the bath. Still their faces hovered hopefully around him, as if this living skeleton would somehow sprout wings and fly. Instead, he sat up like a shot.

  ‘I want – I want – I want –’ he cried. ‘I want a holiday, I want to be happy, I want the moon, or the sun, or something.’

  His voice had fanned the water in increasing eddies of asperity.

  ‘I want the object of my affections badly, anyway – and a big forest, and fine breathing, sweating, sunny walks, and all the trees crying aloud in a summer’s wind, and a camp under the stars.’

  He had slunk back in the water, as if shivering at low tide, and in the distance there came the bell for tea.

 
Thirteen years later and he has his big forest and his sunny walks, he has his camp under the stars. But something continues to gnaw away at him all the same – not a flesheating creature, but something of the soul.

  She thinks of the tiny invisible insects here in the tropics. The one that works its way into closed boxes and pincushions, even able to penetrate the glass face of a watch, to play havoc with the mainspring. Is he so beyond fixing, her son?

  She returns to the desk. Perhaps here, beyond words, in the subconscious shapes of ink she will find a sign. Across the blotter they float like jellyfish, these inky residues of his thoughts and words.

  It is then she sees the photograph. At first she feels the warm flush of skin. The paper is incandescent, curling to hold the heat of the sun. The bodies are floating, she thinks, Adam and Eve before the fall. She feels her mouth drying as she drinks the image in, her eyes filling with salty tears. For a moment the figures swim within, held by her eyes, before spilling down the photograph.

  She puts it down and it is only then that the truth slowly dawns on her – that they are not angels ascending. It is the girl who empties her bedpan each morning. Mary. And he, conjoined in flesh with her, is the painter, the apprehender of her son’s disappearing image downstairs.

  She still feels the warm flush of skin, but the feeling is no longer welcome here. The image sears, too explicit to behold, a shock. Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden. It is something to be rid of now, to cast adrift from this island of her son’s shipwrecked soul – it is something he can no longer have or grasp, this sweet sleep of skin.

  She finds the matches by his spare tobacco behind the Buddha on the desk. Horseriding has kept her hands quick, and no sooner has she brought the sulphurous flare of the match swooping like the tail of her widow’s cap to the curling mouth of photograph than it is aflame.

  In the grate she watches the first angry plumes of smoke give way to the licentiousness of flame. And illuminated here, held briefly by the pellucid tissue of ash, are the two bodies entwined, moving now in their sleep, before falling as grey powder through the grate.

  ‘Madam!’ Summoned by the smell of smoke, Sosimo is calling her through the door.

  She is still pacing her son’s study, exercising her thoughts. All she can think of is the strange freckled girl downstairs, stretched out on the old camp bed. She imagines Mary’s large mannish feet sticking out the end, her spilling hair the colour of a Bellini Madonna’s, hands threaded across her middle, swelling with child. The Madonna del Parto.

  Was this why Mary had been silently drawn to them at the Oxford Hotel in Sydney? A tall flicking shadow, seeking something beyond the reach of her ropy white arms? She remembers the girl had helped them up with their luggage, the rolls of tapa cloth and bags of shells, and that she had asked where they were from.

  ‘We are citizens of the world,’ Aolele had announced, unstoppable then. ‘My husband is Scottish, I am American, and my children somewhere in between.’

  ‘No, I meant these,’ the girl called Mary had said, fingering the frayed edges of tapa cloth.

  ‘The Pacific,’ Aolele had said then, stretching out the word. ‘It is where my husband has decided to remain.’

  The way she pronounced the word made it sound like a place beyond judgement as well as geography.

  The girl seemed content with such an answer, and not another word was heard from her until she announced her intention of accompanying them on the Lübeck with little more than Frederick Cavill’s How to Learn to Swim as luggage.

  Gingerly, Sosimo steps into the room. His tattooed legs resemble black lace stockings at a garden party.

  ‘It is nothing,’ she says as his eyes dart to the little heap of ash in the fireplace. ‘Though please sweep it up and say nothing about it to my son.’

  As Sosimo crouches, his calves bulging, she notices that the inky design seems to run out midstream. Hovering there, it is like a lost train of thought.

  ‘Sosimo?’

  He looks up from the fireplace, his fingers lightly dusted with ash.

  ‘Your legs.’

  Evidently he is used to such abstract expressions of curiosity. ‘It is a pe‘amutu, madam,’ he says. ‘An unfinished tattoo.’

  ‘Like most things in this country,’ she says, trying to diffuse the sudden heaviness of air. ‘Unfinished.’

  She proffers a brief pursing of the lips, neither a smile nor a grimace.

  When he eventually stands up with the pan, she realises that there is still more she has to ask of him.

  ‘The Lübeck leaves for Sydney tomorrow, does it not?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says slowly.

  ‘Please make sure there is a berth for Mary on it.’

  She can see the uneasy chain of events passing through his mind, and for a moment he hesitates.

  ‘And please pack in her luggage our finest length of tapa cloth. It will be spring on her arrival in Sydney, but I think she will need every comfort in the coming months.’

  Sosimo seems at least reassured by this request, but on turning to leave she calls him back.

  ‘One other thing …’

  For this final request she is unable to maintain eye contact, preferring instead to rest her eyes on the tussled sheets of her son’s single bed. Here his flageolet lies, forlorn and faraway. She thinks how in these past few months Aolele’s moods have grown ever more sullen, like the swollen stillness before a storm. Once again Giorgione’s Tempest swirls in her head.

  ‘My son is becoming unknowable to me,’ she says. It has taken her a mile walking around his room to come to this point. ‘Please comfort him, for I fear his wife no longer can.’

  Only then does she glance at Sosimo. His face shows no surprise, just a faint moustache of ash.

  Chapter 26

  DR JEKYLL & MR HYDE

  Lewis plucks from the shelves a replica of the first edition – Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1886 – and is surprised by how slender it feels. In his mind it had grown huge, as weighty as War and Peace, not this slender volume with so tiny a spine.

  He remembers reading the book as a boy, and feeling chafed and abraded by the twin strands of the story, the way they refused to blend into a reassuring shape of wholeness. Perhaps he was irritated by a nagging sense of familiarity, recognising deep down that he and his brother could never be one.

  It would come later: in his early twenties, the book sat more comfortably within him. Once he was alert to his own terrible gift of shapeshifting, it seemed natural that a soul could be so threaded and twisted, sometimes violently, and he felt at peace with the knowledge.

  He wonders if this was a state Tusitala finally arrived at, a pacific strangeness that the Italian painter limned so eloquently with his brush.

  Chapter 27

  AOLELE

  She opens her eyes but it is only the portrait she sees. It has wrenched her from her sleep, the call of her husband’s face. For the first time in weeks her feet have yielded to the territory beyond the island of her bed. They anchor her to the earth: landfall after all these weeks of floating. Little Flying Cloud.

  She passes through veils of mosquito nets, a maze of them, and along the length of her husband’s study she must pass another veiled version of herself, in the John Singer Sargent, and then down the safety of the back stairs, this time veiled by the forest.

  They will soon be returning from the harbour – a whole wagonload of them, with a kerosene lamp casting phantasmagorical shapes in the forest. All but Sosimo have journeyed down the hill to farewell the Lübeck. Even the departure of their maid has required the full attention of the household, as if to ensure she is safely dispatched across the horizon line and that the heavens that have been broken can now be repaired. Mary’s departure was swift. By all accounts the climate was not to her liking.

  In the darkness of the smoking room, Aolele pulls back the curtains, letting in the last of the light. Here, just south of the equator, nightfall comes quickly. Twisting the gold
rings off her fingers, she calculates there are perhaps twenty minutes left before the sun dips behind the mountain. Just enough time.

  Her husband has taken to calling him a drunkard and a sweep, the Italian painter Nerli, already dismissing his portrait as flaky – for catching not so much a likeness as a shadow. But the painter has proved useful after all. His bounty of brushes and tubes of oil have been left on the old card table overnight, still in their spirit of creative upheaval. In such a state, he would not even notice her artful act of subterfuge.

  But she must hurry. Outside she can hear the hectic birdsong, loudest now as they anticipate the night. And since the chiefs have declared a tapu on firearms in the forest, their voices seem to multiply: I think they are hummingbirds but they say not.

  On its easel in the corner sits the nearly finished portrait. Even from this distance she can tell the latest coat is months away from drying, as if the paint itself is protesting in the late October heat. Like skin it seems to sweat from the inside out. This is not the climate for the painting of oils, she knows, and the Italian painter has had no choice but to work ‘wet on wet’, the worst of ways.

  His eyes glint from the corner. It is a little unsettling at first, as though he is sitting there in judgement, watching her like the Weir of Hermiston. For some reason the painter has narrowed his eyes to almost a squint, when in reality they are much larger and swimming with life. Still, it is a strange comfort to have them trained on her all the same.

  She picks up the brush. It feels a nice weight in her hand and the quality of hog’s bristle is good. She sees there is just enough crimson to squeeze from the tube.

  These are the same boyish hands that had struck her husband nearly two decades before. They were hands that dreamt, he liked to say. And still they do, even when the rest of her has gone to fat. Butterball, her husband calls her these days.

  And so her hands had clutched a brush. It was at the artist’s colony of Grez and his eyes had sought her out across a field, by her easel on the riverbank. It was like the sighting of a pistol.