The Pacific Room Read online

  Still closer there’s the lazy shuffle of staff – could it be the beautiful Sosimo or Talolo? – their bare boyish feet papering the verandah outside, followed by silence: a pent-up pause released, finally, by a wave of high-pitched laughter, heh-heh-heh. And somewhere behind them is their watchful shadow, the Australian maid Mary, whose waist is even tinier than his, and whose otherwise blank stare is lit by the faintest golden moustache.

  He is everywhere but here. A rushing wind, called by the conch, the teller of tales.

  ‘So what shall I call you, maestro?’ the painter asks, bringing his attention back from the chink in the curtains. It is as if this question is the gravest, most important thing here, something to unlock the coming portrait with.

  ‘Maestro?’

  The writer pauses, tantalised by the thought. Indeed, never had he considered his own name until coming to the island, here where titles are offered like flowers, each collecting and connecting to the next in a lovely necklace of vowels.

  ‘Tusitala,’ the writer says. ‘Call me Tusitala, the teller of tales.’

  The painter brings a paint-speckled finger to his lips, pausing to survey his cargo of canvases, primed back in Sydney.

  ‘Then I’ll be Tusiata, a sketcher of shadows.’

  The writer takes in this shadow catcher, whose continental airs seem as absorbent as his linen trousers already mottled with leaves. ‘So what exactly is it you’re after?’ he asks. ‘A likeness of what?’

  ‘Let us pretend,’ the painter says. A smile breaks out like a shaft of light in the stillness of the smoking room. ‘Let us pretend that you are Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and that this whisky flask here is filled with a potion that will take us from one state of mind to the next. It is that impression, that likeness, I want to catch with my brush.’

  The writer slumps forward, his feet finding the floor. You cannot catch me, he thinks. Instead, he looks up at the etching of his grandfather’s lighthouse hanging to the left of the fireplace. The memory of light sends up a lonely flare in the foggy gloom. The turning intensity of the lighthouse is constant, not darting, something to be summoned through imaginative will. Despite becoming a writer against his father’s wishes, he is still drawn to the light.

  From the darkened corner where he sits, the back of the canvas is the brightest thing in the room. He thinks of it as a window or doorway, a threshold for his spirit to cross and perhaps depart from. But the image of his escaping soul barely has time to form before it fades. At which point he signals for the portrait to begin. ‘Tusiata, your victim is ready.’

  Chapter 3

  THE SKETCH

  Day begins, as it always does, with breakfast at her mother’s house.

  Dwarfed by the ragged clumps of banana tree out the back, the house is louvred and small, not unlike her own, but painted a deep shade of olive. ‘Nature’s neutral,’ her mother likes to say.

  Shoeless she treads the handful of steps from her door to her mother’s, comforted by the spongy pockets of grass, but fearful that small parts of her will drop away with each step, dispersing the image of herself she has created overnight in her dream. She is also fearful that she will find herself, or someone she no longer recognises.

  In her dream her hair was limed and lightened, glowing red in the afternoon sun. From the ledge of rock she sang to him, the stranger with the moustache in her dream. Flicking the surface of the mountain pool, her voice drew him nearer, so he was led first by his ear, all fleshy and pink in the dappled forest light, then by his sideways-darting eyes. Half of his face was submerged in shadow. It was her voice that drew him close, but it was on her half-leg tattoo that his eye finally alighted, climbing – shyly at first, then quickly – to her sex.

  By the time their eyes met, he was already beginning to swoon, his mouth open in disbelief. Clothes parachuted around his weightless body turned suddenly boyish, small ankles ready to snap. And as he fell, she grew stronger, empowered by what he could not see, the flower she held in her hand.

  In the last few steps to her mother’s house she keeps hold of the vision of herself from her dream, and in a heartbeat she is there.

  The television is on, sound turned down. Rugby players dance across a field, in training for the test match that night in Auckland. Fresh fruit covers the kitchen table, and on the lounge room wall inside is a different kind of offering: a salon-hang of saints, gloriously gold-framed, with photos of family peering out between them. A small charcoal sketch, its frame more modest, dangles by a single rusted nail at the centre of wall. There is no space between the pictures, no room to breathe.

  She grew up within these living spaces, but in the morning light they are made strange again, like something once familiar now discarded. It’s the opposite to her, her mother’s house.

  Her mother looks up from the table and smiles. Like the turned-down television, theirs is a shared understanding that works best on mute. As she sits down, her mother stands up.

  Without a word, she begins to feed her body: mouthfuls of cigarette smoke at first, as if to erase all thoughts of the banquet her mother has prepared for her, then a mountain of cornflakes drizzled with honey, and pineapple juice to wash it all down.

  Her mother is disapproving, her small face turned green by the light through the banana trees outside.

  ‘You should have your fruits first,’ she says. ‘Or water lukewarm, the temperature of the body, to prepare the stomach for the day.’

  It is but the verse to her mother’s chorus that rings out over the breakfast table each morning: ‘Be kind to your body. It is God’s gift and the vessel for all our hopes and dreams.’

  Standing by the window, her mother can’t contain the green light flooding in, drowning in its dazzle. Nature’s neutral. She wonders how this small bird of a woman gave birth to her: a big-boned body bulging with muscles and crazy with curves. The improbability feeds her, building her up and sharpening her wits. She will need them in spades today for the wedding. She also needs her mother to say the words, to affirm them.

  ‘Where am I?’ she asks, as she follows her inside.

  Her mother has taken to burning incense; this morning sticks of amber smoulder under the pictures, as if it is feeding time for these orphan images, these hungry ghosts. A lenticular portrait of Christ winks at her; in another he offers a heart-shaped tear to glisten on his cheek. Scattered between are snapshots of her brothers, all exiled to other houses or other islands, pictured both as slim-hipped schoolboys and fattened fathers. They ran fast and far, her brothers. What she can’t quite locate is a picture of herself. ‘Where am I?’

  Together their eyes alight on the small charcoal sketch, marooned by the shadow of its roughly hewn face. He is the stranger from her dream, Tusitala, a floating fixture in all their lives, torn loose from the Italian painter’s sketchbook and carried along to them by the female side of their family as if by the wind. He begets their story. Tusitala’s servant boy was Sosimo, who had a daughter, her mother’s grandmother, and in this way she can trace her name to his – in a necklace of names, a thread of running vowels.

  It feels alive, the little sketch, like something wriggling under glass.

  In the morning light it’s made strange again, she thinks, the opposite to her. Unlike in the famous painted portrait she has seen in books, here he looks askance, to something near and unknowable, and for a moment she swears she can see Sosimo dance in the corner of the Scottish writer’s eye. With the little wisps of incense smoke, the charcoal is singing. Sosimo’s voice flutes the air. And the writer is turning to speak, his lips parting, but no words spill out. It was said the two were friends, more intimate than servant and master. Who could say otherwise? she thinks.

  Acknowledging this bond of sorts, but smudged in charcoal in the bottom left-hand corner of the sketch, the Italian painter had written: Al mio caro amico Sosimo, questo ricordo di Samoa Girolamo Pieri Nerli offre.

  ‘So where am I?’ she asks her mother again, this time a
ddressing the wall of pictures that shifts gently in the amber smoke.

  ‘You are everywhere,’ her mother says.

  It’s at this point she hears the call to church. Not so much the toll of a bell as a resonance deep within her, a soundless depth charge. No sooner does she feel it passing through her body in a warm liquid current than she is out the door, swimming in light.

  ‘Don’t forget who you are,’ her mother calls out to her, the words she has waited for all morning, naming her.

  Across the lawn she is nearly to her door when the call returns to her stronger than the bell. ‘Teuila.’

  Chapter 4

  KIDNAPPED

  The portrait in question, the reason for his travels, is sixtyone centimetres by thirty-five, and rendered in oil on canvas. Despite the Scottish writer’s icy stare the palette is hightoned, almost feverish. Nerli: the artist’s signature with its calligraphic flourish is rendered in Chinese red.

  The subject is seated. His arms and legs have been cropped, emphasising his torso and face – but most of all his eyes. The looseness of the writer’s pyjama shirt contrasts with the tautness of his gaze, the atmosphere at once simple and severe, Samoan and Scottish.

  Lewis has both seen the portrait and not seen it at all. While he has yet to journey to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh to inspect the work in situ, as an art historian he knows the painting intimately in the way that a luggage inspector might know the bags which pass across his X-ray screen. He communes freely with each crack in the canvas, each daub of paint and brushstroke.

  With little effort he could reel off the details of its painting. Place and date of execution: the Scottish writer’s house in Apia, late 1892. Number of sittings: ten, or if you believe the painter’s widow, twenty-seven. And the various characters just out of frame: the writer’s mother, his American wife and her grown-up son and daughter, all sheltering in an unfinished house in the unquiet jungle. Beyond the forest, he knows, the rebel chief Mata‘afa is encamped, concocting a war of whispers against the Germans and their chosen king, Malietoa.

  Gliding at thirty-one thousand feet above the Pacific, Lewis’s mind races. On the small TV screen in front of him, the computer rendering of the island pulses emerald green. Upolu is perfectly shaped like a leaf turned on its side. Thrown eastward is its inverted twin, Tutuila. Figures of flight time and air speed flitter between Japanese and English.

  He brings the tray table down and opens his book to the reproduction of Nerli’s portrait, releasing the eyes of the Scottish writer to stare out at the cabin.

  Lewis frowns, tugging at his moustache and running a finger along his unsmiling bottom lip, worried by what he cannot see. He is constantly aware that the sitter is returning the artist’s gaze, that this is a painting about the necessity of maintaining eye contact; the face is nothing without being looked at. The stare is unvarnished: Lewis feels as though his soul is being poked with the pointy end of a paintbrush. They are roughly the same age, just closer to forty than fifty, and perhaps more fearful of life than of death. But still they look; they can’t look away.

  The writer’s wife wasn’t shy to deliver her disapproval of the portrait: ‘If the painter had only been willing to paint just Louis and not the author of Jekyll and Hyde, we might have something that looked more like him.’ Through the whooshing of the Boeing engines, Lewis can hear the resoluteness of her Indiana accent, its bossy bravado.

  He hopes through his research trip to Apia to answer her in some small scholarly way. The conference paper under preparation carries the working title ‘Kidnapped: Painting a portrait of Vailima’, and ten days in rainy season should give him ample time to collect an island of voices, to hear notes of dissonance and disquiet.

  Such is the idea anyway, though at times his mission seems as shadowy and unresolved as that of the Italian painter Tusiata. So much seems left to happenstance, in the hands of unknown cataloguers and museum keepers. With the rest of the plane suspended in sleep, Lewis angles the reading light down on the book’s portrait pages so that there is nothing else in the cabin but those bright orbs moving about. Even in reproduction the flash of crimson in the corner of the Scottish writer’s eye is visible. Lewis wonders what he saw.

  He finds both sanctuary and subterfuge in history. As the cabin lights dim around him, Lewis looks out through the Scottish writer’s eyes. He sees the Italian painter before him, a man with loose continental airs and a mouth turned pink with pleasure, and the blackout curtains beyond, making this big-boned body the only real thing in the room.

  Returning from inspecting her breadfruit trees, the American wife would find the writer strangely stilled, as damp as the painted canvas, with perspiration trickling down his stork-like neck: I am not sure who suffered more the artist or the sitter.

  Lewis understands the unwritten rules of portraiture. He knows the seductions of its mirror-like surface, the terrors of concealment and truth. He also recognises the feeling that has overtaken him in the sleeping cabin, a swiftness of sensation that brings everything to tingling close-up, like the sudden sharp illumination of a sheet of microfiche. At halo height above him the reading light shines preternaturally bright, breathing the portrait to life and coaxing a stream of words from the Scottish writer’s mouth.

  Lewis knows this gliding giddiness all too well; for nearly two-thirds of his life, it’s been a silent warning call. And fumbling in his cabin bag, he presses out a small rectangular pill from its bed of silver foil and downs it with a cup of water. The pill is cerulean blue, the colour of a painted sky.

  Lewis isn’t afraid of flying. At sixteen, in his second-last year of high school, his parents and twin brother died along with the rest of the passengers and crew when their sightseeing plane flew into a mountain during a white-out in Antarctica. His Aunt Agatha was visiting Sydney at the time, and Lewis had emerged from the toilet, wallpapered purple paisley, to be told the bad news.

  Aunt Agatha described the horizonless dazzle of snow and cloud as if the white-out had somehow anaesthetised his parents and brother, rendering them as oblivious to pain as this indifferent world of snow. He remembers looking at his aunt and forgetting to wash his hands.

  Later, when he moved back to Dunedin with her to study art history, he felt comforted to be closer to where his parents and brother had perished. The clear-cut pronouncements of Aunt Agatha, as if they had been carved from the city’s bluestone foundations, also helped assuage his grief, allowing him to find solace in his studies. The crash was a simple thing, it seemed to him – he thought of the plane pressing into the mountain, like the time his brother Garry plunged a lead pencil into his plump white calf.

  Lewis began an honour’s thesis on the nineteenth-century landscapes of the sublime, recognising the organising hand of God in a snow scene or a glacier. He wasn’t religious, but the cathedral canvases of Von Guérard or Buvelot stirred in him an almost hallucinatory sense of awe – unfettered by the heavy carved frames on Dunedin’s red salon walls.

  But such awe was almost beyond description and difficult to translate, so he struggled to articulate it. During his candidature a royal commission into the air disaster released its findings, unearthing ‘an orchestrated litany of lies’ about flight paths fudged and blemishes covered over by the airline. Snow scenes could be complicated things, he now realised. Lewis was persuaded by his supervisor to change tack. The Dunedin gallery was showing an exhibition of paintings about the South Pacific. He liked the sketchiness, the unfinished business of this painter Nerli who, a few years after his voyage to Apia, had disappeared altogether from the world.

  When a departmental position became available at the university in Sydney, not long after the death of his aunt, the time seemed right to move back across the Tasman. Helped by his inheritance, he bought an art deco apartment on Botany Bay. He liked its rounded red-brick balcony, the way it appeared almost hermetically sealed. But most of all he liked the name welded in metal above the front door, one which exi
sted in his mind as its own watery mystery: Oceania.

  There was something calming in the chop-chop-chop of the bay’s seemingly shallow waters. And it was reassuring to see, above the whitecaps, the constant comings and goings of planes – so many every hour of the day, so many bodies in transit that would never be embedded in a frozen mountain like lead from a pencil thrust into his schoolboy calf.

  The cabin lights come on with a merciless blink. At once Lewis feels comically constrained, knees knocking against the seat in front of him, a blanket strangling his neck. Miraculously he manages to stow his book in the seat pocket, making way for the sudden arrival of the breakfast tray and its cubist arrangement of little plastic containers.

  Peeling off the foil, he notices a slow tremble in his fingers, the chemicals at work in his bloodstream. Suddenly, he is hungry. A shallow grave of scrambled egg is revealed, the steam briefly masking his face. He fumbles with the plastic knife and fork which are ridiculously dwarfed in his hands. He can’t help but notice the tattooed arm at his side, rhythmically brushing his own, feeling its heat and heft. With the movement of muscle and a film of moisture, the tattoo seems newly inked, the interlocking design moving like snakeskin around the man’s hairless arm.

  Lewis lifts the window shutter to reveal the pitch-darkness of the Pacific outside. In the reflection he can just make out his tattooed companion beside him. Lewis can’t remember him from the beginning of the flight – perhaps, like much of the plane, he had boarded in Auckland.

  From his very first flight across the Tasman, Lewis’s natural instinct has been to hold his tongue in the company of strangers – in any case, his original chaperone, the taciturn Aunt Agatha, considered too much energy was wasted on unwanted words. But there is something irrepressible about his companion, this man freely forking egg into his mouth.