The Pacific Room Read online

  He sees the windsurfer has almost reached the hotel, a kilometre or so to the right, where his sleep this morning was disturbed by the tolling of bells – not for morning Mass, he was told, but a wedding. And it was as if the sound of the hymn-singing had summoned him to the restaurant, the words of ‘Lift Up Your Hearts’ travelling to him across the bay. The waiter comes to take away the half-finished plate of oka i‘a, his voice so soft Lewis has to lean even further into the verandah’s view to hear. There’s such a shyness in the boy’s manner that Lewis feels as brazen as a warship in a harbour, a cap tossed upon a shelf.

  Lewis is in no doubt about who saw who first: Tusitala, angled on his brown pony Jack, was watching for any sign of his cousin among the passengers disembarking from the Lübeck; instead, the painter’s pointy black beard had emerged from the row boat, conspicuous in his straw boater and flannels of white.

  When he was a young boy in Edinburgh, nurse Cummy had cultivated that hawkish stare; on holiday in Paris he had watched her heap second helpings of creamy mashed potato on her plate when the waiter wasn’t looking. ‘To grow strong,’ she had told the sickly boy, ‘let your eyes nourish you. There’s no harm in looking – to have and to hold in your mind’s eye.’

  Disembarking on the beach, the writer saw a man with charcoal-black eyes and lashings of what they were calling southern neo-continental style – almost African. He looked at the painter and saw a heaven breaker.

  Lewis feels the nudge through his whole body, in the threedimensional scent of coconut oil. It’s the waiter again, both offering himself and withdrawing, asking if there will be a second glass.

  Lewis looks out at the harbour to see the windsurfer returning speedily from whence he came, flying through the air. The breeze must have swung around, he thinks, just as a corner of tablecloth is whipped up along with the waiter’s hand-printed lavalava.

  He remembers his box of blue pills back in the hotel room, and quickly pushes the glass away.

  ‘No thanks or I’ll fall asleep,’ he says. ‘But if you can tell me the best way to Vailima, that would be much appreciated.’

  Chapter 9

  MARY

  She slips out unseen. Along the length of the verandah her skirt brushes the hedge of gardenia, its perfect buds still unbruised by the early morning sun, before she spills out onto the lawn. Only just September and the atmosphere is unseasonably close.

  She calculates there are but a dozen long steps across the lawn, the length of the mountain pool, before she reaches the dark cloak of the forest. A dozen steps of being seen.

  But Mary is alert to the energies of the house. Upstairs she can hear the curious rhythm of call and answer as the writer dictates passages from his bed. This will go on for hours with his stepdaughter, their dueling accents of the heather and the cornfields, until the arrival of the Italian painter mid-morning. Within the fog of mosquito netting in her bedroom, his American wife – her mistress – is already high on laudanum and blind to the blinking world outside.

  It is only the stepson Mary has to be careful of as she treads lightly across the lawn, feeling the spring of buffalo grass underfoot. The photographer. From beneath the dark skirts of his camera, he is forever raking the garden with his eyes. He is someone to be wary of, especially when idle. But more recently he has been occupied with a task, a subject to be consumed by his camera. His quarry is the new wing which rises slowly from the clearing. Already the foundations have been laid for the great hall, with the stirring of a grand stair, and hopefully a roof before the start of rainy season. But that is on the other side of the house from here, towards the west, back behind her now.

  She is almost running as she reaches the steaming edge of the forest, her heart racing, as she dives into its welcoming darkness.

  A little flash of fear and then she breaks the surface. Three or four strokes as her body adjusts to the coolness of the water and then she is fine. After a moment or two she can begin to focus on the things buzzing around in her head, calming them down with the lulling movement of her crawling strokes, releasing the fear from the tips of her fingers. Feeling at one with this body of water overhung with trees.

  Just the sight of blood can undo her – not just the always startling intensity of its colour but the warm source of its spillage; that something so repressed by skin could be made manifest. As a girl it took but a nick on her thumb – she was drying a gutting knife – for the tingling weightlessness to come over her, as if she were a handkerchief dropped to the floor. It was a mystery then, a strange fairytale that had somehow snatched time from her, for when she awoke on the kitchen floor in Woolloomooloo, with a sea of freckled Irish faces staring down at her, there was no sense of then and now, only the dull thud of where she’d fallen on her head registering lost time.

  But yesterday in the study was different. Perhaps because it had involved a stranger and had somehow implicated her master. Maybe that is why the incident had continued to undo her, foundering her, releasing her from all sense of gravity, so she continued to faint, over and over again in her head. Here she is always falling, made suddenly weightless, snatched from time.

  The three of them had been standing in front of the painting upstairs, but all she could see was her master’s bright blot of blood, and all she could feel were the pinpricks of sweat across her forehead, and gave in to this sickly sweetness, like a shudder through her brain. And the next thing she was conscious of was the stranger’s face pressed to hers.

  There was a comfort in the bigness of his bones. His mouth was fleshy and broke easily into a smile, and then he said in an accent that seemed sung instead of spoken, ‘The angel has broken.’ Next he was unbuttoning her boots and bringing a flask of whisky to her lips. But the look cast on her by her master was harder to grasp. It was conspiratorial, as if some dark secret had been transmitted from him to her. And in that instant she realised that all traces of blood had been wiped from his moustache.

  ‘Mary is not as strong as she seems,’ he pronounced. ‘But then again, are we not always the opposite of what we seem?’

  The stranger had produced a handkerchief scented with sandalwood, which he was soon dabbing at her temples and neck.

  From the corner of the room her master watched on, as if he were the narrator of the scene.

  ‘Mary does not speak, but the voices inside her are loud and sometimes deafening. Which is how she happened to find herself in our service. You see in Sydney we all heard her silent cry for help.’

  ‘Really?’ The stranger looked up from his dabbing.

  ‘Yes, at the Oxford Hotel – perhaps you know the establishment?’

  The stranger nodded, but in the meantime had taken a sharper interest in the pretty thread of blue veins at her wrist.

  ‘She was the hotel’s maid and had taken refuge in our room. She was being harassed by another guest, a mad harangue, on account of her swift shyness, which he took to be rudeness. If you’ll permit me to repeat the story –’ he turned to Mary, still supine on the floor – ‘he said you had the long carriage and small face of a bat.’

  Still the stranger remained focused on her wrists, as if hypnotised by the tiny pulse of blue.

  ‘The pump of her heart is slow,’ the stranger finally declared in his beautiful accent of chorus and verse. ‘Not out of weakness but strength. Perhaps from all her physical exertions …’ Here he paused, noticing the dampness of her hair. ‘In the service of the house.’

  And the next thing she remembered was being whisked up into the stranger’s arms, feeling gravity at last, before being laid onto her stretcher bed downstairs.

  Her hands sluice the surface, drawing her mind clear. The rhythm is self-generating. With each stroke carved out of the darkness, a slipstream is released from her hip, propelling her forward, her hair wrapping itself around her in shiny streamers. As she swims she displaces the body of her past. Yesterday is pushed behind her; the blood is washed clean.

  She becomes aware of the fecund forest
gathered around her. Turning her face to draw breath, she sees the spray of a giant bird’s-nest fern overhead. Further back are the strangler figs and the spiky forest palms and those armadillo ones that only sprout fruit when they die. And running rampant through it all are the scissoring leaves of the banana plant. Such unimaginable ripeness. They are all but trespassers in the forest, she thinks. No sooner have the logs fallen than they become tangled in vine.

  He comes to her through a chink in the green. It is an offering of sorts, an intervention of kindness. He brings with him the smell of sandalwood and ylang-ylang and soon he is crouching, the white linen of his trousers pooling at the edge of the water.

  She stops and lowers her head so her eyes are at surface level. For a moment she imagines she is a lazy tide, like that which overlaps Cavill’s pool in Woolloomooloo where she learnt to swim. Even now she thinks of the movement of a body through water as something spiritual, beginning with the miracle of floating, and expanded by Cavill’s not always graspable theories of natations.

  But the painter has broken her slow-moving reverie. He is reaching out to her across the water – a swimmer’s arm – to pluck a lily pad from her hair. ‘How is my angel?’ he asks, his voice scaling across the water like a tenor’s.

  She glides closer to where he is crouching on the bank. Slowly her eyes edge up his sweat-soused flannels to a curlicue of chest hair at the opening of his shirt. It is like a question mark, she thinks, and the hat in his other hand, misshapen beyond belief, a melted moustache.

  But it is his face which calls her: as large as a circus bear’s, the blackness of his beard pointing to the pinkness of his smiling mouth.

  ‘I’m not here,’ she finally says, gurgling the water with laughter.

  ‘The Australian angel speaks!’ The circus bear is laughing too, and reaching out to her again, but this time to pull her up from the depths.

  She meets the grip of his hand with her own, tugs back to find his strength, and then she is up – no longer floating, but falling into him, though unlike yesterday she stops gravity with her outstretched hand. Where she touches his linen shirt she can see the olive stain of his Sienese skin beneath.

  He looks down to where she has left her mark on him and says more seriously now: ‘See, you are here.’

  But before he looks up again she has gone, up to the eyrie of overhanging rocks, to dry her body in the sun.

  When he eventually joins her there on the ledge he is shirtless, and she can’t help but notice the little black tufts of hair around his nipples, the same pink colour as his lips.

  He looks up at her over a tanned shoulder, the sun finding the creases of his laughter lines. ‘So how did you become shipwrecked here, in this madhouse of bohemia?’

  She thinks back to their arrival at the Oxford Hotel the year before. They were like beachcombers – the Scottish writer and his unlikely entourage – with their clacking fishnet bags of gourds and shells, rolls of tapa cloth and cedar chests wrapped in rope. Something brought in by the tide. And she felt gathered up with them and taken out to sea.

  ‘Like you, I suppose,’ she says slowly, before swatting a lazy fly at her ankle. ‘The Pacific is what brought us here, and it is what will take us back.’ She likes the way the painter has drawn out these feelings before dispersing them, like the sun drying the droplets of water on her skin. As with swimming, his presence makes her aware of the autonomy of her body as something distinct from her head. And once again she feels gathering around her the fecundity of the place. Even her eyelids feel swollen as if stung by the sun. And when she next looks down to the edge of the rock he has gone.

  She sits up, startled – has she somehow hallucinated his presence? – and then hears something moving quickly through the greenery.

  There is a splash, like the lightest of pebbles, or the tearing of silk, and when she looks down she sees his body moving through the dark water. Only when he surfaces does she notice the whiteness of his buttocks.

  She wonders how just the presence of his body could make her feel the realness of the rock beneath her. There is the shock of being here not there, of being not floating, of something dropped suddenly to the earth. I am the rock, she thinks.

  ‘Come in,’ he calls out from below. ‘Make a pretty painting in the water.’ Even before he has finished his sentence she is diving from the rock.

  Chapter 10

  STOLEN THOUGHTS

  Ahead up the hill the view is suffused with barbecue smoke, blanching the afternoon heat through which comes the yawning note of roosters. Past a road sign he ambles. Kill your speed. And then another. Be smart – slow down. The heat softens him, as if his body is but a membrane porous to the stories floating through the air.

  Somewhere Lewis has read how people are but vessels of ephemeral fact, encoded with data transmitted from one generation to the next. As the heat begins to make sensuous his thoughts, softening them, he thinks of himself as the Scottish writer’s amanuensis, channelling Tusitala’s words out of the atmosphere.

  He walks on. There is no footpath as such, just spilling gardens that bring forth the occasional dog or child to witness the passing of the stranger in his teal-coloured shorts and Birkenstocks. In Tusitala’s day, the forest would have tumbled all the way down to town, with not so much a trail as a faint crack of light between the taro leaves. To a painter’s eye, the palette would have registered as a myriad of green.

  This afternoon, the Cross Island Road carries the lulling whoosh of taxis and SUVs.

  He hunkers down. Away from the harbour, the sea air soon thickens. Waiting at the lights for an unending stream of traffic, he feels a discharge of sweat so sudden it’s as if his facial features are liquefying. As his body softens, his senses sharpen. In visual riffs up and down the road, buses parade like catwalk queens, lavishly costumed, extravagantly titled: Queen Poto, Lady Lanuvea. Even their thick black exhaust seems perfumed. Halfway up the hill Lewis stops to wipe the sweat from his brow. A bell tolls for early Mass and over a garden hedge he watches a dog sunning itself on a low-lying concrete tomb. Lewis moves closer to the hedge. The dog flips over and he can just make out the inscription below: Ray Taulapapa Lesolosolou 1939–2005. Beyond the tomb, a deep green lawn travels up to a small garden bungalow – louvred, but more closed than open. As Lewis waits to pick up a breeze the song carries out to him through the tiny slits of air, Whitney Houston’s ‘Greatest Love of All’. Only with the breeze does Lewis notice the banner strung high above the roof. The fabric is the same colour as the sky, so when the white embroidered words begin to stream with life, it’s as if they are written by a plane:

  In the end

  My Immaculate Heart

  Will Triumph

  The words are still pulsing when he turns back to the road. Here a taxi has stopped, and the driver is calling out to him with a friendliness that makes him wary.

  ‘Hello! Where are you going?’

  Lewis can taste the salty sweat as he smiles and motions up the hill. ‘Thank you but I’m happy to walk.’

  Walking on, he notices that the taxi is stalking him – offering and retreating – in a series of slow–fast shifts through the barbecue smoke. Soon all he is aware of is its shifting shadow. Which is how Blue Machine nearly knocks him from his feet, flicking mud at his legs as it passes in a burst of reggae. A painted skull grins below the back window of the bus as it disappears around a bend.

  Turning back up the hill, Lewis notices the taxi is still stationed just metres away. It’s there in his peripheral vision, something he wishes he could brush off like a fly. He moves to quicken his pace, but his sandals catch in the mud and he lurches suddenly into the middle of the road.

  There the taxi is waiting for him. Smiling from the open window, the driver’s face is broad and calm, inviting him in. The door has been opened, issuing forth the sound of Christmas carols, and Lewis pauses only briefly before stepping in. A necklace of shark’s teeth hangs from the rearvision mirror, along with a cruci
fix.

  As the car slowly climbs the hill, groaning under their collective weight, Lewis realises he’s forgotten to tell the driver where he is going. ‘Vailima, please.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ the driver says.

  The car’s cabin feels sunken and small, a metal skin for their bodies’ warmth. Even the silence that settles over the cab takes on a bodily shape. Lewis is scared, then excited, by the idea that the taxi driver can read his thoughts.

  Turned down low on the stereo, Dolly Parton is singing ‘I Believe in Santa Claus’. As they climb higher, the cabin begins to cool with the air from the mountain outside. Through the open window Lewis can absorb the green, pooled by purple, with moving traceries of red from the tendrils in the trees.

  ‘Si‘usi‘u pusi,’ says the driver, following Lewis’s eyes. ‘Cat’s tail.’

  The higher they go up the road, the bigger the houses. They pass a Mormon college and churches of seemingly every denomination – Baha’i and Seventh-day Adventist – but no people. Coming to the gates of what looks like the biggest house of all, the taxi slows. An ancient tree canopy obscures the house from the road but for a glimpse of red tin roof which sweeps up in imitation of the mountain behind.

  ‘Why have you stopped?’ Lewis asks.

  The driver buries his head in his hands before looking up, his fingers tugging the skin around his eyes. ‘I can’t go any further – it’s a sacred place,’ he says. ‘Some Samoans are still afraid to go in there.’

  Lewis looks at the overgrown gates: they seem to contain more than a house. Their heaviness marks a point of transition, he thinks, not unlike Henry Jekyll’s red baize curtains parting to another world. Through the gates he imagines a spillage of stories, mineral-rich, which are carried down the streams that fall from the mountain behind.

  The taxi’s engine is still running as the driver tells Lewis the story of the aitu fafine. Their bodies begin to vibrate with the story, as the image of the spirit’s red flowing hair is carried out through the open window to find shape in the branches bobbing with si‘usi‘u pusi outside.