The Pacific Room Page 6

  ‘The wind can bring her,’ the driver says, ‘or the sound of singing along a stream, and heaven help the man who falls for her and follows her through the forest. He feels light-headed at first. Then –’ He brings some fingers up to Lewis’s eyes, pressing them so they turn white. ‘And then he goes –’ The driver clicks the bones in his fingers. ‘Like that, something in his brain just goes.’

  The driver is now looking at the mountain that rears up behind the house.

  ‘Why did he come to Samoa?’ the driver asks. ‘Was it for the peace and quiet, so no one could steal his thoughts? But then why did he become involved with the chiefs, with everything here? Why did he want to be buried on top of the mountain, to be carried up by Samoans, when he knew it was difficult to get to?’

  The driver’s knee is knocking against the gearstick now. ‘His dream was to look out over Upolu. They say it is a beautiful view of the sea from up there, but I think it was more symbolic. I think he wanted to be High Chief.’

  The man’s voice has dropped almost to a whisper. ‘Up there no one can steal your thoughts.’

  Lewis is still staring into the gap between the trees as the taxi drives off. It’s inscrutable, that absence of leaves, and as his eyes adapt to the darkness, a streak of red bursts through, sweeping low before flying off.

  The bird makes him think of the Scottish writer and the flash of vermillion caught in his painted eye; how two rainy seasons after his last sitting he met with a convulsion as violent and as final as Henry Jekyll’s in the book.

  Mayonnaise. Of all things, he’d been helping his wife on the back verandah, whisking the egg yolk with the oil and tasting the sharpness of the lime, when the bowl fell suddenly from his hands, sending a pale trajectory across the dark gardenia hedge.

  ‘Do I look strange?’

  These were his last recorded words. That night Sosimo kissed his hands and laid them across his breast, knitting his fingers together like flowers. The next morning the household watched his coffin, held aloft by a dozen brown hands, disappear into an ocean of leaves. Every now and then, at a turn of the mountain, it would emerge from the trees, bobbing higher and higher, floating free.

  Chapter 11

  SOSIMO

  Teuila prays for rain. She prays for absolution, something to subsume her and the memory of the wedding that morning. With the wheeling flight of the windsurfer she had seen her life open up before her, a horizon line of possibilities, a barely visible thread stretching left and right, waiting for the windsurfer’s return to bring it back together.

  She had briefly glimpsed her future. A life with Henry in Auckland; or rather, a life in Auckland waiting for Henry to return from sea – lost in the suburbs, in One Tree Hill perhaps, disappearing from view. It would not be unlike the fate of her least-favourite customers – confined to the middle row of a 747, without window or aisle seat, just a sea of heads in front. It’s a vision that is nightmarish in its realness. Apart from being alone, anonymity is what she fears most of all.

  Tusitala’s words come to her unconsciously, as easily as breathing. In a whisper she invokes the lesson of the trees:

  Lord, Thou sendest down rain upon the uncounted millions of the forest, and givest the trees to drink exceedingly. We are here upon this isle a few handfuls of men, and how many myriads upon myriads of stalwart trees!

  But at the instant the words are released she loses all feeling for them – they seem at once strange and disconnected and devoid of meaning. She is suddenly suspicious of such words that can be accepted unquestioningly. Most of all they make her angry – that from her mother’s great-grandfather, Sosimo, all she inherited apart from the little sketch were these words. No other semblance of his life, just these distant prayers of Vailima which offer no comfort in the wilderness of her bedroom.

  She lights a cigarette and wonders what Sosimo would have done. Together her family has assembled the bare bones of his life: that he had disgraced his father to live and work at Vailima, and that after Tusitala’s death he had raised a family before dying of Spanish flu in the great scourge of 1918. And around these fragments, stories have collected: that he was the greatest changeling of all, able to defy and deflect the slings and arrows of time. He was part-man, part-woman, with long flowing hair, a sweet singing voice and strong curious hands. And he could summon any shape he desired for himself.

  She draws back on the Consulate, the tobacco giving her the faintest of head spins, and wonders what shape she will become. For a moment she sees Sosimo’s lesson as this – that her destiny can be willed at whim, in the crinkling of a brow and a singing stream of smoke: What will I become?

  And then she slumps back, exhausted by the thought. From her bed, she watches the moving tide of her curtains – a shimmer of spotted pink, mauve and green. The cotton is washed tissue-thin, as if the flowers are transported by air or water, shifting in and out of focus. Memory is like this.

  One minute the curtains are pressed flush to the cement-block walls; the next they’re drawn out through the glass louvres, making her garden pavilion appear like one enormous lung. Henry is close in her thoughts one moment; far away the next.

  She grew up overlooking her father’s bungalow in the front garden, fringed by ginger flowers. It was always something separate from the rest of the house, an island. Then when he passed away in her final year of high school, Teuila took over its teal-painted interiors, empty but for a single bed and the blue-patterned vinyl floor; she woke up each morning to a view of his tomb in the garden. To this day it isn’t something she is afraid of, but rather, a comfort – something to sun her thoughts on.

  For as long as she can remember, Ray Taulapapa Lesolosolou had waged a war against clutter. In his world view, clutter came in many guises, both spiritual and material, which needed to be vigilantly guarded against. Finally refusing to come out of his house – now hers – he had told the rest of the family, ‘Ou ke le maga‘o ‘e fa‘alavelavea la‘u va‘i; kalu ai oga ouke maga‘o e kulimaka‘i mea piko i makagofie o lo‘u olaga, lea o lo‘o folasia mai i o‘u lava luma. I don’t want to be distracted; I want to focus on the most beautiful things in my life and for me they’re right under my nose.’

  Respecting her father’s space, she had filled his rooms with just a few signs of her night-time activities. Pinned across the door of his bedroom – now hers – is the Miss Tutti Frutti sash. Inside, bolts of material lean in one corner; the dressmaker’s mannequin stands in another. A tinnysounding ghetto blaster holds court on a pile of Glamour magazines next to the bed.

  Islanded in her father’s bungalow, Teuila was slow to reveal herself.

  Until the final year at school she and Henry had circled each other like reef fish. Then, too small to play rugby, Henry was chosen to represent his class at the annual charity concert, and it was Teuila he turned to for guidance – to sharpen his songs and sartorial style, was the official reason. But deep down he seemed to be after one of those long slow stares that take you in, without judgement.

  On Saturday afternoons, when Teuila’s mother was in town playing bingo, he allowed her to shape him like a piece of material draped across her mannequin.

  ‘You bring me to my best,’ he told her one afternoon: from a medley of tunes to a phrase to a gesture.

  ‘Greatest Love of All’ was probably beyond his scratchy vocal reach. But Teuila instructed him to look out through the louvres of her father’s house and go deeper.

  ‘Picture Mount Vaea and the sound will come, trust me. Feel it here,’ she said, slipping a finger between the buttons of his shirt and pressing at an abdomen as warm and firm as breadfruit.

  ‘And no hair across the eyes either,’ she added. ‘We need to see the feeling here.’ Slicking back his fringe with Vaseline.

  He performed admirably, as it transpired, but as far as both their families were concerned that was that. End of story. Their destinies had already been foretold: for Teuila, a desk job at the local travel agency; for Henry, a weekly g
ig with a dance troupe while waiting for his naval enlistment to come through.

  In the months that followed, when their families deigned to keep the two of them apart, he was the genie that only came out at night – a hallucinated, longed-for presence. During her long days at the travel agency there was rarely a time her mind didn’t rub at the image of him, and she would stretch this moment out with a cigarette, and then another, watching his imp-like shape form in the smarting haze of the roadside barbecue outside.

  It was an agony, of course, a curse that she had brought on herself, making her a sleepwalker through her own waking life. For at three o’clock in the morning she would hear the rustle at the window outside, and all her senses would stir, like a match head struck into flame.

  Across the blue-patterned floor not even a cockroach is seen to scuttle. Which means that rain or, more likely, a storm is approaching, and Teuila feels the pressure mounting within her chest, a series of stabbing pains, as if her heart is tearing.

  She feels, both within and outside of her body, something floating in the vessel of the room. She brings a hand to the cleft of muscle revealed among the folds of her kimono. These contractions of pain, she realises, are following the precise rhythm of the curtains, in and out, as if her heart is a mere vessel of nature, obeying the tides and susceptible to the weather.

  Everything around her – the bells for early Mass, the hum of humidity, the promise of rain – is like a measured pause before death, a slow holding-off.

  At the old Chinese theatre down by the markets, her mother would be at her umpteenth game of bingo by now, daubing the numbers with her coloured marker, the movement becoming mechanical in this assembly line of hope. Across the floor at her mother’s feet, discarded sheets form an ocean of inky dots, the flotsam of her faith.

  These thoughts drag Teuila down until she feels she is drowning. It’s a below-sea-level kind of lowness, this feeling, where everything is grey-blue and sounds come to her baritone-deep and tears are impossible. She can’t remember feeling this low, like the end of the world.

  She wonders what Sosimo would have done when faced with such oblivion – on finding himself all alone in the house but for the corpse of his master, Tusitala. Had his feelings, like hers now, gone into revolt?

  In the last few months before he left, Henry had worked weekend shifts at Vailima, now a museum on the hill. Teuila has always considered its rolling red roof the colour and shape of a dog’s tongue, and the house had been rebuilt so many times in the wake of hurricanes that to call it colonial was like calling her the Queen of Samoa, even if Klaus from the embassy did.

  She would visit Vailima at any excuse. Instead of approaching by the main drive, she would instruct her taxi driver to go down the Road of Loving Hearts at the side, screened by hibiscus hedge, to surprise him. On the lawn she would slip off her shoes and soundlessly approach.

  Sometimes she would imagine herself as Sosimo, shapeshifting across the grass, feeling the strength in his calves and the sweetness in his voice. Then, waiting for Henry’s tour to end, she would light a cigarette, watching the smoke gather around her like a shroud, until she was something neither female or male, but simply a rushing spirit that would snatch up Henry’s smitten soul and carry him away.

  And in a breath he was gone. She knew the precise time and date he was leaving because she had booked the flight herself. She imagined his choice of meals, the movies he would watch, and knew the exact flying time to Auckland in hours and minutes. Even the bouts of air turbulence she could foresee, as she had learnt to travel the low- and highpressure points of meteorological maps at the click of the mouse. But still she wondered what was in his heart.

  With Henry gone, for once the most beautiful thing – as her father liked to say – wasn’t right under her nose. And in his growing wake she began to fill her life with clutter: bingo, Klaus and singing gigs at Tropicana. During the day she dealt with what seemed like a never-ending stream of oneway traffic that trickled and rushed and sometimes slowed. There were even the days when, looking up from her desk, there was no one there. All that greeted her was the poster by the door:

  We call it home … You’ll call it paradise.

  Then the other week, as if materialised from the barbecue smoke outside, Henry returned to Apia for his wedding.

  Chapter 12

  VAILIMA

  The dragonfly brushes up against the windowpane, softly thrumming as if asking to be let out. The glass doesn’t look old and bubbled and handmade, but new and freshly washed. The dragonfly is dazzled by its reflection for a moment before flying away. Gardeners call out to each other across the lawn, their laughter trailing off, absorbed by the trees. The dragonfly makes a last dive at the window, falling soundlessly to the floor.

  ‘Before we go on with our tour I’d like to ask you, please, no touching, do not stand on the lion skin, and please stay on the mats, thank you.’

  They are standing in the smoking room, shiny and spotless and sanitised by the sun. The room feels smaller than Lewis expected, with hardly enough room for an easel.

  The lion skin separates him from his guide. She looks barely twenty, small and slight, with thick wavy hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her accent is American-tinged and each sentence ends neatly with a smile. Rather than what she says, Lewis is struck by how she says it, the verbal segues that lead him from one room to the next, zigzagging as effortlessly as the dragonfly.

  Downstairs the house is but one room deep, the doors open to the garden, so no sooner have they entered than they are outside again, shuffling on the verandah out the back. Even upstairs in the writer’s study, Lewis finds he can’t focus on the various first editions and translations on the otherwise spartan shelves, or the single bed pushed into the corner against a wall of peacock blue. His eyes are drawn outside.

  ‘Between the trees there,’ says the guide, ‘that’s the trail. Have you been to the tomb?’

  Lewis shakes his head at the mountain which seems more vivid than the house itself.

  ‘It’s good to go early in the morning,’ she says, ‘or late afternoon.’

  Into the wife’s bedroom, where Lewis studies the old framed photographs hovering behind curtains of mosquito netting. ‘Her Samoan friends,’ notes the guide. The servant girls in the pictures wear short hair and chokers, their young breasts pointing up at their mistress seated on her chair, a grey wig spilling down her long white missionary dress.

  He can think of nothing else as they pass through the other bedroom suites and then back down the stairs – the perfect peaks of their breasts rising to Aolele la‘ikiki, Little Flying Cloud.

  ‘We’re walking on the original grand staircase – it’s redwood, very solid. Welcome here to the last room, the great hall.’

  The girl’s speech is learnt by rote, as if lyrics to a song, always leading to the chorus of her smile. He tries to imagine her with short hair and a choker, glimpsed through a veil of mosquito netting. It’s a view that haunts him as they pause at the bottom of the stairs: the laudanum dreams of the house’s mistress, Aolele.

  The tour now at an end, the guide abandons him by the piano. It’s where the writer accompanied family singalongs – or so he was told – on his flageolet. Across the room is the iron-box safe. Its doors are splayed open to reveal a pretty olive-green interior: See, no ghosts.

  Once the guide has gone, Lewis has a sudden need to go upstairs again, to move against the flow of the story. It’s as though the mountain air has blown history clean from the walls. A succession of hurricanes and changes of occupancy have meant that little remains of the original house, which at the time of the painter’s visit was being extended to accommodate the grand vision of the widow’s wing.

  Up the staircase he sprints, two steps at a time. And once upstairs he can hardly stand still, dizzy with the thought of having the place to himself. Lewis thinks that if he keeps moving, sweeping through the bedrooms as the wind would, he’ll find the household’s soul.

>   He moves faster and faster, in fear that the guide will call him back down again, and he won’t catch what it is he’s after. He keeps thinking of Aolele’s view through the mosquito netting, or maybe it’s something else that lies there waiting for him?

  Along the length of the study he rushes, rugs and mats slipping underfoot, losing his sense of gravity. The little bed in the corner looks so lonely he could sail through the air and leave his body’s imprint there, but quickly he regains his balance. He keeps moving towards the door, hoping that what he is looking for will be around the next corner.

  In the corridor connecting the new and old wings he finds a small opening in the wall covered with glass, and a switch next to it. When Lewis turns on the light, it reveals the house’s original exterior, which he realises is almost the same colour as his shorts.

  For a moment a face hovers there, silver-haired, its oval shape cut in half by an old-fashioned moustache. The eyes, one blue and one brown, seem to pull the face apart. It shifts in and out of focus, until Lewis finally recognises it as his own.

  The realisation jolts him awake. His mind’s eye begins to open and expand and fill with light. Around him, plaques and photographs inform him of every conceivable household fact: the architect from Sydney, the redwood summoned from California, the overstuffed Scottish furniture carried in a dozen journeys up the hill by a pair of long-suffering bullocks. But Lewis is not sated. He is curious to know these lives in a bodily way, their taste and sight and smell. He realises that’s what he is looking for, circling something he can’t quite inhabit: the scent of gardenia at dusk, the tang of fresh lime, the last wavering of peacock-blue light.

  In the bathroom he opens the medicine cabinet to disturb a row of bottles: Magic Mosquito Bite Cure and Insect Destroyer, Waterbury’s Surgical Dusting Powder, Hinds’ Black Fly Cream, Epsom Salts, Initial Line Tansy Leaves And Tops, Kennedy’s Discovery.