The Difference

by Marina Endicott

  How would Mr. Brimner make do in a strange place like Tonga, where no English ship would arrive with black-bordered letters, and there would be no English marmalade at the breakfast table or Gentleman’s Relish at the dinner? He might find someone in Tonga to teach Greek to—but perhaps, like Father, he would be too busy teaching them English and Scripture.

  It was hard, even after so many Sunday services, to think of Mr. Brimner as a priest. He did not wear vicar clothes, but cool grey linen shirts and jackets; he saved his clerical collars for best. Passing his opened cabin door, she had seen a cupped set of them lying on the bunk. The foot of the bunk was taken up with books, row after row, like Francis had threatened to set a crate of china on her own bunk. Mr. Brimner must curl very tight to sleep, or pack them all away each night. He was more scholar than cleric.

  593. 1. The gods will show us the way.

  2. He was considering what answer to make.

  3. There they remained a week and collected supplies for their journey.

  4. Considerably later (the cloud of dust appeared) like a sort of blackness in the plain for a great distance.

  That was an exciting development, that cloud of dust appearing in the great distance. She did not feel she was making any very great progress, yet Greek words had slipped into her understanding as things themselves, not just other names for the things. Realness was gathering like a cloud of dust in her mind, still in the distance, but perceptible.

  Mr. Brimner opened one teal-blue eye. “Enough!” he croaked. “Walk the rail, jump in place, school your dog, be a child! There is time aplenty for the dark cloud work to crouch on your head in future. Go and ask your brother if you may climb to the crow’s nest.”

  Kay laughed, because Francis would never let her climb that high. And then shivered, because she did not want to!

  9

  Tonga

  Early next morning, the Morning Light crept up on an island, a high green hill humped up out of the ocean. Beyond it they could see larger land, misted to grey in the early morning air.

  Through the morning they rounded the point of the first island, which Mr. Wright told them was ‘Eua. They were not stopping there, but made for Tongatapu, the largest island of the archipelago of Tonga. The map in the saloon called it TONGA or FRIENDLY Is. Mr. Brimner, who had read up in readiness for his post, said that was because Captain Cook had found the people willing to trade and kinder than other islanders, whose first instinct had been to kill the interlopers. And perhaps that would have been a better idea, for Mr. Wright said many islanders had died of diseases brought by Europeans, before they gained resistance to new germs. Like tuberculosis, in the West.

  It was a soft, murky sea around these islands. Near Tongatapu the water lay quiet, variegated from blue-green to brownish in patches, from some vegetation on the sea floor. The main town crouched on a slight rise: scattered white buildings around a larger official mass, also white. Yet everything was a little greyish, and dirty too. A fitful wind blew across the deck.

  “The draft is shallow,” Francis said, coming to sit for a luncheon on deck, in honour of the gentle weather. “Here at Nuku‘alofa we will not dock at the wharf, but anchor well out and take the tender in as we need.”

  That was a strange, unaccustomed name for a town. Kay said it under her breath to get it right. Nuku‘alofa, Nuku‘alofa.

  Across the water she could now distinguish a large white building, a pepper-pot red roof on a stubby white tower; next to that, a church. A double avenue of low, feathery trees hid the buildings from full sight, but there looked to be lawn there, and park grounds along the waterfront.

  Near shore in the shallows, submerged to their chests, dark-haired people moved along a line of basket weirs, threading something through the water and peering down to run hands along. Eels? Kay hoped not eels, for she had a horror of them.

  “They soak the fibres for their mats, ta’ovala, their waist-wraps,” Seaton said from the lifeboat above her. “The women soak them in salt water for days or weeks, and come to check to see how pliable they are for weaving. I had a mat, long ago…My grandmother’s father’s ta’ovala putu, that I wore to her funeral.”

  Was this where Seaton was from, then? His strong hawk nose lifted into the air, seeking, as if this land would have a different smell. Kay breathed in too, but could detect no special flavour.

  * * *

  —

  Mr. Brimner dawdled in the companionway as if unwilling to go up on deck, his dark spectacles flashing in a subdued way. “I hope you will all come to tea with Mr. Hill, if invited?” he asked earnestly. Perhaps he was a little anxious.

  Thea said, “Of course!” and turned back to her cabin for gloves.

  For the heat of the day she also brought a sunshade. Kay did not want to stay in its irksome shade, and was told she would soon have a headache, and warned not to muss her good white muslin dress, laundered to a turn by Jiacheng. “The laundry is not suffering the lack of the Hubbards, at least,” Thea said. “That is good luck, or I should say God’s hand, although why God would use your foot in Lena Hubbard’s bottom end as His instrument I really cannot tell.”

  A soft giggle rose in her throat. Kay had not heard her laugh in ages.

  The tender tied up at a long wharf, with steps cut up one side. Kay’s spindly arms were elastic enough to haul her up a ladder quickly, and she had no fear of her good boots slipping through rusty rungs, but stairs were quicker, and meant Thea would not have to spoil her best white lawn on a ladder climb.

  First at the top, Kay looked about her, inspecting it for Mr. Brimner’s sake. Rubbishy kind of place, and hot in this late September afternoon.

  A gaggle of ragged young men loitered at the pier head, sitting for hire in brakes and open carts, none in good repair and some showing the road right through their floorboards. It was all a bit fly-blown and deserted, for the main town of a place.

  Then along came bowling a neater carriage, an open trap with a white horse pulling it. A clerical gentleman, small and dark, sprang out and came toward them, taking hands one at a time as if this was Sunday morning after church, his mouth making a polite pink triangle. He greeted Thea first, and Francis, and then found Mr. Brimner again and pumped his hands together over and over.

  “We had your telegram!” he cried, seeming more excited than was fitting. He turned to bow to Kay, lifting his old-fashioned hat. “And this young miss?”

  She was prepared to dislike him, or anyone else who stole Mr. Brimner away. With a very slight pressure Mr. Brimner put an arm along her shoulder and said, “May I present the Reverend Mr. Hill, incumbent here in Nuku‘alofa town. He is an old college mate of mine at Caius, and one of the reasons I entered the mission.”

  She yielded, since he wished it. “How do you do, Sir,” she said. At least polite.

  Bowing correctly, Mr. Brimner turned to Mr. Hill. “Let me introduce Miss Kay Ward, younger sister of Captain Grant’s wife. An apt pupil of classical tongues,” he said, giving her a dignified collegial nod, “and a sound maritime companion.”

  “Capital, capital! Do all of you come along. Mrs. Hill has got a luncheon ready, with tea as good as one may obtain on this benighted isle.”

  Francis took himself back to the ship, but the others climbed up into the trap and found a handhold as Mr. Hill shook up the reins and shouted at his poor thin horse. They wheeled off over dirt roads that soon yielded to grass tracks, a little crowded with a quiet jostling of traffic in the town. As they went, Mr. Hill pointed at a number of buildings, which all turned out to be churches.

  Not far from the wharf, a dog darted across the street before them, heavy dugs swinging below a starved-looking belly, and was caught—a terrible sound!—by the wheels of a heavy cart going the opposite way. The dog rolled and shook herself, whimpering, and limped off into an alley.

  Kay had left Pilot in Jacky Judge�
�s charge. She looked down the alley, but the dog had vanished. Perhaps it would live.

  Leaving the crowded market area, they turned corners very confusingly along empty, dusty alleys lined with whitewashed walls and scrap-wood fences in front of little ramshackle houses, and after some time pulled into a short gravel drive before a yellow bungalow with a roof of thatched straw. A woman waited on the porch, fair-haired and tired-looking.

  Mr. Hill announced, with endearing pride in this nondescript lady, “My wife!”

  “We are hoping you will stay to tea,” Mrs. Hill began, as they climbed down from the cart. “And maybe take a walk with us this afternoon, before Evensong…” Her voice was light and hesitant. A girl and a small boy clung to her sagging yellowed-muslin skirts, the boy peeping round and hiding his face again. He had pretty gold curls like bedsprings. The girl’s duller flaxen hair was pulled into taut triangles by braids at her temples.

  Mr. Hill handed them down from the cart, stopping to display his imported British flowers (“Carefully packed, and of course hand-watered in this climate, shoots do survive!”), and ushered them in, all the bodies bustling round in a swirling of people and steps and light and shade.

  Kay stood still in the quiet garden, in the greyish-white light of Tonga, staring at palm-frond leaves and a ragged rooster ranging in the yard, and the horse still harnessed to the cart. In a foreign place.

  Mrs. Hill had brought out her wedding china. “Only coconut cake,” she apologized, setting down small, thick cakes arrayed on a platter of flow blue undoubtedly crated with them from England. Understanding the honour paid her, Thea said they looked delicious.

  Mr. Hill had gone into full clerical spate, informing Mr. Brimner of things he likely already knew: “Our small Anglican congregation in Tonga originated as a breakaway from Methodism. We might perhaps characterize our flock as Anglophile—it was at first named for Queen Victoria!” Mr. Hill chuckled at that. He amused himself too easily, Thea considered.

  Mr. Brimner sat quietly taking in the house: the open expanse of bare oilclothed floor, two chintz-draped chairs, a short row of books in rough shelves below the front window.

  “By the grace of Bishop Willis, our church has been attached to the new diocese under the higher jurisdiction of New Zealand,” said Mr. Hill. “We have a gentleman’s agreement, you know, not to seek converts from among those already baptized by the Methodists or the London Missionary Society, and we do respect that.”

  “Oh yes, yes,” Mr. Brimner said gravely, as if accepting vital dogma.

  Thea suspected that perhaps Mr. Hill, busy with his family and his garden, did not mind having a limit placed on his conversion labours. He had none of the uncomfortable religious zeal she remembered from missionaries they had known in the West. He reminded her more of Mr. Hinch, the finicky curate in Yarmouth, an authority on Gregorian chant who was happy to gossip in Aunt Queen’s parlour. Perhaps zeal was for missions in the wilderness. Tonga could not be called wilderness; its ancient people, its long history and the presence of quite so many churches all precluded that.

  The girl came out to the porch with her brother to call Kay in for tea and cakes. They were named Muriel and Peregrine—a silly name for a boy, but Kay did not say so. Inside, the house was stuffy and dark, with a smell of church over must. Thea and Mrs. Hill sat drinking tea at the table while Mr. Brimner and Mr. Hill talked at the other side of the room in the only other chairs. Mr. Hill had lit a pipe, another reek. Muriel took Kay to sit on a bolster against the wall with a plate of quite nice cakes, if you did not mind chewing.

  They sat silent; Kay was listening to the others talk, and Muriel seemed to have no conversation. She was twelve or thirteen, taller than Kay, but not by much. She kept watch over Peregrine and did not allow him to have another cake, after two. He looked as though he might pout but was distracted by a toy donkey cart he found under a cushion, and spent a long time going back and forth on the linoleum, murmuring clip-clop clip-clop to himself. Muriel said he was six, but the golden curls made him seem younger.

  The burden of going on and on like this, sitting in rooms listening to people talk, weighed down on Kay. The thought of living for perhaps eighty more years, or even fifty—or until she had a baby and died of it like her mama—when even one year or one day more was unbearable. More of this and then more, all of it tedium and irritation. The same feeling descended on her at the start of church, at the first Dearly beloved. This house was infested with churchiness. What was the use of going elsewhere in the world when you brought everything dull along with you?

  The ladies were rising. By the window, Mr. Hill and Mr. Brimner turned, staring as if they were surprised to see them still there.

  “Will you walk with us toward the harbour?” Mrs. Hill asked Thea, which meant Kay would also have to go and walk in the heat. “I am going to call on Mrs. Rachel Tonga, a great lady of the town, and I believe she will be glad to meet you.”

  They left the men in the shadowy house and walked out into one dusty lane after another, and soon went diagonally across a long, scrubby promenade of grass, like a street but with no paving, and then along a withy fence toward the harbour once more.

  The great white house with red roofs they had seen from the harbour was the palace, Muriel said. It had not looked like a palace to Kay; it was not even as large as Aunt Lydia’s house at Lake Milo.

  As they walked, Mrs. Hill did most of the talking. She knew all the royal family, and all those who were related to royalty, in which exact degree, who had done what to whom many years ago, and what that second person had done about it—as if she had transferred an English interest in monarchy straight over to Tonga, with all the reverence attached. Kay found it impossible to fathom the story of the king’s second marriage, or its ramifications for Princess Salote, who had been sent away last year and was now “practically exiled” in New Zealand to attend what sounded like a very ordinary girls’ school, while the people waited for her father’s new wife to have a son, who would be the heir.

  Mrs. Hill told them that Mrs. Rachel Tonga (with whom Princess Salote had been lodged before her exile) lived with her sister Sela and Sela’s husband Sione Mateialona, who had once been the premier. Rachel and Sela, she said, were “real Tongan ladies—certainly the most intelligent and best-mannered I have seen.” She paused to chide Peregrine for jumping and creating dust that might coat the ladies’ muslin.

  Mrs. Rachel Tonga lived along the Beach Road in Kolomotu‘a, west of the palace. West also of the British consul and the Residency, which Thea told Mrs. Hill she was most interested to see, although when Kay wanted to know why, she could not say precisely.

  “Oh, because of Empire, I suppose,” she said, and laughed a little.

  Kay looked up at her sideways. She said nothing impertinent but allowed her gait to slow so that she walked behind Thea.

  “It is a handsome building, is all I meant,” Thea added.

  Then Kay wished she had not asked why. She did not intend to be a disagreeable person, even though it sometimes came out that way.

  “Mrs. Rachel Tonga keeps proper house, you’ll see,” Mrs. Hill promised as they came closer, on this hot and too-long walk. “Very grand and clean. They are fakapapalangi, living in the European style, unlike some of the locals.”

  “They have a little dog,” Muriel told Kay. “A pug dog.”

  “I have a dog,” Kay said, and went back to worrying about Pilot, and whether he might have slipped off the deck and drowned in the sea.

  The house was a low white bungalow with a handsome veranda decorated with angular gingerbread. Mrs. Rachel and Sela sat on the low stoop in their shirt sleeves.

  “You have caught us resting from our washtubs,” Mrs. Rachel told Mrs. Hill, laughing. She was a strongly built, warm-faced woman, bulky at first glance but graceful when she moved. A comfortable presence, calm in her own powerful good sense, and she spoke Engli
sh perfectly well.

  Another woman, Miss Winifred Small, came as they were standing on the steps. She too was kindly welcoming when Thea and Kay were explained as connections of the new Anglican missionary.

  Kay liked Miss Winifred, who was youngish, and prettyish, although some might call her plain. While the ladies talked, she looked like she was thinking of interesting other ideas. Miss Winifred had lived in Tonga from childhood, among the Wesleyan people. She had with her a friend, Lisia Fifita, a round young woman in a straight blue dress, and Lisia’s little girl Eponie, all dark eyes and glowing skin, perhaps three or four. A lovely child, with a deep dimple that came and went, although she was shy to smile. She put a warm hand on Thea’s knee, patting gently in welcome, and soon Thea pulled her up to sit in her lap, where she settled in so comfortably that Kay could almost feel the tender weight herself.

  As the women talked, Kay took off her hat to let the little girl try it on. Liquid, velvet-brown eyes looked up from inside the brim, absurdly happy. When Kay asked for it back, Eponie took it off at once and held it out, but her eyes filled with great tears that spilled over and tracked down her darling cheeks. Thea shook her head. “That is Kay’s only hat,” she said. But she kissed the little girl’s soft cheek.

  In their height and strength the women were interesting to look at, but their conversation might have been ordinary lady-chat in Yarmouth, and Kay wished they were at least still with Mr. Brimner, rather than on this strange visit.

  When she glanced up and saw Peregrine toddling out over the lawn, she followed as if she was looking after him, although she did not intend to bother fetching him back.

  They wandered along the expanse of grass and sand, stopping when Peregrine wanted to. Muriel came after them, even though Kay was finished talking to her. She was an insipid girl, perhaps not a dolt, but not interested in anything of the mind. She talked about ribbons, what she had eaten for breakfast and what there would be for tea. Peregrine did not talk, he merely put a rock in his mouth from time to time, which Muriel would hasten to make him spit out. He was not clever either. Kay felt quite alone.