Kay supposed she was to take that as a compliment.
Below them, the stewards moved along, setting up the deck chairs for the passengers.
“Go down and put dibs on a chair,” Aren said, pushing her with his foot. “I’m going to nap here for a while—the man next to me snored fearfully all night.”
Kay slid gingerly out onto the metal foot of the lifeboat launcher, jumped down and took the stairs to Promenade deck as if she had simply been enjoying the sunshine above.
“Chair for you, Miss? You’re up early!” said the steward, a wiry man of little height with a bright eye.
“May I?”
“Miss Ward, ain’t it, if you’ll pardon me? Got you listed as Cabin 6, which means this chair here, if that suits?”
She sat, and swivelled to let her feet fall on the slanting footrest.
“Blanket?”
The air was brisk still, so she took the blanket.
“I’m Handy, Miss.”
She nodded, thinking he certainly was, then realized it was his name. “Thank you, Mr. Handy.”
“Breakfast at eight, Miss,” Handy said, and went on down the line of chairs.
Kay sat staring out into the far distance, that prospect only available at sea, or (her practical mind inserted) sometimes from a balcony looking out to sea. Like the view out across the prairie from the upper windows at Blade Lake. The long view, the only view she wanted.
Up and down deck, other passengers appeared, in cruise wear or overcoats, depending on their experience and expectation and hardiness. One lady wore furs, although it was only rabbit fur dressed to look like muskrat. Some seemed to be in summer kit. Kay was glad she’d sold her coat. She thought warmly of the little roll of dollars in her brown purse.
The girls from dinner came along to find their chairs, Julia very correct in a navy steamer coat, Elsie more frivolous in a cardigan, a red wool scarf tucked around her neck against the wind.
“Aren’t the mornings beautifully fresh?” she called to Kay.
Kay nodded, and pulled the rug up around the cheek that faced them. She wished she’d brought her book. Now those girls would think they had to speak to her.
* * *
—
At the noon bell, Julia stood and stretched, and asked Kay if she would walk in to luncheon with them. This was a strange life, this passenger business. Being with a large set of people all day long, people you did not know or particularly like, involved multiple courtesies that Kay had not bargained for. She had thought she would just read all the time, yet here she was foisted into social occasions, over and over.
Seeing tape pasted down the middle of the passageway, Kay kept to the left, the dry side. Julia and Elsie walked all over until Kay put out a hand and tugged gently at Elsie’s sleeve to nudge her over. The seaman on his knees swabbing ahead looked up and gave them a grateful grin.
“If there’s tape, they’re waxing,” Kay said, trying not to sound like Mrs. Johns. “They work one side all the way down and then do the other, so we can still walk along.”
“Clever!”
It was only practical, but Elsie demanded to know how Kay knew so much about “shipboard culture,” left her no time to answer, and then talked all through lunch about the exigencies and cleverness of life at sea. Mrs. Johns having come down with seasickness, there was no one to compete with her.
The Constellation, a British-India cargo steamer of four thousand tons, had been a coast-to-coaster for forty years, and a beauty in her time, Lieutenant Johns assured Kay. Even now, sagging after the war and firmly into middle age, Elsie called her “a capital ship for an ocean trip, with everything trim about her.”
Not quite trim, to Kay’s cooler eye. A good old ship, battered but sturdy. The passengers were undemanding, many of them British and American missionaries coming from or heading back to India and points along the way, and a sprinkling of other travellers: people with a little money, but not enough for a liner passage. The Constellation also carried cargo, ferrying silk and spice to the west, and everything from typewriters to trucks back to New Zealand and Australia.
Sheep grazed in pens on the main deck. Elsie mourned them extravagantly. “Look at them, poor things. Doomed to die, one by one, to feed the native crew. And looking as if they knew it.” Kay doubted the mutton was only for the crew. Aren did not like it, so she hoped it was not their only food. She pointed out the ducks on the poop deck, and they were a great hit with Elsie and Julia.
Besides the livestock, between decks, and wherever there was a nook or cranny, coal for the engines was piled—tons of it, the heaps covered with tarpaulin. Francis had said that the journey of a steamer was a constant tug-of-war between coal and time: will there be enough coal to get the ship to shore, or will the woodwork have to be fed into the furnace? Once in a while shipmasters had had to pull up and burn the floorboards to get to harbour.
When the telegram broke the news that Kay had gone, and where, Thea quarrelled with Francis for the first time in their married life.
Dropping the telegram on the dining table as if it burned her, she mowed into the drawing room, where Francis was sitting with the morning paper. She was already shouting incoherently.
Francis, pointing at Roddy’s brown foot deep in the window seat, motioned to her to temper her voice, but she could suffer no restraint, telling herself in a lightning flare that Roddy ought to know what had happened—in fact she was sure he did know, for he and Kay were always hand in glove, always running away into the orchard to keep secrets—
But what did that matter, it was Francis who must have made this wild goose chase possible, must have funded it, and encouraged Kay, and—
Had he seen Aren? Had he gone to Halifax behind her back and—
Thea stood still, her legs shaking with rage and despair. She could not remember ever being so angry. In a wild rush that felt like freedom after chains, she flew out at Francis hammer and tongs, at last, about why Aren had not been happy and what had happened to make everything so difficult. At first it was a flood of mixed-up words, all no and why and how could you and what gave you the right—but once that first spate slowed, she shook her head sharply and found her sense again, and stopped Francis when he made to answer.
“Don’t you dare say that we should not have taken him from that island, as Kay believes. He would have starved—you know those men were at the breaking point. Even so, he was never strong, because of that early deprivation—that is to blame for his TB, and perhaps he had already been exposed to the bacillus, and would have died of it all unknowing in that backward place. And if we had not taken him? Who else might they have sold him to next, for ship’s boy or worse!”
He said nothing.
“Answer me!” she demanded. Her voice was unrecognizable to herself.
But Francis would not fight. He stood on the drawing room carpet like a schoolboy called to account, and refused to quarrel.
She battered herself on the blank wall of his refusal, crying, “He was happy with us—do you question that? On all our voyages, he was the happiest boy, until the war— It all went wrong when you left us to go to France.”
That was something she had never said before. She had not questioned Francis’s decision at the time. But it was a decision—he had enlisted, he had chosen to go, although at an age when most men would have stayed to support their family. Leaving her and Kay to manage everything alone, without word or letter for months at a time, not knowing if he ever would come back, and all for some idea of glory.
“No, not that,” Francis said. “Don’t go blaming the war. The trouble was there before I left. I myself sorted out a few things at the school, if you recall.”
“Between voyages!”
Because he was never there, not there to help her, or to guide his sons. Roddy was all right, would be all right because he was one of them, a Gran
t, and a Wetmore. It was Aren who had needed a father.
But it was she who had insisted that he go to school, had made him go when he’d asked to please stay home. He had to finish his education properly, and learn to be with other boys. Then Roddy’s failing health had claimed her attention, and his weak leg, and the brace for all that time, the worry over whether he would ever walk. Aren was always so patient and good with him, was one of the reasons Roddy was stronger now—was Roddy to lose his brother, too?
Francis did not answer her. He did not speak at all, letting her run her anger out.
Bile rose again in the back of her throat. This anger business was horrible, she wished she was free of it. But Kay’s telegram rose in her mind again, and her head went up in flames again, so that it was all she could do to stand still and not lash out in every direction. How much anger had she been swallowing all this time?
She shuddered again under the onslaught of old time, old fears, and flung at Francis, desiring to spear him in place on Aunt Lydia’s Turkey carpet, “Anyone could see he was unhappy, yet you have not lifted a hand to help him, except by sending him away to Halifax and helping him to a life of hardship and suffering.”
He did not waver at her attack, but stood solid and calm, as if her madness gave him stability. “Apprenticeship is hardly that!” he said. “It is a straight path to a good career, for a lad who knows the ropes.”
In her fury, Thea did not address the instigating incident—the reprehensible behaviour of the King family over boy-and-girl foolishness, or any of the miseries she knew Aren had suffered at school, the Acadian boys throwing stones at him and calling names that first year, or the bad business of Ernest Bain and the stolen books—but skipped back to earlier wrongs.
“You wanted to take him for a cabin boy—” That first day, she meant, the day they bought him. Found him.
“Yes, and it might have been the better for him.”
“There was no reason to separate him from us, from his family—” She bit her lip until it bled, thinking of having separated Aren from his original family. As maybe Francis was thinking now.
“There is always reason to separate a boy from his family,” Francis said. Comforting her, even in this whirlwind. “I was ten when I went to sea, and I did very well.”
“You were a sturdy boy. His lungs were compromised, and he could not thrive. As well take Roddy!”
“Aren was—is—much sturdier than you believe. A wild child, and a man now, fitted to survive. So is Roddy—he’d do very well in a ship’s company. You underrate his strength.”
Her hands had made themselves into fists, sharp-knuckled weapons. She locked them into a hand clasp so they would not fly out at him. “If you do it, if you work hole-and-corner with Roddy, knowing what he suffers—”
“No, no,” he protested. “I would not go against you in that way, I swear it.” He was almost laughing, perhaps readying himself to catch her fists if need be.
But her fine fire had burnt down. She turned away, sick at heart, unable to argue with his fixed idea. “You should not have encouraged Kay.”
“I did no encouraging. I made her safer in what she was determined to do. You’d sooner have had her ship as a stewardess?”
“No!”
“Indeed. There was little enough I could do for them, in any case.”
“Do you even know what ship they are on?”
“The Constellation, bound for Wellington. Cable them on board, if you like to throw your coin away, or a letter will reach port before them. Write to Pitcairn and it might catch them earlier, if you like.”
That was an absurdity. Half the time ships could not approach Pitcairn and had to hand on the mailbag, untouched, to the next ship.
But Thea went off anyway, to go upstairs and write to Kay in this first burst of urgent disapproval. She would wait a day before posting the letter, but she could start a blistering note tonight with all her rage intact.
At the newel post she turned back to tell Francis another thing; turning, she saw back into the drawing room, where Roddy had crept out of the window seat and slid his hand into his father’s.
“It was a good thing that you helped Kay,” she heard Roddy say in a low voice. “I wished I could go along, but she said I was too young still, I must finish school.”
“It’s a tough life, old man,” Francis said, cupping the dear head with his other hand.
Thea turned again and went upstairs.
5
At Sea
May 21, a beautiful shining day. It had taken a week to go from New York to Panama. There was a sameness to the days on a steamer that Kay could not remember under sail, when every day was changeable, dependent on the wind.
In the ladies’ bath she found a great horned beetle living under the slats by the tub, but refrained from mentioning it to the American girls, who would have squawked. Perhaps it was only lively in the very early morning, when she had her own bath. It stayed for some days, clicking and rushing, and then was gone. She hoped it had not gone down the drain and into the sea, poor thing.
She was lonely, although she mostly preferred to be alone. She worried about Aren. He usually managed to sneak away for half an hour in a day; once, he fell asleep on his little bit of matting on the floor of her cabin, and she stayed perfectly still for an hour to let him rest. He was working hard in the belly of the ship, maybe harder than he had worked for a while, but he showed her the muscle in his arm proudly, and he did not seem at all unhappy to be down among the workingmen.
So Kay stayed above in the strange limbo of passenger life. Sometimes she talked to the American girls and sometimes she kept aloof.
The Canal made an excitement in the sameness, and she stood at the railing with Julia while they waited and waited to go through. For a while they were held up in the bay that served as the waiting room for the Canal, twisting in and out between the boats. Then the Constellation sidled up to load again at the coaling docks outside the town of Colón, and the passengers were allowed off for a brief shopping trip. Kay was persuaded to go ashore with Elsie and Julia on a quest for sweet exotic treats. After a donkey-cart ride through sweltering, dusty streets, they carried slabs of chocolate and long packages of cakes back to the girls’ cabin, which they had made homelike by littering it with scarves and gaily coloured lingerie. Sitting on the rug as Elsie and Julia chattered, Kay felt like a donkey among show ponies. Elsie read them the draft of her article. She was a flamboyant writer, partial to phrases like the rose-light of a tropical morning.
With a slight headache from the chocolate, Kay found a postcard and posted it to Marion before they left the dock at Colón, saying she missed her, which would probably seem flamboyant to Marion. The postcard had a startling painting of a swaying Spanish lady, to give Murray Judge and the Krito-sophians something to discuss at the next meeting.
She should have written properly to Mr. Brimner, but that was a longer proposition. She drew out and reread his last letter, so as to have an answer ready to post from Wellington.
The movement of the sea today recalls an old note I found in Prior’s notebook on waves, while he was recuperating at Eastbourne, one wintry English summer: “The laps of running foam striking the sea-wall double on themselves and return in nearly the same order and shape in which they came. This is mechanical reflection and is the same as optical: indeed all nature is mechanical, but then it is not seen that mechanics contain that which is beyond mechanics.”
I see that daily here—how the waves double on themselves and return in nearly the same order and shape in which they came. Beyond mechanics.
This doubling recalls Prior to my mind, of course, but it also recalls you and Aren (and your sister and Francis) to my mind—how we double on ourselves and return, return, and how the waves are usefully able to be bent into many such metaphorical shapes to convey the wishes and desires of humans
for the company of each other.
The first time she read that, last month, she did not know they would be returning.
But you must know I am not lonely here on Ha‘ano, nor in the least alone! My doorstep is stomped at every hour with some visitor or other, and I am glad to be of service and equally glad to be left alone as the evening shutters quickly down.
Here is Sione now, pounding on my door to say the cricket game is on, and I must go and bowl. Our main expense with the school is cricket bats; please thank your sister and Francis for their kind Christmas gift and tell them every penny went toward replacing broken bats.
Late that night, Aren tapped at her cabin door and slipped inside, but he would not even sit, saying he would soon be missed down below. She gave him the chocolate she had got him on the excursion, and he thanked her but said he would keep it in her sink cupboard.
“It gets so infernally hot down there, it would melt in a moment,” he said.
She searched his face again for signs of strain or misery, and he laughed at her and doused his head under her cold tap and dirtied her last clean towel. He told her not to eat his chocolate under pain of death, and went away again.
Thinking of Marion Hilton, perhaps, made Kay dream of Corcovado. She hardly ever dreamed of land. In dusk or dawnlight she climbed and climbed, following Marion’s white lawn dress, her brown legs and half boots up through a green sea of leaves and up again, up to the highest promontory, Aren unseen behind her following too, climbing too fast for his poor lungs.
All the next day, the ship swayed and hesitated through the Canal, and Kay stood as long as she could at the rail to watch this narrow wonder of engineering, of man’s strange imagination and determination, that had cut a continent in two and saved who knew how many boys from drowning at Cape Horn. At last, at evening, they were out, past the peaks of Darien and sailing free, into the midst of a blinding, stinging sunset shower, out into the blue Pacific—on the other side of the world.
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