And of course Kay too remembered things, like the time Virginia had burnt off all her hair on one side with a too-hot curling iron, and left the other side long for a week before accepting that there was nothing to be done but cut it all even with her ears. Or the truly hideous lilac taffeta dress Mrs. Archibald’s wealthy mother had sent for matriculation, which Virginia had had to wear, although it was far too long for the fashion and smelled of moth. So they were cautious with each other as they sat down to midday dinner.
Virginia taught early grades at Yarmouth Elementary School. She was cultivating an interest in folklore and the old songs, which she was determined to write down. It would be a perfectly good life. Kay did not at all dislike her.
But she disliked Mr. Archibald (perhaps mostly for his failure to be Mr. Brimner), and also his wife. Mrs. Archibald was careful of her social standing and liked to place people, ideally below herself. Also, she had known Father, and always told Kay how much she resembled him. Now she did so again, climbing up the veranda steps. She and her husband sat unswinging on the wicker swing, with Virginia beside them on a flowered hassock, smiling vaguely at the general air, all sipping at sherry and making mouths as if it was a little too strong. Thea engaged them in conversation about Giving Sunday and what the missions might expect this year.
Depressed, Kay sat on the veranda steps with Roddy until the dinner bell rang.
Virginia leapt up to help Lena with the plates, so Kay had to do so, too. Thea brought in the asparagus, the first from the glasshouse, arrayed on the famille rose, the greatly loved platter that Francis had given her in Shanghai, arrayed with the emperor’s hunt. She had brought it out from Elm Street when Olive announced her engagement and it became clear that the family would be at Orchard House for some time. Francis smiled to see it, helping himself to asparagus, but could not be persuaded to tell the story of its acquisition, only smiling again and shaking his head. It was one of his silent days.
To cover the slight awkwardness, Thea told Mrs. Archibald that even though Aunt Lydia had such lovely things, it seemed a pity to leave all their own sea bounty gathering dust on Elm Street.
“I see the famous Hundred Faces fan has replaced your aunt’s silver epergne on the fireplace mantel,” Mr. Archibald said. “Fifty Chinese faces on each side, quite a treasure!”
Thea did not correct him; neither did Kay.
Roddy was newer to life and could not contain himself. “Forty-nine on the second side, actually,” he said. “You see, the one who holds the fan becomes a part of it—you yourself are the hundredth face! It is a capital joke.”
Helping herself to salad, Mrs. Archibald said, “I find foreign humour opaque.”
Virginia asked Kay, “What do you hear from Aren? I hope he is very well.”
She probably did hope so. Kay wondered what would happen if she said, He is living in squalor on Gottingen Street and drinking too much and I don’t know what he does for money.
“What an act of Christian charity that was,” began Mr. Archibald, “to bring that young fellow out of darkness into the light!”
Francis looked up from the pie he was dissecting. “Hardly darkness. The light in the South Seas is particularly radiant.” It was the first thing he’d said that afternoon.
“We all thought it was just wonderful of you to take him on,” Mr. Archibald continued.
Mrs. Archibald leaned forward. “His leaving almost reads, I must say, as ingratitude.”
“Nothing of the sort,” Francis said, too loud at the end of the table. “A young man has his way to make in the world—eighteen is high time to be out and exploring.”
Roddy was white and tense, and Thea had put her handkerchief to her eyes. Muttering, “I will see about the tea, excuse me, please!” Kay pushed back her chair and took her plate to the kitchen.
Lena Hubbard was eating her dinner at the table there, raw pink arms splayed on the table. She cast a sideways eye at Kay but turned away to press another piece of pie on Jerry Melanson. Jerry winked at Kay, holding his plate to say he did not mind if he did, and then she was past them and out the back door into the air.
To her surprise, Virginia came after her, running down the back lawn in her Sunday shoes. “I’m sorry about Mother,” she said, when she got near enough.
Kay said, “It’s all right.”
“She doesn’t—she didn’t know him as a person. The way I did. I wondered about him, that’s all, but I’m sorry I asked it at the table.”
Kay shook her head. “It was kind of you to ask.”
“And the fan! How could Father forget the hundredth face? I remember so well when your sister displayed it at the girls’ social tea during the war. It always makes me think of an exquisite porcelain face, you know, delicately flirting behind the fan. You are so lucky to have travelled widely and known such an ancient culture!”
A sick wave of anger rose again within Kay. It was all of a piece: whether the Archibalds thought foreigners were dirty or exquisite, they were not people, not real, only stories. But Virginia was not bad-hearted, only ignorant. Untravelled, as she’d said.
Kay took her arm and said, “I suppose I must go back and make that tea. Tell me, how can you bear to teach? Do you love your students? Or do you take the strap to them with abandon and make their hands burn, like old Mrs. Richards?”
After supper that evening, Kay and Thea sat on the veranda, as had become their habit here at Orchard House. Thea looked very tired, very drawn. Kay wondered if she was ill, or just sick of troubles. In a moment of impatience, she wished Thea would go ahead and die, then, if she was going to leave her anyway. Or Roddy, if he was. Coming down to breakfast each morning, wondering which chairs will be empty, or whether Aunt Lydia had finally yielded into dust in the back dining room. What was the point of loving people, anyway? Better to separate oneself from all that.
But not yet, not yet. While you had people, you should talk to them.
“I have some questions for you,” Kay said.
Thea nodded. “When did you ever not? As long as you do not ask Mr. Archibald . . .”
“Just listen,” Kay said. “You have to answer. Were we right?”
“Right to do what?”
“Were we right—did we have the right, or perhaps even the duty—to take Pilot from New Zealand?”
“Yes! That is a nonsensical question. He was starving in that mining camp—and besides, he was a present from the entrepreneurial dentist, who I believe lost his shirt on those kauri trees, in the end.”
The next question was harder to ask: “Were we right—did we have the right—to take Aren?”
After a moment, Thea said, “He was starving too—gaunt with it, they all were. Do you not remember? The men devoured a bushel of bread, and kept crying poor, poor and clutching their stomachs.”
“Still, was it right, to take a child from his people?”
Thea shook her head and got up from the rocker. “You make me tired, Kay,” she said. “You have a way of simplifying an argument that ignores the complexity of life.”
“The question is answered, then.”
Thea shook her head again. She leaned on the porch railing, trailing her finger along the lilac leaf that overhung it. Tight purple buds had formed; they would be open soon.
Kay did not know how to go on. Perhaps there was a difference between animals and humans. Pilot had been content to be one of their pack, content at sea or on land, only asking to be near them; Aren had needed his own people to find his way in the world.
“Dear Kay, do you always have to be questioning? Why can you not accept that there might be some things we do not know yet, or can never know, because we are human—because you are human, and not God Himself?”
“I can’t leave things alone. I have to ask—the questions just arise.”
Thea shook her head, not smiling. “It’s not a virtue to be curious.”
“I think it is!”
“Virtue involves service to others, not vulgar pr
ying into every tiny crack that does not concern you. Virtue would lead you to a greater peacefulness in your own heart.”
Kay felt Thea’s great eyes upon her, pinning her, putting everything she thought or felt (could not help thinking and feeling, after all) to the test. She could have turned away, gone up to bed. But she loved her sister and did not wish to be misunderstood by her.
Leaning forward to see better in the twilight, Kay said, “I don’t care about virtue, or whatever people say is virtue. I care about being kind, about people being kind to each other. I care about saying what is true and not pretending what’s false.”
She waited, but Thea said nothing.
Kay went on. “At Olive’s wedding, I thought, I don’t want to care what people think of me anymore. Maybe I never did care about it much, because, except for you, the people whose good opinion I wanted were taken away, or died. I don’t care about being demure and pretty, because I’m not pretty anyway. If you look at it coldly, you must admit I have very little prospect of not being chaste.”
Thea put out her hand, shaking her head, about to recite for Kay all the ways that mere prettiness did not matter.
But that was not the point! Kay rushed on, to stop her: “All I mean is, that sort of thing doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care what other people do with their own virtue, or not-virtue—unless they are unkind to others while they do it. All I care about is kindness, I can boil it right down to that.”
Thea did not answer. Her forehead had the U-shaped wrinkle Kay seemed so often to provoke, caused by carefully trying to understand the inexplicable. Or pretending to consider the virtues of her wrong argument. After a long moment, she said, quite quietly, “If you gave yourself to the teachings of our Saviour—You do pray every night, don’t you, dear heart?”
Only Mr. Brimner, her long-lost friend, was able to mention God without causing bile to rise up in the back of Kay’s throat. “I’m trying to tell you, I don’t care about God, He means nothing to me—I don’t know if He is real or invented. All I know is the world we live on, sail on, stand on. I can use that as God, if you like. Church means nothing to me either, but I see that it sustains you, and Mr. Brimner gave his life to it, so I carry on attending, to be kind to you both.”
Thea had tears in her eyes again, because she believed that God was listening to Kay and was being very much hurt by what she said.
Kay tried again. “Long ago, when I said I wished I had the service by heart so that I did not have to hold up the prayer book, you said that it was better not to know it by rote, but to consider and mean the words of Communion freshly every time.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yes, and I thought it was very wise.”
Thea laughed a little. “I am glad to seem wise to you!”
“You always do,” Kay said, surprised.
“But you do not heed my wisdom much.” She laid her hand on Kay’s brown forearm.
“I do! I run my life by it! But if I think differently, I must attend to my own thoughts too.”
“You are so like Father,” Thea said.
And then Kay could not talk to her any longer. “I’ll get Aunt Lydia’s milk,” she said, and walked down the veranda to the far end by the kitchen door, first checking that Lena Hubbard was not there to sour everything even more.
It was time for them to be apart, Kay thought. High time for her to be out exploring. Thea loved her, but was tired of her too. You tire even those who love you best, if you are the kind of person Kay knew herself to be, unsatisfied, restless, exhausting. In the ordinary way she would have been married off by now, gone from Thea’s immediate vicinity, and perhaps be easier to bear. And she was no doubt a bad influence on Roddy, who was also willing to argue with his mother, although not yet with Francis. Not that Francis was a stern father, or brother.
She went to the back rooms in search of him, to ask which route would be best. She could not tell Thea what was in her mind, but she could tell Francis.
Francis was sitting in the accounts room without the lamps lit. Easy to talk in that shaded room. They did not even have to look at each other, there was no need. He was so quick to respond that Kay wondered if he might have thought of this for Aren himself.
“I can put him in the way of passage Tuesday evening, when the Prince Arthur comes in for Boston. Kinney will find us a ship in Boston.”
“He needs to leave from Halifax.” If she tried to make him come to Yarmouth, he would not.
“Ah. Well, I’d talk to Hilton, in Halifax, get him onto one of the Lakes. Lake of Flowers, that’s one of his. Or there’s the Constellation—when did I see that she is leaving . . .” He ran a finger down the sailing list on his desk. “Monday evening! That is quick. Might be for the best. It will be the luck of the draw. Hilton will see him fitted up and find something for Aren to do below decks. He knows his way round a ship, he’ll be useful.”
“But I want him to have proper passage, and a cabin.”
Francis shook his head. “It’s best if he finds a berth below.”
“He’s my brother. He’ll be travelling with me.”
“Oh, you are going too, are you?”
Kay looked at him, without answering.
After a pause, Francis said, “Do you want to fight the world, or do you want to send Aren back to his people?”
“I can’t send him back alone. I don’t think he’d make it.”
Francis shook his head, agreeing. “Doubt it.”
“He’s not feckless or—or irresponsible, it’s not that.”
Francis seemed surprised. “Of course not! Only he’s sad, and ashamed of himself these days, and it takes a certain gall to get around the world at a young age. Gall like yours.”
Kay decided that he’d meant that to please her, although his flat, expressionless face did not change.
“I had it too,” he said. “A good supply of gall.” He turned to open the cupboard and pulled his strongbox out of the shelf, unlocked it and lifted the papers. “You know where you’re headed?” He counted out bills to a hundred dollars, fit them together, tapped them against the desk to order their edges and then continued: “Pulo Anna, the Sonsorol group, south of Palau . . .”
Kay nodded. She and Aren had found Palau on the globe so often that its name had worn off.
“This will not see you the whole way there,” he said. “But it’s all I’ve got on hand. I’ll arrange a bank draft in Wellington for the same again.”
She began to protest, but Francis raised a hand. “When you run out, wire me, and I’ll arrange your passage home—and Aren’s too, if that’s how it transpires.”
“Must I get a passport for him?”
“He’ll stay on the ship most of the time—the seamen’s book will be enough.”
“That’s good, then.”
She did not know how to ask him not to tell Thea what she planned to do.
He put the bills in a little leather wallet and handed it across the desk. “I’m off to Elm Street for the night,” he said. “Things to do in town in the morning—afraid I won’t have time to discuss this with Thea before I go. But I’ll have a word with Jerry Melanson and he’ll run you in to meet the ten fifteen, if that suits you.”
Kay nodded, and held out her hand. They were formal with each other always, and did not hug or kiss, but his clasp was strong and warm. “Thank you,” she said.
“Give Aren my blessing, if it’s any use to him,” Francis told her. “He has a home here too, whenever we are fortunate enough to see him again.”
——
Kay ran quietly up the attic stairs. Dust motes moved restlessly in the last glimmer of sun through the slanted stomacher windows. Her small steamer trunk—very light, with nothing in it. She could carry it down easily, and she could ask Jerry Melanson to take it to the wagon for her once it was packed.
There on a shelf was her mother’s old valise. She put her hand through its black bone handle, felt again the clasp of a hand, like her mo
ther’s hand holding hers. It was small—she opened the trunk and put the valise inside. It would do to hold her books.
She packed her dinner dress and two lawn dresses, white and grey-striped, and a blue serge smock, and then went to the closet and shook out the fawn linen. It had hung itself dry into an almost unwrinkled state. That went in too. She could wear her brown twill for the train. Two cotton nightdresses, underclothes, cotton hose. She packed her silk stockings and took them out again. Then she packed them again. Before they got there, all that way across the world, she might need silk stockings somewhere. But very little else. The small green pocket Odyssey Mr. Brimner had given her, her notebook, two books to read on the long way over (Middlemarch, good and long, and Penny Plain for light relief); her sponge bag, with her sponge from Eleuthera and a bar of the rose soap Thea had bought last year in Paris. Who knew when she would have good French soap again. The silver cup from Dawlish was on the dresser, and she added it.
Her blue linen coat and skirt, in case there was church, and two pairs of shoes—there. Three of the trunk’s fitted drawers were empty. Never mind—if the trunk was lighter, Jerry would not make noise carting it down the kitchen stairs. She went down that way to see if he was still in the kitchen. He was not, and nor was Lena Hubbard, thank goodness. Seeing smoke rising on the back step from his pipe, she stepped out and asked Jerry to help her in a while. No need to ask him not to tell; he never spoke unless spoken to, and only would answer a direct question with yes or no.
Back in her room, she remembered her toothbrush, the nice red one she’d bought at Filene’s in Boston, and added it to her sponge bag. Then, meaning to find Thea, but not to say goodbye, she opened the door again—and there was Roddy, standing in his pyjamas, his hair an upright shock. He saw the packed trunk, not yet closed.
“Are you going away?” he asked, quiet in the evening hall.
“Yes,” she said. She would not lie outright.
He stood thinking. “With Aren too?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I can’t tell Thea.”
He shook his head.
The Voyage of the Morning Light Page 27