Debatable Land

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘Welcome to this evening’s typical Tongan feast. Be seated on the carved chairs and tables. My dear wife has earlier prepared the umu, the oven underground, where it is so large you can fit in one man.’ No one knew whether to laugh, except Logan, who did.

  The host looked gratified. Cannibalism was good for tourists. ‘I will come round to collect expenses of luxurious meal to come. Meanwhile I introduce my daughters.’

  Two noble-headed girls with poised bearing came forward with wooden trays on which toothpicks impaled pieces of pineapple and more oddly various cheese snacks that could have been lifted with the fingers. It appeared that the appetisers had been gingered up to look primitive, with a stick through the nose.

  Coconut shells of kava were passed round. In the flickering light of a pitch torch its colour was invisible, its hot smell and burning taste nothing to its effect as the flames shuffled the faces of the four Tongans and their nine guests. A battery-operated cassette player was turned on. A girl’s voice came out of it, telling the story of the life of Brigham Young.

  One of the Tongan girls seemed choked by the smoke burping gently from the umu.

  The host did some stately dancing, breaking off to sip kava, then later lemonade. The smoke continued to creep among those assembled.

  At last the host clapped his hands. The guests stopped conversing among themselves about the mildness of the night, the atmosphere of the site (which was not to be seen), and what sort of insect-repellent is best.

  ‘A few words,’ said the host, holding out a number of perfect sleeping crisp orange pigs on a stick and starting to carve them in straight lines like loaves without respect for their anatomy. ‘This feast I hold each Saturday and I am proud to. The voice you heard on the cassette player was the voice of my youngest daughter, who perished earlier today at the age of seven after much affliction.’ All the time he spoke he had a smile of great exaltation on his face, and when he finished speaking he clapped. There was nothing for it but to clap too. The handsome daughters hit the tears off their cheeks as if they were mosquitoes. It was impossible to know whether the family were continuing in this way through necessity or custom. The inhibition that lies upon strangers lay thicker than it had before.

  ‘No doubt,’ said Logan, ‘you were a splendid father to her. I am sure that your wife, who has shown such skill and charm this evening, was a wonderful mother.’ Empty words were needed, and Logan had them. He put his arm tenderly around Gabriel, in a paternal way, so strong had his fellow feeling at once become for this wretched bereaved man.

  Fortified by the touch of the female child, he went on: ‘We were uplifted to hear her sweet voice telling the story of the founder of your fine faith.’ God, he has his wits about him, thought Alec, it’s crude rubbish but it is potent and it is what’s needed. The man has a freedom from timidity that makes leaders of coups. He was moved by Logan’s finely spoken, sonorous, trite words as they came. The sisters of the dead child gave up holding off the tears they wept as they handed round the sliced piglets, as they dispensed bottled sauerkraut on the end of long forks, as they collected beer cans and kava shells from the turf where they had laid the finely figured tapa cloth to be admired in the light of the pitch by which little could be seen but the depths of sad dark eyes and the sleeping orange slick chopped-off faces of the suckling pigs.

  ‘It was more than our money’s worth, at any rate,’ said Logan as they passed over the water of the harbour to the boat, where Nick was sitting up in the fo’c’sle listening to the water and the sky.

  Chapter 9

  In the high trees over the road hung umbrellas stuffed with red fur. These stirred occasionally, and put out a tentative hand, like an old lady feeling in her reticule for an indigestion mint. Here were the flying foxes of Tonga by day, huge russet furred bats comatose but reassuringly alive in counterpoint to the low-lying churches of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, tidy bungalows so numerous it was on this island as though prayer might have to be succumbed to at any time and had to take place in one of these facilities rather than in the open air, at will. The number of such facilities suggested that the prayer-bladders of the people of the Kingdom of Tonga were weak.

  Having settled into the life around the harbour after six days at anchor just outside it, Alec and Gabriel, Logan and Elspeth had bicycled to another shore of the main island of the archipelago, away from Nuku’alofa. On their bicycles they overtook cars, which ambled along beneath their hefty drivers. The often moulting girdles of woven palm around the waists of the Tongans did not have the effect of making them look clumsy; being constrained to walk at a dignified pace suited their bulk. They were held back from trivial jerky movements by the matting.

  ‘Perhaps we Scots would be easier to rule if the kilt was rigid,’ said Alec, to Logan. Logan smiled at him without focusing. If he heard a metaphor or a joke in a sentence, he could not always be bothered to fillet out its meaning. He did not think a man should speak in a whimsical way.

  ‘It’s like making the population walk about each with a book on their head,’ said Elspeth.

  ‘Monarchy supported by deportment.’ Alec caught her meaning.

  They were passing a cluster of long huts that were open on three sides and roofed in palm fibre. On the floor of the huts women sat beating palm into tapa cloths. Out of the dusty capital, there were Methodist Churches, Free Wesleyan Churches and the churches of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, more churches than there were family houses it seemed. Children in groups, usually conventionally dressed in grey shorts, white shirts, check dresses full in the skirt, came up to look as the four passed. The children were big, with adult legs and already the stately adult walk, though their matting belts were not as wide as the adults’.

  In the heat of the day, as the shadows of the fruit bats filled trees black at their boles, they saw a sign that said, ‘Tongan specials and blow holes’. There was a compound like the children’s zoo for farm animals found in large zoos. Smartly painted white palings were stuck into dryish earth around a collection of huts painted in saltworn versions of cheerful colours.

  This melancholy shanty prettiness was emphasised by the presence of two white kids tethered to a post. One cleared its throat; the other contradicted it with narrowed yellow eyes. There was a hook-and-eye gate into the compound. Logan opened it and looked around. He saw no one awaiting him and was at a loss till he thought out the next move.

  ‘Anyone here?’ called Elspeth. She would have been happy for there not to have been, but a man came towards them from one of the larger huts.

  ‘Australian, American, German? We do vegetarian specials from each country. We know what you like.’

  ‘British, in fact,’ said Logan.

  Elspeth went off abruptly to scratch the kids, if they would let her. The geographical certainties in her husband’s voice made her squeamish. ‘Other peoples like to know where they stand,’ he said to her.

  ‘Do other people?’ she asked, annoying him without trying to.

  ‘We do a good mashed potato with chips and rice.’

  ‘It’s more the blow holes we’ve come for, though food would be a bonus.’ The other annoying thing was that Logan did always get through to people he spoke to in this way. ‘I was thinking of seafood. That is the sea down there?’ It was about twenty yards away, beyond what looked like a ha-ha at the edge of the coarse grass. Alec saw a splash of foam once, and once a jet of spray. Someone must be playing by the water.

  Lower down the dusty slope of the compound, tables with clipped-on oilcloths stood under an awning that was decked with pearl bulbs like pickled onions on strings. A serving station with another awning was to the side. Slapping and puffing sounds, loud as from walrus, came from the direction of the water, which could be seen now to have a constant edge of mist broken over it.

  ‘Select from booth the seafood. Under Australian vegetarian.’ Heaps of newly boiled prawns and langoustines steamed on enamel trays. American vegetarian, bundles o
f franks, curled in the heat alongside.

  ‘There are no cats. You’d expect cats, with this smell,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘They’re German vegetarian,’ said Logan.

  Gabriel recoiled excitedly.

  Elspeth had rejoined them by now where they sat at a table with beer and Saltines.

  ‘Snacks travel by faster airlines than people,’ she said.

  ‘Have you heard of a concession?’ said Logan.

  ‘I’ve heard of concession.’

  ‘There you are. Gabriel, forepaw for you, or tail?’

  Gabriel looked as shocked as she had the first time. She was good company; you saw a fine picture of yourself in her.

  Alec thought of the note he had seen on one of the Charts of the Pacific: ‘Caution is necessary when navigating among the low, reefy islands of the Pacific Ocean. The several details have been collected from the voyages of various navigators, extending over a long series of years; the relative positions of the many dangers may therefore not in all cases be exactly given; while it is possible there may be others still undiscovered.’

  How could they come to know a place at all by arriving at roughly the speed of handwriting and staying for enough time to leave with three tall tales and a seashell? He had met an old Englishman at one of the many milk bars on Tonga, who said, ‘I’ve not been home for fifty-six years and I’ve travelled all among these islands of Tonga, but I have more idea of England, which is a foreign country to me, than I do of here. I know the facts: small kingdom; intermarried nobles; remarkable girth of inhabitants; uncountable archipelago; regrettable fondness for starch and soft drinks; bisected by international dateline; touch of cannibalism surely atoned for by enthusiasm of converts to the American Way. But all that adds up to something quite different from the genial place that lies about me. All I can do is like it. And keep on noticing what it is actually like.’ He snapped his nose into a spotted handkerchief and wiped at it to keep up the shine. He wore a blazer and had feet of leather, bare hard feet and ankles that shone like boots. ‘At eleven I generally have my banana milk,’ he lifted the heavy beige glass, ‘and then walk down to see what’s going forward at the Palace. Put these on for that.’ He pulled out some chappals from a shoebag labelled ‘shoes’ and sewn with a nametape. ‘Otherwise it’s barefoot. I go barefoot, barefoot. Feet like omelettes. It’s perfect agony in shoes.’ Alec had been no good to this man who liked a few words with each visitor to Tonga, rather more words if they knew the South of England, and perhaps a few more if they followed the fate of the pine marten, whose scarcity, he said, had driven him from the place.

  ‘The last man who remembers seeing one of those before him on a branch of Douglas Fir. That’s me. It was a nicer relation of the mink, I seem to think. I’ll have another, but half only, thanks, that’s all I imbibe till sunset.’

  Also in that milkbar Alec and Elspeth together had met a dandy of over seventy who should have been in Capri, not in Tonga. His monocle and connoisseurial complexion, the thin cane set with a band of chipped nacre at the top, his unrealistic gait and astounded eyebrows were all signals it was doubtful many of the people to whom he spoke were attuned to. He bore out the theory that scientific discoveries or philosophical movements are transmitted through space by some telepathic means, often occurring almost simultaneously in different places. He had created for himself an idiom that was just expiring in Europe, but he had done it alone and having started out as the son of a medical missionary in the Cook Islands. The trait he seemed to have failed to evolve was predatoriness, so it was not likely that he would perpetuate his species by the grimy waters of Nuku’alofa. When Alec watched him watching the tough, good-looking yachties, he saw a taper unlit, a passion less vehement than the other man showed for the pine marten.

  ‘We’ve done this lot justice,’ Logan looked at the plates of claws and whiskers, ‘even if it wasn’t cat.’

  ‘The prawns were perfectly OK, Logan,’ said Elspeth. ‘I’m off. Come on, Gabriel.’

  Alec looked at Logan to see how he reacted to this. He did not. Women had things to speak of that frankly did not interest him.

  ‘I thought we might take a rougher road home, you and I, Alec, later,’ he said. Alec was reminded of the safe and the wrapped morphine. There might be no menace to the man, but his methods relied on one not knowing this for certain.

  Alec heard Elspeth yell and he ran to find her down the drop from grass on to rocks. What had Gabriel said to her? He knew how the words of the innocent can hurt, the innocent and stupid much more.

  Elspeth and Gabriel stood together on a table of rock that was the start only of great grey-blue steps and landings of rock arranged with a rounded stacked precision like old silver plates made ready in a burial chamber. Vaults in the rock below them boomed and from below also came the walrus-slapping of hard waves breasting the giving rock. The water was forced up through holes it had worn like a drill through the rock by persistence and repetition, each abrasion painless, the effect of a million of them a perfect bore-hole through solid rock, through which water shot in jets straight up like poplars. The jets did not have the Italian water engineer’s timing that the great renaissance gardens use to shock and thrill, but they showed the power and beauty of water, the invasive neutrality that makes it desirable to us, and fearful. These forcing jets standing for a moment forty feet in the air then falling back over stones shaped by themselves were only extreme examples of water finding its own level.

  The jets rose and fell in no order. So artificial or so divinely inspired did their display seem that it was not possible to believe they fell without reason. Alec stood on the furthest stepping stone he could reach so as to see as many jets as possible at once, to crack their system. When two shot from the rocks close together, they gave each other rainbows.

  The rock throbbed from below. When the waves receded, the stones minutely settled. On the wave’s returning throw, the tall pipes of water, white all through with the force of the shoving green water from below, stood for that moment in the air, and subsided. Their logic was the logic of the waves, forced through rock.

  Elspeth’s teeth were chattering and she was grinning as if embalmed. Dazzled by what she saw, she was rooted by the thrumming through the rock that she associated with terror and the depths of human pain. Inside and under the rock, packed tighter by each advancing wave, and then thrown to charnel by the swilling recessional of the water, she saw bodies of souls lying in the earth on this island, only one island in an archipelago, that archipelago only one in an ocean full of islands.

  ‘I love this throbbing,’ said Gabriel. ‘It’s like the start of something coming closer.’

  I might even welcome disaster, thought Elspeth, looking at Gabriel and finding it hard to fix upon her, so small and benign did she seem among the piled rocks with the rooves of coloured beach huts behind; perhaps disaster breeds certainty. I am not sure I believe in certainty, but perhaps I should try it.

  ‘This is a sight worth sailing all these miles for,’ said Logan.

  Alec looked at him. A man that unironic would be valuable in war.

  ‘It’s like fountains,’ said Gabriel. She was so free, thought Alec, of having to find the word or the line, exactly to represent something. She saw, and responded. Her words were almost always a weakening of her response. In his painting he tried to show the response with no interval of transition, and it was impossible. Why not give up and be innocent like Gabriel, who likened this inhuman force of water to things men made to adorn parks, those humane places.

  She is an intact personality, intact, thought Elspeth. How can I compare? He wants a new thing to break. I thought we could be like many people who are happy, both broken, but he does not care for that. I sent my heart to him like a falcon but it came back with air in its talons and now it is starving.

  ‘Just like a fountain,’ said Logan. ‘How stupid we are not to have seen that.’

  The bicycle ride for Elspeth and Gabriel was as it had
been earlier in the day. They rode side by side, unless a vehicle approached, in which case it was Gabriel who hung back, and Elspeth who, as a mother would, took the lead.

  In fact I feel maternal towards Gabriel. It is not only her age but the risk she is running that make me want to protect her. It cannot be unknown in a wife to feel protective to the woman who is trying out her husband. She may even be afraid of me. Why do I not fight against what is happening? Do I want it to happen? Or do I feel that I cannot stop it and might as well fight some neutral natural force as enter battle with Logan?

  What Logan and I can never lose is having been married. It is like cigars in curtains, you can’t air it out; when a new cigar is lit, the old ones are resurrected in the room, their scent shaking out of the cloth to join the newly burning leaves.

  ‘Did you meet Logan on a boat?’ asked Gabriel, anxious to talk about what she thought about, and being as subtle as she could. She did not say ‘too’. Only with a girl as young as this could such a circumstance be so drastic, so perilous to a marriage. A man taking up a girl so innocent had to protect her.

  ‘I met him on a bit of land so small it might have been a boat. We met on an island. In Scotland.’

  ‘Oh, Scotland.’ People speak of places they love in a way that suggests that here is a subject for resting on. Gabriel did not speak like that.

  ‘It is the great thing we share.’ I am a fool, thought Elspeth, I have told her the truth.

  The road curved past three trees full of flying foxes. They made noises like children getting ready to flit, rustlings as of wrappers and subdued squeaks. The trees leaned together to form a triangle beneath which had been placed a sturdy bench, made for the support of solid bodies. A massive couple sat on it. They were young, their hands were linked, but their bulk denied their youth, bestowing on them qualities more permanent than slippery beauty and enchantment; they seemed welded, married, made moral by their bulk, not light of love, in a world where there was no longer the time to give yourself for life to another person.