13
A Cough
They celebrated Christmas in Singapore: an unseasonable feast. Singapore was hot as Hades, Kay said to herself, as Mr. Brimner was not there to understand her—Thea would rebuke her for using that word. To go with Aunty Bob’s plum pudding (kept wrapped up since Yarmouth), Thea made roast chicken with raisin bread stuffing. The pudding was dense and sticky but satisfied nostalgia in Francis, its prime purpose.
He was fond of Christmas, and delighted in giving presents. On his excursions he had found toys for Aren—ivory tangram puzzles, a travelling set of Chinese checkers, and a climbing-man toy; and for Thea, a treasure: a famille rose platter depicting an emperor’s hunt. She scolded him terrifically for buying it, weeping a little with pleasure, and said she would keep it wrapped in lambswool whenever the ship was not in dock. Although Kay expected a book, Francis gave her a length of creamy silk to be made into a long dress “for parties in New York,” and a pearl pin like a new moon.
Kay knew that pin; it was the one he had bought in Boston many months ago, when he let slip that Thea was going to have a baby. He had never given it to Thea. He must have decided that it was not bad luck to give it to Kay, since she had no need for a child.
The day after Christmas they went out into the country on a train, to give Aren the pleasure of the great machine. They stopped at the Woodlands railway station for luncheon and Francis hired a guide who took them on a long ramble into a forest park, too groomed and tamed to be real jungle. But there were still monkeys in the trees and wild-calling birds, and one had to watch out for lizards. Aren enjoyed the train very much. He could not be persuaded to sit for a moment, preferring to hang his head out the window and watch the landscape rushing past. Francis took him to the engine car to see how the thing was run, and they came back covered with smuts, so filthy that Thea would not kiss them.
But after their excursion to the Woodlands, Aren developed a cold that settled into the lungs, and began coughing in a very distressing fashion. Kay took it from him, and soon they were both bundled in their bunks and subjected to alternating doses from Jiacheng’s and Thea’s medicine cabinets. For a few days fever gripped them. Aren went very quiet and slept most of the time, hot and dry to the touch, his mouth slack.
Kay took it in delirium—she felt herself to be a whale calf descending under the sea, the fever an almost pleasurable sensation of letting go and submerging into another element. She had ferocious dreams, too many and too confusing to think about. One bad night the dreams were all of rows, long rows of naked bodies, pale on dark ground; rows of dead trees in mud. Then of children in rows and rows of cots, of walking through the ward with her hand clenched on the back of Thea’s pinafore. By that, she understood it must be the first tuberculosis epidemic, not the last one.
She woke with tears washing her face, remembering for the first time in a long while Mary’s body hanging from the doorway, and Thea’s frantic efforts to save her, the worst thing Kay had ever seen in her life. Thea lifting, straining, stronger than she really was, to unhook Mary and bring her down onto the white-sheeted bed and labour over her. Annie came and huddled with her at the foot of the bed while Thea pushed a great needle into Mary’s arm or chest—the dream would not let her remember which, but the needle did no good. Thea standing quiet at last, nothing more to be done. The great quiet in the room when it happened, and Annie silent beside her on the floor.
Kay got out of her bunk, crept along the corridor to Aren’s cabin and climbed in beside him. Without waking, he shifted to accommodate her, one arm over her middle. It comforted her to be with him, though the dry heat that radiated from him was strange.
Another plague, from the general filthy conditions in Shanghai harbour: the ship was overrun with rats. Before leaving Singapore, Jiacheng found two cats to hold them down, but both died—he thought from eating too many rats. He would get a better cat at Manila. Kay protested she was afraid to go to sleep at all now, having a dread of one running over her chest. One night two large rats fought inside the piano! Kay shrieked, feeling them writhe over and under her feet, until Mr. Best flew down like an avenging demon and killed them both.
Having heard that cayenne pepper scattered around would keep them away, Thea tried that, but the drafts swept the pepper into the air. It acted on the humans like the very best snuff, and they were all seized with violent sequential sneezing and strangled coughing until she gave up, opened all the skylight vents and damp-dusted the room.
Loading in Manila was very quick, less than a day. Properly baled, sugar and hemp had little tendency to shift, making the organization of the hold less particular than for case oil. Jiacheng went ashore and brought three great ugly mousers to live below decks as a scourge to the rats. He also installed piglets in the big pen: two to eat soon as roast suckling, one to fatten into the new Mr. Dennis.
Then they were off, away from bustling, feverish cities, headed for the open seas again, provisioned for the next long leg, round the Horn and up the right side of the Americas to New York. That evening, Thea allowed Aren and Kay up on deck for an airing. The steamer Egremont Castle passed close by and the men on board waved to them where they lay bundled up in wicker chairs at the rail.
Kay felt sorry for the passengers swarming the deck, who had to travel by steam instead of in the lovely rush of air. She felt a quickening in her midsection, the giddy sense of going forward. A relief to feel it, after all this tedious sickness.
Thea nursed Kay carefully, but was privately more afraid for Aaron. Or Aren, as he and Kay had decided the name should be spelt; Thea saw no point in arguing with them in this fever. Her experience with consumption in Blade Lake had left scars, not on her lungs (she was luckier than poor Mr. Maitland, who died that last hard winter with the children) but on her spirit. She searched for signs of infection in both, although Kay had proved resilient in the old days, but could come to no conclusion. The coughing, which had been hard to bear, tapered off, and when the fever abated, a little colour came back into Aren’s cheeks, but he was listless.
Even Francis was affected by the change in him, saying quietly to Thea after looking in on him one evening, “Such a bright spark just last week! Terrible to see what it’s done to the poor sprogget.”
Aren was flagged out by this fever; but there was no blood in the sputum, and he did not complain of pain. He had enough fluency in English to let her know where it hurt, and he did not hold his chest or show weakness that Thea could see. She relaxed her vigilance, and rather than fearing the worst, as the complaint worked its way through the men below decks, blamed one sailor or another for bringing back a hacking cold from shore leave.
Seeing the children still flat-spirited, Thea decreed a bath day to revive them. Instead of setting up the hip bath in the saloon, she asked Jiacheng and Mr. Best to prepare a barrel bath on deck for Kay to hop into. A good soaking would revive her interior mood as well as cleansing her exterior. Riding the last wake of illness, Kay was ornery, but Thea persisted, and she did at last consent to strip down to her shift and climb into the barrel.
Mr. Best had set the barrel close to the railing, for ease of emptying later, and had hung a jib sail at both sides of the barrel for a modesty drape.
Shucking off her blouse and skirt, Kay stepped up onto the little stool Jiacheng had thoughtfully brought up from the galley, and into the barrel. She shrieked a little, saying too cold! but after a moment allowed it to be refreshing. Relaxing, she turned this way and that so her shift ballooned in the water and made pleasing patterns. Enjoying the coolness, she let Thea scrub her back and give her hair a good wash, with more water from a jug to rinse it. Wanting vinegar for the last rinse, Thea went to the companionway to call down to Jiacheng.
She looked back to see Kay standing with eyes closed, dripping but content, dreamy in the pleasure of coolness, and close by, up on the railing, Aren. What did he hold—
He was inching along the rail, one hand above in the ropes to steady himself and one arm and hand wrapped around a wriggling little— Oh dear. He had one of the piglets.
He had almost reached her now…Kay was turning, she would see. But her eyes were closed. Ought she to have some warning?
Francis, behind Thea with his Brownie camera, put his hand gently across her mouth in case she might call out. She could feel him behind her, shaking with silent laughter as Aren crept along, somehow keeping the piglet quiet, until ploop! into the barrel went the pig.
The squealing was enough to raise the dead from the bottom of the sea.
Kay lifted off, a shrieking seabird rising from the wave, three-quarters out of the bath before the piglet touched bottom and scrabbled its way back up.
And all the time Francis was clicking and forwarding the film, as well as he could for guffawing. Men were such children!
The sailors watching from behind the jib screen laughed—Arthur Wetmore, Jacky Judge and Mr. Best, even sober Mr. Wright—and Francis louder than anyone, and Thea could not help but join them, hoping Kay would not take one of her fits of umbrage.
Now she was up on the barrel’s edge and out of it, still shouting, shift plastered around her—crying “What? What?” like a banshee, and now she turned to stare into the barrel, where Aren was laughing so much he almost fell overboard, and Jiacheng leapt in to haul the piglet back out of the water before it drowned.
“You!” Kay shouted at Aren. “You! What?”—as if she had lost the gift of language.
“You!” he cried back. “You you you you! You, pig, surprise! I surprise you!”
Thea rushed forward with a towel to put round her, and held her tight, still laughing, until Kay could laugh too, and put out a hand to tickle the poor little pig, the replacement for Mr. Dennis.
“I’ll make sausage out of you,” Kay swore, but in good humour again she lunged to grab Aren’s ankle and dump him into the barrel in turn. Then they were all wet, and the barrel fell over, of course, and everyone on deck got well splashed, even Francis, before Jiacheng caught the pig and carried it off to restore it to its siblings in the peaceful pen.
A little slice of piglet hoof made a moon-shaped scar on Kay’s arm. After it healed over, she liked the pirate look of it.