Chapter 21

THE AMANUENSIS

From the upstairs verandah she catches the words tossed up by her brother in the garden, as if in a game of ball. She knows she is fine as long as she does not pause with them, to own them, before passing them on to her stepfather inside.

Each day the words are more or less the same, announcing the same information, but today they carry with them an added weight, as if knowledge has somehow calcified them. They are little rocks, these words today.

‘He says the painter has arrived.’

She says it with the swiftness of her step, which carries her from the verandah railing to the pale green interior of her stepfather’s study. From her mother, who swept up their little lives in a suitcase, she has learnt that the confidence of movement disguises any undercarriage of fear or uncertainty. She is her mother’s daughter. Even the dark rings around her eyes seem to be cast from the same shadow.

‘He will wait for you in the smoking room.’

She tries to reconcile her impressions of the painter with the man she saw yesterday in the photograph. Until now he has been a fumbling figure of fun, charcoal-smudged, of whom her stepfather has fashioned a limerick:

Did ever mortal man hear tell of sae singular a ferlie,

As the coming to Apia here of the painter, Mr Nerli …

A painter of portraits, but in his gait more like a dancing bear. A man of bowing, dipping graces, forever advancing and retreating. With hat-squashed hair and large clownish eyes, lips the colour of pomegranates. But who was it who said that no Italian is in himself entirely harmless?

It was the previous afternoon she encountered her brother on the mountain road. She had been sent down to the market to buy yet more reams of paper to absorb Tusitala’s outpouring of words; her brother was returning from John Davis’s photography studio in town. His blond-haired hands carried a satchel of freshly developed plates and it took but a casual remark from her to coax a viewing of the photographs. Under the nodding heads of the taro leaves they had looked through the prints, still stained and smelling of chemicals.

They did not speak, only swallowed. He had withheld the picture in question until last, calmly convinced she would know what to do with it, that she would carry the knowledge it contained along with her fingertips, that she alone could make sense of its tangled truth. It was Sosimo who had nicknamed her Teuila, a dissembler of beautiful lies, a weaver of words, so enamoured was she with the elaboration of her stepfather’s stories. Though as Tusitala’s amanuensis, surely she was more a trader of truth.

The photograph curled up at its corners. Perhaps the chemicals had overcompensated for the immodesty of the image, blanching it, as if seeking to erase Mary’s freckles from the enveloping expanses of skin. Unmistakable, however, was the painter’s pointy black beard emerging from this shipwreck of limbs.

‘So how long have you known?’ she asked her brother, suggesting the photograph was but a pictureless vessel for the knowledge it contained.

‘Just this past month. Of course, there is no question the portrait must continue, but what is to become of the girl?’ He spoke with the utmost seriousness, like one of the boys from their stepfather’s books.

She looked at her brother, his head nodding earnestly along with the taro leaves, and thought of Mary. Normally her long carroty hair was pulled back from a forehead that contained not intelligence so much as an intuitive otherworldliness. But here in the picture it fell across her face, with only an ear emerging, as perfectly formed as a shell. The painter’s sleeping head lay next to it, perhaps dreaming of its faraway sound.

It seemed suddenly indecent that such a private moment had been captured by her brother’s camera, snatching this single thread of memory to be left dangling there. And so she grabbed the photograph out of her brother’s hands and, without further word, continued on with her journey down the hill.

She does not need to look at it to know that the photograph is there. Screened from the writer’s eyes, she feels bold enough to touch it inside the pocket of her flowing native dress, patterned in mould, just like her mother’s. She feels the thrill of this little secret she holds in her fingers. It gives her the courage to take the next step, to call her stepfather to account.

‘He says the painter has arrived,’ she says again. ‘He will wait for you in the smoking room.’

She could be speaking in Japanese to her stepfather, immune to her words, who lies supine on his bed dressed in a long blue and white kimono. He stares up at her, his eyes as large as life buoys, even if she, his stepdaughter, is the one in need of saving.

At Grez she had watched him row her mother out onto the lake, her tiny feet balanced on the prow in red espadrilles. How easily it could have been her, alone with him on that gently nodding boat. But, prone to seasickness, she had let her mother go in her place.

Watching from the shore as her mother’s red espadrilles grew fainter, she had suddenly wished that it was her. Not long after, as if emulating her mother’s first marriage, she had been betrothed to a scoundrel – an artist this time, not a prospector, though the ensuing life of single motherhood was just the same: a protracted cry for help.

In being summoned to the Pacific, she had been saved. Her son was now safely dispatched to school in California, his legal guardianship passed along to her stepfather. In so many ways she is beholden to him, this prone figure swimming in silk. But deep down she wonders if she is still the same young woman at Grez, watching stricken from the shore.

His face turns to her, as if coming up for air. Through the mosquito netting his lips seem to be scribbling but no words spill out.

As long as she keeps circling the bed with her notebook and pen, ready to catch the stories, she will be fine. She thinks of her mother lying motionless in her bedroom next door, her spirit rotting like the camisoles in her camphor chest. As long as she keeps moving, this fear won’t fester.

The call from her brother had caught them midstream. Her stepfather had been dictating a new passage of the story that had gripped them all these past few months – about the trader Wiltshire and his shotgun bride Uma on the beach at Falesá, and how superstition swept down from the forest like contagion looking for a host. ‘Devil-Work’, the chapter was called.

In writing them down, in their precise rhythm and flow, she wondered if words could have this effect, disseminating the very fear of their telling. If he was Tusitala, the teller of tales, then she was Teuila, the flower of their telling.

So she thought as she watched and waited for his mouth to release these words to float across the room to her. It was her duty to catch them before they dematerialised, snatching their meaning and shape before the breeze from the harbour swept them away.

This morning he was summoning the sound of a spirit from the forest:

It rose, and swelled, and died away, and swelled again; and now I thought it was like some one weeping, only prettier; and now I thought it was like harps; and there was one thing I made sure of, it was a sight too sweet to be wholesome in a place like that.

She had become mesmerised by the music of the words, as if they had been released from his lips by a flageolet, and then queasy at the thought that they were seeding within her, grafting onto her soul.

Committing the words to paper, she wondered if the tapu that had been cast on Wiltshire and Uma in his story had somehow shifted through the air to settle on Vailima. Is this what paralysed them in their beds, rotting their camisoles, bringing mould to their boots? And as the medium of the story, she wondered, was she now the source of the contagion, colouring his words, taking possession of them?

Behind the mosquito netting her stepfather is already beginning to stir. He reaches for his pyjamas, the gauze turning his flesh into tiny pinpricks of pink.

‘Where is Mary?’ he suddenly asks.

Once again she can feel the photograph in her fingers, its corners curling like a question.

‘Mary?’ She thinks of the strange fecundity of the forest, how growing near the mountain pool in the photograph are the tree African violets, with dainty white flowers and monstrous leaves. She thinks of the natural corset shape of Mary’s tiny waist and how in a month or more it might begin to show, ripening slowly like breadfruit – something to fasten their fears onto, ‘devil-work’, the painter’s child. Something easily banished from here, on board the Lübeck, to be sent back to Sydney from whence she came.

‘Mary is unwell,’ she says.

In Sydney they had coined a verb for what she had been noisily conjugating in the bathroom downstairs: to chunder.

‘Perhaps Mother has a cure,’ he notes wryly, motioning to her white widow’s cap taking flight on the balcony outside.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he is already beginning to assemble himself for the portrait downstairs. He starts first with the yellow knitted socks his mother had presented on her return from Edinburgh. Pulling them up to his knees he stands before his stepdaughter, half man, half giraffe.

She turns her back to his dressing and begins to walk towards the desk at the far end of the room, passing the widow outside as she goes.

Quickly she must catch his words and pass them on.

‘Brother says there has been a sighting of an aitu,’ she says matter-of-factly, so as not to disturb the toilette of her stepfather behind her.

She is now eye to eye with the Buddha that rests dolefully on his desk, commanding calm. As if in defiance, she looks up – first to the hulking shape of the mountain through the windows, then down across his spilling papers, a waterfall of words.

‘The aitu was heard singing by the mountain pool.’

This hardly raises a murmur from her stepfather, and so she leaves the photograph on the desk, casually dropped by the blotter, as if the wind or a stream had carried it there.