I hardly know why I always thought of her as the ginger-lily girl, except that it might have been because the flowers and flower-buds of the ginger-lily make big strenuous plaits in their thick stems exactly like the long coarse plaits of her hair.
Her feet were enormous, with the polished dark underskin and massive breadth that comes of never wearing shoes. Her legs were of even thickness all the way up, shining and equally massive, like stilts of golden mahogany. Her pareu, like those of all other Tahitian girls, was red and white, with a brilliant fresh design of pineapples repeated all over it, but in her case it seemed to cover the body of a mare. Her hands seemed even larger than her feet: great golden-brown scoops which she seemed to use mostly for plaiting and tugging at the two vast blue-black coils of her hair, which in turn reached well below the huge round hips and thighs. The top of the pareu wound itself across her body beneath the arm-pits, making it really seem as if she carried two enormous solid pineapples underneath it, leaving the broad golden shoulders naked.
The face that went with all this had dull smoky brown eyes that had the slightest cast in them. The nose was flattened. It squared off, more like a snout, with two wide deep nostrils that looked like the tops of a twin-necked bottle without its corks. The brow was so low that her hair, parted in the middle and swept away, gave it a depressed and triangular look, the base of the triangle being the single charcoal line of her brows.
At some time or other the mouth, with its thick lips heavily curled and pouching, appeared to have received a blow from something swung with great force: the spar of a fishing-boat perhaps, but more likely the shell of a coconut or a stick of sugar-cane. The wound, badly stitched or probably not even stitched at all, had healed in a scar that stretched half way to the cheek, looking like the red lace-holes of a shoe. She might just as well, in fact, have been born with a hare-lip, except that even that would have been kinder and less fearsome than a scar that gave her face the appearance of being perpetually stiffened in a sneer.
Every morning, when she brought us breakfast on the terrace facing the long lagoon, across which the mountains of the island of Moorea rose like brown-green chimney stacks, she always wore a flower in her hair: generally a large single hibiscus of pure yellow fixed flat to the side of her head, so that the long central stamen stuck out like a snake tongue.
Even the fresh wide flower did nothing to lessen her ugliness. She was extraordinarily clumsy too. She set down cups and saucers with a crash, as if they were iron pots. She let bread slip from plates to the floor. Morning after morning she forgot the milk, the sugar or the coffee and had to stamp away to the kitchens, rolling her wide cart-horse hips, to fetch them, and even then, sometimes, forgot them altogether.
‘Do you notice,’ my wife said, ‘how she never looks at you? She’s always looking out to sea.’
‘She reminds me of someone.’
‘I can’t think who,’ my wife said. ‘She’s so ugly I can’t even look at her for more than a second or two together.’
‘She reminds me,’ I said, ‘of the women in Gauguin’s Nevermore.’
One morning there was something rather different about her. She seemed less clumsy; she seemed almost light and gay. It was only after she had forgotten the coffee twice and then had brought it cold that I realised what it was.
It was the flower in her hair. Instead of the customary big yellow hibiscus she was wearing a cluster of small soft mauve orchids bunched tightly together to give the appearance of a single wheel of flower.
This flower gave her a curious touch of enchantment. With her scar hidden from me I thought she looked quite handsome as she stood for a moment staring out to sea. Between the terrace and the sky-line the great waves beating on reef made a perpetual leaping snow-drift in the sun. Inside the reef the sea was glittering, low and calm.
‘Today,’ she said, ‘the flying-boat comes.’
In Tahiti the coming of the flying-boat, once a fortnight, was like the advent of an eclipse of the sun. Everybody had to go down to see it, just in case it never happened again in their life-time.
‘I think I have a friend on the flying-boat today,’ she said.
There was nothing very surprising in her saying this. In Tahiti everybody thinks, or hopes, that there will be a friend in the flying-boat. In consequence the quayside is always a mass of shouting, laughing, waving figures, brilliant with waiting leis of flower.
‘Did your friend,’ I said to her next morning, ‘arrive on the flying-boat?’
Once again she stood gazing out to sea.
‘Not this time.’
In her hair she was wearing her ordinary yellow hibiscus. Once again she looked coarse and heavy, her eyes depressive under the low dark brows. The slight effect of enchantment given by the little orchid of the previous day had vanished. The boot-lace of her scar was raw.
‘Perhaps next time,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he is sure to come next time.’
She stared for a time at the calmer reaches inside the reef, where a few wading fishermen with spears were wandering in shallow water.
‘I am going to be married,’ she said. On the whole her English was correct, formal and rather good. But sometimes, and it seemed to indicate, I thought, a touch of shyness, she would add a word in French or two. ‘Bientôt.’
‘That’s very nice,’ I said. ‘A man from here? From Papeete?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘From New York. I shall be married in New York. Un pilote. He flies the plane from San Francisco.’
Before I had time to check myself I said:
‘But there’s no plane that comes here from San Francisco.’
‘C’est vrai. C’est ça,’ she said. ‘But he is changing soon to the flying-boats. He likes the flying-boats. He used to be with them.’
The flying-boat runs from Tahiti to Samoa, and then from Samoa to Aitutaki, with its great lagoon, and then on to Fiji, from which New York is still seven thousand miles away. I did not say anything and once more she stood like a big contemplative beast of burden, staring seaward against the sun.
‘Do you like New York?’ she said.
‘It is a remarkable city.’
‘Do you think I shall like it?’
‘Most people like it.’
With her big sombre hands she started pulling at the blue-black ropes of her hair, twisting them against her hips. Then she turned to me and smiled. She did not smile so often, I thought, as other Tahitian girls and when she did so the scar across her cheek gave her mouth a touch of stiff and mocking sadness.
‘Will you fly back to San Francisco?’ she said.
Yes, I said, we should fly back to San Francisco.
‘Would you mind if I asked you to do something for me?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
‘Perhaps you could take a letter for me as far as Nandi,’ she said.
I said I would be glad to take the letter and for a second time she smiled.
‘You might even be able to give it to him there. You might even do that,’ she said. ‘Oui? C’est possible?’
‘It’s possible,’ I said. ‘It’s possible we might even fly with him. What is his name?’
Far out on the reef a wave hit the coral barrier with explosive thunder and across the inner shallow waters a man raised a spear.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but his other name?’
Once again she contemplated the sea, the reef and the distant smouldering peaks with the eyes of a beast of burden, her hands twisting at her hair.
‘Everyone calls him John.’
‘It would be easier if I knew his other name.’
‘It would be easier,’ she said. ‘But if you ask for John everyone will know. Vraiment. Anyone will know.’
When we departed, a fortnight later, there were many leis about our necks, as there always are in Tahiti. A too heavy, sick-sweet scent of frangipani, jasmine and tiare filled the air. The quayside was brilliant with garlands of crimson, purple, flame and pure white flower.
At the last moment she arrived with a little couronne of soft mauve orchids for my wife, and for myself a lei of smallest pink hibiscus blooms.
‘Do you still wish me to take the letter?’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Non, merci. Pas maintenant. I did not finish it. There was so much to say.’
Just before we embarked we threw our flowers into the water. They floated about the lagoon like pretty, empty abandoned birds’ nests from which the young have flown. On the quayside there was a great deal of shouting, tears, waving of hands and laughter.
The girl I called the ginger-lily girl waved her hands too. And once she raised her big, golden, ugly hands to her face and blew us, with tender clumsiness, a kiss from her scar.