Читать книгу Three Views of Crystal Water - Katherine Govier - Страница 4

So this is how it began.

Vera, bereaved, a slip of a girl, stood in a slanting rainfall on the quay. The year was 1934 and she was thirteen. It was a romantic moment in what she hoped would be a romantic life. This little girl, who was me, but has now become, with the perspective of twenty-five years, a stranger called Vera, was waiting for her grandfather. She had loved him for her whole life, a love renewed on his infrequent stops from the sea to dry land, and now she would be his. He was an elusive man, James Lowinger, the pearl merchant, a wild, imposing man whose portrait, a painting of a white-whiskered Poseidon braced against the mast in a tearing wind, dominated the parlour Vera shared with her mother, Belle. But he was coming home.

The Empress of Japan slid into its berth, high-bowed and with attendant pomp. With a great rumble and sigh the engines stopped, and the porters began to run up the long ramps pulling their wheeled carts. The passengers leaning over the rails waved to loved ones below and then began to walk unsteadily down the hypotenuse to terra firma.

No waves for Vera.

On she stood in the cold, under her umbrella. She looked and looked, clutching her skirt with her free hand, waiting for the White-Moustached God to make his appearance. At length he did so at the top of the ramp. There he was, just like his portrait, ruddy and bewhiskered. He waved. She looked over her shoulder. To whom was he waving? She looked back. He was waving to her. She was amazed he recognised her. Then he turned his head to speak to the tiny person who stood beside him.

A woman. In a kimono.

Vera was not entirely surprised. Her mother had made reference to James Lowinger’s travelling companions, biting her lip. Her grandfather and the small Japanese woman came down the hypotenuse. Vera didn’t give him a chance to speak first. She stepped forward.

‘Grandfather,’ she said.

‘It is really you, my dear?’

‘Yes it is. It’s Vera.’

He appeared astonished, and delighted. ‘Vera. My darling.’ He opened his arms.

‘Grandfather,’ she said warningly, ‘I have to tell you.’

He opened his arms more widely.

He wasn’t listening. She had to stop him. ‘Grandfather, Mother died.’

He started, but did not lose his composure. The wind-roughened cheeks twitched; neck sinews stood out over his starched collar; hands clutched, probably involuntarily, at his trouser legs in a gesture eerily like her own; the ruddy colour drained from his face.

‘She did what?’ He said this in a thin voice of incredulity.

Vera could see that he wasn’t comprehending. He had trouble with the verb, the ‘action word’, they called it at school. It was throwing him off.

‘She died. She’s dead,’ Vera amended.

The hand went to pull his moustache. ‘I see,’ he said.

He saw, but what did he see? Did he see Vera, child of his child, bereft and soaked to the skin and all but transparent with grief?

Or did he visualise, in that instant when he knew she was gone, his beloved daughter Belle? Did Belle’s shortened life from the moment of her birth inscribe itself in his mind? How he held her in his arms, in Yokohama, when his wife handed the baby over without a word? How he tried, but not hard enough, to keep her with him in Japan? Did he think of the first time he lost the girl to his wife? Or the second to marriage? Or the third to Vancouver, Canada, a beautiful city with a view to the Orient?

Or did his mind trip, as his foot tripped – over the grief struck grandchild, and his dead daughter – and stumble on the wife who’d given them to him? Did he think of Sophia, whom he had replaced with this young, Japanese woman?

Vera did not know. James Lowinger recovered his balance and put his foot down on dry land.

He was not at ease there. His life was water. One bit of land or another was much the same; it was not-sea. The news had caught him at the moment of landing, of crossing over from water to earth. All of his life, crossings had marked him – going from island to boat, from boat to mainland. Ramps and bridges were the same. He tripped, he lost his footing. All went into flux, his language, his understanding, his memory.

The Japanese woman caught his arm.

He turned to her. She stood there not getting a word of it. He was unsteady; her arm was holding him up. He hardly knew this little girl, though he recognised her, could not miss her, with that white hair. She was strangely personable, for a child, and too much like his wife for comfort.

‘This is my granddaughter, Vera,’ he said. ‘Vera,’ he said, ‘this is Miss Tanaka. Keiko.’

Miss Tanaka, Keiko, was younger than Belle. Younger than Belle had been, rather, because now it is clear that Belle was never to grow old. Vera was as much a surprise to Keiko as Keiko was to Vera. A surprise and yet not a surprise: James Lowinger was a man who had secrets. He gave nothing away, until he had to. The day before, carelessly, as land came into view, he had told her: ‘Oh Keiko, by the way. A long time ago I was married in Yokohama. My wife was English. She left me and took our child to England. Belle married a bounder; he’s left her I imagine. She has a child, my granddaughter. I wired them, that we were coming.’

But he hadn’t wired we. Only I.

As her grandfather and Keiko stepped off the gangplank, Vera was conscious of herself as a girl needing to be rescued. She had been brave for long enough. She hoped to let down for a bit. When their feet touched terra firma and she had delivered her news she offered up both arms in her grandfather’s general direction, for an embrace. She made the same undiscriminating gesture to the unknown Japanese woman. Then, turning toward home, she worked her hand into her grandfather’s, the one that was not carrying the valise, and allowed a few tears to fall.

They found a taxi that would carry their trunks and she gave the address of the little house on Ivy Street that had been Belle’s, that still was Belle’s. When they arrived, the three of them climbed slowly out of the cab and the driver helped unload the baggage, very little, really; the rest would come later. They made their way up the narrow pavement. And all the while Vera was taking the measure of this man, who was pretty well her only chance for being looked after in the world.

The main event was his moustache, which was waxed and hence pointed at its extreme ends. Or should we say moustaches? A plural will give more a sense of the presence of this accessory. They started under his nose and stood out thickly over his upper lip. When the lip ended (although you couldn’t see the corner of his lips, but you knew there was one) the moustaches swooped down, then up and curled back upon themselves, spiralling into smaller curls. This stiff upcurl happened well beyond his cheeks and reminded Vera of the things on the ends of the curtain rods that her mother called finials.

The finials were not white, not like his beard, and not like his hair, but rather an orangey brown. Moving inward, from the tip, the moustache hairs were a dried auburn and tobacco colour, then a dark brown turning to slate grey, and finally at the root, white. He’d been young when he grew the curls, she supposed. One day, she supposed, his moustache hair turned white. One particularly tempestuous day on the high seas.

The swag of the moustaches also left to the imagination the shape of her grandfather’s upper lip. It might be a villainous thin, hard lip, or it might be, and she suspected it was, a soft, full, sweet-shaped upper lip. Vera would never know. The face was blustery, and had high red cheekbones. His eyes were a beautiful blue, but one of them had a white cast over it. His chin was long and came to a thoughtful point; there was impishness to the lines around his mouth, which showed they’d been made from smiling. He wasn’t as big as Vera had expected: the chest inside his double-breasted navy jacket must have shrunk since the jacket was purchased, and his long sea legs, that Vera imagined would have bestraddled the deck of the bucking frigates the way a cowboy bestrode a horse, did not seem steady. His knuckles stood up, his fingers were as long as a pianist’s, and they waved, sensing things. But his voice, now that he had regained it after the shock of her announcement, was powerful and commanding. Keiko circled in its gusts trying to go respectfully behind him while he tried to herd her in front as if he needed assurance that she was truly there.

Vera produced her key and opened the door, and her grandfather and Keiko were impressed with her competence. They gave each other a look: see how she manages!

And then they entered the door of the house, and disappeared.

And silence descended. For days.

The neighbours who had helped Vera bury her mother poked their heads out of their doors and conferred over the rhododendrons. The trio had been seen. What could it mean? Was the curious little kimono-clad woman a housekeeper? They watched the house. But for some reason, maybe because the Lowinger-Drews kept strange hours, or maybe because each of the three exited singly and deliberately tried to pass unnoticed, the other inhabitants of Ivy Street rarely caught a glimpse of the girl, her grandfather, or the mistress. Because that was what had been determined: the little woman was more than a servant. At night when the lights were on in the house and the curtains unpulled, the pair had been seen, nuzzling. Kissing over the kitchen sink. It was shocking for such an old man. And such a young woman; hardly more than a child herself, much more like a companion for Vera.

‘Well that’s nice isn’t it?’ said a kinder soul. ‘She needs a playmate.’

‘Of course, you can never tell with Orientals, they don’t seem to age.’

They liked Lowinger and they called him Captain. He walked down the street, and his eye was caught by every dog or squirrel that crossed his path. He chuckled and was entirely lost in the creature, until it was out of sight.

‘He’s very charming.’

‘And there is money.’ He was thought to have accumulated a fortune as a pearl merchant, on top of the one he inherited from his father from the same business. But some doubted the veracity of this. Inquisitive housewives smiled on James Lowinger and opened their mouths to speak, but words failed and they faded behind their front doors. Were they scandalised by this Japanese woman in her kimonos? Or just shy, as shy as Keiko herself? There was little censure spoken in the corner grocery store; James Lowinger excited no real disapproval for his flagrantly irregular life. Perhaps a little envy, was all. If he hadn’t come home with an oriental woman, who took tiny steps because the folds of her kimono draw together at the knee, they’d have been disappointed.

What they didn’t know was that Keiko, despite her demure and inarticulate manner, her lowered eyes, was no timid Japanese mistress. She was an ama, a diving woman.

For a while life changed little on Ivy Street. Vera still walked to school in the mornings, but the housewives did not call out to her, or if they did it was with a kind of pity. It was not only Keiko who was strange but she, Vera, who became strange by her association with the Japanese woman. And the bravery she affected when her mother died stuck to her. She wanted to lay it down but she could not. She still had her friends in the schoolyard. Sometimes after school they all went to buy a soda pop. She was held in a certain awe because of the tragedy of her mother’s death, and its odd denouement. She didn’t talk about it, but one day the minister stepped out of the manse and said: ‘Is Captain Lowinger in town then for a few months? Will he be stopping here, with you?’

Vera said she didn’t know.

In front of her grandfather’s mistress, Vera was polite and excessively well behaved. This nuance was lost on Keiko, as Japanese children are usually well behaved, but Vera meant it as a hostile gesture. It was to show Keiko that she was a guest and not part of their household at all.

There was another change: instead of going home after school, Vera went to her grandfather’s place of business. It was on Homer Street, down by the water. She took the streetcar to Granville, and over the bridge to the Gastown, on the waterfront. Gastown was the oldest part of town, the port, where the old light standards had once been gas lamps. The lights were left on all day, but they were far apart, and small; often the fog and rain made the street very dark. You could smell the kelp and the oil that mingled at the dirty edge of the water.

That November Vera walked through late afternoon gloom in delight. When her mother was alive she was never allowed to come down here alone. There were fish and chip shops and bars. And there were sailors from all over the world, in their white clothes, sometimes their blue clothes, with weathered faces and strange tongues. At any time of day they might spill noisily through the doors of a bar; they might be asleep standing up at a bus stop. They lived on another timetable, they’d crossed the date line, the equator, the Tropics. They’d be looking for sex, her mother had told her. Vera knew not to catch their eyes, never to look at them directly. As she walked quickly down the street they might look at her, but she was too young and too thin to be of interest.

Out of range of roving sailors, Vera slowed to look into the dark entrances of hotels. The sexy women limping in high heels, were in there often. Farther along the street were women who looked tired, handing out tracts about God and Jesus Christ. There were shops selling seashells, plastic flowers and postcards of the Lion’s Gate bridge. There was a hat shop that belonged to her grandfather’s friend. A furrier with buffalo coats, a hardware shop, a shop selling steel-toed work boots and checked shirts. There were jewellers, traders, importers, exporters. And then there was Lowinger and McBean.

Vera had never seen Mr McBean; his only appearance was in the firm’s name. He might be fictitious, a title only, like the ‘Captain’ in James Lowinger. Her grandfather was no sailor, but a trader in gems, pearls in particular. He and his father before him travelled all over the world, hiring luggers and diving men to search for pearls. But the pearls were gone now. The company had bales of fabric and crates of dishes packed in wooden cases, goods, as they were called.

There were a few steps up from the street. There was a door with a top half of frosted glass. She opened this door and right in front of her, so she couldn’t slip past unseen, was a little office with shipping schedules pasted all over the walls, presided over by Miss Hinchcliffe. Hinchcliffe was at all times erect and mannerly, as if her respectability were at issue. Why she was not Mrs Hinchcliffe, Vera did not know. She was certainly old enough to be married, and there was an inviting vigour in her form that was more like the sexy women than the missionaries. Still, she imagined that no man was polite enough to meet Hinchcliffe’s high standards.

‘Hang up your coat! Wipe your shoes! Put that wet umbrella in the hall!’ were her usual first words, followed by, ‘So, we are to be favoured with your presence again today are we?’

‘Hello, Miss Hinchcliffe.’

There were maps on one wall and a black telephone and metal filing cabinets. ‘Captain’ Lowinger’s office was beyond, in a room with a window of pleated glass through which Miss Hinchcliffe could keep an eye on his shadowy form. When Vera opened the door she would see him seated, smiling, behind a perfectly clear desk. There were no piles of paper and no calendars with dates circled, no complex timetables. His wooden desk had a green leather top and he had a lamp with an emerald shade. To one side was a set of brass scales that was used to weigh pearls, and the corn tongs to pick up the gems. There was nothing else except, in the corner on the floor, a typewriter. She could only assume that in this office, unhampered by physical records, Captain Lowinger conjured magical fundamentals that were then subject to mental administration.

The action was all on the walls, which were decorated with woodcut prints on rough yellowed paper. The pictures were of tall women with fleshy faces and chopsticks in their hair. There was a Japanese name for them: ukiyo-e. But Captain James called them his Beauties. His Beauties stood around like a picket fence, to keep out the world. Each one existed on a blank background as if she were completely alone in the world. She might have been a model on a ramp. Each one had a slouch, an over-the-shoulder glance, and dainty hands and feet which appeared as afterthoughts from under great swirls of decorated fabric. Each sumptuous kimono was patterned with mountains and rocky streams, shells and flowers and leaves. Each Beauty’s body cut a figure like one of those giant letters on the first page of an old book, a decorated L or S or F. They were a veritable alphabet of women.

But they were unreadable. They had their backs to the room, and their eyes cast down, thoughts lost in the folds of their wraps. Everything about them was secretive, held in, padded, even their faces, which appeared to have no bones. They were white and soft and disturbed only by the thinnest fine painted lines to suggest eyebrows, nose, cheeks. Only the lips, red and rounded, were defined. But they were closed.

Her grandfather was not always alone amongst his Beauties. When Vera arrived, he might be talking to an urgent man in a blue serge cap who he called Skipper. Or he might be listening to a visitor who took pulls on a pungent-smelling pipe, sending clouds of smoke into the room, behind which the Beauties faded perceptibly. This visitor might be telling a tale, complete with grand gestures and occasional whispers, and sidelong glances through the door to where Miss Hinchcliffe would type with renewed energy. On these occasions Vera would go back to the warehouse and walk up and down the rows of bales of fabric, feeling them with her fingers. Or she’d peer into the fragile crates filled with dry grass and wonder if there were pearls inside. She might look at the life-sized kimono doll and take all her clothing apart. There were little spikes that went into her hair, and tight wrappings around her middle. Her feet had one split instead of toes, dividing the white cotton foot in two, so that it was like a dainty hoof. They’d been specially designed to fit into the thongs of the platform slippers she stood in.

If his visitor were a persistent one, Vera repaired to the big cutting table meant for fabric with its low-hanging light in a metal shade. She was allowed to open certain wooden boxes and take out the prints one by one and look at them.

She stared and stared at the ukiyo-e. The people were so very, very strange. Most of them looked like women, but only a few of them were, according to Vera’s grandfather. Everyone wore a robe, often with a skirt too. The ones with swords were men. The ones with make-up and hair piled in knots and smirky smiles, who looked very much like women, were also men: they were actors who played women’s parts. It was hard to find the real women. But Vera grew skilled at it. They were softer, and smaller, and less obvious about it.

They were usually shown among other women, fixing hair or serving tea. It was peaceful as they went about their lives inside squared timbered rooms. Sometimes they travelled with their companions, poled along in a banana-shaped boat by a man in a loincloth. If the weather was good and the current was with them, the boatman leaned on his pole, lazily. They glided through such scenery! Mountains and hillsides were cut by a slanted path, where trees attended in stylish attitudes, with clumps of branch here and there like soft clouds.

But there were days when rain came down aslant like a torrent of nails. There was snow too. The women were never dressed for it. For one thing they had bare feet, with a thong between their first and second toes, and square sandals like little benches, to prop the foot up high off the ground. The snow fell heavily, loading their pretty, papery umbrellas with inches of white. It covered the slated tile roofs and stayed in a thick layer on the branches and even stopped, mid-fall, in the air, a white dot carved in the print and coloured in. The snowfall was a kind of burial, but the figures were bright and graceful, as if for them to withstand this final curtain was effortless.

The snow in the pictures was so sad, cold and exquisite. The difficulties were borne lightly, gaily, as if everyone knew it would melt tomorrow. As if everyone knew that the tea house was around the next bend. The cherry blossoms would soon be out. The people would be flying their kites, which they did all together, an entire street of people. Or standing on a shore with a picnic basket looking expectantly to a nearby island.

There was snow sometimes in Vancouver, but it rarely stayed more than overnight. Vera’s mother had had the same delighted attitude to snow, an attitude that was also a denial. She could just as easily have said, ‘Let’s go for a walk with our bare-toed shoes and our thin umbrellas and the little white split-toed socks!’ That would have been on her gay days. Other days she was a sleepwalker.

And the pasty faces, the swollen cheeks, the lost features of these women were her mother’s.

But this was a thought Vera did not like to have, and she pushed it away.

The devils – or men – in the ukiyo-e world simpered and hunched their shoulders and curled their toes. Their eyes were black marbles in wild open Os. They had huge dog faces with curled-back snarling lips and mad, crossed eyes, and eyebrows that make an angry V in the middle of their foreheads. Their hair was tied up in knots on the top of their head, and they often had a rope over one shoulder. One had a blue bow at his waist, the tassels dancing at his knees. His five fat fingers spread out in astonishment as he looked down and off to the right: something was there. He too had bare feet and carried two curved swords.

Once, her grandfather came out of his office and stood beside her. He smiled as she looked from one print to the other.

‘Why do you have so many?’ Vera asked.

‘They used to be easy to find. No one put any value on them,’ he said. ‘I sent them home over the years. I don’t know if your mother ever looked at them. And now – I look. There’s always something new to see.’

‘Do people buy them?’

‘Oh they’re not for sale, not for sale, Vera,’ he said. And he laid his finger alongside his nose making a joke of the secret. ‘If anyone knew they were worth money, my creditors would have them in a flash. We’ll just keep them here, where only you and I can look.’

This day, when she got past Hinchcliffe, her grandfather was tapping on his typewriter. He asked her to wait in the hallway. She knew that when he let her in, the typewriter would be back on the floor and any evidence of paper would have vanished. Once in a while he spoke of a book. Vera hoped he would write it. She wanted to know all about his adventures. Sometimes at night in the house on Ivy Street he told stories. But, he said, any book would put him in a conflict between truth and loyalty. ‘That be very interesting,’ said Keiko, who was learning English.

Vera went to the measuring table and stared for a long time at a print where a child with a net was out in the darkness with a woman, her mother or a nanny. There appeared to be an official nature to the relationship, but then this was true of nearly all the pictures and nearly all the relationships. The little girl reached with her net trying to catch the little lights that were in the air, like stars come down to dance over the tips of the grasses.

‘Fireflies,’ said James Lowinger. He placed his hand on her shoulder. It was heavy but it was gentle. ‘They’re catching fireflies. The Japanese love fireflies. Do you see how the artist has tried to make them shine? It is a very fine print.’

She saw that there was a round hole in the darkness and then little sparks of yellow that radiated from this white spot. She leaned back against her chair and the back of her head rested somewhere in the middle of his chest.

‘Did you ever see them catching fireflies?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. He laughed. She loved the way he laughed. It was uncomplicated, amused. ‘Even I’m not that old. This was a long time ago. Before I ever went to Japan.’

Her grandfather shifted the paper, and found another. His fingers touched the dry, stiff yellowed paper with care.

‘Look,’ he said.

Water was everywhere, everywhere in this land of extremes, of cloud-like blossoms floating in the dry arms of trees, of shores littered with shells and crabs, of people standing on a shore looking out to an island, carrying what she took to be picnic baskets. She grimaced over the working men, their loincloths high over knotted thighs, who poled the boats upstream in a gale.

Tiny, almost comic figures engaged in Herculean tasks amongst giant waves, in deep gorges among mountains with white and black gashes down their pyramidal sides. Small, determined, they fought on.

‘Is Japan still like that?’ Vera asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ he chuckled. ‘Not the last time I checked.’

But he didn’t sound very convinced.

The world of these pictures, which Vera took to be the world of her grandfather’s business, and of his romance, was far away in the distance, but at an unspecified place in time. Perhaps it still existed. It was like the world of fairy tales. It was like a performance. Vera wondered who had made the pictures, which were like records of all that went on. She thought the picture world was his secret world, the one he might be writing about.

Someone was always watching this world. The artists who made these pictures peered through timbers, branches, and windows to frame a view; they hid behind fence poles and horses’ back ends. They stood in corners so that they could encompass a whole line of warehouse roofs descending a hill, or let the bent branch of a tree swirl over and under the scene to frame it. And the people knew they were being watched. They were like actors in a play. They knew they were exquisite. They made processions and fought battles. They toyed with the idea of removing their costumes, but they never actually did. There were a few pictures where the women let the kimono slip off one shoulder or even off both. They raised their hems in certain cases to do unspeakable things. She liked them even more for that. Those prints she looked at furtively, blushing.

Of course she knew her grandfather had been a pearl merchant. But as closely as she scanned the pictures, Vera could see nothing to do with pearls. Water pictures she examined carefully for clues. But then – in a special bottom drawer – she found the seashore prints. The diving girls in their fire circle by the beach. Bare-breasted, with fabric looped over their hips, long-haired and long-bodied. Like sloops, an easy curve from chin to hip.

Then one day, Vera stumbled across the octopus. Good grief, what an idea, what they might do with those tentacles. She was horrified, put down the pictures and leaped out of the room with her face blazing.

More often than not, when Vera arrived after school, her grandfather was waiting for her. He stood up in his courtly way and they went out, telling Miss Hinchcliffe they’d only be a few minutes. He took his umbrella from the stand and opened the wooden door with the frosted top half, paused on the top step to see if it was raining (it was), took Vera’s arm and descended to the street. On the pavement, they turned right. The flatiron building filled the end of a block where two streets angled together, which was why it was called a flatiron: it was triangular. At the bottom of it, just below street level, was a triangular coffee shop. There were windows on either side, one looking on to Homer Street and the other on to Water Street: the café was only ten feet wide at its widest. At the narrow end it came to a point in two windows. At the wide end was a curtain.

As soon as they stepped in from the rain, Roberta appeared from behind the curtain.

‘Captain Lowinger,’ she said, gravely, as if he’d come to church, ‘and Miss Vera.’

‘Hello, love,’ Captain Lowinger said. ‘We’ll have coffee and a Danish, sliced flat and toasted and then buttered.’

They sat. Their faces looked out on to the pavement just at the level of people’s feet. Now Vera had the tall, rumbling figure all to herself.

Vera’s mother had raised her on tales of James Lowinger’s adventures. It was as if Belle had been planning all along to abdicate and leave the girl in his hands, as if she had guessed that the fact, and possibly only the fact, of Vera’s existence would be powerful enough to draw in James Lowinger from his perennial sailings around the South Seas, to rein him in just as his great strength was waning, so that he would be safe at last and seated, facing her, pouring milk in his coffee and muttering that he needed a spoon.

‘My grandfather needs a spoon,’ Vera said, raising her voice to hail the waitress. Roberta was a capable woman past thirty with a dreamy streak, often discovered, as now, with her gaze out of the window into the ankles of the passersby.

‘Where’s my Danish and where’s my sweetheart?’ he said, looking up plaintively for Roberta, his hand on the tabletop, his neck curling forward from rounded shoulders. ‘I might die waiting.’

‘We can’t have that, can we?’ said Roberta, plunking the plate down in front of him.

‘Cut or pick!’ he said to Vera.

It was his game. The first time they played it she’d been small enough to sit on his lap, and he was visiting the house on Ivy Street. Belle had cooked an uneven number of breakfast sausages.

‘We’ll divide them.’

Hamilton was travelling but that wasn’t unusual. In fact it was preferable. Her grandfather wanted to pass on tricks of the trade, and he never wanted to pass them on to Vera’s father. ‘That’s what the pearl traders do.’

‘What do you mean?’ Vera had asked that first time.

‘Cut means you divide them, and let me pick which portion. Pick means you pick, so I cut.’

Vera couldn’t decide. She had gnawed at her pyjama sleeve. She had quivered. He had watched her and smiled as she stared at the prized sausages. If she cut, she could make sure the halves were exactly even. But if she let him cut, he’d have to try to make them even too. But he might make a mistake. Then one half would be bigger, and she could have it.

‘Pick!’ she had said.

‘Smart girl!’ he had roared, and laughed so that his moustache ends wobbled, which made her laugh. ‘The picking price is always higher than cutting price.’ He had divided the sausages meticulously, leaving one end of the extra longer than the other. ‘Now which do you want?’

Vera had giggled and giggled, picking the bigger portion.

He had set her back down on her own chair.

‘Last time I did that I was sitting on the ground in Bombay in one of those low little shops the Indians have. There was some oily meat involved as I recall, that I sopped up with a piece of delicious bread hot from a stove. The merchant laid out his pearls on the back of his hand.’

‘Did you cut or pick, Grandpa?’

‘I picked. I always picked. And then you know what I did? To bargain with him on the price, I covered my hand with a handkerchief and put out my fingers to say how many hundred rupees I’d pay. Five fingers, five hundred. Whole hand, one thousand. Half a finger—’ he made as if to chop off the end of his finger ‘—What do you think?’

‘She doesn’t like arithmetic, Father,’ Belle had said. She was formal with him.

‘Well I do!’ he had said, spearing his sausages and wolfing them down whole. ‘I like arithmetic these days because I’m making money.’

Today, Vera looked at the four quarters of the Danish.

‘It’s cut already,’ she said.

‘You’re right. I’ll have to let you pick then.’

He smiled. His ruddy skin was growing whiter, and beginning to shine like the inside of a shell. His face was clearing of the weather burns and tobacco stains of decades; he was being tamed. Was it his nearness to an end that made him flirt with girls and waitresses? A growing lightness in his life, that was really an acceptance of death that made him so attractive? They were all in love with him – Hinchcliffe, Vera, Roberta. He was powerful but childlike, immense, and visibly incompetent: he trembled and knocked over the cream pitcher. His body leaked and crumpled. He burped and gagged, laughed gently at himself.

‘And by the way,’ Vera said. ‘You won’t die. Not if I can help it.’ She did not think it would happen, ever. Perhaps because her mother had fretted about it so much: he’ll be lost at sea, he’ll catch beriberi, and he’ll come home to die. But he had proven very durable.

‘Today in school we talked about pearls, Grandfather.’

‘I don’t know why you would. There are no more pearls in the sea. They’ve all been snapped up, every last one of them. Every self-respecting wild oyster has cashed in his chips,’ said Lowinger.

‘I don’t believe that there are no more pearls,’ she teased.

‘You have to believe me, I’m your grandfather.’

She pouted. ‘Then tell me about them.’

‘Pearls are not my favourite topic, Vera dear.’

‘But they are mine.’

‘Are they, my dear?’ Busy with his Danish. ‘Are you catching the disease then?’

Vera crossed her narrow feet and took a strand of her white-blonde hair to curl around a fingertip; her stubborn adolescent expression gave way to the blank, childish look of she who expects a story.

‘Is it catching?’

‘Oh, highly contagious, my dear. You want to stay away.’

‘But don’t you think I’ve already been exposed?’ Her mother had sent her around to the neighbours to sit in the rooms of the children who had scarlet fever and rubella, so that she would catch them and get them over with. So that if she got them later in life they would not kill her.

‘Is that your excuse? Well, it was mine too.’

There was silence for a few minutes while he tore off ragged pieces of his Danish, piece by piece, unrolling it, and popped them in his mouth.

Then, ‘Do you even know what a pearl is?’

‘I do.’

‘You don’t.’

‘I do.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘Pearls are formed inside the shell of an oyster when it is irritated by a grain of sand. That’s what they told me at school.’

‘It is not that simple. There are as many explanations put forth for that, my girl, as would take me all day to tell.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘A pearl is nothing but the tomb of a parasitic worm.’ He declaimed with a half smile that made the handlebars of his moustache twitch:

Know you, perchance how that poor formless wretch

The oyster gems his shallow moonlit chalice?

Where the shell irks him or the sea sand frets

He sheds this lovely lustre

On his grief.

‘Who wrote that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do they teach you at school? No proper poetry either I see. It was Sir Edwin Arnold. And do they tell you that a pearl is the result of a morbid condition?’

‘No.’ She knew she had got him going.

‘They don’t. All right. Do they tell you then what Pliny said about the pearl?’

‘No, Grandfather.’

‘Well, they should then. Pliny thought, you see, that pearls were the eggs of the shellfish. That when it came time for these oysters to bring forth young, that their two shells, which are normally closed up tight, only a little gap there for the eyes to look out, you know, that the shells would part and open wide and a little dew would come in. And that this dew was a seed that would swell and grow big and become a pearl, and that the oyster would then labour to deliver this pearl, at which time it would be born, as another oyster.’

He chuckled, and his whitened eye lost a little of its haze. ‘People believed all sorts of things of the pearl. That it was born as a result of a flash of lightning. I rather like that one. And in years when there were very few pearls, that was because there were not very many storms.’

‘That’s stupid,’ she pronounced.

‘Stupid?’ he said, his breath whistling through his moustache. ‘You don’t say that about people’s beliefs. You say that it is magic. That’s what we’re talking about. I suppose because it is difficult to explain, isn’t it, how a small, perfect, beautiful thing can be found in the slime at the bottom of the sea. The Persians believed that pearls came from the sun. The Indians believed they came from clouds. If you listened to the poets, you’d think that pearls were tears cried by the gods, or by angels.

‘The natives in the Malay Archipelago and on the coast of Borneo are convinced that pearls themselves breed. They say—’ and here he leaned toward Vera and adopted a stage whisper as if he were imparting a secret of the greatest importance ‘—if a few pearls are locked in a small box with some grains of rice and a little cotton wool for several months, that when the box is opened – abracadabra!’ His eyes widened and his great furtrimmed mouth gaped ‘—that there are several new pearls in the box! And,’ he added, ‘the ends have been nibbled off the grains of rice! Do you believe it?’

She did not know whether to answer yes or no, so she kept quiet.

Captain James Lowinger flat out laughed here, heartily and in a way not exactly mirthful. And as he laughed, water spurted from the corners of his eyes and he picked up the thin paper napkin that Roberta had dispensed with the Danish pastry, and wiped the water from his cheeks.

‘And there are a lot of men who wished that was true!’

He laughed down into his chest, and picked at the remaining bits of Danish on his plate.

‘Mind you,’ he said again, settling back, ‘these breeder pearls are just as tiny as a pinhead. So—’ His hands fell flat on the tabletop ‘—what’s the use of that? The Chinese grind them for medicine.’

They drank their coffee then. Roberta leaned on her cash register and stared gloomily out of the window into the Vancouver rain. But she was only pretending to stare; Vera could tell she was actually listening.

‘Well, do you believe it?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said.

‘So, you don’t believe it?’ He peered at her.

‘Well,’ she began to doubt herself. ‘Maybe a little—’

‘When Columbus came to America, you know, he found that the natives on this continent believed it too. They had pearls galore, so many pearls, do you know? Pearls were not just in the Orient. No, not at all. When Fernando de Soto got to Florida he found the dead embalmed in wooden coffins with baskets of pearls beside them. In Montezuma’s temple, the walls were all laden with pearls. The Temple of Tolomecco had walls and roof of mother-of-pearl and strings of pearls hung from the walls.’

‘Where did they come from?’

‘Quite literally, they grew on trees. You didn’t know that, did you, Vera?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Yes. In the Gulf of Paria, Columbus found oysters clinging to the branches of trees, their shells gaping open. Do you believe that?’

‘No,’ she breathed. This time she had to have guessed right.

‘Wrong!’ he roared. Roberta looked back at them, her reverie interrupted, and grinned to see the old man teasing his granddaughter, and Vera’s pale face heating up again to the roots of her nearly white hair.

‘Oysters really did grow on trees.’ He went all scientific on her then. ‘The oyster in question is Dendrostrea, or Tree Oyster, a mollusc that is to be found upon roots or branches of mangrove trees overhanging the water.’

She was reduced to silence.

‘There, I fooled you. But you got me going. What did you want to know? What were you asking about?’

‘Ceylon. You went to Ceylon.’

‘Oh, everyone went to Ceylon. My father too. Way back in the 1860s. That’s a long time ago, you can’t imagine how long, my dear.’

‘Of course I can. Seventy years ago.’ She was better at arithmetic now.

‘Give or take a decade, that’s how old your grandfather is. My father was away with the pearling ships when I was born.’

‘Just like my father was away when I was born,’ Vera offered this as a bond.

‘But I came to see you, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, you did.’

Captain Lowinger banged his thick cup on the table. It bounced. The windowpanes seemed to rock in their frames. ‘Consider yourself lucky. My father never came to see me. I am sure I remember being born. I looked around and he wasn’t there. I had to wait years to see him, as far as I can remember. When he saw me, he was not really satisfied. Later, he took me along to make a man of me.’

He rubbed the tips of his forefinger and thumb together. The good eye steadily gazed into Vera’s face. The other one saw her too, but she must have had a white cloud over her head. ‘It’s the way of men in our family. Seafaring men. Go off and leave the woman at home, minding things. It’s a good deal if you’re the man. Mind you, it never worked for me. I tried it with your grandmother, but she was not the type of woman who’d wait around. For that, I lost her and I lost your mother too.’

He looked sad. Roberta brought fresh coffee and he took a long slurp. ‘But we were talking about fathers.’

10 February 1860

Night was falling as they landed at the British garrison in the Strait of Manaar. Before they left the deck of their little vessel, Papa Lowinger took the boy to one side, looking away from the streaky red of the setting sun. That was his first memory.

‘Do you see that land there?’ Papa said to James, pointing into the darkness. The white waving beach and dark hills above were two miles away. ‘That is the island of Ceylon. The people here believe that it was Paradise, the Garden of Eden. Up in the hills lives the King of Candy.’

That impressed James, and he focused his sleepy eyes on it. The small base they had come to was separated from Ceylon only by a shallow arm of the sea, full of sandbars. Candy looked remote. Paradise was closer.

‘At low tide you can nearly walk there,’ Papa said. ‘There’s a string of sandbars called Adam’s Bridge. The people say it was the very spot Adam crossed over when he was expelled from Paradise.’

The bridge was a series of white sand circles and they gleamed under the moon as the water surrounding them went darker and darker. It glistened and seemed to beckon him. James knew that Papa was laying on an enchantment. He did that to people. His voice became like a swallow: it rose and dipped and winged its way into your heart, and then it took fright and flapped upwards and was gone.

The sand fleas were biting. Soldiers stood at the water’s edge, swinging their storm lamps by the handle, luring their boat in. James was bundled up and put in to bed. Through the wall he heard one of those tight-lipped voices. He didn’t know how men got them – at Sandhurst he supposed. His mother wanted him to go there when he grew up. But his father wanted to teach him the pearling business. He was still in the larval stage, white as a fish and squeaky-voiced.

The leader of the garrison talked on.

‘Time and again Ceylon’s conquerors have exhausted the great pearling grounds. First the Portuguese, then the Dutch. We’ve let the banks rest now for four years. Each year we’ve made a survey to see if the oysters were ready,’ the barking voice went on. ‘Some years they are invisible, some years too small. We can’t wait much longer; at seven years of age, an oyster is too old: it will have vomited its pearl.’

Seven was James’s age. Too old!

‘We mean to auction off leases on the pearl fishery.’ That was a different English voice, also clipped, but lower.

The roar of laughter came from his father. He was European in origin, Papa. You could hear a husky German or Austrian in there if you listened. He was a man who left country and religion behind to journey after the pearl. He spoke in his peculiar way, hearty and learned, but rough-edged until he wanted to persuade you; then he was smooth as satin ‘The manner of getting pearls has always been a mad amalgam of religious rituals and native cunning. Now the British Army believes it can apply science to the problem?’

‘This year the fishery will again be great,’ continued the clipped voice in an unhurried way. ‘This is why we have invited you. I tell you, everyone has come to see.’

In the morning they set out in a native boat, pulled by a government steamer. It was all sand, and difficult going; water sometimes disappeared altogether. When this happened, native men with long bare legs jumped into the surf and attached ropes to the boat, and pulled it. They had to be pulled a long way around to find deep water again. It was only twelve miles down to the Bay of Candatchey, but it took for ever, the boat running aground and being pushed off. The soldiers were flaming hot in their red coats, and got a lecture from their leader about how they shouldn’t complain. But the man on the oars told James about the buffaloes that lived in the jungle beyond the beaches and frequented the roads like highwaymen; he said they were known to go quite mad at the sight of red. If a scrap of scarlet cloth flapped to the ground, the creature would run at it and trample it, then get down on its knees as if to pray, and gore it.

‘But your jackets!’ James cried, ‘they’re red as berries!’ The soldier rolled his eyes at James and went on to say there were elephants in this jungle, (‘pests’, he called them) and wild boars and even small tigers.

They made their slow way over the crystal sea toward the morning sun. They looked off to the Indian side and saw nothing but blue salt water divided into amusing little mazes. They looked to the Ceylon side and saw nothing but a huge reflecting collar of sand around a dim, green layer of trees. But something vertical stood out, wavering in the sun, a stick moving along the sand. It was a man running in a solitary manner along the beach. He had a most determined, yet peaceful expression, as if he were in a trance. Bearing in mind that they were passing through Adam’s Bridge, James asked his father if it was the first man himself.

‘Papa, is it Adam?’

‘Where?’ he said, absently. He was often that way.

‘There, Papa. Running.’ His image arrested James.

‘Adam?’ His father laughed. ‘Well, son, perhaps it is,’ he said.

And if it were, where was Eve? The boy wanted to know.

Now his father laughed long. ‘I suppose Eve will be along soon. Isn’t it for her sake he’s running?’

James supposed Eve had got behind. He looked long and hard on that shore, but he never saw her.

Papa eventually took pity on James. He squeezed his hand and then he said, ‘No, that man is called a peon. He is running from Colombo, Ceylon, to Madras, India, with the post,’ his father said. ‘It is five hundred miles and he will do it in ten days.’

James never forgot the sight of him.

How ridiculous he must have been, in the schoolboy grey flannels and blazer that his father had made him wear. His straw boater tried to lift off his head at every minute, so he was kept busy jamming it back down. His skin – so pink in contrast to the skin of every other human they met – prickled, stung with sweat, burned, and peeled until it bled. It took him many more years to supply himself with the bark he had as an old man, seasoned and lined and impervious to insult.

At last they drew in to the large, half-moon-shaped bay. There were hundreds of boats pulled up on the shore. The wind was blowing away from them: sand flew, and in amongst the gusts of it he could see figures swirling in purple and black and burned orange, green and indigo.

He was so short he had to stand on the thwart to jump down out of the boat. He landed, squinting despite the shade of his straw hat, in hard wet sand. This grew lighter in colour, and dried, as they walked inland. But it was still sand, hot, and slippery underfoot. So this was Paradise.

There was nothing built on it, only a few fragile open-sided sheds, straw roofed with skinny crooked poles at the sides to hold them up. And hundreds of tents, which flapped in the wind and hissed with the onslaught of sand that came on the gusts. Papa explained that the fleet had gone out with the land breeze at the firing of the guns at ten o’clock the evening before. It would have reached the banks at daybreak and the divers would set to work. At noon they would stop as the air began to stir to warn them to come back. They were due back, on the sea breeze, in a few hours.

James could see, emerging out of the sand clouds, people. People of every kind he could imagine, hundreds and hundreds of them. He and his Papa had arrived at a giant, seething fair which was all the more astonishing for having appeared on a sand spit, out of nowhere. There were black men, yellow and brown men too, men in long robes, men with pigtails and satin hats, nearly naked and squatting in loincloths, long-haired, turbaned, wrapped in shawls and crowned with fez. There were Malay soldiers with their curved blades called kreese; his father said to watch out. Once drawn, a kreese was bound to draw blood.

It was all impermanent, an encampment, and better than a circus. They passed men with rings through their lips, and women so freighted with jewellery and hardware they had to be supported as they walked. Others were shrouded so that they appeared as only a pair of large wary eyes, in a black triangle. The sun-burned laughing girls who flipped their tambourines at him were sea-gypsies. And there were dancing boys with hips as narrow as a dog’s, who insinuated themselves between the soldiers as they walked.

It was hot, huge and festive. Pigs squealed, donkeys brayed and people shouted in tongues. James stopped before a shy graceful animal like a small deer, in a cage. A gazelle, his Papa said, waiting to be sold. A worldly-looking monkey with a white beard made its way without touching ground, by climbing over the shoulders and heads of whole rows of people.

Papa kept him by the hand. Maybe he thought he’d be stolen. Maybe he would have been. He dragged behind, caught up by a snake charmer playing on a flageolet who coaxed his cobra halfway up out of the basket only to let him drop again. A scribe sat cross-legged on a straw mat on the sand with a little crowd waiting for him to put some message on paper. He crooked his finger at James, but Papa pulled him past. They ducked under the flaps of a tent draped with coloured carpets. An Arab with a long white headdress and a massive black beard greeted his father with open arms; he looked on James kindly and the boy shrank behind his father’s leg. Papa prised James off and showed him the scales, and the tongs, with which the trader handled the pearls, and weighed them. There were big brass sieves for sizing, a whole set of them, each with a different sized hole for the pearls to slip through, and the corn tongs he knew well because his Papa used them himself.

The men in line had pearls to sell. As for buyers, the richest of the rich were there, his father said. James was very impressed by how many of these exotic individuals his father knew by name. This one bought for the Sultan of Sarawak and that one represented the rulers of an Indian province. This man bought for the markets of Paris and London, for opera singers, and famous French courtesans. All this Papa told James. He waited while his father spoke to them and watched a man at a spindle, making holes in pearls. He had a half coconut sitting beside him, full of water, in which he dipped each pearl before he set to work on it. The pearls gleamed in the dim tent.

When they went out again, Papa took the boy to where, under the open sheds, rows of half-naked men were prising open the scabrous shells of oysters. They had white cloth wrapped around their heads and sat cross-legged. Only their hands moved, and if one moved too quickly or too far, one of the Malay soldiers came down on him with knife drawn. In front of them were little trays. A man circled briskly around the openers, and as soon as a few pearls appeared in the tray, he carried it off.

‘There’s the second best job you can have in the pearling game,’ said Papa. ‘If you’ve got nimble fingers and luck you might get away with a pearl or two.’

‘What is the best?’ James asked. He was anxious to impress him, the Papa newly in his life.

‘You’ll see.’

As the afternoon grew hot the breeze died. Papa pointed at a group of naked men behind a fence. ‘Those are divers who were caught swallowing pearls. They’ve been given a herb, and they’ll sit there until they’ve emptied themselves out. Some lucky fellow will have the job of looking for the stolen merchandise.’

The boy stared at the men. They were sullen and defiant as if determined to hold the contents of their stomachs in for ever. He half hoped they would succeed. The place stank of shit.

‘Who thinks of it?’ Papa said. ‘A pearl in a princess’s tiara may have been regurgitated – or worse—’ he said, rolling his eyes significantly ‘—under extreme pressure from that lot—’

James thought about that. It was ugly to contemplate, but not for Papa. He went on. ‘Isn’t it odd, isn’t it marvellous? A pearl may go from sinking in the most foul-smelling mass of dead matter you can imagine, straight to the most beautiful neck in the world. It will wash clean and look as innocent as a newborn babe. That is the beauty of pearls. They come up fresh again and again.’

His father was educating him, you see, as they strode in that sand, and hard work it was. He was a feeble boy and he whined, a mother’s boy, he had been until then. But Papa kept on, determined that the boy should know, and follow him in his way of life. James ate some roasted meat – goat, judging from the upset displayed by the goat’s relatives who were tied up outside. He thought he might be sick. Sweet-smelling smoke came from certain tents along the side of the crowd; this was where the men were smoking ‘bang’, his father said.

The air was alive with hailing and haggling, and Papa was joyous. He pointed out a weird solitary figure at the fringe of the water, facing out in the direction of the pearl banks. They called him the shark binder. Pullul Karras. His job was to keep the sharks from eating the divers. He did this by casting spells. Papa said that the man was a charlatan, but the divers would not go near the sea if he were not there.

‘His is the best job in pearling,’ Papa grinned.

‘Why?’

‘Why don’t you see? He has fantastic opportunities for snitching.’

Apparently everyone snitched.

The conjuror kept up a tranced dancing, his voice rising into a wail, and dropping to a polite appeasing manner, and his body curling and snapping up, arms flung high, repeatedly, like a whip. His eyes were glassy and his lips were black. Papa said that he was supposed to abstain from both food and drink. But, as they watched, he regularly hailed a young boy in a filmy fabric skirt, who had a brass tray with drinks on it. This was ‘toddy’ from the palm wine tree. The shark binder drank one and ordered another. Then another. Now his song came and went without its former conviction, and his arms lost their former height.

‘Papa,’ James said, ‘I don’t think he’s saying the chant right.’

‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’m sure the sharks will get the point.’

There were fortune tellers and charm setters and religious fanatics. He watched an Indian with matted hair put hooks into the flesh of his breast. Then he was hoisted on ropes and swung around a post, his skin tearing.

‘Don’t look,’ his father said when James screamed. ‘He’s doing penance.’

The hour stretched on and the sun inched its way over to the west, where India lay. The boy wanted to see the divers.

‘The best are called Malawas and are from the Tutacoreen shore,’ said his father, speaking of them as if they were dumb animals, although James was certain they understood. ‘They’re Roman Catholics. A long time ago St Francis Xavier went to the coast of India and baptised the people. Because they’re Christian, they don’t work on Sundays but they also observe any festival, Hindu or Mohammedan. They want protection of all the gods, and you would too if you had to earn your living under a ton of water.’

James wanted to see them go down, so his father contrived for them to go out in one of the diving boats. They set sail for the banks at ten that same evening with the landward breeze. James lay on a wooden seat under a robe with his head on Papa’s lap. The sky overhead was a whirl of southern stars, brighter than any he had ever seen. The divers sat on the bottom of the boat, silent, dark, strangely passive shapes. There were ten of them, and several sailors on each boat. His mind went to where theirs was – he saw a shimmering heat, foul smells, salt, and wonderment. Then darkness. Tomorrow might bring their death.

He must have slept. The dawn was a miracle of gold and pink, with clouds shaped like a funnel through which the daylight poured. He watched the divers oil their bodies, and talk amongst themselves. Each had his set of equipment, ropes, and a large red stone shaped like a pyramid with a hole through the top. Each man picked up the rope and the stone with the toes of his right foot, and the net bag with the toes of his left. He held another rope with his right hand, and, keeping his nostrils shut with the left, jumped into the water and, riding on the stone, sank, rapidly toward the bottom.

James rushed to the edge of the boat. The water was so clear that, by hanging over the thwart, he could see to the bottom. Plunging, the divers became blurred black figures with wavy appendages. When the stones hit bottom they threw themselves flat on the sand and began to swim like insects. They were picking up oysters which lay on the sandy slope and thrusting them into the bags. After a minute, they pulled on the rope and the rowers, who now held the other ends, pulled hand over hand to raise them back to the surface.

And so it went, for hours. When they came to the surface, the divers spewed water from their mouths and nostrils. Sometimes their ears were bleeding. They unloaded, took deep breaths, and picked up their stones with their toes, then they threw them overboard again. They went down fifty times, and each time returned with a bag holding easily a hundred oysters. The boat was filling up with the thorny, grey shells; as they lay in the sun the two halves began to gape. James saw one man slip a wooden wedge in the gap. He watched without letting on as the man ran his finger inside the half opened shell, feeling for pearls. And once at least, James thought the man found what he was looking for.

He had few places to hide a pearl, this diver. He put his hand up and casually wiped his eye. James realised that the pearl was gone – into his eye. He did not tell Papa for fear the man would be punished. If sharks were near they were not biting. James sat in dread and fascination, watching the shining black men who shot in a stream of bubbles straight down into the crystal blue that extended to murk. They were down for what seemed like for ever, then they began to reappear, raised majestically like statues that had been buried.

This was his indoctrination to the pearl hunt. ‘I would like to be a diver for pearls,’ he said solemnly then. But his father said no. ‘No white man could ever go to those depths.’

At noon, the wind changed to blow them back to Ceylon. They sailed in, slowly, and when they neared the beach the oars came out. The gun fired and all the trading and singing stopped. The tied elephants brayed. The tambourines rattled to a climax; the crowd began to run toward the shore. Everyone stared out to sea. Owners and investors, fakirs, traders all, in their eyes a look James was to see more than he ever imagined – a look that was avid and fearful. These men had gambled everything on the find of pearls.

He had listened to his papa well, and understood that no one knew how good the oyster fishery would be. Perhaps the starfish had wormed their way in and eaten the flesh, or the seaweed growing on the shells had killed the animal. The anticipation became a murmur. The murmur became a roar. The sea wind with its sting of salt and sand blew in the waiting faces. Finally the boats were within calling distance. Then everyone – jewellers and boat-owners and officials with sticks in their hands, entertainers with monkeys on their shoulders, with skirts flying and veils lifting, robes flapping against legs – began to move toward the shore.

First James and his father’s boat landed, and then another and another. Amidst the shouting and embracing, the boy understood that there was a huge haul. A great cheer and a roaring began. The soldiers stamped about, excited for their chance to bid and make a fortune. The horses whinnied.

The divers sat, bent over at the chest as if all the air had been pushed out of them. They were shivering, even though it was very hot in the sun, cold inside their dark, oiled skin. Their thin extended ribs made their chests look like birdcages. They alone were silent. James could not take his eyes off them. These men consumed him; those who descend. He remembered a poem from school, Keats’s ‘Endymion’: ‘a moon-beam to the deep, deep water-world’. If they spoke and we listened, what would we learn, the boy wondered

But the divers were herded off to be searched.

James made his way in the pearling business, though not as his father would have had it. He was known neither for acuity nor gambler’s instinct, or skill at selling. He’d be remembered as the one with the gift of the gab, a man of words, armed with a poem when a dirkin or a kreese might do better. Some thought they could get the better of him because of this tendency, but it rarely happened. John Keats and his fellow poets were good company, better, he judged, than his country folk, the English, with their lordly manner.

The next day James and his father stayed on shore with the traders. Late in the day there was a commotion as one of the boats came in. He thought at first they’d taken on a log and laid it out on the nets between the divers’ feet. Then he understood that this burden was a man. He could see the black head and arms. It was a diver, his lower body wrapped in a sail. The sail was soaked in blood. The man had lost his leg to a shark.

The boy saw his face; his eyes were closed, his mouth open, as if he had looked on something of awe and had retreated inward. The leg was with him at the moment although James understood it was discarded later. He and it were a strange colour of grey.

There was an outcry, then, about the shark binder. Right on the spot the military Poo-Bah brought him up to account. The Superintendent was high on his horse. He bellowed and the conjuror ought to have quaked, but he was consummate in his act of defiance.

‘A man has been attacked by a shark? Shark binder, it is your task to keep the sharks away. How can you explain the failure of your charms?’

The man stood firm, if you could call his fantastical gesturing firm, undulating his torso and sniffing the breeze for a message, or an excuse. The whole affair was understood as theatre, amongst the Europeans, and the conjurors, too, but not amongst the divers. They stood wide-eyed with terror, but obdurate. It was in their power to shut down the entire fishery; they need merely refuse to sink. It was a lesson to James. The naked ones, because they risk death, had the power.

A crowd gathered around these two men. Papa and he moved in to hear. The shark binder defended himself, waving his arms weirdly and impressively and calling out explanations that surely made no sense even to him.

‘What does he say, what does he say?’ the English asked.

‘He says that a very great witch issued a counter-conjuration,’ explained the Superintendent disgustedly from his horse. ‘That was why the shark bit. He says he will prove he is stronger than she is by issuing an even greater charm to bind the sharks for the rest of the season. I suppose I shall have to pay him double.’

‘Do you see?’ whispered Papa. ‘He can’t lose, that conjuror. He’s got it covered either way.’

The conjuror began with further charms, more exaggerated and bizarre contortions, ululations, screechings and mumblings. Finally, his adherents appeared to be satisfied. Only then did the owners begin to unload the oysters. They lay in heaps to be sold in lots, unopened. When the auction began the bids were fast; each lot went to the highest bidder who then came and hauled away the bags.

It was on that day, in Ceylon, that James saw one more extraordinary sight. A small girl about his age. Proper, dressed for a garden party in flounces of white all dotted with yellow. Sashed and bonneted like Little Miss Muffet on her tuffet, in all that sand and wind she held, over her small self, casting a useless pale shadow in which she was careful to stay, a red, ruffled umbrella.

His eye was drawn to the red umbrella. Red spot in the centre, making the whole scene revolve around it. She was the eye of the storm, that’s what she was. She was the heart of the matter.

‘Who is that?’ he asked his Papa.

‘That?’ his father replied, following his finger. ‘Don’t point!’

There were thousands of people on the beach. He had to point. ‘The girl with the umbrella,’ he said.

‘That,’ he said. ‘You mean she. She is the daughter of a man from the garrison. I believe he is called Mr Avery McBean.’

They were getting closer. She was plump and she pouted. She had a magisterial air about her. He knew as soon as he saw this child that she would make planets revolve around her.

‘Do you know her Papa?’ he asked.

‘I cannot say that I know her,’ said his father, ‘but I have been introduced. And so shall you be.’

And they set out across what seemed like the Sahara, this mile-wide expanse of dry sand. It grew softer underfoot the farther they went from the ocean’s edge. James’s feet sank into it, making each step a little harder than the previous had been, giving him the sense that even as he approached Miss McBean so also did he retreat from her, the sole of one foot moving backwards in the shifting sand and digging itself a little hole as he stepped out on the other. Slowly, ever so slowly, face into the wind and clinging to his hat, he made progress toward her.

Thus men approach their fate.

It was not quick enough. As mentioned, there were, in that area of Ceylon at that time, in the untrimmed jungles that lay behind that godforsaken beach, all manner of wild beasts. Elephants that came steaming out at road crossings, tigers whose golden eyes could be seen in the dark, and buffalos. The buffalos did not like red.

Just then one of these bad-tempered buffalos appeared out of nowhere. He caught a glimpse of the plump, pouting Miss McBean, and took exception to her red umbrella. He put his head down. A charging buffalo is not amusing. It was wide of shoulder with a bony ridge down its back and a tail with a point on it like the devil. Its hoary head was low with shiny black horns at the ready.

‘Papa!’ James cried. His heart began to pound. Had no one told Miss McBean about the colour red? Probably she would have paid no attention if they had. Or did she wear it as the soldiers did, with a fated desire to draw attention to herself?

The buffalo did not stop to think. He headed for her with murder in his eyes.

Dawdling and oblivious, she swung her umbrella over her head, then lowered it to waist level and then, holding it in front of her body as if she were a vaudeville dancer, twirled it. The animal bellowed straight at her.

James did not recall his Papa answering. But in a minute they were running in dry sand. The more they hurried, the deeper they sank. Papa held on to James with one hand and waved his hat with the other, hallooing like mad, though his words were lost in the wind. The buffalo ploughed on. A few men in the crowd shouted warnings. A soldier on horseback wheeled around and cantered toward the rolling red frills. A man who must have been the girl’s father appeared out of a tent and they suddenly were all, all – buffalo, horse and soldier, Papa and James, her doting dad – racing against sand and time toward the girl while she – surprised, but unflinching – got a whiff of danger, and lowered her lovely toy to the sand. She found herself staring down the nose of a charging buffalo.

And what did she do? She put one little fist on her hip and made as if to stamp a foot in a wee Scottish tantrum. But just as she lifted it off the sand, a long arm that might have belonged to a polo player grabbed her around the waist and scooped her up to hold her against a solid military thigh where she remained unbending and in full possession of her umbrella. The buffalo charged into empty space, looking foolish and disappointed.

Later that trip he must have met her. He must have heard her piercing little voice and seen her dimples and righteous blue eyes and pale protected skin. But the voice and the eyes desert him; he has no memory of them. He only remembers the untouched froth of her, the childish form of her, there on that mystic and desolate beach. He remembers her innocent and altogether misplaced lack of fear.

That was the charm. It was not the one his father meant to put on him, a bondage to the business of pearls. To pearls James became an ambivalent servant. To Miss McBean he became a slave, and remained so for many years to come.

The coffee was drained from their cups.

‘It’s all in the past,’ said James Lowinger. ‘You mustn’t be so interested,’ he chided, gently. ‘And not you, Vera, for certain. And a good thing it is that there are no pearls left in the oceans and rivers of the world, my darling,’ he said then with an irresistible and roguish look of tenderness. ‘You can be the first of our family to be free of it.’

Roberta fussed getting James Lowinger’s coat. He shambled to the door, this big man, and pulled his umbrella from the corner where he’d propped it, and paused on the step to open it skyward and herded Vera under it on to the street. She walked him carefully back to the warehouse. Fifteen minutes later, Vera stood waiting for the streetcar in the rain. The first in the family to be free of it. That meant the others were not free. Her grandfather was a captive, she saw that. His father too, from the sound of it: pearls were his religion. Her father must be a captive as well. It must be that which kept him in the Far East and away from her all her life so far. Even her mother, dead now, must have been a slave. The Lowingers were all that way, set apart. And so would she be. Vera Lowinger Drew: the last of a line of men and women whose lives were governed by the pearl. It was sad but glorious. She got off the streetcar and began to walk home. And now the pearls were gone, as the family was almost gone; it had come down to the two of them.

Or three.

She entered the house by the front door, throwing it behind her so that it slammed. Keiko emerged from the kitchen, smiling.

‘Vera.’ Probably she practised the name half the day. Vera was filled with scorn. She let Keiko take her bag. She could see behind her in the kitchen the shells and bowls of water that betrayed the various weeds and molluscs that would be her dinner.

‘Can’t we have meatloaf like everyone else?’

Keiko set the book bag on the side table. In her halting English she offered to learn how to make it, if Vera would teach her. Vera said never mind, she would only eat the rice. Rice was white and so was she.

Then she took her bag and went into her little room to read. Within an hour, the front door opened again and her grandfather’s step resounded in the little stucco house. Coming out to greet him, Vera was stopped by the vision of Keiko on her knees in front of him, pulling off his shoes. ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she began to mutter, but the old man’s eyes, the one so bright and the other whitened, met hers and she subsided in shame.

And she went back to her room and did her schoolwork, biding her time, biding her time.