Beat Not the Bones (3 page)

‘Well,' Nyall said. ‘That settles it.'

Warwick picked up his hat. ‘I must get back.' He glanced at the door and back again at Nyall. He waited, as if for permission to leave.

Nyall said, ‘I have a feeling he won't take it lying down.'

At three o'clock that afternoon Warwick was sitting at his desk writing a letter to his wife. He faced out through the open louvres of his office onto a long, open parade ground ending in a belt of coconut palms. The letter he was answering fluttered in the breeze and he picked up a stone adze and put it on top of the paper.

‘My dear love,' he had written. ‘Your letter arrived this morning. You should not have dismissed your father's nurse without asking me. He is sick and can't know what's best for him. You must consult me about these things. Now you will have far too much to do. I am very angry with you. No, I am not angry – how could I be? But I hate the thought of your taking on too much work. When you come up here you will have nothing to worry about …'

His pen faltered and he looked for inspiration at a framed snapshot on his desk. For some unexamined reason he found it difficult writing to his wife. The snapshot showed a young woman in her early twenties, wearing slacks and open-necked shirt, who sat, cross-legged, on a lawn, a spaniel puppy in her lap. She was bare-headed and smiled. They had been married for only two months, during his last leave in Australia, but his wife had not been able to leave her father.

The telephone rang. It was on a table behind him. He turned and glanced over his shoulder. His assistant, a man fifteen years his junior, was sitting on the other side of the room, his chair tilted back, feet on the desk. He was pulling the heads off a cluster of frangipani and threading them on a piece of string. The telephone rang again, but he did not move or look up.

Warwick leaned across for the phone, but he hardly heard the voice that said, ‘Hello, Mr Warwick please.' His lips bit tight. Something will have to be done about him, he thought. It was awkward, but things could not go on like this.

‘Hello. Warwick here.'

‘Is that you, David?' It was Trevor Nyall. What now? he wondered. Then he remembered Jobe.

‘I thought I'd just ring up and let you know,' Nyall said. ‘I think our friend might pay you a visit. He's not in a pretty mood.'

‘Oh?' Warwick was barely listening. His eyes were still fixed on the cluster of frangipani and the brown, nimble fingers threading the string. They were narrow, long, smooth, like native hands. He had never liked them.

‘He seems to think that the whole thing is your fault,' said Nyall. ‘He won't listen. He says I'm a good bloke, and would have given him a fair deal. He thinks you've got your knife into him.'

‘He must have recognised me,' said Warwick, attending now.

‘I expect so. My guess is he's in the pub now getting a skinful, then he'll come and tell you what he thinks of you.'

‘Thanks,' said Warwick and hung up. He turned round. Jobe did not worry him greatly, but the flowers did.

‘What's the matter, Tony? Nothing to do?' The garland dropped on the desk. The hands were folded.

‘Plenty, but this seems the least destructive. This at least I shall not have to answer for. When our brown brothers ask us for excuses and explanations I shall be able to say, “You've got nothing on me, I only played with flowers …”'

Warwick was not unsympathetic to the younger man. He was perhaps too clever for the Territory, and it did not do to be too clever here. He was too clear-sighted and saw not only the good but the inevitable evil that was trailed after all that was done. But he needed rounding up. He worked under direction with bad grace.

‘We all know it's difficult. We've all made mistakes. Probably it's impossible, but we've got to stick at it. You're neurotic, Tony. Want to pull yourself together,' Warwick said.

‘I'm not neurotic. I'm normal. Here it's the happy, successful and untroubled who are neurotic.'

Warwick turned away angrily. Me, I suppose, he thought. He had never allowed Papuan problems to make him feel uncomfortable. It was suicidal to take the show too seriously. He picked up his pen and wrote – not because it could be of any interest to his wife, but to rid himself of irritation – ‘an interruption … words with my difficult assistant. If things weren't so tied up I'd get rid of him. He has a neurotic, jealous nature and doesn't like doing what he's told …'

He was still writing this letter at 3.45. The office was empty and he sat alone. The rest of the staff had gone home except for one of the clerks who appeared now in the doorway. Sereva was tall and well built. He came from a nearby village and had once been Warwick's houseboy. Warwick had become attached to him, taught him to speak and write English and, after the war, took him into the department. Although he was educated – as far as Papuans could be called so – he was not superficially westernised and had none of the blind regard for anything imported. He did not despise his village customs and preferred to wear a rami rather than shorts and shirt.

He spoke in a soft, whispering voice. ‘There is a gentleman to see you, Mr Warwick.'

In the next instant Mr Jobe had blundered past him, thrust out an arm and sent him spinning backwards. ‘Get out of my way, you filthy savage!'

Sereva, knocked off his balance and crouching on the floor, rose to his feet.

‘If Sereva had a vindictive nature,' said Warwick quietly, ‘he could see you in court for that. Are you all right, Sereva?'

The boy nodded. ‘Yes, taubada.' He did not glance at Jobe, but quietly left the room.

‘Don't you know that it's against the law to strike a Papuan?' Warwick said.

Jobe looked frightened. ‘I didn't hit him. Only gave him a sort of friendly shove.' He stood looking red and sheepish in the centre of the room.

‘I'm sorry about the gold,' said Warwick. ‘It's bad luck, but there you are.'

‘Bad luck!' exploded Jobe. ‘It's a dirty trick, Mr Warwick, and I'm bloody well not standing for it. This fellow Nyall, he's okay. Everything would have gone along fine if it hadn't been for you.' He smiled and stretched out his hands. ‘I ask you, Mr Warwick, is it fair? Throwing up a fella's mistakes at him. Dragging up the past when a fella's trying to be honest?'

‘That had nothing to do with it,' said Warwick. ‘You don't understand what's involved. If you take gold from these people, you strike at the very roots of their culture, and we don't do that until we're in a position to replace it with something that we consider better. You might just as reasonably ask for permission to plunder the crucifixes from churches.'

Mr Jobe, who believed in God and damnation, was deeply shocked. ‘I must say, Mr Warwick,' he said loudly, ‘that's not a very Christian thing to say.'

‘I'm sorry, Mr Jobe,' said Warwick curtly, ‘but that's the way we look at it. You can't have that gold. It belongs to the Eolans.'

‘Natives! You only bother about them when it suits you.' The air of ingratiating sweetness had entirely left him. There was a wild gleam in his partly submerged eyes. He lurched towards Warwick and crashed his fist on the desk. ‘I'm not standing for it!' he shouted.

‘Oh? And what are you going to do about it?'

‘Think I'm not good enough for you, you dirty snob! I'll get around you, Mr bloody Warwick. What about
him
, he'll help me.' He waved an arm at the empty chair, the garland of frangipani still tossed over one of its arms. ‘You're not God Almighty in this town, Mr Warwick. Plenty of people don't like you. I only had to spend half an hour in the pub to find that out. You're in debt, up to your neck. And your offsider here would be the first to step on your face.'

‘Are you threatening me?' Warwick said quietly.

Jobe's hands fell to his sides. He paused for a moment and wondered if he had committed a punishable offence. One more and he'd be out of the islands, probably forced to earn a living. The thought was a sobering one. He gave Warwick a look intended to be pitiful and said, ‘I only want my rights, Mr Warwick. I only want fair play. Came here on the level. It's hard for a man who's trying to forget the past. And it seems to me that you presume a lot when you say that going in and getting the gold will cause trouble. I shouldn't have shown you the spear. That's what comes of being honest.'

‘As a matter of fact,' Warwick said, ‘I've been thinking that we might go in and have a look.'

Jobe stepped forward. ‘You and me?'

‘No. You can wait here till I come back. I'll take a surveyor. Quite apart from the gold, I'd like to have a look at these people. From the point of view of material culture they are extraordinary.'

Jobe winced.

‘If they don't particularly value their gold and would part with it peaceably, then you might be allowed to do something about it. If not now, perhaps later on. If not, you'll have to forget the whole business.'

CHAPTER 2

The man and woman who occupied the two rear seats of the plane each leaned towards a window and peered down. For a moment their faces wore an almost identical look of longing.

The plane was flying over the coastline. They could see the reefs – long purple bruises under the water – and the bands of brilliant turquoise that marked the sandy shallows around the islands. Rising almost straight up from the sea the hills banked up, some of them naked, others blotched with patches of forest until, as they rose higher, forest entirely took over. It was cloudy ahead.

The woman, Stella Warwick, leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes and gripped her hands in her lap with the dramatic intensity of one who does not know or care if she is watched. Her first glimpse of Papua had moved her. The hostess, thinking she might be ill, moved towards her but paused when her eyes opened. Stella sat now staring before her and the hunger in her face had given way to resolution. Then she leaned towards the window and looked at the land below.

So far she had not felt much curiosity about the country towards which she was being so swiftly propelled. The flight had been a dream. She had no picture of the people in the plane or the places they had flown over. She had not wandered around to look at the two northern Australian towns where they had landed, but had sat in the airways offices, her only feeling being anxiety lest she should be left behind, a fear that always encroached when she travelled alone. Now, for the first time, she experienced vague excitement. Here, unrolling before her, was the strange land she had matched herself against.

The plane, which had continued to follow the coastline over an estuary and past a group of small islands, now turned inland and flew straight for the clouded mountains. A light flashed, telling passengers to fasten their safety belts. Stella fancied she could see houses far to the left crouched around a group of hills.

‘Is that Marapai?' she asked the hostess, who was moving past offering the passengers barley sugar.

‘Yes, madam,' said the hostess, blasé but indulgent. ‘That's Marapai. We're going to land soon. Will your fasten your belt.'

Stella, who had chosen her own fate and did not wish another to intrude prematurely, did as she was told.

The hostess, whose name was Penny Smart, had served as a WAAF during the war and was now, seven years later, a debonair woman with somewhat gnarled sensibilities. The bed of her heart had become of necessity stony, yet she found herself unaccountably touched by the sight of Stella's small, clumsy fingers working on her safety belt. What on earth can she be doing up here? she asked herself as she bent to help. Never been away from home, like a child at its first party.

‘Thank you,' said Stella, and lifted her large fanatical eyes.

Disturbed, Penny Smart turned away. No, not a child at her first party. She glanced at the list of passengers that was folded in the pocket of her uniform. She found Stella's name, and a notion of who she might be flashed into her mind, but she dismissed it; this girl was either too young – or too old – and she turned with her barley sugar to the man in the ­opposite seat.

He was big – not exactly fat, but solid and tight-skinned, which gave him an air of joviality and self-satisfaction, such as men will sometimes wear after a heavy meal. He refused the barley sugar, and Penny Smart passed on up the plane. He folded the paper he had been reading, pushed it under his seat, and looked around him, taking stock. Like Stella, in a particular way, he appeared to have arrived. His eyes ­travelled along the seats ahead. Stella was the last to suffer his scrutiny.

She leaned her head against the window, gazing down at the land as it rose to meet them. The sea was behind them, and through a gap in the round, golden hills they had made inland and circled over an airstrip. On one side a straight metalled road led to Marapai, on the other, an enormous bulwark of mountains, their summits lost in cloud, marked the limits of the white man's world. Stella's face was quiet and pale. Her short ruffled hair gave her the look of having just woken. In fact she felt desolate and afraid. All that was before her seemed to rise up like vapour from the earth and fold around her. The future she had sought breathed in her face, but it was not as she had wanted it, clean and somehow comforting, but frightening and lonely.

Her eyes turned and sought those of the man beside her. His future promised to be rich and favourable, and he smiled. Poor kid, he thought, she's been sick. He'd been airsick once himself and sympathised with her. Pretty little thing too. He liked curly hair.

She felt his friendliness and smiled. An image of his broad jovial face, with its tight, unlined flesh, downy hair and little eyes beneath protuberant rambling brows, printed itself in her mind.

She turned again to the window. The airstrip, rising, slid away beneath the plane. They bumped on the earth, rose and fell once more. The plane had landed. It coasted a little and stopped before a low, tin-roofed building. A moment later the gangway was brought forward and the door flung open.

Stella did not move. It was not the thought of landing into danger that frightened her but of landing alone. For the first time in her life there was no one to meet her, no one to manage her luggage and drive her to her destination. Small, practical details that had always been seen to by someone else.

‘Are you coming now?' It was Penny Smart who spoke, standing with the door open and smiling at her.

The hot, noonday glare burned down on the ground. The tarred airstrip was warm and sticky under her feet. The curiosity and astonishment that are part of the will to live were not so dead in her as she had imagined. She forgot her luggage and the desolation of being alone and looked around her in profound surprise.

Papuans, brown-skinned, with enormous mops of black hair, and blue-skinned, with heads cropped close and peaked like coconuts, were lifting luggage out of the back of the plane and dumping it on to a carrier. Her own countrymen were dressed in white. The little airways shed was lifted up on stilts, as if escaping from the ground. All around her was a landscape so rugged, so blue, green and fantastic as to take her breath away. The fierce, majestic hills seemed hardly real, more like a backdrop for a film. Against this decor, it seemed incongruous and strange that passengers were being greeted by friends and luggage was being carried and checked.

Stella picked up her case and walked across to the office, away from the shining eyes and flushed cheeks of those who had husbands and lovers. She stood in the doorway, looking into a waiting-room filled with people talking and attending to their affairs. What was she to do? How would she get to Marapai? There had always been someone who said, Sit, wait here till I come back, found out when the buses left and filled in forms.

A girl behind a counter saw her white face and dismayed frown, caught her eye and beckoned. There was a form to fill in. Her luggage was being taken off the plane, and a bus left for town in half an hour. She had only to wait. With relief she looked up and smiled at the fair, pretty young clerk who had been attending to her. As she turned away, the clerk said to Penny Smart, who stood beside her lighting a cigarette, ‘Is she all right? She looks a bit mad.'

‘She's all right,' said Penny Smart, dropping a match on the floor. Her moment of compassion was over. People came, people went, they all had troubles, and you had your own. Those with any guts kept a brave face. Mysteries, however, were another matter. The Territory fed on them and, when it could not find them, invented its own. She bent conspira­torially over the passenger list that was spread open on the desk, and tapped a long, lacquered fingernail over Stella's name. ‘Take a look at that! That's an interesting name to be carrying in this country.'

The clerk read the name aloud. ‘Nonsense! Why, what would she be doing here?' She looked up and smiled. ‘Yes, sir. Can I help you?'

The man who stood in front of her appeared not to hear. He had turned his head and was staring over into the corner of the room, where Stella sat alone, her legs crossed, her overnight bag on the floor at her feet.

Half an hour later the airways bus left for Marapai. Apart from Penny Smart, the clerk and two of the airways male staff, Stella was the only passenger. The man who had sat next to her had disappeared.

The road wound for a mile or so through low hills covered by small, twisted gum trees with flat, frilly leaves. They were not gum trees as Stella knew them. They looked to have gone mad, thrusting out leaf and branch, without reason or design, in all directions. Occasionally they passed Papuans walking barefoot on the side of the road, the women's grass skirts swinging below their knees.

Stella had seen these people before, standing stiffly in illustrations in anthropological books, or in snapshots fixed in a brown album, but these originals, walking loosely along on broad, flat feet, the sun striking coloured lights from their polished skins, were utterly unexpected.

The road mounted and turned. Below them stretched the coast with its scattered islands, green and smooth-backed as lazy whales. The little stunted trees had passed by and tropical vegetation blanketed the hills – trees with huge serrated leaves, the long, bending trunks of coconut palms and creepers tangling tree with tree. To the right on the plain below and straggling up the low hills were the houses of Marapai.

Penny Smart, who sat in front with the clerk, turned to her. ‘Do you want to be put off somewhere?' she said.

Stella, attending passionately to the scene ahead, started and looked at her with vacant eyes.

‘Do you want to be dropped?'

‘Yes, if you don't mind.'

She produced a notebook from her handbag, opened it at the back page, and read, ‘Number 16, Port Road.'

‘To the mess?' said Penny Smart. ‘Are you working for the administration?'

Stella nodded.

‘Is anyone meeting you?'

‘No,' said Stella. But I am not alone, she told herself. I shall have friends, and enemies. It was on the enemy that her thoughts most lovingly lingered.

They had now reached the outskirts of Marapai and drove along the seafront through a long avenue of casuarina trees. Coconut palms reached out over the water's edge as if yearning for other islands, perhaps the islands of their origin, for they dropped their nuts on the sand, and the sea cast them on many far-off sands. On the other side of the road, bungalows were stilted up among green trees and shrubs with variegated leaves, and there were banana trees with huge, floppy leaves, shredded by the wind.

She looked around her at the people they passed thinking,
He
might be any of these (for she had little information about him and the picture of him that she held in her mind was purely imaginary). He might be sitting in any of these houses, or driving a jeep along this road, not dreaming that today would be different from any other, thinking himself secure, safe.

They had nearly reached the end of the avenue. The driver tooted violently and an old, crippled man hobbled nimbly out of the way of the car. ‘Nearly wiped off that savage,' he said, roaring with laughter.

A few moments later they drew up by a long, wooden bungalow with an iron roof.

‘That's number 16,' Penny Smart said, and opened the door. The driver saw to her luggage.

Stella looked at her new home without much interest. It needed painting and looked dilapidated. There was a grey, blotched look about the walls, as if they were breaking out here and there into patches of mould. A strip of corrugated-iron had been nailed over one window, and a front step was broken.

She mounted the steps and turned to wave goodbye. There would never again, it seemed to her, be anyone permanently beside her, only odd strangers who filled in forms, carried her suitcases, or saw her into cars. The wheels turned, the dust puffed up, and she was alone once more.

She was confronted now by a short passage and three closed doors. The corridor was bare except for one frayed grass mat. From the door at the far end came the sound of voices. What should she do? Knock? Go in? Wait? Those who had loved her had failed to equip her for this moment – indulging themselves in the enjoyment of her helplessness – and had left her in panic at the sound of voices behind closed doors.

Then the door opened and a man in a long white rami came out, leaving it ajar. She could see into the room beyond. Twenty or thirty young women were sitting at long trestle-tables having lunch. They were served by locals, like the one she had just passed in the hall, who were barefoot and wore only white or coloured ramis. Some of them wore black and yellow bands round their forearms and beads in the pierced lobes of their ears. In the centre of the room stood a woman with grey hair who looked to have authority. Her head flicked back and forth, watching the waiters.

Stella paused, hesitating against the wall. The girls nearest her were eating cold meat and hot tinned peas, which they denounced with ardour, but no one noticed her. Eventually she walked over to the woman in the centre of the room. ‘Excuse me,' she said softly, ‘I have a room here.'

The woman did not look at her. Her eyes, set between narrow lids which she contracted as if it enabled her to see more keenly, flicked about the room in search of material for correction. ‘There are no rooms here,' she said.

‘I arrived today,' Stella said. ‘By plane. I shall be working for the government. I have a letter.'

‘There are no rooms here,' said the woman clearly. ‘I ought to know. I'm in charge of the place.' She looked at Stella now. Her manner was so forthright, her words so direct that Stella accepted her statement.

‘What shall I do?' The loss of her room seemed a disaster. She'd had little enough, a letter saying that a room was waiting, a pillow for her head. Now she had nothing.

The woman said, ‘Of course, I remember, you've been moved. You're in Castle Warwick now.'