Debatable Land (28 page)

‘If it were not the houses it would be another thing. Only a very brusque character can refrain from going over the past again.’

‘It saves time if one can be free of it.’

‘Only if you are going to do new things every new moment of your life. I think it is good to remember the past if one is not posing it in fanciful new ways just to make one’s own case.’

‘I will not talk about Logan,’ she said, shocking herself.

He decided not to have heard.

‘Let me take the carpet on deck with you. We can hang it over the boom and beat it.’

‘You are domesticated too.’

‘I tried to elude it, but it has come for me.’

‘Here we are,’ said Logan. ‘What an extraordinary sight you make, Elspeth. We have signed in with an official called Hepplewhite or Sheraton and I’ve made times for the collection of fuel, gas and water. I suggest we go ashore. I’ve met a remarkable character who’s offered us a traditional feast.’

Demolition leads to those traditions, thought Alec.

‘It is at a site,’ said Gabriel.

Elspeth and Alec waited for more.

Logan passed on to the other matter that had engaged him that afternoon: ‘I went to place some calls and make a couple of enquiries about a few things. It’s a pleasant town. The Palace is made of shingle, or we’d call it that in America, whitewashed. People as substantial as you’d expect, and wearing these woven girdles of palm matting. It’s a sign of respect for the royal family. The strangest thing is that on a Sunday, they tell me, the airport is closed so that one of the nobles can play with his remote-control planes. Apparently it’s the same every Sunday. I approve of that, the big planes held up by the toy ones.’

‘It could also be that Tongans are very devout,’ said Nick. ‘They observe the sabbath and go to church two or three times.’

It was Nick who volunteered to stay behind on the boat while the others went to the feast, which was to be cooked in an underground oven and would feature suckling pig.

The Zodiac was deep in the water as they set off for the harbour steps. When they got there the weed and slime made the steps treacherous and the dirty harbour water slapped up and down them. The party was met by a wide man who guided them to his Chevy pick-up. His skin was covered on cheeks and neck with small nodules of skin like the grains of dirt you rub off when you wash with a loofah. He was frantically hyperbolic, waving his dimpled arms in their blue shirtsleeves, pulling up and adjusting his long palm-mat girdle. He was smoking without stopping. They all got into the car.

Later they picked up four more people, Americans, at a place the host called the international dateline, though it wasn’t clear to Alec if it was the thing itself or a hotel named for it. He experienced no shift in time such as he longed to feel. The remarkable brilliance of Pacific islanders in the matters of navigation and time impressed him and depressed him, for he could not see how the islanders’ new lives would use such a gift. Celestial navigation, that bent the impervious stars to human use and absorbed the brain in exercise that freed it from any but the clearest thought, was becoming redundant. Soon it would be revived only as a stunt, a card trick using tides and planets.

‘Welcome to this evening’s typical Tongan feast. Be seated on the carved chairs and tables. My dear wife has earlier prepared the
umu
, the oven underground, where it is so large you can fit in one man.’ No one knew whether to laugh, except Logan, who did.

The host looked gratified. Cannibalism was good for tourists. ‘I will come round to collect expenses of luxurious meal to come. Meanwhile I introduce my daughters.’

Two noble-headed girls with poised bearing came forward with wooden trays on which toothpicks impaled pieces of pineapple and more oddly various cheese snacks that could have been lifted with the fingers. It appeared that the appetisers had been gingered up to look primitive, with a stick through the nose.

Coconut shells of
kava
were passed round. In the flickering light of a pitch torch its colour was invisible, its hot smell and burning taste nothing to its effect as the flames shuffled the faces of the four Tongans and their nine guests. A battery-operated cassette player was turned on. A girl’s voice came out of it, telling the story of the life of Brigham Young.

One of the Tongan girls seemed choked by the smoke burping gently from the
umu
.

The host did some stately dancing, breaking off to sip
kava
, then later lemonade. The smoke continued to creep among those assembled.

At last the host clapped his hands. The guests stopped conversing among themselves about the mildness of the night, the atmosphere of the site (which was not to be seen), and what sort of insect-repellent is best.

‘A few words,’ said the host, holding out a number of perfect sleeping crisp orange pigs on a stick and starting to carve them in straight lines like loaves without respect for their anatomy. ‘This feast I hold each Saturday and I am proud to. The voice you heard on the cassette player was the voice of my youngest daughter, who perished earlier today at the age of seven after much affliction.’ All the time he spoke he had a smile of great exaltation on his face, and when he finished speaking he clapped. There was nothing for it but to clap too. The handsome daughters hit the tears off their cheeks as if they were mosquitoes. It was impossible to know whether the family were continuing in this way through necessity or custom. The inhibition that lies upon strangers lay thicker than it had before.

‘No doubt,’ said Logan, ‘you were a splendid father to her. I am sure that your wife, who has shown such skill and charm this evening, was a wonderful mother.’ Empty words were needed, and Logan had them. He put his arm tenderly around Gabriel, in a paternal way, so strong had his fellow feeling at once become for this wretched bereaved man.

Fortified by the touch of the female child, he went on: ‘We were uplifted to hear her sweet voice telling the story of the founder of your fine faith.’ God, he has his wits about him, thought Alec, it’s crude rubbish but it is potent and it is what’s needed. The man has a freedom from timidity that makes leaders of coups. He was moved by Logan’s finely spoken, sonorous, trite words as they came. The sisters of the dead child gave up holding off the tears they wept as they handed round the sliced piglets, as they dispensed bottled sauerkraut on the end of long forks, as they collected beer cans and
kava
shells from the turf where they had laid the finely figured
tapa
cloth to be admired in the light of the pitch by which little could be seen but the depths of sad dark eyes and the sleeping orange slick chopped-off faces of the suckling pigs.

‘It was more than our money’s worth, at any rate,’ said Logan as they passed over the water of the harbour to the boat, where Nick was sitting up in the fo’c’sle listening to the water and the sky.

Chapter 9

In the high trees over the road hung umbrellas stuffed with red fur. These stirred occasionally, and put out a tentative hand, like an old lady feeling in her reticule for an indigestion mint. Here were the flying foxes of Tonga by day, huge russet furred bats comatose but reassuringly alive in counterpoint to the low-lying churches of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, tidy bungalows so numerous it was on this island as though prayer might have to be succumbed to at any time and had to take place in one of these facilities rather than in the open air, at will. The number of such facilities suggested that the prayer-bladders of the people of the Kingdom of Tonga were weak.

Having settled into the life around the harbour after six days at anchor just outside it, Alec and Gabriel, Logan and Elspeth had bicycled to another shore of the main island of the archipelago, away from Nuku’alofa. On their bicycles they overtook cars, which ambled along beneath their hefty drivers. The often moulting girdles of woven palm around the waists of the Tongans did not have the effect of making them look clumsy; being constrained to walk at a dignified pace suited their bulk. They were held back from trivial jerky movements by the matting.

‘Perhaps we Scots would be easier to rule if the kilt was rigid,’ said Alec, to Logan. Logan smiled at him without focusing. If he heard a metaphor or a joke in a sentence, he could not always be bothered to fillet out its meaning. He did not think a man should speak in a whimsical way.

‘It’s like making the population walk about each with a book on their head,’ said Elspeth.

‘Monarchy supported by deportment.’ Alec caught her meaning.

They were passing a cluster of long huts that were open on three sides and roofed in palm fibre. On the floor of the huts women sat beating palm into
tapa
cloths. Out of the dusty capital, there were Methodist Churches, Free Wesleyan Churches and the churches of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, more churches than there were family houses it seemed. Children in groups, usually conventionally dressed in grey shorts, white shirts, check dresses full in the skirt, came up to look as the four passed. The children were big, with adult legs and already the stately adult walk, though their matting belts were not as wide as the adults’.

In the heat of the day, as the shadows of the fruit bats filled trees black at their boles, they saw a sign that said, ‘Tongan specials and blow holes’. There was a compound like the children’s zoo for farm animals found in large zoos. Smartly painted white palings were stuck into dryish earth around a collection of huts painted in saltworn versions of cheerful colours.

This melancholy shanty prettiness was emphasised by the presence of two white kids tethered to a post. One cleared its throat; the other contradicted it with narrowed yellow eyes. There was a hook-and-eye gate into the compound. Logan opened it and looked around. He saw no one awaiting him and was at a loss till he thought out the next move.

‘Anyone here?’ called Elspeth. She would have been happy for there not to have been, but a man came towards them from one of the larger huts.

‘Australian, American, German? We do vegetarian specials from each country. We know what you like.’

‘British, in fact,’ said Logan.

Elspeth went off abruptly to scratch the kids, if they would let her. The geographical certainties in her husband’s voice made her squeamish. ‘Other peoples like to know where they stand,’ he said to her.

‘Do other people?’ she asked, annoying him without trying to.

‘We do a good mashed potato with chips and rice.’

‘It’s more the blow holes we’ve come for, though food would be a bonus.’ The other annoying thing was that Logan did always get through to people he spoke to in this way. ‘I was thinking of seafood. That
is
the sea down there?’ It was about twenty yards away, beyond what looked like a ha-ha at the edge of the coarse grass. Alec saw a splash of foam once, and once a jet of spray. Someone must be playing by the water.

Lower down the dusty slope of the compound, tables with clipped-on oilcloths stood under an awning that was decked with pearl bulbs like pickled onions on strings. A serving station with another awning was to the side. Slapping and puffing sounds, loud as from walrus, came from the direction of the water, which could be seen now to have a constant edge of mist broken over it.

‘Select from booth the seafood. Under Australian vegetarian.’ Heaps of newly boiled prawns and langoustines steamed on enamel trays. American vegetarian, bundles of franks, curled in the heat alongside.

‘There are no cats. You’d expect cats, with this smell,’ said Gabriel.

‘They’re German vegetarian,’ said Logan.

Gabriel recoiled excitedly.

Elspeth had rejoined them by now where they sat at a table with beer and Saltines.

‘Snacks travel by faster airlines than people,’ she said.

‘Have you heard of a concession?’ said Logan.

‘I’ve heard of concession.’

‘There you are. Gabriel, forepaw for you, or tail?’

Gabriel looked as shocked as she had the first time. She was good company; you saw a fine picture of yourself in her.

Alec thought of the note he had seen on one of the Charts of the Pacific: ‘Caution is necessary when navigating among the low, reefy islands of the Pacific Ocean. The several details have been collected from the voyages of various navigators, extending over a long series of years; the relative positions of the many dangers may therefore not in all cases be exactly given; while it is possible there may be others still undiscovered.’

How could they come to know a place at all by arriving at roughly the speed of handwriting and staying for enough time to leave with three tall tales and a seashell? He had met an old Englishman at one of the many milk bars on Tonga, who said, ‘I’ve not been home for fifty-six years and I’ve travelled all among these islands of Tonga, but I have more idea of England, which is a foreign country to me, than I do of here. I know the facts: small kingdom; intermarried nobles; remarkable girth of inhabitants; uncountable archipelago; regrettable fondness for starch and soft drinks; bisected by international dateline; touch of cannibalism surely atoned for by enthusiasm of converts to the American Way. But all that adds up to something quite different from the genial place that lies about me. All I can do is like it. And keep on noticing what it is actually like.’ He snapped his nose into a spotted handkerchief and wiped at it to keep up the shine. He wore a blazer and had feet of leather, bare hard feet and ankles that shone like boots. ‘At eleven I generally have my banana milk,’ he lifted the heavy beige glass, ‘and then walk down to see what’s going forward at the Palace. Put these on for that.’ He pulled out some chappals from a shoebag labelled ‘shoes’ and sewn with a nametape. ‘Otherwise it’s barefoot. I go barefoot, barefoot. Feet like omelettes. It’s perfect agony in shoes.’ Alec had been no good to this man who liked a few words with each visitor to Tonga, rather more words if they knew the South of England, and perhaps a few more if they followed the fate of the pine marten, whose scarcity, he said, had driven him from the place.