Inheritance (16 page)

‘Damn’ is the word she chooses as a greeting when Elena does indeed arrive, driving up unannounced, uninvited one Saturday afternoon. No hesitating at the gate for Elena. Ann, rooting in the vegetable garden for a few last carrots and parsnips, sees a big red four-wheel drive pull up, watches as Elena clambers out, surprisingly agile for one so large, unhooks the gate and stares up into the setting sun. She sees Ann and helloos, punching the air and dancing her delight. Ann has scarcely time to wash
her hands before Elena is at the door, a grin as wide as the ocean, arms spread wide.

‘Damn you, Elena,’ says Ann, but doesn’t mean it; can’t keep up the charade. She allows herself to be engulfed, lifted off her feet, kissed resoundingly on each cheek.

Elena lowers her to the ground, takes a string of cowrie shells from her neck and places it around Ann’s, where it hangs almost to her knees. She sways her way, half dancing, back to the car and brings out a large basket.

‘Feast!’ she calls. ‘Remember, my friend, always bring a picnic!’ Then stops suddenly, depositing the basket in the driveway. Tears are streaming down her wide brown face. ‘Jeanie, Jeanie, where were you? All these years!’

Ann is crying too. ‘I’m Ann these days; you must call me Ann, Elena.’

‘Well.’ Elena is suddenly serious. ‘Much talking to be made. But first, the feast: ‘ai muamua ona tautala ai lea. All that driving! I could eat a whole pig. Ani? May I call you Ani? You need to live so far away?’

‘Yes,’ says Ann. ‘Yes I do.’ She pulls Elena inside. It would not be helpful if Michael were to catch sight and come to join the party. Not yet. She spreads a white cloth on the dining room table, stokes up the fire and helps Elena unpack the basket. There are ham sandwiches, a chicken, a good piece of cold roast pork, marinated mussels, tomatoes and cucumbers chopped and ready to eat, a hand of bananas, a cream sponge, a whole pineapple and – ‘since we are in a palagi country’ – a bottle of champagne rolled up tightly between a couple of thawing ice packs in layers of newspaper.

‘If you have spinach in the garden we could make palusami,’ says Elena hopefully, waving a tin of coconut
cream. But she is too hungry to pursue this diversion.

Ann pours the bubbles; Elena washes her hands carefully at the kitchen sink, breaks open the chicken, and sits down. Ann can not keep a straight face as she and Elena eat. Every time their eyes meet they smile. The warmth, the love between them won’t be denied. Ann realises how much she has missed an intimate friendship. Yet she remains wary of what is to come; impatient to get it over with. She can hardly detect a change from the Elena of twenty years ago. Larger, certainly – perhaps less exuberant – but seemingly ageless. Elena is in no hurry. As she eats, she remarks on the tapestries, the woven rugs, Francesca’s paintings, from time to time wiping away, with a smile, a trickling tear. She eats with delicacy but thoroughly. Ann waits. Turns down the offer of cake. She is not used to such large meals.

‘Once you were not so careful,’ says Elena.

Ann frowns. ‘What do you mean?

‘You would risk more.’ Elena bites into a large slice with relish, finishes the whole piece before she speaks again.

‘O Ani o lau uo, I have found you at last, my friend.’ She lays her large warm hand over Ann’s small dry one.

‘Elena,’ says Ann with more force than she intends, ‘you have stalked me like ….’ She will not say his name. ‘You have wormed your way into my daughter’s life, bribing her in order to get close to me.’

Elena holds up her hands in dismay. ‘Auoi tafefe! Jeanie … Ani, why do you attack? Your daughter’s work is lovely. Lovely.’ She raises her eyebrows in that peculiarly Samoan expression. ‘Why, why did you run away?’

‘At the museum?’

‘All the time! All these years! You had no need to hide.’

‘I did.’

‘But from me? Your friend?’

‘From everyone. Elena, it’s complicated.’

Elena stands. Picks up dishes. ‘Well, we will clear away and you can talk as we work. Complications are eased, I find, if the hands are active.’

Ann smiles. Wants desperately to give in; to unburden herself to this old friend. Elena is so persuasive, so seductive. She wills herself to guard her tongue.

They store the surplus food then stand at the sink together, looking down towards the road. Elena’s bulk fills Ann’s small kitchen, her hands engulf the wet plates. But she dries with care and stacks them neatly.

Elena comes to the point now. No more skirmishing. ‘Your daughter is Samoan.’

This is not a question, Ann notes. ‘You can’t know that.’

‘Yes Ani, I can most definitely. Sooner or later someone else will make the same discovery.’

‘You saw the Florence painting and made a guess.’ Ann looks at Elena sheepishly.

Elena lets out a guffaw. ‘That painting of Florence! Wonderful! Like a clue, especially to me. Don’t deny – you still thought of me when you told her that big fib.’

‘Yes, yes, I suppose I did.’ Ann frowns, remembering answering little Francesca’s questions, her insistence on knowing. Since the trip to Italy, her daughter seems to have lost interest in her heritage, to Ann’s relief. ‘What makes you think she might be Samoan?’

Elena leans forward and the bench creaks. ‘To me it is obvious. The physiognomy. Her skin colour of course could be Mediterranean, Maori, Arab even. The nose – definitely palagi. But the shape of eyes and cheekbone, the bone structure – the clues are there for a knowledgeable student of Pacific peoples. Has no one suggested it to her before?’

Ann feels the panic rising again. She tries to keep her voice firm. ‘No, Elena, and no one should. She is happy and settled. Please, please do not try to change things.

‘But Ani, how could you do such a thing? Deny her heritage? Her culture?’

Ann is irritated at this accusation. At every step throughout Francesca’s life, Ann has been careful, watched over her daughter, answered questions – if not with the exact truth, then with a good answer. Francesca is well adjusted and happy; Ann is sure of that and will defend that security with ferocity. ‘Elena,’ she says, ‘my daughter’s culture is the one she has been brought up with. Francesca is comfortable in it. I have good reason to hide from her the Samoan side.’

Elena raises one finger, cocking an eye. Ann realises with a start what she has admitted and turns on Elena in a fury, all her care forgotten. ‘Don’t you dare barge in and ruin our lives! You must not interfere in what you don’t know. You must leave it alone, Elena.’

Elena waves a tea towel at Ann as if to flap away a bad smell. ‘Eh! Eh! You sound just like Hamish!’

Ann steadies herself against the bench. She can feel the colour draining from her face. ‘Hamish Lander? He’s still alive?’

Elena’s attention suddenly sharpens. She watches Ann
closely. ‘Hamish Lander, yes. When I told him I’d seen you at the museum he was most rude. Accused me of – well – you would say meddling.’

Ann catches her breath. ‘I
would
say that yes. Most definitely.’

Elena leads Ann through her own house until she finds suitable furniture for conversation. She seats Ann with care, hands her a glass of water; watches as Ann drinks. When she is seated herself, her voluminous dress draped to her satisfaction, she begins.

This is why I couldn’t confide in her, thinks Ann. She takes over. She would have steered me in a different direction. A wrong one.

‘Ani,’ Elena says gently, ‘I understand that you must have good reason to keep the Samoan blood secret. I understand that. You are a careful, strong woman. But there must be a way. After all these years. Surely she should know.’

‘She should
not
,’ says Ann. ‘No Elena she should not.’

‘An illegitimate Italian child is less shameful than an illegitimate Samoan one?’

‘Oh Elena.’ Ann is suddenly tired, exhausted by the battle within. ‘I have made a promise. I have sworn. Please let the matter lie. Please.’

Elena seems not to have noticed the plea. ‘A promise to who? The father?’

‘To myself – on behalf of my daughter.’

Elena shifts a little, regards Ann with her head tilted to one side, considering, no doubt, the next line of attack. Ann waits. She remembers the examination, years ago, for her French orals – the patient tutors behind their
desks, trying not to appear terrifying; and failing.

‘Ani,’ says Elena at last, ‘you must know what I am thinking. That Teo is the father. Her age would fit.’

Ann says nothing. She looks away, out to the hills in the distance. She thinks of her beloved dead father and prays to his soul for strength.

‘You have promised to keep the child secret, to save his pule.’ Elena makes a face. ‘That wife of his – Ma’atoe – is a jealous and proud woman. Her children are not allowed to visit me in New Zealand for fear I contaminate them with my modern ideas! Can you imagine! But then she is high-born.’

Ann stares into the fire. She dares not speak.

Elena smiles and leans forward ominously. ‘My dear Ani, my naughty brother is a better man these days. A little pompous, but not as wayward as in those years we were together. A matai, yes, and a Member of Parliament. He has a certain standing and may enter the Cabinet soon. His reputation is secure enough. An illegitimate palagi child might be excused – even chuckled over as a conquest in past days.’ She slaps her thigh and chuckles herself. ‘Ma‘atoe need not know.’

‘Elena my old friend,’ Ann rises and holds out her hand. The worst is perhaps over. ‘I have made a promise and will keep it. At the time I was very angry with – the father – and never wanted to see him again.’ (This, at least, is the truth.) ‘Francesca will never have knowledge of her birth father. Surely it’s not so important. She is happy and secure with a good mother and many friends. If you want to keep in touch with Francesca, it must be as one of those friends. Or as patron.’

Elena gives a little sigh. ‘Not as aunt?’

‘No. Not as aunt. And you must not mention a word of any Samoan blood. Or of our time in Samoa.’

Elena sighs again. ‘So hard.’

She has given in too easily, thinks Ann. I don’t trust her for a minute. ‘Listen Elena,’ she says, ‘I have told Francesca what you call “a big fib” for good reason. What will she think of me if you tell her something different now? Will she ever trust me again?’

Elena says nothing, but her eyes accuse. She spreads her hands, palms up, as if the answer is obvious, then slaps them down on her thighs.

‘Well, then. So, for the time being we will differ on the matter of Francesca.’ She smiles easily and steers the conversation to other matters. Her own life; Ann’s.

‘That story of Florence,’ she says, tracing a finger over the tapestry cushion at her side, ‘I told not one person but you.’ I made a big joke of it, I think, when we sat over our lunch at the clinic – do you remember that day? How we laughed?’

Ann remembers the ease of their friendship back in the islands, the many hilarities. Elena was away, back in New Zealand, during the darkest time. Her memories seem all to be clear and sunlit; or is she trying to seduce Ann?

‘Yes I remember,’ she says, smiling. ‘Your stories always made me laugh.’

Elena sighs. ‘Shall I tell you the truth? It was not a funny time at all. I changed it to make you laugh. I told
you
a big fib because I wanted to tell, but was embarrassed about the truth. Perhaps you have been the same with Francesca.’

Before Ann can interrupt, to argue again her own
scruples, Elena tells the real story. She speaks in a different voice now – not the usual colourful flow. The words are hesitant, troubled.

‘For me it wasn’t really the fun-filled trip of a lifetime – the carefree OE that we all loved to boast about. My mother didn’t even know about it. I lied to her.’ Elena looks quickly up at Ann and back again at the pattern on the cushion. ‘It was the year before my degree course in Dunedin started. I’d passed my prelim exams in Wellington with flying colours. Two other students – friends in a casual sort of way – decided to have a year off before all the hard work and asked me to come too. I had saved enough of the scholarship money to go and wanted desperately to see Europe, so we went. My mother thought I was hard at work on an isolated farm earning enough to continue my studies. In a way the guilt of that lie spoiled things for me – I was always worrying that she might find out. One of the others was a boy, which would be considered highly improper in Samoa. But I rather fancied him and liked her, so I went.’

‘Was this an affair?’ says Ann, interested despite her worries. ‘You never mentioned an affair!’

‘Not really an affair. He was clever and good fun. We held hands once or twice. I was always a prude, even in Samoa. Teo told me I was known as the ice queen, for my standoffish ways!’ Elena smiles, perhaps sadly. ‘I was interested in other things. Boys usually seemed rather silly to me.’

‘But Florence?’ Ann prompts. ‘Did it really happen?’

‘Oh yes. It happened,’ Elena clears her throat angrily, ‘but not in the boisterous, hilarious way I told it to you – and no doubt you told to Francesca. I was homesick; the
other two had gone off somewhere for a couple of days together. They had become a sort of couple, which made me even more miserable. I knew no one in the camping ground and was freezing, huddled in my sleeping bag in our little tent. I could hear laughter from the tent next door.

‘Then a young English boy poked his head through the flap and said his Italian friend knew of a good party – in an old mill close by. He said they’d noticed I was alone and asked if I’d like to join them. I shook my head.’ Tears stand in Elena’s eyes as she looks up. ‘Embarrassed at my own shyness, terrified of what my mother would think, ashamed of being such a wimp. Get the picture?’

‘Elena, you don’t have to tell me,’ says Ann. ‘It’s a long time ago.’

‘I want to tell you, Ani. Do you mind?’

Ann moves over to sit at Elena’s feet. This is not at all how she had pictured the evening, but she’s glad of the diversion, glad to be, in some way, needed.

Elena takes a deep breath. ‘He was very persuasive but not violent. I buried my head in the sleeping bag and he went away. I felt dreadful. Lay there listening to their laughter, which I now imagined was aimed at me. Finally they came back.’