‘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 half slices of toast.
‘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 cinnamon toast. ‘Are you catching the disease then?’
Vera crossed her narrow feet and took a strand of her whiteblonde 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 bits of his sugary toast, piece by piece, 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 cinnamon toast, 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 crumbs of toast 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 roughedged 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.