Vera tried to picture her father. Was he part of her distant childhood? It seemed to her there had been a pram, and a sweet tooth for toffee. ‘I turned around and he was absent.’ That’s what her grandfather said about his own father. She remembered her mother crying.
This time James kept talking. ‘The trouble with my son-in-law,’ he said dramatically. He knew he had an audience. ‘The trouble is he was too late.’
‘Too late for what?’
‘Just too late. For everything. He’s an imitator. Never had a thought of his own. Never could go his own way. Like the real people do.’ He sputtered to a stand still. Then he started again. ‘The trouble with your father was he was Scottish.’
Vera laughed at that one. Just one more reason her grandfather gave for not liking him.
He peered at Vera. ‘You’re thin, you’re pale, too, young lady. Are you eating properly? You know Keiko makes very good meals.’
Vera smiled primly.
‘You don’t want to be sickly.’
Unspoken words to follow were ‘like your mother’.
She was branching out too, from white food. She ate the Danish: it had white icing at least. She bit into it.
He laughed his pebbly laugh, the one she had come to love, the one of true mirth–as opposed to the other, hollow draining that was not a laugh but a view of the world.
He sipped his coffee. He had developed a tremor, and it spilled in the saucer. ‘You’re not going to try to get me to talk about pearls today.’
‘Everybody’s here and waiting.’
‘Nonsense. They’re here to have their coffee.’
James Lowinger liked to go out with the pearl divers, to see the stone go overboard and the men stand on it and let it carry them down to the bottom, like the lifts in the flat in London. They swarmed across the sea bed all arms and legs, as if they could stay down for ever. He wished he could do it. The rest of it he hated.
It was six years after his first visit, and the British had again announced that there would be a great harvest. His father got bidding for the rights to the oysters, and up went the price and down went the sun and suddenly it was his. He bought it all. The boats returned with hundreds of thousands of oysters, one in a thousand of which might have a pearl. The overseers slung the bags out of the boats and onto the sand.
Now, what to do? Papa Lowinger could hire the natives to open the shells. But then he still needed men to search for pearls. The larger pearls would be hidden in the hinge of the oyster. To remove such a pearl you’ve got to use bare hands and a special prising, cutting tool. So he had to trust some workers. And there were none he trusted. He could chain them and forbid them to chew their blasted betel nut because they would hide any pearls they found in their teeth, and punish them if they did. But he didn’t want the bother, or the brutality of it.
Happily some pearls came loose by themselves and turned up in the silt that built up at the bottom of the tubs. The pearls he found he bottled and sent back to London. But he still had hundreds upon thousands of oysters. He found a place outside Condatchey Bay, where the natives lived. He dumped his oysters in open tubs and they did their part like the docile creatures that they were and began to rot.
There was just one problem. The stench. It grew. In the heat, the dead molluscs smelled absolutely vile. And the smell clung; it did not blow away or dissipate after dark. Day after day, a week, two weeks, there was still the stink of it and more oysters coming in on the boats every day. The village rose up in protest and demanded that the English take the oysters away. But they were poor people and the natives needed the pearling fleets, and the traders persuaded them to let them stay on until they finished.
To keep an eye on the locals, James and his father stayed in a hastily built hut on the beach. James walked on the sand at night, looking at the stars, but it was impossible to escape the smell. He was ashamed. Of the filth. Of the big English brutes with their whips. Of the smell of death. He sometimes wondered if he himself were rotting.
When the rotting was done, and the oysters nearly water, they hired the women and children. They were the poorest of the poor–no one else would do it. Mostly naked they waded in to the mass of decomposing oyster flesh, and felt around on the bottom for pearls. They were up to their armpits in it, and kneeling, gagging at having their faces so close. His father’s men patrolled the edges of the pit with whips. James’s father himself was on a horse. From the height of his seat he saw an old crone slip a pearl into her mouth. He caught her before she swallowed and took her away and bound her to the mast in the hot sun and whipped her until she was nearly crippled.
At nights in their ramshackle house on the beach his papa swore about the greedy government that opened the fishery every year so that the pearls were getting smaller. James went out again to walk on the beach and saw the sun set over India. This is the family business, he thought to himself. This is how Mother got her fine hats and many schoolbooks.
The next day at dawn they woke to find a squad of local officials on the beach.
‘Move on,’ the men were shouting, ‘Go! Away with you!’
They waved their arms. The workers scrambled out of their tents half awake. The officials kicked in their direction, and began to fling sticks at them. The workers began to collect their few small possessions.
Papa came out of the little house to remonstrate. He put on his best manners.
‘Friends! Colleagues! What can I help you with?’
But he was confronted by a short, fat man, who had no small-talk. The Englishman had bought the right to hire the divers and bring up the oysters, he said, but he had not bought the right to let them rot there. He must move on.
‘Impossible,’ said Lowinger. ‘I cannot move this operation, which brings prosperity to you as well as to me. As you see. We are in the midst–’
Ceylon had anticipated his dilemma, said the fat man. In this case the government would help them out by taking two thirds of the oysters as a royalty.
By dark of night they moved on to another village, which had very few people. The oysters continued to appear, every day, on the boats from the pearl banks. James’s papa hoped the government did not notice him this time. He built huts and disguised them with palm branches. They dug trenches and lay the oysters down in them and caused water to run through to clean them. But still they smelled. The police came, but he bribed the police: the oysters were almost decomposed. When the inhabitants began to complain of the stench, he bribed them too.
Dead matter does not give way easily. As the oysters rotted they were infested with larvae and these larvae gave a man strange diseases. While the cleaning went on they had to have a big bonfire burning. It helped with the smell. One man fell into the flames and was burned; he was bitten by flies then and died of oozing infections.
Men’s lungs were damaged. The Chinese coolies seemed to manage the best. The old ladies who waded in the stuff, filtering all that dead flesh through their fingers, seemed indestructible but sometimes one would fall over and nearly drown.
There were flies everywhere. James could not breathe the air; it was oppression, and a plague upon the earth. They tried to clean it up. But more oysters kept coming out of the sea, every day. Lowinger had bought a share of the whole harvest, and the harvest was a good one. He moved from town to town but the locals refused to let him warehouse his putrefying little shellfish, pearls inside or no pearls inside.
At night in their house on the beach–once again, a shack made of boards thrown together, poles and a tin roof–James asked his father to pull up and leave. But no. Oh no, where pearls were concerned, Papa could always come up with a new idea.
When the next batch came ashore Papa produced four huge boxes