‘You … you are children, you don’t understand!’ She cried. Only her mouth moved, her eyes seemed trapped in her face. Crrrackkk! Her desperate hand slapped at his defiant face. His head didn’t move with the blow; he continued defeating her with his unrelenting eyes. ‘You — you Samoan!’ She pushed back her chair; it crashed back onto the floor. ‘Just wait!’ She wheeled, her billowing dress pushing her heavy sweaty smell up into their faces.

  She fled through the back door.

  A short while later, while they were resetting the table for Barker and Stenson, they heard Mrs Pivot’s sobbing coming from her quarters across the garden of ginger flower, hibiscus, hydrangeas and gardenia.

  ‘We shouldn’t have …’ Peleiupu began.

  ‘No!’ Arona stopped her. The irrevocable finality of his judgement frightened her: she was never going to allow herself to be judged by him. Never.

  He squatted and started cleaning the stove.

  Peleiupu went and sat on the back steps. The flowers and shrubs were stirring in the soft wind that was sweeping down from the mountains; she concentrated on the movement and the brilliant colours of the flowers, and her mind soon settled into a submerged, silent reef.

  For a startled moment she thought everything around her was beating like a gigantic heart. The persistent beat continued. She recognised the booming of a church lali and remembered it was Sunday and time for morning service. She thought of her parents at Salua and her sisters and friends in Satoa, and, realising again that Arona had put himself outside her reach, she looked at the mountains and sky, feeling as though the universe was indifferent to her existence.

  She found herself moving silently down the passageway and into the sitting room.

  The stale smell of whiskey and sweat rushed at her as she picked her way through the overturned furniture to the bookcases. She pulled out The Island of Treasures, and hurried out and sat in a cane chair on the veranda.

  She devoured the story: the hunt for treasures through a pirate-infested world.

  ‘She’s all right,’ Arona told her when he came to get her for lunch.

  A neat, self-assured Mrs Pivot was washing dishes at the sink. ‘Mr Barker and Mr Stenson won’t be having lunch,’ she said.

  The table was once again set with the best silverware, glasses and crockery. In the centre was a roast chicken decorated with vegetables. And roast potatoes, peas and gravy. Peleiupu trembled as she sat opposite Arona while Mrs Pivot carved the chicken and put large helpings on their plates. ‘Is there anything else you want?’ They shook their heads. ‘I’ll be in my quarters if you need me.’ She left, still refusing to look at them.

  For a while they tried eating with the knives and forks, then Arona gave up and used his fingers. Peleiupu persisted a little longer, but, seeing that Arona was also eating her share of the food, switched.

  ‘Wish there was some taro,’ he said.

  ‘And some luau and fish.’

  ‘Palagi food is too light. You get hungry again, too fast.’

  After lunch Peleiupu went to sleep in Mrs Pivot’s room, while Arona got a mat and pillow and slept under a breadfruit tree near the stables.

  Peleiupu dreamt of black-eyed, diamond-ringed, turbaned Moslem pirates with sparkling teeth and evil smiles as sharp as swords, and dolphins leaping through crimson seas, their childlike chatter propping up a sky of laughing children. Just before she woke in the late afternoon she was on an island, digging for treasure with a horde of one-eyed pirates with orange headscarves. Up from the black depths of earth sprang the rusty treasure chest. The lid fell open, like the mouth of a whale, and a slab of white light whipped up into their faces, blinding them. Her arms and hands plunged down into the light and shattered it into a million exploding pieces. She sobbed as she tried to catch the pieces.

  ‘Is there any work I can do?’ she asked Mrs Pivot, who was kneading dough at the bench.

  ‘Take Mr Stenson his dinner. It’s on the table.’ A bowl of soup and one buttered slice of bread, on a silver tray. ‘He wants you to bring it,’ Mrs Pivot added.

  She trembled as she pushed open the bedroom door and stepped into the room.

  ‘Bring it here,’ he invited her. With bowed head she went, placed the tray on the table beside his bed, and turned to leave. ‘Don’t go,’ he said. Her body burned as she watched him propping himself up with pillows; he sounded as if he were breathing through thick water. ‘Sit here and talk to me,’ he said. She placed the tray on the pillow in his lap and sat down, afraid to look at him.

  She heard the spoon scrapping through the soup, then his soft sipping. She glanced up. His hair was slicked down over his head, his egg-white skin glowed, his lips were bluish and red-veined. He was trying to control his shaking hands.

  ‘Shall I help you?’ she asked in English. He lowered his spoon and she started feeding him the soup. As he ate, his shivering and laboured breathing eased away.

  ‘Are you and Arona enjoying your stay?’ he asked. She nodded and lifted the tray off his lap. ‘Don’t go!’ She sat down again. ‘Is it bad manners in your culture to look directly at someone?’

  She nodded. ‘At someone older.’

  ‘Are you missing your parents and village?’

  She hesitated. ‘I’m not missing them,’ she lied.

  ‘That’s good. I have a family. Over there.’ On the far wall was a row of blackframed photographs. ‘If you get them, I’ll tell you who they are.’

  She unhooked the photographs and brought them to him.

  ‘My wife and I when we got married,’ he showed her. ‘She was sixteen and I was twenty.’ In the photograph was a young woman in a long white wedding dress, and a young man in an immaculate black suit. Unsmiling and stiff. The woman had a delicately thin face freckled with dots like full stops on a page. Her hair was almost silver-white, and her left hand clenched around a bouquet of flowers as if it were a weapon. The youth was paler, his face fuller than now; his fragility seemed trapped in the blackness of his suit. ‘That was a long time ago,’ he sighed. ‘Rebecca was her name. She was music and love …’ He withdrew into his memories, then said, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘My children,’ he introduced the next photograph. His wife was plumper now, with a baby in her arms, two teenage sons standing behind her, and a daughter, about Peleiupu’s height, sitting beside her. All very formal, unsmiling, posed in front of a large castle — their home. The front of the building was covered with a creeper. ‘John, my eldest son, is a lawyer in London, with ambitions of being a Member of Parliament. A soul loved and worshipped by the Almighty and an over-ambitious wife and two very spoilt children. He should’ve been an artist, a painter, but he fell in love with the daughter of a poverty-stricken lord. I shouldn’t be too harsh on her: now I know he wanted to be converted to the pursuit of status and wealth. After all, we all find it difficult to resist the temptations of material comfort … I thought Matthew, our second son, would become the scientist I wanted him to be. But after two miserable and expensive years at Cambridge, doing extremely well at his studies, he left without my permission. Now he’s an actor in a mediocre troupe performing mediocre plays. Thank God he’s happy.’ Stenson chuckled. ‘He had the courage to be what he wanted to be.’

  He paused and asked Peleiupu, ‘In Samoa, do young people always have to obey their elders?’ She nodded. ‘Well, Katherine, our oldest daughter, is obeying her parents. Her mother wanted her to be the wife of an Anglican vicar, preferably one with wealth. Poor obedient Katherine is still looking.’ He was turning the photograph over, when Peleiupu asked:

  ‘And your little daughter?’

  ‘She died in an accident,’ he said. He showed her the other three photographs of his family at various stages of their life together. ‘I had everything,’ he said. ‘Wealth, fame, a beautiful wife and loving children. I believed I needed nothing else.’ He stacked the photographs and she put them on the side-table. She started to leave. ‘Stay!’ he called. ‘I sense you want to know how my daughter died, don’t you?’ Surprised, she sat down again. ‘If you look at me once directly, I will tell you.’ She did, quickly, and then away. ‘Very good,’ he said.

  ‘Marianne was about twelve when she died. She loved horses. When she returned from boarding school during the holidays there was a horse, a birthday present, waiting for her. She was already an expert rider — and a fearless one. It was so quick. One morning while she was out riding on her own, the horse stumbled and she fell off it. When she was found, she was dead.’ No sorrow or regret in his voice. ‘No one was to blame. It was an accident, pure and simple. But guilt has a strange, cruel, unforgiving way of hunting us out. Within a week of Marianne’s burial her mother was speaking less and less to me. At first I interpreted her silences as sorrow, but when I started catching glimpses of intense dislike in her manner, I knew. Unexpectedly, just after dinner one evening, she gazed at me and said simply but with a burning hatred, “You killed her!” Yes, it was as simple as that. She cried, I consoled her, she apologised, and for a few weeks our relationship seemed normal. Then the silences returned, more sullen, more accusing; they got longer and more unforgiving. Soon our home was a house under siege: we avoided each other; talked only when we had to. Fortunately our children were at boarding school … One evening, and I can’t recall the exact moment of my discovery, I realised she had caused Marianne’s death — she had persuaded me to buy the horse. Yes, she was responsible …

  ‘At dinner that night we sat at the table, locked in our self-righteous hatred of each other. “You killed her!” she whispered. “You let her persuade you to get her that horse for her birthday!” Deliberately, I continued eating as if I hadn’t heard her. “Murderer!” she cried, jumping to her feet. I lowered my knife and fork and, gazing at her, said, “You are going insane. Now sit down!” “I won’t sit down!” she cried, tears streaming down her face. “Not with a murderer!” I got up slowly and left the table, leaving her to her anger and hatred.

  ‘Eventually we found ourselves sleeping in separate rooms, and whenever the servants weren’t there had our meals separately. We were utterly convinced of each other’s guilt. Do you understand?’ he asked. Peleiupu nodded, even though she didn’t. ‘I’ve spent years analysing what happened; there was no logical, sane explanation for our blaming each other, but we did — and that was the important fact. And the more we refused to discuss it, the more it festered inside us. I nursed it and refused, deliberately, to react the way she wanted me to.

  ‘Our friends visited us less and less. We stopped going out. It was as if we loved our silent, destructive war — our destruction of each other. One morning I woke to find she had collected all our children’s pictures and locked them in her bedroom. I retaliated: I locked all their toys in my bedroom. That night while she stormed around the house collecting everything else that belonged to our children, I broke into her bedroom and retrieved our children’s pictures. On her bed I left a note that read: YOU MURDERED HER. Later, when her anguished cries and curses burst through the house, I experienced a gleeful elation, a joy, and fell asleep with her crying: “I’II fix you! I’ll fix you!” … And she did,’ he sighed.

  Remembering who he was confessing to, he spared her the details of her retaliation, her self-destruction. ‘She disappeared for a week. The police found her body in a cheap hotel … And here I am. To this day, I’ve tried to persuade myself that I should feel guilty about her death. But I don’t — that is the awful, pitiless truth of it all. Somewhere during our war I lost the love I had for her. And I did love her!’ He was again talking to himself. ‘The terrible beauty of that love haunts me even now. Not the death of my daughter or the destruction of my wife but the beauty of the love we had for each other.’

  Peleiupu waited for him to continue, and when he didn’t she asked, ‘May I go now?’ She noticed that evening was entering the room, and he was falling asleep.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Barker asked her at breakfast. She shook her head. ‘I’m taking you two into town. Mr Stenson has given me money to buy you whatever you want, as long as it isn’t too expensive.’ She tried to smile. ‘That’s the girl. He’s well again and in his study, writing. Every day he rises at 5.30 am and writes until breakfast, which Mrs Pivot takes to him. After breakfast he works until midday. He spends the afternoons on his correspondence and things concerning his land and house. Many chiefs from this district come to him for advice, as well … You’re not listening, Pele!’

  ‘She’s all right,’ Arona said.

  That morning Barker took them from store to store, and, in his flamboyant, loquacious way, showed them the ‘treasures’ of what he described as the ‘world beyond the reefs’. Arona joined in the adventure of discovery, noticing with pride that Barker didn’t care whether the papalagi owners and their employees were unhappy with Samoans being treated as papalagi. To humiliate the owners further, Barker insisted on his wards speaking their very correct English, aloud.

  Peleiupu tried but couldn’t enter wholeheartedly into the adventure. It was as if after learning Mrs Pivot’s fragile secrets and, even more devastating, the dark key to Mr Stenson’s fate, the treasure house that was Apia was no longer infused with wonder: to her, Apia was now a shabby scatter of buildings and businesses through which the dust moved incessantly.

  At lunchtime Barker tied their horse and cart under an almond tree in the centre of the town. He opened a tin of corned beef and a packet of cabin bread. ‘Here, eat,’ he told them. ‘I’ll be back soon.’ He headed for the bar across the road.

  Thirsty and hungry from a morning of walking, Peleiupu and Arona sat on the back of the cart and ate their food. As the shops closed for lunch, they saw many papalagi going into the bar.

  An hour passed. The shops opened again. Still no sign of Barker. Arona lay down on the grass under the tree and went to sleep. Peleiupu ripped open the bag of sweets Barker had bought them. For another hour she watched the bar and ate her sweets. The bar grew noisier as the afternoon aged; singing started and she could hear Barker’s raucous baritone above the others. She thought of Satoa.

  As the shops started closing she nudged Arona’s shoulder. He woke up. ‘Barker is still in there,’ she told him. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, annoyed at being woken up.

  ‘You should go in there and get him,’ she suggested. He shook his head. ‘I can’t go in there,’ she insisted. ‘The bar is for men only.’

  ‘So let’s just wait.’ He knew she knew he was afraid to go into the bar and, knowing that, he was angry with her; she was equally angry with him for being scared. She sat on the edge of the cart’s tray, kicking her feet.

  The main street emptied of people and traffic; the dust settled; the bar was now full of customers and their singing could be heard all over town.

  ‘I’ll go,’ she said finally, springing down from the cart.

  ‘We’ll wait.’

  ‘What if something has happened to him?’

  ‘We will wait!’

  She started across the road. ‘I’ll get him myself!’

  ‘You’re trying to be smart again,’ he called. When she didn’t stop, he ran up and blocked her way. She stepped to one side and hurried past him.

  ‘Don’t!’ he pleaded as she stood facing the bar door.

  She pushed open the door. The stream of noise and the dizzy stench of beer and smoke hit them. She stepped into the torrent. He slipped in behind her. In front of them was a frightening gallery of papalagi men laughing, talking, drinking, in command. They couldn’t see Barker anywhere.

  ‘Let’s leave,’ Arona whispered. She stood her ground. A tall Samoan waiter was hurrying over to them. Arona tugged at her sleeve. She pulled her arm away.

  ‘You’re not allowed in here,’ the waiter ordered. When she refused to move, he held her left shoulder.

  ‘Please,’ she said in Samoan, ‘we came to look for Mr Barker.’

  ‘Wait outside.’ The waiter pushed open the door behind them. Arona started to leave. A few papalagi beside the door were now looking at them. Gently, she jabbed her forefinger into the waiter’s arm. He looked down at her.

  ‘We’re Mr Barker’s children, and we are not going to wait outside for him,’ she said in her most forceful and perfect English. The waiter hesitated. ‘Please find our father for us,’ she said. ‘Tell him we’re here to take him home.’ She looked up at him. ‘Do you understand me?’ He bowed slightly, wheeled and hurried off. Peleiupu’s trembling stopped. She had won by discovering intuitively one of the secrets of how power operated in Apia.

  Peleiupu turned her back to the bar so she wouldn’t have to see the intimidating tangle of papalagi; she also tried not to smell the cloying flying-fox stench; the cigarette smoke stung her eyes. Arona stood looking at the floor.

  Clatter of laughter. Cries of derision. She looked over her shoulder. The crowd at the bar parted and through it came the waiter, trying to hold up Barker. ‘The Savai’i savage is once again drunk to his eyeballs!’ someone called. Laughter tore through the bar. Everyone applauded. Barker, head rolling loosely, waved and waved.

  ‘How are you going to take him home?’ the waiter whispered to Peleiupu, in Samoan.

  ‘In our cart,’ she replied.

  ‘I can carry him,’ Arona offered.

  The waiter wound Barker’s limp right arm around Arona’s shoulders. Arona squatted to his knees and the waiter shifted Barker’s body across Arona’s broad back. Then, as everyone cheered and clapped, Arona stood up slowly, lifting Barker’s huge drunken weight.

  Peleiupu pushed open the door. Arona shuffled out into the street.

  ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ Barker kept mumbling, as Arona spread him out on the tray of the cart. ‘Had only one wee, wee drink!’ Kicking up his legs, he laughed. His legs landed limply on the wooden tray. He lay still, then started snoring.

  ‘I’ll look after him,’ Arona said, sitting down beside Barker.