The sky was a sea of stars that focused and unfocused when Peleiupu tried catching them in her eyes. ‘Let’s go home!’ Naomi pleaded.

  ‘Fili, I’ve come to say goodbye,’ Peleiupu said to the stone. ‘Tomorrow I have to go to Upolu and Vaiuta School and a new life. I don’t really want to go, but I have to find out if that life is for me. Thank you, Fili, for your alofa and understanding. I won’t betray you, your faith in me.’ Taking the wreath from Naomi, she placed it on the stone. ‘I will carry the scent, the spirit, of my tree, with me always. You healed me with it; you put it back into me when I was drowning.’ She stood up and Naomi moved against her. Peleiupu put an arm around her sister. ‘Fili, look after Naomi too. I’ll come back, someday.’

  Vaiuta

  She switched the suitcase to her right hand. Lalaga and Mautu, carrying bundles of mats, were a few paces ahead. Further up were the three men who were carrying the rest of her luggage on yokes. At least the high canopy of trees was shielding them from the morning sun. Not far past Vaiutu School was Stenson’s house, and she recalled in detail her trip with Barker and Arona up this same track to stay with Stenson, the Magician of Words; and as she grew sad remembering his death, she vowed she would soon visit his house, which was now the German Governor’s residence.

  They’d arrived in Apia the previous afternoon, unloaded their fautasi, beached it in front of the London Missionary Society church and had gone to the pastor’s house. Laupega, the pastor (a friend of Mautu’s from theological college) and his aiga had given them a meal; they’d then showered and slept, exhausted and sunburnt from two days of sailing.

  Peleiupu noticed a quickening in her mother’s walk, an eagerness to rediscover Vaiuta, her old school. Since Arona’s disappearance they’d not talked much. While they’d got her things ready Lalaga’s wishes had been conveyed mainly through sign language, abrupt hand gestures and the odd verbal command. Peleiupu had emerged from her illness unafraid of Lalaga, but she pretended she still was. She also knew that Lalaga tried not to upset her in case she withdrew back into her illness.

  As she watched the soles of her mother’s feet turning up and down as she walked, she wished Lalaga was slower to anger (like Mautu), thought things out properly before acting (like Lefatu), was less protective of and ambitious for her, was more tolerant of Mautu’s dreaming and search, more adventurous and willing to experience new things, and would stop working so hard and just enjoy being idle now and then. You could set a clock by Lalaga’s daily work schedule.

  Peleiupu surfaced from her wishing and found they were passing through Tanugamanono, a spacious malae surrounded by fale and a wooden church; a few youths were cutting the grass around the church; from among them rushed a dog: fur bristling, fangs bared. Mautu stamped his foot on the ground. The animal stopped, barked a few times and retreated. Peleiupu wished her sunburn would stop stinging from the salt of her sweat.

  Up the steep Vaiuta hill her suitcase became a worsening weight. She dropped it down at the gate under some mango trees and sat on it, sighing, wiping her face with her sleeve. The sleeve stung as it slid across her sunburnt forehead.

  ‘It hasn’t changed much,’ Lalaga said. Peleiupu realised they were high up. Through the trees she saw the hills sloping down to Apia and the coastline and the sea that stretched away into haze. She tried not to think of Satoa and how far away it was. ‘No, it hasn’t changed much,’ Lalaga repeated.

  Mautu came and picked up Peleiupu’s suitcase. ‘No, leave it to me,’ she said, but he walked up the drive with it. The drive was lined with stands of flowering ginger, hibiscus, mango, hydrangeas and tall flame trees. ‘I helped plant these,’ Lalaga said. ‘You’ll have to learn to be a good gardener while you’re here.’ Behind the gardens, stretching out to paddocks in which cows were grazing, were fields of taro, lined by rows of bananas. A group of girls were pulling up some taro. One of them waved. ‘Food crops,’ Lalaga pointed out. ‘Have to feed yourselves. Have to learn how to use the’ oso even. No men here to do it.’ Strange but Lalaga was speaking English, Peleiupu realised, the language she hadn’t mastered while at Vaiuta but had been taught her by Mautu and Barker. Lalaga obviously wanted to impress the Vaiutu staff they were soon going to meet.

  The drive crossed through spacious lawns to a large double-storeyed building with wide verandas and two wings that branched back to a row of single-storeyed houses. Red roofs, cream-coloured walls, neat flower beds. Straight out of a book she’d read about the British in India.

  The men put her luggage on the front veranda and retreated to the shade of a pulu tree on the lawn. Lalaga straightened her clothes, looked at Peleiupu, brushed back Peleiupu’s hair and dusted her blouse. ‘Misi Ioana, the new principal, won’t like you looking untidy.’ Peleiupu glanced at Mautu. He looked awkward.

  ‘Tolu!’ Lalaga greeted the squat woman who came out the front door. ‘Are you still teaching here?’ A large smile as the woman embraced Lalaga. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘Yes, about twenty years,’ Tolu said.

  ‘The length of time for me to have this daughter and watch her grow,’ Lalaga said.

  ‘She’s a big girl,’ Tolu said, kissing Peleiupu’s cheek. Peleiupu smelled talcum powder on her.

  ‘Tolu and I were here together,’ Lalaga said to Mautu, who shuffled forward and shook Tolu’s hand.

  ‘Come in. Misi Ioana has been waiting for you. Most of the girls have checked in already. Pele is one of fifteen new entrants.’ Tolu opened the door. Lalaga went in. Peleiupu edged up against Mautu and nudged him into the front office.

  ‘Hasn’t changed, eh?’ Lalaga exclaimed.

  Peleiupu found herself watching herself surveying the large room. High windows. Far wall lined with bookshelves but with few books; two office tables stacked with papers, slates, and other odds and ends. A couple of teachers and students, who tried not to look at them, were dusting the furniture. She wasn’t really there, a part of it. She stood feeling sorry for her father, who looked lost. The teacher and students left quietly.

  And then there was Misi Ioana marching through the door, all in white, black shoes, short-cropped hair, sharply chiselled face, firm steps: a soldier for Christ, thought Peleiupu. None of her books or Lalaga’s memories of Misi Peta had prepared her for Misi Ioana.

  ‘Lalaga!’ she said. ‘Tolu has told me a lot about you.’ Her Samoan was that of a recent learner, intelligible but heavily (funnily) accented. Mautu shook her hand. They sat down around a low table in the middle of the room.

  Tolu welcomed them formally in Samoan. Mautu’s reply was barely audible. Peleiupu wished he was less smiling, less willing to please Misi Ioana.

  ‘And is this Peeleeoopoo,’ Misi Ioana mispronounced her name. Peleiupu smiled. Misi Ioana turned back to Lalaga and Mautu and tried to speak in Samoan, then gave up and reverted to English, which Tolu interpreted (badly, thought Peleiupu, wishing her parents would reveal to their hosts that they spoke fluent English).

  In the papalagi missionary’s presence her parents were behaving like obedient, grateful children. So she sat watching herself watching the others talking, with Misi Ioana asking the questions through Tolu’s stilted and often inadequate translations, and her parents replying politely.

  Two senior students brought in trays of tea and small cakes. Misi Ioana said grace and invited Lalaga and Mautu to eat. She instructed the students to take Peleiupu and her luggage to her dormitory.

  Peleiupu followed them down the corridor, around the veranda and into the nearest wing. ‘Where are you from?’ asked the student with the bulbous black mole on her chin.

  Peleiupu swallowed and replied, ‘Satoa.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ the other one, with the abundant breasts, asked.

  ‘Savai’i,’ replied Peleiupu.

  ‘Savai’i, eh!’ black mole said. Her friend giggled. ‘A long way away, isn’t it?’ Peleiupu nodded.

  The dormitory was a long rectangle, with latticed windows that let in the striped light onto the lines of mattresses under raised single mosquito nets. Beside the pillows at the head of each bed were the students’ suitcases — some were huge wooden trunks. At the foot of the beds were ola in which the students kept their books and school implements. The polished wooden floor gleamed like ice Peleiupu had seen in a book. A world of beds afloat on ice, she observed.

  ‘Your bed,’ black mole said, taking her to the third space from the end, facing the east.

  They helped her spread out her sleeping mats, put the mattress on them, cover it with a sheet, and then tie up her mosquito net.

  ‘Your first visit to Apia?’ black mole asked as they brought her back to the office.

  Peleiupu didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes,’ she lied. To survive without fuss in Vaiuta, she’d decided to hide what she knew, including her fluency in English and knowledge of books. Best to pretend she was from faraway Savai’i: ignorant, with little education. ‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘I’m afraid of being here.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ they said. ‘We’ll help you.’ They meant it. Peleiupu didn’t feel guilty about lying.

  Soon after she got back, Misi Ioana and Tolu said goodbye to Lalaga and Mautu, and left. Peleiupu sat down in the chair opposite Lalaga. Mautu was looking out the window. Peleiupu bowed her head. She noticed a slight tear on her ie lavalava. She would mend it that night.

  ‘Be good. Work hard,’ Lalaga said in Misi Peta’s voice and style. ‘God will help you.’ Peleiupu glanced up. Lalaga looked away.

  The three of them didn’t know what to say for a while. Peleiupu heard the surf of Satoa echoing in her ears: it sounded far away.

  ‘I’m sorry about Arona,’ Peleiupu said.

  And Lalaga was immediately herself again. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘He’ll be all right. He’ll come back. Just do well here.’ Peleiupu leaned towards her. Lalaga clutched her shoulders and looked into her face. ‘We’re very proud of you, Pele. We want the best for you. Don’t waste your talents.’ Lalaga’s hands shook, so she withdrew them and clasped them in her lap. ‘You know we love you?’ Peleiupu nodded. ‘When I’m angry with you, it’s out of love and concern.’ She turned her head aside. ‘Lefatu is right. Pele, you’re the most gifted of our aiga. Of Satoa. So gifted you frighten us at times.’ She sniffed. ‘You understand me?’ Peleiupu nodded again. ‘Remember you are a girl also. Being exceptional and a girl means you face severe limitations. As women we have prescribed roles. We have to act and behave as women. At times that’s very unjust and unfair to ourselves, but we have to do it. We have to be good Christian women. Understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Peleiupu. Lalaga’s arms were around her and she was into Lalaga’s love and out again, with Lalaga on her feet and hurrying to the door. ‘Fa, Pele!’ Lalaga called over her shoulder.

  Mautu continued gazing out the window. Peleiupu looked at her hands. The silence breathed; they listened to it.

  ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have allowed Barker into our lives,’ he said. ‘He changed us. Made us want to search for more, to be more.’ She wondered what he’d done with Barker’s testament. ‘It was my fault. I brought him into your life.’ She looked at him. How vulnerable he looked. Tied to the tired earth again, visions and dreams gone. As lost as Barker had been. He’d rescued Barker from that condition, but who was going to save him? ‘I feel tired,’ he murmured. ‘Arona shouldn’t have left.’ He sighed. ‘But I’m happy for him. He’s searching.’

  ‘He’ll return,’ she said. She got up and stepped towards him. He rose slowly, glanced at her. How she wanted to embrace him, tell him everything was all right, no need to worry, but that wasn’t the way between grown-up daughters and their fathers — not in public, anyway.

  He bent forward, kissed her cheek quickly, turned and was out the door.

  She listened to his footsteps thudding hollowly across the wooden veranda.

  Later that afternoon, while she was alone in the dormitory unpacking her suitcase, she felt a hard object among her sheets in the case. It was the box, wrapped up the way Barker had bequeathed it to Mautu.

  She pushed aside the contents of the suitcase, shoved the box to the bottom of her suitcase, buried it with the sheets and clothes, and knelt inhaling and exhaling through her mouth to control her fear of drowning. Barker was now an atua in the heart of the mythology of her aiga. She vowed never to open the box, not even after Mautu’s death, as Barker had willed. She remembered the books she’d brought, especially the ones Stenson had autographed, got them out of her ola and buried them beside the box.

  Tavita had stood, arms folded, with two friends on a fallen coconut tree trunk behind the crowd that had gathered on the beach at Satoa to farewell her. As she waved to everyone she kept looking at him. The oars dug in. The fautasi began sliding away from the shore. Wave, Tavita! she had willed him. Wave! The fautasi gathered speed and she nearly toppled, but hung on.

  His left arm rose; her heart lifted with it. He waved once, twice, three times. Behind him, she saw Poto waving furiously.

  Her first night at Vaiuta, unable to sleep, she lay savouring every detail of that farewell — a hope that would keep her happy, a future to return to.

  She sat at church the next morning, feeling itchy and hot in her starched uniform. Misi Ioana read her sermon, in Samoan. Peleiupu kept thinking of Satoa and didn’t listen until she sensed that Misi Ioana was upset about something. Then in English Misi Ioana departed from her written text and declared: ‘Today is a sad day, a tragic day for us and our God and our work in this still pagan land. It is my sad duty, girls, to inform you that your country has been declared a colony of Germany, that barbaric empire ruled by the Kaiser.’ She stopped and dabbed the corners of her eyes with her lace handkerchief. ‘This year, as you know, is 1900. It is the end of a century in which Great Britain brought progress and civilisation to the known world. A glorious century for our God and Queen. But 1900 is also the start of another century, and we and your God-fearing people are to be under the Kaiser’s rule. I’m sure God and Great Britain won’t forget us. They will save us from the evil disciples of the Devil. And I promise you we won’t be studying the Kaiser’s language in our school!’

  January 1900. She was almost twenty. A new century. An end and a new beginning.

  Surveillance

  Only Misi Ioana (Miss Joan Brakestaff), two staff members and a few senior students stayed behind during the long Christmas holidays and looked after the school, so each year when Vaiuta reopened, its large grounds and plantation were overgrown with weeds, and new vegetables and crops had to be planted.

  ‘Tomorrow we will attack the weeds, the rubbish and the disorder which, like Satan’s power, are threatening to smother our beautiful Christian settlement,’ Misi Ioana explained during Peleiupu’s first Sunday evening at Vaiuta. She was standing at the front table in the dining room, between two lamps. As a junior and new student Peleiupu was sitting on the floor in the front row, feeling homesick as the sad chorus of cicadas surged through the room.

  ‘… Year after year, month after month, we have to be vigilant in our fight against such forces …’ She was dressed in white, and with the flickering lamplight dancing over her and setting alight her red hair she looked like a luminous reflection shimmering in dark water. ‘… I know some of you are not used to plantation work, but in our school it is through such honest labour that we learn the true Christian virtues of hard work, frugality, dedication, determination. Such work strengthens our willpower, improves our Christian character and, by doing so, prepares us better to fight the forces of Darkness …’

  Peleiupu wasn’t afraid of such work — she’d done a lot of it at Satoa — but, as she observed Misi Ioana’s unreal presence, her feelings of unreality at being away from home worsened. ‘… Here, there will be no separation between man’s work and woman’s work,’ she was saying, smiling. ‘We have no men here …’ Peleiupu glanced around the room, at the other students, and, realising she was indeed in a community of segregated females, felt uncomfortably strange, as if part of the air she was used to had been taken away. She would grow accustomed to their segregation but the acute absence of males would remain with her to the day she left Vaiuta.

  ‘…Weeds are like the ever-threatening temptations that the Devil confronts us with, but we must fight against them …’ Misi Ioana reminded Peleiupu of Miss Milly Tilsley, the heroine in Stenson’s Daughter of the Mill: long-suffering courageous Milly, who’d sacrificed her love for Captain Arthur Fludd to work in an Edinburgh orphanage. ‘… We know that most of you are missing your families and loved ones, but we will, in time, make you feel that this is your home away from home. I, too, have been five years away from my beautiful country, home and family but God’s work in this pagan land has to be done …’ In her self-sacrificing Christian work with the orphans Milly Tilsley had contracted consumption and had died, a year later, in Captain Fludd’s arms. ‘… Don’t hesitate to come and see me if you ever need help and advice, young ladies,’ Miss Ioana ended her talk. Peleiupu straightened up and, with the back of her hand, wiped away her tears. Clothes still luminous with lamplight, Misi Ioana floated out of the room.

  Tolu, their senior Samoan teacher, got up and started explaining the school rules and regulations. Peleiupu had learnt them from Lalaga over the years, so at first she didn’t listen to Tolu, but tried to forget her homesickness (and Milly’s and Captain Fludd’s tragic love) by observing the other new students. Some of them were in silent tears and were avoiding looking at one another. ‘… Some of the new girls are not listening to me!’ Tolu jerked them out of their sadness. ‘Peleiupu, what are two of the rules I’ve just explained?’ Peleiupu wanted to disappear; it was difficult to breathe; why pick on her? ‘Peleiupu?’ Tolu demanded. Peleiupu glanced up at her. ‘Your mother always knew our rules,’ she added, smiling.