Papa could always come up with a new idea.
When the next batch came ashore Papa produced four huge boxes lined with tin. They were like double-sized coffins. The tin was supposed to keep the smell in, and to stop any leakage when the flesh of the oysters started to go, as inevitably it would go, on the sea voyage to England. He had plans to ship the four large tin-lined boxes to England to be washed on the River Ouse at Buxted where there was running water. He had got a merchant ship to agree to take them. He sent the crates by ox cart to Colombo.
But there was some delay in the shipping. It could have been a storm; perhaps the ship needed repair or took another, better-paying load. The boxes sat sealed in the harbour. The oysters started to decompose and when they decomposed they set off the same disgusting smell, only this time it was enclosed.
James and his father went in to Colombo to pay the boxes a visit. James gave them a wary look. The smell was coming out through the hinges. He stared at the containers and thought he could hear popping sounds inside. There were chemical changes as oyster flesh decomposed, and those changes produced gas. He had an awful premonition.
The two entrepreneurs were not around when it happened. They were back at Condatchey Bay dragging more oysters out of the sea. But they heard about the explosions soon after. The gas blew open the tin-lined cases, and the explosion was heard all over Colombo. The air was fouled and the sky blackened for miles around. The smoke had not cleared when the government authorities were on the trail of the Lowingers, father and son.
They were little wiry men not far removed from the ones Lowinger hired to go down and shorten their lives under water. He scoffed at them all. But these authorities were impervious to insult. They responded by seizing the ruptured cases. They took them away and buried them; no one knew where, but James heard a report they’d gone by in bullock carts toward the jungle.
James’s father sat and fumed in his beach house. He made his son’s life hell, carping on about his schoolwork and having him write out algebraic equations. That made James anxious to go home to England, but his father wouldn’t abandon his oysters.
Then they had a visitor. A man came riding along the beach on his horse, a military man who, like many of the soldiers in Ceylon, had taken an administrative post in the local government. Add to that he gambled a little in the pearl market. His name was Avery McBean.
They’d all met before. He hailed them and then he jumped down off his horse. And who was behind him in the saddle, but that overdressed girl with her pout. Except now she was fifteen and on the cusp of beauty and thought herself even grander than once she had. James hated her on sight. She did not move from the saddle; she was six feet up on the horse and probably couldn’t. The conversation took place like that, with the girl watching from above.
‘We’ve impounded the tin-lined cases,’ said McBean. ‘We had to build new lids, for which incidentally, we’ll charge you. The exciting news is that we found pearls in there just as beautiful and just as big as you’d find elsewhere. However they are the property of the government. And you’re in a deficit situation, Lowinger.’
After the ranting and raving settled down, McBean offered friendly advice. He had figured out the system. You’d not see him buying up lots of unopened oysters. The only smart thing was to buy from the small independent boatmen who will wash a small quantity of the oysters themselves.
‘They’ll do you every time,’ said McBean, infuriatingly calm with his Scottish burr. ‘They see that the English are greedy and their greed makes them desperate and a desperate man has little success outwitting molluscs or little wiry brown men.’ The English, he said, as if he were somehow in a different category.
‘Thank you very much,’ said the senior Lowinger, ‘but you are wrong.’
‘Aye, if you say so,’ said McBean easily. ‘You’ll find out the wisdom of my words, sooner or later.’
And the girl sat like a princess on her steed. She smirked down on James. Neither child nor woman, she was something alarmingly in between. He squirmed. He went pale under his hot red face. She parted her perfect lips and stuck out her tongue at him. Then she giggled and rolled her eyes at her father. James smiled, uncertainly.
McBean got on his horse and whirled around.
She looked back over her shoulder and blew James a kiss.
He would never be free of her.
Vera hated to see her grandfather in his bed. For years she had heard people reassuring Belle that since the old man had been all over the world, he’d come home safe and sound and end his days with her. It was what you were supposed to do when you led a life of great danger. ‘He’ll likely die in his bed.’
Therefore, Vera thought bed was the most dangerous place for him to be. She tried to drag him out of it, in the morning. Some days he would shake his head, and go limp, as if all the energy had drained away under the sheets. She would jump on top and rumple up the sheets, prodding him, until he roared for her to go away. He would not come out of his room before she left for school, and those days were not good days for algebra and geography. Vera would worry about him and race to the streetcar for Homer Street as soon as the bell rang for the end of classes. When she burst in the door, her eyes would go first to Hinchcliffe’s face for any clue of mishap, and then to her grandfather’s office door. He’d be in there, a little pale, perhaps, and sinking into his chin. On the way to coffee she would hold his arm at every step he took.
But on other mornings he gamely shook her off with the lion’s roar she wanted, and said he’d be up just as soon as she left him alone. He would wash, and put on his white shirt for the office. Vera would pay a little better attention in school but still make haste for Homer Street immediately after.
On Sundays–most Sundays, if it wasn’t raining–they walked. This particular Sunday the sun was shining. They started at English Bay. James wore a wide straw hat, and Keiko wore a headscarf, blue with white figures on it. People glanced at them, as they passed, no doubt thinking they were an odd group. But Keiko never seemed to notice. She loved the bleached, lost logs that rolled in on the tide and was forever marvelling.
‘So big, so big,’ she said. ‘Where from are they?’
‘They’ve been logged somewhere up north I suppose,’ said James. ‘And sent down in a log boom, and got loose from it.’
‘Oh, oh,’ said Keiko.
Vera liked the kelp with its beads of bright green, which she could squeeze between her fingers and pop. She wandered down to the water to pull up some kelp and back to her grandfather to walk beside him, and away again to walk along a log and hop over another tangle of them, teetering on a rock. No one told her not to now. Her mother had loved to walk on the beach too, and they would pick up shells, and sometimes sit in the lee of the sea wall, looking at what they’d found. But her mother had been nervous of the sea and especially of Vera on the beach, afraid she’d be swept away or fall off a log. They talked about her mother a little then. How she had gone to boarding school in England. How he had been out of touch for so long, until she came to Paris. ‘We all lived together then,’ said James Lowinger reflectively. ‘Until she found Hamilton Drew. Or he found her.’
They reached the path through Stanley Park.
Keiko was different here from the woman she was at home.
She seemed to have known the water for a long time. She cast an expert eye on the rivulets and the bubbles in the sand and knew exactly what rock to pick up to find the crabs. She walked beside James, head
