Then one day, Vera stumbled across the octopus. Good grief, what an idea, what they might do with those tentacles. She was horrified, put down the pictures and leaped out of the room with her face blazing.
More often than not, when Vera arrived after school, her grandfather was waiting for her. He stood up in his courtly way and they went out, telling Miss Hinchcliffe they’d only be a few minutes. He took his umbrella from the stand and opened the wooden door with the frosted top half, paused on the top step to see if it was raining (it was), took Vera’s arm and descended to the street. On the pavement, they turned right. The flatiron building filled the end of a block where two streets angled together, which was why it was called a flatiron: it was triangular. At the bottom of it, just below street level, was a triangular coffee shop. There were windows on either side, one looking on to Homer Street and the other on to Water Street: the café was only ten feet wide at its widest. At the narrow end it came to a point in two windows. At the wide end was a curtain.
As soon as they stepped in from the rain, Roberta appeared from behind the curtain.
‘Captain Lowinger,’ she said, gravely, as if he’d come to church, ‘and Miss Vera.’
‘Hello, love,’ Captain Lowinger said. ‘We’ll have coffee and a Danish, sliced flat and toasted and then buttered.’
They sat. Their faces looked out on to the pavement just at the level of people’s feet. Now Vera had the tall, rumbling figure all to herself.
Vera’s mother had raised her on tales of James Lowinger’s adventures. It was as if Belle had been planning all along to abdicate and leave the girl in his hands, as if she had guessed that the fact, and possibly only the fact, of Vera’s existence would be powerful enough to draw in James Lowinger from his perennial sailings around the South Seas, to rein him in just as his great strength was waning, so that he would be safe at last and seated, facing her, pouring milk in his coffee and muttering that he needed a spoon.
‘My grandfather needs a spoon,’ Vera said, raising her voice to hail the waitress. Roberta was a capable woman past thirty with a dreamy streak, often discovered, as now, with her gaze out of the window into the ankles of the passersby.
‘Where’s my Danish and where’s my sweetheart?’ he said, looking up plaintively for Roberta, his hand on the tabletop, his neck curling forward from rounded shoulders. ‘I might die waiting.’
‘We can’t have that, can we?’ said Roberta, plunking the plate down in front of him.
‘Cut or pick!’ he said to Vera.
It was his game. The first time they played it she’d been small enough to sit on his lap, and he was visiting the house on Ivy Street. Belle had cooked an uneven number of breakfast sausages.
‘We’ll divide them.’
Hamilton was travelling but that wasn’t unusual. In fact it was preferable. Her grandfather wanted to pass on tricks of the trade, and he never wanted to pass them on to Vera’s father. ‘That’s what the pearl traders do.’
‘What do you mean?’ Vera had asked that first time.
‘Cut means you divide them, and let me pick which portion. Pick means you pick, so I cut.’
Vera couldn’t decide. She had gnawed at her pyjama sleeve. She had quivered. He had watched her and smiled as she stared at the prized sausages. If she cut, she could make sure the halves were exactly even. But if she let him cut, he’d have to try to make them even too. But he might make a mistake. Then one half would be bigger, and she could have it.
‘Pick!’ she had said.
‘Smart girl!’ he had roared, and laughed so that his moustache ends wobbled, which made her laugh. ‘The picking price is always higher than cutting price.’ He had divided the sausages meticulously, leaving one end of the extra longer than the other. ‘Now which do you want?’
Vera had giggled and giggled, picking the bigger portion.
He had set her back down on her own chair.
‘Last time I did that I was sitting on the ground in Bombay in one of those low little shops the Indians have. There was some oily meat involved as I recall, that I sopped up with a piece of delicious bread hot from a stove. The merchant laid out his pearls on the back of his hand.’
‘Did you cut or pick, Grandpa?’
‘I picked. I always picked. And then you know what I did? To bargain with him on the price, I covered my hand with a handkerchief and put out my fingers to say how many hundred rupees I’d pay. Five fingers, five hundred. Whole hand, one thousand. Half a finger–’ he made as if to chop off the end of his finger ‘–What do you think?’
‘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 quarters of the Danish.
‘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 Danish. ‘Are you catching the disease then?’
Vera crossed her narrow feet and took a strand of her white-blonde 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,
