rooms of the children who had scarlet fever and rubella, so that she would catch them and get them over with. So that if she got them later in life they would not kill her.
‘Is that your excuse? Well, it was mine too.’
There was silence for a few minutes while he tore off ragged pieces of his Danish, piece by piece, unrolling it, and popped them in his mouth.
Then, ‘Do you even know what a pearl is?’
‘I do.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I do.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘Pearls are formed inside the shell of an oyster when it is irritated by a grain of sand. That’s what they told me at school.’
‘It is not that simple. There are as many explanations put forth for that, my girl, as would take me all day to tell.’
‘Then tell me.’
‘A pearl is nothing but the tomb of a parasitic worm.’ He declaimed with a half smile that made the handlebars of his moustache twitch:
Know you, perchance how that poor formless wretch
The oyster gems his shallow moonlit chalice?
Where the shell irks him or the sea sand frets
He sheds this lovely lustre
On his grief.
‘Who wrote that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do they teach you at school? No proper poetry either I see. It was Sir Edwin Arnold. And do they tell you that a pearl is the result of a morbid condition?’
‘No.’ She knew she had got him going.
‘They don’t. All right. Do they tell you then what Pliny said about the pearl?’
‘No, Grandfather.’
‘Well, they should then. Pliny thought, you see, that pearls were the eggs of the shellfish. That when it came time for these oysters to bring forth young, that their two shells, which are normally closed up tight, only a little gap there for the eyes to look out, you know, that the shells would part and open wide and a little dew would come in. And that this dew was a seed that would swell and grow big and become a pearl, and that the oyster would then labour to deliver this pearl, at which time it would be born, as another oyster.’
He chuckled, and his whitened eye lost a little of its haze. ‘People believed all sorts of things of the pearl. That it was born as a result of a flash of lightning. I rather like that one. And in years when there were very few pearls, that was because there were not very many storms.’
‘That’s stupid,’ she pronounced.
‘Stupid?’ he said, his breath whistling through his moustache. ‘You don’t say that about people’s beliefs. You say that it is magic. That’s what we’re talking about. I suppose because it is difficult to explain, isn’t it, how a small, perfect, beautiful thing can be found in the slime at the bottom of the sea. The Persians believed that pearls came from the sun. The Indians believed they came from clouds. If you listened to the poets, you’d think that pearls were tears cried by the gods, or by angels.
‘The natives in the Malay Archipelago and on the coast of Borneo are convinced that pearls themselves breed. They say–’ and here he leaned toward Vera and adopted a stage whisper as if he were imparting a secret of the greatest importance ‘–if a few pearls are locked in a small box with some grains of rice and a little cotton wool for several months, that when the box is opened–abracadabra!’ His eyes widened and his great furtrimmed mouth gaped ‘–that there are several new pearls in the box! And,’ he added, ‘the ends have been nibbled off the grains of rice! Do you believe it?’
She did not know whether to answer yes or no, so she kept quiet.
Captain James Lowinger flat out laughed here, heartily and in a way not exactly mirthful. And as he laughed, water spurted from the corners of his eyes and he picked up the thin paper napkin that Roberta had dispensed with the Danish pastry, and wiped the water from his cheeks.
‘And there are a lot of men who wished that was true!’
He laughed down into his chest, and picked at the remaining bits of Danish on his plate.
‘Mind you,’ he said again, settling back, ‘these breeder pearls are just as tiny as a pinhead. So–’ His hands fell flat on the tabletop ‘–what’s the use of that? The Chinese grind them for medicine.’
They drank their coffee then. Roberta leaned on her cash register and stared gloomily out of the window into the Vancouver rain. But she was only pretending to stare; Vera could tell she was actually listening.
‘Well, do you believe it?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said.
‘So, you don’t believe it?’ He peered at her.
‘Well,’ she began to doubt herself. ‘Maybe a little–’
‘When Columbus came to America, you know, he found that the natives on this continent believed it too. They had pearls galore, so many pearls, do you know? Pearls were not just in the Orient. No, not at all. When Fernando de Soto got to Florida he found the dead embalmed in wooden coffins with baskets of pearls beside them. In Montezuma’s temple, the walls were all laden with pearls. The Temple of Tolomecco had walls and roof of mother-of-pearl and strings of pearls hung from the walls.’
‘Where did they come from?’
‘Quite literally, they grew on trees. You didn’t know that, did you, Vera?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Yes. In the Gulf of Paria, Columbus found oysters clinging to the branches of trees, their shells gaping open. Do you believe that?’
‘No,’ she breathed. This time she had to have guessed right.
‘Wrong!’ he roared. Roberta looked back at them, her reverie interrupted, and grinned to see the old man teasing his granddaughter, and Vera’s pale face heating up again to the roots of her nearly white hair.
‘Oysters really did grow on trees.’ He went all scientific on her then. ‘The oyster in question is Dendrostrea, or Tree Oyster, a mollusc that is to be found upon roots or branches of mangrove trees overhanging the water.’
She was reduced to silence.
‘There, I fooled you. But you got me going. What did you want to know? What were you asking about?’
‘Ceylon. You went to Ceylon.’
‘Oh, everyone went to Ceylon. My father too. Way back in the 1860s. That’s a long time ago, you can’t imagine how long, my dear.’
‘Of
