Three Views of Crystal Water

‘Everybody’s here and waiting.’

‘Nonsense. They’re here to have their coffee.’

James Lowinger liked to go out with the pearl divers, to see the stone go overboard and the men stand on it and let it carry them down to the bottom, like the lifts in the flat in London. They swarmed across the sea bed all arms and legs, as if they could stay down for ever. He wished he could do it. The rest of it he hated.

It was six years after his first visit, and the British had again announced that there would be a great harvest. His father got bidding for the rights to the oysters, and up went the price and down went the sun and suddenly it was his. He bought it all. The boats returned with hundreds of thousands of oysters, one in a thousand of which might have a pearl. The overseers slung the bags out of the boats and onto the sand.

Now, what to do? Papa Lowinger could hire the natives to open the shells. But then he still needed men to search for pearls. The larger pearls would be hidden in the hinge of the oyster. To remove such a pearl you’ve got to use bare hands and a special prising, cutting tool. So he had to trust some workers. And there were none he trusted. He could chain them and forbid them to chew their blasted betel nut because they would hide any pearls they found in their teeth, and punish them if they did. But he didn’t want the bother, or the brutality of it.

Happily some pearls came loose by themselves and turned up in the silt that built up at the bottom of the tubs. The pearls he found he bottled and sent back to London. But he still had hundreds upon thousands of oysters. He found a place outside Condatchey Bay, where the natives lived. He dumped his oysters in open tubs and they did their part like the docile creatures that they were and began to rot.

There was just one problem. The stench. It grew. In the heat, the dead molluscs smelled absolutely vile. And the smell clung; it did not blow away or dissipate after dark. Day after day, a week, two weeks, there was still the stink of it and more oysters coming in on the boats every day. The village rose up in protest and demanded that the English take the oysters away. But they were poor people and the natives needed the pearling fleets, and the traders persuaded them to let them stay on until they finished.

To keep an eye on the locals, James and his father stayed in a hastily built hut on the beach. James walked on the sand at night, looking at the stars, but it was impossible to escape the smell. He was ashamed. Of the filth. Of the big English brutes with their whips. Of the smell of death. He sometimes wondered if he himself were rotting.

When the rotting was done, and the oysters nearly water, they hired the women and children. They were the poorest of the poor – no one else would do it. Mostly naked they waded in to the mass of decomposing oyster flesh, and felt around on the bottom for pearls. They were up to their armpits in it, and kneeling, gagging at having their faces so close. His father’s men patrolled the edges of the pit with whips. James’s father himself was on a horse. From the height of his seat he saw an old crone slip a pearl into her mouth. He caught her before she swallowed and took her away and bound her to the mast in the hot sun and whipped her until she was nearly crippled.

At nights in their ramshackle house on the beach his papa swore about the greedy government that opened the fishery every year so that the pearls were getting smaller. James went out again to walk on the beach and saw the sun set over India. This is the family business, he thought to himself. This is how Mother got her fine hats and many schoolbooks.

The next day at dawn they woke to find a squad of local officials on the beach.

‘Move on,’ the men were shouting, ‘Go! Away with you!’

They waved their arms. The workers scrambled out of their tents half awake. The officials kicked in their direction, and began to fling sticks at them. The workers began to collect their few small possessions.

Papa came out of the little house to remonstrate. He put on his best manners.

‘Friends! Colleagues! What can I help you with?’

But he was confronted by a short, fat man, who had no small-talk. The Englishman had bought the right to hire the divers and bring up the oysters, he said, but he had not bought the right to let them rot there. He must move on.

‘Impossible,’ said Lowinger. ‘I cannot move this operation, which brings prosperity to you as well as to me. As you see. We are in the midst—’

Ceylon had anticipated his dilemma, said the fat man. In this case the government would help them out by taking two thirds of the oysters as a royalty.

By dark of night they moved on to another village, which had very few people. The oysters continued to appear, every day, on the boats from the pearl banks. James’s papa hoped the government did not notice him this time. He built huts and disguised them with palm branches. They dug trenches and lay the oysters down in them and caused water to run through to clean them. But still they smelled. The police came, but he bribed the police: the oysters were almost decomposed. When the inhabitants began to complain of the stench, he bribed them too.

Dead matter does not give way easily. As the oysters rotted they were infested with larvae and these larvae gave a man strange diseases. While the cleaning went on they had to have a big bonfire burning. It helped with the smell. One man fell into the flames and was burned; he was bitten by flies then and died of oozing infections.

Men’s lungs were damaged. The Chinese coolies seemed to manage the best. The old ladies who waded in the stuff, filtering all that dead flesh through their fingers, seemed indestructible but sometimes one would fall over and nearly drown.

There were flies everywhere. James could not breathe the air; it was oppression, and a plague upon the earth. They tried to clean it up. But more oysters kept coming out of the sea, every day. Lowinger had bought a share of the whole harvest, and the harvest was a good one. He moved from town to town but the locals refused to let him warehouse his putrefying little shellfish, pearls inside or no pearls inside.

At night in their house on the beach – once again, a shack made of boards thrown together, poles and a tin roof – James asked his father to pull up and leave. But no. Oh no, where pearls were concerned, 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 inclined toward him, attentive to his words and to his step, if it faltered. But she was also listening to the wind on the water, and smelling the salt. Sometimes she stood and scanned the horizon.

‘Weather changing,’ she would say, or, ‘tide changing.’

‘Keiko knows all about the sea,’ James would say, squeezing her elbow. ‘All my life I have wanted a girl just like her. A deep diver,’ he would say. Then he would laugh, that dry chuckle that wasn’t really aimed at anyone. ‘Has all my life come to this?’ he said. ‘Do I talk about it as if it was over? I suppose it will be, soon. I suppose I could begin to sum it up.’

They went as far as the benches at First Beach before he sat. Keiko had tea in a thermos. She poured some into the tiny china cup that she brought for him. And when he spoke his eyes looked far out to the east as if there might appear, on the horizon, one of the great sailing ships he’d been on as a boy.

‘At weddings, the Indians used to bring up a pearl from the bottom of the sea and bore it through with a hole to symbolize the taking of a maidenhead. You wouldn’t understand—’

‘Of course I would. Do you think I’m an infant?’

‘We did it when your mother married that man, my son-in-law.’

‘You hate my father,’ said Vera sadly.

‘We saw through him, that’s all. It wasn’t difficult. We saw him for what he was. An opportunist. I saw that in him maybe even before he saw it. But your mother was determined. You couldn’t stop her. Even her mother couldn’t stop her. She said she’d give her a wedding and give her a pearl and give her away and that would be the end of it. Never speak to her again. And she never did.’

He shook his head and laughed again without humour, out of amazement, perhaps. ‘Far as I knew. Of course she wasn’t speaking to me either. When she stepped up to the priest Belle wore one rosee pearl in each ear, a perfect match they were. Your grandmother got them in Kuwait and had kept them all that time.’ He looked very thoughtful then. ‘She sold everything she could make a gain on. They were freshwater pearls from the bottom of the sea. It’s a magical thing, that. We also took our pension pearls and made a necklace so close to the earrings you’d have sworn they came out of sister shells. They got married and that was that. Hamilton Drew took it all. He took my daughter. He took the pearls. He took—’

He stopped.

‘What did he take?’

The old man thought about it for a while.

‘He took my name, that’s what he took. He took my good name and used it for his own ends.’ He brooded and when he spoke again he was back on the Romans.

‘You know Seneca had to chastise Roman women for wearing so many pearls. You can read about it, go look it up. Emperor Caligula’s widow wore pearls in rows and lines all around her head, her bodice, her sleeves and her hem. She wore them hanging from her ears, around her neck, on her wrists, and on her fingers. When she went out into the streets people had to look away so as not to be blinded. And it became the fashion. Ladies began to wear them on their feet, on their shoe buckles, in the thongs between their toes and between their legs too, no doubt.

‘Do you know why Rome invaded Britain? Your teachers probably told you something about Gauls and Caesar. But that’s all hooey. The real reason was the Romans wanted British pearls. They were freshwater pearls, found in lakes and streams, small and of poor colour, some said. But the Romans were desperate. The rage for pearls consumed them. Finally they had to pass laws, prohibiting persons of lower rank and unmarried women from wearing them. This greatly increased the number of marriages, as you can imagine.

‘But you see – and here’s the rub, my dears – pearls have always been connected with wars and theft and ugliness. It’s just the opposite of all that purity. Conquered people had to pay a tribute in pearls, just as they did in women, and in slaves. There was once a battle lost by an emperor called Pezores. I don’t remember what country was his. But he wore an unrivalled pearl in his right ear. Just as he was about to be killed by his enemies, Pezores tore this pearl from his ear and threw it ahead of him into the pit. Emperor Anastasius, the victor, was furious. He promised five hundred gold pieces to anyone who would comb the pit, full of dead men and dead horses. And hundreds did, pawing through that gore. But no one found the pearl. It was lost for ever, with the dead.’

Here James Lowinger shook his head. Vera knew they were talking about her mother again. And Keiko screwed the lid of the thermos back on, and put the tiny china cup back in the cloth bag that she hung around her waist, and they stood up and turned back along the beach.

It was as if he had run into a wall.

What was the wall? Vera wondered. It was the wall of death, perhaps. Belle had gone into it. Her grandmother, the Captain’s wife, must have gone into it, and now he himself was looking at it.

On Sundays when it rained, Keiko kept James at home. He coughed now, and when he coughed his whole body was wracked. Vera went out alone. She walked in the grey drizzle and thought about pearls, and slaves, and women. A fresh pearl white and perfect was beautiful. It had a value beyond price. But a marred pearl was worthless. A woman about to be married was ‘bored’ by a man; an eel could prise open the oyster shell and feed on the animal inside, swallowing the pearl as well.

James Lowinger could talk about pearls in literature, he could talk about pearls in history, pearls of the conquered and the conquerors. But any story hung subject to cancellation, as he rambled. Her grandfather said he did not want to tell. But he did want to tell. It was as if he had come home to tell her something. But the story began long ago; he could not tell it all at once.

‘You know I don’t want my stories falling on the wrong ears,’ he said, teasing.

‘Who do you mean?’

He put his finger alongside his nose. ‘You know who I mean.’

‘You don’t mean Keiko?’

Of course he didn’t. He held out his hand to her; his face was lit with the pleasure he felt in her nearness.

‘You mean Miss Hinchcliffe?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Vera. She is no more than a functionary.’

‘You mean my father then.’

‘Oh, interesting suggestion. My son-in law,’ he said. ‘My erst-while son-in-law.’ James Lowinger took full responsibility for the error in judgement that had put Hamilton into the family: this weak link was his, not his beloved Belle’s and certainly not Vera’s. ‘What an unnatural cruelty! Do I still have a son-in-law when I have no daughter?’

Some days he mentioned the book again. Some days he said he had already got it half written. But he certainly would not finish. The problem was, he said–

‘I know, Grandfather. It puts you into an impossible struggle between truth and loyalty. You told me.’

‘Good girl, you remember.’

When James was ill Keiko nursed him and Vera went to school in a rage and fought with her friends and went after school to Homer Street, even though he was not there, to stare at the ukiyo-e. A silent Miss Hinchcliffe sat over her typewriter.

‘Where is Mr McBean?’ Vera asked her.

‘There is no Mr McBean.’

Vera did not believe this.

‘But his name is on the door,’ she said stubbornly. ‘See? Lowinger and McBean.’

Miss Hinchcliffe smiled in a pinched way. ‘I know it seems that way.’

‘Is he in the Far East, the way my father is?’

‘I told you there is no one called Mr McBean.’

‘Wherever he is, it is time for him to come back,’ said Vera.

‘Aren’t you going to go for coffee?’ Hinchcliffe would say.

‘Not by myself,’

One day when James was ill in bed, Kemp came down from the office above and took Vera to the coffee shop with him. When they burst in through the door shaking rain from their umbrellas, Roberta looked up with hope that the Captain would be with them. Malcolm the mailman was there, at the end of his rounds. The hatter was telling stories about the sailors and how one would come ashore and buy a smart hat, a Borsalino, say. Then he’d go on a big tear and lose it. The hatter could go around the bars and pick up lost hats in the morning if he felt like it. And the next day, before his leave was up, the sailor would come back and buy the same one again.

They murmured appreciatively at this homely story and then it was silent in the triangular café with its three booths.

Roberta said, ‘How is he?’

And Vera burst into tears.

The men sat embarrassed while Roberta took Vera in her arms and patted her on the back.

‘What are we going to do with her?’ she said to the others.

James Lowinger lay in his bed. His veins stood out under the skin on his head. Vera had not imagined that a head could get thinner, but his had. His flesh was clinging to his skull. He lay with his eyes shut but his voice did not change and he could still laugh so that it sounded even more as if his voice were gurgling down a drain. Day by day he grew lighter, his face more luminous. It was as if he were getting younger, on a cosmic timescale that had nothing to do with the days and the months and the years they were living through.

He spoke to Vera in a valedictory way.

‘A longing, almost like lust, to tell the tale as we have lived it, grows stronger the older we are. God knows that man’s lust is a subject of which I have some experience. I mean only the lust for objects. I say “only”, as if this were more manageable, more civilised than sexual lust: it is not, only an expression that has a more public acceptance.

‘I have no greed for gems or gold, which may strike you as odd. Indifference is rare in my trade and the one aspect of my personality to which my survival can be attributed. My lust inclines to the private and the physical, far healthier if you ask me. And for much of my life I was unsatisfied. It made me a good observer of others mind you. That is the story – how their lust entwined with mine.’

There were good days and bad days. Keiko heard news in Japantown that made her cry, and she wrote letters home, letters to which she got no replies. She found one man in Japantown who was from Kobe, and every few days she went to hear his news. But the letters he received were vague, and in contradiction to the news she heard in Vancouver. In Japan the people said the war in China was going well. Papers came to call up men and boys, and this was an honour, to serve the Emperor. Here, the papers said the Japanese were going to lose the war in China, and that the soldiers themselves were poor and hungry, and the people in Japan were even hungrier.