The Pearler’s Wife: A gripping historical novel of forbidden love, family secrets and a lost moment in history. Roxane Dhand
Captain Sinclair? Your representatives in England insisted that all the master pearlers in Buccaneer Bay were on board with the idea that white-manned luggers would be a more efficient and profitable option than the foreign-crewed boats you normally operate. We were told that the Australian government is committed to this belief. All of us have come out here to prove the point. If the sums don’t add up, why have you brought out a boatload of white divers to work for you on the pearl beds?’
The captain folded his arms across his chest and blew out his cheeks. ‘I’m sorry, Cooper, if I sound a little unfriendly. You must understand that from now, until the fleet goes to sea, we are swamped with work. The costs of buying, equipping and running a lugger are crippling. It’s a business of continual risk, and many things can go wrong. It makes us all jumpy. But it is not your fault and not your concern, and I apologise if I have given you the impression that you are unwelcome. I have high hopes that you English blokes will be great and make us all a pile of cash. Then we will be able to send the foreign crews back to where they came from. You mentioned just now the possibility of learning the ropes before you put out to sea properly after the Wet. How would it be if you spend the next few days working with Squinty?’
Cooper wondered at the sudden change in attitude, but money was money and he was running short. ‘Sounds good if you’re going to pay me. I don’t work for free.’
‘How about ten bob a week?’
Cooper looked at his boots. ‘Rent’s thirty bob a week at the Seafarer’s.’
The captain shook his head. ‘I must be out of my flaming mind. Thirty bob, then, till the Wet’s over.’
When Cooper nodded, the captain added, jutting out his chin, ‘Go outside. I’ll send Squinty to you.’
‘How will I know him?’
The captain looked Cooper in the eye. ‘Take a wild guess, mate.’
Cooper left the packing shed with a sigh. It was marginally cooler outside but his ears still seared. He shaded his face with his fingers. It was now mid-morning and the sun was hot enough to blister paint. There was also a slimy heaviness in the air that made breathing a chore, and fat black flies were queuing up to suck the salty moisture from his eyes and mouth. He flapped them away irritably.
He could see the tide was on the turn.
A young Malay – who could not have been more than twenty – picked his way across the hot sand, barefoot and saronged. He wore a chain round his neck on which hung a studded leather pouch, which swung from side to side as he walked. ‘You Cooper?’
‘Everyone calls me Coop. You Squinty?’
The Malay nodded, his eyes rolling in different directions. ‘You working with me today. We’s chasing the vermin off luggers. But we need be quick.’
‘Tell me what to do.’
‘Okay. We join up others.’ His eyes did another circuit. ‘We get stuff off luggers and undo stopcock. Then we wait. For him seaboss tide fella. You got it?’
Seaboss? ‘Yes, I got it,’ he bluffed.
Squinty slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Come. No time for dilly-dally.’ It was too far to go back to the hotel, so Coop took off his boots and yellow socks and rolled up his trousers, in the style of the labouring crew. He unbuttoned his jacket, removed his cigarette papers and tobacco from the right-hand pocket and shrugged the jacket off his shoulders. Wondering if Miss Montague had a point about a hat, he brushed his hair back from his forehead and tied a cotton handkerchief around his head.
Squinty relieved him of his excess garments, rolled them into a sausage-shaped bolster and trotted up the path to the shed.
‘You start remove stuff. Quick smart. Seaboss come soon.’
‘Seaboss tide fella?’
‘Yes, yes, he come cover boats.’
‘Where shall I put the stuff?’
The Malay gestured with his hand towards the red sand dunes, already piled high with baskets and ropes.
Coop rolled a cigarette, and got started. It was backbreaking work. With weeks at sea and only an occasional game of deck quoits for exercise, his muscles were weak and flabby, but he was not a quitter. Back and forth, he squelched through the black mud, dragging the endless contents of the captain’s luggers on heavy-laden pallets through the burning sand, until he could barely see through the veil of sweat dripping before his eyes.
Sucking noisily on a foul-smelling cheroot, Squinty scampered up the dunes. The tide was almost upon them.
‘We stop now. Big seaboss coming.’
Coop trudged up the sand and sank down alongside the assembled seamen to wait for the tide. He framed his face with his hands, giving his eyes temporary relief from the glare. The flies were having a field day.
The tide surged towards them, angry white-topped waves smacking the wooden boats on the stern and surging over the decks. Coop steadied his head in his hands. As the water flooded the holds, thousands of cockroaches clawed and scrabbled over each other, their hidey-holes flushed out. Swirling higher and higher, the tide swept the insects away; Coop retched and swallowed down the bile.
Squinty leaped up and down, his arms pumping, and his enthusiasm ripped through the workforce like a tsunami.
‘Him seaboss strong today. Good fun coming. You need stick.’
‘I’m feeling rough, Squinty. I’ll sit and watch.’
‘Tuan say white man weedy.’
‘He says I’m weedy? Or that all white diver men are weedy?’ Coop pushed himself up off the sand.
Squinty missed the subtlety. ‘He say new divermen weedy. My job make you tired out a lot. So you no think straight.’
Coop sensed trouble. ‘What’s your job on the lugger, Squinty?’
‘I have lot jobs. Maybe sometime I cook little bit. Maybe I clean shell little bit. Sometime I do air hose little bit. I do what Tuan says me.’
Squinty’s eyes were on the circular track. Round and round. Out to sea. Up to the sky and impossible to read.
‘Look, see rats coming up,’ he screeched. ‘You need stick so you can bash him!’
Thrashing in the salty water, desperate to gain dry land, hundreds of terrified rats, blind in the unfamiliar sunlight, made a dash for the shore. Overhead, birds shrieked. In the water, doomed rats squealed for salvation. On shore, the yelling was intense. Someone had laid a bet on who would kill the most and money was exchanging hands.
The sun beat down. The racket on the dunes was too much. Coop clutched his head and tried to cool the scorching thoughts in his brain. What on earth had he signed himself up for?
MARCH ROLLED IN WITH a fresh wave of homesickness.
Maisie sank back in her chair and shut her eyes, trying to recall the detail of the park opposite her parents’ house, with its railings painted midnight black, its bright yellow daffodils and neatly trimmed hedges. In the ten days she had been in the Bay, England would have started to turn green, and the soft spring grass would soon appear in bright juicy tufts. She hated the suffocating humidity, the heat and the pervasive red dust and the endless hours she spent cooped up in the house on her own. She had set out to be a good wife and offer Maitland affection and companionship, but what sort of existence was he offering her when he was out of the house all day and slept alone in his own room at night? She found it both puzzling and worrying that he didn’t seem to desire a wife in the physical sense of the word; he wanted a well-connected facilitator who did what he said and didn’t answer back.
The first time Maisie had entertained Maitland’s friends,