The Pearler’s Wife: A gripping historical novel of forbidden love, family secrets and a lost moment in history

‘Of course not. White people don’t work on chain gangs. It wouldn’t be civilised, would it?’

Cooper stared at her for an instant as she in turn looked at him, expectant. Rather than searching for words he couldn’t summon, he changed the subject. ‘And how do you fill your time, Miss Montague? Is there much to keep you occupied?’

She lifted her chin, her voice rather high. ‘Me? Goodness, there’s so much to do! Bridge parties, croquet and the tennis club … then we have picnics and lots of balls and concerts and fundraisers at the Catholic school. There isn’t a single minute to get bored.’

Miss Montague pulled hard on the reins and smiled a little too brightly, Cooper thought. ‘Here you are, Mr Cooper,’ she said, nodding across the street at a cluster of whitewashed shacks. ‘Delivered safe and sound. Captain Sinclair’s office is in the packing shed over there.’

She pointed the tip of her parasol at a sandy path that snaked down to the beach. The tide was out. A flat expanse of black mud was littered with luggers, some on their sides but the majority dug deep into trenches and sandbagged upright, temporarily beached by the receding tide.

‘And don’t forget about the hat. I declare you’re two shades darker now than when I picked you up!’

Cooper took a deep breath of air and wished he hadn’t. It reeked of putrefying fish.

‘Thank you for the ride, Miss Montague. I am most obliged.’

Her lashes flickered. She reached out and with a small, gloved hand touched a lock of his hair. ‘It’s what we do out here,’ she said. ‘Look after one another.’

As the sulky pulled away, Cooper shaded his eyes with the flat of his hand and squinted at the iron shed. The sun was a bastard. He patted his jacket and reassured himself that his contract was still safe inside. He was anxious to discuss it before finally signing on the dotted line. Funds were running low and he wanted to know when he could get out to sea. Reaching into his pocket, he brought out the items he needed to roll a fresh cigarette and turned towards the foreshore. For as far as he could see, luggers lined the beach. Sid was right. There must have been several hundred hauled up onto the sand, their masts stripped of rigging like dead trees. He had expected the boats to be bigger. Loaded up with diving equipment and supplies, there would be scant room for all nine members of the crew. He shook his head. Sid had probably made the numbers up, and anyway, what was a little discomfort when a fortune was out there to be made?

The beach was teeming with sturdy, short-legged men, trousers rolled up, crawling over the boats. Repairs and maintenance of the fleet was in full swing and Miss Montague expected him to keep out of the sun? All of them, from their heads to their calf muscles, were burned brown. He took a last drag on his cigarette, crushed the butt beneath his heel and set off down the path.

Captain Sinclair spoke like a machine gun in brittle, strident bursts. A one-man firing squad.

‘So, Cooper. Good news. I’ve just had a cable from New York. Our last shipment of shell sold for three hundred pounds per ton. A record price. Where’s John Butcher?’

‘He may be a little late.’

‘Tarts?’

Cooper shook his head and winced with the movement.

The captain clenched his pipe in his stained teeth. ‘Is he reliable?’

‘JB? He’s the best tender I could hope for,’ Cooper affirmed. ‘I won’t dive without him.’

‘What diving experience do you have?’

‘My years in the Navy. I trained at the gunnery school in Portsmouth.’

He banged the pipe bowl on the desk. ‘We need to discuss your contract. I am supposed to pay you thirteen pounds per month and your tender six pounds.’

Cooper dipped his head in agreement. ‘That was what we were offered to leave England.’

‘Thing is, Mr Cooper, for a month I can get a Jap diver for three pounds, a Malay for two pounds, and a tender comes at about one pound. I’ve already paid twenty-four pounds for you and your John Butcher just to get here from England and I have no idea if you can find shell. What guarantee can you give me of return on my investment?’ Captain Sinclair’s face was unfriendly.

‘I don’t see how we can fail, sir. The Navy’s finest has trained us. If the Asiatic can come here and make a success of it you have my assurance, Captain Sinclair, that a Navy man can do better.’

Maitland threw back his head with such force he almost toppled over backwards in his chair. ‘You pompous arse! You’re not in a position to assure me of anything! Do you know what shell looks like, Cooper?’

Cooper had assumed it would be obvious to spot. He hadn’t considered it an issue.

‘Come with me.’ Sinclair led him to the adjacent packing shed and plucked a half-shell from a sorting bin. The mother-of-pearl glinted in the sunlight.

‘This is what you are diving for.’ He tapped the shell. ‘But this is not what you will see. It’s a different thing when it is lying on a tidal bank at twenty fathoms down. It’s the colour of the sea bottom. It takes a top Jap diver a number of years to become proficient at spotting the stuff by himself, and you are a novice on contract for twelve months.’

‘I thought we were to dive in pairs to begin with. To learn the ropes.’

‘I’m not sure that you quite understand the situation, Cooper. To take you on, I shall have to lay off one of my experienced Japanese divers. The Japs are getting demanding. They can afford to be. They know they are the best and won’t sign on for the season unless they have an advance on their earnings. That way, if they croak – and lots do die – they have something to send home. I have paid out money to someone who is not going to earn his keep. That, Mr Cooper, is not good business.’

Cooper stared at his employer. ‘Then why exactly am I here, 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?

Chapter 7

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, four or five days after she arrived in the Bay, Duc threatened to leave.

‘White bossman bad. I tell boss fella. No can work here no more. Knife and fork sit on table. Why’s important who they next to?’

Maitland had insisted he set the table with a white tablecloth and use the new dinner service Maisie had brought from England.

‘I no know who sit next to who. Boss he go shouty mad and smash booze bottle.’

Maisie managed to calm him down and explained that cutlery was put on the table in the order that the food would appear, from outside to in. The soup spoon, dinner knife, dessert spoon, cheese knife on the right, and the side plate, large fork, dessert fork on the left.

In upsetting the domestic applecart, though, Maitland had badly misjudged his wife. He hadn’t in the least expected her to go into bat for their staff.

‘I call the tune on domestic arrangements, Maitland, and let’s be quite clear: you do not raise your hand to nor do you bully Duc. Ever. He is loyal to us both and you are to treat him with respect.’

Maitland looked taken aback. ‘My castle, my rules.’

‘No, Maitland. Duc lives on our property and we are responsible for his welfare as his employers. Anyone with domestic staff has a duty of care whether they live in an English stately home or a bungalow in Buccaneer Bay.’

Maitland was what her father would have called a ruthless social climber. He had backed down in the face of ruffled social propriety.

Propriety … After an early meeting at the church this morning, Maisie had endured an hour at the knitting circle and was now drooping on the verandah, her clothes clinging damply to her skin, her feet puffed up and sticky inside her shoes. She stared listlessly across at the discarded knitting dolly the bishop’s wife had given her and bit her bottom lip.

Winding a strand of hot scratchy wool round and round four pegs held scant appeal. The wool made her hands sweat, and she couldn’t see the point of creating yards of useless rope. She didn’t want to make a teapot cover or egg cosy or, frankly, anything whose purpose was to keep the heat in. She closed her eyes and tried to think of things that would make her feel cold: snow, frost, ice, her mother’s freezing study.

Mrs Wallace had been very clear in her advice at Port Fremantle and had reiterated it since in her letter. I do sense your resentment and frustration, but what you mustn’t do, Maisie dear, is mourn your life at home or chafe against small-town isolation. You must fit in and adapt or you will find yourself a very lonely young lady. And don’t attempt to change your husband or refuse his advances. It won’t work and he will make you miserable and likely plant his affections elsewhere. The best thing you can do for the health of your marriage is have a baby and develop an interest of your own.

Maisie was making a great effort to fit in, but having a baby was another matter. Mrs Wallace had said that most men had insatiable bedroom urges. Maitland hadn’t had one.

Maisie had been in the house a few days before she broached the subject of domestic staff.

‘This is a large bungalow, Maitland. Don’t you think we need someone to help Duc? He can’t be expected to do all the household chores and cook as well. It is too much work for one person.’

‘He’s managed till now.’

She ran a finger over the arm of her chair. ‘The house is dirty, and I’m sure he would appreciate some help.’

‘Duc doesn’t give a toss about cleaning, but get a houseboy if you want.’

‘I’d really prefer not to have a boy. Aren’t there black girls who can be taught?’

‘I’m not having a black gin with the morals of a dog in my house. Lubras can’t be tolerated in a decent home. They’re all lazy and dishonest. Disease and dissipation is what you’ll bring into this house. Pound to a penny, she’d steal my whisky or creep into my bed at night.’

‘Maitland! I know I’ve only just arrived and understand very little of what goes on here but I’m sure you must be exaggerating. I can’t believe that every Aboriginal woman in Buccaneer Bay has flawed morals or a propensity towards theft.’

‘You have no idea what you’re talking about.’

Maisie was stung by his tone. ‘Why did you bring me out to Australia, Maitland? You do nothing but snipe at me. I’m sure I would annoy you less if you were to spend a bit of time at home and give me some guidance.’

He took a cigarette from the box on the table and lit it. Blowing smoke towards the ceiling, he shook out the match. ‘I see the little mouse is growing fangs.’

She said nothing. Just sat. That would make me a rat, wouldn’t it, Maitland, and there’s no room for two in this house.

The disagreement had persisted all evening but Maisie would not give in. Just before midnight, Maitland drained his umpteenth glass of whisky and pressed his flabby hands against his ears.

‘No more, Maisie. I’m going to bed.’

Maitland had not referred to their domestic arrangements again, and two days after their argument, Marjorie had appeared on their doorstep.

‘I want to speak with the new Missus,’ she said. ‘I come allonga work in house.’

‘I’m Mrs Sinclair.’

‘I’m Black Marjorie.’

‘Is that both your names?’ Maisie knew that the French always gave their surname before their first name. Maybe it was the same here.

‘No. Is how you refer to me. I bin Marjorie. My colour is black.’

‘Marjorie, I can’t refer to you as black. It’s very offensive. It would be like you calling me White Mrs Sinclair. Or calling our cook Brown Duc.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘I’m sorry, Marjorie. It is not okay to me. I shall not call you Black.’

‘Okay, Missus. You might like know anyhow we call white people Paleface. So, you would be Paleface Missus. Just so’s you know.’

Maisie was deeply affected by colour: the tomato-red earth, the brilliant red heads on the poinciana blossoms and the cool lime-green bird-of-paradise hedge with its orange pea-flower plumes that bordered her garden. By day, the Bay was bathed in painful white sunlight, which sparkled on the multi-hued ocean; at night, the dark navy sky was studded with dripping silver stars. She loved the vibrancy of the artist’s palette, but she would never refer to people by their colour.

Marjorie was an amply proportioned native woman about thirty years old and told Maisie she had been trained in domestic duties by the nuns at the Catholic Mission. She was as bright as sunlight and right from the start, as a small child, had wanted to learn. To get to school she had to walk nearly four miles a day each way. In the Wet, walking in the heat and then slushing through the cloying mud was the stumbling block – because Marjorie did not own shoes. The soles of her feet blistered in the hot sand or became infected in the cruddy monsoon sludge. At first, she’d tried to jump from grass patch to grass patch waiting for her feet to cool or dry off. Once she’d proposed a shoe-sharing scheme with a friend who had a pair of second-hand boots. The friend would wear the left and she the right – but they’d both regretted the blisters. Another time she’d tried to hop on alternate legs but the effort had been too much. She’d given up with school after that.

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