The Scarlet Macaw. S.P. Hozy
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who were doing God’s work in Borneo. They told her about the history of the Anglican Church mission in Brunei and how the “White Rajah” of Brunei, James Brooke, had invited the first Anglican missionaries in 1848.
“White Rajah?” Annabelle queried. “I must profess my ignorance,” she said. “I know nothing about the history of this part of the world.”
The Hendersons, a pious young couple who had been married only a few years and who shared a zeal for bringing heathens and cannibals to God, were only too glad to enlighten her.
“James Brooke,” Harold Henderson explained, “was originally in the Bengal Army attached to the British East India Company in Calcutta. This would have been around 1818 or 1820. After he resigned from the army, he tried his hand at some Far East trading, but by all accounts he didn’t do so well at that. In the 1830s he came into some money — an inheritance from his father — and he bought a ship and sailed for Borneo. Well, when he got there, to a place called Kuching in Sarawak, there was some kind of fighting going on, an uprising against the Sultan by the native Dayaks, who were headhunters and pretty fierce fighters. James Brooke threw in his hand with the Sultan and helped settle things down, and for that, the Sultan made Brooke an official Rajah of Sarawak. Rajah means prince or chief. And he actually ruled the place, too. It wasn’t just an empty title.”
“My goodness,” said Annabelle, a little breathlessly, “that’s quite a story.” Beryl Henderson, a small woman with thin arms and large hands that reminded Annabelle of a washerwoman’s, was nodding in agreement.
“Yes,” she said. “Isn’t it? It sounds like something out of Kipling, made up, you know. But it’s all true.”
Harold, a reedy man with narrow shoulders, a thin neck, and hair the colour of an orange tabby cat said, “Yes, absolutely. Every word of it is true. He ruled as Rajah until he died in the late 1860s, and then his nephews inherited his position. One of them, his great-nephew, actually, Vyner Brooke, is the Rajah as we speak. He has been since his father, the second rajah’s death.”
“And are there still headhunters and cannibals?” asked Annabelle, wondering how far Borneo was from Singapore.
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact there still are, you know, back in the jungle,” said Harold. “But we’ve been making steady progress over the years, and many of our converts among the Dayaks have themselves taken up the cause and have brought many of their heathen brethren to Jesus.”
By “we” Annabelle took it to mean that Harold was referring to the Anglican Church, not himself and Beryl. “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, although not as glad as she would have been had he told her cannibals no longer existed in that part of the world.
Beryl picked up the thread of the conversation. “Doing God’s work is not easy,” she said, “but it is rewarding beyond measure. For every soul we are able to bring to Christ, we feel God’s presence become ever stronger. He loves us and protects us from harm. You cannot imagine how grateful we are that He has brought us to this place so we can do His work and spread His word. It is its own blessing.”
“Indeed it is,” said Harold. “Indeed it is.”
When she wasn’t talking with the Hendersons, Annabelle found herself observing the social mores aboard ship. There seemed to be a lot of single young women like herself on the way to take up married life with a young man who had served his time either in the civil service or in the commercial service with some trading company or other. Most companies forbade their new employees from marrying during the first — and sometimes even the second — five-year term of employment. It often took eight or ten years for a young man to begin earning a salary large enough to accommodate a wife and family.
“Bloody unfair, I say,” said Maisie Turner, who was about to celebrate her twenty-ninth birthday. “Why should some rubber company tell me when I can get married?” She and Annabelle had been getting their hair washed in the ship’s beauty parlour and had struck up a conversation. Annabelle thought that Maisie was very attractive for her age, but noticed that there were already little pouches forming under her eyes. She could see a varicose vein snaking down Maisie’s left calf. It does seem unfair, she thought, to make people wait until they’re almost thirty to marry. But she guessed they had their reasons.
She noticed that there were a lot of handsome unmarried men on the ship, returning from home leave, and Maisie and some of the other girls went dancing every night. There was no shortage of male attention on board the ship. If she had wanted to, Annabelle knew she could probably dance all the way to Singapore, and with a different man every night. But she had no interest in other men, nor did she particularly want to drink cocktails and smoke cigarettes the way Maisie and her chums did. Many nights when she gazed up at the stars, she wished with all her heart that Francis could be there with her. How romantic it all was. In the middle of the ocean you could imagine that time had stopped forever and that the ship would never dock. There might be nothing in the world beyond this ship, and the ship was a tiny speck in a grand universe. What earthly difference does it make, she wondered, if you brought a hundred or a thousand or even ten thousand heathen headhunters to Jesus? What did anything matter in a universe so infinite?
Chapter Six
Maris had sent an email to her brother Ray telling him her arrival time and asking him to meet her at Vancouver airport. After nearly twenty-four hours of travelling, she was never so glad to see anyone. He stood head and shoulders above everybody else, his fierce blue eyes fixed on the automatic doors as they opened and closed, ejecting three or four people at a time, like a giant Pez dispenser. His dark brown hair was almost black and clipped close to his head, but even so, the unruly curls he had always hated could not be tamed. He looked younger than his thirty-five years, maybe because he was so thin, or maybe because he wore a yellow stretched-out T-shirt with a smiley face on it, under a plaid flannel lumberjack shirt whose sleeves ended an inch above his wrists.
“Ra Baby,” she called as she pushed her luggage cart through the gate. “Am I glad to see you.”
Ray rolled his eyes. “Are you gonna start that again?”
“Start what?” she said.
“You know I hate that name.”
She laughed and threw her arms around him. “Okay, Ra Baby,” she said, hugging him so tightly he couldn’t escape. “I won’t call you Ra Baby any more. I promise.”
He smiled and shook his head. “I’m glad to see you haven’t grown up yet, Maris. Because if you grow up, that means I have to grow up, too. And I’m not ready.”
While Ray went to get the car, Maris thought about what he’d said. Growing up had never been on the agenda while they’d lived on the commune with their mother, Spirit. In fact, the whole idea had been to stay close to the soul of childhood, to embrace innocence, and even to hold on to a kind of unknowing, especially about the outside world. “I want you always to remember how precious and special your life is now,” their mother had said. “Don’t let anyone take that away from you, not your father, not society, not your lovers when you have them, and not your children when you have them. Promise me?”
Of the three of them, only their sister Terra walked in the shoes of an adult. She had been married for fifteen years to a stockbroker and they had two daughters, Emma and Alison, and a huge, faux-Tudor house with a kitchen that was bigger than Ray’s whole apartment. Terra had opted for the comforts of the conventional life, just as their father had, and who could blame her for that? There were things that Terra never had to worry about in this life. Like who she was, how she was going to pay the rent, whether or not she was doing the right thing. Her parents had named her well. Terra’s feet were firmly planted. She was the least introspective of the three of them and could make a decision without waffling. “The buck stops with Mom,” she always joked about herself. “And Mom always knows best.”
Ray, on the other hand, was living in a rooming house in East Vancouver. He was unmarried and still lived like a student. When they got to his place it was Maris’s turn to roll her eyes.
“Ray,”