Barefoot with Professional Assistance

Her father liked to stand on a rise of sun-cracked red volcanic dirt, exactly where the reception desk would eventually go. Salt-scrub grass gave way to drifts of pale sand further down the slope. Warm trade winds drifted in off the water behind him. Nothing in the bare stretch of land around them gave any indication of what it would become.

He described, with his hands, walls that did not yet exist.

“Here,” he said, “will be the doors. Timber, thrown wide on both sides, so the sea air moves straight through without ever needing a fan’s help.”

He turned, tracing an arc she was meant to follow with her eyes.

“And there, running low along that ridge, so low they’ll look like they grew straight out of it, will be the villas. Yours will be the highest one, and the best one, though you’re not to tell the guests that. It’ll be our secret.”

Rosalind was eight, and had learned to nod at the right moments regardless of whether she could actually see any of it. Mostly what she saw was red dirt cut into rough terraces, a scatter of heavy equipment, excavators and dumper trucks parked at odd angles where the workers had left them for the day. The machinery had gone quiet sometime before they’d arrived, and the island’s own sounds had already crept back into the space it left, birdsong, the shift of wind through what remained of the trees, the sea somewhere behind all of it. Her father stood in the middle of it all, sunburnt and delighted, standing in the middle of a building that existed only in his head.

“It’s very sandy,” she said, which was true, and made him laugh, a laugh he made for nothing and no one else, the one that meant he thought she was cleverer than she’d intended to be.

“It’s sandy now,” he agreed. “It won’t always be.”

He crouched down beside her, close enough that she could smell the sweat and sun on him, and drew a rough rectangle in the dirt with a stick.

“The Naivalu, your grandmother’s family, have been on this island longer than anyone can properly account for,” he said. “My own mother’s people. I lived in Australia for so long, I wasn’t sure they’d still want me.”

He straightened the rectangle’s corner absently. “They took me in anyway, when they didn’t have to. I’m the luckiest man alive, that they’d have me back at all. I like to think, some mornings, that this is the one thing I’ve done in my life your mother would have actually approved of.”

He said would have the way he always did when he meant her mother, carefully, the way a person handles something with a crack already in it. Rosalind had been young enough when she died that she mostly remembered her in pieces rather than as a whole person. The house had gone quieter since then, the way houses do once somebody’s stopped living in them. Her father kept a handful of photographs of her, though he almost never let Rosalind catch him looking at them. She understood, without needing to be told, that today was one of the days he was looking at them anyway, just somewhere she couldn’t follow.

It was, she would only understand years later, family money two generations deep, finally given somewhere he actually believed it belonged. A good portion of it was already quietly finding its way into his mother’s people’s hands rather than staying in his own.

He said it lightly, the way he said most difficult things, and didn’t look at her when he said it. Rosalind, who understood even then that some sentences weren’t actually invitations to respond, said nothing at all.

He was recovered a moment later, entirely, and pointed the stick back at the ridge as if nothing had happened.

“Go on then. Tell me what you actually think.”

“I think you’re going to need a lot more doors than that.”

“That,” George said, delighted all over again, “is precisely the sort of thing I intend to charge people a great deal of money for eventually.”

She didn’t understand, not properly, what he meant by any of it. But she understood that he’d wanted her to see it like this, before it was anything at all. So she stood there a while longer in the red dirt and the shadows of the now-cooling, idle machinery, and let herself believe, as children do, that whatever he was building was going to turn out exactly the way he’d described it.

Then she was sent away to school, and the island became somewhere she returned to rather than somewhere she lived.

By thirteen, five years into her father’s resort slowly becoming a real, functioning entity rather than a stick-drawn rectangle in the dirt, school had taught her the actual currency, the kind that would turn out to apply everywhere. Nobody had ever sat her down to explain the exchange rate, nor would they need to.

It wasn’t marks, though marks were what everyone pretended it was. It was who your father golfed with. It was whether your mother sat on the right committee, whether your surname appeared on a plaque somewhere in the building, whether a single, quietly murmured phone call could make a suspension evaporate before it had finished being announced.

Rosalind understood all of this by observation alone, as she understood most things that mattered, and filed it away without once trying to spend it.

She had the same currency available to her, or near enough, through her father, if she’d ever cared to spend it. A word from her father, she suspected, would have done at least as much good for her as it did for the Ashworth-Pryce girl, who’d been caught red-handed with a stolen exam paper and returned to lessons within the hour. She’d been faintly smug about it too, as though the whole business had been beneath comment.

Rosalind had watched that particular piece of theatre from two rows back and thought, with the flat, unsentimental clarity of a girl doing arithmetic, that a single conversation between her father and the headmaster would very likely produce the same result. She’d have it, should she ever need it.

She never needed it, largely because she made a point of never needing it.

When Miss Farrow accused her, wrongly, of copying a French translation from a girl two years above, Rosalind could have ended it in a sentence. She could have mentioned, lightly, that her father knew several of the governors personally, and watched the accusation dissolve the way accusations against the Ashworth-Pryce girl always dissolved.

Instead she sat very still, said that she hadn’t copied anything, and produced her rough working from three exercise books back as proof, because it existed, because she’d actually done the work.

Some obstinate, humourless part of her had already decided that winning the other way wasn’t winning at all.

Miss Farrow believed her, eventually. It took considerably longer than a phone call would have.

What she hadn’t accounted for, not then and not for some years afterward, was that refusing to play a game everyone else was quietly playing did not read as principle to the people still playing it. It read as an accusation. A girl who could pull the same string as everyone else and pointedly declined to was not, in their eyes, being fair. She was being superior about it, and that turned out to be considerably harder to forgive than actual dishonesty would have been.

She came home from school twice a year, Christmas and the long summer break, and looked forward to both with an intensity she’d have been embarrassed to admit to anyone back at school. Term time asked her to be careful, watchful, endlessly aware of herself. Home asked nothing of her at all, beyond simply being herself. Each time she returned, the resort had grown a little further from the place she remembered leaving.

When she first left, the main building was the only one standing, the grounds still turning from bare red dirt into gardens. Whole palms arrived by boat some mornings, root-balled and rescued from other sites slated for clearing on the main island, too large a garden and too little time to wait on seedlings alone. Green cuttings from her grandmother’s family’s own land took root alongside them, smaller and slower, and somehow the ones that mattered more.

At ten, the first villas had gone up along the ridge exactly where he’d once promised they would, bungalows scattered further out across the grounds, too few yet of either to call the villas a proper row or the bungalows proper clusters.

By twelve, the villas were a proper row, the bungalows proper clusters.

At thirteen, the boat rounded the point to find the grounds barely recognisable, new wings grown out from the original building, a proper jetty in place of the makeshift one. Her father waited at the end of it in a linen shirt that actually fit the man he’d become rather than the one he’d been.

At fourteen, a cyclone came through mid-season and flattened an entire half-built wing along with it. Her father rebuilt from the foundations up rather than scale the plans back, the way he seemed to rebuild everything that year, more stubborn about it than before rather than less.

At fifteen, the resort had found almost all of its footing. It looked as though it had always been there, part of the landscape.

She came back for good the year she turned twenty-two, in the humid weeks before the wet season broke. The transfer boat eased in alongside the jetty, one among several queued for the same berth, and she stepped off it with everyone else, indistinguishable, for one unremarkable minute, from any other arriving guest.

A young man in the pale linen the staff all wore stood at the head of the jetty, upright and unhurried, waiting to greet whoever came off next. He settled a salusalu round her neck and greeted her the way he greeted every arriving guest, and she barely registered him at all. Her eyes were already moving over the whole of it, the resort her father had once drawn into the dirt with a stick, now standing in timber and stone and green. It spread further along the coast than she’d let herself imagine from the old photographs. It was close enough to what he’d described that she stopped, halfway up the jetty, simply to look at it properly.

The young man, for his part, did not look away. The young woman didn’t look back either, not really, already walking on.

Ten years of somewhere else had taught her exactly what this place wasn’t. It wasn’t a room where the right surname bought silence. It wasn’t a game with rules nobody would ever admit to teaching her. It was red dirt made real, built by a man trying, in the only language he had, to finish something for the one person who’d never get the chance to see it stand.

She stood on the Bougainvillea Building’s main terrace, long finished by now, its stone worn smooth by almost fourteen years of guests who’d never known it any other way, the sea catching the light off to one side, past the gardens, water her grandmother’s people had known for longer than the building had a name. There, she made herself a promise she never once said aloud, because saying it aloud would have made it sound smaller than it was: this place would not become one more thing she quietly let other people decide the value of. Whatever it cost her, she would be the one who looked after it properly.

Not the heiress of it. The custodian.

She had spent a decade learning exactly how much a person could lose by refusing to play along. She intended, from here on, to spend considerably longer finding out how much a person could build by refusing exactly the same thing.

This time, on her own terms, in a place that had never once asked her to be smaller than she was.