Beat Not the Bones by Charlotte Jay Page B

still facing her, his cheek turned towards her but his eyes staring over his shoulder.
    She had no idea what the gesture meant. Perhaps he had flicked back his head to avoid a blow, or had discovered something in her face that he could not bear to look at.
    â€˜Do you know him?’ Something in his attitude – standing as if paralysed – disturbed her. Then a voice from the main office called out, ‘Hitolo! Who are you talking to?’
    Hitolo did not answer. It might have been death for him to move. Steps sounded in the passageway and around the partition of the office appeared the man whom Stella had hoped she might never see again, the man she had mistaken for Trevor Nyall the day before.
    Hitolo had moved now. He had turned his head, blinked, and his face had become composed and expectant.
    â€˜What are you saying to this boy?’
    Stella met the hostile glance defiantly. Now that she had met him she experienced a peculiar exhilaration. She felt for him some of the comforting hatred she felt for Jobe. She met his dark-ringed eyes, larger than life behind his glasses, and her pulses beat with the excitement of intense aversion. She was certain that he would attack. ‘I was asking him where I could find Sereva,’ she said.
    For a moment he did not answer. Then he said, ‘Sereva is dead.’ His voice was flat and dry.
    â€˜Dead!’ she whispered. To those who have lost someone near to them, death, any death, even a stranger’s, becomes personal, like a shadowy repetition of their own tragedy.
    â€˜Hitolo doesn’t like to speak about it. He saw it happen and it was not, I believe, very pleasant. They were brothers.’
    She glanced at Hitolo who looked quite composed. But she understood now that his peculiar attitude, neck drawn back and cheek averted, had been a gesture of grief. ‘When did it happen?’
    â€˜What do you want to know for?’
    She looked at him in surprise.
    He shrugged his shoulders, picked up one of the stones on the desk and held it in the palm of his hand, looking into it as one might gaze into a crystal. ‘I suppose you’ll find out, and you’ll make something enormous out of it. He died in the field with your husband.’
    â€˜In the field?’
    â€˜It’s a term meaning outside. This last trip he made into the Bava valley. Sereva went with him as usual, and he died before they reached the station at Kairipi on the way back.’
    Stella could scent her prey, and her eyes shone. ‘What did he die of?’
    â€˜It’s hard to tell. There was no doctor.’ He put down the stone and looked up. ‘He was taken suddenly with some sort of convulsion and died a few hours later in great pain. I never thought to see such pleasure taken in a man’s death,’ he said quietly.
    Stella, who could not know that a fanatical light suffused her face, said angrily, ‘Pleasure! How could I …’
    â€˜I can see,’ he said bitterly, ‘that you welcome it. That you see it in some way explaining what you stupidly want to know – the reason for your husband’s suicide. It enhances this mad wish you have.’
    She forgot her promise to Trevor Nyall and answered coldly, ‘David did not commit suicide.’
    He lifted his hands, held them helplessly in the air and then flapped them down to his sides. ‘Ah! So that’s it!’ He turned away, his shoulders drooped, and he trailed his hand over the desk like a blind man. Her eyes followed his hand. His fingers fumbled on the smooth, round stones, and closed around a small, black coconut, carved in a white design. He picked it up and looked at it, blinking his eyes as if waking from a fit of abstraction, then turned it over and examined it minutely.
    Stella looked about her at the littered table, the thick, anthropological volumes in the bookcase, the bundles of spears, the masks, the mysterious round stones.