Free Inheritance by Jenny Pattrick

loved her in a possessive kind of way. I only saw him as a self-centred bully.
    ‘But can’t you see?’ he said to her, pleading for her to take his part.
    ‘It’s alright,’ she said calmly. ‘Father has inherited. It’s all in the family.’
    She might have been speaking to a child.

Elena
    B ack in Wellington, I had reports to write and meetings to attend. Project Jeanie had to take a back seat for a week or two. I thought about her from time to time though. During the slow drone of departmental meetings I would gaze out the window of our high rise office block, watch the cold waves driving up the harbour and think back to those warm, scented months in the islands when we became inseparable friends. Or were we? Obviously not, if Jeanie was prepared to break our friendship so thoroughly. Now that I had found her, I needed to know. My mind kept drifting back to those days, looking for clues.

    I remember seeing Jeanie for the first time at my impossible Great Aunt Gertrude’s welcome party. Whata charade! Gertrude had never invited Tiresa, Teo or me to anything before. Not once, although our family home was only a few miles away on the coast. This time we were invited simply to view her triumph – the discovery of a family to inherit her precious plantation. Everything was arranged to make clear the divide between European status Samoans and those of us who live fa‘asamoa. Gertrude even removed the flower Jeanie had put behind her ear! Teo saw that too and egged me on to welcome her with a little siva. Provocative, but what the hell. (Hamish would call it mischievous!) And Jeanie loved it! Her big eyes alive at the sight of the two of us swaying and whooping. She was itching to join in, it was written all over her, the way her arms twitched and her feet shifted. I knew immediately that we would get on well. What was it about her? Her size, I suppose, was the first thing you noticed. So small and fine boned. I thought of a trim and delicate wading bird. Then her eyes – large and dark, not Chinese like her father’s, but a little pointed in the outer corners. Bright teardrops lying on their sides, with a fine dark brush line above. Such beautiful eyebrows! I don’t think she knew how lovely she was. I never saw her preen or flirt. But we got on well from that first day. Our physical difference was no barrier – quite the opposite. I think she enjoyed my size and solidity, as I loved her delicacy.
    Gertrude, her old, blue eyes cold as New Zealand winter, led the newcomers away towards a group of palagi. My great aunt belonged back in the nineteenth century – was born in it and never progressed out into the modern world. It made me mad to see the way she seated Tiresa and our patele on the mats with the untitledpeople. But then later Jeanie came and sat with us. She wanted to know more about the Samoans at the party, what we did, who we were.
    Teo looked away, wouldn’t answer. He tended to smoulder, back then, in the presence of palagi. Silly boy. He had spent the last eight years at an expensive boarding school in New Zealand, perfectly happy to socialise with well-heeled white boys, but as soon as he was back in the islands, his old inherited prejudices took over again.
    I dug Teo sharply in the ribs. Jeanie wasn’t to blame for our family’s misfortunes (twelve dead in the flu and two gunned down by New Zealand military on that infamous day during the Mau). Teo frowned at me and turned his back on Jeanie. My mother clearly approved, patted his thigh, which made him turn back again to us! Oh what a mixture he was then, my young brother! Wayward, spoiled by our mother, full of half-baked political resentments, yet under all that, a sweetness that one had to hope would eventually come to the fore.
    Soon we were all three chatting and laughing. Jeanie had that special quality of being able to draw people easily into conversation. She was genuinely interested – in the people she met, in Samoa’s history