Three Views of Crystal Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

the pearl traders do.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ Vera had asked that first time.
    ‘Cut means you divide them, and let me pick which portion. Pick means you pick, so I cut.’
    Vera couldn’t decide. She had gnawed at her pyjama sleeve. She had quivered. He had watched her and smiled as she stared at the prized sausages. If she cut, she could make sure the halves were exactly even. But if she let him cut, he’d have to try to make them even too. But he might make a mistake. Then one half would be bigger, and she could have it.
    ‘Pick!’ she had said.
    ‘Smart girl!’ he had roared, and laughed so that his moustache ends wobbled, which made her laugh. ‘The picking price is always higher than cutting price.’ He had divided the sausages meticulously, leaving one end of the extra longer than the other. ‘Now which do you want?’
    Vera had giggled and giggled, picking the bigger portion.
    He had set her back down on her own chair.
    ‘Last time I did that I was sitting on the ground in Bombay in one of those low little shops the Indians have. There was some oily meat involved as I recall, that I sopped up with a piece of delicious bread hot from a stove. The merchant laid out his pearls on the back of his hand.’
    ‘Did you cut or pick, Grandpa?’
    ‘I picked. I always picked. And then you know what I did? To bargain with him on the price, I covered my hand with ahandkerchief and put out my fingers to say how many hundred rupees I’d pay. Five fingers, five hundred. Whole hand, one thousand. Half a finger –’ he made as if to chop off the end of his finger ‘– What do you think?’
    ‘She doesn’t like arithmetic, Father,’ Belle had said. She was formal with him.
    ‘Well I do!’ he had said, spearing his sausages and wolfing them down whole. ‘I like arithmetic these days because I’m making money.’
    Today, Vera looked at the four half slices of toast.
    ‘It’s cut already,’ she said.
    ‘You’re right. I’ll have to let you pick then.’
    He smiled. His ruddy skin was growing whiter, and beginning to shine like the inside of a shell. His face was clearing of the weather burns and tobacco stains of decades; he was being tamed. Was it his nearness to an end that made him flirt with girls and waitresses? A growing lightness in his life, that was really an acceptance of death that made him so attractive? They were all in love with him – Hinchcliffe, Vera, Roberta. He was powerful but childlike, immense, and visibly incompetent: he trembled and knocked over the cream pitcher. His body leaked and crumpled. He burped and gagged, laughed gently at himself.
    ‘And by the way,’ Vera said. ‘You won’t die. Not if I can help it.’ She did not think it would happen, ever. Perhaps because her mother had fretted about it so much: he’ll be lost at sea, he’ll catch beriberi, and he’ll come home to die. But he had proven very durable.
    ‘Today in school we talked about pearls, Grandfather.’
    ‘I don’t know why you would. There are no more pearls in the sea. They’ve all been snapped up, every last one of them. Every self-respecting wild oyster has cashed in his chips,’ said Lowinger.
    ‘I don’t believe that there are no more pearls,’ she teased.
    ‘You have to believe me, I’m your grandfather.’
    She pouted. ‘Then tell me about them.’
    ‘Pearls are not my favourite topic, Vera dear.’
    ‘But they are mine.’
    ‘Are they, my dear?’ Busy with his cinnamon toast. ‘Are you catching the disease then?’
    Vera crossed her narrow feet and took a strand of her whiteblonde hair to curl around a fingertip; her stubborn adolescent expression gave way to the blank, childish look of she who expects a story.
    ‘Is it catching?’
    ‘Oh, highly contagious, my dear. You want to stay away.’
    ‘But don’t you think I’ve already been exposed?’ Her mother had sent her around to the neighbours to sit in the rooms of the children who had scarlet fever and rubella, so that