It’s what we did. I called in as often as I could over the next year. I think that’s all she wanted from me at the time – to know that I would return. I was signed on to a ship taking tourists on Pacific cruises. One day I turned up with a ring, which I gave to her in front of everyone. She put it on her little finger. It was too small for the ring finger. We were married, with a right-sized ring, on my next extended leave. I left journeying and found work round the coastal routes of the Hawaiian Islands.

But seafaring changed when we went to war.

Chapter 10

Oriwia

Aki rang his parents late at night. He hadn’t been home for two years because he’d changed ships, and though the family guessed his reasons for doing this, they didn’t know why he was being secretive. Because they were all on telephone party lines in those days, Oriwia heard the ‘long, short, short, long’ grind which was Taana and Dorothea’s ring. Toll operators tried it three times before the phone was picked up.

Oriwia wondered who had died, this being the first thought when a phone rang in the middle of the night. It was a quarter of an hour or more before the ‘ring-off’ signal sounded, which meant a long conversation had taken place. The ‘ring-off’ was followed by Paa’s ‘short, long, short’ call, which would be Dorothea ringing her father. Another long conversation took place, but Oriwia knew that local calls in the middle of the night were most often brief, and if someone had died Dorothea would have let them all know immediately.

It wasn’t difficult to guess that the phone call was from Aki – not unexpected – to say he was going to be married. Oriwia lay in bed thinking about collecting the ingredients together for the wedding cake. She spent the rest of the night planning it, wondering who the woman was and where she was from. She was bound to be beautiful.

What Oriwia discovered next day when she went to visit Dorothea was a mother in tears who told her that her son was to marry a Hawaiian woman who already had two sons, that the wedding would take place in Hawai‘i, and that Aki would be living there permanently.

‘When I encouraged him to leave here, he wasn’t meant to stay away forever,’ Dorothea said. ‘He’s been given responsibilities. He’s been given the old knowledge. There’s the house, the land.’

‘What happened to her first husband?’ Oriwia asked.

‘She never had one,’ Dorothea replied.