Away with the Fishes (22 page)

“Welcome!” Dagmore greeted them, reaching the dock and extending his hand to give the professor’s a shake. To Anna he bowed his head and smiled, then looking down at the girl who clung sleepily to her mother’s side, he said, “You must be Martine. My, how grown-up you are!”

While the Abbelscotts’ eyes adjusted to the island sun, Dagmore arranged for their belongings and for a vehicle to take them all home. As they drove up the steep and winding roads that carried them higher and higher above Port-St. Luke, the Abbelscotts admired the shrinking and picturesque capital and the crystalline water that stretched as far as they could see. So entranced were they by the scenery, that they spoke of little else, asking Dagmore a million questions, which he was both happy and proud to answer. When they finally reached the villa, Mrs. Jaymes silently served them pineapple juice over ice, on the verandah, from which they gazed in awe at the beach below.

“It’s marvelous,” Anna announced, and Dagmore sighed complacently. So far, everything was going as expected. Neither he nor the island had failed to impress.

They finished their drinks and a tour of the house, and while Anna and little Martine went to rest before dinner, Dagmore and Emmitt took a walk down the rocky path to the beach. Once utterly assured that the beach was Dagmore’s and Dagmore’s alone, Emmitt stripped down and waded in, leaving his shirt, socks,
trousers, and under-things in a pile in the sand. Mrs. Jaymes, who was cooking dinner at the time, poised to spot any signs of trouble, caught sight of him from the kitchen window and, startled, dropped a plate. It smashed apart on the tile flooring, tiny pieces of it scattering every which way.

The first casualty of the Captain’s cockamamie plan to host a houseful of strangers! she thought, and it gave her pleasure to sweep up the miniscule ceramic flecks, each one yet another sign that her fears were well-founded and her suspicions well-placed.

In the mornings, Dagmore took the Abbelscotts on island tours, dazzling them with the local flora and fauna, and with his knowledge of both. In the afternoons, after the lunch prepared by Mrs. Jaymes had been enthusiastically consumed, they lounged on Dagmore’s beach and swam in his private bit of sea. In the evenings came more island delicacies, followed by cocktails and cigars in the sitting room. There, the guests were equally enthralled by Dagmore’s piano-playing and by his lectures on Oh’s every aspect, from its cocoa plantations and its honeycombs, to its plantains and its bush tea. When, with heavy heart, the Abbelscotts finally packed their cases and went home, promising to return again soon, Mrs. Jaymes surveyed the damage and was irked to find that it amounted only to the broken plate, and the extra bedsheets she had had to launder. Miffed that her instincts were still just that, she sat and shook her head.

Storms that took too long to brew were bitter cups to swallow.

Raoul crinkled his brow and looked at Mrs. Jaymes, visibly disappointed. “Then everything
did
go according to plan,” he
complained. “You said those invitations were trouble. That the house was sending messages. What about all that?” he cried, as if accusing her.

Mrs. Jaymes, forgetting her glee from remembering Dagmore, responded in kind. “Aren’t you reading what you’re writing down in that book of yours? You must be as single-minded as the Captain himself! A thunderstorm doesn’t come out of nowhere,” she declared.

“Doesn’t it?” Though flattered, now, to be compared to the Captain Dagmore he had once met, Raoul was confused.

“Well, of course not!” she replied. “It collects itself. Gathers itself up. The sky calls out to the wind, and the wind musters the clouds, who plump themselves up until they blot out the sun. Then the lightning turns up and the thunder behind it.
That’s
when the rain comes,” she announced triumphantly. “You can’t have a downpour until you line up a few clouds!”

Hmm. Raoul recalled the story of mathematician-musician Stan Kalpi. Mr. Stan had lined up his variables, but never any clouds. He
had
played music on his homemade not-quite-guitar-but-more-than-mandolin, which, Raoul reasoned, was not so very different from Dagmore and his piano. He decided to give the story another chance.

“Very well, Mrs. Jaymes. Carry on,” he said, checking his watch and turning to yet another page in his nearly full notebook. “Line up your clouds.”

Mrs. Jaymes barely had time to get things in order, to polish the silver and wax the floors, make up the beds and put up
pineapple preserves, when next Captain Dagmore set off to town humming. She had only just liberated herself of the Abbelscotts, and already the Shelbys and Fitches were bearing down on her. She feared the villa would never be quiet again—and for a long time it wouldn’t. Dagmore had grown so accustomed to the camaraderie of his English friends that he couldn’t abide an empty house anymore, not even when, alone, he played the piano to summon his father from the beyond. The company of a spirit, while soothing, was not the kind of company with whom he could argue or smoke or take tea. His father’s ghost never answered when Dagmore posed a question, never applauded when Dagmore played, not even after the most rigorous of
rinforzandos
. If filling the villa with living, breathing visitors meant Dagmore had to tolerate Mrs. Jaymes’s complaints and admonitions, he found it a small price to pay.

As he had forewarned her when the letters first arrived, a large group indeed were the combined Shelbys and Fitches. The former were four sisters, aged twenty to twenty-five, accompanied by their twenty-six-year-old brother, who served as chaperone. The Fitches, in an unlikely pairing with the garrulous youths, were a somewhat crusty financier, his fussy wife, and his even fussier mother-in-law. Dagmore had cast a wide net with his invitations, and in hindsight the Fitches were not the most sparkling of his associates. Still, Phillip Fitch was an intelligent man and highly regarded in his field.

Because the Shelbys and Fitches shared so few interests (the ones wanted to see every corner of the island, while the others preferred to observe it from Dagmore’s verandah), their presence posed a challenge for both the Captain and the cook. Dagmore was quite content to spend his days with the Shelby siblings,
accompanying them on nature walks or to town on market day (where each bought a coconut-leaf hat with a coconut-leaf bird on a stick poking out of the top), but even a man as adept as
he
couldn’t be in two places at once. Dagmore regretted leaving the Fitches to fend for themselves at the villa, though the arrangement didn’t disturb the Fitches in the least. They took great comfort in Mrs. Jaymes, whom they turned to for hot meals, cold drinks, and more chats than she cared to count. Dagmore, upon returning in the evenings with the happy siblings, was forced to endure Mrs. Jaymes’s rants before she would set so much as a salt-shaker on the table where the guests were to dine.

One day when the Fitches had Mrs. Jaymes’s dander up good and thick, she almost quit the villa for good. They had pestered her morning and afternoon with silly questions—“Is it always so hot?” and “How fast does a pineapple grow?”—and when Mrs. Jaymes caught sight of the returning Shelbys, the protruding birds on their hats jerking and flitting above their heads like flustered green gulls in miniature, it was all the silliness she could take.

“Captain, I can’t stay here a minute longer!” she blurted out. “It’s too much. Too much!”

“Calm down, Mrs. Jaymes, what’s happened? Is everyone alright?” For a minute he feared one or more of the Fitches had fallen into the sea.

“Oh, they’re fine!
I’m
the one going mad listening to their nonsense! Do you know what they asked me today? ‘How many times a year does it rain?’ Like we have nothing better to do around here than sit and count the raindrops. And what about those Shelbys? Traipsing about the island every day like a bunch of children skipping school. Don’t they have lives of their own? Don’t they need to get home and do whatever it is they do?”

“They’ll be leaving next week, Mrs. Jaymes, if it makes you feel any better. They’re just visiting, taking a little holiday. Surely you’ve done that yourself.”

Mrs. Jaymes watched him, appalled. She most certainly had done no such thing! “Where in the world would I be going off to, to do nothing but waste my time and someone else’s?” she challenged him.

“They aren’t wasting my time, Mrs. Jaymes. I want them here.”

“Don’t I know it! That’s the problem.”

“Mrs. Jaymes,” he reasoned with her, “for two months now you’ve been preaching about some sort of trouble. But what has happened really? Has a single thing gone wrong? Everyone’s having fun. What’s the matter with that?”

She couldn’t think of anything to say, her broken plate an admittedly brittle argument, and simply repeated the warning she had delivered so many times before.

“I’m telling you these people are trouble!”

Dagmore comforted her and convinced her she was wrong (or so she let him think), and Mrs. Jaymes agreed to stay—but only because in her heart she knew her predictions would prove correct, and she wanted to be there to see it when they did.

Still and all, apart from a cranky cook, the friends and colleagues that showed up on Dagmore’s doorstep did him a world of good. Dagmore once again felt at home on his island, which he thoroughly enjoyed showing off, and he felt at home in his house, where he entertained his intimate audiences with his music and his island lore, both of which met with their applause. The house that Captain Dagmore Bowles had built soon became quite renowned in his former circles, and before long not a single English acquaintance had failed to turn up, unannounced even (
poor Mrs. Jaymes!), for word had spread that Dagmore would turn away none.

The tales of his generosity and his wealth took on a life of their own. Those who had been fortunate enough to benefit from his hospitality told stories of a luxurious mansion perched high above its own sandy shore. They talked about the breathtaking views and the stars and moon that seemed to shine for the sake of the villa alone, and they talked about Oh. About Crater Lake, from which only Dagmore had ever emerged alive, and about the island’s rain-forest full of wild monkeys. They recalled dishes with potatoes in shapes and colors they had never seen and drinks made from fruits they had never tasted.

Whether for his magnanimity or for the exotic locale in which he had made his home, Dagmore, too, became the subject of speculation, the embodiment of mystique. Hailed as a sea captain, a scientist, a virtuoso, and a wealthy eccentric, some began to wonder if Dagmore and his house were real. Suddenly he found himself in great demand, as important figures from the corners of Europe came to verify his very existence. Within a few short years, his house boasted the most prestigious of houseguests, from princes and painters to writers and entrepreneurs. His sitting room rang with the arias of opera divas and his divans cushioned the bottoms of top-level leaders.

As the caliber of Dagmore’s acquaintances grew, his interactions with them gradually shifted. The crowd that now came to call wasn’t interested in lizards or almond trees (and wouldn’t be caught dead in hats with protruding coconut-leaf birds). It was more likely to debate the merits of the latest novel or coup d’état than to discuss the differences between island limes and lemons. This didn’t bother Dagmore. He could hold his own with the best
of them. What mattered most was that he wasn’t alone, that he had peers with whom he could joke and discuss. If at the end of the evening they begged him to tickle an ivory or two, well, that just sweetened the fish pot.

In short, the Captain was becoming a snob and Mrs. Jaymes didn’t like it one bit. He lived on the island without
living
on the island. All he ever wore were piano clothes; he had even hired a local tailor to sew him some new ones “with more fashionable lines” (the tailor’s first attempt had produced an unfortunate jacket of striped green and blue). He never walked to town to play dominoes anymore, rarely took a swim, and took his guests on only the most perfunctory of island tours. The guests themselves were even worse. They treated Mrs. Jaymes like a common servant, rarely uttering a word that wasn’t a request (or an order) and their “pleases” and “thank yous” were as perfunctory as their sight-seeing. Mrs. Jaymes was almost nostalgic for the inquiring Fitches.