Black Marina (4 page)

It was a rotten shame to have to leave then really, and especially for one of those little Creole kids who was trying to totter along the pier and play with the model boat Sanjay had made for his daughter. She was so excited to see the ship with the sails up, and there was even a breath of wind, so the canvas puffed out and the ship tugged daintily at its string. But Sanjay had collapsed the sails before the poor little brat could get there. He wasn’t thinking, I suppose. And Duchess Dora – did she put on speed – she leaned over that toy pier and clouted the kid on the back of the head. So it went splash into the murky water, little pink dress and all.

‘Dora!’ Sanjay said in quite a different tone to his wife. But I reckon that kind of thing was happening all the time, because none of the other children paid a scrap of attention.
And it was for Millie to come on those slow, heavy legs round the bend of the creek and pull the bawling creature out. I can’t say I go for kids, never have, and this wasn’t a particularly attractive specimen.

‘Take her up to the village, Millie,’ Duchess Dora said. ‘And tell Tanty Grace to keep a better eye on things. You hear?’

Millie worked for the Allards then. Mrs Van der Pyck and her equally demanding régime were yet to come.

We all sat on the gnarled beach stools Sanjay had fashioned from flotsam, and tucked into the picnic in silence. It was good – roti and beef with curry and samosas and soursops and mango, which for some reason don’t grow good on St James and have to come over from another island on the
Singer
,
just as they were supposed to yesterday.

‘I’ll tell you about the Sea Island cotton I’m considering reintroducing,’ Sanjay said. He kept his eyes away from me as he talked. Duchess Dora’s eyes were fixed on me, though, in fury. I want to get off of here, I remember suddenly thinking then. No one listened as Sanjay talked of crops and rainy seasons and the hurricane that hit Dominica a few years ago.

*

Sanjay is walking along the beach, and the helicopter hovers a moment longer before turning – in the opposite direction this time, over the island where no one will look up from the village at propellers cutting into the blue sky or look after it when it has gone down towards Laughing Gull Bay. (
Sometimes
the pilot amuses himself, swooping right down to the sand, and last month, after a freak tide, he found what he thought was an arm or a leg sticking up out of the sand by the reef – he’s used to that kind of sight by now, I suppose. It was in fact the neck of a pre-Columbian urn. ‘So beootiful’ – I can hear Jim Davy now, when it was brought in to him by
the pilot. Wide, a warm brown, chased with pale painted whorls. ‘We’ll put it in the Craft Centre,’ Jim Davy said. ‘We’ll teach the students to make an urn like that.’)

I get these flashes of fear, they last as long as the shadow from a chopper’s blade, and it suddenly comes to me that Sanjay is walking towards me with news of disaster. Is there a war starting up? What can he see, from the verandah of his wooden house where you can stare and stare and you won’t see anything until you get to the coast of South America? He could see a fleet all right, steaming up to fight out a bloody Falklands on our beaches. But the British don’t want
anything
to do with protecting St James. When we were made ‘independent’ (what a laugh), along with St Jude to the north, and a chinless member of the Royal Family came – he was trying to grow a beard, I remember, the sweat of the tropics came through the pathetic straggle of hair – what a fuss Duchess Dora made! Oh, the tea on the lawn! a steel band, even. It was embarrassing. But they don’t want anything further to do with us. The fighting’ll be between the Cubans and the Americans. I see it in my dreams and then the Russians fly in in planes from dark skies heavy with snow.

*

‘Holly!’ I hear. I go into the store, it’s time I served Millie, after all, because her basket is full with those extra trimmings Mrs Van der Pyck needs for tonight. ‘You going to dinner up there?’ Millie says, and I shake my head and we both laugh. We’ll be sick-drunk together later, no one is stopped from going into the Coconut Bar. In a comic-strip show of equality and comradeship, the Americans and Venezuelans will dance with the villagers from St James and the funny hats will go on and we’ll all be happy as the night is long. Mrs Van der Pyck will make her annual pass at Sanjay, who will slip away before the end. Jim Davy dressed as Santa Claus. ‘What are you giving us this year, Santa, to keep us good?’ But Jim Davy’s not
here, and that’s one of the reasons I suspect bad news.

Now I’m back in the store I see the girl from the yacht has an impatient look. She’s swum over with a wad of dollars tucked in her hair and she’s laid them out on the counter.

What is she trying to prove? And now I find there’s a lump in my throat. It’s fear again. Because every day this place gets more and more like a re-run of an American TV serial. I just expect her to pull a gun – and point it at me. Steady on, Holly, I say to myself as I add up Millie’s shopping on the ancient cash register.

‘Going away on holiday this year?’ I say to Millie, to keep up the seasonal running joke between us. And Millie laughs – that slow, rumbling laugh that makes you feel quite cheered up until you remember you’re stuck on an undefended island only four miles from Grenada.

‘Just the usual little skiing holiday,’ she says. ‘In
Switzerland
.’ And we both laugh together, while the girl stands staring at us in open contempt. A couple of old bats, you can see her thinking about us. And I think back, well, dear, you’ll just have to wait your turn to get served. As if we were in one of those crummy streets in West London where you see girls looking like this one, and not on an island that might be blown up any minute and the pieces scattered as far as Trinidad.

*

Lore was the one who wrote and told me the news, that Christmas after Teza vanished with Ford. (They’d gone to Union Island in the fisherman’s boat, it was later revealed, and had a lobster dinner and spent the night in the one battered hotel.) It was the first time Ford had left St James. By the time they got on the big plane to London in Barbados his eyes were nearly popping out of his head.

‘It’s cradle-snatching,’ Lore said. ‘But he is rather sweet. Do you know, he even writes poems and reads them aloud to Teza’s friends? No one dares to laugh, of course. Teza’s
bought this little house near the Portobello Road. She seems quite happy, but she’s restless really. Something tells me she’ll have a baby next. Well, I suppose you can afford to if you get left a nice lump of money and you’ve got a roof over your head and you just stroll down to the market for your yam or sweet potato every time you get a crave.’

Well, yes. As for me, I stayed and I worked at first in the Coconut Bar because the store was nothing then, just for locals. Sanjay said to me, the day after Teza and Ford
disappeared
and he was finally sure in his mind that I hadn’t aided and abetted them by pinching the boat or anything, ‘Why not stay on here, Holly? We have great plans for St James, you know. You can join in the fun. You give me the feeling you’ve been left out, not joining in, all your life somehow.’

(It’s funny what a few kind words will do.) And what did I have to go back to? A furnished room in Chelsea where you can see the river if you lean out of the window, and you feel like throwing yourself in if you could jump that far, and a religious maniac living underneath who comes up and threatens you with her Bible when the wind’s easterly. And it’s so warm here, the nights are as warm as swimming in your own blood when you lean on the rail at the Coconut Bar. (Not forgetting that in those days the yacht owners gave big tips. Now they have Ferdie, a great laughing man from Tobago, to mix the punch and the daiquiri.)

‘You’ll never believe this,’ Lore’s next letter went. ‘I had supper round at Teza’s last night’ (this was some years later, I’ve lost count). ‘Ford’s in Black Power now. He has yellow socks and a navy wool cap pulled down over his head and a belt with so many spikes and studs it makes you think you’re at the Tower of London. And he’s a celebrity! He shouts out his poems at meetings, he raps to an astonished audience in the drawing rooms of the English literary world. Holly, it’s too funny. You should come back just to see.’

Of course I did get homesick a lot, but somehow there was never the funds or the time to get home. Lore sent a photo of herself and some passing boyfriend in a grim-looking farm place where he rears chickens. She looks pretty miserable and certainly cold. Anyway, I feel as if I’m sewn into this place by now. I know St James so well that I can’t imagine the streets at home any more, or the English rain, or the first strawberries in the market, with the mushy ones hidden underneath. The strange thing is, you don’t feel the stitches going in. One day, though, there you are. I’m part of the needlework by now, just as much as Sanjay as he saunters along the beach, skipping the wavelets that come in over half-moon-shaped pillows of sand.

But – today – there’s someone who doesn’t fit at all. Swim back the way you came, my girl, I say under my breath as she fixes that long, rude stare on me. Then I see, behind Sanjay, there’s another unexpected face. Damn it, I say, what an afternoon it turns out to be.

I suppose you could place Sanjay’s daughter Pandora in the category of things that come and go here in St James. It was a tragic thing. But I wasn’t honoured with the company of Sanjay and Duchess Dora much in those days, as Duchess D.’s discovery that I was serving at the Bar instantly put the place out of bounds for her husband. (I never knew why he put up with it. No one said, of course, when Dora died, that it must have been a relief for him, but it’s hard to see how it could not have been.) But Sanjay’s daughter – I remember her that day of the picnic at the lagoon when she ran from the uncleared trees to join her father – now she’s all in white, in a long dress like a portrait of a Victorian girl; she’s making a sound like a laughing gull, swooping in white over the sand behind Sanjay.

What happened to Pandora is hard to figure out. Mrs Van der Pyck, who is the island gossip, she says Pandora
inherited
madness from her mother. But then Mrs Van der
Pyck hated Duchess Dora too. (Sometimes I wonder if the poor woman’s maddening air of superiority didn’t get her
ill-wished
by so many people that she was likely to sicken and die. But one mustn’t think like that in this part of the world. It’s too dangerous, there’s so much of it around. Maybe I should do better to bear in mind Teza’s strictures on
underdevelopment
and superstition in the Third World. All the same, it was mysterious that Duchess Dora died of an illness that had never before manifested itself in the Caribbean. I’ve felt guilty about it myself, to tell the truth, like you do when someone dies and you just couldn’t care.)

San jay never forgave his wife for sending the girl away to the madhouse, that was the
on
dit
on the island. But where else could she have stayed? You can’t lock up a young girl so easily these days, even here. Some visitor or other would have talked about it in St Jude or Trinidad and they’d have come and shipped her all the way to Barbados, that’s the way I see it. Whereas the asylum in Grenada is – or was – so near that Sanjay used to go once a month to see Pandora and come back looking haggard and sad and go and sit in the bar at Carib’s Rest and drink brandy and water the colour of mahogany. And you could say all was well, up to a point – at least he could see her – until the Bishop revolution in Grenada and he stopped going over altogether. And then Duchess Dora went down with that fever and died. I used to feel sorry for Sanjay. So many youthful, optimistic plans, London swinging to his tune when he was just starting out, the chance to transform an island in the sun, and he ends up in a falling-down house alone, with his wife dead and his daughter out of her mind. Then the Bishop régime was overthrown two months ago and in the fighting the madhouse was bombed to the ground. There were twenty or thirty killed. Heaven knows how Pandora escaped unhurt. She was found wandering near the garrison by an American marine. Rescued – airlifted: Sanjay told Jim Davy he had a lot to be
thankful for and he knew Jim Davy had pulled every string he could to help. ‘I won’t forget,’ he said to Jim Davy every night in the Coconut Bar. I used to fall half-asleep listening to Sanjay going on and on about the saving of the life of his daughter. And I couldn’t help thinking, it might have been better for her if she hadn’t been saved at all. She’s out of her wits, poor darling.

It wasn’t long after the day of that picnic at the lagoon that little Pandora fell into madness. Millie thought someone had put a hex on the child. Her look said as much. I remember we were standing up near Corbeau Bay in the north, where the consortium was pushing ahead with the first stage of
building
, and Millie had gone up with sandwiches for the labourers. I was just hanging around – you can certainly get restless on a place like this. And from this point in the north you can see the big tankers on their way up from Venezuela to the USA. Sanjay would be there some days too, supervising the
building
with his overseer, Mr Ritchie, and pointing to the places where he wanted to put in clematis and flowering vine and frangipani.

Pandora was very subdued at the picnic, I remember, because it was the one time I wouldn’t have minded some childish disturbance to cover up Teza and Ford making eyes at each other.

No one knows a thing about madness, or so it seems to me, in spite of all the theories. It probably is inherited in this case. But I’ll have to admit it gave me a great fright – oh, about a month ago it must have been – when I was packing up late here at the store and I heard a terrible screaming coming from the direction of the lagoon. They’ve been
clearing
there recently, hacking down Sanjay’s private jungle to make way for an airport. His lease runs out any day now, as you know.

Pandora had apparently wandered off down there, Millie said. (She’d heard this from her Tanty Grace who’d come
down to the Allard house to help out with Pandora since the bombing of the Grenada madhouse.) Pandora had gone down to the little creek. The manchineel trees were half cut down and the bank had been bulldozed, so the place sort of jumped out at her, where the miniature jetty had been, and then she started to scream.