First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (11 page)

Further along the street, I saw this again. The building with the sign
POST OFFICE
on it appeared to be made of red brick. But the brick was only paper, and was peeling off in places, revealing the plywood base. Then we passed the St Jude Inn. It reminded me of the pub in Stroven with its walls of grey granite and the smell of beer seeping out into the day. Except that the granite was only textured paper, and bulged in places; tacks had been used to stop it from peeling off at the corners. Many of the other buildings along the main street showed the same symptoms.

The walk was uncomfortable for me. The sun was low
and dusk was falling quickly, and I’d never experienced such heat. Also, mosquito bites were quite new to me. They seemed harmless at first, but now they were beginning to itch maddeningly. Brown flies were biting me, and other, smaller flies were sticking needles into my neck. My suitcase was heavier and heavier. I kept hoping we’d soon come to my aunt’s house. But we walked past all the cul-de-sacs and the cobblestones ended. We were now at a huge gateway in the battlements. A heavy wooden gate with brass studs all over it was half open.

My aunt went through the gateway and I followed.

We began walking on a dusty track across the lava plain, which rose very slightly towards the mountain. Ahead, I could see how this track narrowed in the distance till it seemed nothing more than a pencil scrawl. My aunt pressed on ahead, saying nothing.

We walked and walked, and all the time, the dusk became thicker, so that the black mountain was gradually dissolving. I was sticky and hot. The whining assaults of the mosquitoes seemed more vicious and personal. My shoes were leaden. The suitcase in my hand was a dead weight leeching the strength out of me. I began to feel sick. I began to feel I would soon vomit. My aunt, shuffling along ahead of me, made no offer to help, only stopped when I stopped to scratch my face and arms, or to shift the suitcase to my other hand. I hated her. I could think of nothing except the weight, the itch, the nausea, the hatred. I’d almost made up my mind to lie down on the track and sleep.

Then, all at once, we reached our destination.

The track had led us past a huge lava outcrop near the foot of the mountain. We passed a sign still faintly visible in the dusk—
AGRICULTURAL STATION
. Nearby was a stone cottage with a verandah, and a little front yard with an iron gate. My aunt opened it and held it for me to go through.

I was feverish. The very moment I walked through the gate, the dusk became pure blackness and swallowed in one gulp the black mountain and the cottage. This monster darkness terrified me, and I stood holding onto my suitcase in my left hand, as though it were an anchor. I felt a hand take my arm.

“This way, Andrew.” My aunt led me a few short steps. I heard her fumble with a doorknob, and the door squealed open. We stepped into a large room dimly lit by an oil lamp hanging from ceiling beams. I put my suitcase down.

“Norman! We’re here!” my aunt called out. “We’re here!”

She let go my arm and stood behind me, putting her hands on my shoulders. I might have been an offering, or a shield.

I could make out someone sitting in an armchair at the rear of that gloomy room.

“This is my nephew,” my aunt said. “This is Andrew Halfnight.”

A man’s voice, a very deep voice, replied.

“Good. Now we can all have supper.”

S
O
I
MADE MY FIRST
acquaintance with the Island of St Jude and with my new family. During the early days my Aunt Lizzie asked a few brief questions about my mother’s final illness. Otherwise she didn’t say much, though she constantly watched me and would smile when our eyes met. I had a feeling she would have liked to be more friendly, but
that something was keeping her back. Still, she didn’t seem unhappy I was there.

As for my uncle, Norman Beck: he didn’t pay much attention to me. When I’d heard his deep voice the night I arrived, I’d expected him to be a big man. But though he was tall, he was very thin, with greying hair, lined cheeks and a slight hump. No matter how hot it was, he wore a black wool sweater that was always frosted with dandruff at the shoulders. He rarely spoke to Lizzie or to me, and never called us by name. There was a kind of chill about him: I noticed that even the mosquitoes in flight veered away from him. If he had any warmth, it was absorbed by his work: the vegetable garden at the back of the cottage; and by his hobby: astronomy.

The vegetable gardening was professional. He was a botanist and had been posted here to look after the government project. He was trying to find which northern vegetables could be developed in this climate. The official garden was at the back of the cottage. It was about the same dimensions as the cottage itself and was enclosed by lava rocks loosely piled on each other to make walls. Tons of northern soil had been shipped in over the years. He was experimenting with types of lettuce and potatoes and carrots and turnips. He tended them with great devotion; but apparently, in spite of his care, and no matter how promisingly they began, they’d rot in the ground.

Lizzie sent me out into the garden the day after I arrived to tell him lunch was ready. He was crouched over, halfway along a row of potato plants, looking at something. He motioned to me to come and stand by him. He pointed to an insect that seemed to be constructed from oversized matchsticks, sitting under the leaves of a potato stalk. The insect looked a little like him, bent over with its forelimbs joined together like a frail monk.

“A praying mantis,” he said in a hushed voice. “It’s a female. After mating, it eats its mate.”

That was the first statement Uncle Norman had made directly to me. When I went back inside, I told Lizzie he’d shown me a praying mantis. She looked at me with a small smile.

“Now there’s an insect we can learn from,” she said.

When he finished his garden work in the afternoons, he’d sit and read one of his astronomy books till dinner. The tropical daylight would disappear as quickly as though a lamp had been switched off. After dinner, he’d go out into the garden again, this time to his telescope. It was on a tripod at the back, covered during the day by a tarpaulin. He’d sit for hours peering at the crowded skies.

Some evenings, during those first weeks at the cottage, Lizzie sent me out to stand beside him. I think she hoped he might allow me to use the telescope. He never looked at me or said anything, though he must have known I was standing there beside him in the dark, tormented by mosquitoes. He seemed to be looking for something particular in the night skies, and sometimes he’d stop moving the telescope and would hold his breath and gaze intently at some spot for ages, as though he’d found it.

He didn’t let me use the telescope, but he did show me something else. I was in the living-room one morning reading a novel when he came in from the garden. He was holding a jar containing a scorpion he’d trapped. It was a brownish colour, the size of my hand.

“Come with me,” he said.

He gave me a can of kerosene to carry and we went out to a bare area in the garden. He poked his finger into the soil and made a little circular ditch about nine inches in
diameter and an inch deep. He filled the ditch with kerosene and lit it, making a ring of fire.

“Now watch this,” he said.

He took the lid off the jar and dropped the scorpion into the middle of the ring. It immediately tried to scuttle away. The flames stopped it. It tried again, and again, and again. No matter where it went, the flames drove it back.

The scorpion stopped and crouched for a while in the middle of the ring. Then it raised its sting and slowly lowered it onto its own back. It gently felt around for a crevice in its scales, inserted the sting, paused and jabbed itself.

It went into a trembling frenzy, then it shuddered once or twice more, then it died. The flames still blazed around it.

“See?” said Uncle Norman. “A scorpion would rather sting itself than die with its sting unused. I read that in a book.”

Lizzie bought me the normal island clothing for a boy—a white shirt and black pants with suspenders. That made me feel more at home. Sometimes, I’d see a look on her face that puzzled me. Her green eyes would turn to ice, and her lips would twist the way my mother’s did, but in a more bitter way. When she became aware I was watching her, she’d immediately brighten up. I had a feeling that, unlike my mother, she would have liked to show her affection for me. In fact, she was becoming more and more talkative—as though she’d had the words pent up in her and now they’d found a way out and were enjoying their freedom.

O
NE MORNING
L
IZZIE
was putting some lotion on my bites—the mosquitoes and the little needle-flies were still a torment to me. There was no escape from them, even in the house. The windows had no screens, and the bead curtains over the doors weren’t very effective. The net over my bed kept the insects off during the night, but it also kept out whatever air there was, and I’d throw it off in my sleep.

“You’ll get used to them, my dear,” Lizzie said as she rubbed the lotion on my arms and neck.

She slipped my suspenders off my shoulders, and made me take off my shirt. She let out a little gasp when she saw the purple stain. She touched it. “Ah, yes. Well, well,” she said softly and gave me a quick hug. Then she spread the lotion over my chest and back and told me to put my shirt on again.

“Now, my poor Andrew,” she said. “Come and sit by the window.”

I sat in one of the big rattan chairs by the back window and she sat opposite me. Her short legs dangled an inch or two above the floor. We could see Uncle Norman at work in the garden, metal chinking against lava. She began talking.

“It all happened six months before you were born. It was January, and the snow was falling heavily. He was driving too fast, the way he always did, and the car went out of control and hit a tree.”

“Who? Uncle Norman?” I said.

“No, no. Your father—Thomas Halfnight,” she said. “Who else would I mean but your dear, dead father?”

She said this quietly, with tears in her eyes. It was odd to see tears in eyes so like my mother’s who disapproved of shows of emotion.

“Did Sarah not tell you about that?”

I told her I didn’t know anything about it. And so, for the first time, I began to find out the truth about my father and about the incidents at the time of my birth.

“The poor man was pinned behind the wheel for hours before they found him,” she said. “His right arm was so badly frostbitten, they had no choice but to amputate it. Can you imagine anything so awful?

“He was in hospital for weeks. When the wound was all healed, they fitted him with one of those arms carved out of wood with wooden fingers. It was either that or a hook, and that would have been unbearable.

“After that, when he woke up in the mornings he couldn’t believe his own arm was gone. He said he could feel his fingers, as though they were still attached. The poor, dear man. He wore black leather gloves all the time. I remember the way they used to glisten.”

Now, sitting here in this cottage on a remote island, I learned from my Aunt Lizzie about my premature birth and the fact that I’d once had a twin sister, Johanna; about the terrific heat that spring long ago in Stroven; about the naming ceremony, about the party in the garden of the big house. And about my sister’s death.

“He asked to hold his babies. Well, that was only natural, wasn’t it? Your eyes were wide open, but Sarah gave him your sister to hold, even though she was asleep.” Tears were in her eyes again. “He had her in his arms, showing her off, and the blanket began slipping. He tried to hold on to her, to stop her from falling. What kind of father wouldn’t have done that? But with that arm, he accidentally killed her. And afterwards, when I tried to comfort him, he wouldn’t be consoled. He was out of his mind. He said he believed something in him actually wanted to do it. He said the arm was only doing what he really wanted.”
She wiped her eyes with her apron. “The poor man. What an awful burden for a man to bear.”

Now she told me about my father’s death at the Roman bridge, and how, afterwards, the rumours began to spread.

“No one in Stroven knew about the arm. Even Doctor Giffen didn’t know that. So there were a lot of rumours. Some thought maybe your father had cut it off himself. There was a rumour some of the men had cut it off and then thrown him from the bridge while he was still alive.”

The chink of the shovel stopped. My uncle was standing upright behind the potato drills, as though he were listening. But she had talked so softly he couldn’t possibly have heard a word she’d been saying. After a moment, he stooped over his potatoes again, and began weeding once more. Aunt Lizzie looked out towards him, and her eyes were hard. Then she smiled at me again.

“So your mother never told you any of this?”

“No,” I said.

“She never got over what happened,” she said. “And who could blame her? Before the little girl was killed, she was a different woman. I’m telling you all this, because you ought to know. Your father was a good man. Even though before he met Sarah, he’d been with a lot of other women. He really fell for her. He’d have done anything for her, he loved her so much. She would have told you: I’m sure she meant to, some time. But just remember this: they loved each other.”

Tears began streaming down my Aunt Lizzie’s cheeks at this point. She brought the apron up and buried her face in it for the longest time. I didn’t know what to do, I felt so embarrassed. After a while she looked up at me.

“They loved each other. Remember that. Love makes up for everything,” she said.

That was the first and the only time I learned some of the details about my birth. Lizzie had seen my sister’s death, she’d seen my father’s corpse laid out on the kitchen table. She also knew many other things about my parents I’d only heard vaguely mentioned by my mother. For example, that my father wasn’t very wealthy but had enough of an annuity from his family’s distillery in the North to live in a place like Stroven; that his parents didn’t approve of my mother any more than of his previous women, so the wedding was nothing more than a visit to the Registry Office.