Port Mungo (9 page)

A curious figure he cuts, then, my brother, this fiercely driven artist, this latter-day Gauguin, stimulated by the wealth of form and colour in the natural world down there, also by its fecundity, its exuberance, its violence—yet at the same time displaying a maternal solicitude towards his two daughters while their mother was off doing whatever she liked, mostly, it appeared, drinking and chasing men. And it occurred to me that it was perhaps because of this sustained immersion in nature and mothering that he was losing the civilized reflexes. And he
was
losing them, of this I had no doubt at all, and I can remember various occasions when the fact was vividly brought home to me. Once, towards the end of my stay, we were sitting out on the deck at sunset, having the first drink of the day, when we heard from inside the house a series of groans and a slow, uneven tread on the stairs. We turned towards the door. It was Peg, and she was in pain: always barefoot, she had trod on a thorn of some kind and could put no weight on her left foot. In she hopped, and Jack briskly told her to sit on the deck in front of his chair, and had her lift her leg. He leaned forward to examine the sole.

—This it? he said, prodding the ball of her foot, and Peg let out a scream.

—Oh don’t be such a baby.

He then seized her slim brown ankle and, with his other hand gripping the foot tight, applied his mouth to the sore place, and began to suck. That foot was filthy! She’d been all over town, god alone knows what she’d stepped in. I offered to go fetch the disinfectant but he said it wasn’t necessary. He sucked lustily at the dirty foot, sucked and spat, and every few seconds he lifted his eyes and grinned at her. Peg grinned back as she wriggled about on the deck on her bottom. After a minute or two he sat back, picked at her foot with a fingernail, then extracted the thorn with his teeth. He held it up for us to see, tossed it over the railing and wiped his hands on his paint-smeared trousers.

—All right now?

—Thank you, Jack, said Peg.

But before she limped off, he had her stand with her back to the railing—and urinated on her foot! To disinfect it, he said. Then he sat down again, grinning at me, as he pushed himself back into his trousers.

He enjoyed my snort of disapproval, and I was on the point of telling him what a primitive he was becoming when we heard a scream from the staircase.

—What is it now? he shouted, turning towards the house.

—Mummy’s home!

Port Mungo boasted one grand establishment, a sagging relic of the town’s former glory which despite its flaking paintwork and spreading mildew—its cellars were flooded on a yearly basis—did maintain certain of the old amenities, in particular the large rooms on the upper floor which got the breezes off the sea. For this reason the Hotel Macaw was favoured by those of the townspeople who at midmorning or twilight liked to take their rum in the relative comfort of large rattan chairs, beneath ancient ceiling fans, in the spectral presence of dead banana moguls who drifted along the verandahs with the proud ghosts of exotic Creole women on their arms.

Jack and Vera took me there the evening she turned up at Pelican Road after an absence of several months. When Jack heard Peg’s shout he was out of his chair and down the stairs in a second, himself shouting as he went. I waited on the deck, not wanting to intrude. A minute later Peg appeared at the top of the stairs.

—Mummy says why don’t you come down and say hello, you rude cow.

So down I went. There she was, sitting cross-legged in the middle of her studio amid bags and baskets, rummaging about in a battered rucksack. There was a young black guy in cut-off jeans bouncing on his haunches nearby, rolling a spliff, and Jack stood at the table pouring rum into tumblers. He turned with a smile as I came into the studio.

—Here she is! cried Vera, rising from the floor.

She stood before me, grinning broadly, her arms wide, and there was the empty slot between her teeth. Same old Vera, only more so, this was my first impression. Into her forties now and it showed, for the ravages of weather and drink were evident, but somehow, at the same time, she glowed. There was more than a little of the hippie earth mother about her—the brightly coloured headscarf, the flowing cotton garments—but more, I think, of the Gypsy queen, for her skin was tanned a deep brown, and there was much silver on her person. She took me in her arms. Her physical presence was overpowering, and I found myself hugging her close and enjoying the smells that came off her, patchouli oil, marijuana, citrus, I don’t know what else. I didn’t want to let her go. When we broke apart she gazed into my face with glistening eyes and told me it was a beautiful thing I had done, coming all the way down from New York to see my brother.

—And me! shouted Peg.

—And my Peg, said Vera, holding my hands and squeezing them tight. Then she turned away, abruptly dropping my hands.

—Where’s the
rum,
Jack? she shouted.

It was not a typical homecoming, I believe, for the simple reason that I was there. I saw none of the resentment, none of the animosity which according to Jack usually accompanied these reunions. It was all very warm and cheerful, my brother resembling not so much the stern paterfamilias as a fond old hen with a lost chick back under the wing. Soon we were all upstairs on the deck, including the young black guy, and quite who he was I couldn’t figure out. Peg was sitting on her father’s lap and gazing intently at Vera while Jack asked questions about her trip, and as she told her stories I began to form a very different picture from the one Jack had given me. Instead of the restless, irresponsible creature he had described, what I saw was a woman with a genuine curiosity about the world beyond this obscure little river town, and it was an artist’s curiosity, for it was as an artist that she spoke about what she’d seen. And I glimpsed, too, her courage in setting out into that world—no simple thing for a woman alone, not in Central America—so as to know it better. I am no sort of an explorer, or even a good traveller, I am a woman who likes to sit in a room in a city—preferably New York City—with a book in my hand, and travel in my own imagination. So what Vera did, what she had been doing for years, was impressive to me.

And what of Jack? He had come to life with Vera’s return, animated for the first time since I stepped off the ferry, and all at once I was struck by the thought that for all his dedication and self-sacrifice and seriousness, and oh, the ponderous nobility of his artistic endeavour—for all that, every day of the past week he had been extremely anti-social, buried in his studio from dawn to dusk. He appeared only briefly at lunchtime, with paint on his hands and nothing to say beyond a grunt or two, and it took a couple of large rums at sunset to tease a human response from him. Imagine that every day, for months on end, for
years
on end—and all at once I understood why Vera wandered, and with that realization my moral understanding of the household tipped on its head, and I saw Jack’s formidable discipline as a kind of silent brooding ingrown negative energy which must have sapped the vitality of a woman like Vera and driven her wild with frustration. No wonder they fought! No wonder she left home for months on end, and took lovers, how else could she live with my brother, whose single conversation in life—and this I had seen for myself—was with himself? One of the paintings he had shown me was called
Narcissus in the Jungle.
Now I understood what it was about. It was a self-portrait.

Vera soon got restless in the house and wanted to go out. She wanted to go to the Macaw, so after supper the three of us set off into town. Close to the dock we turned onto a street of large wooden houses which with their columned porticoes and broad staircases must once have resembled the plantation mansions of the American South. Each of these buildings, peeling and sagging now, sheltered numerous families. Washing lines and hammocks were slung across verandahs where rich men had sat smoking large cigars and pondering, presumably, the price of bananas. Near the end of the street, set back from the seawall, the lamps of the hotel spilled out onto the water. We climbed its wide stairs to a pair of double doors folded back against the wall. We stepped into the hallway, aware of voices in the bar to our left, and the desultory tinkling of a piano.

Our appearance roused the company. Stout men struggled up from the depths of wicker couches and rattan armchairs and waved cigars in our direction. Desiccated women fluttered their fans. There were bluff cries of welcome as we made our way across the room to the bar: this was the bourgeois element of Port Mungo, and it had seen better days. And here was Ector, the bartender, in a short white jacket, idly turning the pages of a month-old newspaper. He looked up and put away his paper.

—Hello boss.

I was introduced to Ector. He was a short, swarthy man with a moustache shaved thin as a hair. His smile revealed several gold teeth. Jack ordered rum as Vera moved to the other end of the bar, where a big man with a head of thinning red hair sat staring at a chessboard. The two warmly embraced, and then the man turned towards me and half rose off his barstool.

—Gin, darling, Vera said in her hoarse working-man’s accent, this is my friend Johnny Hague.

—Good evening, he said.

I turned towards Jack, curious how he would respond to Vera’s former lover. They nodded at each other with cool inscrutability. He had a languid upper-class slur, this Johnny Hague, and he not so much sat on his barstool as draped himself over it, long legs in baggy white flannels crossed at the knee. Vera was leaning against him, her hands on his shoulder, beaming at him, until her drink appeared. We made polite conversation. It was an ugly face, big chin, large teeth, high forehead, and the pale-red hair combed back in wisps. He told me he ran the hospital. He treated mostly fever cases and machete wounds. Out of loyalty to Jack I tried to display indifference to the man but he appeared not to notice. He was rather amusing on the subject of machete wounds, he certainly made Vera laugh. He said he lived here in the Macaw, up on the top floor. Handy for the bar, he said, and I said I supposed it must be. He then told me he knew my brother. I didn’t understand.

—Jack, you mean, I said.

—No, Gerald. We did pre-med at King’s together. King’s College Hospital, Peckham. Still write to him every year or so.

Jack had not told me about this family connection.

—Extraordinary thing, I said.

He asked if I had any news of him, and I told him what few details I had of Gerald’s life. I was more animated than I’d intended to be. Vera had flung an arm round the man’s neck and everybody seemed to find this all quite normal.

Jack meanwhile had moved onto the verandah and was smoking a cigar. So I joined him, and wordlessly we gazed out to sea. I was about to mention this bizarre coincidence, the local medic being an old friend of Gerald's, then thought better of it and talked about Peg instead. Having seen them together for the first time, I said, I saw a lot of her mother in her, and Jack roused himself, and with small snorts of laughter told me how she came in for her supper at dusk every evening and, on being asked what she’d been doing all day, would either reply, Nothing, or untap a flood of stories so jumbled that little sense could be made of it, until she collapsed fast asleep at the table or had her attention seized by something out in the yard or on the river and lost all interest in her story—all of which, he said, was pure Vera. He then fell silent and glanced back into the room, where she and Johnny seemed still to be having a fine time at the bar. Suddenly I felt terribly sorry for him. On impulse I suggested he and Peg come to New York. Come stay with me for a week or two, I said. See some art, take her to a few concerts. Give her an idea what the city’s like.

—My dear Gin.

He turned from the rail of the verandah and gazed at me. In the darkness I saw his eyes shining with unshed tears. Abruptly he went into the bar, trailing his fingers across my shoulder. I hadn’t realized quite how low he was, so low that a simple act of kindness, sister to brother, could affect him profoundly.

Chapter Seven

Many years later, when Jack was living with me in New York, he told me that he had always been a jealous man. Ironic, this, he said, producing a dry strained cough of mirth, that the lover of Vera Savage should be afflicted with sexual jealousy. I agreed. I said that to have embarked on the journey those two took, burdened with feelings of suspicion and possessiveness—surely a recipe for disaster? Jack thought so. But earlier in his life he’d thought that those feelings would pass, or rather that experience would burn them out of him, leave him tempered as though by fierce heat—but no. It became no easier. And he’d realized from observing others that jealousy died only when love died. A jealous man was no longer jealous when he no longer cared. Another irony—he couldn’t not care. He couldn’t not love the woman, it was beyond him, and god knows he tried. Her boozy way of living drew men to her, he said, of course it did, and though she was tough, and could look after herself better than most, a few got through. The clever ones, the good talkers—certain sorts of men had always interested Vera, he said, writers usually, articulate characters who could put an idea in flight and carry the imagination of a painter with it. Painters love ideas, said Jack, they will give their heart without a qualm to a man who can get an idea airborne and then move it around like a kite in the wind.

He said he had learned not to ask too much about her trips away from Port Mungo. Too painful, he said. Enough that she came back, even if it took her a year to do it, which it did once. Hearing this, I was astonished yet again at the sheer resilience of the feelings my brother seemed to harbour for Vera, and continued to harbour until the day he died. That his heart had not grown hard, as it would have in the breast of any other man: how was it that he had the capacity to go on loving her despite the emotional battery she’d inflicted on him? I don’t know; but I do know that a love as robust as that is more than enough to keep a man alive, which is why the medical examiner’s report was so distressing to me.

But this love of theirs: somehow the relationship accommodated their very different ways of living, somewhere it found the supple strength to allow love to flourish between these two unlikely figures, one of them a kind of monk, the other a buccaneer. Much of the burden fell on him, of course, as he was the one who was abandoned whenever Vera chose to wander off. This he could cope with; but when she took up with Johnny Hague, he said, he was cut as never before. He felt that she could at least have behaved with restraint while she was in Port Mungo, and he said it with a flare of indignation which seemed to issue directly from the fiery mass of anger ignited in him when the affair began. What sort of affair was it? The sort, I suppose, that predictably occurs among white people living in hot places with time on their hands and a fondness for liquor. I had sized the fellow up, briefly, in the bar of the Hotel Macaw, and although he was a rough, red, ugly brute of a man I had glimpsed a vitality that might well have attracted Vera. Also, there was the fact that he was an educated man, and that his conversation offered a welcome change from my brother’s endless deliberations on paint and its ways. For I had realized after a very few days in Port Mungo that the great problem of the tropics was boredom, and that Jack, perhaps, with his single-minded dedication to his work, alone had solved it. But for others—like Vera, like Johnny Hague—work had long since lost its allure. Time was the great problem, debauchery the common solution.

It seems they made only the most perfunctory attempts to keep the thing secret. In such a small town it would have been hard to conceal it even if they had tried to, but Jack said he would have felt better about it had he seen at least a modicum of clandestine effort. But no. Vera left the bar of the Macaw with the doctor at midnight, went upstairs with him to his room at the top of the building, and returned to Pelican Road in the early morning when people were already on the streets or on the river, people who didn’t need to guess where she had spent the night, and were not reluctant to talk about it. Jack couldn’t have cared less about the gossip but once he understood that he was being laughed at because of Vera’s behaviour he confronted her and demanded she put an end to it.

—And what effect did that have?

A shrug. It seems they were less conspicuous after this, but it hardly mattered, the damage was done.

—How old was Peg?

And here all at once we were at the heart of the matter. Peg was an infant when it began, but Peg grew up. And as Jack told me this I understood, although to this day I don’t know how, that I had touched the first link in the chain of events whose end was Peg’s death. I also realized why Jack had not spoken of it to me before: it tormented him. His sense of loss was still acute. His awareness of the mistakes that had been made in Port Mungo was as fresh as it had been all those years before, when he’d first traced the inexorable movement of cause and effect whose terminus was his daughter’s death. And the first cause, Jack seemed to be telling me, was Vera’s affair with Johnny Hague. All else flowed from that. If she had shown some restraint things would not have turned out as they did, and Peg would still be alive. Perhaps.

So Vera had carelessly embarked on an affair with this disenchanted doctor, this Englishman in exile with his Cambridge drawl and his lazy irony, and also—Jack became convinced—a drug habit that was a distinct liability when it came to the making of medical decisions. Not that Johnny had so many decisions to make. Those of the local people who had any truck with Western medicine presented him with few real problems. Fever, infection, machete wounds—as Johnny had said at the bar of the Hotel Macaw, the doctoring in Port Mungo wouldn’t tax a drunken intern. What did he see in Vera? Probably what any man would—good talk, an appetite for life lived as perpetual celebration, a promise of reckless sex—and for a jaded cynic like Johnny Hague this was irresistible. His pursuit of her was not exhausting, nor did it need to be. She was amenable, in her amused, detached way, and he was soon deep in thrall.

Jack sneered when he told me this. He had seen it before, men in thrall to Vera. Men often fell in love with Vera, he said, she was the sort of woman who provoked it, hadn’t he done it himself? But what he had then done was to live with the consequences, and after the first flush of intoxication had subsided he had not wandered away, no, he had understood his fate, or his work, rather, as consisting of being the man who
held on,
and this he had done as best he could—attempted, that is, to be a husband to Vera, inasmuch as such an idea was not absurd. He had learned the work as he went along, and he supposed that on balance there had been as much joy in the thing as there had been pain—does anybody do much better than that?

Not a thing I had ever really given much thought to. I said probably not.

It hardly mattered now. The point was, this was his decision, and he remembered the circumstances of its making, the night in New York when he had fled the bar and walked the alien streets and sat on a bench in the Battery till dawn, and decided that he would stand by this woman regardless, not because she necessarily wanted him to but because she
needed
him to, whether she knew it or not, for if he didn’t do it perhaps nobody would, and then she would go under.

Thus my brother’s thinking that distant night in New York, or his reconstruction, rather, of that thinking, which resulted, he claimed, in his extraordinary loyalty down the years: him the man who held on.

All of which gave him ample time and opportunity to watch other men fall in love with Vera, also ample moral authority, earned through suffering, with which to sneer at them. Johnny Hague had once been a confused, idealistic young physician unwilling to assume the position his family expected of him. He had not wanted a comfortable professional life in England, he had wanted to practise medicine in a place where his work would have value of a different order altogether. But the years in Port Mungo had kicked the idealism out of him, and they had also exploited his weakness by corrupting him, by wearing down his resistance to the idea of using the drugs in his dispensary to treat his own fatigue and disillusion. They worked. They eased the bitterness with which he now regarded the great error of his life, and allowed a kind of perverse romanticism to burn fitfully in a mind only truly alive in the nocturnal glow of morphine intoxication. This, then, the limping anti-hero of the Hotel Macaw, who had delivered Vera’s child and ten weeks later taken her up to his room at the top of the hotel and persuaded her to betray Jack then and there.

Jack was in the bar when she came down. He told me this in such a bleak tone that I could not ask him, although I dearly wanted to—what was that
like
? That meeting of the eyes, the blaze of knowledge between them, as she stepped into the bar from the staircase and saw him there, and him knowing she had just come from Johnny’s room, that minutes earlier—what, five? ten at the most?—minutes earlier she had been copulating—what, bent over the bed with her skirt rucked up, grinning over her shoulder at him, and him thrusting into her from behind?—and now Jack staring at her as she entered the bar: what was that
like,
for a jealous man? A most primitive moment, surely, in that no amount of—
understanding
—could erase the fact of a sin still smouldering in the immediate wake of its heated commission—there in the turgid, trembling air of the hotel bar, and Jack not alone in his knowledge of what room Vera had just come down from.

—What was it like?

—Very bloody horrible indeed.

He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask him to. I presume they went home together. Did the row begin as they walked down Pelican Road, or after they were indoors? I think it did not begin in the hotel, I think he would have told me if it had. Was Peg awakened by their shouting? Or was there no shouting at all—Jack gone cold as ice, arctic and noble in silent, suffering resentment—and Vera a stranger as ever to guilt and remorse and not about to begin apologizing now. But a low point however you construe it, a low point for those two.

—How long did it last?

Years. Off and on. It never really ended, not as long as they all three lived in Port Mungo. Johnny talked of getting out, but as far as Jack knew he never did. Unlike Jack he seemed not to know when it was time to leave, and if he did he lacked the courage to do it.

—Off and on?

Off when Vera was away, on when she wasn’t—and here another dark bark of mirthless laughter. No, it was more complicated than that, he said. The sex lasted a few years and then petered out. It was pretty much like any other physical affair in those years, when the tensions were exacerbated by Jack’s fluctuating levels of tolerance. There were times the three of them coexisted more or less amicably, but at other times the atmosphere was poisoned by Jack’s rage at Vera’s relentless betrayal. It all depended.

—On what?

—My mood, said Jack. And what, Gin, he said—genuinely amused now—did my mood depend on?

—The work?

—The work. Simple as that.

—And what happened, I said, after the physical thing stopped?

A long pause here. Extended sightless gazing at the wall. He told me a friendship existed between them from which Vera was unable to extricate herself, even though he believed she wanted to. She had found something of value in this frail creature, this rather pathetic man trapped in an existence he himself had created on the basis of an error—the error, said Jack, of believing himself adequate to the stern moral challenge of doctoring in an obscure tropical backwater. He wasn’t up to Port Mungo. The town was destroying him, eating away his backbone, and his plight aroused in Vera a tenderness that Jack claimed not to understand. Port Mungo was not destroying
him,
he said, and Vera showed him none of the tender solicitude she lavished on that man—this was Jack’s complaint, when at last I dug it out of him.

—And was Johnny Hague never uncomfortable about what he was doing to you?

—Oh sure, at the beginning. He showed a lot of bloody discomfort when the thing started. Vera got him over that.

—How?

—She told him lies about me.

—What sort of lies?

It was like getting blood out of a stone, getting him to talk about it.

—That I hit her. And worse.

I was speechless. What could be
worse
than what she’d said? But he wouldn’t say more, and it troubled me, for I could not imagine what this
worse
could possibly be. Still he was protecting her; still, apparently, he loved her.

She tired of the man eventually, and made no secret of it. Jack said she broke the bastard’s heart, and he for one was glad. This of course shifted the balance between Johnny and Jack, it made for uneasy encounters in the bar of the Macaw; uneasy, that is, as far as the men were concerned. Vera acted blithely unaware, greeting Johnny with the kind of warmth you reserve for an old friend with whom relations have never been other than cordial. As she had the night I was there. Jack was at times made furious by the looks Johnny cast across the room, and threatened to go over and thrash him. Vera laughed immoderately at the idea of Jack as a barroom brawler. Then, when she was away on her travels, he caught glances from the doctor, as though to say—you and me both, brother.

Jack said Johnny hated him from the moment he was rejected by Vera, because whereas once he had been able to crow over Jack’s humiliation, Jack was now witness to
his.
I thought of our brief encounter, and did not remember a man seething with hatred. If anyone was seething with hatred it was Jack. Reflecting on this I felt a twinge of doubt; mentally I stepped back a few paces, tried to get a clearer view of the thing.

None of it would have amounted to much, said Jack, in the normal course of events. Small towns abound with such festering hostilities, and they were members of a prickly community, the gringos who’d stayed on after the banana boat pulled out. No, what distinguished this particular state of hostility, he said, and shifted it from a harmless antagonism into something with much greater potential for malicious damage, was the fact that Johnny was a weak man, a dishonest man, a
vindictive
man, his judgement thoroughly distorted by the abuse of drugs.