The Far Side of the Sun (10 page)

What does he want?

‘Do you like working here?’ he asked sombrely.

‘Yes.’

Don’t get me sacked. Please, don’t get me sacked. I need this job.

He tapped his expanse of white shirt-front. ‘Come and work for me.’

Dodie’s mind stumbled. She realised her mouth was open and she shut it quickly, but the glasses on her tray rattled.

‘I’ve watched you for months,’ he continued easily. ‘You’re good at your job. In fact, darn good, I reckon. I’m always on the lookout for top-notch hotel staff and you fit the bill.’ He glanced across to where Olive Quinn hovered near the door, her sharp eye ready to pounce on trouble in any corner of the room. ‘She pays you chicken-feed, I bet. It’s what the lady is known for.’ He moved half a step closer. ‘Come over to my British Colonial Hotel to work and I’ll pay you double her rate. What do you say to that?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Don’t be dumb, young lady. It’s a damn good offer.’

‘I’m happy here.’

‘Is that a fact?’

‘Sir Harry, I am grateful for the offer but,’ she shook her head firmly, ‘no, thank you.’

She moved away quickly before he could say anything more. Ignoring the beckoning hands of guests and aiming straight for the door, she shot down the corridor till she reached the kitchen, threw the tray on the table, snatched up her cardigan and didn’t stop. She kept on going, though Minnie called after her. She kept on going right out the back door and kept on going into the night.

Something was wrong.

Ella was playing poker. She’d just lost her watch on a pair of tens. Time to leave.

‘Don’t go, Mrs Sanford. Watch me one more time.’

Ella sat down again. ‘I’m watching.’

The sooty-haired Welsh pilot spun his wheelchair and scooted over to the table-tennis table where he wielded his bat with an aggression and purpose that she had caught no hint of during their conversation over a beer. His manner had been mild, his voice soft. But put a bat in his hand or a pack of cards on the table and he transformed into a daredevil. Was that how he’d crashed his plane? Skimming its wings too low over the water, drawn to the limits of danger?

‘Jonesy, give it a rest!’ someone called out.

But Ella clapped when he scored another point, agile in his chair, and he grinned across at her. He’d paid the price for his devilment, only one leg now, but he’d been patched up at the service hospital at Oakes Field. Though he’d been offered a cushy trip home to Blighty, he’d declined it and settled for an RAF office job in Nassau pushing paperwork around.

‘At least I’m still here,’ he’d told her proudly. ‘Still doing my bit.’

It wasn’t unusual to see men in uniform being escorted around Nassau’s streets in wheelchairs. They were always the ones treated to the widest smiles by shopkeepers or given free beers by bartenders. They were one of the reasons Ella liked to drop in on the Canteen for a couple of hours. After a day like she’d had today, it put things back in perspective.

The Canteen had been set up as a place of entertainment for servicemen, somewhere they could go to blow off steam when they needed a drink or a game of darts, or even just to hit the dance floor for a jitterbug with a pretty girl. The Society of Freemasons had donated part of their magnificent lodge on Bay Street for the Canteen’s use and a committee arranged dances and singers or a steel band, and even film shows, when they could get the projector to work.

There was a lively atmosphere here and a deep-chested laughter that Ella liked. And she wasn’t the only one. She was pleased to see a handful of local girls had looked in on the boys, sparking off the usual rivalry between the British and American servicemen. All it took was an attractive blonde or a striking redhead to get the flags flying.

‘Dance, Mrs Sanford?’

Ella looked up. A corn-haired flight lieutenant stood in front of her, a hopeful smile on his face. So handsome. So young. Probably barely in his twenties. As bomber crew, the likelihood of him ever seeing his thirties was slim, and she knew this was where the energy in the room came from – that glimpse of death around the next corner.

‘I really should be going,’ she said. ‘I’m late for something already.’

He grinned cheekily. ‘Is it important?’

Ella glanced around the room. Felt the fast beat of the music. Saw the frightened blue eyes.

‘No, not important at all.’

‘You’re late.’

‘I’m sorry, darling. I got caught up.’

Reggie frowned. ‘You had me worried. After what happened to you and Tilly this morning, I don’t like you being out alone.’

Ella kissed his cheek and accepted a rum punch from a white-jacketed waiter. ‘Don’t fuss, Reggie, please. Now,’ she added with a bright smile, ‘where’s Hector?’

They were celebrating the birthday of Tilly’s husband, Hector, at the Nassau Yacht Club. It was a rather dull sprawling building with yellow stucco and well-tended gardens on the eastern fringe of the city, near the Fort Montague Hotel and the old fortress, but it was a popular watering hole and the usual crowd had gathered there.

‘Happy Birthday, Hector!’ Ella greeted him.

Hector was a lawyer, one of the pack of Bay Street Boys. They were out in force tonight in their dinner jackets and gold watch chains, but it struck Ella that the mood of the party was less buoyant than she had expected. Or was it that the one she’d just come from at the Canteen was so animated and spirited that this one, by contrast, felt dull?

‘Ella, my dear girl, what a delight to see you safe and sound. Bit of a scare you and Tilly gave us all. Damn rioters!’

‘It was hardly a riot, Hector,’ Ella laughed and changed the subject rapidly. ‘How did the yacht race go this afternoon? Sorry we missed it.’

Hector drew down his bushy eyebrows but didn’t bother to drop his voice. ‘That johnnie-foreigner won again. You know, the lounge-lizard fellow.’

‘Freddie de Marigny?’

‘Damned right, that’s the one. What Sir Harry’s little girl Nancy sees in him I don’t know. Likes to win, he does.’

Ella smiled. ‘Don’t you all?’

He laughed and drifted over to a group of cigar smokers who were deep in discussion about the ten-day Axis bombardment of Pantelleria, a Mediterranean island between Sicily and Tunisia.

‘Wiped out those bloody Italians, we did,’ one voice gloated.

‘Not a single British life lost. Our troops just marched in and they surrendered like sheep. No backbone, you see.’

‘It’ll be Sicily next. And then we’ll slice through Italy like a knife through butter.’ It was Reggie’s voice.

‘General Montgomery and the Eighth Army will make mincemeat of those gutless Italians, mark my words,’ Hector asserted.

Ella edged away. She didn’t want to picture the young men fighting, maybe even some of the men she’d seen in the Canteen tonight. With bullets slamming into their flesh and their smiles buried in the foreign mud. A shiver passed through her.

She reached for another rum punch and was just lighting a cigarette, when Reggie appeared at her side and asked crisply, ‘What happened to your watch?’

‘The island is changing, Tilly. Changing for the better.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Ella. Look at what happened to us today. Simply ghastly.’

They were standing at the yacht club windows that looked out over the eastern harbour. It was dark outside, but amber lamps picked out the terraced grounds below that ran down to a small marina where yachts bobbed and bustled against their mooring ropes. How many times, Ella wondered, had she stood in this spot? With these same people. Drinking the same rum punch.

‘The war has been good for the island,’ she insisted. ‘Don’t stick your head in the colonial sand, Tilly.’

‘How can you say that, darling? It’s been vile. The streets and cafés are packed with brash young men in uniform who think they own this island. They strip their shirts off in all the wrong places and steal all the girls, so that our own decent young men don’t stand a chance.’ She knocked back her drink in one shot. ‘Simply vile.’

It was true. Ella couldn’t deny that there was some friction between the island’s men and the newcomers. She exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke at her own reflection trapped inside the window pane, blurring the lines of her face.

‘But the war has brought prosperity as well, Tilly, you have to admit. Thousands more jobs. Not just at the airbases but in the shops and restaurants, and that means lots more work for black women on the island too, better pay and better —’

‘Ella, don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

Tilly sighed. ‘Don’t try to change us. I want things to stay exactly as they are.’

Ella stared at her tall graceful friend with her precise dark hair and her finely sculpted mouth, and realised that in an odd way she didn’t know her at all. She was not sure what lay behind the carefully cultivated colonial mask. Is that what Tilly thought of her too?

‘Don’t worry, Tilly,’ Ella teased, ‘I’m sure the Duke will be staying on as Governor until the end of the war, whenever that might be.’

Tilly raised a carefully groomed eyebrow along with a languid smile. ‘Darling, you are such a comfort.’

Outside, the muted murmur of the ocean drifted closer.

The warmth of the night wrapped itself around Dodie as she ran from the Arcadia. Shadows brushed against her skin with moist breath that did little to cool the heat in her veins. She stretched her legs and fell into a steady lope as she covered the distance to the shoreline and then swung west along the fringe of tall palm trees that leaned over her with grasping fingers in the dark. Fronds whispered overhead and night creatures chirruped unseen in the undergrowth. Some instinct was driving her towards home though she wasn’t sure why. There was no reason for it. Just a fierce need to hunker down in her own house, to close the shutters tight, to lock out the world.

Something was wrong.

Badly wrong.

How did Sir Harry Oakes know who she was or what she’d done? Or which words she’d used in the privacy of the police station? And why would he care?

The red glow in the sky behind the trees ahead of Dodie could have passed for the first fingers of sunrise. But she was heading west, not east, and it wasn’t even midnight yet. She flew over the ground, drawing closer till she could pick out the shimmers of gold splashed over the trunks of the casuarinas and the slashes of vermillion that flickered and danced along the leaves of the palms.

As she burst on to the beach, it was as if a scarlet hole had been punched into the blackness. A great roar of sound charged across the sand at her and she felt the heat hit before she saw its source. Her house was on fire.

Oblivious to the sparks and embers that swirled through the air, she ran to it, desperate to save her home. A small crowd of people had gathered around the burning shack, their shadows writhing over the sand as the flames clawed up into the night sky. Voices were shouting. But Dodie’s ears heard only the crackle and clamour of the fire, her heart hammering as she darted in and out, trying to sneak under the flames to retrieve something – some small shred – of her life. But a hand clamped firmly on her arm and dragged her back. It was Mama Keel.

‘Quiet, child, stop your noise.’

The sounds coming out of her own mouth were fearful. She jammed her arm across it to shut them off. It was the stink of singed cotton on her sleeve that brought her back to her senses and the realisation of how close the flames had come to devouring her, as well as the house. She let Mama Keel lead her away to safety and only then did she notice the string of people working fast with buckets, passing water along a chain of hands from the sea to the shack. In the glow from the blaze she could see sweat gleaming on their faces and she wanted to tell them to stop, to give up, to abandon their task. She could see it was too late. The flames had won. Mama Keel stood beside her, her arm wrapped around Dodie’s shoulders, but neither could look away from the fire.

‘Thank the Lord you ain’t in there, child.’

Dodie shivered.

‘Think of it this way,’ Mama Keel said against the roar of the flames, ‘you just losin’ things. You had a life before you got those things and you’ll have a life now those things is gone. There ain’t no end to our desire or to our greed, but they is just foolish nothings. Believe me, child.’

‘Mama, tell the men that I am grateful but now they can stop.’

‘Your spirit is more solid than them there flames. Remember that.’

‘I will, Mama.’

But as Mama Keel moved off to speak to the men with the buckets, a section of the shack caved in with a spectacular shower of sparks. Dodie caught sight of a young man, etched in gold, raking with a long branch into the inferno that used to be her home. He was dragging some of those foolish nothings back to life and was in serious danger of injury to himself.
Stop
, she tried to say,
I want you to stop.

But she couldn’t. She felt herself standing on the edge of a cliff. She didn’t look down but she could sense something dark moving below her. Waiting for her to fall.

Dodie woke. The light was muted and greyish, matching the mood behind her eyelids. At first she was still in her dream, with her father selling bibles door-to-door around rainy Manchester in England when she was only eight. But she heard the cry of a seagull and opened her eyes and that was when she remembered the fire. A knot of barbed wire seemed to lodge itself in her throat.