The Forever Girl (3 page)

They had one son, a boy, who was a month older than Clover. He was called James, after George’s own father, who had been a professor of medicine in one of the London teaching hospitals. Alice and Amanda had met when they were pregnant, when they both attended a class run in a school hall in George Town by a natural childbirth enthusiast. Amanda already knew that she was not a candidate for a natural delivery, but she listened with interest to accounts of birthing pools and other alternatives, knowing, of course, that what lay ahead for her was the sterile glare of a specialist obstetric unit in Miami.

Friendships forged at such classes, like those made by parents waiting at the school gate, can last, and Alice and Amanda continued to see one another after the birth of their children. George had a small sailing boat, and had once or twice taken David out in it, although David did not like swells – he had a propensity to sea-sickness – and they did not go far. From time to time Amanda and Alice played singles against one another at the tennis club, but it was often too hot for that unless one got up early and played as dawn came up over the island.

It was not a very close friendship, but it did mean that Clover and James knew of one another’s existence from the time that each of them first began to be aware of other children. And in due course, they had both been enrolled at the small school, the Cayman Prep, favoured by expatriate families. The intake that year was an unusually large one, and so they were not in the same
class, but if for any reason Amanda or Alice could not collect her child at the end of the school day, a ride home with the other parent was guaranteed. Or sometimes Margaret, who drove a rust-coloured jeep that had seen better days, would collect both of them and treat them, to their great delight, to an illicit ice-cream on the way home.

Boys often play more readily with other boys, but James was different. He was happy in the company of other boys, but he seemed to be equally content to play with girls, and in particular with Clover. He found her undemanding even if she followed him about the house, watching him with wide eyes, ready to do his bidding in whatever new game he devised for them. When they had just turned nine, David, who fancied himself as a carpenter, made them a tree-house, supported between two palm trees in the back garden and reached by a rope ladder tied at one end to the base of the tree-house and at the other to two pegs driven into the ground. They spent hours in this leafy hide-out, picnicking on sandwiches or looking out of a telescope that James had carted up the rope ladder. It was a powerful instrument, originally bought by David when he thought he might take up amateur astronomy, but never really used. The stars, he found out, were too far away to be of any real interest, and once you had looked at the moon and its craters there was little else to see.

But James found that with the telescope pointed out of the side window of the tree-house, he could see into the windows of nearby houses across the generously sized yards and gardens. Palm trees and sprays of bougainvillea could get in the way, obscuring the view in some directions, but there was still plenty to look at. He found a small notebook and drew columns in it headed
House, People
, and
Things Seen
.

“Why?” asked Clover, as he showed her this notebook and its first few entries.

“Because we need to keep watch,” he said. “There might be spies, you know. We’d see them from up here.”

She nodded. “And if we saw them? What then?”

“We’ll have the evidence,” he said, pointing to the notebook. “We could show it to the police, and then they could arrest them and shoot them.”

Clover looked doubtful. “They don’t shoot people in Cayman,” she said. “Not even the Governor is allowed to shoot people.”

“They’re allowed to shoot spies,” James countered.

She adjusted the telescope so that it was pointing out of the window and then she leaned forward to peer through it.

“I can see into the Arthur house,” she said. “There’s a man standing in the kitchen talking on the telephone.”

“I’ll note that down,” said James. “He could be a spy.”

“He isn’t. It’s Mr Arthur – Teddy’s father.”

“Spies often pretend to be ordinary people,” said James. “Even Teddy might not know that his father’s a spy.”

She wanted to please him and so she kept the records assiduously. The Arthur family was watched closely, even if no real evidence of spying was obtained. They talked on the telephone a lot, however, and that could be suspicious.

“Spies speak on the telephone to headquarters,” James explained. “They’re always on the phone.”

She had no interest in spies and their doings; the games she preferred involved re-enacted domesticity, or arranging shells in patterns, or writing plays that would then be performed, in costume, for family and neighbours – including the Arthurs, if they could be prised away from their spying activities. He went
along with all this, to an extent, because he was fair-minded and understood that boys had to do the things that girls wanted occasionally, if girls were to do the things that boys wanted.

Their friendship survived battles over little things – arguments and spats that led to telephone calls of apology or the occasional note
I hate you so much
, always rescinded by a note the next morning saying
I don’t really hate you – not really. Sorry
.

“She’s your girlfriend, isn’t she?” taunted one of James’s classmates, a boy called Tom Ebanks, whose father was a notoriously corrupt businessman.

“No. She’s just a friend.”

Tom Ebanks smirked. “She lets you kiss her? You put your tongue in her mouth – like this – and wiggle it all around?”

“I told you: she’s my friend.”

“You’re going to make her pregnant? You know what that is? You know how to do that?”

He lashed out at the other boy, and cut him above his right eye. There was blood, and there were threats from Tom Ebanks’s friends, but it put a stop to the talk. He did not care if they thought she was his girlfriend. There was nothing wrong with having a girlfriend, not that that was what she was anyway. She was just like any of the boys, really – a friend. She had always been there; it was as simple as that; she was a sister, of a sort, although had she been his real sister he would not have got on so well with her, he thought: he knew boys, quite a few of them, who ignored their sisters or found them irritating. He liked Clover, and told her that. “You’re my best friend, you know. Or at least I think you are.”

She had responded warmly. “And you’re mine too.”

They looked at one another and held each other’s gaze until he turned away and talked about something else.

4

Amanda was surprised. The fact that she had fallen out of love with David seemed to make little difference to her day-to-day life. That would not have been the case, she told herself, if affection had been transformed into something stronger, into actual antipathy. But she could not dislike David, who was a kind and equably tempered man. It was not his fault; he had done nothing to bring this about – it had simply happened. She knew women who disliked their husbands, who went so far as to say that they found them unbearable. There was a woman at the tennis club, Vanessa, who was like that; she had drunk too much at the Big Tennis Party, as they called their annual reception for new members, and had spoken indiscreetly to Amanda.

“I just can’t stand him, you know,” she had said. “I find him physically repulsive – actually repulsive. Can you imagine what that’s like? Can you? When he puts his hands on me?”

Amanda had looked away. She wanted to say that you should never talk about the marriage bed, but she could not find the words.
That’s private
would have done, of course, but it sounded so disapproving.

“I’ll tell you,” went on Vanessa, sipping at her gin and tonic, and lowering her voice. “I have to close my eyes and imagine that I’m with somebody else. It’s the only way.” She paused. “Have you ever done that?”

The other woman was looking at Amanda with interest, as if the question she had asked was entirely innocuous – an enquiry as to whether one had ever read a particular book.

Amanda shook her head. But I have, she thought.

“That’s the only way I can bear to sleep with him,” Vanessa
said. “I decide who it’s going to be and then I think of him.” She paused. “You’d be surprised to find out some of the men I’ve slept with. In my mind, of course. I’ve been
very
socially successful.”

Amanda looked up at the sky. It was evening, and they were standing outside; most of the guests were on the patio. The sky was clear; white stars against dark velvet. “Have you thought of leaving him?”

Vanessa laughed. “Look at these people.” She gestured to the other guests. One saw the gesture and waved; Vanessa smiled back. “Every one of the women – I can’t speak for the men – but every one of those women would probably leave their husbands if it weren’t for one thing.”

“I don’t think …”

“No, I’m telling you. It’s true.” The gin and tonic was almost finished now; just ice was left. “Money. It’s money that keeps them. It’s always been like that.”

“Not any more, surely. Women have options now. Careers. You don’t have to stay with a man you can’t stand.”

“No,” said Vanessa. “You’re wrong. You have to stay, because you can’t do otherwise. What does this tennis club cost? What does it cost to buy a house here? Two million dollars for something vaguely habitable. Where do women get that money when it’s men who’ve got the jobs?” She looked to Amanda for an answer. “Well?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“No, it
is
bad. It’s very bad.”

The conversation had left her feeling depressed, because of its sheer hopelessness. She wondered if Vanessa was at a further point on a road upon which she herself had now embarked. If that were true, she decided, she would leave well before she
reached that stage. And she could: there were her parents back in New York – she could go back to them right now and they would accept her. She could take the children, and bring them up as Americans rather than as typical expatriate children living in a place where they did not belong and where they would never be sure exactly who they were. There were plenty of children like that in places like Grand Cayman or Dubai and all those other cities where expatriates led their detached, privileged lives, knowing that their hosts merely tolerated them, never loved them or accepted them.

But then she thought: she had no difficulty living with David. She did not dislike him; he did not annoy her in the way he ate his breakfast cereal or in the things he said. He could be amusing; he could say witty things that brought what she thought of as guilt-free laughter – there was never a victim in any of his stories. He did not embarrass her with philistine comments or reactionary views, as another friend’s husband did. And she thought, too, that as well as there being no reason to leave, there was a very good reason to stay, and that was so that the children could have two parents. If the cost of that would be her remaining with a man she did not love, then that was not a great price to pay.

“That poor woman,” said Margaret one morning. “She’s going to lose a leg.”

“What woman?” asked Amanda. Margaret was one of those people who made the assumption that you knew all their friends and acquaintances.

They were standing in the kitchen, where Margaret was cooking one of her Jamaican stews. The stew was bubbling on the cooker, giving off a rich, earthy smell.

“She works in that house on the corner. The big one. She’s worked there a long time, but they don’t treat her right.”

The story could be assembled through the asking of the right questions, but it could take time.

“Who doesn’t treat her right? Her employers?”

“Yes, the people in that house. They make her work all the time and then she gets sick and they say it’s got nothing to do with them. She twists her leg at their place, you see, and they still say it’s got nothing to do with them. Some people say nothing is to do with them – nothing at all. At their own place too.”

“I see …”

“So now the leg is fixed by that useless doctor. He kills more people than he saves, that one. The Honduran one. All those Honduras people go to him when they get sick because he says he was a big man back in Honduras and they believe him. You know how they are. They believe things you and I would laugh at – the Hondurans believe them. They cross themselves and so on, and believe all the lies that people tell them. No questions asked.”

She elicited the story slowly. A Honduran maid – a woman in her early fifties – had slipped at the poolside in the house of a wealthy expatriate couple. They were French tax exiles, easily able to afford for their maid to see a reputable doctor, but had washed their hands of the matter. They had warned her about wet patches at the edge of the pool, and now she had injured herself. It was her fault, not theirs.

The maid had consulted a cheap Honduran doctor who was not licensed to practise in the Cayman Islands, but who did so nonetheless in the back of his shipping chandlery. Now infection had set in in the bone and progressed to the point that the public
hospital was offering an amputation. There was an ulcer, too, that needed dressing.

The leg could be saved, Margaret said, but it would be expensive. “You could ask Dr Collins,” she said. “He’s a good man. He could do something.”

“Has he seen her?” Amanda asked.

Margaret shook her head. “She’s too frightened to go and see him. Money, you see. Doctors charge a lot of money just for you to sit in their waiting room.”

“He isn’t like that.”

“No, so they say. But this woman is too frightened to go.”

There was an expectant silence.

“All right,” said Amanda. “I’ll take her.”

It was not onerous. And she realised that she wanted to see him. She had never been into his clinic – the run-down building past the shops at South Sound – but she had seen the badly painted sign that said
Dr Collins, Patient’s at Back
. She knew that he was not responsible for the apostrophe; that was the fault of the sign-writer, and she knew, too, that it remained there because the doctor was too tactful to have it corrected. The sign-writer was one of his patients and always asked him, with pride, if he was happy with his work. “Of course I am, Wallis,” the doctor said. “I wouldn’t change a word of it.” That had been told her by Alice.