The Infinite Air (35 page)

Her flight across Germany proved to be her last.

CHAPTER 33

NELLIE AND JEAN, MOTHER AND DAUGHTER,
chose the place to build their house in Jamaica together, although not without some hesitations and misgivings about its location. The land they bought, in 1948, was beside the sea at Tower Isle, on a stretch of coast east of the town of Ocho Rios. It was a rough, winding ride to the sea, through countryside dotted with wooden shanties occupied by West Indian locals, and by places they called the balm yards, thatched covered huts clustered together, a bright red flag flying overhead, where revival meetings were held every night. Black cattle strayed among sparse coconut palms that barely moved in the almost
non-existent
breeze. Cane fields stretched into the distance, tended by West Indian labourers clad in white robes and white turbans. Towards the sea lay mangrove swamps that reminded Jean and Nellie of Auckland. And then they came upon the sea, so clear that they could see the grains of sand, the life of fish, when they stood above it. The beaches were the colour of pale champagne.

This is where it will be, they said, in almost one voice. It was not the first time they had lived on this part of the island. When they arrived, two years earlier, they had rented a house in the area, one with a long view of the Caribbean, surrounded by an exotic garden, darting with humming birds. Jean was enchanted. This was perfect, it gave her heart ease, she said. But Nellie hadn’t been so sure. There was something wrong with the house, she said, something evil was going to befall it.

‘Mother, don’t be so silly,’ Jean said. ‘You’re going back to that weird old church of yours. Just because you’ve come to a place where
everyone believes in jumbies and ghosts, doesn’t mean you have to go spiritual on me again.’

‘I don’t believe in jumbies,’ Nellie said in a sharp voice, although she shivered. Jumbies, the islanders held, were the souls of live people who lived in the bodies of the dead. ‘Listen to the music, and all that chanting. It’s been building up louder and louder the last few nights. There’s something sinister going on. I don’t understand what it is, but we need to get away from here.’

She had been so insistent that Jean had agreed to them packing up their possessions and leaving the next day. Nellie was right, though. The day after they left, the young gardener, high on ganja, had run amok with an axe, breaking every stick of furniture in the house.

‘Perhaps he was unhappy because we left,’ Jean said, but Nellie would have none of that. They landed up in a cottage in a British army camp, high in the Jamaican Blue Mountains, for the next year or so. The trees, native cedar and teak, were high and thick; the mountains took their name not from the colour of the trees, as in Australia, but from the blue mists that shrouded the forest for much of the year. The rainfall was high, and there were more days spent inside than out. Besides, the proximity of the camp meant that
well-meaning
residents sent constant invitations to dinner. Jean wanted none of that. Nor, she told her mother, could she bear the constant memory of the Blue Mountains in that other country ‘where things had happened’. It was she who planned their escape route, consulted a builder and chose the piece of land at Ocho Rios, and, in the end, Nellie had to agree that it seemed the perfect spot.

The house was not all Jean had dreamed of: the one she had planned in her imagination cost more than they could afford. Nellie kept a careful eye on the stocks and shares she had managed with such skill and thrift over the years. ‘Totally impractical,’ she said, when she saw the plans, and what the house would cost.

They settled for something more simple and conventional, not unlike an Auckland villa, with three bedrooms, a good-sized kitchen
and a verandah looking out to sea. As if to stamp some sign of wealth on it, Jean had a swimming pool built that stood between the house and the sea. She chose the name Blue Horizon for the property. It was her decision, too, to have a high fence built around the house, with a gate that locked. Inside its walls, Jean planted a garden full of brilliant colour. After lunch, they sat in low-slung deck chairs, under large sun umbrellas, and read.

A man stepped through the gate one afternoon in January, when the gate had been left ajar for the delivery of groceries. He was tall, hollow-cheeked, with a crooked nose, as if it had been broken and badly set, like a scar on his otherwise perfect features. His eyes were heavy-lidded. ‘I was just passing,’ he said, holding out his hand. As soon as he spoke, Jean noticed that his teeth were rather long, so that, after all, the symmetry of his face was flawed. She still noticed teeth, remembering the way her father used to give an involuntary glance at people’s mouths before he looked at their eyes. ‘Excuse me if I’ve interrupted anything.’

Jean was slow to take his hand. The man could have been fifty, it was hard to tell his age, but he smelled of cigarettes and gin. ‘We were having a rest, Mr—?’

‘Fleming, Ian Fleming. And you’re Miss Batten?’

Jean nodded. ‘We enjoy our own company here,’ she said crisply. She was dressed in a floral patterned halter-neck top and wide-legged shorts, not what she would have chosen to wear to receive guests. Her feet were bare.

‘I’ve heard of you, Commander Fleming,’ Nellie said, getting to her feet. ‘Royal Navy? You’re one of our neighbours, aren’t you?’ She was in her seventies now, but she was still strong and supple in her movements. Her hair formed a silver cloud around her shoulders when she released it from the pins that held it in place in public.

‘Not all the time. I come here when it’s winter in London.’

‘Ah yes, you’re in newspapers now, aren’t you? You own that house, Goldeneye, on the cliff at Oracabessa?’ Nellie said.

‘Very well observed.’

‘It’s a little hard not to know who’s who in this place,’ Jean said. ‘Which is why our gate is generally closed.’

‘A pity,’ said Fleming, with a casual shrug of his shoulders. ‘I’ll remember it the next time I’m in this neck of the woods. I’d been going to suggest dinner at my place.’

Nellie said, ‘Commander Fleming, dinner at your place would be delightful. Did you have a date in mind?’

He suggested the following Sunday — drinks around six and they could watch the sun going down, then Violet, his cook, would prepare them some fish. He hoped they were partial to the local fish.

Jean had moved away from her mother, her back rigid, as this conversation took place. Fleming came and stood beside her for a moment, before he left. He looked down at her, sideways, his hooded eyes resting on her. ‘I like solitude, too, as a rule. But now and then I like a change. We could get on well, you and I.’

‘I doubt it. I don’t care much for men.’

‘Really? Well, I wouldn’t have picked that.’

Jean shut and locked the gate firmly behind him. ‘Why did you do that, Mother?’

‘You don’t want people to think us odd, do you?’

‘They do already. What does it matter?’

‘Well, just say I’m curious. I understand he’s the foreign manager of the Kemsley group — the
Sunday Times
and all that. Quite an important position.’ Nellie, who had grasped the patois of their servants more easily than Jean, often had conversations with them, and had become well informed on local matters.

‘You know I don’t want newspapers anywhere near me,’ Jean said.

‘Well, of course not. But Mr Fleming comes here for a rest. All I’m saying is, he could be interesting. Now come on, dear, you should have a swim, and I’ll brush your hair out for you afterwards. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

FLEMING’S HOUSE HAD A ROUGH, DO-IT-YOURSELF QUALITY
and was Spartan in its furnishing. The canvas chairs, once blue, had faded to grey, and the concrete living room floor, originally intended to be navy blue, had turned out with an odd but not unattractive marbled effect.

The Battens were not his only guests. A man, wearing a patterned satin tunic over white linen slacks, held out his hand before Fleming greeted them. His face was long, saturnine and smooth-skinned, his smile white. ‘My dears,’ he said, ‘welcome to Golden Eye, Nose and Throat.’

Fleming now appeared from behind a wreath of smoke. ‘Take no notice of my dear friend Coward. He can’t resist a dig at my lodgings, although he makes himself perfectly at home when it suits him.’

‘I stayed here once,’ Noël Coward said. ‘It was perfectly ghastly, no hot water, iron bedsteads.
And
he charged me fifty pounds a week for the privilege. And he’s still got this awful stool thing to sit on at the dining room table.’

‘There’s hot water now,’ Fleming said, sounding grumpy.

‘I have my own house along the road these days,’ Coward said. ‘You’ll have to come and visit me next. Miss Batten, I expected you to be wearing wings of diamond. I’m a great admirer of yours.’

‘Well, nobody could admire
you
more than my mother,’ Jean said, laughing in spite of herself. She wore a sleeveless white silk dress, like many she had worn in the past, only shorter, the hem swirling around her knees, and silver sandals. The only diamonds she wore were her small ear studs, which she touched a trifle self-consciously.

‘I’ll never forget
Blithe Spirit
in the West End — 1941,’ Nellie said. ‘The war, and all of us so down-hearted, and then that wonderful play.’

‘You enjoy the theatre, Mrs Batten?’

‘My mother is a thwarted actress. Worse, she’s a thwarted spiritual medium,’ Jean said, mocking Nellie. ‘Of course she loved
Blithe Spirit
. She could see herself in it.’

‘Now then,’ Fleming said, fitting another cigarette in his holder,
‘what’s it to be? A vodka martini? Whisky soda?’ An ample West Indian woman had appeared from the kitchen.

‘Have you got champagne?’ asked Jean.

Fleming looked put out. ‘Champagne, oh well yes, if you insist.’ There was nothing welcoming about him at all. Jean wondered why he had bothered to invite them. Nellie agreed to a whisky soda, as if to humour him.

‘Violet, Miss Batten wants champagne, if you please,’ he said.

Violet put her hands on her hips. ‘Oh Lordy, Lordy,’ she muttered, as if there had been an invasion of locusts. ‘Champagne.’ But she was soon back with a bottle of Dom Pérignon.

While the drinks were poured, Coward asked, in a desultory way, whereabouts exactly they had come from in New Zealand. When Jean said she was born in Rotorua, he clapped his hands.

‘I’ve been there,’ he said. ‘You can pop an egg in the ground and boil it.’

‘You could,’ Nellie said, ‘although we never tried it.’

‘Oh. But such a bonus, hot water everywhere. Although I’ve heard you boil up some poor devils out for a walk as well.’

‘We did have to keep an eye on Jean. She was a very adventurous little girl.’

‘I can imagine. I have to say, in spite of all the domestic possibilities, I wouldn’t find it compensation for having to live immediately on top of the hidden fires of the earth.’

Dinner was now served, conch gumbo and fried octopus tentacles with tartare sauce. ‘Violet’s food is perfectly vile, too,’ Coward said. ‘Fleming, pour Miss Batten some more champagne.’ They were all perched on the narrow banquette seating that ran along either side of the table.

‘So what did you do in the war, Miss Batten?’ Fleming said.

‘I worked in munitions until I was released to give talks for the war effort. I raised a considerable amount of money.’ Fleming appeared to be listening intently, but he made no comment. ‘I spoke at factories and dockyards, textile mills, town halls. I went to coal mines, and
another time I spoke to thousands of dock workers at the Chatham Naval Base.’

‘But you didn’t fly?’

‘My plane was requisitioned at the outset of the war.’ Jean’s eyes filled, and she raised her napkin to catch the unbidden tears. ‘I wanted to fly for the Air Transport Auxiliary. I was disappointed, to say the least, when they turned me down.’

‘Now, why I wonder was that?’

‘There was something wrong with my eyesight, or so they said. So, as I couldn’t fly for the Auxiliary, they took my plane. I suppose I got lucky. Look at Amy Johnson, the war had hardly begun and she was killed. I was surprised at that, but then her health wasn’t good and she was a wreck after her divorce. All those things going wrong for her and they took her on. I don’t think
she
was fit to fly.’