“That doesn’t mean anything much.”
She shrugged; she had always felt that her husband lacked imagination; so many men did, she thought. “Perhaps that she’ll have to travel far to get what she wants. Travel far – or wait a long time, maybe.”
He laughed at the idea of paying any attention to such things. “You’ll be talking about her star sign next. Superstitious behaviour. I have to deal with that all the time with my patients.”
“I don’t take it seriously,” she said. “You’re too literal. These things are fun – that’s all.”
He smiled at her. “Sometimes.”
“Sometimes what?”
“Sometimes fun. Sometimes not.”
2
The new parents employed a Jamaican nurse for their child. There was plenty of money for something like this – there is no income tax on Grand Cayman and the salaries are generous. David was already having the prospect of a partnership within three or four years dangled in front of him, something that would have taken at least a decade elsewhere. On the island there was nothing much to spend money on, and employing domestic staff at least mopped up some of the cash. In fact, they were both slightly embarrassed by the amount of money they had. As a Scot, David was frugal in his instincts and disliked the flaunting of wealth; Amanda shared this. She had come from a milieu where displays of wealth were not unusual, but she had never felt comfortable about that. It struck her that by employing this Jamaican woman they would be recycling money that would otherwise simply sit in an account somewhere.
More seasoned residents of the island laughed at this. “Of course you have staff – why not? Half the year it’s too hot to do anything yourself, anyway. Don’t think twice about it.”
Their advertisement in the
Cayman Compass
drew two replies. One was from a Honduran woman who scowled through the interview, which did not last long.
“Resentment,” confided David. “That’s the way it goes. What are we in her eyes? Rich. Privileged. Maybe we won’t find anybody …”
“Can we blame her?”
David shrugged. “Probably not. But can you have somebody who hates you in the house?”
The following day they interviewed a Jamaican woman called
Margaret. She asked a few questions about the job and then looked about the room. “I don’t see no baby,” she said. “I want to see the baby.”
They took her into the room where Clover was lying asleep in her cot. The air conditioner was whirring, but there was that characteristic smell of a nursery – that drowsy, milky smell of an infant.
“Lord, just look at her!” said Margaret. “The little angel.”
She stepped forward and bent over the cot. The child, now aware of her presence, struggled up through layers of sleep to open her eyes.
“Little darling!” exclaimed Margaret, reaching forward to pick her up.
“She’s still sleepy,” said Amanda. “Maybe …”
But Margaret had her in her arms now and was planting kisses on her brow. David glanced at Amanda, who smiled weakly.
He turned to Margaret. “When can you start?”
“Right now,” she said. “I start right now.”
They had not asked Margaret anything about her circumstances at the interview – such as it was – and it was only a few days later that she told them about herself.
“I was born in Port Antonio,” she said. “My mother worked in a hotel, and she worked hard, hard; always working, I tell you. Always. There were four of us – me, my brother and two sisters. My brother’s legs didn’t work too well and he started to get mixed up with people who dealt in drugs and he went the way they all go. My older sister was twenty then. She worked in an office in town – a good job, and she did it well because she had learned shorthand and everything and never forgot
anything. Then one day she just didn’t come home. No letter, no message, no nothing, and we sat there and wondered what to think. Nobody saw her, nobody heard from her – just nothing. Then they found her three days later. She was run over, thrown off the road into the bush, I tell you, and the person who did it just drive off – just drive off like that – and say nothing. How can a person do something like that to another person – run over them like they were a dog or something? I think of her every day, I can’t help it – every day and wonder why the Lord let that happen. I know he has his reasons, but sometimes it’s hard for us to work out what they are.
“Then somebody said to me that I could come to Cayman with her. This woman she was a sort of aunt to me, and she arranged it with some people at the church, she did. I came over and met my husband, who’s Caymanian, one hundred per cent. He is a very good man who fixes government fridges. He says that I don’t have to work, but I say that I don’t want to sit in the house all day and wait for him to come back from fixing fridges. So that’s why I’ve taken this job, you see. That’s why.”
Amanda listened to this and thought about how suffering could be compressed into a few simple words:
Then one day she just didn’t come home …
But so could happiness:
a good man who fixes fridges
…
There was a second child, Billy, who arrived after a complicated pregnancy. Amanda went to Miami on the last day the airline would let her fly, and then stayed until they induced labour. Margaret came with David and Clover to pick her up at the airport. She covered the new infant with kisses, just as she had done with Clover.
“He’s going to be very strong,” she said. “You can tell it straight away with a boy child, you know. You look at him and you say: this one is going to be very strong and handsome.”
Amanda laughed. “Surely you can’t. Not yet. You can hope for that, but you can’t tell.”
Margaret shook her head. “But I can. I can always tell.”
She was full of such information. She could predict when a storm was coming. “You watch the birds, you see. The birds – they know because they feel it in their feathers. So you watch them – they tell you when a storm is on the way. Every time.” And she could tell whether a fish was infected with ciguatera by a simple test she had learned from Jamaicans who claimed it never let them down. “You have to watch those reef fish,” she explained. “If they have the illness and you eat them then you get really sick. But you know who can tell whether the fish is sick? Ants. You put the fish down on the ground and you watch the ants. If the fish is clean, they’re all over it – if it’s got ciguatera, then they walk all the way round that fish, just like this, on their toes – they won’t touch it, those ants: they know. They’ve got sensitive noses. You try it. You’ll see.”
Amanda said to David: “It could have been very different for Margaret.”
“What could?”
“Life. Everything. If she had had the chance of an education.”
He was silent. “It’s not too late. She could go to night school. There are courses.”
Amanda thought this was unlikely. “She works here all day. And then there’s Eddie to look after, and those dogs they have.”
“It’s her life. That’s what she wants.”
She did not think so. “Do you think people actually want their lives? Or do you think they just accept them? They take the life they’re given, I think. Or most of them do.”
He had been looking at a sheaf of papers – figures, of course – and he put them aside. “We
are
getting philosophical, aren’t we?”
They were sitting outside, by the pool. The water reflected the sky, a shimmer of light blue. She said: “Well, these things are important. Otherwise …”
“Yes?”
“Otherwise we go through life not really knowing what we want, or what we mean. That’s not enough.”
“No?”
She realised that she had never talked to him about these things, and now that they were doing so, she suddenly saw that he had nothing to say about such questions. It was an extraordinary moment, and one that later she would identify as the precise point at which she fell out of love with him.
He picked up his papers. A paper clip that had been keeping them together had slipped out of position, and now he manoeuvred it back. “Margaret?” he said.
“What about her?”
“Will she have children of her own?”
She did not answer him at first, and he shot her an interested glance.
“No?” he said. “Has she spoken to you?”
She had, having done so one afternoon, but only after extracting a promise that she would tell nobody. There had been shame, and tears. Two ectopic pregnancies had put paid to her hopes of a family. One of them had almost killed her, such had been the loss of blood. The other had been detected earlier and
had been quietly dealt with.
He pressed her to answer. “Well?”
“Yes. I said I wouldn’t discuss it.”
“Even with me?”
She looked at him. The thought of what she had just felt – the sudden and unexpected insight that had come to her – appalled her. It was just as a loss of faith must be for a priest; that moment when he realises that he no longer believes in God and that everything he has done up to that point – his whole life, really – has been based on something that is not there; the loss, the waste of time, the self-denial, now all for nothing. Was this what happened in a marriage? She had been fond of him – she had imagined that she had loved him – but now, quite suddenly and without any provoking incident, it was as if he were a stranger to her – a familiar stranger, yes, but a stranger nonetheless.
She closed her eyes. She had suddenly seen him as an outsider might see him – as a tall, well-built man who was used to having everything his way, because people who looked like him often had that experience. But he might also be seen as a rather unexciting man, a man of habit, interested in figures and money and not much else. She felt dizzy at the thought of … of what? Years of emptiness ahead? Clover was eight now, and Billy was four. Fifteen years?
She answered his question. “I promised her I wouldn’t mention it to anyone, but I assume that she didn’t intend you not to know.”
He agreed. “People think that spouses know everything. And they usually do, don’t they? People don’t keep things from their spouse.”
She thought there might have been a note of criticism in what
he said, even of reproach, but he was smiling at her. And she was asking herself at that moment whether she would ever sleep with another man, while staying with David. If she would, then who would it be?
“No,” she said. “I mean yes. I mean they don’t. She probably thinks you know.”
He tucked the papers into a folder. “Poor woman. She loves kids so much and she can’t … Unfair, isn’t it?”
There was an old sea-grape tree beside the pool and a breeze, cool from the sea, was making the leaves move; just a little. She noticed the shadow of the leaves on the ground shifting, and then returning to where it was before. George Collins. If anyone, it would be with him.
She felt a surge of self-disgust, and found herself blushing. She turned away lest he should notice, but he was getting up from his reclining chair and had begun to walk over towards the pool.
“I’m going to have a dip,” he said. “It’s getting uncomfortable. I hate this heat.”
He took off his shirt; he was already wearing swimming trunks. He slipped out of his sandals and plunged into the pool. The splash of the water was as in that Hockney painting, she thought; as white against the blue, as surprised and as sudden as that.
3
George and Alice Collins had little to do with the rest of the expatriates. This was not because they were stand-offish or thought themselves a cut above the others – it was more a case of having different interests. He was a doctor, but unlike most doctors on the island he was not interested in building up a lucrative private practice. He ran a clinic that was mostly used by Jamaicans and Hondurans who had no, or very little, insurance and were not eligible for the government scheme. He was also something of a naturalist and had published a check-list of Caribbean flora and a small book on the ecology of the reef. His wife, Alice, was an artist whose watercolours of Cayman plants had been used on a set of the island’s postage stamps. They were polite enough to the money people when they met them on social occasions – inevitably, in a small community, everybody eventually encounters everybody else – but they did not really like them. They had a particular distaste for hedge fund managers whom George regarded as little better than licensed gamblers. These hedge fund managers would probably not have cared about that assessment had they noticed it, which they did not. Money obscured everything else for them: the heat, the sea, the economic life of ordinary people. They did not care about the disapproval of others: wealth, and a lot of it, can be a powerful protector against the resentment of others. Alice shared George’s view of hedge fund managers, but her dislikes were even broader: she had a low opinion of just about everybody on the island, with the exception of one or two acquaintances, of whom Amanda was one: the locals for being lazy and materialistic, the expatriates for being energetic and materialistic, and the rest for being uninterested in anything that interested her. She did not want to be there; she
wanted to be in London or New York, or even Sydney – where there were art galleries and conversations, and things happened; instead of which, she said, I am here, on this strip of coral in the middle of nowhere with these people I don’t really like. It was a mistake, she told herself, ever to come to the Caribbean in the first place. She had been attracted to it by family associations and by the sunsets; but you could not live on either of these, she decided, not if you had ambitions of any sort.
I shall die without ever having a proper exhibition – one that counts – of my work. Nobody will remember me
.
The Collins house was about half a mile away from David and Amanda’s house, and reached by a short section of unpaved track. It could be glimpsed from the road that joined George Town to Bodden Town, but only just: George’s enthusiasm for the native plants of the Caribbean had resulted in a rioting shrubbery that concealed most of the house from view. Inside the house the style was not so much the
faux
Caribbean style that was popular in many other expatriate homes, but real island décor. George had met Alice in Barbados, where he had gone for a medical conference when he was working in the hospital on Grand Cayman. He had invited her to visit him in the Caymans, and she had done so. They had become engaged and shortly afterwards she left Barbados to join him in George Town, where they had set up their first home together. Much of their furniture came from a plantation house that had belonged to an aunt of hers who had lived there for thirty years and built up a collection of old pieces. Alice was Australian; she had gone to visit the aunt after she had finished her training as a teacher in Melbourne, and had stayed longer than she intended. The aunt, who had been childless, had been delighted to discover a niece whose company she enjoyed. She had persuaded her to stay and had arranged a job for her in a local school. Two years later,
though, she had died of a heart attack and had left the house and all its contents to Alice. These had included a slave bell, of which Alice was ashamed, that was stored out of sight in a cupboard. She had almost thrown it away, consigning that reminder of the hated past to oblivion, but had realised that we cannot rid ourselves so easily of the wrongs our ancestors wrought.