Black Marina (11 page)

Not that these thoughts do anyone much good. I had to tell
Sanjay that Ford was here. After sixteen years, a more
successful
gambler in life than Sanjay, whose enterprises had finally come to nothing back in London, Ford had turned up in a cream linen suit and with three bulging mailbags. ‘Let’s leave now,’ I’d say to Sanjay as we stood watching some of his favourite birds – red-legged partridges from St Lucia – as they flew in over the reef and settled on the scratchy lawn. ‘Let’s take a small boat out, like Teza and Ford, all those years ago. We’ll row over to Union Island and change to a big cruise liner in Trinidad and go all the way down to Tierra del Fuego. Walk away from the place and they’ll thank you because they’re coming over tonight.’

I walked through the thinnest part of the jungle and then through a plantation of coconut palms that were as straight as stripes on a wallpaper and then into the riot of bushes and trees that protects Sanjay’s house from the outside world. There’d been a sudden, rare downpour this morning, and the too-bright grass belched up steam at me. I went on, knowing as I went that the house didn’t have Sanjay in it. I can tell when he’s around. And, of course, I hadn’t got used to the fact that his daughter Pandora was back with him since a few days before, after the bombing of the Grenada madhouse. I felt something – heard something – on the verandah, and for a moment I was afraid because it sounded like Duchess Dora’s rocking-chair when she was ill and sat all day on the verandah, rocking, rocking. But it was only poor Pandora; she was humming a sort of tuneless hum. And Tanty Grace was beside her on an upright chair by a rickety table with wools and a needlework frame.

Our mad girl, Pandora. I turned and went silently down to the lagoon. For I knew Sanjay must be there. He never goes up to the north now. So there was, literally, nowhere else he could be.

It’s silly, though, to think you can walk past Tanty Grace and Pandora without them seeing you. The first thing that
happened was that I stumbled against a root – a tree felled in the preparations for the airport, a disturbing sight – and I gave a hissing breath that must have sounded loud, in the stagnant air. There was a clatter behind me on the verandah, as if Pandora had risen clumsily and sent the shaky table over. Then, trying to go on, I found myself wading through a heap of white feathers, half-hidden under a tamarind tree.

No one who hasn’t lived out in these parts can know what the sight of that pile of white cock’s feathers can mean. If they’d a hunch – that is, that if the feathers didn’t mean anything to them – they’d have no reason to feel fear. I knew. I’m not likely to forget the feathers in Tanty Grace’s yard, three houses down from Millie in the village.

I only wanted a few days – or weeks, or maybe a year – of a kind of happiness only Tanty Grace knows how to get for you.

Of course, Dora’d been ill a long time with one thing or another. And when she died it was of real fever. But that day, when Ford came and I went looking for Sanjay and I walked into that circle of feathers that looked as if Tanty Grace had set it right there under the trees, I thought again I heard Dora in the rocking-chair and heard its groan. No one really expected Dora to die. And Sanjay took it so bad. There’s been some
obeah
woman working against her, he said. His face was dark with grief and rage. I remember I lifted my rum punch – we were always in the Bar and he drank himself silly those days, trying to get over it all – and I remember too that the glass was frosted outside, with the ice melting so fast your fingers left a clear trail like a snail’s. I must have concentrated on that so as not to feel too glad.

That was four years ago. She’s well dead by now. A year after the new régime started up in Grenada, ‘I shan’t go and see Pandora in the asylum any more,’ she said. ‘They don’t want me to visit, I don’t like the atmosphere on that island any more.’ And Sanjay said, well, he would because he loved
his daughter so much, even if she didn’t have the faintest idea of who he might be when he came. And some of Sanjay’s birds escaped that year, I remember, because I saw their feathers too.

*

It was Maldwin Carr’s intention to visit the village before he went down to the house by the lagoon, but first he took the girl Mari over to the yacht for a change of clothes, and he found it hard to restrain himself then from asking her what the lady who ran the store might have found to say on the subject of Ford. Restrain himself, however, he did: Maldwin Carr could see the girl was in a highly charged state, very unlike the cool, almost detached manner she had assumed on the long plane flight to Barbados and the subsequent trip down to the Grenadines. In Maldwin Carr’s impassive features caution and calculation combined, and by the time the Boston Whaler, which accompanied the yacht, had drawn up alongside, he was no more than a concerned employer, helping a young lady up the gangway and calling out for another hand from the crew.

A radio message had arrived for Maldwin Carr while he had been supping his gardenia-laden drink on the verandah of Carib’s Rest. It informed him that a certain Mr Jim Davy was expected to arrive that evening, Christmas Eve, on the island. Maldwin Carr should exchange such information as he had gleaned with Mr Davy, who would make contact with him at dinner at the hotel.

The foreign editor of Lockton’s newspaper hoped Maldwin Carr was enjoying his trip and then signed off. And Maldwin Carr, who seemed as certain of arriving at trouble spots at the right time (or the wrong time, depending on how you looked at it) as did Young Lochinvar when he Rode Out of the West to arrive at the wedding of his love to another, smiled faintly to himself before going to his cabin and donning the
shark-skin dinner jacket that was
de
rigueur
for a Christmas celebration at Carib’s Rest.

As the girl showered and changed, Maldwin Carr reflected on the speed with which the transactions between them had been completed. It was as if, when he had arrived at the house off the Portobello Road to pay his visit to Teza (as he had thought, but another woman who called herself Eleanore had been the one to let him in), Julian Byrne had already informed Ford’s daughter of this opportunity to go out to St James and look for her father; and Maldwin Carr had no doubt that he had. It was hardly difficult to imagine the instructions Mari had been given on arrival at the island – the only wonder, Maldwin Carr thought, was that she and her friend Eleanore had so easily swallowed his story of needing a cook and of having the girl’s interests at heart in taking her on a cruise in the West Indies. She must, by now at least, have noticed that the ‘crew’, a man well used to preparing food, had done precisely that throughout the
journey
; that she was, in that respect at least, useless. Yet she seemed quite unmoved: it was her age, he supposed, or perhaps the sense of her mission that made her oblivious to these primary things.

When Mari came into the neat, teak-fitted cabin where Maldwin Carr sat waiting, he suppressed a smile at her appearance – a West London get-up of corkscrewed hair and layered rags and a baggy blouse – and suggested a drink. Mari shook her head. Not for the first time, Maldwin found himself amused by the need for a look of fury in today’s young. But then, remembering his liberal views, he silently conceded that unemployment and the prospect of a
futureless
world might permit a certain measure of fury. He stepped up on deck and held out an arm to help the girl down once more to the speedboat that would take them to the quay – and perhaps a quick visit to the Bar – before going on up to the village.

‘You think Ford is dead, don’t you?’ Mari’s voice was close behind him. He turned to find her already on deck and glowering under a moon that seemed twice the normal size.

‘I don’t know, Mari, dear,’ Maldwin said. ‘Surely that’s one of the things we’ve come to find out.’ He was aware of the tired cynicism of his tone – so he told Jim Davy much later, when he looked back on the events of the evening – but he hadn’t been ready for the outburst, after the week they’d spent in near-silence together, or for the hatred of which the girl showed herself to be capable.

‘You’re all in it together, aren’t you?’ she cried. (The ‘crew’, waiting down at the wheel of the Boston Whaler, looked carefully out to sea.) ‘You and Julian Byrne and this “Sanjay” and Holly and all of you! It’s a plot. I tell you, baby, I know a set-up when I see one!’

For a moment Maldwin Carr could have sworn that the girl’s face changed entirely. She was angry but in an arrogant way he hadn’t thought possible from her. In the moonlight she was white, and her hair, braided out from her head, was a deep black.

‘What are we all in?’ said Maldwin Carr quietly. (Across the water more lights in the Bar went on. Flashes of
phosphorescence
lit up the small waves, and the ‘crew’ leaned over towards them from the side of the boat.)

But the girl was laughing. It started as a harsh, made-up laugh, then she did it for proper – head back, shoulders convulsing under the junky old blouse, a beautiful neck, very long and slim, bending and swaying with the sheer volume of the laugh.

‘We’re in nothing, you know,’ said Maldwin Carr. ‘Please, Mari, shall we go?’ (For by now he felt a sudden chill: the girl had gone off her head, maybe, or was heavily on drugs. He would take her up to the hotel, pursue his inquiries alone.)

‘Julian Byrne, Maldwin Carr, Sanjay, Holly and me,’ the girl cried, still choking with laughter. ‘My God, man. Give
me five!’ And she calmed as suddenly as she had begun. ‘You go nowhere without me,’ she said, eerily echoing Maldwin’s most recent thoughts. ‘And don’t you think you can slip away from me so easy, Mr Carr. ‘Cos I’ll be after you.’

Maldwin Carr cleared his throat, a signal to the man in the boat below to rev the engine. He had to admit, he said to Jim Davy as they later ran together to the south of the island and it was Maldwin’s chore to explain how the girl had slipped away from him, that he had never in his life before witnessed so rapid a facial change in anyone. For as they went down the ladder to the boat that would take them to shore, she turned once and looked back at him. And she was a different person again, Maldwin Carr said. Caught between the side of the yacht and the dark water, her face was black, features heavy in her face, mouth full in a savage contempt. Her plaited hair was like reeds in a tribal crown. From then on he’d known that he’d lose sight of her, that she’d change herself and slip from his fingers and away however hard he tried to keep her in his sights.

*

At first, though, the girl’s rage seemed to have cleared the air. By the time the small boat was at the quay, she was smiling – almost, anyway, thought Maldwin as he shot uncomfortable glances at her in the stern. She stepped out, and there they were on the jetty and then on the soft white sand where
dugout
canoes and fishermen’s boats were pushed up – boats like the one Ford and the girl’s mother had eloped in, Maldwin thought, and then he felt uncomfortable again. It was a few seconds’ walk along to the Bar, and he tried to sense her mood as they went. But the fronds of palm came down in zebra-stripe shadows over her face, and she was as remote as an actress in an ancient film: flickering, silent, an image in chiaroscuro. They reached the side steps to the Bar and walked up. Bunting had been strung across and fairy
lights that looked as if they had been pulled out of the bargain basement of an Oxford Street store. Rolling Stones on the jukebox – ‘Satisfaction’. And only two people there: the Negro albino boy Maldwin had glimpsed on the beach when he arrived, doing press-ups, and a woman,
blowsy-looking
rather, shaking thin silver bangles like the bangles hippies used to wear that tinkled and crashed as they passed each other a joint. This woman, Maldwin Carr ascertained, was the woman who ran the store.

‘Pathetic, aren’t they?’ Holly waved at the decorations. Maldwin backed slightly: he was fastidious and sensed spit, bad teeth, rum and a daub of toothpaste on top. ‘They’re Sanjay’s – he had them as a child. Not here, of course.’

‘No, of course,’ muttered Maldwin. ‘I knew … er …
Sanjay
slightly when he was younger, actually. We were at the same school. And then I used to see him and … er … Dora in London before they came out here.’

‘How simply fascinating,’ said Holly Baker coldly. She turned to the girl, who was standing with her eyes fixed on her as if Holly were capable, with some extraordinary
conjuring
trick, of pulling her missing father, dead or alive, out of a hat. And indeed she may be, thought Maldwin Carr. She knows what happened to him. Or where he is.

‘We were thinking of paying a visit to Sanjay,’ Maldwin said. ‘I believe the hotel has a car. D’you think we could borrow it and drive down there?’ He pointed to the lagoon. ‘That
is
where he lives, isn’t it?’ he said.

Holly Baker told Maldwin that he had only to go up to the hotel and ask. It was none of her business what happened up there. No, she would not be at the Christmas dinner tonight. How kind of Mr Carr, but she was quite unable to accept. No doubt she’d see him later, back here at the Bar. Dinner at Carib’s Rest wasn’t for the likes of her, no man, you bet, and she stay here, Holly will, until it’s time to pick up she cutlass an go.

Maldwin Carr looked mildly surprised. But he could tell already the dislike of his class and gender sizzling out of the woman in the old Indian printed caftan, under which poked dirty feet in thonged sandals – a hatred that grew up strong again in the girl, it was plain to see. Holly, after all, was the old friend of Teza. These women stood, arms akimbo, against the world. The world made by men, as they saw it (though the strong personality of Lady Anthea Carr had caused her son to think, until he went to private school anyway, that women were solely responsible for the making of the world). The schism between the two women and the man widened as the disc on the jukebox shrieked to a close. There was no noise now except the slap of waves against the posts holding up the floor of the bar. In the centre of the small dance floor Mighty Barby executed a few headstands.