Authors: Emma Tennant
Mari broke in here. I think it was the first time she saw herself as a pawn and she started to struggle a bit. But to expect facts to be plain and straightforward was mad, of course. Byrne simply said in a soothing voice that she’d already been told not to expect guarantees. They couldn’t be sure of anything. But what they’d heard was that if Mari could go to the southern tip of the island – there was a lagoon there apparently, and it was a bit of a jungle, but a track had been cleared recently for a new airport – and stand right on the tip by the reef and show a light …
‘That’s where Ford’ll come if he’s coming at all,’ said the Australian and Byrne and the quiet man all together.
‘And please lose Mr Carr in the course of the evening,’ said Julian Byrne with a laugh. ‘It’ll be Christmas Eve. He’ll probably get lovely and drunk – if you help him, of course.’
‘But suppose he’s heard too that something … might happen on that night?’ said Mari, showing more intelligence than I’d credited her with. ‘He won’t go and get drunk or anything. He’ll stick with me all the time!’ And I felt sorry for her again, Holly. The wretched girl was beginning to realize she was in something big and impossible to escape from and they had her where they wanted her, of course.
‘You needn’t go,’ said Julian in his kindest voice.
‘No!’ said Mari, terrified.
Then the young Australian started to speak. ‘You know what they’re doing on that island?’ he said. ‘They’re
pumping
in dollars to keep the islanders in a state of subjugation. They’re building up caches of arms to murder the St Jamesians if they do rise up with the aid of the comrades. They’re introducing biological warfare. A breed of mosquito that’s never been reported outside Africa has suddenly appeared on those islands. There are deaths resulting. Outbreaks of
dengue fever. Trees shedding their leaves and dying. All to keep their capitalistic enterprises on the go.’
After this schoolboyish speech, which had obviously made Mari colour up the way she does – she’s a real little Turk when it comes to ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ and all that, because she said, ‘That’s disgusting.
God
!’ – there was a scraping back of chairs and I saw I had to slide back along the wall and get to the front door. The cleaner was safely off in a far bedroom.
No more to report, Holly – I was out and down the stone stairs and in the crescent where the snow had iced over even more and the sun was shining and it was pretty as a Christmas card. The thing is, Holly, I feel worried for
you
now as well as for the girl. For God’s sake, what shall I do? Should I send a cable to Teza after all?
When I’d been home about half an hour Mari let herself in and smiled at me quite kindly. ‘I’m sorry to shut you out, Lore,’ she said. ‘But you don’t mind really, do you?’ And she took off her tatty old cloak and came and sat on the rug at my feet. She’s got a cheek, Holly, honestly she has. ‘I have to go and see Julian sometimes,’ she said. ‘He tells me things.’ And I must say, she looked radiant.
‘What kind of things?’ I said, although I knew perfectly well, of course.
‘He told me my real name was Marina,’ she said. (After I’d slipped out, I suppose, and he’d started pulling all the
emotional
strings.)
‘Ford loved the name, Julian told me. He said it was the name of a lost daughter who wandered over the seas and then got reunited with her father in the end, when he thought she’d been drowned all that time.’
‘How very poetic,’ I said.
*
Lore added that she’d decided to spend Christmas with her mother in Torquay. Then she signed off, with all the usual pleas for me to come over soon.
I’ll take that Maldwin and the girl up to The Heights and I’ll give them one more chance to get off the island. ‘You’re in danger,’ I’ll tell that stiff-necked man who looks as if he’s seen too many spy movies. ‘Mari, go home,’ I’ll say, ‘or you may regret it all very much indeed.’
I’ll have to go down to the lagoon. That’s me, poor Holly, you see there, trudging down past the scratchy bushes on the bone-dry track in the dark with a torch in one hand and a spade in the other. Because I know what Mari’s being sent to do even if she doesn’t, poor girl.
What I say is, fair is fair, let ’em come. But don’t let ’em get at the guns. How about that one, Lenin?
But that won’t get anyone very far. In Grenada, the island next door, everything belongs to the people these days. The sad part is that the people here don’t know that nothing belongs to them at all.
*
Racing on, meandering on in the hotel jeep, I can hardly stop myself from falling out as we bump up and over the top of the hill. There’s Millie, coming out of her house in a fresh cotton dress. She’ll tie on her apron when she gets to Carib’s Rest, she’ll cook the Christmas dinner and then help serve it up. I don’t know how she stands for it here. But then, when you look at any of our lives, I don’t know how I do either.
There’s Tanty Grace now, as the hotel jeep slows, and Mr Maldwin Carr says perhaps they should stop and ask a few questions first in the village, and I say, ‘No, go on. I want to go home straightaway.’
Tanty Grace sets out at the same pace as Millie. I watch them in the side mirror of the jeep. All the feathers and all the spells. And it was the Americans after all who put in that mosquito that gave Dora the dengue fever so she died. There’s enough evil in the world without whistling for it.
Tanty Grace and Millie’ll leave the row of houses together.
At the foot of the hill, where there’s a beautiful tree with pink blossom like a wedding – I’ve never found out its name – they’ll go off in separate directions: Millie to the cranberry sauce and crackers with ribald jokes that came down last month on the
Singer
from Barbados, Tanty Grace to another grim evening sitting with poor mad Pandora and trying to make sure she doesn’t put her finger down her throat and bring up the pills she has to take to control her terrible visions. Then Sanjay will be drinking on the verandah. Sometimes a big moth will bang into his face and he won’t even bother to brush it off, as if it might be a fragment of a bad dream he was having anyway.
That day Ford came, I went back past the house over the billiard-table-green grass, and the feathers under the trees on the way made me remember Tanty Grace, and I thought of how I’d tried her spells. Then the next day, when I came back to the store (Ford’s bags had gone, of course), I remembered Sanjay’s messenger birds and Jim Davy saying it was his hobby to teach them to fly from one island to another – and he said, laughing, ‘You have to put salt on their tails, you know, Holly.’ But now I know it was poison, really. Those birds were being trained to fly to Grenada. And my feathers never hurt Dora at all.
*
Dora came from a family in West Cork. She liked the rain and the grey skies. She hated it here. The wrong sea, the wrong colour – everything about the place depressed her. Even the fruit and the flowers were too big. ‘They look like the photo of the wax flowers on my grandmother’s bonnet at Schull fair,’ she said. How she loved her family! They’d intermarried with the other couple of families that came over to settle estates in Ireland from England in the seventeenth century, much as the Allards had done here. They were more like poor whites, though; they didn’t have the Allards’ mercantile
sense that went on down the generations until you get to Sanjay throwing it all away. They sounded like those mean whites in Barbados, who came over from the West Country at the time of the Monmouth rebellion and stayed poor and half-mad with the interbreeding, farming their little scraps of land. ‘Redlegs’, they call them. Dora was a bit of a redleg, I used to think. There was her ancient line in Ireland and the grey stone house with the roof coming off, and the parties in London when she’d come over from Ireland, and she was so pretty Sanjay married her without thinking twice. But she had a funny, dopey look. Her big blue eyes were set too close together. No wonder she and Sanjay made a mad child. No wonder, with all that interbreeding.
*
I used to think, when I wandered down to the lagoon on those evenings that were too hot to get through alone, that Sanjay had something a bit missing too, as he sat hour after hour in his museum or carving grotesque animals out of driftwood. It was a pity he gave up making his boats. The perfect mast. Sails that fluttered so clean and delicate, when he was likely to go around in a dirty shirt and forget to change unless Millie whipped it away from him. A galleon with a hundred tiny oars. I knew that one was a slave ship, and Sanjay was embarrassed he’d made it but he just couldn’t resist it for the sheer beauty of the thing. And I’d put my hammock up in the pleasant clearing of nutmeg and cacao trees that stretches away to the southernmost tip of the island and watch Sanjay encouraging the children to build the harbour out of stones and those big pink shells the colour of old-fashioned knickers. And a little quay – the mud
cement-mixing
was their favourite part. I liked to watch the bend of his shoulders and back, as he worked on repairs to the fleet or pencilled a small skull and crossbones on a handkerchief to amuse a child.
*
It’s true that that’s where I’ll go tonight, and it’s true too that although the small harbour’s all grown over with jungle and Dora died from a terrible fever just about the time Grenada changed direction and Pandora’s back here as helpless as a baby, nothing’s really changed. Sanjay is the landlord, for another week at least.
Poor Dora. She’d be miserable now if she saw me drive in the jeep up to The Heights with just the kind of man she would have found glamorous and respectable and a
honey-skinned
girl who gets so black with silent rage she vanishes into the darkness in the front seat by the driver. How Dora would have hated her! And how she’d have hated to see me take these new guests into my squalid room and tell them everything they want to know. Yes, and go down to the lagoon later and dig for the guns Ford must have left there. She wouldn’t have liked to find me so in charge of her home – even if she never was happy here. ‘St James is my island,’ she said to me once, when I’d left neutral ground by the store and was playing Tom Tiddlers on the beach down by the lagoon. ‘Holly, why don’t you go back to where you belong?’
Of course I shouldn’t really have said to the girl what I did. But everything can be corrected. ‘Everything can be made shipshape again,’ as Sanjay used to say when the little kids blundered about on the pretend jetty and the wet mud fell in near his precious fleet.
*
‘So you’re another person who can’t remember exactly whether the man you saw shooting down the hill and into the sea was a man you knew or a perfect stranger,’ said Maldwin Carr with quiet sarcasm. He was on a rush chair – the only chair in the room – under a light bulb inadequately covered in stained parchment, so the light was bright in the eyes, uncomfortably like an interrogation room and made no more agreeable by the way the girl had taken up a
deliberately
martyred position on the floor on a rug so old and dirty it looked like the ends of a hundred mops sewn together. Holly stood by the side of the bed, arms folded over a stomach that ran sideways under her arms in ripples of fat. Why does the woman have to live in quite such miserable surroundings? Maldwin thought, and he noted this thought, from pure impatience, from habit, on the school pad that he carried always with him and that emerged, invariably to the surprise of onlookers, from his elegant suit. There was
something
self-pitying and attention-seeking in this statement of poverty, Maldwin Carr decided. ‘Find who she’s trying to get to feel sorry for her,’ he scribbled down. ‘Allard? Probably.’
The notepad went on to record that Ms Holly Baker had spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the trials and tribulations suffered by St James over the past years. Was anyone aware that tropical fevers not previously known in the region had declared themselves in Grenada, Carriacou and Bequia? Mrs Allard here, she’d succumbed to one of these and not a word had appeared in the press, as far as Ms Baker knew. Would Mr Carr please report this, as well as the employing of poisoned feathers and the defoliation of trees, down at the lagoon in particular, where there was a primal jungle much in need of conservation? Did Mr Carr know that a Mr Jim Davy, who was involved in the local Craft Centre, had put in a large amount of US dollars, as she could stand witness? Didn’t all this add up to a concerted effort on the part of the United States of America to ‘destabilize’ any island with a régime that favoured the people?
Maldwin Carr inclined his head gravely, the white man who was both judged and judge in this outpouring. An expression of infinite tiredness gave him the look of a don listening to the paper of a faintly disliked student. The girl, he noted, was sitting bolt-upright on her rug. Her eyes were filled with tears – she was a fiercely feeling one all right – and he cursed those like Holly or Mr Julian Byrne who were able
to play with emotions so cynically. There was a look of astonishment and respect too: Maldwin Carr noted that it was clear, from the girl’s expression, that Holly had not spoken in this way on their earlier encounter in the store. And he wondered why that might be.
In London – going to the house, trying to gain admission by the front door, realizing the girl’s mother, Teza, was away, going down the basement steps and finding himself let in by a sharp-featured woman who called herself Eleanore – Maldwin Carr had been struck by the girl’s quick acceptance of his plan. She would set something off here, there was no doubt. She’d gone out of the room and he’d asked Eleanore, quite casually, whether Mari knew what she was in for, embarking on a probably disappointing quest – and, could he hint at least, very likely with dubious political backing from somewhere or other that might land her in considerable danger? Eleanore had flared up, as he might have guessed she would. Mari had every right to go looking for her father. Did Mr Carr know that in all the years Ford had failed to take an interest in the child her doubts and fears had grown, so she thought in the end she was the most unwanted human being that ever walked the face of the earth? Whatever might happen when she arrived, it was a vital journey for the girl, and if Mr Carr was afraid that things would ‘get set off’ – she made Mari sound like some automatic combustible squib, which would explode on contact with the island of her origin – then all the more reason to keep a close eye on her. And Lore had gone into the kitchen and come back and said, ‘We’re right out of wine.’