Black Marina (16 page)

The party Maldwin remembered hadn’t been more than a stone’s throw from where this girl’s mother, Teza, lived now. As well as the girls with legs like cricket bats sticking out of mini skirts and men who, with their long hair, looked like portraits of Renaissance crooks, there were one or two black men, as Maldwin remembered – and one black woman who was a lawyer and had been brought along and stood
laughing
at the dissipation of the scene, and a Sudanese who ran an ‘alternative’ magazine, and an Indian recently acclaimed as the best prose writer of his generation. Things were different now – there was no free and happy atmosphere any more. After the gloom and destruction of the last sixteen years, it was little wonder. Maldwin pulled himself back to the present and thought, with what was almost a pang, that
Mari would hardly have been born at the time of that party.

He rose. An elegant wrist shot out from a cuff to show the marking of time, the hour of dinner at the hotel. He cleared his throat, a further signal to the girl who stood now
completely
entranced by Holly, as if she had herself been the author of all these wise and true words and would save the world for Mari if she wanted it. ‘Mari, my dear, we should go,’ said Maldwin Carr gently. ‘We shall see Holly again after dinner, no doubt.’ And he turned to Holly with a small, gallant smile, as if they were all in the foyer of a London theatre and not on a small island on the brink of terrible trouble.

‘My father …’ Mari said. Her cheeks were burning. She looked quite lovely, Maldwin thought. It was a pity for a girl like that to involve herself in something as unrewarding as revolutionary politics.

‘Your father is here,’ Holly said.

There was a silence. Then, ‘So … did you … you … save him?’ Mari’s words came very faint, more of a statement than a question. For the first time she lowered her eyes, as if the news was too much to bear in the presence of others.

‘I hope to,’ Holly said.

‘He’s – he’s here?’

‘Yes, you’ll find him,’ Holly said, ‘on the island.’

Lanterns had been lit up on the verandah of Carib’s Rest by the time Maldwin Carr and his companion, a
mountain-honey
-coloured girl who attracted a good many glances from early merrymakers, had come over in the jeep from The Heights and parked in the grassy lot screened off by hibiscus bushes. The decorations, like those in the Bar, had that amateurish, nursery look that Maldwin could identify
immediately
with an English upper-class childhood. The hand of Sanjay was here still, however much the consortium might introduce teak bars and air conditioning and ‘local’
specialities
that tasted of almost nothing, in their frangipani frills and pools of piquant sauce. There were half-broken paper lanterns and streamers, forgotten or overlooked, presumably, by the smart interior decorator from New York and coming out once a year when it was too late to do anything to change them. Maldwin Carr smiled. He wondered that Mrs Van der Pyck was ready to wreck her luxurious hotel, in appearance at least, and to transform it to a youth club hall or some such – and Mari, of course, was quite unsurprised by it. ‘Now you’ll go to the cottage and get ready,’ Maldwin said, for he was afraid that the girl who was walking beside him like a zombie might turn on her heel and fly away. But he needn’t have worried after all. She followed him quite passively to the row of gingerbread cottages that had once housed the slaves of the Allard estate. Ten minutes after she’d gone in, she was out again, silent as ever, her only concession to ‘getting ready’, as far as Maldwin Carr could see, being a cosmetic one.

‘Heads would turn all right,’ as Maldwin told his audience when the night was over, and a succession of nights after
that, and he was safely back home. You didn’t often see anything like Man – at least he hadn’t, and it was clear that the visitors to Carib’s Rest on Christmas Eve hadn’t either. It was the strangest thing. Mari’s face white as a mime. Great eyes circled in black. A mouth so red it looked like a
flamboyant
. And all the flowers seemed to crowd in now that night had really begun: Maidwin saw them in the dip of light from the floodlights, below the cottonhouse steps and
creeping
along the railings of the verandah. Hibiscus and
flamboyant
gaping and pushing out at them as he and the girl walked to their table. A general silence fell. In the white dip of light he saw the flowers on the paw-paw tree, and the flowers on the soursop tree, and the flowers on the mango tree, and the flowers on the guava tree, and the lilies planted for guests to look out at to interrupt the uninterrupted view of the sea, all grow big and stretch out towards them as they went. It was quite unnerving, Maldwin said, something to do with the weird state the girl was in – and it brought it home to him again that tropical nights were something you forgot quickly when you were away from them, but when you returned and they came down on you, you remembered that uneasy feeling all right. The girl Mari could well have been one of those soucriants, he said, the spirits that like to dress up as beautiful women and stare out at you from the trees at night with their big eyes. It was like following something like that – and he was glad, absurdly so to tell the truth, when they reached their table.

The girl had spoken once on the way down the verandah, where the ever-blowing trade wind brought in the thick scents from the flowers on the trees and mixed them with the women diners’ French perfume. Mrs Van der Pyck, all sapphire blue eyes and red hair – nervous, Maldwin could see, at the appearance of this strange young woman and the possible repercussions on the guests – was foolish enough to step into the girl’s path. Not for the first time Maldwin Carr
wished that convention and his English public-school
upbringing
did not force him to walk behind a lady when going in to dinner.

But it was too late. Mrs Van der Pyck stood and smiled an inane smile into the face of this girl whose face was like a white bell flower.

‘I put some lovely irises on your table’ – some such
nonsense
. And then, ‘I do hope, Mr Carr and er … Miss … that you’ll find everything just as you want tonight.’

‘What we want,’ said Marina – and Maldwin reported that you could have cut the silence at that moment with a knife – ‘what we want, madam, is a Revolution.’ And she swept on to pull out her chair and sit down before Maldwin Carr could do the proper thing and help her.

It seemed interminable, he said, the time it took for a buzz of conversation to start up. But then, as in a film, a glass did fall and break on the wooden floor and a high laugh turned the atmosphere jovial, if rather frenetic. And Mrs Van der Pyck went as fast as her stiletto heels would carry her to put on Frank Sinatra on the cassette player in the long, panelled room.

‘Things didn’t change much, even then,’ Maldwin said later, as he made the wry face for which he was well known among friends and foreign correspondents, at his club. Any trouble in these far-flung spots and the gringos will relax to the sound of Ol’ Blue Eyes. But somehow, tonight, Maldwin had the feeling these comforting strains wouldn’t be quite enough.

The effect on the diners of Mari’s reply to their hostess’s polite concern for her welfare – well, it was as if a sudden feverish sleep had fallen on the guests on the verandah at Carib’s Rest. Not a single person there woke or looked ordinarily about until the first bars of the Sinatra tape went on.

*

When Sanjay arrived the party on the verandah relaxed, and Mrs Van der Pyck doled out Christmas punch, and all the lights were turned off, which left only candles in glass holders flickering on each table. To walk meant brushing against the paper streamers, invisible now, and some of the women, as they moved from table to table, gave low cries like birds at the touch, as if walking in a wood in a dream. A pudding came in, held aloft by Millie and flaming merrily. Mistletoe, fresh from polythene and a flight from London to Barbados, was tied in bunches and was then there apparently by magic in the rafters over the verandah, the dark wire hidden in the tropical blackness.

Out beyond the balustrade a full moon hung with the same insouciance over lawn, coconut palms and the sea. Maldwin Carr, with a table as near to the steps as he could get, looked out at it – and back at Sanjay, not very different after all these years after all – as he smiled at the guests and allowed his back to be thumped with good Christmas will. Wasn’t the poor bloke about to surrender his lease? Maldwin
remembered
and felt a surge of pity for him. What the hell
did
a man like Sanjay do when he’d reached the end of his resources, emotional and financial, as Sanjay obviously had? Stay and watch his old house done up, like this one, as a club for winter visitors? Stay on as steward or overseer? It seemed unthinkable somehow. At the same time Maldwin was aware that pity for Sanjay was not strictly necessary. Even if there was something childlike and untouched about the man, that made you sorry for him. It was when you thought of him up against it in a tough modern world. All of which was pure sentimentality, of course. It was partly to do with the rearing – and the schooling they’d both had too. You could see Sanjay walking across his fields or moors with the absolute confidence that belongs to those who have been brought up to believe that ownership of the land goes with the Act of Creation, that the Lord gave to the local landlord as if by
some mysterious right. There was the dignified,
bow-windowed
library, where all the books, written by the world’s greatest writers, also belonged to you. You owned the writers, too. There was the smell of the walnut desk, and the old leather cigar box, and a bowl of dried rose petals, the roses picked by a great-aunt as she went stiffly with her dress hitched up and her bustle bobbing like a rabbit’s tail among the bushes in the garden. The bowl, blue-and-white Chinese – Maldwin saw the scene and smelt the scene and saw the sides of the earth, East and West, welded together to serve the afternoon tea in the library of Sanjay’s forebears. So why feel for him now? Sanjay had a very sweet smile, of course, and there were at least three women hanging over him at any given time: ‘Sanjay, you’re such a recluse!’ ‘Sanjay, won’t you come to Mégève with us for the New Year?’ But it wasn’t this that made Maldwin feel a little for Sanjay that night. It was, perhaps, that Sanjay was the last imprint of a vanishing breed – and he seemed oddly vulnerable, Maldwin thought, as if he might shortly vanish himself. But maybe these apprehensions were the result of having the girl with him on this island that looked so placid out there under the moon.

Maldwin was too busy with his thoughts – not that that was how he’d put it later, when asked to account for the girl’s disappearance. He’d say instead that it was an American who distracted him – he said his name was Jim Davy and he held out an arm and a hand as scaly as a tortoise’s. They were both wearing paper hats; the stage had been reached of crackers and riddles and jokes, while the St Jamesian boys stood in the doorway to the long room looking out on the verandah in grave amazement at the winter visitors’ idea of merriment. Maldwin could say he’d turned back from
looking
out at the preposterously big moon, hanging there and lighting up the corrugated iron roof of Holly’s store below like the outline of an evil cottage in a children’s book. And when he turned back the girl had slipped away.

In fact, Maldwin had seen Sanjay begin to notice Mari’s extraordinary beauty, grotesquely and clownishly made up though she was. As the American and Venezuelan women hung on him and Mrs Van der Pyck came up, ever-hopeful, with a bottle of Armagnac and an assortment of stockings packed with gifts that she would throw wildly among the tables, he saw Sanjay look out at the moon and in again at the other face of whiteness sitting by a candle at the far table where all the flowers came in. Maldwin saw him rise, gently shake off his admirers, as if they too were clinging vines or clematis, and make his way over to her. He saw Sanjay recognize him when he was halfway there – but Sanjay was too dazed, too struck by Mari, to turn back now.

‘Sanjay! Where are you going? Are we going to dance?’ came the voices of the women, and hands coiled round his neck, pulled at his hair, hooked through his arm. ‘Shall we go to the Bar?’ ‘That would be fun!’ ‘See if Ferdie’s got a new punch for us like Christmas last year!’

Sanjay and Maldwin exchanged greetings. ‘And what brings you out to St James?’ Sanjay said, but not in the words he would normally use and without taking his eyes off the strange girl sitting at Maldwin Carr’s table, with her eyes now on Sanjay. Her eyes floated like waterlilies in a pool fenced with barbed wire. Maldwin saw that Sanjay had never seen eyes like that before. And, set in the made-up white face as they were, they seemed to be blazing with hostility. Sanjay stared. Music came loud from the long room. In an effort to persuade the guests to stay at the hotel, to put off the drunken Christmas Eve wander down to the Bar, Mrs Van der Pyck had put on a tape of early rock ‘n’ roll.

Sanjay held out his hand. ‘Come and dance,’ he said to the girl. And Maldwin, who knew he should have found some reason for forbidding it, let her go.

*

I had to go back to the store. I waited until they’d gone – the man who was playing 007 and the girl who may say she wants an extreme left-wing revolution but is more likely, by the looks of her, to end up as a
Playboy
centrefold. I walked from The Heights to the village, and a boy there who is a cousin of Ford’s was sitting on a little motorbike thing, and he gave me a lift down to the store. I have to get the spade, you see, I nearly told him. But in the end I kept my mouth shut. Bring ’em all in and the blaze could go anywhere. I have to get the spade and go to the southern tip of the island, past the red new earth where the diggers and dumpers went in.

I nipped in to the Bar first for a quick one. There weren’t too many customers there, when you consider it was
Christmas
Eve – only the bores, who don’t manage to get a table at Carib’s Rest, and the engineers working for the consortium on constructing houses and pipe laying and the rest, who aren’t considered high-class enough. One of the bores, a fifty-ish man with a small house up in the north, near the old Allard place, pulled at my arm. The jukebox was playing ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’ while Ferdie giggled behind the bar.

I could see the fun under way at Carib’s Rest by going out to the end of the bar-raft and looking up. There are the scissor palms and a bloody great moon that certainly ought to help things along tonight, and people in posh dresses
wandering
about on the verandah of the hotel. I thought, I’ll very likely see that girl next, she’s doubtless half-fallen in love with the whole way of life already. And I saw the people like cut-outs, those cardboard figures you shoot down at a fair. I wonder how many of them will still be around after tonight.

‘And how’s our lovely female brigand?’ said the bore.

And, ‘Oh yes, that’s me,’ I said.

‘Sail the seven seas, eh, Holly?’

‘Yeah, pick up me cutlass an go.’ But tonight, as Ferdie made his usual joke about my credit running out and Bing
Crosby drooled over a sea that’s flat and pearly under the moon and lying out there like a stomach with stretch marks, I felt only a terrible weary feeling and tense as a snapping wire as well. ‘Another rum and Coke, a Cuba Libre, heh?’

I don’t know how long I was asleep. I must’ve crawled down the side of the raft dance floor place on to the sand – to get away from the wandering fingers of the bore, I daresay. I was asleep and I dreamed of Dora in her beautiful house in the West of Ireland, and the horses ready for the hunt, and then the whole lot of them galloping into the sea, which turned from grey and cold to a blue that was so blue and warm that it hurt. I dreamed of Ford. In the old days, the days of Teza’s early letters, when she said, ‘He’s dedicated his new book of poems to you, Holly.’ Oh, yes, I said to myself when I thought I’d write back to her, ‘Am I a singin’ she-dog then?’ For that was the name of the long poem that made him famous. ‘No, you’re London, the spirit of London,’ Teza said in the dream. ‘Ford likes you. We’re happy.’ Then they weren’t happy any more. In my dream Ford left Teza. I watched in the corner, crouched on stone paws. Like it was one of the lions in Trafalgar Square, but when I looked down it was me – I’d turned to stone and I was crouching there on my chipped stone paws. A singin’ she-dog, and on the corner of Portobello Road – where I watched Ford walk away for good, leaving Teza alone in the street and holding a baby. Then Dora came down the market, but even in the dream I knew that was ridiculous and I couldn’t help laughing. It must’ve come out as a kind of snort, so I woke myself, because I came to for a moment and saw the sand just as bright under the moon and a palm cracking and flapping above me like a big bird. And waves – the wind was
beginning
to get up.