Authors: Emma Tennant
‘You have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Teza said. Her eyes were very open, candid-looking, a way she had when she was impatient and annoyed. ‘She’s a traitor. Worse than being a class traitor, a traitor to her sex. The chief enemy. The symbol of feminine weakness.’ And Teza turned on her heel and walked away.
But I can’t help feeling sorry for them both. Dora because she was trapped in a dream that didn’t even belong to her husband but to his dead family – a pretty horrible dream too, when you come to think of it: slaves, cotton, sugar, idleness, frippery. And Sanjay was trapped in his fault. It was all his fault. And now the girl comes here – and she says it again, straight off. ‘Sanjay. Sanjay is to blame.’ Who told her that? How can I tell if I might think so too?
*
Maldwin Carr had come a long way in order to arrive at this precise moment: sunset on Christmas Eve on an island where the outline of Grenada, one of a chain of sad, thickly green islands in the blue, stood bottomless and roofless in the evening mist. He replaced his binoculars in their case and turned to smile at the girl who had climbed the hill from the store to join him for a drink. Aloft, blouse billowing in dudgeon, Mrs Van der Pyck took the order for two Stinger Sundowners into the barman in the long, panelled room. Her instinct for once had been wrong. Mr Carr was not
homosexual
. He had a beautiful and nubile girl as his companion for the evening’s festivities. Mrs Van der Pyck was growing old, would soon be sexless as an old woman in a park feeding ducks. She instructed the barman that a generous amount of angostura bitters should be added to the already potent cocktail, which was an invention of her late South African husband. Vodka went in, Cointreau, Cinzano Rosé, lemon twist, the bitters making a pink-gin effect that matched the glare of the evening light on the verandah. Mr Carr and his girl should enjoy their Christmas celebration in St James.
*
It had meant a series of island-hoppings to find the girl and bring her out here. First, the island of Maldwin Carr’s London: the clubs, the Savoy Grill where he lunched with Lockton and was asked to investigate a possible landing on the island of St James from Grenada by the extreme left
Revolutionary Party, the ‘Pol Pot régime of the Caribbean’, as Fidel Castro had described them.
The leader of the Revolutionaries, Hudson Austin, was in jail in Grenada with his accomplices after the failed coup and the American invasion, but there were rumours that
remaining
members of the party had taken to the hills of Grenada and were planning to infiltrate St James and use it as a base for their violent brand of Marxism-Leninism. Lockton had many interests in Venezuela and El Salvador. There was no interest for him at all in seeing a toy resort island in the middle of the trade route through the Grenadines become a trading post instead for Russian warheads and increased political instability. Two problems here, the newspaper proprietor confided. One was the ex-Black Power leader and internationally acclaimed poet, Ford, who had been missing since the end of October. Why had inquiries into the poet’s whereabouts, after his failure to collect the American Endeavor Prize (awarded to black writers who had done most to bring harmony to an explosive interracial situation anywhere in the world), come up with nothing at all? Had Ford perhaps gone back to his home, St James, in the Caribbean, to foment revolution? You could never tell with these fellows. They changed their position every two minutes, funny thing.
Lockton said that rumours had come to him that a landing from Grenada by the Hudson Austin faction had indeed been planned on St James in late October. It was foiled. And Ford the poet had not been heard of since.
The second problem was that the island was still
part-owned
by an eccentric chap, James Allard by name. His lease would run out in the New Year, but apparently the land in the south of the island was in parts virtually impenetrable jungle. Perfect for a concealed landing from the south, no doubt. He still had the power to forbid trespassers on his land – but for some reason he’d permitted the
American-Venezuelan
consortium who’d bought the north end of the
island from his uncle to start flattening a part of the wooded area for the building of an airport. Most winter visitors in St James were based in Caracas. They already had a private airport in the centre of that city in case of urgent need for an escape route in times of social unrest. Now, rather than have to go via Trinidad, they wanted to be able to fly their planes in to St James directly. Also, of course, the airport would be useful for flying up to the United States on business matters.
‘Allard,’ Maldwin Carr said in his gentle, ruminative voice. He’d been at school with James Allard. ‘Not such a bad family, at least one of them,’ he said. In 1876, in the Federation Riots fanned by Pope-Hennessy in Barbados and spreading like wildfire to the Windwards, the Allard of the day had greeted the maverick Governor with open arms and feasted him at his home while handing out free provisions to his own labourers in St James. For, Pope-Hennessy, horrified by the conditions he had found on his appointment as Governor to Barbados – starvation, floggings of an unbelievable
severity
in the prisons – had decided, after his pleas for a more lenient attitude had been scorned by indigenous landowners and British Parliament alike, to stir up trouble in the islands among the blacks and to turn a blind eye when crops and property were raided. None of this made the Governor
popular
, of course, and he was soon sent home.
‘But,’ said Maldwin with that unassuming voice
suggesting
a liberal outlook that too brash a commercial personage would be foolish to overlook, ‘old Allard of those days was a splendid fellow. Apparently he even laid on a dance as well as a banquet for the workers, with sucking-pig on a spit and as much rum as anyone could drink, and they all revelled together till dawn.’
‘Very nice,’ said Lockton, drily.
‘And James Allard – the one who’s out there now – isn’t such a bad sort either. Allard – they call him Sanjay – has a museum of oddities. Like those famous eccentrics in the
eighteenth century: Don Saltero, for instance, who collected all manner of impossible things. Allard’s even had a plaster copy made of the famous Slave making love to his Mistress – their petrified bodies of course, caught in the flow of the lava from Vesuvius. From Pompeii.’
‘Extraordinary,’ Lockton said in a cool tone.
‘Sanjay Allard is a kind man,’ Carr said, ‘an old-fashioned liberal, you might say – and, funnily enough, there probably isn’t all that much difference between him and the late, lamented Maurice Bishop, the saviour of Grenada, who was feared and loathed by the Americans and the fanatical left alike. Both men with the same aim, depending on how you look at it. A fair deal, a sense of identity for the islanders. In Sanjay’s case he is just too bloody naive. The consortium isn’t going to give the inhabitants a welfare state, you bet. With Bishop – well, he was indecisive. He let his deputy, Coard, walk all over him. Sad thing, really.’
‘And Mr Sanjay will let Mr Hudson Austin and Mr Coard’s men walk all over St James?’ asked Lockton. ‘That’s what I want you to go and find out, Carr. After all, with an airport under construction on the island, St James could make a very useful landing point for Cuba. And if you do find a
probability
of insurrection, would it not be our duty to inform Her Majesty the Queen?’
‘To send troops to protect the little island?’ Maldwin said and laughed. The thought of toy soldiers lined up in front of Sanjay’s decadent museum was somehow irresistibly comical. He said he didn’t think there was a question of sending troops. ‘St James is independent now. After all, no ships went out to Grenada. America is so comfortably near.’
Lockton said, ‘But there’s been little news of the progress of the airport recently.’
‘The last I heard of the airport,’ Maldwin said, ‘was a joke that Sanjay was letting loose his famous collection of tropical birds there. “So
that
’s
what the airport is for!” he said. His
time’s running out, you see,’ Maldwin added, as he saw that the joke had been lost on his employer. ‘So he’s letting everything he owns run down – and run free.’
‘And where does he expect the birds to fly to?’ asked Lockton with a puzzled frown. ‘The United States? Or Grenada?’
*
Maldwin Carr’s next island involved travelling a few miles to the west. It lies between Notting Dale, the leafy,
police-haunted
region at the foot of Notting Hill, and Clarendon Cross, where windows of fine Bokharas face tiny shops selling cabbage and potatoes already sprouting a quiff of purplish tuber, and Golborne Road, beyond the Portobello street market’s surge under the great bridge of the motorway, where trays of plastic rings and fall-apart shoes are
overlooked
by white giants in chintz suits and young blacks who have never seen the Caribbean. To this area, roughly the size of St James, to a dilapidated flat in a redbrick Edwardian building at the end of one of these gracious, renovated crescents, Maldwin Carr went next on his quest.
He knew that the critic and literary mentor, Julian Byrne, could be found at any time in his flat on the first floor of this building. And he inhaled with slight distaste as he went into the lobby, recognizing the faint smell of century-old economies taken from the pages of
Mrs
Beeton’s
Household
Management.
All London’s Edwardian life is here – untouched, thought Maldwin Carr, suppressing a smile as the door on the first floor opened and Byrne looked out.
Julian Byrne was tall, thin to the point of ghostliness, with large, deep-brown eyes encircled by black shadows and abundant white hair. His expression was mild and vague. It would have seemed unlikely to anyone other than Maldwin that such a man should be sought out for clues in the possibly politically motivated disappearance of an
Afro-Caribbean
poet. And if Maldwin did not keep his ears
always to the ground, detecting the subterranean crack of one social grouping as it merges with another, the unlikely juxtapositions that form and then melt away, Julian Byrne would indeed be the last person to be visited by an
investigative
journalist. Surely, he lives in the past, from the endless re-reading of novels of fierce restraint by Yorkshire parsons’ daughters (not nearly as good as Jane Eyre, obviously) to the viewing and reviewing of stilted, permed performances by unknown actresses, old ladies now or dead. The journalist hadn’t come to discuss the missing Ford’s career as a poet either. He knew that Julian Byrne, with his laser eye for what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’, finds Ford’s work – with its attempt to establish a common strand running between the Mayan and pre-Columbian societies of the South American continent, to whose neighbouring islands his ancestors were transported as slaves, and Africa, the land of beginning – merely ‘self-conscious’. The fact that Ford is acclaimed worldwide is another mark against him, a guarantee of mediocrity. No: what Maldwin Carr had heard, from a girl who knows a young man who visits Julian Byrne fairly often, was that for some time the chief interest in the life of this modest and reluctant ‘character’ had been – in reaction
perhaps
against the embalmed quality of his previous interests – a strong sympathy with left-wing revolutionary politics.
*
‘I think she’s rather
frightening
,’ Julian Byrne said. He gave a little giggle. ‘But do go and see her. She’s rather fascinating, really. Something a bit Baader-Meinhof – probably because her mother had money and rescued her Czech husband when he was working as a lavatory attendant at the Open Air Theatre, although he’d been a famous scientist in
Czechoslovakia
before he escaped – you know the sort of thing.’
Julian Byrne paused for breath, and Maldwin Carr, seated on a tattered ottoman, shot a quick glance at him. The description he’d been given was too vague, he thought, or
perhaps this was because his informant was young and barely educated. Julian Byrne was a caricature by Beerbohm – in his black shirt and white trousers, and with the
wave-crest
of white hair over the eyes that seemed to have become permanently embedded in a smudge of black shadow, Maldwin Carr saw him framed on the cover of the
Yellow
Book
, stooping, half-joking, arms outstreched. ‘So you don’t know … er … Teza particularly well?’ Maldwin tried. ‘I mean …’
‘I’ve met her,’ Julian Byrne countered. He bestowed on Maldwin Carr one of his well-known flashes of contempt. ‘I simply said she was rather frightening. That’s all.’
Maldwin Carr nodded in deference. The school he and Julian Byrne – ten years apart, it was true – had both been to, along with James Allard and almost everyone you could think of apart from Lockton, made the deferential nod an instant code: you could be gay as you like or live in the shires with a wife and six daughters, but women were a race apart – and faintly disgusting – all the same. ‘What a marvellous photograph of Ruby Keeler,’ Maldwin Carr said, to confirm and end the transmission.
Julian Byrne waved his long fingers, each one of which looked like a cigarette holder in a Shaw play, and said of the framed print of Busby Berkeley’s favourite dancer over the chimneypiece, ‘Yes. Isn’t it
marvellous
?’
Maldwin Carr hadn’t found it easy, in his quest for Ford, to draw satisfactory answers from cunning old Byrne. Inquiries as to whether the poet was known to be in England or to have gone abroad elicited: ‘I
liked
his early poems, you know. I
discovered
Ford. He was so unpretentious. The poems were awfully good and funny, you know. Then – well, he allowed himself to be turned into a sort of pundit. He really became rather
embarrassing.
To tell the truth, I’ve no idea where he is now. Everything’s perfectly all right, of course – I mean we didn’t
quarrel
or anything – but I simply haven’t seen him for ages.’