A Judgement on a Life

by Stephen Baddeley

  ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. You know that. I knew that. I knew, from the SOTH, that I’d work better if I exercised.

  Why do we ‘take’ exercise rather than ‘have’ it or ‘do’ it? Funny language, English. You ‘have’ a glass of beer, you don’t ‘take’ one. You don’t ‘have’ medication, you ‘take’ it. Funny language, English.

  I was playing better tennis. Better than I did at school. I was twenty-six, near my prime. So, not surprising, I suppose. Caius won that year. Cambridge did too. I got my blue.

  Annie and I liked playing. We sometimes drew a crowd. I played well. No one came to watch me. I knew that. They came to watch her. The scarred and damaged, eyepatched beauty. I knew that too. They watched her because she was a lovely thing to watch. She played beautifully. She was beautiful. They came to watch her beautiful play, her agile, beautiful body and her lovely, naked, sun-tanned bum when she bent down to pick up the balls. She couldn’t help herself.

  Try playing tennis with one eye shut. It’s not easy. It gets easier with time. That’s what she said.

  I didn’t mind men lusting after her. As long as it wasn’t Prouse.

  Prouse didn’t lust after her. He once collected her. You may know that. He wanted her back in his collection. He wanted her, because other men wanted her. He wanted to own her, because other men wanted to own her. Why would anybody want to own another person? Prouse was an evil man.

  The thought of owning her gave him power. Power over other men who wanted to own her. Power over other men gave his life reason. Money didn’t give his life reason. Power over other men did. He was an evil man. He was an unhappy man. His money made him unhappy. He thought money should make him happy. When it didn’t, it made him bitter. I saw it happen with Father. Knowing Prouse was bitter made me happy. Knowing Prouse was unhappy, made me happier. It did with Father too.

  He thought he had the upper hand. He always did with me. He thought I was a fool. A lucky fool. Lucky so far. A fool who would never win. Not against a man like him.

  He was a proud man. Would the proverb stand? Would he fall? Time would tell, I supposed. But proverbs didn’t help at night. Not when the drawer wouldn’t stay closed.

  He thought I was weak. Offering him Melancholy proved it. Proved I was scared of him. He was right. I was scared of him. Scared of what he might do. Scared for the people I loved. The people he would destroy, if destroying them would hurt me. If destroying them would destroy me too.

  I was damaged, not destroyed. The fear wasn’t gone. Not for me.

  We flew home to Darwin. For just one week. The dogs were pleased to see us. I missed the dogs.

  It was the ‘build-up’. It was hot. That was good. We liked the heat. We had a party for our friends. It wasn’t like the first party. The party before the bad things started. This wasn’t a party for everyone we knew. This was a party for our friends. It was a good night.

  We walked the beach before dawn. We watched the dawn become morning. There was construction across the harbour. There were cranes. Mr B didn’t know what it was. He did, later. We all did, later.

  When we went to Cambridge, J. Maz stayed in Darwin. I wondered why. I thought he’d come with us. I thought he’d come to London, to be back home. But he didn’t. He was happier in Darwin. He could run things better from there. Better with the staff he knew. The London office didn’t need him.

  Pip was well. She enjoyed her work. She modelled the mechanics of the Trust. She did things I didn’t understand. She worked with J. Maz. They worked well together. She was happy, she said. She wasn’t missing Sydney, she said. She didn’t mind the ‘build-up’, she said. We all went out to dinner.

  We got home. Annie said, “Pip’s in love.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. Ambrosia laughed.

  “You men. You t’ink you is so clever to be a’putin de man up onto de moon, but you knowin’ nutin’ about what is a’happnin’ down here on de earf.” She could ham things up when she wanted to.

  Was I really that dumb? It seemed so.

  “Who is it?”

  “You really don’t know?” said Annie. I felt embarrassed.

  “No, who?”

  “Jesus wept,” she said, laughing. “You men really are something else.”

  “Who?”

  “J. Maz, dummy.”

  “Oh.”

  Bloody hell.

  We met the Siena in Miami. Macs and Jimmies were there. Macs and Jimmies were hard to see. It was an art. Their art. When we went ashore, they were there, somewhere there. We knew that. They were the hard-men. Mr Munroe only employed hard-men. These were the hardest he had.

  This was my first experience of luxury. There was no luxury in my childhood.

  Life with Father was austere and violent. Holidays with Mother were cold and hilly. Fly-fishermen climbed, waded, and threw a thousand casts a day. Fly-fishermen were fit.

  The only luxury I knew was a week in Florence. A week with Mother. Luxury and beautiful things. Luxury at the end of days. Luxury lying next to Mother. Holding Mother in the big, soft bed. Holding Mother tight. Holding her by open windows. Holding her on warm Florentine nights. Holding her because I loved her. Holding her before she died.

  The Siena was luxury. She was long. She was beautiful. She was fun. If we wanted oysters at midnight, we got them. If we wanted to dive, we dove. If we wanted lobster for lunch, then we could. So we did.

  The lobster came with Mad Fish. It was my favourite wine. I knew I married the right woman. I looked at her. She laughed.

  “Mumm too?”

  “Thine every wish dread sovereign.”

  We first drank Mad Fish at lunch with her friends. The fateful lunch in Manly. The lunch after she said she didn’t love me. Said she would never love me. She said she didn’t love me, but wanted something living of me inside her. So I put something living of me inside her. Then she cried and said ‘fuck’. Said it a lot. It was then that I thought she might be in love with me. Then she told me again that she wasn’t, that she never would be. It was a lie. A lie to me. A lie to both of us. A bigger lie to herself.

  A lot of things happened after that. After she told me she didn’t love me, could never love me. Bad things happened after that, good things happened too. Life happened after that.

  I still drink Mad Fish. It’s ‘clean’.

  Eleven

  I hadn’t seen my Dada for three years. It was a shock to me when I did, because he’d grown so old, and I think, when Mama died, a part of him died too. That probably happens to a lot of people, when they have been in love for a long time, and then one of them dies. I think the one who dies first is the lucky one. The one who doesn’t die first suffers until they die too. That is only if they were in love. Some people are happy when their ‘loved one’ dies. Then they are the lucky ones, but they are the unlucky ones too, because they never knew what love was in the first place. Only lucky people become unlucky people when their ‘loved one’ dies. So, everyone’s unlucky in one way or the other. The unluckiest person is the one who doesn’t love their ‘loved one’ and then dies first.

  I think I’m lucky. I have four people I love and I have four people who love me too.

  It was good to see Dada, and it was good to see my brothers. Adam was my oldest brother and he had gone to study in Kingston. Adam was going to make something of himself and wasn’t going to work ‘on-the-sugar’, not like the other boys. Adam was now the minister of our church, and was an important man. People from our church looked up to him, and that hadn’t been good for him, because being looked up to had made him proud and pompous. ‘Pompous’ was a word Annie taught me. She said it applied to a lot of people in Cambridge, people at the university.

  Adam wasn’t the loving brother he was when I was little. The one I looked up to most when I was growing up. I think it was because he disapproved of
me, and disapproved of how I lived my life, and what I’d done with Annie and Tom to have their babies.

  Alfred was my favourite brother, and always was. He was two years younger than Adam and only a year older than me.

  Arthur and Andrew worked ‘on-the-sugar’. They were lazy at school, because they knew where their future lay, and they saw no reason to work to get an education that would make no difference to their lives. I suppose I’d done the same thing.

  Not having an education didn’t make any difference to their lives ‘on-the-sugar’, but it did make them less than they could have been. They were shallower than they should have been, and the horizon they looked at was closer in than it should have been.

  When I went to live with Tom, during those bad times between him and Annie, my horizons weren’t far away either. Tom showed me all that. He educated me more in that year than all my school years ever did. He showed me distant mountains and far away stars. I came to know what I didn’t know, and then he taught me the things I didn’t know. I’m not the same person I was before I met him.

  Tom and Annie were good to Dada. He lived with his sister now and spent most of his time in an old armchair on the front porch looking out over the harbour. Tom sat next to him and they talked about cricket. Tom didn’t know much about cricket, but knew Dada was a fast bowler when he was young and had played for Antigua. He knew Curtly Ambrose was one of Dada’s friends, and it was how I got my name. I’d told him that.

  Annie told him about the three of us and about how the girls were made. She told him just as it was, and he accepted it just as it was. Dada was never a judgemental man, and of all my relatives, only Adam was judgemental, and Tom would say, ‘Nice people, Christians.’

  Everyone came on board for Christmas Day. I had a lot of relatives in ‘the Harbour’. Cousin Jared was still in Kingston. I rang him and asked him to come, but he couldn’t. I was disappointed. I wanted him to meet Tom and Annie, and I wanted them to meet him.

  I still had a lot of friends in ‘the Harbour’ and not many had ever left. Annie insisted I invite them for the day. I wanted everyone to know everything about me. Only, if they knew everything about me, could I be happy that I was happy with my life. I knew I was happy with my life, but I wanted all my family, and all my friends, to know I was too. I wished Melena didn’t die.

  The girls were the centre of attention. They always were. It’s almost impossible not to look at children when they are in the same room, especially little children, especially twins, especially twins with ginger hair, and especially twins with white skin and ginger hair, born to a woman as black as me.

  Everyone was back on shore by midnight. I stood at the rail with Tom and Annie and looked out over the harbour. It was a pretty sight, prettier than I could remember it being from my childhood. Most of the memories from my childhood made things out to be better than they really were, but not this one.

  I thanked Tom for having everyone on board for the day, and he said how much fun it had been.

  We watched as a beautiful yacht, almost as big as the Siena came gliding in from the sea. I felt Annie go stiff and I saw her turn and look at Tom.

  Twelve

  My name is Iain Munroe and I’m the youngest of the Guv’nor’s four sons. We all worked for the company and it was always expected that we would.

  After I’d worked with Mrs Laroche-Lodge on the security for the Caribbean trip, the Guv’nor had asked me to take over the ‘L-L File’. I knew he had a soft spot for the family, and I knew he was trusting me to look after them well. So when Tom rang me at home one night, I knew it would be about something important, and it was.

  He’d told me, before, that he wanted me to call him Tom. He’d said that being called ‘Mr Laroche-Lodge’, especially by someone older, made him feel uncomfortable. So I called him Tom, and he called me Iain. I felt the same as he did about being called ‘Mr Munroe’, because that was what people called the Guv’nor. So we used first names after that and I came to like him.

  After I talked to Tom, I talked to Mr James. He was the best man we had. That’s why I’d arranged for him to be on the Siena. Then I talked to Tom again.

  After he told me about what was happening in English Harbour, he told me about his meeting with Prouse the month before. We both knew he should have told me about that at the time, but I didn’t say so, because I didn’t need to. He knew I knew he should have told me, but there was no point in saying so. We talked for a long time about what was happening. We made plans for what he was going to do, but mostly, I suppose, they were plans about what he wasn’t going to do.

  I knew Tom liked making plans. I didn’t worry about his strengths. I knew he was strong and I knew his wife was too. Their strengths were wrought by Hephaestus in the fires of Nisyros. The Guv’nor told me that. He liked applying classical allusions to modern people, and he taught us all to like doing it too.

  Thirteen

  Was this how it was going to be? Was this what he meant by relative terms? Would the game never finish? Was it a game? If it was a game, what were the rules? How did you score? How did you win? What happened if you lost?

  I was a loser all my life, until I met Annie. After I met Annie, I knew I wasn’t a loser. Even after I lost her, I knew I wasn’t a loser. Perhaps I could be a winner.

  Prouse was a winner all his life. ‘The Melancholy business’ was his first loss. Losing Annie was his second loss. He thought they were just a blip in the story of his life. He knew he would be a winner again. He knew he would be one soon. He was in a hurry to be a winner again. Hurry might, one day, be his Achilles heel. I knew that. I knew he didn’t.

  Achilles’ mother was a water nymph of dubious moral standing, but who am I to judge? His father was a mortal guy who knocked her up. She was a bad mother. Not a Harlem gang type bad-mother, just a bad mother. She abandoned him. You know the story of that. About Chiron and the Styx, and how he didn’t get his left heel dipped.

  She abandoned him. Didn’t feed him. Didn’t breastfeed him.

  ‘Chellos’ is Greek for nipple. So, A-chellos, A-chilles, Achilles, never saw the nipple. I bet you didn’t know that.

  Prouse’s Achilles heel was his pride. We all know what that comes before. But would it?

  What should we do? Annie wanted to sail that night. To get as far away from the Esmeralda as we could. Iain thought we shouldn’t. After we talked, we thought we shouldn’t. Leaving would show fear. That was what we didn’t want. Leaving would show weakness. We didn’t want that either. We didn’t want to show those things, because we weren’t those things. We weren’t afraid and we weren’t weak. If Prouse thought we were afraid and weak, he would know he was a winner. He would never leave us alone, wherever we were. He found us in the Caribbean. He would find us anywhere. We stayed calm. We stayed outwardly calm.

  I sent an invitation. I invited him to lunch. He wouldn’t expect that. It would unsettle him. I hoped it would. I hoped it would do to him what I did to him before. The time we ate at his club. You may know about that already. The time he treated me like a child. The time he told me I was too young. Too young to know what I was doing. That the empire, my inheritance, was too big for me. That I needed him to manage it. That without him I would fail.

  It was the time I told him I had plans. The plans I made for the ‘G’. The time he wanted to know what they were. The time I wouldn’t tell him. The time I felt on top, for the first time in my life. The time I was on top, for the first time in my life. Until he sent Annie to destroy me.

  Now, again, I was going to win. As the Esmeralda slipped past us, I again decided to win. I didn’t want to win, I needed to win. I didn’t tell Annie that. I think she knew. She always knew what I was thinking. How do women do that? What is it about women?

  The Esmeralda moored close by. Mac took the launch. He took the invitation. He took a bottle of Mumm. We tied a ribbon round its neck. The invita
tion was for Prouse. It didn’t include the Major. If Prouse came, the Major would too. Prouse never went anywhere without him.

  I addressed the invitation ‘Dear Peter’. He wouldn’t like that. I knew that. He was once my guardian. I was once his ward. He wouldn’t like me calling him ‘Peter’. It would irritate him. I knew that. I thought I’d write ‘Pete’, but I didn’t. Then he would know I was trying to irritate him. So, ‘Peter’ was enough. I wanted to irritate him. I didn’t want to be obvious.

  I saw the Esmeralda glide in. I knew it was another game. A big game. Not the little game at his club. Not the game of relative terms. Another big Prouse game. A game with different rules? Different rules to the last big game? The big game I almost lost. Almost lost, but didn’t. Didn’t, and that’s why Annie was still alive.

  We didn’t know the rules of this game.

  Would calling him ‘Peter’ help? Would the niggle help? I thought it might. But would it? I wasn’t sure.

  I knew about rude people, from when I was young. There were a lot of rude people in my life, when I was young. So I learned how to deal with rude people. I learned to be polite. The more polite the better. I learned that. I learned how to deal with raping, crucifying, mutilating savages too. I learned to be civilised. The more civilised the better. I learned that too.

  I thought he might ignore me, but he didn’t. A reply came back. He would be honoured. It came with a bottle of Mad Fish. I was researched. My fifteen–love was now fifteen–all.

  Annie spent time getting ready. Getting her mind ready. I was proud of her. She was getting ready for the men who arranged all those things for her. To entertain the men who arranged all those things for her. The men who left her to die. And she would have died, if Hoppy and I didn’t happen along.