A View of the Empire at Sunset

by Caryl Phillips

  By mid-morning even the horses were finding it difficult to keep their footing on the narrow track. Leslie’s mare was clearly the less robust of the two animals, and one foot was unshod, which caused the horse to occasionally stumble in an often alarming fashion. The intermittent rain only added to the misery of this steep ascent through dense, untamed foliage, which their barefoot guide had to regularly take his cutlass to. Thirty or so years ago she remembered making the journey by taking a precipitous mossy path which wound its way skywards beneath a sometime impenetrable thatch of overhanging trees. Light slanted down through the canopy and speckled the ground across which she and her siblings walked, and although these childhood journeys from Roseau to the Geneva estate were always a little arduous, they were also times of great joy and happiness, particularly for herself and Owen. What, she wondered as they continued to slip and slide, had happened to the stamped-in path? How could nature have triumphed so completely, and in such a short space of time?

  “Mistress need to rest?”

  The gap-toothed guide wiped some sweat from his brow with the tail of his soiled shirt, but she looked down at him and shook her head, insisting that they press on. As they did so, they approached a particularly wooded section of the meandering track where on the ground they were forced to negotiate huge gnarly tree roots, while overhead they were effectively roofed in by a dense forest. Entering a shaded region was like being doused by a waterfall, however, and she was happy for the welcome respite from the brutal heat.

  * * *

  “For Christ’s sake, Leslie, put away the blasted camera. I can’t bear to watch you taking any more photographs. And what exactly is it that you think you’re capturing?”

  She was sitting in a canvas chair that a porter had placed beneath a pair of soaring palms that she remembered from her childhood. The guide and a second porter squatted some way off, preparing lunch, but she had long ago lost her appetite. A remorseful Leslie sat down in the chair next to her own.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cause offence. I just thought that we should have some evidence of the place.”

  She said nothing, but used her arm to shade her eyes as Leslie removed his straw hat and began to fan his blotchy face.

  “It’s a damn fine view from up here, you can’t argue with that.” He pointed down into the valley below. “Are those the plantation works? Good Lord, you can see everything from up here.”

  Her mother used to boast that her family’s Geneva estate covered nearly two thousand acres, and she would always insist that it was a place of great happiness for everybody. But if this was true, why had these ungrateful Negroes burned it down?

  Leslie quickly lifted the binoculars from around his neck and stood and trained his gaze on a parrot that had alighted some distance off, but whose mournful call split the silence.

  “My God, she’s a beauty. Would you like to take a look?”

  He began to strip the binoculars from his neck, but she held up her hand.

  “Why don’t they like us?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  She glowered at her husband, whose furrowed brow suggested that he had absolutely no idea of what she was talking about.

  “It doesn’t matter, Leslie.”

  She surveyed Martinique, which shimmered and seemed to hover somewhat magically on the horizon. Above the island she could make out the ghostly outline of a rainbow, one foot of which was dipped into the sea, whose face was blemished by the dark shadows of languid clouds. Then she looked again at the burned-out, discarded ruin of her mother’s family estate house. Indeed, once upon a time she had been happy here. And now this. As the Negro guide moved towards them with a cleaved coconut in each hand, she decided that she would go for a walk by herself and leave it to Leslie to explain that she no longer possessed an appetite for either coconut water or food.

  62

  Through the Saloon Doors

  She sat on the side of the bed and continued to stare at her husband. Leslie was leaning against the wall to the side of the slightly ajar French windows, which gave out onto a small Juliet balcony, and he was looking down onto the inadequately illuminated streets of Roseau. The distant rumble of thunder heralded what was to come, but Leslie showed no inclination to close the windows and turn his attention to the bedroom, where the occasional beetle or moth was now making a practice of crashing into the naked lightbulb and creating a commotion out of all proportion to its size. An hour ago, to the dismay of her husband, she had finally settled Owen’s affairs for him, and so, after the disappointment of the expedition to the Geneva estate, and the tension of this recent encounter with Owen’s descendants, they were both now eager to leave Roseau. As a consequence, they had agreed that tonight would be their last evening in the capital before undertaking the journey to the north of the island, where they intended to spend the remainder of their time reading and relaxing in a small house that had been made available to them by friends of her mother’s family.

  She had asked Owen’s daughter to meet her in the shabby and neglected bar of the Paz Hotel, which, when they arrived on the island, she had been reliably informed was these days considered a more acceptable option than the increasingly louche Cherry Lodge. A thin layer of dust coated the rows of sunlit bottles that decorated the shelves behind the bar. Leslie ordered a cold beer, while she asked for a rum and lime juice, and she watched closely to make sure that the young Negress mixed it with care. The bar was empty aside from a pair of rotund Syrian merchants in the far corner, whose cigarette tips glowed in the gloom, and then, safely tucked between forefinger and thumb, the red tips swooped as the men reached down to pick up their glasses of whisky. As she and Leslie carried their drinks to a table, she looked at the sad and fading photographs which decorated the walls, and the bunches of croton that had been stuffed into bowls that were randomly scattered on tabletops, and strangest of all, a bamboo birdcage but no bird, and she understood that this would be her one and only visit to this bar. They took up two seats beneath a nonchalantly turning fan, which gave off eddies of draughty air and immediately caused her to shiver. Before touching his beer, Leslie began to apply some colourless ointment to his lips, for the intrusive sun had caused them to begin cracking like paint and he had shared with her his worries that they might blister. Eventually the saloon-style doors slowly swung open and an attractive mulatto woman, followed by a bemused, fleshy teenage girl and a painfully thin young man, straggled their way into the bar. She smiled at them, but they seemed nervous, and so she raised a friendly hand and watched as they threaded their way towards her table. Once they stood before her, she was able to see that, although they possessed the nose and mouth of the Negro, their bright eyes and hair clearly belonged to her family. Leslie stood and offered his hand, which they each shook limply, and then he encouraged the family members to sit and he asked them what they would like to drink. The mulatto woman ignored the Englishman and addressed her relative. “Aunty, we taking soft,” she whispered, apparently speaking for them all.

  Finally the storm broke and the first torrents of rain began to pelt against the galvanized roof with double-barrelled accuracy, and this sudden downpour created a turbulence with which she was familiar. Her husband closed the French windows and came and sat on his bed and looked across at her.

  “I’m sorry, Gwen, but it’s difficult for me to watch people take advantage of you.”

  “Nobody took advantage of me. Owen will reimburse your money.”

  “But, Gwen, Owen has no money. And I simply don’t understand how you can be so accommodating. After all, these people just sat there with their paws out as though you owed them something.”

  “We do owe them something.”

  “They are Owen’s bastard issue, let him pay for them.” He paused and crossed and then uncrossed his legs. “I’m sorry, but there’s a distinct whiff of impropriety about this whole matter. Your brother should be man enough to take responsibility for the mistakes of his youth.”

&nb
sp; She scrutinized her husband and could see frustration giving way to anger, and so she reached out and placed a hand on his knee. She wanted Leslie to see her world, but it was already evident that the more her husband saw, the less he understood.

  “Thank you,” she said. Leslie looked quizzically at her. “For treating them with the greatest consideration.”

  “Is it the heat, Gwen, that causes this breakdown of order? Is this Owen’s excuse?”

  She said nothing as a pink-faced Leslie once again stood up and crossed to the window. Lost in his own thoughts, he stared out into the darkness as the thunderstorm reached its furious climax and a thousand gutters began to sputter thick cords of water down into the empty streets. She decided to begin preparing herself for bed, knowing full well that her stricken husband would make his own arrangements once the turmoil in his mind abated.

  63

  A View of the Empire at Sunset

  “The way you were going on, anybody would think you’d won the bloody Victoria Cross.”

  Leslie put down his glass and stood up. As he turned to face her she could see that her ungenerous comment had struck home.

  “I think it best that I go for a short walk.”

  Leslie picked up his straw hat, and for a moment her husband hesitated as though he might sit back down, but he decided to remain standing.

  “Listen, Gwen, I know that today’s events have upset you, but why take it out on me? Ever since we came to this place you’ve done little but snipe, and it’s as though you’re deliberately trying to make my life miserable.”

  She ignored him.

  “Well, are you?”

  Leaving Roseau for the north of the island and a few weeks’ seclusion at this rundown estate house was supposed to offer them both the opportunity to read and relax and forget the various frustrations that had marred their disheartening stay in the capital. The additional bonus was that Leslie would no longer have to suffer the confusion of daily interaction with West Indian society, which he evidently found disenchanting and perplexing in equal part. The four-hour steamer journey from Roseau to Portsmouth had been difficult for them both, for they had been forced to share the unsophisticated accommodation aboard the small vessel with various animals and a dangerously excessive number of country Negroes. Thereafter, a car had transported them across the top of the island to the Atlantic coast, but the small estate house at Hampstead had been closed and shuttered for over a year and the servant had opened up the place only on the morning of their arrival. Nearly a week passed before the unpleasant smell and dampness left the premises, but this had entailed sleeping with the windows open and hoping that the ancient mosquito netting would prove to be a sufficiently effective deterrent which, predictably enough, it had not.

  “Well,” said an exasperated Leslie as he placed the straw hat on his head, “I do hope that you will be in better spirits when I return.”

  She watched her husband saunter his way around two large curved flowerpots, then step down off the veranda. She snatched up the bottle of cane rum and emptied the last drops into her tumbler, and then she hurled the heavy vessel in Leslie’s direction and saw it flash by his head and crash into the bushes with an impatient thump, but they were both spared the drama of the bottle shattering. Her husband stopped as though gathering himself to turn and say something to her. “Go on, say it. You and your bloody senseless prudence.” She stared as Leslie slowly plucked a handkerchief from the pocket of his flannels and painstakingly mopped his brow. Then he simply pushed the handkerchief back into his pocket and decided to continue to walk down the grassy hill towards the small strip of white sand beach.

  When they received the second invitation to lunch, it was her husband who took the position that it would be rude to make up yet another excuse. He insisted that claiming to be fatigued was all well and good, but after two weeks in residence the Napiers would be cognizant of the fact that they were now rested and established on the estate. Leslie continued and reminded her that these neighbours were friends of her mother’s family, and it was her mother’s relatives who had kindly allowed them to make use of this Hampstead property, and so she reluctantly conceded. The Napiers sent their car and driver to collect their lunch guests, and after some twenty minutes of twisting and climbing, with the driver giving out occasional blasts of the horn to scatter the Negro children wandering by the roadside, and then pumping furiously on the brakes as they made sudden and treacherous descents, they were deposited at Pointe Baptiste and welcomed by their elegant hostess and her dapper husband.

  The woman’s hair was drawn back into a tight short ponytail, which suggested a severity that their hostess tried a little too hard to dispel with her overfriendly aspect. However, from the start this Mrs. Napier seemed interested only in Leslie, and once the woman discovered his connection to the London publishing world, she turned her whole body in Leslie’s direction and fired off a volley of questions which seemed designed to offer him the opportunity of introducing her name into future exchanges with his colleagues. Or so it seemed to her as she tried to keep up with the gushing autobiographical surge of this Mrs. Napier’s prattle, while half-listening to the low drone of complaints that Mr. Napier seemed determined to share with her on the subject of garden management in the tropics. (“It’s a devil of a task, but one mustn’t shirk.”) Lunch was edible, if simple, and comprised of yams, plantains, and unboned fish, followed by oranges and soursops, after which they retired to the veranda, where Mr. Napier, apparently sensing her discomfort with his conversation, seized her husband’s attention and took it upon himself to mention his wartime service in the Royal Canadian Forces. She looked on as the strange man disappeared inside the house and emerged clutching a box of medals which he and Leslie began to finger like a pair of giddy schoolboys. This gave Mrs. Napier the opportunity to enlighten her female guest on developments on the island during the few years that she had been a resident, and share with her the many suggestions she had as to how things might well be improved if only these Dominican people would make the effort to find a way to work together.

  She and her husband said little to each other as they were chauffeured back to Hampstead, aware that the driver worked for their hosts. But once the car backed its way out of the long driveway that was fringed on both sides by wild limes, she asked Leslie to send Fredrica, the servant, home for the day. Thereafter, she took up a seat on the veranda and stared intently out to sea. Her husband stepped out from the house with a bottle of rum and two glasses and sat down beside her. He poured the rum and handed her a glass.

  “Well, my dear, at least that’s done and out of the way. To be honest, I thought it was going to be more of an ordeal.”

  Leslie continued, and she listened as her husband praised the Napiers’ hospitality, but she said nothing and poured herself another drink, and then another, and eventually Leslie stopped speaking. He turned to face her.

  “Listen, Gwen, did I do or say something to offend you?”

  * * *

  As daylight started to ebb and the hummingbirds began to dart from one upturned bell to another in a beating hurry to drink the last beads of nectar before dark, she rose unsteadily from her chair and stumbled off in search of her husband. After a few minutes she discovered Leslie settled on a scrap of pasture that sat just above the modest expanse of beach. He was gazing at the Atlantic breakers, seemingly unconcerned that to his left three small goats that had been tethered by Fredrica’s husband were busily chewing the wispy, poverty-stricken grass that had been distressed by drought and making their way ever closer towards him.

  “Well, are you coming back to the house, or do you intend to sleep out here under the stars?” Leslie looked up, and she saw the sadness etched on her husband’s face. “I’m sorry, Leslie, but these vile people won’t do. They simply traipse around the empire talking about themselves. I know the type, but you don’t. You’re far too easily taken in by such idiots and their fictional stories of wartime heroics.”

&n
bsp; “That’s enough, Gwen. You’re being unfair.”

  “Am I? Unlike you I have no faith in the civilizing power of the English.”

  “Please, Gwen, no more.”

  “What the hell do you mean, ‘no more’?” She stared angrily at him. “In a short while we’ll return to Roseau and then depart for England and leave behind this place. Has it even occurred to you to ask yourself what this has all been about? For me, that is?” She waited. “Well, has this thought even crossed your mind?”

  It was beginning to get dark now, and out at sea the wind was kicking up a fuss and causing the waves to curl and crash with increasing ferocity. They had no electricity at the house, and having dismissed the servant, they would have to light the lamps themselves. What had it all been about? They had visited places from her childhood. They had seen Owen’s family. They had consulted with the staff at the hotel. They had travelled from one end of the island to the other. They had made small talk with the servant Fredrica and her husband. They had swum in the river by the semi-abandoned plantation works. At various times they had sat and looked at the French islands to both the north and the south. They had enjoyed freshly squeezed limes in their drinks. But never once had Leslie spoken to her about her home without some thinly veiled sense of disquiet on his part. Until today, that is. I thought it was going to be more of an ordeal. The Napiers were his type of people, cocooning themselves in smug shaded silence while their blissful days of blistering heat slid by, their peace only punctuated by imagined distant drumming or the whispered hush of trees as the wind suddenly rises, and come sunset, these people surface and begin to recite their litany of complaints about the difficulties of living “Behind God’s Back,” only bothering to display joyful animation when the subject of England is raised. “Tell me about everyone.” Father was right, these people were not acceptable, and because she could see that they were now plentiful on her island she would have to go. She couldn’t possibly stay. It would have to be England again. But perhaps she ought to explain all of this to Leslie?