He shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you.’
‘If you can’t tell it then you shouldn’t do it,’ she told him stoically.
He stood up and took a step away to distance himself from her.
Springing up, she reached for his arm. ‘Please, Leo…’
She heard him sigh with exasperation before he said, ‘But it’s a secret!’
She crossed her arms. ‘If we are to be married then we cannot keep secrets from each other. Now, do you want to marry me or not?’
Leo rolled his eyes and groaned. ‘Okay, you win. You know how, over the years, my uncle has discovered lots of old shipwrecks from the days when ships used to sail past here filled with treasure…’
‘Yes,’ Isla said. ‘I hear that’s how he built his house on Mango Cay and bought his boat.’ She knew that the house on Mango Cay where Leo lived with Jack was almost as fine a house as her aunt’s and, at sixty-five feet long, the Poseidon was the largest fishing boat in the harbour. She prodded Leo’s bare broad chest with her finger. ‘Go on, tell me more. Has he found another wreck? Is that the secret? Come on, Leo, this is really exciting. You’ve got to tell me!’
He laughed and pulled her close so he could whisper the rest of the secret into her ear.
‘This time he thinks it might be Captain Henry Morgan’s lost treasure.’
Isla broke away from his arms to do a little dance of excitement on the sand and, just to be sure they were talking about the same lost treasure, she said, ‘Do you mean the two hundred thousand pieces of gold that are supposed to be buried somewhere on the island? He knows where it is?’
He pulled nervously at his goatee beard with his index finger and thumb. ‘Well, maybe it wasn’t buried. Maybe it was sunk off the reef,’ he suggested.
‘Will you be diving? Is it dangerous? Can I help? Can I come too?’ Her words came out in a rapid fire until Leo grasped her by the shoulders.
‘No, Isla. Because I’m not supposed to have told you about this. This is the first time Jack’s ever let me in on one of his salvage operations and he’s splitting the reward with me fifty-fifty. So, it has to be our secret!’
She shook herself from his grip and conceded. If they were salvaging for a reward then surely it had to be all right. ‘Okay. Now I understand the need for secrecy. But when will you do this?’
‘I shouldn’t be telling you this either… but if you promise not to repeat it?’
Isla nodded and crossed herself. ‘I promise not to tell a soul. On my life.’
Chapter Six
Isla – Present Day
Wearing cut-off denim shorts and a white linen shirt, Isla stared into the section of her aunt’s wardrobe where she had claimed just enough space to hang a few of her own things. On the rail, on silk padded hangers, were all her aunt’s gowns. All couture. All classics. Valentino and Oscar de la Renta in the exact red of her rubies. Lacroix and Missoni and Versace in the same shade as her emeralds. Shimmering Dior to compliment her diamonds and Chanel to wear with her pearls.
Isla felt a painful lump rise in her throat as she recalled her aunt wearing these gowns, always looking beautiful but entirely heartbroken as she stood on the porch alone every night at sundown.
She ran her hand over the stylish day dresses at the other end of the rail and pulled out a pale cream Halston wrap dress from the mid-1970s, which she held against her and checked out in the mirror. Two of her aunt’s lawyers were flying in from Grand Cayman and she planned to meet them at the airstrip at noon, so why hadn’t she thought to bring at least one sombre-looking outfit with her? The clothes she’d packed were all more suited to a walk on the beach rather than a reading of a Will. In the sharp morning light, she realised that she looked like a ghost, as the wrap dress was the same pale shade as her skin.
She glanced once again over to the photograph of her sixteen-year-old self on the bedside table and noted the healthy-looking tanned face, youthful frame, and her long sun-streaked blonde hair. Today she looked like an entirely different person.
She sighed despondently. Her hair was still long and blonde, although professionally streaked these days, and she was still slim and youthful, but her face had been transformed from one of naive innocence to cynical disillusionment so very soon after that photograph had been taken and the effect had obviously been lasting.
She put the cream dress back on its hanger and laid out one of her own instead.
To hell with sombre and pale.
Delicious wafts of food enticed Isla to the kitchen, where Grace was preparing breakfast. She realised she was feeling ravenous.
‘Good morning, Grace. I can’t believe I slept so long.’
Grace beamed a smile at her as she tossed sliced plantain around in a pan. ‘That’ll be the jet-lag I hear about.’
Isla sat on a chair at the kitchen table and took a sip of freshly squeezed orange juice to quench her dry mouth. As she did so, she felt something soft brushing up against her leg and heard a gentle purr. She lowered her head to peek under the table.
‘No… this can’t be? After ten years… this can’t be Hemingway, can it?’
She quickly counted the tabby cat’s mitten toes and, sure enough, there were six toes instead of five.
‘Oh, yes, he’s Hemingway all right, but the son of the Hemingway that you knew,’ Grace confirmed. ‘In fact, we have four cats on this island with six toes right now, all descended from the one cat that was gifted to your aunt by the great writer’s son. I remember he came to the island in 1983 and stayed several weeks.’ Grace went all misty eyed at the memory.
Isla kept quiet in case she wanted to share any more fascinating snippets from the good old days, but Grace quickly changed the subject.
‘Anyway, you are the talk of the island this morning. So many people remember you fondly and everyone is very happy that you’re back and that you are the new owner of Pearl Island. I’m sure Miss Kate is looking down from Heaven and feeling very proud of the lovely woman you have become, Miss Isla.’
A plate of food was slipped in front of her and the smell of fresh fruits and crispy bacon and plantain cooked in honey immediately took Isla back to her childhood.
It had always been Grace who had cooked her breakfast, washed her clothes, saw her to the school gate and picked her up again in the afternoon until she was old enough to cycle to and from the village school by herself. She’d been more of a mother to her than Aunt Kate Rocha ever had. Isla set back her chair and stood up to wrap her arms around the woman’s shoulders and hug her.
‘I’ve missed you, Grace.’
Grace let out a little sob and hugged Isla so tightly that she practically squeezed the breath out of her.
‘Oh, Miss Isla, I can’t tell you what a blessing it is that you are here. We can’t assume to know His plan but I always kept faith that one day you would come home.’
Then she wiped away the tears from her eyes with her apron and encouraged Isla to tuck into her food. Grace had always been a great believer in Him. Whereas Isla believed that if indeed there was a Heaven, then by default there must also be a Hell, and therefore her aunt was more likely to be looking up – with a cocktail in her hand, naturally.
After breakfast Isla walked through the garden to pick flowers to lay on her Aunt Kate’s grave. The morning sun, rising but still low in the bluest and clearest of skies, felt pleasant on her skin as its warm light filtered through the palm trees. The air around her smelled perfumed and fresh as she meandered along an overgrown winding path made of finely crushed white shells through what used to be the flower garden.
Her aunt and Grace had both been enthusiastic gardeners, but clearly as her aunt had become sick and Grace had become older, the untended garden had matured into something of a jungle of tropical flora and fauna. She continued walking to the furthest part of the garden, where all the plants had grown into each other and were competing for space and light. The putting green she remembered had completely disappeared and the swimming pool
was now stagnant and green with algae.
She reached out to pick maiden ferns and bougainvillea in many vibrant shades, while silently fluttering butterflies and tiny humming birds accompanied her. She carefully avoided the nightshade and itching vine, as from suppressed memory she remembered they were toxic. What a shame the garden was so neglected.
Then she remembered where she might have seen the airstrip attendant before. Hadn’t he once been her aunt’s gardener?
Back at the house Grace found a ribbon to tie around the flower stems. Then Isla set out for the church in the golf cart. She drove down the palm tree lined driveway and then took the sandy sun-baked track up to the church. The sun was climbing quickly and the heat already escalating rapidly. Perspiration ran in rivulets down her back. Her thin cotton sundress clung uncomfortably to her skin until she reached higher ground, where there was at least some relief from the humidity, as the sea breeze whipped away her hair from her neck and shoulders.
From here she could look down and see everything and nothing - the small green island beneath her through the tops of swaying palm trees and the empty horizon line that made this place look like it was the only place left on earth - an isolated paradise that could also be a hell depending on one’s perspective.
She drove slowly past The Rectory, as her Aunt Kate had always called the minister’s house. To Isla, it didn’t look anything like a rectory in the traditional sense. It was just a simple wooden shack with a rickety porch, bedecked with wind chimes and religious effigies that Minister John had carved himself from pieces of driftwood found on the beach.
But then Minister John wasn’t quite what you’d expect either. He was more of a religious hippy or a shaman than a man of the cloth. Isla remembered how, except for on a Sunday or a Holy Day when he wore a long white cassock. He was often seen walking around the island bare-chested, except for a large handcrafted wooden crucifix hanging around his neck and a colourful old tie-dye sarong loosely tied around his waist and flapping in the breeze.
Grace had said that John had arrived on the island in the mid-1980s with a backpack full of bibles and he’d never left. That her Aunt Kate had immediately befriended him and given him a place to live in return for overseeing the renovation of the old church and teaching her yoga and meditation.
Everyone on the island, even Grace, thought Minister John was wonderful.
Isla hadn’t ever felt the same way about him. She’d always thought he looked and smelled strange, even by island standards, with his straggly hair and his tobacco-stained beard, his spectacles balanced on his hook of a nose and his long, bony, half-naked body.
Grace had also said that when Minister John arrived on the island, her Aunt Kate had embraced religion for the first time and had relied heavily on John for her religious guidance. Isla remembered how, on her way home from school, she’d often seen her aunt sitting cross-legged on his porch, smoking a big pipe in a ritual that Aunt Kate claimed aided enlightenment.
Now, of course, she realised they had been smoking pot on the porch, which Minister John had likely cultivated himself in his ‘herb’ garden. And as for the ‘mindful meditation’ sessions he held each afternoon, Isla had always suspected they were just an excuse for Minister John and his band of zany followers to sit on his porch and fall asleep.
As she slowed the golf cart and peered through her sunshades at the lowly-looking shack, she saw someone resembling an old hippy peering out from the porch.
‘Isla? Is that you?’ he shouted out to her.
‘Yes, it’s me. How are you, Minister John?’
‘Oh, I’m doing fine. I’m missing Kate, of course, but I know she’s in a better place now. Would you like to come in out of the sun?’
Isla climbed out of the cart and followed him onto the porch. A multitude of wind chimes swaying in the breeze made a terrible racket. He gestured for her to sit on an old bench that had a split in the wood along the entire length of the seat. Isla sat down only to be pinched painfully on the bottom, not by Minister John, but by his bench. Her squeal of pain was drowned out by the wind chimes. He disappeared, muttering something about hospitality, only to reappear moments later with two glass jam jars filled with cold limeade.
‘Cheers’ he said, and they clinked glasses. ‘It’s so good to see you again, Isla. You look very well.’
‘You do too,’ she said. ‘I swear you haven’t aged a day.’
Seriously, he did look exactly as she remembered him.
He laughed and recited a quote about ‘time wounds all heels’.
‘Buddha?’ she asked.
‘John Lennon,’ he replied.
She slugged back the limeade, which felt wonderfully cool washing over her parched throat, and explained how she was heading up to the church to lay flowers on her aunt’s grave.
He smiled at her reverently. ‘Then you go ahead. I’ll see you up at the house later this afternoon. I’ve been told that dear Kate, in her eternal kindness, has blessed me by including me in her last wishes.’
Isla tried to hide her surprise. ‘Oh, right. Yes… then I’ll see you later.’
Her surprise was not in that her aunt had left something to one of her best friends, but because she had been told by Mark King that she was to inherit her aunt’s estate in its entirety. She recalled his exact words to her: ‘Pearl Island, including all the properties and businesses thereon.’
She couldn’t help but wonder what Minister John was to receive?
When she reached the church, Isla sat in the cart for a moment or two to catch some air and to look about her. The view was spectacular. The Caribbean Sea, calm and shimmering, lay all around her not as a flat line but as a circle of three hundred and sixty degrees. Isla shaded her eyes and gazed into a myriad of blues. At the far-off line of cobalt blue, then where the colour of the sea became a lighter azure blue, and then eventually aqua blue where it washed over the reef.
Below her ripples of clear water kissed the soft white sand beach, which curved gently around the bay fringed with swaying palm trees, until it reached the headland and Mango Cay. Then looking up at the old church, a whitewashed wood and stone building, she found comfort in the familiar sight of the still slightly bent spire that she knew had stood defiantly against everything Mother Nature could have thrown at it for over fifty years. Isla realised that the graveyard was well attended for a tiny island, as there were lots of headstones laid out in neat rows, marking previous islanders’ graves.
Grace had said there was no headstone yet to mark her Aunt Kate’s grave, so she stepped out of the cart and followed a meticulously clipped grassy pathway until the grave was easily spotted for all the flowers that lay there. She steeled herself to approach the grave and lay her own offering. She wasn’t a religious person, yet here, in the quiet stillness of a sunny, breezy and fragrant spot on a tiny island in a vast sea, she felt something other-worldly around her.
‘Rest in peace, Aunt Kate,’ she whispered to the ground and to the flowers quivering in the breeze. ‘I don’t hate you anymore. I haven’t for a long while. I just hope you have long forgiven me.’ Tears were falling now and her words came out as whispered sobs. ‘I’ve come back here just like you wanted but I can’t stay. To be honest, I don’t really understand why you left the island to me when you could have left it to Grace or Minister John or even the Hemingway cats.’
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, straightened her back, and raised her chin.
This was ridiculous! She didn’t believe in life after death, so she was basically talking to herself.
Rather than go straight back to the house, she drove further along the coast road. She remembered how the road dropped steeply downhill towards the small village where the main population of Pearl Island lived. As the village came into view, she realised from a westerner’s perspective, it looked like a shanty-town of dilapidated shacks.
But Isla had never seen it that way. It was true that the villagers lived in modest homes and that the
y washed both themselves, their children, and their clothes, in a bucket outside and they cooked in an old oil drum that had been cut in half and made into a grill. But in Isla’s experience, everyone had always looked clean and happy and there was always plenty of food to eat, because there was fish in the sea, fruit on the trees, and a zillion amazing things that could be done with coconuts.
This was a place where poor people lived rich lives. Where goats and pigs and cockerels and hens scratched around as free range as the children. Where people smiled, not because they had lots of stuff around them, but because they were surrounded by a tribe of close family and a supportive community of caring neighbours.
In contrast to her aunt’s grand house, village homes were tiny and packed together. They often had just one room where many slept on a mattress on the floor. The roof over their heads would typically be made of corrugated tin or palm thatch, so it could be easily fixed if it sprung a leak or be replaced if the whole thing blew off, which would invariably happen at least once in the hurricane season.
From her viewpoint today, she could see that the village was still noisy and vibrant and busy. Children were playing games of their own making and imagination, while their mothers mixed flour and baking powder and salt into a dough to cook on the griddle to make a constant and delicious supply of balleadas, a flatbread stuffed with protein packed mashed red beans; a delicious and staple part of any Caribbean diet. Girls were doing laundry in the sunshine while laughing and gossiping together over their washing lines. Boys were mending fishing nets. Old men were sat on upturned lobster pots in the middle of the sandy street playing dominos and drinking Flor de Cana rum.
Seeing life being lived so simply, had the effect of making her feel shamefully aware of how much she had changed since leaving Pearl Island, in the respect of how important material things had become to her. She thought of her spacious town house in Edinburgh and also weighed up the size of her mortgage. She considered her top of the range car and her need of it. She thought of her wardrobe of expensive clothes and all the shoes she owned and suddenly it all seemed unreasonable and extravagant.
Island in the Sun Page 4