People liked Celia, they had no wish to wound her. But she had another arrogance, you see, my dear Mrs. Livingston, although she did not see it as such. I may have mentioned before that she was extraordinarily proud of her swimming. She was not a large woman, but her shoulders were wide and muscular, her arms long. She once told me that when her strokes had found their rhythm, there was no effort and no pain. She felt she could go on forever. Her strokes were powerful enough that both my husband and Cyril, after repeated failures, declined to race her anymore. And she was courageous too, going far out, beyond the breakers. I remember Cyril standing at the shore following her progress through binoculars, her arms like white wings flashing, creating hardly a splash as they cut through the green water.
Many thought that she was showing off, but the truth is that Celia believed she was being like us — being an islander, that is. Islanders, she assumed, were swimmers, we had to be, you see. She somehow, or perhaps conveniently, forgot that England too was an island, and that swimming has never been among the qualities for which Englishmen were admired.
And this was why people chose to belittle her afterwards, I’ve always believed. It was not so much because of the leaves. It was, rather, because of her inability to see …
Excuse me for a moment, my dear, I seem to have something in my eye. Now where have I put my purse? Ahh, here it is …
Yes, Yasmin says the same thing. She too thinks me old-fashioned, but I do prefer my hanky. You cannot perfume a paper napkin, after all. Now if you’ll excuse me for just a moment …
7
THE ROUTE TAKES them along the coast for a while, the road rising and dipping — glimpses of cliff walls, the sea mottled in a zebra pattern of blue and bottle green — until it bends inland and begins a steady rise into the hills.
In the silence, Yasmin becomes aware of the sounds of movement: the wind whispering in through the open windows; the murmuring engine, the tires searing along the asphalt. Since entering the car Cyril has said nothing beyond, “We going to the north coast.”
Knowing this, though, is of no help to Yasmin. Her sense of direction, usually dependable, is scrambled. Every corner, every twist and turn serves only to confuse her more. She has no idea where they are going — but she is with Cyril, and so she knows she is safe.
Presently the road narrows, no longer following the contour of the land, but cutting its way through walls of rocky, reddish earth that enclose it on either side.
Soon the banks of earth give way to vegetation that is thicker, less delicate, with eruptions of dense bamboo and formidable trees, thick-leaved and braided with lianas. The forest floor is an unkempt embroidery of twigs, trunks and branches, the earth dark and wet — and, beyond a few feet, mysterious with darkness. Yasmin sees giant ferns, and shades of green defiant in their subtlety.
Cyril points out a poinsettia, a splash of red in the emerald gloom. The flower changes colour every six months, he says. Then, with a light laugh: “Women says it’s got the character of a man. Inconstant, nuh.”
Branches overhead reach across the road, blocking out the sun. The air turns cool, and a rain so fine it is like thick mist forces them to turn the windows up.
A tropical land — but Yasmin shivers.
Cyril turns on the windshield wipers, and Yasmin’s heart begins to pound when she sees, in the gloom not far ahead, that the road comes to an end — not petering out, but an abrupt termination. She sees a rigidity of blackened tree trunks, and a shower of heart-shaped leaves as large as broadsheets. “What is this?” she says, her throat tight with tension.
“We almost out,” Cyril says. “This is the summit. Not much of a view, I know, but that going to improve. We’ll be heading down to the coast in a minute or so.”
Her tension swiftly recedes. The road does not end — it was an illusion of the forest and the light. She regrets her fear and the rush of distrust — wants to apologize, but restrains herself. Cyril has apparently not noticed. An apology would require an explanation — and that would cause him unnecessary pain.
She is still making an effort to force her body to relax when, as they round the unseen corner that has betrayed her to herself, the forest falls away and she is momentarily blinded by the sunlight.
The descent to the coast is swift, the road less winding, the vegetation less thick.
It must have something to do with the breeze off the sea, Cyril says — a breeze which, with the windows rolled down again, is constant and warm and thick with salt.
And with the sun too, he adds. The sun which scorches the earth, drying it out and turning the forest friendly.
Yasmin says, “It’s like a different world.”
Cyril nods. “We’re a small place, but the land reaches very high. And you never know what you going to find around any corner.”
The slope grows shallow, the air heated as the sea breeze falls off. A wide bay comes into view, the water whitish in the distance. It is defined by a flat green peninsula on the left, and a loaf of rugged cliffs much farther off to the right.
The road flattens out, the view is lost, and there is the sense now of a narrow coast: grassy fields ending in foothills on one side, on the other palm trees, sand, and the endless water, now an iridescent blue.
Yasmin says, “What’s the real colour of water? Sometimes it’s white, sometimes green, sometimes blue, sometimes all three.”
“The water?” Cyril says. “Water has no colour. You know that, Yasmin.”
8
IF SHE SQUINTS, she could be witnessing the lumbering of giants, light scattering among their tall and slender shapes.
Cyril says, unexpectedly, “He said to me once, ‘You realize Lenin’s real name was Ulyanov, Stalin was Dzugashvili, even Molotov was really Skryabin. Aliases belong to revolutionaries, movie stars, writers and criminals. Nobody can ever really know them.’
“And I was puzzle at the time to see that he seemed to envy them. Strange, eh? Puzzle me still.
“But you know, he felt that politicians should cultivate what he use to call humorous vagueness. On one level, say nothing but make them laugh. On another, reveal nothing but be hail-fellow-well-met. Humorous vagueness. You getting my drift? Of course some people criticize him for taking it to extremes, but you know, Yasmin, dear — how he couldn’t?”
Yasmin thinks: This is all practised, these are things he has said to himself, and probably to others, many times. She says, “I thought palm trees grew wild. They all seem to be in rows.”
“They are. They were planted. Long time ago. All this is a coconut-tree plantation. Is only from a distance they look as if they growing every which way.”
She decides she prefers the distant view, focuses on the light between the rows. She sees surf, rolling and tumbling, and beyond it the oily wavering of a horizon growing choppy.
He says, “Nobody ever understood Ram, you know.”
Yasmin relents. “Did you, Cyril?”
He doesn’t take his eyes from the road. “I said, nobody.”
9
YOU ONCE ASKED me, my dear Mrs. Livingston, if I intended ever to return to my island. Do you remember that? One is often asked that question here, particularly by those like yourself, who were born and raised in this country. As if you cannot quite believe that this country is worthy of a greater loyalty from those born elsewhere. Or perhaps, as if you cannot quite believe in the reality of the country and, so, of yourself. Does that sound harsh? I suppose it does, doesn’t it …
I was rather short with you, as I recall. No, I said, with no further explanation. I saw that I had hurt you, but that the moment had passed for pursuing the matter. I resolved to find an opportunity to explain myself more fully. That opportunity never came, and so I will create it now.
I have told you about my brother-in-law, Cyril, and his wife, Celia. I have told you about my close yet somewhat problematic relationship with Celia, and I have told you about the difficult situation in which Cyril found himself having returned
to the island from England with no achievement to his name.
What I have not told you is that through everything, Celia and Cyril continued to love each other. A love that was far more tactile than that between my husband and myself. He would take her hand, she would rub his back and shoulders. They were, I think, a happy couple — happy to be in each other’s company. I could not begin to tell you what they spoke about in the intimacy of their room, but one had the impression that they spoke, and of much besides politics. In company, they paid attention to each other, approved each other’s words and ideas.
But I know that Celia feared for their future. Cyril was drifting, so different, she once told me, from the eager law student she had met. He had dreamt of qualifying and returning to the island to work with his brother, to realize the dreams they shared. Then he had changed his mind and dreamt of a quiet practice in England. And now here he was, working for his brother, a hop-to-it man with no dreams of his own. And that was putting it kindly, for among my husband’s people Cyril was known as the useless man.
She was galled when they began referring to him as the Manager. She knew what he did, knew the title was empty. She knew that, in their eyes, his thoughtfulness, his gentleness, counted for nothing. And the attention he paid to Celia earned him, in that world of ambitious men, an unshakable derision. It was not lost on Celia that any future they might have was entirely dependent on my husband.
As time went along, as Cyril’s status remained on the shelf, as it were, it all began to take its toll on Celia. I saw the effects. You saw that there was no tension to her hand in his, that there was a listlessness in her fingers. The back rubs she gave him he now had to ask for, and she would perform them with an abstracted expression that revealed the great distance between her thoughts and her touch.
And there came a day when I realized they no longer touched each other. The same day that Celia said to me, with great seriousness, that her brother was calling her home.
10
THEY CROSS A small bridge, of iron painted silver and floored with wooden slats that clack under the tires.
Just beyond the end of the bridge, Cyril pulls off the road and parks on the narrow verge. They get out and he leads her back to the middle, through a silence absolute save for the distant buzz of a cricket. The water appears unmoving, as still as a lake.
Cyril says that the river, channelled in a valley between two low hills, begins in the mountains — he once saw it many years ago, raging down along a bed of stones — and that it ends here, wide and placid.
Yasmin thinks: the colour of rust. But then, she reminds herself, water has no colour.
He points out that the tide is low. Off in the distance, the river dwindles to a narrow stream that cuts through the beach sand to the sea.
“It looking quiet and harmless now,” he says. “But come high tide, is a different story. The sea overflows the beach, opening up the channel. So you have sea water rushing in and river water rushing out. You can imagine. A different story.”
He leads her back to the car. “This is where Columbus never came ashore,” he says. “So they named it Columbus Landing. Ram always thought there should be a question mark at the end of the name. But, you know, we in this place never let the facts get in the way.”
He stands for a moment, looking around, sniffing the air. “Hasn’t changed much over the years,” he says with some surprise. “We use to come here all the time when we were young. We use to fish from the bridge. Ram took his fishing very seriously — did you know that? Anybody even so much as whisper, he’d say, ‘Shhh! The fish have ears.’” He motions her into the car. “Let’s see if the path’s still there.”
He drives slowly ahead, eyes peering at the trees and vegetation lining the road. After a few minutes he says, “It wasn’t this far. We must’ve missed it.” He turns the car around, and not a minute later gives a little exclamation of triumph. “There it is!” he says, pointing.
Yasmin is skeptical. She sees nothing more than a thinning of the vegetation between two large trees.
But Cyril presses ahead, easing the car between the trees, and at last, in the twilight, she discerns the beaten earth of a very old passage. It is overgrown, no vehicle has passed here in a long time. But the car moves easily ahead, clearing the brush before it.
11
THESE THINGS HAPPEN very quickly, don’t they, my dear Mrs. Livingston? Fundamental change in people close to us — and what’s insidious is that change of this nature occurs so deep within the person, we’re unaware of its presence until it’s taken hold.
Seemingly from one day to the next, Celia withdrew into herself. She rose late, taking breakfast — usually just tea and fried bread — all by herself on the porch. I tried talking with her — small talk, nothing grand — but she remained unresponsive, and I remember standing in the doorway, looking at her, and being struck by the thought that she seemed somehow to have shrunk — into herself, I mean. Physically.
She became irritable, particularly with Cyril. He himself, it must be said, had begun retreating into a smaller world, whether from a full understanding of his situation or in reaction to Celia’s own retreat I cannot say. But now, when they spoke even of the simplest things, their conversation was riddled with disagreement, misunderstanding and, worst of all, disapproval.
One morning she looked at him and said, “You aren’t going to wear that tie, are you?” But of course he was standing there, arms full of my husband’s papers, that tie knotted around his neck. More than making him look foolish, she made him feel foolish, which I suppose was the point, and he replied like a foolish man. He said, “I guess not,” and immediately put my husband’s things down to go change the tie. But Celia pursued him. “So why did you put it on, Cyril? You know how ugly it is.” He had no real explanation. He said he had put it on without thinking, which confirmed her suspicion he had put it on merely to annoy her.
It was horrible to watch — and watch we all did, for they exercised no discretion. Just as they had made no secret of their affection, so they made no secret of their disaffection.
When Cyril was not there, Celia would sit by herself in the porch or under a tree out back, engrossed in a world far from the one she inhabited. A distance difficult to gauge for she now kept silent about the travels of her mind.
I tried talking to her once, hoping for the kind of confidence we once shared. Foolishly perhaps, I remarked that she seemed unhappy. Only people in search of companionship enjoy having their unhappiness noticed. Those, like Celia, who want solitude resent it.
A quick coldness came to her. She said, “Yes, well …” and turned away.
In the coming days, Cyril began to see that she could not be mollified. I watched as he gave up on excusing or explaining himself. Any word beyond a simple acceptance of what she said would infuriate her. She saw it as talking back to her, and that was a right — I am speculating here, you understand, my dear — a right she felt he had forfeited.
She had often spoken, before, of how much she had given up in marrying him, in leaving England, in accepting a life so utterly alien. But she had spoken with no rancour: as if it were an adventure she had embraced. I admired that about her. I felt it took great courage. The same courage which had forbidden her to see her husband as the useless man. The courage which, I began to see, had deserted her for reasons withheld from me. I felt that she was now left with only the dissatisfactions of the life she had chosen.
Understand, my dear. This was a change that occurred over a period of two or three weeks, no more. Celia had told me that they had fallen in love very quickly, and they seemed to be falling out of love just as quickly — a sign, I think, of the passion they shared.
The tensions in the house became palpable, and it was my husband, I think, who suggested we all go off to the beach house for the weekend. Cyril was unsure, but when he saw the brightening that came to Celia — the brightening we all saw — he seized on the idea.
Oh, hello. You a
gain. Time to turn her?
Mrs. Livingston, my dear, I must leave for a few minutes. This is a sight I cannot bear. This rolling of your body. This physical helplessness. I shall return, my dear, never you fear.
12
THROUGH THE DARKNESS Jim said, “All these years, Yas. The years of long days, the evenings, the countless weekends. And now this.”
His breath was raucous, the rattle of ice in his glass a startling counterpoint.
She said, “At least you got a shot. There’ll be another.”
He sniffled. “This was it, Yas. The building. A construction of light.”
His shudder vibrated in the night, a disturbance of the air that separated them.
“It’s over, you realize,” he said.
“There’ll be other projects, Jim. You may have to dim some of the light next time around. Didn’t anyone at the office —”
“Yes, but no one else understood what I was trying to do. This design was my baby.”
My baby: Her heart pinched. Yes, perhaps he had found a baby to replace, or displace, the other. She knew the thought to be harsh, unkind, but she knew, too, that it was true. Even as she resented him for it, she ached at his failure. Success would have brought him a new strength, and perhaps that strength would have fed them both.
“I insisted. I didn’t want any obstructions to the flow of natural light, I pictured a flood —”
“But you’re always so careful.”
“There’s a margin, Yas, between being careful and being creative. And sometimes the more creative you are, the narrower the margin becomes. Perhaps I let the margin become too narrow.”
The Worlds Within Her Page 25