A Sea-Grape Tree

by Rosamond Lehmann

  ‘What about his wife?’

  ‘Does she love him, you mean … Well, I must be charitable. She may have been hurt … I wonder. But she’d never let on. There’s nothing inside her, if you know what I mean. She’s like a tin—you shake it and something rattles—dried peas or something. Oh, she’s quite friendly when we meet, she likes a joke. She comes down and has a swim sometimes. Or now and then when she’s not swanning around with her chums and practising her tangos and things, we make up a four for bridge and have a pleasant evening. Harold sticks up for her: he says she’s plucky and Johnny shows her no consideration. She’s lost her job in a manner of speaking: Louis has completely taken over looking after Johnny. No one else is allowed to touch him. Louis would die for Johnny. He scarcely ever speaks, only sort of grunts out bits of words, and murmurs in his throat; but he understands Johnny’s every mood and wish. He’s got a gorgeous singing voice, has Louis. Deep, rich. Sometimes I hear him singing at night to the guitar—old plantation songs. Then I know they’re happy. Still, the songs do sound sad.’ She sat down again, plunged her head in her hands. ‘Life is sad nowadays, Anemone. You may not agree with me, but there’s been a change. August 1914 it started. Nothing will ever be the same. The heart of the world is broken. I said so once to Johnny and he said yes, and watch out for the next thing, people will be born without hearts and a damn good thing too. That’s haunted me. It couldn’t really happen, could it?’

  I was dumb: such a possibility seemed too near the knuckle; and next moment, recalling my plight, she put an arm round me and hurried on: ‘Of course it couldn’t. He didn’t mean it either. He was in a bad mood—he does get awfully blue, no wonder. I think he misses that Anstey woman. She did keep up his spirits—with her unusual outlook. What a personality! A bonny fighter, wasn’t she? She fought for him. She was determined to get him on his feet again.’

  ‘I can imagine it. That was always the pattern: to have someone in her life, a superman, that she could make into her own special superman.’

  ‘Cure them, you mean, if they had something wrong?’

  ‘Well, in a way.’

  ‘By prayer, or laying on of hands or something?’

  ‘No, no. By casting her spells. By the power of her will.’

  Ellie reflected, then said severely: ‘That could have been against the will of God.’

  I laughed. ‘That wouldn’t have bothered her.’

  ‘She wasn’t a Christian?’

  ‘No. Well … she might have said so, and meant it, sometimes. But I think all her shrines were pagan.’

  Ellie said, after a pause: ‘You’re clever, aren’t you? I saw you were, at once.’

  I said: ‘I remember one of them very well—one of her supermen: a sculptor, from South Africa. He was killed. He was rather wonderful. He let her down though. They all did, one way or another.’

  Ellie remained thoughtful. ‘Johnny is wonderful,’ she said presently, ‘and he couldn’t have left her, not under the circumstances, if that’s what you mean by letting her down. He really was fond of her. After she died he seemed to get more apathetic. I used to hear them laughing together while they were playing chess or something. That was so nice.’

  It occurred to me that in the old days I had never heard her laugh: had never connected her with laughter or the absence of it. In my childhood, the word would have conjured up giggling fits in the night nursery, fou rire in church or class; or else the daemonic sounds arising from the kitchen quarters, especially when gardeners dropped in for elevenses during their employers’ absence: up-and-down-swooping shrieks, convulsions of agonised hilarity, interspersed with rumbling bass obligatos—the whole suggesting a world of mysterious and potent sexual innuendo.

  But Elbe’s kindly naïve words had evoked a particular intimacy, an irreplaceable pleasure, which I too had known and was deprived of now. For the first time I could imagine Mrs Jardine natural, her panache and her swank discarded, behaving like any woman happy with her lover, and sisterly towards other happy women.

  It seemed somehow fitting when Elbe added compassionately: ‘What a tragedy to lose that little granddaughter. I wonder if Staycie helped her? I expect she did.’

  I had not thought of Cherry, not consciously at least, for many years; or of any of the sufferers in that disaster. But now they were all astir again within me; and the experience, its actual nature, pierced me like a knife thrust. It is easy to dismiss what an undeveloped heart cannot imagine: brutal severance; lacerating self-reproach; pain without remedy, stoically endured. But I was older now; and Cherry, no longer a winged denizen of a land not open to strict scrutiny, came back sharply for a moment, sitting up in bed and reading aloud to Harry.

  Ellie began to sing softly, in her husky voice:

  ‘Poor Butteryfly!—’neath the blos-soms wait-ing,

  Poor Butterfly . . . for she loved him so.

  The mo-ments passed into hours,

  The hou-ers passed into days,

  And still she sighed:

  The moon and I … know that he’ll be faith-ful,

  I know he’ll come—to me by and by …’

  She broke off, got up, said: ‘That’s quite enough. See you tomorrow dear. Drop in whenever you feel like it. You’re always welcome. I think it’s time I gave a little party. Be careful how you go. There’s a great big bullfrog sits on the path sometimes—a lovely boy. Don’t step on him. Night night.’

  She stepped away briskly into the shadows. I sat on, listening, watching. Earth’s myriad midget dynamos throbbed on, secretively, insistently. The gramophone no longer moaned and bawled. Cocks crowed at the moon, dogs barked and barked across the hills, through all the valleys. The tropic stars hung down so huge and low they seemed not altogether out of reach. I looked far out for the spectre of the reef; its demented twists and menacing collapses had undergone a metamorphosis; had become a dance, inspired, elastic, rhythmical; as if some phantom god with streaming crystal locks were leaping in majesty, flinging out spangled veils to hide his presence and reveal it. The wind on the sea seemed to carry a faint sound, a shimmer as it were made audible, or whispering become light’s essence. Or the laughter of disembodied creatures—Allegra beings, buoyant among the waves, clapping their hands for joy.

  The lamp in the hut went out: Johnny had been put to bed. A tall figure could be seen to slip out, hang something on a branch of the sea-grape tree, come clear of its shadows, pushing the boat down to the water’s edge. He waded out, got in, pulled on the oars and glided off. Louis, gone fishing.

  I was part floating part anchored in a world without stain; purged of spells, charms, humans, duppies and all harmful things. My laceratingly unacceptable identity no longer troubled me; I was nothing but pure exhaustion, supreme astonishment: the trackless wilderness in which I had been stumbling had led me back to the door in the garden wall. Yet it seemed unreachable; and if Mrs Jardine was waiting behind it, it was for others, not for me. She had become a statue, a marble monument raised to imagination, industrious imagination, superimposed upon that idyll she had dreamed of—a life-style of arcadian simplicity: fruit for the picking, fish for the fishing, all the island for her garden, all the shores to comb for shells; dark-skinned primitives to serve her, worship her; and at the heart of it all, her treasure trove, her stranded Titan; the one, the unique, the corresponding inmate. As it was in the Golden Age.

  ‘Sweet Lord, you play me false!’

  ‘My dearest Love, I would not for the world.’

  She was dead now, safe; and he still captive. They could not if they would …

  All the same as I climbed up through the barrage of moths, fireflies, cicadas, and looked back a last time in the direction of the hut, I fancied a figure watching me.

  Now and then, late at night, from the other side of the wood-panelled­­­­ wall which divides the visitor’s austere bedroom from the one next door, co
mes a medley of curious sounds: shuffling footsteps, mutterings interspersed with volleys of sharp slaps. It is Mr Bartholomew, goading his antique frame into activity, driven by the mindless automatic restlessness of extreme old age; or by the fear, perhaps, that if he lay down to sleep, death might pounce unawares.

  But why from time to time does he rain smacking blows upon his skull? According to Miss Stay, when these sounds are described to her, it is his little device for driving out unwelcome thoughts: or possibly he is acting out cowboy fantasies of being a crack shot.

  What he goes on muttering is poetry—a random anthology of lines and phrases culled from Shakespeare, Milton, Racine, Dante, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, to name but a few. He loses the thread, stamps, curses obscenely, starts again. Beneath the bridal swathes of her mosquito net she lies and listens, is sometimes tempted to yell a prompt line, more often tries to block her ears, or considers doing him violence. Finally, after a particularly prolonged bout of slaps, he is complained of by the couple on the further side. Miss Stay registers dismay but not surprise; explains that he does have these trying turns, agrees that it won’t do, and banishes him to the annexe with Winkliff the garden boy for guardian. She does not permit him to move in with Daisy, as he would prefer. No no, he would not, she tells him in a scolding voice, give the poor animal a moment’s rest; and heaven knows she earns it. He knows better than to argue; but come daybreak he is up and dressed and off, scampering over the rocks to Daisy’s humble shack behind the cocoa mill. Leading her forth with endearments and caresses, he saddles her and mounts her. At a plodding pace she ambles out of sight with her bizarre burden; up the road that climbs to the plantations and beyond them to the island’s heart: to grass abounding, says Miss Stay. Yes, yes, he leads her to sweet pastures. There, watched by her inamorato and shaded from the burning sun of noon, she relishes luscious revitalising provender. Often they do not return until the sunset hour, and heave into view at a fairly creditable turn of speed, Mr Bartholomew whooping and whirling his Panama hat in cowboy fashion. With a flourish, he dismounts; Daisy relapses into her customary drooping and apathetic stance.

  Mr Bartholomew is a favourite with the female staff who, when the spirit moves them, plait him a splendid lei of orchids and hibiscus. At his insistence Daisy gets one too, and then—he is relentless and imperious—he calls for ‘the photographer’. This is Kit, who never fails to oblige, and to present Mr Bartholomew with the results: though, as he cheerfully remarks, it could almost be called a waste of time and film, for Mr Bartholomew is all but blind and cannot, surely, descry his curious image—his gaunt, hobgoblin frame contained in a once elegant now frayed, discoloured suit of biscuit-coloured linen, several sizes too large for him; his skeletal head and wintry moth-eaten beard; his air of mingled intellectual distinction and decay incongruously posed against Daisy’s dejected profile or indifferent rump. Sometimes his arm is flung about her neck; sometimes he is making as if to offer her a titbit; but always the effect is of a one-sided emotional relationship. And never does he display these records of his pastimes and obsessions: he flings them into a drawer, locks it and hides the key. If Miss Stay knows where he hides it, or what other clues to his identity and buried days are there secreted, she does not tell. Is he a bachelor? A widower? A once eminent professional or academic person now fugitive from life? or from the law? No letters come for him. When Miss Stay goes once a month to Port of Spain for (so she says) her beauty treatment, she cashes a sizeable cheque for him; and then he tips the staff with reckless prodigality, orders in cases of rum and whisky and throws a midnight party in the kitchen.

  Johnny is carried up from the hut amid enthusiastic cheers on these occasions. The revels start in a spirit of old-world grace and courtesy. To the strains of Louis’ accordion, Mr Bartholomew rotates with Miss Stay in a decorous valse, while the staff clap hands and give utterance to yelps and throaty snatches of musical encouragement. But within the hour, mayhem has broken loose; Miss Stay curtsies to Mr Bartholomew, kisses her hand to the assembly and retires; and the party drifts, reels, prances down to the shore and there continues with howls of laughter and general abandon. A huge fire of driftwood and dried palm shells is lit to banish any lurking duppy. Johnny is set down on the top step of his dwelling; drinking steadily, he alternates between strumming on his guitar and changing dance records on his gramophone. Kit and Trevor trip over from their bungalow to join him. They lend an air of cheery domesticity to his aloof and striking figure. When not attending him, they dart hither and thither through the party, bestowing greetings, hugs and kisses, collecting fuel for the bonfire, whisking the inebriated away from contact with the flames. The Cunninghams have appeared to join the fun. After a couple of drinks or so the Captain allows a mellow mood to take over, and needs little coaxing to render one or other or all of his three songs: wholesome, manly songs of bygone years. In a powerful if unmelodious bass he renders The Floral Dance; then Uncle Tom Cobley; finally a song whose rousing refrain rings incongruously upon these languorous shores.

  Sing ho! sing hey! for merry merry mer-ree maids!

  Their eyes are bright and glow-owing,

  Their eyes are bright and glow-owing,

  But what their way with a man will bee-ee-ee (Pause)

  My goodness! My goodness! my goodness there’s no KNOWING!

  Stiffly, unsmilingly he bows, acknowledging applause; roars ‘Put it down Sir!’ as Bobby is seen to emerge from the shallows, a crab depending by one pincer from his lip; limps away without another word.

  Mrs Cunningham remains. In Malaya, she says, we used to sing duets at all the local concerts; but no no no, nothing will induce her to sing in public any more. However, she enters into the party mood and dances quite a provocative tango with Kit and Trevor before going to sit at Johnny’s feet. He takes no notice of her.

  The couple from Lancashire, recent arrivals at the guest house, are circling quietly together on the periphery of the bonfire’s glow. They are not strangers to Anonyma, having travelled out in the same banana boat. He is a retired stone-deaf building tycoon, a stooping, shambling giant of a man, with freckled skin and wisps of sandy hair; his travelling companion is his secretary, one of those tightly-upholstered middle-aged women whom it is impossible to imagine stripped, or without dentures and rimless spectacles. Each night on the boat they danced and danced to the band. ‘Can you ’oom?’ he enquired of Anonyma one night. ‘Gladys she ’ooms the toon and I can ’ear ’er like a buzzin’ in my ear. If you could ’oom we could ’ave a dunce.’ Alas, she could not; but they all three had a drink together … Now here they are again, still dancing, Gladys from the tensed look about her jaws still humming: a self-sufficient and devoted couple. Not married? No. His wife is in a bin. No matter.

  The party begins to disintegrate. Princess has long vanished into the shadows with more than one companion. Unaccustomed to alcohol, Winkliff stands swaying, tranced, one hand upraised in the Boy Scout salute. Presently he keels over and passes out; is scooped up by Louis, whose grandson or maybe great-grandson he is, and stretched out in the nether regions of the hut. Carlotta, surrounded by elderly cronies from the village, has so far preserved a certain dignified distance from the wanton throng; but now, as they thin out she rises, takes her partner and begins to dance The Dance. Carrying her obese frame with buoyant majesty, she slowly rotates, one hand holding out her ample skirts, the other holding aloft a large white handkerchief. Her partner advances, retreats, skips nimbly round and round her in a chasse interspersed with leaps and lunges. He is a toothless, shrivelled ancient, said to be one hundred and ten years old and rumoured to have escaped long long ago from Devil’s Island. Now and then she stands stock-still, lowers the handkerchief, allows a ritualistic sexual gesture to ripple through her frame from hips to knees; then starts to rotate in majesty once more. They are dancing a traditional courting dance from Carlotta’s native island; and the cronies, knowing better than to join in, participa
te at a respectful distance by crude gestures and other variants upon the main obliquely indicated theme.

  Young Mr de Pas comes crashing down in his Ford, grinds to a halt on the terrace above the bay. He announces himself as usual by four sharp blasts on the horn, two long two short: Toodle-oo pip pip!—his signature tune to the initiated. After a brief pause he revs up and crashes off again to some unknown destination: perhaps to pick up Jackie and drive with her all night, bucketing up hill and down dale as the whim takes him, through pitted by-ways and scarcely beaten jungle tracks. This nocturnal speeding steadies his nerves, according to Miss Stay; Jackie must accept it as her lot: reward or penance who shall say?

  Mr Bartholomew, whose steadiness is also so frequently at risk, sustains the role of host from first to last. Bottle in hand he scampers here and there, crying: ‘Servez-vous, mon vieux’, or ceremoniously murmuring: ‘A votre sante.’ His customary equivocal approach has changed to one of eager kindliness; and apart from a first toast to Daisy given in the kitchen—To my best girl!—he appears to have cast off the shackles binding him to her. The benefit to him of these liberating occasions lasts for some time. Returned on trial to his own quarters he embarks upon one of his sensible turns and spends quiet evenings reading late by lamplight with the aid of a large magnifying glass. Snatches of poetry continue to escape from him, but at longer intervals and on a subdued, nostalgic note. Many a green isle needs must be . . . Ah, what avails the sceptred race … The wood spurge has a cup of three … The old June weather … And life’s time’s fool … Over the great Gromboolian plain . . . On the sole Arabian tree . . . So we’ll go no more a-roving . . . Words such as these steal on the visitor’s ear.