This is where we stayed a whole month, in one room looking out over the harbour. We shared a large wooden bed, perfectly big enough to stick pillows down the middle and never knock into them, and not much else. There was no chair, no cupboard, nothing else to share. But we did have our own slot of a bathroom with a shower that spurted cold water erratically, and a lavatory. So we were lucky. It suited us fine. We were hardly in it, except for a few hours at night. It was an outdoor life from the moment we woke up and went to have breakfast next door, sitting looking out at the boats and often sharing a table with the yachties. These came in all sizes and nationalities, coming in to shore in their dinghies, buying supplies, treating themselves to a drink, and then going back. Was this what Susannah and her friends had done? I thought the place could hardly have changed and that what I was seeing would be what she had seen and where I sat might very well be where she had sat. I only hoped she felt as fit and well and relaxed as I soon did.
But even if she sailed here, the address in the book had named a cabin and another bay, so once she’d arrived she hadn’t stayed on the boat. Was she ill? What was she doing, with a heart complaint, going off on such a voyage? What had my grandmother said? But maybe that was the point, to prove to herself she could do it and had got over her childhood poor health. There were lots of certificates showing a certain kind of sporting prowess among the memorabilia my grandmother had saved for me and used to insist I looked at. It was obvious that though she didn’t go in for contact or team sports (I was glad, I remember, that she didn’t seem to have played hockey, which I loved and was good at) she had done well at anything not quite so physically demanding. She swam, she played golf, she could ride well. She obviously chose to defy medical opinion and scare her mother, and for a while she had succeeded. Was Bequia the high spot of her good health? Maybe she felt so strong, in this glorious climate, that she’d stayed on; maybe the others had sailed on but she’d stayed behind, in this cabin place. Alone? I didn’t think so. And not for long. She’d never missed a year at university, so whenever she had come she would only have had three months, four at a pinch.
But I’d promised myself not to be obsessed by Susannah, only thank her for bringing me here. It was just what I needed. Rory and I spent our time walking – more like ambling – to other beaches, or taking little water taxis to them. There were beach bars on a couple of them where fish was cooked every day, the morning’s catch, and we sat for hours eating and drinking, then lay on the sand and slept. I didn’t even take photographs the first week, though I was never parted from my camera. At the end of the second week, I managed to hire a car, more like a small truck, open at the back, and we rode round the rest of the island as far as roads would permit, which wasn’t far. There were few tarmac roads and they soon ran out. It was when they ran out and we carried on along dirt tracks, until these became impossible, that Bequia was at its most mysterious. On the far side of the island from where we were staying, the road ended at a beach, heavily shaded by trees, where a fisherman had established a sort of hospital for turtles. He took the baby turtles as soon as they had hatched and cared for them until they were big enough to fend for themselves, then he returned them to the sea. We talked to him, and he let me take photographs and I got some unusual shots which I knew would come out perfectly.
We spent the day there, on the Atlantic side of the island, Rory as content as I was, and strangely silent. He pointed out what I’d been thinking myself – how like parts of Scotland the scene before us seemed. Parts of Arran, parts of Skye had looked like this when we went on holiday there as children. Neither of us knew the names of the trees we were now looking at, but we knew they were not palms or coconut trees, nor trees associated in our minds with the West Indies. They looked more like fir trees. The grass was long and rough here, growing thickly between outcrops of rock, and, though there were no mountains behind us, the land rose gradually to the north and had a rugged look. The sea broke quite violently along the headland and we watched the waves crash on the rocks and thought about shipwrecks. We used to play at being shipwrecked as all children do, given the chance, given the right setting, only we played it not wanting to be rescued – our game never ended with ‘Ship ahoy!’ It was the being-resourceful part we liked, trying to build a shelter and find provisions.
We returned again and again to that place, drawn by the isolation and the curious sense of familiarity. ‘I could be a good person here,’ Rory said one day and, though I laughed, knowing any ‘goodness’ wouldn’t last long, and how bored he would become put to the test, I knew what he meant. Rory’s problem is one of temptation. He succumbs so easily, and here there would be nothing to tempt or provoke him, not, at least, until he turned away from it and, inevitably, went in search of what it lacked. He never mentioned going back to London and neither did I, but I thought about it. I thought about my turtle photographs and about developing and printing and selling them to a magazine. I felt I was going to be proud of them and I realised I wanted them to be seen. It was a very long time since I’d felt anything of the sort and the pleasure of it, of some interest in my work, warmed me as much as the sun did. I wished Rory had something to cheer him. All he would go back to would be more of the same, not a single satisfying thing about it. But I wasn’t going to act the concerned mother, though the opportunity was there.
I felt that here, if anywhere on the island, there must be the cabin to which Susannah had referred, but there was no sign of one. I asked the fisherman and he pointed to a wooden house set back from the beach and named a couple of others not far away, but none were called cabins nor ever had been as far as he knew. I asked people all the time, in cafés and bars and on the water taxis, but, though some knew of several cabins, none knew of any called The Cabin, which served as an hotel or similar. I always took care to enquire when Rory was out of earshot, feeling some odd need to be secretive, and one day, when he’d gone off to buy us bread and fruit, I managed to get our landlady to myself so that I could ask her in detail about where I might start looking for a cabin that had been there thirty or forty years ago and had taken in guests. At first she said she’d no idea, she’d only come from St Vincent herself ten years before, but then she gave me my first bit of help. There was a woman called Gracie Monroe, an elderly Scottish woman who lived at the top of the island and had done for as long as anyone could now remember. She might know of this cabin, and if she didn’t then nobody would. I asked for this woman’s telephone number but she had no telephone and, as for address, it was simply ‘Miss Gracie’s’ and I’d have no difficulty finding it – all I had to do was follow the road to the top of the island and I’d see her house, just the one house there, all by itself.
I don’t like calling on people unannounced, just as I don’t like being called upon, but there was no alternative. By that time, Rory and I were often separating and spending a few hours on our own (God knows what he was up to – I didn’t ask), so there was no problem about that, but in fact I almost asked him to come with me. He loved door-stepping and would be in his element and useful to me. But then I thought I had a better chance of establishing some rapport with an elderly woman if I were on my own – two women together sort of thing. So I went alone, following the road as instructed until it turned into a track and then stopped abruptly at a gate. The gate was flimsy, not much of a barrier at all, but as I got out of the car a huge dog came hurtling towards it, barking furiously. My landlady had said nothing about a fierce dog. She’d said Miss Gracie loved all visitors, that she was crippled with arthritis and loved company because she could no longer get about. I stood by the gate and waited. The dog stopped barking and, putting its paws on the top of the gate, wagged its tail. But I was not reassured enough to try to get past it and went on standing there, uncertain what to do. At last, after several minutes of the dog and me practically eyeball to eyeball, I saw a young black woman coming slowly down a path which I could see led from the gate to a flower-covered stone house some distance away.
She was wearing a red dress, the colour of the hibiscus on either side of her, and she was singing.
She patted the dog, and without speaking to me opened the gate. ‘You come see Miss Gracie?’ she asked, smiling and gesturing that I should follow her. I said yes, I had, and was it convenient to call now, uninvited? ‘She always glad to have a visitor,’ the woman said. ‘She lonely now, she don’t walk far, she eyes poor, she don’t read much.’ We walked at a very leisurely pace back to the house, my companion resuming her singing and swaying a little as she walked. I had to try hard to walk slowly enough not to get ahead of her. The dog bounded along and I saw another, smaller dog come out to meet it. I tried to make conversation but the singing continued and I gave up. Turning a slight bend, we approached the house from a different angle than the one I had seen from the gate, coming towards a terrace facing towards the Atlantic side of the island. At the top of it was a flight of wide, shallow stone steps out of which, all along the rims, grew masses of tiny purple flowers. There was an air not of neglect but of abundance only just controlled about the whole garden, a feeling that at any moment nature would explode and reclaim steps and house and paths, and go back to how it had once been before man had interfered.
On the terrace there was a white basket chair, in which sat an old lady with her feet up on a broad stool covered with a cushion.
‘That’s Miss Gracie,’ the young woman said, and then raising her voice she called, ‘Miss Gracie! A lady visitor from England for you! Come see you now!’
I hadn’t said I was from England, but I suppose this did not take much deducing. Miss Gracie’s eyes had been closed as we approached, but now they opened and she smiled and said, rather disconcertingly, ‘About time, about time. Sit yourself down, here, close by, or I won’t hear a thing.’ Her accent was unmistakably Scottish and what’s more it was an Edinburgh accent, with what Scots call a ‘pan-loaf’ sound to it (meaning posh, or cultured, a pan-loaf being a superior kind of bread). So I sat where she indicated, on a stool at her left side, and said, ‘Good afternoon,’ and gave her my name, and told her my family was from Edinburgh, that they were Camerons on my mother’s side. (It was the first time I’d ever referred to Susannah as my mother and even as I said this I resisted the words.)
‘It’s a wee while since I was in Edinburgh,’ she said, ‘but I mind it well, oh I do, I was born and bred there.’
Her breathing seemed laboured, and I wondered if she was going to be up to much talking at all and whether I would exhaust her if I tried to get answers to the questions I wanted to ask, but she seemed eager enough, and her eyes, if as poor-sighted as her maid had said, were nevertheless bright with intelligence and curiosity.
She observed me closely, looking me over quite deliberately, taking in my camera case (though she could not know what was in my ordinary-looking canvas bag), and her glance flickering over my hands several times. Was she looking for a ring, a wedding ring, I wondered? She asked me if I liked Bequia and I enthused, and the maid brought out a jug of lemonade and she urged me to have a glass of it. ‘You must drink plenty here,’ she said, ‘in the heat, you know, and not the hard stuff either,’ and she laughed. We both drank, and then she asked me some obvious, polite questions – was I by myself, was I staying long, where was I staying – and I let her finish before venturing any of my own. I asked her first how she came to live on Bequia, and she sighed and said it was a long story and she hadn’t the energy to go over it all but that she’d come out here to get married and the man she was engaged to, whom she’d come out to join, had died before they could marry. She’d been ill with the grief and shock and then when she was well enough to go home again she found she hadn’t the heart to return. ‘There was nothing calling me back,’ she said. ‘I had no family left there. I thought I might as well stay in the sunshine, near Douglas, for a while, anyway.’ The ‘while’ had grown and she never had gone back, not even for a visit. ‘I had the means to stay, or it might have been different,’ she said. ‘Douglas had provided for me before he was taken. He took no chances. And the folk here were awful kind, they took to me.’ She’d started a little school – she was a schoolteacher, Douglas a clergyman – to occupy her, and to bring her into contact with children because she would never have any of her own and she loved them. ‘And here I still am,’ she said, smiling.
All this had taken a long time to tell, with many pauses and sips of lemonade, and I thought she might need to rest, even to sleep, but almost as soon as she had finished she said, ‘Now tell me about yourself, I’m wanting to know everything.’ But I didn’t know how to begin. I’d practised in my head what I would say, how I would lead on to Susannah and the address book, but I stumbled as I began to tell my tale and all fluency deserted me. I started again, but realised I’d oversimplified the story and that all its complications were needed to make it mean anything. Suddenly, I found myself blurting out, ‘My mother died when I was six months old’ – exactly what I had been determined not to begin with, however true it was as a beginning. I’d thought it too much like a plea for sympathy and had hated the idea of seeming to beg for it. But instantly Gracie patted my arm and her face creased even more with concern for me. ‘Oh, the poor lassie, the poor lassie,’ she said, and I didn’t know whether she meant me, now, or my dead mother, then. ‘Was it the cancer?’ she asked, and I told her about Susannah’s heart condition and what had happened, so far as I knew. Then, with Gracie’s attention so concentrated, I plunged straight into the story of the memory box but left out my rejection of it and implied that it had been lost until recenlty. Gracie was enthralled, her cheeks became quite flushed and I was worried I was over-exciting her. Her mouth formed ‘oohs’ of astonishment and her eyes widened when I got to the bit about the address book. I’d brought it with me and held it out to her, but she shook her head and said she could read nothing now, not even with her spectacles. I said there was nothing much to read, only the name The Cabin, and Friendship Bay, Bequia.
Gracie’s face grew calm, almost blank in expression, when I asked her if this meagre address meant anything to her. She seemed to have withdrawn from me and I didn’t know what to do to bring her back again, or even if I should try to do so. I hesitated, and then said something about how I thought Susannah may have come to Bequia, the theory that she’d sailed here in the late Fifties, and somehow stayed on. At this, Gracie opened her eyes again and frowned and said that struck a chord, but she didn’t know why. She held her head for a moment, as though listening, and then shook it and sighed. ‘It was a long time ago,’ she murmured. ‘Lots of young folk came in their boats – it’s a great place for the boats – but we didn’t see them up here. There was just us, and the German man with the hut.’ I didn’t dare interrupt her to ask if ‘us’ simply meant herself and a maid, but stayed quite still and let her remember whatever she wanted to remember, relevant or not. ‘He was a German man, but who was before him in that hut? Poor whites, a family of them, locals, but Bequians look down on them, they don’t mix, they never did, the black Bequians and the poor whites … The German man left. When?’ (I hadn’t asked when. I wasn’t interested in any German). ‘Oh, I don’t recall. Then there was a soldier, yes, there was, after the war was over in Europe. I knew him. He introduced himself, he was a gentleman, but I can’t mind his name. He had a boat, the soldier. He married a Bequian girl – now, what was her name? – names are the devil … she had a baby …’
On and on Gracie rambled, her voice low and monotonous but perfectly distinct. I strained to identify anything in what she said which might relate to Susannah, but there seemed to be nothing at all. She’d never heard of Susannah, or of a cabin. It was all hopeless. I sat there feeling numb and miserable, and somehow ashamed that I’d come at all to harass this sweet old woman, but trying to stay alert. She was still describing the soldier and his wife and children when for the first time I heard the word ‘cabin’. ‘The hut burned down,’ she was saying, followed by details of the fire, recalled astonishingly
vividly, ‘and he built a proper cabin, he built it himself.’ (Yet when I’d asked her she’d said she’d never heard of any cabin up here. Had I planted the word in her head?) ‘He’d lost his money and they had to make a living somehow and they took in visitors in the nice new house … Not many … It was a long way for visitors to come. They stayed down in the port … it didn’t pay much … But they looked after them well in their house, the beds were clean and the food good … They went to England in the end … They said they’d come back to visit but they never did … Too far, it was too far … I had Christmas cards from them for years, mind.’ I risked asking, ‘And their cabin?’ ‘Cabin?’ Gracie said. ‘Their house?’ ‘Oh, their house burned down, just like the hut had done … caught fire, nobody knew how … the blaze was spotted too late … my house is stone …’
She stopped, and this time did fall asleep, deeply enough to snore. Should I just go? But I didn’t want to tiptoe away without thanking her and without saying goodbye. I got up and walked very quietly down the steps of the terrace, slipping off my sandals so that I would make no sound. The garden I’d been facing for the last hour was not so much a garden as, I now realised, a fenced-off area of open hillside with little distinction between what grew inside and outside it. I recognised bananas growing wild and other fruits, fruits that looked something like pineapples but were too small. There was a slight breeze blowing not from the sea but towards it, carrying the scent of herbs of some kind. When I had walked to the furthest extent of Gracie’s land, almost to where the hillside rolled down to the sea, I had a magnificent view stretching all the way to some smudgy-blue outline of another island far off. I stood there so transfixed I was unable to get out my camera, though the sight cried out for it – all that dazzling sea, all that enormous sky, and that thumbprint of another island. I tried instead to fold away into some deep recess in my memory what lay before me, looking hard, hard, and imprinting everything on my mind instead of on film so that I could take it out when I was back in grey, dismal London. And as ever, in a way that was becoming automatic, I wondered if Susannah had done this. Lying on her bed, weak and ill and afraid, had she conjured this up to console herself? Maybe. Maybe not. It didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that I had seen this, I would treasure it.
The Memory Box Page 12