by Jane Arbor
The beach hut was of rondavel type—round, beehive—thatched, its walls of flimsy lattice, its rickety door permanently ajar. Hope and Tina had explored it once on a swimming trip together, and she was recalling Tina’s coy giggle of ‘Bet this is an “in” place for the local courting couples!’ as Craig stepped to the door, forced it wide and then stood back to allow her through it before him. ‘She is here,’ he said.
And there indeed Tina was, sitting on one hip on a pile of the dried palm fronds which strewed the floor, supporting herself with one spread hand, the other protectively clasping her uppermost ankle. At sight of Craig and Hope she gasped, as did Hope, running to kneel by her. ‘Tina—what?’
Tina winced. ‘I can’t walk,’ she said in a thin high voice which threatened tears. ‘I think I’ve sprained my ankle—look.’ She lifted her hand to show her foot’s purpling, angry puffing. ‘And look—!’ she whimpered, raising her face to the dappled light to show that it, as were her bare arms and legs, was tortured and blotched by mosquito bites.
Hope began in pity, ‘Oh, poor—!’ But Craig cut her short as he strode past her to lift Tina lightly and easily into his arms. When they returned to the car he ordered Hope, ‘There’s a rug in the boot; put it over her on the back seat.’ And when Hope had obeyed, muffling Tina to her chin, and they were ready to set out, he turned in his seat to chide Tina with a wry humour which she actually answered with a watery smile, ‘In future, that ought to teach you to sleep under a net, you silly young wench!’
That was all. No blame. No accusing questions. Instead, real concern and practical help. For people who could stand on their own feet—and Hope counted herself one—he had little sympathy to spare. But for the underprivileged, the unfortunate and the unhappy, he was a rock of defence. Which made his treatment of Barbara inexplicably out of character—didn’t it?
On the drive Tina, embittered and disillusioned, volunteered her story.
Luke Donat had telephoned her to ask her to meet him at their usual rendezvous last evening. Desperate to see him, she had dared to ask Victoire for time off; unexpectedly had got it, and had taken a taxi for Witch Creek. Luke knew, she said, that she no longer had the use of a car, so she had dismissed the taxi at the beach, counting on his driving her home.
She had gone on foot down the beach to the hut. But close to it—‘I heard—that is, I knew someone else must be there,’ she recounted haltingly—‘because there ware voices and laughing. Two people laughing. And when I pushed the door and went in Luke was there—with a girl. One of the town girls. I don’t know her name, but I’ve seen her about. And when they saw me, they laughed some more and Luke said, “Come on in. We’ve been expecting you—!” ’
‘ “We”? Meaning himself and the girl?’ questioned Hope.
‘Yes, “we”. And when I asked him what he meant and what she was doing there, he said that was the—the object of the exercise. That I should find her there with him, which should teach me, since nothing else seemed to, that he wasn’t my exclusive property and that if I didn’t relish sharing him with as many other pretty girls as he chose, then I knew what I could do about it, didn’t I?’
‘And you said?’
‘I—I don’t remember,’ Tina choked. ‘A lot, but I was half crying too. I was so angry. I know I told him I never wanted to see him again—ever. And he said, “Fine”, and then to that girl, “Mission accomplished. Let’s be on our way”. And I let them go. I’d have died rather than go with them, but he didn’t even ask me how I was getting back. They just—went.’
Hope drew a long breath of pity and despair, and looked at Craig, who asked Tina, ‘And then?’
‘I stayed for a long time, sort of—of hating him. Until it got really dark. Then I started to try to walk it, hoping someone might pick me up. But at the top of the beach I fell over some air-roots of the trees, and my ankle hurt so much that I hobbled back—just to rest it, I thought. But it swelled and swelled until I couldn’t even stand on it. And then the mosquitoes began to bite, and the sandflies, and—I think I slept a bit, but not much. And then it was morning, and I was still there, not knowing what to do’ She broke off and sat up, thrusting back the rug as Craig turned in at the plantation gates. ‘No! No!’ she exclaimed in panic. ‘Not back to the House! I daren’t go back. Not there—please!’
Craig slowed the car. ‘Where then?’ he asked Hope. ‘To Barbara’s?’
Hope nodded. ‘Barbara will welcome her, I’m sure,’ she said.
Events moved swiftly for Tina after that. Claiming hysterically that she hated Madenina and everyone, or almost everyone, connected with it, she insisted on going back to England; cabled her father to tell him so, and snatched at the chance to travel by the same flight as Ian Perse, who was being recalled temporarily to Head Office for a conference.
Once, before she went, Craig called for her at the bungalow to take her to Victoire, who claimed the satisfaction of formally dismissing her. Tina cringed, and both Barbara and Hope protested. But Craig was adamant that Tina must face Victoire, who had offered her a job in good faith, and in leaving it without notice Tina would put herself badly in the wrong.
‘And of course Victoire must have her pound of flesh,’ Barbara remarked to Hope who, suspecting what she did of Victoire, could not blame the bitterness in Barbara’s tone.
The following Wednesday Tina departed for England with an air of shaking unwelcome dust from her feet. Ian went too, but would be back for the Mardi Gras festival, now less than a week away, which the television team planned to film as a background of dramatic local colour to their documentary on sugar. Meanwhile Luke Donat, warned, managed to bring forward by several days his own flight to Europe. He had already gone, his return indefinite, Craig heard when he tried to reach him again.
‘I should have known that rats run when they’re cornered,’ Craig commented to Hope. ‘I ought to have taken him by the scruff of his miserable neck to Witch Creek; faced him with Tina and trounced him soundly in front of her. However, he’s dependent on his father and Planchet for his keep. He’ll have to come back, and I can wait.’
Already the mounting anticipation of carnival was in the air, marked by day-long ‘jump-ups’ which could last until midnight and beyond, taking their toll in an absenteeism which every estate had learned by custom to tolerate. As Winston Fortune expressed it to Hope’s amusement, ‘Things got to get worse before they better. Fat Tuesday, Ash Wednesday—they peak. But come dawn, first day cane-cutting, then rum done, fun done; man sober again, see sense and earn good cash.’
By contrast with the excesses promised for Ash Wednesday the festive turn-out on Shrove Tuesday was almost staid. The town was gay with bunting and street-stalls selling everything from paper hats and balloons and papier-mâché animated snakes and toads to samples of every kind of fruit in season. The highlight of the day was the afternoon parade of decorated floats and tableaux, an official, well-conducted affair with an early evening climax of speeches and prize-giving on the savannah, the wide park-like area at the town centre. Later most of the hotels were open to non-residents for gala dinners and cabarets, and it was only well after nightfall that preparations for Wednesday’s daemonic activities were afoot.
Ian, returned from England the previous day, had invited Hope to dine at a luxury restaurant facing the savannah, and as the darkness deepened, they watched from its terrace the building of the gigantic funeral pyre to which Vaval, Madenina’s traditional devil-spirit, would be consigned tomorrow night.
‘Let’s hope it will.be a slightly more exciting affair than today’s Parade. The team is grumbling that Torquay Regatta or the Lord Mayor’s Show could offer them a lot more camera scope,’ Ian remarked. ‘They’ll have my blood for suggesting they shoot it, if the whole thing fizzles out like a damp squib on Bonfire Night. And supposing it rains, as the rain here alone knows how, what then?’
‘I’m told,’ Hope laughed, ‘that it could rain china elephants, let alone cats and dogs, for all
the devotees of Vaval would notice. According to Barbara, they’ll have been “jumping” and drinking most of the night, and from noon or earlier, the whole thing becomes a kind of tarantella frenzy, working itself up.’
‘So I’ve heard too, and if the TV types are to be impressed, it had better. You’ll let me come for you and bring you to it, won’t you? We’ll drive in and park, as we did today. I’ll order a table here for dinner again, and afterwards we can stroll around and mingle, and see what goes on,’ Ian arranged comfortably, as unaware as Hope of the chaos which a Vaval-pressured Mandeninan crowd could create.
To begin with, he had to abandon his car on an avenue at least half a kilometre from the savannah, for between it and this random parking every street and boulevard were jammed with people, most of them masked in black, many of them, the diablesses, the acolytes of Vaval of both sexes, costumed in black-and-white, dancing in grotesque, curveting gyrations, and feting Vaval on clarinets, trumpets and improvised steel drums to an insistent rhythm. Cha-cha ... cha-cha—on and on.
With his arm about Hope, Ian and she had no choice but to join and go along with the general direction of the crowd—an undulating snake of movement roughly towards the savannah. It took the best part of an hour to get there, and they never did achieve the refuge of the restaurant and their booked table. For the swarms which blocked its approach and filled its rooms and its balconies had already made nonsense of any reservations. The spirit of Vaval had taken over and was not to be defied.
Dusk was falling now. Time to light the pyre. The effigy of Vaval was ready to be thrown upon it. The diablesses were executing a wild abandoned dance around it. Ian and Hope stood, hemmed in by the shifting, pressing crowd about them.
‘All right?’ Ian mouthed against the racket of noise, and ‘Fine’, she mouthed back, surprised that she should feel so.
Normally she hated and dreaded crowds. But somehow she was excited and stimulated by this one in its frenzied expectation of the devil’s doom to come. Guilty of mob hysteria? She supposed she must be, but tonight she was experiencing something of the same satisfaction she had had on sighting the green ray. Both that tradition and this primitive ritual were the island’s own, and sharing them, she felt, gave her the right to fantasise that, however briefly, she ‘belonged’ to Madenina.
She thought about Craig, whose home it was, who belonged to it as she never would. Did he attend Vaval every year? Did Victoire? Or, having long outworn its attractions, had he perhaps driven her out of town somewhere to dine in sophisticated peace at some up-country luxury hotel?
Now the flames of the pyre were leaping high enough for the immolation of the effigy, and it was hurled by many hands, its grotesque limbs splayed wide. People shouted, mock-wept and groaned, ‘Adieu, Vaval! Adieu!’ and swung hands with strangers.
Hope told herself, ‘It’s all very Fifth of November and Auld Lang Syne,’ but for the moment it was more than either. It was her scene and she was part of it, and she reached for and took Ian’s hand—But it wasn’t Ian’s hand. It was the hand of someone whose touch and stature, masked though he was, she could never mistake—Craig, forcibly pressed so close to her side that she could feel the hard resistance of his thigh against hers. Ian was nowhere to be seen near by. The compelling drift and movement of the crowd must have swept him away. He couldn’t be far off—But this was Craig’s hand she held; Craig, hooking a finger over his mask and pulling it down; Craig, thrusting and pushing her back through the crowd into a little pocket of space where he faced her, dropping her hand.
‘What on earth are you doing in this mix-up, alone?’ he demanded of her, shouting.
‘I’m not alone,’ she told him. ‘I’m with Ian. We were booked to have dinner at Les Immortelles, but we couldn’t get there, and we seem to have got separated. But only just. I thought he was still right next to me when he wasn’t, and—and you were.’
‘Fortunately.’
She smiled. ‘Yes, but—I mean, I wasn’t lost or really alone. In those few minutes Ian couldn’t have moved far—’
‘In which few minutes?’
‘When they threw Vaval on to the lire. When I wasn’t noticing much, but watching, and then wanting to do what everyone else was doing, and hold hands. But if you’ll let me go back to where I was standing, Ian is sure to be there, looking for me and worried—’
‘It’s to be hoped so.’ With a firm hand under her elbow Craig began to ease their way back through the crowd. But they had not progressed far, when suddenly he froze, staring, and she thought he must have spotted Ian.
But it was not Ian whom his free hand winkled out from the press of people about them. It was a young West Indian, drinking from a rum flask until Craig forced him forward, when he lowered the flask and stared back.
‘So,’ muttered Craig. ‘You’ve come back. Where have you been—since?’
‘Down Barbados.’ The tone was sullen.
‘All the time? And what as? Cane-cutter, eh?’
The man drew himself up. ‘I, low cane-cutter? Waiter-man in good hotel, that’s me.’
‘Waiter-man—with paying sidelines. But you had a date with me, remember? Why didn’t you keep it?’
A shrug. ‘Not convenient that day, mister.’
‘Nor the next? Nor any day since?’
Another shrug. ‘No good, next day. Nor after. I go Barbados soon. Only now come back.’
‘In time to keep that date with me—tonight. Yes, I know you’ll miss the rest of the fun, but that’s just too bad. You and I are going to have the talk we didn’t have —then.’
The man brightened a little. ‘You pay still, mister?’
Craig shook his head. ‘Sorry to blight your hopes, my friend. I never was going to pay you, and I’m not now. I just want to know why you really stood me up that other time, and you’re going to tell me—or else. So come, get going while I deal with some other business first. March!’
It was so, Craig policing them both like a couple of escaped prisoners, that they eventually found Ian, to whom he handed Hope over with a nonchalant, ‘Your property, I think,’ as if she were a mislaid parcel.
Ian gave a long sigh of relief. ‘Heavens, yes. I looked the other way for the wink of an eyelid. One minute she was there; the next, she wasn’t, and I’ve been berserk with panic.’
‘Well, neither were you there when I thought you were,’ Hope pointed out. ‘I looked round for you, but—’
‘Well, thank goodness you found her,’ Ian told Craig. ‘I’ll see she doesn’t get detached again.’ With which he tucked his arm into Hope’s and clasped her hand. ‘You with the fellows—the TV gang?’ he asked Craig.
‘No, I came alone,’ Craig said.
‘And—?’ Tan looked an enquiry at his companion, who stood with bowed head, his hands limp at his sides, his sandals scuffing the trodden earth underfoot. Ian went on curiously, ‘Who is he? You didn’t find him bothering Hope, did you? If so, I’ll—! Or is he one of your chaps from the estate?’
As Craig looked down at the man Hope had the impression that it was from more than his physically superior height. There was contempt in his glance. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t making himself a nuisance to Hope, and I wouldn’t employ him for free. It’s just that, in a certain incomplete jigsaw puzzle, he’s got to be the missing piece.’
CHAPTER NINE
Barbara said, ‘What was this man like?’
Surprised by the sharp urgency of the question, Hope stopped short in her account of the evening’s happenings. ‘Well, young,’ she said. ‘Probably belonging here, because Craig accused him of having come “back” from Barbados, where he said he had been since—well, since some occasion they both seemed agreed upon.’
‘Yes, about that?’ queried Barbara. ‘You say Craig suddenly dived for him in the crowd—and what then?’
As accurately as she could remember it, Hope related the whole incident of Craig’s capture and accusations, concluding, ‘After we came up again with I
an, the man hardly spoke. He just stood there, looking resigned and sort of defeated, while Ian asked Craig who he was and what he’d done.’
‘And did Craig tell Ian?’
‘No. He said something cryptic, which neither Ian nor I understood and he didn’t explain, about the man’s being the missing piece in a puzzle, and he took him away.’ Hope paused. ‘Why, do you think you know him, and what Craig could have meant?’
Barbara did not answer at once. Then, ‘I’ve an idea,’ she admitted. ‘But if Craig didn’t say anything, I mustn’t—’
‘Do you think Craig may explain to you?’ Hope asked.
‘Possibly. Yes, I think he may, if he’s right. If he is, it should clear up something which concerns us both. So yes, he’s sure to tell me,’ Barbara agreed.
Tm glad, if it’s going to help.’ To Hope the moment seemed right to put a question she had long wanted to ask. She ventured, ‘Look, Barbara, you must realise I’ve known how your relationship with Craig has changed since I came here. You were friends then, seeing each other often. What’s happened? Why don’t you now?’
Barbara shook her head. ‘Of course you must have noticed. But—’
‘But you don’t want to talk about it?’
‘No.’
‘Nor even tell me the bare facts of what’s happened between you? You may well say it’s no affair of mine, but if there’s anything I could do or say that might help, you must know I would?’
Barbara nodded agreement. ‘I do know, and I do want to tell you. But I can’t, without—’
‘Without Craig’s permission?’ was Hope’s shrewd guess, but Barbara’s reaction was stubborn.
‘I can’t,’ she reiterated. ‘Just leave it at that, please.’ Changing the subject, she went on, ‘Go on about the rest of your evening. You and Ian stayed to see Vaval duly buried?’
For a moment Hope had been tempted to refuse to be deflected by telling Barbara what she knew or suspected about the source of that anonymous letter she had seen. But fearing another snub, she went on to describe the final cortege for Vaval around the dying funeral pyre; the waving torches, the simulated mourning and the massed chanting of a refrain in which the whole crowd had joined.