by Jean Rhys
For several months after this Ramage disappeared and one afternoon at croquet Mrs Cox asked Miss Lambton if she had any news of him.
‘A strange man,’ she said, ‘very reserved.’
‘Not so reserved as all that,’ said Miss Lambton. ‘He got married several weeks ago. He told me that he didn’t want it talked about.’
‘No!’ said Mrs Cox. ‘Who to?’
Then it all came out. Ramage had married a coloured girl who called herself Isla Harrison, though she had no right to the name of Harrison. Her mother was dead and she’d been brought up by her godmother, old Miss Myra, according to local custom. Miss Myra kept a sweet shop in Bay Street and Isla was very well known in the town – too well known.
‘He took her to Trinidad,’ said Miss Lambton mournfully, ‘and when they came back they were married. They went down to Spanish Castle and I’ve heard nothing about them since.’
‘It’s not as though she was a nice coloured girl,’ everybody said.
So the Ramages were lost to white society. Lost to everyone but Dr Cox. Spanish Castle estate was in a district which he visited every month, and one afternoon as he was driving past he saw Ramage standing near his letter box which was nailed to a tree visible from the road. He waved. Ramage waved back and beckoned.
While they were drinking punch on the veranda, Mrs Ramage came in. She was dressed up to the nines, smelt very strongly of cheap scent and talked loudly in an aggressive voice. No, she certainly wasn’t a nice coloured girl.
The doctor tried – too hard perhaps – for the next time he called at Spanish Castle a door banged loudly inside the house and a grinning boy told him that Mr Ramage was out.
‘And Mrs Ramage?’
‘The mistress is not at home.’
At the end of the path the doctor looked back and saw her at a window peering at him.
He shook his head, but he never went there again, and the Ramage couple sank out of sight, out of mind.
It was Mr Eliot, the owner of Twickenham, who started the trouble. He was out with his wife, he related, looking at some young nutmeg trees near the boundary. They had a boy with them who had lighted a fire and put on water for tea. They looked up and saw Ramage coming out from under the trees. He was burnt a deep brown, his hair fell to his shoulders, his beard to his chest. He was wearing sandals and a leather belt, on one side of which hung a cutlass, on the other a large pouch. Nothing else.
‘If,’ said Mr Eliot, ‘the man had apologized to my wife, if he’d shown the slightest consciousness of the fact that he was stark naked, I would have overlooked the whole thing. God knows one learned to be tolerant in this wretched place. But not a bit of it. He stared hard at her and came out with: “What an uncomfortable dress – and how ugly!” My wife got very red. Then she said: “Mr Ramage, the kettle is just boiling. Will you have some tea?”’
‘Good for her,’ said the doctor. ‘What did he say to that?’
‘Well, he seemed rather confused. He bowed from the waist, exactly as if he had clothes on, and explained that he never drank tea. “I have a stupid habit of talking to myself. I beg your pardon,” he said, and off he went. We got home and my wife locked herself in the bedroom. When she came out she wouldn’t speak to me at first, then she said that he was quite right, I didn’t care what she looked like, so now she didn’t either. She called me a mean man. A mean man. I won’t have it,’ said Mr Eliot indignantly. ‘He’s mad, walking about with a cutlass. He’s dangerous.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Dr Cox. ‘He’d probably left his clothes round the corner and didn’t know how to explain. Perhaps we do cover ourselves up too much. The sun can be good for you. The best thing in the world. If you’d seen as I have . . .’
Mr Eliot interrupted at once. He knew that when the doctor started talking about his unorthodox methods he went on for a long time.
‘I don’t know about all that. But I may as well tell you that I dislike the idea of a naked man with a cutlass wandering about near my place. I dislike it very much indeed. I’ve got to consider my wife and my daughter. Something ought to be done.’
Eliot told his story to everyone who’d listen and the Ramages became the chief topic of conversation.
‘It seems,’ Mrs Cox told her husband, ‘that he does wear a pair of trousers as a rule and even an old coat when it rains, but several people have watched him lying in a hammock on the veranda naked. You ought to call there and speak to him. They say,’ she added, ‘that the two of them fight like Kilkenny cats. He’s making himself very unpopular.’
So the next time he visited the district Dr Cox stopped near Spanish Castle. As he went up the garden path he noticed how unkempt and deserted the place looked. The grass on the lawn had grown very high and the veranda hadn’t been swept for days.
The doctor paused uncertainly, then tapped on the sitting-room door, which was open. ‘Hallo,’ called Ramage from inside the house, and he appeared, smiling. He was wearing one of his linen suits, clean and pressed, and his hair and beard were trimmed.
‘You’re looking very well,’ the doctor said.
‘Oh, yes, I feel splendid. Sit down and I’ll get you a drink.’
There seemed to be no one else in the house.
‘The servants have all walked out,’ Ramage explained when he appeared with the punch.
‘Good Lord, have they?’
‘Yes, but I think I’ve found an old woman in the village who’ll come up and cook.’
‘And how is Mrs Ramage?’
At this moment there was a heavy thud on the side of the house, then another, then another.
‘What was that?’ asked Dr Cox.
‘Somebody throwing stones. They do sometimes.’
‘Why, in heaven’s name?’
‘I don’t know. Ask them.’
Then the doctor repeated Eliot’s story, but in spite of himself it came out as trivial, even jocular.
‘Yes, I was very sorry about that,’ Ramage answered casually. ‘They startled me as much as I startled them. I wasn’t expecting to see anyone. It was a bit of bad luck but it won’t happen again.’
‘It was bad luck meeting Eliot,’ the doctor said.
And that was the end of it. When he got up to go, no advice, no warning had been given.
‘You’re sure you’re all right here?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Ramage.
‘It’s all rubbish,’ the doctor told his wife that evening. ‘The man’s as fit as a fiddle, nothing wrong with him at all.’
‘Was Mrs Ramage there?’
‘No, thank God. She was out.’
‘I heard this morning,’ said Mrs Cox, ‘that she disappeared. Hasn’t been seen for weeks.’
The doctor laughed heartily. ‘Why can’t they leave those two alone? What rubbish!’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Cox without smiling, ‘it’s odd, isn’t it?’
‘Rubbish,’ the doctor said again some days later, for, spurred on by Mr Eliot, people were talking venomously and he could not stop them. Mrs Ramage was not at Spanish Castle, she was not in the town. Where was she?
Old Myra was questioned. She said that she had not seen her god-daughter and had not heard from her ‘since long time’. The Inspector of Police had two anonymous letters – the first writer claimed to know ‘all what happen at Spanish Castle one night’: the other said that witnesses were frightened to come forward and speak against a white man.
The Gazette published a fiery article:
‘The so-called “Imperial Road” was meant to attract young Englishmen with capital who would buy and develop properties in the interior. This costly experiment has not been a success, and one of the last of these gentlemen planters has seen himself as the king of the cannibal islands ever since he landed. We have it, on the best authority, that his very eccentric behaviour has been the greatest possible annoyance to his neighbour. Now the whole thing has become much more serious . . .’
It ended: ‘Black peop
le bear much; must they also bear beastly murder and nothing be done about it?’
‘You don’t suppose that I believe all these lies, do you?’ Dr Cox told Mr Eliot, and Mr Eliot answered: ‘Then I’ll make it my business to find out the truth. That man is a menace, as I said from the first, and he should be dealt with.’
‘Dear Ramage,’ Dr Cox wrote. ‘I’m sorry to tell you that stupid and harmful rumours are being spread about your wife and yourself. I need hardly say that no one with a grain of sense takes them seriously, but people here are excitable and very ready to believe mischiefmakers, so I strongly advise you to put a stop to the talk at once and to take legal action if necessary.’
But the doctor got no answer to this letter, for in the morning news reached the town of a riot at Spanish Castle the night before.
A crowd of young men and boys, and a few women, had gone up to Ramage’s house to throw stones. It was a bright moonlight night. He had come on to the veranda and stood there facing them. He was dressed in white and looked very tall, they said, like a zombi. He said something that nobody heard, a man had shouted ‘white zombi’ and thrown a stone which hit him. He went into the house and came out with a shotgun. Then stories differed wildly. He had fired and hit a woman in the front of the crowd . . . No, he’d hit a little boy at the back . . . He hadn’t fired at all, but had threatened them. It was agreed that in the rush to get away people had been knocked down and hurt, one woman seriously.
It was also rumoured that men and boys from the village planned to burn down Spanish Castle house, if possible with Ramage inside. After this there was no more hesitation. The next day a procession walked up the garden path to the house – the Inspector of Police, three policemen and Dr Cox.
‘He must give some explanation of all this,’ said the Inspector.
The doors and windows were all open, and they found Ramage and the shotgun, but they got no explanation. He had been dead for some hours.
His funeral was an impressive sight. A good many came out of curiosity, a good many because, though his death was said to be ‘an accident’, they felt guilty. For behind the coffin walked Mrs Ramage, sent for post-haste by old Myra. She’d been staying with relatives in Guadeloupe. When asked why she had left so secretly – she had taken a fishing boat from the other side of the island – she answered sullenly that she didn’t want anyone to know her business, and she knew how people talked. No, she’d heard no rumours about her husband, and the Gazette – a paper written in English – was not read in Guadeloupe.
‘Eh-eh,’ echoed Myra. ‘Since when the girl obliged to tell everybody where she go and what she do chapter and verse . . .’
It was lovely weather, and on their way to the Anglican cemetery many had tears in their eyes.
But already public opinion was turning against Ramage.
‘His death was really a blessing in disguise,’ said one lady. ‘He was evidently mad, poor man – sitting in the sun with no clothes on – much worse might have happened.’
‘This is All Souls Day,’ Rosalie thought, standing at her bedroom window before going to sleep. She was wishing that Mr Ramage could have been buried in the Catholic cemetery, where all day the candles burnt almost invisible in the sunlight. When night came they twinkled like fireflies. The graves were covered with flowers – some real, some red or yellow paper or little gold cut-outs. Sometimes there was a letter weighted by a stone and the black people said that next morning the letters had gone. And where? Who would steal letters on the night of the dead? But the letters had gone.
The Anglican cemetery, which was not very far away, down the hill, was deserted and silent. Protestants believed that when you were dead, you were dead.
If he had a letter . . . she thought.
‘My dear darling Mr Ramage,’ she wrote, then felt so sad that she began to cry.
Two hours later Mrs Cox came into the room and found her daughter in bed and asleep; on the table by her side was the unfinished letter. Mrs Cox read it, frowned, pressed her lips together, then crumpled it up and threw it out of the window.
There was a stiff breeze and she watched it bouncing purposefully down the street. As if it knew exactly where it was going.
Good-bye Marcus, Good-bye Rose
‘When first I wore my old shako,’ sang Captain Cardew, ‘Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago . . .’ and Phoebe thought what a wonderful bass voice he had. This was the second time he had called to take her for a walk, and again he had brought her a large box of chocolates.
Captain Cardew and his wife were spending the winter in Jamaica when they visited the small island where she lived and found it so attractive and unspoilt that they decided to stay. They even talked of buying a house and settling there for good.
He was not only a very handsome old man but a hero who had fought bravely in some long ago war which she thought you only read about in history books. He’d been wounded and had a serious operation without an anaesthetic. Anaesthetics weren’t invented in those days. (Better not think too much about that.)
It had been impressed on her how kind it was of him to bother with a little girl like herself. Anyway she liked him, he was always so carefully polite to her, treating her as though she were a grown-up girl. A calm unruffled man, he only grew annoyed if people called him ‘Captain’ too often. Sometimes he lost his temper and would say loudly things like: ‘What d’you think I’m Captain of now – a Penny a Liner?’ What was a Penny a Liner? She never found out.
It was a lovely afternoon and they set out. She was wearing a white blouse with a sailor collar, a long full white skirt, black stockings, black buttoned boots and a large wide-brimmed white hat anchored firmly with elastic under her chin.
When they reached the Botanical Gardens she offered to take him to a shady bench and they walked slowly to the secluded part of the Gardens that she’d spoken of and sat under a large tree. Beyond its shadow they could see the yellow dancing patches of sunlight.
‘Do you mind if I take off my hat? The elastic is hurting me,’ Phoebe said.
‘Then take it off, take it off,’ said the Captain.
Phoebe took off her hat and began to talk in what she hoped was a grown-up way about the curator, Mr Harcourt-Smith, who’d really made the Gardens as beautiful as they were. He’d come from a place in England called the Kew. Had he ever heard of it?
Yes he had heard of it. He added: ‘How old are you Phoebe?’
‘I’m twelve,’ said Phoebe, ‘– and a bit.’
‘Hah!’ said the Captain. ‘Then soon you’ll be old enough to have a lover!’ His hand, which had been lying quietly by his side, darted towards her, dived inside her blouse and clamped itself around one very small breast. ‘Quite old enough,’ he remarked.
Phoebe remained perfectly still. ‘He’s making a great mistake, a great mistake,’ she thought. ‘If I don’t move he’ll take his hand away without really noticing what he’d done.’
However the Captain showed no sign of that at all. He was breathing rather heavily when a couple came strolling round the corner. Calmly, without hurry, he withdrew his hand and after a while said: ‘Perhaps we ought to be going home now.’
Phoebe, who was in a ferment, said nothing. They walked out of the shade into the sun and as they walked she looked up at him as though at some aged but ageless god. He talked of usual things in a usual voice and she made up her mind that she would tell nobody of what had happened. Nobody. It was not a thing you could possibly talk about. Also no one would believe exactly how it happened, and whether they believed her or not she would be blamed.
If he was as absentminded as all that – for surely it could be nothing but absentmindedness – perhaps there oughtn’t to be any more walks. She could excuse herself by saying that she had a headache. But that would only do for once. The walks continued. They’d go into the Gardens or up the Morne, a hill overlooking the town. There were benches and seats there but few houses and hardly anybody about.
He
never touched her again but all through the long bright afternoons Captain Cardew talked of love and Phoebe listened, shocked and fascinated. Sometimes she doubted what he said: surely it was impossible, horrifyingly impossible. Sometimes she was on the point of saying, not ‘You oughn’t to talk to me like this’ but babyishly ‘I want to go home.’ He always knew when she felt this and would at once change the subject and tell her amusing stories of his life when he was a young man and a subaltern in India.
‘Hot?’ he’d say. This isn’t hot. India’s hot Sometimes the only thing to do is take off your clothes and see that the punkah’s going.’
Or he’d talk about London long ago. Someone – was it Byron? – had said that women were never so unattractive as when they were eating and it was still most unfashionable for them to eat heartily. He’d watch in wonder as the ethereal creatures pecked daintily, then sent away almost untouched plates. One day he had seen a maid taking a tray laden with food up to the bedrooms and the mystery was explained.
But these stories were only intervals in the ceaseless talk of love, various ways of making love, various sorts of love. He’d explain that love was not kind and gentle, as she had imagined, but violent. Violence, even cruelty, was an essential part of it. He would expand on this, it seemed to be his favourite subject.
The walks had gone on for some time when the Captain’s wife, Edith, who was a good deal younger than her husband, became suspicious and began making very sarcastic remarks. Early one evening when the entire party had gone up the Morne to watch the sunset, she’d said to her husband, after a long look at Phoebe: ‘Do you really find the game worth the candle?’ Captain Cardew said nothing. He watched the sun going down without expression, then remarked that it was quite true that the only way to get rid of a temptation was to yield to it.
Phoebe had never liked Edith very much. Now she began to dislike her. One afternoon they were in a room together and she said: ‘Do you see how white my hair’s becoming? It’s all because of you.’ And when Phoebe answered truthfully that she didn’t notice any white hairs: ‘What a really dreadful little liar you are!’