‘Yes, he’s leaving a clue, like children in a game, leaving a trail.’ Madeleine followed behind Vincent along the path.
Together, they descended the track through the agave towards the lake. The same hot blistering weather had continued. The white light and glare was intense here, because of the sand and salt margins of the lake. In the distance, the heat shimmered and rose above water.
‘Do you want to blow the conch to tell Jonah that we’ve found the butterfly net?’
‘No,’ Vincent said softly. ‘Let’s go it alone.’
They each picked their way carefully. Together they had their eyes peeled for clues of their dear boy, on the scuffed path, for any trace of him on this deserted, windswept landscape.
The salt margins of the lake drew them to the mirror of lucent water. The deserted place held its own peculiar kind of beauty. In front of them, there were a myriad Yellow Migrants, issuing as if from a funnel of swift air; the rate at which they were fluttering and flying forth. They crouched together and stared. White egrets looming on the higher branches were disturbed, and sailed off to the further end of the peninsular.
Looking into the distance, following their flight, Vincent and Madeleine noticed, at the same time, what looked like a crouching figure. How had they not seen him before, out in the open in the blinding light, but seeming like a mirage in the rising heat?
They continued to stare, drawing close to each other. They got up and began walking slowly towards the figure they now saw plainly as Theo, crouching over a log at the far end of the open spaces around the lake. They skirted the shore, their steps crunching on the salt. They did not want to frighten him. Their own feelings were a mixture of intense relief, and ecstatic excitement. But rising in Vincent was a kind of anger. Why had he done this to him? He controlled his anger. Who knew why this boy did what he did? Did he himself?
Vincent and Madeleine, with Theo now before them, utterly absorbed in something in front of him, both exclaimed, ‘Theo!’
Theo turned and looked over his shoulder blankly at them.
They moved forward to kneel behind him. He continued to be absorbed by what they then saw was a chrysalis attached to the under part of a dry log.
The caterpillar had found this well camouflaged spot to spin, with its sticky saliva, its silken web. It had already purged itself of its intestines and entwined the hind part of its body to the web of silk. It had shrunk considerably. The caterpillar was now a chrysalis. A dry leaf like the other dry leaves on the salt shore. This was what Theo was staring at. How long had he been here, to catch the short moment from caterpillar to chrysalis, this metamorphosis?
The outline of the butterfly could be seen clearly beneath the chitinous outer shell which must have been here for three weeks at least. They had caught it on the last part of its journey. The top and sides of the chrysalis had popped, and the head and shoulders of the butterfly were emerging. The butterfly was pushing itself out on its wiry legs. It was now half-way out, the wings crinkled like colourful tissue paper.
Theo, Madeleine and Vincent knelt and stared at the wet abdomen, and then the still folded butterfly began to ease itself away. There were these little pumping motions. They could hardly see the huge transformations with the naked eye.
Time had ceased, it seemed, as they knelt, till the moment a fully extended butterfly let the morning breeze filter through its wings, strengthening them for imminent flight. Then, it was gone.
‘Theo!’ they exclaimed again together.
He turned towards them and stared.
‘We’ve been looking for you for days,’ Vincent said gently.
‘For ten days,’ Madeleine said softly.
Theo registered but remained mute. He seemed well, not dying of thirst or hunger. He was sunburnt, his brown sugar hair dry and matted.
‘Theo, we can hardly believe that you are here and safe,’ Vincent continued.
Theo smiled, faintly.
‘Come, let us go. You can tell us what you want to tell us, later.’ Madeleine encouraged him to rise.
For some time, as they were kneeling behind the boy, Vincent had smelt the kerosene and seen the stains on Theo’s khaki pants. He said nothing to Madeleine, or to anyone else. He did not blow the conch. Jonah was surprised when he heard them coming down to the jetty. He waved and shouted. ‘Theo, Theo, they find you boy. They find you.’ Surprisingly, Theo waved and smiled, as if suddenly realising the stir he had created.
Later Vincent was to hear from Jonah and Singh that they had heard from some of the fellas that the running figure, which had been seen with the kerosene tin and the flambeaux at Saint Damian’s, had also been seen running between the barracks and the stores of the American base: a running figure bent low in the night, escaping the search lights and the intermittent beam of the now renewed lighthouse.
That evening, Jesse visited the Doctor’s House. He came through the back door, carrying his saxophone.
Madeleine was cooking tonight, and Theo was out on the jetty, fishing with Vincent. When, in the past, Vincent had longed for the words as conversation, now there seemed to be no need. Everything had been said. They could feel close without words. They each caught a red snapper. Jesse came down the steps just as Theo landed his on the boards of the jetty.
‘Hi, Theo.’ It was if nothing unusual had occurred.
‘How you going, Jesse?’ The boy looked up.
Then Jesse spoke to Vincent. ‘After this, the authorities are not going to sanction the continuance of the base or the leprosarium. Your case and the case of Jonah and Singh has been forced upon them by coincidence.’ When he said that, he looked over to Theo who was still fishing, and then back at Vincent. ‘The preparations are almost complete. The soldiers will be away in days. The patients are to have a halfway house on the base at Chaguramas. It’s the least we can do. They’re abandoning camp fast.’
‘I’ll be there tomorrow to see the last of the patients off safely,’ Vincent said. ‘Today I was occupied elsewhere.’
‘I understand.’ Jesse smiled.
After Madeleine’s supper, they all went out onto the verandah, relieved of having to have blackouts or restrictions on noise. Small freedoms. There was a full moon and Jesse played his saxophone. Madeleine and Vincent danced. Across the bay, Father Meyer still played his Wagner.
‘Hi, Father, turn that thing off,’ Jesse shouted.
At that moment Jonah and Singh arrived with a bottle of rum. Calypso, bottle and spoon filled the night air as they all said their farewells.
The following morning, the bay was alive with the double evacuation. Jonah had arrived at dawn like he had for years. Vincent, Madeleine and Theo went to Saint Damian’s to help the patients with their safe boarding of every possible craft which was available. Singh and Christiana helped. They were a few who had spent such a long part of their life at the leprosaruium, that they were confused by the idea of leaving. Mr Lalbeharry was philosophical about the change.
While the patients knew that they were not going to their homes immediately, and to some that would have been a terrifying prospect, they were, on the whole, relieved to be leaving Saint Damian’s. The nuns were resigned to whatever was the will of God, as they too helped. Sister Rita waved from their passing launch.
All could see that the American base was being evacuated as well, because of the damage which the fire had done. The theme song of the departure, sung as the patients boarded the old island steamer was:
‘For fifty old destroyers, so it was said,
They sold those valuable bases over our head
And today we don’t know who are masters in this land
If it’s the English or the American…’
The fellas, who had kept the meeting going under the almond tree, jeered with their calypso the departure of the soldiers.
‘Bolo, I sure you know who is master here now!’ Elroy called.
‘Boy, is we self!’
Versailles
1948
>
Le Petit Trianon
In the late afternoon, Theo left to go into town. Earlier in the day, under his supervision, they had installed Madeleine’s father’s old desk from France into the room off the verandah at Le Petit Trianon, their small house in the grounds of Versailles.
The desk had stood in the small room off the hall in the house at Saint Jacques de Compagne, where her father saw his patients when he was not working at the hospital. Madeleine could see it under the window with the lace curtain. They had gone to the empty house on her return in 1948 with Vincent. On the door, still the scrawl Les Juifs.
Everything had been put by neighbours into Emile’s barn. She saw herself again among the packing cases, her father’s books and papers.
All left that day. At first, no explanations, only those single words ‘Ils’ and the more staccato, ‘Le Gestapo’. The shadow through the glass of the door. The two chairs in the hall, the stumped out cigarettes: ‘So polite. But they never told you anything, the German soldiers.’ All the villagers had their stories for Doctor Weil’s daughter.
Everyone was now in the resistance. She found that people looked over their shoulders, guarding their backs. Some bowed their heads when others spoke. There were those who had resisted and those who had collaborated. But publicly, she felt that all wanted to have resisted now, at least now. It was their pain. She would not be part of that settling of scores, that division and its aftermath. She had not been there. She had her husband with his island and their possibilities, their future.
They visited her father’s grave with the lettering on the stone which read: Disappeared at Auschwitz.
After Theo’s departure, Vincent and Madeleine took a stroll to the old Versailles house, at the top of the pasture, near the cocoa houses.
‘Who works these now?’ Their sliding roofs were pulled back. The beans were being sunned.
‘Bosoon, the old overseer. He’s a smallholding farmer. He was my father’s groom.’
‘That’s good. The future will be different,’ Madeleine stated.
‘Not immediately.’
‘We must make it happen,’ she insisted.
‘Yes.’ Vincent watched her, and wondered how long it would take to fit in. They had their work. That would make a difference. It would take time to slip past without being noticed, for Madam and Boss to disappear.
‘Here, let’s go up the front steps.’ They seemed sturdy enough and the verandah had a concrete floor. ‘It was put in just before they left.’
They looked over the estate out from the ledge where there always used to be pots of seed ferns. ‘They used to tickle my face. I remember that,’ Vincent said, folding his hand over Madeleine’s.
‘We’re always looking back,’ she said.
‘Yes. Making the journey over and over again.’
‘We must stop this.’
‘Look, let me show you, take care, stand back.’ They stood at the door looking into the house. The floorboards had been taken up. They could look up and down into the depths and the height of the house, as far as the turrets. There were no floors. The wood had all been ripped out, as well as the windows. The house was completely open to the wind and the rain, and the corruption of the light.
‘Like the bomb sites in London and Berlin.’
‘Only, it’s time that has done this, time and thieves,’ Vincent explained.
‘Wind and rain. Thieves? An abandoned house? Where else would you get materials?’ Just visible, beyond the pasture, were the barrack rooms with their poor.
‘How long will they be there?’ Vincent wondered.
‘They cannot burn down their homes. For where will they go?’ Madeleine made her point.
‘Well, someone has stolen the wood. Someone has dismantled it. Time now will finish it off. See, over there, that’s another estate, and they are all falling apart.’
‘Where was Le Petit Paradis? These names that they chose,’ Madeleine laughed.
‘The Marineaux estate? Yes, where Theo was. At the top of Pepper Hill, you turn right by the Saint Joseph church and go along that road. We can go and see it if you like. They never rebuilt the house after the fire. We can go in the buggy. Bosoon still has the buggy. It’ll be like when we were children.’
‘And there?’ Madeleine was pointing just beneath them at the back of the house. They looked right through the house, through a green light. The walls were cream and mildewed.
‘The servant’s room.’ Vincent remembered every detail.
‘Such a world. There is nothing back there, in Europe, for all of this to rest on now, and there is nothing here for them to take anymore. It’s unsupportable. People must support themselves.’
‘We need Singh and his revolution,’ Madeleine said emphatically.
‘I’m sure Krishna will do it. He won’t disappear.’
‘Nor Jonah. He can’t do it without Jonah, not really, and the barefoot revolution marching and standing in Brunswick Square.’
‘What are they calling it? Did you hear Theo speaking about the meeting. The University of Brunswick Square?’
Suddenly, there was a gust of wind taking a piece of cardboard and hurling it out into the yard where it flew and tumbled in the air over the pasture. ‘My God!’
‘What? A little hurricane?’ Madeleine exclaimed.
‘Bernard,’ Vincent explained. ‘That piece of cardboard, like his toy plane. The plane he built with my father, and they flew on the pasture. It crashed.’
They had had a letter from one of Bernard’s RAF Fighter Pilot friends. He told his story:
‘We flew together in one of those two-man bombers, nothing but plywood, fast and small. A Mosquito. Mostly low-level bombing. The Mosquito’s speed made it possible to escape the flak, you know, the anti-aircraft fire. Too risky man, too blasted risky. The Germans soon learnt how to deal with the Mosquito. Later, most of the bombs we dropped never reached their target. That’s something to realise. Your brother loved flying. He was a sucker for it. Bernard love the Mosquito. After the Mosquito, we joined the Pathfinder Force together. It was our job to guide the bombers. Boy that’s when we did flights like peas over Berlin and Hamburg. You didn’t have time to be ’fraid. Too much work. When you get coned, catch in a search light and the flak coming at you. Well then, you ’fraid no arse. Frighten no arse, but nothing to do about it. You just keep in there. To tell you the truth, that night I could see his aircraft coned, miles away. I saw him get hit. I was sure I saw a parachute. But you know, in the end, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure. And we got back to base. They didn’t come back. I found the grave in France. All you gone there, I expect?’
‘Chéri, we’re going to have to look after ourselves, and others, but always ourselves. You’re going to have to look after me and I’ll look after you. We can’t go on like this. Always remembering the terror of everything. We can’t keep burying the dead. I know. Me, I can’t speak. I‘m the worse. Your poor brother.’ They held each other, teetering at the door of the house without any floors in the green light.
Back at Le Petit Trianon, that evening, over rum punch on the verandah, Vincent said, ‘You know, there is something I have to tell you.’
‘Something that you’ve not told me before?’
‘Yes. Something that I’ve not told you before.’
‘What could that be?’
‘I mentioned the servant’s room.’
‘Yes.’
‘Odetta?’
‘Yes, you told me about Odetta a long time ago, on El Caracol. A childhood love. There was Odetta, and Simone in Paris. Yes?’
‘Nothing is a long time ago.’
‘Seems so.’
‘She had our child. A boy.’
The wind sung in the palms far above them. It seemed to Vincent that a long time passed before Madeleine spoke.
‘Ours?’
‘Yes. Hers and mine. Not ours. You know what I mean.’ Vincent was nervous.
Madeleine could not help herself, ‘Wha
t are you saying?’
‘That I’ve got a son.’
‘Why’ve you not told me all this time. My God!’
He saw a kind of horror on her face. ‘Trust me.’ He touched her arm.
‘Don’t touch me. How can I?’
‘Believe me.’
‘Do you know your son?’ Madeleine cut him off.
‘I was not allowed to. I glimpsed him once, feeding at her breast. I was passing the house in the village.’
‘He must look like you, be about Theo’s age. Does Theo know about this?’
‘Of course not. Would I tell him before I had told you?’
‘Have you thought what it will mean to Theo, you having a son, another son?’
‘I was a boy at the time,’ Vincent protested like a child.
‘That’s not the point. You’ve not been a boy all these years that I’ve known you.’
‘I’m telling you now.’
‘Why now?’
‘He lives in the village.’
‘My God! Vincent!’ Madeleine got up and went into the house.
At supper, Madeleine was silent.
‘At least that was done,’ Vincent turned to Madeleine.
‘What? I didn’t hear what you said?’
‘I was just thinking. At least, my parents gave money to Odetta.’
‘Oh, yes, that’s good. But he’s your son. You’re his father. Are you not curious to see him?’
‘I’ve missed him all my life.’
‘Why did you not tell me. Do you not know? You must know what this means to me?’ She bit her lip.
‘Madeleine. I wish I could start all over again. When I came back, and then the war, it all receded into a past that I could not retrieve, or, tried to forget. Because a boy, he could be seen as an heir to the family inheritance. There was the question of the name, whether he would carry Metivier. I think that is what persuaded my parents to fix a once-and-for-all financial settlement with Sybil, and then to be passed onto Odetta when she came of age. This, they hoped, would keep the matter quiet. They didn’t want to be pestered. They were paying her off. It allayed the shame they felt.’
Night Calypso Page 43