by Alec Waugh
Sometimes they would stay in the dusk of the mango trees, close-locked and silent; sometimes they would drive to one or other of the beaches, to swim there with the coins of phosphorus drifting between them : to spread a rug out on the sand under the casuarinas. There would be no sign of human life: no sound except the beat far away in the hills of the Congo drums; the croaking of the frogs; the splash of waves upon the sand, the buzz of the mosquitoes.
“And to think I once talked about mosquitoes as chaperones,” she laughed.
The days were few when she did not see him alone, some-where, sometime.
“One would think I’d be getting tired of you,” she would laugh. “Yet I don’t seem to be.”
On the contrary, each day seemed new: seemed fresh. There was no repetition; no sameness; each separate wooing was individual and complete. As hot afternoons upon the launch with the circle of sunlight moving across the polished woodwork alternated with cool nights upon the beach with the moonlight filtering down through the meshed net of the casuarinas : so did the times when their love-making was a long series of variations on a single theme alternate with these other moments when they would be so much in tune, so much one person, that the mere touching of hands, the mere exchange of a glance, would lead them in an instant to the very point which thirty hours before they had only reached through the elaborate ritual of courtship.
At dances at the club, suddenly, with no words said, they would break from the dance, step out into the scented star-light, and there with the dusk of a parked car their screen and shelter, with the sound of foxtrots in their ears, rediscover in a breathless second that shattering relief. It was bliss: it was rapture. It was something for which no words existed, for which there was no dictionary definition: something that made everything that before had seemed to her in books to be an exaggeration now seem an understatement.
Her whole life was a preparation for those moments. She had no existence outside those moments. EI Santo had become a background. The whole town looked different. There was no street, no corner that had not its own association. The oriental bazaar was not just a one-storied shack where you could buy Japanese silk pyjamas at twice the price that you would pay for them in London. It was the place where they had met unexpectedly one morning, to turn over curios together, where he had bought her an ivory elephant, where he had said as they walked out into the street, “Wouldn’t it be heaven if we could go round the world together, looking into curio shops and always travelling from West to East so that each time we went round the world we’d gain a night?”
El Santo was a different island: just as she herself was a changed person.
On that first carnival afternoon she had been surprised, looking at herself in the glass, to find that she looked no different. Now she was not so certain. She had an idea that she not only felt different but looked different. She had read about women wearing a transfigured look when they were in love. Was that a novelist’s myth : or had some such change really taken place in her? People seemed to be looking at her in a new way: an interested way; as they had done when she was a newcomer to the island; when she was someone they were seeing for the first time. Once Anne complimented her on a frock.
She laughed.
“It is successful.”
“You’ve seen me in this a dozen times. I bought it February year.”
“Did you? It looks new, somehow.”
Or was it merely that it looked different because it was worn by a different person? And why should young Stewart, the junior of the police officers, whom she had known for two years, suddenly be at such pains to join her table whenever she was in the club? Had she really become a different person? If she had, was Gerald conscious of the change? She could not believe he was. He had relapsed so completely into a blinkered middle age: old before his time, concerned with the things that ordinarily did not occupy men exclusively till they had reached the sixties; their health, club politics, patent medicines. He would talk sententiously about the Empire. The island was going to the dogs. “A young fellow in the club this morning …” He would curse at these damn’ fool doctors who couldn’t tell him what was the matter with him: “It’s their job, isn’t it? If your wireless goes wrong, you get an electrician. If he can’t put it right, then he’s a rotten electrician. It’s the same with one’s inside. It’s a machine, isn’t it, like any other....” Night after night he would fall asleep directly after dinner: night after night she would hear choking groans from the far end of the bungalow as he fought back his breath: “What’s the good of living if one feels like this?” No, Gerald would not notice the change in her. She was a piece of furniture to him now.
She was lucky, she supposed, that Gerald was like that. If she were married to a younger man, who was still physically aware of her, would it have been possible to conceal the fact from him : would there not inevitably have been some change of manner; some hesitation, some reluctance : or were she to stage an act, imagining herself in a lover’s not a husband’s arms, would not some keener response, some unexpected gesture, discountenance and warn him
Poor Gerald. If only she could do something to make life lighter for him. She had read that women at such times turned against their husbands. She didn’t. She felt an added fondness for him. But then, in books, women who had deceived their husbands were wretched; with a sense of guilt, resentful at the situation, angry because they could not have their lovers to themselves; frightened and jealous because they had no real hold upon their lovers. But in novels the whole situation was so different. In a city like London it was natural to feel anxious : in a big city you could have no idea what your lover was doing in the hours when you were not with him. Here in El Santo she knew Barclay’s every movement. Since Mardi Gras she had scarcely known an unhappy moment. The whole world seemed her friend. She had felt impatient with Gerald before. But when you yourself were happy you could not harbour an unfriendly thought.
If only she could make Barclay realize how happy she was. She tried to tell him, but he would interrupt her with protestations of his own. She wrote him letters; little notes sandwiched between one meeting and another : a jotting of stray thoughts, things that she had read, things that might make him smile, amuse him. But they were notes, not letters. There was no time for writing letters; no opportunity.
There were moments when she almost wished that they did not live in quite such close propinquity: that there were short separations, brief spaces in which she could brood upon him: in which she could write to him, out of her heart, telling him the things that she never could when she was actually in his company.
Letters could bring one so very close. It was by his letters, after all, that he had won her. Short separations were a bond. One needed distance to see things in perspective. She almost found herself looking forward to the six weeks’ separation of his New York visit. She could write him the letters then that would set the seal upon their loving.
10
He was to sail in ten days’ time. Anxiously he debated the strategy of their last time together.
“If only it could be Barbados so that we could really be together.”
She smiled at his earnestness.
“What does it matter, darling, as long as we do see each other?”
“I know. But the last time. I’ll be thinking of it so often during those six weeks. I want it to be the kind of which one can remember every second.”
“But there’ll be so many other times.”
“I know. But …”
His preoccupation was so serious that she in her light-hearted indifference laughed out loud.
“If you take last times so seriously, you must in a place like London have arranged a very appropriate farewell with that girl you left behind you.”
He flushed at that, flushed and frowned.
“Let’s not talk of that,” he said.
“No, but really. It’s interesting. I want to know. No, no, please. I insist on knowing.”
There was
a pause. He replied sullenly:
“If you must know, there was no last time.”
“No last time? But that’s absurd. If there were any times at all, there must have been a last time.”
“I don’t mean that: not literally. There was no actual goodbye, I mean; no planned last time.”
“But, darling, why? You hadn’t quarrelled, had you? She didn’t make a scene about your going? Not since you had to go. Most women love to stage an act. I can’t imagine …”
“It wasn’t that. It was …”
Again he hesitated. Again she had to prompt him, dragging the truth out of him : as she had that first time.
“If you must know, I couldn’t face the strain of a last time, knowing it was the last time; watching the minute hand of a clock go round, thinking ‘ never, never again.’ I didn’t even tell her I was going. I sent her a goodbye letter from the boat. My last time was a time that I didn’t recognize as the last time; that I thought at the time was one of many.”
He spoke quickly, impatiently. Very much as he had spoken that other time. She watched him curiously.
“You really must have been in love with her.”
He shrugged.
“It was a madness. It’s over now. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s forget it. I’ve forgotten it. What about our last time?’
She was to remember that admission of Barclay’s two afternoons later as she watched through drowsy eyes the circle of sunlight move along the polished woodwork. If this were a last time, with what horror, with what fear would she not be watching the minute hands of the clock move round. The last time, the very last. How terrible that thought would be. How lucky she was for this so-called last time to be no more than the marking of a pause, an interval • a rest that with one part of herself she was almost welcoming: in a planning of the reunion.
How exquisite that would be, the first time after a six weeks’ interval.
“I think I’ll go mad,” she said. “I shan’t be able to keep my hands off you.”
“And what about me?”
“Oh you. You’ll probably arrive worn out with some flirtation on the boat.”
He chuckled.
“You really are heaven. I don’t think there’s another woman in the world who could make a joke like that.”
“I’m not the jealous kind.”
Why should she be? There was no need here for jealousy. Barclay might have a flirtation on the boat. He might have more than a flirtation in New York. He was young and vital and attractive. But it couldn’t mean anything: not after the hours they had spent together. By knowing what they had meant to her, she knew what they must mean to him. She could laugh at the idea of the young women who would fall for him during the next sjx weeks. “Have a good time “was the last thing she said to him as he left her at the gangway’s foot.
11
“Dear one, it’s a whole week,” she started.
It was her first letter to him. It would have been useless for her to write before. He had gone northwards, away from her. She could not space out her letters. It would be on his return that he would find at ever) port a “come back quickly” message.
“Dear one, it’s a whole week,” she wrote.
More than a week, nine days if you reckoned it from that last afternoon : nine days; two hundred hours, more than two hundred hours.
At her side lay a five-page letter: his first to her, posted his second day out. It had arrived that morning. “Dearest, a whole day without my seeing you,” it started....
“Darling, if it were only yesterday,” it ended.
As she reached that final sentence she closed her eyes, reliving behind the darkness of shut lids second by second the details of that last afternoon—the cool of the deck, the contrasted heat of the narrow cabin, Barclay behind her, his chin rested on her shoulder, his cheek on hers; his body from shoulder to knee pressed close against her; her head leant back against his shoulder, her eyes closed and her lips parting.
With a shudder she rose to her feet, ran her hands upwards through her hair, shook herself, walked over to the balcony, stood there, looking with glazed eyes over the roofs of Rodney. She was trembling and her hands were dry. Nine days; two hundred hours. And it would be a thousand, more than a thousand hours before she was in his arms again.
“Dear one, it’s a whole week …”
The six words stood black against the mauve-grey notepaper.
“Dearest,” she began : then paused. She was trembling still; her thoughts lit by memory.
A fortnight back, she had pictured herself expressing in letters all that she had been too shy to express in words. She had pictured herself tranquilly recollective, in the calm that would follow on his sailing. But now that she was at last alone, a morning stretched emptily before her, a sheet of paper blank beneath her hand, she was not in that mood at all. The moment she began to visualize those sun-soaked hours on the launch, those darkened hours in the car, those moonlit hours under the casuarinas, her mouth grew dry, her hands began to tremble.
She stared at the seven words, trying to summon back the half-planned paragraphs her fancy had composed during those long languid mornings. She shook herself. No, it was no good. The sentences would not come.
In Rodney an historical novel was waiting for her at the library. Miss Hardwick had rung up that morning to tell her that the book* for which her name had been on a waiting list for weeks was at last available. She shook her head, however, as she ran her eye over its close-printed pages. It looked so long, so heavy.
“I’m sorry. I’ve been pestering you for this for weeks. But now I see it… I’m lazy, I suppose. I feel like something .. something like …”
She paused. What did she want? A Crime Club choice? No : not a thriller. A travelogue ? She did not want escape. A Wodehouse? She did not want to laugh. She wanted another kind of book: something more personal; a book that would be a mirror, that would reflect her moods, that would analyse and arrange those moods; probe them and interpret them: so that, reading it, she would feel half in the confessional, half in the company of an intimate friend; the friend one dreams of and that one never finds—with whom she could talk in shorthand, comparing notes. That was the kind of book she felt like. But she could scarcely explain that to plump, officious, self-important little Miss Hardwick. She ran her eye along the shelves.
Madame Bovary.
It was years since she had read it. It would be amusing to compare Emma’s experiences with her own.
“I’ll take this,” she said.
On the steps outside., she encountered Mavis Trevor’s mother. Mrs. Trevor was short, plump, and garrulous: a blonde who had let herself go to seed.
“What’s that you’ve got? Madame Bovary? Fancy your never having read it! But you have read it? Fancy reading the same book twice. When there’re so many new books, that’s to say. Have you heard anything of Barclay? Mavis had such an amusing letter by this morning’s mail. I’d no idea he had such a literary touch. The descriptions of his fellow-passengers … good enough for Punch. As I said to Mavis, ‘ He really ought to write a book about the island. Someone ought to encourage him, and there’s no one he’d take more notice of,’ I said, ‘ than you.’ I don’t know if I should have said it. But she flushed so prettily when I did. No, no, I’m not one of those match-making mothers, please don’t think that. And I’m quite certain that there isn’t anything really serious there. At the same time, they are such good friends. They would make such a handsome couple.”
“That’s what I’ve always thought.”
I’m a rat, she thought. But she could not help chuckling as she drove back up the steep dusty road, over the contrast between the Punch-like descriptions of his fellow-passengers and the torrid sentences that had quickened her own heart’s beating; over the contrast between Mavis’s sympathetic encouragement to write and the eager phrases that she herself would be sending north tomorrow.
“Dear one, it’s a whole week … Dearest
…”
The seven words stared back at her from the mauve-grey notepaper: had been staring back at her for twenty minutes : as they had stared at her the previous morning.
On the table beside her lay Madame Bovary. Restlessly she picked it up, rustling the pages, skimming, identifying herself with Emma, seeing herself clamber into Rudolph’s room in the early morning, picturing that drive through Rouen, the white hand through the window; picturing that room in Rouen, the long curtained afternoons. Poor Emma. It should have been so easy for her too, living near a town. What a fool she’d been …
Impatiently she closed the book, tossed it away from her, stretched herself backwards in the chair, clasped her hands behind her head. Why did the heroines of that kind of book behave so sillily? These tragic endings, these Emma Bovaries, these Anna Kareninas. Why couldn’t they have been sensible and happy, like herself?
A smile flickered on her lips as she recalled that happiness. What a fool Emma had been. What a fool she herself had been … in a different way: shy and timid and restrained. How she must have tantalized Barclay in these early days, before that visit to Barbados … and even afterwards.... Hadn’t there even then been some part of herself withheld? If there hadn’t been, would she have felt the need of letters? … Letters! What was the use of letters ?
She stirred restlessly in the chair. You could not prove love with letters. She had welcomed this interval; had felt she needed it.... Yes, and she had needed it. But not to write letters. She had needed it so that she might learn how much she missed him, how and in what way.... It would be different when he returned, different, very different. She closed her eyes, slid her arms under the long chair cushion. “Barclay,” she murmured, “Barclay.”