“She sounds pretty jealous of you,” Douglas said.
“Other children don’t behave like that, though. I know a man who re-married, and his girl was nicer to his second wife than she was to her own mother.” He pondered a minute. “I suppose if a child is born bad, you can’t do anything about it. I believe she has a bad streak in her, you know—inherited. Her uncle on her mother’s side was a bad lot. He was in prison in England once or twice,”
“Heredity may have a lot to do with it,” Douglas said. “Still, we must make the most of what we’ve got.”
‘”You think there’s a chance of straightening her out a bit?” he asked hopefully.
“I’d say a good chance, given time.”
He rose and shook Douglas’s hand.
“I’ve a great deal of confidence in you, Mr. Lockwood.” He was embarrassingly sincere. “I’d like to make a success of the girl for her mother’s sake. I feel I can count on you.”
Douglas walked back with him to his car. The same evening he met Silvia going in to supper. She had been making herself inconspicuous since the incident with Norah on the juniper slope, but she still showed no sign of friendliness. He asked her if she had been glad to see her father.
“He can come up here if he wants,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “It doesn’t bother me.”
Every Monday morning at nine o’clock there was a staff meeting. It was held in the Common Room next to the library. Mr. and Mrs. Morgan sat on one side of the table and Duffield and Douglas on the other. The Pawleys sat facing each other at the ends. For some weeks the proceedings had been complicated by the Morgan–Duffield feud, which prevented a matter raised by one party from being discussed by the other. It was now further complicated by Mrs. Pawley’s feud with Douglas. He had met her several times since Thursday. On each occasion she had cut him dead. This morning he made another attempt to restore their relationship to normal. When she came into the room he wished her good morning. She ignored him. They were a very happy party.
Luckily this morning there wasn’t much to discuss. Pawley himself had only one point. He wondered if his staff would find it too great a burden to participate more actively in the children’s hobbies. His wife, for her part, was intending to encourage fresh interest in piano-playing, which it was one of her functions to teach. Morgan then expressed a public regret at the falling-off of interest in butterfly collecting. Pawley suggested tactfully that this might be due to the children’s aversion to memorizing a list of Latin names, which was a necessary qualification for membership of Morgan’s Butterfly Society. This set Morgan off on a lengthy speech about the international nature of entomology and the importance of using labels that were equally comprehensible to collectors in Omsk and Timbuctoo. When Pawley managed to interrupt after five or six minutes, the original question had been forgotten.
Mrs. Pawley then voiced an impatient opinion that Joe was becoming too familiar with the girls. She had caught him lifting one of the girls up the bank where they went to dig clay—quite unnecessarily, since all the girls could scramble up it themselves. As clay digging was under Douglas’s jurisdiction, he took this to be aimed indirectly at himself, although Mrs. Pawley spoke without looking at him.
Pawley referred the matter to Douglas, and Douglas said that he would instruct Joe not to lift children up the bank, although he suspected it to be his helpful nature rather than a prurient interest in little girls. Pawley then referred the matter back to Mrs. Pawley, who shrugged as if she hadn’t been listening and had anyhow lost interest.
After that Morgan, who had been silent for at least five minutes, put forward a plea for compulsory work on the farm by all the boys. He put this forward at nearly every meeting, supporting it with a compelling discourse on the importance of scientific agricultural knowledge to every Jamaican. Pawley retaliated with another time-honoured speech on the detrimental effects of compulsion, and finally, after having considered the question from all angles, rejected the proposition. Duffield smiled with discreet satisfaction. Pawley then asked if there was any other business for today’s meeting. He goggled at each of the staff in turn.
“Duffield? Lockwood? Mrs. Morgan?” None of them had anything, so he placed his hands on the table and beamed and ended up with his customary speech, “Thank you all for attending, then. I hope we can look forward to another satisfactory week.” He then said to Douglas, “I’d be glad if you could spare me one more moment, Lockwood.”
When the others had gone, he put on rather a martyred smile, handed Douglas a folded letter, and said:
“I’m afraid we haven’t got rid of our anonymous correspondent yet.”
The letter was in the same uneducated hand as the first. It said:
I regretfully note, Sir, that you have not taken action upon my friendly warning and John Cooper is still at your school infecting innocent companions with the terrible disease which he is known to have contracted from his ancestors. I have informed you that this disease is leprosy. The matter is already being discussed by many concerned people all over Jamaica, and it is only in the spirit of friendly help that I advise you to send John Cooper away from your school before any unfortunate consequences arise.
Douglas put down the letter.
“I suppose we’ll have to do something this time,” he said, and he told Pawley what he had heard at the cocktail party.
Pawley looked troubled—more troubled about the gossip at the cocktail party than he had been about the note.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s something we can’t afford to ignore. I’d like to make a suggestion. Of course you may have a better idea—in which case we shall certainly discuss it—but in my opinion the first step is to consult John’s parents. We should do so in common fairness. They may know who’s writing the letters. Personally I believe it’s someone who objects to a coloured boy being at the school.”
“It sounds from the language as if a coloured person had written it,” Douglas said. “Or at any rate a mulatto.”
“Probably a mulatto,” Pawley said. “They’d be the first to find fault with John—for being blacker than themselves.”
“Anyhow, I agree we ought to see John’s parents,” Douglas said. “If we don’t tell them what’s going on, they’re bound to hear about it from someone else.”
“I’d like you to see them as soon as possible,” Pawley said. “What about tomorrow morning? You’ll have to put off your classes, of course.”
“I could take my day off tomorrow instead of Wednesday,” Douglas suggested. “It would mean losing less time at the school.” And it would mean he would be with Judy a day sooner.
“You don’t mind? I hadn’t liked to ask you after switching you about last week.”
The post-runner took the post down in the afternoon. Douglas wrote out a telegram and sealed it in an envelope with some money, and put it with the letters after lunch. He was in an excellent mood all the rest of that day. Tuesday had seemed like a long desert of time, without an oasis, that he would have to trek wearily across before seeing Judy again; and now all at once she was standing this side of it.
He left the school immediately after breakfast and was in Kingston before ten. He had not met John’s parents; they did not own a car, and never visited the school on Sundays. He went straight to their address. It was a bungalow in a small garden, amongst many other bungalows exactly like it. They all had an air of respectability maintained on small incomes.
As he opened the gate a woman came on to the porch, wearing an apron and holding a broom. She was middle-aged, with negroid features and coffee-coloured skin. It was John’s mother.
After Douglas had introduced himself she took off her apron apologetically and showed him into the little room which she called the lounge. She wouldn’t let him refuse a drink, and she went to the cupboard for a bottle of whisky. It was right at the back, evidently kept there for special occ
asions. On a side-table there was a photograph of Mrs. Cooper with John and her husband. Her husband worked in a Government office. He looked much less negroid than his wife, and John looked the darkest and most negroid of them all.
Mrs. Cooper sat down with the hopeful look of someone not giving way to fears of bad news. He told her why he had come, and reassured her that there was nothing the matter with John; they had no intention of sending him away, and their only concern was to kill the gossip.
As he spoke her face subsided into an expression of hopeless misery. Her plump hands were shaking.
“I knew people were talking,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone had written letters, though.”
“You’ve no idea who might have done it?”
She shook her head uncertainly.
“We’ve got to find out somehow,” Douglas said.
“I can’t think who it could be.” She said this very unconvincingly. She was shaking more than ever.
Douglas said, “We’ve got to find out for John’s sake, Mrs. Cooper.”
She suddenly began to cry. She took a handkerchief from the short sleeve of her cotton dress. When she had recovered a bit, she said:
“I think I know. But I daren’t tell you. I daren’t.”
He pressed her and promised discretion, and presently she said, “I think its a woman who’s trying to get my husband. She hates me. She knows I’ve given up everything to send John to a good school, and it would break my heart if he had to leave. She’d like to break my heart, that’s what she wants.”
“We could prosecute her for writing the letters,” Douglas said.
“No.” She shook her head. “I daren’t. Because of my husband.”
“Your husband would want to stop her writing the letters, wouldn’t he?”
“He wouldn’t want to get her into trouble.”
“But if he knew about this?”
She started crying again.
“It’s been going on for ages. She’s been trying to get him. He likes her—she’s fairer than me. She’s younger, too. She’d never make him happy though. She’s a hussy.”
“Writing libellous letters is a curious way of trying to win someone’s affection,” Douglas said.
“He doesn’t care about John. He wants a fair child. He was terribly angry that John wasn’t fairer.”
“Does he know what people have been saying about the leprosy?”
“Yes. It only makes him more angry with me. It’s quite true that my father and sister died of leprosy. I never had it, though. I didn’t tell him when we were married, because people don’t like it. They seem to think it’s a crime. Then he found out afterwards. He nearly left me then. I expect he told the girl himself.”
“I’d like to talk to your husband about it, if you’re agreeable,” Douglas said.
“No,” she said. “Please don’t do that.”
“I might be able to make him understand what a frightful thing these letters are.”
She shook her head.
“I know what he’s like. It would only turn him more against me. It would tum him more against John. He’ll say we’re the cause of it. That’s what the girl hopes. She hopes he’ll feel so ashamed of us that he’ll leave us.”
“Would you mind if I gave the letters to the police?”
She looked terrified.
“Oh no,” she said. “You mustn’t do that.”
“I could do it without bringing you in. I won’t say I’ve been to see you.”
“People in the road will have seen. My husband will find out. He’ll blame me if anything happens. He’ll make me take John away from the school. I’d much rather you didn’t do anything.”
“And you won’t let me speak to your husband?”
“No, please don’t,” she said. “It would only make everything worse. It wouldn’t take much to make him go away with the girl altogether. He only stays because of his Government job and what people would think.”
“Very well,” Douglas said. “We shan’t do anything unless you agree. Perhaps it’ll all die down.”
She came with him to the door. At the door she said:
“Mr. Lockwood—John doesn’t know about it, does he? You haven’t told him anything?”
“Of course not. We’ve been very careful about it.”
“Oh, thank you,” she said with great relief. “Thank you, Mr. Lockwood. I suppose he’ll have to know about it one day, but I don’t want to tell him yet. It’s been such a terrible blight on me.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “John’s a wonderful little chap. Everyone likes him at school. He’ll go a long way.”
As he said this, her whole face filled with pleasure and pride. Her damp eyes shone.
“I don’t mind what happens if he goes on like that,” she said. “I don’t mind what.”
Judy’s new flat was two miles from the centre of the town, on the first floor of a house that had been converted into apartments. He had been worried that she might not have received his telegram; but when he arrived he found her waiting with lunch already prepared to take out to the bay. She was wearing a dressing-gown.
“I thought I’d find out what you wanted me to wear,” she said. “These pink slacks—or this playsuit.”
“The slacks would remind me too much of Mrs. Pawley,” he said.
“All right, the playsuit. We shan’t be walking through Kingston, shall we? The air-line would sack me if I appeared in Harbour Street like that. You can look at the flat while I change. Not that there’s much to look at.”
There was only one living-room, quite plainly furnished, but it was high and airy, and a neat little kitchen led off it, with a refrigerator and an electric cooker. A wide balcony to the living-room overlooked the garden. The bushes of bougainvillea were neatly paraded and manicured, the lawn freshly striped by a mower. In the centre of the lawn grew a tree with knotty, twisted branches. It was a mass of tiny blue flowers that reminded him of flowers springing up on the heels of melting Alpine snow.
“You know what that is, don’t you ?” Judy said, coming out on to the balcony.
“I’ve seen dozens of them down here. But they don’t grow up at the school.”
“It’s my favourite tree. It was my favourite before I found out what it was called. I laughed when I heard.” She laughed now.
“What is it?”
“The Lignum Vitae—the Tree of Life. I wonder if I was born under one? Perhaps that’s what put a charm on me.”
“It’s a good emblem for you, anyhow,” he said. It was a wonderful emblem—she had so much vitality that he could feel himself drawing from it, sharing it, so that even down here in the town, where usually he felt jaded and sick at heart, he was for once completely alive.
“Shall we go?” she said. “We can’t afford to waste a minute of today.”
They drove down to the docks in the station-wagon, and found a boatman to take them out in a launch. The oil and scum of the docks slipped away at the sides of the launch, and soon the water became quite clear and blue, and above their heads was the blue-grey haze of tropical heat. They followed the marking posts across the harbour. There were pelicans standing on many of the posts. At the approach of the launch they flapped patiently away across the water, as if turning their backs with faint disgust but without reproach. They flapped round in a circle, and came back again to their posts after the launch had passed. It was several miles across the bay. On one side stretched the low, deserted walls of an old fortress. Then the coast became rocky, and behind the rocks lay stony, uninhabited hills. It was strange, this trick that nature played with Jamaica. A few miles away, beyond Kingston, were jungles of orchids and bamboo and fat tropical plants, and the broad wet acres of sugar-cane, but here nothing grew except cactus. The cactuses stood on the ridges, silhouetted against the sky like a grotesqu
e army of soldiers in the stark landscape of the moon.
They came to a point where they could land. There was a small jetty built on the rocks, and a bare stone building with gaping doors and windows. Some rusting metal rails led steeply up the hillside between the cactuses. They followed these to the top, and found themselves at an old gun-site, with concrete pill-boxes and a huge circular concrete pit. The place was littered with yellowed and torn bits of newspaper and rusting tins, the rubbish of departed humanity that flies had long since discovered and abandoned.
“I rather like places like this,” Judy laughed. “I love things that are grotesque and twisted and stark. The cactus is my favourite plant after the Lignum Vitae.”
“Much less appropriately,” he said.
“We’ll have to eat under a cactus. Do you mind?”
Some of the cactuses were enormous, they gesticulated with long prickly arms and flat green hands. Here and there a few blades of grass pushed weakly through he sand. There was no wind. The air burnt against the skin. Down below, the sea toyed with the rocks, idly and intermittently breaking into froth.
“Do you like salad and pâté?” Judy said. “I’m rotten at this sort of thing. I’ve brought practically nothing.”
She had brought plenty, a huge salad wrapped in a damp cloth, and cream cheese and oranges and bottles of beer. The beer tasted less like beer than like some cheap kind of perfume, but Douglas was delighted with it none the less; and some time later at the school, when Duffield gave him a bottle of the same brand, it brought back to him in a sudden overwhelming flood the whole mood and atmosphere of that lunch, with the heat and the cactuses and his happiness and Judy’s long, smooth, bronzed legs stretched out on the sand.
“Did Caroline divorce you?” Judy said. “Or vice versa?”
“No prodding today.”
“No but I’d like to know.”
“She divorced me,” he said. “She’d have liked it better the other way round—more chic—but I was damned if I’d let her have the fun of making confessions in court.”
“She sounds a nice sort of person.”
The Shadow and the Peak Page 15