When Daniel came round the door I didn’t feel any great exhilaration of joy. I was too weary. I did have a familiar sense of homecoming, as he leaned over and kissed my forehead. I tried not to bend or twist or laugh, attempting to protect myself from the severed muscles in my stomach.
“I came the minute I heard,” Daniel said. Nora had told him. He was living in Jamaica again, up at Erehwemos.
Nora had visited only once. She was struggling with chronic, debilitating asthma. She couldn’t handle stress. Jacob was away, busy as always covering some conference down the islands.
“Déjà vu.” Daniel smiled gently, seeing me in a hospital bed again.
“But a lot older,” I said holding on to his hand as he tried to manipulate himself into a chair by the bed. His hand felt the same, thin-boned and smooth, but he’d put on weight. His face had that becoming of self that the young lack. It had come into its own. Maybe less hopeful, more resigned. His wire glasses made him look more philosophical, less definite.
“Your glasses make you look older.”
“But wiser?”
“No. Not wiser,” I said. The air required to speak hurt me.
It was hard to think of anything but the pain.
“Your muscles are sore?” he asked.
It was the gas, I explained. Excruciating pain that not even Pethidine helped. Someone had sent me a flask of mint tea and, unbelievably, it was the only thing that worked.
He sat there for the afternoon as I slept and woke. He poured tea from the Thermos and held the cup to my lips. He spoke to me gently. When I rested, he smoked and read a paperback he’d brought along in a battered old satchel.
On one of my wakings, he noticed me fighting sleep to watch him. He squeezed my hand.
“Silence between friends is an acknowledgement of man’s need for God.”
I frowned. Had he become religious?
He said he’d seen it in a little Yorkshire town. It was engraved on a chapel door.
The sound of the nurse rolling a trolley past the door must have awoken me despite the drugs. He was reading his beloved Nabokov.
“Read to me.”
“From the beginning?”
“Wherever you are.”
I don’t remember which Nabokov. Perhaps it was Ada, or Ardor. I drifted between sleep and wakefulness to the sound, rallying and unrelenting, continuous and imperiously fine, of that great master of words whose work charmed even on Daniel’s mumbly voice.
“I found my poem,” I told him. “The one you dedicated to L.S. I wrote one for you too.” I don’t know if he heard me. Maybe I dreamed I told him.
At one stage I woke and became aware that he had slipped the leash of my hand. He was standing at the window smoking a cigarette. He couldn’t see our mountains from there, only a concrete building, another wing of the hospital. My view beyond the room was either an inch of sky through that window or, on the other side of my bed, the corridor. But here we were again in the lap of Mona, where our friendship had begun. This time we weren’t on the single path of our youth; we were travelling down separate roads. I thought it ironic and sad that my return to Jamaica would be to bury the first fleshy home of my sons.
“Daniel,” I called to him softly. I hadn’t the strength just then for more.
He turned and frowned through a pull of cigarette as he looked over at me.
“I’m okay.”
I don’t know why I said it. Never had I felt less okay. Something happens to a woman when she loses her uterus. It’s much more profound in the mind than in her stomach. I had lost my ability to create, to make life. That joy, that ebullience is in the body of earth every spring, and in its creatures. Go out and multiply. No matter how the doctors told me that they’d left in my ovaries, I woke on another shore, a dryer landscape that would deprive me of the power of a reckless potential I had not thought about and had simply taken for granted.
He hesitated, about to place the cigarette he held like a drunk between his thumb and forefinger in his mouth again, but instead looked at it and tossed it through the window.
“If suddenly you should call my name …” he recited.
“… even from the shores of sleep,” I whispered back.
He smiled. He was pleased I remembered.
Things would be themselves again. Sun would be sun. Rain would be rain.
Daniel had finally left England after what he confessed had been an emotionally gruelling ten years, but how else could he have lived those years, or any years? I knew he blamed both Nora and Jacob for what he saw as his exile. Both our first marriages had ended, him with two daughters, Marion and Zelda, and me with two sons, William and Thomas. We agreed that our spouses had deserved more than we had been able to give, though I hadn’t even tried. We both had what Nora would call “strange bonds” with our elder children, a less entangled and more easily joyous weave with the younger ones.
We had kept our friendship through a life of letters, exchanged between England and Barbados.
England is England. The Brits for all their opportunistic global forays remain as much an island people as we are — insular and courteous, private yet neighbourly, but distrustful of a legacy of perplexing cultures they used to rule at arm’s length now arriving on their shores. Including me of course.
I have discovered you were my link between the outer man and inner writer. These became one with you. Now there is gulf between the two, a coping husband and father who wears an everyman’s mask and does the groceries and mows the lawn, while inside the writer is so graced with curiosity and joy, amazed by every new feeling and attitude here, by its politics and culture, its history, the face of every new flower and the squirrels that bring nuts to bury for the time of famish to come. How different we might be in the eternal summer of home if we had to prepare for a winter! My writing has turned outward in prose to the world beyond me, embracing it with whimsy and the shine of an outsider’s insight. Maybe poems are meant for the young. I like the subterranean me beating like a heart beneath my inscrutable surface.
He loved that word, subterranean.
What can I say of Barbados? Much the same as what you say of England, for the Barbadians are influenced by the English and at heart remain kindly. I suspect they’re more wily and though also disturbed by a new world changing around them, are brilliant at utilizing what it has to offer without actually changing a mote of who they are.
As for the split between my selves, I am the opposite. Outwardly I have become an aging, rather pathetic social butterfly, whilst inwardly I remain neurotic, scared, blaming, nostalgic and lonely for the past. I am like a child who hides, waiting for someone to notice I’m missing!
Answering his letters and waiting for his to arrive in the blue airmail envelope with his familiar, small black type, I managed to fashion myself into a separate person for him. Separate from my everyday life with its squalor and failure, its boring jobs in sales or advertising, its tender sometimes frustratingly devoted timeline of mothering, its yearning for nightclubs and cards and dominoes and friends and acquaintances, its efforts not to see the years eroding the beachhead of my face, its passing fancies and romances, its hurts and disappointments, its cruelties and disloyalties. Trying to remember to forget missing Jacob back home. I shut it all out from Daniel, except my poems and sweet sons.
Communication about Daniel’s book on Ernest hadn’t gone smoothly with Nora and Jacob. Daniel and Nora fell out over what he could or should not write and they locked horns. This was not an unusual plight for a biographer faced with a subject’s widow.
A book is not life, fumed Daniel in a letter to me as I tried to mediate and untangle problem after problem between them. Life starts, dreams, ends — but a book, albeit a biography, becomes its own immutable entity. It is art and its life is not human. It is created to possess the immortality that could never be Ernest’s.
And who are any of us to second guess the fierce omnipotence of that art?
Daniel won most of the points. Because Jacob and I wore Nora down. Only on one occasion did I ask Daniel to meet Nora halfway. It was regarding a letter from a great-aunt expressing worry over Ernest and Nora going into their future with the albatross of a mixed-race marriage around their necks. I didn’t think the comment came from bigotry. Rather it was the worry of a concerned family member in an age when cruel social consequences to their union could be expected. How could she know that Ernest and Nora would buck the norm instead, changing and reshaping their own small world in ways that would prove her fears to be unfounded?
Mediating the disagreement long-distance from Barbados, I sent a cable to Jamaica: “Will you trust me and comply. I sympathize. Somewhere.” The last word I added on second thought and knew on sending it that it was a cheap shot.
Daniel knew it too. He reluctantly complied on that one count, but then the project ran aground over other issues. I withdrew from the failing negotiations, leaving Jacob to deal with it. I recognized I could no longer help, having depleted Daniel’s goodwill. After another misunderstanding, an angry Nora made a melodramatic, stupid remark to someone who repeated it to Daniel: “He’s not even a national!” Daniel took my silence and Jacob’s reticence as a sign that we had sided with Nora. Somehow he thought he’d be deported. This was a ridiculous thought. Nora didn’t have such influence and to think if she did and would use it unjustly was not to know her or Ernest, the subject of the biography.
Daniel gave up the project. I wasn’t aware he had. The silence deepened between us. For me it was as though he had died or as if the person I had been in his eyes was no longer. When I could stand it no more, I sent a silly letter accusing him of having forgotten me.
Please don’t make these glib accusations, he replied. In truth memory keeps what it must and sloughs off what is not vital. But in many ways I am in danger of becoming my self-imposed solitude, and I sense you are scared and lonely. Maybe these are the years to which “we” haven’t been invited. Bear with us in our lost wondering. But your place in my heart as you well know is quite without question, sacred.
I was sad he had abandoned Ernest’s book. His intuition about me was right. I was without a mate for the first time in my adult life. And I was broke and scared.
After the breakdown of his marriage, and his subsequent peripatetic literary wanderings, Daniel returned to Trinidad to write and teach. He’d been away more than a decade. When I asked him why he left Helen, he told me she had become too successful. And what was wrong with that I asked. It meant he would become rich and spoiled; he would lose the edge he needed to write he explained. When I said that I wouldn’t be prepared to make that sacrifice, he replied I already had. I hadn’t by choice. He said, yes, I had I just didn’t know it and had I read Moby Dick yet?
Before Daniel left Helen and England, I was visiting Nora who’d sworn off Erehwemos and was settling into her new life at Jacob’s flat in Kingston, when I noticed sitting there on the table where he and Ernest used to work, Daniel’s first book — a thin red-and-orange volume, a collection of poems.
“Are you and Daniel talking again?”
“Helen sent it,” Nora explained.
For a fleeting moment, my heart skipped, hoping it was the book on Ernest. But no; I realized it was too small. I picked the book up and began searching the table of contents. I found one dedicated to L.S. and as I sped through, reading random lines, I knew it was meant for me. I cannot trace the map of your sprite/your homeless eyes will search but not for me/you will grow old, but not for me to know.
I read the book in a single sitting, devouring the poems as though for news of him. Most of the poems I had never seen before. I marvelled as I always had at the sheer might of his voice, its power and artistry, its accuracy, its economy, its unerring truth and fearlessness, its fierce beauty.
“He has really grown into a fine poet,” Nora sighed. Was I sensing regret?
He was always a fine poet, I thought.
A few weeks later, more news came from England. His book had won one of England’s most prestigious poetry prizes. Although this attracted little fanfare in Jamaica, Nora and her friends were ecstatic. I was jealous and proud.
After the disappointment of my shoddy and indifferently received self-published book, I started sending Daniel poems, inviting his advice and changes.
Listen, he wrote. When we were young, and despite your fleet-ing figure on the way to Seacole Hall armed with Blanca at your side, and your disappearance up those dreaded steps, I knew it was our destiny that we’d live together forever, nothing seemed finite so it was easy to pretend I was objective enough to offer criticism. But with you gone these poems you send are all I have now, small spirit parts I cherish just to hold and know, to read between the lines for a sense of your thoughts, for a sense of you. Don’t ask me to be your editor now.
And you, my beloved pretty girl, trapped in your youth both on the Graecian Urn and in my head, how are you?
And you, my forever sweet bird of youth, flown so imaginably far from me! How are you my beloved pretty girl?
I didn’t answer, but sent him my second book of poems. Again I’d self-published, this time in Barbados.
In reply, he included a dense review of my book with a letter. The review was a treatise, at twice the length of my collection, too long to ever get published. He had lived with my poetry and thus with me for a month, he wrote, as the rains came and these days there are fogbanks in the valley. He apologized that the review’s section on love was the weakest, as he wasn’t able to overcome an impulse toward privacy, his and mine. He’d felt torn between love and ambition, wanting to embrace these poems as something pure from me and yet wanting to return them to me edited and improved.
That he would analyze my work in such depth was the greatest compliment he could pay me. So I chose instead to think he fell in love with my poems and thus for me the review was more credible than the tender letter.
Daniel eventually returned to Jamaica many years later. As soon as he arrived he hired a car and drove up to Erehwemos to find Nora. She wasn’t around, as she had moved to Jacob’s flat in Kingston. He looked into Ernest’s studio and broke down, weeping, at the sight of the idle, mahogany desk. Ernest was long gone, but his absence hadn’t been real until Daniel saw the motionless drawers. He felt a greater sense of loss than he did at the departure of his own father. I suppose he knew Ernest better in the sense of knowing him as an adult. I have come to believe that our dead form a degree of sadness in us that becomes our normal. They are separate when we mourn, separate each in memory, but as they move along behind us in the wake of the past they combine to share a common slipstream, a deepening trough, the weight of nostalgia.
Daniel found Nora at Jacob’s. I think no mention was made of Ernest’s book or of the disappointments. If Daniel was big enough to visit, Nora was gracious enough to rise to that challenge. She was moved to see him again, expressing regret over Helen. Never having been one for small children, she was quite content to have Daniel to herself and asked only fleetingly about his two daughters.
Daniel’s return included someone new. Mary was Daniel’s second wife. He had met her in Trinidad, married her there and had brought her to Jamaica. This was soon after their wedding. They were to start a new life. She turned up on Daniel’s arm during the next visit to Nora. She was ramrod-straight. Helen, the daughter of an officer, had had perfect posture, but what this Mary had was way beyond perfect posture — it was an inflexibility of spirit made flesh. All this Nora relayed to me, still in Barbados, by telephone.
Daniel hadn’t mentioned Mary to me in his letters. I was used to this by now. Nora said they were recently married, and she’d decided to rent Erehwemos to them at a peppercorn rate, which was Nora’s elegant expression to say that the house was theirs for nothing.
“It’s strange,” Nora said to me in a phone call. “Daniel is always drawn west to Jamaica while you like to disappear to the Caribbean of the east.”
“And never the twain shall meet,” I said casually, but I thought about that. I wasn’t sure what it meant.
Once again, whatever “somewhere” meant to Daniel and me, it was devalued by the ease with which he seemed able to share it — this place he knew through me and called so special with someone other than me. It was special to me, but not because of Daniel. He’d explain that it was the idea that was sacred not the geographical place, but I had come to realize that like my father, Daniel in love could rearrange the landscape to make all the pieces fit.
His letters became noticeably more detached. He had read an interview in a Caribbean magazine in which I had described his poetry as cerebral. Not cerebral! I thought of all his mumbo-jumbo talk of spondees and dactyls, caesuras, iambic pentameters, sonnets and villanelles whose melodic iterations went straight over my head. He told me it was the opposite but that my answers were just ironic enough, tactful and fluid and not without depth and not without grieving either. He guessed I was growing up okay. I should have thought him patronizing, but instead I dug around to find the magazine so I could see what I said that had impressed him.
It was apparent Nora disliked Daniel’s new wife. Mary was a concert pianist and insisted on having a concert grand piano hauled up the mountain, a challenging feat that intrigued the local farmers. The musical strains of what Nora supposed was her straight-backed grim classical music were a far cry from the dull casual throb of reggae from the distant village sound systems, making unfamiliar demands of the valley’s echoes each evening. In the mornings Mary would practise her scales. The farmers said her music frightened the birds.
Daniel, enjoying the simple needs and rituals of country life, had bought a cow and taken up milking it early each morning. He called the cow Miss Mansfield. When Nora went up to check on the coffee trees, the farmers were full of stories. They told her Mary was an obeah woman and even the farm animals seemed to agree. Daniel had invited Mary to milk the cow. He sat her on the low milking stool beside the cow and showed her how to take hold of its udders. Her hands must have been cold, because Miss Mansfield lunged forward trying to escape, standing on her hind legs with her front legs pawing blindly in a vain effort to climb the guava tree to which she was tied.
The Black Peacock Page 13