Eden Burning

by Belva Plain

  “Why not? It’s my name.”

  The girl set her packages down on the table.

  “What have you got there, now?” Porter wanted to know.

  “Dishes. A set of Spode.”

  “Good God! You hand them back all your wages on gewgaws!” It was a reproach, but a tender one.

  “We needed dishes. The old ones are a disgrace. And these are seconds. You’d never know the difference, though.”

  “Well, I certainly wouldn’t!”

  She reached into the box and held up a cup. “There! Isn’t that a lovely pattern?”

  Patrick was not looking at the cup. He was looking at the pleasure in her face, the most beautiful he had ever seen. It was a classic face with narrow, sculptured lips, large, round-lidded eyes, and a thin, patrician nose—all of these cast in ebony. She wore a red blouse and a white skirt. She had a silver chain on her wrist. Something profound and powerful stirred in Patrick’s chest. Afterwards he thought it must have been fear that she would vanish as easily and quickly as she had appeared.

  In those few seconds he was changed.

  She addressed him. “Has my father been bending your ear?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. I’ve been enjoying myself.” A stilted answer, schoolmasterish and dull, when he was capable of doing so much better! Her beauty had quenched his flow, silenced his wit.

  Porter asked, “Why don’t you invite Mr. Courzon to supper?”

  “Patrick. Please, my name is Patrick.”

  “Patrick, then. You’re invited,” said Désirée. “I’ll have it ready in half an hour.”

  The table, at one end of the front room, had been set with the new dishes. Hibiscus flowers, cerise and yellow, floated in a crystal bowl. He saw that the bowl was very fine.

  Clarence Porter followed Patrick’s gaze. “Another Da Cunha special. Out of place in this house.”

  “Beauty is never out of place,” Désirée said.

  Patrick ate silently, while a pleasant banter crossed and recrossed the table. The girl got up to fetch the next course. From where he sat he could see into the large, clean kitchen. He watched her moving about, watched as she lifted her hair and twisted it into a coil on top of her head. That long, straight hair, heavy as rope—from where had she got it? From some Arab traders wandering south and west into Africa two centuries ago? Or from some Spanish buccaneer who had wandered into the slave cabins on this very island?

  “It gets so hot on my neck,” she complained, with a little petulant sigh.

  “Désirée is part Indian,” Clarence Porter said, as though he had read Patrick’s mind. “My wife’s great-grandmother was a pure Carib, off the reservation.”

  This time the father had given her the name that belonged to her. The name had a caressing sound, apart from its meaning. If you didn’t know the meaning of desire, those syllables alone would tell you.

  “And what do you think of the land settlement they are pressing for on St. Vincent?” Porter asked.

  “Pa, don’t!” Désirée turned to Patrick. “My father is too serious. Sometimes I simply have to close my ears.”

  Porter was amused. “All right, I’ll be quiet.”

  “Too much heavy talk,” she said. “Taste the ice cream. Look out at the evening.”

  Patrick followed her gesture. The sun was an orange ball, tipped on the long, even line where the sky met the sea. Covetown lay in cobalt shadow.

  “How wonderful it is!” she said softly.

  Her perfume smelled like sugar. Flowers and sugar.

  “The time is today,” she said, as if to herself.

  Patrick looked up at her then. “You know, you’re right,” he said.

  Too much heavy talk. Everything has grown too heavy. Ever since I was six years old, when Maman sent me off to school, it’s been a competition. Work. Strive. Be earnest. But what of laughter? It’s true. The time is today.

  His courtship was short. He needed only a few weeks to learn what he wanted to know about her.

  He took her to dinner at a place he couldn’t afford, Cade’s Hotel at the end of Wharf Street. It was a fine, square stone house with a high-walled garden and, if one didn’t count boarding houses, the only place on the island where travelers could stay. In a quiet dining room, dominated by a loud tall clock and gilt-framed portraits of the royal family, one dined alongside English tourists and traveling salesmen on expense accounts. Locals, the whites and the near-whites, came occasionally for a change from their clubs.

  Désirée had never been inside. Her pleasure was infectious.

  “Look at that, Patrick, will you!”

  “That” was a colored print of Queen Victoria at Balmoral, a scene replete with enormous yardages of plaid, fuzzy little dogs and a view of cold, foggy mountains.

  “Scotland,” he said. “I’ve been there.”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh, I would like to see it! I would like to see everything, anything. I’ve never been anywhere. Only once to Martinique and once to Barbados.”

  So, over drinks, he retold his English years as best he could, bringing color and drama to the telling, enjoying her attention. With a flourish of expertise he ordered the dinner: calalu soup and crab farci.

  “I’ve never had crab cooked this way,” she said.

  “It’s the French style. These are land crabs. They’re fed for a few days on pepper leaves. Then they’re baked.”

  “How do you know so much about cooking?”

  “I don’t. I only happen to know about a few French dishes because my mother is from Martinique and she’s a wonderful cook.”

  Désirée was silent for a moment. Then, hesitating, she inquired, “Your mother—she came to Martinique from France?”

  “No, she was born there and so were her people before her.” And aware that this was not the answer that the girl was seeking, he said quietly, “What you’re really asking is whether my mother is colored or white.”

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s all right. My mother is dark, quite dark.”

  “As dark as I am?”

  “No. Nor as beautiful, either.”

  He thought he saw her frown. Her face was lowered and he couldn’t be sure.

  “Is there anything wrong, Désirée?”

  She raised her head. “You understand, I—we—don’t go to places like this. Without you, I wouldn’t be here. They wouldn’t put us out, but they would make us so unwelcome that we wouldn’t want to come.”

  “Of course, I understand.”

  An ant, crawling up the side of the water bowl in which the sugar bowl had been set, fell struggling into the water. Patrick shoved the whole contrivance to the other side of the table.

  He laughed. “Look, it’s not so fancy—you needn’t be overawed. For me, in fact, the ants remind me of home.”

  She laughed, too. “You make me feel good.”

  “I don’t think you need anybody to make you feel good. It’s the other way around when I’m with you.”

  “Is it? Then I’m glad.”

  “You’re a glad person.”

  “Well, I am most of the time. Or I try to be. The trouble with me is, I want things so badly.”

  “What things, for instance?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just a vague kind of wanting inside.” She made a fist at the hollow of her throat. “When I see something beautiful … The Da Cunha brothers have pictures in their houses. There was one I loved, a ruined building, all columns and moonlight, you could feel you were there. Rome, Mr. Da Cunha said. He gave me a print of it for Christmas. I have it in my room.”

  The simple, childish recital touched him, reminding him of himself at age fourteen or so, reminding him, too, of the “blank slates” on which from Monday through Friday he struggled to write something that might inspire and endure.

  “Désirée,” he said softly. “I’ll always call you that.” Then realizing the implication of that “always,” he added, “I’m going to know you for a long
, long time.”

  In the evening they walked, carrying their shoes, on the long beach beyond the harbor. Between the ocean and the pine hills lay the salt pond, rose pink in the faltering light.

  “This one has been here since the time of the Caribs,” Patrick said.

  “What makes it pink?”

  “The algae. Red algae.”

  “You know so much. You know everything.”

  He glanced at her. For a second it flashed through his mind that such praise might be a mere feminine trick, the flattery that is supposed to ensnare a man; but no, her honesty was total. The quick-talking girl with the tossing hair who had subdued him at first meeting was, under the surface of a touching worldliness, only a naïve and tender child. And he knew that he had won her.

  A pair of black-necked stilts came running through the shallow water.

  “Hush,” she said. “Watch them.”

  But he was watching her. In the still, unmoving air, her perfume was strong again: sugar and flowers. He touched her arm.

  “Come,” he said.

  In a pine hollow, perfectly hidden, dark and soft, they lay down. He removed her white blouse and skirt. How many women had he known? As many as any man his age and as many varieties: the eager and lustful, the indifferently accommodating, those who had to be coaxed or pretended that they had. This one was different.

  It was her first time. He felt an excess of tenderness on discovery, but no guilt or remorse, because he knew himself; knew, as his hands thrust the heavy hair from her shoulders, smoothed her firm breasts and long thighs, that he would never leave her. And he felt as they lay there together, both of them too overcome or perhaps too shy as yet for words, that she knew it, too.

  When at last they stood up, it was quite dark.

  “Shall we come here again tomorrow?” he asked.

  “But it’s a working day, isn’t it? You have to travel so far.”

  He trembled. “Why? Don’t you want to? Are you afraid?”

  She laid her head on his shoulder. “No. I was only thinking of you.”

  So they will merge to make a whole. A serious man will respond to a sensual woman and to her delights, whether they be in a bauble or the music of rain or—or in himself. She grasps life with both hands and will teach him her way. While, he, born earnest, will draw her up to form, out of her young, captivating spirit, new tenderness and new strength.

  Agnes was angry. He had taken Désirée to meet her in Sweet Apple one Sunday afternoon.

  “You’re not going to marry that girl?”

  “I haven’t asked her yet, but I’m sure she will.”

  “My God, but the older you get, the more stupid you get!”

  “I can’t think what you mean!”

  “You can’t think? Well, look at her! A dark girl like that! A smart man marries up! He marries light, to improve himself and his children, don’t you at least know that?”

  He controlled himself. “I don’t understand you, Maman. After all you have told me about the years of slavery, you can still talk like this?”

  “What has that got to do with it? You have a way of twisting what I say, you always do.”

  “It’s you who are twisting, you who’re so confused that—”

  But she had gone out, slamming the door.

  He took a sheet of paper and wrote out something he had seen once in a history book about the slavery era.

  White plus black equals mulatto.

  Mulatto plus black equals sambo.

  Mulatto plus white equals quadroon.

  Quadroon plus white equals mustee.

  Mustee plus white equals mustafina.

  He shouted, “What the hell am I?”

  He looked in the mirror. Quadroon? Mustee? God damn! Who was the man who had fathered him? Three generations away from slavery, Agnes was, and still the confusion was entrenched, the pride and the shame intertwined like a nest of snakes. A stubborn woman who would not, simply would not, talk.

  And yet, what difference would it make if she did talk?

  In a burst of rage he threw his hairbrush across the room, splitting the handle of the brush and making a dent on the door.

  Agnes opened the door. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  She stood there, breathing hard, holding on to the wall. For the first time he noticed her knobby, arthritic fingers. A lonely old woman, nearing the end of a lonely and limited existence. What could she know? His anger dissolved.

  “I’m wrong,” she said. “Go ahead and do what you want. Whatever makes you happy.”

  He knew she only meant it in part. Her feelings would not change. So this would have to do.

  “You’re marrying Clarence Porter’s daughter? A beautiful girl,” said Dr. Mebane. “Not radical like her father, I hope? No offense meant.”

  “No. She isn’t interested in public affairs.”

  “That’s good. A man’s woman. When will it be?”

  “As soon as she will.” He had to have her. Suppose someone else were to come along one afternoon while he was away in Gully? He went cold at the thought.

  “Why don’t you wait a little? Nicholas will be home in a year and the two of you could have a little fun together. Spend a week in Barbados. Jamaica, even. Enjoy yourself. There’s time before you need to tie yourself down.”

  “It’s not being tied down when you want it,” Patrick said gently.

  “I just hope you’re sure of your own mind. There are a lot of girls around.”

  He meant, You could do better.

  “I’m sure,” Patrick said.

  Clarence Porter was happy. “I knew it all along. I could tell the first day you laid eyes on her. And she on you.”

  They were to live in Clarence’s other house at the top of the street. The present tenants were to move and Clarence would paint the place fresh for them.

  “I’m so relieved we’ll live in town,” Désirée said. “I never liked the country.”

  “You couldn’t live where I am now, anyway. I’ll just get up an hour earlier each day and drive.” He had bought a wheezing car, third or fourth hand. “We’ll have to get a ring for you at Da Cunha’s.”

  “Da Cunha’s, Patrick? Where are you going to get enough money for that?”

  “Don’t worry, it won’t be anything very large! But my mother sold a piece of land she had in Martinique and gave me some money a few years ago. Enough for my education and a bit left over.”

  “Then maybe we can have a better house of our own sometime.”

  “I don’t know. Teachers don’t earn much.”

  “Perhaps you won’t always be a teacher.”

  He scarcely heard her.

  They were married at the Anglican Church of the Heavenly Rest on the ocean side of St. Felice. It was a small Gothic building that might well have stood at a crossroads in the Cots wolds, except for the coconut palms along the edge of the graveyard and the breaking surf on the shore two hundred feet below the cliff. For fifty years now it had been more or less abandoned by the planter families who had built it, the advent of the automobile having made it easy to attend cathedral services in Covetown.

  “But I would like to be married there,” Patrick had told Father Baker. “I love the age of it, the way it has rooted itself like a tree.”

  The little group—the bride and groom, with Clarence Porter and Agnes—arrived ahead of Father Baker. They wandered along the nave. The filtered light of stained-glass colors, amber, rose, and lavender, lay on ancient, pale memorials, on florid script chiseled into stone.

  In holy Remembrance of Eliza Walker Loomis, devoted Wife and Mother, a charitable and pious Example to her Relations.

  Alexander Walker Francis, born in the Parish of Charlotte in the year of Our Lord seventeen hundred and fifty-two. Died in the service of His Majesty, King George the Third in the year of Our Lord seventeen hundred and seventy-eight. Valiant and honourable in the performance of his sacred Duty to God, King and Country.

  In the dampnes
s of the unused building lichen had begun to creep, obliterating the old words.

  Borne aloft on Angel Wings. Here lie interred the Remains of Pierre and Eleuthère François, infant sons of Eleuthère and Angélique François, died and entered into Paradise on August the fourth in the Year of Our Lord seventeen hundred and two at the Age of eight Months. Our Tears shall water their Grave.

  “Francis,” mused Désirée. “And François. The same family, do you suppose?”

  “It is the same,” Agnes said.

  Father Baker came. Patrick took Désirée’s hand and they went to the altar. Through the poetry of the marriage service scraps of thought went in and out of his head: I wish Nicholas were here today with us…. It’s not really Gothic, those are Corinthian pilasters…. I don’t want to forget what he is saying.

  He did remember kissing Désirée and shaking Father Baker’s hand. He remembered the creak of the old door as they went out from dimness into light and drove away.

  They circled the island, making a slow trip back to Covetown. On a hill where a little river curved to the sea he stopped the car to look at the view.

  “See over there,” said Désirée.

  A columned house stood alone on the slope. Not large, it still had a simple grandeur.

  “Imagine the view from those windows!” she cried.

  “Perfect, I should say.”

  “It’s called Eleuthera. It’s empty now. I don’t know why.”

  “Eleuthera! It seems to me I was there once.”

  “What would you have been doing there?” she asked him curiously.

  “I don’t know. Perhaps I only imagine I was.”

  “Oh, I should love to live in a house like that. Wouldn’t you?”

  He laughed. “I assure you I never give it a thought, my darling.”

  “Perhaps you could have lived in a place like that someday if you hadn’t married me.”

  “Why, what on earth do you mean?”

  “Who knows how far you could go? Without me you could join the Crocus Club, for instance.”

  He leaned over and kissed her. “I have absolutely no desire to join the Crocus Club. And this is no talk for a wedding day, or ever.”