by Alec Waugh
It made admirable sense, but there were problems.
‘How are you going to explain to her?’
‘In the simplest way. I’ll tell her that I’m going to have a baby: that I’ve only just discovered; that I don’t want to have it here, in this climate, without proper attention. I’ll tell her that I don’t want to put it off too late. She doesn’t know, or at least I don’t think she does, very much about all that; that the first three months are the ones when I’m likeliest to lose it, and that if I were sensible, I’d wait till the fourth month. She won’t think of that. She’ll be excited at the idea of going home. England is still home to her. She’ll regard it all as a piece of luck; missing the last half of a term. You watch her face at breakfast when I break the news to her.’
She had guessed her daughter’s reaction accurately. Breakfast was at seven, the three of us were at table promptly: we had agreed on that the night before. Iris was ten minutes late. She was wearing her school uniform: white blouse, blue skirt, blue tunic. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said. ‘I’m due there at eight. I haven’t packed yet. I’ll have to hurry.’
Raymond laughed. ‘No need to do that. Take all the time you want over your breakfast; make a good one; when you’ve finished, you can go upstairs and change into ordinary clothes.’
‘Why?’
‘You aren’t going to school today.’
‘Why not? The Mother Superior said …’
‘She may have. But she no longer has any jurisdiction over you, if you know what jurisdiction means.’
‘Of course I do.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘I don’t know the exact meaning, but I know what it stands for.’
‘That’s fine: let’s, say it means authority. You are no longer under the Mother Superior’s authority.’
‘How so?’
‘You’re leaving school.’
‘When?’
‘You’ve already left.’
She frowned. She looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Not what you’re afraid I’m meaning. You haven’t been expelled. We’re taking you away.’
‘Why?’
‘So that you can go back to England.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon.’
‘What?’
Eileen intervened. ‘Darling, something exciting’s happened. You are going to have a little brother or a little sister. And you know what that means don’t you, when a woman has a baby ?’
‘Of course.’
‘A baby gets very heavy, during the last five months. Too heavy a burden for a place like this, so hot, and all these hills and all this rain. So we’ve decided that I shall go back to England and have it there. And of course I couldn’t leave you behind me, could I ?’
‘Is Uncle Raymond coming too ?’
‘I’m afraid not, not at the moment—there’s too much on the estate to be attended to. He’ll join us in the summer.’
‘And where shall I go to school?’
‘To St James, it’s at Malvern, where Jenny goes.’
Jenny, I was to discover later, was the daughter of an English neighbour, and a friend of Iris.
‘When does the new term start ?’
‘The end of April.’
‘A six-week holiday, oh goody-goody.’
‘It’s not going to be a holiday altogether. You’ll have to do some work on the ship. Uncle Alec has promised to read you Shakespeare.’
‘So Uncle Alec’s coming with us ?’
‘As far as Boston. We go onto Montreal and catch a ship from there.’
That was another of the decisions they had made the night before. There was no American consul in Dominica qualified to give them an American transit visa.
‘Where shall we live in England ?’ Iris asked.
‘We’ll stay with your Aunt Mildred till we can find a house to rent.’
‘In London or the country?’
‘Which would you prefer?’
‘London. I’ve had enough of country.’
‘You see,’ Raymond said, when she had left the room, ‘already she’s living in the future. She’s excited about what she’s going to. She’s not worrying about what she’s left behind.’
Certainly there were no tears in her eyes on the following morning. Nobody had come to see us off. Hardly anybody knew that we were leaving. It had all happened so quickly: before anyone had recovered from the post-carnival hangovers. Raymond came out with us in the row-boat to see us settled in. It was raining, and we crouched under our umbrellas, silent, too exhausted for conversation. Eileen and Iris were sharing a state-room on the boat deck. I had a minute cabin to myself. ‘I can’t stand long drawn out farewells,’ said Raymond. ‘You’re clearly going to be all right. I’ll go back to the Paz and have myself a punch. When I hear the siren go, I’ll come down to the quay and wave to you.’
But when the siren sounded, the rain was coming down in a succession of torrential waves, one after another, with only a half minute’s pause between them. The Morne was covered.
‘He won’t come out in this,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, he will. He does the correct thing, always.’
And sure enough, just as the crunch of the anchor started, the red Morris Oxford swung into the quay: its door swung back; an umbrella pointed out, opened, and Raymond followed it. He stood beside the car. We were protected by the roof of the upper deck, and in the shadow. He could not distinguish us, but we could see him clearly. He took off his hat and waved. We waved back, though we knew that he could not see us. He returned to the car, pulling in the umbrella after him. A faint series of hoots came from the car. Slowly he drove off.
‘What a casual leavetaking,’ she said.
‘Scarcely a leavetaking. He’ll be following you within four months.’
‘Will he ? Who knows ? Four months is a long time. A lot can happen in four months. And it may be longer than four months.’
‘But for sure he’ll be back in the late summer for your confinement.’
‘He’d better be.’
There was a grim look in her eyes as she said that.
It was a pleasant trip. The Canadian ship stopped at all the British islands. We skirted the north coast of Dominica, pausing at Portsmouth for a couple of hours. We passed Guadeloupe, we were due at Antigua on the following morning: we were to stop at Montserrat and St Kitts; then make north for Bermuda.
St Kitts and Montserrat would be new for me. Eileen, coming out by the French line, had made her first call at Guadeloupe. She had seen none of the other Leeward islands. In fact she had only left Dominica once, that time in Barbados. It was all new for her. We sailed from Portsmouth in the afternoon. The mountains of Guadeloupe were bright with rainbows. ‘There’s sun there at any rate,’ she said.
When we woke next morning, the sky over low-lying Antigua was almost cloudless. We drove out to a nearby beach. The sand was golden and the water blue. ‘This is how I thought the tropics would be,’ said Eileen.
‘In Antigua,’ I said, ‘they don’t have nearly enough rain. There’s a lack of water. Do you see those bare patches on the hills ? They’re catchments to conserve the rain.’
‘That’s better than having too much rain.’
‘You might not think that if you lived here.’
‘Mightn’t I ? I think I would. Why on earth did Raymond have to fall in love with Dominica?’
‘That is what he did, didn’t he?’
‘I’d say he did.’
‘That’s how it gets some people.’
‘It didn’t get me.’
‘On Sunday night you didn’t seem too horrified at the idea of staying here.’
‘Sunday seems a century ago.’
‘I can’t believe that ever happened.’
‘It did though, didn’t it? I’m glad you were there to see. Without you as a witness Raymond would never have believed it.’
Looking at Iris, it was
equally difficult to believe it had. She was exactly as she had been before I went on the trip across the island. I read her Hamlet, Twelfth Night and As You Like It in Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare: when I had finished each play, I would read her certain selected passages from the actual text. She was absorbed by them, asking me questions afterwards, questions that were both naïve and understanding.
I also read to her from the Golden Treasury. When we reached St Kitts, I told her of Browning’s connection with the island, of how his grandmother was a Creole from St Kitts.
‘What’s a creole?’ she asked.
‘Someone or something native to, or born on the islands.’
‘We were talking about that word at school. One of the girls said it meant having coloured blood. Does it ?’
‘Not necessarily. You can have a white Creole, a brown Creole, or a black Creole. In Browning’s case there isn’t any doubt that his grandmother was in large part African. His father was so dark that when he went to St Kitts as a boy he was told to sit on the side of the church that was reserved for coloured people. Browning himself had such an olive complexion that a nephew in Paris mistook him for an Italian. You remember that poem of his wife’s we read the other day, “How do I love thee, let me count the ways”? Well, when she got engaged to Robert Browning, her father objected. He had sugar estates in Jamaica, and he didn’t want his daughter marrying a man whose grandmother was partlv African.’
‘Wasn’t that very silly of him?’
‘It didn’t seem so then.’
‘But today...?’
‘Everything is different in that way today.’
In retrospect I recall the eight days of that trip as a long discussion, endlessly broken off, endlessly renewed between myself and Eileen.
‘I’ve always known that Iris was going to be a problem. Who is there for her to marry in Dominica? There’s not a single unattached eligible white man. The young men who are eligible get sent back to England and they don’t return. There are tourists, of course, and winter visitors; but tourists and winter visitors aren’t out for marriage: they’re for a roll in the hay. They’d be no use for Iris.’
‘Yet you seemed so happy that other night, when you and Raymond were reading poetry together.’
‘Seemed, that’s the word, yes, seemed.’
‘But weren’t you ? You looked radiant.’
‘Did I ? Perhaps I was. It was a relief, a great relief. After all that waiting and all those disappointments. It made me feel differently about myself; to know that I could have a child. No woman likes to feel she’s sterile; and then there was Raymond. That was a relief, too.’
‘Was it? I’ve never thought that Raymond was all that anxious to have a child.’
‘Didn’t you? I don’t know that I did either. But then what do I know what Raymond feels about that, or about anything for that matter ?’
‘That’s a strange thing for a wife to say.’
‘Is it? I suppose it is. But I don’t know him any better than I did three years ago—in the things that really count. I know how he’ll react to certain things, about my being punctual, about what I wear, about how our guests behave; he’s very punctilious; I know his views on local politics; I know how hell react when the Administrator puts up a proposition. Yes, I know what he thinks. But how he feels, that’s another matter.’
‘Three years ago, when you turned up in Villefranche, you didn’t know how he was going to take your news.’
‘I know I didn’t. And I should have done. He did, as I should have known he would, the correct thing for the second son of a British peer. I didn’t know then how he ran to type—to an inherited pattern of behaviour. But how he felt, now that’s another matter. Even now I don’t know how he felt. I never know how he feels.’
‘Yet you’re saying now that you knew he’d be relieved when he learned that he was to become a father.’
‘Of course he was. Isn’t that part of the pattern: that a child is the cement that holds a marriage firm?’
I shook my head. T may be wrong. I’ve never discussed it with him. But I don’t believe that being a father means very much to him.’
‘Then what does mean very much to him?’
‘That’s something I’ve often asked myself.’
‘And have you found an answer?’
‘No.’
‘Neither have I. It’s puzzling to be married to a man about whom one knows so little.’
‘Was it different the other times ?’
‘I’ll say it was. They talked about themselves all the time, in their different ways. How they felt and why they felt that way. Always analysing themselves. With Robert, of course, well, we were kids both of us, you know how it is when you’re a kid. We chattered our heads off. It was wonderful. The second time, Mark was well over thirty: nearly ten years older than I was. He was always explaining himself. “What you’ve got to understand about me is this,” he’d say. By the end he’d begun to bore me, but I knew him inside out. With Raymond, on the other hand …’ She paused, a puzzled, lost expression on her face.
‘But he must talk a bit about himself. Everyone does,’ I said.
‘Yes, of course. He talks about things he’s done, people he’s met, places that he’s been to, but it’s all told from the outside. It’s all impersonal. He’s never inside himself, telling how he’s felt. You know how it is in a novel, when you’re being told how the hero or the heroine felt, and you get impatient. You say “to hell with how she felt, get on with the story: tell me what happened next”. That’s how it never is with Raymond. He’s always getting on with the story. Never stopping for psychological disquisitions.’
‘Does that make him difficult to live with ?’
‘Everybody’s difficult to live with, in some ways: in most ways no one could be easier. He’s affable, affectionate, ready to fall in with plans, providing that you remember certain things.’
‘Such as?’
‘That he hates noisy night-clubs late at night: that meals must be punctual, so that he can get the wine at the right temperature; don’t let cigarette smoke drift across his face. Don’t interrupt him when he’s reading... and then, oh well, to get down to brass tacks, in lovemaking one finds out what his particular kinks are—but he’s always ready to find out about one’s own. He’s really the easiest man to live with in the world; at the same time—how shall I put it? I wish he weren’t so easy. I’d prefer to have to wonder about him, to be apprehensive about what he’s planning... to be kept guessing.’
The morning after we left Bermuda, the ship’s company appeared in blue. The sky was almost cloudless and the sun was shining, but there was a bite in the air. My stewrad, when he brought my morning tea, advised me to put on tweeds.
Eileen was wearing a coat and skirt. ‘Oh, the relief of this, to feel cold again, two more nights and I’ll be filling a hot water bottle. That clammy Dominican damp: never feeling cool, never feeling dry, never that extra zip: always being under par. Thank heavens I’m not going to have my baby there.’
On my last dinner on board, I ordered a bottle of champagne. I raised my glass across the table. ‘Good luck to you both,’ I said. ‘This has been a happy trip for me.’
‘So happy,’ said Eileen, ‘that I have been wondering…’ But before she could tell me what she had been wondering, a steward had arrived, carrying a sheet of paper folded on a salver. She spread it open. Her eyes widened and she smiled. ‘What a surprise,’ she said, ‘a cable from my father-in-law. Listen to this, Iris. “Very excited your happy news invite you both spend summer here.” That’s dear of him now, isn’t it? What shall I say Iris ?’
Her daughter’s curiosity was quickened. ‘What does that mean, mummy; stay with Uncle Raymond’s father instead of going to Aunt Mildred’s ?’
‘That’s what it amounts to. How would you like that ?’
‘Depends on where he lives.’
‘You know where Charminster is. I showed it to you on a map.�
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‘I know. But how does he live; in a palace?’
‘You’d better ask Uncle Alec. He’s been there and I haven’t.’
I told her about Charminster.
‘Not a palace, but a big house; quite a big one, with a large garden. You’ll like it there, I’m sure: no mosquitoes: another thing, you’ll find your Uncle Raymond’s nephew there. Just the right age for you. Two years older. You might fall in love with him.’
‘Me, marry him? Then I’d become a Lady.’
‘That’s right.’
‘With Mummy only an honourable. One up to me. Oh, do let’s go there.’
But Eileen was still uncertain. ‘Tell me more about the set-up. Tell me about his other daughter-in-law. Shall we like each other?’
‘No reason why you shouldn’t. You’re not in any competition with each other.’
‘Do you like her, yourself?’
‘Yes, from what I’ve seen of her, a lot.’
‘Oh do let’s go there, Mummy, do, do, do.’
Later, quite a little later, as much as anything to change the subject, I said, ‘Before that steward came along, you were starting to tell me something. I’d just toasted you and said what a happy trip it was; and you said “So happy that I’ve been wondering” … Can you remember what you’d been wondering ?’
‘Yes of course I can. Have you any god-children ?’
‘I’ve one.’
‘A boy or girl?’
‘A girl.’
‘Then it won’t be too much of a responsibility, if this child is a boy, if I asked you to be his godfather. You were in at the start, after all, and if that first book of yours is still in print when he goes to school, he might get a kick out of having you as a godfather. At any rate he might think of you as someone whose advice he could ask if he found himself in any trouble. What about it?’
‘I’d be honoured, naturally.’
‘I’m glad we’re keeping you in the family,’ Iris said.
7
Most of us, both male and female, would be ready to concede that it is possible to have a satisfactory love affair with somebody one does not like. But most of us would hesitate to admit that we can become friends with someone whom we do not like. Yet it can happen. I did not particularly like Eileen, yet I enjoyed her company, I was always glad to see her at a party. I could be confidential with her, knowing that she would respect my confidences. I enjoyed looking at her, although except for that brief moment at the carnival I was never tempted to make a pass at her. I wished her well. I was curious to know about her. I would have gone out of my way to help her. And when a couple of months later she asked me if I would come down for a cricket match, I did not hesitate to accept. I was curious to know how she was fitting into her new world.