Colony

by Hugo Wilcken

  He’d have liked to ask Charles whether it was very common for the commandant to be up and gone by six. He’d have liked to ask him whether he’d found Leblanc’s letter and put it back in the cupboard. Or whether he’d said anything to the commandant about finding Manne in the study.

  After breakfast, he went back to his room and on several occasions tried to see the woman. Each time he opened his door, there was the butler, apparently cleaning something on the landing, or in the dining room at the foot of the stairs. As he sat fretting in his bedroom, an idea came to him. His servant, Guépard, was still on his mind. It occurred to him to call for him now and ask him if he wanted to join himself and the woman on their escape. He would provide the boy with funds, lodge him secretly in Paramaribo, get some papers made up for him there and buy him a passage out of the town. The boy might even accompany the woman to Buenos Aires as her servant. As soon as the idea came to him, he realised it was ludicrous, merely idle fantasy. As if Manne were not enough of a liability to the woman, without her having to contend with an escaped convict.

  Later, Manne crossed the lawn to the ruin by the edge of the forest. Despite his scepticism, he’d decided to keep the appointment with the convict Guépard had met, who’d claimed to know where Edouard was. The ruin was not much more than a crumbling wall; Manne wondered what it had once been. He imagined some other commandant, years ago, who’d decided to build his house there, and had been defeated by it.

  Manne cast about in the undergrowth with his feet, for want of anything better to do. As he looked down he noticed what seemed to be a large hole, disguised with branches. He got down on his hands and knees to examine it more closely. The branches looked freshly cut; he pushed them aside, put his hand down into the hole and touched something smooth. He peered into the hole. Three lidded barrels were secreted there, plus another larger, lidless one. He prised the lid off one of the barrels. Inside was a series of parcels, carefully wrapped in greased paper. Manne opened one of them and found some dried, salted meat. His guess was that the butler was smuggling foodstuffs out of the house to sell later on the black market. He rewrapped the meat, put it back in the barrel.

  Half an hour, an hour … the convict wasn’t going to turn up. The whole thing had been a sting that the convict had considered and then thought better of. It meant that Edouard was gone for good. Manne visualised his long face and dark hair, his glass eye staring at him, his own reflection staring back in miniature.

  Now it was time to prepare for the escape. To jettison everything that wasn’t needed. Always a sense of anguish with every departure, however desired. And always an urge to strip himself of everything but the essential, as if to counter some inner deadweight. There wasn’t much left to him now that was extraneous. He stuffed some banknotes into his back pocket, and put the rest of his money and bank orders into a canvas bag. He’d give it all to the woman. She needed it more than he did; he could always find a way to make money. But he also had a sense of foreboding. A feeling that something would go wrong. That they wouldn’t be escaping after all. Not together, in any case. He picked up his journal, and put that into the bag, too.

  Crossing the garden, Manne stopped at one point and turned back towards the house. The butler was standing by the door, arms folded against his chest, staring at him, or beyond him. He made no movement to acknowledge Manne’s presence. Manne inwardly shrugged. What did it matter now?

  Before, various bits and pieces had been scattered over the floor of the folly – a rug, the lamp, a couple of books, maybe some clothes. There was nothing there now. It had been cleaned out. The room looked bare and forlorn. He thought he could make out a mark where the lamp the woman had thrown at him had dented the wall.

  Manne wandered about the small clearing in which the folly was set, waiting for the woman to show up. There was some scrubby bush by the folly wall and, out of the corner of his eye, Manne caught a glint of colour. He bent down. A tiny orchid had attached itself to the wall. Manne knelt down and gently removed its roots from the wall with his penknife. A spider orchid, but not an especially rare one. And yet to the best of Manne’s knowledge, it was native to Florida only. How could that be? He stared at it.

  ‘Is that for me?’

  He hadn’t heard her come, it was as if she’d simply appeared. Manne got to his feet.

  ‘If you like. Have it.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve never much liked orchids.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something unpleasant about them. Unnatural.’

  ‘Not this one. It was growing here in the wild. That’s natural enough.’

  ‘Unnatural is the wrong word. They look unreal. Artificial.’

  ‘And yet your husband told me that you loved orchids.’

  ‘Did he? What would he know? Actually, I don’t think I care much for flowers in general.’

  ‘What do you like?’

  But the absurdity of their conversation struck them both simultaneously, and the light mood now evaporated. Manne picked up the canvas bag he’d left on the ground beside him as he’d been collecting the orchid.

  ‘I brought this for you. There’s some money in cash here. Some of it in francs, some of it American dollars. Also some American bank orders you should be able to cash in Buenos Aires.’

  She opened the bag, pulled out some of the banknotes. ‘I don’t need all of this. It’s very kind of you, but I’m not asking you for so much. Just to help me get to Paramaribo and pay for my passage out.’

  ‘Take it anyway. I don’t need it.’

  ‘I’d rather make my own way as far as possible.’

  ‘I’m offering it to you. Take it.’ He desperately wanted the woman to accept the money. But she didn’t reply. ‘Well, I’ll hide the bag here. I don’t feel it’s safe in my room. I don’t trust the butler. I’ll decide what to do with it later.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  She followed him into the folly. Its bareness struck Manne again – everything smooth, circular, like a little chapel. There was a slightly loose floorboard he’d noticed once before, and he thought there’d probably be room underneath to hide his canvas bag. He dropped to his knees, got his penknife out. The board came up surprisingly easily. He felt about under it for somewhere to put the bag, and his hand came up against something hard and cool. An old jar, with a screwtop lid. With some difficulty, he got the top off. The contents spilled out over the floor.

  ‘Photos, by the looks of it.’

  Manne flipped through them. Mostly old holiday snaps, some of them half-eaten away by fungus.

  ‘Show them to me.’

  She peered at the top photograph intently, as though examining a specimen through a microscope. Finally she put it down and moved on to the next one, to which she gave the same treatment. Then the next one, and the next. All in all, there were around a dozen. She sat there wordlessly, as if deep in thought – subdued, as at dinner, when her husband had told her about the death of her convict acquaintance. She shook her head several times.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’re of me,’ she said without looking up. ‘They’re all of me.’

  She pushed them back into the space on the floor between them. Through the mould stains, Manne could make out the same girl in each of the photos. Here she was, fresh-faced at a debutantes’ ball. Men in uniforms, must have been during the war. Here she was again, at the beach, in a swimming costume, smiling gaily, innocently, at the camera. Thinner, younger. But not much. Probably only a few years ago. And yet, at the same time, impossibly long ago.

  ‘How did they get here? You didn’t put them there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who did, then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Photographs. The more inept, the more blurred or poorly framed, the more they haunted. And the people in them, whether still living or dead, were ghosts just the same … The woman’s head was bowed over them now as she spread them out on the ground. The expres
sion on her face was transparent, filled with remembering. Looking at the photos, Manne, too, was struck with a sense of nostalgia, although the pictures were a private shrine. Nostalgia for things never known. Manne remembered his French grandfather and the glimpses of Second Empire life he’d gleaned from him, odd memories of the war with the Prussians or drinking in Latin Quarter cafés. Details that could suddenly breathe life and longing into a long-dead, never-experienced era.

  The woman’s voice cut through his thoughts: ‘The first time I came here, there was someone camping out in the folly. He must have just come out of the jungle. He asked me to get him food. And so I did.’

  ‘An évadé?’

  ‘I supposed so.’

  ‘You weren’t afraid of him?’

  ‘I was, yes. But … not so much. He was in a pitiful state. Half-dead. He wasn’t about to do me any harm. He was only here for a couple of days. Twice I brought him food. Then he disappeared. It was only after he vanished that I started coming here.’

  ‘You didn’t tell anyone about him?’

  ‘No. I’m opposed to transportation.’

  ‘Do you know who the évadé was?’

  ‘No. Although not long afterwards, I heard that a famous jewel thief had been caught near here. Perhaps it was him. But I’m told there are quite a number of évadés up and down the river.’

  ‘Whoever he was, you think he had something to do with these photos.’

  ‘No. Yes. I don’t know what to think.’

  She went silent again. The photographs, the spider orchid, the convict hiding out at the folly … it seemed to Manne that they were all elements of the same thing, which he couldn’t quite seize in its entirety. As if a blanket had been thrown over an unknown object, revealing only the bumps and angles of its exterior shape.

  ‘This one of me dancing. That man there in the background, in the left-hand corner. How very odd. I had no idea he was there that night. It was before we met.’

  She was almost talking to herself, lost in her discovery. The man in the photo was just a black sliver, a blur in a bow tie.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He was my lover.’

  ‘Your cousin?’

  She looked up at him bizarrely. ‘Of course not. What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘You were going to marry your cousin, weren’t you?’

  ‘My husband told you that, too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, let him believe it if he likes.’

  ‘He told me you were engaged.’

  She shook her head. ‘We grew up together. That’s all. One day he thought he was in love with me. I wasn’t in the least bit interested. Not in that way.’ Her mood darkened. ‘What does it matter now?’

  She was looking at the ballroom photograph again, still lost in it, far away. ‘The dancing. It’s what I miss. Possibly most of all. I used to go to a lot of dances. My husband brought his gramophone all this way. And yet he didn’t bring a single record you might dance to.’

  ‘I know where that photograph was taken,’ Manne said. ‘It’s at the Crillon, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. That’s where it was.’

  ‘I went to a ball there once as well. A long time ago. Before the war.’

  The woman was now staring at the folly’s blank white cornerless wall, softly humming a melody to herself. Manne recognised that, too. A Tchaikovsky waltz. One of those infectious, physical melodies that he too had once danced to, years ago, a lifetime ago.

  A bewitching mood had settled over the folly, which now filled with sound, with music, pushing back its walls. Manne found himself on his feet. The woman was in his arms. The technique came back to him; he swept her around the tiny room. It was the Crillon, he was with his lover, the one he’d never seen again after his desertion. The woman, too, was at the Crillon, he was sure enough of it. Their respective fantasies intertwined and fused as they danced together, memory and sensation blending seamlessly. The music filled him until he could feel nothing else but its sounds and rhythms, and the woman held lightly against him.

  How long had it lasted? Two minutes? Twenty minutes? After the dancing, they disentangled from each other and sat down on the floor again. For a while he still felt overpowered by the sense of music in the air. The mood had spun away into something else again by now: an easy, comfortable tristesse, as if the two had just made love. Something had changed in him; for a moment he felt that it didn’t matter what happened now. Slowly, they broke into conversation, which came in fragments, as if each were confident that the other could mentally supply what was left unspoken.

  She was talking about her husband. ‘He comes and stares at me sometimes, at night. He comes into my room. I pretend I’m asleep. After a while, he goes away again.’

  Then later: ‘I could have done it so easily before. I could have got away. We had a huge row and I just took off one morning, in a rage. Not really knowing what I was doing. I walked to Saint-Laurent. When he came to collect me, that was that. He took my papers away. Put me under surveillance. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to end up here, like this.’

  They sat opposite each other, knees almost touching. At one point Manne uttered her name, and she replied: ‘Don’t call me Renée. Only my husband calls me Renée.’

  ‘What does everyone else call you?’

  ‘Mathilde.’

  A long silence, and then: ‘What are you hiding? Why did you come here?’

  ‘You said I don’t look like a botanist. But I’m a sort of botanist. I collect plant specimens.’

  ‘That’s not why you’re here, though.’

  ‘No. I came looking for someone.’

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘A bagnard?’

  ‘Of course …’

  ‘You haven’t found him.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘If he wasn’t a friend, why were you looking for him?’

  ‘He has some valuable information. He offered to share it with me. He offered me a deal.’

  ‘You’re still wondering whether you shouldn’t stay here.’

  ‘No. I have to leave now. Tomorrow isn’t soon enough. Your husband suspects me.’

  ‘Suspects you of what?’ She stared at him with curiosity. ‘You’ve committed some sort of crime. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  He didn’t immediately answer. For a long time he just stared back at her, taking in all the details of her face, as he’d done in her bedroom the night before. She met his gaze unflinchingly. Outside he could hear the midmorning rain thrum down on the trees, intensifying the atmosphere of intimacy and confinement within the folly.

  ‘Listen,’ he said now. ‘Come with me. We can go anywhere. I’ll support you. The money I have could last us a couple of years. I’ll do whatever you want me to do. We could go to New York. Or Buenos Aires. I could help you start a business, if that’s what you want. I know Buenos Aires well enough. I know people there who could help us.’

  Even as he said that, he realised he knew the city only in the same way as he knew any other city – hotel rooms, restaurants, bars, brothels, merely skimming the surface. The woman shook her head, and there was nothing further for him to say. The rest was just form.

  ‘You frighten me. You’re handsome. But you’re a dry root. I can’t give you what you need. Even if I could, I don’t want to. I have my own life to lead.’

  ‘I understand.’

  The rain had quickly died down to an uncharacteristic drizzle, to a whisper down the walls. Bars of grey light, filtered through the shutters, criss-crossed Mathilde’s face.

  ‘You might have seduced me. You didn’t have to spoil it all the way you did.’

  ‘No.’ He felt cleansed of feeling. ‘I didn’t have to do that.’

  ‘You’d better go now. My husband will be back soon. I won’t be at lunch today, but you’d better be there. I’ll see you at dinner – certainly not afterwards, not after last night. Tomorrow we’ll meet as arranged
.’

  XII

  The thought of his room in the commandant’s house filled Manne with a sort of horror. Instead of returning there, he went to sit by the river, until it was time for lunch. For an hour he watched the tiny waves lick at the riverbank; in the distance, glints of light dazzled across the water’s surface. Further downstream, disappearing into the haze, Manne could make out Boni canoes darting through the current, a paperchase of gulls trailing them.

  The sense of being cleansed of feeling hadn’t gone away. Never had Manne felt more empty. Something had happened during those snatched moments of dancing in the folly – but in the end he’d failed to draw Mathilde into a world of complicity, of sensuality. His mind worked its way back to other failures he’d suffered in his life. The carefully laid plans that had gone awry; the wrong paths taken. The lover who had killed herself. Friends who had long since fallen silent.

  Once he’d helped Mathilde onto a boat in Paramaribo, Manne had no other plans, good or bad. No ideas. Clearly, he wouldn’t stay in Paramaribo. Clearly, he’d move on. The world was a vast prison: it was immaterial which particular corner he ended up in. Perhaps Edouard had reached the same point of no return. If Edouard too was a deserter, as Manne suspected, then he might have come to the Colony quite deliberately. The fear of exposure was not so far from the hope of it. And the men who spent a life in hiding were often enough the ones who wanted to be found.

  Meanwhile, back in the here and now, there was lunch to get through. It struck him forcefully that the commandant had been holding out on him, had not told him about the letter he’d received from Leblanc, had not told him that Manne was under investigation. Even so, the commandant had no moral duty to tell him. In any case, Manne had received the commandant’s hospitality under false pretences. He had made advances to his wife, had even cuckolded him. Mathilde, in turn, had her own secrets. The eternal roundabout of deception and betrayal.

  Judging from the sun, directly above, it was close to midday. Manne had barely got through the back door when the butler appeared in the corridor. ‘The commandant would like to see you, monsieur.’