by H. E. Bates
‘Don’t you think that’s amazing?’ Miss Vane said. ‘He even finds roses up here.’
‘Where on earth do you get roses?’ Manson said.
‘In the garden, sir. At the back.’
‘He says there was a wonderful garden here once. An Englishman made it. He used to come here for the summer. He was a sugar-planter or something. Wasn’t that it, Manuel?’
Manuel’s eyes rested thinly and dryly on some point across the valley.
‘Yes, madame. He was sugar. He was sugar, wine, sugar-brandy, coal, sardines, water, everything.’ He spoke slowly. ‘He took the water from the people and sold it back again.’
‘You mean he developed the country,’ Manson said.
‘That’s so, sir.’
Manuel walked away and Manson looked after him. He detected, for the first time, an oddity in Manuel’s walk. The right foot, swinging outwardly, stubbed the ground as it came back again. And this weakness, not quite a deformity, suddenly deprived the stocky shoulders of their power.
‘Are you looking at his leg?’ Miss Vane said. ‘He was in an accident or something. With his brother. He was telling me before breakfast. Before you came down. Did he tell you?’
‘No.’
‘I feel rather sorry for him,’ she said.
He sat down in the sun, his mind searching for a change of subject. He stared across the valley, remembering with what thin, dry abstraction Manuel had looked there.
‘Oh! I just remembered,’ he said. ‘After the Alacantara on Wednesday there isn’t another decent boat for three weeks.’
‘No wonder you get a feeling of isolation here.’
‘Well, anyway I thought you ought to know. It’s a long time.’
‘Would you find it long?’
He wanted to say ‘It depends.’ He wanted to qualify, somehow, the statement he had already made. He knew that what he had to say and feel depended on Miss Vane and whether Miss Vane caught the Alacantara. Already he did not want her to catch it. He was afraid of her catching it. But he could not express what he felt and he said:
‘That damned man is always whistling. Can you hear it? He’s always whistling.’
‘I hadn’t noticed it.’
When they went in to lunch Manuel stood behind her chair, holding it, pushing it gently forward as she sat down.
As he prepared to serve soup she suddenly waved her hands with impatience at herself and said:
‘My bag. Would you think I could be such a dim-wit? I leave it everywhere——’
‘I will get it, madame,’ Manuel said.
He hurried out of the room with dignified jerky steps.
‘I could have got it for you,’ Manson said.
‘I know you could.’ The large flashing blue eyes disarmed him. ‘But he likes doing things. He would be hurt if we didn’t let him. That’s what he’s here for.’
Manuel came and put Miss Vane’s bag on the lunch-table.
‘Thank you, Manuel,’ she said.
Manuel served soup from a wicker trolley.
‘By the way,’ she said, ‘we would like to do the climb to the top. How long will it take us?’
‘It isn’t a climb, madame,’ Manuel said. ‘It’s just a walk. It takes half an hour.’
‘You and your inaccessible places,’ she said to Manson. ‘Everything is too easy for words.’
‘What about the Serra?’ Manson said. ‘That isn’t easy, is it?’
‘I do not know the Serra, sir.’
‘What is the Serra?’ she said.
‘It’s the high plateau,’ Manson said. ‘The really high one. The really lonely one. Isn’t that so, Manuel?—it’s lonely. People don’t like it, do they?’
‘No, sir,’ Manuel said. ‘People don’t like it.’
‘Why not?’ she said.
‘I can’t say, madame,’ he said. ‘I think it’s because there’s nothing there. People like to have company. They don’t like places where there is nothing.’
‘I think that’s where we should go,’ Manson said. ‘That would be something worth while.’
‘I don’t think so, sir.’
‘Oh! I most certainly think so,’ Manson said. ‘After all, that’s what we came up here for—the high places and the view and that sort of thing.’
‘If the view is no better,’ Miss Vane said, ‘there’s hardly any point in going, is there? Is the view any better?’
‘I don’t think you can see so far, madame,’ Manuel said.
‘Well, there you are,’ she said.
With irritation Manson said: ‘I thought you were the adventurous one. I thought you liked it the difficult way.’
‘Oh! I do,’ she said. ‘But if there’s no point. I mean if Manuel doesn’t think the thing worth while.’
Manson waited for Manuel to clear the soup dishes and take them away through the gauze doors that separated the dining room from his cage at the back.
‘I fail to see what Manuel has to do with it,’ he said. ‘We can go alone. Manuel isn’t obliged to come.’
‘What is there about this place?’ she said.
‘He’s afraid of it. They’re all afraid of it. They’re superstitious about it.’
‘Is there anything to be superstitious about?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘Then why do you suppose they’re superstitious?’
‘They hate being alone,’ he said.
‘Don’t you?’ she said.
‘Not a bit,’ he said. ‘I rather like it——’ Abruptly he realized what he had said and he felt his confidence, which had been mounting and strengthening, suddenly recede. Confusedly he tried to retrieve it and said:
‘I didn’t mean it quite like that—I meant I liked being alone in the sense that I wasn’t frightened of it——’
‘Oh! it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Here comes the food. It looks like sort of pie—is it, Manuel? Is it pie?’
‘Yes, madame,’ he said. ‘It is steak and kidney pie. Made in the English way.’
After lunch, as they had coffee outside, under a tree he kept telling her was an arbutus, though he was not sure and it was only a way of getting his confidence back, she said:
‘About this place. Would you like to go?’
‘I’d like to,’ he said.
Her eyes, always so large and incorrigibly assertive and apparently forceful, seemed suddenly uncertain. She ran her hand across the streak of paler hair and said:
‘It isn’t one of those evil places, is it? You know—nothing to do with the dead?’
‘It’s just high and lonely,’ he said. ‘It’s the crowning point of the island. That’s all.’
She stared across the valley, to a far glitter of sun on harsh iron rock, and Manson remembered how Manuel had stared across the valley too.
‘You’d really like to go, wouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘We’d have to go alone, I suppose? Manuel wouldn’t come.’
He felt an ascendant rush of triumph at the thought of being alone with her.
‘I don’t think it need bother us,’ he said. ‘It isn’t that far.’
For a moment she did not answer. She had slipped off the dress she had put on to cover her sun-suit during lunch and once again he found himself thinking how taut and mature her body looked, emerging naked and smooth pale brown from the costume of vivid green. If only he could have rubbed out, somehow, the disturbing streak of paler hair.
‘You really think it’s not one of those evil places?’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with the dead?’
‘No more than anywhere else has.’
‘Only I couldn’t bear it,’ she said, ‘if it had anything to do with the dead. And it’s been so easy so far.’
Chapter 6
They arranged to start next morning at nine; but when Manson came out of his bedroom and went out on to the verandah he discovered Miss Vane and Manuel talking at the foot of the steps. Manuel had rigged up a pole on which, at each end, he had hooked a basket for lunc
heon. As he saw Manson coming he hoisted the pole to his shoulder, balancing the basket on the curved smooth pole.
With vexation Manson said: ‘I thought Manuel wasn’t coming.’
‘He’s coming as far as lunch,’ Miss Vane said. ‘Then if we want to go on any further——’
‘Of course we want to go farther, don’t we?’ he said. ‘We want to do the whole thing.’
‘He says that’s up to us.’
‘It’s amazing how people fold up when it comes to it,’ Manson said. ‘Good God, you might think it was Everest or something.’
‘Well, it’s probably as well he is coming,’ she said. ‘We’d only have to carry the lunch baskets and it’s going to be awfully hot.’
Manuel, who had not spoken, began to walk on ahead. Miss Vane followed him and Manson walked some paces behind her. The sunlight behind him was already so crystalline in its sub-alpine transparence that it shone in Miss Vane’s hair with a remarkable effect of edging it with minute thorns of tawny gold.
Presently, across the steep short valley, he could see the high edge of the central plateau. It surprised him, in that first moment, by having something domestic about it. It emerged as a vast and domestic piece of pumice stone abandoned between two vaster shoulders of naked rock. In the strong sunlight he could have sworn that these rocks, perpendicular and iron-grey and treeless to the foot, shot off a spark or two that flashed like signals across the lower valley.
‘That’s where we’re going,’ he said to Miss Vane. ‘See?—up there.’
‘It looks farther off than I thought,’ she said.
‘We’ve got all day,’ he said. ‘After all it’s only Monday—you don’t have to catch the Alacantara today.’
As he spoke of the Alacantara he remembered the town: Monday morning, the drawn sun-shutters of the office, the spiritless flat dustiness of rooms shut up for the weekend, the horrible Monday lassitude. A signal from the opposing rocks across the valley shot off with a trick of winking semaphore and expressed his astonished joy at being no longer part of that awful office, watching the cabs on the water-front, the listless boot-blacks rocking on the pavements, the funerals racing away up the hill.
He realized, with a remarkable surge of confidence, that he was free.
‘By the way, are you going to catch the Alacantara? Have you made up your mind?’
‘Not quite.’
‘I know her captain,’ he said. ‘I’d come aboard with you and see that he knew who you were.’
She turned and held out her hand suddenly and said:
‘There’s room for you to walk on the track with me. Come on. I hate walking alone.’
A fragment of his hesitation came back.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Come and walk with me. I hate the feeling of someone being just behind me.’
She reached out and caught his hand and they walked abreast.
‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Now I feel you’re with me.’
Sometimes the swaying coolie-like scales of Manuel’s baskets disappeared beyond dark shoulders of rock. Manson felt then that Manuel was not part of himself and Miss Vane. He looked up at the enlarging plateau, assuring himself of its unexciting domesticity, feeling contemptuous of people like Manuel who saw it as a formidable and fearsome thing.
At the same time the feeling grew on him also that Miss Vane was slightly afraid. That was why she wanted him to walk with her; that was why she would ask him now and then if he still wanted to go to the top. He had the increasing impression too that she had something on her mind. Perhaps that was why she was continually so forgetful of things like her handbag.
Half way through the morning one of his shoe-laces came undone. He had not brought with him very suitable shoes for walking and the best he could find that day was a pair of old canvas sandals, with rubber soles.
As he stooped to tie the shoe-lace Miss Vane stopped to wait for him. He had some difficulty with the shoe-lace and was afraid of breaking it. When he looked up again Manuel had disappeared and Miss Vane was alone, staring at something far down a long spoon-shaped gorge of rock.
His feelings at seeing her there alone gave him a sort of buoyancy. His shoes were soft on the path. He had nothing to do but creep up to her and put his hands on her hair and turn her face to him and kiss her.
Before he could do anything she turned and pointed down the gorge and said:
‘There’s something down there. Do you see? Right down. A house or something—two or three houses.’
‘Yes. They’re houses,’ he said.
‘I didn’t think there were villages up here.’
‘It’s a longish way away,’ he said. ‘Probably two or three hours by path.’
‘We must ask Manuel about it,’ she said.
His feeling of buoyancy died and when they walked on again he automatically fell into the way of walking behind her until she reminded him about it and held out her hand.
Before lunch, which Manuel laid out in a small clearing of pines, in one of those places where water dripped like summery rain from fissures of cacti-studded rock, Manuel asked her stiffly:
‘Would you like something to drink before you eat, madame?’
‘I would,’ she said. ‘What is there?’
‘There’s beer, madame,’ he said. ‘And gin.’
‘What gin is it?’ Manson said.
‘The best, sir.’ Manuel held up the bottle for Manson to see and Manson said:
‘Good. We don’t want local muck. I’ll have gin too.’
He drank the gin rather quickly. Then, looking down over the sliced-out gorges, streamless far below, he used exactly the words Miss Vane had used on the journey up with the mules.
‘Well, this is marvellous,’ he said. The village of obscure white houses seemed of paltry insignificance, far away. ‘It’s absolutely marvellous, I think. Don’t you?’
‘It’s lovely.’
‘I think it’s stunning. How far to the top, Manuel?’
‘This is as far as the track goes, sir.’
‘I don’t get that,’ Manson said. ‘You can see a path going up there as plain as daylight. I’ve been watching it. You can see it going most of the way.’
‘It’s probably made by goats, sir.’
The remark seemed to Manson to have in it the slightest touch of oblique insolence, and he asked abruptly for another gin. He was very glad that Miss Vane decided to have one too.
But the lunch was good. He awarded absolutely top marks to Manuel for the lunch. A slight breeze blew off the upper mountain and cooled the glare of sun. He took another gin and was aware of the semaphore spark of signals ignited over the black of distant rocks and he remarked several times, munching on big open sandwiches of red beef and peeled eggs and ham, that food always tasted so much better in the open air.
‘What is the village, Manuel?’ Miss Vane said.
‘That’s the village of Santa Anna, madame.’
‘How far away is it?’
Manson said: ‘Several hours. It would probably take more than half a day to get there. Sometimes there are bad mists too. Then it takes more than a day.’
With another gin, in which he was glad Miss Vane joined him, Manson felt all the flare of antagonism against Manuel come back. The man was a damn know-all. Too smooth by half. Too smooth. Too knowing. Worst of all too damned right.
‘Good God, look—there’s an eagle,’ he said.
A large bird, suspended between the two shoulders of mountain, seemed to hold for a moment the entire sky in its claws.
‘That’s a buzzard, sir,’ Manuel said. ‘There are no eagles here.’
Manson stared at the bird that seemed, with motionless deceit, to hold the sky in its claws.
‘I’d like another gin,’ he said. ‘Would you?’
‘I will if you will,’ she said.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’ll get us steamed up for the top.’
Chapter 7
During lunch Miss Van
e took off her shoes and for some moments after lunch, when she appeared to have some difficulty in getting them on again, Manson felt impatient and disappointed.
‘Oh! it’s nothing. It’s only that my feet ache a bit.’ He saw her look up at the plateau of rock that spanned and blocked, exactly like the barrier of a dam, the entire western reach of valley.
‘It looks awfully far,’ she said.
‘Don’t you want to go?’
‘It isn’t that. I was only wondering about time.’
‘I thought you were the one with plenty of time,’ he said. ‘We ought to have brought the hammock. Then we could have carried you.’
He said the words rather breezily, with a smile.
‘You think we can make it?’ she said. ‘I mean in the time? Perhaps we ought to ask Manuel?’
‘Oh! damn Manuel,’ he said.
Manuel was washing the lunch things under a small fissure of water that broke from perpendicular rock above the path.
‘Manuel—how far is it to the top?’ she said. ‘How long should it take us?’
‘You should give two hours, madame.’
‘There and back?—or just there?’
‘There and back,’ he said.
‘Oh! that’s nothing,’ Manson said. ‘That’s no time.’
The sight of Manuel deferentially wiping a plate with a tea-cloth, in his shirt-sleeves, so like a waiter who had lost his way, made him feel suddenly superior again.
‘You’re coming, Manuel, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘No, madame, I’m not coming. I shall wait here for you.’
A moment of strained silence seemed to be pinned, suspended, ready to drop, in the immense space of hot noon sky. With irritation Manson heard her break it by saying:
‘We’ve got all afternoon. Won’t you change your mind?’
‘No thank you, madame.’
‘Oh! if the fellow doesn’t want to come he doesn’t want to come. That’s that.’
‘I was simply asking,’ she said.
A moment later, fired by something between annoyance and exhilaration, he was ready to start.
‘If you get tired of waiting,’ he said to Manuel, ‘you can start back. We know the way.’