by Alec Waugh
She felt sorry for Euan. It must be difficult for him here, with no established friendships, and the constant knowledge that he had to comport himself in terms of his father’s position. As a safeguard against unpleasantness she had arranged a larger party than usual: twelve of them instead of six. Since Sylvia and Maxwell were in town, they had three cars. If things got difficult, they could break up into small groups.
They met at ten at the Continental. From the veranda Bradshaw watched them arrange themselves in three sets of four. Archer, he noticed, was not with them. He had fish of his own to fry presumably. Young Templeton did not get into the same car with Mavis. Did that mean that the quarrel was still on; or was it farsightedness on Euan’s part? It would give him a chance of saying to Mavis in the evening, “I’ve not seen you once today. Let’s get in the same car now.” Then driving back together in the dusk, he could make his peace with her. Was that the way it was?
He saw Jocelyn get into a car with some Barbadians who had come over for the Carnival. He saw Mavis with Doris and Doris’ brother join up with Grainger Morris. Grainger—that was a possible pipeline that he had neglected. He watched the three cars drive off. He would give a lot to be around when those cars returned, to read the expressions on those twelve faces. He settled himself back in his deck chair. He repeated the phrases of that Baltimore editorial. It was the first time he had been referred to in an editorial. It need not be the last, if he played his cards correctly. The world was a good place.
Mavis too was thinking that as she drove at Grainger’s side. It was a perfect day; the air was so clear that she could see shadowy on the horizon across sixty miles of water the outline of Guadeloupe. It was hard to realize on a day like this that a hundred and fifty years ago men were watching anxiously from here for French ships to attack across the channel.
Grainger smiled when she said that.
“They never did, you know.”
“Never did what?”
“Attack across the channel. They were always threatening to, but the trade winds were too strong. The English could always sail from Antigua and intercept them.”
It was only by a fluke, he said, that the British captured Santa Marta. A squadron of Rodney’s, sailing for English Harbour, got driven south by a hurricane and as Santa Marta lay in their path, they took it.
“I’d never realized that before, about the trade wind, I mean.”
“Because they don’t teach history and geography simultaneously. They leave the climate out of their text books. And everything turned on the trade winds in those days. That’s why there was so little fighting here, the attack came where it was not expected. That in the long run is why there are so many old feudal families still left here. Like the Fleurys. In Grenada and St. Lucia they were all wiped out by the revolutionaries. But the French Revolution didn’t touch Santa Marta because by then the British were in possession here.”
“But there were slave risings here, too, weren’t there? Lots of them?” she said.
“In ten minutes we’ll be passing a house that was destroyed in one.”
It lay on the slope of a hill, two hundred yards back from the road. Only its carcass remained, the walls with the gaps for windows and the “welcoming arms” flight of steps. In the roadway was the crumbled masonry of the gateway. Three royal palms marked the avenue that had led from it to the house; higher up the road was the rounded tower of a windmill: shrubs grew out of the interstices between the bricks: there was a broken archway, the ruins of a boucan: the ground between the gateway and the house had been planted with coffee; the last yellow petals were about to fall: the picking of the feathery buds would be starting soon. It all looked very calm and peaceful.
Grainger stopped the car. She had passed the house innumerable times, she was familiar with the legend that surrounded it. But she wanted to have him tell it to her. She liked the sound of his voice, and the knowledge and authority that lay behind it.
“When did all this happen?” she asked.
“In eighteen sixty-three,” he said.
“After emancipation then.”
“There was more trouble after emancipation than before.”
Santa Marta during the eighteenth century, he said, had been a happy island mainly through its lack of history. It had been prosperous in an unobtrusive way and the slaves were treated well. But after emancipation, when the landlords were no longer responsible for their workers’ health and comfort, there was poverty and unemployment.
“The slaves,” he said, “could not get the idea of a day’s pay for a day’s work. A great many of them haven’t yet. They think that their boss should provide them with food, clothing, and a house; it’s smart to do as little work for him as possible, and steal when they get the chance; they put in their real work on their own small gardens where they grow their vegetables.”
She had often heard the same sentiments expressed by her father’s friends. But with them it had been said angrily, sneeringly, spitefully. “Treat them like mules, dangle a carrot in front of their noses and keep a stout whip in a strong right hand.” She had heard hatred in the voices of her father’s friends. But in Grainger’s voice the mockery was friendly. He liked these people; they were his own people after all.
She looked at the ruined house upon the hill.
“Why did it happen? What was it about?”
He shrugged.
“Can one ever tell how those things start? It may be a single insult, a single injustice; it may be the accumulation of small incidents. But the basic cause is constant: a part of the community is ill-housed and underfed; there’s a grievance; and a scapegoat’s sought; there’s an inflammable situation; the first spark touches it off. You know what these people are. How excitable, how quickly worked up they are.”
“What happened to the owners of the house?”
“They were found burnt.”
“Were the people who did it caught?”
“How could they be? No peasant will give evidence against another where a white man is concerned. Everyone in the village had an alibi.”
She looked across the green stretch of the coffee crop, at the three solitary palms and at the crumbled walls. She shivered. It was hard to believe, on a day like this, that ninety years ago when those palms had been three units in a long, proud avenue, the shrubberies had quivered with creeping figures, vowed to vengeance; that the blackness of the night had been lit suddenly by towering flames, with dark, distorted faces glistening in the glare, that human screams had broken through the noise of crackling wood.
“Let’s go on,” she said.
A mile farther down the road they reached the houses in which ninety years ago that pack of murderers had laid their plans. It was a straggling village, almost a township, at the foot of a valley with a river running through it to the sea; a jetty ran out into the water; produce was shipped from here to Jamestown; sloops called from the other islands; boats were being built and repaired along the beach, the village was sufficiently large to own a police station and a post office. Today it was hung with flags. Every shack was decorated. The main street was crowded. There was scarcely a villager who was not “running mask.” Sometimes they paraded in groups, similarly attired; sometimes they were in couples, sometimes alone. There were men dressed as women, waggling their posteriors as they danced. From the porches of the shacks that lined the road old men and women yelled encouragement, children jigged up and down on the edge of the road in imitation of their elders. On the veranda of the police station, a ten-piece steel band was beating out its jagged rhythm.
The noise was deafening and the car was forced to slow down till it was scarcely moving. Children jumped on the footboard. Men and women peered through the windows, waving whatever they carried in their hands, laughing, shouting, gesticulating. Some of them carried bottles. But it was only the minority who did so. By and large West Indians do not take alcohol. They were drunk not with rum but with the music. Their teeth shone white in the gash
their mouths made in their painted faces. Beads of sweat percolated through the paint. There was a powerful pervading smell of brilliantine and coconut oil that overlaid the smell of sweat, but did not any more conceal it than the paint concealed the beads of perspiration. The car was below the level of the parade. The sun beat down upon its roof. The airlessness was suffocating.
“It’s seven years since I was here. I’d forgotten it was like this,” said Grainger.
Mavis made no reply. She was thinking of that day ninety years ago. The great-grandparents of these men must have looked very much like this as they pranced round that guttering building, waving their cutlasses, the glare of the fire illuminating their gloating faces. They were happy now, these people: gay, good-natured, laughing, but they were out of control. They were as drunk with happiness as their ancestors had been drunk with hatred. She turned toward Grainger. His eyes were on her face.
“We’re thinking the same thing aren’t we?”
“More or less,” he said.
2
The rendezvous was a beach on the north point of the island. They could be sure there of solitude. The patricians would be at Grande Anse; the proletariat would be “running mask.” They arrived, in their separate cars, hot and soiled and tired, eager for the cool fresh water. They sat on the sand under the palms and drank punches out of thermos flasks. They were too tired to talk. After the first two punches, most of them went back to swim again. Then they opened their lunch baskets. Each had brought something different: there was lobster mayonnaise, there was “soursop,” chilled in a wide-necked flask; there was a rabbit pie and a sponge roll and cheese: mangoes were not yet in season, but there was a pawpaw and a pineapple. They overate a little, as one does at picnics. After lunch they stretched themselves on rugs, so tired that even the sandflies could not stop them sleeping.
The heat of the day was over when Euan woke. The sun was sinking toward the hill. Another three-quarters of an hour and the beach would be in shadow. He was the first to wake. He felt sluggish and heavy-eyed as he always did after a siesta. Another swim, he thought.
That did the trick. On his return to the beach, he saw that Jocelyn too had woken. The others would be waking soon. That meant more punches. He could dispense with that.
“Is Belfontaine far from here?” he asked.
“Three miles.”
“I’ve never seen it properly. Could you show me round?”
“I’d love to.”
They looked at their slumbering friends.
“Will they be driving past the house on the way back?” he asked.
“They may do, but it’s a longer way.”
“It doesn’t matter, though, we’ve got three cars.”
It was the first time she had been beside him the whole day. It was the first time they had been alone for at least a week. As always she felt cozily at ease with him. And it was good, after the noise of carnival to be driving round the tip of the island in the quiet, past a long grove of coconuts, with grazing ground stretching toward the foothills. This was the least populated parish in the island because the least protected; but it was one of the most charming.
“I can see why your ancestors chose this place,” he said.
It was the first time he had approached Belfontaine from this side. It looked very dignified, white against the green of the surrounding cane fields, with the avenue of palms leading to it from the road.
Jocelyn honked the horn as she turned into the avenue.
“I’ll bet that wretched guardian has taken the day off,” she prophesied.
The windows were shuttered and the front door locked. No sound came from the outhouses.
“What did I tell you? They’re the most casual people. You can’t rely on them.”
“Does that mean we can’t get in?”
“No, no. I know where they keep the key.”
It was in a small flowerpot on the veranda.
“It won’t take a minute,” she told him.
She had parked the car to the left of the drive, in the shadow of a mango tree. It was out of sight of the house.
A ten-year-old urchin who had been squatting on the edge of the cane field since midday, noted its position with approval. He slunk back to the main road, keeping out of view. The moment he was out of sight he began to run. There was plenty of time still to “run mask.” Perhaps the man who had sent him there would give him fifty cents. The man who had posted him was one of those whom Boyeur had exhorted to “fix that bastard good.”
It was less than thirty hours since Maxwell and Sylvia had driven into town, but already the shuttered house carried a damp smell. Jocelyn wrinkled her nose.
“Do you wonder that nothing lasts here? Worms eat through books and furniture. It’s not worth having a good piano. They eat the felt. Let’s let in some fresh air, quick.”
They moved from room to room, opening windows, throwing back the shutters. In five minutes a transformation had been effected. The fusty, frowsy atmosphere had been dispelled, sunlight was streaming through open windows onto rosewood and mahogany, onto silver and Venetian glass; onto family portraits in dull gilt frames. From the windows you saw the fresh green of the cane fields and the cotton crop.
“In the tropics all you need is a roof supported at the corners, and a floor to stand beds and chairs and tables on,” she said. “You don’t need any decorative furniture or pictures. Look at that.”
She pointed toward the windows. The series of views seen through them made the walls look like the corridor of a gallery lined with pictures.
“Perhaps that’s why these people have produced no art,” he said. In the north you had to have pictures on your walls; nature gave so little; you had to create beauty in protest against the niggardliness of nature.
Even so it was a relief to have all this, he thought as he looked about him, at all the evidence this house contained of a long-based family life, pictures and photographs and chairs and tables that had been bought and cherished over two hundred years, the residue of changing tastes sorted out from one generation to the next. It reminded him of the Queen Anne house on the edge of Dartmoor in which he had been born, the house that had been requisitioned by the Army during the war, that had only been partially reopened, that had been offered to the National Trust and been refused; that in all human probability would never be a home again.
He looked at a collection of West Indian prints, collected by Jocelyn’s great-great-grandfather. He had been shown them when he had been brought out to lunch, but he had no time to examine them. They had a charming eighteenth century quality; a sense of leisure, a lack of hurry; with the slaves either elaborately clothed in Sunday raiment or naked, except for a loincloth, in the cane fields and at the sugar mill. They reproduced the scenery, the landscape and foliage of the tropics, but they did not present the tropics. They were the tropics seen in terms of an English country house. The heat and humidity of the tropics had been left out.
In what had been her father’s study the walls were hung with photographs. “That’s grandfather,” she said.
It had been taken on the steps of the house in Devonshire that Euan had known so well in boyhood. The house had been acquired, during the slump, by a rich man in the city, who had children of his own age and had given lavish parties.
“It’s funny to think that you’ve never been in that house,” he said.
He looked more closely at the photograph. Her grandfather was wearing a Norfolk jacket, with a handkerchief tucked sideways into the long pleat; the pockets sagged; he had a gun under his arm; there were cartridges most likely in his pocket; his breeches fitted tightly at his knees. He was wearing boots. There was a spaniel at his feet.
“I’ve got a photograph of my grandfather looking just like that,” he said.
“There’s one of Daddy with his father.”
It was a cricket group. They were both wearing I.Z. blazers. They were very obviously son and father, though the son was thinner, smaller, w
ith finer features, and the darker hair cut short. They were seated on the steps of a pavilion.
“That’s the Sidmouth ground,” he said. “I’ve played there often.”
“That’s Mummy.”
“She’s the image of your aunt Cicely.”
“It’s strange your knowing all these relatives that I’ve never met.”
“That’s what I told you at that first garden party.”
They looked at other photographs. He told her about the people in them, the places that were in the background. “This one, I’ve seen before,” he said. “In my aunt Julia’s house. Isn’t it strange to think we’ve been brought up with the same things round us, living all these miles apart.”
They reached the final photograph.
“Haven’t you one of your father’s mother?” he asked.
“Daddy’s got one somewhere. Only a snap. You can’t see her at all well. She’s wearing a floppy hat. Her face is in the shadow.”
“He was born out here wasn’t he?”
“Not in this island, in Jamaica.”
They returned to the veranda. The shadow of the palms had lengthened, the blue of the sky had darkened, the green of the cane stalks deepened. All day their waving spearheads had been like polished metal reflecting the sun’s glare; now in the declining light they resumed their own rich hue. There was not a cloud on the horizon.
“We may see the green ray tonight,” she said.
They stood side by side on the veranda, leaning against the railing.
“The others ought to be coming by now any moment.”
“Unless they’ve gone the other way.”