Island in the Sun

by Alec Waugh

  Now that at last that scene was to be enacted, she felt apprehensive. This time yesterday morning she had been vivid with anticipation, chuckling over her secret. If only she could be in that mood now. If only she and Euan could have played their truant roles a little longer. Everything was changed and wrong now, though she could not tell why.

  She waited for the pause in the conversation.

  “I’ve news that may surprise you,” she remarked. “I’ve been proposed to.”

  She said it in a way that made her parents believe that she was treating the occasion with levity.

  “Who by?” her father asked.

  “Wouldn’t you like to guess?”

  “I’d need to know first what your answer was.”

  “I answered like a well brought up young lady in a Victorian novel. I said I must ask my parents.”

  “That sounds as though you’d like to answer ‘yes.’ “

  “I would.”

  “So you’re in love with him?”

  She would have liked to have quoted from a musical hit, “If this isn’t love, the whole world is crazy,” instead she said, “Won’t you guess who it is?”

  There was a pause. Her father looked puzzled. She knew what he was thinking: that it was Grainger Morris or somebody like Grainger Morris. It wasn’t fair to tease him.

  “Don’t look so alarmed,” she said. “It’s Euan Templeton.”

  “Darling, how wonderful.”

  It was from her mother that that exclamation came. But it was at her father she was looking, watching to see if his expression changed.

  “If you are in love with Euan Templeton then it’s all plain sailing,” her mother was continuing. “I know he’s young, but nowadays it’s quite common for a married man to go up to Oxford, and Euan isn’t perhaps in the same situation as other men, as regards his career, I mean. Examinations won’t mean as much to him as they do to the young men who have to make their own way in the world. You wouldn’t be a hindrance to him.”

  Jocelyn let her mother talk. She waited for a pause, she watched her father.

  “Mother’s right,” she said. “Euan is in a different position. He has a name to carry on, he has duties, obligations. That’s why I have to be quite certain. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t marry him?”

  “What do you mean? What reason could there be?”

  It was her mother who spoke, but her eyes were on her father. Did he hesitate or only seem to hesitate?

  “Father?” she said. He still stayed silent. So she had been right then. She repeated her question. “Is there any good reason why I shouldn’t marry Euan Templeton? Is there any reason why I shouldn’t be the mother of his children?”

  Her father shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “There’s no good reason why you shouldn’t marry him.”

  “In that case then …” Jocelyn hesitated. She should, she knew, be feeling jubilant. From every worldly point of view, no one could be more suitable than Euan. Had she been told six weeks ago that she would find herself in such a situation, she would have felt that life was pouring all its riches into her lap. All this and heaven too. Yet her heart was heavy with a vague foreboding. She looked back nostalgically to the eager mood of anticipation with which twenty-four hours ago she had begun the day.

  Chapter Twelve

  1

  The news of an imminent engagement between Jocelyn Fleury and the Governor’s son reached Carl Bradshaw on the morning that he had finished his second article. The article started with the line:

  “On Mardi gras as dusk was falling, while the streets of Jamestown were thronged with prancing revelers, fifteen miles away a white man and his white companion stood on the veranda of a bungalow, facing a furnace. The cane fields had been lit, the telephone wires had been cut, their car had been put out of action; they were prisoners, cut off by fire from the road: victims of a terrorist assault. The white man was the Governor’s son.”

  The news of the engagement reached him in the club. On his return to his hotel he reread the article. It was shorter than his first one had been, a bare thousand words. Should he add a postscript. He hesitated, then decided no. It was better to keep to one main thread. This new piece of information could make the pivot of another article. He had not forgotten his first conversation with Father Roberts.

  2

  Four days later Bradshaw’s second article was headlined in the Baltimore Evening Star. Its main points were cabled back to London by the Reuter service. The editor of the Globe, the foremost Opposition paper, read it with interest. He was looking for a whip with which to flog the Government: this seemed as good as any: the pinprick of a picador. He called up his news editor. “The line is this,” he said. “The Government has appointed as Governor a man without Colonial Office training; this is an injustice to the service that is only justified by success. Templeton has only been in Santa Marta for five months and for the first time in the island’s history they are having trouble. Make a particular point of the fact that the Governor’s son was the object of a terrorist attack.”

  Next day the leader page of the Globe lay blue-penciled on the desk of the Minister of State for the Colonies. The Minister read it with a frown.

  “Has Purvis seen this?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir, there’s his minute.”

  The minute read, “Suggest we should ask His Excellency to forward a report.”

  The cable asking the Governor for a report reached Santa Marta before the copy of the Baltimore Evening Star did.

  “I wonder what our journalist has told the world this time,” he thought. He rang for Denis Archer.

  “Is Colonel Whittingham in town?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. I’ll find out.”

  “Do that. I’d like to see him as soon as possible.”

  Whittingham was in the police station. He was round within ten minutes. The Governor handed him the cable.

  “What am I to say to that?” he said.

  “How do you mean, sir?”

  “Have you any further information?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What is your personal opinion; do you think I should be justified in saying that Carnival always provides an opportunity for the paying off of grudges, and that this incident means neither more nor less than that?”

  “That, sir, is my belief.”

  “You don’t think that my son was the object of this attack?”

  “I don’t see how he can have been. No one knew that he was in that car.”

  “You are convinced therefore that the whole incident was the paying off of a grudge against young Fleury.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know what is the reason for this grudge?”

  The Colonel hesitated. Belfontaine had always been a tricky district. He did not like to play an ‘I told you so’ part. Even so …

  “I have heard, sir, that a number of the peasants held Maxwell Fleury to blame in that Preston case.”

  “But the local man won the case.”

  “That didn’t help the peasants. They didn’t get the five dollars they had been promised.”

  So they were still harping on that point, were they? They still believed that he should have intervened. They were sticking to their guns. He let that point pass.

  “I haven’t yet read the article by Bradshaw that’s responsible for these inquiries,” he said. “But his point appears to be that there’s a general atmosphere of unrest of which this incident is symptomatic. You don’t agree with that?”

  “No, sir.”

  Neither did Templeton for that matter. How could Bradshaw know? There was an idea nowadays that journalists by hanging around bars knew more than ambassadors who received top secret reports from twenty confidential sources. He knew more of what was going on than Bradshaw. Two weeks ago Bradshaw had been saying that Euan was in love with Mavis Norman. Now Euan was unofficially engaged to Jocelyn Fleury. That showed how much Bradshaw knew.

&nbs
p; “Thank you very much,” he said. “I’ll explain this to Whitehall. By the way, what’s happening about the Carson incident?”

  “The Committee haven’t decided yet. I believe they’re going to ask him to apologize.”

  “Will he do that, do you suppose?”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  “Neither do I.”

  There was a pause.

  “We can cross that bridge when we come to it,” the Governor said. “And there seem quite a few bridges ahead of us at the present moment, with these elections coming. Do you anticipate any trouble there?”

  “I shall be very glad when they are over, sir.”

  “Don’t you think I shall, too?”

  They laughed together. As he rose to indicate that the interview was ended, the Governor pressed the bell upon his desk that rang in Archer’s room.

  “I want you to fix an evening soon when Colonel Whittingham and his wife can dine here for an informal party. Oh, and by the way, I’m lunching with the Fleurys, Euan is too. That means that you can make what arrangements for yourself you like.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Archer kept his expression calm, but his heart bounded. That meant a meeting in the summerhouse.

  “When will you be back, sir?”

  “Not before half-past three.”

  Half-past three. That meant at least two hours; two hours of picnicking, of gossiping, of reading poetry, of playing the gramophone, of making love. The Governor’s wife who fifty years ago had built this chalet had chosen the site wisely: out of earshot, out of sight, it was a secluded paradise. No one could see you going there, but from its windows you could observe approach. He had wondered sometimes whether the lady who had built it had not had some ulterior motive when she sited it. He wondered who she had been. He had looked through the records, but there was nothing to show when it had been built. There had been so many Governors during forty years. “I wish I could find out who she was,” he had said to Margot. “I’d like to write a poem about her.”

  “You don’t need to know who she was to write a poem.”

  “I’d like to have a peg to hang it on. I’d like to think of her watching over us, a friendly ghost.”

  “I find that very easy to believe.”

  It was over a series of enchanted hours that the ghost of the forgotten Governor’s lady had stood as sentinel. Denis Archer had an eye for decoration. He had brought down three eighteenth century prints from the lumber room at Government House; he had found some chairs, a few rugs, a table, and a divan day couch: within a few hours he had made it a personal apartment. He had told the Governor that he needed a place in which to work, and to perfect his alibi he had fallen into a routine of going there, before breakfast, lunching there when he was not on duty, and returning there three to four times a week when the office closed. Quite often he went after dinner and worked there by the light of a hurricane lamp.

  “If ever you find yourself with half an hour free, you are more likely than not to find me there,” he had said to Margot. Quite often she did come on the off chance, without prearrangement. He would have thought that the knowledge that she might come unexpectedly would make it impossible for him to work, that he would be restless, impatient, striding up and down the room. Yet to his surprise it was not like that at all. He found it easy to concentrate upon his manuscript.

  A year back in London he had known the strain of a liaison: the constant watching of a clock on this and the other mantelpiece, the jump every time a telephone bell rang: he had felt enslaved. “The white implacable Aphrodite.” There was nothing like that now: there was no greedy snatching at stolen minutes, no sense of haste or hurry: no uncertainty.

  On days when they had a definite rendezvous, Margot would arrive punctually but casually: on the table there would be fruit, a cake, perhaps some cheese. She might turn on the gramophone, she might pick up a book, she behaved as though she lived here: as though this were her home. They would talk, and share their picnic: sometimes they would dance to the gramophone, suddenly they would find themselves making love. They always did make love: yet it was never, at any time, suggested or inferred that she had come there on an assignation. Lovemaking was part of the rhythm of their joint lives, a long deep rhythm.

  On the morning that the Governor had interviewed Colonel Whittingham, Denis Archer was so absorbed in his writing that he never saw Margot walking up the path toward him, never heard her open the door: he was conscious suddenly of a scent beside him, the deep strong scent of jasmin; he turned and her hand was on the desk beside him. She was reading over his shoulder.

  “I think that’s good,” she said. “But will you read it to me?”

  She perched herself on the desk while he read his poem to her. He finished and she took the sheet. She read it back to him, in her musical singsong voice. She looked at him questioningly when she reached the end. She never made a criticism. She waited for him to make it, but always when he heard her read one of his poems, he became aware of its deficiencies.

  “I don’t like the sound of that passage, right after the beginning,” he remarked.

  “I’m not sure I do. Read it to me again.”

  As he reread it, he saw where the passage failed.

  “I must work up those four lines,” he said.

  She crossed to the table, cut a slice of cake, opened a Coca Cola.

  “I heard a new calypso record; if you like, I’ll bring it round,” she said.

  “I’d like you to.”

  She sat on the table swinging her legs. It was the most natural thing in the world to see her there, yet he had as little idea of what was passing in her mind as he had had the first time he had walked into the Bon Marche pharmacy. She picked up the manuscript book in which two or three times a week he jotted down impressions of what he had seen and heard; she turned the pages.

  “What will you make out of this?” she asked. “A novel?”

  “Perhaps, I don’t know. It might be more original to do it as a diary. It might be an idea to publish it anonymously.”

  She pouted. “But you want people to know who you are, don’t you?”

  “If the book was a success, I’d announce who I was.”

  “I see.”

  She turned the pages. “It’s the kind of book I’d like to read,” she said.

  When she read, a frown invariably came between her eyes. It made her look very solemn and very young. He sat beside her, his arm round her, reading over her shoulder.

  “It doesn’t seem too bad,” he said.

  “It’s very good.”

  They read in silence. She began to laugh. “That’s very funny.”

  It was the description of Carson’s treatment of the Obeah man. “But it’s dangerous to make fun of the Obeah man,” she said.

  “Do you believe he can do you damage?”

  “Of course.”

  “You believe that he can put a spell upon you.”

  “I know he can.”

  “If you wanted something very much would you ask an Obeah man for it?”

  “If I wanted it very much.”

  “Even though your priest told you it was very wrong?”

  “Even if my priest told me it was very wrong.”

  “You would have more faith in your Obeah man than in your priest?”

  “It’s different.”

  “Have you ever been to an Obeah man?”

  “My friends have been.”

  She was not laughing any longer now. Her face was serious. He hesitated. He had a feeling that she did not want him to question her, but he was inquisitive.

  “Your friends have told you what happens when they visit the Obeah man?”

  “They have.”

  “When do they go to him?”

  “When they want something very much.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “When someone has done them harm.”

  “Or when they are in love?”

&nbs
p; “Yes, when they are in love.”

  “And do they get what they want from the Obeah man?”

  “If they do what he tells them.”

  “What would he tell them to do?”

  “Different things.”

  “For instance.”

  “He might ask for a piece of the loved one’s clothing.”

  “What else?”

  “He might say ‘a piece of cloth with the loved one’s blood on it.’”

  “And you believe all this.”

  “We all believe in it.”

  He was standing beside her now, in front of her, his arms round her waist. He drew her to the edge of the table. She twisted her ankles round his calves.

  “I sometimes think you’ve put a spell on me,” he said.

  She smiled. She raised her arms. She twined them round his neck, lifted her face under his. That first afternoon in the Bon Marche pharmacy, when he had hesitated on the brink of the first step, he had felt himself to be on the threshold of sinister experience. Yet nothing could have been more natural than this lovemaking.

  3

  In the town in the Fleury household lunch was ending. It was a family party. The parents, Jocelyn, Maxwell and Sylvia and the two Templetons. It was an engagement party though it had been agreed that there should be no official announcement yet.

  “It would be far better for Euan to have at least one term at Oxford,” said Lord Templeton. “He will get to know his contemporaries far better if he does. Jocelyn could come over to England. They would be able to see quite a lot of one another. They could be married at Christmas. I feel that is the better way.”

  “And we can stick to our original plan,” Julian said, “and sail together in October.”

  And that, Maxwell thought, left constant the position as regards Belfontaine. He watched his wife. Did she seem relieved? He thought she did. How did he know what was passing behind that smooth calm mask? Was she adding up her opportunities of seeing the man who had smoked that Egyptian cigarette, or was she pondering on her own bad luck in not having been free when young Templeton had paid his visit? He would surely, might she not be thinking, have preferred her to Jocelyn.