Island in the Sun

by Alec Waugh

  The shape of that final article began to form. The volcano was not extinct, but it was quiescent. On that note he would say good-by to Santa Marta.

  On the following morning Bradshaw toured the island with the other journalists. They took a picnic lunch. Four cars were booked, and several of the local girls were requisitioned to act as hostesses. Bradshaw was placed in the same car as Doris Kellaway. One of the journalists was a bachelor in the middle twenties. Clearly it was to be quite a day for Doris. Bradshaw had rung up Belfontaine after breakfast, and arranged that his carload should look in for a punch after their bathe. He regarded Maxwell as a pipeline. That first election meeting had been one of his best stories.

  “You wouldn’t mind stopping there, would you?” he asked Doris.

  “On the contrary, I was going to suggest it myself. I want to see Sylvia particularly. You’ve heard her news?”

  “I only got back yesterday.”

  “I know, but you might have heard. It’s marvelous. She’s going to have a baby.”

  “You’re right, that is marvelous.”

  It should make all the difference to Maxwell. He had been such a problem child, by all accounts; surly, with a chip upon his shoulder. He was a different person now, everyone said the same thing about him. That article about the colored blood in the Fleury family had done the trick. Maxwell had nothing to be secretive about any longer.

  Certainly he could not have been more gracious in his welcoming of the journalists. He took them on a tour first of the grounds, then of the boucan.

  “I don’t know how it’ll strike you,” he said. “You’ve seen so many more of the islands than I have; you can compare one island with the other, but from what I’ve been told and from what I’ve read, there are certain things here that you can’t get anywhere else, at the same price that’s to say. We’ve a real sense of the past here. And there’s no better bathing in the Caribbean. What’s your candid view about making this a summertime resort?”

  Four months ago he would have been a poor advertisement for the island, now he was a good one. He was a salesman without appearing to be one.

  “It’s an easy flight from New York,” he said. “You have to change planes at Puerto Rico, but maybe we’ll be able to get that altered. Pan Am. might stop here if there was sufficient demand. The airstrip is adequate. And, as you see, the climate stays good right through into September. The countryside may look parched; it may have been greener farther south and you may have seen more flowers and more trees in flower, but in a way that lack of rain is to our advantage. You can rely much more upon the weather here. I wouldn’t recommend Grenada or Dominica for a summer holiday to a family that has only three weeks off a year and needs reasonable weather.”

  He discussed the issue with an impartiality that was effective.

  “I’ll be very grateful if before you leave you’ll tell me exactly how this place strikes you,” he said. “As probably you know, I’m on the Leg. Co. and we’ll be discussing at the next meeting the possibilities of developing this island as a summer resort. We don’t want to invest a lot of money in hotels and tennis courts and find them empty on our hands. I’ll be most grateful for your advice.”

  Three months ago, Bradshaw thought, if Maxwell had talked to journalists on such a subject a sneer would have come somewhere into his voice. He would have belittled the island, or himself; he would have been truculent toward these emissaries from a larger world, ready to take offense, putting the others’ backs up. Today, without being in the least ingratiating, he so put his point that the journalists wanted to be able to do something for him.

  Bradshaw turned to Sylvia.

  “Success has made him quite a different person. It’s a point that Maugham has made more than once. We’re all pleasanter people when the sun is shining. Your husband does not seem the same person that he was when I came here first.”

  Sylvia smiled. “I have to thank you for that.”

  “You genuinely believe that article made all that difference?”

  “He admits it himself. He draws a parallel with psychonanalysis. The psychoanalysts maintain that all our troubles are caused by a hidden worry; something that happened in childhood put us onto the wrong road, but as soon as we know what that worry is, we can start to cure it. Till we know, we are in the dark. Maxwell always had a feeling that people were against him, that people despised him; he thought he hadn’t been given a fair chance, he was jealous of his brother. He was an awkward person; to be quite frank, I couldn’t relax with him myself. I didn’t at the time admit it to myself. I can only speak of it now because everything is different, but he was a person whom it was very difficult to love. And in addition, he had that insane, ridiculous hatred for the colored people. He was no good on that account at running an estate. The peasants wouldn’t work for him. They knew he didn’t like them. He didn’t know how to handle them. You were at that first meeting of his. He hit the wrong note every time. Then your article came out; he realized that he was one of them: it’s made all the difference.

  “What he himself thinks is that subconsciously he knew it all along. A nurse or a housemaid when he was a child made some remark about the Fleurys having colored blood that lodged in his subconscious. Your article was a violent form of shock treatment.”

  “The change really started with that article.”

  She nodded.

  “The very day. I remember the morning it came out. He was furious. He was swearing all manner of vengeance against you: he was going to sue you for libel: heaven knows what else. He drove into town, to see his father, directly after lunch. He came back a different man.”

  She smiled, a fond and tender smile that sprang from a deep well of happiness. That night had been her real wedding night.

  Bradshaw too smiled, for very different reasons. Journalists were always accused of making copy out of their friends; particularly a gossip columnist like himself. He resented the criticism. It was his job to write about personalities. Everybody knew that. People asked him to their houses at their own risk. He could not afford to go to parties that would not provide him with a paragraph. And indeed hostesses for the most part considered themselves ill-used if no reference to their hospitality appeared in print. At the same time he had his conscience. He exercised discretion. On occasions he had abused a confidence. He had done it knowingly, remembering Maugham’s remark that it was hard to be both a writer and a gentleman. When the temptation was too strong, when the copy was too good, he yielded. He consoled himself with the casuistry that the sin was much less when you were still able to recognize it as a sin. It was when you could not distinguish between right and wrong that your soul was in dire peril.

  He had known that he was betraying a trust when he had revealed the secret of the Fleury ancestry. The Archdeacon should not have told him; but the Archdeacon had. He had been ashamed of himself. He would never have written the article if he had known that it would be reprinted in Santa Marta. He had shivered when he had seen it in The Voice: yet here lay the irony of the situation, the one act of which he was ashamed since his arrival in Santa Marta had unquestionably, irrefutably done good.

  He enlarged on the topic on the following day to Whittingham. He had gone there to check over his impressions before writing what he planned to be his farewell article on Santa Marta.

  “Out of Evil, Good,” he said. “There’s no doubt that Maxwell Fleury is a reformed character, and it’s entirely due to that article. At least that’s what his wife assures me.”

  “There’s a change all right; we’ve all noticed that.”

  “And it started on the day that article appeared.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Quite certain. I was at the club that evening. I confess that I was shy of going there. I did not know how I should be received. Luckily perhaps for me, a good deal else was happening that night. Carson had that scene with Leisching.”

  “Did he now? Yes. Of course he did. I’d forgotten tha
t. It’s a long time ago. As you say, a good deal happened that night.”

  He pursed his lips.

  “Your article comes out in the morning. Young Fleury reads it at lunch time. He hurries straight up to see his father; he then learns that there’s no case for libel; he goes round to the club, to make, as he called it, a gesture; to show everyone that he doesn’t give a damn. He goes on foot so as to clear his mind. He passes Carson’s house, just after Carson must himself have reached it; he may have passed it at the very moment when Carson was being killed; he arrives at the club, in such a state of excitement that he never learns that Carson has had that scene with Leisching; he makes a long speech to you.” Whittingham paused again. He looked very thoughtfully at Bradshaw. “Looking back, in what kind of a mood would you have said he was in that night?” he asked.

  “He was very self-assured. He took me aback. I’d never seen him like that before.”

  “The phrase is a cliché, but would you say he was bubbling over with some inner, I don’t know what the word is, I’m losing my vocabulary as well as my memory. But you know what I mean.”

  “I do. I’d say that’s how he was.”

  “And after he’d made his speech, and stood drinks all round, he’s still so absorbed in this discovery about himself that he doesn’t listen to any gossip. He does not know about Carson’s scene with Leisching. It’s ironic that he was the one person at the club that night, I might also say the one person in Jamestown who wasn’t discussing Carson over his dinner, yet he was near as dammit to being the man who discovered Carson’s murderer. And then when he’s stood his round, he hurries back, still on foot, past Carson’s house, notices incidentally that there are no lights on in the bedroom; you’d have thought he was too busy with his own thoughts to have noticed that; he’s in such a hurry to get back home that he forgets to give his sister a message that young Templeton left for Jocelyn—and a message from young Templeton that night must have been important. Jocelyn can’t have known how the Templetons were going to take this news of yours. He’s bubbling over inside himself, he drives straight out to Belfontaine. And his wife tells you that from that evening on, he’s been a different person. There must be more in this psychoanalysis than I’d suspected. Yes, it’s quite a business. You certainly provided, what was his wife’s phrase for it, shock treatment. For all that to have happened in one evening.”

  “Are you any nearer to finding out who did kill Carson?”

  Whittingham hesitated. Bradshaw was proving a useful catspaw. There was no reason why his usefulness should not be exploited further. He nodded.

  “Are you any nearer to an arrest?” Bradshaw asked.

  “You’ve been away ten weeks. That means I’m ten weeks nearer.”

  “You’re confident that you’ll get him?”

  “Quite confident.”

  “I suppose you can’t tell me anything.”

  “Nothing that you could use. I’m afraid that you’ll have to do what I do, sit and wait.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  1

  That evening Bradshaw settled down to compose his final article. He wrote in a carefree almost a valedictory mood, with the confidence that is born out of success. In a sense he was going back on what he had said four months earlier. He was prophesying smooth things now: but it was the privilege of journalists as of politicians if not to eat their words at least to set up a different menu. The memory of the public was mercifully short. You had to titillate their interest from day to day. They were grateful if you kept them alert and interested.

  Volcanoes can remain quiescent for several years. That was his general thesis. Santa Marta had rumbled, had sent up clouds of smoke, there had been flashes of fire; a planter had had his cane fields burnt, a colonel had been killed. But for the moment there seemed no immediate anxiety. The elections had passed off quietly. David Boyeur was now a person in authority: he was also engaged to be married. Two such simultaneous events could be expected to have a tranquilizing influence. The best way to disarm a revolutionary was to give him public office. In a few years’ time there would be another David Boyeur; or rather an equivalent for David Boyeur; there was still discontent under the surface, but at the moment nothing very alarming need be feared from Boyeur.

  Bradshaw drew a parallel between the political situation and the apparent inactivity of the police in connection with the Carson case. The murderer was at this moment congratulating himself that he had got away with the perfect crime. Twelve weeks had passed, no movement had been made by the police, yet it would be as unwise for that criminal to become complacent as it would be for the Colonial Office in Westminster to look on Santa Marta as a file that could be shut away. The police were accumulating evidence: they were not yet able to justify a warrant for arrest, but they had their man under their eyes. Sooner or later he would play into their hands. In just that way, time would set a match to the essentially inflammable material that comprised the social structure of Santa Marta.

  Whittingham chuckled when he read that article. Bradshaw had played his cards for him very satisfactorily. Whether anything would come of it, he could not tell. But he liked to think of “his man” wilting as he read that piece.

  Boyeur also chuckled when he read it. So they had got that idea of him, had they? He read the article out loud to Muriel.

  “They’ll see at the next Leg. Co. meeting whether my teeth are drawn,” he told her. “I’ve got a motion down on the condition of our school building. They’ll see if I’m tamed.”

  She watched him with adoring eyes. He was so definite; he spoke with such authority. At home everyone was so mild; everyone accepted everything, even Grainger, clever though he was. She was marrying a real man, thank God.

  2

  Maxwell read the article in the club. He had come in for the day to stock up on groceries. He had left Sylvia behind. He did not want to have her traveling on that bumpy road more often than was necessary. The fourth month was the danger time as he had always heard. He had finished his shopping quickly and was alone in the club. He thanked his stars for that. He sat by the window, staring at that final paragraph. He read it a second time and then a third. The steward stood beside him, with the lime squash that he had ordered. It was cold and sweet. He drank the half of it in one long swallow. He wished that it were rum and ginger. He longed to order a strong hard drink that would warm his blood, restore his courage. But he mustn’t. He knew that. Alcohol would be fatal. He must keep his head, watch himself: maintain that latchet on his tongue.

  For the fourth time he reread the article. Was Bradshaw right? Did the police know? Was it only a journalist’s guesswork? He turned over the paper: there was a paragraph about the meeting of the Leg. Co. on the following Tuesday. There was a proposal that patients to hospital should be allowed to wear their own clothes without payment, if they wanted. What on earth was this about? He’d have to find out the facts, it was the first he’d heard about it. He wasn’t going to sit there silent; there was a proposal about developing a section of Grande Anse as a resort for tourists, with bungalows and tennis courts: there was also a proposal about repairing the school building in St. Patrick’s; that was Boyeur. He’d better have a look at that school and also at some of the other schools: find out exactly what had been done, what was being done, what it was planned to do. He’d put a spoke in Boyeur’s wheel if he could. Repairing of schools indeed; a typical Boyeur plan to impress his own constituents.

  He turned to the back page. Next week the new version of Show Boat was coming to the Carlton. He mustn’t miss that. It would be good to hear those songs again. “Can’t help lovin’ that man,” and “Ol’ Man River.” He hummed the tunes. He looked through the window onto the carenage. A schooner from Guadeloupe was being loaded with sacks of copra by a couple of longshoremen. They were bare to the waist; their blue jeans were patched; their damp shoulders glistened under the sun; their biceps swelled and sank as they heaved the sacks onto that deck. “Lift that rope, hea
ve that bale…” Had their lot really changed, in its essentials, since emancipation? He was in part repelled by their instinctive animal existence, in part he responded to a kinship with it. He had a chance now of doing something for this people. Far more than Boyeur. Boyeur was a demagogue. He didn’t care about the people: only about himself: the misfortunes of the proletariat were for him so many private stepping stones. He must find out the facts about those schools.

  He laid down the paper. As he did so, his eye fell on the leader page, on Bradshaw’s article. He blinked at it. Why was he worrying about schools and cinemas and Boyeur? How did he know that he would be a free man on Tuesday, that he would ever see another film? For ten weeks now he had let himself forget about that dark half-hour in that hidden house. There had been so much else to think about. There had been the excitement of the election, then there’d been Sylvia’s news. So much had been happening; everything had gone so well. He had been so happy. Love, reciprocated love; he had known it for the first time during these weeks. His sky had been unclouded. Yet all the time the enemy was drawing closer.

  He rose. It was ten past eleven. In a few minutes the first of the planters would be in here for his morning punch. When he had left Belfontaine he had pictured himself standing round the bar, swapping stories, picking up the local gossip. That, after all, was his job now, as a councilor, to know how people were thinking, what was on their minds. But he was in no mood now for that kind of morning. He’d have no peace of mind till he’d seen Whittingham.

  He drove straight round there without ringing first. As usual Whittingham was in.

  “Forgive my barging in like this,” he said. “But our telephone’s impossible. You know the way it is with a party line. Probably you’d have got the message wrong, and that would have been a pity, because what it was is this. Sylvia won’t be coming into town more than she can help, these next few months. You’ve heard our news, haven’t you?”