Island in the Sun

by Alec Waugh

  His mother flushed. I was always her favorite, he thought.

  “Don’t say anything, Mother darling, but remember that. I must run round to the office now. I’ll be back for lunch.”

  On his way to the office he met Denis Archer. Archer stopped.

  “I heard you were in town; have you any news for H.E. How are things out there with you.”

  “They’re all right.”

  “Yet you’ve brought your wife in?”

  “Only because I don’t want to have her worrying. In the condition she’s in, you know.”

  “So you don’t want me to alarm H.E.?”

  “Good heavens, no.”

  “That’s fine, he’ll be happier after what you’ve told me. He’s been told your district is the trouble area.”

  “I dare say it is, but it’s calm enough at the moment.”

  “Good. I’ll tell him that.”

  Archer was about to move on down the street, but Maxwell checked him. He had never seen very much of Archer. They weren’t really each other’s type, but Archer had always been friendly to him: he’d like to do something for him.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’ve thought of something. I’ll be rather lonely at Belfontaine. Why don’t you come out one night to dinner.”

  “That’s very nice of you.”

  “It would be nice of you to come, and as I’ll be out there as a bachelor, if there’s any girl in whom you’re interested, why not bring her out: I know how hard it is here to have any privacy. There’s plenty of room there for you both; you could drive back in time for work next morning.”

  “That is an idea.”

  “Any time you say. Ring up when you feel like it.”

  “I’ll take you at your word.”

  “Do that.”

  Julian Fleury was surprised to see his son.

  “I hadn’t expected you so early.”

  “I’m going back this evening. I’m on my way to the club now. I’ll probably be falling among friends there. I thought that if we had any shop to discuss, we’d better talk it over first, when my head’s clear.”

  But there was not a great deal to discuss. There were no immediate problems. Copra and cocoa were fetching a high price, and the estate was running at a handsome profit.

  “It should be possible this year to plough back a large percentage of our profits into new equipment. Otherwise we’ll be having trouble over income tax,” his father said.

  “I don’t know why we should be doing so much better now than we were five months ago.”

  Julian Fleury smiled.

  “I can give you the answer to that. You’ve got your eye on things in a way that you hadn’t then. You’ve cut down waste. You can’t think what a difference a two percent saving makes when it’s spread over an estate’s balance sheet.”

  “Is that really true, father?”

  “Of course it is. What other explanation is there? The price of cocoa and copra are the same.”

  “You were pretty worried, weren’t you, in the spring? If it was a question now of taking Jocelyn back to England and leaving me out there in control, you’d have no qualms, would you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You wouldn’t put Preston in charge and bring me back to the office where I couldn’t do any damage?”

  “That’s not the way I figured it when I suggested that. I said that I had to have somebody in Jamestown whom I could trust.”

  “You put it tactfully. But you were worried weren’t you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I’ve been a great trial to you, I’m afraid. I’ve been a disappointing son. But I’ll be better in the future. I know where I am now. I didn’t then. You don’t need to worry.”

  He never really cared about me, Maxwell thought. But then how could he have. I was awkward, difficult, never knowing my own mind, ungrateful, unresponsive, so different from Arthur. No wonder he was impatient with me. It was probably only because I was so unamiable that my mother put me first.

  He went from the office to the Jamestown Club. He did not mean to stay there long. But this curious “last-time” mood was still upon him. There were loose threads to be snipped off, a final impression to be left.

  He arrived there shortly before twelve and the club was crowded. He paused in the doorway looking round him. Whittingham? No, Whittingham was not here. That was a relief. Whittingham could wait. He had brought in Crime and Punishment. He would return it to him in his office after lunch.

  Whittingham was not here, but Boyeur was; standing aggressively self-conscious by the window, within full view of the street and of the library across the way. Maxwell went across to him. This was a loose thread all right.

  “How’s your strike getting on?” he asked.

  “You should know better than I.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re in the trouble area.”

  “You wouldn’t think so, if you came out there. They’re as happy as clams—if clams are happy, and I can’t see why they should be. They’re having a holiday with pay. They beat those drums of theirs all night; then they sleep all day. What more could they want. It’s paradise for them.”

  “This is only the beginning. It’s like the start of World War II. Eight months of phony war. You wait.”

  “Wait till what.”

  “Till the Union funds run low.”

  “Then they’ll come back to work.”

  “Oh no, they won’t. Not at least on the terms that you imagine. They’ll come back on their own terms, with a good many planters very sorry that they didn’t accept my terms to start with.”

  His voice was raised. Attention had been attracted and a group was forming round them. It was what Maxwell wanted. He had known there were some loose threads here, but he had not known which.

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

  “That’s obvious I should have thought. After a month or so, if the planters still hold out and I’m not convinced they will, the strike pay will be reduced. When the strikers have to tighten their belts you can expect trouble. They’ll be hungry and they’ll remember that the planters have stacks of food stored away.”

  “And they’ll see you driving around in your M.G., wearing smart clothes: and they’ll know that you’re eating well at the Continental on their subscriptions. How’ll they like that?”

  He said it sneeringly. It was fun baiting Boyeur. He had only to shut his eyes to see Boyeur strolling into that line of limelight. Boyeur: all his troubles had sprung from that tainted source. The two young men faced each other, loathing each other with that basic unreasoning hatred that only those who carry chips upon their shoulders can feel for those who have hurt their vanity.

  “My people know me, my people trust me. They know who are my enemies. And when the burning starts, they’ll know which houses to set the torches to.”

  Maxwell laughed. “Now we all know where we are don’t we,” he said and turned aside. He had known there was some unfinished business. He had kept calm and Boyeur had lost his temper. What could have been more satisfactory?

  4

  Whittingham only went home to lunch on the very few occasions when his wife had guests. He brought down a small packet of sandwiches and ate them in his office and took a two minute siesta, rocking in his chair. All you needed, he insisted, was the mental relief of making your mind a blank. If you went to bed under a mosquito net, you found yourself sleeping for half an hour and needing a shower afterward. By lunching in his office, he put in, so he claimed, an extra ninety minutes work each day, “and ninety uninterrupted minutes too.” That was when he did his thinking. Most men in the modern world never had time to think, he’d argue. They were caught up, imprisoned by routine details. Because he saved that ninety minutes at noon, he had spare time at the end of the day to drink and gossip, the two things he most enjoyed.

  Maxwell was aware of this routine. He hesitated, when lunch was over and the family scattered to their rooms. S
ylvia looked at him, questioningly. He would have given much to have gone upstairs with her, but he wanted, during his long evenings in the empty house, to have as a last time memory that of the siesta when he too had slept.

  He shook his head.

  “I’ve too much to do,” he said. “I’ll be back for tea.”

  He reached the police station shortly after two. Whittingham was alone, with a heap of files upon his desk.

  “I’ve brought you back Crime and Punishment” Maxwell told him.

  “Fine. You see what I mean now, don’t you.”

  Whittingham swung round in his chair, pivoting himself against the bottom drawer.

  “You can understand now, why I’ve read that book so often. It’s very comforting, very reassuring for a policeman. It reminds him that in the long run ninety-nine times in a hundred he’s bound to win. The criminal gives himself away. He can never shake off the memory of his crime. It haunts him all the time. It is his shadow. He keeps looking over his shoulder for his shadow. That is what betrays him. You see how Raskolnikov gave himself away, fainting in the police station. And when he was recovering from his illness, lying on his sofa in a torpor, never displaying interest in anything that was discussed, except the murder; and then all those conversations of his with the policeman; his absorption in the murder. First of all the detective suspects, finally he knows.”

  “But he had no proof. Raskolnikov would never have been caught unless he had confessed.”

  “Ah, but that’s the point; the criminal is always impelled to a confession, until he confesses he is a prisoner. I’m speaking, mark you, of the intelligent criminal. Not of the brutal thug who holds up a bank and shoots the cashier. That’s an indiscriminate crime. I mean the man who kills a specific person for a specific reason; for jealousy, or to inherit an estate, or to marry someone else. Look at it this way. Most murders are committed as a means of escape, by someone who feels himself imprisoned by lack of money, a rival in love, a wife he no longer loves. He cannot live fully till he is free; with money, without a rival, rid of matrimony.

  “That is what he tells himself. What happens though? The very opposite. He escapes from one prison into another, and a much worse one. He is imprisoned by a sense of guilt, by a fear of discovery and worst of all by his loneliness. He has a trouble which he can confide in no one. That is a terrible thing, to have a secret that you cannot confide. Secret drinking is the worst form of drinking. Anything is tolerable that can be shared. We all of us have our troubles. And we all need somebody with whom we can share our troubles. That is why marriage is necessary for most of us, someone to share things with. There’s a poem I read once with the lines

  You will die unless you do

  Find a soul to whisper to.

  I don’t think I’ve got it right. My memory lets me down all the time. Perhaps it’s friend, not soul. It’s something like that.

  You will die unless you do

  Find a friend to whisper to.”

  He repeated the quotation slowly. His voice was mesmeric. It made Maxwell feel drowsy; the voice ran on without a pause.

  “The loneliness, think of the loneliness of it. Put yourself in his position. He has exchanged one prison for another. There is no one in the world to whom he can speak openly. He is enduring a penal sentence. Solitary confinement. He has no fellow prisoners in whom he can confide. Any other trouble he can share. Suppose he is in debt, there are plenty of friends with whom he can discuss the tantalizing knowledge that if only he had a little capital he could buy himself into the business that would lead to fortune. Perhaps he is jealous. He has friends who have known jealousy, with whom he can compare that feeling of desperate impotence when someone he adores is beguiled by some ridiculous physical trait, the sound of a voice, a way of smiling: he longs for vitriol to throw in the rival’s face, to destroy that smile, to pour acid down the throat, burn out those vocal cords; he can compare notes on jealousy: as he can compare notes on the misery of being married to a woman who will not divorce him when he meets his soulmate: those are troubles he can share. But murder, no, he cannot speak of that.”

  How true, Maxwell thought, how true. The loneliness, the fear, the isolation; with the intervals of an occasional blissful day when you can forget; a day like yesterday.

  The voice droned on.

  “One prison for another, and a far worse prison than that other one. And remember this, the man who is in this position has a fetish about freedom. He cares so much for freedom that he will commit murder. Most of us can endure a little servitude: can compromise a little with necessity. But not this type of man. He has committed a crime for the sake of freedom.”

  “But he may not have committed a murder to escape,” Maxwell interrupted.

  Whittingham was wrong there, and Whittingham had got so much right that he must be shown where he had got it wrong.

  “The murder might have been committed by mistake,” he pointed out. “Suppose two men start a fight, suppose one of them falls and as he falls strikes his head against a sharp corner. You often see that happen in the films.”

  “Yes, you quite often see that in the films.”

  “It happens in real life too doesn’t it.”

  “Why shouldn’t it?”

  “Or it might happen the way it did in Carson’s case.”

  “And how was that?”

  “The way we agreed, don’t you remember? A man flinging his arms sideways as he fell; the other kneeling over him, his knees pinioning the arms, his hands at the throat, seeing red, beating the head against the floor, not realizing what he was doing till the man was dead.”

  “And is that how we agreed that it might have happened.”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “Do I. Possibly. Yes I think I do. So that’s what we agreed on, did we? Yes, of course we did. I remember now.”

  “And in that case it wouldn’t be premeditated. It wouldn’t be a case of escaping out of one prison and entering another.”

  “No, that’s right, it wouldn’t. But that case is far less common. It isn’t usual, you know, except in books and films. When a man is killed in that way, it’s manslaughter after all, and the man who did it could plead self-defense. He might get off altogether. If he had any sense, he’d go to the police right away. Every film with that kind of manslaughter is a warning against the folly of not doing that.”

  “I know, but suppose the man sets off to the police station meaning to give himself up, then on the way there realizes suddenly that no one has seen him leave the house, that he has passed no one in the road leading from it, that no one saw him go to the house, that he had no assignation, that he went there uninvited. He has left no clue. He realizes suddenly that no one can connect him with the act.”

  As he spoke, Maxwell could see himself four months ago, on that moonless night, hurrying down that dark pathway to the road.

  “Don’t you remember only two weeks ago, after the Leg. Co. meeting, how we stood in the path running from Carson’s house; how we pictured to ourselves the man who had killed Carson, pausing at that very same point, wondering whether he could reach the roadway. You remember, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “In that case then, if it had been like that, the man who killed Carson wouldn’t have stepped from one prison into another.”

  “That’s very true, but he would be in a prison all the same.”

  Maxwell nodded. How well he knew what it was like inside that prison. Who knew better than he did?

  “He’s in a prison,” Whittingham’s voice droned on. “And there’s only one way out of it, confession. That’s where Crime and Punishment is so sound. Raskolnikov is longing to confess. From the very start, within half an hour of committing the crime. He’s not strong enough to carry the burden of his guilt. In his heart of hearts he prays to be found out. The police station is a magnet to him. He returns over and over again to the detective, for no need at all: not only because the detective i
s the one person who understands him, but because the detective is the one person who can set him free. That’s how I think of that poor devil who killed Carson, I mean poor devil too—I don’t bear him any ill will, I don’t blame him, why should I? Who am I to judge anyone, who am I to blame him?—I’m sorry for him. I think of him, out there in the districts, or here in town, meeting his friends, going to parties; perhaps he’s got a wife and children: perhaps he’s a bachelor and engaged; or there’s a girl in love with him, to whom he daren’t propose because there’s this burden on his conscience. Quite possibly he’s someone of importance. He must be. If he’s someone in a position to have been jealous of Carson.”

  “What makes you think he was?”

  “Wasn’t that one of the possibilities we considered the other day. Or was it with someone else, to someone else that I suggested the possibility of that?”

  “No, it was with me. I remember now.”

  “It was. I thought as much. But I go over this case so often, with so many people, it’s hard to remember who said what and when. But it may have been jealousy, and if it was jealousy, the betting is that the crime was done by someone of a certain consequence, a member of the Jamestown Club. It’s not impossible. I picture that fellow standing at the bar, saying ‘Take an order’ to the steward, behaving like everybody else, looking like everybody else, yet all the time he’s imprisoned in this lonely cell. Poor devil, I say to myself, poor devil.”

  Maxwell nodded. Poor devil. That was the way it was.

  “And do you know what I feel, how I feel,” Whittingham was continuing. “I want to go up to him and take him by the arm and tell him not to worry. ‘I’ll do my best for you,’ I want to say to him. ‘I’m not out to punish you. I’m not out to punish anyone. I’ve got to protect property and persons. I’ve got to maintain law and order. We have to set an example now and then. But I mean you no harm. Tell me the way it happened. We’ll get it fixed as manslaughter. That might only mean five years and the sentence could be remitted for good behavior: it might only be three years. That may seem a long time now, but three years pass very quickly. Look back three years. Does it seem long ago? No, of course it doesn’t. Three years isn’t a big price to pay for your peace of mind. A prison of bolts and bars is far less bad than an invisible prison of the mind. Come now, tell me.’ That’s what I’d like to say to him.”