by David Black
‘I used to sail with the Elders and Fyffes Line,’ said Dr Harbinson, who had followed them through the house and was now standing in his surgery with them. ‘I keep my underpants in the big chest in my bedroom, if you want to check there next.’
They drank coffee while Dr Harbinson fried the fish with thin slivers of sweet potato and herbs that Harry didn’t recognise. Then they ate. The food improved the doctor’s mood and he decided he’d start talking to them again. He’d sent forth his gallopers, he told them. The gallopers turned out to be island children, mostly boys aged nine or ten, young teenagers too, who did favours for him, running errands, carrying messages, helping out in any way they could, his gimcrack network of dissent across the island. They did it because their families could never hope to afford to be treated by Dr Harbinson in the conventional way. But treated they all were, as Harry would later discover. And because their pride dictated they repay him in some way, this was how the locals met their bills. The fish and sweet potatoes arrived as part of the same arrangement.
As they ate, messages were being delivered all over the island, Harbinson said; rendezvous were arranged and routes to all the key villas and police outposts planned. How would tomorrow night do? Because that’s when they were all going off to capture Fort-de-France.
Harry looked at Bassano; was that what Captain Syvret had planned? Harry didn’t know. Nor, he suspected, did Bassano.
‘Is that for security reasons?’ asked Harry. ‘Is that why you want us to move so soon? In case people know we’re here and word gets back to Fort-de-France?’
Harbinson gave him a yellowing, toothy grin and nodded behind him to beyond the veranda. When Harry looked round a crowd had gathered; a sea of black faces, and some creole: shy toddlers on mothers’ hips, old men and women, some youngsters too; all in bright-coloured clothes, some barefoot some in sandals, smiling. And there were more coming down the path from the settlement to join the ones already there, peering in at the two strange sailors having breakfast with M’sieur le Docteur. Harry waved and everybody laughed and waved back.
‘It’s better we go sooner rather than later,’ said Harbinson.
Harry looked at the gathering crowd. He’d never seen a black person in the flesh before; the odd lascar sailor in Glasgow, a Chinaman or two, but never a black person. He fought a terrible urge to stare; they all looked just so . . . exotic. What would Shirley make of all this? He shut that train of thought down immediately, and turned back to Harbinson.
‘How did you end up here, Dr Harbinson?’ asked Harry. ‘You’re a long way from Belfast.’
‘I’ve often wondered that myself,’ said Harbinson, producing a bottle of rum from a case under the table. ‘Try asking me why, instead.’
Harry shrugged. ‘Why did you . . .?’
Harbinson interrupted. ‘It’s a long way from Belfast,’ he said. ‘Rum, gentlemen?’
Chapter Seventeen
Everyone was on the beach by early the following afternoon. Thierry and his merry band were there in their dress uniforms; a shore party of sailors in immaculate tropical kit; Cantor in his whites carrying a satchel full of the necessary signalling equipment; Faujanet and Syvret. Harbinson had found Syvret’s plan that they should move only under the cover of darkness hilarious.
‘What? Like you don’t think everybody knows you’re here already?’ Harbinson had asked, incredulous, once he’d got his breath back. ‘Not that it matters. Who’s going to tell the gendarmes anyway? Oh, I know! All the people who hate to have roast suckling pigs to eat, and vegetables and rice, and beer to drink; and who can’t bear the touch of a US dollar on their fingers. I can see the queues now, at every gendarme post, banging on the door to denounce us.’ Harbinson had looked away, shaking his head, muttering, ‘Let’s just get going, eh? Jeees-us Christ, it’s enough to make you want to throw shite at yer grannie.’
The weapons containers had been wrestled out of the mine racks by brute force, supplied by a clambering mob of settlement fishermen delivered to Radegonde lying out in the bay on a veritable flotilla of open fishing boats; all gaudily daubed fifteen- to twenty-footers, some of which had been lashed together to support the weight of the containers as they shuttled them from the submarine to the high-water mark. Everything was being unpacked and stacked; and the slabs of tinned haricot beans and peas and singe – the French Navy’s equivalent of spam – were already being passed out to wide-eyed, grateful settlement women. And wads of francs were going to the fishermen, as per Harbinson’s helpful hint.
Captain Syvret had inquired as to how best to appeal to the community. If he wanted local support would it be best to use moral arguments, or the prospect of a nice dinner of grub they hadn’t tasted in over a year, and cash?
Harbinson had replied, ‘Just pay them.’ Because they shouldn’t waste time on sharing a meal, but press on the very minute the last pack was filled and shouldered. It was only a little under thirty kilometres as the seagull flies from Sainte-Anne to Fort-de-France, but over fifty-five kilometres if you followed the rudimentary highways. No one was in a hurry to denounce them, but word would eventually get back to the authorities, so the sooner they got moving, the better.
Harbinson advised they followed the road for most of the journey. It would be a long march, if they were going by foot, but there were a couple of locations where they could pick up motor transport. They came on the first location early in the evening, with the sun still up, and the air humid and buzzy with insects.
They’d been marching in two columns, one either side of the road. Everybody was sweaty, gritty and irritable as they came over a slight rise and into the view of a clutch of buildings around a road junction. There were a couple of indeterminate shacks, and what must have been a petrol station, with a single rusty pump sporting a smeared glass diamond shape on top with the oil company’s logo on it, all scratched and unreadable. Every building was overgrown with weeds, except the one facing the junction’s T.
There was a beautiful little cottage; a turquoise blue with white shutters, and a flagpole protruding above its glassed-in portico. The pole sported a Tricolour and beneath it a sign proclaiming Gendarmerie in recently applied black paint. There was a neatly kept sward of grass in front, and to the side was what must have been a vegetable patch. Kneeling between the neat rows was a white man, obviously doing the weeding. And although he was stripped to the waist, as they marched closer, they could all tell he was a gendarme from the red stripe down his dusty trouser leg. Harry wasn’t sure whether he heard the crump of their feet, or something had caught the corner of his eye, but he suddenly sat up, surprised; he squinted at them, and from the way his shoulders slumped, Harry thought it looked like he sighed. And then, without further ado, he bent back down again and resumed his work.
‘Bonsoir, M’sieur,’ said Syvret in the lead, as he came up on the weeding gendarme. Without looking up, the man called instead to Harbinson, marching two men behind, ‘Are these your friends, William, or are they bringing you to me to lock up?’
‘It’s you who’s going to get locked up, Baptiste,’ Harbinson called back. ‘That day has finally dawned!’
The gendarme looked up, his tanned, tired face gave away no secrets. He was a little overweight, head shaved to a dark stubble, and he looked about, what? Mid-thirties or even middle-aged, Harry couldn’t tell. He gave Syvret a baleful look. ‘Do you have to?’
In the end they didn’t, and Baptiste returned to his weeding, untroubled by the fact that they took his pistol – it was, he swore, the only weapon he knew of in a ten-kilometre radius – and liberated his black Citroën Traction Avant.
‘You can have them back once we’ve finished,’ said Captain Syvret.
Baptiste shrugged; they belonged to the Government of France, whoever that was these days; he didn’t care. ‘Bonsoir!’ he said as Bassano, Harbinson and two Fusiliers Marins drove off in the Avant, on a mission to find more transport, with four Jerry cans lashed up and sticking out of the boot.
The cans had come courtesy of three mechanics who’d been asleep in the petrol station when they’d arrived, and who’d eventually decided to interrupt their afternoon nap that had considerably overrun to come out and see what was happening. They’d led Syvret round the back and showed him their 1939 Citroën TUB van. He was welcome to it, but no he couldn’t take it away as there was no petrol in it, or in the pump, courtesy of Tassereau’s policy of isolation. ‘Merci beaucoup, Monsieur le Gouverneur,’ spat one of them at the very mention of his name. The invasion force had sat down to wait.
The next day, Harry was walking near the front of the main column, as they trudged down a descending path that hugged the walls of a huge semi-jungled gorge. Their local guide, Jean-Paul, called it jungle, but it wasn’t real jungle; it wasn’t one of those Borneo-style or Amazon Basin hellholes so beloved of National Geographic photo-essays that had given a young Harry nightmares; but it was pretty damn amazing nonetheless.
Although it was mid-afternoon, the tree canopy enclosed a permanent twilight. The trees themselves were huge, plummy things whose names and genus Harry had no idea of; gnarled and ancient and festooned with liana, with roots like twisted fists gripping the sides of the gorge. The ground was choked with ferns and low shrubs that made Harry think of snakes, and everywhere were fallen mangoes, hundreds of them, some new, others rotting. The air was steamy and sweet with their smell. And there were birds, none of which Harry recognised, all of them noisy.
Having joined the Royal Navy, Harry had never envisaged one day he would be marching off to war, but here he was. Trudging along wearing drill trousers, a striped matelot’s vest and boots that were too big for him, with his whites and his blanco shoes stuffed into the gas-mask bag Cantor had brought him.
They’d waited all night for Syvret and Harbinson to return with two more vans and all the petrol they could find, and then had driven off at first light to a road end, where this column was dropped off to execute their role in Captain Syvret’s grand plan. They were to make their way to the back of M’sieur le Gouverneur’s villa before sunrise. And as they plunged deeper into the gorge, the rest of the force was ferried to their jumping-off points elsewhere around the town.
‘Explain to me again, Sir, why I am here, and not back aboard Radegonde, liaising,’ Harry had asked.
‘You’re the representative of the British Empire, Sub-Lieutenant Gilmour,’ Syvret had replied, with arch patience. ‘And you’re here to assure M’sieur le Gouverneur that it is Free France that is the internationally recognised, and therefore legitimate, government, not Papa Pétain’s gang of Boche bum-kissers. And when he sees you, all got up in that fetching little white confection your navy calls a uniform, it’ll be like he’s being confronted by his Majestic Britannic-ness himself, and he’ll rupture himself genuflecting. Now shut up and start thinking martial thoughts, there’s a good boy.’
Harry had been laughing to himself since they’d set out yesterday. It was all a comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan; the whole shambolic farce, made even more farcical by the sombre and affected gravity exuded by these men of destiny manqué. War is hell, he was thinking, getting ready to stifle another bout of giggles, when something arced through the air from above and one of the Fusilier Marins yelled, ‘Grenade!’ and shoved Harbinson sprawling into the undergrowth. Harry dived with no regard as to how hard the ground was going to be when he hit it. He had the impression of all the men behind him going down too. There was a splatting sound, and a rustle of ruffled ferns; then nothing. No bang. No screaming. A dud? Then Harbinson started up, ‘Jesus H. Fookin’ Kerr-rist! What the fookin’ . . .’
Etc. Etc. thought Harry, as the Irishman’s tirade continued unabated for several seconds, until Syvret shouted in English, ‘Will you shut up!’
They had been walking in a ragged row down the path, with Harbinson leading. ‘You won’t need a guide on this one,’ he’d assured Syvret. ‘I know every way in, out and roundabout that papist bastard’s bawdy house. I’ve made it my business to know. Because come the day . . . come the fookin’ day!’
There had been one of the six Fusiliers Marins behind him, then Syvret, Harry, Cantor and then the remaining soldiers. Now they were all on the ground. Harry was too shocked and winded to be frightened. It didn’t seem so Gilbert and Sullivan now.
‘Can anyone see anything?’ called Syvret, and as Harry stuck his head up, he was just in time to see another small, round object in the air, and it looked like it was heading right at him. He only had time to suck in a breath to yell before it sailed over his head and crashed into the foliage less than half a dozen feet to his right. He was even sure he felt its impact on the ground, as his whole side involuntarily cringed and shrunk away from where the damn thing had landed. A yell rose in his throat, but got no further; even his windpipe was cringing and he was too choked even to scream. But there was no blast. A bird screamed, so loud and so close, he almost lost control of his bladder, and he realised he was shaking uncontrollably. He rose to his knees, tensed to spring away and dive to a safer spot, and as he came up, he was in time to see several other little round bombs already in the air, incoming.
And in that moment he saw them, way up in the canopy; three diminutive figures perched in the upper branches, twenty feet, maybe a bit more, above, gazing down on their victims with a simian, bland detachment: monkeys. Monkeys throwing mangoes. As the official envoy of a foreign power, Harry wasn’t armed. If he had been, he would have shot them, out of rage and shame and embarrassment. He wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines, but Syvret, practically in tears laughing, was striding up the line, waving down all the raised weapons.
The dawn was still just a hint in the sky when they emerged from the trees and walked down to M’sieur le Gouverneur’s residence. It was a white stucco, two-storey plantation house, encircled by verandas on each floor, and with a red-tiled roof and a forest of chimney pots on each gable. In front was a huge drive, to the far side, partially obscured, were stables, and to the back, tennis courts.
As the party skirted the out-buildings, they could see the lights were on; the staff were up already to prepare for the coming day. Harry thought it was a testament to the loyalty M’sieur le Gouverneur did not inspire that none of the servants peering out of the windows at them seemed particularly fussed that an armed party had just descended on their master’s home; certainly, none of them looked like they were going to raise the alarm.
Syvret led the entire troop into the house, where they made themselves at home in a huge dining room. Open French doors looked out on to a veranda and down the hill towards the town and harbour. All except Harry, who had been detained in the scullery area by a young black woman.
When Harry, Syvret and Harbinson had first walked into the kitchen, Syvret had paused to get his bearings in the house, and to ask of the old cook where M’sieur le Gouverneur’s quarters were. That’s when a girl had emerged from the laundry area and immediately attached herself to Harry. She was in her late teens, maybe a little older, Harry guessed, very dark skinned, with a fluid, moving tangle of black curls; she was built and moved like a gazelle. Huge almond-shaped brown eyes drank him in, and her flat, high-cheeked face radiated a smile like a million kilowatts. She curled round Harry, entwining one of his arms in hers so that her tiny high breasts and the round of her tight belly pressed against the thinness of a dazzlingly red shift, secured at the waist with an old Boy Scouts’ belt.
‘Parles-tu français, M’sieur?’ she’d whispered in a girl’s voice, as she had frankly appraised him.
Harry had been momentarily stunned. He shouldn’t have been. For what he didn’t know yet, in fact he probably never really would, was that because of all that French cooking filling him out, and a sun-kissed ocean cruise behind him that had turned his skin a luxurious tan, and with his hair grown out, all French Navy fashion, so that you could see its natural wave, he had become an extremely good-looking young man. That gangly, pallid youth living under the imm
anent threat of spots had long gone. What Harry did know, however, was that the use of ‘tu’ in the French language was as pretty a come-on as any chap could wish for, especially when it was being used by some fetching popsie who didn’t even know your name.
The cook had prepared coffee for the party and carried it through to the dining room, while the girl, who said her name was Lydia, had rifled through Harry’s gas-mask pack and produced his uniform whites. ‘Tut, tut,’ she had said and immediately began to sponge and press them, while rarely diverting her huge, liquid eyes from him, or turning down her toothy, beaming smile. She had even shoved him into the laundry and began undressing him when she’d finished with the whites. Harry had thought about fighting her off, but since everyone else had disappeared, he had decided this was not the time for false modesty. He could hear others from the landing party talking elsewhere in the house. The noise of them padding about. So far there had not been a single challenge; there had been no raised voices; and nobody seemed particularly alarmed. And no one seemed to have missed him. It was all just too unreal. And no one, ever, had looked after him like Lydia was looking after him. Ever. What the hell.
When she had him all togged up again, and looking fit for an Admiral’s inspection, she stood back, admired her handiwork briefly and then moved in for a very unambiguous kiss.
Harry had let her lead him then, through the house to where the others were gathered, so that he was already there by the time M’sieur le Gouverneur eventually descended in his silk brocade dressing gown, ranting colourfully at the failure of his attendants to attend him; his morning toilette was quite ruined, and where was his effing coffee anyway. They were all waiting for him in the dining room.