Black Marina (3 page)

Millie never had the opportunity to move. That’s why she’s in the store even on Christmas Eve, pulling polythene bags of olives from what is supposed to be the cold display. ‘She’s so slow,’ Mrs Van der Pyck says, rolling her eyes. ‘But then I suppose they all are.’ And as for me – where could I have gone to anyway?

Ford was Teza’s friend’s brother. Something had brought him out from the yard, the sound of Teza’s voice probably, and my grunt of reply. He stared at the ground when Teza asked if his family could put her up for the night. And Millie said it was room in her house and she knew we’d be at the picnic tomorrow with Mr Sanjay at lagoon.

And Ford suddenly looked up at Teza and said, ‘Does she want to go Coconut Bar?’ And there I was. And Ford and Teza were on a moped and all the chickens ran stupidly about in the dust when they went off pop-pop-pop down the road just the way we came. Millie and I didn’t look each other in the eye at all. And I walked back down again to the wooden house by the lagoon – to the irritation of Duchess Dora, who was then slap-bang in the middle of her afternoon rest.

*

The Coconut Bar had at that time just been put up. No lights, no jukebox, no deepfreeze for the lobster claws – just a platform out on stilts and a hat of dead coconut fronds over it. A bar, that was the nice part, an old mahogany bar Sanjay
took from old Allard’s house before the consortium came to see what was what. It could have been a bar in a London club, it made you think of brass fenders and fires burning and the kind of Christmas you were meant to have had as a London child (speaking for myself, I froze in an aunt’s boarding-house in North Berwick). Fresh lime was kept in old lemonade bottles. The rum was stacked in a crate under the bar and new crates got hoisted in from the
Singer
with a good deal of shouting and pattering on the floor that was planks nailed together. When it got dark, there was the most spectacular sunset. Pools of crimson on a nut-brown
backcloth
, and sea silvery in the moon in no time, as if a
toucher-up
with a glitter pot hadn’t had the patience to wait.

Not that I liked the nights in St James then any more than I do now. If you live in these places you just have to take the fact that the night is the one thing the white man couldn’t chain down, and for all his plans and compromises he still can’t. No wonder they call them
tristes
tropiques
,
and they don’t mean the morning when the sun catches the hibiscus and a humming bird skims past and the impression is that all is made new. They mean the coming of the night. The hedge of coconut palm and seagrape along the beach go first, as suddenly as colour draining out of the cheeks of a corpse. Then the horizon, playful in the day with the outlines of small islands, is knocked flat out of the picture. It just isn’t there any more. The sun splits sideways, bunging up the sky with red. This gives a blood light all over to the sand and trees – and at the same time, although there’s no wind, there’s a rustling, whispering sound that sounds like a whole townful of tongues. I’ve even heard music. I don’t care what anyone says about the cruelty on these islands and the slaves beaten into silence and the long history of their mastery of the night: the dance and the tales of kings and monsters, and the song, all come out of this terrible darkness. Cane rustles, though it grows the other side of the island, over the hill, you
can hear it on certain nights. It’s different now in the
Coconut
Bar, of course. Fairy lights strung out over the sea. Music billowing deep into the waves if the sea gets up. It’s all reggae and rock. You have to go to The Heights, to the crossroads of tumbledown dwellings the far side of the village, to feel that old fear and sadness now. But then, when the Bar had just been put up as a place for the few visitors to the island to call at on their way to Grenada, Carriacou, Trinidad, it’s difficult to know what effect sitting there for hours on end – to a girl like Teza at least – would have had.

Sometimes I think of that evening, or rather the tail end of that afternoon, when I look at Sanjay, as I do now. (He’s taken his shoe off in the water, examined the sole and replaced it: then he’s wading into the shallows and his thin legs, brown as wooden stumps, are visible down to the tops of his feet.) I think how things would have been so different if Teza and I hadn’t gone to St James, and if Teza hadn’t gone to the Coconut Bar, and if we all hadn’t gone to the picnic at the lagoon the next day. I think of Teza and Ford sitting there on the old beer crate they had for seating in those days, with the first bats of the evening diving under the thatched roof of the Bar. And flying fish making those phosphorescent trails in the water below. There’s the smell of wet sand, and snappers’ heads thrown into the sea under the Bar, stinking up the soft wind of the evening. Ford and Teza – they didn’t exchange a word, she said – listening to the night that Ford knew everything about and Teza nothing at all. In any case, Teza flew off the next night with this so-young man with the big, quick eyes. Or rowed off, presumably. There was a fisherman’s boat missing from where it had been tied up, in front of the store. You can guess who took the rap for that.

*

Now I just listen to the sound of that bloody helicopter. The tearing sound makes me think of the days my friend Lore
and I used to go to Peter Jones and get the salesman to rip us off a yard here and a yard there in the sale, for a motley lot of cushions and curtains for our flat. That’s long ago for you. And if Lore didn’t write, how’d I keep up with all the
goings-on
in London Town? She even came out here. Barbados on a package, it was, and she came down and caught the
Singer
and put herself up in a hotel run by a Mrs Heering in St Vincent or was it Bequia? Lore’s the one who knows how to get around. For all Teza’s political sophistication, she’s an innocent compared with Lore. And with me, I would have said in the past. But I don’t know now.

We were all friends. Lore and I lived off the King’s Road and worked in various bars, and Lore did a little escort agency stuff when we needed a holiday or simply a rest from serving literary drunks at the Green Velveteen. Teza lived near Westbourne Grove, Portobello Road, that area, where, as Lore put in her first letter, ‘There are so many West Indians already that one more won’t make any difference.’ She wasn’t as astonished as I was by Teza going off suddenly with Ford. I suppose nothing seems surprising in London, whereas the village here in St James did seem too remote for it to be possible for anyone to leave, let alone elope from. (This is silly, I know, because Ford’s brother had already got away and is a London teacher.) Maybe it’s to do with Ford’s peculiar look of innocence – he could have been a child in those days, and by my standards today that’s just what he was. I reckon Ford was rising eighteen that summer and Teza was twenty-two, the same age as me. And all that sixteen years ago. You could hardly blame me for failing to see the Ford-who-became-a-famous-poet, the Ford of Black Power and the final, anarchic Ford in that short day and a half before Teza took him away.

Sanjay was the first to welcome Ford-the-uninvited-guest to the picnic at the lagoon on that Sunday in December. (God, I think to myself, sixteen Christmases later and the
new houses for the winter visitors are up, the interior
decorators
came from New York, Mrs Van der Pyck arrived and all the cotton fluff was swept out of the cottonhouse and it was made gleaming and olde worlde and rechristened Carib’s Rest.)

Sanjay was unpacking a hamper and he looked up and smiled at them both, and said, ‘Oh hello, Ford. Come for Sunday lunch?’ And I could see Teza was disconcerted. She was so determined to make a monster of Sanjay, a colonialist, capitalist warlord, and there he was knowing the name of a youth from the village, and he grinned and held out a hand that had oil on it from the salad dressing and I could see Teza could not think massa at all.

It hadn’t been a very pleasant night for me at the old wooden house by the lagoon. I see now that Duchess Dora, who lived out her last years in a state of agonizing jealousy – it’s a constitutional hazard for white women in the tropics, and particularly those, like Duchess Dora, with every tiny thing done for them – had it in for me from the start. ‘What extraordinary things people wear nowadays’ and other
similar
remarks throughout the evening put my teeth on edge. Sanjay didn’t seem to notice; he was kindness itself to the baby-faced wife with black curls held in by a bandeau and this hard, lisping voice that was clearly put on because it was considered to be attractive. The skins of white women go green and the hair goes lank in this tropical heat. As for me, I haven’t such a bad figure – Go on, Holly! – according to Jim Davy at the Coconut Bar anyway. But if I look up now at the mirror Jim Davy insisted on installing in the Craft Centre against shoplifters (who on earth would want to steal any of his bloody pots?), I see myself just as ravaged by the bloody equator as Duchess Dora, for all her whiteness and her face creams, was then.

We all went to bed early, after a meal of a dryish
pork-tasting
thing that Duchess Dora sharply told me was a great
delicacy, for it came from Grenada, sent by Dr Gairy himself, and it was armadillo. There was coffee on the verandah, and the groaning of the wicker rocking chairs, and our three faces in the light of the old Venetian lamp. Sanjay told me of his plans for new crops on St James. ‘It’s eggplants in the north,’ he said. ‘And we may try some tobacco.’ He sounded as if he couldn’t make enough plans for the exotic place he had come to. But Duchess Dora sat very quiet and pale by the coffee tray. Her airs and graces had tired her out, I thought then, uncharitably.

*

The picnic had that same sad kind of feeling – to me anyway – as the evening before when Duchess Dora went listlessly back and forth in her chair on the verandah. It may have been the music from Sanjay’s tape deck coming out over the lagoon. After all, we were in the late sixties then, and everything was rotting with sadness and protest and self-pity and loneliness. And there’s something about the tropics that makes you feel so lonely anyway. But that’s just me again with my left-out feeling – for I could see Teza smile at Ford, and soon she was lying right up close to him on the rug on the sand, while Duchess Dora pouted with disapproval and Sanjay poured us rum and sliced open coconuts for the chaser.

I remember there was a sort of little creek at the side of the lagoon farthest from the house. Cinnamon trees and tall palms shielded it from view. Sanjay took me there. ‘This is my favourite place, Holly,’ he said. And he took my chin in his hand and held my face as if trying to decide whether or not to add a finishing touch. ‘You’re a lovely girl, Holly,’ he said.

This, I can tell you, is par for the course. Married men, and they tell you later why they won’t be able to see you after all. I can tell the dudes who come off a yacht for a bit of fun in
one glance, and I can count the number of drinks they’ll need before they say there’s nothing doing. But the profits swell the till, and the Bar is lumped in with the store, so it all adds up. At least it used to before I looked in the accounts book last week and my eyes nearly jumped out of my head. ‘Holly, you should put more water with it,’ I said. But there the figures were.

If I remember fuzzily, it’s because it gets on my nerves to look back to that day at the lagoon, with Sanjay holding my face and then turning away as if he was angry with himself – and so I think, only think, some small kids appeared,
paddling
in the creek. Yes, I guess they must have, because there was a sudden burst of rain and they all screamed and Sanjay squatted down near them. I remember noticing his broad back. His smooth hair wasn’t so smooth that day, and it was falling in his eyes, so he didn’t look so much like a
polo-playing
, wife-murdering Englishman. He’d made a small pier that stuck out into the creek and there was a model boat tied up there. The kids – now I see them, about five or six of them, white and pale brown and blackest black, and heaven knows how many of them with Allard blood from the old slave days, and Barby, the albino Negro from The Heights, just a tiny boy then with a white frizz of hair and his poor skin burning so badly from the sun. There was this quick downpour of rain, as I say, and Sanjay called to the kids to come out from under the manchineel trees. They got a poison sap, and rain coming through the leaves can burn you bad. Some of them started screaming; I reckon there’d been some harm done already.

‘I made this boat,’ Sanjay said when the kids had scattered over his pier. ‘It’s a galleon, sails and all.’ And he fiddled with a string and sure enough a fine set of sails unfurled.

I was in no mood, however, for model boats at that moment. On top of which I could see Duchess Dora, who had
doubtless
scoured the bushes at the back of the property, and the
orchid house, and the open aviary very likely too, with the swooping keskidees and humming birds no bigger than a bright leaf in the thick, tropical growth. She was walking towards us, with the fixed smile of the permanently, insanely jealous and she was carrying, as if strolling on an English lawn, a pair of secateurs.

‘It’s for you, Dora,’ Sanjay murmured. He wasn’t speaking to his approaching wife, but to his daughter, who was as pale as a vanilla ice-cream and had wafer-yellow hair to match. Pandora, I can’t think why they called her that. ‘Dora’s lovely new boat,’ he said in a fond-father voice. I felt a bit sick, you’ll understand. The way men rub up to a girl, make a pass at her one moment and then speak in the same voice to a child the next. It smacks of something disgusting to me.

But by this time Duchess Dora was just a few yards away. ‘Sanjay!’ She didn’t say my name; maybe she hoped she could disappear me into the creek like a soucriant if she thought hard enough that I wasn’t there. ‘Sanjay, we’re all longing to unpack the hamper,’ she said. ‘Bring Pandora with you. Millie’s laid it all out on the new coral table the other side of the lagoon.’