Black Marina (6 page)

So what else is new? I say to myself every time I read of a new thing like palimony – or women preaching in church – or businesswomen in America with marsupial briefcases that hold stiletto-heel shoes for putting on after the Nikes they’d jogged to the office in. I’m from a really distant past, and OK I look like a dinosaur too. But I genuinely didn’t recognize Ford when he came into the store just under two months ago.

*

Counter, curtain of beads, stained-wood floor where the fruit squash in when it fall from the basket – big freezer like a punishment cell, holding wild meat and poor fat pre-packed turkey for the Christmas blow-out. Nothing’s different since then – even the helicopter going overhead, and the humming of the generator out there by the chicken shed. The only thing that’s different is that instead of Ford, smiling coolly at me in the beret and the NH glasses without rims and the eyes much too big behind them, there’s this tiresome girl with her hands spread palm down on the counter top. ‘
Where
is
Ford?
’
Who tells her to come here and ask me that? Who
gives her permission to swim over into my private lite here anyway?

‘Please go in there a moment,’ I say to the girl, indicating the Craft Centre. I can see Sanjay’s shadow on the concrete walkway outside and hear the patter of his daughter’s
footsteps
after him. ‘You’ll get in trouble,’ I say to the girl – and Millie takes the opportunity to wash her hands of the whole thing and go out through the swinging conches for the last time, swaying hugely, bowed down with carrier bags. ‘You didn’t go through customs, did you?’ I say in my most menacing voice, as it seems that to cap it all the girl has it in mind to disobey me. ‘This is the proprietor of the island coming in now,’ I hiss. ‘He can have you taken for
interrogation
in Trinidad.’

‘OK.’ The girl moved her shoulders in a faint shrug of disdain, as if she knows as well as I do that customs
formalities
only take place here once a week when the
Singer
docks, and people from yachts can come and go as they please. And I see as she swings past me and down the one step to the Craft Centre that she has a slight smile on her face. The impertinence! I see too a birthmark, white, something like an unripe Alpine strawberry, on that lovely long neck under the chin. Butter wouldn’t melt in
her
mouth, I think. And on she walks – and her legs part as neatly as scissors and she’s gone from sight altogether. The saucy creature has climbed right into Jim Davy’s priceless pre-Columbian pot! Now what the heck am I going to do? And I feel suddenly a fatigue that merges in with Sanjay’s face and battered white suit with the image of Ford in his combat jacket and those sweet, kind eyes smiling out at me. Whatever people may say, Millie was right. He’s a sweet boy and he stayed one. But where is he now? And how much was Sanjay to blame?

‘Hello, Holly.’ Sanjay came and leaned with one elbow on the counter like he always does. It’s a semi-confidential but still lordly stance. He likes to stay quiet for a time before
asking with a self-deprecating smile for an orangeade. But today I’ve no time for this type of thing. Any minute, after all, that bloody girl may break her way out of the pot and – I can’t imagine what.

‘Yes, you can leave it in the Craft Centre,’ Sanjay said to Jim Davy when the beautiful thing was brought ashore, as exciting as finding a dolphin close-up. ‘But don’t forget it’s beyond value.’

‘What’s that great urn thing, Holly?’ Ford said too, when he came two months ago and he’d had to tell me who he was. And I realized he was just the same really. We kissed, as if that time with Teza all those years ago had somehow been the turning point of all our lives.

‘I have poems about beautiful great pots like this, you know, Holly,’ he said; and I felt embarrassed that everyone on St James had decided somehow to ignore the fame and talent of Ford – which you could understand with someone like Mrs Van der Pyck, but Sanjay reads Shakespeare and
Tom
Jones
and things like that out on the verandah by his paraffin lamp. I suppose it took me a long time to figure out that Sanjay hears news from London too, and as far as he’s concerned, Ford has spent years fighting for his overthrow. Yet – you have to hand it to Sanjay – he’d laugh and joke with Ford if he turned up one day, like these little differences of opinion were miles below him.

‘It was found at Laughing Gull Bay,’ I said to Ford, and he turned and made a shrieking noise like one of those laughing gulls that keep me awake in my room at The Heights. For Ford was always merry – I remember that evening in the Coconut Bar, after our picnic at the Lagoon and before he and Teza slipped away in the canoe. He made you laugh when you weren’t expecting to. There was kindness and thought in there, too. He wasn’t a frivolous person even then, not Ford.

‘It’s a vessel for the blood of human sacrifice,’ he said then. ‘An ancient Mayan ritual, Holly. That’s where they came
from.’ And he went over and stroked the belly of the pot. I felt a bit scared. I thought of one of Lore’s letters, where she described that Panther’s speech where he said that if things didn’t change, a lot of white blood would flow like water before we attain our rightful desires. Poor Ford – whose blood was it that spoilt the millionaire’s blue water half a mile away down Union Bay?

‘I’ll have an orangeade,’ says Sanjay, leaning a little closer on his patched elbow. ‘And an ice-cream,’ he adds hurriedly, for Pandora, dragging her steps like a tired child, stands crowned by the beads and shells in the curtain like she’s just been pulled out of the sea.

‘And how’s your baby, Ford?’ I said that time, and he said, ‘What baby?’ and we both laughed because there’s a way here, where the blooms never change and the sun is always up there or right down under your feet, that you can’t tell the passing of time. Yet, after he’d gone I thought maybe he meant she’s a big girl now, no baby, and you’re no chicken either, Holly. Or maybe he just couldn’t recall walking out on Teza – on purpose by mistake he’s forgotten the whole episode, so to speak. I certainly hope they don’t change the laws too quickly that the man need pay no maintenance in these liberated days, before the women get right on top.

There was a snuffle from the big brown pot and Sanjay swung round. He’s so relaxed in his manner, but he’s as paranoid as the rest of us, you bet. Then his face smoothed out again. My heart was in my shoes but it was OK because Sanjay thought the snuffle came from his daughter Pandora and God knows the wretched girl cries enough. She’s
standing
behind Sanjay now, with one hand on his arm and he’s trying not to look irritated. It’s a shame the gringos bombed the madhouse in Grenada, but it’s no reason for her not to be sent off somewhere else, I say. And she came up to me and said in that little-girl voice, ‘A Raspberry Ripple, please,’ which is about the only ice-cream name she seems to have by
heart. And I go with her to the big treezer and Sanjay comes too: thank heaven it’s as far as you can get from the Craft Centre door.

‘So what’s new, Holly?’ Sanjay says in his quiet,
confidential
tone, while I hand the poor girl her ice. Her face is quite red and blotchy, and it looks like she’s always crying. And I knew as I said, ‘Nothing’s new’, and Sanjay pretended to look in his trousers for change, and I said ‘I’ll mark it up’, that there
was
something new – and bad news too, and not so far from where we were standing. For when Sanjay and Pandora had taken their interminable time leaving, with Pandora dropping her ice and trying to scoop it up and Sanjay talking to her with love and exasperation, like you do to a child at the end of a long, long day, I went quietly into the Craft Centre and peered down into the neck of the pot. The girl looked up at me, bold as brass.

‘You’re Holly, I know,’ she said. ‘And you were a friend of my mother, Teza. Ford is my father, see?’

Evening in the tropics – the time the white man of Empire traditionally sat down with a sundowner, or a sun’s-
over-the
-yardarm, or a noggin brought in by silent servants – came to Carib’s Rest Hotel, with its usual violet hush. A persimmon sky leaked over the verandah, where a white man did indeed sit, a copy of the London
Times
unfolded on his lap. His lip, upper and stiff. Dark hair so flattened down and made brilliant it looked ready to reflect the stars. Yet somewhere, in the small, hard eyes that had seen Eton and Christchurch and Teheran and Vientiane, Laos, and the starving crowds of Ethiopia, was a shifty, amused look. Although there were rumours that this man so obviously fitting the requirements must be a spy, it was also argued that it is hard to tell where sensitive reporting ends and espionage begins. Things did mysteriously happen when Maldwin Carr had just left a place – or they happened just before he turned up. But then he could claim that that was why in the first place he was there.

The yacht lying out at anchor on a placid sea had been chartered in Barbados by Maldwin Carr. He was a first-class sailor and had taken only one crew on board – apart from the girl, of course, who was cook. More trouble was expected in this corner of the eastern Caribbean. Why else, as they gossiped in the London clubs where in December great flares were lit, showing a Christmas-cakey St James’s Palace through the rain or sudden gusts of hard, white hail, would Lockton, proprietor of the famous newspaper that employs Mal Carr, send him out there? And why was he, Mal Carr, the recipient of so enormous a salary? (Not that anyone knows what it is, but the amount in gossip currency rises and falls at lunch and
dinner in the club, depending on whether it’s a bull or bear market.)

The answer, so it goes, is this. Mal Can has such
impeccable
credentials, such agate integrity, that readers of this famous paper would no more think of mistrusting his
judgement
as the result of his investigations than they would think of performing a citizen’s arrest on Alec Guinness as Smiley or Sean Connery as Bond. Everyone knows that Maldwin Carr has his shirts made to measure at Turnbull and Asser and his Stilton to send to Lady Anthea at Christmas from Paxton and Whitfield, both in Jermyn Street, of course. So much the better. In this Royal Park of England, dreams take a long time to die. So even if Lockton has interests in Latin America and an obvious interest in preventing a left-wing régime from taking hold in islands adjacent to Grenada, his dispatching of Maldwin Carr to look at the situation in depth is entirely balanced and fair. Carr’s articles will be read with the port and cigars at the clubs in St James’s, and in humbler homes, in garden cities and shires. And many of the readers will do no more than reflect with relief on how wise they were not to have booked a ‘luxury holiday’ in the Caribbean after all.

*

An hour earlier, before afternoon had gone over into
evening
, Maldwin Carr stood on the verandah of Carib’s Rest and watched a strange dance, or so it seemed, take place round a ramshackle building by the scuffed track that runs parallel to the beach. He had his bearings by now – the lagoon with, above it, the old wooden house that had belonged to the cadet branch of the Allard family in the south; a flat stretch above the lagoon as far as the Coconut Bar, where yachts moored; above that the northern end of the island, where the consortium had built houses for winter visitors and
sprinklers
turned like dancers in a water ballet, forcing the coarse
grass green. Above that, the remains of old Allard’s house – but for some reason the consortium hadn’t wanted it and after sixteen years it is almost a ruin. And on the windward side of St James, where the great rollers come in and the sand is white as icing sugar, Man o’ War Beach and Laughing Gull Bay. Carr could see the village if he strolled to the southern part of the verandah that stretches round the first floor of the hotel, once the cottonhouse. And he did so, passing the hotel macaws in a cage and pulling a frangipani blossom that had strayed into the passageway and sticking it in his buttonhole.

Mrs Van der Pyck walked from the long principal room and joined the new visitor. He had requested a sea-view room and she had given him the best, looking straight out to sea over the store and on the right the Bar with its picturesque thatched hat. Now the visitor was asking for another vodka and some of that excellent fresh ginger beer and Mrs Van der Pyck was simpering and waving to the barman, who stood by the bar at the end of the panelled room.

‘It seems there’s one part of the island that can’t be seen from here,’ Maldwin Carr said. His tone he invariably kept dry and self-deprecating, as if he were the fool and would join quietly in the laughter when his foolishness was shown up.

‘No need to see that!’ said Mrs Van der Pyck, as she stood at what might be imagined to be an elegant angle to the verandah rail. With her dark, hennaed hair and white chiffon pleated dress she could have been an illustration – there were enough romances set in these parts, God knows – on the cover of a book of a beautiful woman and a distinguished man meeting somewhere in the equatorial islands and falling in love. But women were often quickly aware of Maldwin Carr’s sexual ambiguity; and Mrs Van der Pyck kept her distance still.

‘It’s an absolute slum,’ she said. She couldn’t think why Sanjay hadn’t had The Heights cleared years ago, when he
came into the land. After all, it was in the southern part of the island. But then, why did old Mr Allard make such a strange will? Why should Sanjay have only seventeen years or so? Of course, she knew the answer. Old Allard got a better price from the consortium if a shortish lease was attached to the southern half. At the same time, the island could remain to all intents and purposes British. He had seen independence coming, which would mean increased dependence on America. He was a clever old brute, everyone said so who’d known him here.

No, she hadn’t been on St James when the old man was alive, Mrs Van der Pyck said, as Maldwin Carr drifted just a foot or two away from her and took up a position by the opening to the elegant long room. She’d come to St James shortly after … It had been a terrible business clearing this place up and getting it going, as he must probably see. But it was worth it. They’d had the Vice-President’s mother down here with a party only last month. So, yes, confidence in these parts was returning. Well, look at the welcome the Americans had been given in Grenada. And she did pride herself on the best food for nautical miles around. It was nice too to meet an Englishman who had the time and money to charter a yacht and while away the sunny hours round the islands … How she wished she had some of that time, though she could always get away for a couple of days, for there was such a trustworthy staff…

Maldwin Carr, who had by this time turned 180 degrees on his heel, had looked over the rail down towards the beach. He’d seen a man in a battered white suit make his way into the store. A girl of about eighteen ran in after him – but at first, like a child, she’d hung around on the concrete
walkway
. Now Maldwin saw the exodus of the man in the white suit and a woman – this time – at his side, in a floral dress. Maldwin pointed down and asked Mrs Van der Pyck who this woman could be.

‘Holly Baker,’ Mrs Van der Pyck spat out the name. ‘Now
she
lives in The Heights. Yes, there’s an example for you. I really wouldn’t go near the place!’

Maldwin Carr, veteran of street fighting in Beirut, massacre in Kampuchea and Kampala, as well as of thoughtful poetic treks in search of the marsh Arab or southern Afghan nomad, seemed unalarmed by this. ‘The gentleman must, of course, be Mr Allard,’ he said.

‘You’ll meet him later! He always comes to Christmas dinner here!’ Mrs Van der Pyck’s voice retained its sharpness. And she went on: ‘Sanjay’s poor daughter, bombed out of the Grenada madhouse, looked after by a local woman down at the Allard house on the lagoon … and his wife died of …’ but Mrs Van der Pyck’s voice was now trailing away. For the dance continued unexpectedly at the foot of her carefully mown and bougainvillea-planted lawn. A girl had now come out of the store. The girl was slim and bronzish in colour and she stood staring at Mr James Allard and his poor cracked daughter as they made their way back down the beach to the lagoon. Who can
she
be? it was Mrs Van der Pyck’s turn to wonder, and then to wonder again when the impeccable Englishman said that the girl, for the duration of the cruise, was his cook. She’d come out with him on his yacht. And she was coming up the hill at his invitation to join him for a drink.

*

‘Ford is dead,’ I said to the girl. Except I didn’t. I watched her climb out of that great brown jar with the swirls of paint thousands of years old and I thought, as she walked to the door and looked after Sanjay and his daughter, she’s a figure who could have walked from a Greek vase, a terracotta figure with slim waist and hips and breasts like a boy’s. There’s no break in the ocean as it goes round the earth from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean Sea after all.

But I said instead, ‘Who’s that man up there at the hotel? He’s off the yacht, isn’t he?’ and I stared up, irritated at the way he leaned so nonchalantly on the balustrade of the verandah, with Mrs Van der Pyck ogling at his side.

‘I cook for him,’ the girl said. Then she pointed down the beach at the retreating figure of Sanjay. ‘He’s to blame,’ she said. ‘He killed my father, didn’t he?’

I don’t know how you get out of these things. The girl had come back to the counter and was looking me straight in the eye.

‘You’re Mari,’ I said. ‘Lore told me about you. You’re making a mistake. Go home.’

*

Lore wrote me after she got back from her visit out here, that things were getting quite out of hand in London now. She’d moved into Teza’s – and already she could hardly believe she’d been here, those brief two days when she came over on the
Singer
and left again on one of the yachts. (It’s so easy, she can just sit in the Coconut Bar and she’ll get offered a cruise all round the world. But I like to go on my own. When I go, when my Colt .22 comes from the States, it’ll be at the helm of my own motor cruiser.)

When Lore came, she had already moved into the
basement
of Teza’s house and she said Teza’s daughter was hanging around asking too many questions, making trouble.

‘It’s quite nice here,’ Lore said. ‘But I’m beginning to see why Teza said I could stay for no rent, just pay the electricity. Teza’s daughter – Mari – she’s developed an obsession about Ford. I’m supposed to remember everything I can about him. But it’s so hazy. Mari ought to be sent away to school or something. God knows, Teza has money enough. But I knew this would happen to me, Holly. I’m the surrogate mother while Teza camps out on Greenham Common. Mari’s a nice girl. A sharp London girl. You know. But she ought to be got
away from this mania about her father, it just isn’t healthy at all.’

Roots, roots, roots, I thought, as I read Lore’s letter, when she said there was lots of people coming round to the house now and Mari was excited, she imagined she was on the trail. That’s all people want nowadays. You can even find out who your real parents are if you’ve been adopted, these days, when you’re eighteen. And Mari must be about sixteen I suppose – no wonder she’s desperate to find out what she can. For Teza had done that incredibly stupid thing, she’d refused to talk about Ford with Mari at all.

‘It’s not that Mari feels particularly keenly towards Teza,’ Lore said as we sat sipping our rum punches, waiting for the rain – for Lore came in off-peak season, it’s cheaper then. (It’s a time of waiting – for a hurricane, for rain and the stink of fresh greenery before it all rots in the sun at midday.) Teza was a bit – well, brisk with the girl, it seems. She was militantly independent – so Mari must be too. ‘There weren’t many men to be seen in that house near the Portobello Road,’ Lore said with a laugh. She had to ask any man who came to visit her to creep down the basement quiet-like, if it was late at night. Teza never said anything if she came down and saw you with a bloke in the mornings, but you felt uneasy, like it was time to move out and go somewhere else. Mari, for a fact, had been sent up to the clinic for the Pill when she was fourteen, but Lore could have sworn blind she’d never had it off with a soul. It was too much of a responsibility, somehow, with Teza standing there in the background preparing to be a single grandparent and indoctrinate the child with her beliefs. Moreover, it would be born despite the Pill (for Teza didn’t believe there was such a thing as real protection against Nature’s intentions, vile always as far as women are concerned). Maybe she’s right too, I think sometimes when I look at the lives we’ve all led. But to hell with it. Whose is better, anyway? Who would have wanted to be Duchess
Dora, with all the money in the world and plenty of time to read the books Sanjay brought out that rotted with damp in the old library down by the lagoon?

‘The trouble was that Mari wanted me to come with her on the quest for her father – and I had to help her,’ Lore said, ‘with Teza away and risking arrest daily. Where does
what-you
-do-for-your-flesh-and-blood and what-you-do-for-
the-world
begin? I’ve had to ask myself.’

‘I wonder that too,’ I said, and Ferdie brought us more of the gold rum and mango and papaya juices and a sweet peppering of fresh nutmeg from the tree. ‘That’s what we’ve always wanted to know,’ I said. ‘At least Teza is trying to stop us all being blown up by the bomb.’

‘While her daughter suffers alone,’ Lore said.

And now here’s Mari, ready to blow up the whole world by the looks of her, that’s the irony of it all.

It was a question at first, apparently, of Mari finding a photo of Ford in the writing desk of the sitting room that Teza did up, surprisingly good-taste and stripped-pine for a woman of such revolutionary and uncompromising views. She found it in the old rosewood desk, against a wall stippled pale orange – on a floor of polished boards with the odd kelim dotted here and there (Lore said it was agony when Teza had meetings, with the thumping on the floor above). It was classic really, Lore said. Finding a photo in a drawer. Nineteenth-century style. Until she saw it there and a ring with a little locket built in and another tiny photo inside that, with a lock of Teza’s hair round it – until then, she said, she hadn’t been sure whether Ford was her father or not. After all, Teza hardly liked to acknowledge fatherhood in the new matriarchy. But she had been in love with him once, she must have been. It was tragic, Lore said, that Mari came down to the basement holding the ring and the photo as if she’d just stumbled on the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx, or something: ‘Wasn’t Teza’s hair
yellow
then?’ And
so on. The poor girl was crying … and Mari was a tough London girl, she’d say it again, it was really pitiful to see.