A Boat Load of Home Folk (16 page)

“Stage-props,” murmured Gerald. “One million coconut palms all bending the same way. A chorus of nut-trees by C. B. De Mille. Blue water. White sand. Outrigger canoe.”

He drew a cross on the beach with his heel.

“What's that?” Kathleen asked.

“It's a postcard,” he said. “That's where we're staying.” (Memories of the trip—of shuttered rooms and open drains in the hot dusty French island town with date-palm square, of flamboyants along a port side, of bickerings on corners, near churches and in upstairs cafés where the wine had been watered. And later, after the rows, after the attempts at reconciliation, more days like the preceding, unwinding like a film of tiny black and white pictures.)

An acidly green finger thrust through distance into the sea, a finger towards which their compelled feet smacking the shelving beach took them to discovery of a tidal inlet and three old native men with bottles of beer. The five of them were held in the heat and silence until one of the old fellows laughed and handed his bottle to Gerald. Gerald hesitated. They were dirty men, and not altogether pleasant. The native, explanatory, raised the bottle to his own mouth and swallowed, then offered.

“Go on!” Kathleen whispered.

“I don't really. . . .”

“You have to.”

Gerald pushed the neck of the bottle aside. “Thanks, old man, but no. Not at the moment.”

Under the pigmentation and the dirt of age some hurt was apparent. The old man with the beer bottle pushed it forward once more at Gerald's negating head and then dropped his arm. One of the other two said something angry and quick and spat.

“Come on!” Gerald ordered Kathleen. He swung her about by the arm and commenced walking her back along the beach, feeling idiotic in his bathing trunks with his sunburnt and skinny legs propelling him bandily away. Behind them came elderly hoots and mirth, came cries. Bantam Gerald was all a-ruffle and diagonally Kathleen began to move away from him up the beach to the sandmound where they had left their wraps. These failed to disguise their sulks as
they trudged sullenly back the long road between the plantations towards the port.

Gerald said unexpectedly, “I've been thinking over what you said this morning. Maybe it would be for the best now the boy's an adult.”

“Why have you got to be so selfish, so self-concerned?”

“Hey! It was you who brought it up.”

“I'm not talking about that. About that old man, I mean. Can't you ever give the tiniest attention to the feelings of anyone except yourself?”

Gerald's mouth went tight and behind his compressed lips was a store of bitter replies he preferred for the moment to keep to himself as he remembered the horrible straight marriage road of domesticity punctuated by his sugared eruptions and the marital rite. The communion feasts all round were a crumbling farce of stale gesture and promise, unmoistened by the tears of his wife or even of the other women he had used and forgotten. Brutally he concentrated on recalling, in physical detail, the woman he had seen that morning at the store, tracking in memory a curve of the mouth that preluded in her perhaps an abandonment of conscience he knew he would find pleasing for a change. Thus aided, he strode along two miles of private sins—or so he thought, but from the withdrawn expression of his plump face and blue eyes, Kathleen was wearily aware of some likely erotic preoccupation. It was possible for him to sulk enormous
distances away, and he did so now, all the hot sweating way to the port and the dinghy that he hailed to take them back to the
Malekula.

The ship was swinging wildly as the afternoon became alive with wind and at some time past five Captain Brinkman tapped on their cabin door to warn them he was shifting the boat to the lee of the small island they could see from their cabin port. It would be their last chance to go ashore that evening, he assured them with a kind of dampness about his words and mouth. His radio had tapped in a hurricane warning. They might be safer ashore.

Communication with others, even of the simplest kind, always revived Gerald, who tended to flag after an hour or more with the same companion. Somehow as if he needed a transfusion, thought Kathleen sourly. Not normally given to uncharity, she found a tendency to it developed by Gerald's vengeful withdrawals.

We change our attitudes with our underwear, they were both reflecting in unexpected communion as they dressed, poking their awkward limbs through concealing and revealing garments that had long since lost the need to do either of these things. Sometimes Kathleen or Gerald would observe dispassionately, and, ah, the veins, the sag, the pallor. It was a hymn to despair. But with the clothes the bodies managed to put on a layer of insensitivity that took them, speaking once more, into the chucking dinghy, took them up to the wharf, up the main street again past the bougainvillea,
the Bar des Sportifs, the huddling water-front pub.

Gerald kept looking about him with the eager eye of one who hopes to locate a face he has lost.

“I am going to get good and thoroughly shickered,” he said. “A farewell to the place. Do you know,” and he bent his pleasant bald head towards Kathleen and almost twinkled, “we'll be back in another week. Back home, I mean.”

“Back to what?” Kathleen inquired bitterly. “The same old jazz?”

“Jesus!” he said. “You're difficult.” His mouth tucked in like a wrapper over lumps of feeling. And that was that.

His wife fussed savagely, up-ending a small purse onto the windy grass while she hunted for a handkerchief into which she might blow her stuffed up rage; but she had forgotten as usual and in her handbag only a compact and the stubby bullet of a lipstick lay singularly useless beside some pins and airmail stickers that the damp climate had turned into a fancy collage. Tears racing from her eyes made her turn to the succour of the landscape that now offered its blotter-like expanse under a dramatic and bruised sunset. The sun was rushing down like a suicide and they watched it for a minute before taking their grievances to the Lantana.

The lobster and the dry red. The lobster and the white.

If you concentrate on these food portions, Kathleen swore to herself, you will not be distressed by the vision of Gerald munching with his eyes on the woman at the end of the room. That she too was aware became obvious round about the fourth glass, for she caught Gerald's eye and held it for three heart-beats before turning away with a smile to the woman she was with! a privacy of exchange that excluded the wife victim—or the husband. Kathleen went red and poked about at the crayfish shell while Gerald, rather in the way of a dog, snapped and cracked at claws, worked them over vigorously with his fork, poking out titbits and exclaiming with pleasure. Her hatred was blossoming into giant florets. She could have handed him a great bouquet and he would merely have said, How lovely, darling, thank you.

There was rain now, hard cold nails of rain driving across the harbour and the windows of the dining-room. The wind raced it away before it had time to moisten, it seemed, and the louvres all along the veranda began to dance and bump at the one time. Gerald was maudlinly drunk, and with that, nostalgic, leaning across the table towards her, and denying the need for divorce, denying it with his eyes glued elsewhere. He even reached across to touch her wedding-finger, but the wells of Kathleen's eyes had dried up. He could not drown in them. “If you look,” she said with that ambiguous irony of non sequitur that fascinated and infuriated him, “you will find old lobster
claws and bits of broken bottle. Lots and lots.”

“Look at what, Kathleen?”

She began to hum. Her mood changes were inexplicable to him. And as she hummed, staring past with her chin propped on laced fingers, she found herself involved with two people who had been drinking in shadow to one side of the bar. A priest and a terrible painted lady she now saw to be Miss Paradise. Miss Paradise had risen from her table and wobbled across. “Veronica wipes the face of Jesus,” Gerald hissed at one stage, watching Miss Paradise lean towards the priest and fuss with circumstantial concern. And now he added as Fricotte moved across as well, “Simon of Cyrene draws near.”

“Don't you ever . . .?” Kathleen began. And then chewed up the rag of some statement whose consequences she feared.

Gerald waited politely enough for her to finish, but she rose and went to the lavatory where the flapping screens on the windows cracked like drums. Watching herself in the lavatory mirror. The blue eyes. The pretty and tired face. The lines. The hair that wandered about. She was not reassured, even by the fresh lipstick and the insolence of her nose and the half-lit schoolgirl look. The wind broke in gusts between the louvres and their rhythm, irregular and harsh, jangled her into bravery that made her resolve.

“I shall leave Gerald,” she told herself, “for my humiliation is too constant and extended. And where
once I plumped out on being loved, now I am wasting away from remembrances of row upon row with me whimpering and Gerald refusing to talk. Gerald smiling past me, opening and closing his hand in a funny wave to a child, while beside him I cry and cry.

“Please,” she would beg. “Please what?” he would snap, snap. And then the smile or the wave beyond beyond. As she combed her hair away from her face, she recalled evenings as a girl when the party dressing was the ritual of love rather than the accepted accustomed grabbing formulae she had come to perfect in the occasional embraces of lovers who after all never saw. But should two martyrs meet for this act? she pondered, applying pre-ritual paint to the hurt mouth. I will have done all this, she knew, mainly enduring, and have made no ripple at all on the surface of existence and none on him. Victim. All the time victim. As she tasted this juice of discovery she saw again the priest outside wrapped in some envelope of distance that removed him and then, trembling with dissatisfaction and discovery above the handbasin, she put her mouth down suddenly to gulp from her cupped hand water that tasted surprisingly clean and good after wine.

When she came back to the dining-room, the other women had gone. There were only the priest and Miss Paradise locked in secrets. Gerald had moved away from the terrible remains of their lobster dinner to talk with the last of the diners, self-protecting in bar
jokes through which the wind rolled and bore their mounting concern as shutters along the front of the building tore off like gull wings. About this time, too, the first of the large waves smashed into the sea wall and sent spray across the room.

Kathleen, ignoring her husband, went to the street door, but the road between the shops was glittering with sharp quills of water and litter piled in small rubbishing islands, seen now in the last illumination of the evening. Not quite the last illumination for the lights of an approaching truck were pinning her against the doorway and their brightness drove her back at last to Gerald who was huddled cravenly below the table, cuddling his double scotch.

10 p.m., 10th December

No door seemed more welcome.

Stevenson, disabled only physically, for his emotional energy was world without end, leant in his giddiness and exultation against the tottering doorpost of Marie's flat in Erromango Street, and tapped the perturbation of his heart against the dripping panelling. He had left Miss Trumper at the Lantana where her friend and Lake had emerged from the little crowd of drinkers to take charge. He was too tired to question the wisdom of leaving her there and did not even notice the waves that were already breaking over the sea-wall and crossing the road. He thought at the back of his mind that it might blow itself out in an hour or
two but he was beyond caring, with the enemy within gnawing at his nerves. Every time lately that he placed his hand against his side to still it, he was aware of a hardness under the skin, and although he had tried to ignore this, its presence grew physically and monstrously within his mind as well as his body.

From beneath the door came no suffusion of light, and after a moment he fought his way against the wind down the side of the building under the papaw-trees to the rear where a flywire door smashed backwards and forwards against the wall. He lived like a spider amidst webs of fear that she would not be there or that she would deny him or that he might apprehend her in some more disastrous expenditure; but so far there was only the expectation, the frenzy of suspicion, and the ultimate cathartic collapse that winded him, emptied his bowels, and left just so much less of the thinking man. Jesus, he prayed, Jesus. And hammered on the barrier, knowing that she could never hear him in the pitching dark.

He tried the handle and it opened.

Yet he was unwilling to discover and had to force himself in, into the rented flat with its grass mats, its horrible glass louvres, and the scattered personal objects that made it particularly hers. There were few enough of these, and they took the form not of softness of feminine device in cushion or drapery or trapped flower, but of prints of casual and supremely telling line, of books and typewriter, records. There was not
much else. Her few clothes he knew as well as his own and if he had examined the wardrobe where they hung could have told by the omission noted in the eyes' sweep just what she would be wearing.

He called and there was no reply, so he switched on the torch he had brought in from the truck and made his way to her bedroom, harsh as a man's, with the battery radio still running faintly and a note for him propped beside the lamp. This he seized like food, but was frightened to eat.

“My dear,” it said, and he repeated the words with bitter and almost ironic savour and ran his tongue around the emotions the sound ejected into his tired mouth. “I have gone down to the Lantana after all, not knowing when you would be back. In at ten.”

Her signature was its usually highly strung scrawl, with no love between the message and it, yet he suffered this, too, and examining her clock-face found it now to be twenty minutes after that time. His heart then became a fish and leapt at slopes of water uselessly, while outside the drumming of the rain and the gale wind reached peaks of violence that made the whole building shudder under the pliant lashings of trees.