The Worlds Within Her (41 page)

The slope grows shallow, the air heated as the sea breeze falls off. A wide bay comes into view, the water whitish in the distance. It is defined by a flat green peninsula on the left, and a loaf of rugged cliffs much farther off to the right.

The road flattens out, the view is lost, and there is the sense now of a narrow coast: grassy fields ending in foothills on one side, on the other palm trees, sand, and the endless water, now an iridescent blue.

Yasmin says, “What's the real colour of water? Sometimes it's white, sometimes green, sometimes blue, sometimes all three.”

“The water?” Cyril says. “Water has no colour. You know that, Yasmin.”

IF SHE SQUINTS
, she could be witnessing the lumbering of giants, light scattering among their tall and slender shapes.

Cyril says, unexpectedly, “He said to me once, ‘You realize Lenin's real name was Ulyanov, Stalin was Dzugashvili, even Molotov was really Skryabin. Aliases belong to revolutionaries,
movie stars, writers and criminals. Nobody can ever really know them.'

“And I was puzzle at the time to see that he seemed to envy them. Strange, eh? Puzzle me still.

“But you know, he felt that politicians should cultivate what he use to call humorous vagueness. On one level, say nothing but make them laugh. On another, reveal nothing but be hail-fellow-well-met. Humorous vagueness. You getting my drift? Of course some people criticize him for taking it to extremes, but you know, Yasmin, dear — how he couldn't?”

Yasmin thinks: This is all practised, these are things he has said to himself, and probably to others, many times. She says, “I thought palm trees grew wild. They all seem to be in rows.”

“They are. They were planted. Long time ago. All this is a coconut-tree plantation. Is only from a distance they look as if they growing every which way.”

She decides she prefers the distant view, focuses on the light between the rows. She sees surf, rolling and tumbling, and beyond it the oily wavering of a horizon growing choppy.

He says, “Nobody ever understood Ram, you know.”

Yasmin relents. “Did you, Cyril?”

He doesn't take his eyes from the road. “I said, nobody.”

YOU ONCE ASKED
me, my dear Mrs. Livingston, if I intended ever to return to my island. Do you remember that? One is often asked that question here, particularly by those like yourself, who were born and raised in this country. As if you cannot
quite believe that this country is worthy of a greater loyalty from those born elsewhere. Or perhaps, as if you cannot quite believe in the reality of the country and, so, of yourself. Does that sound harsh? I suppose it does, doesn't it …

I was rather short with you, as I recall. No, I said, with no further explanation. I saw that I had hurt you, but that the moment had passed for pursuing the matter. I resolved to find an opportunity to explain myself more fully. That opportunity never came, and so I will create it now.

I have told you about my brother-in-law, Cyril, and his wife, Celia. I have told you about my close yet somewhat problematic relationship with Celia, and I have told you about the difficult situation in which Cyril found himself having returned to the island from England with no achievement to his name.

What I have not told you is that through everything, Celia and Cyril continued to love each other. A love that was far more tactile than that between my husband and myself. He would take her hand, she would rub his back and shoulders. They were, I think, a happy couple — happy to be in each other's company. I could not begin to tell you what they spoke about in the intimacy of their room, but one had the impression that they spoke, and of much besides politics. In company, they paid attention to each other, approved each other's words and ideas.

But I know that Celia feared for their future. Cyril was drifting, so different, she once told me, from the eager law student she had met. He had dreamt of qualifying and returning to the island to work with his brother, to realize the dreams they shared. Then he had changed his mind and dreamt of a quiet practice in England. And now here he was, working for his brother, a hop-to-it man with no dreams of his own. And that was putting it kindly, for among my husband's people Cyril was known as the useless man.

She was galled when they began referring to him as the Manager. She knew what he did, knew the title was empty. She knew that, in their eyes, his thoughtfulness, his gentleness, counted for nothing. And the attention he paid to Celia earned him, in that world of ambitious men, an unshakable derision. It was not lost on Celia that any future they might have was entirely dependent on my husband.

As time went along, as Cyril's status remained on the shelf, as it were, it all began to take its toll on Celia. I saw the effects. You saw that there was no tension to her hand in his, that there was a listlessness in her fingers. The back rubs she gave him he now had to ask for, and she would perform them with an abstracted expression that revealed the great distance between her thoughts and her touch.

And there came a day when I realized they no longer touched each other. The same day that Celia said to me, with great seriousness, that her brother was calling her home.

THEY CROSS A
small bridge, of iron painted silver and floored with wooden slats that clack under the tires.

Just beyond the end of the bridge, Cyril pulls off the road and parks on the narrow verge. They get out and he leads her back to the middle, through a silence absolute save for the distant buzz of a cricket. The water appears unmoving, as still as a lake.

Cyril says that the river, channelled in a valley between two low hills, begins in the mountains — he once saw it many years
ago, raging down along a bed of stones — and that it ends here, wide and placid.

Yasmin thinks: the colour of rust. But then, she reminds herself, water has no colour.

He points out that the tide is low. Off in the distance, the river dwindles to a narrow stream that cuts through the beach sand to the sea.

“It looking quiet and harmless now,” he says. “But come high tide, is a different story. The sea overflows the beach, opening up the channel. So you have sea water rushing in and river water rushing out. You can imagine. A different story.”

He leads her back to the car. “This is where Columbus never came ashore,” he says. “So they named it Columbus Landing. Ram always thought there should be a question mark at the end of the name. But, you know, we in this place never let the facts get in the way.”

He stands for a moment, looking around, sniffing the air. “Hasn't changed much over the years,” he says with some surprise. “We use to come here all the time when we were young. We use to fish from the bridge. Ram took his fishing very seriously — did you know that? Anybody even so much as whisper, he'd say, ‘Shhh! The fish have ears.'” He motions her into the car. “Let's see if the path's still there.”

He drives slowly ahead, eyes peering at the trees and vegetation lining the road. After a few minutes he says, “It wasn't this far. We must've missed it.” He turns the car around, and not a minute later gives a little exclamation of triumph. “There it is!” he says, pointing.

Yasmin is skeptical. She sees nothing more than a thinning of the vegetation between two large trees.

But Cyril presses ahead, easing the car between the trees, and
at last, in the twilight, she discerns the beaten earth of a very old passage. It is overgrown, no vehicle has passed here in a long time. But the car moves easily ahead, clearing the brush before it.

THESE THINGS HAPPEN
very quickly, don't they, my dear Mrs. Livingston? Fundamental change in people close to us — and what's insidious is that change of this nature occurs so deep within the person, we're unaware of its presence until it's taken hold.

Seemingly from one day to the next, Celia withdrew into herself. She rose late, taking breakfast — usually just tea and fried bread — all by herself on the porch. I tried talking with her — small talk, nothing grand — but she remained unresponsive, and I remember standing in the doorway, looking at her, and being struck by the thought that she seemed somehow to have shrunk — into herself, I mean. Physically.

She became irritable, particularly with Cyril. He himself, it must be said, had begun retreating into a smaller world, whether from a full understanding of his situation or in reaction to Celia's own retreat I cannot say. But now, when they spoke even of the simplest things, their conversation was riddled with disagreement, misunderstanding and, worst of all, disapproval.

One morning she looked at him and said, “You aren't going to wear that tie, are you?” But of course he was standing there, arms full of my husband's papers,
that
tie knotted around his
neck. More than making him look foolish, she made him feel foolish, which I suppose was the point, and he replied like a foolish man. He said, “I guess not,” and immediately put my husband's things down to go change the tie. But Celia pursued him. “So why did you put it on, Cyril? You know how ugly it is.” He had no real explanation. He said he had put it on without thinking, which confirmed her suspicion he had put it on merely to annoy her.

It was horrible to watch — and watch we all did, for they exercised no discretion. Just as they had made no secret of their affection, so they made no secret of their disaffection.

When Cyril was not there, Celia would sit by herself in the porch or under a tree out back, engrossed in a world far from the one she inhabited. A distance difficult to gauge for she now kept silent about the travels of her mind.

I tried talking to her once, hoping for the kind of confidence we once shared. Foolishly perhaps, I remarked that she seemed unhappy. Only people in search of companionship enjoy having their unhappiness noticed. Those, like Celia, who want solitude resent it.

A quick coldness came to her. She said, “Yes, well …” and turned away.