A Man Over Forty (8 page)

‘It makes me feel despairing and humiliated,' said Mr McGregor, ‘it makes me sick at heart when I think of all the advantages that boy has had, and how he's made nothing of them. All his life he's had advantages that were denied to me. He's legitimate, for one thing – his mother and I are legally married – and I sent him to school: a good school. If I had had his advantages I could have become a scholar, I could have travelled abroad – with my abilities I could have done that – but I was handicapped from the start.'

Balintore, to comfort him, said the boy had been guilty only of youth's intemperance, of youth's exuberance and inexperience, and should not be blamed too harshly. He had, he said, been much impressed by the charming warmth of the Jamaican temperament; and a little excess of warmth – if it did not occur too often – could surely be forgiven.

‘There's no vice in the boy, that's true enough,' said Mr McGregor. ‘He's maybe too simple in his mind to ever make a great success in life, but he's kind to his mother, he's got a good heart like all our simple people. Yes, man. There's three kinds of people here in Jamaica, and two of them's good. All our country folk, they're good, and people right at the top, like Mr Weatherby Scroope and his father, they're good too; though there's not many of them. It's people of my sort, the middle classes, that I don't trust.'

Gloomily he shook his handsome silver head, and repeated, ‘No, I don't trust them. But if you come here to live, Mr Balintore,
there's be no hard feeling against you. Not as far as I'm concerned. I don't support any colour bar, and I've got no hard feelings against white people as such. So long as they don't belong to the middle classes. Yes, man.'

Their search had now continued for nearly a month, without Balintore having found anything to suit him. Palladis had shown exemplary patience, but insisted that every second day, at least, they should spend in the comfort of the Morgan Arms or one of the other hotels that offered good food and a bathing beach.

‘You may regard yourself as a prospective resident,' he told Balintore, ‘but I am a tourist, and I'm not going to be so silly as to deny myself the pleasures designed for tourists.'

After another day of heavy rain he proposed that they go boating on the Rio Grande. ‘An exercise,' he said, ‘that no self-respecting tourist will lightly miss.'

‘You had better go tomorrow,' said Scroope. ‘You need plenty of water and a good current, and the river will be high enough after today's rain. But it goes down quickly.'

Balintore protested. ‘I'll do no such thing! Rafting on the Rio Grande, indeed! I don't know what it entails, or what it implies, but I suppose it's some sort of Caribbean fun-fair, a milling crowd of trippers queuing up in sweaty anticipation of factitious thrills—'

‘Let me give you some more rum,' said Palladis.

‘I'm sure it isn't as bad as that,' said Scroope. ‘I've never done it myself, but I'm told it gives you a good view of some remarkable country. And on Friday – this is Tuesday, isn't it? – I'm going to take you to the other end of the island, to a cattle show.'

‘Will there be tourists there?'

‘A few, I expect. But essentially it's local entertainment, for neighbouring farmers and their friends. And a man I know there – a man I've known all my life – has a small house, with two or three acres, that he's willing to sell. It may be what you want. I've written to half a dozen people – more, I think – and told them the sort of place you're looking for, but till now I've heard of nothing that seemed to me worth going to see. Well, you may be disappointed, but I think it's a chance for you.'

‘My dear Weatherby, what splendid news! I'm immensely grateful to you!'

Balintore stood up, with the manifest intention of shaking his kind host's hand; but thinking better of so ostentatious a gesture, chose instead to drink his rum punch at a gulp, and refill his glass.

‘I have always felt,' he said, ‘that my search would be successful in the end. And now—'

‘Don't be too confident.'

‘No, no. Confidence is man-made, but I – well, I trust myself to Fate.'

In this good mood he was easily persuaded to risk vulgar association on the Rio Grande, and the following morning he and Palladis drove again to Port Antonio. There, from a score of men who competed genially for their favour, they chose one of honest appearance and burly stature, and with him in the back seat drove inland for another few miles till they came to the bank of the river. There Balintore again showed signs of uneasiness, for they were not alone.

At this point the river was fairly broad, and on the shingle beach were rather more than a dozen people about to begin their voyage. Most of them were of middle age and manifestly respectable, but a little man in short trousers of a bright red tartan, and a tall, blonde, bony-chested woman in a bikini, who complained loudly in a mid-American voice about the hard discomfort of her bench on the raft – these excited Balintore's displeasure, and he frowned uneasily till they had disappeared downstream.

The rafts were simply but ingeniously constructed of long bamboos. Thirteen or fourteen stout trunks, bound together, made a loose, pliable floor, and a bench for two, like a garden seat, was built on its after third. Behind this stood the boatman with a long pole.

They pushed off, and a few minutes later were caught in a swift-running channel between a bar of shingle on the one side, and formidable rocks on the other. Their boatman, with agile movement and strenuous thrusting of his pole, kept their raft in mid-stream, and they slid down a bright green aqueous slope, edged with a dancing chatter of broken water, to a calm
and placid reach under a rampart of tall trees. The sun shone hotly on the cool pellucid river, and ahead of them lay more rapids.

‘I was wrong,' said Balintore half an hour later. ‘Quite wrong. This is very pleasant indeed.'

They were being poled slowly down a long stretch beneath a hillside, thickly wooded, that rose abruptly to a tall green arc against the brilliant sky. Small birds flitted among the trees and little blue herons stood, contemplative, in the shallows.

‘And not over-crowded,' he added.

The river quickened, and they approached more brawling water that turned a sudden corner beneath a low cliff. Dexterously their boatman navigated the awkward channel, but just beyond the cliff they saw another raft whose passengers had been less fortunate.

They were elderly people of massive build, whose bulk overflowed the garden-bench on which they sat, and their weight had anchored their raft to a narrow shoal. Its bow floated free – swung to and fro – but the river chattered mockingly and over-ran the stern, while their boatman thrust unavailingly, now on this side and now on that, to push her free. His passengers, in their gay holiday clothes, made no move to help him, but sat in a ponderous and placid immobility like Buddhas in a temple in the jungle.

The two boatmen exchanged some rapid conversation. What they said was incomprehensible, but Balintore and Palladis' man clearly regarded his colleague's mishap as a good joke, and made no move to go to his help. They swam down stream, rocking slightly on lilting water, and the shipwrecked Buddhas were soon out of sight.

‘It could become a little crowded,' said Palladis, and asked their boatman where they should stop to swim and eat their lunch.

‘Good place coming,' he said, and presently steered them to a green bank where the river was broad as a small lake, and divided, as if by its protruding backbone, by a long white shoal. On the far side several rafts had been beached, and some ten or a dozen people were swimming in smooth water.

Balintore looked doubtfully at them, but Palladis said
brusquely, ‘They're too far away to prick your privacy. Come and swim.'

But twenty minutes later, when they were sitting on the bank eating their sandwiches, Balintore said, ‘There's a woman looking at us through field-glasses.'

A little apart from the other bathers on the far bank, she stood, with legs apart to give her stability, and stared fixedly at them. She was a woman of mature and generous figure in a pink and white swimming suit, and suddenly, to their surprise, she raised a sunburnt arm and called, not to them, but to one of her near-by companions.

A man walked slowly towards her – a man of middle age, his belly plump above a red bathing-slip – and took the glasses from her. He too stared intently – put down the glasses and spoke to the woman – and stared again. Then both, with waving arms, called loudly across the river.

‘Come on,' said Balintore, ‘we're going. I don't know who they are, and I'm not going to wait and see. Oh, for God's sake hurry!'

‘They may be friends of mine, or people we both know,' said Palladis.

‘I don't care, I don't want to meet them. Old friends can be worse than total strangers, and the odds are – oh, the odds are always against you!'

He gathered his clothes together, shouted to the boatman, and began to push off the raft. Palladis, puzzled but not alarmed by his nervousness, shrugged his shoulders and stepped aboard.

‘Go as fast as you can,' said Balintore to the boatman, and looking anxiously over his shoulder exclaimed, ‘My God, she's coming after us!'

One of the rafts on the far bank had been pushed out, and while her companions looked on – or stared across at Balintore and Palladis – the woman in the pink and white bathing suit went hurriedly aboard – almost lost her balance – and a moment later, through the smooth water on that side, was being poled towards them. The plump man continued to wave excitedly, and shout; but his words could not be distinguished.

‘I'll give you a pound to get clear away from her,' said
Balintore to the boatman; who, as if it were the most natural sentiment in the world, said cheerfully, ‘Yes, sir! Now we go like steam boat!' And thrusting with all his strength, drew gradually away from their pursuers till a quickening of the current pulled them swiftly into a hundred yards of dancing rapids; where, to Balintore's loudly expressed pleasure and relief, the following raft fell out of control, slewed sideways, and went aground – but into no danger – on the rocks round which the river pranced in white plumes.

‘And serve her right!' he exclaimed. ‘Damn all who threaten privacy – that's what I say!'

Palladis looked at him curiously. He had thought Balintore's recovery almost complete. For more than a month he had been living in a calm and reasonable way – drinking very little, taking exercise – with nothing to worry him and the sun to colour his skin till he looked five years younger and ten years fitter than the shaken invalid who, so reluctantly, had boarded an aeroplane in early February. That Balintore had always shown an explosive, ill-regulated temper was true enough – it had helped to make him famous – and no psychologist had ever resisted the temptation to explain his outbursts by the postulate of a deeply hidden traumatic memory. Palladis himself, however, tended to accept the simpler hypothesis that some people were more irritable than others – had, as it were, tempers with a lower boiling point – and on innumerable occasions he had seen how easily Balintore recovered from, or threw off, an apparently devastating rage. Two minutes after an eruption of terrifying force he could summon from a well-furnished cupboard of his mind a quotation from Burke or Macaulay – from the Bible or a French poet – to quash the arrogance or ill-founded opinion of some rash opponent.

That his collapse in the television studio had been a symptom of illness or exhaustion – physical illness or mental exhaustion – was beyond doubt; but Palladis had expected his power of recuperation from petty annoyance to show itself in recovery from graver injury; and in the last few weeks he had seen, as he thought, the improvement he had looked for.

Balintore's persistent search for a cottage, and his reiterated
intention to settle down in Jamaica, Palladis did not take quite seriously. What was apparently an obsession would, he thought, be quickly cured if he did buy a cottage: of which he would soon grow tired. But his sudden nervousness before the hail and summons of a distant stranger – a stranger on the other side of the river – and his obvious fear of pursuit, could not easily be accounted for; and Palladis began to wonder if Balintore did in fact see Jamaica as a possible refuge from unknown enemies, whether real or imagined.

When they returned to the Great House, however, this discomforting thought was dispelled by a nearer, more urgent discomfort; for Weatherby Scroope was in a state of perturbation that even his long habit of equanimity could not conceal.

He apologized to Balintore for boring him again with family affairs, but said, ‘I must talk about this, for I have to leave you here, and I can't very well leave you without an explanation.'

‘Leave us?' said Balintore. ‘But where are you going?'

‘Look at these,' said Scroope, and gave them a sheaf of photographs that showed a tall, lean old man of distinguished appearance – he was not unlike Weatherby – and a handsome woman, with resolute features, who seemed to be in her early forties. Several of the photographs had been taken beside a swimming pool, and clearly showed the disparity in age of the two figures.

‘That,' said Scroope bitterly, ‘is my father – my damned old rascal of a father – and
that
is the woman who, he says, he is going to marry.'

‘At eighty-one?'

‘Eighty-two next month.'

‘My dear Weatherby,' said Palladis, ‘how I sympathize with you!'

‘I had a letter from him today – a letter enclosing these ludicrous photographs – and he asks me to wish him joy!'

‘Is he still at Palm Beach?'

‘Yes, but not for much longer. His
fiancée
– he calls her! – comes from a town called Peoria, which I think is in Illinois, and he proposes to go there with her to meet her family.'