Becoming Strangers (19 page)

Adam was down on his knees in the surf like a man looking for his glasses, saying, 'Calm down, calm down, keep your hair on,' over and over again as he tried to stand. Jan and Burns ran down to the shore and Jan held Adam while Burns held Jason.

'Get off of me,' said Jason, shrugging Burns off easily. He turned on him, 'What kind of a place are you running here with your staff molesting your guests?'

'I asked him to leave.'

'And he sure listened to you.' Jason stood quivering. Physically maladroit, with the pinched nose and sucked-in cheeks of a scientist or a computer programmer, it was only his thick reddish blond hair and his new clothes that gave Jason the appearance of being a wealthy Wasp. His body went awry when upset; at this moment he looked like a question mark. In those rare old-fashioned moments when a man is supposed to be a man, thought Jan, one has the chance to see his true character, as if by X-ray. It was compelling. He was not alone; looking round he saw that everyone was transfixed.

Relaxing his jaw muscles with an effort, Jason took his wife by the hand and said to Burns, 'I'll talk to you in the morning. You'd better find us another hotel for tomorrow night.' They moved through the dancers, who were almost immobile. The music continued. At
one point Jason turned back, a single fisted arm flailing, like a vestigial reaction; the rest of his body continued along with his wife.

Looking over to the boy who was putting CDs on the ghetto blaster, Burns saw that he had his eyes closed and was mouthing the words to the song.

Peculiarly enough, he realized that he was as embarrassed as if it was he who'd thrown the hapless punch and trembled like Shirley Temple in front of the crowd. Try as he might to renounce the American, consoling himself internally with words like prick,' he couldn't seem to shake the sense that they were the same person. One and the same, divided by circumstance, by luck.

B
ECAUSE THEY SELDOM SLEPT
more than an hour or two after dawn, George considered it a weakness tantamount to deviancy to 'loll about in bed.' On Sunday morning, he called their eldest daughter, the one who was keeping an eye on the place. With five hours' time difference on her side he expected her to be halfway through her day.

Dorothy was taking her first cup of tea, in bed, resting the saucer on her bosom. She had her teeth in, but no glasses. She looked lost in thought.

'Bloody still in bed,' George was saying to her, his hand over the receiver, but Dorothy didn't seem to hear. 'I say, Carol's still lolling about in her bed. At ten-thirty
of a morning, no wonder she never gets anything done. Shouldn't wonder if the geraniums are parched. I told her, morning and evening at this time of year.

'Yes, still here,' he went on into the phone. 'You sorted yourself out now have you? Put the dog out. Poor bleeder, surprised it hasn't piddled everywhere. Fancy keeping a dog in till ten-thirty. Its bowels must be in a right state.' George winced, looking towards the toilet door.

'Yes, lovely,' he sounded as though he was making a grudging concession. 'We're having a lovely time, but we're coming home soon, you know. Shan't want to see them flowers dead. Of course I worry, so does your mother. Yes, she's fine.' George looked at her, she was lying stock-still, unblinking; he thought for a moment she'd gone.

'Dorothy,' he said sharply, 'are you with us?' Dorothy looked at him; her expression didn't change.

'When are they coming round?' she said. 'I'll put on a joint for lunch.'

'What are you on about?' he said. 'Hang on, Carol duck, your mother's talking.'

Dorothy's mouth began to move anxiously, 'I can't remember if I did the shopping. Have we got any spuds?'

'Pull yourself together, for Pete's sake,' George said, then, into the phone, 'We'll be home Saturday. Not long now. We'll see you then.' And he put the phone down.

'What are you talking about?' he asked, standing. She looked at him with a frightened expression, like a rabbit cornered. He felt the heat of anger rise in him.

'I was only saying, I didn't know what we'd got to cook for lunch, for the girls.'

'We're on our bleeding holidays, woman, we're in the Caribbean. We ain't got to cook lunch. The girls ain't coming round here.'

Dorothy's mouth continued to move but no words came out. With no one else there, he knew he had options, he could comfort her, he could shout at her, he could do anything he wanted. No one would see him, whatever he did, not even Dorothy, for she was not there either.

He stood in front of her bed, like a colossus.

'Come on,' he said, 'come on my old sweet, my old love, you've got to try a bit harder.'

W
ITH THE WORK ON THE NEW ANNEX COMPLETE
, the terrace area in front of it was no longer roped off and so the dining tables and chairs that had previously comprised the outdoor seating there were reinstated. The residents could begin their day with breakfast by the pool. This was granted, edict-like, via posted bulletins on the restaurant double doors and the news was received with interest. Burns helped out on Sundays himself and he noted the chirruping excitement of the clusters of breakfasters with pleasure. He ought to think up something 'new' every mid-week, it need only be a rearrangement of seating.

What creatures of habit human beings are that they find the mere act of eating a customary meal in a different location a great treat, Jan thought, standing at a remove from the residents who had filled the outdoor tables, looking for Bill. They can tolerate the curtailment of all sorts of freedom, so long as they have petty diversions. There was never a day that he woke and said, today I will choose liberty above all else, or justice, hedonism or even new experiences. No, he chose coffee or tea, albeit very good brands, and sometimes he screwed with the proper order of things and threw in a cube of sugar. Hospitals, prisons and schools—these institutions were crammed with human desire, desire that had been thwarted by other forces, immured and immolated. He and many more men and women like him were empty buildings.

Suddenly his eyes came into focus and he saw that Laurie was looking at him, holding a croissant over her mouth in the shape of a smile. He laughed. There was a seat next to her with an empty cup and saucer and a space between a knife and fork. He had only to fit in.

At the same table were the rest of the crew. 'Morning, son,' said George, looking up at him, then back down at his breakfast. A sinister expression on his face, George was penetrating the interior of a tiny jam jar with a large knife.

'Hallo there,' said Dorothy brightly, wiping her mouth. There were tiny flakes of croissant in the small cracks around her lips.

'How's the missus?' asked Bill, popping a triangle of
egg-soaked toast into his mouth. Jan looked at him for a second, saw the tongue reach out to take whatever egg remained in the sides of the mouth, saw the beginnings of sweat on the mans brow, even at this early hour.

'She is sleeping,' he said.

'Sleeping it off?' asked George, turning the jam jar upside down and leaving it in the middle of his plate.

'Why, yes, she is as a matter of fact,' said Jan.

George looked at him quickly. 'You look fit.'

'Why shouldn't I?'

There was a silence.

'No reason, son,' said George.

'So you are joining Mr Moloney's Mystery Tours again, aren't you?' asked Laurie.

'No mystery today. I'm going to church. There's a wee church, one of the first built outside the main town, all white, wooden, a real little gem, up on the northeast and I'm looking forward to the service. Anyone who wants is welcome to come with me. We'll have to get cracking though, we should be on the road within a half-hour or so.'

'Well, I think I am ready,' said Jan, rather formally. He looked at Laurie, watching the slender sides of her neck move as she drank her orange juice. 'I'll finish my breakfast and meet you all in reception if you like?'

'Jolly good,' said George, 'we've got to pop back to the room. I've got to see a man about a dog. Can't get on with the day till I've got it out the way.' He winced as he rose and helped Dorothy up.

'Gently,' she said as he pulled at her, holding her underneath her arms.

'Well, get a move on then,' he said.

'All right, all right,' she was saying as they went off towards the hibiscus alley.

'Pardon!' they heard George say loudly and the three of them exchanged glances and fell about laughing, Laurie folding her napkin and putting it on her plate, saying, 'Poor man.'

Bill leaned forward, waggling his knife at them. 'He's a martyr to his digestive tract, that much he told me this morning when the breakfast was being served, warned me not to mess with the onions, told me he can trace a lot of discomfort to those villainous vegetables.'

Just before they left, Annemieke joined them for a black coffee and a croissant. She waived the menu from the waiter. 'I won't be eating anything cooked, have you noticed there is no staff? I wonder if it's not Burns himself cooking,' she said, lifting her dark sunglasses and raising an eyebrow. Sitting back in her seat, she peeled layers off her croissant. 'I've been to better places.'

'Well, we didn't pay for it,' said Jan.

'That's not the point, Jan. For a businessman, you often miss the point, financially.'

Bill and Laurie began picking up their breakfast things.

'So where is your team off to, today, Mr Moloney?'

'Will you not be joining us, Annemieke?'

'Oh God no,' she said with a little laugh, 'excuse me,
no. I don't get much holiday time and I don't like group tours. I'll be at the pool, reading, relaxing...'

'Ach well, you've got it all worked out.'

'Yes.'

'How satisfying.'

'Yes.'

'We're going to a little church, it's three or four centuries old,' said Laurie, 'one of the first here.'

'Well, when you're from Europe, churches they don't seem quite so appealing, every town has one that dates back a thousand years or so. And I'm not religious. Neither is my husband. When you see what's been done in the name of religion around the world, it makes it hard to believe in a God.'

'When I see what man has done to man, that's exactly why I believe in God,' said Bill. He sat back in his chair and smiled at her. 'Given the real depths to which mankind can sink, isn't it just amazing that the human race has survived at all?'

Jan looked up at Bill from his plate, chewing, his mouth moving, his eyes still.

'See, he's going to convert you this morning, Jan-tche,' his wife went on, crossing her legs. A little "
mea culpa",
some holy water and you'll be absolved, but then you'll have to live the exemplary life that Mr Moloney lives.'

Bill moved his chair back, making a sudden scraping noise. 'Well now, I've already done most of the work. I got the four of them baptized yesterday, so I did. In the sea. Your man's born again.'

O
N A TRIANGULAR LOT OF GROUND
, next to a desolate roundabout and opposite one or two shops, a picture-book white church complete with steeple seemed to be on a cliff. In fact the land the other side of the church dropped slowly away to more of the sugar plantations through which they had driven to get there.

They took a quick walking tour of the cemetery behind the church across cracked paving tiles, taking in the plastic flowers in waterless jars, the gothic white marble tombs and bread-slice gravestones with their sombre Victorian names—Ernestine, Archibald and Arnold—and the next generations sentimental diminutives, Nettie, Archie or Arnie.

The church offered some relief from the heat and the group followed Bill up the aisle and sat side by side in a pew near the front. The Reverend was an elderly white man with an amiable manner and a habit of screwing up his eyes, a relief from his short-sightedness. The congregation was black for the most part, and the service, Bill told them, pretty standard for a Presbyterian church. They were amused, though, to hear the agreement of the congregation grunted and spoken freely during the sermon and prayers.

'Yes, Sir,' a neighbour of theirs felt bound to say every few moments, 'mm-hmm.'

Jan recalled going to see the priest of the church in which they chose to marry, just outside Brugge. Perhaps
that was the last time either of them had participated in any sort of religious discussion. The meeting was a mandatory precursor to their getting married in the church. An old fellow had been pleased to offer them tea and take them through the service. He'd then thought, though celibate himself, to share some thoughts with them, some observations. He considered, he said, that along the road of married life they would meet obstacles that hindered their path; he had asked their permission to call these obstructions, 'elephants.' The analogy reeked of use. Jan had tried hard to listen. He knew from the set of Annemieke's mouth what she was thinking and he had held her hand; they were thick as thieves in those days. There would be big elephants and small elephants, he told them, and the point was to distinguish between the two and find a way around them, hand in hand. Even—or perhaps especially—as a relatively unsophisticated uneducated man in his late twenties, this had struck Jan as useless advice. Still, they'd been grateful that it had been so easy. It seemed that the best one could expect from any religious interaction was vague benevolence. They were relieved.

Stepping outside and taking to the little Ford car that Jan drove in those days, they had gone to Brugge for a beer. In those days, beer tasted wonderful and the drunker they became the more she made him laugh and she had been able to make him laugh till his eyes watered. She was the opposite of his conscience, she was the wicked sense of humour he lacked but had
sensed since childhood was vital equipment for the good life.

Now, catching the drift of the sermon, rousing himself from his reverie, he was able to understand that the old vicar rummaged in his own bag of memories, re-counting tales from his youth in an industrial town in England, then chanced a small conceptual leap and begged the people facing him to be stoic in the face of adversity. Then he'd read a passage from one of Paul's letters and finished by sharing some good news he'd gathered from his congregation concerning the birth of twins and the cricket score.