Black Marina (10 page)

How d’you know I’m not middle-aged by now? I felt like saying. Revolution wears off – unless you’re Teza, fixed in a zealous sisterhood which keeps you forever young. Maybe all the revolutionaries and reformers who’ve changed our lives for us are stuck in childhood that way. Maybe you have to be to keep your ideals. But I said nothing.

‘Look, Holly, I’m leaving these here today and they’ll be picked up tonight,’ Ford said in a different voice, but still smiling. You could see him at a Buckingham Palace garden party. ‘You’ll leave the back door of the store open, Holly, like a good old lady.’ Then he must have sensed something in me because he said, ‘You’re wondering why I trust you, Holly. Isn’t that so?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty simple, really. There’s no one else on this Godforsaken dump I can trust. Look at it that way.’

‘But isn’t it a terrible gamble?’ I said.

‘And when haven’t I taken a gamble?’ Ford said. ‘Going
over to England that time, that was the first of them. One after the other ever since.’ He shrugged his shoulders, elegant in the cream linen. ‘And maybe this is the last of them,’ he said.

‘Your poetry,’ I said, ‘have you lost interest in that?’

‘I ask you what that’s for,’ Ford said. The smile had gone out of his eyes. ‘Lucky I have friends in London who put me back on the right path. And not the kind of friends you’d imagine, either!’ Now he laughed again. I began to wonder – he was restless, pacing the store – if he was hipped on something. Or whether it was just his natural, reckless instinct, denied for years of novelty, and now a new game had come up.

I didn’t tell Ford about Lore’s letters, so I didn’t tell him I knew about Julian Byrne, or that I’d known Byrne myself a little too when I worked at the Green Velveteen. He and Ford were like impatience and boredom coming together, and I couldn’t think of anything more dangerous. ‘I a-change de rules, I a-kill de blues’, as the song has it. ‘Even Castro condemned the New Jewel Movement,’ I said, but I realized as I spoke that I sounded like an old colonel in Cheltenham or something.

Ford was confident; he’d made up his mind. He strolled to the back of the store and gave a loud whistle when he looked in at the Craft Centre room. ‘Jeez, Holly, this is a tragic sight. What the fuck’s goin’ on here?’

I explained that the island had benefactors now in the guise of various Americans and Venezuelans from the
consortium
, and in particular one Jim Davy, who took all the trouble to set up a kiln and a weaving centre and so on in the village.

Ford laughed, but this time harshly. ‘Caribbean peoples have no skills,’ he said, ‘no culture. We descended from slaves. What’re our hands any good for?’

Firing guns, I thought, as I gazed at those damned canvas bags with an increasingly sinking heart.

‘Not for making fancy pots!’ Ford had suddenly exploded in anger. Then he quietened down again. ‘I’ll tell those friends who come to pick up my goods to be extra careful they don’t break none of this valuable stuff when they come in the back door here.’

‘Yes, do,’ I begged him. ‘God knows what some of the stuff is worth – one of those is a pre-Columbian urn.’ For a moment Ford’s expression went bright – and I remembered he’d been famous for his attempt in his poetry to wed the Mayan culture with the African tribal culture of his
beginning
. Then he shook his head quickly, as if a fly had flown in his eye. ‘All I do know,’ I went on, ‘is that one hell of a lot of cash went into the accounts book for the Craft Centre a month ago. Nine million dollars. For a little local industry! I asked Jim Davy how the hell it got there and he said to ask no questions but to be glad for the future opportunities for St James!’

‘Did he indeed?’ Ford said. Then he gave me a walloping great pat on the back and said I was a good girl and he’d be back later. And off he went, into the blinding glare and the sand.

I had to lend the girl Mari a dress in the end, a white cheesecloth kind of thing. She’d swum over because she wanted to see me before she had to go up to the hotel, and she had nothing to wear.

I begin to see what Lore means. You have to start standing in as a mother for Teza whether you want to or not, and right now a mother is the last thing in the world that I’m aiming to be.

Then old Bratwurst in the golfing cap came into the store, and while I was still thinking this, the girl slipped away.

*

‘So you couldn’t say that it was definitely Ford who was shot down?’ Maldwin Carr said. ‘Whoever it was, doesn’t it seem rather strange that the death went unreported?’

The girl Mari had joined the journalist on the verandah, and they sat on bamboo chairs facing Mrs Van der Pyck, who was the other side of a glass table. Between them long dishes of Smith’s crisps flown from London to Barbados and then shipped on the
Singer
twice monthly in the high season for the nostalgia of cocktail drinkers at the hotel. A nest of whipped egg white, white rum and gardenia blossom in a glass bowl also separated them, and in the bowl were three straws, through one of which Mrs Van der Pyck sipped
frequently
. The girl’s straw was untouched.

‘Of course, I can’t say I’m 100 per cent sure that anyone was actually
killed
,’
Mrs Van der Pyck said. She threw a
Beauty-of-
the-Islands, high-cheekboned smile at Maldwin Carr: as soon as the girl from the yacht had arrived on the verandah she had known there was nothing going on there, and a more enjoyable Christmas Eve seemed to lie ahead. She even felt quite sorry for the girl, borrowing dirty Holly’s dress – because she had no better, she could only suppose.

‘We’re interested because we’re great admirers of Ford’s poetry,’ Maldwin Carr said in his gravest tones. ‘The Poetry Society in London is extremely concerned that he missed a reading last month without giving notice. And that he failed to collect the Endeavor Prize in the States, of course. If by any chance Ford had decided to come out here at the time of crisis in Grenada …’ Maldwin Carr’s voice tailed off.

‘Oh, I do see,’ said Mrs Van der Pyck. She lowered her lips to the gleaming straw and ingested deeply, leaving a garotte mark of red.

Maldwin Carr then mentioned the name of the famous Sunday newspaper of which Lockton was proprietor. ‘We’re here to research the background of the poet,’ he said, and he added that all Mrs Van der Pyck had to say would be treated with the utmost confidence.

‘I was up at the pool,’ said Mrs Van der Pyck. She waved a creamed and manicured hand in the direction of the expanse
of blue, filtered water, laid out in the shape of a waterlily pad, which many of the guests preferred to the natural joys of the Caribbean. ‘I saw a man run past. Hardly anyone runs here, you know, Mr Carr.’ Another smile: it was clear from Mrs Van der Pyck’s darting eyes that she was frightened. ‘I don’t want to exaggerate, you know. But it took me a second or two to realize that he wasn’t running at all. He’d – well, I heard the shot but, you know, I thought it was Jim Davy starting up his silly old model plane, single-propeller thing he seems to have to shoot into before it’ll get going –’

‘You realized the man had been shot in the back,’ Maldwin Carr said.

‘Yes. And was sort of
flying
down the hill.’

‘Into the sea,’ Maldwin Carr said.

‘Into the sea.’

Mrs Van der Pyck rose and went over to the rail of the verandah. Her gait was melodramatic and Maldwin Carr suppressed a smile. He wondered what Julian Byrne, after all the efforts he had made to persuade Ford to return to St James and thwart American presence in the West Indies, would make of the consequence: Ford missing presumed dead; a distraught daughter who had lost her father just as she found him; and a frivolous woman, red-hair-in-the-
sunset
, commenting on it all in a voice heard too depressingly often at minor Embassy cocktail parties.

‘It was all so terribly quick,’ Mrs Van der Pyck said. She didn’t add that a tumbler of vodka, fresh ginger and crushed ice had not helped her own progress to the side of the pool, where you can look down at the sea, the dilapidated store and the Bar. But she did say she had seen only the cloud of blood, in the water near the quay by the Bar, where it looked like it does if you cut your hand and pull the plug out of the basin, so there’s a swirl and then it’s all gone.

‘You didn’t see the man in the sea, then?’ Maldwin Carr said. ‘Where would the body have gone?’

Mrs Van der Pyck hesitated. Mari had risen too and had gone to stand looking out at the view: postcard coconut palms with a Day-Glo touch of pink round the fronds, scissoring a rusty sea.

Mrs Van der Pyck made up her mind. ‘You really should ask Holly Baker about this,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty certain she was in the doorway of the store when the man … hurtled … past. In the back door, where they put the Crafts, you know.’

‘Pretty certain,’ Maldwin Carr said. His voice held the faintest note of derision: Mrs Van der Pyck was showing herself to be an unreliable witness – and on purpose too, he could sense. With a vague, aristocratic sweep of the hand Maldwin Carr knocked the three-day-old
Times
he had been pretending to read earlier to the verandah floor. With it, quite accidentally, went a saucer of nuts and crisps.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry. What a bore,’ said Maldwin Carr.

‘If Holly
wasn’t
there – the light was like this, you know, evening does set in so rapidly in this part of the world –’ Mrs Van der Pyck was gabbling now. The slim young waiter from the inner room, hearing the crash of a glass dish, had come out on the verandah, and in the red light Mrs Van der Pyck saw Maldwin Carr’s lizard eyes flicker over him. ‘Or, as I say – I don’t really remember about Holly, but there’s one person who was
most
definitely on the hill just there as Ford … or whoever the poor man was … was shot down.’ Mrs Van der Pyck gestured grandly at the hillside by the pool, almost green now in the dusk.

The waiter, crawling in the dark on the floor, retrieved a handful of crisps and replaced them on the saucer. Dark or not, Mrs Van der Pyck saw and stamped her foot in irritation.

‘No, please! Throw them away!’

‘Do tell us who it was,’ said Maldwin Carr, much as though a crossword clue was about to be supplied unexpectedly.

‘Sanjay.’ Mrs Van der Pyck smiled, but her back was against the light and her face was invisible. ‘Mr James Allard.
He was certainly down there. With his crazy daughter Pandora. You should go and see him, Mr Carr.’

*

Millie’s left Carib’s Rest. I can see her walk along the path on the side of the hill. She’s going back to the village for a couple of hours before Christmas dinner gets under way. Down here I can smell the turkey and chestnut stuffing. Last year an English couple arrived with a bouquet of frozen
chrysanthemums
in a plastic sheath. To remind them of home, they said. You should have seen Sanjay’s face light up, and then he looked sad again.

The day Ford was here. He left the store. I waited a while. I pulled down the plastic shutters so as to make the place look closed, and I could hear an Italian jet-set woman, a friend of the Venezuelans and a regular visitor, cursing outside on the blistering walkway when she found she couldn’t get in for her fix of
marrons
glacés.
And it didn’t stop Jim Davy either from nipping in the back door to the Craft Centre. This time he was holding what looked like a hastily made clay bison, about six inches in length.

‘My Johnny made this,’ Jim said (he meant one of his pupils up at the village). ‘It’s great, isn’t it, Holly? We’re really making progress.’

I wish Jim Davy well, but he and his sort should go home. Let in the people from Grenada, I say, and let them teach the people of St James a different kind of craft: that of governing yourself instead of being told what to do by others. Look, I say to myself, Sanjay’s lease runs out. Where will he go? What will he do? He likes the people of St James a sight more than he likes the consortium. Let him have the chance to let them in, so say I. Or so said I then. Now I just want one thing and that’s peace. Next time the
Singer
comes I’m stepping aboard and I’ll go to Trinidad and make my booking home. Lore’ll get a surprise. We’ll set up in Fulham, that’s the place for us to be. A good distance from Teza anyhow.

When Jim had gone – and he seemed to take an age walking northwards up the beach, a beige ant in shorts and a visor cap with a face under it that looked as if it had been stamped out of a mould – when he’d turned twice to wave to me, I slipped out of the Craft Centre door and headed south. I knew Ford would have gone up to the village to say hello to Millie and the others. And I had to find Sanjay.

It was a long time since I’d walked out in the sun in the afternoon. My hair stuck to my head so fast it was like a pail of warm water had been emptied over it. My eyes, which felt like peeled eggs, kept blinking and rolling against their sockets. And the sand on the beach seemed as far away one moment as a photo map of the Sahara, where the fine ripples stretch out without perspective, and as near the next as a handful of grit pushed right up into your face.

The straggle of trees round the lagoon grew nearer all the same. I knew Sanjay would be in one of his derelict
outbuildings
: the library, where the peeling-off spines of the books hang like moths half out of their cocoons, or the aviary, where he opened the doors weeks ago and they all flew away – the humming birds and the mocking birds and the pelicans with their beaks like suitcases in the St Vincent street market. Or he’d be in the ‘museum’, where the clutter of old
newspapers
and pressed flowers and butterflies under broken glass has spilled over and almost smothered that effigy, in stone, of slavish love. I used to go in there, after Duchess Dora had died, and stare at the expression on the face of the woman, the mistress in the proper sense, of the man who had been called one hot afternoon to pass the afternoon in love under the shadow of the volcano at Pompeii. I thought of the lava falling on the slave and his owner. And I thought of this island, lying just under the shadow of Grenada, and the day coming when the violence would erupt and we’d all be frozen, for ever, in boiling stone.