The Green Flash (25 page)

‘Merton.'

‘It must be sad for Merton and more like him. After a hundred years or more when the white man was the master and the black man his servant, then the islands were given their freedom. But what has changed? Every diner in this room is white! Every waiter is black! So what has changed?'

I cut into my succulent little hen bird. ‘What can you do about it? Sugar. Rum. A few cottage industries, They couldn't maintain their standard of living on that. So it has to be tourism. And in the nature of present-day tourism ninety-eight per cent of the clientele is white. Most West Indians swallow the pill. There's no way out.'

‘Hm.' She sipped her wine. The character playing the guitar in the band had a deformed hip. He sat on a high stool with another for his feet. Oddly enough the waiters moving among the guests seemed to have no rhythmic feel for the music: they didn't walk in time or seem to be aware of the calypso beat.

I said: ‘Are you a communist, Shona?'

She looked up, her eyes sparkling in the candlelight. ‘You ask
me
that?'

‘Well … it could be, couldn't it? When you left Russia you were getting out from under Stalin, not necessarily from the system.'

She was quiet, eating her food, until I wondered if she wasn't going to answer.

‘It is possible that all good people ought to be communists – in principle. Isn't that so? I don't know, but it is at least arguable. But no one who has lived under such a system and escaped from it would ever wish to go back to what men have made of that principle – in practice. Does that make sense to you?'

‘It crossed my mind to wonder.'

‘There is a lot I do not like about the West, but the imperfections, in proportion, are small. As a considerable capitalist myself …'

‘I noticed the high time you had talking to the Baumgarten woman about the good old days.'

‘The old days. May I correct you?' She patted my hand. ‘ Not the good old days. But of course youth looked back on always has its rosier side.'

Did it, I thought? Not mine. ‘She seemed to go a long way back, your chum. Once I heard her talking about the early days of Stalin's dictatorship. When would that be: 1926? 1930?'

‘Oh, Ilya, she is older than she looks, and she forgets that I am not so old. She rambles on. It was enough to see her again, though most of the people we knew are dead. She lost her first husband in the first year of their marriage. Then she came to Vienna as a secretary in the Russian military command, but by the time they withdrew she had married this Austrian, Joseph Baumgarten, and she was permitted to stay.'

I said: ‘ May I trawl up the forbidden subject?'

‘What is that?'

‘Have you fired Trudi?'

‘Would you mind?'

‘I would mind if it involved me.'

‘Well, I did not. I have given her another chance. Does that please you?'

‘It pleases me not to be involved in the decision.'

‘You are not. I reasoned …' Shona laughed deep in her throat. ‘I reasoned that we were far more likely to get the money she owed us if she remained in the firm than if she left.'

Most days the weather was variable, with cloud and sun doing quick-change acts, and a sighing breeze. We went to sleep every night and woke each morning to the cracking of the waves on the shore. We hired a catamaran and sailed almost out of sight of land. We water-skied and skuba-dived; and I hired a yellow Moke and drove jolting round the island, up to the North Point, to Farley Hill, to the Andromeda gardens, and of course once or twice into Bridgetown. The surface of the roads was frightful. Shona said: ‘At least you cannot drive fast here!' She seemed to look younger every day. The invitation came I'd been angling for: the Governor General and Lady Millerton wanted us to lunch with them next Monday at twelve thirty.

‘That will be a pretty ending to the holiday,' said Shona. ‘But this you must have arranged!'

‘Ronnie Baird is in the British High Commission. I went to school with him, and he was one of the very few blokes I liked there.'

‘I often forget that you are so well connected.'

Every night we drank too much wine, and every night we made love. Every evening at six we sat on the terrace and watched for the green flash as the sun went down.

‘Nothing!' said Shona every time, and then, after a fellow guest had claimed he had seen it, ‘it is
subjective
! … But of
course
! One stares at the sun so long as it goes down that it is a delusion of the eyes …'

‘I wouldn't think you're far out.'

‘But then – why isn't it
our
delusion also? Ah well …'

There were dances at the hotel, and once or twice we made a few circles of the floor for form's sake before retiring to our cottages. On the Saturday evening as the green flash once again failed to show up she said: ‘Do you know, I don't think I want to go back at all!'

I raised my eyebrows at her in the accumulating twilight.

‘You're joking.'

‘Not joking. More than half serious. I suppose it is a wish to stop time more than anything else.'

I said: ‘This is a dreamer's existence. Always better for being short. Another two weeks would be marvellous. But it's specially marvellous because of the contrast. That's why heaven would be such a bore.'

‘Perhaps this is better than heaven.'

So it had worked for her. I really believed it now.

She rumbled on her lap for the book there. ‘You know what I have been reading? You must have seen it.'

‘Balzac's letters.'

‘I came upon this passage last night. May I read it to you?' I nodded and she put on her other spectacles, held the book up to the fading light. ‘ ‘‘The sudden revelation of the poetry of the senses is the powerful link which attaches young men to women older than themselves; but it is like a prisoner's chains, it leaves an ineffable imprint on the soul, implants a distaste for a fresh and innocent love.'' ' She lowered the book. ‘David, I have never pressed you for any display of your feelings in our affair. I have always been grateful when any sign of them occurs spontaneously. So I am not demanding anything extra now. But … does it seem to you that Balzac was right?'

I stared out over the sea. A pleasure steamer, as big as a Mississippi riverboat, was drifting across the orange glow where the sun had sunk, with fifty or sixty rights winking in the encroaching dark.

‘God knows how old Balzac's mistress was; how much older than he was, I mean. Balzac was right for himself. The only other thing
I
can say is that you seem to be right for me.'

She said: ‘ When you first became my lover I was careful to keep the word love strictly out of it. I tell you that it has
never
entered into my association with any other man.
Never
. That it
has
entered this one, I have to confess – now. You must have known it for a long time. I have ceased to be the cool and calculating
boss
; I am at once dismayed and delighted at what has happened. I am at sea when jealousy and possessiveness break in. I know all the greater dangers of such an association. I ask nothing more from you than what you can give. At the very beginning I was reluctant to begin because I sensed the risks. But now I am glad. Whatever happens in the future, I am glad for here and now. This has been the most wonderful period of my life.'

‘So,' I said. ‘So. It's not easy for me, Shona, to say much.'

‘Don't try.'

‘I should try,' I said. ‘ I should try.'

Darkness comes quickly in the tropics.

Shona said: ‘Do you know, every night when we have been watching for the green flash I have been saying something to myself. I have been saying, ‘‘If I see the Green Flash, David will love me till I die.'' '

The band was drifting in for the evening session. The little cripple was fixing up his electronic drums.

‘We've four more days,' I said.

‘Four more sunsets.'

‘Maybe,' I said. ‘Maybe we should both see it before we go.'

III

The wine was good, and at dinner we drank more than usual. We didn't dance that night, but supported each other to the doors of the cottages. After some discussion we chose hers. There we did not make love but lay beside each other smoking and talking long into the small hours. In the end I told her what I had never told anyone else – about my father, and his jealousy of me and his bullying, the locking-up in the cupboard under the stairs. And then that final night when he had come home gassed and found me in the kitchen and got me in a corner, and then, when I was scared out of my wits, he had lost his balance and toppled over and cracked his skull on the iron bar of the stove. And his death, and the police and the inquest, and all the hoo-ha of that time …

It was a struggle talking about it. I may put it down in so many words like that, all pat and easy; but it was as hard as breaking bones.

Then later on other things came up, raked over from that last meeting with my mother, feelings that she wasn't blameless in the nasty mess-up of our lives, that in some ways she was as jealous as he was, that it had become a sort of three-way scrap for possession and dominance which had suddenly, unexpectedly blown up in her face. I told Shona things I thought I'd forgotten, maybe things that were best forgotten … We droned on and on.

The next morning I woke in my own bed with a thick head and couldn't believe I'd said so much – got into a state of resenting it like hell.
In vino Veritas
, drunken inspiration, yak-yak my tongue had gone, spilling it all like a broken flour bag. But I recalled – or thought I recalled – that her little promptings, her sympathetic questions in the darkened room, had come at discreet intervals, inviting me to go on. Maybe she hadn't been as drunk as I was – that hard Russian head – and had baited the trail for me to follow. In future when the proper occasion turned up she'd be able to fling it back at me. Nothing I did out of step now – or what she considered out of step – would fail to be related to what I had told her last night. Like a second-rate shrink she'd have the answer for everything.

All Sunday I was in a filthy mood and her teasing good temper made it worse.

Why, she asked, did all the West Indian birds have such big feet? They all looked as if they were wearing skis. And were these little yellow birds that stole our sugar the same as those in the old song ‘Yellow bird, way up in banana tree'? And how did she address the Governor Generals wife tomorrow – what was
her
title? And thank the merciful God for a small breakfast, for one ate altogether too much here. And if we were using our Moke today we must be careful to tip the overnight rain off the hood before we started: otherwise we'd be engulfed in a cataract. And did I mind not going to the caves? She'd always fought shy of them since she once went deep into the caves of Majorca and the lights failed.

Shona wasn't noted for her angelic temper and at the least she would normally soon have barked back at me, wanting to know what grisly bear she was living with or if over-drinking had produced too many spots on my liver. The fact that she didn't showed she cottoned on to my feelings about the talk of the night, and was ‘making allowances'. Making allowances, for Christ's sake! Even minking the words set my teeth grating and put me in a lousier mood than ever. We went water-skiing that morning and then after lunch had a stand-up row, raking up every subject except the one that mattered.

When it was spent we were spent, and separated, and lay and slept and smoked and fumed in our separate cottages. We met again in time not to see the green flash, and by dinner we were on speaking terms. But we ate little and drank less, and after the meal went to our cottages with isolation the only need.

Isolation was certainly
my
need. My tongue tasted like a sewer and I felt as if, because I'd given her some part of my mind, I would never want her body again.

When it came time to change for the luncheon, I went out into the garden and picked myself a bougainvillea flower for my buttonhole. When Shona saw it she made no comment and we walked to the taxi, which she insisted we take, otherwise by the time we got to Bridgetown her hair would, she said, be standing out like a punk-rock star.

She was in cool grey silk, with grey tights and black patent pumps. Her only ring, a ruby, glowed on her hard thin finger.

Government House was a handsome eighteenth-century shack, guarded by Barbadian soldiery, and we had to pull in and wait at the guardhouse while they telephoned to ask permission for us to proceed. An adjutant greeted us at the door and led us upstairs to meet Sir Anthony and Lady Millerton and half a dozen guests. We drank rum punches and made chat until lunch was dished up.

They were a fairly usual mix: the lieutenant commander of a British naval frigate that had just put in to Bridgetown; a female choreographer on holiday from Paris; two well-known television stars, the girl a sexy piece who was seated next to me; the editor of the local paper and his dame.

We ate at the smaller table, while a pianist dealt out Liszt in the adjoining salon. Conversation was fairly boring. Shona, on Sir Anthony's right, was as usual the object of special attention. I tried to be objective and compare her particular looks with those of the intelligent young critter sitting next to me. Felicity had all the puppy charm of a very pretty young woman. Shona looked hard, clear cut, spare, refined by the years, intellectual, yet never quite unattractive, always just feminine enough.

The meal was modest; afterwards, over coffee and brandy, Sir Anthony Millerton came over to me. We'd had little to say to each other so far. Now he said: ‘I believe we have to commiserate with you – and also congratulate you. Did you know about it before you left England?'

‘About what?' I said.