Sweet Seduction

by Whitelaw, Stella

  "Can’t we be friends, really good friends?" she said brokenly.

  "I don’t know if I could stand it. Seeing you, but not having you."

  He bent and kissed her fiercely, his lips hard and demanding. The wind howled in her ears and it was if all the devils in Barbadian folklore had been let loose to cause mischief.

  "Goodbye, my darling. Never forget that I love you."

  Then he was gone, and Kira stood stunned and desolate as the storm swallowed him. Her life was being torn apart again, the tender roots wrenched from the soil and thrown into the air.

  They could rebuild the chattel houses but could she rebuild her life?

  Thirty-One

  The island was devastated after Hurricane Erica. Copens was flooded by the high seas. The Reed & Earl sugar plant lost its roof and thousands of dollars of stored cane were damaged. Sugar Hill survived the onslaught, apart from a few broken windows, but the grounds were flattened, trees uprooted and tossed about like sticks. André La Plante’s house was too dilapidated to withstand the storm and many of his paintings were ruined.

  Kira made herself useful around Fitt’s House, tidying up, unable to work until the roads were cleared. She managed to check that Jessy and Dolores were all right. Jessy said that Moonshine was back on the beaches, though many of the tourists had gone home on the first planes available.

  It gave Kira time to think. If Giles was right and Tamara was indeed Reuben’s daughter, then that could be the strongest reason why Benjamin had refused to help. He had been prepared to bring Tamara up as a child, accepted her as his daughter, but the island gossip must have been humiliating. At some point he would have decided enough was enough.

  She could not speak to Benjamin about it, afraid of broaching the subject, of causing more hurt. He wanted her as a granddaughter and that was what she wanted too. But why? Perhaps it was simply because she reminded him of Dolly and he wanted a living reminder.

  "We shall have to live on breadfruit," said Benjamin, collecting the fallen fruit.

  "Wonderful as it is, breadfruit doesn’t make a drink. I’d like some tea and coffee and fresh milk."

  "We got plenty of limes."

  Kira walked into Bridgetown to shop for food. It was not that they were short of food, but a lot of the supplies in the kitchen had been spoilt, burst open or broken. Some of the shops might be open.

  She was appalled by the damage she saw on the way, particularly the rows of wooden chattel houses. Carpenters were already at work, repairing doors, windows, replacing roofs.

  A leggy girl bumped into her round a corner, not looking where she was going. She was swinging an empty bag and was clearly at a loose end. It was Lace, in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt.

  "Don’t bother going anywhere," she said. "Half the shops in Bridgetown are closed for repairs. My car was wrecked in the storm, total right-off, and there are no parties to speak of. It’s hopeless."

  They were in Trafalgar Square, near the bronze statue of Nelson. It had survived the storm. Lace’s mouth was turned down, her clothes un-pressed as the electricity was still cut off to Sugar Hill. It looked as if she hadn’t bothered to wash or comb her hair either.

  "Giles has found someone else," she told Kira, a glimmer of amusement coming into her eyes. "Remember Patsie? They’ve been going out quite a lot recently. She’s one of the international set, so clever and smart, bags of money."

  "How nice," said Kira. "You know, Lace, I always enjoy meeting you. You are such good company. But I wonder why you set out to offend me every time. Is it a form of infantile insecurity, do you think? Some personality flaw?"

  Lace looked taken aback. "I don’t know what you mean. I like to keep up-to-date with the news, who’s going out with who. And what my brother does is always of supreme interest. There’s nothing else to do on this damned island."

  Kira felt sorry for the girl. "It seems as if you really need something to do, some occupation that you would enjoy. Isn’t there anything you like doing? Couldn’t Giles give you a job? If everything he does is of such supreme interest . . ."

  "Heavens, no. Work with my brother? Perish the thought. He does nothing but tell me off."

  "With reason. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that your flighty ways and irresponsible chatter might irritate him? He works very hard and you take it all for granted, do nothing but spend his money. Do you ever go and visit your mother?"

  "I hate illness."

  "That says a lot about you."

  Lace flashed her eyes with contempt. "Oh dear, you are upset, aren’t you? Has big brother really got under your skin? Better forget him, Kira. He’s lost interest in you. Your time, brief as it was, is over."

  Kira nearly called her Auntie, but swallowed the words. The taunt would have been wasted. She would not know.

  "You need a job. You’re frittering your life away. You’ll be screwed up, your mind atrophied and old before your time, Lace. Find something to do. You like clothes, don’t you? Open a boutique. Sell dresses, design dresses, anything. There are lots of good dressmakers around who would make up your designs."

  "I don’t need your advice," said Lace, flouncing off. "I have no intention of wasting my time working."

  "Why don’t you open a second-hand dress agency, then you could get rid of all your old clothes?" Kira suggested lightly. Lace pretended not to hear. "After all, some of them must be out of date. You could call it Lace Work. That’s a great name.”

  Kira watched her go, tottering on unsuitably strapped shoes despite the potholes in the pavement, and wondered who could help her. Perhaps she would fall in love and make a happy marriage. But Lace did not seem the homemaking type. She would flit from affair to affair.

  The roads were not cleared for public transport so it meant walking back as well, or cadging a lift from Land Rovers that were managing to make a few trips. Kira had been lucky with a part-way lift coming into town. Now a crowded Land Rover was going as far as André La Plante’s house.

  "Done made a real mess of that old place," said the driver, welcoming her aboard the crowded vehicle. She sat tightly on a bench seat, next to buxom housewives also out looking for food.

  Kira was sad to see the damage that the hurricane had inflicted on the painter’s old house. It looked shrouded in sorrow, windows shattered, veranda torn apart, doors off their hinges, several walls down. It would need a lot of repairing.

  No-one seemed to notice her as she wandered around. The carefully preserved artefacts of the artist’s life were strewn over the ground, caught in trees, hanging from branches. She started to retrieve them, putting them in baskets. Kira found a pair of brocade evening shoes in the debris and wondered who they had belonged to. She had a feeling that Dolly had rarely worn shoes.

  "Who do these shoes belong to?" Kira asked one of the women custodians, who did not seem to know where to start with clearing up.

  "I dunno, miss. I ain’t ever seen them before. Perhaps his daughter wore them but they look mighty old."

  "Would you like me to help you? I know a little about the family," said Kira. Dolly was certainly her grandmother.

  "Why, sure, mizz. That would be really nice of you. I don’t know what to do. I shall have to be talking to the authorities of the museum. Such a terrible wind storm. You’re Mizz Reed, ain’t you, staying along at Fitt’s House?"

  "Dolly was my grandmother," said Kira.

  "You don’t say? Well, I never. Then you’re right welcome here. Your grandmother, you say? I can make some coffee for us. I’ve brought a little oil stove with me."

  Kira walked back after helping with some of the clearing up at André La Plante’s house. She promised to return another day, to sort out the baskets of items they’d found. His paintings were lined around to dry out, but some were ruined beyond renovation. She could not find the one of Dolly running across the sand, the first painting she had seen all those weeks ago.

  Kira thought of Lace’s latest gossip. Giles had every right to go out with who
m he pleased. And if he had known Patsie since schooldays, what could be more natural?

  She tried not to think of him, kept herself busy. Gradually the island came back to normal. Electricity and telephones were reconnected. Food began to appear in the shops. The airport reopened.

  Giles phoned once, a short sharp conversation to see if she was all right.

  "We’re fine," she said, her voice strangled. She waited for some personal word that did not come. “Thank you.”

  "That’s all right then," he said, ringing off.

  Jessy found Kira working in the garden, sweeping up branches into a huge pile with a broom. Jessy had brought out coffee and home-made biscuits, aware that Kira had not stopped for breakfast.

  "Like your grandmother, you are," said Jessy, putting the tray down on a cleared step. "Never had no time to eat. She thought food wasn’t important. Thought she could exist on air."

  "I don’t want Benjamin slipping on this lot," said Kira, clearing the rest of the steps. "He’s so anxious to find out the extent of the damage to the plant. Some of the phones are back."

  "I guess it’s taking time to repair the lines, counting their losses. And the cane’s flattened. It’s all right for the big planters who are insured, but the small farmer can’t afford no insurance."

  "Giles will help, if he can," said Kira. "He won’t let the small farmers go under."

  "Sure, Mr Giles will help but he don’t have a bottomless money-purse. I hear his house, Copens, took it pretty bad, real smashed-up. You’re really taken up with that Mr Giles, ain’t you? I see’d it on your face."

  "Yes, I’m real taken up with Mr Giles," said Kira, making light of it. "But Lace says he’s going out with Patsie now."

  "Don’t you take no notice of that silly girl. She done make up half of what she says. Ain’t you sure about Mr Giles then? He’s the finest man on the island. No-one been able to snap him up till you come along. The girls all tried, of course, but he had so much on his hands, especially his mother getting ill after Reuben died. Dolores looked after her for years, but it got too much for her in the end."

  "How did Reuben die?"

  "Oh, it were terrible, mizz. The island went into shock. Such a dreadful end for a good man. No-one knows how it happened. Most folk think it was an accident, that he was dead tired and fell, but there’s others, less kindly, who think he was pushed."

  "How appalling. What do you think really happened? Did someone hate Reuben so much that they would want to kill him?" Kira thought she knew the answer. Benjamin hated Rueben but she could not believe that her grandfather would take such an awful revenge.

  "Well maybe, but I knows it wasn’t Mr Benjamin because he was here, nursing a swollen sprained ankle and in a mighty bad temper with it,” said Jessy. “He was too much a gentleman, even if he was raw jealous of Mr Reuben and Dolly. He’d fallen over some left-out tool in the yard and there was no way he could have climbed the steps up to the furnaces. He was hobbling about, bad tempered, on a stick for days."

  "Does Mr Giles know this?" Kira asked quietly.

  "I don’t rightly know. He was a small boy when it happened and Lace only a toddler. You know, you and Mr Giles would make an ideal couple, right for each other, both so clever and hard working, looking out for sugar and the island."

  "Mr Giles doesn’t think so," said Kira, turning away so that Jessy could not see her face. She did not want to talk about Giles any more. It was over and nothing could be done about it. As Lace said, she had had her time.

  Kira tried to light a bonfire but the wood was still too wet to burn. Steam was rising off the sodden land as an apologetic sun rose in the sky. The breadfruit tree was badly damaged, despite Benjamin’s pruning, but its roots were secure and it would survive. Benjamin said he was going to put a plaque on the tree, commemorating their meeting, and ordering that the tree should never be cut down. She smiled at the thought.

  "Is it all that old rumour and gossip that’s stopping you and Mr Giles from getting together?" said Jessy, collecting the empty mug and tray. She went indoors to fetch more matches. "That wood won’t burn yet, you know."

  "I know," said Kira, suddenly tired of the effort.

  "The island won’t let that old gossip go, yet it’s so back in time. Then especially when Reuben done get himself killed. As if he couldn’t stand living any longer without his Dolly."

  Kira felt a headache coming on. She was more tired than she knew, and tired of loving people who didn’t love her back. The trauma of the hurricane had taken its toll, then all the physical work since. She wanted Jessy to go on talking, yet she also wanted her to go away. "You mean he may have killed himself? You know about Reuben and Dolly then?"

  "Lordie yes, mizz. Everybody knew. It was no secret. Those two thought nobody knew but the whole island knew of them meeting on the beach. Secret? It weren’t no secret, Lordie no!" Jessy went into a peal of laughter that denied the tragedy of the romance.

  Kira was afraid of what Jessy might be going to say. Her heart suddenly lost its rhythm.

  "They were mad for each other and it showed. Especially Miss Dolly. She were reckless girlie in love. Nothing could stop her, yet she done go marry Mr Benjamin all the same, daft thing."

  "They say that before her wedding, she and Reuben," Kira began cautiously, not sure how much Jessy would divulge. "That she and Reuben spent the night together."

  “Yes, they sure done that.”

  Thirty-Two

  Jessy’s thoughts drifted back to the past.

  “I knows they spent the night together at Sugar Hill. Nobody know exactly what went on, but it don’t take too much guessing. They sure weren’t playing dominoes or drinking cocoa."

  "If that’s so, then Tamara, my mother, could have been Reuben’s child. That’s the crunch, Jessy. She might not have known it but she could have been pregnant when she went to her wedding."

  There, Kira had said it aloud. It was out in the open, black and white. Tamara could have been Reuben’s child.

  "Rightly so, she could have been," said Jessy, a disapproving tone entering her voice for the first time. "But she wasn’t. I dressed Miss Dolly for her wedding in that old ramshackle painter’s house of her father’s. I went up because she had no mother or bridesmaid to help her. When I got there, she was mortal upset."

  "What do you mean?"

  "There was blood running down her legs and she thought she was dying. She didn’t have no regular times of the month for her flow and she didn’t know what it meant. No mother to tell her and a father with his head in a paint pot. So I told her and fixed her up and she was terrified it was going to show through her wedding dress and everyone would see. She was so ashamed, but I told her it was natural and nothing to be ashamed of. No, Dolly weren’t pregnant on her wedding day. Just inconvenienced."

  Kira knew Jessy was telling the truth and the relief was overwhelming. She felt careless and amazingly happy. She could hardly wait to find Giles and tell him the truth, to throw herself into his arms and make him love her again. But she did not know where he was or if his love had survived. He had gone away, that day of Hurricane Erica, and she had not seen him since; she was not sure of anything.

  "Poor Dolly," said Kira. "What a dreadful thing to happen on your wedding day, but not the end of the world if the man really loves you."

  "And Mr Benjamin loved her badly, so you see, he’s your true granddaddy. Tamara was his baby girl."

  "But he was never sure?"

  "No, how could he be? Because Dolly never told him or let him anywhere near her bed for days. Like she said, she was ashamed of the flow."

  "Couldn’t you ever tell him what you’ve just told me?" Kira asked. "It might have helped."

  "Lordie no, I wouldn’t talk to a gentleman about such intimate feminine things." Jessy was shocked at the idea. "It’s women’s talk. Sides, it wouldn’t be nice, Mr Benjamin being my employer and all.”

  Kira sighed. If only Jessy had overcome her scruples all those years
ago. But she wasn’t to know that such knowledge would have made the difference to so many people’s lives. Tamara would not have died, thousands of miles away, in poverty. Benjamin and Reuben might have been able to work together more amicably; Kira would have had a family when she most needed one.

  But Kira did not blame Jessy. It was her upbringing, her sense of her place, of what was right and wrong to talk about. Nothing could change the past but Kira could now change the future.

  Kira wiped her hands hastily on her old jeans. "I’ve suddenly remembered something else I must do," she said, hurrying away. "Thank you for the coffee."

  She did not stop to tidy herself but hurried down the lane and towards the beach. It was unrecognisable, strewn with flotsam and jetsam, torn from the ocean’s depths in the storm. The beach had completely changed in appearance, even if the storm had calmed and the sea was as peaceful as if Erica had never happened.

  She would have no scruples in telling Giles. It was too important. She was sure now about their rightness for each other. She loved him. A seed was growing out of the darkness and it would blossom in the sun.

  Giles was at Copens. She knew he would be there. Something had told her, drawn her to his villa like a magnet, not aware of the pull. She hesitated in what had once been a lovely garden, wondering how he would greet her.

  But she need not have worried. He flung his arms round her and held her tightly. Not kissing her, holding himself away from her mouth, but the closeness telling her everything she wanted to know. The moment was golden and still. They clung like survivors after a disaster.

  "Darling, darling, are you all right? That stupid phone call, I’m sorry." He had not shaven for days and a dark stubble covered his jaw. His clothes were old and crumpled but he still looked every inch the man she adored. He was so strong, and the intensity in his eyes made her bones weaken.

  "I’m fine. I’ve been clearing up. Fitt’s House and Dolly’s old home, the painter’s museum."

  "So I’ve heard. News still travels fast. And now you’ve come to help me. Here’s a broom."