Then there were those nights, like a fever, when the drums did not stop. There was something in the insistence of the boy’s voice, like the insistence of those drums. And from his bedroom window, Vincent saw Sybil going down the gap to the village the other side of the savannah, under tamarind trees. She was dressed in white and her head was tied with a white cloth. Then he knew that soon there would be clapping and singing, which sounded like wailing, chanting and lamenting; not like hymns in church in the Catholic chapel; not Latin hymns, not Tantum Ergo, or, O Salutaris at Benediction, or, the favourite ones to Our Lady, Ave Ave Ave Maria, or to the Sacred heart, Sweet Sacrament Divine, but singing which was more rhythmic, more rocking, more hand clapping, sounding like somewhere else and yet sounding like it belonged right there in that village.
The palms sighed. The boy’s stories stirred all of this in him, and more that he wished to forget.
When Vincent walked out onto the landing, he saw that the door of Theo’s room opposite had been left wide open. He could not hear the boy downstairs. He had not looked out of his window onto the jetty. Theo had taken to going out early in the morning, before dawn even, and sitting at the end of the jetty.
Had he missed the news? Had the boy turned down the volume of the radio?
As he approached, the light in the room seemed different. Not its usual, bright, early morning dazzle. When he got to the door and looked in, he could see why. It was the reflection that the morning sun was making on the walls.
At first, Vincent was not quite sure what had happened. Then he saw the brown grip, which was open on the floor and left in the middle of the room. He recognised it as the brown grip that Theo had arrived with, that he had run down the corridor at Santa Ana to get. Vincent could see him now, so small then, the boy and his grip which he had imagined held his small number of clothes. Quite obviously, they had held newspapers as well. Cut up newspaper was strewn on the floor. Newspaper cuttings were stuck to every wall.
Vincent went up to the wall nearest the door. The paper was wet and smelt of that familiar glue, flour and water, he had used as a child sticking pictures into a scrap book. He walked around the room passing his hand over the moist, damp walls. Where the sunlight hit the wall directly, the paper was drying fast. Vincent noticed that it was the entire room, not a single inch of wall was not covered.
He was struck by this transformation of the room. It was only as he stood there, staring around, imagining that Theo might emerge from somewhere, that he began to remember that, of course, it was customary for poor people to cover the walls of their small board houses with newspaper. It kept the rooms warm and stopped rain coming in. It brightened them up as well, papered over cracks. He remembered walking through the barrack yards below Versailles, and seeing the interiors of the board houses and the barrack rooms. He remembered Sybil, hording newspaper.
He began to read where there was a picture that he recognised. When he looked at the date of the paper, he could see that plainly these were newspapers from a few years back. The boy had horded The Gazette and The Guardian.
He looked at the familiar photographs, and began reading the news below them. The photograph he settled on was one of a fire in Fyzabad in 1937, when the oilfield rioters had captured the fallen policeman, Corporal Charles King, who had had a leg injury. They had fallen on him and drenched him with kerosene and set him alight. The police were unable to get to the body in time. The well known story was there, pasted on the walls. All of this time Theo had horded these cuttings!
Vincent remembered him staring at the burnt body of Michael Johnson in the yard at Saint Damian’s. He heard again Ti-Jean’s rendering of the calypso, When they beat him and they burn him in Fyzabad. As he stared at the walls, Theo appeared at the door.
Vincent turned towards him. ‘Theo, come here, boy.’ He opened his arms. Theo ran and clung to him.
Agave
The pouis were golden on the hills. Where there had once been an old cocoa estate, Vincent could see, this morning, the tall immortelle, planted for shade, the colour of red coral, orangey and pink, changing in the light and high breeze at the end of the dry season in May, 1940. He watched the morning hills as the pirogue cut across Chac Chac Bay to La Chapelle Bay. Jonah had brought the message. It was a note from Mother Superior asking him to come to the convent before going to Saint Damian’s.
He was met at the jetty by the infirmarian, Sister Luke, and taken to a cell separate from the others, off the infirmary.
‘It’s Sister Thérèse,’ Sister Luke whispered as she opened the door of the dimly lit cell.
He followed the infirmarian into the gloom of the room with the white muslin curtains still closed. He surveyed the small room. Sister Luke pulled the curtains. There was a single iron bed and a prie Dieu, above which was a small wooden crucifix. In the corner, to the right of the door, was a small table on which stood a white enamel basin with a jug. The rim of the basin was blue, as was the lip and handle of the jug. A white cotton towel hung from a railing at the side of the table. Along the opposite wall was another small table and chair, used as a desk for reading and study. Lemon light flooded the room as the nun opened the curtains.
Sister Thérèse lay in bed, covered with a white cotton sheet drawn right up to her neck. Only her face was showing, looking out of the round of the white cotton skull cap, stretched around her face, and firmly buttoned under her chin, attached to a cotton shift. She was cocooned. She lay quite still, as Sister Luke ushered Vincent to the bedside with the firm whisper.
‘Doctor?’ Her statement was inflected like a question.
He made to sit at the edge of the bed, as was his bedside manner on the wards. The infirmarian restrained him, and without saying a word, brought the chair from the desk. She put it next to the bed, motioning him to sit, as she stood by the door with her arms in her sleeves and her head bowed.
Sister Thérèse lay with her eyes closed. Vincent leant towards her. ‘Thérèse.’ Sister Luke cleared her throat, disapprovingly. He was aware that he had been too familiar, omitting the title, ‘Sister’, as he was tempted to do when they worked together. Sister Thérèse opened her eyes. She moved her lips. He leant closer to hear and understand.
‘Meuse.’
‘Say it again.’ He had not caught the word.
She raised her head to speak more clearly. ‘Meuse.’ She ran her fingers along the sheets, tracing a swerving line along the white cotton sheet. She kept on drawing the invisible line, repeating what he then understood was the course of the river. She crumpled the covering sheet, pinching it to make peaks. ‘Ardennes, les forêts, les montagnes.’ She pointed with her fingertips. He watched her fingers, the one with her gold ring, her bridal ring, dab at the sheets, then crumple them in her fist. She concluded her action with, ‘Sedan.’
The infirmarian cleared her throat again, showing her irritation. Vincent pulled back from the bed. Sister Thérèse smoothed out the sheet, stretching her hand towards where his hand had been. ‘Warm,’ she whispered. He turned to Sister Luke as if to say something, then turned back to Sister Thérèse.
She began again, more violently, digging into the mattress with her fingers, drawing deep invisible lines, radiating out in all directions. She stabbed the sheets more deliberately. He could not understand what she was trying to tell him. He wished he was not being policed. She lay back again and closed her eyes, exhausted.
‘Sister Marguerite found her in the chapel. She must’ve fainted, or fallen asleep at her vigil. She found her on the floor before the communion rails.’ The infirmarian’s whispers were sharply enunciated.
Vincent nodded.
She whispered again, close to his ear. ‘She’s been babbling incoherently since then,’ she said dismissively.
He turned, still sitting, and looked up at her, speaking quietly, ‘She’s quite coherent, quite coherent.’
Sister Luke went back to her post. Her fingers worried her length of black rosary beads, the Fifteen Mysteries hanging
at her side.
Under her breath, Vincent distinctly heard her ultimate dismissal. ‘Les Juifs.’
Vincent was startled. ‘In the convent,’ he thought.
Sister Thérèse opened her eyes and looked at Vincent. ‘You see,’ she said. ‘Even here.’ She had not missed the tone of prejudice.
He turned again to look at the infirmarian on guard.
In order to calm the furious illustrations, he put his hand over Sister Thérèse’s. This had been his gesture before, a doctor’s way. She opened her eyes, and raised her eyebrows. Vincent understood her frustration with the presence of the other nun.
The sun was up and it poured into the cell. The dry season was ticking in the bush. The cigales prayed for rain. Beyond the garden with the cemetery, the thunder of the waves breaking at Bande du Sud, was carried on the salty air. The peninsular, at this end of the island, ended in the mangroves and agaves around Salt Pond.
Vincent turned abruptly to face Sister Luke. ‘I need you to go and call Mother Superior. You may still catch her before she leaves for Saint Damian’s. If she’s already left, I want a message sent to her to come at once. Doctor Metivier wants to see her. Do you understand?’ He spoke in his most authoritative tone. ‘I think you may find that she has already left for Saint Damian’s.’
Sister Luke hesitated, and then left the cell, mumbling something about it being out of order, leaving him alone with a nun. The door of the cell was banged shut.
Then there was peace and the cigales’ prayers were a lament.
‘Thank you.’ Sister Thérèse opened her eyes. Her hand closed over his.
‘Tell me what happened.’ He held her hand. He smelt her sweet breath. It was the smell of communion wafers.
His childhood flooded his mind, that sweet smell of communion, when he and Odetta were allowed to kneel next to each other at mass, giggling and squirming in their seats. He remembered his mother’s voice, ‘That child must sit at the back with Sybil.’
Sister Thérèse sat up and then leant over the edge of the bed, digging under the mattress for something. Vincent leaned over to help her. She extracted from inside the fibre mattress, where she had hidden them, a bundle of letters tied with brown string. He immediately recognised her father’s handwriting. He remembered the letters she had brought to read to him at Saint Damian’s two years ago. While they were consolation, they were also the source of her fear. Without opening them, she clasped them to her breasts, hugging them to her neck. Then, staring at the ceiling, she began, as if she were praying, to recite a litany.
‘Pogrom, ghetto.’ Then with her hand at her side, her finger tracing the course of rivers, the contours of hills, drawing the boundaries of maps which were learnt at school, she continued her litany. ‘Meuse, Rhine, Verdun, Donaumont.’ She rested and started again. ‘Maginot, Petain, le vainquer de Verdun, le medécin de l’Armée, Jeanne d’Arc.’ He listened to her bizarre recital.
He heard the words plucked from a childhood memory, a father’s history and political lessons.
‘La der des ders. Verdun!’ She had learnt her First War. As she grew more quiet, she whispered, ‘Dreyfus, le juif.’ Her words disappeared with the breeze.
Each name conjured an epoch and an event, describing now what she was imagining would happen to these places, to that history, for her father and her beloved France. She riffled her father’s letters, tearing them open for phrases which she spat out from her position, propped up now on her fibre pillow.
Vincent stared, distressed.
‘Mourir pour Dantzig?’ She snarled, in the voice of another.
‘Thérèse.’ He tried to comfort, forgetting his decorum.
‘Phoney war.’ She twisted the word in a mock, posh English accent.
‘Come Thérèse,’ Vincent stretched to hold her hand, disentangle her fingers from the brown string, and the ripped, opened correspondence from her father.
But she continued her diatribe. Softly now, ‘La Marne Blanche.’ Vincent did not know how to stem this flow, how to quieten this derangement. For some time, he had felt her father’s letters were not good for her. The convent rules should have been followed. She should have got rid of these letters. But she had broken the rules. She hoarded his words and fed her fear with them. She plucked them from his historical analyses.
‘Nous somme dans un pot de chambre et nous y serons emmerdés. Shit.’
He was shocked but listened. He wondered if Mother Superior was going to arrive. What would he tell her? What would be his advice, his diagnosis?
‘Thérèse, let me give you something to calm you.’ He did not know what. Maybe words were the best cure, this bloodletting of words.
It was as if she was having convulsions, as she spat out the names: ‘Gamelin, Daladier, Weygand.’ Her father’s bitterness was like a blood transfusion. ‘Skitzkrieg.’
He heard the last twisted word. He got up and opened the door and looked down the corridor. No one was about. The sisters were at the hospital. Somewhere, he heard the clanging of a water bucket and the slop of a mop. In the haze at the end of the corridor, he saw a lay sister mopping the floor. Hunched over her work, she looked like a mirage; the morning sun flooding through the arch from the convent’s cloister into the gloom of the corridor.
He returned to the cell and to her bedside. She cried out, the words sounding like the voices of those who had attacked in the streets on Kristallnacht. ‘Klotzen nicht kleckern’. He knew enough German to translate. ‘Make waves not ripples.’
The room went silent after that. Then, like the very waters of those rivers she had dug out on her sheets, the words flowed.
Vincent had a vision, as he sat with his hands in hers, of the low-lying countryside of Hainault and Flanders, like the watercolours and oils of their artists, seen in galleries in London; low-lying fields, water meadows and poplars; clouds, windmills and the bridges over the rivers of her maps. Her voice was precise on each name. A toponymy, a poem of names: ‘Meuse, Sambre, Schelde, Escaut, Scarpe, Lys.’ These were arteries of invasion. She continued, ‘Seine, Marne, Aisne, Oise.’ Like a strategist, she was mapping the navigational routes to Paris. Then, she stopped abruptly. ‘Non.’
She was sitting up in bed. She had kicked off the white cotton sheet, and sat with her legs splayed. She pulled her shift above her knees. He did not know where to look. He stared at her in her cotton shift, her white cocoon, her head tightly bonnetted, her face encircled. He saw only her wide black eyes, those shining eyes. She flattened the surface between her legs and began another map, another route. ‘Somme, Amiens, Seine, Rouen.’ She looked up at Vincent and smiled. ‘Let the last man brush the Channel with his sleeve.’
He listened, amazed. She lay back and slept. He got up from his chair and covered her with the sheet she had thrown off, pulling it right up over her bare legs and knees. He was relieved that Mother Superior had not come in at that moment.
The name-letting had stopped. Peace reigned.
He sat and watched her. He listened to the sea, to the wind and the cigales’ cries which never ceased.
Vincent was in the servants’ room of the house at Versailles. Odetta was sick. Back from school, he had gone to visit her. He was allowed this one visit, because Odetta was going away. They did not tell him where she was going. His mother had said that they could not keep her here. He remembered her running her hand through his hair and saying, ‘Go and say goodbye, darling. Don’t stay long. She’s not well. Tell Sybil to come upstairs afterwards.’ His mother had always comforted him, despite her disapproval.
He kicked a stone across the gravelled yard. He arrived dusty and sweating. Sybil was sitting by the bed. ‘You come to see her. Cheups.’ She got up from the bedside.
Like everyone knew everything, but kept their silence. The door to the bedroom was ajar, and the lemon sunlight threw shadows on the pitch pine floor. Motes of dust hung in the bands of light. Odetta was sitting up in bed in a white cotton chemise with her legs apart, her small b
are shoulders, her round stomach lifting the chemise. Her black hair was unplaited, and was a glistening nimbus of black net. It reminded him of his mother’s lace mantilla which always looked as if it had tarantulas trapped in its embroidery.
At first, when they were small, she was the little girl in the turret room, showing him her spider. And then, that last August, when they were older, so quiet and alone, the rain drumming on the roof, as if no one else existed in the world, they stopped playing, and found that sweet pleasure, which still, always, reminded him of the fragrance of guavas. It was a moment he had never been able to recreate, but which, on every other occasion with a girl, there had been an attempt. He was trembling over her. But, finding her cunt, that word, had been easier than boys at school had said. He had had a childhood to discover the tight entrance to her wet flower. Her guiding fingers had helped with their knowing touch. He liked to smell and lick them when they had been there.
Right away, they knew that there would be consequences; his awful banishment once she was discovered making baby. ‘Why she go lie? Why for? Is the Master. Is Master Vincent, Madam.’
It was the grown-ups who quarrelled, his mother with Sybil, ‘Always bringing that child up to the house, what did I tell you?’ They quarrelled about who had failed to instil the right ways in their children.
Then the words of Theo’s stories, the history of the Dellacourts of Corinth, flooded Vincent’s mind.
Vincent was startled out of his daydream. Thérèse had dozed. He thought he heard someone in the corridor. He thought it might be Mother Superior arriving at last. He put his head outside the door. It was the lay sister finishing her chores with her clanging bucket.
Thérèse lay quite still, as if she was sleeping. He went and stood at the window. Thoughts of Odetta had disturbed him.
Night Calypso Page 15
