by Alec Waugh
And at lunch there would be Gerald back from his office with news about the crops, about a demand for higher wages, about a recommendation that was being made to the legislative council, about a memorandum to the Colonial Office. That too was fun.
In England she had heard women complain that their husbands bored them by “talking shop.” But in England work was something that men went away from their homes to do in offices. It was something with which women were not concerned; men talked of their business friends, their business lunches. It was different here; where everyone knew everybody’s business and most of one’s friends’ income; where there was no distinction between business friends and the friends that one asked home; where business and social life were inextricably one. She never found conversation dull or difficult during that hurried lunch before Gerald retired for his half-hour’s sleep.
And later, after her own siesta, when she had woken refreshed and rested, the real holiday of the day began: with tennis-balls lashed across asphalt courts; with small urchins hunting the bushes that fringed the nine-hole golf course for sliced approach shots; with the parking space jammed along the beach—two hours of violent exercise to work off the torpor of the day, to prepare a proper basis for the succession of rum swizzles for which the sun’s sinking would be the signal, either at a bungalow to celebrate this birthday or that return, the arrival of this or the other tourist, or, if there were no excuse for a party, in the long gallery of the club. “It’s a perfect life,” she assured her mother.
Yet, even so, it was with misgivings that she had paused, pen in hand, above the sheet of notepaper on which she was to describe hour by hour the details of the day that would satisfy her sisters’ Hollywood-born conception of the tropics. To say that one had a pretty house, that the landscape was picturesque, that one’s new friends were nice, that one’s status as a married woman was a flattering promotion, that one found one’s new way of life congenial, was to write the kind of letter that might be expected of any happy bride after two months of marriage. Where in such a recital was the glamour of the tropics, its variety, its vividness, its strangeness?
She had smiled to herself, faced with this predicament.
For life here in El Santo was those things. It was strange, it was varied, it was vivid. Only somehow you could not explain how it came to be, to someone who did not know it; any more than you could explain the reality of snow to a West Indian peasant.
That was in her third month of marriage.
Now, six years later, she was to smile, remembering that predicament. Variety, she would think: the only difference now between one day and another was whether Gerald fell asleep in his armchair before or after dinner; and whether he had had three or four rum swizzles at the club before coming up to lunch.
And he had had four; four or possibly five, she thought, as she watched him climb out of his car on the morning of Barclay’s startling outburst.
With a slow, shuffling step he came towards her. He had been on the wharf that morning supervising the unloading of a schooner. He was wearing khaki trousers and a khaki shirt. They were faded, not very clean and rather ragged. He looked old and tired. He had not actually put on much weight during the last few years. He could still wear the morning-coat in which he had been married. But she thought of him now as fat, just as she thought of him now as middle-aged. He had no longer that zest for living that had made him such a dashing figure when he had strolled along the front at Brighton, that had made her think of him in terms not of years but of vitality. When he was with a crowd, in his store, on a party, at the club, he kept up his old exuberance. But the moment he was alone, he dropped his shoulders. Life was an effort for him now: because, she supposed, he had nothing to keep him young, no incentive, nothing in particular to live for; to look forward to. Would it have been different, she wondered, if their child had lived, if it had been possible for her to make that attempt again? It might have been. One could not tell.
He was breathing heavily as he came up the short flight of steps. He paused, his hand on the railing, his eyes half-closed, drawing a long slow breath into his lungs, shaking his head, beating his fist above his heart.
“This chest of mine. It’s intolerable. It spoils everything for me. Life isn’t worth living with it.”
He wheezed like punctured bellows. Poor Gerald, she thought.
He had a wretched time with that chest of his. Any violent effort made him wheeze. Night after night the cooling of the air would start him off on a series of coughing and choking fits that would shake his heavy frame as large waves shake a liner, with shudders running through from prow to stern. Poor Gerald. That chest of his spoilt half his fun. Yet at the same time she could not help suspecting that it would not worry him so much if only he would drink a little less.
Pityingly her eyes followed him as he shuffled across the verandah towards his room. Then suddenly she remembered. The look of pity changed. He was not a man to be pitied on such a day as this. Had not she news for him that momentarily at least would bring back that zest for living? The building of this hotel would be the starting of a boom for everything in El Santo. She smiled, remembering her news : a smile that changed, that softened as remembrance brought its own corollary. I wonder, she thought, what Barclay will have to say to me in that letter?
3
“Darling,” the letter ran. “You won’t, will you, mind my writing that. It’s what you are to me : it’s how I think of you. How I can never speak to you, except on paper. Were you angry with me this morning? Are you still? I pray you’re not. I shouldn’t have spoken : I know that. I’ve tried to stifle back what I’ve been feeling: all these days now, from the first time I saw you. For it was from the first, do you realize that? I was standing on the quay. I was fussed and nervous. You know how it is: that noise, those porters shouting, everyone fighting for your luggage. What an appalling place, I thought. I wished I’d never come. Then suddenly I saw you. Have you any idea how exquisite you looked? You had a white dress on, there was some kind of a green trimming. You had a floppy hat, a white one with a broad green ribbon round it. You looked so cool: so calm. And then you turned and looked at me. There was so much happening. There was so much noise. But that first sight of you : I can’t describe it. It was like the first glimpse of a new country through a porthole window. Something seemed to stop inside me.
“And then that first sound of your voice. How does one describe a voice? They talk of gold and silver. But what does that mean? I only know what your voice did to me. It was the loveliest sound I had ever heard. I found it so difficult not to say ‘ Don’t stop, please go on talking.’
“All that day it was a long enchantment: being with you, watching your expression change; listening to your voice. That night when I was back in my hotel, I stood, for I don’t know how long, on the balcony. It was quite quiet in the town. I could hear the croaking of the frogs, and the sound in the hills of drums : there were fireflies and a young moon, sinking towards the sea: with far away on the horizon a liner’s lights. The air was so warm, so scented. It wasn’t my first West Indian night. I’d had to wait four days in Barbados for my connection. But I’d a feeling that I was seeing the West Indies for the first time : that they’d become real to me at last. But it wasn’t really of the West Indies that I was thinking. They were a background : nothing more. ‘ Tomorrow I’ll be seeing her,’ I thought. I kept repeating that. It ran like a refrain between my thoughts. ‘ Tomorrow I’ll be seeing her. Tomorrow I’ll be seeing her.’
“When I woke up next morning I couldn’t at first understand why I should be so happy. Then I remembered and felt even happier.
“That’s how it began. That’s how it’s gone on : growing deeper, stronger, tenderer. I never knew that anyone could exist like you: that anyone could be so beautiful, so gracious. I kept telling myself that you couldn’t really be such a miracle, that there must be a snag somewhere. I tried to find that snag. If only I can find it, I thought, then I shan’t fall
in love with her. Because I didn’t want to fall in love with you. It was a hopeless thing to do. I realized that. But I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t find that snag. I fell deeper, deeper into love, till I knew it was no good my trying to save myself: till I let go : till it was a relief, a pride to sink: to know myself sinking deeper, deeper, beyond hope of rescue.
“I felt a pride in my own surrender. That’s why I had to speak to you this morning; why I’m writing to you now. I’m proud of that surrender. I want you to know that. I don’t mind looking silly. There are some men who won’t admit that they’re in love until they’re quite certain that they’re loved back. Even then they’re shy of using the actual word. I’m not. I’m proud. I wish we were back in the days of Arthurian Romance, when I could wear your favours in my helmet. I should like to proclaim to all the world that there’s no one lovelier in the world than you : to challenge anyone to deny it. That’s why I’m writing to you now : so that you shall know how I feel. I’ll not be a nuisance. I’ll not pester you. I don’t ask anything in return. I just ask to be allowed to love you. You’ll let me, won’t you?
“My love to you, my darling, all of it.”
Slowly, sentence by sentence, she read the letter through : then closed her eyes : its phrases ringing through her head. No one had ever written to her like that. It was the first real love-letter that she had ever had. There had been no need for letters during a six weeks’ engagement when she had been seeing Gerald practically every day: when such few letters as he had written had been little more than a practical setting out of plans—that he had arranged for passages on a certain sailing; that he had cabled his agent in El Santo to make certain purchases. Scrawled little notes, written in a hurry by a busy man.
And anyhow, Gerald was not the man to write this kind of letter: he was not the kind of man to whom words came easily. She had known he loved her, not because of any eloquence of pleading, but because of the tremor that came into his voice when he said some quite ordinary thing, because of the glow that lit his eyes when she came into a room. Gerald was not the man to pour out himself on paper.
She rose to her feet. She walked over to the edge of the verandah. She had waited till she was alone, till Gerald had gone to bed, to read the letter. The sky was cloudless, and the air was warm. From the garden stretching below her rose the scent of flowers; a heavy, exotic perfume; a mingled scent of jasmin and the white shrub they call “Lady of the Night.” From the stream below her came the croak of frogs. Faintly from afar came the slow-paced “tom-tom” of the drums. Behind the hills a moon was rising. On such a night as this a fortnight back, Barclay had repeated like a refrain “Tomorrow I’ll be seeing her.” Was he at this moment standing upon his balcony, sleepless too; his thoughts fixed on her? The sentences of his letter rang through her head. She drew deep into her lungs a long slow breath. It was lovely to have had such a letter written her.
4
El Santo, during the four and a half centuries of its existence on European atlases, had known many changes of government and fortune. Discovered by Columbus, it had been captured from the Spaniards in the middle of the seventeenth century by the pirates of Tortuga. Colonized subsequently by the French, it had remained French through the long wars of the eighteenth century, when the sugar islands were the focal point of European colonial policy. Recaptured after the Battle of the Saints by Rodney, after whom its capital had been renamed, and to whom in the centre of the Savane, surrounded by a quadrangle of royal palms, stood a large white statue, its retention in the Treaty of Versailles was the one entry on the English credit side.
To the French planters this surrender seemed at the time the most cruel betrayal of their rights, but later they were to recognize that it was to this betrayal that they owed their ultimate survival. Protected by the English Fleet, they did not suffer the slave risings, the confiscations of property, the massacres that were to destroy during the French Revolution the traditions and culture of their cousins in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and, though in a lesser degree, in Martinique. In El Santo the original French atmosphere survived.
Although it was a century and a half since the French flag had flown from the fort above the harbour, the natives still talked a patois that from a distance sounded rather more French than the chatter of Barbadian stevedores sounded English. The island was ninety-five per cent. Catholic, and the telephone book was filled with names of mixed French origin, such as you might find in Guernsey. The caprice of history had given El Santo a quality that was not to be found elsewhere. Few islands except Barbados had such a “lived-in ” feeling.
But though El Santo had been saved from the disasters of the Revolution, it was not spared the slow disintegration, the outcome of absentee ownership following the emancipation of the slaves, that during the latter part of the nineteenth century undermined the wealth of the West Indies, forcing planter after planter into bankruptcy.
A sense of “departed glory ” was implicit in the ruined aqueducts that flanked the Boucans, in the crumbled masonry of deserted mansions, in the abandoned red brick barracks that could be acquired at a nominal rent by anyone who cared to convert them into bungalows.
The least inconvenient of these buildings, originally the officers’ mess, had been taken over by the golf club. And Mary had often mused ironically on the twist of fate by which the social centre of a society that had regarded as the two essential visas on a passport an unblemished ancestry and a dissociation with “trade “should have become the social centre of a community based on barter and a disinclination to study family antecedents further back than the second generation.
It was not, however, in an ironic, but in a slightly nervous mood that Mary drove up to the club on the afternoon following her receipt of Barclay’s long letter. Barclay would probably be there. She had not seen him in the town that morning, she felt shy of their first meeting. The long letter had created a new situation between them. She would have to be very diplomatic, she told herself.
To her relief, if to her surprise, however, he showed himself perfectly capable of such diplomacy. He was sitting next to one of the more attractive of the unmarried girls in the community. They were examining a catalogue and he waved to her to join them.
“I was thinking of getting a small motor-launch,” he said. “I was asking Mavis’s advice. Tell me what you think.”
His interest appeared to be concentrated solely on his intended purchase. His manner could not have been mere matter-of-fact. He wanted a launch, he explained, that he could work himself; something big enough to cruise between the islands. His shyness had vanished. He showed no anxiety to retire from the general conversation into a duologue. He seemed, on the contrary, to want people round him. He kept inviting newcomers to his table, and ordering fresh rounds of swizzles. When finally Gerald came across to remind her that they were dining out, he said, as though it were the most innocent transaction :
“Oh, by the way, you remember that novel I said I’d lend you? I forgot to bring it here. I’ll send it up by hand tonight.”
He looked at her very straight as he said that: in a look that told her beyond doubt that she would find a letter there.
“Dearest,” the letter ran, “I feel so happy, so relieved. I can be open with you now, as I could never be before. Wasn’t it altogether different at the club? I used to feel fussed and anxious the moment you arrived. I’d start trying to get away from whomsoever I might be with, I’d want to be beside you, if possible alone with you. Not out of any jealousy. I’m not that kind. I wanted to impress myself upon you; make you aware of me; say something, do something that would make you think of me, that would interest you in me, that might even make you discuss me, talk about me when I wasn’t there. I felt that I couldn’t afford to miss a single moment.
“But that’s all over now. There’s no need for me to try and impress you in any of those ways any longer. I’m a privileged person, the person who’s in love with you. Didn’t you feel how much more fun it was this
evening? There was I sitting by Mavis Trevor—she’s rather amusing, don’t you think. If it had been any other day I’d have been making excuses to get away from her. There’d have been constraint: it would have been a bore for you; being monopolized, huddled away into a corner. It was so much more fun, wasn’t it, the three of us sitting there together, with others coming up to join us, ourselves a part of a group, yet set apart by our secret knowledge. Didn’t you feel as though we were fellow-conspirators, knowing something that they didn’t?
“And tonight, back alone in my hotel, I don’t feel lonely as I should have done two days ago. I can talk to you, on paper. Darling, do you mind if I talk to you, if I often talk to you this way? I won’t bother you. I won’t pester you, I promise that. There’s nothing that can be more boring than to have someone one doesn’t love in love with one. But I won’t be a nuisance, I promise you. As long as you’ll let me write to you. May I? Night after night, when I come back alone, with your image before my eyes, with the sound of your voice in my ears; my heart and spirit flooded with echoes and with pictures, feeling you so close to me, loving you so much. You’ll let me talk to you then, won’t you. You’ll let me write?”
