by Alec Waugh
How her heart’s beat had quickened the first time that she had stood here, at Gerald’s side. And now, after seven years, yes, it gave her just that thrill: of having found at last the place that all her life she had been looking for. That was how it had been. This was how it was. She stood gazing in a trance : a trance so deep that she never heard the clatter of crockery as Jeanette laid the breakfast.
For the first time since she could remember she had to be told that her coffee was on the table.
“Ah yes, Jeanette, of course.”
There was a broad grin on Jeanette’s face. She was a friendly grinning creature. As they all were, these natives, friendly creatures if you were good to them. Her eyes followed Jeanette as she moved over to the kitchen. How well she walked, such grace. She would look well in that scarlet chiffon. Natives loved bright colours. And they were of the same height, Jeanette and she.
“Jeanette,” she called out. “You know that red dress of mine? It’ll be a long time before it’ll be proper for me to wear it. Would you care to have it? ”
She smiled at the astonishment, the childlike incredulous astonishment on Jeanette’s face. She’ll remember this moment as long as she lives, she thought.
“And live this day as if thy last.” How often had she not wondered how she would really spend it. Would she spend it in the virtuous way that the hymn supposed? Might she not on the contrary, knowing that there could be no consequences, rush to do all the things she had refrained through fear from doing?
And yes, she thought, it might be like that, if that last day had been arbitrarily chosen for her. But if the day was one that you yourself had chosen, why then it was easy. You had got to the end of a race. You finished it with the last ounce of energy you possessed.
She crossed from the breakfast-table to her desk. She drew a block of notepaper from the drawer.
“My dear J. B.,” she wrote, “Your card has made me so happy, so very happy. Of course I shall come to the party, for a few minutes, to wish them luck. Are you as happy about this as I in your place would be? They are such a delightful couple. They will have, I am sure, a delightful life together. But it’s for your sake even more than theirs that I am happy. You’ve been so kind to so many people. You deserve to have something like this happen to you. I have seen naturally little of you since your arrival. Perhaps one day soon we might have a drive together.”
She took another sheet.
“My dear,” she wrote, “I have just got J. B.’s invitation card. I am so happy, so more than happy for your sake. It is the kind of thing that I have always wished for you. No wonder you looked so happy yesterday. Good luck, Barclay dear, in every way. If prayers can help, you will have, you know, all mine.”
They won’t get those till tonight, she thought. Tonight or tomorrow morning. They would know by then.
She could picture how J. B.’s cheeks would flush. “I don’t think I ever really appreciated her,” he would say. “I knew she was attractive, that she was good company. But that she had a heart, such a heart… No, sir, I never realized that.”
And Barclay; with what fury of jealousy had she not two months back pictured him describing “the perfect affair “to some successor. She had squirmed at the boastful note that would light his voice. There would be no boastfulness in his voice now when he spoke of her: as he would speak, yes, of course he would. His voice would soften, grow deeper, fonder. “She was such a lovely person,” she could hear him saying. “The best thing that I could wish for my own son would be to meet some one like her.” He wouldn’t use her to promote his own prestige with some successor. It would make impossible the role of a successor. In his memory she would be unique and perfect: she would stand alone.
“Lucille,” she called. “I’m going out to swim. I’ll take some sandwiches. Yes, egg sandwiches, and you can fill the thermos; black coffee; and coconut milk. No, there’s no hurry. I shan’t be going out for an hour or so.”
The first two hours of the morning were by far the loveliest. The colours were fresh and clear. Later in the day leaves and flowers lost their individual colours; they became burnished surfaces, reflecting the midday sun. It was the mornings during their first year here that she had loved the most; lying out on the long chair on the verandah, her hands clasped behind her head, not doing anything, not reading, not even brooding; just watching the passing of the ships on the horizon, the lightning and darkening of the far humped outline of Martinique, the cars and peasants passing along the high hill road. It was so long since she had lain there in just that way, her hands behind her head, her mind a blank: no conscious thought; sensation merely. It was such a rest to lie like that. She had forgotten how beautiful it was.
How lucky she had been to come here. How few girls of her world had ever seen anything like this. She’d been lucky, very lucky.
She paused in the doorway of her bedroom, looking backwards : looking not at the verandah that stretched emptily in front of her, but at that long film of pictures to which that verandah was the background: seeing herself standing in the moonlight, reading Barclay’s letters; seeing the hammock and the dented cushions and the magazine flung downwards on the table; seeing herself watching across the bay for the sailing of the small white launch.
She sighed softly, tenderly. It had been lovely, She would only have half lived her life if she had never known those hours. How lucky she had been. How many girls born into her kind of world had ever known such hours?
Since Gerald’s death she had worn white. But she shook her head as she looked at the line of clothes hanging in her wardrobe. No, not white today. Something gayer, brighter, something more herself. Mourning seemed so inappropriate to the tropics. And that wasn’t the way she wanted to have people think of her. “I saw her that very morning,” she could hear them saying. “She was so young, so pretty.” What was that frock she had worn the morning she had met Barclay? The white-and-green. She took it from the hanger. It must be five months since she had worn it. It still looked new. Yes, she would like to have people think of her in this.
She walked slowly from the Savane where she had parked her car. She would go and see Miss Hardwick. Ask for some book or other. Say something that would please Miss Hardwick, some appreciation of the work that she was doing on the island. She would call on Mr. Carrington, thank him for all he’d done for her, apologizing for having been so stupid the day before, agree with him that the wise thing would be for her to go back to England, ask him to book a passage for her, leaving in his hands the winding-up of her estate.
Yes, she thought, as she walked into the Lido café. They’ll remember the day, remember it for ever. She could hear the quick stutter in Miss Hardwick’s voice: “And do you know that only that very morning she came to see me. And do you know what she said? It was so typical, I’ve always thought, of her…”
She could hear Carrington’s voice lift pompously: “She could not have been more gracious. She spoke so generously about the few things that I had been able to do for her …”
Yes, that was how it would be.
At one of the centre tables of the Lido, June Langley was sitting with Anne Kennerley. They waved to her, and she joined them. They were discussing Barclay’s engagement, as everyone in Rodney would be discussing it that morning. “Of course I know he’s supposed to be attractive,” June was asserting, “though I can’t myself say that he’s my type.”
Mary smiled to herself hearing that, remembering how Barclay had spoken of June Langley.
She looked at June thoughtfully. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been you, she thought. It was strange to think of that. What was it that Barclay had said of her: that when that kind of woman was really roused she could make all those Hollywood glamour girls seem tame? What was it that he had seen in her? June seemed so featureless, so sallow. Just that, she supposed; the fact that she was capable of being roused, the potentiality that he with his instinct recognized. If it hadn’t been me it would have been you.
She rose to her feet.
“It was nice seeing you both,” she said. “I shan’t be going out a great deal. And I expect to be leaving El Santo fairly soon. But I don’t want to lose sight of my real friends. Perhaps you might come up to the bungalow one morning for a little bridge? “
They’ll remember, she thought, that I called them my “real” friends. On the way out she paused at the desk, by the proprietress.
“How pretty your daughter’s getting. She makes me wish I’d been here twenty years ago to see you at her age.”
It was almost the first time she had ever spoken to her. How easy it was to be friendly in that way when one was not committing oneself to anything. How easy it was to make a gesture. It was the maintaining, not the touching of a level that was the thing.
And that’s that, she thought, as she walked towards her car; walked slowly, deliberately, because it was hot, because the streets were crowded, because she was busy noticing the flags that hung from the shop windows, the masked figures that in preparation for the next week’s carnival cavorted round the statue, between the palms, cracking their whips, prancing, shaking their balloons; noticing the derelict bodies that lay out in the shadow of the colonnade; the children with their ragged trousers, the young men waiting for tourists to whom they would rush with a bright smile, a doffed cap and a “What can Robert Taylor do for you? ”; noting each detail of the crowded scene, just as she noticed them in her first days, when she had paced these streets slowly, looking from left to right with new and eager eyes, making a mental inventory of each detail of the coloured scene.
Yes, it was a lovely place. Why shouldn’t an hotel succeed here? Why shouldn’t it become as much of a tourist resort as Cuba or the Bahamas? Perhaps J. B. would recover his old enthusiasm now that El Santo no longer through her presence presented a problem for him. Perhaps, who knew?
How smoothly everything was fitting into place.
She drove slowly out to Petite Anse, not by the usual road, by the higher road beyond the Morne. It was several weeks since she had driven there; since she had seen from its summit the emerald green rivers of sugar-cane flow towards the sea. She halted, looking out across the Windward Channel towards the humped outline of Martinique. Diamond Rock was a cone of silver. The air was so clear that she could see, or fancied that she could see, the high mountain ranges of Dominica. The twin Pitons of St. Lucia seemed a bare five miles away. What a panorama. How small that liner looked. It scarcely seemed to be moving on its way across the Channel. And those native women on the lower road, with their light blouses and the high-piled baskets of fruit upon their heads, looked like china ornaments along a mantelpiece.
She turned, looking slowly round her, at the bright green of the cane-fields, the coconut grove along the coast, the bright scarlet of the immortelles, the fishing boats tacking in the bays. How fertile it was, how abundant in resources. It was hard to realize that in the green shadows of the hills, the abandoned plantation houses were breaking into rubble; that the ruined masonry of aqueducts and archways attested to the slow passage and decay of privilege. What would happen here? Would the island become a tourists’ playground? Or would it sink stage by stage from one level of depression to another, abandoned one by one by its white planters, to be handed over to the mulattos: a brown race to take the place of that brown Carib stock that the white man had supplanted. Would it? She did not know, she did not care. What did it matter? What did anything matter today except that it was beautiful.
Slowly she drove down the hill to Petite Anse.
She parked in the edge of the bay in the shadow of the casuarinas where so many times that grey-green Chrysler had been parked. How lovely it had been with the moonlight slanting through the latticed leaves. Slowly she munched her sandwiches. How well Lucille did this kind of thing. And was there any coffee to be compared with the coffee that was not so much sweetened as thickened with the thick strained cream of the coconut. Lazily she stretched her arms above her head. Had she time for a siesta? Scarcely; no, anyone might come along.
As she folded her clothes, arranging them carefully in a neat pile upon the seat of the car, she remembered how she had folded her clothes after she had shut the garage door, so that if anyone were to enter suddenly when she was asleep, there would be no signs of flurry, of discomposure. Everything had had to look in order. Everything must look in order now. The car in the shade, the picnic, the folded clothes; the memory among all those people of her security, her cheerfulness that morning: the letters that would be delivered that night in Rodney. She could hear Camberley’s voice taking full advantage of the situation: “In spite of her great recent loss there is no sign that she was not, there is every sign that she was, preparing to meet the future not only with fortitude, but with hope.”
With a smile she surveyed the neat pile of clothes. No one would suspect. Of course no one would suspect. She had the same sense of having done something clever that had come to her on that Mardi Gras evening at the club, a feeling that she had got away with something.
The sand was hot beneath her feet. She quickened her pace. Another second and the water was cool about her ankles. She sighed with relief, with thankfulness as she sank back, as she felt the water lift along her shoulders.
Slowly she struck out to sea. The peace of it, the escape. How easy, how effortless it was. How absurd it had been of her to worry, when all the time all she had had to do was to drive a car out of Rodney; fold her clothes neatly on a seat, then swim: swim till the power to swim left her, till limbs grew limp, till exhaustion came, till she could relax simply through that exhaustion into a dreamless peace.
She lowered her foot. She could not feel the sand. She tried to stand upright, failed, stretched her toes, still could not touch the sand. Out of her depth already. And a wind was blowing from the shore, a tide was bearing her.
Lazily she turned over on her back, feeling the sun warm upon her face, striking out slowly, aware that it was the strength of wind and tide rather than her strokes that was bearing her away from the shore. How easy it was: if only she had known how easy. She would never have let herself become so miserable, had she only known how ready a remedy lay within her grasp. How foolish of her to have been so miserable. In the light of this new-found sense of ease her very troubles seemed unimportant. Why had she worried about Kitty? She could always have got Barclay back, in the things that mattered. Why had she wanted to marry Barclay? Why should one want to marry just because one loved? Could one not be content with love? Why did one connect love with marriage? Were you not as likely to lose love in marriage as outside? Likelier, with propinquity and wont. Who hadn’t she been content with what she had? What a fool she had been. She had worked herself into a hysterical condition. The heat, the setting had worked upon her nerves. How ridiculous that she should have allowed herself to be worried about a man like Hutchins. What could he prove, what could he suspect ? Why had she let herself be frightened?
Because he had said “I never said suicide,” she had fancied he had underlined the word “suicide.” That was her imagination. Hysteria again. How could he have suspected anything but
suicide before he had made one enquiry? Of course he couldn’t. How could he? It was only because she had misread his meaning there, that she had grown suspicious, had felt herself suspected. Wasn’t it obvious now that there had been no cause for alarm at all? Her first suspicion was the basis of all subsequent suspicion. The first suspicion removed, the whole structure of suspicion collapsed. Of course there had been no cause for alarm. The whole chain of evidence that she had created : that picture of herself in the narrowing field of corn, the whole chain of evidence that had forced on her this morning’s strategy: her letters, her visits to the library and to Carrington, her talk with June in the Lido, her drive out to Petite Anse, the neat folding of her clothes: how ridiculous it had been, how unnecessary. The whole thing was a fabric of the imagination. It was so ridiculous that she had to laugh : that she did laugh, throwing back her head, throwing it back so far that for a moment eyes and nostrils went below the water: so that she swallowed a mouthful of salt water: so that, spluttering and choking, she turned over on her side to face, not the sky and the sun and the receding shore, but the far bare line of the horizon. She was spluttering still, and her throat stung, but she was chuckling still. Ridiculous, ludicrous, unnecessary. It was the silliest thing that…
Suddenly she paused. The sting of the salt water on her throat had broken her passive, tranquil mood. What was it that she had said : ridiculous, ludicrous, unnecessary? But if it was unnecessary, what in heaven’s name was she doing here, swimming out to sea, letting herself be carried out to sea? What on earth was she doing? What lunacy was possessing her? Was not this whole exploit the final stage in that mounting hysteria that had driven her to close the door? She’d been mad, of course she had. And she’d not realized it till now. To be swimming out to sea, letting herself be carried out to sea. When there was no need for it, no need at all. When she was not suspected. When life could still be so good. She was free, wasn’t she? Couldn’t she get Barclay back? Of course she could. She had once. She could again. She was in his blood. She was free, wasn’t she? It would be different, altogether different now. Of course it would. What was she doing here? When life could be so good.
