Eden Burning

by Belva Plain

  No, nor Père’s life either, Tee thought. She rested her head against the door. If I would just die and get it over with…. But I don’t believe it, really…. There’s a mistake. Something has got to happen to make it all right again…. Something …

  “They found Clyde over on the other side of the island,” Agnes said. “In Lime Rock. I think he’s got family there.”

  “They have, have they? I want you to get word to him, Agnes. Tell him—tell him I want to see him. I need him to take me fishing. He knows how to handle my boat.”

  On the sixth evening Père came at last to Tee’s room. She was just sitting at the window looking out into the dusk when she felt him standing in the doorway.

  “May I?” he asked softly. He came in and sat in the opposite corner. “I’ve something to tell you, before I say anything else. I went fishing today. Clyde took me. There was—an accident. The ocean was unusually rough. He fell overboard and I wasn’t able to reach him in time…. He never could swim very well.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I thought you might want to know.”

  She looked at her grandfather, who was waiting for a response. His tired eyes held questions and concern. Her answering look was dull. She could feel the weight of the dullness within her. Clyde was dead and Père had caused his death. That was a simple fact, but her mind worked so slowly that it took some minutes to assimilate the fact.

  Père stood above and behind her, stroking her hair. “A complicated business. Justice and mercy. Yes,” he murmured, talking to himself. “Hard. Very hard.”

  So he was dead. Dead, too, were the Brownings, the imperial parrot, and Gaudi’s stone flowers in Barcelona. Dreams. A boy’s dreams. Why did you spoil it all, not only for me, but for yourself? You had so much to live for; even if none of the dreams were ever to come true, you still had so much inside yourself.

  Strange, she thought, I don’t feel the same anger I’ve been feeling. Some of it’s there yet, but it’s changed. Père’s glad he’s dead. But I’m sad, it’s all so terribly sad.

  Père said, “Tee, little girl, I’ve made my plans. You’ll go to France. I have an old friend in Paris, an artist. He would do anything for me, and so for you. I trust him.”

  “France,” she repeated.

  “The French don’t care about things like this as much as we do.”

  Scandals, he meant. Despite all his proud French blood, he always said they had no morals.

  “And afterwards?”

  “We’ll see. One thing at a time. Agnes will go with you. On the ship she will dine separately, of course, but in France she can appear to be a friend. You can live together and eat together.”

  “At the same table with Agnes?”

  “Yes, in France it can be done. They don’t have the same ideas about color as other people do. She will take good care of you. She knows what to do. Shall we go and have something to eat? Agnes says you’ve been starving.”

  “I’m never hungry.”

  “Come, Adela is still in the kitchen. She can fix you some biscuits and fruit, at least. Come. They think you’ve been ill with a fever, that’s all.”

  “Père,” she whispered, “I don’t know how brave I can be.”

  “You’ll be brave. This family is tough.”

  “But I’m not.” She was the timid and bookish one; hadn’t they always told her so?

  “Yes, you are. Tough inside. It’s the slender tree that stands up in a hurricane, you know.”

  He put his arm around her shoulder. In the sott dusk, dark as it was, she could see the shine of his tears.

  She was to leave from Fort-de-France in Martinique at the end of the month.

  “But she’s too old to be sent away to school now!” Julia protested, meaning, She’s fifteen and it’s almost time to start meeting young men. She had already said this a dozen times and now, on Tee’s last Sunday before departure, was saying it again.

  Tee moved the soup spoon around the bowl of black crab pepper pot. This was a soup reserved for feasts, as were the turtle and goose waiting now on the gadroon-edged silver platters where the servants stood at the sideboard.

  “In France you’ll see snow,” Virgil observed, making neutral conversation.

  “It’s like sand, in a way,” Uncle Herbert explained energetically. “If you can think of sand coming out of the sky and being cold and white.”

  “You’re not eating anything at all!” Julia cried.

  “She’s excited,” Père rebuked Julia. “It’s only natural before such a journey, isn’t it?” But his eyes begged Tee.

  For his sake she took another spoonful of soup. What shall I do without you, Père? I’m so afraid of going—and more afraid of staying.

  So the dinner was got through and, two days later, the sailing.

  High as the deck rose above the quay, Tee could still see the faces: Julia’s tears and Père’s persistent smile. They had been fueling the ship since first light, the women, bearing the coal on their heads, weaving a long line from the sheds to the hold. Now they were finished and the gangplank was taken down. Compagnie Générale Transatlantique was printed on its side. The ship trembled and backed away. From the fort the farewell gun boomed, sending a flock of gulls and boobies into frantic loops above the harbor. The ship turned in a great arc toward the open sea.

  “I’m never coming back,” Tee said.

  “You will! Of course you will!” Agnes cried.

  “No, never. Except perhaps to be buried. Yes, they’ll bury me at home.”

  “What kind of talk is that at your age? Come below for coffee. There’s a box of almond cookies and a cake.”

  “No, not yet.”

  Staring, staring, I stand at the rail. I’m leaving you, Père. I’m leaving you, Mama, and I’m sad about that, for in your way you love me, too. So many thoughts go round in my head! Who will ride Princess when the morning’s still cool and bring sugar to the stable? Who’ll sail the Lively Lady past the headland to Covetown? Will anyone ask about me when the new term starts at school, or wonder why I’ve gone? All my books—I suppose they’ll give them away, like Papa’s things when he died. And then there’ll be nothing left of me on St. Felice, nothing at all.

  So, now, good-bye. Good-bye to the Morne and the little Spratt River, to the wind and the sun and the girl I was. I’m not sure where I’m going, but I know I have to go.

  By midafternoon they had doubled back northwest, passing St. Felice. It was too far away to be more than a curve against the windy sky. Or a turtle, Tee thought, as she had done when she was a child, a domed and sleeping turtle, resting in the sea.

  TWO

  A burst of wind rattled the north window of the attic studio.

  “It’s too bad we had to be so gray and gloomy on your first day in Paris. It must seem terribly forbidding after St. Felice,” said Anatole Da Cunha.

  Tee raised her eyes from where she had been looking at the tips of her dusty shoes and saw that he was studying her. His own eyes were mild and reddish brown, like his hair and the tips of his paint-stained fingers.

  “Here, you may read the letter,” he said.

  Père’s script was black and vertical, his signature like dark trees in a grove: Virgil Horace Francis.

  “I don’t need to. I know what it says.”

  “In that case, let’s get rid of it. Watch me.”

  Torn paper fluttered into the fireplace, flamed at the edges, and was eaten up.

  “So, Teresa, no one here knows anything at all about you except your maid, whom you trust, and myself, whom your grandfather trusts.”

  “Why does he?”

  “Because I owe him something and he knows I won’t forget it. When I was eighteen—I’m forty now—he befriended me. No need to go into details. He befriended me, I a Jew of no importance on the island—”

  “You, a Jew? The Da Cunha family—”

  “Is Jewish. Or was. They came from Portugal via Brazil in sixteen hundred and something.
Traders, merchants, all over the islands. Of course, they’re all Anglican now, except for my branch. I’m the last twig of a thin branch that hung on, for some reason or other. I haven’t seen your grandfather in twenty years, the last time he was in Europe.”

  Everything overwhelmed, this day in which she had entered for the first time a great, pressing city, such as she could not have imagined: the incredible traffic, miles of houses, and this house on a street of walls so high that one saw only the roofs behind the walls. One felt trapped. Here in this chilly room pictures were stacked everywhere one looked; on an easel in the corner stood a portrait of a woman entirely naked, brazenly naked, no concealing shadow anywhere. Yet Père liked this odd man, so it must be all right.

  “Marcelle!” Anatole raised his voice. “Come in now, Marcelle. Teresa, this is my friend, my lady. She lives here with me.”

  Tee put her hand out. Marcelle’s long, pointed nails pricked her palm. She kissed Tee’s cheek. Her sharp, intelligent face was unmistakably the face of the naked woman on the easel.

  “Ah, yes,” said Anatole. “Marcelle is the only other who knows why you’re here. But don’t worry. She has arranged everything for you in her village, a little house where you can be comfortable and you will not run into anyone who knows your family. No one will question you. Country people don’t bother with strangers except to gossip behind their backs and why should you care about that? Tomorrow we’ll be taking you there.”

  At the end of the single village street lay the house, the last in a row of ancient houses between the church and the mairie. It consisted of a simple kitchen and two sleeping rooms.

  Agnes sniffed haughtily. She had taken an immediate dislike to Anatole and Marcelle. “I must tell you, monsieur, Miss Teresa isn’t used to places like this.”

  “I’m sure she isn’t,” Anatole said calmly. “But in the circumstances, first things first. You’ll be warm and cared for, Teresa. In a few months—it’s easy to say, I know—but in a few months it will all be over.”

  The season deepened into an icy winter. Darkness settled in the old trees, and the lamps were lit early. At home now they would be having tea with chocolate cake, or at Drummond Hall, those wonderful crisp elephants’ ears that Uncle Herbert brought from the patisserie in town. The four o’clock rain would have left a bright drop on the lip of a scarlet canna and the air would be cool on the back of your neck. In the stable yard Princess would be drinking from the trough, raising her aristocratic head to snort her pleasure, then dipping it again to drink. And Mama, with Baby Julia and Lionel—Tee blinked.

  She had been reading the same sentence for the last five minutes. Her mind was three thousand miles away—or maybe it was four thousand? Sighing, she put the book away and folded her cold hands together.

  Agnes was reading a newspaper. It was strange to see her thus at leisure. It occurred to Tee that she had never seen Agnes when she was not hurrying about at work. Up until now, she had never even seen Agnes eat! The business of eating, when you came to think about it—and in this time of waiting and isolation Tee had come to think of many curious things—was a very personal and serious business. Agnes ate delicately, reflectively, without sound. One wondered about her thoughts. Julia had once remarked that Agnes was surprisingly refined, élevé au chapeau: brought up to wear a hat, to have manners like a white girl. In the dusk now the gold beads, her collier-choux, gleamed against her brown neck.

  “You’re looking at my beads, you admire them? My lover gave them to me when I was fifteen, a little younger than you. It took him three years to pay for them.” She laughed. “A good thing they were paid for by the time he got tired of me.

  “You—lived with him—your lover?”

  “Well, certainly I did! Naturally!”

  “But you call Marcelle a bad woman because she lives with Anatole.”

  “Well, naturally. Because that’s different. You shouldn’t mix with people like Marcelle. You’re not like me, you’re a young white lady of good family. You’re not like me,” Agnes repeated. Her mouth twisted, as if in anger, or perhaps in sorrow.

  I don’t know her at all, Tee thought suddenly, aware of confusion in the other. I’ve never seen her except as a person who was there to do things for me.

  Gloom crowded the room as cold seeped through the walls. The weight beneath the folds of her woolen skirt grew heavier. She wanted time to hurry; she wanted it to stand still so that the thing which was about to happen would never happen. But the clock rattled steadily, deepening both the silence and the dread.

  When a bird whistled in a barren thicket at the window, Agnes looked up.

  “Listen! Siffleur-de-montagne!” She sighed. “My God, I didn’t know they had birds in this place. It’s not fit to live in, even for birds.”

  Tee made an effort. “Oh, yes, in the spring they come back, thousands of them, Anatole says. And everything is green again.”

  “So then, we’ll see. By spring your troubles will be past, anyway. That’s one good thing.”

  Her troubles past! If they would just stop telling her that! Tears leaked, slid under closed eyelids and rolled over the trembling mouth from which no cry came. Her fists clenched as if to control her panic that those tears would never cease, that she would never end in a corner of some dim room shut away, curled knee to chin on a cot or sitting upright in a chair, just staring, staring with the useless tears brimming, like that poor cousin of the Berkeley family over at Belleclaire, the one it wasn’t polite to mention.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Agnes. I don’t want to be such a nuisance, it’s only that—that we’re so alone here in this silence, it’s like the end of the world.”

  “Ah, don’t! You don’t have to hide your wet eyes from me!”

  “I really try—”

  “Yes, yes you always did. You’d come in the house with a bloody knee, biting your lips so you wouldn’t cry, poor baby! Listen, it’s good to cry things out, then the lump in your throat won’t choke you.”

  Agnes stood, letting the newspaper fall to the floor. “What a crazy world! Poor Tee, poor little Tee! If I could take what’s in your belly and put it in mine! Forty-eight years I am and nothing to show for it! Can you imagine that? And how I wanted it, while here you are—”

  “I hope I die.”

  “You’re not going to. You’re young and strong. You’ll be walking around the next day.”

  Tee plucked at her swollen waist. “I hate this thing. And I’m sorry for it because I hate it. Can you understand that?”

  “Yes. Yes. I’m sorry, too.”

  Agnes mourned. The little room was filled with mourning. Unbearable. Tee stood up, went in to the bedroom, and lay down. In the dimness she could barely see Anatole’s half-completed painting propped on the dresser.

  “Will you do something for me?” he had asked. “I should like to paint you as you are. I’ve never had a pregnant model.”

  Compliant, indifferent, she had sat for him, or rather, reclined, close to dozing, while he worked and talked.

  “The fruitful body. It’s beautiful, you know. Don’t shake your head! Some day you’ll feel what I mean, you’ll have wanted children, you’ll be proud. You don’t think so now, but you will.”

  He rambled, musing, thinking aloud, as if he did not care whether she heard him or not, and indeed she had not cared, either, whether she heard him or not. Yet now there were echoes in her head.

  “… a strange history, our bloody little island. All the islands. At one time they used to fine a planter who fathered a mulatto child. Two thousand pounds of sugar, I think the fine was. And the woman, with the child, was confiscated and given as a slave to the monks. That was when the French were in control. Well, there was always a shortage of white women, you know. Back in the seventeen hundreds they even sent a shipload from Paris. Poor wretches, gathered up from God knows where, their only qualifications that they weren’t pockmarked and were young enough to bear children! Talk of your island aristocracy, your
first families! Yet there came a time when a touch of dark had a certain style. Like Alexandre Dumas. And they say even the empress Josephine, although I’m not sure—”

  Now Tee rocked her head from side to side on the pillow. It was all too much, too much thinking. Two Clydes, the gentle, feeling, comprehending—and then that other. Two Pères, the generous, the tender—and the one who had killed. For her. He had killed for her. And all this horror had come out of those few minutes, only an inch’s worth of clock ticks; all this dread, because of a caged bird and a drowsy afternoon, and—and a stupid, ignorant girl who hadn’t even understood her own feelings!

  With cold hands she covered her burning face. In the kitchen the clock struck, sounding distant and faint, so that with part of her mind she knew that sleep must be on the way. Oh, the comfort of sleep and the long nights of escape! If only they could be twice as long, to envelop the days and blot them out! Past, present, and future, all blotted out!

  There are those who cannot sleep when they are beset, but Tee was able to, and perhaps it was that which saved her.

  When the incredible pain was past, she heard low talking in the kitchen. Then the voices grew louder.

  “… a strong boy. Could pass for Syrian or Greek.” That was Marcelle.

  There came a rich sound, part cooing, part singing. That was Agnes.

  Presently Anatole spoke. “Wrap him up and take him to the nurse. Just till we can get her up in a couple of days and back to Paris.”

  Three voices rose together, with a certain agitation in their mingling. Raising her head, Tee could see, through the partly open door, long shadows moving on the kitchen wall.

  “Listen,” Anatole said. “We arranged it all before and there’s nothing more to discuss. She’s not to see him! It’s humane, it’s sensible, it’s what’s done in cases like this. She can’t keep him, so why start up? Take him away, Agnes. Right now.”

  “But shouldn’t I?” Tee murmured. “Mustn’t I?”

  “Shouldn’t you what, my dear?” Marcelle had come in and was standing by the bed.