by Belva Plain
A few minutes later he rounded a bend. And there it lay. To his right on a little knoll stood the house; for an instant, as the moon struck through dark and mounting clouds, its white columns glistened. Once when Patrick had brought him, he’d been given lemonade on that veranda. He remembered the woman of the house; she’d worn a lace collar and had been polite, but he had hated her. He stood there now, remembering.
A wind rose suddenly, making a sea sound in the trees. Below on his left the sea was making wind sounds; pale gray it gleamed; in a shaft of moonlight he saw a wave shatter itself upon the distant rocks. It was more beautiful than anything he had ever seen: beautiful, all of it, the water, the wind, the fragrance, and the stillness. Beauty like that could give you pain. And it could make you angry at yourself for feeling so. Angry. Angry.
Now again, clouds covered all the silver. It is going to storm, Will thought. In the house there were no lights. Yes, one, in an upstairs window. Bastards getting ready for bed. He stood looking at the window. Then he walked slowly up the path. He had no idea why, or what he wanted except just to look. Between hibiscus hedges he moved nearer.
A dog barked and another joined in. You could tell by the yapping that they were little dogs, some sort of silly pets.
“Quiet!” he heard a man’s voice say. It was so still that the voice carried clearly over the rustling wind.
Will waited. For a moment or two a woman’s shape appeared at the window, too far away to be recognizable, if he had known her. All he could sense was remoteness; beyond reach, in some long pale garment, cloud-white, flower-white, she stood high. Perfumed, he thought, cushioned like one of those jewels in a velvet box in Da Cunha’s window. And his brain, which was so keen tonight, so filled with jumping images, brought him inexplicably the smell of kerosene burning in a battered lamp on an oilcloth-covered table in a littered hut. What would that woman up there know or care about that hut?
And he stood there, leaning against a tree, with his hands thrust into his pockets, watching that window even after she had gone. One pocket held a broken cigarette, left over from a secret smoking session in the shed. Also, there was a full book of matches. These he took out, turning them over in his hand. He fondled them. Then he had a queer thought, which he pushed away. The thought came back. It jumped in his head. And the tingling began again, just as it had in Covetown earlier, when he’d been running and the ambulance had clanged and glass had shattered. Once more his feet danced; hot excitement poured; it was wild, it was joyous, it was angry. Why not? Oh, why not? Be damned to everything. Why not?
And laughing now, laughing silently from deep in his chest, keeping out of the path of light that beamed from the bedroom, he crept toward the house. There was here, unmistakably, the smell of fresh paint. Under a downstairs window, which was ajar, a couple of painters’ cloths had been left lying on the grass. He picked them up to smell them. Yes, turpentine and paint.
It was so easy! Some of the biggest things you could do were sometimes so ridiculously easy! Just shove the cloths in at the windows where they would touch the blowing curtains, then strike the match. That’s all you had to do.
Frightened and fascinated, Tom watched. “What are you doing, Will? What are you doing that for?”
“Because I want to, fool. And if you ever,” he whispered fiercely, “if you ever open your mouth I’ll say we planned this together and you’ll be—”
“Will, Will! You can trust me! What do you think I am? I swear I’ll never—”
The fire ran up the edge of the curtain. Too bad they couldn’t stay to watch! They sped down the driveway. Three or four miles down the coast, past the junction to Moorhead, they could probably pick up a lift. If anyone should ask, it would be plausible to say they’d been at Moorhead. And that was all there was to it. The last thing they heard when they reached the end of the drive was the shrill commotion of the dogs.
“Useless little things, Pekingese,” Richard says. “I wish they’d stop yapping downstairs.” He waits for a comment.
“I suppose they miss Marjorie,” Tee replies.
She has gone to bed early because of a headache. Richard offers aspirin, and thanking him, she takes it. But aspirin will not assuage this ache. This is a terrible, terrible pain. She does not recognize herself through the chaos of such pain.
She is wracked with shame. Shame because of having borne him or because of having denied him? Truly, she does not know. She is heavy with pity for his young pride, the pride of Patrick Courzon. But her mouth is dry with fear. She scourges herself for her fear. Yet it is there all the same.
He’ll come back into your life, Agnes told me. Someday, she said. Wise and good. Honest and strong. Agnes, who saved me.
Cursed, she thinks, oh cursed, like the island itself that I loved so much, as Père loved it, as Francis does and as now, so it seems, does—he!
How tough he was this afternoon! Tough and solid as Père. Everything intensifies in this isolation, this extravagance of light and heat. Anger is harder, grief is sharper and desire more keen.
Strange it is, although one’s heard it often enough, that nothing can ever be forgotten. One buries and covers over, layer upon layer, but in the end it is no use. There are all those secret cells in the brain which remember even when one doesn’t want to. Now, not piece by gradual piece, but instantly, “as in a blinding light,” one sees …
Rape, you say? Attack? Yes, and also no. The happiness of that summer! Sun and wind and poetry. The astonishment of discovering one’s own mind reflected in another’s. How ignorant, how wise, how daring, and how young!
She took his hand and held it. The parrot, flashing royal blue and emerald and gold, fled upward into noontime silence. “I’ll never forget you for this,” she said, or something like that. She took his hand, she looked with tenderness into his face.
Attack, you say?
And that is what happened when she was fifteen, knowing nothing, but feeling everything, feeling what she had never felt before, or since.
Richard comes in from the bathroom to ask again how she is.
“Better,” she lies, for her head is hot, and under the blanket she is shivering. She turns and twists on the pillow, her cheek rubbing her spread hair. Aphrodisiac, said Anatole.
“A very attractive room,” Richard remarks.
“Red and white,” she says. “Cheerful.” He expects an answer. Yet it is good to keep talking of easy, banal things; it is a way to keep rooted in reality, as, when someone is hideously dying in the house, it helps to make coffee and slice bread.
“Not red and white,” Richard corrects. He has such a fine, critical eye! “It’s far more subtle. Crimson and cream. Those are Chinese peonies, you know.”
He picks up the telephone and shakes it. There is neither hum nor buzz. “Seems to have gone dead. I’ve been trying it downstairs for the last half hour. I suppose it has something to do with the strike.”
“I suppose.”
“I’d like to know what’s happening at the hospital. Our first grandchild,” he says, with marvel in his voice.
Gone domestic now, in middle age, she thinks, not unkindly. Reformed. All the zest gone out of him, just leaked away. I never knew him, really. Maybe there was never much to know. He was always thinking of something else, someplace else, when you tried to talk to him. Only art moves him. I never did. Maybe it was my fault. But maybe no one else ever moved him, either.
“Francis says the doctor’s excellent, trained in London. The first child is the hardest, of course. Although yours took no time at all, did it? But then, you were so young.”
Lived a whole life like two strangers, he and I, and had all those children. A pair of friendly strangers, living side by side, but separately. Yes, for a long time I tried to make a union of us two, something solid and warm. I wanted it. I needed it. Only it didn’t happen. So we speak now of common, daily things and I have known quiet happiness of a sort, yet there is always the silence, the secret silence, which h
e is not even aware of.
What if he were to be told who I am?
“Survive,” Marcelle said. Hers was a lesson of cunning and courage. It has served well. Yet there is another courage that goes not with cunning but with truth.
“Richard,” I shall say, “Richard, listen to me, there is something I must tell you—”
He is taking off his shoes. The room has gone pink in the lamplight. If I should speak those words, the peonies would explode into shredded petals on the floor and the lamps would shatter.
“I was thinking about that speech this afternoon,” Richard says, taking off his shoes. “The fellow was eloquent, wasn’t he? Must have had a fine education. In England, I imagine, on account of the accent. He was practically white, too. Must be hard for a person like that.”
She thinks, Surely he had Père’s nose, as Agnes said? Surely he looks a little bit like Francis?
Something dares her. Maybe she is losing her mind. But she walks to the edge of the precipice.
“Did you think he looked something like our family? My family?”
“Good God, no! What kind of an idea is that?”
“I thought maybe he did.” It is like playing Russian roulette. Shall I? Shall I wait till morning or shall I never at all?
“You need to have your eyes examined.” Richard yawns. “What are those two ridiculous dogs yapping at again?”
“The barn cats’ prowling, I guess.”
He calls the dogs upstairs. He strokes them and quiets them, then he gets into bed.
“That wind!” he complains. “I didn’t know it could blow like that here.”
“It’s a northeast trade. I’ll lower the windows a bit.”
She gets up and stands for a moment looking northward to the Big Dipper.
“Eerie,” she says, thinking aloud.
“What did you say? Eerie?”
“Yes. The way the night just drops down.”
She goes back to bed. By his breathing she knows that Richard has fallen asleep at once. She is sorry for him because of what she must—might?—do to him in the morning. To him and all of them. If only there were some way of knowing what was right to do! It is this island that is at fault; one can’t even think straight here!
The sad wind cries in the trees. She remembers these nights, the croak and peep and shrill of forest life, the sudden squeal of a small wild creature seized in bloody terror by some larger creature; all these have stayed with her except the sadness of the wind. She has forgotten how it blows all night off the Morne.
This will be a night without sleep. She does not even try to coax it. When morning flickers on the ceiling and birds rustle, she will be still awake. Perhaps, by that time, an answer will have been given her. She prays mercy for all who lie awake hoping for an answer by morning.
Perhaps, though, she dozes after all, or is so drowned in her trouble that it seems a sort of sleep. She starts up, aware of a change in the texture of the night. There is a sound of swishing under the wind rush. It is like footsteps in tall grass or tissue paper crackling lightly in a box. She thinks maybe Richard is making the sound, but he is lying quite still on his side in the other bed. A storm must be rising. She sinks back into crowding thoughts.
After a while she hears the roar of surf. That’s odd, because the house is too far from the beach for surf to be heard. It puzzles her, but not too much. She is too tired. She turns again into herself.
Suddenly then, unmistakably, there is the salty tang of smoke. There is a new sound, a sizzle and snap as of meat frying and jumping in a pan. She gets out of bed and stands unsurely, dizzily, in the center of the room, trying to orient herself. Something is burning somewhere. Then all at once she understands. Jolted to panic, she rushes to the bedroom door and tears it open. A gust of incredible heat, like an eruption of the sun, flings her backward into the room. The entire hall and the stairway are blazing! Smoke flames into her lungs. With frantic force she tries to push the door shut, but the strength of the roaring heat is like the strength of a hundred men. She fights to breathe. Now the flames catapult into the room. They are taller than soldiers; they are an army advancing with their fearful weapons drawn. They catch the sheer curtains and the carpet; they reach for the ruffled shoulders of her nightdress and her long black hair. Her lungs are agony.
“Richard!” she screams.
Barely awake, he stumbles to the window, pushes the screen out and her out after it. There is a terrible mingling of cries in her ears, his as the sweeping fire sets him ablaze, and her own as she escapes it, to fall in fainting terror onto the net of the ancient boxwood hedge beneath the window.
FIFTEEN
Dr. Strand’s private clinic lay on the outskirts of Covetown, above Government House. For fourteen hours Francis had been there, waiting. He had paced, attempted to read, and briefly, lightly, dozed. Now at midnight he stood at the window, looking down upon the harbor and the moving lights of cars.
The doctor came from across the hall with another report. “We’re monitoring her pressure, Mr. Luther, and it’s holding. She’s fairly comfortable right now. The medication, you know.”
Francis, wondering whether his confidence in the doctor was justified, nodded. The man had a good reputation and gray hair, which always bred a certain amount of confidence in the beholder.
“We’ve time yet to make the decision. Naturally, I’ll avoid a cesarean section if I can.”
One must have seen hundreds of cartoons and jokes about young husbands waiting outside delivery rooms. For some reason people found humor in the situation, God knew why, when in reality a man’s head was plagued with doubts and questions. Some men must be torn with love of their wives and fear for them, while some would be praying first for the safe arrival of the child, though that was wrong, wrong, wrong …
“A good patient, plenty of courage,” Dr. Strand was saying. “She wants this baby. No complaints, not a murmur out of her. A woman of pride.”
“Yes, great pride.”
But suppose this were Kate’s child? Guilt ran hot and cold down his spine; his spine was naked, all of him was naked and exposed.
He hadn’t been with Kate that often, a dozen times perhaps since Marjorie’s pregnancy, not counting the time they had flown to a hotel in Barbados together. All night long the wind had rattled lightly in the palms. He’d got her a bouquet of gardenias—they grew almost wild down here—whose musky sweetness, reminding him of something, had kept him awake. It had reminded him of his father. Yes, yes. (Don’t tell your mother, son; I wouldn’t hurt her for the world.) And he hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t walked out on his children, either. But then, his woman had not been Kate.
What do we ever know about anyone? he wondered now. I’d given up believing that my mother would ever come to St. Felice. For what subtle reasons, out of what fears she stayed away so long surely I never knew; maybe she herself never knew. His thoughts spun, driving, hurling him from Marjorie to Kate, back to his parents and to the child now struggling to be born. Oh, let it be safe and well, let it be a son who will be to me what my father and I never could be to each other!
He hadn’t realized he was holding his head in his hands until the doctor touched him on the shoulder.
“You need a drink. If it weren’t worth one’s life out in the streets I’d go get you one.”
At once he became alert. “What’s happening? Have you heard?”
“Riots and demonstrations all over the island. A big tax protest over in Princess Mary parish. Somebody fired on the police, they fired back, and there were three killed, some wounded. More over at the south end too, I think. Anyway, Lord Frame expected this a week ago, it seems. There’s a cruiser on the way from Bermuda with a detachment of troops. That’ll straighten things out, if,” the doctor finished glumly, “if they get here in time. Why don’t you stretch out on the couch? I’ll be back.”
Francis lay down again. He was deeply tired. Far easier to labor in a field than to endure such pressure in t
he head and spirit! This could be disaster night, he thought, recalling old tales of rebellion, the night of the sword. Attempting to console himself, he reasoned that that sort of thing didn’t fit the twentieth century, and was immediately aware of his own absurdity. Not fit the century of Hitler and Stalin?
He woke to the sound of rustling. In the lamplight, on the other side of the room, Lionel was reading. He moved his lips and strained his neck over the newspaper as a man does who is not accustomed to reading.
“Hello. Have you been here long?” Francis asked.
“Only a few minutes. I ran the gauntlet. The governor’s declared martial law. The town’s full of rioting drunks and scared merchants and planters who’ve rushed in from the country, afraid to be out there alone. Cade’s Hotel is jammed. How’s Marjorie doing?”
“We don’t know yet. They’ll probably have to operate. It’s awfully good of you to be here, Lionel.”
“That’s all right. Family, after all. Besides, I happen to be fond of Marjorie.”
“Well, she likes you, too.”
I must be better at dissembling than I knew, Francis thought. He felt—he felt sly, in the presence of this bluff, bumbling man, having to hide his sometimes furious jealousy that the man had lived with Kate and “had” her. “Had.” An antique, yet still expressive, use of that simple verb. Had. Possessed. Her dear flesh.
He became aware that Lionel was looking at him quizzically.
“Damned hard for you, Francis. May I say something frankly?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I know about you and Kate. Don’t ask me how. People find out things.”
“I won’t ask.”
“That’s what I meant by ‘hard for you.’”
“Yes.” And hearing his own laconic voice, like that of a stage Englishman, Francis thought, I don’t know what else to say.
“If you had seen her first instead of—” Lionel began and stopped.
Instead of Marjorie? Oh, if only—! But it might not have made any difference if he had. Too young, without experience and so in awe of beauty, he had not been half the man he was now. And so the lovely, brief enchantment had simply slid away as imperceptibly as the change of seasons in a northern country.
