Eden Burning

by Belva Plain

  “She would have been right for you,” Lionel resumed. Not meaning to, he was twisting the knife. “What are you going to do?”

  “Oh, God,” Francis said and murmured, “We’ve a child now.”

  Lionel nodded. “Of course. And you don’t want to smash Marjorie’s world. Well, you can have it both ways, can’t you? The family at Eleuthera and the little place in town. It’s done all the time.”

  Kate had already offered that. Better than nothing, she’d said. But she ought to have more.

  And he said so. “Kate deserves more. For that matter, so does Marjorie.”

  Lionel smiled. There was kindness and a certain amusement in the smile.

  “You’re really in a moral bind, aren’t you, old man? I’m sorry for you. You know, I always have felt a little sorry for you, anyway. You take everything too seriously, too hard and heavy. I suppose you can’t help it.”

  “I guess not.”

  “We both Know I’m a rougher sort than you. I don’t seem to feel about a lot of things the way you do. You suffer. To me you’re a little soft in the head. Oh, I like you in spite of it, make no mistake! It’s just that I think you’d be a whole lot better off if you stopped worrying about other people so much and looked out for yourself.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  Words, words! You are what you are, and Francis could no more be Lionel than Lionel could be Francis. Still, he had looked out for himself that morning, hadn’t he? Or perhaps it had not been on his own behalf that he had issued that defiant order to get the crop out; perhaps really it had been because he was now thinking of the child, of money and safety for his child. Already it made a difference. He hadn’t yet seen its face, but it made a difference.

  Lionel returned to the newspaper. And Francis sat on, straining for sounds from across the hall which might have meaning, but there were only passing footsteps, conveying nothing. He studied a row of “arty” photographs on the wall: horses knee-deep in pangola grass, which made him think of Kate; veranda columns casting shadows, as at Eleuthera; black children in a schoolyard, as at Gully, where he had first met Patrick …

  The lights went out.

  “Must have struck the power station,” Lionel said. “They’ve already struck the phones, you know.”

  A nurse came in with a pair of oil lamps.

  “There are fires all over the parish,” she reported. “Our handyman just came in the back way and he says they’ve attacked the wireless station with stones and bottles, broken every window, smashed all the equipment.”

  They won’t attack Eleuthera! Francis thought. They won’t go after private homes. Besides, it’s so far out of the way. He said aloud, “I had a hassle this morning.” And he told Lionel what had happened earlier in the day. “I wish there was a phone, though. I’d like to find out what happened, whether they got any of the crop out.”

  Lionel shook his head. “You took a chance. Not that I blame you. Damned radical devils! So much for your fine friend Patrick, hey?”

  “I don’t know. I was mad as a hornet, but I’ve cooled off some. It’s possible he really couldn’t do anything, although I still think he could have bestirred himself a little for me.”

  “There you go, making excuses for everybody! Matter of fact, on my way here tonight somebody told me Courzon was out your way this afternoon giving a very inflammatory speech. Egging the crowd on to pillage and burn, he said.”

  Francis shook his head. “No. Impossible. That I won’t believe.”

  Lionel shrugged.

  “You don’t have to stay here with me,” Francis said considerately.

  “It’s safer here. Wouldn’t dare go down into the streets now. Besides, where would I go? The hotel’s full and so’s the club.”

  The two men waited, one sleeping with his head back on the chair, the other wide awake, watching the maddening, slow advance of the hours. It was the longest night. The oil lamp flickered weakly. The silence was expectant; one awaited gunfire, and the crashing-in of doors, sounds that must surely explode in the next moment or two; one imagined also dreadful, perhaps final, things occurring in the room across the hall.

  In the last hour of the night when, in spite of darkness, some subtle alteration of the atmosphere predicts the dawn, the doctor came back. He looked both weary and pleased to bring an announcement of importance.

  “A natural birth. Hard, but we didn’t need to operate, thank goodness. Come in and see them now.”

  Not yet out of ether, Marjorie lay with a look of peace on her lips, as if, in spite of her pains, she had gone under with a smile. Her hair curled on her temples as it always did when it was damp. She must have been soaked with the sweat of her struggle.

  “She wanted this baby,” Dr. Strand said, “and she fought for it.”

  Francis felt his tears collecting. “I’m so glad,” he murmured foolishly. Or perhaps not foolishly: what else was there to feel but simple gladness? He smiled, for once not ashamed—he knew he cried too easily for a man from a northern culture—to let another man see his tears. He reached down and touched Marjorie’s limp hand. She would be a good mother, too fussy, no doubt, as she always was, but a good mother, all the same.

  “I’m so glad,” he repeated.

  “Don’t you want to see the baby? She’s down the hall.”

  “She? I thought you said—”

  “I didn’t say anything. You must have imagined it. Why, were you expecting a boy?”

  “Well, I thought—” He stopped. He was as disappointed as a child who has been expecting a bicycle for his birthday and has been given a book.

  “Sorry, but you’ve got a girl. A pretty one, with a cleft in her chin. Big, too, which was part of the trouble. Here, have a look.”

  She had her mother’s dark hair, a whole head of it.

  “Enough to tie a ribbon on,” the nurse said.

  Francis stammered. “Aren’t they usually bald?”

  “Usually.” The doctor laughed. “I told you she was pretty. You’ll have your hands full when she’s sixteen.”

  “A girl,” Francis said.

  “She’ll mean more to you than ten sons. Take my word for it. You’ll come back and tell me so.”

  Well, true or not, she can’t help it, he thought. And he reached down to touch the baby’s hand, as he had the mother’s. The scrap of a hand was warm to his touch. The fingers grasped his finger. Only a few minutes out of the womb, where it had been hanging upside down, a feeble creature floating in warm water, and here it was already making a demand of life! The fingers clung. He had the strangest feeling in his chest, in his throat. And he would not have pulled his hand away if the nurse hadn’t put the baby back in the crib….

  In the waiting room Lionel looked up with a question.

  “A girl,” Francis told him. “And both well.”

  “Are they, then? Well, good luck, old man! And here’s another good omen for you. Come and behold.”

  In three-quarter darkness the cruiser rounded proudly to port, lights glittering and gleaming from stem to stern. It seemed to fill the harbor with its authority.

  “So,” Lionel said, “that settles that. It’s been a long night on both counts.”

  “Yes, both counts. Mother and baby,” said Dr. Strand, who was literal.

  “I meant,” Lionel corrected him, “I meant the birth and our small revolt. In a few more hours, now that the troops are here, we’ll have peace and order again, thank God.”

  “No, my friend, you haven’t seen the end of this by any means,” the doctor cautioned.

  “You think not?”

  “Oh, yes, for now, but this was only a skirmish. I’m looking ahead a few years. Yes, I’m looking ahead.”

  But Lionel was concerned with the immediate. “You’re not starting home yet, Francis? Things can’t be calmed down this soon.”

  “I want to get home and sleep. I could sleep for a week.”

  “Well, just be careful. It’s been a long night, t
hat’s sure. Just be careful.”

  The morning was almost still. In the mild breeze small ash puffs rose from a bed of cinders where the new wing had been. Only a few feet from the central portion of the house a miraculous and mighty rain had halted the fire.

  “If only it had come sooner!” Osborne lamented. “We tried using the well, but the pump was too weak. And we couldn’t stretch the hose from the river. We fought with buckets, we tried everything, Mr. Luther. My wife came out, and the maids and everybody. We almost killed ourselves trying.”

  “You did what you could,” Francis said quietly.

  “That fire went wild! I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it myself. Of course, the wind was against us. That and the fresh paint. Thank God, though, the rain came, or we’d have lost the whole house.”

  Nothing, nothing was left of the new wing but some twists of metal—andirons or candelabra, perhaps.

  “Terrible,” Osborne said. “Terrible.” He spoke with awe.

  All that morning and all the day before people had been talking at Francis. Thinking to give comfort, they seemed compelled to talk.

  “By God, I wish I knew how this happened, Mr. Luther! It was the only house on the island to be fired! Oh, some cane fields here and there went up, but that’s to be expected at a time like this. We haven’t seen a house burned, though, not since I was born and probably a time before that.”

  “No,” Francis said. He had a pain in his chest. He wondered whether anyone as young as he could have a heart attack from grief. He couldn’t afford to have a heart attack, leaving Marjorie with an infant in this chaos.

  Osborne lowered his voice. “I keep asking myself, to be frank with you, whether it wasn’t on account of the bananas. We got one load through the gates before the crowd could stop us. They were pretty mad, let me tell you! Still, I’d swear it wasn’t any of our own people. Sure, they’d overturn a truck, but they wouldn’t do a thing like this. There were a lot of gangs in town setting fires, you know, kids no more than fourteen years old, they tell me. Wild kids, slippery as eels. They’ll never catch them.”

  For the first time in hours thought took shape in Francis’ numbed brain.

  “Not kids from town. Why would they come way out here to pick just my house? It doesn’t make sense! No, it has to have been the strikers, Osborne, maybe not Eleuthera people, but hotheads from other villages. My uncle told me they’d been steamed up to pillage and burn. Why, there was a radical meeting right here in this parish, not two miles from our gates! I didn’t believe him when he told me, but I do now. Because—here’s the result.”

  Osborne did not comment. Instead, he held out his hand to catch a flurry of drops that had suddenly fallen out of the calm, bright sky. “Sun-shower,” he said.

  A rag had blown from the fire onto the grass. Scorched at the edges, the center still disclosed an arabesque of buds. Recognizing the fabric that Marjorie had had sent from New York, Francis bent to pick it up. How she had labored over her choices! The decoration of these new rooms had been the gladdest thing in her life here until her pregnancy.

  He rubbed the cloth between his fingers. His father had died while that cloth flamed. A living torch, he had been extinguished among red and white Chinese peonies. Gone now were all the gaiety and kindness, the generosity and the foolish weakness; no one need fret or worry about him ever again. Bound and bandaged, his mother lay stunned into silence as if she had not yet assimilated the disaster, or as if she were remembering her own reluctance to come back here. It was only because of me that she came, Francis thought, over and over.

  The sun-shower sprinkled his shoulders. For a long time he stood there crying in the warm, quiet rain.

  SIXTEEN

  In later years these events would be described by someone with a gift for imaginative language, someone, for instance, like Kate Tarbox, as a series of shock waves come and gone in a handful of days. There was, first, the shock of death, death of the innocent at Eleuthera, and then those killed in confrontations between police and citizens, along with one lone soldier from the cruiser, an ignorant lad shot by a wild bullet on his first trip out of England. But the greatest shock came from realizing the extent of anger, its depth, and the speed with which it could spread.

  To be sure, the cruiser stood firm guard in the harbor. Order was restored. Shattered glass was cleared away and people went back to work. Passing on the roads and in the streets they gave greeting again as before; yet one had to wonder what rages and resentments still burned beneath the greeting.

  All this passed outside of Francis’ awareness. Beclouded, he moved through required hours and places. From the memorial service—that is to say, the funeral without the body of the dead—he went to the hospital. There Marjorie, half hysterical with fear and horror, alternately trembled, wept, and consoled herself with her new baby. There, down the hall, his mother, winning a valiant struggle for acceptance and control, recovered from burn and shock. Most of the time he sat at home in the cocoon of his library, staring at grief, which seemed to hover just beyond the window like some threatening, faceless dervish in whirling robes, waiting to descend and clutch.

  He was sitting there like that when Kate came in.

  “Oh, my darling,” she said.

  He put his head on her breast. Her fingers moved in his hair.

  “Oh, my darling, what can I do for you?”

  “Just stay here. Be with me.”

  “Yes, yes. I am. I will.”

  Opening his eyes, he saw the little rise and fall of her breast. Her neck and upper arms were scarlet.

  “You’re sunburned,” he murmured.

  “I was weeding. I should have worn a jacket.”

  He raised his head, reproaching. “You’re so tired. You don’t take care of yourself.”

  “It’s just that I haven’t slept. How could I sleep when all this was happening to you?”

  Her eyes were troubled. Darkened, they were almost violet, a morbid color, color of pain.

  “You love me,” he said, as if the discovery were new. “You love me.”

  She swallowed hard. He could see the small lump move in her throat.

  He had never been so near to another human being in all his life, so near that the very blood in their veins seemed to run together. And suddenly desire, which had been the farthest from his mind during these last hours, tore him into its current.

  He got up and drew the curtains shut, making a wall of rippling green. The room, now dimmed, assumed an aqueous coolness, a forest coolness.

  “Lie down,” he said. “Take your dress off.”

  “Now? Inhere?”

  “It’s all right. I can lock the door.”

  Elsewhere in the house he would not have taken her. Some subtlety of judgment, some refinement of choice, would not allow him to do this thing in any room that had been adorned by Marjorie, in which her presence remained as though she herself were standing in it. He could not have done that to Marjorie, to Kate—or to himself. But this room belonged to him alone and there was no one here except himself, with Kate.

  In her now he found all comfort and all healing.

  Afterwards they lay quietly, not speaking. Slowly, the ceiling turned from white to luminous gray.

  “It’s getting late,” she said. She sat up and put on her dress, then pulled the curtains back so that light slid across the floor.

  Francis looked out the window. The whirling specter was gone; no threat was there, only the afternoon lying placidly among the trees.

  “Did you know—could you have known—how I needed you?” he asked.

  A smile began as a tender curving at the corners of her mouth and almost as quickly stopped. Her face fell into sadness.

  “What is it?” he cried.

  Her reply was so low that he barely heard her. “Suddenly I feel guilty. I don’t know why. I’ve not felt that way before. It’s this house, I suppose. Being here like this in her house.”

  It angered him that any s
hame should blight them, yet he didn’t know what to say.

  “Do you—don’t you feel what I mean, Francis?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I should. I don’t know.”

  He unlocked the door and poured a drink from the bar in the cabinet.

  “Have one? It’ll steady you.”

  “No, thanks. Tell me about the baby, please.” She had begun to steady herself.

  At once laughter tingled in his throat. “She’s pretty…. Funny how I wanted a boy. Maybe men always do? But now I don’t mind at all. Her name’s Megan. It’s Welsh. Her mother’s people were Welsh.”

  “I’d like to give her a wonderful present. May I?”

  “Of course you may! Why do you ask? Why shouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe, in the circumstances, it might not be—”

  The laughter left him. “Oh Kate, Kate my love, why can’t things ever be clean and clear and easy? Everything’s such a goddamned tangle!”

  “But we’ll manage, won’t we?”

  “I’ve done this to you. I’ve complicated your life.”

  “No. You’ve brought life into my life. I’m sorry I felt grim there for a minute. I won’t let it happen again. One has to—to take charge.” And, jingling her car keys, she told him, “The first thing I’m going to do is buy Megan’s present. The next thing—oh, I hate to pile another trouble on you, I wasn’t even going to mention it, but I’ve no one else to ask, at least not until Nicholas Mebane gets back, and that won’t be till tomorrow night, and it would be a shame to wait that long—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Kate sat down again. “They arrested Patrick this morning.”

  Francis’ heart jumped a beat.

  “Can you imagine anything so idiotic, so criminal? Some utter ass must have decided to cast a net out for anyone and everyone who’s ever opened his mouth to express an opinion! ‘Incitement to riot!’ Patrick of all people!”