Hannie Richards

by Hilary Bailey

  Simon just looked at his mother. Hannie was glad to interrupt. ‘But what’s the connection between the letter about your mother being ill and the arrival of these men in a car outside your door here?’

  Sarah told them, ‘That was when they took my mother to St Colombe, to the doctor there. First, she wasn’t well. Then she got really sick, so they went to the doctor. There’s no doctor on Beauregard, no doctor, no school, no electricity either, no water, except from the wells—it’s like a hundred years ago. And Angelina wrote to me that my mother was very ill, might die. But even before the letter came, the men in the car were here.’ After a long pause she sighed and said, ‘She’s got this letter, you see, from Edmund Corrington. He wrote it two years before he died and in it he gives her the whole island when he dies. Now my mother is dying, they think she, or Angelina or me, will show the letter and claim the island. I think that’s why those men are here—to watch and make sure I don’t do anything. I’m worried now. I’m afraid for my family. I want to go there, but Angelina tells me not to go. She thinks if I go things could get worse.’

  ‘Is the letter witnessed?’ asked Hannie.

  ‘By old Mr Squires, the lawyer, but he’s dead now, and by another man, a respectable white man from Barbados.’

  ‘What did Edmund Corrington’s will say?’ Hannie pressed. ‘If he left a will when he died—’

  Sarah shrugged. ‘I don’t know about that. All I know is no Corrington’s been to Beauregard since he died nearly four years ago. They’ve been watching and waiting to see what my mother would do. Now she’s dying they want it finished.

  ‘The Corringtons are going down. They need that land, for money. Men’ve been coming round to see the family, too. Not often, and they don’t say much, but they come. That’s why I’m afraid. There’s no one there to help my mother and my father and Angelina. Everyone’s poor and afraid. That’s why my mother never claimed her rights when she could have, after Mr Corrington died. On that island it’s still like slavery days. The white man says what’s got to happen and nobody argues with him.’ Looking at her children she said, ‘Your granny was happy with her little bit of land, a few animals, her garden. Now something’s got to happen—the peace has gone.’

  ‘So why doesn’t she take the letter to a lawyer?’ demanded Simon.

  ‘She doesn’t trust the lawyer,’ Sarah said. ‘She thinks he’s in with the Corringtons—gets a lot of business from them. That’s why she doesn’t send it here. She thinks the mail’s interfered with. It’s a small island, everybody’s everybody’s cousin. The black people are afraid of the white people.’

  Simon, looking at Hannie, said, ‘So why’s she here?’

  ‘I want that letter to be brought here to England,’ Sarah said. ‘Here, where the Corringtons can’t reach out. None of us can go out there. Everybody knows us, or they know all about us. I thought about it, believe me, even chartering a boat from somewhere far away and landing on Beauregard at night. But we’re still black people, arriving somewhere, chartering a boat. It’s too unusual. One phone call, and we’re found out. They could catch us. A white woman pretending to be a tourist can get to Beauregard and take the letter and bring it back here, all without anybody knowing, that’s my idea.’ She said to her children, ‘We make one mistake, and those men might kill the family on Beauregard—or us. If they take all that trouble to watch us here, where will they stop? It’s not like it is here, not around those islands. You talk discrimination—you’re probably right, but on those tiny islands things go bad fast, faster than here—’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Simon said angrily. ‘I hear you. Don’t say any more. How we going to get the letter, that’s the point now.’

  ‘Don’t talk to your mama like that,’ Francine warned.

  ‘If it’s five miles from St Colombe to Beauregard I can go on a package tour,’ Hannie said. ‘Then, with a boat, I can be on Beauregard, collecting the letter, before anybody knows it. Can you send a message so they expect me?’ she asked Sarah.

  ‘Have to be clever,’ she said. ‘That postmaster on Colombe could be opening the letters.’

  ‘How do we know she won’t sell the letter to the Corringtons once she got it?’ Simon asked, looking at Hannie who said promptly, ‘You don’t. You’re all going to have to study me now and phone me later if you trust me.’

  ‘The problem is, I can’t pay you much,’ Sarah said. ‘Only the cost of your trip and a thousand pounds.’

  Francine was horrified, ‘All you got.’

  Sarah said firmly, ‘If that island’s ours, willed to us by my real grandfather, then it’s ours. He meant us to have it. It’s Simon’s future, and yours. And the future of all the others there. I’m investing.’

  Hannie, choking a bit, for the idea was against all her principles, suggested, ‘Supposing I do it just for the expenses? I invest, too. If it works, you can pay me properly later—say £20,000? It seems a lot, but that island is worth tens of millions. And that’ll reduce your worries about me turning dishonest—if I’ve got a stake in the business.’

  The Fevriers looked at little shocked. ‘I could be risking my life,’ Hannie pointed out. ‘You’ve said yourself these people are dangerous.’ She stood up, adding, ‘You don’t have to agree now—talk it over. Can you see me out, Mrs Fevrier, looking a bit upset, as if I’d brought you bad news?’

  On the step she was seen to reassure Sarah, as Francine looked towards her brother as if reproving him for causing trouble to the family. And Hannie walked down the street still looking busy and caring, conscious of watchers’ eyes on her back. She took a bus to the Town Hall, went up in the lift and only left when she was sure she had not been followed.

  She felt rather cheerful. She guessed the Fevriers would decide to hire her. And this was exactly the kind of job she really enjoyed—and the £20,000, if she pulled it off, would come in very handy too.

  Later that evening at the White City dogtrack, she asked Jean-Pierre Hoffmann, ‘Why is it that I can’t stand the boring jobs?’

  There was the sound of a bell, a brief roar from the bystanders as the dogs ran, then silence. Jean-Pierre looked disgusted. ‘Merde!’ he said, and threw his ticket down on the unswept concrete.

  They were standing by the barrier and it was drizzling. Hannie looked at her card and then at her companion. He wore a sweater and a tweed jacket, casual trousers and suede boots. His camera was round his neck, as usual. As she watched him, he scribbled on the card, raised his camera, pointed it at a crowd of men and women farther along the rail, took a picture and asked, ‘Have you picked a dog for the next race?’

  He raised the camera again, focused it and took a picture of something on the other side of the track. Hannie looked at the card and picked a name at random.

  ‘Sam’s Return,’ she muttered. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I think I’ll have Turn of Fate and Belle Hélène,’ he said. He was getting dull and dour, she recognized, the way gamblers do when the luck is neither good nor bad. They walked to the tote and placed their bets. Hannie listened to the hare rattle and the murmur of the crowd as the dogs ran while she wondered vaguely if Sarah Fevrier had told her everything. Sam’s Return won at 50-1, and Hannie collected a hundred pounds, saying, ‘Dinner’s on me.’ Jean-Pierre won fifty on the next race and a hundred on the last, but he was still not happy. He was a news cameraman. He had been everywhere in the last twenty years, from Stanleyville to San Salvador, and he did not go to the White City dogtrack just to break even.

  Hannie, relieved to get away from the drizzle and the too-brief thrills of the track said, ‘Let’s eat.’

  Over the meal she asked him again. ‘Jean-Pierre, why can’t I stand the boring jobs?’

  The eyes of a man who had seen massacres and scurried out of Saigon at the last moment in a plane crammed with frightened Vietnamese and desperate Americans looked at her steadily.

  ‘Hannie,’ he said, ‘you’re like a kid.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘My
God, I hope one day you don’t find out what a kid you are.’

  ‘Jean-Pierre,’ she said, ‘I don’t go where you’ve been. I don’t have to see death and political corruption.’

  ‘You will one day, Hannie,’ he told her in a firm voice.

  ‘Phooey,’ Hannie said, disturbing an elderly lover and a young girl at the next table. ‘You’re just tired and gloomy, Jean-Pierre. Saying dismal things to bring me down.’

  ‘Sometimes you’re a pig, Hannie,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you this: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. No easy job. I know that because I got one ten days ago. I turned up at a smart restaurant to eat and photograph Elizabeth Taylor, if she came. I was standing in for another photographer. So I was sitting there, eating my lamb, when the Arabs suddenly blew up the restaurant. I got the worst war wound I ever got—there are twenty-three sutures under my pullover and right down to my balls. I saw the blood and thought, My God—it’s gone. Now you come to me and accuse me of being in a bad humour.’

  ‘Phew,’ Hannie said. ‘I’m sorry, Jean-Pierre.’ Then she enquired, ‘Is it gone?’

  Jean-Pierre winked at her. ‘Find out for yourself.’

  The next morning, Hannie rolled over in the bed at the Hilton and yawned. After a night spent making love, and a visit from the hotel doctor when he panicked about his stitches, Jean-Pierre was fast asleep. Hannie got up and collected her tumbled clothes. She took them quietly into the next room. She had the knack of waking at any time she wanted. Her plane left in an hour and a half for Paris, where she had to collect some money.

  She was drinking coffee when Jean-Pierre came in, naked, his stitches livid in the dawn light. He took the cup from her hand, drank the contents. ‘Ah, Hannie,’ he said sadly, ‘Paris now, and then straight back to the bon ménage on the coast of England. When shall we manage to spend some time together like human beings. Always hotels, hotels, hotels.’

  ‘You’ve forgotten the back of that truck leaving Beirut,’ Hannie pointed out. She had been badly caught out there. After finishing a long hop from Australia to Jerusalem with the formula for a fuelless car, and a short hop from Jerusalem to the American University with the scrolls of the newly-discovered fifth gospel, she had just been paid off in gold when the first Israeli bomb hit a building six hundred metres down the street. In the end she and Jean-Pierre had made a dash for it in a truck full of antique furniture. They had made love on a pile of Turkish rugs. And half an hour later he had banged on the back of the driver’s cab, made the truck pull up by the roadside, got out and gone back to Beirut.

  Jean-Pierre again removed her coffee and drank it. ‘Nevertheless,’ he said, ‘one day, we shall spend a week in the country together. We shall walk, eat, make love…’

  ‘For two days, until you get out and go back to Beirut,’ Hannie interrupted him, perhaps a little shiftily, for although she was fairly certain that Jean-Pierre was happy to be like a ship that passed in the night, could you ever really be sure about people whose lives were so affected by the times they lived in and the countries they went to? They presented to the outside world a personality like a pebble which had been rolled and grated by the tide for aeons—smooth, featureless, almost without colour. Yet for all she knew she was Jean-Pierre’s last chance to get off the beach and find a cleft in the rock where he could safely lodge.

  She pushed the thought away and stood up. Jean-Pierre stepped forward and embraced her closely, murmuring, ‘Back to bed now. Get a later plane.’

  And later, as they lay talking, he said, ‘You leave the good husband and the delightful children and—what?—take a plane to some hotspot to smuggle something in or out of the country. You get dirty, tired and frightened, no doubt, like we all do. You don’t need to do this. If you don’t like the husband, well, you can find another.’

  Hannie, who had been dozing, said blurrily, ‘My husband could not be bettered.’

  ‘If you say so,’ remarked Jean-Pierre.

  ‘I expect you believe women only do anything as a kind of comment on their relationships with men,’ Hannie said. ‘And sometimes that’s true, just like it is with men. But I’m remembering.’ She paused, still feeling rather tired. ‘You see, it was about eight years ago. We had the old house in Devon, where we live now. It’s a lovely place, very green, with the sea not far from the house. And the gentry called on us, and we called on them. I was pregnant and very happy. It seemed like a life I could easily lead for ever and then—’

  ‘You found out,’ said Jean-Pierre, ‘that your husband was sleeping with another woman.’

  Hannie sat up and stared at the picture on the opposite wall. It was a bad print of a Renaissance woman in heavy brocade and pearls. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it wasn’t that. On this particular day Adam went off fishing, as he often did, but the sea suddenly got up, and he was late. I struggled up the cliff path to the headland in the wind so I could look out for his boat. I wasn’t that worried, I don’t think. Just a little bit. But there I was, looking over the stormy sea. I couldn’t see the boat, and I began to think that I was expecting twins and I might be a widow, and the wind was whipping round me—and do you know what I saw?’

  Jean-Pierre was laughing. ‘I see the heroine of some Gothic novel—the kind they sell in paperbacks at airport bookstalls all round the world. They always have a woman standing on a cliff on the cover. She has a long cloak and a big skirt.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Hannie said angrily. ‘That’s exactly what I saw, too. Me, waiting. I was fed up. It suddenly seemed to me that while everything had looked so wonderful I’d booked myself for a twenty-year wait. Waiting for Adam, while he went out in the boat, waiting for the children to come home from school, or the man to fix the roof or the groceries to arrive. I went down that hill in a bad temper, all wet, and I was thinking that I wouldn’t be able to stand it. All this waiting. Anyway, it was like an omen because before I got to the bottom I realized I was in labour, nearly a month too soon. So I got in the car and drove myself to hospital and had the twins.’

  ‘What had happened to your husband?’ asked Jean-Pierre.

  ‘Oh, he’d had to put into a small port down the coast. The phone lines were down. By the time he’d dried out, driven home and then driven to the hospital I’d had the babies. It was very quick. The doctor was more frightened than I was.’

  Jean-Pierre looked at her intently. ‘You made up your mind that next time he could stand on the cliff in labour with his long red hair streaming in the breeze, and you would be in the boat?’

  ‘Don’t give me that one, Jean-Pierre,’ Hannie said impatiently. ‘I get enough of that sort of thing from the clients. I’ve confided in you. Don’t start rubbishing me. The smuggling started by accident because I live on a smuggler’s coast. Always has been. And it’s something I can do without spending three-quarters of my life away from my husband and children, like I would if I worked for the Post Office. And I make a lot of money, which we need. So you don’t have to start telling me I have some strange psychological reason for trying to keep my husband at home. He’s a farmer, after all.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant,’ he said but she thought that he had meant it. She realized that he was probably paying her back because she had taken his near-romantic declarations too lightly. Even Jean-Pierre was not incapable of doling out a little male spite when the need arose.

  After a silence he said, ‘Oh—all right. That is what I meant.’

  ‘You’ve been around a long time,’ she told him. ‘You see me as a silly amateur. Someone playing grown-up games she doesn’t understand.’

  ‘A beautiful woman who won’t look any better after ten years in a Bolivian gaol. And,’ he said, earnestly, ‘to tell the whole truth, I am not in love with the tradition you belong to. I am very fond of you. I have another friend who is the same, and I love him too. But it is your horrible, English, bourgeois ideal. It is the rose garden with its ancient walls, and the rooks in the old elms—your countrymen have spent nearly two h
undred years now moving all over the globe, cursing the heat or the cold, dreaming of the gentle rain over fields, exploiting, looting and enslaving. And all for your rose gardens and your tennis courts and your scones and jam under the oak tree. The world is still trying to deal with the results of all that, and so is your country, but you cannot see it. And you and your kind are still doing it and you’ll go on doing it until the last green eye of the little yellow god has been taken away to restore your beams or to send some poor helpless child away from home at seven years old so that he can go to a school where they’ll teach him the same lesson. The little, puny English dream—you want to pretend to be lords of the manor. And those manors can only be kept up by plundering the world and not mentioning that the money comes from “heathen” countries.’

  Hannie lifted the phone and asked for breakfast. Putting it down, she said, ‘Look, Jean-Pierre, I’m not a big political thinker. I’m just doing the best I can to get by.’

  ‘I have an obsession,’ he told her. ‘And also, I should like you to be safer.’

  ‘Then we should never meet,’ Hannie pointed out.

  ‘I would go to live in a thatched cottage near your house,’ Jean-Pierre said gallantly.

  Not long after that she left for Paris. And, a week later, for St Colombe.

  Hannie moored her boat to a tree standing near the water at the edge of a crescent beach of glittering white sand. She stepped ashore. Birds wheeled overhead as she walked, under a brilliant blue sky, towards the fringe of trees behind the beach. It’s Eden, she thought. Edmund Corrington had protected Beauregard, twenty miles square, with a population of one hundred people, so that, as she had approached in her boat, she had felt like the buccaneer her sister had accused her of being—about to set foot on an island in the Caribbean, all coral and white sand under a piercingly blue sky, and as the guidebook told her, in the interior of the island, pleasant woodlands, fresh streams and groves of wild banana trees.