Island in the Sun

by Alec Waugh

Archer’s heart beat fast as he took his seat at the wheel. In a quarter of an hour’s time, he thought.

  The Normans drove the Fleurys back. Jocelyn had taken the family car for a bathing party. Mrs. Norman drove, with Fleury at her side.

  “Did you have any talk with him?” she asked.

  “Scarcely a word.”

  “Did you hear what he was saying about the possibility of a tourist summer season?”

  “It made sense to me.”

  “There, do you hear that, Jim? That’s what I thought too. I’m always telling you that we could make more out of the St. James. Three-quarters of the rooms are empty. It’s ridiculous that Mr. Bradshaw should be booked at the Continental. Just because it’s got a reputation for being livelier. You’re on the Council and you run the Tourist Board. If anyone could do anything you could. Don’t you agree, Julian?”

  “You may have got something there.”

  “I’ve asked Mr. Bradshaw for a drink on Friday. We won’t make it a big party. Six or seven. We’ll find out if he’s anything to suggest.”

  They drew up outside the Fleury house. The car was already in the drive. “It’s early for them to be back,” Mrs. Fleury said.

  There was no downstairs light on in the Fleury house, but at the Normans’ the drawing room was lit up. Mavis was stretched in a long chair, smoking, a glass of milk beside her. She did not get up as her parents entered. “Hullo,” she said. Her voice was listless.

  “You’re back very early,” her mother said.

  “Euan was feeling tired, so was Jocelyn.”

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “It was all right.”

  She rose languidly, stretching her arms above her head. Her parents exchanged a glance. Mavis was a problem they preferred not to discuss. Each knew what the other thought. But there were some things better not put into words.

  In the doorway Mavis paused, turned slowly round to face them. “I wonder what you would say if I were to ask—no, there’s no point in asking. I know the answer.”

  No point at all, she told herself, as she walked upstairs. Oh, she was so tired of it all. What a fit they would have if they could know what she had it on the tip of her tongue to ask them.

  Carl Bradshaw stood at his window, looking out over the now silent town. He had slept badly on the plane the night before. He had had a siesta, but his mind was racing. He had made a good start. He had learnt a lot. He had seen how the field was set. Mrs. Norman would prove useful; she was garrulous; she had children; she was in several camps. But the Archdeacon, that was a different matter. There was a kinship there, different though they were in age, in race, in calling; they could talk in shorthand. He looked forward to tea on Thursday.

  From the courtyard below came the purr of a revolving engine. He craned his neck. A car drew out of the shadows and drove toward the shore. It looked very like the car in which he had been driven down. It was a quarter of an hour, at least, since he had been dropped. What on earth had the A.D.C. been doing? The bar was closed. He must check up on this.

  8

  The Archdeacon surveyed his tea table with approval. He had an English idea of how a tea table should look. Old china, a silver tray, thin-cut cucumber and marmite sandwiches, hot scones, a fruit cake. He fancied that his guest’s tastes were similar.

  He had guessed correctly. Bradshaw’s eyes brightened.

  “I am being indulged.”

  “We try to maintain our civilized oubliettes.”

  Bradshaw looked round him. The Archdeacon, he had been informed, had the best house in Jamestown.

  “Now and again,” Archer had told him, “you get a first class example of Georgian architecture in the Caribbean, particularly in Antigua. Have you seen John Summerstown’s book? H. E.’s got a copy, I’ll lend it you. There are not too many houses left, of course, there’ve been so many hurricanes, and fires and what not, and the atmosphere here is French. The Archdeacon’s house is one of the best examples. It was built after the English took over: being a Catholic island there was no Anglican establishment; they had to build one. They meant it for a bishop. It’s called the Palace. Have a good look when you go there, compare it with some of your New England colonial styles. There are some features that may be new to you: the long low arched fanlights over the doors for instance.”

  Bradshaw had been prepared for a gracious harmony of line, but he had not expected that Georgian paneling would serve as a background for a Venetian mirror, a cutglass chandelier, Chippendale chairs and Doulton china.

  “The Church seems to treat its Archdeacon far better than the Commonwealth treats its Governor,” he commented.

  The Archdeacon chuckled. It was the kind of compliment he relished.

  “It is not so much the Church that tempers the wind to the Archdeacon, as the Archdeacon’s aunt. The old lady was, I venture to say, extremely fond of me, but she had an unfortunate experience in youth. She was, I think it is the correct word, jilted, by a curate. She cherished as a result an unfortunate prejudice against the cloth. She was distressed when I took holy orders. I was her favorite nephew. I had always believed I was to be her heir; I proved to be, but only on condition that I preached the gospel to the heathen. It was a pretty point for the lawyers to decide, whether or not the West Indians could be classed as heathen. Finally it was agreed that my aunt had meant anybody with a dark complexion. So I came out here.

  “Was it a life sentence?”

  “A ten years’ sentence, with ill health as a waiver clause.”

  “Yet you’ve been out here over twenty years.”

  “I’ve come to like it here.”

  “For the climate’s sake?”

  “Not altogether. Every climate has its disadvantages: even this one. Its advantages are obvious. It is never oppressively hot; there is no rainy season. It’s a little sticky in October and November; but that is all. There are no diseases. For the first two years one feels one is in the Garden of Eden, then one finds one would give anything for a sharp September morning with a mist in the valley, the leaves turning yellow and frost in the air. I have leave every three years. I always arrange it so that I shan’t miss a day of an English autumn.”

  “Why have you stayed on here?”

  “Motives are mixed. The more confessions I hear—and for certain members of my congregation I strongly recommend confession, it clears the minds, take burdens off the shoulders—the more confessions I hear the more I realize that people do not recognize the causes of their actions, even to themselves. It may be that I’ve stayed on because the climate had made me lazy, perhaps it’s because I have more than a suspicion that if I went back to England I should find myself out of touch with my old friends: those were I daresay factors in my decision, but I should like to believe that I stayed on because I felt that I could do more good here.”

  He paused and his voice took on the same slow tone that it reached in the peroration to his sermons. It was not a theatrical, mannered, sanctimonious manner. People liked his sermons because he was direct, simple, and sincere. “These people are good at heart, they are lovable, gay, good-natured. But they have no roots; they are featherdown in the wind, and the winds blow strongly. Their lives are drab; they are born and live and die in squalor. They need badly what the church can give them, the pomp and pageant of its ritual, the majesty of its language, its reminder of a world elsewhere, of values beyond their own. I know that they go to church because they like dressing up, because they meet their friends there, because they enjoy singing hymns; they don’t understand the meaning of the words they use; but those words repeated Sunday after Sunday through a lifetime do create, as the passage of time creates a patina, a subconscious armor of faith. One knows one’s doing good here.”

  He paused. A twinkle came into his eye and the tone of his voice changed.

  “When I go back to England and see my contemporaries in their Georgian rectories and fashionable city churches, I don’t envy them their congregations. Estab
lished religion in England today, well shall I put it this way, I can’t honestly say that in England I should care to choose my personal friends from the churchgoing section of the community.”

  Bradshaw chuckled. This was a man after his own heart. And what a relief after those sour swizzles and savory canapes was this profusion of scones dripping with warm butter, and cakes layered with cream and coated with almond icing. The tea too, though Indian, was slightly scented, with a Chinese aftertaste.

  “I’m not saying,” the Archdeacon was continuing, “that a great deal of very noble work isn’t being done in the slum areas of England, but we must accept the limitations that the good Lord has chosen to impose on us, and can you picture me, my dear Mr. Bradshaw, in a dockyard parish.”

  They laughed together. Yes, this was a man after his own heart. They did not need to explain themselves. Bradshaw had been right in gauging that look across the dinner table as one of recognition.

  “Even so,” Bradshaw said, “it does a little surprise me that you should have taken holy orders in the first place.”

  “Another case of mixed motives possibly.” The Archdeacon said it in a tone suggesting he would prefer to evade that question. But Bradshaw was insistent. He had documented himself carefully on his man before coming out. Father Roberts was well connected, with titled cousins, there was money in the family, he had gone up to Oxford in the early twenties. Bradshaw was an anglophile. He spent at least an hour a week in the Holliday Bookshop. He knew what that period stood for.

  He was not, however, prepared to let the Archdeacon know how carefully documented he was. He assumed a semi-knowledge.

  “They tell me you were at Oxford; judging from your age you were up at what must have been the period of the Bright Young People. I shouldn’t have thought that the religious atmosphere was strong there at the time. And I should have thought you were the kind of person who would, as a young man, be in the swim.”

  The Archdeacon smiled, nostalgically. Yes, he had been in the swim all right. And what a period to be in the swim of. Oxford in ‘22 and ‘23. The Hypocrites Club and all those feuds between the aesthetes and the hearties. A halcyon period. The wartime lot had all gone down, and the young men who had been submerged at their public schools during the war with the indifference shown to anyone who was not in the war—“Don’t bother us with your petty problems when your uncles, brothers, and fathers are in the trenches”—the young men who had begun to think when the war was over that they were of no account because they had been too young to fight, a generation that had grown up with a chip on its shoulder, rebellious and self-distrustful, had at last had a chance to spread its wings. How it had spread them, and what wings.

  From a distance of three thousand miles, he had watched his contemporaries one by one make their mark in public life. Christopher Hollis and Hugh Molson in the House of Commons, Peter Quennel as a critic and a poet, Anthony Powell as a novelist, Cyril Connolly that captious arbiter of taste, Harold Acton that elusive aesthete, Patrick Kirross as a keen, quick-witted traveler, John Sutro as a voice behind London films, the mysterious Henry Green, Claud Cockburn with his live pen and many pseudonyms, Anthony Bushell on the stage, Terence Grenidge with his eccentric publications, Robert Bryon—what might he not have achieved if the war had spared him, and how much he had achieved before that untimely end; and finally, as first the mouthpiece of the period, and its highest peak—the author of Vile Bodies: A halcyon period; so halcyon that he did not dare to think of it now, too often.

  It was true that there had not been much talk then of religion, and for that very reason it had been an amusing conversational line in tune with the temper of the day to announce that he was proposing to take holy orders; in the same way that when it was “the thing” to be a socialist, it had been amusing to make Tory speeches at the Union. But that had been a very partial, a very superficial reason for his acceptance of a calling.

  He had been always what his contemporaries had labeled “serious-minded.” He had always needed a solid rock under his feet. He had never doubted the general tenets of the faith in which he had been raised. When his contemporaries were seeking for panaceas in Marx and Bernard Shaw he had believed sincerely that the Established Church offered a sounder answer. Social reform alone would not satisfy the hankerings of the human heart for something that could not be explained in terms of material improvement. He had in addition a deep-rooted social sense of obligation toward his fellows. He wanted to help others to find the road that had led him to a peace of spirit. But he was not prepared to take this highly agreeable American into his confidence to the extent of explaining quite all of that.

  “I agree with you,” he said, “it was a wild bright time; in which religion was a negligible factor. But within a few years many of my contemporaries had come to feel need for authority and guidance. A number became Catholics, and quite a few, you may remember, became communists; though most of them, I fancy, have recanted since. Perhaps I was a little ahead of my friends in feeling that need for authority and guidance in 1924 instead of 1930. Perhaps because I felt it earlier, I was not forced to the same extremes. I could satisfy that need in the faith of my forefathers.”

  He said it simply, but directly; Bradshaw was impressed. This was a far deeper, more complex man than he had suspected when he had been aware of that pensive glance fixed on him across the table. He must put in a lot of time on Father Roberts.

  Slowly he worked the conversation round to the island’s more general problems.

  “You probably see more than anyone,” he said. “The people relax with you. Would you say there was any danger here of communism?”

  The Archdeacon shook his head. “They’ve not reached that stage yet. There’s the usual conflict of the haves and the have-nots, but they are very backward; they have stayed backward because the intelligent ones go to the larger islands, Jamaica and Trinidad, and to British Guiana; that’s where you’ll find communism, where there are highly intelligent educated men who feel that they can’t advance because of the inequalities of the social system under which they live. That’s a thing you’ve always got to realize about this place. The best people go somewhere else. Take a fellow like David Boyeur, whom you’ll be meeting soon if you’ve not already met him. He’d never amount to anything in Jamaica. He has no real education. He’s forced to cultivate his own back yard. Communism isn’t a problem here; it may be in twenty years but it isn’t now. The party is too busy organizing its cells in Trinidad, Jamaica, and B.G. to worry about Santa Marta.”

  This information disappointed Bradshaw. He had thought there might be an article on the communist menace as presented by British West Indians who were coming up to the States. It might have made a three day sensation. It still might, at a later date, and in another place, but his present assignment was the Windward and Leeward Islands.

  “What would you say then was the issue here?” he asked.

  “Color, my dear fellow, color.”

  A mischievous look came into the Archdeacon’s eye: he was a good man, devout, sincere, an idealist, but he had a leavening humanizing share of malice.

  “For three hundred years,” he said, “Europeans have been settling in these islands. There has been marriage and intermarriage and every variety of irregular alliance. Nobody can be sure of their precise ancestry. How many Englishmen know the maiden name of their mother’s maternal grandmother. We all carry in our veins blood of whose nature we have no suspicion. In England that does not matter, since our skins are white; but here where skins are brown, it’s a different matter. There used to be a phrase, ‘touch of the tarbrush.’ Now its place has been taken by ‘passes for white,’ and there isn’t a family that does not try to pretend that as far as itself is concerned, those two words ‘passes for’ do not exist.”

  “Does it matter so very much?”

  “More than you as an American from the North can begin to realize. A Southerner would not ask that question. You don’t have our situation
in the North. Your colored folk are segregated in different parts of your cities. You aren’t meeting them all the time, as Southerners are, and we are here. When I first came out I was astonished to realize how much that trace of color meant, how many social barriers it creates. There was a time, as you won’t need reminding, in Haiti before the French Revolution when Moreau St. Mery drew up some two hundred different classifications of mixed blood. That spirit still persists. The man with an eighth mixture considers himself the superior of the man with a quarter; though the man who’s completely African thinks himself the superior of the man of mixed blood. But the pure white and pure African among the educated classes are the exception. Among the vast majority this question of color affects every official, social, and political issue.”

  “Indeed.”

  Bradshaw was listening attentively. He was on to something now.

  “It would amuse you,” the Archdeacon was continuing, “to know the trouble to which these patrician families put themselves to conceal what everybody knows. You noticed the Kellaways for instance at G.H. the other night. It’s obvious to everyone that she has some African ancestry. But will she admit it—no of course she won’t. And the grandmother who might give away the secret is kept well out of sight, tucked away in a nice little villa in the hills and never allowed to come into Jamestown.”

  The Archdeacon chuckled. The malicious side of his nature was in control.

  “Old parish records are most illuminating,” he went on. “I was something of a scholar in my day. I had a taste for research. I get few opportunities of indulging it today. But I have derived much entertainment from tracing the genealogies of our leading families: when I visit other islands, as I often have to, I continue my research there. Several members of my congregation would be astonished by the information I possess about their antecedents.”

  Again he gave that ripe, rich chuckle.

  “I’m having cocktails with the Normans tomorrow. Is there a skeleton in that cupboard?”