Island in the Sun

by Alec Waugh

  The Archdeacon shook his head. “Norman is a Barbadian; the French never touched Barbados. It lay outside the cock-pit arena of the eighteenth century. It lay too far to the east and with the trades winds blowing against them, the French in Guadeloupe and Martinique could never launch an attack against it, so the rule of the whites was never disturbed. The same thing happened in Antigua in a lesser way; and that’s where Mrs. Norman’s mother came from. Her father’s family has a clear record too, at least as far as her father’s concerned. He’s a nice old boy; built the St. James Hotel. You’ll probably meet him there tomorrow.”

  “Will you be there?”

  “One of the advantages of my calling is that I have an excuse for not attending cocktail parties. I consider them one of the most barbarous inventions of our day. Evensong is sung in the Cathedral every evening at six o’clock. If ever you need an alibi, my dear fellow, there it is.”

  Chapter Eight

  1

  The Archdeacon was right in thinking that Mavis’ grandfather would be asked to meet Carl Bradshaw. Mrs. Norman wanted the American to meet new people. She discussed the party’s composition with Mavis.

  “We’d better ask Euan. He wasn’t at G.H.,” she said.

  To her mother’s surprise Mavis shook her head. “Euan sees quite enough of us.”

  Her mother made no comment. She remembered Mavis’ manner on the previous evening. They must have had a tiff.

  “Who else would you suggest? Doris Kellaway?”

  “She’s always fun.”

  “We want some men.”

  “That’s a perpetual problem.”

  “What about Denis Archer?”

  “There’s always Denis Archer.”

  It was said with an eloquent absence of enthusiasm.

  “Don’t you like him?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “It’s no good suggesting Grainger Morris is it?”

  “Well, darling, after all—”

  “I know, I know.”

  “It would only embarrass him, now wouldn’t it?”

  “Sure, sure. What about Colonel Carson?”

  “Well, what about Colonel Carson?”

  It was a question that the elder group often asked themselves. The Colonel was, in a very special way, an odd man out. He was too old for the younger set, yet as a divorced man, he did not fit into the adult married group. In Santa Marta, a Catholic island, divorce was rare. Carson introduced a discordant note. He was neither one thing nor another. Though he had an estate which he was working with success, he chose to live in town, driving out every morning. He was neither a planter nor a townsman. He had no intimates. There was no mystery about his past. He came of a sound Hampshire family; he had been to Marlborough and to Sandhurst. He had served in his county regiment and been mentioned in dispatches. Yet even so he was a dark horse, and Santa Marta was on its guard against dark horses. It liked people to keep their private thoughts and opinions to themselves, but it liked them to be transparent; packages hermetically sealed in cellophane.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Norman said, “there’s always Colonel Carson.”

  At lunch she mentioned the matter to her husband. He hesitated, as she herself had done when Mavis brought up his name.

  “He’s always at the club, you could ask him when you see him there tonight,” she said.

  “I could.”

  But when he arrived, and saw Carson leaning against the bar, Norman was tempted to go back upon his promise. He was late and several of his friends were grouped around tables on the veranda. Carson was by himself. That was one of the things about him that put people off. He was self-sufficient, often preferring his own company to his fellow members. At an annual general meeting he had caused considerable resentment by proposing a non-treating rule. “A man’s club should be like his home where he can please himself as to how many drinks he has. There’s no reason why because he wants to sit at a table with six other members he should have to have seven drinks.” He had argued the case at length. “It’s very hard on the young fellows. They don’t come up, except on dance nights, because they can’t afford to. They’re shy of not standing their rounds, and they don’t like to appear spongers. So they stay away. That’s not what we want at all. We had a non-treating rule in my regiment, and a very good thing it was.”

  That final remark put people’s backs up. Airing his military rank, treating a colonial club like an Army Mess. A non-treating rule undermined the whole fabric of West Indian hospitality. Carson did not find a seconder for his proposal. A number of harsh comments had been passed. “Trying to make out that he was thinking of the young men. He wasn’t at all. He was thinking of himself. He’s unsociable and thinks he’s Lord God Almighty. He likes to pick and choose, to stand up drinking by himself, then before he goes home he’ll condescend to sit at a table that suits him for a final drink.”

  Norman seeing him alone at the bar was tempted to pass on down the veranda. Why should he bother to ask to his house a man who was clearly so well satisfied with his own company? But at the last moment he thought better of it. You never knew what people were thinking under their façade. Maybe the man was shy. He walked across to him.

  “We’re having a few people in for drinks tomorrow, to meet this American journalist, Carl Bradshaw. We’d be delighted if you could join us.”

  “I’d love to. Thanks a lot. What’s yours?”

  Norman could scarcely refuse, though he did not want to drink at the bar, though he wanted to join a group; that was one of the damned things about Carson: he always put you in a false position. “I’ll have a pony rum and water, thanks,” he said.

  “That’s very modest.”

  Carson turned to give the order. “One pony rum and water. I’ve only just started mine,” he added. He had a long drink in his hand.

  Norman finished his drink quickly. “Come over to one of the tables for the other half,” he said.

  Carson shook his head.

  “I’m on the point of leaving.”

  He had had three whisky and sodas and he did not want to switch into rum: which he would have had to do, since whisky was expensive and he did not care to sting anyone for the extra cost. That was one of his objections to this treating rule. You could not drink what you wanted. Sometimes he felt like beer, and Dutch beer cost the earth. He liked to drink in terms of his own purse strings, not the other man’s. Why should he have to drink a pony rum and water if he didn’t feel like one?

  His glass was still half full. He sipped it appreciatively. He did not believe in hurrying his drinks. Norman, who had finished his drink, felt awkward standing without a glass in his hand. He wished Carson would either come over to one of the tables or finish up his drink. But that was another of the troubles about Carson. He moved at his own pace.

  He took ten minutes finishing his drink, then, “I’ll be on my way,” he said. “I’ll be seeing you tomorrow.”

  Norman watched him go with mingled relief and irritation. He felt frustrated, and irritated with himself for feeling so. He disliked being stood a drink without being allowed to stand one back: which was illogical, he fully recognized. Tomorrow he would be standing Carson four or five rum swizzles, to say nothing of a whole plate of “short eats.” Highly illogical; but that was the effect that Carson had on one. Norman recalled a jingle he had learnt at school:

  I do not love thee, Dr. Fell,

  The reason why I cannot tell;

  But this alone I know full well,

  I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

  That summed up Carson.

  Carson lived within five minutes’ walk of the club, behind the police station. It was the quietest place in Jamestown, and he had chosen it for that very reason. During the war he had spent six months in Baghdad and had learnt the necessity for privacy; particularly if you proposed to indulge in gallantry. He was delighted when he had found this small brick-built eighteenth century house, within fifty
yards of a main road, in a cul-de-sac, screened both from the main road and from prying eyes by a cemetery on one side and the blank wall of the prison on the other. No one could see his front door and visitors could park their cars behind the club.

  A light was burning in his hall. Through the open doorway of the dining room he could see his table, set for a buffet meal; a pile of plates, a potato salad, a chafing dish and a bowl of eggs, with cheese and bread and a row of tins that he could open if the occasion needed. The table was set like that most evenings, in case he returned with guests. Sometimes he would get into a poker game at the club, they would sit on late, and the best way to break it up was to say, “one more round of jackpots, then let’s go back to my place and have food.”

  He never made any set plans for the evening; sometimes he would go to a chopsuey; sometimes he would miss dinner altogether; he made his big meal in the middle of the day. He sent his boy back early. He did not want to keep him up. He paused, looking at the preparations of a meal. It was barely seven. He did not feel hungry yet. He probably would not by the time he had had another whisky. Better clear everything that needed clearing. He took the salad, the cheese, and butter and shut them in the Frigidaire. He lifted the lid of the large thermos flask. Ice there all right: he took it with the tantalus, a glass, and a bottle of soda water into his sitting room across the passage.

  He switched on the light and winced. How dreary it all looked. What they had called a man’s den, in Edwardian novels: a roll-top desk, a table with magazines; bookshelves that were mainly empty, pictures of school and regimental groups. How different from that other room, with its bowls of flowers, its fresh, crisp chintzes and the firelight flickering upon old china and polished rosewood. How long was it ago? Twelve, fourteen, fifteen years. Sometimes it seemed to be yesterday, sometimes it seemed to belong to another century, to a life upon another planet.

  He poured into his glass a two-finger peg of whisky; filled it three-quarter way with soda, took a long steady sip and put the glass down upon his desk. He was restless and did not feel like sitting down. He liked walking up and down a room, then coming back to his drink; you could keep your hands in your pockets and your ice didn’t melt too fast. He was used to walking. He had spent many hours pacing a parade ground, trying to keep warm while the N.C.O.’s drilled their sections. He could think better walking.

  He paused in front of a framed school photograph of a cricket side. He was sitting on the left side of the captain. The captain held the challenge cup upon his knee. It had been taken his last week at Marlborough. He had regarded the winning of the house cup his last term as a happy augury for Sandhurst. What would he have thought then could he have foreseen that photograph hanging here?

  Beside the Marlborough picture was a regimental group; the officers, thirty of them taken outside the mess, three years before the war. They were just home from India. He’d been engaged three weeks: he was to be married in October. How good life had been, how alive he’d felt; the green fresh fields of England after the arid plains, and Daphne…. After the masculinity of those years in India he had been ready to fall in love with the first white woman whom he met. What crazy good luck that that first person had been Daphne; Daphne who was so witty, was such good company, sat a horse so well, shared all his tastes; who was in every way the jackpot.

  It had all been so unplanned, too. He had no idea when he had met her at that first regimental dance that she was, if not an heiress, halfway to being one. He’d noticed her across the room; the fresh coloring, the air she had of combining delicacy and strength. He hadn’t known who she was. He’d watched her as he danced; he had noticed how smoothly she moved, then suddenly he had been aware that she was watching him; it had sent a shock along his nerves. The music had stopped. She was standing beside her partner at the buffet. Her eyes were on him. I can’t go up to her like this, he thought, but knew he could. He knew he had to. “We’ve not been introduced. But I’m Hilary Carson. I think you’re the most attractive girl I’ve ever met. When will you dance with me?”

  “The next one would be as good as any.”

  It had been as easy as all that. Before they had taken three steps together he had known it for a settled thing.

  Should he have been warned by the easiness with which it went? He had been so dizzily in love, it was so much the once-in-a-lifetime miracle for him, that he had never doubted it had not been the same for her. And perhaps it had been too, at that.

  Backward and forward he paced up and down his study. He ought to stop brooding about the past. It was done and over; it was the present and the future he should be thinking about now. But how could he help living in the past when it was much more alive?

  He looked again at the regimental photograph. How boundless had seemed then the boundaries of the future. For several years the battalion would be at home. He had a small private income. He had passed his captain’s exam. Her father had bought them a house in Devonshire. Daphne had in her own right half as much money again as he had. They would not need to bother over pennies. For a few years they need not bother about anything. They would incur no responsibilities. A family could wait. They could do every amusing thing they wanted, throw a gay party, dash over to Le Touquet, buy a hunter. He did not know what he had done to deserve such luck. What would he have thought had he been told when that photograph was taken that he would finish up like this, alone, in a twopenny-ha’penny West Indian island?

  His glass was empty and he refilled it. This was the last. He had some accounts to go over. He must keep his mind clear for them. As he paced the room, he looked about him with disfavor. Why couldn’t he make something better of it? Why couldn’t he buy some decent furniture? He could well afford it. He looked with irritation at the vase of flowers. That idiot Sam had merely jammed them in. Why didn’t he do the flowers himself? He’d seen Daphne arrange flowers often enough. He remembered her great masses of mixed flowers, ferns and leaves and every kind of flower. She ought to have been married to a painter, he had told her. That big vase of Waterford glass that she had always kept in the corner of the drawing room. Once again there rose agonizingly before his eyes the memory of that drawing room as he had seen it last in the spring of 1940.

  He had been posted in March as a replacement to the second battalion stationed then at Malta. He had been sent home on a week’s final leave. It had been a bitter winter of cold and snow, but the fires had been banked high at Taviton. Their hearts had been light: the phony war was on, Italy was neutral. His posting to Malta was merely one of those routine nuisances inseparable from a soldier’s life. Soon Daphne would come out and join him. They had still thought of war as that—an exacting form of peacetime maneuvers. All the same, since they might be separated for a year, it might not be a bad idea for them to start that family they had been postponing. It would keep her occupied. When he came back or when she came out to join him, they could pick up the threads of their earlier carefree life.

  That final leave had been a second honeymoon. They had felt utterly at peace, fulfilled, very much one person as they had sat on that last evening, before the fire. They’d call it Hilary, boy or girl, they had agreed. Hilary was a girl’s name too. How little he had guessed that that was the last evening he would ever spend at Taviton, that he would never again sit alone with Daphne before a fire.

  It was all a very commonplace story, he supposed. It had happened to how many hundred others. There had been that first letter beginning, “Too sad, darling, but no little Hilary, there’s plenty of time though, isn’t there.” Then there had been a spate of letters, sometimes two a day, arriving in great batches, that he had tried in vain to sort into their proper order. Soon the letters had become less frequent, less ecstatic, but that after all was only natural. So had his too. You could not live on that high plane forever. You had to get down to ordinary living. The war became suddenly intense. The fall of France, Italy joining in, the siege of Malta: then his own posting to the Western Desert, to take ove
r command of a territorial battalion: there’d been the long chases back and forth; halfway to Tripoli, back to Alexandria; finally Alamein, with the wounds that had kept him in hospital for seven months, then when he was convalescent there had come, out of the blue, that letter starting, “Dearest, this is the hardest letter I have ever had to write.”

  He had never seen her again. The divorce had taken place through the usual channels. He had not been in any hurry, when it was through, to return to England. He had refused repatriation when his four years were up. By the time he had got home, she was in South Africa, and Taviton was sold.

  It might have been easier if he had seen her again: if some later picture had exorcised those earlier pictures: if he could have seen her with her new husband, when she was no longer in love with him, when her voice had lost the special inflections that it had for him. Then he could have consoled himself with the thought, She’s a different woman now: the Daphne that I knew has vanished. But he never had. Nothing had come to shatter the picture of that earlier Daphne, of their three years’ marriage, of that embarkation leave. He still felt married to that Daphne.

  He had said that to H. E. once, and a look of surprise and interest had come into the Governor’s face. “It’s curious that you should say that. It’s what I’ve felt about myself.” He had thought about that afterward. Perhaps in their different ways he and H. E. were in the same boat. H. E. had lost his wife during the war. H. E. had been accustomed to long separations. His wife’s death had not suddenly cut the thread of livelihood. His routine had continued, unchanged. The Whitehall official who loses the wife whom he has been accustomed to seeing every day of his life for a dozen years, is for a while distracted, broken, rudderless, but gradually he becomes acclimatized to a new way of existence: he becomes a new person and that new person is able to form new attachments. It was altogether different if your run-of-the-mill routine was undisturbed as his, as H. E.’s had been. In that case you remained loyal to your bonds and vows. He had often heard people wonder why H. E. had not remarried. That was the reason. For himself, as for H. E. He felt himself still married to his wife.