Island in the Sun

by Alec Waugh

  His glass was half empty now; high time to eat. He went into the kitchen and cut a sandwich. He swung a leg over the table and munched it slowly. What a way to dine, for a man who was used to the ritual of a mess. He looked at the clock: quarter-past eight: early yet. Plenty of time to get down to that stack of figures. Come on, he told himself, back to the other room. Show a leg now, Carson.

  He returned to his study. Once again he winced, at the sight of it under the hard glass of the single central light. He must alter that, buy a chandelier. Against the wall was the mahogany bookcase that had stood in the drawing room at Taviton. Everyone had admired it, when it was there; it amounted to nothing here: just as he himself had looked so right there, and amounted to so little here. The whole life here was wrong for him. He was not the man for it. He ought to be in England, the colonel of a regiment, with a wife he could be proud of, with a son at Marlborough, a daughter at Roedean, another son at a preparatory school. Horses and golf and the regiment and a home of his own, that’s what he was meant for. … As for this—

  He finished his whisky, turned toward his desk, hesitated, turned back to the decanter. Those figures could wait until tomorrow.

  2

  To his relief and very considerably to his surprise Carson woke the next morning as the room was lightening, in fine fettle. Well, there it was, you could never tell. If you were someone like himself, who had been blown sky high by high explosive, whose system was a conglomeration of unexplained reactions, the outcome of this nerve pressing on this tendon, you never knew how alcohol would affect you. It might release this pressure, close on that. After a quiet tomato juice evening you could wake with a cracking head, every joint stiff and your mouth like a bird’s cage. On the other hand, with a ruin of Scotch around you, you could wake as though it was your seventh birthday. He drove out to his estate, after breakfast, in the highest spirits.

  It was as well he did. He arrived to find an atmosphere of high confusion. Outside the estate house, which was occupied by his manager, and where he stayed on the rare occasions when he had to spend the night on the plantation, was a group of chattering, gibbering peasants. It was like a monkey house.

  “What is all this about?” he demanded.

  There was a twittering silence. Fingers were pointed at the bungalow. He stared and understood. The wirework mosquito screen round the veranda was spattered with white feathers. On the grass round the steps leading to the veranda was a semicircle of white feathers. An Obeah spell had been placed upon the house.

  “How did this come about?” he asked.

  There was a movement at the back of the group and the manager’s wife was pushed forward to the front. She was a tall, handsome young woman, who was always laughing and with whom Carson indulged in flirtatious badinage; today she was bowed, she seemed to have shrunk into half her height, her face was shapeless with crying; her story was interspersed with gulps; she kept her head averted. He could scarcely hear what she said. Her husband interpolated explanations.

  At last Carson was able to discover what had happened. Her niece, her sister’s daughter, a child of six, was visiting with them. The girl had gone out swimming with a villager. They had gone out too far and the villager’s daughter had been drowned. The mother blamed the manager and his wife. They ought not to have allowed the children to go swimming. She had gone to the Obeah man and he had put this curse upon the house.

  Carson’s face grew grave. This, he knew, was serious. The peasants believed in their Obeah man. Something must be done, and quickly, or there’d be idle hands on the estate for weeks. He thought fast, and an idea came to him. It was the kind of situation that he liked; for which his training had equipped him.

  He raised his voice.

  “Now listen, all of you,” he said. “The woman whose child is dead is angry. I will see her. I will give her money. She does not work for me, but she lives in the village where you work. I want no one in that village to be angry.”

  He spoke slowly. He used short and simple words. He had listened to the Archdeacon’s sermons and had noted, for his own use, his avoidance of long words and his repetition of essential phrases.

  “The woman has suffered; she is sad and she is angry; but why is she angry against John and Helen? Are they to blame? How can they be blamed? It was not Helen’s sister’s child who led this woman’s daughter to the sea. Helen’s sister’s child is younger than was the daughter of this woman. It is the elder one who is the leader. Helen and John are not to blame. This house is not to blame. The woman is angry. She takes her anger to the Obeah man. Was it right of her to do that? No, it was not right. No blame lies upon John and Helen, no blame lies upon this house.”

  He paused. He looked round him; he had placed himself on the second step of the flight that led to the veranda: the peasants stood on the far side of the half-circle of white feathers. Their faces wore a rapt, mesmerized expression.

  “The woman is angry and she wishes to bring harm upon John and Helen. She wants to bring harm upon this house. She goes to the Obeah man. Is that right of her? No, it is not right. Was it right of him to have placed a spell upon John and Helen who have done no wrong? No, it was not right. And was it right of him to have placed a spell upon this house that had done no wrong? No, it was not right. But though it was not right, he has laid this spell; upon John and Helen, and upon this house. What are we to do?”

  Again he paused. The silence was complete. He had got them where he wanted.

  “A spell has been laid,” he said, “and it must be broken. It must be broken because it was wrong to lay it. It must be broken and I will break it. The Obeah man is wise, but I am wiser. The Obeah man knows many spells, but I know more spells. My spells are more powerful than his spells. I have traveled far, in Baghdad, Jerusalem, Damascus. The wise men of those countries know many spells. They taught me their spells. They taught me their magic. The spell must be broken. I will break it.”

  He was speaking now for the mere sake of speaking. The longer he talked, the more they would be impressed. He kept repeating the refrain: “John and Helen have done no wrong. This house has done no wrong.” He also kept repeating, “His spells are powerful. My spells are more powerful.” He would be unwise to disparage the Obeah man. The peasants believed in him. The Obeah man was clever. He had proved his powers. It was for himself to show, not that the Obeah man was puny, but that he was mightier.

  “I will break the spell,” he said. “You wait, all of you.”

  He kept a dispensary in the bungalow. He took from it a hypodermic, an ampule, disinfectant, cotton wool. He held up the hypodermic. A gasp went up. The hypodermic had great prestige value among the peasants. It was the new magic of the atomic age. It had relieved sufferings and cured sores. The villagers felt proud when they could say on their return from hospital that they had had injections. They felt cheated when they were given medicine.

  “The spell has been laid upon this house. I am the owner of the house, but John is the master of the house. I will kill the spell that has been laid on John. Then there will be no spell upon this house and no spell upon Helen.”

  He was standing now upon the veranda. He filed off the cap of the ampule, filled the syringe, and laid it on the table.

  “John, come here.”

  He wheeled forward a divan couch. He was resolved to make a parade of the occasion. The peasants were used to injections in the arm, he was going to make this one intramuscular.

  “Slip down your trousers and lie upon your stomach.”

  A ripple of interest ran along the crowd. Not so many of them had seen an intramuscular. He held up the hypodermic. “I am going to drive this two inches into John’s seat, but he will feel no pain at all.”

  He rubbed disinfectant on the spot. It felt like rubbing leather. He prayed that the needle would not break. It was a question of timing, like a short pitch to the green. He hoped he had learnt the knack. He struck. The needle quivered but stood firm. He emptied the syringe slowly.


  “That’s all,” he said. Then gave the other cheek a slap.

  The slap removed the tension. A laugh went up.

  “Did it hurt?” he asked.

  John shook his head. He was a tall, stalwart fellow in his later twenties. Thirty minutes ago he had been scowling; now a great grin lit his features.

  Carson faced the crowd.

  “The spell is broken.”

  He walked down the steps, he picked up two handfuls of feathers and tossed them over his shoulder, then he turned to Helen. She had shed her woebegone expression. She looked quite pretty. How quickly these people went from one extreme to another.

  “That Obeah man said he would make John sick. I will prove to you how sick he is.”

  He took her above the elbow and his eyes twinkled. “How long have you been married?”

  “Two years, sah.”

  Carson grinned. He broke into patois. “John, bien bon au cabane?” Which meant in the vernacular of a first war private soldier “John pretty good jig-a-jig.” Had he said it in English, she would have been embarrassed, but said in patois, she was delighted. She flung back her head and gave a cackling laugh; the others joined her.

  “I’ll wager you are not too bad yourself,” said Carson.

  She covered her face in her hands and turned away in simulated coyness. She giggled behind her hands, a series of cackles spluttered round her.

  “Now you listen carefully, Helen,” he went on. “Tonight you leave John alone. My spell will be fighting with Obeah man’s spell. You sleep in another room. And tomorrow again, you sleep in another room. John will be tired after the fight between the two spells: very, very tired. You leave him alone, but the next night, Saturday, you go to him. Then you tell all this folk on Sunday whether he’s sick or not. You got that? Good. Now back to work, the lot of you.”

  Carson returned to town that afternoon to the Normans’ party in the highest spirits. He was glad that the American would be there. It was a story that a journalist would appreciate.

  Bradshaw listened with appropriate attention.

  “What was in the ampule? Don’t tell me you injected water?”

  “Heavens no, I injected hormones. Mystotesterone, fifty milligrams, and that young fellow likes his wife. Helen won’t get a wink of sleep on Saturday. That Obeah man’s going to be the laughing stock of the whole neighborhood. He won’t monkey around again with my people in a hurry.”

  Bradshaw chuckled. He had only been in this island half a week and every hour he learnt something new: each new acquaintance was a window opening onto a different aspect of the island’s life.

  “We hear a lot about Haitian Voodooism. I hadn’t realized how far spread it was.”

  Carson corrected him.

  “Voodoo and Obeah are two separate things. There’s much confusion on that point. Journalists’ fault in the main, I’m afraid to say. I’d describe Obeah as necromancy, as the art of the witch doctor. But Voodoo is a religion. It’s come straight from Africa. It’s genuine, in its way. But I don’t know very much about it. I’m not even sure if there is much of it here.”

  “Would you say Obeah was all quackery?”

  “Indeed no, not at all. Those boys know their stuff. They know the local herbs. And that was our own medicine, after all, five hundred years ago. They can poison you if they want to. Some of their love potions are genuine aphrodisiacs, they can cure some ailments: why shouldn’t they be able to, after all.”

  “And there’s the power of suggestion.”

  “There’s very much the power of persuasion. I don’t disbelieve these stories of sticking pins into clay models. Doesn’t modern medicine prove that the witch doctors were nearer to the truth than the Edwardian G.P.? Aren’t they proving that half our illnesses are mental?”

  “Won’t that Obeah man try to get his revenge on you?”

  “If I started to worry about things like that I wouldn’t get much sleep.”

  To that there was no answer. But it gave Bradshaw a slight shiver down his spine to reflect that at this moment, sitting on his haunches, in some hut under the palm trees, was a man endowed with curious and uncalculated powers who in three days’ time would have only one desire, to be revenged on the white man who had made him an object of ridicule to his neighborhood. He looked thoughtfully at Carson. In his different way this man might prove as useful as the Archdeacon.

  “You like your laborers, don’t you, on the whole,” he said.

  “One can’t help liking them: at least I can’t. They’re comics, they make me laugh, they drive me mad at times. I can understand how in the days of slavery, their masters tortured them, even though they were damaging their own property. They can be maddening. But at heart they are thoroughly good-natured. They bear no ill will, provided they know you like them. That’s the important thing, to make them realize that you like them, even though you swear at them. They have such capacity for enjoyment too. You’ll have a chance of seeing that at Carnival.”

  “When is that?”

  “The two days before Ash Wednesday. Three weeks from now. Trinidad is the place to see it, at least people will tell you that it is, but in Trinidad the Carnival’s too organized for my taste, too commercial. It’s more intimate in a small place like this. You mustn’t miss it.”

  “There’s something else I’ve been told not to miss. The case that one of the planters is bringing about some cattle of his that strayed onto a neighbor’s land.”

  “That’ll be interesting all right.”

  “Will you be going?”

  “I expect so.”

  “Could I go with you? I’d enjoy it much more if I had someone to tell me who was who.”

  “I’ll be delighted.”

  “I’m most grateful.”

  On the evening after the case he would write his first article. It would be as well to start writing before his first, clear impressions became blurred. It was an axiom of travel writing that you learnt more in your first five days in a new place than you did in the next five months. You began to learn too much. Everything he was seeing and hearing now made a fresh impact.

  “I must have a word with our hostess’s daughter,” he told Carson. He wanted to make a few inquiries about that A.D.C. He was curious to know more about that car that he had seen driving away from the Continental two nights before.

  Chapter Nine

  1

  On the eve of the Preston case, Carson went to bed early and completely sober. He had played a round of golf in the afternoon, given the club a miss, gone to the first show at the cinema, and on his return had scrambled himself a couple of eggs and made a pot of tea. He woke, however, with a searing headache. Better take a shower, he told himself; the cold water would revive him. But as he stepped from under it, he nearly fainted. Back to the beaters. He lay supine, wondering whether he was going to be sick. The wound in his hip was aching, and the ball of his right toe—the toe that he had lost at Alamein—began to throb. If that shell had pitched one fraction of an inch nearer him…

  Why hadn’t it? What had his life been for the last ten years? What would it be for the next twenty?

  Lying with his eyes half closed, with aching limbs and thudding temples, he faced a self-imposed confessional. He had not one friend in the place. He had no illusions as to how they felt about him: he was surly, off-hand, ungregarious; then when they had written him off as a sour impossible person, he would disarm them by being genial, good company, generous. He’d talk amusingly, he’d collect a group round him in the bar, take them back with him to supper, fix them something pretty good in his chafing dish, open a bottle or two of wine and have a cracking evening: they’d part on the best of terms. And that stood him in worse stead than his surliness. People went away from one of his parties saying that after all the old colonel wasn’t a bad fellow if you got to know him; flattering themselves that they had been specially selected to be shown “his real side.” it only made it worse next day at the club when he retired
behind his mask: they felt they had been cheated.

  He was hopeless, hopeless, and he knew it. Sick in body, sick in mind: poisoned in mind and body. So poisoned that unless he had taken the counter-poison of alcohol, he felt like death; so poisoned in mind that unless the glow of alcohol was on him, he felt savage, bitter, ready to snap at anyone; and half the time alcohol made him even bitterer. He knew what he was doing but he could not stop it when he came into the club, feeling like murder; he couldn’t join in that everlasting shop about the price of copra and the price of cocoa, and their trivial gossip about who’d said what at the last G.H. party. If people came up and spoke to him, when he was in that kind of mood, he couldn’t help snapping off their heads. He could hear himself saying these things and he couldn’t stop himself. Why hadn’t that shell pitched an inch farther to the right?

  When his boy brought him his cup of tea, he shook his head. Whisky, that was the medicine that morning.

  2

  At the same time that Carson was refusing his morning tea, Max-well Fleury was taking his, perched beside Sylvia’s bed.

  “I’m going into Jamestown to hear the Preston case. What about you?” he said.

  “You know me. Any excuse to get into town.”

  He frowned. Any excuse to see Hilary Carson, was that what she had meant? It was ten days now since she had had a chance of seeing him. He had watched her closely; he thought that he had known what she was doing at every hour of the day. But maybe he was only fooling himself. He had no check on Carson. Carson could swoop down at any moment in his car. Maybe they had found some ingenious meeting place. It would be easier when they were both in Jamestown, then he could check upon joint absences. Then he’d know the truth, one way or another.

  “I’ll ring up Mavis. She’ll probably be going,” Sylvia said.