Island in the Sun

by Alec Waugh

  Euan made no comment. Huddled in the corner of the car, he looked away from Archer. What’s biting him, Archer thought. He dropped Euan at the front door then drove round to the garage. He looked into the secretariat, two dark heads were bent over their desks. Margot was not alone: there was no real point in his going in, but the impulse to be near her, to hear her voice if only for a moment, was insistent, and he had an excuse for going in; they would want to know about the case.

  They listened with interest and amusement to his recital.

  “Serve Montez right,” said the other girl.

  Margot made no comment. There was an air about her that he had come to connect with the harboring of inner thoughts. He looked at her interrogatively.

  “I reread your poem,” she said. “I’m beginning to understand it. But there were four lines I didn’t get.”

  “Which ones?”

  “These.”

  She slipped a sheet of paper in the machine and began to type. He stood behind her shoulder. It touched and flattered him that she should have learnt his lines by heart. He was surprised too. They were lines of which he had himself been doubtful.

  He watched the lines appear upon the sheet. She tapped three spaces, then a line of dots, then the words “My parents will be away tonight.”

  She pulled out the sheet. “There,” she said, and handed it to him. There was no change in her voice, no change in her expression. The other girl seated three yards away could have no inkling that anything unusual had transpired.

  5

  Carl Bradshaw, on his veranda, sipped at his strong, sweetened tea. It was a relief to enjoy a civilized drink after all those punches. Across the tea table David Boyeur lounged back in a long chair, recounting the story of his rise.

  “I wasn’t going to live the way my parents did, in a small house, with no money to spend on clothes or parties. My father had worked hard, passed exams, learnt to be a good clerk in an office. But where did that get him? There were fifty others like him in this island alone, the pay is poor, there are no prospects. He has to wear neat clothes. The little money he has must go in keeping up appearances. All my childhood it has been the same thing. No fun because no money. That wasn’t good enough for me. No, sir.”

  He stretched out his legs; his eyes rested with pleasure on his thin silk socks and his highly polished brown and white shoes: he was a Balzac character, Bradshaw told himself; a West Indian de Rubempré. Had anyone understood young men better than that coffee drinking Frenchman? That phrase of his that George Moore had quoted as the key to every young man’s ambition; the urge “to be famous and to be loved.” That goad had driven Boyeur.

  “What made you decide to go in for politics?” Bradshaw asked.

  “I had to find something that I could do better than the others could. I found that I could speak. We had a debating society at school. I could get people to listen to me. I could get them to vote the way I wanted, even against their own calmer judgment. All I had to do was talk. They followed. That was what I had to rely on, that was my one gift, apart from being good at cricket. How was I to make the most of it? I saw that quickly. By getting their trust and confidence. I had to do something for them, then when I had them behind me, the ‘big shots’ in Jamestown would have to take notice of me. I had to take a short cut somewhere. I hadn’t time to wait.”

  Bradshaw nodded. It was pure de Rubempré. Balzac himself had waited. Poor and squat and ugly, he had taken the long slow way; triumph had come when he had no longer the heart and youth to savor it; but his young men one and all had been the exact reverse. They had been tall and handsome. They had snatched at success when they were young, when they could wear it like a buttonhole; they had taken their short cuts; and the account was registered in the long ledger of the Human Comedy. Boyeur was one of those.

  “I’ve always heard,” Bradshaw said, “that the first ten thousand dollars of a fortune are the hardest earned, that it’s the first step that counts. What was yours? How did you get started?”

  “I went to Trinidad.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “Two things. I played cricket. I’m a good cricketer. I made a lot of runs. I played in the state trials. I was offered a job in one of the stores so that I could play for Trinidad. I refused. I said I was a Santa Martan, that I wasn’t going to desert the island of my birth. That was reported in the papers here. It sent up my stock.”

  “What was the second thing you did?”

  “I met the Left Wing politicians, men like Uriah Butler. Everyone here has heard of him. I wanted to quote him on my return, to be able to say ‘My friend Uriah Butler.’ “

  “How long did you stay away?”

  “Not long, two cricket seasons. They mustn’t have time to forget me. I was given a big reception when I returned. They asked me to captain the island cricket side. But I refused. That was my short cut. I told them that there were more important things than cricket. At least for me. I hadn’t time for cricket. I had other things to do. I had come back to raise the living standard of the islanders, to devote myself to the Santa Martans. They believed me, because they saw I had made a sacrifice on their account. You know how they worship cricket. They thought there must be something special about a man who could have played cricket for Trinidad, but preferred to return and work for them. I had them where I wanted them.”

  Bradshaw listened, sympathetically. It was Balzac, all the way.

  “They tell me that you are running for a seat in the local Parliament. Doesn’t that mean that you’ll have to toe the party line?”

  Boyeur laughed boastfully. “Not me. I’m an independent. I’m not taking orders. The Left Wing want me on their side because I’ve got organized labor under my thumb. They can’t afford to quarrel with me.”

  “What’ll happen when you and they don’t see eye to eye?”

  “That won’t be happening. I shall know what’s my business and what isn’t. I’ll let them run their show, but when it’s a question of labor, they’ll do what I tell them.”

  “Is there such a thing today as an issue that doesn’t turn on labor, whether it’s education, housing, anything you like?”

  Boyeur grinned. “That’s what the boys are going to discover. I shan’t push myself. But they’ll soon find that at every turn of the road I’m the important person. Up to now I have played their game, I shall appear to go on playing it. In all these other islands, Grenada, St. Kitts, Antigua, there have been serious strikes. Here there has only been one strike; a short one, and we won it. I have stopped strikes. I have told my chaps that they have only to wait for the new constitution, then they won’t need to strike. They will be given their raises legally, through the Leg. Co. The party members know how much they owe to me. I’ve kept this island quiet for two years.”

  “Do you think that below the surface there is discontent?”

  “Naturally, why not. ‘The haves’ and ‘the havenots.’ They know that Whitehall has lost its power. They have seen what has happened in India, in Egypt, in the Persian Gulf. Other peoples are free, they say, so why not us?”

  “Do you think they are ready to govern themselves?”

  “That’s another question. They think they are. That’s what they’re clamoring for. They want to run their own show.”

  Bradshaw nodded. It was the same story everywhere, people preferred to run their own show, even if they ran it badly: how many thousand Indians had not been slaughtered by fellow Indians when the British troops went out of India, but the Indians preferred it that way.

  He sipped his tea, helped himself to another slice of cake; what a good meal tea was. He had enjoyed reading in English novels of returns home after golf in winter, drawing the blinds and sitting down before a fire to tea and crumpets. There were many very admirable things about the English and their way of living.

  He let Boyeur talk on; he encouraged him to talk. Everything Boyeur said was copy. He had been hurt, angry, aggrieved when his chief had give
n him this assignment. He was grateful now. He was alert, stimulated, eager, impatient to get it down on paper: he’d show the boys in Baltimore that he wasn’t finished.

  From the street below came the clatter of a steel band, preparing to parade the town. Carnival was only a few days distant, and tension was already mounting: shops were filled with costumes and the children had started to run in bands, with their faces painted. Bradshaw walked to the edge of the veranda.

  “It’ll be quite a show I reckon, on the day.”

  “For three days the whole place goes mad. On the last day anything may happen. You’ll have a good view from here.”

  “I see more than you might imagine from up here. The other night quite late in the evening I saw a Government House car drive away from here. I assumed that that young A.D.C. doesn’t waste his time.”

  “From what I’ve heard he doesn’t.”

  Boyeur chuckled as he said it. There was a knowing twinkle in his eyes that Bradshaw did not miss.

  “That sounds as though you knew the form that those amusements take.”

  “I’d say I do. She’s one of the secretaries at G.H. She was my girl for a couple of years.”

  “Indeed.” Wheels within wheels, and with a vengeance. “What happened between you two?”

  “Time. One of those things, we both felt that we could use a change.”

  “You didn’t quarrel.”

  “No, no. Mutual agreement. We’ve stayed the best of friends.”

  Did the Governor know that, Bradshaw asked himself? Every moment the plot got thicker. Unless he wrote his first article quickly he would not be able to get all he had to say into a single column.

  6

  Bradshaw would have liked to begin his article the moment Boyeur left him; but his professional instinct warned him that on a night like this he should put in an appearance at the club.

  As he had foreseen, the Prestons were the center of attention.

  “We all owe you a real debt of gratitude. These fellows will think twice before they try that trick again,” Mr. Norman was assuring them.

  There were a dozen or so round a table. Carson was one of them. He looked morose and sullen. He had pushed back his chair so that he was half outside the circle; in but not of it.

  Dr. Leisching joined them. “You are right. They are out of hand; Did you see how that impertinent puppy Morris talked to me today?”

  The doctor had had two punches; it was an airless evening; his face was flushed, and the pleated skin tissue of his scar stood out white and livid.

  “That fellow needs a lesson too,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you give it him when you were in the box?”

  It was from Carson that that came, and it was said on the note of aloof superiority that those who knew him well recognized as a danger sign. He had felt ill all day. His wound had ached, from under his armpit right down his left side to his ankle; there was that twitching sensation in his severed toe. Alcohol alone could dull the pain, and now the periods of immunity were getting briefer. For the last ninety minutes he had been drinking fast. He was in a belligerent mood, knew it and did not care.

  The fact that Carson was sitting put Leisching at a disadvantage. It embarrassed him that the Englishman should loll back there, while he was standing. He felt like a subaltern had up before his colonel. He looked for a free chair and did not see one. He tried to be haughty too.

  “I am a very busy man. I have work in the hospital. I have my private patients. It was a great inconvenience for me to have to give evidence at all. In a case like that, it should have been sufficient for me to give evidence in my own house, in my own time, on oath.”

  “It must be nice to be able to consider yourself and your own time as important as all that.”

  “My time is anyhow too important to be wasted by a bumptious young colored lawyer.”

  “At any rate he’s a Briton.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That this is his country and his parents’ country and his grandparents’ country; that for a hundred years, since emancipation, his people have been brought up in a country where justice is respected. He hasn’t cashed in late.”

  “Are you trying to insult me?”

  “Am I? I don’t know. I’m telling you the truth. You should consider yourself very lucky to be allowed to live in a society such as this, every night and morning you ought to go down on your knees and thank your Maker that the British have been so magnanimous as to allow you to enjoy their laws and liberty.”

  “I’m a British subject.”

  “I know you are. There’s an American phrase for that. ‘A johnny-come-lately.’ If you and your pals had had your way there’d have been no British laws and liberty for you to shelter under.”

  Carson’s voice remained as calm and as aloof as ever. He had not lost his temper. He was not drunk. He felt like death; his wound was aching, but he knew what he was doing. He was enjoying himself. If this square-headed bastard wanted to pick a fight he could. These bloody Germans, how he hated them. They’d spoilt the world for everyone, with their insufferable arrogance, born of that chip upon their silly shoulders. Always rattling their sabers and starting wars. They had ruined life for his father’s generation, now they’d ruined it for his.

  He half closed his eyes. How different everything would have been for him if there’d been no war. He’d never have lost Daphne; his side would not be throbbing. He’d be in England, in the prime of manhood, colonel of his regiment, with a wife, a home, two children … the way his kind of Englishman should live. But here he was, a second-rate expatriate in a third-rate colony; because of these damned Germans, who thought themselves so important that they couldn’t be called away from their work to give evidence in a court of law.

  “It is most unjust of you to say things like that,” the doctor was protesting. “No one objected more than I did to the excesses that were committed under the Hitler regime.”

  “What form did your objections take? You kept out of the concentration camps, I gather.”

  “Why should I have been in a concentration camp? I am not a Jew.”

  “A great many Germans who were not Jews found themselves in a concentration camp.”

  “I would remind you that I am not a German, that I am an Austrian.”

  An Austrian, not a German. There it went again. They always had an excuse. It was never their fault, always someone else’s. They weren’t Prussians, they were Bavarians; they weren’t Nazis, they were liberals; they weren’t Germans, they were Austrians. Always an excuse. Their sniveling self-righteousness was more tiresome than their saber rattling.

  “It suited you all right to be Germans when Hitler was winning battles, when Hitler was bringing you plunder from France and Belgium, when you were fed, with money in your purses, earned for you by him. It was great gravy then. It was a very different thing when he started losing battles, when your cities were bombed, when food ran short; then you became Austrians. I can’t say I’ve much use for fair weather patriots. There is a lot to be said for the old British motto ‘My country right or wrong.’ “

  “Sir, that is too much.”

  “Is it? I don’t think it is. When my father was fighting against your people in what is now called ‘The Kaiser’s War,’ they had a phrase ‘There’s only one good German, a dead German.’ That wasn’t very complimentary. It wasn’t such a polite war as this last one’s been. I’d use that phrase in another way. I’d say that the best Germans are dead.”

  He was still keeping his voice on a level note. He was angry, very angry, but he had not lost his temper. He was in control. He had rarely enjoyed himself so much. Leisching was flushed and angry. There was silence along the whole veranda, not only at his table, but at the other tables. Everyone had turned to see what was happening, but that was because Leisching had raised his voice, not because Carson had. No one would be able to say next day that Carson had got drunk, lost his temper, and made a scene.

/>   “I’d put it this way,” he went on. “When I say that the best Germans are dead Germans, I am referring to the men of the Afrika Corps, to the men who were sacrificed at Stalingrad, to the men who made their last desperate effort in the Battle of the Bulge; they were brave men and honorable soldiers. As a soldier I can respect and honor them. I can’t say I can have feelings like that for men who disown their country when things go badly with it. There’s a lot to be said for going down with a sinking ship.”

  “Sir, I insist.”

  Leisching was scarlet; his voice was strained, with its guttural quality accentuated. “You may say what you like about my country, but in my country, when a man insults us, we slap him across the face, and next morning his seconds call on us, and we fight a duel. Look at this proof of that.”

  He pointed to the scar on his forehead. There was a little murmur of approval. The doctor had made a point, and Carson knew it. He had to make a comeback. He rose to his feet.

  “You and your scars. I call them self-inflicted wounds, scratches kept open with salt so that they shan’t heal. When an Englishman fights a duel, he makes a job of it.”

  He paused. He took a quick look round him at the circle of smug faces; they were all secretly loving it, yet were all prepared the moment it was over to say, “What terribly bad form.” He longed to shock that smug look from their faces. They couldn’t guess what he was feeling. What did they know about wars and Germans: what had they done, any of them? With about two exceptions they had been indispensably employed out here, sitting in the sun, with all the rum they wanted, and an American naval base to keep them supplied with Chesterfields. What did they know about wars and Germans? He’d show them, once and finally. His hands went to his belt. He undid the buckle. Eyes widened in the circle round him. No one could guess what he had in mind.

  “This is how we fight duels.”

  He pulled down the zipper of his fly and his trousers fell in a pile about his feet: he turned his back upon Leisching, raised his shirt, bent slightly forward and displayed his rump. “That’s the kind of scar we carry in my country.”