Island in the Sun

by Alec Waugh

  4

  At the club that evening Jocelyn was the center of attention. No one wanted to discuss anything else. Doctor Leisching’s case was shelved. It was amusing to have so much notice taken of her, and all the time there was the dramatic irony of knowing that no one guessed the story that lay behind the story. Carl Bradshaw was particularly inquisitive. His eyes had lit when the news reached him. His second article was taking shape.

  “There can be no doubt, can there, that it was a plot against your brother?” he said to Jocelyn.

  “I don’t see what else it could be; the telephone wires had been cut.”

  “Have you any idea why anyone should have borne a grudge against your brother?”

  She could think of a great many reasons. She had no illusions about her brother. She knew that he was unpopular with his laborers, that he was tactless with them, alternately overindulgent and overstrict. But she was not going to tell Bradshaw that.

  “You can never tell with these people,” she said. “They get a fancy in their heads. They brood and it breeds.”

  It was the precise answer that Carl Bradshaw had hoped for. It suited his theme that the island was in a restless state whose exact nature no one could diagnose. He did not want to have to give precise reasons. His articles would be much more effective if he could use the simile of a sick body that broke out in sores, now here, now there; sores that were not local but organic. He crossed to Colonel Whittingham.

  “Have you any explanation for this incident?” he asked.

  He received the same answer from the policeman.

  “Do you stand any chance of finding out who did it?” he inquired.

  The colonel shook his head. “Everyone will have an alibi. I shall strengthen my police post in that area. I may hear whispers. I may learn who needs watching. But that’s the most that I can hope for.”

  “Were you surprised?”

  “I’m never surprised by anything that happens here.”

  It was again the answer Bradshaw had been hoping for. Across the veranda he saw Euan Templeton. There was nothing that young Templeton could tell him but his training had taught him to tap every line.

  “I was wondering whether this business would be an indirect way of attacking your father through you,” he said. “Could anyone have known in advance that you were driving in that car?”

  “I don’t see how they could, seeing that I didn’t know myself. We were a party of twelve. We had three cars.”

  Bradshaw nodded. He had watched them drive off himself.

  “But a hundred people must have seen you driving out.”

  “They may have, but we changed cars after the picnic.”

  Of course they had. Why hadn’t he spotted that himself? He should have realized that something must have happened for Euan Templeton and Jocelyn Fleury to have been alone. He ought not to have missed that point. He wondered what had happened. He docketed the fact in his mind’s reference file.

  “I don’t think anyone can have known I was in that car,” Euan said. “We drove round the north part of the island. I don’t think that we passed a person on the way. It must have been premeditated. They planned to burn the cane on Carnival night. They knew Maxwell would be in town: they cut the telephone wire to make sure that no one could send out a warning. When they saw a car there, they took the precaution of throwing away the carburetor, so that whoever was in the car couldn’t drive away and give a warning. They probably recognized it as Maxwell’s car. It’s being there was an unexpected dividend. Can you see any other explanation?”

  Bradshaw shook his head. He couldn’t. It was motiveless malignity against a planter. It suited the temper of his article.

  Euan, as he had been talking, had caught Jocelyn’s eye. He raised his eyebrows, and she nodded. Her heart was light. How she was going to enjoy the private drama of these conspiratorial glances flashed across crowded rooms.

  He made his way to her.

  “I’ve an idea for tomorrow,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a film at the Carlton. We could start out to go to it, and not go to it. I’ve seen it already. I can tell you what it was all about.”

  “All right.” She nodded in agreement. Her parents were dining with the Normans. “We could have a snack at our place first,” she said.

  She felt no qualms when she told her mother that Euan was taking her to the cinema. Would her mother care if she knew the truth? She did not think she would: she would not want her daughter to be involved in a scandal, but she had never cared for her daughter in the way that she had for her sons. The appearance of the thing was all that counted with her. Jocelyn would see to the maintenance of that.

  5

  The cinema began at eight; Jocelyn left the house a few minutes before her parents.

  Euan drove up the hill.

  “Where are we going?” she asked. She had expected that he would drive along the shore.

  “You wait,” he said.

  He was by now above the town.

  “It looks as though you were going to G.H.”

  “I am.”

  He drove through the main gates. There were no lights in the lower rooms.

  “The old man’s dining with the A.G.,” he said.

  She was perplexed and puzzled; surely he was not planning to look at photograph albums in the drawing room. He parked the car in the garage.

  “Out we get. There’s a side door here.”

  It opened onto a long dark passage at the end of which was a glow of light. He slipped his arm through hers. “Straight up. Don’t make a noise.”

  She tiptoed up a flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs. It was like that nursery game “I spy.” Her heart was beating fast. It would have been exciting to steal into any house this way with a lover, but to put the sacrosanct premises of Government House to such a purpose was very special.

  The stairway branched at a narrow landing.

  “To the left,” he said.

  It was a short flight of seven steps leading to a door. “I’ll go ahead, you wait.”

  He looked both ways, then beckoned her on to the wide thickly carpeted gallery that led round the center hall.

  “To the right,” he said.

  The door was already open. She slipped quickly through. “Safe,” he said.

  She was in what seemed to her a small study annex, furnished mainly with a desk. On the table were a cake and a decanter.

  A door beside the desk led into a bedroom. It was high and wide, with a mahogany fourposter.

  “This is where I live,” he said. As a frequent guest, she was familiar with the general geography of the house, but this was new to her.

  “I’ve never been here before,” she said.

  “I’m not surprised. It’s the Governor’s private quarters. It’s completely shut away; that stairway’s never used. I’m lucky don’t you think?”

  She nodded. She had been excited but she had been frightened too, as she tiptoed up the stairs. Now she felt reassured, like a kitten that has licked the butter off its toes. She looked slowly round her. It was cozy here. Lucky. It was not only he that was lucky, she was too. One of the things that had always held her back when she had toyed with the idea of following Mavis’ example had been the fear of a squalid setting. Particularly in a place like Jamestown, with its lack of privacy. They were lucky to have this hideaway.

  “Would you like a glass of port?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  He stepped toward her.

  “Do you mean ‘not yet’?” he asked, as his arms went round her.

  “Yes, that’s what I mean,” she said. “Not yet.”

  The moon had risen, filling the room with twilight. She held his head against her shoulder under her chin, her hand stroking his hair. She had never guessed that there could exist a happiness like this. She had read in a novel that it was the second not the first night that was important. She had wondered what the writer had mea
nt. Now she knew. And it would go on getting better. She knew that too.

  She hated to disturb this trance-like rapture.

  “Oughtn’t I to be going back; won’t your father be home soon?”

  “It won’t matter if he is. He’s in the other wing. I can smuggle you out any time.”

  “But I mustn’t be too late. My mother mustn’t get suspicious.”

  “The cinema does not come out till half-past ten. It would be natural wouldn’t it, to go for a drive afterward?”

  “I suppose so. Yes.”

  “And when the moon’s nearly full, one might be tempted to go swimming.”

  “One might.”

  “So that if you were back by one o’clock …”

  “By half-past twelve.”

  “Anyhow, as it’s only half-past ten…”

  “And the cinema’s just ending: don’t you think you’d better tell me what the plot was.”

  “Right now?”

  “Why not: oh darling, yes … no, perhaps, not right now.”

  “I think now you might,” she said.

  “Might what?”

  “Tell me about that film.”

  He outlined the plot. It sounded very silly.

  “So that’s how it ends up does it?”

  “It’s the way most films end.”

  “How?”

  “With people getting married. Where are we going to get married, by the way, here or in England?”

  She smiled. She had half expected this. In Victorian days when a man kissed a girl, he felt bound in honor to say he loved her, and in those days to say that you loved a girl was to propose. Now in a modern day, a man who had spent a weekend with a girl felt himself bound to mention marriage. And in each case the girl’s obligation was the same; unless she was quite sure that the proposal was serious, to shrug it off. It was a convention as the other had been. On both sides face was saved. She was grateful to Euan for having fulfilled his side of the bargain, so early and so deftly.

  “If we were married here,” he said, “we’d have two marriages. There’d be the ceremony in Jamestown, then there’d be all the parties for us when we got back home.”

  She made no answer. He was being nice about it. The proposal was not a serious one, but it was said in a way that made it seem it was. It was now up to her to fulfill her side of the bargain.

  “I think it would be more amusing to be married here,” he said. “There’d be a public holiday for it. It would be a second carnival.”

  She recalled Maxwell’s wedding. Half the island and three-quarters of the police force had come into town; the church was packed, the windows lined with peering faces. She had been one of the four bridesmaids. As she came out of the cool dark church into the bright hard sunlight, she had been dazed and dazzled by the crowded color of the scene: necks were craning from every window, urchins had clambered up every tree: the men were wearing their gayest shirts, the women their brightest turbans. And that had been for a planter’s son; what would it not be for a Governor’s son. A second carnival. Yes, it would be that all right. She pictured the scene. Then she blinked. It was too fond a pipe dream.

  “Darling, let’s not talk of it,” she said. “Never again, not ever.”

  “But what am I to tell my father?”

  “Your father?”

  “I’ve already told him that we are half engaged.”

  “You’ve what?”

  “Told him that we’re half engaged.”

  “But you hadn’t proposed to me.”

  “I’d assumed that was assumed.”

  “You had.”

  “Why, naturally.”

  His head still rested on her shoulder. She could not see his face. His voice was light and bantering. She could not believe that he was serious; yet if he was not serious he was taking a joke too far.

  “What did you tell your father?”

  “That I was in love with you, that I thought you were with me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That if he’d been told on my christening day that his son would one day marry the daughter of two such trusted friends, he couldn’t have wished a happier fate for me.”

  “He said that, did he?”

  “He said a good deal more. Shall I tell you some of it?”

  “No, please don’t, it’s quite impossible you know.”

  “That’s the last thing it is.”

  His voice was confident and masterly. He was serious, there was no doubt of that. For a moment she let that dream picture flicker before her eyes. It was not true. It could not be. It was too like her schoolgirl dreams of marrying a Duke or a foreign Prince. She had never thought of Euan Templeton in terms of marriage. They had separate destinies. She could not adjust the reality of her lover to a schoolgirl’s dream world.

  She temporized. “It’s not sixty hours since that picnic.”

  “I know.”

  “The last thing that you imagined when we drove to Belfontaine was that you’d be talking like this to me tonight.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t you think it’s very silly to let the events of a single night upset the plans of a whole lifetime?”

  “Shall I tell you what I think?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Yesterday morning, as we drove back into town, I told myself that if I lost you now, my whole life would be empty.”

  His voice had lost its bantering tone. His cheek still lay against her shoulder. She could not see his expression. She was glad that it should be this way, his voice coming to her out of darkness. She stroked his hair, her eyes half closed.

  “You don’t know what my life’s been,” he said. “I didn’t realize what it had been myself till we drove back yesterday. Can you realize how alone I’ve been since my mother’s death? No atmosphere of home; no brothers and sisters; living with aunts and cousins; my father away all the time. Can’t you see how someone brought up like that builds a defensive covering for himself, goes behind a screen; so much is bottled up.

  “That’s what happened to me. I lived behind reserves. That’s why I behaved the way I did when I came out here. I’d had those eighteen months in the Canal Zone. I was due for a good time. I wasn’t looking for anything that went deep. I was living on the surface, as I had been for a dozen years, and when you have been living like that, it needs something violent, something sudden and unexpected to break through the crust. That’s what happened two nights ago at Belfontaine. I was taken off my guard. I did not know that there could be anyone like you, that anybody could do to me what you have done; I’m defenseless, wide open now. That barrier is down. I’m a new person: the person that I’ve become now, can’t exist without you.”

  He spoke slowly, quietly, undramatically. She had no doubt, there was no reason for doubting, that he was speaking out of his very heart. She could not trust herself to speak. In all her girlhood dreams, as a corollary to those reveries of grandeur, as a counterbalance there had been the dream of hearing such words spoken, of finding herself adored and needed by someone whom she could revere and love; words that would count more to her than the proud position, words for whose sake she would forsake tiaras. And now miraculously she had heard those words spoken, and by one who at the same time fulfilled that other dream. She could not believe that it was true. She continued to stroke his hair while she recovered control over her voice.

  “Whatever happens, never forget this, never. You’ll never be more loved than you are this instant.” She said it fondly, tenderly, but her voice was sad.

  It wasn’t possible. She knew it wasn’t, deep in her heart she knew it.

  It was close upon two o’clock that he left her outside her parents’ house.

  “I have been accepted haven’t I?” he said.

  She smiled, ruefully. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t give to be able to say ‘yes,’ but there’s one thing, no … I can’t be certain yet. I’ve got to discuss it with my parents.”

  6<
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  Jocelyn came down to breakfast to find the Belfontaine incident being discussed in the light of Maxwell’s candidature.

  “It would be both wise and dignified for him to retire,” her father was saying, “but I know he won’t.”

  “Isn’t that exactly what they want him to do?” her mother said.

  “By no means. They’ve their own remedy, not to elect him, as of course they won’t. But if he told them that he didn’t care to represent such a group of thugs, some of them would feel humble. But he won’t. And because there’s been this attack upon his property, he’ll say something during his election speeches that will stir up bad feeling. The trouble’s only half begun.”

  Jocelyn listened in silence, waiting for the moment to break her news. It was a moment that she had often dramatized in her imagination, visualizing the scene against many settings: sometimes she had pictured herself announcing an alliance that her parents would regard as disastrous, sometimes one of such glamor that it would take their breath away: at other times in a gloomy mood she had seen herself announcing some dreary “better than nothing at all” engagement, to which her parents could only say, “Of course, dear, if you really are sure that it’s for your happiness.”