by Alec Waugh
He looked into the other pockets; a driving license, membership card to a night club in San Juan, the photograph of a girl: no one he recognized. He put them back into the wallet. No thief would bother about those. He wiped the wallet carefully with his handkerchief, inside and out. No fingerprints. He took out the wrist watch. It was ticking cheerfully. How little had Carson thought that morning that he was winding it for the last time. Would it ever be wound again?
His heart was buoyant as he took his seat in the car. He wanted to sing. It was as though he were rid of the burden that oppressed his boyhood. He had forgotten Euan’s message for Jocelyn. Should he go back and give it? Would his forgetting of it awake suspicions? He did not see how it could. The message could not matter, surely, and he was anxious to get away.
The moment he was out of Jamestown he began to sing. The road for a mile or so would be dotted with bungalows, then there would be the cane fields and the coconut plantations that divided the clustered ghuts. There was no moon, the sky was clouded. Soon he would be on a bare stretch of road. A scud of rain dashed against the windscreen. All the better. If there were any footprints on the flagstones this would wash them out. You could rely on a shower most days at this time of year. There were no headlights ahead, there were no headlights behind. He was in open country.
He slowed down the car, but did not stop it; there must be no sign of a car having stopped along this road. That was the kind of thing that gave a man away. With one hand on the wheel, he took Carson’s wallet from his pocket. It was wrapped still in the handkerchief that had wiped it. Using the handkerchief as a sling, he flung it toward the cane fields. It was so dark that he could not see it in the air. Would anybody find it; most likely someone would. Would the finder hand it in to the police: possibly, but more likely not. Perhaps some peasant would be caught with it in his possession. But if he were, it could not harm him. He could prove an alibi. He would not have drawn attention to himself by spending money. If I hadn’t kept the money, Maxwell told himself, I might have got some peasant into trouble. In how many detective stories had not the criminal’s conscience been pricked by finding an innocent man accused of the crime he had committed. He had insured against that happening.
The watch though, was another matter. A watch would be hard to explain away. Why should anyone who had bothered to steal it throw it away. Perhaps he had made a mistake in taking it. He must get rid of it so that it would be lost irrecoverably, so that its disappearance would be a mystery, so that the police would waste time searching for it. He could take it out with him tomorrow when he swam. He had a small pocket in his bathing trunks. He could drop it well out to sea; yes, but was that safe? He would have to have it in his possession for the night.
Suppose he had a car accident and was knocked unconscious. The watch would be found on him. The betting was a million to one against that happening, but it was those million to one chances that brought men to the scaffold. And even if he concealed the watch till tomorrow, how could he be certain that the watch would not be washed ashore, brought in by a fisherman, near his house, so that the locality was defined. It was another million to one chance, but an outside chance could happen. There was that shark that had been caught in Sydney with the arm of a man undigested in its stomach; the arm was identified by a signet ring and round the wrist was the mark of a rope showing that the man had been flung bound into the harbor; a man had swung for that. You could not leave things to chance. He had to get rid of the watch at once.
He put himself in the position of a thief who had been surprised by Carson, and had in a moment of panic taken his accuser’s life. Being a thief, he would, before hurrying away, have taken whatever of value he could see. What was there of value but the watch and wallet? He would take them, surely. And then surely when he began to think, he would realize that the watch was something which he must not keep. He would fling it away. It was no use hiding it. He could never use it. Fling it away. That’s what the thief would do. That’s what he must do. He took it out of his pocket, wiped it carefully and flung it wide. The last link with Carson gone. He breathed deeply. That was that. He was safe and free. He began to sing again. He was still singing when he drove up the drive to Belfontaine.
Sylvia was on the veranda reading. She rose to welcome him.
“Well?” she asked.
He looked at the clock. It was after half-past nine.
“You must be starving,” he said.
“I’m not. I’ve nibbled. How about you?”
“I’m ravenous.”
He was not, but he felt that he should say he was. He ought to be. He had not eaten since lunch and he had eaten little then. As they moved to the dining room, he passed his arm around her waist. How pliant and soft she was. Her hair smelt of jasmin. He faced her across the table. She was very neat and trim, with her hair firmly waved, under a smooth mask of make-up. Perhaps after all he liked her better this way; it was good at the end of a long day to return to something delicate and artificial, someone who would provide a contrast to mundane actualities. He leant forward across the table.
“It’s true,” he said.
“What’s true?”
“About my grandmother having an African ancestor.”
Sylvia made no comment.
“Doesn’t it surprise you?”
“No.”
“You mean you knew, all the time.”
“I can’t quite say; I suppose I did. I …”
“Does everybody know?”
“I’ve never heard anyone discuss it.”
“How did you know then?”
“I didn’t exactly know. I guessed.”
“You guessed?”
“It seemed quite likely, likelier than not.”
Likelier than not. So that was the explanation of her coldness, her indifference, her revulsion.
“Didn’t your parents mention it when we were engaged?”
“No, no one mentioned it.”
Of course not, no one would. How true Bradshaw’s article had been. That conspiracy of silence.
“But you yourself, you must have thought over it.”
“I didn’t, really.”
“It must have made some difference.”
“No, honestly, it didn’t. You see …” She paused, she hesitated. She wanted to put it, he felt, in a way that would not hurt him. “The point is this: people who have got colored blood, whether it’s a little or a lot, fuss about it, they get self-conscious, but people like myself who know we’re completely white, it’s something that seems unimportant.”
She said it slowly, with a smile. Was that really the way that it had been?
“While I, on the other hand, I’ve not only never known, it never occurred to me to wonder. But perhaps all the time I have known subconsciously. I might have overheard it from a nurse. It may have worked in the dark like a secret poison.”
“It may have done.”
Was this the secret of his moodiness? Had the high drama of this day been like a lancet cutting a hidden abscess? Was that why he had sung in the car driving back, why he had felt himself rid of the burden that had oppressed his boyhood? For the first time in his life he could carry his head high. Was this the explanation? At last he knew what he was and who he was. He stood square upon his own two feet. Wasn’t this the miracle that psychoanalysts performed for you? They found out what was the secret reason for your problems. Then when you found out, your mind was clear. He had thought it all nonsense when he had heard it talked about. Why should a man feel any different because he learnt that his moodiness was due to his having been jealous of his nurse’s flirtation with a chauffeur at the age of three? But perhaps those psychos had something after all.
All his life he had been fretted by his hatred of the colored people, he had resented having been put under a colored teacher; he had carried a chip upon his shoulder. Might not that have been due to an unconscious knowledge that he had colored blood? Now that he knew the facts he could toss
that chip away, he could accept himself for what he was. That fight with Carson had been the vindication of his newly discovered self. He had found his manhood. He could look anyone in Santa Marta in the face.
“I expect that’s what’s been wrong with me all along. I’ve known but I’ve refused to admit to myself that I’ve known.”
He looked at her thoughtfully across the table. They had sat here alone so often, facing each other, during their year of marriage. This was the first time that they had really talked to one another: there had always been a barrier.
“I must have been very difficult at times,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“I would. I must have been. I’m sorry. I’ll be different now. Everything’ll be different now.”
He had a sense of his whole life starting again, in his new-found confidence.
“It’s going to make all the difference to my candidature for the Leg. Co. That’s what I told Bradshaw at the club tonight.”
He recounted the conversation. She listened, interested.
“That was clever of you,” she said. “You’ll disarm them that way.”
In her voice there was a note that he had never heard before, a note of pride. He told her about the meeting he planned to hold, of what he proposed to say. He talked quietly, uncontentiously. He had never talked to her like this, she thought. Where previously he had been arrogant, boastful, intolerant, he was confident, self-assured. If only he were like this oftener.
“It’s getting late,” he said. He stood beside her as she rose, he passed his arm about her shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve had a wretched deal. It’ll be better now.”
There was a new tenderness in his voice. The exhilaration, the sense of power and achievement that had made him sing as he drove back was still upon him. He must make amends to Sylvia.
Later when he took her in his arms there was a new tenderness of word and touch; an exulting adoration in the hands that fondled, the lips that wandered in lingering caresses. Before he had been fierce, tyrannical, insistent, greedily gloating over her. He had revolted and disgusted her. She had felt that she was no more than a receptacle for passion. Now she had the feeling that she was a shrine: there was devotion, there was worship in his wooing. For the first time she felt a need to give; to meet, to reward his ardor. She wound her arms round his neck, let herself relax, let herself respond, meeting the rhythm of his courtship as though she were his partner, unconscious but acutely conscious, submerged yet dominant, dictating in her response the speed and tempo of his wooing with a new-found delight in her own powers. It was like music rising from one peak of harmony to another, till at last the shuddering, shattering excitement of which she had read but disbelieved in, finally convulsed her.
Chapter Fifteen
1
Maxwell woke with the room filled with daylight. Sylvia was turned toward him. He raised himself upon his elbow. She had never looked lovelier than now, in profile against the pillow. He bent and kissed her. She stirred, opened her eyes, blinked, then smiled a long, slow smile of recognition and remembrance. She raised her arms, folded them round his neck, drew down his face to hers.
“Darling,” she said.
At last, he thought, at last.
It was a peace, a happiness such as he had never known, then suddenly, shatteringly, he remembered. That body in the room behind the Court House. At this very moment Carson’s servant would be letting himself into the back room, to light the stove, to prepare the morning tea. At this very moment the alarm was being given; policemen would soon be in the house, searching here, searching there, finding heaven knew what. How did he know that he had left no clue?
Panic struck him, with a sense of the dramatic irony of his position. Here he was, in this soft warm bed with his wife’s arms round him, secure and loved and cherished, for the first time at peace, at the very moment when the structure of that happiness was threatened. His arms tightened about Sylvia’s shoulders, desperately, as though she were an amulet. “You’re everything I’ve got. Everything I care about in the world.”
Once again she felt herself relax, respond to these new accents in his voice, to this new tenderness of tone and touch. There was a tap upon the door. The maid with the morning tea. She drew back with a laugh. “Too bad,” she said.
She chattered happily as they sat up side by side, sipping at their tea. Usually she sat in silence: “I’m never alive till breakfast time,” she’d say: he’d hurry out to his early chores as quickly as he could. But today she was awake, bright-eyed, talkative, wanting to know who had been at the club and who’d said what. It was part of the dramatic irony of the situation that she would want to talk on this one morning when he had to be alone, to think. But he must not show her that. He mustn’t behave as though he was worried. In a month, a week, perhaps a few hours’ time, she might be forced to take stock of his behavior during the day ahead. He could hear counsel for the prosecution saying, “Now think back carefully, Mrs. Fleury. Wasn’t there anything in your husband’s behavior that night and on the following day that seemed unusual?”
Sylvia would of course deny it, but she had to deny convincingly. The jury must have no doubt that she was telling them the truth. He must behave as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, nothing except this miracle of self-discovery, of self-revelation.
“How I wish I were a gentleman of leisure; that I could idle here. Confound these planter’s chores,” he said.
Those chores began with the half-past seven roll call at the boucan. In the shade of a ruined aqueduct, he watched his laborers file past as the overseer called their names. There were over thirty of them, the men with their cutlasses, the women with their baskets: the men in their blue jeans, the women with their bright blouses and their heads tied round with yellow and red handkerchiefs. For each one he had a word of greeting. Among them he presumed were the men who had fired his cane, cut his telephone wire, put his car out of action. How little that mattered now. Was he standing here for the last time, was the evidence already mounting against him, down there in Jamestown? A girl whom he had known as a child went past. He remembered her as an untidy urchin making mud pies in the road. She was now on the verge of womanhood, rounded and slim, with a straight proud carriage. She was a handsome creature.
“What a big girl you’re getting Julie.”
“I make sixteen next month, sir.”
“All that and not a husband yet?”
She gave a cackling laugh and turned her head away. They were gay, inconsequent, all right. In the light of yesterday’s knowledge of himself, he felt a kinship with them. If only he had had this knowledge earlier. Had it come too late? What was happening in Jamestown?
As he rode round the estate, he recreated the scene with Carson. It had lasted a bare seven minutes. Surely he could have forgotten nothing. What clue could he have left behind? If he had made a mistake he would know about it in the course of that day, surely. If he had left anything behind, the article could be identified quickly. The scope was limited, here in this small community. If he had made a mistake this was the last time, for how many months, perhaps forever, that he would ride round his estate, that he would watch the men snipping off the cocoa pods with their long knives, the women piercing them with a stroke of their pointed cutlasses and dropping them off into their baskets. They worked in pairs, husband and wife. He watched a couple squatting down beside their basket, the man cutting open the pods and the woman shelling them. A mood of envy touched him. It would be good to share one’s work with a woman in that way, as those faraway ancestors of his had done. A partnership, two people become one person.
What was happening in Jamestown? It was after eight. The news must be out by now. Everyone must be discussing it. How soon would the news reach Belfontaine? How would he hear it? He had got to be careful about this. He must show the right kind of surprise, the right kind of concern; but he must not overdo it. He must be i
nquisitive, but he must not ask too many questions. He must ask the right questions. He had read enough detective stories to be on his guard on that account. How often had he not read of a detective swinging round upon a suspect with the question “How did you know that?”
How would the news come to him? It wouldn’t, it couldn’t be in that morning’s paper. Tomorrow’s paper would not reach him until lunch time. But the news would be in the village before then. Three or four buses passed every day; the first one had already been by: had it brought the news and if it had, how would it get to him. Who would tell Sylvia? She did not gossip with her maids. They were much likelier to learn from someone motoring past who paused for a gossip and a punch. He would have to be on his guard. The conversation might run on for ten, fifteen minutes before Carson’s name came up. When would that car drive past? All day he would be on edge, awaiting it. Sometimes two or three friends would look in in a single day. But sometimes three or four days would pass without a car stopping at their door. The whole village might know about Carson, while he and Sylvia remained in ignorance. What a day it would be. Would his nerves stand the strain?
He paused at the sheds where the cocoa pods were being trodden in large circular cauldrons by laughing, sweating laborers with their trousers rolled above their knees. He examined the shallow trays where the pods were laid out to dry. It was a good cocoa crop. It should set the estate in the black. One of his overseers came across to him. A piece of ground where water had been lying stagnant had been drained. Would he care to see it?
“You’ve been quick about that,” he said.
He had given the order only yesterday. When he had given it, Carson had been still alive. If only he could turn back the clock to yesterday. If only none of this had ever happened. A whole new life might have begun for him. He had found the truth about himself, found too the way to Sylvia’s heart. Oh, to erase those seven minutes. If only he had driven to the club instead of walking there. On how casual a hinge the door of one’s fortunes swung. You spent your whole life working to a certain point, to achieve a certain object, and then you walked instead of drove the half mile from your father’s house; the first time in a year that you had done so, because you said you wanted to clear your head, and the whole structure of your life was threatened.
