Island in the Sun

by Alec Waugh

  “The Attorney General’s,” he went on, “is the key position in our administration. Whatever reforms we make must be made legally: the law is above politics. That is the strength of the British people: that is the great gift we have brought to the countries we have colonized—a respect for law, a certainty in the minds of the governed that they will receive justice before the bench, a judiciary that is independent of the executive. I need the best man. You are the best man. I hope you will accept my offer even though it is to your financial disadvantage.”

  Grainger Morris was able to answer without hesitation. If he appeared to hesitate, it was only because the offer had surprised him. He had been confident that one day the post would become his. It was an obvious, an inevitable stage in his career. But he had had no idea that it would come so soon. Attorney General at twenty-seven.

  “I’m flattered and honored, sir. I’ll do my best to justify your faith in me.”

  “That means that you accept.”

  “Of course, sir, naturally.”

  “I’m delighted. You have put my mind at rest. And may I say how much I welcome the opportunities with which this appointment will provide me of seeing you in this house more often. It will be a genuine pleasure: it is rare that the doing of one’s duty pays a personal dividend.”

  The Governor rose with his hand outstretched.

  “I shall be seeing you here tonight, of course.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you very much.”

  “Fine. I can’t say how happy I am about this engagement: the daughter of one of my oldest friends. Euan is a little young. I’d rather in one way it had happened later, but there are some things in which prudence does not pay. Jocelyn’s a delightful girl. It’s a wonderful thing for Euan.”

  His voice rang sincerely. Did he really mean it, Grainger asked himself? Was H.E. genuinely unaffected by that streak, faint though it was, of African ancestry in the Fleurys. He himself, raised in an atmosphere of racial discrimination, found it impossible to believe that Bradshaw’s article had not shocked the Governor. But things were different in England and H.E. had spent many years in India where no one of culture and intelligence could think for long that there was any innate superiority in what E.M. Forster had called “a pinko-grey” complexion. Perhaps H.E. really had read that article without a qualm.

  The Governor accompanied him to the porch. “Is David Boyeur a friend of yours?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t say a friend, sir, but I know him.”

  “He may be a problem to us, in the next Leg. Co. He’s bound to be elected and it may go to his head at first. We shall have to ensure that he doesn’t break the standing orders. But he’ll learn. He’s a good fellow, at heart. Goes for the bowling. I like that. See you tonight, my boy.”

  Grainger’s spirits were high as he drove away. Attorney General and at twenty-seven. It was due to luck far more than it was to merit, he knew well. It would never have happened if Euan and he had not made friends in the Canal Zone. During the three months before Euan’s arrival, he had only been twice invited to G.H. and then on formal functions. It was only through Euan’s sponsorship that H.E. had become aware of him. Through Euan he had taken a short cut.

  It was luck, fantastic luck, all along the line. It was luck that he had made that lecture tour in the Middle East; luck that he had visited Euan’s unit. On the night in question he had had a touch of sandfly fever, with a temperature of 100°. He had been advised not to go. One should watch a temperature in that climate. But he was reluctant to let people down, particularly soldiers; a sore throat did not relieve you in the trenches. He had gone and because he had been feeling ill, he had made a special effort to counterattack his headache. It had been a highly successful evening: and it had led to this. He had got to show himself worthy of his good luck.

  2

  Grainger arrived home in the middle of a family discussion. His sister Gertrude’s voice was raised.

  “This is the second time this week. You ought to stop it. Muriel’s much too young to go about with a man like David Boyeur. You know what his reputation is.”

  Her voice was shrill. It often was these days. He remembered how soft it had been, fifteen years ago, when she had sung hymns by Muriel’s cradle. He took a seat on the veranda. His parents were there and two of his brothers, the eldest and the youngest one.

  “David Boyeur’s thoroughly unreliable,” Gertrude was continuing. “He’s been involved with any number of young women. He’s an upstart. His parents are nobodies. He’s earned a cheap notoriety through his trade union, but it can’t last. He’ll go too far and they’ll disown him. It’s fatal for Muriel, at the start of her life to get her name linked with his.”

  Grainger made no comment. Let Gertrude get it off her chest. Then he would interpose, tactfully, in a way that would not offend Gertrude, but that would leave Muriel with her freedom.

  One had to treat Gertrude gently. She had been a true friend to him when he was a boy; she had encouraged and inspired him. She had watched every cricket match he had played in. She had heard him his lessons, gone over his mathematics with him. It was to her first that he had brought the news of each fresh triumph. She had been his judge and audience. He had admired her, she was his ideal. He had dreamed of finding a girl like her to be his wife. Gertrude had been handsome, tall, athletic. She had played tennis for the island. She sailed. She was good company. Everybody liked her. During his years in England they had written to each other every week. It had been a shock to him to find on his return how time had soured her.

  Letters were deceptive. Writing to each other every week their relationship had been static. The big proud sister, the admiring brother. They had played the same parts to one another: the changes in each had been unapparent, for he had changed too, of course, though in a different way. He had passed from boyhood into manhood. He was an adult person, poised and proved. For him it had been a period of progress. For her it had been a time of slow sad recognition of the tether by which her life was bound. She was thirty and it was unlikely that she would marry. She would inherit very little money. She had not put on much weight, but she had lost her suppleness. Working in the hospital, accustomed to giving orders, her manner had grown authoritarian. Her voice was no longer soft.

  He had seen the same thing happen to many English women who were doomed to spinsterdom because they would not marry out of their own class. Ambitious young men went abroad, or regarded marriage as a stage in self-advancement. They wanted to better themselves. In England they married a girl with money, in Santa Marta they married a girl with a better skin. And Gertrude was the dark one of the family.

  Gertrude had faced the Gorgon during these seven years and it had made her bitter. In another ten years she would have perhaps become adjusted. She would fill then a position of high respect in the community. She would be matron of the hospital. She would have built up her defenses. But at the moment she was in turgid waters. She was a young woman still. She had not completely abandoned hope of matrimony. There was still a chance that the right man might arrive, and the fact that she had not abandoned hope, made her resentful of Muriel’s acceptance of a solution she had herself declined, and that subconsciously she criticized herself for not accepting.

  She turned for support to her eldest brother.

  “You agree, don’t you, that David Boyeur’s impossible as Muriel’s husband?”

  “Is there any question of his being that. Has he proposed?”

  “I don’t say he has. That’s not the point. A girl of Muriel’s age ought only to go about alone with the kind of man with whom it would be suitable for her to fall in love, a man whom she could marry if she wanted.”

  “What men for instance?”

  “Michael Forrest. John de Boulay. Eric Des Voeux.”

  They were all of them so little colored that in England they could have passed as white.

  “You agree don’t you,” Gertrude persisted, “that David Boyeur is impossible as Muriel’
s husband.”

  “I shouldn’t be pleased about it.”

  “What have you got against him?” Mrs. Morris asked.

  “The same things that Gertrude has, I take it. He’s brash, he’s boastful; politically he’s a subversive influence.”

  “Exactly,” Gertrude said.

  But when he said “the same things,” were the reasons he had given the actual ones? Wasn’t Boyeur’s color the decisive point? Wasn’t that what was worrying them both, in the last analysis? He transposed the situation to England; the daughter of a college professor, say, falling in love with a Left wing Trades Union leader. The professor and his wife would describe the young man as dangerous, an enemy of the realm. Would they dare to voice their real objection, that he was not a gentleman? In such a case, he himself would have argued that in a democratic day it was good for a girl to link herself with the future, with a man of courage, ambition, vigor, somebody who was alive, even if he was common. But here, in his own country, wasn’t he imitating the professor, concealing his real opinion: talking about “boastfulness” and “brashness” and “subversive influence.”

  Color, color, color … How it ran through everything. How ingrained in every West Indian was that predilection for the “better skin.” Even in himself, who in England had met on equal terms and outpaced in studies and on the field the pick of England, who knew intellectually that all men were equal, who had it confirmed for him by the English attitude that in the mid-fifties a man stood on his own feet to be judged on his own qualities, by his own performance, even so, even in himself this prejudice persisted.

  “I agree with Gertrude,” he said, “but if we oppose Muriel, we’ll put her back up. I suggest that we should welcome Boyeur to the house. We’ll disarm them both that way. But let’s invite at the same time young men like de Boulay and Des Voeux: give Muriel a chance of comparing the one group with another. We’ve not done nearly enough for her in my opinion. We don’t give girls a coming out dance here as they do in England. In a small place like this where everyone knows everyone it isn’t necessary. But we should entertain for Muriel, have young people to the house, show Muriel off against her background. It’ll give her confidence, send up her stock. Why don’t we have a cocktail party dance for her.”

  They were still discussing the project when they went in to dinner. They had their meals in the drawing room. Their living room was the veranda that ran three sides of the house. The drawing room was littered with assorted furniture, china and silver cabinets: a bookcase with the bookcovers eaten through by worms; highly decorated tables carved out of local wood; a Chippendale armchair bought in the auction of an old estate. Some of the articles were good, the majority were worthless. Nothing had been flung away. The walls were decorated with oleographs and enlarged photographs; there were two plates emblazoned with pictures of Edward VII and Alexandra at their coronation. It was a dark room, lighted by a central lamp, draped with silk, that could be raised and lowered. As a child, Grainger had loved examining the various objects. As a boy he had looked forward to the day when he could transport these treasures to his home. In England he had closed his eyes, visualizing the house, each piece in its own niche. But now, remembering rooms that he had seen in London, he found his home tasteless and tawdry. It irritated him to be surrounded by so much junk.

  The Graingers kept two servants, a maid of all work and a cook that had been with them for twenty years. She had prepared the kind of dinner that he had been eating for as long as he could remember. A thin chicken soup that was tasteless without a sprinkling of chili sauce, was followed by roast beef: the meat was tough. It always was in Santa Marta since meat was cooked on the day the animal was killed. The joint was accompanied by starchy vegetables, yams, mashed taros, sweet potatoes.

  “Only a very little for me,” he said. “I’ve got to dance and there’ll be a supper.”

  But that was not the only reason. He was sick of West Indian cooking; it had no personality. In Trinidad through the East Indian influence you got curries and the callalou. In the Middle East he had enjoyed meat dishes like kibbe and cool bitter salads like tabouli. In India and in the Middle East a cuisine had been evolved in keeping with the climate and the people’s faith. There was no such tradition here. Breadfruit had been brought from Tahiti and the slaves had been told to eat it. That was typical. West Indian cooking did not spring from the soil and climate, from a personal way of living. It was superimposed. As everything in every way was here. Superimposed was a key word to West Indian life.

  He had seen in England the confidence and security that the English derived from their long past. On every side of them, in their buildings, their schools, their churches, their parks, their local customs, they had reassurances of survival. And at the apex of the social pyramid was the Crown, the symbol of continuity.

  Himself a schoolboy in Santa Marta in the autumn of 1940, he had failed to see how the British Isles could survive against the overwhelming might of Germany. In England he had asked a number of Englishmen if they had felt the same. They had without exception smiled. They had not considered the possibility of defeat. A country whose streets and fields for nine hundred years had been untrodden by foreign feet could not at that late hour be overthrown. At the very hour when the invasion barges were collecting in Northern France, a committee in Whitehall was calmly considering the report of the Moyne Commission on the West Indies and was allocating to the Caribbean colonies an annual sum of a million pounds in welfare services. The English because of their past were confident in their future. Each Englishman saw himself as the torchbearer in the race. How could a West Indian with his untraced roots in Africa feel like that?

  Sitting now at his father’s table on what should have been one of the proudest evenings of his life, he was vividly conscious of his isolation. This was the house in which he had been born, which was the setting of his childhood’s memories, yet he had not here the sense of family that his English friends living in their furnished flats had. Years ago as a schoolboy he had brought back to Gertrude the news of each new success. If anyone had told him on his seventeenth birthday that within ten years he would be the colony’s Attorney General, he would have pictured himself as rushing home proudly to proclaim his triumph. Yet here he was discussing the guests for Muriel’s cocktail party. He wanted to tell his parents, but the words stuck in his throat. This appointment meant much to him. To them it would mean something altogether different. Their delight, their congratulations would jar his nerves. They would be happy for the wrong reasons. He did not try to particularize, to explain to himself what those reasons were: but he knew they would upset him, that they would destroy the deep interior happiness he felt. Let him brood on his happiness alone for this one night. He would tell them tomorrow. Tomorrow would be time enough.

  3

  The party at G.H. was scheduled to begin at half-past nine. Grainger planned to arrive at ten. He had a couple of briefs to study. Then he would shave and shower and change into evening clothes. He left the family and went into his study bedroom. The walls did not reach the ceiling, and he could hear, though he could not distinguish their actual words, his family talking on the veranda. His younger brother switched on the wireless, and it half drowned the talk. It was turned onto a Puerto Rican station that transmitted dance music. The music provided a congenial background to his thought, but the incessant commercials maddened him; there was an irritating quality about the voices of all announcers whether an Englishman was smugly deploring the death of a politician, or an American was recommending a new brand of toothpaste. The knowledge that at any moment that voice might interrupt made concentration difficult. He would have to get an apartment of his own. He could afford one now. The Governor had suggested that the acceptance of a Government post would be to his financial disadvantage. That might be true when a prominent silk went on the bench, but for an unestablished barrister like himself the appointment would mean a very great improvement in his scale of living. He would be a
ble to afford a number of things that he could not previously. A car for instance. What kind should he get.

  His thoughts began to wander. It was no good his trying to work tonight. He’d set his alarm for half-past four. He’d take his shaving slowly and get to G.H. by quarter to.

  As he came out from the shower, he saw the outline of a head through the veranda screen.

  “Hi, who’s that,” he called. It was his younger brother who had wanted to watch him change. Grainger was the only member of the family who possessed evening dress, and his opportunities of wearing it were few.

  “I want to see you in your armor,” the boy said.

  Though he wore a white dinner jacket, Grainger was one of the few Santa Martans who wore a stiff white shirt. It was cooler, he said, because it stood away from the body. But the real reason was that he possessed a pair of platinum and ruby studs that he liked to wear.

  “Come in and sit down,” he told his brother.

  The boy sat on the bed, staring at him with wide admiring eyes. Grainger knew what he was thinking.

  “Are you looking forward to the day when you can wear a shirt like this?” he asked.

  The boy nodded quickly.

  “Do you know what you’ll have to do to wear one?”

  “Grow up.”

  “No, that’s not enough. You’ll have to work. This shirt is a uniform. It is only worn in a certain kind of house, a certain kind of restaurant. You do not get invited to that kind of house unless you are someone who has passed exams. If you are born rich, you will be asked to that kind of house, you can go to that kind of restaurant without passing exams. But you and I are not born rich. We have to earn our right to wear this armor. It isn’t a question of money for us. We don’t need to be rich. We have to show that we have good brains and know how to use them. You remember the parable of the talents.”