Island in the Sun

by Alec Waugh

  “Why don’t we take our lunch down to the beach?” he said.

  “Why don’t we?”

  It was something they never did, something they never had a chance of doing. They could only picnic when they were on holiday in Jamestown.

  They sat on the veranda after breakfast. They turned on the radio and picked up dance music from Puerto Rico. Sylvia had her knitting. He rocked himself slowly back and forth. It was utter peace. Then the Prestons had driven up, honking their horn, and they had gone down to meet them, and Mrs. Preston had talked and talked in her slow, persistent, unhurried way. She did not urge them to leave Belfontaine. It would have been beneath Mrs. Preston’s dignity to urge anybody to do anything. Other people’s affairs were their own concern. Herself, she was independent of them, superior to them. Yet she considered it her duty to give her friends the benefit of her wisdom and experience. She made it very clear that in her opinion it would be very foolish, very nearly criminal of Maxwell not to send Sylvia into town.

  As the station wagon drove away, Maxwell passed his arms about Sylvia’s shoulders.

  “I suppose they are really right,” he said.

  “I suppose they are.

  “Let’s not think about it for the moment, though.”

  “Let’s not.”

  “Let it wait a day.”

  “At least.”

  They turned back toward the house. “There’s something I’ve always thought that this house needed. More flowers. Why not have an orchid house,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Do you remember that house we were taken to see in Port-of-Spain, Mrs. Fitts’ wasn’t it? With that pergola of orchids. Something like that.”

  Back again on the veranda, she elaborated her idea. They’d have to find exactly the right place for it. Would it need sun or shade? Perhaps Santa Marta lay too far north. Perhaps orchids would be too ambitious. What about gardenias?

  “And why not some more simple flowers; roses for example.”

  With one part of his mind while he listened, he thought of that station wagon raising its cloud of dust along the windward road. How glad he wasn’t in it. Preston would be going round to the club to pick up the latest gossip. The club: they’d all be there, arguing, explaining the rights and wrongs of it: Whittingham would look in probably. Whittingham with that great booming voice and silly grin. Thank heavens, he was here, not there.

  “What about zinnias,” she was saying. “They’re so pretty and they are easy to grow. We could have some seeds sent out.”

  It was the first time she had talked about the garden as something of her own, something to be worked upon by herself. Up till very recently she had been a stranger here; in this house as in her marriage, a sojourner, ready to fold up her tent; she was putting roots down now, here where she belonged.

  The radio was turned low; it was background music, like the wash of the breakers on the reef. She did not have to raise her voice. How peaceful it was; if he had acted as the Prestons had done, he would be on his guard, taut, poised; watching Whittingham. Had the Prestons been right? He supposed they had, but it was hard to believe on a morning such as this that his laborers were planning their reprisals, any more than he could believe that down there in Jamestown Whittingham was laying out his bait.

  He thought again of those rabbits in the corn field. When the machine was circling round their sanctuary, their ears were warning them of danger. Yet, at noon when the sun was high, the harvesters sat in the shade of the hedge and ate their cheese and drank their cold tea, and there was silence over the corn; the cowering rabbits could fancy themselves secure. Nothing disturbed eye or ear. But the sun would lower in the sky and the harvesters would return to their machine; and down there in Jamestown, Whittingham was sharpening his hooks and in the village a mile away idle men were sulkily growing restive: soon the wheels would revolve and the scythes slash; but not today, not yet. First there was this hour of armistice, of high noontide peace.

  “We might go down to the beach fairly soon?” he said.

  “Right now, why not.”

  The beach was empty. On the whole Santa Martans preferred bathing in the streams; many of them could not swim. It was for the most part only those who had been subjected to urban influence who enjoyed the beaches. In Jamestown Sylvia would not have worn a bikini. But here she did.

  “I shan’t be able to wear one of these much longer,” she said laughingly.

  No change in her figure was apparent yet. She was like a flower in the instant of its fullest bloom; she had never seemed more beautiful. She would never, he warned himself, look so beautiful again. The breasts would lose their firmness, and the stomach muscles slacken; the smooth skin would be ruffled by minute white flakes; her beauty was the present’s sacrifice to the future; her beauty was being despoiled for the future’s sake. It gave him a sense of awe. Let his eyes delight in this beauty, of which they would be robbed so soon. He had a “last time” feeling. Never again, he warned himself, never again. Make the most of it. The reapers will soon leave the hedge.

  They swam, then sat on a rock and threw pebbles at a tree stump. Then they swam again. “Time for a rum punch,” he said.

  “I’ll have one today. Just one can’t do any harm,” she said.

  He sipped slowly, with that “last time” feeling not exactly haunting him but sharpening his enjoyment of the moment. Sylvia had prepared a chicken salad; mangoes were still in season. This was the only way to eat a mango, she maintained; on a beach, in a bikini, when you didn’t mind how the juice dripped or what it stained. He watched her peel the skin and bite into the slippery fruit: a thread of its stringy flesh caught between her teeth, her mouth was smeared. A drop of juice fell into the hollow of her throat and trickled toward the division of her breasts. He bent his head forward, kissing it away.

  “It’s like a honeymoon today,” he said.

  “Every day is like a honeymoon now,” she answered.

  Lunch made them drowsy. They laid out their towels on the sand and fixed up their empty lunch bag as a pillow, but the sand flies began to settle and bite the moment they were motionless.

  “It’s no good,” she said, “we’d best go back.”

  She curled into his arms under the mosquito net and for once the pressure of her head upon his shoulder did not disturb him.

  It was the late afternoon sun shining in his face that woke him. He blinked, looked at the bedside clock: twenty to four. That he should have slept so long. How wonderfully one slept when one had nothing on one’s mind. He laid his head back beside hers on the pillow. If only it could be always this way. This was what a honeymoon should be, what his own honeymoon had not been. How slowly the time had passed during those three weeks in Trinidad. Their friends there had avoided them, thinking they had wanted to be by themselves. “Next time you’re here,” they had said, “we’ll give parties for you. But we know that’s the last thing you want now.” Actually it was the very thing they had wanted, something to do, something outside themselves, something to take them out of themselves. The time had dragged so that he had found himself counting hours to his return. It was now, not then, that parties would have been an intrusion on his privacy: now not then that he was living in a timeless universe. This, not that, was his real honeymoon.

  It was in a honeymoon mood that later, after she had woken and they had showered, they sauntered together round the outbuildings to see if the pigs and chickens had been fed and the horses watered.

  “It’s nice without any of the workers here. It seems so much more our own,” she said.

  No sounds came from the village across the bay, no steel bands practicing. Was there an omen in that silence? He did not know, he did not care. Tomorrow could take care of that.

  “What are we having tonight for dinner?” he inquired.

  “A lobster, grilled.”

  “Then we’ll drink champagne.”

  It was in a honeymoon mood that on their return he moved the
bottle from the cellar to the ice box; in a honeymoon mood that he joined her on the veranda; he had brought out the gramophone. He did not want this evening to rely on the caprice of a conductor. He wanted to choose his own favorite records. Some new, some very old. “Small hotel.” “You ought to be in pictures.” “People will say we’re in love.”

  “Do you remember,” he asked, “that song you sang when we were driving into Jamestown?”

  “I gave my love a cherry?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  She began to sing it.

  I gave my love a story

  With no end

  I gave my love a baby

  With no cryin’.

  He answered with the repeated queries,

  How can there be a cherry

  Without a stone?

  How can there be a chicken

  Without a bone?

  Her reply came back clear and sweet

  The story of I love you

  It has no end

  When a baby is sleeping

  There is no cryin’.

  “It seems to mean more now,” she said.

  “Yes, it means more now.”

  The sun sank toward the sea. The horizon was strewn with clouds. Every second a new shade of color flamed and faded. The ragged plantain leaves assumed a deeper color.

  “This is the first day that we’ve ever had here, just ourselves,” she said.

  There could not be many more such days he told himself. The strike would not last for ever: and soon very soon there would be the incessant demands of a nursery.

  “I’ve had a funny thought,” she said. “Two years ago, three years, for as long as I can remember anything, when I’ve been to the cinema I’ve thought how wonderful it would be to have an immense palace kind of house—the Hollywood Long Island type, with a swimming pool and butlers and twenty people sitting down to dinner. But this last two weeks I’ve been thinking of the films that I did not notice at the time, that made no appeal to me; films that took place in some small town in New England, with a succession of wooden bungalows painted white and green, set back from the road with the grass very green and elm trees everywhere and at the end of the road, above the trees, the thin white spire of a church. And the houses inside are very simple, all except the kitchen which has wonderful gadgets for washing dishes and getting rid of garbage; with that kind of a kitchen you don’t need servants, and the husband gets up first and fixes breakfast, and the wife comes down in trousers and a shirt, with her hair tied up in a handkerchief. And he has to go into the big town by train; they’ve only one car, so she has to go to the station with him, to drive the car back.

  “Then she gets down to her household chores. Once a week there’s someone who comes in to do the rough work and the ironing: but now and again things aren’t going so well with them, and she has to do it all herself: and in the drawing room there’s a TV set and when there’s a program that she likes particularly, she watches while she does her mending.

  “Then she drives into the village to do her marketing: and that’s not at all the way it would be here. One store has everything you want, but everything. She takes a wire trolley and pushes it from one stand to another, and tosses into it all the tins and groceries and vegetables and fruit she needs. And there’ll be friends to gossip with and she’ll call the men who serve her by their christian names; and she pushes her trolley through a kind of turnstile to a man who runs up her account, and all she’s bought gets packed into one large card-board box and a boy carries it out into her car for her, and then she goes back home and fixes herself a sandwich and a cup of coffee.

  “There’s a lot to keep her busy through the afternoon. There’s the TV and dinner to be prepared and a magazine to be read and friends to ring up. Then it’s five o’clock, and that’s her zero hour: that’s the hour to which everything in the day has been building up: she takes a shower and puts on something that’s very crisp and laundered and she drives down to the station and the sight of her sitting there at the wheel is his reward for all his hours at a desk.

  “He’s tired and he’s hot and he’s rather grubby and they don’t talk much as she drives him back. ‘I’ll fix a drink while you get changed,’ she says.

  “And when he comes back into the living room in a casual open at the neck sports shirt, she’s waiting with a cool frothing concoction, made with another of those gadgets, something she plugs in. And they sit and gossip over their cocktail and she tells him what she’s done during the day and he tells her about the office and perhaps there’s something on TV they want to see and perhaps there isn’t. And perhaps they’ll feel like a second cocktail and perhaps they won’t. And they’ll eat when they feel like eating, not when a maid announces dinner, and if they’ve anything to celebrate they’ll have a glass of wine. They’ll sit as long as they like over the table. It’s their own life of their own, to do what they like with, and I’ve been thinking over that kind of life these last three weeks. And this evening, with everything so cozy here I’ve been feeling that if I could live the kind of life that people in films do, that’s how I’d like to live, in a New England village; not as they do in Hollywood and Long Island with swimming pools and butlers.”

  She spoke slowly, in a drowsy, dreamy voice. It was her way of telling him she was in love with him. He replied in the same key, obliquely. He put on a new record. “If this isn’t love, the whole world is crazy.”

  Maxwell was woken by the sound of drums. The room was dark; the moon had set. It must be some time after three. He raised himself upon his elbow and looked at the bedside clock. Five minutes to five. It would be light in half an hour. He was rested and refreshed. He had had all the sleep he needed. No wonder the drums had woken him. It was strange though that they should be being played so late. The men must have been up all night. The moon had gone down at three. They usually packed up when the moon went down. That, though, was when they were at work. Now they could sleep all day.

  Slowly, rhythmically, with the maddening rhythm that never reached a climax, the dull thud of the drums beat across the cane fields. It tore one’s nerves, fired one’s blood; would it never reach a climax. Night after night of this, followed by long days of slumber, what effect might they not have on men who were used to long hours of manual labor in the heavy sun.

  Sylvia had to go home. There was no doubt of that. He lay back on the pillow, his hands clasped under his head, waiting for the sky to lighten, for the thud of the drums to cease. He was in a mood that he had heard described as “happy-sad”: the honeymoon was over, but at least he had known what a real honeymoon was like.

  3

  They left shortly before nine. Sylvia had little packing to do. She kept a wardrobe full of clothes in Jamestown. Maxwell was to return that night, as Preston had the night before.

  “The animals would starve if I wasn’t here to see them fed,” he said, “to say nothing of how much would be stolen from the house.”

  He spoke lightly. It was easy to speak lightly now. Now when the sun was mounting in the sky it seemed impossible for any misfortune to befall Belfontaine. But four hours earlier in the dark, with the drums beating, that had been another matter. Night after night he’d have had no peace of mind, he’d have had no sleep, lying there waiting for the drums. It might have got on Sylvia’s nerves too, and that was something that must not happen at a time like this.

  “I’ll try and work out something with Preston, so that we can work in shifts,” he said. “Don’t be surprised if you see me in town again tomorrow night.”

  But even as he said it, he knew that he would not be there. There would be no peace of mind for him in Jamestown with Whittingham waiting, watching. It was only at Belfontaine that there was peace. He had a “last-time” feeling as he drove along the windward coast.

  They arrived in Jamestown at quarter to eleven. His eyes brightened as he drove over the saddle-back hill above the carenage. It was a clear sunny day with the trade wind blowing. A sloop
with its sails furled was slowly steering through the pass. Groups of longshoremen were seated on the wharf, swinging their legs over the side. They were on strike, but they came down as usual to loll and chatter by the bags and barrels. The carenage was their club, they had nowhere else to go. Nothing was changed. There was the habitual air of picturesque inaction. He drove to his father’s house. His father was at the office, but his mother was at home. While Sylvia went upstairs to unpack, he stayed with his mother in the drawing room.

  “I think it was wise, don’t you, to bring Sylvia in?” he said.

  “I’m sure that it was very wise.”

  “It’s not that there’s any real danger but she might think there was. She might start worrying. That would be the worst thing, wouldn’t it?”

  “The very worst.”

  “I shall miss her out there. I think she’ll miss not being there. She’s very happy out there now.”

  “I’m glad of that.”

  “You remember, don’t you, when there was talk of my coming in to manage the office here, while you and father took Jocelyn back to England.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You thought that she’d be happier in Jamestown, that she was bored and restless in the country; she isn’t now you know.” He paused; in the light of this “last-time” feeling, of this urge to make the most of each last minute he wanted to say something that would reassure his mother; that would make her feel happier about herself.

  “I suppose you must have wondered sometimes during this last year whether you oughtn’t to have discouraged us from marrying so young. It didn’t look as though it were working out very well. But I’m so grateful to you now for not having discouraged us. A couple as young as we were is bound to take some little while to get adjusted, but now that we are, we’re so much happier for not having got on so well to start with.” He took his mother’s hand. “I’m more grateful to you than I can say for everything. I’d never have had this happiness but for you.”