A Man Over Forty (6 page)

‘Weatherby told me the last few miles would be rather rough,' said Palladis. His voice was apologetic.

‘I hate jokes based on understatement,' said Balintore. ‘The humour of meiosis – it's an English humour – is cowardly escapism, and nothing else. Oh, damn this road! How much longer have we got to suffer?'

‘Not long now, sir,' said the driver, and stopped where the steep slope beneath was bare of trees and a vast landscape loomed of mountains rising black and tall against the thinner obscurity of the star-pricked sky. On the foreland of a long ridge, that seemed far above them, were the yellowish lights of a house.

‘That's it,' said the driver. ‘That's where we going.'

He set off again, jolting and bumping on the rain-channelled road, and Balintore said angrily, ‘Is that what you expected? Did you know your cousin lived in a house on an inaccessible mountain in impenetrable jungle?'

‘I only knew what Weatherby told me when I met him at home a few years ago. It's one of the old plantation houses – they still call it the Great House – and from the way he was living in London, I gathered he was used to living well.'

‘In a hermitage! He and his father: a couple of hermits hiding behind long white beards in a shack in the woods, and living on yams and rainwater – that's what we're going to find!'

Palladis said nothing. Even his equanimity was a little shaken by the roughness of the approach, and faint qualms assailed him when he wondered if their reception was to be as gracious as he had expected.

But a few minutes later they both grew more cheerful when a Negro servant opened white gates for them, and they drove slowly between flowering trees to a long, low house on whose brightly lighted veranda stood a tall, white-haired man in a white suit, and behind him a quartet of trimly-dressed brown or black maids.

‘I saw you coming,' said their host. ‘If we're on the lookout we get about twenty minutes' warning when a car turns uphill. Sometimes it's very useful. Well, come on in. Don't worry about your luggage. The women will look after that.'

He led them through a long room, furnished with casual comfort and some display of haphazard luxury, to another and larger veranda that faced north. There a table was prepared for their comfort with whisky, both American and Scotch, with rum of various sorts and colours, with an ice-bucket and mineral waters. Presently one of the maids came in with a plate of sandwiches and a great basket of fruit. When Scroope spoke to her she said, ‘Yes, sir!' in a deep, contralto acquiescence, and showed the brilliance of her teeth in a smile that seemed to expose a private, inexpugnable happiness.

Weatherby Scroope and Palladis were gossiping – talking of people whom Balintore didn't know – and Scroope apologized for his inattention to a distinguished guest.

‘Give us ten minutes,' he said, ‘and we'll have said all we have to say. We claim cousinhood, and though that's little better than a fiction after all these years, we like to keep in touch as far as we can. It's a harmless sentiment.'

Balintore, ill at ease in strange surroundings, had been looking at Scroope's eyebrows. They were mobile and luxuriant, and appeared to fan his red cheeks while he talked. His bright colour, thought Balintore – irritated by neglect – might well be the consequence of high blood pressure rather than exposure to the sun.

He gave Balintore another whisky and soda, and Palladis said to him, ‘I'm looking forward to meeting your father. How is he?'

‘The old scamp!' said Scrcope, and walking to the edge of the veranda looked into the darkness. The overflow of light made luminous the huge white trumpet-blooms on a datura tree, and in the distance a faint light glimmered on the sea. The shrill of cicadas fretted the stillness of the air.

‘He's gone to Palm Beach,' he said. ‘Jamaica's too dull for him. Before Christmas he was complaining bitterly that there's nothing for a man to do here, and a month ago he went to Miami. And now Palm Beach.'

‘How old is he?'

‘Eighty-one.'

‘The terrible frivolity of old men!' said Balintore.

‘I apologize for boring you with family affairs. My father's behaviour is of no interest to you—'

‘Indeed it is,' said Balintore. ‘I remember how bitterly my mother resented my father's attitude to life. He was twenty years her senior, and much less serious.'

‘Addicted to sudden journeys?'

‘No, he died before he was old enough to be really irresponsible. But he used to laugh at things my mother thought important.'

‘If the young were less solemn and the old more sensible,' said Palladis – but stopped when he saw Scroope beginning to yawn.

‘I only talk like that when I'm tired out,' he added. ‘Do you think we might go to bed now?'

In The morning, an hour after sunrise, Balintore and Palladis stood on the veranda that looked northward, and before them, five or six miles away, saw a great arc of the sea whose colours were sharply divided. The shoreward water was apple-green, of lucent brightness, but the oceanic sea appeared to shine with a profound assertion of intrinsical dark blue.

Beneath them – between them and the sea – the land lay like a bowl broken by a shallow, meandering river. It was all green, but the various green of sugar-cane and the great drooping leaves of banana trees, of orange grooves, and wind-tossed coconut palms; and on either side it rose to the darker green of rain-forest on steeply climbing hills.

Immediately in front of them, on the one flank, was a gianttall hedge of daturas, from which depended white flowers like trumpets; and on the other side an enormous cotton tree on whose gnarled and ancient branches grew little orchid gardens. Three or four turkey-vultures dropped from the tall sky and came so near that their red scaly heads were clearly visible.

‘I am favourable impressed,' said Balintore. ‘We are to live in an eyrie from which, when we feel disposed, we can descend to the shore and watch the vulgarities of life from a suitable distance.'

‘This isn't the sort of hermitage you feared.'

‘That road, in the darkness, couldn't fail to excite fear of the worst. But I underrated your cousin when I expected his table to be furnished only with yams and rainwater.'

They went down a short flight of steps to a rough lawn, and turned the corner of the house towards the veranda by which they had come in the night before. Bougainvillaea and hibiscus grew on the one side; poinsettias, trumpet vines, and poincianas on the other. The drive, as far as the white entrance gates, was flanked by cassias and a scarlet bougainvillea. Beyond the bright trees a precipitous mountain rose three or four thousand feet towards immaculate azure, and from a vast green distance a taller, more irregular crest came down to meet
it and enclose, as if it were a deep inlet of the sea, a profound green valley.

‘It would be vulgar if it were anywhere else,' said Palladis. ‘Too much colour and too many colours; or there would be, against a smaller background.'

‘Or under a sky not quite so refulgent. But the sky—'

‘Exonerates them.'

They stopped to watch a humming-bird hovering on the beat of its invisible wings before a flower, whose name they did not know, in which its orange bill was deeply engaged. It was a bird with a black head, a breast of coruscating green, and a tail divided into two long black tapes. Another of the same sort came to a neighbouring flower.

‘I wonder what prices are like?' said Balintore. ‘The price of land, I mean. Of a small house with a big view. I said yesterday – in Nassau, wasn't it? – that I might think of buying a property here, if I could find something suitable.'

‘If you settle down to a life of contemplation, you won't need me.'

‘But I couldn't live alone!'

‘I daresay you could find a couple of well disposed and nicely shaped black girls to look after you.'

‘No, no! There are going to be no more women in my life. Unless, of course, I hear from Polly Newton. If I hear she needs me. You know, I distrust that employer of hers. I admit I know nothing about him except that he buys pictures – or drawings: Old Master drawings – and when he goes to look for them he takes his wife with him. His wife! You take my word for it, she's nothing but an old procuress!'

They returned to the north veranda, where Weatherby Scroope was already at the breakfast table. A black girl – she who had brought sandwiches the night before – welcomed them with a broad, shy smile of gleaming friendliness, and gave them grape fruit of a pinkish hue.

Her long bare arms were as smooth as chocolate, her carriage stately, and she walked with an undulation like the unbroken swell of the deep sea. The grape fruit were flagons of sweetness.

‘Her name's Mary,' said Scroope when she had gone, ‘and
she's a very good girl. But don't give her any money. She's religious, in her own way, and a month ago she joined the Seventh Day Adventists. That's an American sect, and they take a lot of money from here. She'll take yours, unless you're careful. Because now she's collecting for a fund to send underprivileged American children – that's white children – to the seaside. I told her she'd be better employed collecting for Jamaican pickneys, and she said, “They got the seaside already.” But I don't give her anything, and I advise you not to.'

‘Are most of them religious?' asked Balintore.

‘Nearly all of them, in one way or another. Our slaves were Ashantis by origin – the majority of them – and the Ashantis were a warlike people. Since fighting's been discouraged, they've taken to religion like retired colonels.'

‘I'm not a practising Christian,' said Balintore. ‘That's to say, I don't go to church, and much of what the church teaches seems to me a fabulous recital of improbable events. But fundamentally – yes, fundamentally – I'm a deeply religious man. Though not, of course, in a conventional way.'

‘I've never thought religion a suitable topic for the breakfast table,' said Scroope, and helped himself to bacon and eggs. ‘It was my fault for introducing it when I should have been talking about more practical things. I don't know what you want to do while you're here, but you mustn't feel under any obligation to me. There's a car you can use, and plenty to see. I do very little entertaining, but I know a lot of people, and if you want introductions I can probably supply them. Otherwise you'll have to look after yourselves.'

‘Do you work?' asked Balintore. ‘Daily work, I mean? It seems an unnatural activity in Paradise.'

‘Some evening,' said Scroope, ‘I'll tell you about the economics of Paradise. And now I must go to the factory.'

‘This,' said Palladis, after Scroope had left them, ‘is precisely what you asked for: total privacy, and solitude impaired only by me.'

‘Yes,' said Balintore, ‘this is all I had hoped for. More indeed – I hadn't expected vultures.'

He looked with a dubious eye at the large bird sailing insolently
across the lawn. Its wings were motionless, but as it passed it turned its scarlet head as if to inspect him.

‘He'll know you again,' said Palladis cheerfully.

The vultures came every morning, patrolled the valley, and presently rose to upper winds and sailed off. The big, long-tailed humming-birds were also morning visitors, but little vervains flashed and hovered about the veranda all day. When the afternoon sun had drained its colour from the landscape it was time to sleep for an hour or two, and at six o'clock Mary brought out the ice-bucket and put white rum and gin on the sideboard. After dinner Weatherby Scroope fell easily into conversation till about ten o'clock, when he grew sleepy.

The Great House, perched on its high, protruding rib of the mountains, seemed to command a silence of its own. Hardly a sound came to it – till the cicadas woke at night – except when a rising wind carried the bourdon of the sea or the murmur of moving leaves on a hillside. The servants and their several children lived quietly beyond a courtyard, and made no noise but an occasional chorus of laughter. For several days Balintore and Palladis felt no desire to leave their bird-bright isolation, but walked idly on rough hill-paths, and enjoyed indolence without reproach of conscience or the nagging of desire. Palladis had never seen Balintore so relaxed, so easy of mind. He seemed to have forgotten entirely the shame of his collapse, and even after dinner did not grow angrily rhetorical or argue loudly with Weatherby Scroope. He and Scroope got on well together, and Balintore persuaded their host to tell them something of the history of his family since the departure from England of his remote ancestor the Regicide.

It was Scroope who expelled them from their indolence and isolation. He said one night, ‘I've been talking about the past, and you really must go and look at the present. There's a good car you can have – as I told you before – and the roads aren't bad. Go to Port Antonio, go to Ocho Rios, and see something of the country that's been ours for three hundred years. It's not going to be ours much longer – it isn't ours now – but we've had a long tenancy, and when you've seen it you'll understand why we took some trouble to keep it.'

‘I'm fascinated,' said Balintore, ‘by your knowledge of your
ancestry. You've suffered all sorts of reverses – as a family, I mean – you've lost the lands you used to occupy—'

Two hundred years ago we were grandees in a society of grandees. We had a couple of thousand acres of land – land that grew sugar-cane when sugar fetched forty-two shillings a hundredweight – and more than a thousand slaves. By 1830 we were broke. Sugar had fallen to twenty-eight shillings, and the slaves, anticipating the event, were in revolt because they thought slavery had been abolished. Then my great-grandfather – no, my great-great-grandfather – did a sensible thing. He married a mustee: a girl whose mother was a quadroon. But her father was rich and left most of his money to his illegitimate daughter. And their eldest son, my great-grandfather, married the daughter of a Portuguese Jew who had a lot of money too. So we began to recoup, and buy back some of the land we had lost.'