Black Marina (2 page)

*

You have to go to the past to find the seeds of trouble. (‘There’s Holly with her homespun philosophy again,’ says
Jim Davy and whatever American cronies have come down on their three-masted schooners from Guadeloupe or Martinique. ‘Tell us what to do next, Holly.’ ‘Have a Planter’s.’ I quite miss Jim, with his stiff knobbly knees. Plump, polite, talcum-scented, trying to look young in Bermuda shorts.) But maybe too they’ll remember they weren’t here when I was. When I came with Teza and we stood by the cottonhouse and looked down at that beat-up American car taking old Allard’s body to the quay. And then went to the wooden house by the lagoon and were given tea by Sanjay and his wife, Duchess Dora as she was known. And went up to the village, before it became a model village for the new age of the St Jamesians, which was to learn how to operate a Poggenpohl kitchen for the visiting rich. Oh, long before any of that. But sure enough, the seeds of trouble were already there.

The trouble was that St James hung on in its own blue bubble of time. Everyone knew old Allard’s stooped, broad back, his hawking cough, the way he blew his nose in his fingers as he drove the jeep through the wild cattle he was too lazy to round up and the mosquito-breeding swamps he was too idle to clear. It seemed old Allard had been there for ever, as long at least as the God with the blue eyes in the painting in the chapel up on the hill – and doing better than that old God, too, because Allard’s house hadn’t got the roof half falling off. Nothing would ever change.

Then he died and the consortium came and it did. At first, of course, no one knew about the consortium. Sanjay was a decadent and delightful offshoot of an old, interbred family. He even built a village hall, modelled on one of those pastoral dreams of paternalism you find in the West Country in England, and a children’s zoo, where he planned to put rabbits and pigs – but the first consignment of rabbits got bitten by a mapipie snake and pigs mysteriously disappeared.

‘It can come to no good,’ Teza said. We were standing in
the village, which at that point was undergoing Sanjay’s improvements. Open drains were in the process of being dug out. A large generator – supplying the first electric light to a people whose slave forefathers, sullen and surly all day, had turned in the light of lantern and fire to fantastic
storytelling
, dancing, throwing off shadows as vast as trolls on the hut walls – hummed deafeningly a few feet away. The
children’s
zoo, which had already become a kind of rubbish dump for old bicycle tyres, patches of material, torn cement bags, had a mass of small children crawling about on it. A young man was walking down the street towards us, with a
transistor
radio dangling from his wrist. Yes – I wouldn’t forget that.

‘His heart’s in the right place,’ I mumbled, meaning Sanjay and his optimistic plans to pull St James in one leap from Neanderthal to Now. ‘I mean it’s better to be comfortable than to die of agonizing disease in poverty!’

Those were the days when I still bothered to say that kind of thing. These days I just shrug. Who’s the one who went back to England and came into money from her mother or someone and pursued her radical journalism and bought a nice little house in Portobello Road, where the West Indians are, move along, move along, please, up the Harrow Road as the area becomes more fashionable? Teza’s the one. Not I. Yet you could say I was the lazy one not to go back with her in the first place. And take instead this ‘temporary’ job – with the tins of Carnation milk and frozen shark steak in the fridge. ‘It’s the most extreme form of patriarchal
imperialism
,’ Teza said, and the subject was closed. But I may be a bit of a snob, I’d liked my tea on that wooden verandah where the rocking chairs groan like
Gone
with
the
Wind
and a soft trade breeze blows through night and day, bringing a smell of fried yam from the kitchen. I didn’t even mind Sanjay, I knew that worried look he had from when I used to hang round Chelsea, working in the antique hypermarkets or
serving Tom Collinses at the Green Velveteen Club. The look is bloated and pinched at the same time: the effect of too much money and too much drugs and what you rip off with one hand you give munificently with the other. Just the opposite of Teza’s look, I must say, and it’s no surprise they didn’t hit it off at all. I could see Sanjay thinking Teza the most bloody awful little puritan he’d come across in a long time.

Teza is half Czech and she has wide cheekbones and long, corn-coloured hair like a woman in a Soviet agricultural poster. But somehow she’s not beautiful: her eyes are too small, they’re like pieces of fossil chipped off a rock and set in a slanty angle to her nose. Which, in turn, is long and pointed, as if she’s forever on the point of truffling out some unpalatable fact. And she is. She finds corruption at each step. I’ve laughed, sitting in my room by my hurricane lamp. (The famous electricity never reached the conglomeration of squalid houses where people like me live – misfits, white trash, old-young – missing persons who ran away from home a generation ago and are ageing here very gently, presumed dead.) I’ve laughed, thinking how the stallholders in
Portobello
Road must dread Teza, when she comes down on them with some statute or by-law she’s dug up to prove they’re trading illegal. Yet Teza has a kind heart, even if she does have a totalitarian mind to go with it. She keeps in touch. Last time she went to Cuba she sent me down a bundle of Havana cigars. ‘It’s shocking, Holly,’ she said on the card from the Socialist Havana Hilton poolside. ‘These cigars are still made by the women here rubbing the tobacco leaves on the insides of their thighs. And it’s still a piece-work system, I’m quite surprised.’ I laughed then too, smelling the warm cunt – as I liked to fantasize – of a Guantanamera woman every time I lit up a cigar at night by the lamp. Maybe those are the seeds of everything that went wrong later. For in every peach Teza must find a worm.

*

Looking at Sanjay, who was standing on one leg now, head craning over his shoulder backwards, posing like a flamingo in the blue water that cuts him off at the knee, I think of tea in the wooden house that day – and the picnic at the lagoon the day after. I see Sanjay must have hurt his foot or he wouldn’t be standing like that, but I can’t help remembering the lobster nipping him in the thick weeds of the lagoon all those years ago, and him lifting his foot and toppling in.

I laughed. I must have been mad, I suppose, because the girl in the front of the store heard me and she didn’t cough or anything, she just called out, ‘Who’s there?’ But then, through the assorted clumsy pieces of pottery that Jim Davy gets made in the new kiln in the village, I saw Millie – or half of Millie – come in the store, and the girl was quiet again. Behind the pots Millie was moving quietly about,
assembling
her order. What the hell does Mrs Van der Pyck want now? As if Christmas dinner and all the trimmings and a fine choice of seafood wasn’t enough. Maybe it’s the new people off the yacht the girl swam ashore from and I never saw them land. (It’s funny here, you can so easily find you’ve dropped off to sleep. It’s the heat.) But I’d have made a mental note of it if the minibus from Carib’s Rest had come down to the jetty to pick up a load of passengers off the yacht. Maybe Mrs Van der Pyck has invited the whole island – the smart end, the northern end, that is – to dinner tonight. Well, she wouldn’t ask me anyway, would she? I’m just the
storekeeper
here, even if the store has gone up in the world. All it used to sell was meat pies and rum – and it hired out hair clippers to Millie and other St Jamesians – in the days before the cottonhouse ever became Carib’s Rest.

That first tea in the house by the lagoon, Sanjay carried the bamboo tray out to the verandah and Duchess Dora did the pouring. I’d have laughed again, if it wasn’t precisely the wrong moment to do so, for seldom can so many
misunderstandings
have been playing themselves out in one small
space at the same time. The first, and funniest, was that Sanjay’s wife – I never found out why they called her Duchess Dora but it must have been something to do with her grand voice and her airs and the way she talked about huntin’ in her childhood in West Ireland – anyway, Duchess D. was definitely under the impression that we were there to interview her for
Vogue
or American
House
&
Garden
or some such. She was even quite disappointed, I think, that I hadn’t a camera – and certainly she’d dressed up in white lace for the occasion. A parasol leaned against the balustrade of the verandah, I can see it now.

‘And what kind of thing do you want to ask?’ Sanjay said as we sipped our tea from cups so thin they looked like those shells you can see through when they’re lying in shallow water on the sand. ‘You mentioned the improvements I’ve set in train here and I think I’ve filled you in about them all. The first houses for visitors will be constructed in the coming months, in the dry season, of course.’ Teza’s pencil pretended to race. ‘And we will not, it goes without saying, alter the natural beauty of the island or imperil the ecology.’ (Saving the Earth was just getting in its stride then, as the Americans blasted the leaves off the trees in Vietnam.) ‘We intend to preserve an unhurried, rural way of life,’ Sanjay said. He threw a quick, sharp look at Teza and I thought, he’s not such a dimwit after all. The almost black hair smoothed back as if for his thousandth polo match, the slightly weak jaw, eyes that were in a mirthful, apologetic crease as if to compensate for the ridiculous luck of being an Allard less interbred than his predecessors, it’s true, but rich from the money of slave owners, and knowing it. ‘The conditions of the inhabitants of St James will soon be altered beyond recognition,’ he said. ‘By June there will be running water in the village, I’m glad to say. And the school will be fully air-conditioned!’

I’d be glad to say on this day that there’s running water at The Heights, the sardonically named slum where I live, in
the dip in the hill in the middle of the whale’s back where no one can see us. We’re not a show village – but what’s the point of grumbling? Half the people there could find
themselves
thrown out if they make too much of a fuss.

‘Will the St Jamesians be obliged to work as servants in the new hotel and wait on the winter visitors?’ Teza said.

I must say, you have to hand it to Teza. But Duchess Dora came into her own at that point and saved the situation – for them, of course, not for us – in the classic fashion. The biscuit china went down with a tiny crash on the saucer; a moon face, with curls as dark as Sanjay’s flat thatch and with a little-girl bandeau to hold it all in, peered in friendly
confusion
at her husband over the tray. ‘Sanjay, darling.’ The voice was meant to be lisping, but it came out hard. ‘We haven’t mentioned the picnic yet. We haven’t invited Teza … and … er …’

‘Holly,’ I said.

‘Oh, you make me think of Christmas,’ this priceless woman then said. ‘How divine. I was saying, we have a picnic at the lagoon on Sundays … children and things … some of the heavenly Venezuelans are coming, they’re simply
camping
up at the old Allard house in the north at present … and you must both come …’

‘Just a family picnic,’ Sanjay said. He hadn’t liked, perhaps, the mention of the Venezuelans. ‘Also, I don’t know where you’re spending the night. But if you’d be able to bear it …’

‘And not be put off by the
ghastly
discomfort,’ Duchess Dora said.

Teza and I exchanged the most fleeting glance you could get. Mine said, why not? Teza said aloud, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Allard …’

‘Sanjay,’ Sanjay said firmly. For the first time I saw he was attractive, used to getting his own way and doing it with a sudden charm out of the affectation of tiredness. He rose. His faded shirt was a very pale pink against the roaring blue of
the sea beyond the posts of the verandah. Here goes, I thought, here’s the photograph I was supposed to take. I decided not to include Duchess Dora in the imaginary shot (but that’s me, you know – childish).

‘I’d love to,’ I said.

‘I have a friend in the village.’ Teza finally came out with her unexpected news. ‘So thank you, but I’ve already made arrangements to stay.’

*

It wasn’t strictly true. Teza, at her London college, had briefly known a young trainee teacher who came from St James but had gone early to live with a relative in Trinidad and then on to London on a grant: he left college and went to teach at a comprehensive in North London; he said he had a brother, much younger, on the island and Teza should look him up. But Teza is the kind of person for whom a piece of information is as solid as human flesh or a bed to sleep in. Like most people of her sort, she has no idea how much inconvenience this can cause others. And she ended up in poor Millie’s bed while Millie slept on the floor – and all this just because Millie was walking with those slow, slow steps down the village street at the very moment when Teza and I, breathless in the heat from the short climb, were walking up it.

There was no shade. There were no dogs because there was no shade for them to lie in. A few chickens squawked. Out the other side of the village, down the far side of the hill, were nutmeg trees and there some old men lay. But it was too far to reach. Even the chapel, roofless, looked as if it had caved in under the weight of the blue sky. And Millie with her slow steps walked, apparently not moving, towards us. Tiers of pale washing stood on her head like a wedding cake.

A boy came out from behind one of the squat houses. He had a transistor radio dangling from one arm. We all stopped. The four of us stood there, trapped in the scene. Speed and
movement-ahead to Teza and to the boy, who was still just legs-and-arms-all-over-the-place but would become Ford, the well-known, brilliant, reckless Ford. Slowness and
slowness
and death for Millie and me. Or that’s how it seems on the afternoons when the sun’s stuck up in the sky and the pyramids of cans of rock salmon are blistering to the touch, and the iced-lollie wrappers stick to the tray in the
deepfreeze
so the whole lot has to be melted out.