Collected Short Fiction (43 page)

Henry said, ‘Once upon a time – and really now it sounded like a fairy tale – once upon a time Mrs Lambert was a very poor girl. Family from Corsica. Living up there in the cocoa valleys with the tall
immortelle
trees. Times was hard. You couldn’t even give away cocoa. And Lambert had this job in the Civil Service. Messenger. Uniform, regular pay, the old pension at the end, and nobody sacking you. Marriage up there in the hills with the bush and red
immortelle
flowers. Oh, happy! Once-upon-a-time fairy tale. Wurthering Heights. Hansel and Gretel in the witch-broom cocoa woods. Then the world sort of catch up with them.’

The pillars were knocked down, and where the old wooden house stood there presently began to rise a house of patterned concrete blocks. The house, I could see, was going to be like hundreds of others in the city: three bedrooms down one side, a veranda, drawing-room and dining-room down the other side, and a back veranda.

No longer a doorstep at which Mr Lambert could sit, greeting us in the morning with his glass of rum. The old wooden house was sold, for the materials; frame by frame, jalousie by jalousie, the house was dismantled and re-erected far away by the man who had bought it, somewhere in the country. And then there was no longer a Mr Lambert in the morning. He left the yard early. In his khaki suit he was like a workman hurrying off to a full day. We often saw him walking with Mano. Mano, the walker in Henry’s yard, who after his morning’s exercise put on his khaki messenger’s uniform and walked to the government office where he worked. Their dress was alike, but they were an ill-assorted pair, Mano lean and athletic, Mr Lambert even at that early hour shambling drunk.

Mr Lambert had a sideline. At sports meetings, on race days, at cricket and football matches, he ran a stall. He sold a vile sweet liquid of his own manufacture. On these occasions he appeared, not with his cork hat, but with a handkerchief knotted around his head. He rang a bell and sang his sales rhymes, which were often pure gibberish. ‘Neighbour! Neighbour! Where are you? Here I am! Rat-tat-too.’ Sometimes he would point to the poisonous tub in which hunks of ice floated in red liquid, and sing: ‘Walk in! Jump in! Run in! Hop in! Flop in! Leap in! Creep in!’

This was the Mr Lambert of happier days. Now, after the degradation of his house, it seemed that he had given up his stall. But he had grown friendly with Mano and this friendship led him to announce that he was going to the sports meeting in which Mano was to take part.

Henry said, ‘Mrs Lambert doesn’t like it. She feel that this old black man hopping around with a handkerchief on his head and ringing his bell is a sort of low-rating, especially now that she building this new house. And she say that if he go and ring that bell any more she finish with him. She not going to let him set foot in the new house.’

So we were concerned about both Mr Lambert and Mano. We often went in the afternoons to the great park to cycle around with Mano as he walked, to help him to fight the impatience that made him run in walking races and get disqualified.

Henry said, ‘Frankie, I think you trying too hard with Mano. You should watch it. You see what happen to Mrs Lambert. You know, I don’t think people want to do what they say they want to do. I think we always make a lot of trouble for people by helping them to get what they say they want to get. Some people look at black people and only see black. You look at poor people and you only see poor. You think the only thing they want is money. All-you wrong, you know.’

One day while we were coming back in procession from the park, Mano pumping away beside us past the crocodile of Ma-Ho’s children, we were horrified to see Mr Lambert stretched out on the pavement like a dead man. He was not dead; that was a relief. He was simply drunk, very complicatedly drunk. Selma ran to Mrs Lambert and brought back a cool message: ‘Mrs Lambert says we are not to worry our heads with that good-for-nothing idler.’

Henry said, ‘We are not doing Lambert any good by being so friendly with him. Mrs Lambert, I would say, is hostile to us all, definitely hostile.’

Mr Lambert at this stage revived a little and said, ‘They say I am black. But black I am not. I tell you, good sirs, I am a Scot.’

Henry said, ‘Is not so funny, you know. His grandfather was a big landowner, a big man. We even hear a rumour some years before the war that according to some funny law of succession Mr Lambert was the legal head of some Scottish clan.’

The house went up. The day of the sports meeting came.
Mano was extremely nervous. As the time drew nearer he even began to look frightened. This was puzzling, because I had always thought him quite withdrawn, indifferent to success, failure or encouragement.

Henry said, ‘You know, Mano never read the papers. On the road yesterday some crazy thing make him take up the evening paper and he look at the horoscope and he read: “You will be exalted today.” ’

‘But that’s nice,’ I said.

‘It get him frightened. Was a damn funny word for the paper to use. It make Mano think of God and the old keys of the kingdom.’

Mano was very frightened when we started for the sports ground. There was no sign in the street of Mr Lambert and we felt that he had in the end been scared off by Mrs Lambert and that to save face he had gone away for a little. But at the sports ground, after the meeting had begun and Mano was started on his walk – it was a long walk, and you must picture it going on and on, with lots of other sporting activities taking place at the same time, each activity unrelated to any other, creating a total effect of a futile multifarious frenzy – it was when Mano was well on his walk that we heard the bell begin to ring. To us it rang like doom.

‘Mano will not run today, Mano will walk to heaven today.’

Exaltation was not in Mr Lambert’s face alone or in his bell or in his words. It was also in his dress.

‘On me some alien blood has spilt. I make a final statement, I wear a kilt.’ And then came all his old rhymes.

And Mano didn’t run. He walked and won. And Mr Lambert rang his bell and chanted: ‘Mano will not run today. He will walk into the arms of his Lord today.’

We had worked for Mano’s victory. Now that it had come it seemed unnatural. He himself was like a stunned man. He rejected congratulations. We offered him none. When we looked for Mr Lambert we couldn’t find him. And with a sense of a double and deep unsettling of what was fixed and right, we walked home. We had a party. It turned into more than a party. We did not notice when Mano left us.

Later that night we found Mr Lambert drunk and sprawling on the pavement.

He said, ‘I led her up from the gutter. I gave her bread. I gave
her butter. And this is how she pays me back. White is white and black is black.’

We took him to his house. Henry went to see Mrs Lambert. It was no use. She refused to take him in. She refused to come out to him.

‘To my own house I have no entrance. Come, friends, all on my grave dance.’

We had a double funeral the next day. Mano had done what so many others on the island had done. He had gone out swimming, far into the blue waters, beyond the possibility of return.

‘You know,’ Henry said, as we walked to the cemetery, ‘the trouble with Mano was that he never had courage. He didn’t want to be a walker. He really wanted to be a runner. But he didn’t have the courage. So when he won the walking race, he went and drowned himself.’

Albert the postman was in our funeral procession. He said, ‘News, Frankie. They send back another one of Blackwhite’s books.’

Blackwhite heard. He said to me, ‘Was your fault. You made me start writing about all
this
. Oh, I feel degraded. Who wants to read about this place?’

I said, ‘Once you were all white, and that wasn’t true. Now you are trying to be all black and that isn’t true either. You are really a shade of grey, Blackwhite.’

‘Hooray for me, to use one of your expressions. This place is nowhere. It is a place where everyone comes to die. But I am not like Mano. You are not going to kill me.’

‘Blackwhite, you old virgin, I love you.’

‘Virgin? How do you know?’

‘We are birds of a feather.’

‘Frankie, why do you drink? It’s only a craving for sugar.’

And I said to him: ‘Dickie-bird, why do you weep? Sugar, sugar. A lovely word, sugar. I love its sweetness on my breath. I love its sweetness seeping through my skin.’

And in the funeral procession, which dislocated traffic and drew doffed hats and grave faces from passers-by, I wept for Mano and Lambert and myself, wept for my love of sugar; and Blackwhite wept for the same things and for his virginity. We walked side by side.

*    *    *

Selma said Henry was right. ‘I don’t think you should go around interfering any more in other people’s lives. People don’t really want what you think they want.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘From now on we will just live quietly.’

Quietly. It was a word with so many meanings. The quietness of the morning after, for instance, the spectacles on my nose, quiet in an abstemious corner. I was a character now. I had licence. Sugar sweetened me. In Henry’s yard, in Selma’s house, and on the sands of the desolate bay over the hills, the healing bay where the people of the island sought privacy from joy and grief.

Priest’s denunciations of us, of me, grew fiercer. And Blackwhite, seen through the flapping curtain of his front room, pounded away at his typewriter in sympathetic rage.

Then one blurred aching morning I found on the front step a small coffin, and in the coffin a mutilated sailor doll and a toy wreath of rice fern.

They came around to look.

‘Primitive,’ Blackwhite said. ‘Disgusting. A disgrace to us.’

‘This is Priest work,’ Henry said.

‘I have been telling you to insure me,’ Selma said.

‘What, is that his game?’

Henry said, ‘Priest does take his work seriously. The only thing is, I wish I know what his work is. I don’t know whether it is preaching, or whether it is selling insurance. I don’t think he know either. For him the two seem to come together.’

To tell the truth, the coffins on Selma’s doorstep worried me. They kept on appearing and I didn’t know what to do. Selma became more and more nervous. At one moment she suggested I should take her away; at another moment she said that I myself should go away. She also suggested that I should try to appease Priest by buying some insurance.

‘Appease Priest? The words don’t sound right. Henry, you hear?’

Henry said, ‘I will tell you about this insurance. I don’t know how it happen on the island, but it becoming a social thing, you know. Like having a shower, like taking schooling, like getting married. If you not insured these days you can’t hold up your head at all. Everybody feel you poor as a church rat. But look. The man coming himself.’

It was Priest, wearing a suit and looking very gay and not at all malevolent.

‘Dropping in for a little celebration,’ he said.

Selma was awed, and it was hard to say whether it was because of Priest’s suit, the coffins, or his grand manner.

‘What are you celebrating?’ I said. ‘A funeral?’

He wasn’t put out. ‘New job, Frankie, new job. More money, you know. Higher commission, bigger salary. Frankie, where you say you living in the States? Well, look out for me. I might be going up there any day. So the bosses say.’

I said, ‘I’d love to have you.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘how in this insurance business I have this marvellous record. But these local people’ – and here he threw up his beard, scratched under his chin, screwed up his eyes – ‘but these local people, you know how mean they is with the money. Then this new company come down, you know, and they get to know about me. I didn’t go to see them. They send for me. And when I went to see them they treat me as a God, you know. And a damn lot of them was white to boot. You know, man, I was like – what I can say? – I was like a
playboy
in that crowd, a playboy. And look how the luck still with me, look how the luck still in my hand. You know what I come in here to celebrate especially? You know how for years I begging Ma-Ho to take out insurance. And you know how he, Ma-Ho, don’t want to take out no insurance. He just saying he want to go back to China, back to the old wan-ton soup and Chiang Kai-shek. Well, he insured as from today.’

Henry said, ‘He pass his medical?’

I said, ‘Offhand, that man looks damn sick to me, you know.’

‘He pass his medical,’ Priest said.

‘He went to the doctor?’ Henry asked. ‘Or the doctor went to him?’

‘What you worrying with these
details
? You know these Chinese people. Put them in their little shop and they stay there until kingdom come. Is a healthy life, you know.’

Henry said, ‘Ma-Ho tell me one day that when he come to the island in 1920 and the ship stop in the bay and he look out and he see only mangrove, he started to cry.’

Selma said, ‘I can’t imagine Ma-Ho crying.’

Henry said, ‘To me it look as though he never stop crying.’

‘Offhand,’ I said, ‘no more coffins, eh?’

‘Let me not hear of death,’ Priest said in his preaching manner. He burst out laughing and slapped me on the back.

And, indeed, no more coffins and dead sailors and toy wreaths appeared on Selma’s steps.

I knocked on Selma’s door one day two weeks later. ‘Any coffins today, Ma’am?’

‘Not today, thank you.’

Selma had become houseproud. The little house glittered and smelt of all sorts of polishes. There were pictures in passe-partout frames on the walls and potted ferns in brass vases on the marble-topped three-legged tables for which she had a passion. That day she had something new to show me: a marble-topped dresser with a clay basin and ewer.

‘Do you like it?’

‘It’s lovely. But do you really need it?’

‘I always wanted one. My aunt always had one. I don’t want to use it. I just want to look at it.’

‘Fine.’ And after a while I said, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, the war’s not going to go on for ever. I can’t stay here for ever.’

‘Well, it’s as Blackwhite says. You are going to go back, we are going to stay here. Don’t weep for me, and’ – she waved around at all the little possessions in her room – ‘and I won’t weep for you. No. That’s not right. Let’s weep a little.’