Eden Burning (25 page)

He didn’t say that he had invited Agnes to live with them, now that she was too old to tend the store. No, she had told him, there was no room for two women in one house. Yet she was going back to live with a cousin. And he knew that neither time nor two babies had eased her resentment of Désirée. Indeed, he had once caught her comparing the skin of her arm with his babies’ arms, which were many shades darker than hers. There lay the crux and cause of her anger! Yet in a curious way, and unjust as it was, he could understand and forgive her. Like so many, she was only a victim of universal prejudices. He felt a wave of sadness at losing her; he remembered her long-ago tale of Mount Pelée and how, only a child herself, she had fled to St. Felice.

Désirée spoke from the back seat. “Francis Luther made her have us there today. You can be sure she won’t let any of her friends know she entertained us at her dinner table! Personally, Patrick, I feel humiliated in that house.”

“Forget her,” Patrick said impatiently. “What about Father Baker? Your father can tell you a few things about him. And what about Kate Tarbox? The few services we have, the little we have in the way of hospital care, are mostly her doing. Your father can tell you that, too.”

“All right, Kate Tarbox. I’ll agree,” said Désirée. “But she’s one in a hundred thousand.” She laughed, reflecting,
“Did you see Marjorie Luther’s face when Kate said that about her husband not wanting to eat with us? I thought she would go through the floor, not that she doesn’t agree with Kate’s husband herself, Lord knows.”

Nicholas chuckled. “She speaks her mind, that Kate. An interesting character. I have an idea she can be trusted, too.”

“Trust Kate?” Patrick repeated. “Take my word for it, you can do that.”

“The Luther woman is the much better looking of the two, though. She has height, for one thing,” said Désirée, out of satisfaction with her own height. “And she knows how to wear clothes. That dress cost a fortune.”

Patrick objected again. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Kate has life! She has fire! Take a good look at her the next time.”

“Listen to the man! Anybody’d think you were in love with her,” Désirée told him good-naturedly.

Patrick was stubborn. For some reason it was important to defend Kate Tarbox. “She’s
real.
One isn’t used to a human being like her. Most people wear a mask. She doesn’t.”

“Well, if she doesn’t wear one, she’d better do it soon, or the whole world will see she’s in love with Francis Luther.”

“That’s ridiculous! Women!” Patrick said, shaking his head at Nicholas.

“Marjorie Luther knows it, too. That’s why she hates her.”

“Oh, women!” Patrick repeated, in mock despair.

Nicholas said quietly, “Désirée is right, you know. I sensed it, too. That’s why I made an effort to draw Mrs. Luther out. The art of politics, my friend. You have to have keen perceptions or you won’t survive.”

“I’m not keen at all,” Patrick said, feeling some wistfulness.

“You’re not fair to yourself,” Nicholas admonished him kindly.

They topped the last hill before the descent into Covetown. Pink and silver gilt and rose touched he rooftops, as the great
red ball had begun to lower itself into the sea, and this final splendor rekindled some memory of the day’s contradictions.

“Eleuthera,” Nicholas said softly. “Freedom. A beautiful name.”

“Yes,” Désirée said. “You could certainly feel free in a place like that, couldn’t you?”

“Freedom is relative,” Patrick admonished. “You can live in a palace and have a mind so narrow that you might as well be in prison.”

Nicholas teased, “You haven’t changed since we were at school, my friend. I told you then and I tell you now, you should have been a philosopher.”

“Oh, I never know what he’s thinking,” Désirée said affectionately. And as the car drew up in front of their narrow little house, “What I do know is, I could sit on that lawn forever, looking out at the ocean. Do you think people like them have any idea how lucky they are?”

   Long stripes of pink and silver gilt and rose lay over the sea as the horizon tilted upward to consume the sun. The four, when the others had departed, sat out on the lawn with their faces turned to the radiance.

Marjorie was the first to speak, underscoring the nouns. “I don’t know about all of you, but I found that exhausting! So much effort to manufacture
conversation,
especially with that
woman.
What on
earth
was there to talk about? That Nicholas was the best of the lot, a
gentleman.
He seems more like one of us, although of course he isn’t really, either.”

“That doesn’t sound like you,” Francis chided. And somewhat disturbed before the others, he explained, “Marjorie is too kind to have meant that the way it sounded. She’s not a bigot.”

“No,” Marjorie insisted, “No. I did mean it just as I said it. I don’t like having my house used for a political meeting. To me it was a false occasion. Artificial. What can we have in common with those people, or they with us?”

Father Baker answered calmly, “We may have to have—apart from any moral considerations—we may have to have much in common before we’re through. They are going to be running the government here sooner than you think. The British Empire is being chipped away. India is already gone, and the rest of us are going, make no mistake about it.”

Marjorie was in a mildly argumentative mood. “I don’t see why you people are so ready to give up, to humor all these agitators! These people don’t have such a bad life, you know. The climate couldn’t be easier. You go down into the markets and see all those piles of marvelous vegetables and fish and—”

Father Baker interrupted. “Surely you must have learned by now that there’s not nearly enough food to go around and not enough money to buy what there is.”

“Well, there would be,” Marjorie persisted, “if they didn’t have such enormous families. It’s really disgusting. All these children and no husbands. But of course there was no wedlock in Africa, so I suppose—”

“There are no jobs for the men, haven’t you heard?” Kate put in. “That’s why so many of them leave.”

The women are sharpening their knives, Francis thought.

Marjorie digressed. “They’re a childish people. One of the maids almost scared me to death last week. Shrieking that spirits were making her baby sick and spirits were throwing the furniture around in her house. I thought she was going insane till Osborne told me it was just obeah. What can you do with people like that? And they want to run the government!”

“You sound like Lionel,” Kate said. Her jaw was set.

They despised each other. Francis moved restlessly in his chair, wishing the guests would go home. It was only seven thirty; in an hour they could decently take their leave. He felt annoyed with Marjorie and also defensive of her.

“Is it so bad to sound like your husband?” Marjorie asked.
Your husband
was accusatory. “I happen to admire him.”

“Oh, he is admirable in many ways,” Kate replied.

“I admire the way he enjoys life. He works hard and spends his money without all this heavy guilt about having it, which gets so tiresome.”

The conversation went in waves. After each crash came a lull, in which the force of the wave withdrew to gather itself for the next collision. And he wished again that they would go home, and his wife go to bed, and leave him alone. They were upsetting him, which was a pity, for he had truly enjoyed the afternoon and the interaction between minds so different in experience from his own.

“They were both in my classes,” Father Baker was saying. “I suppose I feel involved with their future because I always took special interest in bright boys of the other race. A mixture of compassion and, I’m afraid, some plain curiosity.”

“Nicholas is obviously the smart one,” Marjorie said.

The old man contradicted her. “Smart, yes. Clever, yes. But Patrick is the thinker. Slower and far less ambitious, almost without ambition, but—Well, time will tell.”

“There is something very fine about him,” Francis said. “I always have a sense of depth, of much unspoken. There is something in his eyes”—and, looking over, caught Kate’s own eyes.

“Yes,” she said, turning away.

“Do you hear from Julia and Herbert?” Marjorie inquired now of Kate. She was remembering her obligation as a hostess, in spite of all. “We had a letter two or three months ago.”

“Yes, she says it’s a good thing Herbert was brought up in England, otherwise they’d be just another pair of colonials. Colonials are never top-drawer, you know. It’s all so funny really, these silly people sticking labels on themselves! ‘I’m better than you; he’s better than she.’ Like those women at the club in town—especially the foreigners—acting so grand toward the help. They’re almost worse than those of us who were born here.”

“I haven’t found them so,” Marjorie said stiffly. “I’ve
made good friends at the club. I wish we lived closer in. I wish Francis would buy a house in town, one of those lovely old ones with a walled garden in an alley.”

“You know I have to be here,” Francis said.

“You have Osborne. You always say he’s so trustworthy.”

“Yes, but not to wear my shoes.”

Marjorie sighed and Francis thought again, She ought to have a child. The thought was always with him and no doubt always with her. Her nerves were going bad. During their visit to New York they had both had tests and the doctors had found no reason why she had not conceived. Everyone they knew had children, sturdy children with sun-bleached hair and rosy tans. Their joys and their tribulations were the inevitable subject of adult conversation. Sometimes he thought, although probably it was unfair of him, that Marjorie suffered more from a feeling of failure and deficiency in not having given birth than from the fact itself.

Yet he felt his wife’s pain.

“It’s getting damp,” she said now. “Let’s have our coffee in the house.”

“Will you play for us, Kate?” asked Father Baker. “I remember when you were a little girl, practicing the
Liebeslieder
waltzes.”

“I don’t play very well anymore.”

“But will you, anyway?”

She sat down at the piano. From his “own” chair near the window, Francis had an oblique view of her cheek and the curving hair which swayed like a curtain as she moved. He supposed she played with skill, but he was no judge; he only knew when music moved him, and Brahms always did. He had not worked, because it was Sunday, and had no reason to be so tired, yet he felt a need to soothe fatigue, and putting the coffee cup aside, he laid his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes. The music rippled, telling of simple, country things, of May and streams, of gardens and
first love. And the scents of frangipani and wet grass blew in with drenching sweetness.

Then, abruptly, the music changed. It paused and slid into a minor key. It was as though the shadow of some sorrow had darkened the spirit of the player. Just so, two or three times in the past, he remembered, had a visible shadow passed across her face.

… but he married me instead.
He could still hear the cadence of the words, could see the sudden gravity and then the determined cheerful toss of the head. Funny, plucky little soul! A scrapper, he thought, afraid of nothing, and yet—

He had been thinking of her ever since. No, not thinking, exactly, just aware, as of a hovering presence at the back of thought, so that on an errand in town it would cross his mind that he might perhaps encounter her again on the street. It had never happened. Or entering a room at one of those crowded gatherings where you stand all evening holding a drink, it would cross his mind—oh, idly, very idly—that she might be there among the crowd. She never was.

All of this was meaningless, of course—aberration and whim! It came to all men at some time or other. It came and passed. And opening his eyes, he met Marjorie’s rather thoughtful gaze, just as the music stopped and Kate closed the lid of the piano with a final thump.

“It’s late,” she said. “Come, Father.”

It had grown quite dark. At the car Kate paused and looked up at the sky, where there was no moon and blue stars quivered.

“No wind up there. No sound,” she said. “It seems so strange. Turning and turning, millions of stars in total silence.”

He thought he saw tears in her eyes, but it might have been only their natural shine.

“We don’t know anything, do we?” she said, and got into the car.

He went back up the walk to where Marjorie was waiting. Braced against the doorpost, she, too, was looking up into the sky.

“A depressing night,” she said.

“Depressing?”

“Yes. Yes. Tell me, do you really think we’ll ever have a child?”

With his arm around her, he could feel the rigid muscles under the soft silk.

“I don’t know,” he began. “Still—”

“But how stupid of me to ask! How can you know?” She began to cry. “I’m sick of myself, Francis! What excuse is there for a woman without a uterus that works? What am I to do with my life? Keep putting a good face on things with my friends? Run around like Kate Tarbox, making an idiot of myself?”

His fingers, which had half-consciously been soothing her shoulders, withdrew.

“What have you got against Kate? She’s never harmed you.”

“I don’t trust her.”

He spoke quietly. “Can’t women have compassion toward each other? You know she’s not happy at home.”

“That doesn’t give her a license to poach.”

“Poach, Marjorie! That’s total nonsense!”

Was it? Hesitating and denying, tentatively reaching and withdrawing, with their silences and their eyes, they had been communicating, he and the other woman. Yes, they had.

And, very troubled, very afraid, his arms went out again to his wife, but she had pressed herself against the door and shrank away.

“I’ve done you an injustice,” he said, “keeping you here.” When she did not deny it, he continued, “I suppose we ought to quit and go home.”

“You know you’re not going to do that, you’re too committed here.”

It was so. Now, would he have gone willingly with her if it were she who had committed herself to a labor and a way of life that fulfilled her need? With painful honesty he tried to
answer Yes, he thought he would. True, this was a man’s world, but there was in him a sense of fairness, and he thought he would. Then, was he asking too much of
her,
after all? He thought he was not.