Heaven's Edge (11 page)

‘Are you sure?' I had assumed it was on the other coast. In the south where the sand was easier to dig and the sea free for thousands of miles.

‘There is no other beach,' she said. ‘They must have migrated.'

I didn't think so. But then the butterflies migrated. We all did. From one world to another, sometime.

The road plunged through thick, pulpwood scrub. In some places it deteriorated into bomb craters and potholes but the big billowing wheels of the cruiser rolled over them all, flattening brushwood, scattering rocks. Jaz, bouncing in the back, bawled out, ‘Why on earth did you ever come to a hole like this, Marc?'

How could I explain to Jaz how much I wanted from this island? How much it represented of a world I had once believed I could never reach. ‘My father's father was born
here. My father died here. I thought I might find some remains. Something, maybe, about who he was and who I am. I came to learn what my life is all about.'

He leant forward, greedy for more. ‘And got enchanted?'

‘There seemed no point in going back until I found something, and when I did – how could I?'

‘Once you met Uva, huh?'

I looked up at my rear-view mirror and saw Jaz's eyes gleam with vicarious pleasure.

My father's decision to come here, flying east on his own – over the Alps, the deserts of Arabia, the Indian Ocean, over camel humps, golden dhows, catamarans and shoals of singing fish, to a place where sealost sailors believed they would see the springs of heaven rise – began to make sense to me only after I followed him.

Grandma Cleo knew I would do so, long before I did. Whenever I said I wanted to be still, she would rock her head and say it is in my blood to move. ‘You'll find child, one day, there'll be a journey you'll have to make. We all have little Argos of our own, dear, you jus' like me.' She too had travelled east, as far, to meet her Eldon in an overcast Britain – an island halfway between their own two warmer ones, hers in the Caribbean Sea and his in the Indian Ocean.

I used to wonder how she and Eldon could have found anything in common: she had come from what she always called the West Indies to support a war of an unknown, and unloving, motherland; whereas he, Eldon, made no secret of his distrust of stories of hope and glory. Once when I came back from a school visit to an exhibition about nations at war, he got quite upset. ‘There is nothing to learn from
war except the colossal stupidity of men,' he exclaimed. ‘Museums these days sanitise the past to make it shine more interestingly – educatively – than it ever should be remembered.'

‘But if not for war you wouldn't have met Grandma,' I pointed out, too young to understand the deeper logic of life as it has to be lived.

Eldon had been a well-heeled student when he had first come to England. ‘Those days, the poor of the Empire only travelled out of this country, not into it,' he'd explain, drawing for me a picture of a whimsical young man indulging in lazy punts and preposterous motoring jaunts. ‘I was the first to get the new super-fast Alvis, you know. Glorious car. Even at the height of austerity I'd happily blow a month's petrol ration on a single afternoon's romp in that magnificent machine.' He'd chuckle at my consternation and flap a hand in the air. ‘To get to my age, dear boy, you have to have had some pranks to laugh about.' That was why, he said, he learnt to fly. ‘I thought I might one day write a sonnet in the sky.'

In the end though, he admitted, he had never even finished his degree. ‘I decided that there was more to life than posturing in a cap and gown. I came to London and learnt to see the history of our times in a different way …' He said he had met people who made him rethink everything he had taken for granted before. ‘Over warm beer and cigarette smoke they exposed the injustice of the whole colonial enterprise. The Empire they said was an occupying force, a greedy enslaver. Firebrands like Satish and Vernon were ready to punch the lion right on the nose. Independence, revolution, had to be now or never, they claimed. Out of the rubble of Europe they wanted to build the road to our freedom.'

Eldon told me he was never very sure about the metaphors they used, but London did seem then to be a cauldron of cabals. ‘Quite a different thing from the collection of villages that the natives imagined,' he added with a slight smirk. ‘In those days the Indians here knew even each other's bellybuttons, and the West Indians I met all seemed familiar with every inch of each other's backyards. Even our fellows in town got on well enough for a regular monthly bunfight, you know.'

Then came the war. ‘I was called for an interview in some musty office off the Kingsway. “We need you,” a big oaf from the Air Ministry announced.' Eldon cleared his throat noisily as if trying to untie a complicated knot inside. ‘I told the fellow that this was a squabble that had nothing to do with me. A military brawl between European powers that had been systematically looting the rest of the world. Napoleon, Bismarck, even that woman Victoria had all been, to my mind, pompous bullies craving a bit of their own sun to swagger in.'

His mouth curved down as he recalled the next few months. ‘It was only in September 1940, when the bombs began to fall on civilians in London, that I saw that this, like Spain, might turn out to be something really very different.' He met refugees who had managed to escape to England and began to feel a bond with those under siege. Even so, he said, he couldn't bring himself to take life, human life. Influenced by the fringe pacifists of the time, he preferred to give humanitarian help – charity – as foreigners often do in foreign places everywhere. He joined the air medical services, ferrying supplies and wounded patients into hospitals around the country.

It was on one of these missions that he had met Cleo. She had come to England following her brother who had
got into the RAF. She had wanted to as well. Eldon said he had been intrigued by Cleo's loyalty for a country that seemed so keen not to reciprocate her affections. I guess an abundance of love was what allowed her to feel protective; showed her how she sometimes might have to sacrifice the more simplistic ideas about what one should or should not do for the sake of something more dear. I can understand that now, but I am not sure Eldon ever did.

Eldon and Cleo were married after the war. By then Cleo had no one else; her brother had been killed in action, her parents were both dead. Eldon was no war hero but, I suppose, she must have seen something in him she recognised. A commitment to her. He sold his fancy Alvis and started a small air service business to earn a modest, but autonomous, livelihood in a country he was beginning to call his own. For a marriage like theirs, he said, post-war Britain despite the soot, the rancid fog and the ration cards seemed to be the only place. By then, he said, he had realised the prejudices of his old home towards a bond like theirs would be even harder to break.

For me my grandfather's inadvertent migration and awkward pacifism was all the more poignant for being rejected by his only son, my father.

When I was a little older I asked Eldon what he believed was really at stake in that early war he'd tried to shun.

‘In some ways everything, just as in the conflicts we have today. The dividing line between what is right and what is wrong.' Eldon tapped a column of ash off his cigarette into an empty teacup. ‘Look around you now. There are some things people do that are very clearly right, and some very clearly wrong. But there are a great many things we do that are easily confused, especially by ourselves.'

I didn't know what he was getting at. It seemed to me
he was the one confused. I tried to pin him down. ‘Do you really think there was an alternative then?'

He brushed aside some specks of ash that had drifted on to the table. ‘During those years not everyone understood what was going on, or why. So much was bungled to begin with that the motives became quite mixed up. Sometimes, it seemed to me, fighting was fuelled more by xenophobia …'

‘That's not really true, is it?' I protested, not quite sure of the word, but certain that it was unfair. Perhaps it was his old age, I thought, muddying the past. ‘Anti-fascism, wasn't it? There's no real choice, is there, about tolerating tyrants? You have to fight evil.' Appeasement, I had learned, could not be right. Everyone talked of the need for strength. How you can't give up the fight. I had the beat in my blood.

He looked at me a little in surprise. ‘Yes, of course, but the question is how do you do it? By fighting for peace? By violent retaliation? Revenge?' He waited for the words to sink in. Then, in the silence, his gaze dimmed. I felt something retract. He continued in a quieter voice, as if to himself. ‘We now know don't we, that if you hit someone to teach him a lesson, the lesson you teach is how to hit.'

I could see that, but I couldn't make sense of it. ‘But if you destroy the monster, isn't that the end of it? It's not a lesson.'

Eldon hesitated. ‘Have you heard of the Hydra?'

‘It was eventually killed, wasn't it?' I replied. ‘Not tamed.'

He wasn't listening. ‘We have yet to learn the true cost of a bomb: how it accrues over years, decades, lives. I like to believe we can learn – that the young will see more clearly.' He fixed his eyes on me again. ‘You must do better in your life.'

I went cold when he said that.

‘The art of killing cannot be our finest achievement,' he added, cupping his hands to light another cigarette. ‘At least, I could never accept that. Not then, not now. Not even in the most ancient battles of the world. It can't be right. Nothing is inevitable. Not even history. There is always an alternative.'

I remember looking at him then and thinking, he still doesn't know what he should have done; what anyone should have done. The uncertainty had troubled him all his life, and maybe through him also affected my father's. The thought frightened me. I wondered whether all my father's heroic sorties were only a reaction against Eldon's opinions. I tried to imagine what he would have said in my place, what his real convictions were. Why did he not bale out on that last flight? Doubt, it seemed to me then, could be a flaw.

But there were moments of doubt for me too – and culpability, I now know – when clips of muted bombs and missiles were shown on TV. I'd see a child's face, like mine, dodging behind the screen, behind the indiscriminate incendiaries. Eldon would sink back in his chair after watching with me. ‘How can they kill ordinary men, women and children for the sake of an idea planted in their heads? Destroy one life to save another? How can anyone believe in such a hierarchy of souls?'

Perhaps, as he claimed, it has something to do with the face you know, and the one you don't. Could it be that easy? Or is there a need to help the innocent, the weak, against the strong? Sometimes maybe we have to work out what is the greater good, however inadequate our mathematics. But he wasn't there to argue with by the time I came to think of that.

*    *    *

The jungle expired and we broke out into a stretch of parched fields. The road broadened. We passed a few broken-down houses. Kris peered out and said it was OK to continue. There was no sign of anybody around. We came to a village pond and a schoolhouse. In the centre of the grounds, a tall empty flagpole held up a patch of dirty sky. On the periphery large tamarind trees spread a speckled shade and dry gunge covered the ground.

‘There may be something we can use here. Something to eat even,' I said to the others and parked by the gate.

Kris got down and looked around for a food store. I went straight into the school office and opened the cupboard I found in there. It was empty. ‘Who would have been here?' I asked Jaz who had followed me in.

‘Maybe it is not yet occupied, you know? Maybe it is one of those new villages they are always planning and then forgetting to copulate. I mean populate.' He laughed nervously. ‘Sorry. Just a joke.'

I ignored the comment and stared out of the doorway. From the office I could see the whole compound: the rusted earth, the trees, the glimmer of the pond on the other side of the road stuffed with big grey leaves rotting in the heat. Not a single sound stung the air.

Jaz flicked a stray cowlick back and walked hesitantly away. By the window he stopped and seemed to perk up. He shut his eyes and sniffed the air; his crushed bustle rose fetchingly off his haunch. ‘This way,' he exclaimed and set off at a brisk trot.

‘Where?'

‘The perfume, darling, the perfume. Can't you smell it?' He wagged his head in exasperation. Quickening his pace, he disappeared around a corner excitedly invoking young sailors and the scent of sun-warmed smegma.

I was glad to be left alone. I tried to imagine what might have been taught in this desolate school. History? The past choked with wars, disputes, borders as pointless as chalk lines in water. Ideology? Doctrines bloated with blood and bones, perverted by power. My own lessons, I realised, had taken too long to learn; I guess it was nobody's fault but mine.

Then Jaz returned, beaming, with a bedraggled, bare-bodied boy at his side. ‘Look what I found.' He had one hand on the nape of the boy's neck and in the other an old-fashioned automatic. He threw the gun to me.

The boy had no shirt, he was wearing torn khaki drills and grubby Shanghai trainers. He had a belt of bullets masking his narrow waist and a brown rag wrapped around his head. His skin was sunburnt. A wispy beard blurred the edge of a pretty, thin face dominated by dark protruding eyes. He reminded me of an early hero of mine whose poster had been on my wall for years: a cover version of his song about shooting the sheriff came to me. Eldon, I remember, did not like it one little bit.

‘He says he is a fighter, but that gun of his doesn't even work.'

I tried to open the cartridge chamber. ‘What's he doing hiding here?'