Night Calypso (15 page)

Thérèse lay quite still, as if she was sleeping. He went and stood at the window. Thoughts of Odetta had disturbed him.

‘You not leaving me, are you, Doctor?’ He turned back to the bed. She was sitting up on the side of the bed with her feet on the ground.

He stood next to the chair which Sister Luke had placed by the bed. ‘No. I thought you were sleeping.’

‘I feel as if I’ve not slept for years,’ she sighed.

‘Are you not sleeping well then? How long has this been going on?’

‘The night is full of noises. The sea, the wind, the insects, the frogs.’

‘You’ve not yet adapted to our tropics.
Tristes tropiques
.’

‘I wake, and a ship is all lit up at my window, like a moving city, a deep drone. Then, in the early hours of the morning, before we’re called for Matins, the fishermen are returning from the
bocas
. The night’s busy. I’m tired when I first go to bed. So tired after the hospital. Then I wake and listen and listen. I hear their words, their bottle and spoon, their calypso tune, long after they’ve passed through the night:
Anywhere you go you can tell a Jew. The nose in their face not like me and you
. Then I can’t sleep.’

Vincent watched her trying to touch the floor with her bare toes. He noticed the scar on her ankle from the cut when he had first attended to her. ‘It’s healed well. Not too bad a scar.’

She looked down. ‘Oh, that. It seems such a long time now.
Kristallnacht
.’ She looked at him.

He did not want to encourage her dwelling there.

‘I’m so thirsty.’

‘Let me get you some water.’

‘There’s a glass near the jug on the table.’ She pointed.

He poured and then handed her the glass. She gulped the water and he got her some more.

‘Take one of these after ten minutes and don’t drink after that for another ten minutes. I got them in France, in a pharmacy in Paris, when I was a student. Kept them for a rainy day, as they say in England.’ He shook out a small pill from a brown vial.

‘Isn’t that most days?
En Angleterre!
’ They laughed.

Thérèse toyed with the small white pill.

‘It’s called Aconite. Lie back and I’ll tell you a story.’ She slung her feet back onto the bed, and tucked herself under the white cotton sheet. She lay like when Vincent first came into the room.

‘Yes, tell me a story.’ She held the small pill in the tips of her
fingers, waiting for the seconds to tick by in her head. She looked like a child waiting for a bedtime story.

Vincent began. ‘There’s a blue flower, almost violet, which grows in the mountain regions of Europe and Asia. Each bloom is a hood which some call Monk’s Hood. It’s the way that it folds like the cowl of a monk.’

Thérèse was staring at the ceiling.

‘It flowers along the tip of the lengthy and leafy plant which catches the wind in the mountains. The blue-violet
aconitum napellus
. But you must not be fooled by that beauty, by that monastic cloak which hides a poison.’ He smiled.

Thérèse’s eyes flickered and she turned them on Vincent. Then she put the pill on the tip of her tongue.

‘Let it dissolve,’ he said.

‘Will there be a big change?’

‘Gradual.’

‘What’s this one for?’

‘For when you wake in the night and hear the big ships. It’s for the fear which comes with the wind and the sea. It’s for when you think you are going to faint in chapel, when you think you are going to die.’

‘Will you stay and watch till I fall asleep?’ She reached out to hold his hand. He thought he could pretend to be taking her pulse, if Mother Superior arrived at that moment. He let her hold his hand. When he thought she was sleeping, he let go of her hand and slipped out of the cell.

There was no one about. The convent was dead quiet except for the intermittent breaking of the waves under the cliff, which seemed as if they were rushing right under the very foundations of the convent. He thought he could hear the pillars buckling. He walked down the steps to the jetty. The place seemed abandoned as he looked out over the bay to Saint Damian’s and his own house, a pink blur in the green shade. Chac Chac Bay was empty, but there was an oil tanker passing outside in the gulf, heading for the Boca de Navios. Sister Luke had not returned, and he now wondered why.

The morning had flown.

He was suddenly startled by the sound of the Angelus, with a clanging of bells on the cliff above. It was rung by the same lay sister who had the iron bucket, mopping in the corridor. She seemed to be the only soul about the place. Her noise was soon echoed by the ringing of the Angelus at Saint Damian’s. Then the bells stopped, though still ringing in the hills, like a shower of rain in the distance. He would just have to wait for a boat.

Vincent returned to the infimary’s cell. When he got there, he saw that the door was open. Thérèse was not in bed.

He followed a trail of bed linen along the floor into the small garden outside the infirmary. He was now quite worried. He climbed the hillock with the cacti and agaves above the old cemetery. This gave him a view of the peninsular, at the end of which was Salt Pond, and then further on, Bande du Sud. He had only been there once. It was an exposed and barren part of the island.

The midday sun was high in the sky. He was thirsty and hungry. The morning had been a strain. If he was feeling this way, what condition would Thérèse be in, by this time? He began the descent, along a small track through the scrub and agave. The waves were breaking like cannons. The wind had died down. The
cigales
were screaming. A
corbeau
circled overhead.

He thought he might see her veil in the wind, a white flag of surrender. But, then he remembered, she had not had her veil on. He doubted that she would have got fully dressed. She must be out there, barefoot, in the white cotton shift she had been wearing in bed.

Vincent’s worse fears, as he descended the cliff, were that Thérèse might have stumbled and fallen over from any of the sheer heights on the way down to Salt Pond. Even worse, that she might have ventured along the coastal path above La Tinta, which overhung the rocky coves of the Boca Grande.

Then he found the clue that he was looking for. Thérèse had caught her white cotton shift on the thorns of a cactus. It had left a ribbon fluttering in the breeze, which now gave some relief from the heat. Vincent unpicked the torn hem of her skirt from the thorns. He held it like a holy relic.

When he came out of the shade of the mangroves on to the edge of Salt Pond, he found a margin of salt on the shore. He brushed aside the dangerous manchineel with its poisonous ooze. The light was blinding white on the aquamarine of the water, which reflected the succulents and sedge which bordered the pond. A haze shimmered. The rocks and stones were dusted with salt. Thérèse, in her white cotton shift and skull cap, stooping down near the edge of the water ahead of him, was almost indistinguishable from some of the larger, whitened rocks. She was still. The place hummed. Only the white egrets stirred, settling on the green branches of the mangrove.

There was a shimmer of gauze, the zing of a
batimazelle
, like a sliver of glass; two dragonflies coupling on the wind, almost invisible, a zing, then gone on the wind.

A jade green lizard emerged from the cleft in a rock near his foot and scuttled into a dried moss fissure.

Vincent approached Thérèse quietly. A
jaune d’Abricot
pinned itself to a piece of driftwood. It startled him with its yellow flutter.

His footsteps crunched on the salt. He knelt by her stooping figure. He put his hand at the small of her back. ‘Thérèse, it’s okay now.’ He noticed that her bare feet had been bruised on the shale and stones along the track where he himself had slipped more than once in pursuit of her.

She turned and looked over her shoulder. Her face was burnt. Her fingers were cut, and she had scratches on her arms. Her white cotton shift was stained with blood and dirt. She took up a small stick and began drawing on the entablature of caked mud. Her abstract hieroglyphs were accompanied once more by her litany of place names.

‘No, Thérèse. Don’t worry yourself now. Leave that now,’ Vincent advised.

Beneath her breath, she was singing a snatch of the fishermen’s calypso. ‘
Anywhere you go you can tell a Jew. The nose in their face not like me or you
.’

Then the thing he had not wanted to happen, happened without choice, as she turned to face to him more directly, and as he leant towards her. Their brows were beaded with sweat. Their lips were
cracked. Their mouths were dry. But, with that first kiss, their dry lips resting there in the glare of the midday sun, they let the
cigales
’ prayers for rain drown their fears. They kissed and kissed.

‘Doctor,’ she whispered.

‘Vincent.’

‘Vincent. Yes, Vincent.’

‘Thérèse.’

‘Say Madeleine.’ The sea breeze stole her words.

‘Madeleine.’

‘Yes, I’m Madeleine now. I’m Madeleine Weil.’

‘Madeleine Weil, yes,’ he repeated.

What would they do?

Her stooping, bruised figure, her dry, cracked lips, the silence of the desert they inhabited on the salt margins of the pond, filled his mind to overwhelming, crowding out his sense of caution and the proper decorum of a doctor. But then he thought, what had he done? Again?

The calypsonians kept their commentary going on the time; words for an era. The Doctor’s House was a buzz of humming and singing, replacing the ban on carnival by the governor. Theo kept up with the calypsos of the day. ‘
Hand me the papers let me read the news, because ah puzzle and I’m so confused
.’

A month later, the first rains stitching the sky, veiling the hills, bringing the pouis’ flowers to the ground, the almonds dropping fast, thudding on the sand along the beach at Saint Damian’s, they heard the news on the BBC, that the Germans had entered Paris.

‘
France after fighting desperately, Got retarded and surrendered to Germany.
’ The fishermen were the calypsonians.

Over at the convent, the nuns processed to the chapel for special prayers. ‘
Custodi me Domine, de manu pecatoris.
’ Keep me, O Lord, from the hand of the wicked.

The younger sisters cried openly at the hospital for days after the news of the invasion of France, and then after the fall of Paris. The patients now tried to comfort their nurses.

The advance of armies had the fourteen-year-old Theo racing up to his room. The black
Swastika
crayoned in its white circle, on its red background, was pinned to the wall, stuck in the centre of Paris.

Theo had a way of showing which countries had fallen under the Germans, by laying out their flags flat against the wall. The
Swastika
and Union Jack were erect. ‘
Blutfahne
,’ he whispered adjusting the pin. Vincent could not believe, sometimes, the words he came out with. ‘Blood banner.’

Instead of filling the night with his own stories, Vincent found him awake, torch under the blanket and earphones on, attached to
his crystal set, absorbed by the language of war, the crackle of Morse. Then the
tricolore
was lain flat.

‘
Run your run, Adolph Hitler, run your run
…’ he whistled and buzzed about.

‘Come Theo, we need to get off. Remember you promised to go by Singh today. You mustn’t ride Cervantes hard. He’s only a small donkey.’ Vincent watched him flying about the house.

He would not leave till he had done his chores. He busied himself while talking to Vincent. ‘Who go clean this place, tell me.’ He had refused to give up his household work, even on the days he was over at Saint Damian’s.

Vincent had overheard him last week. ‘We don’t need servant here, Miss Beatrice.’

A lot of his time was taken up with the maintenance of the vast theatre of war in his room which was taking the place of the 1937 Riots. A collage of newspaper cuttings could be seen between the cracks of maps with intriguing juxtapositions: Marcus Garvey and Jesse Owens disappearing behind Abyssinia, while a boatload of Jewish refugees landed on the jetty at Nelson Island, on a torn photograph from the Porta España
Gazette
.

The clinic, where Vincent and Thérèse worked at their research, was quiet, except for the rain dripping into the drain below. She could see him out on the verandah smoking. His khaki figure stood, looking away from her, blowing the cigarette smoke out to the bay. They were embarrassed to meet each other.

She bent her head to the microscope, examining her latest cultures of
mycrobacterium leprae
. She worked now to forget their kiss at Salt Pond. She worked not to imagine what was happening to herself. She lost herself in the secret life of the
bacillii
which created so much havoc in her patients’ lives.

A macabre silence surrounded her.

Vincent came in off the verandah.

‘I expect there’ll be no more letters now,’ she said abruptly.

He looked at her, unable to offer reassurance, and at a loss about their newly declared feelings. She did not meet his eyes.

‘I don’t know what to say. I don’t know.’ He could not hold her now.

‘Everything has changed,’ she declared.

‘Everything?’ He was unsure whether she was referring to them or to her father.

Then she was distracted again. She continued with her research. ‘Look.’ She pointed far out into the gulf where there was a glimpse of Nelson Island. ‘History, odd, called after a British Admiral, now a camp for my people. You, know what the calypsonians have been saying.
The way they are coming all of them, Will make Trinidad a new Jerusalem.
’ Vincent smiled at her rendition of the calypso.

‘You’re still kept awake by the fishermen?’ Vincent tried to catch her eye.

‘I take my doctor’s remedy. I take
aconitum nappellus
and sleep.’

‘No matter the ships that pass in the night?’ he asked.

Vincent’s question reminded her of their intimacy. She pulled away. Could not allow herself to be reminded. He was the doctor, and she was again his research assistant.

Neither of them recalled their time at the edge of Salt Pond. That, too, became part of the present silence. She had not taken his hand. He had not folded his over hers.

The present silence became part of the darkness which descended with the monsoon. It became part of the great silence of the sea. ‘
Le silence de la mer
,’ Thérèse said to herself.

‘What?’ Vincent asked, looking across from his desk. ‘Did you say something?’ Thérèse looked up. They both looked sad with longing.

She checked herself and repeated, ‘
Le silence de la mer
.’ They both looked out over the bay, into the gulf.

She retreated, he guessed, into her worry about her father. He could almost imagine her reverie.

‘Do you believe in evil?’ Thérèse broke her silence, looking up from her microscope and the notes she was making on the pad beside her.

‘Evil?’ Vincent questioned. Where was this leading?

‘Yes, an absolute source of evil, as there is an absolute source of good,’ she elaborated.

‘I’m not sure I understand that. If, as you argue, God is all powerful then he must be powerful over evil. Anyway, without getting into metaphysical tangles, no, I don’t. Not sure I believe in an absolute source of good, anyway.’ He did not want to be talking about this.

‘How do you explain?’

Vincent moved to the door of the pharmacy and lit a cigarette. He felt he had to go out. He drew deeply, inhaled and blew the smoke into the distance. He turned at the door.

‘I observe and believe that people commit bad acts, wrong acts. If we call them evil and monsters we give up the chance to understand why it is that people like ourselves commit these acts.’ He could hear himself lecturing. What were they doing? Why was he saying all of this? ‘We need to understand history. We need to understand nature. Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund
Freud? They describe Nature and there’s no God and no Devil in Nature. We need to understand why we commit bad acts ourselves.’

‘What is a bad act?’ She was facing him now.

‘What do you mean? One that harms ourselves and others.’ He was impatient with this conversation.

‘You’re thinking of the children?’ Thérèse looked to see the reaction on his face.

‘I wasn’t actually, at that moment. I was thinking… What were you thinking about anyway?

She blushed. ‘A bad act could be…’ she hesitated.

‘But I’ve wondered,’ he cut her off. ‘Of course, of course, I’ve wondered more than once. How possibly even Ti-Jean could’ve stoked the fire.’

‘There are other kinds of bad acts.’

‘I thought you might be thinking of the war. Of your father.’

‘I wasn’t then. I was… I was earlier. Sounds like you think we’re left to ourselves to sort things out.’

‘Ourselves? Sort things out?’ He looked at her. She lowered her eyes. They were skirting around each other. ‘Pretty well. With history and nature and, of course, reason and science.’

‘Yes. I know about all of that, but I also meant us.’ She looked directly at him.

He stood next to her desk. He reached out to anchor some papers which were fluttering in the breeze. He could smell her. She put her hands into her sleeves.

Vincent started his lecture again. ‘We need to find the reasons in history, in personal history, in political history. Science and nature guide us there. Not comfort ourselves with hypothetical absolutes which are responsible for how things are.’ He could hear himself again. He wanted to kiss her.

‘Personal history?’ Thérèse broke off from her work abruptly. They were both feeling they did not know how to talk to each other.

The Angelus sounded. She stood and prayed. Vincent continued with his work, impatient. The bell for the sisters’ lunch summoned her. She tidied her papers.

‘Such order.’ She turned at the door and looked at him.

‘There’s so much disorder.’ There was longing in her eyes.

‘Or it is just how things are?’ he differed.

‘We don’t agree,’ she said emphatically.

‘We might? Will you be back after lunch?’ He checked his wooing tone.

She smiled, brushing her veil from her face.

‘This Chaulmoogra Oil, more headache than it worth.’ Vincent had a view through the window from the verandah into the pharmacy. He waited for a moment before entering. Singh and Theo were sitting at the work counter. They had their backs to him. ‘This have side effects.’ Theo was looking on intently as Singh prepared the tray to be used for the afternoon’s treatment.

‘The skin get pulpy and inflamed, yes?’ Theo repeated.

‘That’s right. You listen well.’

‘You think the patients get some help, because it work like a placebo.’ Theo went over his lesson.

‘You have the correct terminology. You learning quick,’ Singh praised the boy.

‘I does pick up vocabulary fast.’

Vincent smiled at Theo’s eagerness. He did not want to eavesdrop, but he did not want to interrupt the science lesson.

‘What we want is new medicine.’

‘I frighten when I look at them, you know. When they have sores, and deformed hands and feet.’

‘You mustn’t fear that, man.’ Singh was talking as an equal to the boy. ‘They will feel bad if you show that. As I tell you, you have to understand what you seeing.’

‘So, if this not really helping them…’ Theo pointed to the Chaulmoogra Oil preparations.

‘Well, is what the doctor say. Hygiene and care. Clean bandages.’

‘How that go help that look in their face. Those stumps? What you call it? Claw hands?’ Theo began to bend his fingers to illustrate his horror. ‘Short short fingers. The way they hand bend so. No thumb, bones sticking out. Septic wounds! You hear that! More vocabulary I learn.’

Vincent did not have the heart to walk in and interrupt. He left the verandah. As he did so, he heard Singh. ‘Colonial contempt and religious superstition, too many documents and prayers.’ He stopped in his tracks. He had to wait to hear what Theo was going to make of this first lesson in politics.

‘Oh gawd! What’s the time? I suppose to meet Doctor in the clinic for lunch,’ Theo shouted.

‘Go then. Come back after your lunch. I go teach you some more.’

Vincent returned to the door of the pharmacy and met Theo as he came out onto the verandah. ‘Eh, eh, I was just coming to see what you were up to.’

Singh followed Theo out. ‘Checking up on your boy. In case I lead him astray.’ He put his hand on Theo’s shoulder. ‘Bright, you know?’

‘I learn science and thing, you know,’ Theo enthused.

‘Good, good. Thought you must be starving.’

Theo went down into the yard.

‘Easy on the politics, eh?’ Vincent said to Singh as he walked off, following Theo.

‘So you was really checking up on me.’

Vincent smiled. ‘Keep to the science.’

‘That alone not going to save us. You know that.’

‘He’s a vulnerable boy, Singh. Young.’

‘You know what I was doing at fourteen. Lighting fire in the cane. Sabotage on the estate. Golconda had the record in the riots.’

Vincent looked to see if Theo was within earshot. ‘You know what I mean. Take it easy. I’ll deliver him safely after lunch.’

‘You still have a lot to learn, Doc.’ Singh looked at Vincent searchingly. ‘I have more story.’

After lunch, Vincent and Thérèse were back in the clinic and Theo had rejoined Singh in the pharmacy.

Gertrude Palmer, one of the very needy patients, entered the clinic. Vincent could not contain himself as he saw her walking in. ‘Gertrude, Gertrude! What’re you doing?’ He checked his irritable 
tone. Gertrude had walked in on the end of her tibia. When he examined her he found bits of gravel and leaves wedged in the marrow cavity. ‘Gertrude, Gertrude!’ His voice was more sympathetic.

He and Thérèse exchanged looks and smiled. Gertrude left happier for her new dressing. Vincent and Thérèse threw up their arms in despair.

‘Totally anaesthetised!’ Vincent screamed.

‘A kind of amnesia, isn’t it?’

‘Those messages just not getting through.’ Vincent paced the clinic.

‘She sauntered in completely indifferent to pain.’