Black Marina

The tiny island of St James in the eastern Caribbean forms a link in the chain which stretches from Tobago to Dominica. At a latitude of 120° – and rumoured, incidentally, to have been the real setting for Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson
Crusoe
(or so the locals insist over the scrumptious rum punch) – Trinidad is just a seaplane-hop away. Four miles to the north-east of wooded Grenada with its ancient fortress and fabled spices, St James is one of the more exclusive types of resort. Long white beaches that look like no one’s walked there since Man Friday. A lagoon and primeval jungle. And a truly stunning hotel, where all the most evocative features of the old
plantation
house are blended with a luxury that’s bang up to date. Choose your own
mousseline
de
fruits
de
mer
by the pool. Or select callalloo, a sancoche or a roti – just some of the exotic and intriguing Caribbean dishes on offer. Whatever you do choose, you’ve no choice but to accept the peace and tranquillity.

Here’s our recipe for that punch:

Standard golden rum (as much as you like). Booster of white rum (watch out there). Grenada nutmeg (pow!).
Angostura
bitters, the mythical aromatic concoction of gentian and other herbs and spices. Fruit juice and water (don’t drown it).

And if you’re one of those super-executives who are
contemplating
Christmas on the magical island of St James, here’s the recipe for the St James traditional Christmas punch. The Island’s legendary non-alcoholic blender with rum is sorrel. Dried sorrel sepals are infused with cinnamon, cloves, sugar and orange peel. Leave for two or three days and then strain. The drink is a pleasant red colour, with a fresh spicy taste. Book early for Christmas!

Her head came in like a blot on the water – like a drowned spider – and I wouldn’t have seen her in the first place if it hadn’t been for the helicopter with its whirring over the island just at the hottest time when all the white people rest.

The noise drew me out of the store. Thank the bloody Christ I’ll be away from here soon. That’s me, pick up me cutlass an me three-cornered hat and go. ‘Where you going next, Holly?’ they say at the Coconut Bar when the nutmeg’s run out and the brown rum makes puddles on the counter. ‘South China Seas again, eh?’ ‘Our favourite lady pirate’ – and all that. But it’s not funny any more. The cutlass can well come in handy. And I’m not leaving this godforsaken island until the pistol arrives from the US of A. ‘Mind they don’t drop it in the sea near Cuba, Holly,’ Jim Davy said down at the bar that night – but then he went too.

There was a big yacht moored out beyond the bar, to the left of the store and straight in my line of vision, framed by a couple of palms and Mighty Barby doing press-ups (in this heat) on the beach. But there’s nothing so strange about that. This time of year is high season. They reckon, I daresay, that trouble’s over for the meantime. That’s an American chopper, like a bee gone off course from its pollen trail at the lip of Grenada, just four miles away. Maybe, for all I know, the people on the yacht like the sense of security it gives – tearing blades, high security, police presence and all. You might not think it was much of a holiday. But – again maybe – it’s the only safe holiday you can have these days if you’re stinking rich.

The girl must have climbed off the yacht when I was still in the store, counting out change for Mrs Van der Pyck. (A big
dinner party last night up at Carib’s Rest: snapper and lobster ordered from the fishermen days ago, mangoes – but the old ketch, the
Singer
,
didn’t come in this morning; a storm blew up last night and there’s no mango after all. ‘Holly, give me some of that terrible artificial ice-cream.’) The girl, as I say, was just a head at first – it could have been a coconut, blown off in last night’s winds. Or, when you began to see the tentacles of hair trailing, a big, bobbing, bad-luck black widow spider. And let’s say that’s what she proved to be. I had no evidence yet, and no evidence to the contrary either. But she looked like bad luck to me.

*

The island of St James used to belong to the Allard family. The family was split into two branches – the elder had a house at the north end of the island and the younger, three miles away at the southern tip, sat out on its wooden terrace above the lagoon and there was nothing to see until you got to South America. Not that they ever did, of course. The Allards had intermarried for generations and were far too tired to go to Trinidad, let alone Venezuela or Nicaragua. Their money came from Trinidad, anyway. A
seventeenth-century
Allard had made a fortune in arrowroot, and then there was sugar, always sugar, and slaves. Life on St James was – and still is – pretty feudal. The first time I came here, taken by my friend Teza, I thought Russia in the days of the serfs must have been like this: those big estates, and the trees, and a gentle wind always blowing, while the money and the sale of human sweat takes place somewhere else. In the case of St James there’s a small village at the top of the hill (the island looks like a child’s drawing of a whale) and a cottonhouse, for there used to be a small crop of Sea Island cotton.

When I went to St James with Teza, the descendants of the slaves were sitting on the cottonhouse floor, picking cotton.
They were all women, and the voice of Martin Luther King came out of a transistor on the stone floor with a metallic, melancholy sound. I remember thinking the words and music must mean as little to the women as the voice of some rare species of tree frog, swum over from the botanical gardens the circumnavigators loved to plant on the island, near the edge of the sea. I was wrong, as it turns out.

It was very hot – the rainy season – and the mangrove swamps below the cottonhouse had a sort of pall of mist rising up over them. If there was any sign of life at all it would be one Allard visiting another, going along the narrow dirt road like a fly. By the time I went, they had jeeps; but I used to laugh, thinking of the Allards in the old days, crawling back and forth along this track, with offers of marriage and candied fruits, in a pony and trap. Then, the three-and-a-half-mile length of the island must have taken quite an hour to do. Maybe they rested the horse by Man o’ War beach, where the big rollers come in on the windward side. And by the time they arrived at the house at the southern tip of St James, the inevitable face of cousinship and interbreeding could have seemed at least a little removed.

When Teza and I went all that time ago to St James (I was bar-hopping, working as barmaid all over the States, and Teza was a journalist) the car that crept along the dirt track towards us was one of those giant-size American cars, a Cadillac probably, or a Pontiac about ten years old, and there was a body in the back. It was the body of the last remaining Allard, and now there were none left. The strain of the proposals and the infertile adjacent marriages had finally wiped the family out. A servant was driving old Allard to the jetty to load him on to the
Singer.
They must have kept him in the underground ice house at the northern end of the island, I suppose. Because the
Singer
only visits once a week, or did then, at least. Nowadays a few things have changed.

*

I never liked it here in the first place. It’s the kind of thing that happens to you, and you wonder how. It’s money, of course. Everything is. You take a part-time job one day in a small store on an island that looks as if someone had thrown it into the sea because they had no use for it. And there you are, still wrapping plastic reindeers and digging out the mince pies for Mrs Van der Pyck fifteen years later. Of course, some things have changed. We didn’t sing carols to the sound of US helicopters in the old days. And there weren’t any T-shirts with slogans printed on them, like we sell now.
YANKS HANDS OFF
I’ll write on mine one day. But I wouldn’t mind betting I’ll be the one to go home first.

The girl only lifted her face out of the water a couple of times for air. I stood and watched as the dark head came up to the wooden platform they put at the Coconut Bar for those who’ve had a couple of daiquiris too many and fall in. She lifted her head there and stared straight at me. Her black hair was all over her face. Behind her, like a flat, badly painted canvas in this heat that distorts everything as soon as you look at it, was the yacht. No sign of life whatsoever.

The helicopter was making a terrible din. It was like a great sheet being torn up. I went outside the store and leant against a palm. Mighty Barby had finished his press-ups and gone away. There was no one between me and the scuffed sand, and those ugly pink shells the local kids find at the lagoon and try to flog to tourists at the Bar, and the blue sea nibbled by dead palm fronds – and the girl who had pushed off from the side of the platform now and was swimming in as if she’d been given my address the other side of the world and was making straight for me. And I’m not so far off the mark there, either. Except that there
was
one other figure in the landscape – coming towards us down the beach, just as she swam in.

Afternoon may be the time when white people out here have a good lie-down (and especially today with the Christmas
Eve Ball at the hotel to look forward to) but it wasn’t too much of a surprise seeing Sanjay walk along the beach in this kind of heat. I’d easily not have seen him at all if the swimming blot of dark head hadn’t unnerved me somehow and made me look to right and left, like an old woman trying to make up her mind whether to cross the road. (And I will be an old woman soon if I don’t get off this goddamn island by New Year.) The truth is, recent events have made
everyone
jittery here. Even Jim Davy, just about the calmest, thickest American you’re likely to meet, half jumped out of his skin the other night at the Bar when a bat flew in over the water and dive-bombed him on the skull. You keep moving your eyes from side to side – and often as not you catch another pair of eyes doing the same.

There wouldn’t be any danger of that with Sanjay. I honestly don’t think he knows or cares what’s going on here. He walks up from the lagoon to the shop or the Bar once or twice a week in his straw hat and his white flannels with green stains at the knees and he smiles and orders a Coke or a ginger ale. He likes to talk about his garden, or about a new consignment of exotic birds he’s ordered from the Far East, or whatever. He’s proud of the fact that his is what he calls an ‘open aviary’ – the birds can leave if they wish, but most of them seem not to want to. Like you could say that about me – or any of the villagers here who toil for the bloody
millionaires
– I’d like to say – being sarcastic, of course. But you can’t: Sanjay would look hurt. Maybe that’s how the rich get away with it. They leave you with the feeling they just don’t belong to this world anyway.

Not that Sanjay is fantastically super-hyper-rich. Not any more. Sometimes I think people just think he is. Because he’s the last remaining nephew of the Allard family – he came out to St James when the old man died, and he stayed on. Like me, you could say. But with some difference. The house at the southern tip of the island had been derelict for years –
that branch of the family must have died out in the thirties – and no one had expected this nephew, who’d spent his childhood and youth in England, to come out and settle in St James. He had a wife then, and she died. That’s why, some people say, he never got the strength to load up his things on the
Singer
and go.

Sanjay was still a white shimmer on the sand, like a line of light that’s got into film and cracked the photo, when the girl came in up the beach and rolled for a moment on her back to stare up at the sky. I’d gone into the store by then, and I was pretending to wipe a frosting of tinsel, fallen off the
decorations
that Mrs Van der Pyck had pressed into the arms of her maid Millie, from the counter top. I could see the girl perfectly well, of course, through a pyramid of cans of
concentrated
orange juice, but I was pretty sure she couldn’t see me. And by the time she’d picked herself up and tossed her hair to get it dry, and started to dance towards me – yes, lifting up her feet high, because the concrete walkway
outside
the store gets scalding hot this time of day – I’d slipped into the Craft Centre through the back door of the store. It’s always nice to be near a phone, I say. And I could see her through the opening to the Centre, framed by pottery jugs hanging by their handles and bursts of raffia baskets, and I saw she’s lighter-skinned, not a high yellow but definitely lighter-skinned, than I had at first thought. A pretty girl. A pretty honey colour, like a sponge. If it wasn’t for her
expression
– I just couldn’t go for that at all.

*

Sanjay wandered down the beach where the hedge of
seagrape
trees can whip back at you if you push too hard against the broad shiny leaves – and if you don’t, you’re driven by the narrowness of the strand into toe-stubbing coral. By the time he passed the bamboo shelter for the millionaires to rest under, on the rare occasions they walk to the southern tip of
the island, the flop of his straw hat and a lime green scarf at the neck had come into view. At one point, where the reef recedes and water shows a deeper, bluer blue, he slipped off his straw slippers and waded in, head peering down, like a seabird marking fish. Below him, shoals of guppies darted like fireworks.

Then Sanjay stood back and surveyed the island. Trousers rolled up, he stood in the sea up to his knees without
moving
, as if he half-permanently belonged there, like a merman. His tropical jacket, with its greenish, sea-lichen look, seemed a part of him too, grown on him, encrusted like a fine thing found in a wreck. He stood among and was part of the sand and water and scraggly forest in the background, the
uncleared
manchineel trees and the scrub that seals off the lagoon and the privacy of his creaking house.

It’s impossible to imagine that by New Year Sanjay’s lease runs out. After all, he was here before the rich people and the houses with ornamental gables, and the bougainvillea round the pools.

It got he was called Sanjay because he was James Allard, and when he came to St James about the time it was clear the old man was going to die, he said the place wouldn’t know itself in a few years, he was going to make such
improvements
.

‘I’m Mister St James,’ he said to the visiting dignitaries from Trinidad, as he showed his latest inventions for swamp clearance, mosquito riddance, a water reservoir for the
village
and a new roof for the little Methodist chapel that used to make you feel when you went inside, like you’re trapped in a fault of Nature: the intense blue on all sides and the roof open to more blue, and creepers growing up through the cracked stones like a beard. Sanjay – Mr St James – altered all that. He had the Allard money, of course, but he was a sixties man of money too. I think he saw the village as a sort of commune, only one that would cater pretty exclusively to his
needs. What he chose to forget, it seems, was that while old man Allard had sold off the northern end of the island to a consortium of American and Venezuelan businessmen, he had only granted a lease to his nephew. Pure greed probably; it made it a better deal for him. Sanjay could indulge his dreams, while the money lasted, in the jungle of the small estate by the lagoon. He never cleared the trees there.
Visitors
wanting ibis or flamingo for their home movies are only allowed the near end, the stretch of water you can see from the Coconut Bar if you lean out on the rail over the sea.

Now the consortium, after the sixteen-year lease Allard had granted his nephew runs out in the New Year, will be in possession of the whole island. The major development will start. They’ll pull down the wooden house. A digger and dumper will wrench out the roots of the trees – it’s already started and you won’t hear the trees scream over the roar of the engines. Sanjay’s red cockatoos will go off into the sky. But after what’s happened round here recently, why should Sanjay care? Do I care? I think about the day I first came here with Teza – when the island, from the deck of the
Singer
, looked as if it might, like a gentle whale, blow out a spout of water. It even, in that haze of heat, seemed to be moving slowly away from us like a peaceful dream you never can quite catch. And then I think of the day two months ago – red blood in the blue water and shots that sounded at first like a hailstorm on the corrugated-iron roof of the shed by the side of the store. Only it wasn’t the rainy season. The spurts of red blood went into the bluer, deeper water where Sanjay is standing now; arid, looking up at the sky, he sees his red birds clearing the tops of the trees and going off into the blue. But how much was he to blame?