Black Marina (7 page)

Lore is a good sort, really. She may say she had no choice but to help Man look for her father, but there’s not many that wouldn’t have just packed their bags and left. I mean, it’s a heavy assignment. And when Ford
was
finally confronted with his daughter, who’s to say he’d be welcoming? Lore did it out of the kindness of her heart. And I hope I find the kindness myself not to blurt anything out to the girl in the short time she’s here. Because she sure has to go soon.

I knew bad news when I saw that spider-girl swimming over in the glare of the sun, at that hour in the afternoon where everything goes double, and the girl swam above her spider shadow to bring us all more trouble here.

How can I say that Ford walked into this store just a few weeks ago and denied his own daughter – or as good as, anyway? ‘You might say that it’s lucky,’ I tell Lore in my thoughts – for I need Lore now. Lucky that Ford left here before Mari could discover the truth. Which is that all her efforts to find her father would have gone unrewarded anyway.

*

‘… the man they call Sanjay.’ The girl is standing by the counter and then she has to step back because one of those yachting - cap - and - shorts - with - legs - like - German - sausage comes in – I can’t even remember his name, he’s from the villa with the oleanders and the keskidees caged up out the back.

‘Well, Holly,’ he says. ‘And how’s my lady pirate, wanderer of the seven seas today?’ He glances sideways at Mari, his interest immediately disguised by an apparent keenness on the display of suntan lotion – Ambre Solaire, a coconut oil to burn the white people till they go blotched as poor Pandora, Johnson’s Baby Oil for the millionaire women who like to say
they keep their beauty preparations to a minimum. ‘Guess I’ll have one of these,’ he mutters. Grey and pink, like a skinned armadillo he stands next to tawny Mari; and she feels his eye on her crotch and moves out to the concrete walkway outside the store.

‘Mari!’ I cry, as the hundreds of beads and tiny molluscs tinkle behind her. ‘Wait!’

But, as in a corny nightmare, it is too late. I take old yachting cap’s EC dollars with fury, while he squeezes my hand as a substitute for the girl. By the time I’ve rung up the cash register and pulled change from the scoured drawer, the girl has gone. Striding the low hedge of hibiscus as if there were no such thing as demarcations between private and public property, a hotel lawn where the rich and white may walk and others can’t (although you wouldn’t find any notices saying so). I’m inured by now, I suppose, to our tiny, pettily obsessive social system. And something equally pettily ridiculous in me is shocked that the stranger Mari doesn’t know you can’t just walk up to Carib’s Rest by crossing the hedge that divides it from Holly’s store.

*

If such things were possible, then Holly herself might do it from time to time. Jim Davy is the only one who takes little Holly for a drink on that verandah, with its lean-back,
comfortable
chairs in chintzes imported by Duchess Dora from Harrods. Disregarding Mrs Van der Pyck’s stony stare, Jim orders a Scorpion – a white dry-snow-cauldron of rum and eggwhite and bitter-fresh lime. We have straws to sip it with and a gardenia floats in the middle. ‘Almost as good as Trader Vic’s in the Hilton in London,’ Lore said laughing when Jim Davy treated us both up there, and he ordered three in succession for us, as I remember. Jim Davy was asking Lore so many questions. How long had she lived in her friend Teza’s house? How about the great scandal of the
Ford–Teza elopement here that Holly had told him about over and over: the meeting in the village, the picnic at the lagoon, the long hours in the dusk and the night, with the fireflies lighting up the shore from where you sit out on the raft on stilts at the far end of the Coconut Bar. Did Lore see Ford in London now? Does Ford come round and see Teza … and isn’t there a little kid? So he’s heard anyway. A romantic story, really – and Jim Davy calls for more salted peanuts to aggravate the thirst. Lore got quite drunk, I know that. But don’t ask me what she said to him. Sometimes it feels like a relief, Jim Davy being off the island. ‘Marry me, Holly,’ he’ll say when we’re down in the bar and the jukebox plays ‘Autumn Leaves’. ‘I can give you a great life in Kansas.’

A legendary tale, the Ford–Teza story by now, it’s true. No doubt because Ford became a famous poet – and involved in the black struggle too – and then disappeared off the face of the earth. It’s all too late now. But even so I see this girl coming to wreck the whole scene, to cut simple pieces out of a complicated puzzle and, by jamming them together, break everything up.

So it’s Sanjay the wretched girl wants. To kill him no doubt, to force him to say if Ford is dead or alive. It’s Sanjay, poor Sanjay. I can smell the damp, woody smell of his shirt that day after the picnic at the lagoon when we walked back, tired, along the curve of the yellow beach to the house. Duchess Dora was tired too and she had gone to lie down. I followed Sanjay, skirting the verandah and the ropes of flowering clematis that hang down like Rapunzel’s hair over the balcony. We were shaded from sight. I watched his back as he went off to the far side of the lagoon. He pushed his way through trees into the creek again – I followed – this time on the far side and in thicker jungle than ever. How can they dare come and hack it down? Put an airport there? The jungle, the twisting ropes of liana and the big butterflies that go so slowly they’re like handkerchiefs raised and lowered in
the streaming green – the world has found more and more ways of eroding and destroying places like this.

Sanjay had a house there. It was a sort of floor of spars and beams from an old ship that had been wrecked off the coast of St James, and there were natural curtains of hanging branches of tamarind tree and a window where you could look out between the leaves and see the creek, and opposite, in the still water, his child-size pier and the boat he’d made, riding at anchor. God knows what happened to that magical place all this time. The creek grew over entirely, I suppose, when little Pandora began to show signs of her illness and they didn’t go down to play boats any more. The jungle closed in over Sanjay’s forest shelter too. I don’t like to go down to the lagoon now and see the scar the tractor made into a hill of red mud, and trees dying that have leaned against each other and died and come up again for thousands of years.

Sanjay and I made love on a bed of palm fronds on the floor of his house. I thought at first, what if the little girl runs in and sees us – but the jungle was too thick here for that to worry me for long. And Millie would have taken her in for her rest. Sanjay was quiet and sad and I cried when we’d finished because I felt the end of something and not the beginning, and there was something very bitter in that.

Sanjay rubbed my eyelids with his finger and smiled.

‘Where were you when I was younger?’ he said. And I hardly hesitated at all. I said, ‘Dora …’

Some men make the fact of their marriage like an
inadmissible
secret, which if ever spoken, would bring ruin and disaster to whoever heard it. It’s as if a congenital illness, a joint one, held the couple in its thrall. If at first I put Sanjay in this category it was because I sensed a weakness in him, a fierceness that had to be too strongly held down, a need for a reason for his strange life out here. Later I came to know better. I understood the shadow under which Sanjay lived,
and I saw his escape into childish things – the making of miniature ships, the painstaking building of an artificial harbour, with stones and branches dragged along the jungle track – as his way of shutting out pain. And, too, he did try to love his daughter, Pandora. It was touching. When they used to come along to the Coconut Bar – when I was working there before the store was ready and Mrs Van der Pyck was issuing her fancy orders from above – Sanjay and the little girl would perch on stools, and Sanjay would wear this particularly shy smile, and the child would ask for a lime juice or a slice of water melon (we still didn’t have a freezer in those days).

‘You’ll grow up to help Holly in the bar, Dora,’ Sanjay said. ‘We’ll have ice-cream then, you’ll see.’

‘Ice-cream,’ the child said, because of course she’d never had one. And Sanjay would look me in the eyes and laugh. Then he’d grow melancholy again. All very sentimental, I’m sure – but I used to wait for the moment when Millie would appear along the beach or down the track from the village, usually with a bunch of other kids in tow, and swoop little Pandora up. Then Sanjay stayed on a while. He never drank much – maybe he’d just have fresh ginger and some soda to top it up. He never said much either. But he’d look pleased if you said the new houses were coming along very well, or there had been some interesting passengers on the
Singer
, keen to meet up with the manager of the consortium’s estate and buy, maybe, a plot of land for building a house. He was so cut off, poor Sanjay. As if old Allard had purposely condemned him to live out his lease in the tail end of the nineteenth century, while the new age thundered ahead in the north.

*

Dora. If I was asked what the shadow was which Sanjay lived all his time in fear of – when she was alive, of course, and then after that he was even more afraid – I’d make a fool of
myself by saying it was the fear of her death. But that was the fact of the matter. Duchess Dora, with all her affectations and the clothes and the flowers that had to be exactly right, not vulgar, in the tropics where flowers do so terribly easily tend to be vulgar, was as delicate herself as a crocus on the equator. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. There was skin cancer – or the fear of it. And the symptoms were duly produced. There was pernicious anaemia and diabetes and hyperglucose and colitis and a womb upside down and, by the sound of it, about to fall out after the perilous experience of giving birth to Pandora. No one could count how many times a wireless signal went out to the
Singer.
Once there was even a helicopter, which landed up by the village on the flat patch where they play cricket – when there’s enough kids for two teams, that is. I think the helicopter time was the time of the womb – but I can’t stand the sound of the blades, as I’ve said, and it may all be connected with blood in my mind: blood in the sea when Ford was shot down, blood in the old bedstead in the wooden house by the lagoon; and Sanjay frightened stiff.

It was all his fault, that was the point. In London he had been a successful entrepreneur, but his ideas had suited the sixties, and when the more austere years came, his ideas were redundant, too imaginative. Maybe he was tired of money – he’d bought fine things and maybe he’d had enough of them. And the calf-bound books from great European libraries, bid for at Sotheby’s, went unread anyway, except by Sanjay himself, who would creep down to the old building where the rafters disastrously leaked and pull out a handful – Shakespeare, Petronius, Ovid – I’ve seen him at the Bar, with a disintegrating book in his hand and a strong smell coming off it, paper mulching back in the tropics to root and tree. (Why didn’t he keep the books in the house? Dora said they made her ill. She couldn’t breathe when they were there.)

All his fault. Dora blamed Sanjay for staying on in St
James. When they first came out, a couple of years or so before Teza and I turned up that fateful day (for us, at least!), he’d promised his wife they were out there for a long winter holiday, that was all. How much did he care about the fall in the value of his shares on the stock exchange – from neglect and lack of supervision? How strong was the pull of the island where his family had lived in feudal grandeur before he was born?

‘Living here is like lying down in your own grave,’ Sanjay said to me that afternoon all those years ago. ‘But I can’t get up. Why? What should I get up for, I’d like to know?’

What, indeed? It was like a death dance, between two insects perhaps, the kind of thing you see pictures of in the geographic magazines.

Sanjay wouldn’t leave the island, and it rewarded him by becoming all he had – everything else fell away. His staying there made Dora continually, terminally ill. So he couldn’t leave her either. She’d threatened the final, vengeful method if he did, of course. Millie used to tell me she heard the suicide speeches from the verandah while she was putting Pandora to bed. (Maybe the child heard them too. Certainly her childhood with Dora must have been a hard one, before she succumbed to the madness that got her taken away – in the
Singer
again, but this time with Tanty Grace – to the asylum in Grenada.)

Then that as well was Sanjay’s fault. If it hadn’t been for the malodorous, unhealthy air, air where the simplest
infection
grew a puffy bloom overnight and antibiotics fought against impossible odds – and so on and on. Dora refused to accept that her daughter’s madness was anything but physical. She’d read of the deranging effects of jellyfish bites. Wasn’t Man o’ War Beach called just that because it was famous for these vicious bags of transparent membrane, floating on waves too boisterous to allow for visibility? Hadn’t Millie taken the child there, just a week or so before
she started to see things in corners of her room and scream the house down in a voice that sounded like one possessed? Or those big tarantula spiders? Or the scorpions? All the fears of the islands came out as Dora raved and wept and dosed herself with anti-depressants, tranquillizers, vitamins. And Sanjay sat there silently, it was his fault.

‘Well, Holly,’ Lore wrote in answer to one of my letters when I said I was sorry for Sanjay, sorry for his life – and for mine too, for I was stuck on the island too – ‘mind you, it looks to me as if it’s his fault, all right. Why should a man think he can shut a woman up on a lump of earth in the middle of the sea and just expect her to live her life out with him? It’s OK for him, no doubt. He’s got land. He can make plans. Treat someone like wallpaper and they peel off on you.’

Maybe Lore was right. I wouldn’t have liked to ask Teza what she thought of it all. Because Teza, with her abstract love of women, her pure vision of equality and independence and sisterhood and freedom, couldn’t stand the sight of Dora from the first. ‘But Teza!’ I said even then. For her dislike was so great it seemed irrational. (Those days on the island when I thought I’d be leaving too, with Teza, I’d felt nothing much either way about Dora, except to say her name to Sanjay that afternoon in the house of leaves in the lagoon – Dora. To show his remark was pointless. Where had
he
been when he was younger, for that matter? With Dora, was the answer, he had a wife.) But Teza had shrugged off my timid suggestion that Dora was a woman after all, there was no need to hate her with such vehemence.