Night Calypso (16 page)

‘Seemingly without any instinct for self-preservation.’

‘Nerves, the peripheral nerves all gone!’

‘He jests at scars who never felt a wound,’ Vincent said.

Thérèse looked up, inquiringly. ‘Yes?’

‘Shakespeare,
Romeo and Juliet
.’

‘Doctor,’ she said teasingly. ‘A literature scholar?’

‘We’ve got to understand how these channels of transmission, how that wiring has been impaired. Otherwise, we’re doomed to sores, ulcers, leaking blisters, sepsis, and necrotic tissue! A nursing and doctoring of bandages and more bandages. Chaulmoogra Oil for another century!’ They both collapsed laughing into their chairs.

‘Madeleine,’ he leant over to take her hand. ‘Sorry.’

‘No, no, Vincent. What are we going to do?’ She took his hand. They heard a sister passing in the corridor outside.

‘We’ll think of something,’ they said together, encouraging each other.

‘Something?’ Thérèse, more serious, asked. ‘Something?’

‘You’re the one with the faith, Sister.’ Vincent smiled. They were talking about themselves and their research. ‘We’ll experiment. Science will work with nature.’

‘Where has reason and science brought us?’ she asked another kind of question.

Vincent knew that Thérèse had moved onto the war. She didn’t really believe that. ‘That’s lunacy.’

‘Yes, we think so. My father thought that. But look. A lot of science and culture, and philosophers of reason, are brought into the service of this vision, their lunatic vision.’

Vincent could see that Thérèse was getting sad again. ‘Thérèse.’ He was going to put his hand over hers, but restrained himself.

‘I know.’

‘Let’s get back to work.’

‘Where were we?’

The afternoon had disappeared. ‘I need to get Theo back. We’ll continue later. Can you work late?’

‘I’ll see what Mother Superior says.’ Her eyes said what her heart was telling her.

On the way back to the clinic. Vincent looked in on Singh. He entered the pharmacy without knocking. ‘Oh, sorry, I forgot Theo said you had another student.’ Singh and Christiana leapt to their feet as he entered. They had been sitting close to each other reading from a pharmaceutical manual. The girl hurried from the room. ‘You don’t have to go,’ he called as she ran along the verandah.

‘Come back later,’ Singh called after her. ‘She shy.’ Singh stood at the door.

‘I see. Well. How did it go with Theo?’

‘Good man. He does learn fast.’

‘Christiana? Not sure why she’s still here. I haven’t found any signs of the illness,’ Vincent commented.

‘She herself knows that, and is scared now.’

‘Maybe we need to get her back home. How old is she?’

‘Sixteen.’ Singh looked embarrassed.

‘Must get back to the clinic. Sister Thérèse is waiting.’

‘Good. I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said, relieved.

Back at the clinic Vincent and Thérèse picked up where they had left off. The evening came on quickly. The kerosene lamp hummed and spluttered, as moths torpedoed themselves at the glass lantern unable to learn a lesson in injury. ‘We need to operate. I need to do an autopsy. I need hands,’ Vincent was saying.

‘Where’ll we operate?’

‘Here. Maybe in Porta España.’

‘Will they let you take the body there? Will they bring the operating theatre here?’

‘We could. I don’t see why not. What a memorial to life if a patient’s hands gave us the evidence we need.’

‘It’ll need to be a day on which the ice arrives. When we have plenty ice.’

‘If I’m called right away, we can operate quickly, before putrefaction. But we’re running before we can walk.’ Vincent slowed himself down.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We need to look at hands. We need to examine many hands, before we can think of operating. What are we looking for?’

They were both exhausted. The night ticked outside beyond the hum of the kerosene lantern. Vincent watched Thérèse’s hands on the desk. Then she put them under her scapular like a good nun. They sat in silence.

‘Hmm,’ Vincent sighed.

Thérèse looked up. Their eyes found each other’s. They smiled. Thérèse got up and started tidying her desk.

Vincent went out the screen door onto the verandah and lit a cigarette. It glowed like a firefly. Thérèse could see his face in the glow when he pulled on it. It went dark again, as he flicked the ash on the zinnia beds.

They were both thinking that they should not find themselves like this, alone, alone at night with each other.

At the end of the verandah was the night sister in her cubicle, where Thérèse would be sleeping.

When Thérèse came onto the verandah, Vincent was almost in total darkness. She bumped into him.

‘Off to bed?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I don’t like not being at the convent. In my own cell.’

‘Yes, I understand. I like to get home too.’ He did not sound convincing.

‘How long does it take?’

‘Depends on Cervantes.’

‘My father’s favourite author.’

‘He’s a good donkey. Not sure how he got his name.’

‘Take care.’ She put her hand on the bannister of the verandah, and inadvertently touched his. ‘Sorry.’

But she did not move it. Vincent removed his hand and placed it on top of hers. They stood like that for what seemed an eternity to both of them. They could hardly see themselves in the darkness.

Vincent had thrown away his cigarette. It smouldered on the ground. She smelt the tobacco on his breath.

Further away, they could hear the surf on the beach below.

Where was she? Vincent thought. As he pulled Thérèse towards him, he felt her voluminous sleeves, her scapular, her veil and the rosary hard at her side. His hands moved up to her face. He wanted to touch her body. The wildest thought was to get his hands under her skirt. She was running her hands up his arms.

She was giving into her passion, as she broke through the buttons of his shirt to his chest, running her hands through the hair there. Resting her head on his chest, smelling him. It made it easier for her that she could hardly see him. They could both pretend that it wasn’t happening, because they could not see each other.

‘Madeleine,’ Vincent whispered as he found her lips which were wet, and not cracked as they had been at Salt Pond.

‘Vincent…’

A screen door opened at the end of the verandah, throwing a shaft of light along the floor. A ward nurse came out and stood in the light. Vincent and Thérèse could see her, but she could not see
them. They remained absolutely still, in each others’ arms. To break from each other would have disturbed the gloom, and the ward nurse might have seen the movement of shadows. She had come out for air. She returned and the screen door banged shut behind her.

‘I must go,’ said Thérèse.

‘Yes, me too. I must go home.’ He watched her disappear along the verandah. For how long could they continue with these kisses, this holding of hands? To talk about it would be to let it take a place alongside their work and the rest of their lives.

Mounting Cervantes, Vincent thought he saw Singh in the shadows behind the stores with someone else. He could not see who it was.

Theo was up even earlier than usual, adjusting his wall maps and collages according to the latest news last night, and at dawn. ‘I looking after things here, Doc.’ Vincent smiled at his familiarity. He worried that he was not getting enough sleep, plugged into his crystal set. At least the night-time stories had ended, he hoped. The boy seemed so much better. Just letting him be had proved a sensible line of action.

But Vincent could see that Saint Damian’s was a struggle for Theo. The science lesson had gone well. But he was not altogether surprised when, over breakfast of
Crix
and
buljol
, the boy suddenly asked, ‘I could get leprosy?’ There was real fear in his eyes, as he heaped the saltfish onto his dry biscuit.

Vincent was blunt. ‘Theoretically, yes. But it’s highly unlikely, if you take care with your hygiene. What did you learn in your science lesson? You’re in much less danger than me or Sister Thérèse, or Mr Singh. Only one of the sisters, after all their years of nursing, has contracted the disease.’

Theo listened intently. ‘I see someone up Pepper Hill who skin turning white. One day, they find him rotting away in a hut up in the bush.’

‘Yes, that can happen, if the disease is allowed to take hold, and the patient does not get the required care.’ Vincent explained to Theo the theory that he had lectured about, and was constantly arguing on the wards.

‘Yes, Mr Singh tell me. Well, maybe I go come a doctor too, or a pharmacist,’ Theo said thoughtfully.

‘Those are fine ambitions. Your schooling is going to have to be more important than ever.’

Later, Vincent noticed that Theo was at the jetty with him waiting for Jonah. He had elected to carry his doctor’s bag to the pirogue.

Thérèse was already at her desk, making notes and continuing her research from the night before. Or so Vincent thought, as he stumped out his cigarette and entered the old clinic, and saw her bent over her desk. ‘Morning,’ his voice tried to give a normal ring to things as he entered the pharmacy.

He expected her to turn and smile. He expected some joy, some sense of the continuing excitement of the night before to exist between them.

He had hardly slept last night.

When she looked up, he saw that she had been crying. He stood over her, his hand touching her shoulder. It was all that he could allow himself. She was sobbing.

‘Thérèse.’ He noticed how he used her different names, depending on whether they were doctor and nurse, or lovers. The word had entered his imagination. Her hands pressed against the desk. He wanted to hold them, touch her face, kiss her eyes. He had felt her body under her habit last night, but then let her go. She had sought the warmth of his body.

Her right hand was clenched. It was holding something. He moved over to her right side, putting his hand over hers, as was now their way. He unclenched her hand. It was a soft yellow cloth, like a stuffed pocket, shaped like a star, a yellow star. Pinned to the back of it was a printed message, WEAR IT.

Even before the war had started, they knew that the German authorities required Jews to wear yellow stars when they walked in the streets.

‘Who’s doing this? Who hates me so much?’

Then, he used her other name. ‘Madeleine, no one hates you. This is the action of a sick person. It must be one of the other sisters. You can see the work.’ The nuns did embroidery in the evening, sitting around the common room, after their tiring day at the hospital.

‘Surely not? She didn’t do this while sitting among the other sisters,’ Thérèse protested.

‘She must’ve kept it hidden in her cell then, progressing each day with her hate,’ Vincent speculated. ‘Let’s leave this, Thérèse.’ He had switched back to her religious name. ‘We’ve work to do. Hands. We’re going to start on the hands.’ Vincent tried to change the mood.

She got up and followed him out of the pharmacy towards the adult wards, as he explained the plan he had come up with. Their night-time encounter in the darkness on the verandah had stimulated him, so that, as he rode back in the dark, he had planned the research.

‘Thérèse.’ She had stuffed the yellow star deep into her pocket, as they went down the steps to cross the yard. ‘For too long we’ve been seeing everything as if we were dermatologists. You know, if we look at our notes over the months, certainly in the last year, you’ll notice, as I’m sure you do.’

Vincent looked across to her. She had dried her tears, but her face was sad. What a terrible world they were making.

‘You know, we’ve been making notes about colour and texture of the dry patches on the skin,’ he continued.

‘Yes. We’ve noted it all clearly, the different reactions in a macule and papule. We noted each and every infiltration of the dry skin.’

‘A nodule and a plaque.’

‘Yes, as you say, as if we were dermatologists.’

Vincent could see Mother Superior at the window of her office. He felt as if he and Thérèse were naked, walking across the yard. He tried to look businesslike, and put a little more distance between himself and Thérèse, in case their arms knocked into each other. He noticed that he had quickened his stride, and that Thérèse had consequently done the same.

‘Do you remember that day on the wards when… no, it was in the book-binding shop. That young Indian fella. I’ve forgotten his name for the moment. You know?’

‘Raj. Raj Jaikaransingh.’

‘Yes, of course, Raj.’

‘What about him?’

‘Don’t you remember? His hand. He had beautiful hands with
long slim fingers, completely intact. They were soft and supple, not like fingers stiff with arthritis. But they were useless. He was trying to pull that string through the binding on the book. The thumb and four fingers of one hand were curved in, and pressing against each other, the classic claw hand.’

‘Yes. I remember.’ Thérèse was involved.

‘But do you remember what our diagnosis was then?’

‘Paralysis.’

‘Yes, paralysis from nerve damage.’

‘I wrote down what you said, because it tallied with what I remember my professor saying in Tulle when I was training. That’s what this disease does, paralysis, plus complete anaesthesia. I can hear Professor Rothmann at this moment.’

‘Yes, Raj couldn’t feel the string, to pull it through the loop in the binding.’

‘And then you asked him to shake your hand, and to press hard. You thought it might not have any strength. I remember you yelping, shocked, when he kept on squeezing.’

‘Absolutely. I had to cry out, stop. That’s exactly when I realised, as my hand lay between his bent thumb and fingers.’

‘Raj was so surprised. He didn’t understand you, because you asked him to squeeze and then you were telling him to stop.’ Thérèse laughed.

‘He had no idea how much he was hurting me. But it sent another kind of jolt right through me, that shock. I realised as I’ve gone over it many times in my mind since, that though his hand was useless, nevertheless, concealed there, in that apparent uselessness, were powerful muscles. This wasn’t paralysis.’

‘No?’ Thérèse and Vincent had stopped at the foot of the stairs to the adult ward. They were transfixed by their debate. This was when everything else collapsed: the war far away, the absence of her father’s letters, his concern for his brother Bernard, the war that was building here in the gulf, the yellow star. Above all, those kisses, and holding hands in the darkness, in the white light of the infirmary, out in the glare of Salt Pond. Those kisses on her cracked lips faded in the excitement of their work. Their work held them close.

At that moment, there was the drone of a surveillance plane disappearing behind Cabresse Point. They both looked up, and followed the direction of the flight with their eyes.

‘The mystery was on Raj’s face,’ Vincent continued.

‘Mystery?’

‘Well, a question. Why were we treating this whole thing as if we were dermatologists? When what was staring us in the face, was an orthopaedic question. Look at the deformities we’ve got before us each day. Why had not medicine, my training, your training, not asked the orthopaedic question about leprosy?’

‘Why do you think?’ Thérèse was a student again.

‘There are probably many reasons. But a known one for sure is that leprosy is not looked at like other diseases. We, in our profession, have put it continually in another category. At the worse end is the conviction that it is a curse from God. Many of our patients come with that view, pursued by the fear of their villages, terrified by priests, pandits, imans and obeah women.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes, I do. When I spoke to my professor in London, he commented, when I told him that I wanted to work at this leprosarium, that only mad people, missionaries and priests worked in leprosariums. They never had good physicians and never a specialist in orthopaedics. I’ve had my hunch for a while that dermatology was not the only place where our answer lay.’

‘So, is that what I am? A mad missionary?’

‘Thérèse. You know…’

‘And you?’

‘You’ve got to admit. Dr Escalier! What did he do, but inject with Chaulmoogra Oil, while the nuns prayed, and the government banished the buggers to this island.’ He smiled, checking his language. ‘What’s been going on here is an eternity of bandaging. You know exactly what I mean. A system in various degrees of neglect, by state and church. No one is thinking about doing the research. Not now, while we fight this confounded war. We do charity. But it isn’t charity. Because, in the end, we affect very little.’

‘I think you’re unfair.’ They were raising their voices at each
other. A group of children were standing around them staring. ‘I think you should credit the sisters with more. I know your differences. I know you. You’re like my father. You’re a Communist. That’s what I think you are. You’re a Communist. A Bolshevik. Quite soon you’ll have us singing the
Internationale
.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Thérèse. What’s this about? What’s Communism got to do with it?’

‘It has everything to to do with it. You think we don’t know what Singh, Jonah and you are up to here. You mentioned Karl Marx the other day.’

‘Thérèse, can you lower your voice! Whose voice are you speaking with, your superior’s? Is that what you think of me? I thought we were the same.’ He was almost touching her, in the full glare of the yard.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she whispered sharply. The stooping children were giggling. ‘Run along. The bell has gone. Recess is over.’

‘Thérèse, listen to me. I want to tell you about my research.’

They mounted the stairs to the verandah outside the women’s ward. The rain came down while the sun was still shining. ‘God and the devil fighting. That’s what the children say.’ Thérèse was retreating.

‘Yes, thinking of children. I need feathers and cocoyea sticks.’ From the verandah, Vincent noticed Theo on his own, gazing out onto the bay from outside the pharmacy. Then he saw Christiana leaving the pharmacy. Singh welcomed Theo back in, as he waved to the young girl.

‘Science students!’ Vincent said cynically.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Nothing. Theo. Singh.’

‘Feathers and cocoyea sticks?’ Thérèse interrupted. ‘And come to think of it, you protest too much. I heard my mother tell my father that one day.’ Then Thérèse started crying all of sudden. ‘Sorbonne. They were the brightest pair that year. The Ecole Normale, Montmartre, the little squares with the artists and the musicians, the bars, the cafés. Poor Papa. I still haven’t heard
anything. No letters. There’ll be no letters. Paris. They both loved Paris. The Seine, Notre Dame, and the little street
La Rue du Chat qui Pêche
on the left bank, near where they had a room. The narrowest street in Paris!’

‘
La Rue du Chat qui Pêche?
’

‘
Oui.
What is it?’

‘
Non, non
.’

‘No, tell me. What is it?’ They were now both laughing at the name of the street and the coincidence. Vincent blushed. ‘
Non
. Ah, a girl I once knew. She told me about that street, as we walked by the river. Her father had lived near there once.’

‘A girl?’

‘Simone.’

‘You remember her name?’

‘Yes.’ He remembered watching her closing the shutters and the room growing dark while the afternoon sunlight leaked through the jalousies, like the light in Pizzaro. Light from here and light from his island, he had thought then. He remembered her naked back, the nape of her neck, and the length of her legs. Her hands closed over his eyes, when she returned to the bed and kissed him all over, asking him if it was his first time. He had gone in his mind, from that room above the street in Paris, to the turret room at Versailles, where he had first lain with Odetta, and then to the cocoa house with the leaking light through the cracks above himself and Odetta under the rolling roof. He smiled, pretending that it was his first time, so Simone could have her fantasy and teach him to make love.

‘It’s a pretty name, Simone. I had a school friend called Simone.’

‘Yes. And you?’

‘What?’

‘A boy friend?’

Thérèse looked up surprised, caught unawares by the question. ‘Yes.
Oui
, of course, Marcel. He was the brother of my best friend Sophie-Marie.’ She had not thought of him for ages. Questioned, she built his identity. ‘He loved to hunt, with a sling-shot when he was younger and then with a rifle. He once gave me a rabbit’s paw for good luck.’

Vincent did not want to elaborate on Simone. He did not want to confess to Thérèse that this was an afternoon of love, in Paris, and that he had paid for it with the few francs he had had as a student, and could not really afford. But, to be in Paris and not be in love!

How could he tell Thérèse about all of that now? What was he doing? Would he tell her about Odetta…

What had they done last night, and before that at Salt Pond? And she, taking his hand more than a year ago, so impulsively? He could be sacked from his post and made a disgrace in the local press. He could hear the gossip of the chattering family on the verandahs of Versailles and the other estates.