The Love Beach (3 page)

Two

George Turtle left his bungalow at 15 Laburnum Avenue, Sexagesima, at eight‑thirty. It was the last month of the rainy season, a hot, brown, and grey morning with one rattling shower just tailing over St Peter's Island, heading for St Barnabas, and another coming in with the certainty of a train on time from the seaward direction of St Paul's and St Mark's.

It would be like that for most of the day, and every day until April when the last of the rain trains would pass the islands and the ocean sun would be left to itself in the ocean sky. Mr Turtle had only gone a few yards towards the lean‑to which sheltered the green Morris Minor he had shipped with him from Isleworth, but by that time his shirt under his plastic mackintosh was breathing heavily with the day's first sweat. It must be eighty already, and before noon it would be ninety or more and there would be four hard showers in the morning, and a further seven before nightfall. There would also be an electric storm.

He unlocked the fading Morris with keys sticky with moisture. Inside the car it stank like a humus heap. NU Turtle could not decide whether to steam in his plastic bag as he drove or whether to take it off and have to get into the uncomfortable cocoon again in five minutes when he reached the radio station. The rain was banging down on the roof of his lean‑to. He decided to leave the mackintosh on. He started the car and backed it out into the thick wall of rain. It drilled frighteningly on his roof and he couldn't see through the rear window. But it also meant he could not see Minnie waving from the bungalow window and he would not have to wave back. That was something anyway. She had received a letter from her sister in Isleworth in the consignment of mail newly arrived in
The Bafjin Bay
and Minnie was upset because it had been snowing in Isleworth.

23

'Poor things,' she kept saying as she went about the bungalow. 'Poor things.'

George had bright eyes and no hair. He was one of those men who show photographs of army groups taken at Aldershot in 1944 and challenge you to guess which is him. No one had ever guessed right. He had bushy hair in his military days and it gave him added height. Even he had not realized how small he was until he went bald after meeting and marrying Minnie.

Going cautiously down the running red mud of the hill which fell from his bungalow to the radio station, the windshield wipers pathetically losing their battle with the Pacific rain, George had a quick thought that he had moved from Isleworth because of the weather. But he felt guilty about it, and thrust it away with an annoyed twitch of his head. It was like having a short steamy dream about an old mistress. Not that George had any mistress, old or otherwise, although he did occasionally have short, steamy dreams. He did feel guilty about them, but the guilt never lasted. After all, with Minnie he felt he deserved some recompense somewhere.

Snow in Isleworth. Poor benighted devils. He could picture them now sliding about on the pavements, trying to claw their way on to buses, jammed like pigs in the underground, trying to make some progress in their cars through the freezing slush and the frozen traffic. Hah! He was lucky to be out of that lot. Rushing to get to their offices; little cups
of tea, wet coats and shoes, neon lights that sent you blind by the time you were forty‑five.
My
God, how fortunate he had
seen
it all as it really was, and in time too. In
time,
that was the important thing. He was only forty‑three and he had seen it all
in time.
What fools they were, those Isleworth idiots, those Dagenham dolts, those Twickenham twerps, those Russell Squares even. He took one hand from the wheel and smugly patted the back of the other, congratulating himself on his alliteration. He really must write a book one day. I Went To Paradise. Not bad. I
Ventured Paradise. Much better. A good title that. It had that sniff of arrogance, bravery, romance about it. I Ventured Paradise.

Very good indeed! He would definitely start writing this time. That evening. After the British Legion meeting.

Not that you could see much of Paradise today. The outer islands had been gobbled by the rain, the lagoon lay like waste water from a miner's laundry. The Baffin Bay was out there riding irritably at anchor while the little boats went out to get her cargo. She had been a whole day late again which had put everyone on the island in a filthy humour. MacAndrews's fault obviously, hanging around on the journey. No adventure, MacAndrews. Everyone agreed on that. And a day late again.

As the Morris was slithering the final few yards to the base of the hill, a wild pig came out of the wall of undergrowth at the side and gave the car a violent blow with its backside as it went by. George braked as soon as he saw the shape through the rain on his windscreen. Not through any particular humanity towards wild pigs, but through some remnant of suburbia, some deposit of Isleworth still left in his instincts, which made him react like that. It annoyed him immensely and he hoped that another couple of years among the islands would see the flaw eradicated. Kendrick and Hassey and a lot of the others were always driving up to the British Legion Club with something or other they had hit sticking like a trophy to the front bumper. Dogs, chickens, goats, and Hassey had once turned up with a very old man from one of the native villages transfixed there. That had cost him twenty‑three pounds ten shillings, one way and another.

Mind, you had to be going at a reasonable speed to get the better of a wild pig on a rainy morning. He got out of the car into the almost solid rain. It beat on his plastic mac, with its pixie hood, making him feel as though he were in a paper bag. There was a dent in the mudguard. These pigs were getting troublesome around the town. He got back into the car. The rain funnelled down the creases of his mac and made an infantile pool around his feet. Something ought to be done about them. He would bring it up at the next meeting of the Roads Committee of the Sexagesima Town Council. Feeling through his outer covering was like rummaging through wet cabbage leaves. But he made it with as little discomfort as possible. He took out his Apostle Islands Horticultural Society Diary and wrote in the memorandum with a ball‑point pen.

The British Governor of the Apostle Islands, Sir William Findlay‑Stayers, watched the rain pebbling the water of the lagoon and shivering the palm trees just outside his study window. He thought how much heavy rain made palms ,look like old ill men, heads bowed, arms hopelessly dangling.

If Sir William had been afforded a choice of islands upon which to live, he would not have chosen this one anyway. Luing, in the Inner Hebrides, was more his place, or Seil, where you could walk to the highland mainland over a flower‑thick bridge across the narrowest neck of the Atlantic Ocean. He was not fond of sea travel and if it were possible to walk to an island he preferred it. He liked cold wet islands, too, not hot and wet.

He went to his study window again and looked grumpily over the cut‑up water to
The Baffin Bay
unloading her cargo. So far no official mail had arrived, but this was not unusual. The Chinese shopkeepers in the town invariably got their letters before his arrived. On Her Majesty's Colonial Service meant nothing to the postal service, but since it was run by a Jew, the only joint public operation in the entire archipelago, this was to be expected. In fact he shrewdly suspected that the French Governor perused the British official dispatches before he did. That is why they were always so late. He had, on one or two occasions, heard Etienne Martin, his French counterpart, drop accidental remarks at social affairs which could only have been the result of reading the British letters. Still, Sir William was disinclined to make an issue of it because relations were never less than strained, and, in any case, through some addressing error the monthly consignment of excellent French liqueurs and brandy unfailingly turned up on the doorstep of British Government House, and Sir William enjoyed them.

'Funny game,' he muttered to himself, thinking around these things. 'Aye, a funny game.' He was in the tradition of gaunt highland Scots, his face like a retired sparrow‑hawk, sharp and powerful but having lost its hunting look and aggressive intentions. He yearned for home, for the bald brown hills and the winter waters of the Lom, for fat cattle and fat women, and for great roaring fires. After he had been Governor of the Apostles for two years he had abruptly surrendered to an orgy of nostalgic patriotism, had ordered a stone fireplace to be built at his residence, and, when it was done had, regardless of the terrible Pacific heat, sat alone, kilted and dirked, before a huge blaze, drinking toddy and singing the songs of the islands, sweet and rough. After this he had been in hospital for three weeks suffering from severe dehydration and the fire had not been kindled since.

Marge, his dear highland wife, was dead, five years gone, back in Scotland. After a violent Bums Night party she, a democratic woman always, had driven a new Rolls‑Royce, loaded to the roof with gamekeepers, dairymen, and other sundry workers, dramatically, and with tremendous finality, into the deepest depth of Loch Lorn.

By the following Burns Night he was below the Tropic of Capricorn, in the hot Apostles ‑ an Anglo‑French Condominium, a curious, pantomime situation. Only in the New Hebrides, north in the ocean, did it exist elsewhere.

'Worthless dots!' Sir William remembered the condemnation by his irritable predecessor, Dugdale, late on the night of his first arrival.

Sir William recalled him sitting in the big study with made and unmade jig‑saw puzzles all about the room. 'Man needs a hobby here or he'd go mad, ' Dugdale had bawled at him as they sat down after dinner. 'The very act of putting together a thousand pieces of, say, Shakespeare's England or Dover Castle has saved me from going out and killing the entire native and British and French populations of this awful damned place.'

'Dots!' he repeated at Sir William. 'Nobody wants 'em now. No economic, no strategic value. Nobody in London or Paris admits it, of course. They still issue their inane little Condominium postage stamps with pictures of natives spearing fish and all that palaver. Hah! Just imagine a place like this having two administrations. You wait until you see them rubbing away at each other, telling prep-school tales, lining up on Armistice Day and all that todo.'

His eyes swivelled craftily to the desk again. Swiftly his hand pecked at a jig‑saw piece. It was like a heron picking up a small fish. He tried it, turned it, and regretfully rejected it. 'Two Public Health departments!' he continued. 'Very little public health, though. Two Highways and Cleansing departments and what for? ‑ five miles of filthy roads. Our dual Education Authorities have spectacularly raised the standard of illiteracy among the native and the white populations. And our two splendid Police Forces had a pitched battle last New Year's Eve.'

Sir William was glad to see the back of the testy old devil going up the companionway of
The Baffin Bay,
even though the ex‑ Govenor's last gesture had been to push a native porter violently down the steps and into the lagoon as a finale to his rule. But since then the truth had reached him too. The Apostles were indeed worthless dots. Warm, wet, wearying, worthless dots. He, too, would be glad to depart.

His relations with M. Martin, the French Governor, had never been harmonious. They lived on the most distant opposites of the island and never met unless they could not avoid it. Sir William disliked the way that the Frenchman always appeared so cool, composed, and well dressed. He liked to refer to him privately as 'the tropic dandy'. Nevertheless the white business shorts of M. Martin always fitted splendidly, even sexily, while Sir William's khaki drill were always starched like a bread board and often cut him painfully below the knees. Oil formal occasions the decorations, both gallant and distinguished, attached to M. Martin's breast and dangling from his masculine neck looked like a brilliantly flowering garden compared with Sir William's miserable window‑box. His slim Latin moustache and his eyebrows were like triplets; his tie and his dry martini were always at precisely the right angle.

Nor did the Frenchman ever throw away an opportunity to score off him. Only the previous week they had been at a cocktail party given by the Sexagesima Amateur Art Circle. 'Our navy will be paying us another visit soon, perhaps in a month or so,' M. Martin had said. He emphasized the word ,another' so slightly that it hardly jumped out of line at all, but Sir William heard it. He was not feeling in a diplomatic mood.

'You mean that little gunboat of yours is coming across from New Caledonia.' he suggested.

'The patrol vessel Auriol,' corrected the French Governor. 'The red pom‑poms will be in the streets again! I thought you were expecting a naval vessel at some time.'

'A destroyer,' said Sir William defiantly. 'A big destroyer.'

'Let me see, HMS
Sandpaper,
was it not?'

'Sandpiper,' glared Sir William. His starched shorts were cutting his legs again and he was getting angrier.

'Sold for scrap,' murmured the Frenchman triumphantly. 'Three months ago in Sydney.'

The British Governor had not been told. 'Was she?' he grumbled uncomfortably. Then lamely, 'Oh well, we'll get another, you'll see.'

Sir William's uncomfortable memory of that exchange was interrupted by the arrival of his official mailbag. Everything came in it, government hand‑outs, Foreign Office letters, and reminders from the Colonial Development Ministry to keep out of trouble with the natives. He also received, each five weeks with the boat, a complete list of Premium Bond winning numbers none of which, so far, had ever been his, copies of
The Times
and the
Scotsinan,
and, in this particular consignment, a letter from the Prime Minister.

It would have been no more surprising to Sir William to receive a note from Santa Clans. But there it was, a personal one‑pager, saying how glad the Premier was that Her Majesty had chosen to visit the Apostle Islands during her forthcoming tour of the Pacific dependencies, and that everyone at Number Ten was sure the visit would be a happy and successful one.