Authors: Lawrence Scott
Vincent was retching. He now had to tolerate the smell as best he could, as he tried to attend to the boy. He had learnt to deal with the stench at Saint Damian’s: the smell of rotting flesh, the putrid bandages, the Chaulmoogra Oil. He had to bear this. He was a doctor, after all.
‘Theo. Theo, come boy, come.’ Vincent put out his arms to lift the boy out of the press. He did not help Vincent. He was a dead weight. His head was bent between his legs. His hands were tucked beneath his buttocks. Both his hands and the cheeks of his buttocks were caked with his faeces. While Theo continued to moan, he swayed back and forth. Vincent wondered at the old press not collapsing. ‘Come, Theo, let me lift you. Help me.’
Then he recognised the moan. It had words. Two words with two syllables, each said deliberately, issued from the buried head, the hidden lips of the foetus. These were then followed by a kind of trill. The moan wanted to be a song. ‘Coco, Coco, Cocorito.’ Vincent remembered Father Dominic in the convent parlour in Porta España, calling Theo ‘Coco’. He wondered at the friar using what seemed a pejorative nickname at the time. When had Father Dominic first heard that name, in what circumstances? It did not seem to be a name to trifle with. It had not cropped up in any of Theo’s nocturnal stories. Not as yet, at any rate.
There was a visible relaxation, as the boy let himself be coaxed out of his curled up shape, and made to stand on the floor. Vincent lifted him into his arms and took him downstairs, outside, down the short, pebbled path to the beach, across the stretch of ochre sand. He walked straight into the sea with the naked boy, Vincent himself still fully dressed. He squatted in the shallows and small waves. Holding Theo in his arms, like a baby, he bathed his head and wiped off the faeces from his face. The boy allowed himself to be administered to in this way, without any objection. Vincent looked up, and out to sea. The bay was empty.
‘Theo? What’s the matter, boy? What’s the matter? You can tell me.’ Vincent continued to cup the water in his palms and bathe and clean the boy’s body. Theo was looking up to the sky.
‘What’re you telling me Theo?’ He stared into boy’s face, into
his eyes. Theo looked back at him. It was not for long, but his eyes did really meet those of Vincent’s with a recognition which had not existed before, in any of their previous meetings.
It saddened Vincent that the boy had had to bring things to this extremity, for this to happen. But, it must mean something that he had decided, or had been driven to this, to make himself known.
He held the boy within his doctor’s arms. He continued to clean him with a doctor’s hands. The boy’s nakedness was not something that was foreign to him. He had had to examine many children. It was not unusual for him to take the penis and wash it, to wipe between the buttocks. He performed this with understanding, as a professional. What astonished him, and made these gestures different, were the circumstances.
What surprised him at this moment, was seeing himself in the sea, fully dressed with the naked boy in his arms, looking out to the bay, to the gulf beyond.
Holding the boy, he surveyed the world: the high blue mountains beyond the port of Guira on the eastern coast of Venezuela; the empty distance of the gulf from this position in the sea; the bay itself with the white walled convent over the other side. When he turned and looked around him, he saw that the green hills behind the house, with the lilac shadows of the afternoon, and the light which the increasing sunset threw across the water and over the hills, were dissolving into flames. The house was a livid pink, its white lattice work gleamed. The fret work was like white lace. He and the boy were in the house which was in the water. The pillars and gables were sinewy in the water. They buckled and twisted, were narrowed and elongated. Their own reflections, just beneath them, were part of this insubstantiality, this variable, this changing possibility, which was now their lives.
Theo was content to float, held at the small of his back with Vincent’s reassuring hand. As far as he knew, the boy could not swim. This was his daily fear, when he left him alone in the house with Beatrice. The boy floated above Vincent’s steadying hand as he sat in the shallows feeling the pebbles moving under him. With each wave he had to work to regain his balance. The water was filling his pockets like balloons. Sand was getting between the
seams of his pants and shirt. But he remained balanced. Quite imperceptibly, Theo moved his legs like fins, keeping himself afloat. He swam away from Vincent a small distance. ‘Oh, he can swim,’ Vincent thought.
He stripped off and flung his own clothes on to the rocks nearby. He and Theo swam naked the length between the beach and the point at Father Meyer’s house.
Returning, they could hear that the gramophone had already been started up with the evening’s Wagner. It would have to stop soon, because of the newly enforced curfew.
It seemed as if Theo and Vincent had been in the water a very long time. ‘Theo, come boy.’ Vincent grabbed up his own wet clothes. ‘Race you up the beach, back to the house.’ As he looked back, Theo was running out of the water, the waves breaking behind him.
They both stood on the kitchen floor, naked, panting. It was like he was taking care of a smaller child. ‘Theo, wait here. I’ll be back very soon. Let me get some dry clothes.’
He ran upstairs to his own room, dressed and came back with a towel to wipe Theo. He also brought one of his own white cotton shirts to dress the boy. Theo stood, transformed in the tails of a man’s big shirt. It made him look smaller, like a very small boy, like a boy in his father’s shirt.
The strangeness of what had happened dawned fully on Vincent now. He got the boy a clean pair of khaki pants. He paced around, tidying up. He stopped, abruptly. ‘We’re going to sit and have a cup of tea. We’re going to have tea Theo, like I used to have tea in my mother’s house.’ Vincent looked at Theo, as he turned from the sink where he was washing his hands. He did not quite know why he was doing this. The moment called for something different. ‘Now, you sit there. I’m going to get the tea.’ He had been so distracted, so swept away by what he had found, by what he and the boy were doing in the sea. He stood looking at him, standing in his man’s shirt. He stood there in the middle of the kitchen, staring at Vincent, looking down at the floor. ‘Why don’t you go and sit on the wall by the tank. I’ll bring our tea out there.’
There was the big silver tea pot, the silver milk jug, and the
matching bowl for sugar. He went back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room. He ransacked the packing case under the stairs for these essential elements of his mother’s tea. The water was boiling on the kerosene stove. The green tea was in the pot. There was just enough milk left in the churn on top of the ice box, in the cool of the pantry.
Soon the tray was ready. He got some butter from the safe outside the kitchen door, put some of Beatrice’s guava jelly in a bowl. All that was needed were the Crix biscuits. He rummaged in the barrel under the counter for the rations from the
commisserie
. He put a handful on a plate. He poured the water over the tea leaves. All was ready.
‘Ah! One thing missing.’ Vincent went back out to the safe by the kitchen door. ‘Cheese! Rat cheese!’ The big yellow cheddar block was discovered. It was what he and Bernard had christened rat cheese. You could not eat Crix biscuits and guava jelly without rat cheese. Setting the mousetraps with big chunks of yellow cheddar was a feature in this house as it had been at Versailles.
Vincent went out into the yard by the water tank, which was overflowing, because it had been filled to the very brim this afternoon, from the water boat. Theo was perched on the concrete wall looking out onto the bay.
The sunset was dying over the island rock, Patos. A haze was settling on the fractured glass of the sea. Through the haze, a fire of the sun was burning up the gulf, as if there had been an enormous explosion; orange and red and the sea in flames, as if oil had been poured over its waves.
‘Theo, come, boy. Here.’ Vincent poured the boy some tea, into one of his mother’s, Madame Metivier’s china cups, the white ones with the gold monogrammed crest of the Metivier family which he had also unpacked from the case, stored under the stairs. The old past glinted on the tray.
‘Now, Theo, let’s feast.’ He buttered a Crix biscuit and cut a piece of cheese, spooned some guava jelly onto the cheese and offered Theo the childhood confection. Theo took a quick look at Vincent, as he accepted the gift, and bit into it, the crumbs falling onto the front of his clean white shirt.
This tea ceremony that Vincent had remembered since childhood enveloped him and the boy, as they both gorged themselves on rat cheese and guava jelly, sipping hot tea from Madame Metivier’s white china cups.
The crisis of the afternoon dissolved. The boy and the doctor did not talk, but there was an unspoken communion that afternoon, as they munched away.
Vincent, eventually, cleared up the tea tray got the fishing rods from behind the kitchen door. With his hand on the boy’s shoulder, they walked down to the jetty. ‘We’re going to catch our supper.’ Vincent got some old bait he kept in the boathouse. They sat at the end of the jetty on the warm boards with their legs dangling over the edge. Theo followed, as Vincent threaded his rod and baited the hooks. With a deft flick of his wrist, he slung the line into the water. With luck, they might catch two small red fish.
It was Theo who got the first bite, and, in no time, they hauled in the first catch.
‘Hold him, hold him, don’t let him slip away.’ Vincent was a boy again. Theo said it all with his eyes, and his following of everything that Vincent said to do, though he knew quite well how to fish. ‘Theo, you carry on. I’m going up to the house.’
Before the light had gone completely, Vincent boiled a large bucket of water. With cloths, scrubbing brushes and carbolic soap, he cleaned out Theo’s room, using disinfectant and leaving the windows open to dry the room. The sheets and mosquito nets he put into the barrel outside the kitchen, and burnt them. The smoke trailed out over the bay as the last of the sun went down.
The boy was still there at the end of the jetty, on his own, fishing.
Later, Theo and Vincent ate fish and bake. They washed up in the dark, behind the black-out curtains which had been issued that day, brought on the island steamer, and put up on the windows at the front of the house. Vincent lit one kerosene lamp. He erected a camp bed in his room for Theo. The house now smelt of Dettol.
There were no words spoken by Theo. Vincent talked his way
through his actions. ‘Now let us get you another mosquito net from the spare room.’ Theo followed and watched. Vincent looked after the boy.
That night there were no stories. Doctor and boy slept soundly. Vincent thought he had woken at some time to the sound of a dull thunder. Then, later, there was the drone of an Albacore. But these sounds were becoming part of his dreams.
Vincent watched Theo absorbed in the four o’clock news. His first act, on returning from Saint Damian’s, was to turn on the radio. He adjusted the knobs to get the clearest reception, munching Crix biscuits, cheese and guava jelly, now his favourite. This was their time together, silently, all ears for the advance of armies across borders and frontiers. Vincent sipped his tea.
They listened to Germany’s attacks. Poland was caught between the Russians and the Germans. Theo had his atlas out. He had retrieved a globe from under the stairs which had been Vincent’s and Bernard’s as children. He spun it, searching and tracing with his finger the movement of troops.
Earlier today, they had stood and watched the last shipload of Jewish refugees come through the
boca
, to be quarantined on Nelson island. The fishermen sang the calypso of the day, describing the
Making of a New Jerusalem
, as they put out for the fishing banks.
Since dirtying himself, Theo’s night calypso had subsided. But Vincent was always waiting for it to begin again. He dreaded its resumption. What more did the boy have to go through? What more had he been through?
The afternoon light slanted, yellow as the lances of the palms. Theo had moved to the jetty. The wake of a British destroyer swamped the sunbaked boards as it turned in the bay. He stared at the sleek, silver strip, HMS Liverpool, slipping out of the bay into the gulf, fluttering the Union Jack, as if it were a toy he himself had pushed out onto the waves, a carved cedar pod on the stream.
After the news, he was checking his log of barges and tugs of the
British navy doing their exercises. This had been the first visible sign of the war. He kept a note of what he spotted. The low flying aircraft had joined the frigates, cormorants and diving pelicans.
Vincent watched the boy from the verandah. He was in another world altogether, different from the one at Pepper Hill or Father Dominic’s friary, as he threw his line from the jetty, in the hope of a catch.
Darkness came suddenly after a green flash on the horizon as far as Guira on the eastern coast of Venezuela, bringing its gloom into the lamp-lit house. The generator had broken down again. Fireflies pulsed in the bushes.
Theo had earlier kneaded the dough for a bake which was now ready. He fried a supper of his red snapper catch for Vincent and himself which they ate with the bake in silence. Vincent thought he seemed as if he had sunstroke. He had caught the sun on his face and arms and bare back. He had noticed him bathing his head with water from the tap at the tank, outside the kitchen. The water darkened his Demerara-sugar-coloured hair. ‘You must respect the sun on the island, Theo. Wear a cap. There’s one under the stairs.’
Theo looked up for an instant. There was a flicker of recognition, then his eyelashes were lowered, shutting down the light of his green eyes.
Vincent followed him up the creaking stairs to bed. He let himself into his room, barely opening the door, sidling in, furtively. What secrets now? Vincent thought.
‘Sleep tight, don’t let mosquitoes bite.’ Vincent retired, without receiving a response.
It must have been just after midnight when Vincent woke to one of the island’s owls. The
jumbie
bird, as people called it, kept the night watch. It was between a hoot and a trill. It had its own Morse Code, transmitting its own messages. Then, there was the usual static and hum of the night.
The voice which had haunted him was barely audible as it began its story. It ran like a river. Vincent listened, dreading the long night. Theo sat stunned at the foot of his bed.
C
OCO
M
AMA
, Emelda, know more than Mister. She have history lesson too. She give it to her boy. What she know was from where she come from, down in the gully, in the barrack yard, below the big house on top of Pepper Hill. What she know was from the dolly house in which she and Coco live.
Coco? Hmm! That’s not my name.
What she know was from the yard of she grandmother, Ma, who come out at specified hours of the morning and evening to rock back and forth on her teak rocker, make for her by Mr Cardinez in Guapo, and who rise only to water her anthurium lilies, growing in cut-down kerosene tins on the ledge of the verandah, with a calabash dip in the bucket of water, and which have to always be on the verandah steps for this purpose. She carry in herself a long memory which take her, herself, back to herself, back to the young girl, Christina Dellacourt of the Dellacourts of Corinth, that fair estate in the soft undulations of sugar cane, which lie between Petit Morne and Golconda.
She come on the request of the then Madame de Marineaux, if not enslave, at least indenture still, or, at very least, feeling that the trip by buggy from Corinth to Pepper Hill, near Gran Couva, must be the longest trip she ever make in this life.
Is here, Ma Dellacourt say, that her daughter Alice leave and go to work as a servant in the big house on top of Pepper Hill, when the present Mister Pierre was a little boy. All called Pierre, like they don’t have other name to call their children. Pierre de Marineaux!
Coco Mama, Emelda, was a little girl then, and the secret that the whole world know run through she vein and blossom on the red skin cheek of the little girl that Ma Dellacourt daughter, Alice, leave with she.
Child, what trouble you bring me? But leave the children them, Emelda and Louis, the twins, and go and do your work. Watch yourself, Alice.
Alice continue to please her Mistress and serve she Mister, a Mister that come from a line of misters since they start to come in 1820. That shameful time!
De Marineaux and then de Marineaux and more de Marineaux, the name they give the children born to the Mistress inside the
house, the wife, the one who is bride since she is a child sheself, dress up in yards and yards of Chantilly lace and
broderie anglaise
. You does see that in them pretty pretty picture, yellow yellow, stun by the camera, wrap in torpor. That is Father Angel word. I get it in vocabulary lesson. TOR POR.
But, as time pass, de Marineaux is the name take by the outside children in the barrack yard. De Marineaux bloom like orange blossom on the slope of Pepper Hill. De Marineaux, ripe like purple governor plum, like
jolie
mango. Like rose, like mango
vert
. De Marineaux like red sorrel in the breeze Christmas time.
Child, what you telling people, Emelda say.
Is so, I hear my great-grandmammy say.
Vincent was transfixed. Theo threw back his head and laughed. Vincent listened to the tongues in which the boy spoke, not the tongues of Father Dominic’s devil, those wild, priestly superstitions, but the troubled tongues of a troubled child. A great-grandmother’s story. He must listen to the boy. He must keep awake. Theo looked straight at him, but did not seem to see him.
The entranced child sometimes lay across the end of his bed. Sometimes, he was at the window in the shadow of the blackout, sometimes walking about the room, gesticulating, or sitting in a chair, imitating an older person, a voice in the story. He was a mimic, sometimes standing close to the mosquito net and peering down at the doctor’s face, or kneeling by the bedside to confess the story into his ear, as if to a priest in a confessional, or an accomplice in a crime, pouring his history into his ear.
Theo strode across the room delivering his history lesson in the learnt voice of an adult.
M
A
D
ELLACOURT
daughter, Alice, not the first to get take, on a quiet afternoon, to the tune of the catechism class downstairs, under the house, teach by the mistress of the house, Ma Dellacourt tell me.
What must you take most care of, your body or your soul, children?
I must take most care of my soul because it is immortal and will never die.
The fine, high voices sing and repeat, they learn by heart. Ma Dellacourt daughter, Alice upstairs, think, never die? What a tribulation! Sometimes, more easy, just to die. And she say, she say to she self, let me die. Die, die, die.
Vincent listened to the boy telling this astonishing tale, as he unfolded the history of his grandmother, as told by his
great-grandmother
. The story possessed him, so that he told it as he had heard it, rendering the tones of the voices which possessed him. It was as if he had a fever. Vincent let him tell the story. No matter how painful, he had to listen to the boy he cared for. It frightened him how much he cared.
I
S TO THESE
catechism voices that the young girl, Alice, who know no better or, even if she do, unable to do anything about it, let the attention of her Mister, in those days still Master, seduce her into giving up her body. She let him take her body, hearing the
sing-song
children, with their young faith, repeat time and time again, that it was her soul she must take most care of. What of the body?
Before that, the Monsieur de Marineaux of the time make his way into the body of Christina Dellacourt, Ma Dellacourt as she become. It begin an ancestry of such interference! All she think of was how far Corinth Estate is, and whether it better to stay there, to scrub floor.
What a danger in such simple work! To kneel on the ground and let the soapy water swamp her dress. She tell how a young son of the Corinth house take her, there, on the floor, in the soapy water flooding her dress, a twelve year old girl. He take her like she was a dog. He call her puppy, and come up behind, to lift her skirt. Puppy, Puppy, and before she can fight, she feel the pain of it, the push of his swelling into her.
And all the time, Christina, my great-grandmammy, say she hear the keskidee in the zaboca tree. But the one sound that she never forget is the sound of the blacksmith pounding iron far down in the estate yard. Clang, clang, clang.
That dry season, that crop time, trash blow in from them burning fields on a hot afternoon. The clanging sound fill the blue sky. It toll and toil like a bell at church. She cross sheself for the Angelus.
The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, and she conceive of the Holy Ghost.
Hmm? This was no Holy Ghost, my great-grandmammy say, but it make Christina think even then, that this taking of young girls in these houses, always have to have the music of the church accompanying each push of the mister swelling. The tolling of bells, the repetition of the catechism, telling them that if they have to lose their bodies, is their souls that the church want to save.
Ka-ka, Kif-kif
.
Even now, Christina, my great-grandmammy, say she hear the laughter from the barrack rooms.
Vincent listened to the laughter in the voice of the boy, mimicking the laughter of his great-grandmother, and under that laughter, the sadness of the story of herself and her daughter Alice, the boy’s grandmother.
The fever was rising. Vincent was sitting bolt upright, his eyes wide open, listening to Theo who sat on a rocker, poised like the Ma Dellacourt of his story. He had taken the counterpane and draped it about him, and held his head sideways, his hand on his chin, a little tilted up in a manner both superior and spurning of the time that he was describing. He topped off his costume with a turban made from a white towel, so that he looked like one of those Martiniquaise women who strolled on the quay in Fort-de-France.
Theo continued. The voice changed to something more sorrowful.
E
ACH WEEK
, when she go up to the little cemetery, and through the gate to the ground outside, to put flowers on the grave of her daughter, Alice, Ma Dellacourt have the twins with her, Alice little ones, Emelda and Louis. She read the name, Alice, with a cross on a stone with writing she know she pay for already with she own body, what she give the cemetery man. Well pay for, Ma Dellacourt say, as she turn from the grave, as she tell me the story, no matter
my Mama, Emelda, who tell me. Tell me when she not even know she telling me.
My Mama have story,
oui!
But, great-grandmammy say, as she look out onto the soft rolling hills between the high ridges, hump like the back of an iguana, rich with the cocoa, that she see, on their wild savannahs, a cemetery nobody know is there. Big with ditches.
In the dead of night, the pilgrimage from the little board house is by one desperate girl, no more than a child herself, anxious to make her life more simple, to undo her life and start again, to smother that last one she called, Mercy, who she fear get damage between the sheets of the de Marineaux.
Vincent felt to restrain the boy from his painful story of his mother’s younger sister, Mercy. But Theo, possessed, delirious, sped on, leading here and there, and then coming back to the main road with his family’s secret.
A
LICE
, take by the pain of guilt, remorse and despair, go down the dark canal of trace, to the shady patch with a mango tree at the centre of the brilliant light. It low enough to sling a rope over a branch and swing, and high enough that she can’t drag she foot on the ground, but allow for her dead weight to drop. Once that young girl, Alice, who learn from her brother at games to swing, hice sheself up, she let the rope take the full strain, once she have the noose tight around that little neck of hers, upon which a mother once hang a cheap silver chain for First Communion. The neck crack and she swing, till the odour of death and the buzzing of flies, till high in the blue air the soaring and circling of the corbeaux, bring some cocoa picker to look, and run and call people. Look, who child it is, hanging in the clear light of the afternoon, down by the
dou douce
mango tree? Maybe she try to climb the rope to save sheself in one last moment of hope, but reach up too late, so slip back, jerk, snap, and let her grazed and bloody fingers lose their hold, as she cry, Mercy.
Theo did not let up. The voice carried him.
W
HAT PEOPLE
remember out in the open, then, was not the reason for this death, the one responsible. They don’t pick up sticks and stones and pieces of iron to march up to the big house on the hill, for retribution and reparation.