Night Calypso (26 page)

Singh looked embarrassed.

‘We still have to talk, Krishna,' Vincent said. Singh looked away.

Vincent for the first time really noticed Christiana's beauty. She was a
dougla
girl, the African and Indian in her blended into an unusual perfection. Sixteen, she looked more like eighteen. When she looked up at him, as he spoke to Singh, her eyes flashed. He could see that she would get her own way. He now saw it all quite plainly. He had been distracted by his own affairs, not least by his own clandestine relationship. He watched Singh and Christiana walk away towards the whale. He envied their boldness.

The sisters were beginning to round up the children in preparation for the walk back to Saint Damian's.

Vincent still could not see Thérèse anywhere. He had not wanted to ask Sister Rita in case she suspected something, so much was Thérèse's visit to the house, and the events that night, still in his mind.

There was reluctance to leave the beach. No one wanted to leave the whale. Everyone wanted to wait and see what would happen at high tide, and whether the whale would be successfully launched back into the ocean. Vincent could still see Jonah working with the Marines to keep it as wet as possible. Still more sheets were brought, soaked and draped over the sad creature.

‘They say it must've happen last night, Doc. You heard the thunder and the guns?'

‘Yes, Jonah. What're they saying?'

‘It get hit with a torpedo.'

They both looked at Sister Rita. They did not want to alarm her, have her carrying news to the convent which would worry the sisters.

‘They could come right in here you know, Doc.'

‘That's why we have the Marines here. Why we have our fortifications. Our American base, the artillery guns.'

‘You believe in all of that, Doc? I ent see what they could do if they decide to come in.'

‘Let's not terrify ourselves Jonah.' Vincent looked at Sister Rita and then again at Jonah.

Vincent knew that it was not the idea of a U-Boat invasion which was making Sister Rita look agitated, go silent, seem far away. She was looking towards the sand dunes which were heaped up near the pass to the other side of the island, which led back to Perruquier Bay. She looked embarrassed. There was some commotion where the pass narrowed to an obstacle path of rocks, a rough track among the agave. The children, who had begun the trek back to Saint Damian's, were clambering up to get through the pass.

‘
Oo la la
!' Sister Rita gathered up some crutches which had been abandoned on the beach by children who did not need them, finding it easier on this terrain to scramble as best they could without them. ‘What's going on? I must go and see,' she called.

There was a lot of shouting and waving. Vincent thought perhaps he should also go and see what was happening, and get hold of Theo at the same time. He could not see the boy nor Ti-Jean anywhere.

As they both neared the sand dunes, they saw what the matter was. It was Sister Rita who first recognised her. Some of the other sisters were trying to prevent her from descending to the beach. The children were laughing and pointing. Vincent still could not make out exactly what the tumult was all about, till Sister Rita ran away from him in the direction of the crowd, crying, ‘It's Sister Thérèse. I must go.' Vincent followed hastily.

At first he could not see Thérèse clearly. Then his heart leapt into his throat. ‘Oh, no. My God!' He looked around for Theo. He wanted to have Theo at his side. What would he make of this?

The sun was now so hot that the distance shimmered in the heat. He looked for Thérèse's veil, and then he saw what all the children were laughing and pointing at. He saw her bald, shaven head. What he saw was a girl in a short cotton dress. She looked so much younger than she did in her habit, so much younger than she had in the boathouse, in the gloom of the boathouse and the confined cabin that held their passion that night. Still he felt the sea rocking the boat, heard the thud of the almonds on the galvanise roof. He had time for the memories, like the scent of the boathouse, her breath, pervading his mind, caressing his body.

For some reason, he focused on the dress. It was a white cotton
dress dotted with small blue flowers. Like a meadow in Provence, he thought. It was odd. He wondered where she would have got it. Where would she have found a dress? Maybe they kept dresses for those who wanted to leave. It never occurred to him that anyone ever left. That she would ever leave. Is that what she was doing?

He remembered the story he was telling her a couple of nights before as they sat on the jetty of his house, of the nun who had drowned herself.

Vincent was falling over as he ran in the sand dunes. Every time he got up, and then looked ahead, he saw that she was closer, fighting her way through the children and some of the sisters, trying to hold her back, as she made for the open beach, for the whale.

He did not think that she had yet seen him. Why had she done this? What really had she done? Vincent felt compromised. Why come out here like this?

The other sisters had abandoned their attempts to restrain her. As she stumbled towards him, he saw her bare white legs and the brush of black hair. Then he saw her face with rouge and lipstick. Her lips were carmine. Her cheeks were raddled. Her head was so small, so small, he thought.

When he stood up from where he had fallen, she at last saw him. She called. She shrieked, ‘Vincent!'

All those at the path among the agave turned back to look at her, running and falling, and getting up and running towards him. He stood and waited, their secret being proclaimed to all the sisters, Marines and children on the beach. When she reached him she stumbled and fell in front of him, at his feet, her face in the sand.

Vincent knelt down next to her. ‘Madeleine.' He knew no one was near enough to hear him say her name. He repeated, ‘Madeleine,' as if to wake her, as it were, from where she lay, face down. When he looked up he could see everyone else staring from a distance.

Quite close were Singh and Christiana, standing and staring. They both looked sad. They both understood, he felt. They were suspended in the haze of the heat, as if they were not really there, a kind of mirage. They waved and turned.

‘Madeleine, come, sit up, stand up. What's happening? What has happened? Why are you dressed like this?'

He hoped people would see this as the distressed Thérèse coming to him, the doctor. He hoped Singh might see it like this, but he doubted that now. He could still hear his name, Vincent, shrieked across the beach, echoing from the cliffs, proclaiming their intimacy.

Vincent noticed that the sisters were turning the children away from the beach, moving them back to Saint Damian's. Jonah was helping. They were all leaving him.

The Marines were getting on with their rehabilitation of the beached whale. Vincent found himself using the presence of Theo's Leviathan to distract the distraught Thérèse. ‘Look, the whale.'

The beach was suddenly deserted, except for the Marines continually working at protecting the razor back whale, sixty feet long, from drying out in the hot sun; hosing the flanks, covering them with wet sheets.

Vincent and Madeleine sat at the mouth of a small cave at the end of the La Tinta beach. Sand flies stung, mosquitoes hummed. Vincent poured citronella from a vial he carried in his pocket. He rubbed it into Madeleine’s arms and along her legs. He applied the repellent to himself. They sat out of the sun, looking towards the beached whale. The tide was coming in. It was a gentle trickle over the rocks. High tide would be hours away.

This was not the time to interrogate her about what was going on, why she was dressed in the cotton frock with the blue flowers. Where was her nun’s habit? Why was she here with her cropped hair, without a veil? He was shocked. He sat with her and waited. The sun had already burnt her face and arms. Sometimes she spoke, other times he guessed, from her single words, the state of her mind.

‘Papa, Papa.’ She was hardly audible.

‘Have you had some news?’ He held her hand.

‘Drancy.’

‘The workers camp?’

‘Yes.’

He did not think she could have had specific news about her father being at the camp. Since they had heard of its existence, it had been a fear. The letters from Canada were far more general, never specific enough news. The rest was surmise.

‘Here, pin it for me.’ She handed him an embroidered yellow star she had received recently. ‘Pin it to my lapel.’

‘Madeleine! No!’

‘Pin it. My brooch.’

He humoured her. He pinned the yellow star to her frock with the blue forget-me-nots. He wanted, above all, to keep her calm.

‘Would you like to get closer to see the whale? What a wonder!’ He hoped that this would distract her.

She stared as into a mirage, the whale shrouded with wet cotton sheets in the morning haze, the Marines’ hoses playing over its flanks.

Then, more lucidly, she said, ‘I heard the fisherman say the whale was torpedoed, by a German U-Boat.’

‘Or it took a depth charge from the Americans.’ He played with her curiosity and fear about the accident and the immediate war.

He could see that talk of the Germans brought into her mind only one thing, scenes which were never very far away, images that she could not really imagine. Yet it was this that was precisely the making of her fear, the unimaginable, and what she made of it. ‘These letters you horde don’t help you,’ he advised.

She read and re-read them, he knew. ‘By the way, are you any closer to knowing who embroiders your yellow stars?’

She stared at him vacantly. He felt her distress. He felt scared.

‘
Rafle,
Drancy.’ Her obsession guided her.

‘Sister Thérèse.’ He wanted to distance himself.

She stared at him. He had not called her by her formal title for ages.

She whispered, ‘My name is Madeleine Weil.’

‘But you are Sister Thérèse of the Order of Martha and Mary.’

‘Is that right, Doctor Metivier?’ She spat it out, quite uncharacteristically. ‘Is that right, Doctor Metivier?’

Vincent felt a mixture of anger and embarrassment. He knew the moment that he saw her in her dress with the blue forget-me-nots, that it would have to stop. She could not just turn up like this, shrieking out his name. They could not continue. How would he stop it?

‘Pogrom
!’ she intoned.

‘Sister. You are deliberately distressing yourself. I won’t listen to this. You have got to get a hold of yourself.’ He was very nervous.

‘Verdun.’

He could read from the fertile miscellany, the glossary of her mind, influenced by talks with her father, her father’s letters. Her mind was a map of rivers. He knew this geography. He had entered
this territory with her before. But now he felt he had lost her.

‘Meuse, Rhine’. She knelt and drew a map of lines, boundaries. She built fortifications like a child building sandcastles.
‘L’homme mort.’
She was reading for her
baccalauréat
as a young girl,
‘La France. Ils ne passeront pas.’
Vincent could see what was happening to her mind, as she built the ring of hills scarred with shell craters, ditches, trenches. ‘Verdun, Donaumont.’ He knew enough of Mr Freud to sense what was happening.

More names raced through her mind: ‘Petain, Maginot.’

She looked up at him from her sandcastle.
‘Le vainquer de Verdun
or
le medécin de l’Armée.
General Petain?’

These names of places, heroes and villains were all that she had with which to think, to feel.

‘La der des ders.
The last of the last. Now this.’ Standing up, she scrawled the dates 13th May and 14th of June 1940, the dates of the German entry into France, and into Paris. She squatted again to trace with her fingers the Meuse. She was herself, in the Ardennes, thought Vincent. He was out of his depth. Who was there, but himself, to help her?

Jonah came over to talk to Vincent about the whale. Thérèse continued to kneel in the sand. Some of the older children, still on the beach, crept close, playing, looking for
chip chip
shells. Thérèse played along with them. They were reluctant to leave the whale.

Vincent knelt close to her. ‘Sister?’ She looked at him vacantly as if he were not speaking to her.

Then, she said, ‘Dreyfus.’

‘Come, Sister.’

They were both interrupted by an American accent, a voice saying. ‘Doctor Metivier? So, you’re the father of this boy. This is your son?’

Vincent got up and turned to face the voice.

‘Lieutenant Jesse Morrison.’ They shook hands. He repeated his remark, standing between Theo and Ti-Jean with an arm on each of their shoulders.

‘Well, yes, they’re both my boys,’ Vincent answered.

The boys were smiling at each other. Vincent was pleased that
Theo seemed to be at ease with Ti-Jean. What had happened that night of the courtesan? What had been exorcised by the carnival, with the red satin dress, the green scarf, stockings, high-heeled shoes, lipstick and rouge? The two people could not be compared. Something had been laid to rest.

‘But this one. This lover of God, Theophilus,’ said Jesse.

‘What’s that you name him?’ Ti-Jean was jumping around on his crutches. ‘That is name pappy! The-who-of-a-who?’

Theo looked shy. Jesse was telling tales. It was not fair.

‘This Theophilus, lover of God, who I’ve to say is a smart kid. The other day, as we investigated the midden behind your house, tells me that, yes, you’re his father and he’s your son.’

Theo was now trying to break away from Jesse’s clasp, and run off with Ti-Jean over the beach, trying not to catch Vincent’s eye. He had been telling tales.

‘Well, if that is what he says, it must be so.’ Vincent looked at Theo as he said this. ‘As good a son as anyone would want to have.’ He winked at the boy.

‘And me?’ Ti-Jean interjected, not to be outdone.

‘Well, you’ve always been first, Ti-Jean.’ Theo looked intently, taking that in. Vincent smiled at Jesse.

The boys were off, and the men were left looking at them. ‘Hop-along Cassidy and Billy the Kid! Hi!’ Jesse called after them. ‘Hi, Theophilus!’

‘You can call him Theo,’ Vincent advised.

‘Theo!’ Jesse shouted.

The boys ran back, Ti-Jean stumbling on his crutches in the sand, Theo helping him. Thérèse assisted him as a nurse. Both boys stared at her in her new garb. Ti-Jean put out his hand to touch the yellow star. She pulled away. He looked at her, both knowing her and not knowing her.

‘Let’s see if you’ve kept your promise,’ Jesse interrupted.

Theo put his hand into his pocket and brought out a piece of pottery, part of the lip of a vase, shaped like a heart.

‘At least five hundred years old, from a midden, a grave of bones on the outer shore beyond Point Girod, near the ocean,’ Jesse lectured.

Vincent passed it to Thérèse, trying to make things look normal. He was aware how bizarre she looked in her dress, her face smeared with rouge and lipstick. What would Jesse be making of this scene? What were the boys making of it? She held the fragment of fired clay up to the light.

‘From a midden on the north coast,’ Jesse filled in.

The piece of earthen biscuit-coloured pottery had a rough grain. Vincent remembered it in the light of the night in his room, as Theo told his story of the midden, and the graves and the bones, and bodies falling into the graves.

Just then there were parrots in the air, making for Monte de Botella with their screams and their fire. Vincent remembered the words about the voices of the ones who had leapt at Sauteurs.

Thérèse turned the shard in her fingers. ‘A piece of the past,’ she whispered, almost inaudible, as she handed it back to Theo, smiling. ‘Fired in ovens not unlike ones used on the island at the present time,’ she contributed knowledgeably.

‘Probably,’ Jesse responded, taking in Thérèse in her unusual dress. ‘There is more here, I understand. Did you know that, Doctor?’

‘Apparently. There are layers of history just beneath our feet.’ Then he looked to the Boca Grande, and the opening into the Golfo de Ballena. ‘If the gulf could speak, it could tell of myriad periods of history that have used these waters for its ships. From the dugout canoes, the first pirogues, to these destroyers. This small corner of the world has been preyed upon. There is a line of conquering soldiers who stretch out behind you, Lieutenant.’

‘We’re here to defend you this time, Sir.’

‘We hope so. But it makes us part of your battlefield.’

‘There are your oil refineries and sugar factories.’

‘They are not ours, Jesse. We’re still part of an Empire,’ Vincent explained.

‘They is our land, our natural wealth,’ Jonah burst forth.

‘Well, you’ll want them when you govern the place. I heard the speeches the other day. I saw you there.’ Jesse turned to Jonah. ‘And that Indian fella. A
commie
if ever I heard one. Is that possible? That you will govern here?’

‘Mr Stalin’s our ally now, you know?’ Vincent smiled.

‘Sure, it’s possible,’ said Jonah, who was watching and listening intently. ‘You hear Atilla’s calypso,
Shout the glad tidings, and urge the hero on, he’s a David, a Goliath, and a Sampson all in one
… And you have your own battles up north, Lieutenant.’

‘So we have an historian and a revolutionary here.’

‘Me is a fisherman, Sir. Jonah Le Roy from La Brea where the pitch lake is, that other wonder of the world.’ Jonah glanced at the whale. ‘Sir Walter Raleigh caulk his ships from there.’

‘I’ve heard of your bottomless lake. That buccaneer who was a poet, seeking booty for his queen. So this is your whale? You’ve just been delivered back to life. Jonah, you must make for Niniveh.’ Jesse mimicked a preacher’s voice, ‘Those people need converting.’

‘That’s what the Doc, here, is always joking about. We’re into the business of delivering people into life, into the light. Not so, Doc?’

‘We sure are, Jonah,’ Vincent agreed.

‘What we want to know is how you Yanks going to help this business?’ Jonah said to Jesse.

‘Well, that’s obvious,’ Jesse replied.

‘Yes, the war is one thing, but here, you’ve seen our people. You see the conditions of our people.’ Jonah looked behind him at the patients finding the path to Perruquier Bay. ‘Watch them children. You ever see thing so. Imagine shooting one of them!’

Jesse fell silent. ‘Let’s leave the shooting to Major McGill and his inquiry. There’ll be an inquest.’

‘We’ll be coming to you, or to your superiors with some ideas.’ Vincent cut in. Then he paid attention to Thérèse again. She had calmed with the distraction of the boys and the discussion.

‘Medicine, Major,’ she said suddenly.

‘Sorry, Mam, I didn’t get your name.’

‘Weil, Sister Thérèse Weil.’

‘Jesse Morrison, Miss.’ It was now that he stared at her with her cropped hair and her white skin freshly burnt, her distressed look, the yellow star burning on her lapel.

Jonah looked at Vincent, inquiringly. Vincent introduced Thérèse. Jesse looked more puzzled.

She went on. She was now lucid. ‘Medicine, equipment, better conditions. That’s what we need here for our work. You’ve seen the place.’ She wanted to go on. She smiled and stopped. Then she began again, ‘We need Penicillin, the new Sulfa drugs. Should not be only for soldiers in a war, but also for poor people.’ Her eyes were wide and watery, staring beyond Jesse, to the whale and the ocean beyond.

‘Yes, Mam. You’ve got a comrade here,’ Jesse said to Jonah and Vincent.

The men smiled, but, embarrassed by her appearance, hoped that would be the end of Thérèse’s speech.

Theo and Ti-Jean had been listening to the grown-ups, while Theo showed Ti-Jean his find from the midden. He returned the pottery piece to his pocket. Then he and Ti-Jean walked off. The grown-ups began to make their way towards the patients among the dunes.

‘Friends for life,’ Jesse said to Vincent, looking at the boys.

‘The whale has brought us all together.’

‘Boy, he’s bright. Your son.’ Jesse smiled. ‘Questions! And talk, talk, talk.’

‘Really,’ said Vincent.

‘Yep, never stops.’

‘Oh, I can believe that. But conversation?’

‘Not really, kind of shuts you out with his stories. Though he’s checking up that you are listening.’ Jesse smiled.

As they walked on, Thérèse lagged behind. Vincent kept his eye on her. He was dying to ask what stories Theo had told Jesse. They could compare stories. But he restrained himself.

Thérèse caught them up.

They all began to walk to where the other sisters had gathered up the children for the trek back to Saint Damian’s under the supervision of Mother Superior, who had not really wanted this expedition to see the whale. In the end, she had not been able to prevent it.

She had stood on a high sand dune, with one of the novices holding a parasol to shade her, while she attempted to direct events as far as possible. She had decided, that what with the other battles
which she had to win, to let this one pass. She glanced censoriously at Thérèse and Vincent. This was something that she was going to have to deal with, but not publicly.

Thérèse pulled at Vincent’s arm. ‘I can’t go with them. I’m not one of them anymore. I have nowhere to go. Where do I go?’ she asked pleadingly.