Night Calypso (31 page)

Madeleine completed her whispered reading of the fragment. There were other short pieces torn from similar letters. ‘Theo?’

‘Yes, Miss.’

‘Where did you get these?’

‘I sure I see them in the waste paper basket. That’s where I get them.’

‘Theo.’ Madeleine did not believe him.

‘He leave them about the house, you know.’

‘Letters, Theo. Other peoples’ letters. Letters written not to you but to others.’ Her voice had become agitated.

Theo lowered his eyes. He did not like to be criticised. He did not like to be out of favour. He continued to defend his position. ‘Yes, but if I find them throw away, then they come like something I find on the midden. They belong to history. Not pre-history. But history. Living history. Is as if I dig them up. They is one of my find.’

‘One of your finds?’ Madeleine smiled. But she was angry, and deeply moved at seeing fragments of those letters which had worried her so much, caused her so much pain, been part of her secret meetings with Vincent over the last few years as they worked in the pharmacy, and then had been entrusted into his keeping.

Here they were now, enshrined, part of the boy’s museum, because she had passed them onto Vincent, when she could not keep them in her cell, and because Vincent had forgotten to give them back to her.

‘Theo.’ She was about to tell the boy that these letters were part of her story, her personal story, the story of her father. Then she stopped herself.

For the first time she realised, profoundly, that this was not so. These were not personal letters to her, were not about her father. She did not know anything about her father. These were letters
about other people, thousands of people. These were documents about the war. The boy was right. He had come across them, as he had come across pots and vases at the midden, the bones like coral, his shard of pottery. These were not part of any one person’s particular history. They were part of a collective history. Taino, Aruac, Carib, French, German. Yet, they were once personal histories.

Madeleine stood up and rubbed her hips, and then knelt down again, pulling her skirt around her knees, continuing to read:

French time is now German time. This autumn the early mornings are long and dark
…

When was that she wondered? When was that time? When did time change, that someone noted it down? Autumn. She said the word over and over in her mind. She had not heard the word autumn for a long time. No one talked of autumn here.

‘Theo…’

‘Yes. Miss.’

‘What do you understand from these? How do you read these?’ Madeleine lifted the curled edge with writing which carried over to the other side. She continued to read to herself while she talked to the boy. ‘Do you know what autumn means, Theo?’

‘Miss? Spring, summer, autumn, winter. The four season.’ He looked surprised that she should ask him such a simple question.

‘Whose seasons are those, Theo?’

‘They are the season of a temperate climate.’

‘A temperate climate?’

‘Yes. A cold climate.’

‘I see.’

By the tone of her voice, Theo was learning that there was something else to this questioning, to these repetitions. He was learning something about the emotions, about the rhetoric of emotions.

He himself repeated himself. ‘Yes, Miss.’

‘When is time personal, and when is time just time?’ Madeleine wondered aloud.

The last Metro is like a Carnival… Paris at night. Noises, rifle shots, hobnailed boots on the cobbled street…a black Citroen speeds
past. You wake and it’s the gendarmes at the door of the neighbours who are not there when you wake in the morning. The city gets emptier and emptier.

Madeleine read, wondering which country this was? When did it come into existence? Who lived in it?

All the trains go East.

It was as if she had not remembered these letters. They were telling her, in their disjointed way, about a country, a time, which had been once hers.

She could fill the gaps. Her love filled the gaps; the deep surging love which she always carried in her heart for her father, who increasingly she could no longer see, could no longer imagine, not knowing where to place him.

Theo stood up and began straightening labels and flags on the wall display. Madeleine remained on her knees, absorbed. As she knelt, there, reading, she could feel she was going to cry. She could not control her tears which were welling up in her eyes and brimming over and wetting her cheeks. She saw a tear fall on the floor, a stain which quickly dried in the heat. She did not want the boy to notice, so she kept her face close to the wall, reading through the blur of her tears. But she could also feel herself shaking now. She tried to steady herself, her emotions. She kept with her reading.

The queues continue as if for miles. Then there is very little to be had when you get to the counters.

Then there were single words which jumped out of their contexts,
Kommandantur
, contexts she began to find too difficult to read. They were contexts which brought back memories of her first reading of those letters.
Arrondissements
. There was a kind of poetic cadence to the ordinary words as she said them to herself, careful that the boy did not hear her tearful whisperings,
concierge, quartier.
Did the letter writer know how clearly he had conjured a world, another country, when read from here?
Carte d’identité, Ausweis, Laissez-passer, feuille de mobilisation.

The poetry of displacement told the stories of zones, Vichy and the Occupied Zone, the country on the move, prevented from moving, moving illegally. Families were broken up, their homes
usurped by the presence of a German soldier. Prisoners were deported to
Stalags
or
Offlags.
Two million had been taken prisoner.

The boy had his facts.

These were the figures after the Armistice. Madeleine read the old news as if it had just come through on the radio. She relived her pain. Through her tears, she smiled to herself, that she was told this story by a young boy who knew these stories as learnt, as overheard, as rifled from waste paper baskets, stolen from drawers, picked up from his foster father’s dressing table; a boy on the prowl in a house by the sea on his own in the day, on the hunt for a story of origins and fulfilments.

These were his stories, stories he told, as she knew he had told the story of Moby Dick on the beach at La Tinta, and the stories that Jonah told her the boy repeated under the big almond tree of Achilles and his silver fish. There were the stories he told the doctor.

She felt the silence, the music of the sea, as the shale and sand and shells moved up and down the beach under the jetty. She was transfixed here.

Theo cleared his throat.

Madeleine turned round to face the boy, who was standing with one of his little flags in his fingers, ready to be pinned to the wall, to indicate the most recent torpedoing that he had been told about yesterday.

‘Theo, what are you doing? Come, give me that.’ Madeleine pulled herself up from the floor. She took the flag from him. ‘What’s this Theo? What’s all of this?’

‘Miss?’

‘Tell me. Don’t keep calling me Miss.’ She took him into her ams, and embraced him generously. ‘Theo, Theo, Theo.’

He let himself be embraced. His respect for Madeleine, her work with the microscope, his fascination with her change, the way she had transformed herself from that shorn figure, looking like a boy his own age, absorbed him. He had noticed it all since he had first seen her from the end of the jetty that fateful afternoon, coming to spend the night with the doctor and himself.

Now, her beauty filled his thoughts with the possibility of transformation, both for herself and his doctor for whom he had wanted something like this, seeing him on so many evenings on his own, not content to have a young boy to look after on his own. And yes, secretly he entertained thoughts of his own transformation. Theo was overcome by Madeleine’s demonstrations of emotion.

When he released himself from her embrace, he looked at her closely. ‘Everything alright?’

‘Yes, Theo. In time.’

‘I know a thing or two.’

‘You do, Theo. You do. You surely do. What is this all about, Theo?’

‘You mean you don’t know? Is so they keep you in ignorance in the convent. Let me tell you. Where I go start?’

‘No Theo. I know. You know I know. I mean, I mean what is it all about, in the end?’

‘In the end, Miss? Well the prospect of an ally victory is still in the balance. Decided, if you listen to the rhetoric of Mr Churchill. But you know what leaders are. That is their role in history. You read Henry the Fifth? Think of Napoleon.’

‘Henry the Fifth? Napoleon?’

‘Shakespeare. “Once more unto the breach dear friends…” Father Angel make me learn all that speech when I study for Exhibition Class.’

‘Oh yes, Theo, excellent! But no, Theo, all of this is wonderful and shows how good you are at geography and history. But mine is another kind of question.’

‘A more fundamental kind of question? Father Angel does call them kind of question me-ta-phy-si-cal question. You mean, ul-ti-mate-ly, what is the meaning of all of this in the end? Father Angel, well as you know, is a priest, so he bound to have a religious kind of twist to thing. He does call that an es-cha-ta-lo-gi-cal question. A question that does concern the last things.’

‘Does he, did he?’ Madeleine’s eyes grew larger with her listening, as she heard the boy. She wanted to still him, to still his
mind, so that she could feel his feelings. She wished she could stop the stories.

‘Vocabulary. He was always extending my vocabulary.’

‘I can see that.’ Madeleine smiled. Whatever Theo had done, he changed her mood from one of despair into one of wistful amusement, by his astonishing optimism. At least, that is how it seemed to her then, in the boy’s room, the afternoon light piercing through the cracks in the wooden walls.

‘Theo. This is enough of geography and history for one day. I’ve always wanted to learn how to fish. I want you to teach me this afternoon, before the light goes.’

Madeleine watched Theo intently, as he went back and forth, gathering up all his fishing tackle from the shed under the verandah steps, bringing it to the jetty and laying it out on the hot boards. He was more than a young boy now, he was growing fast into a young man. There was still a kind of innocence about him though, in his face, in his voice, she thought, which kept him as a young boy. But his body was now filling out, the muscles on his arms and legs, his back as he bent and stretched, his strong neck, the definite line of his jaw.

She watched him in his torn khaki pants, bare back in the sun, barefoot always. Had he ever worn shoes? His reddish hair glinted in the light, his green eyes smiled, as he darted a look at her, as he put down the fishing rods.

He noticed her looking at him.

She turned to look over her shoulder, as he put the hooks and lines down on the boards behind her. Everything he did, he did neatly, with precise movements. He ordered the world around him. She noticed that, this morning, in his room. She noticed it in the kitchen at lunch. She smiled at his manners. She looked at him differently.

This afternoon, something happened to her. He allowed her to see things differently.

Before he had taken her up to his room, just standing around in the kitchen, relaxing, eating salt fish
buljol
and
Crix
, he was different, he was growing fast. ‘Come, try some pepper sauce.’

Now, in the full glare of the afternoon there was something altogether changed about him.

‘Theo,’ she called to him from the edge of the jetty where she
was sitting, dangling her legs over the side, watching her reflection curl in the rusty water. ‘Can I give you a hand with some of that?’

He stopped in his tracks and looked back at her. ‘No thanks. Is okay. I’ve everything now, I think.’

His manners! She smiled. His charm. But what was that other thing about him? She could not put her finger on it.

Madeleine shaded her eyes. The bay was full of activity this afternoon. There were barges and tugs going back and forth from the base in Sancta Trinidad through the archipelago.

‘
Oui
boy! That’s a mine sweeper. You see she, just now, she just gone round the point, any moment now you go see she through the pass at La Tinta. Watch so. Watch, watch!’ Theo was pointing and jumping up and down excitedly. ‘There she is!’

Indeed they saw the huge apparition of the mine-sweeper, its grey hulk, passing through the Boca Grande.

‘A few last things, and then we ready,’ he said.

Madeleine noticed how suddenly, watching the boat, Theo had been transformed back again into the small boy, then as suddenly, the efficient organiser of the fishing lesson. She looked over to the convent and to Saint Damian’s, worlds that she was now excluded from. She felt like a hermit in the hills with her patients, her wretched of this earth. Mother Superior had found a way to exclude her without actually throwing her out, using her for the most dangerous work.

Something in her grieved for how things had been, her simple desire for her vocation to be a nursing sister in the missions, with her fellow sisters about her. That was the bit she missed, a meaning to her life, which was made of service. Yet, now, her service was extreme with the patients in the hills.

She did not miss the convent, the communal prayers, the petty rules, the cruel actions of some of the embittered ones. Nor did she miss the authoritarianism of her superiors, their neglect, their narrow mindedness and lack of sympathy; their world ruled by the idea of sin.

Not even their hate, with the persistent production of the yellow stars, seemed as terrible as everything else. She had only pity for that lonely mind, those embroidering fingers. Before she
left she had come upon Sister Hildegard, her lap full of the yellow stars. She had simply stared at her covering up her cruel creations. She did not even have the words. The nun had looked so absurd, so foolish, caught in the act.

But it had only needed an opportunity for these views, long ago held by her father, and resisted by herself and her mother, to come to the surface, and be the language which she possessed, in order to understand what had happened to her.

They rose in waves to consume her with a rage and a hatred of something that paraded itself with so much power, so many self-righteous opinions of what was good and what was evil, with its bishops and archbishops and priests, lording over people. She had borne the brunt of that. The thought that the Archbishop had wanted to detain her in a house for wayward girls, filled her with almost uncontrollable rage.

She did not miss any of that. There were her once a week visits back to the convent to get a clean habit, to go through the pretence, as she saw it, of still being a sister. But she missed the life of the hospital, the children, the old people, her part in trying to find a cure, to make them well again, to give them back dignity. Some of that she had regained when Vincent brought her microscope to the house.

She looked over into the sun, crinkling the sea in Chac Chac Bay. Then she turned to Theo, making everything ready to teach her how to fish. She did not know how much longer she could take the banishment to the hills, and then this other life, here with Vincent and Theo. She was torn by the duplicity.

Suddenly, she missed Sister Rita. They had been real sisters, looking out for one another. She had experienced a glimpse of what community life sometimes had been, what friendship in the novitiate had been, which had given her the strength to leave her father and come out to the missions.

What had her life come to? Now, she had time to think of Vincent, living in his house most nights. She had never been as close as this to any man, apart from her father. She thought now, maybe, that was one point to her mother’s death, strangely, to prepare her for this, to be living with Vincent, a man like her father,
a dedicated doctor, a man almost like a priest in his service to Theo, to Ti-Jean, to his sons, as she saw them, and to all the patients young and old. In the midst of all of that, she had noticed his eyes, his hands and the way in which he talked to her and touched her at her elbow from the beginning, opening the door with his charm. And then how she had, without very much resistance, felt she was falling in love with him, and letting her vocation as a nun slip away.

‘Madeleine.’ She did not hear Theo at first, calling her to start the fishing lesson. A
batimamzelle
zinged close to the water, the dragon fly, glinting in the sun and absorbing her. ‘Madeleine.’ Theo persisted with his concerned voice. The sun drugged her. There was numbness in her fingers which was worrying her. She put it out of her mind.

Madeleine turned abruptly. ‘Theo. Where was I?’

‘I don’t know.’ He laughed. ‘You seem to be far away. I call you, but you ent hear me. So I keep calling. That does happen to me sometimes. Doctor does call me, and then I don’t hear, and then, he does say, Theo where were you? Always funny when he say that, where were you? When I standing right there in front of him.’

‘Where did
you
go to, Theo?’

Theo looked at her. At first, there were questions, many questions in his face as he frowned. Then she saw that other thing which had been puzzling her about him, that something else she could not put her finger on. Now, she saw it. It was a look of utter sadness. An extreme sense of abandonment.

She had seen many children who were truly abandoned among her patients, and there was an obvious reason for their plight. But here was Theo, with his confidence and his brightness. It seemed to contradict this other look which came over his face. It was a paradoxical face.

But, as he knelt close to her, she was tempted to run her fingers down his spine. She wanted to stroke the pain she imagined had first accompanied this wound, stroke out the pain from it, with her
gentle fingers, where it blistered in the sun. Then her words came out without a thought. She immediately regretted them, almost at the same time as she heard their utterance. ‘Theo, what happened to your back?’

He looked up from his hooks and lines. ‘Bait. I forget the bait. Jonah bring fresh bait this morning when he come for Doctor. Some nice little bait. Funny, eh? They does call that bait, Jonah. I’ve it in the ice box, otherwise it does stink in the hot sun. I go go and get it now.’

He had escaped her, running along the hot boards of the jetty, two, three steps at a time, up to the verandah and disappearing into the gloom of the house. Madeleine knew that she had overstepped the mark, ventured where she should not have gone. It was a mistake. She would have to leave it. She would not even apologise. That would be to bring it up again, to place him in a dilemma, pressuring him.

Theo seemed to be ages up at the house, then he waved from the kitchen window, ‘Coming.’ Madeleine waved back.

She got up and stretched. What kind of life was this? Fishing in the afternoon? She watched the barges and tugs. A lone seaplane circled and then landed like a giant pelican in Perruquier Bay.

Then it seemed, like in no time, Theo was back with the bait, smiling and encouraging her to join him, kneeling before his fishing rods, lines and hooks.

‘Right. We go begin. You ever fish before?’

‘Yes, of course. I’ve fished in the Seine. But that’s different, yes?’

‘You fish with seine. I don’t believe that.’

‘On the Seine, yes? You know the Seine?’

For a moment Theo was lost. And then he looked embarrassed that he had made a mistake like that, with his knowledge from Father Angel. He should not have made a mistake like that. Then he burst out laughing at himself. ‘Seine, seine. Maybe that’s where the word come from, or, maybe, that’s why the river call so, because it like a seine, a net full of fish.’

‘Maybe. There are stories in words,’ Madeleine said.

‘Ety-mo-lo-gy.’

‘Yes, derivations.’

‘Yes, I see the Seine which run through Paris.’

‘Yes. That’s it.’

‘That’s a big river,
oui
!’ Theo was excited.

‘Long and wide.’

‘Tell me about it. I mean I know it. You know I know things I learn. But I never see it, like you. You have first-hand experience.’

‘You know things that have happened to you too,’ Madeleine added.

‘Tell me.’ Theo had a way of ignoring inferences he did not want to dwell on. He had a way of pressing ahead with the conversation in the direction that he wanted it to go. ‘Tell me how it is when you fish on the Seine.’

Theo sat back on his heels, fixing with his fingers the finickety business of threading lines and baiting hooks, ready to start his lesson. He settled back to hear Madeleine’s story, every now and then bending forward to cut his bait with his penknife. She turned to face him more directly, pulling her legs up from dangling over the jetty, pulling her knees up, embracing them, tucking in her skirts, resting her chin on her knees, gazing into her past, but also into Theo’s face.

‘What should I tell you?’

‘Tell me a fishing story on the Seine.’

‘Well,’ Madeleine smiled at Theo, suddenly made self-conscious, by his precise request. ‘Well, where should I start?’

‘At the beginning?’ Theo giggled.

‘Not a bad place to start. Yes. No, where was I?’

They both laughed remembering their previous joke.

‘Our house had a path that led down to the Seine. It was a stone path, and it led from a door at the side of the house, between the garden beds to a wrought-iron gate. I remember it well. When you opened the gate it led down some stone steps to a landing stage on the river. There was a key to the gate, a big, cold iron key which hung inside the side door of the house. I remember now that over the gate was a tree. It was a tree that I loved very much. I could see it from the window of my bedroom.’

Madeleine looked up to see how Theo was taking her story. Her eyes met his staring at her, as he listened intently, as they both sat
on the still jetty in the hot afternoon sun.

‘What kind of tree?’ Theo asked.

‘What?’

‘The name of the tree?’

‘The name? I don’t think you have this tree here. But yes, the flowers are tropical looking. Magnolia.’

‘Magnolia. That’s a wonderful name.’

‘They flowered in the spring. Their flowers are like big cups, big fleshy cups, white, almost cream. There are different colours, purple as well. But this one was a white Magnolia, and it bloomed in the spring over the gate to the river. When it bloomed, it was heavy and weighed down with lots and lots of these cups of cream. It made me so happy to see it.

‘When it came to the end of its bloom, the white petals fell over the garden path, and onto the steps to the landing stage, and then they were blown onto the river. I remember them floating down the river, white Magnolia petals.’

‘Well, so that’s the setting. A story needs a setting. But what about the fishing?’

‘Well, first of all, I’ll tell you a joke. Near to the street that we lived on is the narrowest street in Paris. It’s called
Rue du Chat qui Pêche.’

‘Oui.
The cat that does fish. That’s funny, because, of course, cats like to eat fish.’

‘Absolument!
Your French is very good.’

‘Un peu.’
Theo smiled.

‘Well, I never saw a cat fishing, but there were lots of fishermen along the banks of the Seine. And on a Saturday afternoon, because I did not have school then, my father would take me to the
riverbank
under the landing stage, and there we would throw out a line.’

‘Throw out a line. Line fishing?’

‘I don’t know. A rod. A rod with a line. It looked a bit like that.’ Madeleine pointed to one of Theo’s rods lying across the boards of the jetty.

‘And what you use for bait.’

‘Maggots.’

Theo looked puzzled.

‘Little worms.’

‘Worms, yes, we does use worm up Pepper Hill when we fishing in the river for
wabean.
Bread too. We does use stale bread.’