Authors: Lawrence Scott
He had just recently attended to her as her doctor, lifting her skirts above her ankle. But now, suddenly, he was looking at her differently. Had it been the shared intensity of their earlier experience, finding those abandoned patients?
The afternoon sunlight was a halo behind her. ‘Sister?’ he exclaimed. She was both holy-looking and ravishing.
‘Doctor?’
She reached out and touched his hand. She had not done that
before. He saw that her eyes were full of tears. Something was the matter. They had not completed their chat about her father and her worries. He had not listened to the news that day. The BBC’s World Service was their life line. She was seeking reassurances. ‘I’m sorry, no news, not today, Sister.’
She began again. ‘So far away. Yet, so close.’ She pressed her hands on her heart.
‘We must wait for letters.’
‘I think news will become even more difficult now than ever to get.’
‘We’ll see. My brother, Bernard, he’s over there. Somewhere in England. My mother has not heard much. We don’t know what will happen.’
‘Yes, I must not think just of myself.’
‘We’ve got our work. We’re lucky,’ he said reflectively.
‘Yes.’
She held onto his left hand. He put his right one over hers. They stood alone in the clinic.
The last couple of weeks had been too intense. He put it down to that.
They both seemed shocked at the same time, as they looked around them, standing alone. ‘Here we are,’ Vincent said nervously. The realisation of what was afoot in the world was creeping closer, staggering them, as they stood together and looked out of the window and saw the fragile huts, the rusting galvanise roofs of the hospital and the stores down by the jetty. It was a strange encampment.
There was the congregation of patients under the almond tree.
A group of girls were skipping on the verandah. The two holding the rope had one leg each. One balanced herself on the bannister of the verandah, the other held onto the door. The girl who was skipping had no arms below her elbows. Her face was pure joy. She screamed with laughter.
‘There’s the new girl, Christiana. How pretty she is. How long will it last? You say she’s not got the disease.’ Sister Thérèse folded her arms away into her sleeves.
Vincent watched the children playing. ‘We don’t know.’
‘I must return to Theo.’ Vincent interrupted their meditation. ‘Beatrice will want to be leaving.’
‘Theo, Lover of God. God has come to live with you, Doctor.’
‘Just a boy with a lot of needs.’
Vincent headed for the jetty. He turned. Sister Thérèse was still standing at the door of the clinic. He waved. She waved back.
As the pirogue rounded the point into the next bay, Vincent did not feel his usual elation on arriving home. He had grown fond of the place very quickly. After a day at the hospital, he was more than delighted for the peace of the empty house, the jetty, fishing on his own. The pink and white house wavered and fractured, reflected in the yellow and lilac water. But because Vincent anticipated his meeting with Theo, the house appeared sinister, holding the boy’s presence. There was no sign of him or Beatrice.
As they drew close to the jetty, a figure looked out of the upstairs window, quickly vanishing, then reappearing on the verandah downstairs. Vincent waved. But Theo stood and stared without response, then disappeared.
‘Okay man, see you tomorrow.’
‘Watch yourself, Doc. You sure you don’t want me to stay?’ Jonah had picked up Vincent’s anxiety about the boy.
‘No, Jonah. Is fine.’
The two men waved goodbye. Vincent pushed the pirogue away from the jetty.
Theo was not on the verandah, or in the drawing room. The kitchen was cleared from the night before. The wares, pots and pans washed. There was no Beatrice either. ‘Beatrice.’ There was silence. The house was dead quiet.
The stairs creaked as they always did when he climbed to the bedrooms. Theo’s bedroom was empty. Vincent went into his own room and found that the bed had been made. The dressing table had been tidied. The floors had been swept. ‘Theo!’ he called again. ‘Theo!’ There was no reply.
As Vincent descended the stairs, he heard a creak, which was not one of the usual creaks, the music of the house, the tune it played
as he walked about on the pitch pine floors, its expansions in the heat of the day and the contractions in the cool of evening.
As he stood listening, the sea breeze banged the bathroom window. It unhooked the latch on the kitchen door and entered. It got wild. He had to dash about closing the windows which faced the sea. The waves rose and rushed the small beach at the side of the jetty, sucked back out by the tide.
A percussion of pots and pans falling off the shelves in the kitchen alarmed him. Loose sheets of galvanise banged on the roof. The wind whistled through cracks in doors and windows.
Vincent called, ‘Theo,’ and listened again to the particular creak near him. It came from under the stairs. When he opened the door, it was dark and smelt of mildew. Vincent could not see anything unusual, at first. But when he bent down, to look into the furthest recesses under the slope of the stairs, he discovered the crouching boy in the gloom. He was bare backed and wore only his short khaki pants. He crouched with his back to Vincent, his head between his legs.
‘Theo. Come, boy. You don’t want to be sitting in here, alone.’ The boy did not move. Vincent touched his bare back and read the same story he had read earlier. ‘Come Theo, I can’t leave you here. Let’s go out and catch some nice sea breeze. What about fishing? We could go on the jetty and fish.’
Theo did not speak, but he allowed the doctor to coax him out of his hiding place into the glare of the verandah, into the astonishment of the setting sun. The wind had died down.
Why had the boy been hiding, when only a moment before he had seen him on the verandah? He wanted the doctor to come and find him, a small child’s hide and seek.
That evening Vincent and Theo fished together from the end of the jetty, but the fish were not biting. They only got two
crapeau
fish. They threw them back into the water. But, with a last try, Theo landed a small red fish. As he unhooked his catch, Vincent thought he saw a smile, not quite, but a flicker in the glow of the kerosene lamp.
Vincent made hot cocoa for them both. They went to bed early
after fried fish and bake. Sleep seemed the best way out of their wordless communications. The windows at the front of the house facing the bay let in the moonlight.
Vincent woke to the voices as insistent as the sea.
M
Y EYES
get big big. My ears nearly drop off with Mama talk, hot from big house. I on top the bed jumping up and down. Mama brisk brisk, taking off she dress, standing in front the window in she white silky petticoat, Mistress give she. She drop it on the floor. It look like a pool of milk for Curly, the cat, to lap up.
Mama caress she self in panty and brassiere. Mama gaze out the window. Breeze rustle the sapodilla tree. It go quiet. Fowl peck the soft dirt under the window. Now and then, cluck cluck.
Stop that jumping. All the coconut fibre busting out, already. Who go bring mattress for Mama? Who go make feather pillow? Look at the bed. Straighten up the counterpane.
Mama gaze. I look up at she. She gaze out the window. Gaze at the blue hills. The sweet breeze move the curtains.
Mama talking talking all the time, talking, talking, talking.
No one go stop Mister, walking in Esperance. Or, stop Mistress and the children take a train into town from Pond Road Station, to stand on the station and wait for a train in the afternoon.
That is what Mama say. Mama say it like, she is Mister. Like she is Mistress self.
It was like many voices all at once. Vincent was frightened by the strange lucidity.
A
ND THEN
, Emelda say, No one going come with hoe and spade and big stick to march up into Mister yard. No one going come with iron and rock stone to pelt this house. She raise she self up. Big house on the hill. This is a house that hide secret in turret room. Is a house that have cellar for the best wines bring from Burgundy and Beaujolais. I see the label them. Special room with special aquarium for crab, for the special crab and
callaoo
soup that every Monsieur Marineaux like to suck.
Trouble go come, Emelda say, with a look in she face which say
that she know more than Mister. She feel more than Mister. Emelda know more than Mister. All know, all who in the yard, all who meet under Chen shop, that these people who Mister call
niggers
and
coolies
on the march from Fyzabad to San Fernando, go reach town with their noise and demand. They go out do Mr A. A. Cipriani in town which still echo with the 1919 calypso.
Gal, who you voting for?
We don’t want Major Rust to make bassa bassa here.
Cipriani
We don’t want no Englishman, we want Trinidadian
Cipriani.
One good apple in a rotten barrel. Captain A. A.! Mister say he gone England and come back with Labourite ideology. Now he walk barefoot with
coolie
and
nigger
. He own people self watch him, and know that this kind of thing dangerous. Even if they feel is from inside their own house he come out. They have him down as a madman.
Like they have Butler down like a madman too.
But they bound to think he mad. Buzz!
Mama boy read the news, cut out the picture and writing from
The Gazette
.
Mama, you see Butler! They take out he picture in San Fernando bandstand, Harris Promenade. She boy read like an Exhibition Class boy, who never go in San Fernando, or move from Pepper Hill self, but plenty time get a promise to go town to ride tram and trolley bus.
Child what nonsense you reading, and messing up the house with all this cut up newspaper? Is that they does teach you in Exhibition Class?
All the time Mama talk, she look over her shoulder and pretend to read the news. Mama can’t read.
‘Theo. Stop now.’ The boy was in a sweat, as if wakened from a fevered sleep, thrashing around, gesticulating, inhabiting now this voice, now that, himself a character in his own story. Vincent understood Father Dominic using exorcism. But of course it had not worked. How could it?
‘Come, Theo, let’s get you to bed.’
The fluency of this night-time tale, this calypso, as the boy had called it in the nights before, was as if it were written down. Indeed, it did go here and there and then come back to the main road, as Father Dominic had said it would.
What was the drama between Mister and the boy’s Mama? How had he imbibed the Labour riots of the last few years so clearly? Butler and Cipriani, political figures entered as principal players of his drama. Vincent marvelled at this orchestration of voices, this recall, this living history.
But the engine which drove this story was fuelled by something else. Why was he so full of it? Why was he mute in the day, talkative at night? For Theo, to come again tonight, and perch at the end of his bed, startled Vincent.
Early the next morning, the fishermen came close into the bay. Vincent heard them under his window, with bottle and spoon, and hoarse rum-stricken voices, reach their
do re me
with:
‘What does the Austrian corporal expect to do
His plan for invasion must eventually
End in the ruin and destruction of Germany.’
‘You feel time could stay so sweet, Doc?’ Jonah asked, beaming. The sweet season of Christmas, with its soft breezes, brought 1938 to an end. Jonah strummed his cuatro, playing
parang
. ‘
Maria
Maria Maria, Maria Magdalena.’
Singh and Vincent joined in with their own more raucous song.
‘Drink a rum and a puncha creama, drink a rum, on a Christmas
morning
,’ beating bottle and spoon, trying to sink their differences with the spirit of the season and the rum.
From Saint Damian’s came the sound of bamboo bussing. ‘Young fellas having a good time,’ Singh relished the cannon shots echoing across Chac Chac Bay.
They all wondered if time could stay so sweet.
Across the gulf, the ships in the harbour off Porta España blew their hooters and sirens, announcing the New Year of 1939. They could hear the oil tankers as far down south as Pointe-à-Pierre. Vincent called for a toast. He, Jonah and Singh drank in the New Year, Jonah sprinkling a libation of rum on the ground for the ancestral spirits, before filling their glasses. ‘You have to remember those who gone before.’
Singh called out, ‘Theo, come boy, come and have a nip for the New Year.’ The boy sat unmoving at the end of the jetty. He did not know Singh like he knew Jonah.
Vincent rested his hand on Singh’s arm, restraining his invitation to the boy. ‘He’ll come in his own time.’
‘Is the rum, Doctor,’ Singh explained.
The men drank and talked, while the boy stayed out till well past midnight, watching the flares from the fireworks in the Porta España harbour.
Let the boy have his freedom, Vincent thought. He wished for new things for him in this new year. He had not as yet opened his present. Remembering his own childhood, Vincent was playing daddy. He wished the boy had opened it, to find the new fishing rod. But he had left it, from a week ago, at the bottom of his bed, still wrapped in the red crepe paper.
Across the bay, the convent lights were on for midnight-mass. Sister Thérèse was again in Vincent’s thoughts, her hand on his, his on hers.
‘Things looking peaceful and happy tonight, eh! But it not going to stay so, for long,’ Singh said. The light was the colour of the rum they were drinking.
‘I feel so too.’ Jonah joined in, pouring himself another drink and striding out onto the verandah. His shadow filled the walls as he moved, a kind of colossus, overwhelming and enveloping them in his open arms, as he spoke and declaimed, ‘I feel so too! I feel so too! It not going to stay so. It can’t stay so, when the things that going on, going on.’
Vincent listened to the two men, who had been at Saint Damian’s longer than himself and had a closer feel for the patients, when they were not being respectful to
Docta
.
The three men were a map and a history of these islands. But, they could not be described just by their ancestry. They were who they were in themselves. Despite all the sympathy for his patients, his socialism, his membership of the Fabian Society when he was a student, Vincent wondered at times how Jonah, and particularly Singh, who had already voiced his distrust, viewed him. How did they see these colonial divisions, these histories of skin? He wondered whether they thought he belonged here. His family went back to 1840 on the island.
On returning from university, he had not re-entered the world of the cocoa hills, the houses with the turret rooms, among the tall teak and the
immortelle
. He had not been down to the Union Club, on Porta España’s Plaza de La Marina, with the sons of the white, linen-suited planters, standing on the balcony above the square,
looking down onto the promenade, eyeing up the young mulatto girls strolling down Almond Walk under their parasols.
He was not going to the Country Club, the old de Boissiere estate house, Elyseé, a heaven in the imaginations of its founders, on Saturday nights to drink and dance, or play tennis in the afternoons. No, he had not dropped in at Casuals and Tranquillity, or the Sainte Claire Club, on the Maraval, for the
fêtes
and balls.
‘How you going to meet a nice young girl, darling?’ his mother would ask with prayers in her eyes, with rosary beads entangling her fingers, with novenas in her thoughts, and whispered ejaculations to Saint Jude, or whoever was the patron saint of pure love and marriage for hopeless cases. ‘You know is better to come home and find one of our own girls from one of the good families, than come home with an English girl, not knowing what kind of people she has come from,’ was how his mother had put it in letters received by him in London.
When he visited her, on his days off now from his work at Saint Damian’s, she invariably had some suggestion, some Chantal or Nicole, some little Corsican butterfly, who had just disembarked from a ship of the French Line and fluttered ashore, back from finishing school in France; some countess even, from the Parisian cousins; some de Noirmont, some de Pompignon, some d’Origny, some Boisluisant, some Lahens.
His mother had a list. Increasingly, he did not go to Porta España, or up to the house at Versailles, on his days off, to have lunch, to meet aunts who smelt of
vertivert
and held his chin in their arthritic fingers, as if he were a boy of twelve, and been naughty for staying away so long. ‘Vincent,
le petit garçon
.’
After a priest in the family, he was the next best thing, a doctor. If not the consecrated fingers to bring Christ down upon their altars, at least a physician, to keep them in good health, to do some good for
these
people. They were always referred to in that way,
these
people, separate, and ultimately unsaveable, kind of diseased.
The look in his aunts’ eyes, when he talked about Saint Damian’s, was of thoughts that one day he would be canonised, become Saint Damian himself. ‘Don’t know how you do it, Vincent,’ they would say. ‘But, darling boy, for how long? Surely
soon, you’ll want a practice of your own?’
They leapt ahead. His whole life was planned out on the verandah before lunch. ‘Come, come now darling have some nice
callaloo
and crab.’
‘We can work together, Doc.’ Jonah drew Vincent from his reverie. ‘Singh, what you say, boy?’ Jonah was the optimist.
‘I say it depend on we working together. That’s where the hope of the people rest. But…’
‘But, what Singh? What you mean, but?’ Jonah interrupted.
‘Wait nuh, man, let me talk. I know where
I
stand.’
‘What? Like you don’t know where we stand?’
‘Who is we, Jonah?’ Singh came back.
‘We, you and me and the doctor. Doc, what you say?’
Vincent winked at Jonah. Still there was tension between him and Singh.
‘Jonah, you and me come out of a village.’ Singh continued. ‘I see you. I definitely see you. And you, you see an Indian boy. You know me? I think so. But the doctor here?’
‘Singh?’ Vincent questioned Singh’s tone.
‘Let me finish, Doctor Metivier.’
Vincent sipped his rum and walked to the edge of the verandah and stared at Theo at the end of the jetty. What would the new year bring for the boy?
He turned back to listen to Singh. The rum was going to their heads. But, Singh was right.
There had been one or two Indian fellas and negro boys, like his
pardner
Jean la Borde from Arima, who boarded across the road from the college, before Vincent went away. Unlike Bernard, his brother, he had close friends among them. But, in the afternoons after school, they went their different ways home, into different kinds of homes. He saw the houses on the side of roads, down in a gully, perched on a hillock, when he passed in his father’s car. They lived in barrack rooms on the estate board houses, which were skeletons of their hoped-for selves, ribs of wood through which he caught glimpses of interiors, shadows of the people of the
house, with the light leaking through at night from the kerosene lamps. They were half-finished houses, for lives which, he now began to feel, were half-lived lives. But who was he to say? They might be full lives, lived against all odds! Maybe he had lived half a life.
These men had emerged from these houses. Their journey to their ideas had started there. They had responded to a politics forged in the fire of poverty and history. They had been nurtured in that university of hunger, as Singh liked to lecture. They had gone on the hunger marches out of the cane fields and oilfields, from South to North.
Now, in this work here, there was an acceptance of him, because he was a doctor. He had something crucial to offer. But he could not do his job without them. An unconscious alliance of sorts was being formed. Though they were also suspicious, particularly Singh. Doctor Escalier had been the villain in the past. They did not automatically trust a doctor.
So, as the rum worked, the talk got better between the three men.
‘Singh, how you get into this business boy?’ Vincent was more relaxed. Singh, normally reticent in conversation, saving his words for the platform under the almond tree, got up and walked out to the edge of the verandah.
‘How you mean, Doctor?’ He spoke with his back to the two other men, looking into the darkness and the flicker of the
flambeau
next to Theo fishing on the jetty.
They listened to the sea breathing.
‘Well, I know very little about you,’ Vincent answered.
Singh turned back, looked at Jonah and Vincent and laughed. ‘You want to hear story? Jonah is the one with the stories. He have big history and thing from his grandfather and grandmother, who was a big
Shango
woman in Moruga. His father was a stick fighter in the
gayelle
. That was his arena.’
‘Don’t worry with he, Doc. He have story. Singh know well the story that driving him. Tell him the story, nah, man. The white man need to hear this story.’ Jonah laughed and winked at Singh, and then looked at Vincent, with his smile.
The rum was working. It was Old Year’s night. Vincent, again, noticed the hunched back of Theo on the jetty, intent upon his fishing. The
flambeau
bowed in the breeze.
The nuns’ Compline chants came across the silent waters of the bay. Their sombre night prayers were accompanied by the antiphons of the waves. The face of Sister Thérèse, cocooned in white, was there in Vincent’s mind.
‘This island is full of stories.’ Vincent lit a cigarette. ‘Now is a night for ghost stories.’
‘Not them kind of story Doc, not them kind of story, not the story about the nun who make baby with a fisherman and then drown she self. They say they does see she walking on the jetty at La Chapelle Bay, crying for she baby. Not them kind of story. Is not ghost, Doc. Is spirits. Yes, is spirits,
oui
. Hmm! Take another drink, Doc.’ Jonah handed the rum bottle to Vincent. ‘Tell him, Singh. Tell him the story of how your grandfather reach all the way here into them barrack room. Right up so, in Golconda on the way to Barackpore. How he reach there. How you come out of there. Tell him that story.’
‘The doctor know them kind of thing already, Jonah. What you talking about tonight? Like the rum really get inside your head tonight, boy. You want me to tell this story, so that you could tell them story about Africa.’
‘I go tell my story when I ready. Is your turn. Talk, man. I don’t need you to tell the doctor anything, so I could talk about Africa. When you look out across the Atlantic ocean, you not meeting any land till you reach Africa. You know that, you know that, man.’ Jonah knocked back his nip of rum. ‘Africa!’
Vincent turned to Singh. ‘In one way, I know the story Singh, but in another way, I know nothing.’ Vincent looked at Singh intently as he said this. Then he winked at Jonah.
‘You never wonder about the people in the barrack room on your father estate?’
‘Of course I have. But. You know…’
‘But what? You watch from the outside. You sit at at your table and you hear man beating woman. You hear baby cry. You hear someone get chop with a cutlass. Man beat he wife, he chop she
and she bawl. You hear that? You is a child. Them is noise, noise you can’t properly understand, but it terrify you. It terrify you, what you hear coming out of the one room barrack room in the gully below the white bungalow, with the palms swaying with its plumes. Royal palms! Hmm! Royal palms! I watch that dream from inside the barrack room. I watch you. I watch all you good.’
‘You hear the story, Doc. Now he telling story. Take a next another rum, nuh, Singh? It go sweeten you mouth.’
‘Doctor, don’t worry with Jonah, nuh. Tell your story Jonah.’
‘Man, you only now start. You not even start.’ Jonah laughed.
‘I want to hear it as you tell it Singh. Take a smoke,’ Vincent encouraged.
Singh smiled. The rising anger and mockery slipped from his tone now. ‘It start in Calcutta. It end in Golconda. See how they call the place, making an India of
Chinitat
. It cross the
kalapani
.’
‘
Chinintat, kalapani
?’ Jonah echoed and beamed. ‘You hear words boss! That is words, pappy! Is how he does mix them medicine.’
‘Is so the ancestors first pronounce Trinidad. They cross the Black Water, the passage from Calcutta. Right so,’ Singh pointed to the Boca Grande, ‘We would’ve see she, the Fatel Rozack, coming through the Boca Grande, in the early morning.’ Then Singh pointed across the bay into the gulf. ‘Nelson Island, where them Jews in quarantine now, is there self, they drop the first load from Calcutta. Disinfect, delouse, this lot for Reform, that one for Retrench, another lot for Harmony Hall, hear the name. That one for this sugar estate, this one for the other, and so on. Right on these little islands, these things happen.’
‘You hear music, Doc. Hear that with a
tassa
drum coming out of Caroni. All of we have a calypso to sing. Indian have a calypso to sing.’
‘Jonah, you
mamaguying
me, boy. You making joke of me,’ Singh complained.
‘Come, Singh, tell your story, don’t bother with Jonah.’ Vincent was getting into the spirit of the men. Of course, they were all fuelled by the spirit of the bottle.