Though this was not something which worried me to distraction every waking hour of my life, I was ready with the answer. It began: ‘
From Vanity Fair to The Shoes of the Fisherman
, from Flaubert to Steinbeck, the novel has always been–’ and ended, four paragraphs later, with: ‘–in a stronger position than ever.’ It was a good answer, and I hadn’t used it for more than four months, and never in Barbados; it came out as smooth as hot chocolate sauce. The young man scribbled industriously, while I watched the waves bending the sunlight as they broke over the edge of the reef, fifty yards away. Bliss, literary bliss … The reporter crossed his question off the little list he had prepared for the interview, and then propounded the last one: ‘What do you think of the prospects of a new West Indian Federation?’
I began again: ‘I think it’s a very hopeful sign that–’ and then I thought:
What the hell
, and broke off. We had had a good hour of this, and an hour, though no hardship, was enough; it would make a full half-page interview anyway, topped off by a photograph of the distinguished author gazing seawards, manuscript in hand, cigar in mouth, creative gleam in eye. Therefore, instead of pontificating, I answered: ‘I honestly don’t know. I’ve only been here three days. I’d prefer to wait a little longer before giving an opinion,’ and then stood up.
It was dismissive, but not, I hoped, too brusquely so. He had taken a lot of trouble with his questions, which were a vast improvement on those of his average American and British counterpart, who didn’t read books, not even their titles, and only wanted to know how much money one had made in the current financial year. And (I thought, as he took his courteous leave) when I had said: ‘I honestly don’t know,’ it was, though an evasion, somewhere near the truth. I didn’t know the answer, aside from guesswork and cliché, and basically I didn’t care. Barbados, God bless it, bred this sort of indefensible neutrality.
It was in the air, the climate of disengagement. Every morning, when I awoke, it was to one of those dawns which only a very clever painter, and no photograph, could ever reproduce; lucid as water itself, fresh as virginity, soft as the feathers on the wings of sleep. One woke to this pale, yellow-green light with quick pleasure, instant awareness, and clear-headed in spite of all past and current excesses. The new day beckoned, and could only be answered by a matching readiness.
I would dress, scruffily and swiftly, and pour a drink, and go out to meet it.
Pouring a drink was no blasphemy. Once you were installed in the West Indies, rum did not count as alcohol. A whisky-and-soda before breakfast might have meant all sorts of deplorable things; neat rum at dawn was nothing, nothing at all. Already I would have felt eccentric without it.
My cabin was on the shoreline itself, a few feet from high-water mark and a prudent distance from the main core of the hotel, a sophisticated log-palace dedicated to the belief that North American travellers wanted nothing so much as to feel that they had never left home, and were prepared to pay $50 per person per day to achieve this immobility. I spent the minimum of time there, and the maximum in the sun, my back turned to plush civilisation, my face to the sea.
The beach, though freshly manicured each morning and evening, was still for beachcombers; and wandering along it, as I did every day at first light, was a boyhood exploration. It was never a rich harvest; there were no pieces-of-eight, no doubloons or jewelled pectorals, no overspill from Captain Morgan’s vanished cache of loot.
But there were other things, trophies of a minor chase; tiny scurrying crabs, and flying fish which had strayed off course, and strange shapes of driftwood, and beautiful shells, called Auroras – double-winged, delicate, shading from orange to palest blue or pink; and fingers of coral, and the bleached skeletons of gulls, and fronded weed-tresses, and sand wrought by the grindstone of a million years, as fine and white as sea salt itself.
I would plod a slow, meandering, barefoot course, or bend to look at new treasures, or stand still, staring over the blue-green lagoon to the deep water beyond, listening to the waves growling as they washed across the reef. On the far horizon, the sails of the flying-fish fleet dipped and swung and held taut against the North-East Trades … It was at such moments of trance, in this rum-soaked, sun-blessed, sea-circled paradise, that there was a temptation to contract-out forever; to cast off and sail – by island schooner, by dug-out canoe, by catamaran, by raft – anyhow and anywhere, as long as it was far enough away; to let the lousy argumentative world go by, and disappear without trace, and emerge five years later with the best book ever written about
bêche-de-mer
or Gulf Stream flotsam; with a skin the colour of rubbed mahogany, with no answers to any questions except to say: ‘It was heaven’.
But heaven, I knew, must wait, perhaps forever; it did not sit with reality, with top-heavy bank loans, with books about crowded people; it could not enthrone Erwin Orwin. And now, here was the argumentative world again, on my own salty doorstep – a small oared boat which had been fishing close to the reef, and was now hauled up in shallow water, surrounded by people like quarrelsome gulls, market slatterns arguing the price of fish … I would leave them chaffering over their prey, and wander home again, and breakfast off pawpaw and fried dolphin and slightly-spiked coffee, under the eaves of my own humble cabin – rented at tourist-trap rates, panelled in satinwood, vacuumed not less than once every morning.
Already I had loafed for three days, and it was nearly time to work, and I was ready for it.
Three days had been enough to take the temperature of the island, and sample its offerings, and appreciate the difference between the life of the sidewalk and the life of sand between the toes. The resident queers were wearing white shorts that year, which possibly gave a new hazard to the inquiry: ‘Tennis, anyone?’ and the steel bands were banging out a devout offering called ‘
Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring Bossa Nova
’ – a translation which had excited a certain amount of local protest, but was no more offensive than the close-harmony monks and hit-parade nuns of our northern paradise.
I had lunch with a doctor friend at the elegant, old-style Barbados Club, and picked up the essential gossip. (On a small island, the grapevine on who-was-sleeping-with-whom was, if anything, more hotly debated than on Lower Broadway.) I had a swim at the Yacht Club, and paid other regulation visits: to Sam Lord’s Castle, to the Garrison Savannah racecourse, to the oddly-named Bathsheba beaches, to the thriving inner harbour, patrolled by policemen straight out of
HMS Pinafore
, and still called the Careenage.
I ate Inside Soup, and
calalou
, and grilled flying fish, and pepper-pot stew. With very little urging, I sang a perennial calypso favourite,
‘Back to Back
,
Belly to Belly
,’ at a nightclub where, to destroy the edge of pleasure, they cooked the steaks in rancid coconut oil. I donated a transcribed first page of
Ex Afrika
to the local museum.
I bought a tartan dinner jacket, made of Madras silk, unwearable except among sympathetic friends, behind closed doors, south of the tropic line.
I visited, on impulse, a small grave.
It was high on a southern hillside, overlooking the sea; as I pushed open the creaking gate of the cemetery, and walked the criss-cross pathways of stubbly grass, and came at last upon the miniature plot, all that now remained of ‘
Timothy
,
beloved only child of Jonathan and Katherine Steele
,
aged 1 year and 6 months
’, my mind went quickly back.
The coral headstone was green-moulded already, and shabby, and weathered by sun and wind; I remembered when it had been shining new – and when there had been no headstone at all, but only a small gash in the ground, and a pile of fresh earth waiting to fill this fatal hollow.
I remembered Kate, on that bright and terrible morning, turning to bury her face against my shoulder, in hopeless grief; and my own face, still and frozen, in a mask only wearable because a man did not cry. That had been Timothy, beloved only child of privilege and protection, tripped and tumbled just as he had learned to run, brought to his first and last stillness by enteric, which only killed poor people in dirty houses – and there was another memory there, of Kate crying: ‘No one dies from that anymore!’ in frantic disbelief.
But within an hour of her saying it, someone
had
died; and within a day, for tropical reasons, the someone was buried where I now stood.
At that moment of remembrance, I missed Kate, with astonishing sharpness, with a lonely hunger. Later that night, lonely still, I thought of writing to her, to say – I did not quite know what. But the mood passed. I had lived alone a long time, in the old days, and I could encompass it still. And the trigger of this weak relapse was three years rusted … I put a different piece of paper in the typewriter, and went willingly to work.
Once started, it ran smoothly and steadily, because I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and could thus control the wandering child. A week for the skeleton, two weeks for the lightly-fleshed form, and I was well on the way to the complete ‘rough outline’ for which Erwin Orwin had asked, as a starter. I enjoyed the writing; when I re-read bits of it, they made me laugh quite a lot, though I could not guarantee that this was a good sign.
I grew very sunburnt, from working on my patio at the water’s edge, and a little sleek round the middle, and a little dreamlike, on and off, from the steady intake of rum and pressed limes. People – passers-by, hotel guests, local spies – bothered me at first, and then they gave up. The word went round that I was working, and furious if disturbed; and though people often regarded this as a social challenge, a long-haired myth to be disproved at all costs, I managed in the end to make my point.
When the customary Canadian business blockhead – florid, complacent, stupid as the ox behind his eyes – plunked himself down in my spare chair, with the words: ‘I wish I could afford to just sit and scribble, ha ha ha!’ and was sent away with a metaphorical flea in his ear and a literal kick in the pants, my isolation was pretty well established.
The pile of typescript grew; now the pages were numbered. Presently I could sit back, and clasp my hands behind my head, and stretch my legs and wiggle my toes, and think:
This meal is really on the fire
. I had reached the stage when I was rewriting and touching up, rather than conjuring magic spellings out of the warm Barbados air.
Then I became aware, as a man does when he has time to wiggle his toes, of a very beautiful girl, a resident of my district.
She was not staying at the hotel, but farther down the beach, at a lesser establishment which catered to younger and slimmer people; and she was there all the time. The good news was a matter of gradual release. First, I came to realise that there was a long-distance, pretty girl around; then, on a morning paddle along the edge of the water, I saw her closer to, and found that she was far more than pretty. At much the same time, she became aware of me, and before long we had established a mutual observation society. About her, I learned a little more each day, and I imagined that she was doing the same as I.
She spent her time, for the most part, alone, either reading or sunbathing. She sat under a shabby beach umbrella, with a towel, a mesh-bag full of oddments, and sometimes a drink; but under the umbrella the girl was far from shabby. She was tall, and not too slim; she had beautiful legs; she was generously breasted, and her hips – for want of a better word – were as full and rounded as a strong man could wish for.
Sometimes she wore dark glasses, and robbed the world of a pair of large, decorative eyes. She had very fair hair – model’s hair, done in a different way on different days; sometimes like a beehive, sometimes like a shower-cap, sometimes close to the shape of her head, which was very good. I liked that version best. She wore a sunsuit, red-and-white striped; or a plain black swimsuit; and once a bikini, designed, I would have said, for a smaller frame. She swam well, and walked as a tall girl should. She did not have to tell me that she knew I was there. We both understood all about that.
She would look at me, and I would look at her, and we then would agree to give our eyes a rest. Once she smiled, but it was not really a smile for me. So far, it was just a smile, though with a teasing quality, more than enough to trouble the blood, if ever the blood were willing. She really was lovely.
In fact, she was a rare beauty, in this Barbados wasteland of over-stuffed tourist femininity, and of haggard resident harpies, run out of England for God-knew-what brand of public harlotry in the middle thirties. It was a pleasure to know that she was on deck, to be sure that the beach would be adorned, for most of the daylight hours, by this handsome and glowing creature. I could always just see her, far away, from my working platform; and during the last week, when I was working less, I saw her more and more.
She was beautiful, and mostly alone. I did not really want to do anything about it, and then suddenly I did.
It was 6 p.m. The sun was dropping down, the sky fading from pale blue to pale green; the coral reef, bared by low tide, had fallen silent. Anticipating dusk, the bats were already weaving overhead, trying out their radar. In more sophisticated climes, it was the hour of the assignation; of the quickly swallowed cocktail, the very late nooners or early, top-of-the-bedspread lovemaking; the confederate world of
cinq-à-sept
. In Barbados, for various reasons, the transition from work to play was not so sharply divided; we had no offices to leave early, no patient wives to keep waiting. But there was still no doubt that these twilight hours intensified the playful urge. Perhaps, in spite of an island simplicity, we were still city boys at heart.
It was 6 p.m. I had done enough work for that day, and was restless for something else; I did not even specially want another drink. The girl, I could see, was still at her post. It was high time for us to meet.