No Truce with Time Read online

  NO TRUCE WITH TIME

  By

  ALEC WAUGH

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  1

  It was a quarter to twelve on a morning in early January in the small British West Indian island of El Santo. A sultry sun streamed through a clouded sky. Into the side of an empty road a small two-seater had been drawn. A man in the early twenties stood beside it. His forehead was damp with sweat; his hands were clenched; his eyes were glowering.

  “Don’t you understand? Haven’t you yet grasped what I’m telling you? I’ve fallen head over heels in love with you,” he said.

  A youngish woman, prettyish in a brown-haired, brown-eyed way, stared at him, astounded. It was without exception the most astonishing moment of her life: not merely because of its incongruity, the difference in age and in position between Barclay Ashe, this boy in the early twenties, and herself, married and nearly thirty, who as the wife of Gerald Montague enjoyed in the island life a priority of status over women many years her senior: nor again because of its inappropriateness, that this unheralded confession should have been blurted out on a main unshaded road under a midday sun : not even because of its unexpectedness, that never having thought in that way of him she had never imagined that he could entertain any such thoughts of her. It was none of these things, it was not even the sum of these things : it was the manifest and desperate earnestness of this unexpected, inappropriate, incongruous outburst that had made the situation so astonishing. What on earth do I do now? Do I laugh it off? she thought.

  “But, Barclay …”

  He would not let her speak. He interrupted her.

  “It’s silly, yes of course it is. Nothing can come of it. I know that. I tried not to tell you: tried to keep it back, but I couldn’t. It was too strong. It wasn’t fair to myself. I had to tell you. Now that I have, well … you’ll be able to understand me now. Come, let’s go.”

  He turned, opened the car door for her, and without another word drove her the three miles back to her hillside bungalow. When she asked him if he would like a drink, he shook his head.

  “You’ll be going to the club tonight? I shan’t. But I’ll be leaving a book there for you. I’ll say that you asked to borrow it. There’ll be a note inside.”

  Well! she thought.

  It was astonishing. The last thing she had foreseen. She had neither false modesty nor false vanity. She was, and she knew she was, a woman that men found attractive. And she had admittedly during the last fortnight been constantly in Barclay’s company. But even so, no friendship could have been less sentimental in its origin and in its conduct.

  Because the Colonial Office in Whitehall had decided to exploit the tourist possibilities of one of the smaller islands, and was prepared as a preliminary step to subsidize a hotel that would satisfy a transatlantic standard of comfort and modernity, Barclay Ashe, whose father was chairman of the Caribbean Shipping Line, had been sent to report upon El Santo’s suitability. The island, naturally anxious to present its claims in the most advantageous light, had deputized a committee to see that no aspect of its qualifications was overlooked, and Gerald Montague, whose family had lived there for two hundred years, had been chosen as its chairman.

  “The great thing,” he had insisted, “is not to make the young man feels he’s being got at. Everything must be informal. And I suggest that a young man is naturally susceptible to the charm of places that he sees in the company of a pretty woman. Gentlemen, it is up to our wives and daughters.”

  With readiness, but without excitement, Mary Montague had accepted her assignment. During her six years in the West Indies she had met many “visiting firemen.” As I thought, was her mental comment as Barclay was brought up on the dock to be introduced.

  He was very much the kind of young man she had expected; a typical ex-public schoolboy, clean-shaven, well set up, with a ruddy complexion that contrasted healthily with the drained sallow or brick-red of the average resident. A very ordinary young man, but ordinary in a pleasant way, she had decided later. His voice had a good-natured ring, he had easy manners. She liked the way he dressed, in double-breasted, holland-coloured Palm Beach suits. He wore amusing ties; with the day of the week woven into the satin fabric, in French and English: mercredi, Wednesday; vendredi, Friday.... He had reversed calf shoes that buckled instead of tied.

  He had enthusiasm too : a genuine zest for living. And he was ambitious : a thing that very few people in El Santo were.

  His father, who was largely responsible for its development, had been mayor of Falborough twice, had been indeed for so long a respected figure in that genteel South Coast town that few remembered the obscure Northerner who forty-five years earlier had come south to gamble in real estate. There was no need for him to gamble now. He could afford to consolidate his gains. “The ball’s at your feet,” he would tell his son. “You can kick it where you choose.”

  “And I’m going to kick it somewhere to some purpose,” Barclay vowed, as he drove Mary round the high hill roads, exploring the island’s possibilities. “I’m not just going to be a rich man’s son. I’m going to go steadily for a year or so : to feel my way. But I’m going somewhere, I know that.”

  A transfiguring light would come into his eyes when he discussed his future. In repose his features were unexceptional; of the kind that you would never notice in street or restaurant. But when his interest was held, he ceased to be the conventionally educated, conventionally employed young man who had come to the West Indies to establish a reputation, to put so many pennies in his father’s pocket. He would seem at such moments to be not so much himself, not so much Barclay Ashe, as a symbol of some kind, a portent. Of what? she would ask herself. Of youth’s setting out on a crusade? In a sense perhaps.

  She had enjoyed his company. She had enjoyed showing him the island. She had presumed that he was grateful for her help. For in spite of his ambitiousness, in spite of his capacity for enthusiasm, he was a shy young man. He only talked with any freedom in a duologue. At the club, he would sit silent at her side, waiting for the chance to turn to her with a “What I’ve always felt …” that would detach them from the general talk. She had assumed herself to be his best friend in the island. But nothing in his behaviour, nothing in his manner had suggested that he was even attracted by her. She could not have been less prepared for the outburst that had come that morning.

  It had come so abruptly too. He had driven her to the Morne Rouge Valley, a winding river of sugar-cane that ended three miles north of Rodney, the island’s capital, in a grove of coconuts. They had stood on a kind of plateau, some three hundred feet above the sea, with the hills behind them rising in a succession of peaks to the towering summit of the Morne. In the distance they could see the curve of the Carenage with its schooners and cargo-boats at anchor. In the bay beyond, a square-sailed fishing-boat was tacking. In the distance the superstructure of a liner on its way from St. Lucia to Martinique shone white across the Windward Cha
nnel. Behind them a line of women strode like a frieze along the mountain road, with baskets of bananas on their heads; their blouses of red and yellow were vivid splashes of colour against the deep green of the bush.

  It was not one of those majestic panoramas that take your breath away, that seem to say, “Here at last the great architect of the universe has chosen to do his stuff.” But it had intimacy; a typicality of West Indian life. “This is our life,” it seemed to say. “It is of this that our life is made: long valleys of sugar-cane, sunlight and a fertile soil; with schooners to trade between the islands and cargo-boats to bear our produce to the world; with peasant proprietors carrying their bananas to the towns, to exchange them there for the fish that from the high mountain roads they can see their cousins catching in the bay below. Sitting here quietly for a day, you could see the whole life of the island pass before you.”

  They had stood in silence there.

  “This,” he said, “is where we’re going to build that hotel.”

  It was the first indication he had made of his decision to accept El Santo. I’ll be the first with the news, she thought.

  “So you have decided, then?”

  He nodded.

  “The boys will be excited over this,” she said.

  He laughed.

  “I hope they know who they have to thank for it.”

  As she raised her eyebrows he nodded in confirmation.

  “I’m glad I’ve been such an efficient saleswoman,” she said.

  He laughed at that: scornfully.

  “Saleswoman indeed. That’s not the reason. I didn’t decide on El Santo because of that. I decided on El Santo because you lived here.”

  “That’s very flattering.”

  “Flattering!”

  He stared at her, almost angrily: then suddenly he flushed. His eyes glowered and he clenched his fists.

  “Flattering! Don’t you understand? Haven’t you yet grasped what I’m telling you, that I’ve fallen in love, head over heels in love with you?”

  His voice was shaking, the flush of his cheeks deepened. He meant it, there was no doubt of that. It was the absolute certainty that he meant it that made the moment so astonishing. If he had not meant it, the outburst could have never come at such a moment. It was one thing to make tender speeches when the moment and the mood combined—a moonlit balcony and the sound of music, a car in the shadow of a palm with water lapping against sand—it was easy to invoke high heaven at such moments. But to stammer, barely articulate, at midday, on a dusty road, under a heavy sun. You had to be serious for that.

  Her eyes softened as she remembered how his voice had trembled, how his hands had clenched. What a child he was ! How old was he? Twenty-three? Only six years younger than herself. He might be thirty years younger, in experience. To blurt out his confession like a schoolboy, to hurry home to write that letter that would explain and justify it. How juvenile it was. I must be kind to him, very kind, she thought, I mustn’t hurt his feelings. He’s too nice not to be treated nicely.

  2

  When Mary had come to the West Indies six years earlier, as a bride, she had found it difficult to answer her sisters’ demand for a detailed description of her day “hour by hour from the moment you get up”; difficult, that is to say, to supply an answer that would satisfy their preconceived idea of “life near the Equator.”

  Her sisters, younger than herself by two and four years respectively, had never ̇been out of England. Their father, a city clerk, supported their family of five in a semi-detached villa in Wimbledon on a yearly salary of five hundred pounds. A bi-weekly visit to the cinema and a fortnight’s holiday at the seaside had marked the limit of their entertainment. To them it had seemed a supreme adventure that their sister should marry somebody “from foreign parts.”

  They had met Gerald Montague during one of their summer holidays at Brighton. He was large, heavily built, and over forty. But they had not thought of him as fat and middle-aged. He had cut, on the contrary, a dashing figure as he strolled along the front, in white flannel trousers, white buckskin shoes, a blue double-breasted coat, and a panama hat with a bright club ribbon jauntily tilted over his right eye. His dark moustache was twisted and his cheeks were tanned. He was exuberant and gay. He was always laughing. He was generous and spent money freely. He had landed only a week before, he told them. He had been to school in England. For a time he had run a flat in London. But when the slump had come, he had returned to manage his estates himself. He had not been to England for six years, and he was resolved to spend the economies of six years in half as many months.

  Her sisters listened entranced to his stories of El Santo. To them the tropics were a single place; an amalgam of Kipling and Maugham stories, White Cargo and South Sea films: the dust and heat of the bazaars, opium dens and temple bells; white men wearing dinner-jackets in the jungle, beachcombers drinking themselves to death, guitars and moonlight and girls with flowers in their hair.

  “You’ll have a marvellous time,” they assured her. “You’ll have hundreds of black boys to wait on you. You’ll be carried over rivers in a chair. I wonder how many elephants you’ll have. I wonder what the Sultan will be like.”

  Remembering those reveries, she had found it difficult to describe her life in the West Indies in such a way that they would not feel disappointed. She could describe the beauty of the island; the unbelievable colour of it; the flowers, the natives’ clothes, the sky. She had not believed such a blue was possible. She could describe her house; a long bungalow on the hill, with a view over Rodney from its verandah. She could describe the work on the estates; the hacking up of a field of arrowroot, the digging for the roots in the upturned soil, the long process of washing and of straining, the endless splash of water along cool, bare galleries, till the white starch was ready to be dried.

  She could describe the working of the cocoa; the morning roll-call at the Boucan, the labourers laughing and chattering as the overseer called their names, the men with their long knives snipping down the pods, the women shelling them, while the old women moved slowly between the trees collecting the black cocoa, the seeds being trampled for “polish ” in the vast circular caldrons by strong-thighed, sweating natives with trousers rolled above their knees.

  She could describe how charming everyone had been to her : how much everyone had made of her during those first weeks at Rodney. She had been afraid, not very, but a little, that at first she might not be welcomed, that she would be resented for her appropriation of the town’s favourite bachelor. “I thought you might think me an intruder “she was to confess when she had found her feet. Her confession was greeted with a laugh. “You can’t think what a relief a new face is,” they said, “and such a pretty one.”

  She could describe, too, the fun of being “someone.” Not so much financially. Though Gerald had a number of irons in the fire—plantations scattered about the island, a large general store, the agency for General Motors and for a couple of shipping lines—he was no more than reasonably well off. He laughed when she had told him that at first she had taken him for a millionaire. “Don’t you know the old West Indian saying, ‘ The Creole goes on leave with plenty of money and no clothes and comes back with no money and a well-stocked wardrobe’?” They were in fact only barely solvent. But in a place like El Santo where everyone was overdrawn, where half the estates were bankrupt, with their London agents only delaying out of friendliness the foreclosure of their mortgages, money did not matter provided one belonged to a certain set. And the first Montagues to settle in El Santo had sailed north with La Fayette to fight the English.

  Gerald was one of the chief figures in the island. As a member of the legislative council, he was entitled to be addressed on envelopes as “The Hon.” He was the Administrator’s unofficial adviser, and when the Governor of the Windward Islands came over from Grenada for one of his periodic visits, it was to Gerald that he turned first for information. Gerald was president of the club; on the selec
tion committee of the cricket team; was captain of the golf club, and for three years in succession the winner of the Open Shield. He was one of the first to be consulted when any new project was under consideration. And Mary found that as his wife she was approached as the best medium for the furthering of favours by men to whom she would have expected to find herself talking with the greatest deference. It surprised her and it flattered her. She occupied a position not only as someone new, not only as a bride. In her own rights, she was a person. Gerald laughed when she told him that. “A person, indeed. You’re the whole world to me.”

  He would look at her with shining eyes when he came back from his office before tea to take her down to the club for golf or tennis. She would be rested and refreshed from her siesta. He would stand on the steps of the verandah staring at her.

  “My word, I’m lucky,” he would say.

  “I never knew it was possible to be so happy,” she told her mother.

  For in addition to everything else she loved the life: the open-air breakfasts on the verandah in her Chinese dressing-gown : the lazy mornings after Gerald had left her for his office, lying out on a long chair with a magazine across her lap, watching the lights change across the water.

  Remembering her mother’s complaints about “that girl…,” the nursery adage, “A woman’s work is never done,” she had felt nervous about the responsibilities of housekeeping. But there were no responsibilities of that kind in a place like Rodney. A West Indian establishment ran itself; casually, untidily, unpunctually, but with ultimate effect. By half-past eight Gerald would have left the bungalow, but time never dragged. A single short story in a magazine would be a morning’s reading; the writing of a four-page letter a “serious tackling of my mail.” A couple of telephone calls would be a “talking into that mouthpiece an entire morning!” Life in that heavy heat was geared down to the pace of a slow-motion film; nine o’clock became half-past ten. And at eleven it was time to bathe or go down into the town, to choose a novel from the library, to match a trimming, to gossip at the Lido café— over the probable composition of the next dinner party at G.H.; the interest that the new police officer was taking in the Attorney-General’s daughter; the stand-offishness of the Administrator’s wife; the tourist on the last liner who had arrived with letters of introduction to half the island; Susan’s attempt to stop Frank from drinking. There was no lack of material for gossip in a community where everyone knew everybody else. She never found herself glancing at her watch wondering how soon she could leave with decency. It was always with surprise that she heard one or other of the women say, “Quarter-past twelve. My word, but I must be getting back to lunch.”