No Truce with Time Read online

  Everything seemed new today.

  In the calm of the bay, Barclay shut off his engine. There was no tide; no current; the launch did not even sway.

  She sighed as she rose to join him at the wheel.

  “I’ve a feeling that I’m looking at a place I’ve never seen before,” she said.

  “That’s what I should be thinking if I were here alone.”

  Through his finger-tips an electric current tingled.

  “I’ve got a bottle of champagne in the frigidaire. Don’t you think we ought to christen her?”

  His hand still upon her arm, he piloted her down the narrow companion-way. It was the minutest of minute cabins : barely the size of a sleeper on an English train. A narrow table was fitted against the wall opposite a divan bunk : a single porthole almost filled the wall: there was scarcely room for two people to stand up. His hand still upon her arm, he turned her round to him. His eyes were glowing.

  “If you only knew how I’ve been longing for this minute.”

  It was a full half-hour before he took the bottle from the frigidaire.

  “This seems a very minor christening,” he said.

  7

  It was a truant time that started after that; a time that had the quality of a dream. She could not believe that she was actually conducting an intrigue in full view of half the island. Its very brazenness comprised half its charm. The whole setting was so romantic: the white sand and palm trees and the rough thatched cottages; the anchoring of the launch; or the mere leaving of it to rock in a tideless estuary; the tenderness in Barclay’s voice, the contrast between that tenderness and the fierce urgency of his hands as they caressed her shoulders; the contrast between that urgency and the patience, the infinite finesse with which he wooed her: with later, in the aftermath of love, the lying among cushions on the narrow bunk, her senses soothed, her nerves relaxed, with the sunlight moving through the porthole across the wall as the launch rocked gently against its anchor: with the sky through the hatch above her, a pale filtered blue; with Barclay at her side, his fingers slowly stroking in gratitude, in adoration, the arm that hung limply towards the floor; to lie there talking, in the utter peace that follows love.

  In a way this talking afterwards was the happiest element in the whole adventure. Now that she was committed definitely to an intrigue, that the episode of carnival was seen as a first step, not as an isolated experience to be remembered but referred to never, it amused her to discuss with him step by step the stages by which they had come to this acceptance.

  It was the first time she had been able to discuss things in this way. She had felt shy with Gerald, but Barclay was a contemporary, a fellow-conspirator. There was nothing she could not say to him, nothing she could not ask him. There were so many things, the ice once broken, that she found herself curious to know : about men and how men felt; the things that attracted them to different women. In the light of this new knowledge of herself, she was curious about her friends. Had any one of them known hours such as these, she wondered.

  “Some of them must. Of course they must. Though heaven knows how they managed it. It’s not everyone that has a launch. Suppose you hadn’t been able to afford a launch, what would you have done?”

  “That was a point that was just beginning to worry me when the idea of a launch occurred to me.”

  “You don’t mean to say that’s why you bought the launch?”

  “I had to find some place where I could talk to you alone.”

  “You mean you bought it entirely on my account?”

  “Entirely? Let’s say nine-tenths.”

  There was a roguish twinkle in his eyes that pleased her. Whether nine-tenths was an exaggeration or an understatement, his refusal to enter into a hundred per cent explanation made it all a much cosier transaction.

  “You seem to have planned things pretty carefully,” she said.

  “I hadn’t planned Mardi Gras.”

  And that too pleased her. She liked to think of that first step as something completely unpremeditated : for him, as it was for her, an exquisite surprise.

  “And to think of my discussing that launch with you in all innocence. How you must have laughed.”

  “It made me smile.”

  “Oh, darling, what fun we have; being able to talk about it all like this.”

  She would wonder sometimes what would have happened if she had not been on the island.

  “Who do you think you’d have fallen in love with, Mavis Trevor?”

  “I don’t suppose I’d had fallen in love at all.”

  “Nonsense, of course you would. With palm trees and a moon and scented flowers,.”

  “I didn’t fall in love with a landscape. I fell in love with you.”

  “Did you, darling? That’s sweet of you to say so. But it helped. I wonder whom you would have fallen for. I don’t think that Miss Hard wick’s quite your tea.”

  They roared together over that. Miss Hardwick, a spinster of five and forty autumns, was the island’s highbrow: she supervised the library and the dramatic club : she contributed topical verses to the El Santo Record: she was at work on a history of the island, which would prove that Nelson had refitted before Trafalgar not in Antigua as had been popularly believed, but at Vieux Port. She was plump and squat, and her sing-song West Indian accent was like a dreary dirge. The idea of Miss Hardwick in love was irresistibly ridiculous.

  “But, seriously, who would you have fallen for?”

  “I don’t know. June Langley, possibly.”

  “June Langley!”

  Incredulously Mary repeated it. June Langley was over thirty. She was thin, pale-skinned, with large saucer-like eyes and lustreless, thin hair. She hardly ever talked, and smoked incessantly. It was a miracle to Mary how June could have found anyone to marry her: quite an attractive husband too.

  “June Langley. You can’t mean that washed out, pop-eyed creature.”

  “That’s not how I’d describe her.”

  “No, but even so …”

  He laughed at her astonishment.

  “It’s women like that who, when they do wake up, make your Hollywood glamour girls seem like characters in a nursery novelette.”

  “But June …”

  Mary stared, still incredulous. Then burst out laughing.

  “What fun it’ll be in five years’ time, when you come and ask my advice about some new affair.”

  “I refuse to think of a time when I’m not in love with you.”

  “It’ll come though, darling.’’

  “It needn’t. Anyhow, I don’t want to think of it.”

  “Don’t you? I rather do. It’ll be such fun being friends, when all this is over. We shall be such friends too, because of this.”

  “You couldn’t talk like that if you were in love. If you were in love with me, the way that I am with you, you couldn’t bear to look ahead : unless the future were to be the present going on. If it were’nt that way, you’d refuse to face it. You couldn’t talk about five years hence. And being friends. Before you can reach that point, something has to die.”

  He paused. He frowned.

  “If only we could be alone, really alone together. Then I could make you love me.”

  She smiled at the seriousness with which he spoke. It was silly of him to be so serious, she thought.

  Not that she took his seriousness very seriously. For in spite of his seriousness, he had made no change in the general scheme of his career. His plans for the hotel were nearly completed now. He would have in a few weeks’ time to cross to Barbados to confer with one of the chiefs of the shipping line. A little later he would go to New York for a final conference. He discussed these plans with as much animation as he had on his first arrival. To her, speaking of love, he used the big words of love,“eternity,” “the real thing,” “nothing else in the world mattering ”; but it did not occur to him to alter his life so that this “one thing in the world that mattered “could become a permanent pa
rt of it

  It amused her and pleased her too. It made him more many-sided; more of a man: that he could be so wholeheartedly in love, and yet so wholeheartedly concentrated on his work; a work that meant something too, a work that was creative that was not just a sitting in an office, letting the climate and the soil work for you. He was a real man all right. How lucky for her that he was. It would have been terrible if he had been one of those weak-kneed men who went flabby in middle age, at whom one would look afterwards with the thought, how could I have?

  One afternoon, on her return to the Carenage, she found her maid on the wharf in high alarm. Gerald had been taken with a fit of choking. He had broken a blood-vessel in his throat. He had been brought back to the bungalow half-insensible. The maid had been on the point of hiring a sloop to come out in search of her mistress.

  When Mary next met Barclay she raised her eyebrows significantly.

  “It would have looked fine, wouldn’t it, if Jeanette had found us in the cabin.”

  “I shouldn’t have minded.”

  “What!”

  “There’d have been a scandal and you’d have had to marry me.”

  “What a thing to say!”

  “Is it? When one’s in love. Do you think I’m content with these snatched-at hours?”

  “But, darling, such a scandal. You as the guest of the island, almost in an official capacity, and me the wife of the chief councillor. It would be the end of the hotel all right. And as for you.... They’d never send you anywhere again.”

  “That wouldn’t matter if I had you.”

  “You wouldn’t though. Gerald’s a Catholic. He’d not divorce me.”

  “You could change your name, then, by deed-poll.”

  “You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you?”

  “Isn’t that what one usually does when one falls in love.”

  “Idiot.”

  “Do you really mean that if I were free you’d want to marry me?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Though I’m six years older than you, though a woman is supposed to be at least five years wounger?”

  “Age doesn’t matter when one loves.”

  “It’s lucky for you that I’m not free ”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re not in love with me. If you were, you couldn’t talk like that.”

  Nor would he listen when she reminded him that she could never have a child : that a child was something that sooner or later every man wanted. What was a home without a nursery? What was a career if there were no children to carry on the name that that career had honoured? He shook his head impatiently when she told him that.

  “That’s the world’s way of marrying. That wouldn’t be mine. I’d marry for one person’s sake. Because I wanted that one person : because she was indispensable to me : because I was only half-alive without her. That’s what you could be to me. That’s why, if you were free, I’d be pestering you with proposals.”

  Her eyes softened as she listened. Would she, if she were free, be able to resist the quiver in his voice, the fire in his eyes? She ought to, she knew that. It would be fatal for him; tied to a woman six years older than himself; a woman who could not bear him children. It would be unfair to him, criminally unfair. She had always criticized those women who married men much younger than themselves, who ruined the lives of those men. “I can’t understand how they can do it.” she had said. But she had said that before she had seen that fire in his young eyes, heard the quiver in a pleading voice. Hearing it, seeing it, she wondered if she would have had the strength if the temptation had been actually presented. It’s lucky I’m not free, she thought.

  And how right, she added, was the man who had wished for his son that he should know first love under conditions where marriage was impossible. Young men needed to be protected against their idealism. He’s lucky, luckier than he knows, she thought.

  “It’s only because you’ve never been in love that you can talk like that,” he said. “If only I could teach you. And I could teach you, if I had you to myself. If you were in Barbados, say, when I was. As you could be, you know, if you really wanted.”

  With a fond smile, she listened. Barbados? Well, why shouldn’t she?

  8

  Barbados, the first port of call for West Indian travellers, is as an introduction to the tropics a disappointment. It has none of the high-mountained splendour of Trinidad, the luxurious foliage of Colombo. With its nickname of “Little England “it seems at a first glance another Isle of Wight; less foreign than Alderney or Guernsey. The negroes diving for pennies from their boats seem as out of place, as inaproriate, as the white soles of their feet against the ebony of their ankles. It takes time to appreciate its particular and peculiar charm, its “lived-in ” atmosphere.

  Anne Kennerley pouted when Mary insisted that the six days of a shopping expedition could be spent more entertainingly there than in Trinidad.

  Anne was little and lithe, with long blonde hair. A Londoner, in the later twenties, she had married one of the island’s less prosperous planters in a panic-stricken realization that most of her friends were married, that “blondes go off,” that it was better to be married unsatisfactorily than not married at all, and that if one has to marry unsatisfactorily, it is better to be married abroad where the propinquity of one’s old friends cannot remind one that one has accepted a second-best. For two years she had filled her role with exemplary discretion. Six months back she had presented her husband with an heir. She was in the spirit for a fling. It was natural that she should pout peevishly at the prospect of staging that fling in an English rather than an international atmosphere.

  “We’d have much more fun in Trinidad,” she urged.

  But Mary smiled.

  “We’ll find fun all right. Wait till you’ve spent a morning at the Aquatic.”

  It was at the Aquatic that she had made her date with Barclay. “Some time between eleven and twelve on the first morning,” she had told him.

  At the sight of him at the end of the short wide pier in bathing-trunks and a wide-brimmed panama her nerves gave an unexpected jump.

  It was a real adventure this.

  His back was turned to her. But she gave no sign of recognition as she strolled slowly at Anne’s side; she waited for Anne to call attention to his presence, with an angrily complained “The last thing one wants when one comes away is to meet the people that one knows at home.”

  “We needn’t see him.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  “He’s bound to be very busy.”

  “Is he? I suppose he is. That’s something. Are you going to talk to him? I’m not. I’ll just say good-morning, then go on. You’ll find me by the diving-board at the steps.”

  Her welcome of Barclay was less a welcome than a dismissal.

  “What a surprise to see you! How much longer are you staying? A week. We’ll be here six days, so perhaps we’ll meet each other. Though I suppose that you’ll be as busy in your way as we’ll be in ours.”

  As she walked away, Mary turned to Barclay with a smile.

  “And that’s that, isn’t it?”

  He did not answer. His eyes were hungry.

  “At last,” he said. “At last.”

  Mary was a bare twenty minutes absent, but by the time she arrived Anne was alone no longer. Two youngish men in bathing-wraps were on either side of her. Quick work, thought Mary.

  She smiled as she saw how quick work it was.

  They were Americans, on a short vacation. They had come down on one of the Lady Boats. They were rejoining their ship on its return from George Town. They were strong and healthy-looking; with short wiry hair, and very white and even teeth. Their good looks were of the nondescript type that one associates with a clothes advertisement. They had boyishly high-spirits; laughing at everything that was said, whether a joke was meant or not. They had been in Barbados for a week and had started to get bored, they said. At least they ha
d been till the last ten minutes. It was too bad that Mrs.Kennerley was dining out that night. They might have danced. But even so, they could go bathing. “You’ll be back by eleven, we’ll have a car waiting for you at the Marine.”

  Mary chuckled to herself. I didn’t make any mistake about Anne, she thought.

  How right she had been to bring her. What better alibi could she have? On their return there would be scarcely a reference to Barclay’s presence at Barbados. Nothing but jokes and giggles about the two American college boys and moonlight parties.

  It was indeed a different Anne from the Mrs. Kennerley who graciously enquired at the club after the health of the Attorney-General’s mother, who perched that evening on Mary’s bed. Her eyes were bright. Her voice had risen.

  “It’s fun, isn’t it, having met those boys? You don’t mind coming out now, do you? It’s such a relief, isn’t it, to meet new people; not to be supervised all the time. One couldn’t do anything like this in Rodney.”

  She watched Mary cautiously as she talked. Trying to size me up, thought Mary, to find out how far she can go with me, how far I want to go, how far we can trust each other. I’ve got to play her game.

  “Didn’t I tell you,” she said, “that we’d find fun here?”

  It was after one. In her high-collared Chinese dressing-gown, Mary lay back in a long wicker chair in the corner of the balcony. It was cool after the long day’s heat; quiet after the long day’s noise. There was no shouting from the beach; no flashing of cars along the road. From the garden rose the rich sweet scent of jasmin. A moon three-quarters full sent a channel of silver-gold across the sea. There was no wind. The lighted superstructure of an anchored liner was cast in unruffled reflection on the bay. On the horizon were the lights of ships.

  Her nerves were taut. A minute or two more, and she would hear behind her the soft click of a turning handle.