No Truce with Time Page 8

  “Dear one, it’s a whole week … Dearest …”

  The seven words still stared there. It was hopeless. She was in no mood for letters. She picked up the paper, crumpled it, tossed it into the basket. No, It was no use. Later, there would be a time for letters. Brief letters, at each port of his return : “I miss you. Come back quickly “notes—notes whose brevity might frighten, might worry him. He might feel that she was not really missing him. He might return anxious and perplexed. Yes : but how quickly, how amply he would be recompensed by this new self that would be waiting for him. She chuckled, picturing him raised upon an elbow, looking down at her, astonishment and adoration in his eyes. “But, darling, I had no idea you could be like this,” she could hear him saying.

  12

  She had wondered if he would look any different.

  He did not; not at all.

  She recognized him when the ship was a full half-mile out. when the faces along the taffrail were a white blur under wide-brimmed hats : that loose droop of the shoulders, the grace, the sense of power—it was unmistakable. How had she ever thought him ordinary?

  He looked just the same.

  He had lost a little weight. Yes, and he had lost his tan. But thinness and pale cheeks suited him. He looked better when he did not look too well. He was wearing a suit she did not recognize: a cream-grey silky cotton, with a striped tie to pick out the faint green striping in the suit. A handkerchief with faint green spots was in his pocket. He was wearing a new pair of white crepe-soled shoes. It was the kind of get-up that you could see advertised in Esquire. Why hadn’t he looked like that the first time she had seen him? If he had, they would not have wasted all those weeks. Or had he looked like that, and she had not noticed? Was he one of those conventional Englishmen that you had to know before you realized that he wasn’t turned out to pattern?

  She watched him as he shepherded an American couple—a father and daughter—through the Customs. To that American girl, no doubt, he was just another Englishman : good-looking, in an obvious way; well-dressed, with an ease of manner based on an assumption of superiority; the kind of man who opened doors for you, grappled with porters, got luggage through the Customs, but preferred to spend his evenings in a smoking-room with men.

  Was that how that girl thought of him? Most probably it was. It was how most of the women in El Santo thought of him. It was how she herself had thought of him till the morning they had driven out to the site of the new hotel. Would Mrs. Trevor be so anxious for him as a son-in-law if she knew what he was really like? What a shock it would be to her. What a shock it would be to all of them if they could see this decorous young Englishman transported into the wild-eyed satyr that she knew.

  She chuckled to herself as she watched him that evening at the club. There was a large crowd there : there always was on boat days. But tonight was an occasion. The Americans whom Barclay had guided through the Customs were persons apparently of considerable consequence. “What! Jimmy Bruce!” Gerald had exclaimed. “You’ve never heard of him! Not heard of old J. B. One of the biggest men in cotton. It’s certainly a smart move of young Barclay’s, getting him down here. If only we can get him interested in the place!”

  It was a thought, clearly, that had occurred to many others. The island was very definitely on parade for his inspection. There was a light in every eye, an eagerness in every voice, as though each in his own way was pleading the island’s case. “Look how gay we are. Isn’t this the kind of place where tourists would enjoy themselves: little and intimate; no need to put on show? ”

  Barclay was the compère of the performance. Half the drinks were of his ordering. It was he who brought up one by one the various notabilities to be introduced. It was like royalty at a garden party, with the American finding for each in turn the appropriate remark. “Of course, yes, I’ve heard so much about you from our young friend here. I’m very anxious to see that collection of old French maps.” To another, “I can’t wait to see that place of yours at Vieux Port.” He stood stationary, receiving, while his daughter let herself be whisked from group to group.

  He was a man in the middle forties, clean-shaven, tall and slightly stout, with a fresh-coloured boyish complexion. He wore a bright striped tie that in England would have indicated the membership of some Old Boys’ club. He wore his coat open, with his hands in his side pockets. To Mary, he was a type that innumerable films had led her to label “typically American.”

  Just as his daughter, with her smartness, her vitality, her self-assurance, was typically the American girl of the magazines. She had had an attack of sinus, her father said. This cruise was her convalescence. “You can’t think what a skimp of a thing she was ten days ago.” Nothing could have looked less “a skimp “now than this tanned, smiling, self-confident young woman who assured everyone with a rush of words that ought to have been breathless but somehow wasn’t, that El Santo was the one place in the world that she’d been crazy to see. She was a bare eighteen and looked as though she had never known what the word shyness meant.

  Mary eyed her without favour. She had the same distrust of the young American girl that the average English public school-boy has for the Etonian. No one had the right to be such a finished product at eighteen; at an age when one had been oneself so acutely conscious of one’s awkwardness. It was all too well done. They spoil their young girls up there as much as we spoil our young men in England. You’d think she’d bought the earth, thought Mary. And I’ll bet that underneath she’s as hard as nails.

  Not that she gave the girl more than a fleeting moment of her attention. She was too busy watching Barclay as he performed his role of host and compère, moving from group to group. How well he did this kind of thing. What an invaluable capacity it would prove. It would take him far. Was he conscious of that gift? Did he recognize it for the asset that it was : did he foresee the day when he would use it as a lever for his ambition? Did he picture the time …? She stopped. She did not want to picture the time when Barclay’s ambition would have led him.... She did not want to picture the point to which that ambition would one day lead him.... He was so ambitious. He must have such a very clear-cut picture of that future.... She did not want to remember that, not now: on the day of his return.

  “Barclay,” she called out. “Just a minute.”

  “A second, and I’ll be back.”

  He was passing on his way to the bar, within a yard of her. He smiled as he went by. It was a signal long ago arranged between them. They mustn’t make obvious their enjoyment of each other’s company. At parties they would stay apart at the beginning. They had agreed on this password of “Just a minute,” and the countersign, “A second, and I’ll be back,” as the signal to start disentangling themselves from whatever conversation might involve them. They took it in turns to act as sentries. She had forgotten whose turn it was. It was so long ago. But it was time, very certainly it was time....

  Smiling, he came across to her.

  “It looks just the same,” he said.

  “Did you expect it to look any different? “

  “I wondered. There were times up there, it was so cold, it was all so different. Rodney seemed so far away. I wondered if there were really such a place. There was nothing to remind me of it. Not even …”

  He paused, and his eyes twinkled.

  “You weren’t very communicative, you know.”

  “I wasn’t, was I? ”

  “And think of all the letters I wrote you.”

  He spoke lightly, teasingly. But there was no recrimination in his voice. He was smiling with that easy friendliness: a smile that sent the blood happily along her veins. She needn’t have worried after all: of course she needn’t. She should have known. Wasn’t there a telepathy when people love? She wondered how she could have ever worried, now, with that warm friendly smile upon her, with the sound of that warm voice in her ears. And what was it that he was saying now : could she come out on the yacht with him tomorrow?

  �
�Do; you must. Kitty and her father’ll be coming too.”

  13

  It was J. B’s first visit to the tropics, and there was about his well-pressed holland suit, his white cotton shirt, his panama, his sandal shoes, the same sense of unreality that invests the unworn tweeds of the week-ending Londoner. He was unmistakably a tourist: a tourist out to enjoy himself.

  He was in the best of tempers. To the urchins clustered round the quay, staring in wide-eyed silence at the yacht as though they could not believe that anything so bright and shining could really move, he tossed a handful of loose coins, chuckling as they scrambled for the pennies. They were comics: yes, sir, they were.

  He was lyrical about the yacht. Never had he seen anything so functional. And would he like a planter’s punch to toast long life and fortune to the barque and skipper. Yes, sir, he would. And was there a difference between planter’s punch drunk right from where it came and Baccardi cocktails on 52nd Street? He’d say there was. While as for those mountains up there over Rodney. The Almighty had certainly chosen to pull his stuff when he staged that set-up. When the yacht turned the corner of the bay, and he saw the huts of Petite Anse brown and grey between the bending palms, he became, if not inarticulate, at least ungrammatical.

  “A man like myself could certainly have a whale of a big time in a place like this,” he said.

  He was standing at Mary s side, against the taffrail. He leant towards her and he dropped his voice.

  “I can see myself up there in New York, overworked, jittery, going stale—suddenly one morning pulling myself together:’ No, sir, this isn’t good enough. I’ve got to snap right out of this,’ hopping a plane and finding myself within forty-eight hours right down here in the sunlight. Yes, sir, when I get back to New York I’m going to start pulling wires with Pan-American. I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t make a break here. No, sir, I don’t.”

  It was the most matter-of-fact speech. Yet it was said on a note so confidential that it was like a stage in courtship. It was almost as though he had put his hand upon her elbow.

  With a smile, she remembered the young American in Barbados. Was this the kind of man that that boy would become in twenty years: collegiate still under the imposed surface of directors’ meetings and balance-sheets? She could picture J. B. in ten years’ time a typical “sugar Daddy “: taking girls out to cabarets, feeling himself a dog; toasting “Our wives and sweethearts, may they never meet”; yet leading in fact the most blameless of domestic lives.

  “Yes, sir, a whole lot of fun.” He paused : shook his head knowingly. “Look at young Barclay over there. How he would laugh if you were to tell him so. He thinks I’m on the shelf. When I was twenty anyone of thirty seemed laid out for burial. I could never understand how my sister could get any fun going to dances at her age, yet she was barely thirty. One can’t look more than ten years ahead. I can’t picture anyone in the middle fifties having a particularly gay time, but I suppose they manage to. I reckon that if there is any fun going, I’ll know when I get to that age where to find it. Yes, sir, life’s a lot of fun at twenty, but it can be a lot of fun at forty too. Not that those kids there would realize that. Just look at them.”

  They were standing by the wheel. Kitty was on one knee, looking up at it from underneath. She was wearing slacks and a short-sleeved singlet. She fingered at a nut. Another moment, you felt, and she would be on her back, stretched flat, stripping down the engine.

  Her father’s eye rested upon her proudly.

  “Crazy about cars,” he said. “Always has been. Half our youngsters are. The spirit of the age. They love garages as our grandfathers loved stables. She’s never so happy as when she’s all over grease from head to foot.”

  Mary wrinkled her nose. Herself, there was nothing that she hated more. She loathed getting her hands dirty. She loathed the smell of petrol. Cars were to here bright and shining mysteries propelled by a pedal’s pressure. She loved the leather, the polished woodwork, the glistening paint. She had laughed when Barclay had tried to explain the particular merits of his engine. “No, darling, please. It’s a lovely toy. Let me keep my illusions over it.” Barclay, on the other hand …

  His eyes were glistening now as Kitty Bruce peered above his shoulder. They were like a couple of garage hands.

  J. B.’s eyes rested on them fondly.

  “So healthy, too,” he said. “But that’s how most of our young people are. They play games together. They’re real companions to one another. You wait till you see Kitty in the water. Hey, Kitty, show Mrs. Montague how you do that backward somersault.”

  She did it as though it were not a trick at all. Bent backwards in a smooth, clean curve: a sudden spring, her hands touched the ground and she was over.

  Barclay’s eyes flashed approvingly.

  “I wonder if you can do this? ” he asked.

  Another minute, and they were vying with each other in acrobatic feats.

  J. B. beamed on them.

  “It’s marvellous what you can do when you’re really supple. It lasts such a short time too. By the time one’s twenty-six one’s begun to stiffen. I noticed that at football. You don’t recognize the difference, but it’s there.”

  Twenty-six. And in a week or so she’d be in her thirties. But could she even at twenty-three have shown that agility? She watched them enviously. She had had no idea that Barclay could do things like that. He never had with her: knowing, of course, that she would be no match for him, any more than she could have matched him with the series of somersaults and backward dives with which he and Kitty challenged themselves the moment the yacht was anchored. She had never seen this side of him, never suspected it.

  “Aren’t you coming in? “he called.

  She shook her head. She was hot and the cool of the water tempted her. But she was not going to enter into competition with that rubber-boned sophomore.

  J.B.’s eyebrows went up sympathetically.

  “Not feel like it? To tell you the truth, I don’t feel too good myself after that party at the club. Surprised, in fact, that I don’t feel worse. I’ll keep you company.”

  He kept her company with an unchecked flow of reminiscence. She scarcely listened. She watched Barclay as he dived and swam: as he exhibited trick after trick in answer to each fresh challenge. No, she had never realized that he was such an athlete, so strong, so supple. He was climbing now on to the top of the taffrail, steadying himself with his hand against the short projection of the flag-pole. Drops of water were running over his shoulders. How smoothly the muscles ran under his skin. How white his skin was. What a contrast between the clean cream-white of his back and the deep brown from wrist to elbow. His hair was tousled on his forehead, matted and damp, as she had so often seen it during the long afternoons when the circle of sunlight had moved across the polished woodwork. How often had she not run her fingers through it: pressing the heel of her hand against his forehead. She caught her breath sharply at the pictured memory.

  She walked across to him as he clambered back dripping and gasping up the ladder.

  “I’ll be in the library tomorrow at eleven. It would be nice if you’d help me to choose a book,” she said.

  14

  He was waiting in the far end of the library, among the French books. Miss Hardwick, who was certain to try and make Mary’s choice a personal responsibility, would have to leave at the arrival of the first subscriber. She could not, as she called it, “supervise ” from here.

  Officiously, she bustled up to Mary.

  “So it’s a French book this time, is it?”

  Mary was standing before a long row of Maupassants: she took one from the shelf.

  “I was wondering if there’s anything here,” she said. “There are so many different editions of the short stories.” She chattered for the mere sake of talking. “One thinks one’s found a whole new volume and then one sees that it’s only a selection of the ones one already knows, with just one new and not very good one put
in front. I don’t think authors should be allowed to do that, do you?”

  She put back the volume, picked out another.

  “Notre Cœur. I haven’t heard of this. Another collection of short stories. No, it’s a novel. Is it any good?”

  She said it for the mere sake of giving Miss Hardwick the kind of cue she liked.

  But Barclay interrupted.

  “It’s nothing. I read it on the journey out.”

  “Really?”

  She flicked its pages; paused; read a line or two.

  “I thought I’d read all his novels. It looks good. I think I’ll take it.”

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

  He spoke quickly, almost petulantly. She looked up, surprised. It was as though he hadn’t wanted her to read it.

  “It’s the sort of book …” Barclay was hurriedly explaining....

  But she was not listening. From the far end of the room came the soft pad of indiarubber shoes. Miss Hardwick peered round the corner of the bay. She pouted. “Mrs. Longton. What a bore! She’ll take hours, I know she will. Now don’t run away,” she added, as she shuffled down the room.

  At last! Mary thought. At last!

  She turned to face him. He had not had a chance to speak to her on the yacht. He had had no chance of speaking to her at the club. There had been no note slipped into a book. He had been too busy sponsoring the Bruces. At last! she thought. At last!

  He smiled; his friendly, casual smile. He put his hand under her elbow.

  “We’ve a lot to say to one another.”

  She nodded. So much: so more than much.

  “Yet now we’re here, there doesn’t seem anything to be said at all.”

  “No?”

  “It’s as though it had been said already: as though you understood.”