The house was again rocked by the boy’s calypso in the night. Theo’s fainting, the fear generated by seeing Mr Lalbeharry, had precipitated a night of sleep walking. Vincent was kept up, wandering about the house, having to comfort the boy as he sobbed his heart out. There were no words, only the music of tears. In the morning, Theo refused to go to the school. He had had a fright. This was a child with extraordinary sorrow.

Vincent had to arrange again for Beatrice to spend the day at the house.

‘I go cook him something nice, Docta. Come boy, stay with me,’ Beatrice comforted him.

Vincent waved to them on the jetty from the pirogue.

Jonah had the boat at full throttle.

 

When Vincent and Sister Thérèse met again, they were taken up in their work. There was no time for teasing this morning, as Vincent donned his white coat. There was no time for the nun’s tale, for their shared secrets. They were busy administering the dosage of Chaulmoogra Oil, the interminable injections under the skin, to the long queue of patients who had come down from the huts in the hills. Some had come from Indian Valley beneath the lighthouse on Cabresse Point, others came from the terraces built into the hills above the hospital.

There were some tapia huts, some of the original wattle huts of the nineteenth century, which were even more remote, ruins of the original leprosarium. No one came from there. Vincent had never ventured there on his rounds. He trusted the older nurses, who said, ‘No one live there now, Doctor.’

‘What good does this do?’ Vincent dumped a broken syringe into the rubbish bin. He washed his hands at the sink in the clinic, then sat at his desk, taking a rest from this painful routine, lighting up a cigarette, taking a long draw and exhaling as he leant back in his chair. ‘What possible good?’

‘Doctor, you must not let them doubt their recovery.’ Sister Thérèse was preparing the new batch of injections. ‘They think it does them good, particularly the older ones,’ she argued.

‘But at what a price!’ Vincent was thinking of the sores the injections themselves could create. ‘Escalier’s cure! Between the Chaulmoogra and the putrid stench, I don’t know which is worse.’ In the old Frenchman’s time some of the patients had had more than a hundred injections a week.

Indeed, it was the common treatment of the time. In the absence of the new Sulfa drugs they had heard about, it was all they had.

‘You see, this is where Singh is right,’ Vincent argued. ‘We should be trying those new drugs. Our patients have a right to them. Anyway, they don’t prevent the infectious sores, the loss of joints and limbs, their inability to feel pain.’

‘Doctor,’ she tried to calm him.

‘They think they can just throw people off Sancta Trinidad into this backwater, give them the free nursing of nuns, one misled doctor with fantastic ideals, and that’s their problem solved.’

‘You’re not misled. Just frustrated. Your ideals aren’t fantastic. They’re the right ideals.’ She left the room, tossing her veil from her face as she walked into the sea breeze blowing onto the verandah. The routine got to her as well.

Vincent watched her through the mosquito screen as she went along the line, preparing the patients for their injections, accompanied by Sister Rita. There was more independence in her today. He noticed that her body still anticipated the pain she might feel if she put full pressure on her sore ankle. She expected the pain to send its signal, but she was getting better. Her wound had healed. Her wound had not rotted. She was well. She had the natural gift of pain. How could he get his patients to feel pain, or at least to compensate for the fact that they did not? Chaulmoogra Oil was not the way.

Later that morning, Vincent prepared to give the first of a series of lectures to all the nurses and their assistants. A lecture might have been too grand a title. This was a new idea. Another of his fantastic ideals, he thought. He wanted his hospital, no matter in how small a way, to be a teaching hospital.

Mother Superior was the first, at the front, in the row of chairs arranged on the verandah outside the nuns’ common room. She had eventually relented, giving her permission. Between Mr Krishna Singh with his political speeches under the almond tree, not to forget Jonah Le Roy, the tall black man, as she always referred to him, looking more like Moses than Jonah, and now this new, free-thinking doctor with his lectures, she wondered where she could make her impression, except in the Chapter House of her convent.

She invited Father Meyer, the chaplain, to come along, as a kind of inquisitor, Vincent thought. Maybe he would be taken out and burnt at the stake afterwards for heresy.

Sister Thérèse sat with Sister Rita at the back. Those other nuns who were not on duty filled up the other seats. Krishna Singh was at the front. Jonah was standing at the back, near the steps.

Vincent placed a small table in front of his audience, laid out his papers, securing them from the relentless wind with a stone. Sister Claire brought him a chair from the common room.

The gist of Vincent’s lecture was education. The stigma, as old as the disease, making outcasts of the lepers; the image of people bandaged in rags, shunned, forced to ring a bell to announce their arrival, so that others could get out of the way, had to be resisted. ‘We’ve got to educate the public and the authorities.’ Vincent looked up from his paper. He saw anxiety and disapproval on the faces of Mother Superior and the sisters near her. But he continued. ‘We’re quarantined here. Our patients are exiles in their own home. We must change that view.’

He needed to catch some other eyes. ‘There’s the shame our patients feel when they first come to us. We see it whenever the bumboats arrive. There’s the loss of self brought by this disease. It’s as if their very history has taken their self-esteem away.’

Before he moved on from the social stigma of the disease, he looked up and thought he saw the faintest glimmer of a smile on Sister Thérèse’s lips. Her bright eyes encouraged him.

Singh looked ahead proudly, sitting next to the chaplain and Mother Superior. Jonah was beaming from the back, ushering in some of the older patients, like Mr Lalbeharry, who sat on the steps. Vincent gained in confidence.

‘Where the infectious, incurable form of the disease exists, there is relentless deterioration. It can seem an endless task: suppurating sores, joints that rot away, faces which collapse. Yet shining through, like in some of our boys, Ti-Jean, for instance…’ Vincent looked up and smiled proudly. Everyone knew that the boy was his hero. ‘Or, take Ma Rosie! We see the individual no matter the state of their body.’ He paused to mention other particular patients, to drive his point home. ‘You, Lal.’ Mr Lalbeharry smiled from the back. ‘We can get depressed that, after all our advice, we see the little care some of our other patients take of themselves. Why is this? They burn themselves. They stump their limbs. They cut their skin. We need to remind ourselves that this is not the disease itself. Yes, it’s a job of clean bandaging. It’s a matter of looking after wounds and sores. But, there’s more. There’s understanding the complexity of this disease. What can we do to heal? What can we do to prevent deterioration?’

Lastly, Vincent said, ‘A bit of love, sisters. Let them experience that. And, dare I say it, a bit of pleasure.’ Jonah stamped his feet with approval. Singh applauded. Mother Superior moved her chair deliberately as if to get up and leave, then remained sitting, bolt upright with an unflinching face. The chaplain coughed profusely. Vincent had noticed that this was a nervous reaction on his part throughout the speech. ‘The general well-being of our patients, the opportunity for a full life.’ Vincent caught Sister Thérèse’s eyes. ‘By encouraging full relationships, sisters, we can bring happiness amidst so much sadness.’

Mother Superior came up to Vincent when he had finished. ‘I’m glad that you appreciate the individual soul, Doctor.’

‘Soul? Who said anything about the soul? I mentioned the individual. It’s their mortality I’m interested in improving. I know nothing about immortality. I leave that to you, Mother, and Father Meyer here. You deal with the invisible. I’ll deal with the visible, even though I may need your entire community looking into a microscope to find it.’

‘You think words will heal. You joke. You charm. But you don’t charm me Doctor.’

‘Just the opposite. Understanding what the disease is, how it works, how it’s prevented. We know more than we did. This is what lies behind research. Research and education is allied to treatment. That is the valuable work your nuns can do. Meticulous, relentless research in order to extend our understanding helps us prepare our treatment.’

‘They’re just poor people. They know more than any of us how to suffer and to accept the cross Christ has given them to carry. We can assist in that.’

‘I see no cross. Poor, yes. But that means they deserve even more, surely. Even your religion teaches us that.’

‘The poor will always be with us, as Christ says in the gospel.’ Father Meyer, within earshot, contributed.

‘Well, yes, if you think that way, we can then rely on the poor always being with us. My work is to help them, so that they can work themselves out of poverty.’

The other sisters moved away in embarrassment, their loyalties stretched.

‘Don’t underestimate the gift of patience which they have, and what it allows us to witness. Suffering, Doctor, is the way of the Lord.’

‘I admire my patients’ endurance. Don’t get me wrong. But I want to harness it to improve their health, their self-esteem, not remain silent receivers of charity.’

Father Meyer smiled. He preferred his battles over a few rum punches and Wagner on the gramophone. He patted Vincent on the shoulder in order to quieten him. He patronised both him and Mother Superior with his smile, as if their discussion was beneath him. Seemed to Vincent that his philosophy was that charity was to keep the poor poor, even if not expressed so bluntly. ‘They allow us to advance in virtue, as they themselves grow in that very same virtue.’

‘And don’t forget, Doctor, that my nuns are brides of Christ.’ With that parting salvo, Mother Superior turned her back and walked away.

Singh, leaning up against the balustrade of the verandah, caught Vincent’s eye. ‘I see you on our side now, Doctor.’ He patted Vincent on the back.

‘I hope we’re on the side of our patients.’

‘People. People, Doctor.’

‘Words, Krishna. You heard Mother Superior.’ Vincent smiled. ‘How many brides does Shiva have?’

‘And Mohammed?’

‘Religions! They’ll keep the poor poor.’

‘Opiates!’ Singh proclaimed.

Later that afternoon, finishing his rounds, Vincent turned to Sister Thérèse who carried a tray of bandages. Resting it down, she passed the lint through her fingers, snipping with her scissors. He knew she was one of the best on the wards. She was firm in her purpose, but delicate and gentle. He watched her hands turn in the light. He watched her fingers in the strips of cotton cloth and muslin lint, a gold band on her marriage finger. She was Christ’s bride. He watched her wash wounds and clean suppurating sores. What had brought this young girl to El Caracol?

‘Le village. The village.’ She spoke phrases in simultaneous translation. It was a kind of nervousness, a kind of being in two places at once, being in two minds at the same time. After her doctor’s lecture, and the public response from her Mother Superior, the air was tense. She spoke in her French accent, opening conversation on something other than their work as doctor and nurse. She talked about the place from where she had come. ‘We went to Provence in the summer and vacations. Otherwise, we were in Paris.’

They were not supposed to have personal conversations. When Vincent had first arrived, Mother Superior had always insisted that Sister Gertrude, a woman of nearly seventy, should be his ward assistant. Then he used to look at the young sisters giggling together, catching them in an off-guard moment in the pharmacy.

He had requested Sister Thérèse Weil because of her research experience. He was getting used to her as his best assistant. She was looking up at him from where she bent over her work. ‘What’s it, Sister?’

Her eyes were always being lifted from below a bowed head, an irritating gesture of humility, learned in some spartan, Jansenist novitiate in France. Not her natural demeanour, he thought. She extracted from her copious sleeves an envelope which was as blue as the Antillean sky. ‘A letter from Papa.’ The paper had faded with its passage, and was creased with its secrecy, secreted into the folds of her habit, now withdrawn between the tips of her fingers. Once read, already censored, it should have been destroyed. That is what Mother Superior would have wanted.

‘You’ve not given up the world, Sister, that you long for its news so,’ Vincent teased.

‘Papa, you know. I’ve told you of his letters.’ She smiled, refolding the letter, indicating its author, putting it back into her sleeves, secreting it further, somewhere deep in all those folds. He could not imagine where it eventually encountered her flesh.

Women who had worked in his mother’s house lifted their blouses and inserted money and keepsakes in the depths of their bosoms. Hers were flat. She seemed like a boy in girl’s robes. What had she done with her breasts? ‘No, go ahead, Sister. I would be delighted to share your news. I’m of the world. I long for its news.’ Vincent smiled.

‘Papa is worried. He hears from friends, les amis.’ There were tears in her eyes. What was he to do with a crying nun? He moved to comfort her, then stopped, folding his arms. Better to keep those out of the way.

‘What does your father say? What has he heard from a friend?’

‘Events in Germany will encourage ideas in France. It’s a long history. Kristallnacht. It sounds pretty. Like the name of an opera, or a piece of music.’

‘Yes Sister, it was in the local paper. It was on the radio.’

‘C’est dangereux. For France.’

They talked about the report which had come through on the BBC, again reported in the local papers. A high-ranking remember of the German embassy in Paris had been shot. A seventeen-year-old young man had been detained for questioning. He was a Polish Jew, Hershel Grynzpan. The man was reported to have said that he shot the official, Ernst Von Rath, to call attention to the fate of Polish Jews in Germany. He died on the afternoon of November 9th.

Vincent and Sister Thérèse exchanged these facts. Between their exchanges were long silences.

‘There were riots by the National Socialists right across Germany,’ she continued to read from her father’s letter.

‘Yes, Sister.’

‘Acts of revenge.’

Vincent remembered Theo glued to the radio, fiddling with the knobs to try and tune in the reception more clearly. ‘“Kristallnacht”, new vocabulary, Doctor.’ Words excited the boy.

‘It’s been reported that SA men in uniform, some in civilian clothes, rioted in the streets of many German towns across the country, destroying Jewish shops, synagogues, attacking Jewish citizens. Many are seeing these riots as a direct result of the killing of Ernst Von Rath in Paris, but others are seeing it as a pretext for what is now National Socialist policy, as expressed recently by Herman Goring. He has called for all available resources to be brought to bear on a final solution to the Jewish question. They have no place in our economy.’

Sister Thérèse folded her father’s letter over and over till it was as slender as a needle, which she then again inserted into her sleeve, as if she were administering herself an injection. She looked up. ‘They’ll kill my father.’

Vincent listened.

As if to distract herself from her real pain, she spoke quickly of other reports in her father’s letter. ‘News coming through says that the riots were supposed to appear as a spontaneous outbreak by the Volk. Leaders of the Jewish community are calling the attacks a Pogrom.’

‘Your father is very detailed.’

‘Witnesses in the city of Aachen have reported that the firemen, responsible for putting out the flames to the burning synagogue in the city, were seen spraying chemicals which contributed to the destruction.’

‘I can believe it.’

‘He says the smashing of windows with bars, sledgehammers and picks have inspired commentators on major newspapers to call the night of destruction, Kristallnacht, describing the broken glass in the streets, in many cities, across the country.’

By now, Sister Thérèse had unfolded the letter once more, like some piece of espionage.

‘Sister, I’m sorry, try not to disturb yourself.’

Tears wet her cheeks. She paid no attention to Vincent’s caution.

‘“It is reported that there are thousands wounded, and a hundred people have been killed. The events are said to have caused concern in many European capitals, though there are no official statements, which other commentators are seeing as the delicate caution with which the government of the National Socialist Party is being treated.”’

‘It’s terrible. You’re not helping yourself.’ He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Come, sit. Don’t read anymore.’

But now, as if to heed Doctor’s advice, she switched to the news of developments in Sudetenland since the recent agreement in Munich between France, Britain, Germany and Italy to concede the province in north-west Czechoslovakia to the Germans. She read blandly, emptied of emotion.

Sister Thérèse’s hands were full of the sodden bandages taken off from Ma Cowey, whose feet were worse than ever. She and Vincent were both thankful for the sea breeze. The stench of putrefaction and ulcerous sores was overwhelming.

‘Ma Cowey, you are not using the crutches we made for you. That was a good piece of cyp that Singh cut for you from the forest. Bon Bois.’ Vincent registered Ma Cowey’s name in his ledger. Two hundred injections this week.

‘Docta, you know how it is. I not accustom to crutches. And I not feel nothing. I not feel nothing happening. I surprise myself to see it so.’

Sister Thérèse helped Ma Cowey down the steps to the yard after completing her bandages. ‘Come again tomorrow at the same time.’

She returned, wiping her hands on her apron. She went to the sink and scrubbed with carbolic soap. ‘Scrub hard, Sister.’ Vincent tried to clear the air of emotion.

She returned with her hands in a towel, then unbuttoned her sleeves and rolled them up her arm. She wiped her naked arms. ‘Il fait chaud.’

‘You’re right, Sister. It making hot, as the old people say.’

She smiled. Then she became serious again. ‘She’s not using the crutches.’

‘What do you deduce from that?’ Vincent interrogated his assistant.

‘She talks almost as if she doesn’t see the need for them.’

‘Why?’

‘She doesn’t realise what’s happening. She forgets she needs them, because nothing reminds her that she does.’

‘Nothing? Why?’

‘She cannot feel. She cannot feel pain.’

‘Exactly. Pain should remind her. Pain is the message that we hurt. Pain tells us that we need healing. They’re not getting that message. I was looking at you limping this morning. Even after I’d taken out the stitches, you had patterned yourself to limp, just in case. You were getting compensatory messages.’

‘Pain is a gift.’

‘Well, it’s our protection. We’re wired that way. Something has gone wrong with their wiring. I want to carry out those nerve experiments. But I need a cadaver. I need the conditions in which to work on it.’

They completed their rounds by seeing how a new boy had settled in. Christiana, the new girl, had shown no signs of the disease so far.

Already, Ti-Jean had taken the boy off to school, to play football, getting himself another holiday from the classroom by being legitimately let off by the doctor, but having to avoid Mother Superior nonetheless.

Suddenly, it was overcast. Coming up from the gulf was a hard rain. A dark gloom settled over the yards. There was a serrated flash, followed by deep thunder and a downpour which had everyone scuttling for shelter under verandahs and doorways as rain, like rock stones clattered on galvanise roofs. Children bawled with excitement and fear on the wards. The drains gargled and pelted down the hills to the sea, in runnels of brown water. Then it was over. The clouds had blown off to the Atlantic. The sun baked the wet yards dry. The scent of hot steam filtered through the humid air, like on ironing day. Children played in the water-filled drains.

From the path, going up to the huts, there was a wide view of Chac Chac Bay and the gulf beyond. It was strangely empty. Recently, they had become accustomed to seeing the trading ships which came up from Brazil and Argentina. They sailed along the coast of Cayenne and the Guyanas, sheltering and refuelling in the safe embrace of the Golfo de Ballena.

A lone frigate bird soared high above the island. There always seemed to be this crucifixion in the sky.

The breeze lifted Sister Thérèse’s veil. It wrapped her white cotton habit around her legs and hips. She laughed, disentangling herself, bowing her head to her knees, keeping her skirts down over her ankles. She was like a giggling schoolgirl.

Vincent and Sister Thérèse stood and surveyed the bay. They looked at each other and smiled and then continued on their walk. He remembered to respect the sisters’ silence, their proper decorum.

They reached the very last of the huts, calling in and checking on patients who had not managed to get down to the clinic. Neither of them had come this far in their rounds before. There was still much of the island that they both had to explore, and there were stories that some patients had escaped from the compound, and were hiding in the hills like maroons.

At the end of the track, they could see a hut set apart from the rest. As they walked towards it, a bent figure covered in rags crossed from the bush to the hut. Vincent was immediately reminded of such a figure shuffling away from behind the stores, near the jetty one afternoon, when he was leaving Saint Damian’s. He had meant to inquire the next day, but it had slipped his memory. There were, periodically, reports of food stuffs missing from the stores, depleting the already meagre rations.

Vincent and Sister Thérèse approached the hut into which the figure had disappeared, then recoiled from the retching smell which they recognised from their work on the wards with the most deteriorating patients. Dead flesh!

They dreaded the worst. The door of the hut was jammed. They had to push hard, at the same time calling out, if anyone was there.

In the gloom of the hut, the smell was so intense, that Sister Thérèse turned away. She had to go outside and bend down at the side of the track and vomit.

Vincent noticed several figures who had retreated far into the corners of the hut, covering themselves, hiding in the gloom, not wanting to show themselves. He steeled himself, holding back his feelings, his instinct to be sick.

‘There’s no need to be afraid. I want to help you.’ He repeated this phrase. ‘Help you, help you.’

Sister Thérèse, now recovered, echoed her doctor antiphonally.

There was heavy breathing, but no words came from the gloom.

The figures began to stir. They moved towards Vincent together. When they were on their knees they extended what was left of their arms. Some, who still had fingers, clasped them in a prayer. Claw hands were raised in the gloom.

‘This is the bad leprosy,’ Sister Thérèse whispered as Vincent knelt to be at the same level as the patients in front of him. The sight which met his eyes at such close range was horrifying because of the disintegrating faces. He had to fight against his revulsion. This was Lepromatus Leprosy at its worst, unattended kind.

These people had retreated here out of shame. It was a shame which had started in some village when they were first detected with the disease. They had had to come on the enforced journey to El Caracol. It was a paradox. Some had wanted to come because of the pain of being shunned. They welcomed their exile. Others wanted to hide.

‘This has to change,’ Vincent whispered to Sister Thérèse, trying to observe all the worse signs of the deteriorating condition before him. Then he spoke to the patients in front of him again. He had now worked out that there were at least six of them. He was not sure, as yet, who were men and who were women. ‘We want to help you. We will help you. You mustn’t stay here.’

They unlatched the wooden shutters of the hut and secured the door open. Light shone in like a searchlight, and frightened the huddled mass of six back into the corner, with their backs turned, their faces against the walls.

The wind moved dry leaves and newspaper on the floor. ‘You must allow air into the room. You must wash yourselves at the stand pipe. Later, we’ll bring up new clothes, as well as dressings for your wounds.’ Vincent could see that one of the patients was only a torso in a bundle of rags. This person was being carried by two others. He thought it was a man, but could not really tell. He hated to think how this situation had arisen. How had this been allowed to continue?

Dr Escalier had grown old and not been able to cope. That was clear. But also Vincent continually found, in the older religious, a resignation which depended on prayer, not on science, as he was fond of repeating. He looked at the young sister at his side and hoped that she was the beginning of new blood among the nursing nuns. He hated to think of the worse stories of the marooned groups in the hills. He had his work cut out for him, as Jonah was so keen to remind him.

Coming down the stairs, to the clinic, Vincent turned towards where the light poured through an open window onto the counter. Sister Thérèse was standing with her back to him, preparing medicines, so that all he saw of her was the white cotton veil which fell wide over her shoulders, halfway down her back. It was as if she was behind a screen. She turned, as the staircase creaked. He suddenly saw her differently.

He concentrated on her face, her dark eyes peering out of the tight under-veil, taut beneath her chin and stretched over her forehead. It was damp with perspiration. The full veil fell from the crown of her head over her shoulders forming a tight cocoon. Her face peered out of a hole, as if cut in a sheet. Her skirts fell to below her ankles, just above her sandals and stockinged feet. Her arms were covered in full sleeves to her wrists. A scapular fell loose from her shoulders, over her flat chest and down her back. She was girdled with a leather belt and a black string of rosary beads, the Fifteen Mysteries, hung at her side. The sleeves were folded back from her wrists, to prepare the drugs on the counter. But, beneath these full sleeves, and cuffs, were other tighter sleeves and cuffs, buttoned down at her wrist. Her face and her hands were her only exposed skin. Her eyes were black. They shone.

All of her presence came up into those two eyes, peering out of that face. Her skin was creamy, but cinnamon with the sun. Her cheeks were raddled, like rouge. She smiled. Her skin was pulled back by the tight veil. There was nothing to distract from her face, her eyes, except her hands which she wiped on a blue apron. She put her arms away, folding down her sleeves, hiding her hands. She lowered her head as Vincent stood at the bottom of the stairs staring at her. He noticed the slightest wisps of jet black hair escaping from beneath her taut veil near her temples.

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.

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.

It was like many voices all at once. Vincent was frightened by the strange lucidity.

AND 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.’