Chapter Four

 

I drove down from New York, taking four days on the trip and then leaving the car at Miami; it was only 1,300 miles, and the slow approach, the gradual melting of the winterised spirit, the warming trend from bleak New York to a Florida which really was doing its damnedest as the Sunshine State, was much more fun than any quick flip by jet. The soft sell was the one which best suited escapist authors. So I loitered by the way, though the way – mostly US Highway No. 1 – was not invariably enchanting.

There were some curious contrasts on that journey, the contrasts of two or more Americas. There were the rich and rolling grasslands of Virginia, and the bare, scratched, exhausted earth of South Carolina. There was poor drab Georgia, suddenly blossoming into rich, well-kept Florida within the space of a few yards of highway. There was the magnificence of Palm Beach, which must command some of the finest houses in the world, compared with the vulgar stucco horrors of Daytona and Defray. There were Spanish mission-churches four hundred years old, and then the miles of garish motels, and the snakepits and monkey glades and alligator farms, and the temples erected to pecan fudge and peanut brittle, and all the orange juice you could drink for ten cents (children, fifteen).

Above all, there were the signs – signs by the million, all the way from the New Jersey Turnpike to the last screaming mile of the main street into Miami. There must have been a clear thousand miles of exhortation – to eat, to drink, to sleep; to spend, to save, to invest; to visit, to explore, to sing, and dance, and pray; to ride, walk, swim, fly and sail; to mount elephants, to crawl along the sea-bottom, to catch tuna and tarpon, to wrestle with alligators and shoot the rapids in the Tunnel of Love and send a peach-fed ham home to the folks. There were twenty-seven flavours of ice cream, and a flavour of nothing at the same time.

I would like to read the journal of the Man Who Did Everything. But it would have to be posthumous.

At the beginning, I started to ‘collect’ odd signs, and then the spirit of research faded and I gave up. With the sun warming my hibernated bones, and the Mercedes going like an elegant bomb, I wanted to enjoy myself, not probe the sociological horrors of tourist travel. But a few of them stuck in the memory. They ranged from whimsical motel signs: ‘madam, your sleep is showing,’ and ‘our honeymoon suites are heir-conditioned,’ to the sinister: ‘save america - impeach earl warren,’ and the cynical: ‘souvenirs of anywhere’. But after I encountered ‘it’s paradise in the garden of eatin’ ’, I lost heart. There was a limit to what one creative writer could take from his competitors.

As soon as I was airborne, however, the voyage itself took wing. The only available plane, on the day I wanted to leave, was an island hopper, reaching Barbados by a wayward route which included Jamaica, San Juan, St Croix in the Virgin Islands, Antigua and Martinique; and the idea of taking off and touching down six separate times, instead of sampling one shot of each manoeuvre, seemed to involve lending several extra hostages to fortune.

I had never really enjoyed flying, since the day when a plane from New York to Washington, with me in it, developed a high-pitched scream in one of its engines and had to make a forced landing at Newark, New Jersey. The magnificent array of fire engines, ambulances, police cars, television equipment, and undertakers’ touts which awaited our arrival on the runway had turned me a dull shade of green at the time, and remained in the memory ever after. Since then, if I flew at all, I flew fortified.

I was fortified now, on a rum basis, and continued to be so for the best part of twelve hours, as we zigzagged our way south. It was not at all an ordeal. With each stop, itgrew sunnier, and warmer, and greener, and friendlier; it was a pleasure, every time, to dip down upon a new island, and emerge from the plane into the benevolent air, progressively shedding top coats, and other coats, and waistcoats, and eventually ties, as the air grew more benevolent still, and the bars cosier, and the drinks longer and cooler.

I made several lifelong friends in the course of that journey, all for the right length of time – about an hour; and there was always something to watch, even if it was only staid citizens buying funny island hats, and being self-conscious about them, and then gradually growing to look as if they had worn them all their lives. As far as Puerto Rico, where we were bereaved, there was a most ravishingstewardess on board; about eighteen, hopelessly incompetent, quite lovely. All the male passengers were turning handsprings and putting up with terrible service, just to catch a glimpse of those shy young breasts, that delicious puzzled face.

‘Regular Madonna of the airways,’ said the man next to me, with absolutely no warranty, practically sobbing into one of his martinis. But I wasn’t going to argue a technical point. She had just bent over me, and beamed her breathless smile, and murmured: ‘I declare – I’ll forget myself next!’ When we finally lost her, we lost a certain zany element, and no more coffee was served in Old Fashioned glasses; but we lost a lot of the décor as well.

Her place was taken, as a focal point of interest for the observer, by a quintet of people who, on the next leg of the journey, honoured us with their presence. They were five largish, fattish, oafish young men, distinguished by an enormous self-assurance. They broke all the rules enforced upon ordinary travellers; they stood up during take-off and landing, wandered in and out of the pilot’s cockpit, clogged the aisles, monopolised the pint-sized bar, talked loudly and determinedly about recent air disasters, exhibited an embarrassing gallantry towards any woman travelling alone, and generally impeded and annoyed the paying passengers to the point when a lot of us wished we had gone by sea.

They were delegates on their way to a convention of airline public relations officers, enjoying a free ride with the aim of popularising air travel.

But all things pass, including such thick-skinned idiots as these; and next, between St Croix and Antigua, we were entertained by a genuine drunken nuisance. He was a great bulging hulk of a man, wearing a ten-gallon white Stetson which might have been Texan, and could have been Albertan – or any other part of the world where the men look like bulls and the bulls look ashamed of it. He had a load on when he came aboard – and who was I to comment? – and he improved on this at a phenomenal rate; the process involved, apart from a fresh drink every ten minutes, a servile and scurrying attention from anyone for whom the bell might toll.

Above all, he was argument-prone, and proud of it; everything was wrong, from the buckle of his seat belt to the ice in his drinks; it was clear that he had assumed a God-given right to be where he was, and for all others a God-given duty to minister to his needs. He was up, we were down; he was rich, and everyone else was poor.

Such men were only funny if in the end, they were defeated; and eventually this one was. But before that happened, we had a long way to go, and a lot to endure. He got into one tremendously vulgar row with one of the stewardesses, a nervous Jamaican girl who was doing her best in exceptionally trying circumstances, and who was finally dismissed with the bellowed command: ‘If you don’t want to be a hostess, for Christ’s sake change your job! If you want to keep it, bring me another martini-on-the-rocks. Pronto!’

Later, after Antigua, there was another rancorous scene when the vacant seat next to him, over which he had spread his coat, hat, briefcase, camera, and feet, was needed for an incoming passenger. He rounded out a noisy refusal to give way with the ringing declaration: ‘If these cheap trash are first-class passengers, then we’re using the wrong words.’ After that, the captain was called, a man of a different calibre, and the culprit – dispossessed, deflated and dry – subsided into mundane sulks.

There were plenty of ways, I thought virtuously, to be drunk on an aircraft, without using this one.

Then suddenly it was the dusk of a long day, dusk at Martinique. As we climbed back on board for the last lap of all, the burnt smell of the tropics mingled with flower scents – of hibiscus, and bougainvillea, and wild orchid – to make the bowl of night a perfumed blessing. A row of scarlet poinsettias, standing sentinel at the edge of the tarmac, caught the lights overhead, and gleamed darkly, and shimmered, waving us farewell.

By way of earthy contrast, while we were waiting for our final take-off, the captain came out of his cockpit, walked purposefully down the length of the passenger compartment, gathered up a handful of air-sickness disposal bags, and went back into his lair. But the incident was funny rather than foreboding; at this stage, it did not seem to matter much – and in the event it did not matter at all, since the short flight was rock steady all the way, and no disaster threatened. By logical deduction, I worked out that he probably wanted to wrap up some spare sandwiches for home consumption.

We flew low, across a dark sea just restless enough to shiver when it caught the track of the moon. The stars came up to bear us company; the Dog Star for mariners, the far-away Southern Cross for romantics, the winking Pleiades for decoration. Presently we picked up the glow of Bridgetown Harbour, and the ribbon of lights along the shoreline; I took my last legal swig of rum at the company’s expense; and then we touched down in the warm, welcoming air of Barbados.

It was eleven o’clock on a velvet night; twelve hours from Miami, and the forsaken world; a gentler pace altogether, a release from care, a private accommodation.

 

The reporter, a small, earnest young Negro who had never seen me, nor anyone else, on television, but had actually read one of my books, asked: ‘Mr Steele, what do you think are the chances of the novel surviving, as an art form?’

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.

She saw me coming, and looked away, no doubt in utter confusion. I could even divine her thoughts, or make them up for myself, which was even more satisfactory. (Who was this lone romantic figure, wandering along the beach, coming nearer with every passing moment? Could it be? Yes, it was! It was the mysterious stranger of the last ten days, the pale despairing loiterer, the lover of her secret dreams! Ah, pray Heaven that he would speak! She would die if he did not, she would surely die. Be still, betraying heart! Down, fluttering bird!)

When I was level with her small encampment, I walked up from the tidemark, until I was standing by the beach umbrella. She looked up, and said: ‘Hallo,’ in a matter-of-fact American accent.

She was wearing her black swimsuit, and observing it I said the first thing which came naturally to mind. ‘You mustn’t catch cold.’

‘I was just going in,’ she said. ‘But sit down.’ As she spoke, she swung a yellow beach-robe round her shoulders, obscuring a view which really had been as lovely as I had guessed. ‘Are you through work?’

‘For today.’ I sat down beside her, not too close, not too menacing; there was a delicate balance here, to be preserved for at least the next five minutes. ‘How do you know about my work, anyway?’

‘Well, I know who you are,’ she answered. ‘Somebody told me. And I saw you typing.’ She smiled suddenly, changing a lovely face into an open-house invitation. ‘Jonathan Steele. Easy.’

After that, everything else was easy.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Susan Crompton.’

It sounded vaguely professional, but I could not yet identify the profession. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘About three weeks.’

‘All alone?’

Her face clouded briefly. ‘Sort of. I was with some people. But they had to go home.’

‘All alone now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Not yet. But I will be.’

‘Would you like to have dinner with me?’

Her face was grave again. ‘Yes, I think I would. Where?’

‘Let’s start at my place. About eight o’clock. I’ll send a car.’

Her bright hair caught the last of the sun as her head turned. ‘That sounds wonderful. Can I dress up?’

‘I think that’s a very good idea.’

 

We dined by candlelight, under envious eyes. My hotel was staging some sort of gala dinner that night, involving floodlit coconut palms, long trestle tables laden with serve-yourself food, a steady stream of tourists gorging and screaming, and two orchestras, count them, two – a steel band playing calypso, and a smaller dance group filling in the awkward gaps. We managed to withdraw ourselves a little from this bacchanalia, and sat at a side table under the trees, where we could watch if we wanted to, and ignore when we chose; we were served as rich men squiring beautiful women should be served, in any democratic society. At $50 a day, I wasn’t going to carry any plates, not even for this one.

The girl really had dressed up, and the result was something for me to be proud of, and the rest of the mob to covet at a distance. I had been sure that she would wear black, the addiction of young things who wanted to look like women of the world; in most cases, they might as well be wearing their school uniforms. But Susan Crompton had settled for white, the badge of chastity. It was fair to say that, in this case, only the colour looked chaste.

The white dress revealed, in benevolent detail, a figure remarkable for its invitational candour; and above the expectant bosom and the creamy-brown shoulders, her face – young, alive, ready to laugh, ready to melt – had a beguiling beauty. She sat there, a few feet across the table from me, with the candlelight linking us and winking on the wine-cooler; the trees arched over our heads, and above them was a far-distant sky, black, star-pricked, the canopy of our intimate night. But I only looked at her. Thus close to, she seemed as feminine as perfume, as available as the next bed, and I could not take my eyes off her.

I had to admit to being overthrown. I was out of practice in this area, of course, and vulnerable for other reasons, other frailties of armour. But even so, even so … If the food had not been so good, I would have started eating her there and then.

She was something of an eater herself, which I welcomed; so many girls in this category of looks seemed to believe that the ideal of beauty was the kind of skinny lesbian known as a ‘top model’, and nibbled accordingly. This girl was hungry, and didn’t care who knew it, and was going to do something about it … The moment of this discovery was also the only moment when she seemed really young, almost touchingly so, in spite of all the glamour and elegance. While we were ordering, she read the menu from beginning to end, with many a sigh, and then asked: ‘Do you think I could have caviar?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Next question.’

‘It’s so expensive.’ She looked up, almost as if gauging my mood; she might have been an orphan at a convent picnic, wondering what the nuns would stand for. ‘Can I have steak as well as lobster?’

I could not guess whom she had been dining with lately, but he sounded economical. ‘You can have two of everything, as far as I’m concerned … Susan Crompton, you look absolutely wonderful!’

I wanted to practise her name a bit, just in case. Sometimes, in moments of stress, one used the wrong one.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and gave me her ravishing smile. ‘I feel wonderful. For a change.’

I ordered dinner, and the champagne I now felt like, and then asked: ‘Why? Haven’t you been enjoying yourself?’

‘Not much. Something went wrong.’

‘What was that?’

‘Oh, just something … You’re married aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said, readily enough. If she wanted to make the point at the outset, she was welcome to it. This thing was not going to stand or fall on a technicality. It was not even in the lap of the gods. It was in hers and mine, and as far as I was concerned I could feel it there already. Either we would, or we wouldn’t, and the key to this traditional puzzle was not going to have much social connotation. Freedom alone would not get us into bed; nor would the stigma of adultery keep us out, if that was where we were headed. ‘Yes, I’m married.’

‘Where’s your wife?’

‘In South Africa. Six thousand miles away.’

She nodded to herself, accepting the answer, unsurprised; as if all the people she met had 6,000-mile wives, as if there weren’t any other kind of marriage, nor breed of men. We listened to the music, which already had an agreeable, insistent beat; and then the caviar arrived, and after that the evening started swinging.

She lived in New York, she told me, between hearty mouthfuls of everything in sight. Doing what? Having fun! And for a living? Oh, all sorts of things.

She had started, at the age of fifteen, as a movie-theatre usherette, but had soon given it up. ‘It was too dark,’ she said, and her eyes grew wonderfully dark at the thought of it. ‘And I was embarrassed, anyway. The things they asked you to do in the back row!’ She had acted as a doctor’s receptionist, and sold magazine subscriptions on the telephone, and been elected ‘Miss Representation’ at a used-car dealers’ banquet in Miami.

She had walked on at the Met (gypsy-girl in Carmen), and off again at a ski-school in the Adirondacks, where the Austrian instructor insisted that they all lie down before they even learned to stand up. She had demonstrated lots of different things at exhibitions – potato slicers, stain removers, floor waxers, sewing machines.

‘I can do monograms on a sewing machine,’ she said importantly; and when she saw me grinning: ‘Well, it’s not so easy,’ she went on, smiling also. ‘It took me two whole weeks to learn. And I used to model at fashion shows, till I put on too much weight.’

‘Weight?’ I said. ‘Oh, come on! If you’re too big anywhere, I’m Napoleon.’

‘But it’s true,’ she answered. ‘They don’t want girls like me. You have to be as thin as a stick, so they can hang any sort of clothes on you and get away with it. They’ve all got a thing about little boys, anyway. I used to go through agonies every day, trying to keep my weight down. I starved! A few pounds here and there can make a terrific difference.’

I poured out some more champagne. ‘I’m ready to confirm that,’ I told her. ‘And three cheers.’

‘Oh, it’s all right for that,’ she said, leaving me to wonder. ‘But professionally it’s terrible. I used to do TV commercials too. But then you get identified with the product, and that’s no good, either.’

‘What was the last product you were identified with?’

‘It’s all very well to laugh. I had a whole year as one of the silhouettes for Playtex.’

Mostly, I realised, her story was keyed to the phrase ‘I used to’; there had been little clue as to what she was doing now, and how she had come to Barbados, and why. I was going to raise the point, when she said, out of the blue: ‘I’m having a wonderful time tonight. I do want to thank you. And I like that coat.’

‘It’s terrible,’ I said. The switch of subject, for some reason, had been rather moving: like a very pretty child remembering its manners. ‘But what the hell? I’m a writer … Why did you suddenly say that?’

She was playing with the stem of her wineglass, waiting for the next course, which was the much-desired steak. I watched her twining fingers, and pictured them elsewhere, like any dreaming boy. The music wove its pathway round us, soothing and sensuous at the same time. She saw my eyes on her bosom, and she said: ‘You like me, don’t you?’ and before I could answer she went on: ‘I thought we’d been talking enough about me, that’s all. You’re so important. I know that. People keep saying things about you … Do you always drink so much?’

‘Yes.’

‘I just wanted to know.’

‘I’m used to it,’ I said. ‘And champagne doesn’t count, anyway.’

‘It counts with me … Do men really say they’re “investing in a girl”?’

‘Well, yes,’ I answered, brought up short. ‘I suppose they do. In certain circles. But why?’

‘I heard it somewhere.’ She smiled, and this time it was for me. ‘In certain circles.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Nearly twenty.’

‘I’m thirty-four.’

‘Why, Mr Steele,’ she said demurely, ‘thirty-four isn’t old,’ and we both burst out laughing.

The steak came, and was steadily demolished by both contestants. This girl was excellent for all the appetites. A couple I knew vaguely at the hotel – they were English, the woman as leathery and loud as an old sergeant-major, the man positively pop-eyed at the first waft of female youth – tried to crowd our party, and were eased out, not too subtly. (But writers had absolutely no manners, it was well known.) Susan Crompton, sighing still, disposed of the last few licks of the filet, and asked: ‘Can we wait a little before the strawberries?’ as if loath to forfeit or even to hurry a single strand of the night’s enjoyment.

She was on the right lines, and I was willing her to stay there. I poured from the fresh bottle, and went back to something which had stayed in my mind.

‘Why didn’t you go on with television?’ I asked her. ‘I know all those commercials are damned stupid, but there must have been plenty of other things to do. Like ordinary acting. The way you look, there should have been lots of work for you.’

‘The way I look,’ she answered, frowning for the first time, ‘there was lots of work for me, but it was never in front of the cameras. Honestly, Johnny–’ it was a great pleasure thus to hear her say my name, ‘–you’ve got no idea how those bastards operate …’ Her face had now taken on an entirely novel look, of dislike, of reminiscent contempt. ‘To start with, every single man expects you to sleep with him, as a matter of course, as part of the deal. Whoever they are. Assistant producers. Cameramen. Dialogue writers. Every stinking little hanger-on who’s remotely connected with show-business takes it for granted you’ll lie down for him, before he’ll do a damned thing to help. It got to the point when I thought, if that’s the way it is, I might as well–’ She did not finish the sentence; instead she took a sip of her drink, and started another one. ‘It’s the same everywhere. I actually did take a screen test once – or very nearly – and that wasn’t for free, either.’

‘What happened?’

‘Everything,’ she said crisply, looking back on it with grim disdain. ‘It was one of those nights … I was in Chicago, doing the cabaret at a lawyers’ convention, and afterwards I got in with some film people, and they said, you look so gorgeous, why not come and take a screen test tomorrow? You could be famous overnight. They have screen tests in Chicago. They have everything in Chicago. So I said, OK, I’d like that very much. Then the party broke up, and I went to bed. In the middle of the night, there’s a knock on my door, and it’s one of the film people from the party, and before I knew it he pushed me inside and just jumped on me. He had this robe on, and underneath he just had his woollen underpants, and they had moth holes in them … He worked me back to the bed, and he said: “How about it, baby? I didn’t want to say anything earlier on, I didn’t want to take advantage of my position.” His position!’ She expelled a long breath, through lips which suddenly had a vicious twist to them, older than the oldest victim of betrayal. ‘His position! He was one of those jerks they have hanging round the studio, slapping two bits of wood together and saying, “Take one”. And you know–’ she was now almost breathless with indignation, ‘–that’s exactly what he did say. He said “Take one, baby”, and then there he was lying on top of me.’

‘Good heavens!’ I said, genuinely appalled, both at the picture, and at the bitter edge to her voice. ‘What then, for God’s sake?’

‘I was eighteen,’ said Susan Crompton, ‘but I still had my strength.’ Already, in the space of seconds, she was something less than bitter; her lovely brow was clearing; this was danger escaped, and therefore not too awful to remember. ‘I brought my knee up hard, the way mother teaches you in survival school, and then I called the front office, and kept on calling till they sent someone up. I don’t know who he was; one of the girls said they keep this guy they call the rape clerk, but I don’t know. Anyway, he said, like, we don’t want any scandal in this establishment, do we, and then he said, could it have been your own fault, and then by golly he wanted to settle down and talk things over quietly, like two reasonable people! Men!’ She ended her recital, with a sharp toss of the head which made her hair glint in the candlelight. ‘You really are a wonderful bunch, you know.’

‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘What happened about the screen test?’

‘That was the screen test. They sent word down next morning, they’d mixed up the dates and couldn’t fit it in. And that was all I ever heard. I think that was the day I decided I was doing all this on the wrong basis.’

‘How do you mean?’

Her eyes lighted up suddenly; but it was for the strawberries, which did indeed look luscious. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But all the wrestling, all those propositions … And what did I have to show for it? I was getting less famous every day.’

This was still not clear. ‘Was that what went wrong down here?’

She laughed. ‘Heavens, no! That was something else again.’ She was now busy eating, at ease once more, and certainly resigned to most of the current hazards; it seemed that she had forgiven us all, because we could not really help it. ‘Men,’ she said again, on a gently chiding note. ‘And it’s not as if I was just dumb and stupid. After all, I practically graduated from college.’

‘I wish I had enrolled at that establishment. Where was it?’

‘Well, it was a sort of finishing school. In San Francisco. The first day we were there, they told everybody: “Go away and write an essay called Who I am and why I came to college.” One hundred words. Then they worked out what courses we ought to take.’

‘What did they choose for you?’

‘Courtship and Marriage.’

After that we danced, because it was by then high time that I had at least an arm-and-a-half round this ravishing creature. A man could spend just so much energy on the twirling cape-work; thereafter, honour and appetite combined to make a definite engagement essential.

There were certain young women of whom you knew, as soon as you touched them, that their next word – even their next movement – would be ‘yes’; and for me, Susan seemed to be one of these. She was a close dancer, supple and generous; we had circled the floor only once before I felt as if I knew her all over. My terrible tartan dinner jacket was thin, and through it I could feel both the shape and the warmth of those delicious breasts; when our thighs touched, hers lingered closely and frankly before moving aside. The moving-aside was not exactly a bereavement.

Yet I knew very soon that my overall guess was going to be wrong. For all her compliance, she seemed to have made up her mind to remain cool; cool to me, cool to the music, cool to the fact that my body was growing patently ambitious. She must have known what was going on – she would have to have been wearing armour-plate, to think otherwise; but she was not really joining in, so much as riding out a storm which she hoped would be brief.

Her own pressures were skilful and receptive, yet they remained friendly; and at this particular moment I was not looking for a friend. I did not need to be psychic to realise that no measurable or mature progress was being made; this message, for some reason, was being relayed swiftly, continuously and finally, by a body which, though almost frantically sensual, belonged only to her.

At the age of thirty-four, one did not become bad-tempered when facing this particular cul-de-sac; and when we went back to our table we still liked each other, and the evening was still much more fun than any other social occasion was likely to be. Indeed, when I cooled down a little, I was intrigued. There were some odd pieces in this appealing pattern; and unless it was a simple teasing operation, which I doubted, they combined to make up quite a puzzle.

What was she doing in Barbados, solitary, beautiful and probably broke? What was the thing that had ‘gone wrong’ down here? And that remark about ‘investing in a girl’ – what was that meant to be? A caution? There were plenty of other things. The vivid and disgusting picture of the near-rape had been frankly revealed – but to what end? Enticement? – or warning? And the other remark about doing things on the wrong basis. What was the right basis, and was she using it now? And what was this thing all about, anyway? If it was a seduction, who was doing it to whom, and what was holding it up? And if it was a stand-off, why had she started the exercise in the first place?

She could have been lonely. She might even have been hungry. But having told me so much, she would surely have told me this also.

I did not ask her any of these questions; but now, we both wanted, by mutual agreement, to enjoy what there was, not what there might have been. All I did was confirm the fact of exclusion.

When the music restarted, about half an hour later, I said: ‘We try again?’ and she answered: ‘Help yourself,’ with a smile and a look which told me that she knew what this was all about, also. I had not been mistaken; the rules remained the same. Though she nestled in my arms agreeably, and such pretty witchcrafts as a chance visitor might feel were enough to set up a thriving pulse, yet her whole body was once again saying No.

Later, we sat and talked on the patio outside my cabin, and we held hands, because – with moon rhyming with lagoon, and night with delight, and sea with you-and-me – it would have been silly to do otherwise. Later still, we walked back, barefooted, along the beach towards her hotel; and when we were near it, we stopped and kissed candidly, our toes in the water, our faces in moonlight, our bodies one single shadow on the sand, and, in the flesh, warm and confluent.

At that moment, I wanted her, with the most urgent need of all the evening; and at that moment she put her refusal, at last, into words.

‘No, Johnny,’ she said, her arms still twined round my neck. ‘Not tonight. I’m just not in the mood.’

‘You could be,’ I said. ‘And I presume you already know about me.’

‘Oh, I know you want me,’ she acknowledged. ‘And of course it could be mutual. It just isn’t, that’s all. I can’t really explain why. I’m just not too keen on men, at the moment.’

‘How long will that last?’

‘I don’t know that, either.’ But she was not being tough, nor even unkind. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly, and turned within my arms, brushing my whole body, as a loving girl should. Her hands, it seemed, were ready to move obligingly. ‘And I know what it’s like for you … Can I take care of anything?’

‘No,’ I answered. She really was an astonishing character; as knowledgeable, understanding and generous as a man could wish for, if he had to make second choice. ‘No. Though thanks. Top prize only.’

‘Good night, then, Johnny. Lovely evening. And no hard feelings?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s one way of putting it.’

We laughed together, and on laughter we kissed again, and on laughter we parted. I was left to cool my ardour with champagne, under the wheeling stars, staring sombrely at an ocean as restless and alone as myself. The champagne and the night were both beautiful, but they were not her. Nothing was her, and I knew it for many hours afterwards, hungrily aware of what another man in another part of the forest had called divine discontent.

 

She was still not too keen on men, the following night, but at least she told me why.

The daylight hours had passed as they usually passed in Barbados; dreamily, gently, happily, under a tropical sun whose burning edge was eased by the tradewinds traversing three thousand miles of surging ocean to console us. I had worked most of the morning, cleaning up the masterpiece, which was now almost ready for other eyes; then, after lunch, I had given Susan a long-distance wave, and joined her in a swim out to the reef and back, and a little collecting of sea anemones, and some frank admiration of a body which, when dripping wet, was as good – as very good – as naked.

Then we drank at our ease, and talked the sun down, and kissed a temporary goodbye, because there was some obvious mutual pleasure in kissing. Now we were keeping our second formal appointment.

First we had gorged ourselves afresh. Already, traditions were springing up around this particular contest, and that night they involved a procession of caviar (again), grilled dolphin, chicken off a turning spit, and crêpes suzettes, with (God bless us every one) a lime-sherbet as a chaser. Susan justified this atrocious menu with the words: ‘It’s good for you to eat’; in the circumstances, it was one of the least disinterested remarks I had ever heard.

Afterwards we went for a slow drive through the Barbados maze of winding inland roads; lost ourselves in mid-island; had a brief wrestling match in a sugar-cane field (‘Not here,’ she said reprovingly; ‘don’t you know, everyone does it in the cane fields?’); made our way back to the coast by star-navigation; and finally settled down in a beach nightclub, a few miles out of Bridgetown. If there was one thing I had to do, it was to put my arms round her again, in legal circumstances and permissive surroundings.

Our surroundings were certainly permissive; the place was impenetrably dark, the décor chiefly palm branches and bamboo partitions, the dancefloor thronged by entirely motionless couples, from whom an occasional moan was the only evidence of life. But if one was in the mood, it was just right. I was in the mood.

She was looking very pretty that night, as always, in a green dress of off-the-shoulder, liberal design; though her hair, which yesterday had been smooth and closely shaped to her head, was now a top heavy, bouffant swirl, like a small pitchfork of hay. I did not like the effect at all; but perhaps, I thought, it would come undone later. There was no harm in looking ahead.

It was a night and a place for confidences. I played with her hand on my knee, and told her all about being a writer; she leant back in her chair, superbly aware of a ravishing display, and told me all about being a girl. Presently, when we had groped our way round the dancefloor, and finally given it up (we were really too old for this branch of the Tunnel of Love), she began to answer the questions that still intrigued me, and by degrees her story was out.

She had come down to Barbados with a man. ‘You probably guessed that already,’ she said softly, her fingers stroking my wrist. ‘It’s not the surprise of the year, is it? Not for me, anyway … I never have any money, I couldn’t afford this sort of trip myself … You know how men offer you trips and money and things, as soon as they know–’ she left that one in the air, as she sometimes did, and finished instead: ‘Well, anyway, that’s what I do sometimes.’

‘How many men has that involved?’

‘About twenty.’

‘Twenty!’ I had not meant to react so swiftly, nor to grimace, but she must have seen my face in the half-darkness, for she went on: ‘Well, it’s not like every day and night, is it? It could have been hundreds … I told you, it just didn’t make sense, doing it for phoney screen tests and interviews with agents and things like that.’

‘Well, all right,’ I said. Naively, I felt bereaved, though I guessed that the feeling would pass. She was that kind of a girl; the girl who was eternally forgiven, forever kissed and taken back; and if not by the same man, then by another man prepared to adore her in spite of all transgressions. ‘But it still seems a lot of people.’

She was frowning. ‘I thought you’d be more–’

‘More what?’

‘Understanding.’

‘So did I.’ That was true, and I came round to the realisation even as I pondered it. ‘And so I am. But tell me more, Susan. Who was the one down here?’

‘He was a mistake. He was terrible.’ She was sitting back again, staring squarely at her miscalculation, and not liking it at all. ‘He seemed just right in New York, and then it all went wrong. It’s always guesswork, and this was a bad guess. But what can you do about that? If you say yes, and they make all the arrangements, you’ve got to go through with it. To begin with, anyway.’

‘What actually went wrong?’

‘Well, as a starter, he turned out to be mean.’ This must have been the first time she had talked about it, and she was very ready to take the chance. ‘Mean like an expert … I told you, he was perfectly OK in New York. He spent all sorts of money up there. I suppose that was the investment bit. Then he must have begun to add it all up, and he was a very slow counter … First there was the mink stole. He promised me a mink stole. He didn’t have to. But he did.’

‘And?’

‘He kept making excuses. In the end he rented one. In Washington. With my initials on it, but only for a month. He said, let’s not lose our heads over this, by the time we get back it’ll be warm weather again.’

‘Frugal,’ I said.

For once, she wasn’t listening. ‘That was just the beginning of it. We went to lousy motels all the way south, and he’d argue half the night about the price of the room, and if there was one where we could share a bathroom with someone else, he’d take that … We used to go the whole day on coffee and doughnuts, and then for dinner he’d go out and buy one chicken-in-a-basket and one carton of French fries, and we’d sit down and share the feast, watching complimentary TV. Then we came down here, because he had a free pass or something, and after that it got really bad.’

‘No wonder you’re so hungry,’ I said. But it was not at all funny, and I squeezed her hand, ashamed that I had tried to make a joke out of it. ‘Sorry, Susan … What did go wrong here?’

‘The whole bit,’ she answered. ‘He was just a pig, and soon he didn’t bother to pretend anything else … He was dirty. He never took a bath, or shaved, or changed his shirt, or anything. And he was horrible to share a room with. You’d think he’d never lived in a house before. He used to do it in the washbasin.’

‘Do it?’

‘You know – wee-weed.’

‘Oh.’ Visions of truly bizarre behaviour evaporated, in favour of mundane eccentricity. ‘Lazy as well … But the thing I can’t understand is, how you picked him in the first place.’ I squeezed her hand again. ‘You know, you’re truly one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen. Why give it to a man like that?’

‘I told you – it was just a bad guess. Back in New York, he was just another Joe, with a nice car and plenty of spare money and a few good jokes … I suppose that was the advertising front. He was in advertising. He was quite good-looking, too … What worries me is what you do if you actually marry a man like that. It could happen! I mean, suppose you wake up and find you’re tied for life to a man who absolutely revolts you.’

‘You usually spend more time choosing.’

‘I’d like to believe that … Well, anyway, there I was in Barbados, with a mean man who behaved like a dirty animal … I can’t tell you what he was like, Johnny. He used to scratch himself for hours. And he had enormous yellow toenails. Like tusks! He never cut them … It’s not funny,’ she said, seeing my expression. ‘They slashed me!’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Some of the hazards of the profession are new to me.’

‘It’s not a profession,’ she answered. She brooded for a moment. ‘At least, I don’t want it to be … I suppose that’s really why I walked out. He was disgusting, and it wasn’t any fun, and I had a little money left, and I was still me. So I said, that’s all, my friend, thank you, and he went back to the States with the mink stole, and I stayed on here, by myself.’

‘When did all this happen?’

‘About two weeks ago.’

‘And how much money left now?’

‘Not much. But enough. And I’ve got my ticket back to Miami.’

It was the end of her story, and it had been sad, and moving, and somehow important. The thing which struck me most forcibly was the terrible vulnerability of a girl like this one, as soon as she had opted for a life set in this pattern. What started out with glamour and hope and excitement, tailed off into rented minks, French fries, intrusive toenails, and just enough money to get halfway back home … If this was what could happen to the pick of the candidates, how fared the ugly and the old?

Of course, I was probably being naive again. The fiasco – and all comparable setbacks – were entirely her own fault; she could just as easily have chosen to be the world’s most beautiful waitress, and her worst hazards would then have been gravy-stains and fallen arches and ten-cent tips. But, stern common sense apart, I still could not help feeling sympathetic, and vaguely protective.

There was, I found, no residue of distaste. There was quite a lot of jealousy, but that was something different … Above all, this girl, who had put herself in the public domain, still kept intact her own private quality; she had remained a free spirit, and she had not feared to cut loose when she fell out of step with what she was doing.

It seemed to me that she would never weep, nor blackmail, nor beg for favours, nor move in and try to clean up the masculine half of the human race, no matter how brutally she might be brought up short by its imperfections. She would shrug it all off, and start again.

The two of us had been silent for a long time, while the music beat its pathway through the gloom, and the smoke shrouded the dubious stationary figures on the dancefloor. It was Susan who spoke first.

‘Thinking?’

‘Just a little.’

‘You want to go?’

‘Yes, if that’s OK with you. Let’s breathe some fresh air.’

‘I hope that wasn’t meant for me.’

‘No. No! Actual oxygen. I’ve had enough of this zoo.’

She did not argue about that, either.

That evening’s farewell, on the beach outside her hotel, was far more gentle than the night before. It was not that Iwanted her less; there was, as I now found out when I kissed her, only one thing which would slake that particular thirst, and it wasn’t lime-sherbet. But I had discovered quite a lot more of what she was thinking and feeling, in the course of the evening; I recognised her reasons for withdrawal, and they were good ones. She had been manhandled, in several disgusting sequences, and she was still showing the scars.

If she needed time to clean the decks, and forget the taste of ordure, then time she could have.

In all sorts of ways, she was now, more than ever, just what I wanted.

 

But this tender and forbearing courtoisie was not the sort of thing that lasted – not with Susan Crompton, not with me. She didn’t need time, I decided next morning, as soon as I awoke, refreshed and ambitious once more; she needed encouragement. I walked along the dawn-deserted beach, and ate breakfast, and downed the first medicinal daiquiri of the day, with a total recall of appetite. Faced by man’s most momentous challenge, I felt lion-hearted, and lion everything else. Today was going to be the clincher, or else.

All other urges apart, I was in a wayward mood of benevolence, the sort which, in northern latitudes, encouraged men to hand out chinchillas to comparative strangers while the martinis ran out of their ears. I made a quick trip into Bridgetown, and came back with the best example which the modest town afforded, in the realm of diamond bracelets. Then I changed back into Tropical Alert, and walked along the beach again, my little present in my hand, like any dutiful envoy; and there was Susan, just spreading out her wares under the beach umbrella.

It was bikini day, and I wasn’t quarrelling with that, either. I sat down, and put my hand firmly round her ankle, by way of making the first shy contact.

‘That was a message from your sponsor,’ I said. ‘Good morning, out there in TV-land.’

‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘My fraternity doesn’t have that grip.’

‘The man of the moment.’ I proffered the jeweller’s case, unwrapped, brash as a bare chest. ‘I was just passing the flea market … This is for you, Susan. I thought you deserved it.’

She opened it, and gave the traditional gasp of surprise. Then she looked up, her eyes shining. ‘But Johnny – it’s beautiful!’ Swiftly the bracelet was out of the case, and swiftly clasped round her wrist; she turned it this way and that, allowing the sun to set up a very respectable sparkle. ‘Is it really for me? It must have cost a fortune!’

‘It cost about the same as a small car, and I don’t care who knows it.’

‘Oh,’ she said, watching me, but smiling, ‘it’s like that, is it?’

‘Just like that.’

‘You don’t have to give me presents.’

‘That’s all I want to know … How about coming on a picnic?’

‘I’d be a fool to say yes.’

‘I’ll get the hotel to set up a lunch for us. A shaker of daiquiris and some wine and lots to eat. You like chicken-in-a-basket?’

‘Now just a minute …’ she began.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll make the jokes, you – er – make the coffee.’

Suddenly she put her hand on top of mine, which had left her ankle and was thoughtfully playing scales up and down her leg. ‘Thank you, Johnny,’ she said softly. ‘I was afraid I’d scared you off.’

‘Afraid?’

‘Just that.’

‘I think we’ll have smoked salmon and cold grouse and some of that Brie, don’t you?’

‘You mustn’t put yourself out.’

‘The very opposite.’

‘Hey!’ she said. But she was laughing. ‘So early in the morning.’

‘Actually,’ I told her, and I almost meant it, ‘I thought we’d just wander off somewhere in the car, and enjoy ourselves.’

‘I’ll have to change, and get ready.’

‘Come like that,’ I said, eyeing the bikini.

‘Absolutely not.’

‘The bracelet will stop the sunburn.’

‘Slacks and a shirt,’ she said, ‘for a very minimum.’

‘All right,’ I agreed. ‘I’ll pick you up. Twelve o’clock. “When the bawdy hand of the dial is on the prick of noon.” Romeo and Juliet.’

‘You’re full of alibis this morning.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m taking over that department.’

 

It was cooler inland, on the high ground which formed the spine of the island, as we jogged along in the minute hired car which was all that was viable for the Barbados road system. Susan’s idea of clothes suitable for a picnic turned out to be lemon-coloured stretch pants, and a gaping scarlet shirt with bare black footprints stencilled on it, and a nutty kind of frayed straw hat such as I wore myself, and gold-strapped Roman sandals; this unabashed get-up did not improve my driving, though it did no harm to the scenery. The clink of bottles from the basket on the back seat made music for our holiday mood.

After a lot of local inquiry and back-tracking – Barbados was signposted strictly for those who knew their way around already – we found the place I was looking for. It was an elegant ruin of a former plantation house, transformed alike by time and by a film company which had tried to make it over into Hollywood’s image of British colonial magnificence; but the later excrescences – fake plaster colonnades, a garden staircase with false magnolias stapled to the balustrade – were now becoming happily overgrown, and the superb shape of the old house, of pink coral stone weathered to a honey-gold, was beginning to assert its mastery.

We wandered hand in hand through a succession of bare, echoing rooms, and kissed in strange places – larders, slave kitchens, a vast oval ballroom whose ceiling had sagged down in one corner to meet a floor itself buckled and rotted out of shape. Some of it was sad, but we were not sad; if we had a vanished past, it had vanished in favour of a buoyant, impulsive, living present.

We were followed round, all the time, by a small ragged smiling boy, who might have been the official guide. I gave him some money quite early on in our tour, but he continued to cling to us, wide-eyed, watchful, interested perhaps in human nature for its own sake. True to artistic integrity, we did not censor the show on his account.

Then it was time for pastoral delights. We found a place for our picnic, on a high bluff of rock with a magnificent view eastwards to the sea; far away, caught by the sun, the marching lines of gleaming white breakers advertised the surge and assault of the great Atlantic. I broke out the bar with a flourish, and we drank to scenery, and sunshine, and us; figured against a pale blue sky, Susan looked very lovely, and I told her so, with words always at the command of a writer with half a tumbler of rum cocktail in his hand. She seemed pleased, but admitted to being hungry as well.

‘You be cook, then,’ I told her, pointing towards the picnic basket. ‘If they haven’t been nice to us, I won’t pay my hotel bill.’

‘Is that place very expensive?’ she asked, already rummaging.

‘Yes. Much too. It’s like all these Caribbean paradise hideaways. They start by being simple and unspoiled and cheap, and then five different airlines decide to run a daily jet service from New York and Toronto and London and Paris, and the prices go up through the roof. What they sell you here is only what they got for free in the first place – the sea and the sun and the climate. And that hotel of mine is only a sort of Dogpatch Hilton, anyway.’

She spoke indistinctly, through a smoked salmon sandwich. ‘Why do you stay there, then?’

‘It’s comfortable,’ I said, munching also. ‘And I can ring a bell when I want anything, and they leave me alone. It’s been a very good place to work. That’s getting to be the most expensive thing in the world – privacy.’

‘It must be wonderful to be a writer,’ she said, traditionally.

‘Now don’t you start … You haven’t got a manuscript you want me to look at, have you?’

‘I used to keep a diary.’

‘And you’d like me to turn it into a book, and go fifty-fifty on the proceeds.’

She laughed. ‘Is that what people say?’

‘It’s one of the things.’

‘What else?’

‘They say: “If only I had the time, I could write a bestseller.” They say: “My life has been much more interesting than that girl in your last book.” They say: “Do you plan it all in advance, or do you wait for inspiration?” They say: “Why don’t you write a book about my uncle? He’s been round the world twice.” They say: “Do you write with a ballpoint pen?” They say: “You’re not at all what I thought you’d be like.”

‘What did they think you’d be like?’

‘Dignified, I suppose.’

‘M’m.’ She was thinking, and of course eating at the same time. ‘Johnny?’

‘What?’

‘Do you wait for inspiration? I’ve always wondered.’

I laughed, and rolled over on my back, and stared up at the flawless sky, with the sun hot on my face, and the earth under me warm and sustaining. ‘No. You sit down and start writing, and if you don’t sit down you starve. Inspiration is for people with rich old aunts … I’m waiting for you to have inspiration,’ I told her. ‘In the meantime, I couldn’t be more content if I was up to my socks in Krug.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A superior brand of champagne.’

‘I’m so glad …Why do you want me?’ she asked suddenly.

I addressed the listening sky. ‘Because you look like a million dollars, and you make me feel like a man.’

‘Didn’t you feel like a man before?’

‘Not specially.’

‘What happened to you?’

There was a faint echo there, and I knew what it was, and turned deaf to it again.

‘I got in with a fast crowd. They go for canasta.’

‘I was just interested,’ she said, rather far away. ‘I wondered what made someone like you want one girl more than another, or want to change suddenly … If we made love, would you tell me?’

‘If we made love,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t have to tell you.’

‘Oh, tra la la!’ she said, suddenly light-hearted again. She pretended to search through the picnic basket. ‘I can’t find it. Don’t tell me you forgot to bring it.’

‘What?’

‘The violin.’

‘Now just for that,’ I said, ‘I won’t play my piece.’

‘It probably needs a rest.’

It was good to be mocked, when mocking promised such sweet certainties as these.

I think we were both feeling happy on the same secure plane, and sun-drugged, and dreamy – the things which accorded with the spirit but not necessarily the act of love, especially not the first act. We found this out a little later on, when the cool wine was finished, and all the food; we smiled at each other, and presently took to the woods, but it was in search of shade, not of cover.

There was a grove of trees nearby, mostly pine and spreading oak, topped by a lone cork tree which might have served as the banner for my other field of endeavour. We lay down under this interlacing arch, withdrawing into the dappled, speckled shadows, like prudent animals. We kissed, with good average intensity, and Susan was freer with her body than she had ever been, and we saw in each other’s eyes that, by mutual accommodation, the animals need not be prudent.

But it was siesta time, not lovemaking time. I did not especially want to make love to her then. We did not want it. Though we were moving towards our rendezvous, and we both knew it, we knew also that it would hold a little longer for us. Ours was not to be a cane-field free-for-all, nor love among the pine needles; no lemon-yellow stretch pants were going to be involved, either. We were waiting for the most liberal licence of night.

So before long we smiled again, and moved gently apart, and went to sleep instead; and we slept untroubled, like babes-in-the-wood who knew their way both round and out, until the sun went down and the cool relief of twilight returned to our earth.

When we awoke, yawning, thirsty, bone-happy, we clasped hands and wandered once more out of the forest, as good as when we went in. Perhaps there were not many people in the world who would have believed us; and there was one on hand who patently did not. This was the small attendant boy. I gave him some more money as we climbed into the car; but – unfair, suspicious, prurient boy! – he watched us go with shadowed eyes, seemed rather shocked, like Cupid who feared he had only been serving as Pandarus after all. The gulf of doubt between the generations had never seemed wider than at that moment.

The way back was the way onwards. It was eight o’clock by the time we had regained coastal civilisation, and after a brief parting to put on some clothes more suitable to the conformist trend (it was a long time, a very long time, since I had thought: The next time I take these off …) we dined once again at my hotel. Tonight it was a quieter retreat; the revellers had gone somewhere else, and we could sit in private solitude, under the trees which were once more our own, and talk without intrusion, without raising our voices above a companionable murmur.

Susan had chosen to wear red, that night, and she had chosen right; no matter from what angle – and she afforded them all – she seemed to sum up the very shape and colour and texture of desire. When she saw me staring at her, in admiration and all sorts of other things, she said: ‘This is the third of my three dresses,’ and I answered: ‘Then they’ve just lasted us out,’ and she mimed the violin-playing motion, in mockery again, yet in collusion.

She was wearing the diamond bracelet also, and making unashamed play with it, as if the time for secrets – whether between us and the world, or between herself and me – was now coming to an end. It was a very agreeable way to be given the good news.

After dinner we walked along the beach, in and out of the shadows, in and out of the mounting tide, and when the mood took us we stopped and coupled and kissed. This time the kissing was different. It was as though she were saying: You are hungry? – so am I. Women can be as hungry as men … I had never known – or had forgotten – that there could be such willing and wanton co-operation, in so simple a thing as an open-sky embrace.

The word ‘professional’ slipped into my mind, and was quietly buried again. If one single fraction of this was assumed, if she was doing any sort of job on me, I didn’t want to know about it.

‘Why so sweet to me?’ I asked her, at the end of one memorable bout.

‘I suppose because now I like you enough.’

‘What made that happen?’

‘Just the way I am. Just the way you are … You’re strong tonight. Strong all over.’

‘That’s consolidated Steele.’ We had reached the farthest margin of the beach, under a rising moon; the only way back was now homewards, and I was ready to take it. ‘I would be very sorry,’ I confided, ‘if any of it went to waste.’

‘We mustn’t let that happen, must we?’ She was looking round her, at the moon, the lapping tide, the line of palm trees along the foreshore; then she rose on tiptoe to kiss me, and she was all warmth, all yielding softness. ‘What a beautiful night to make up one’s mind … It’s no good at my place, Johnny.’

‘Come back to mine, then.’

‘Won’t they object?’

‘Not if we’re absolutely quiet.’

‘Keep reminding me of that,’ she said softly. ‘I could forget.’

 

She was extraordinarily talented, as I had known she would be; from the moment when, naked in the half darkness, she allowed her face to take on the divine, surrendering silliness of love, while her superb body lay waiting for my capture, she had not ceased to tremble, to excite, to move like warm quicksilver, to kindle and to assuage. I forgot all else, first in wild enjoyment of this invasion, then in a more lingering reprise which presently achieved the same frank end.

I could not be quite sure that she shared this abandon. Sometimes, in those moments of acute awareness which illumined our long night, I thought I could detect in her a sort of detachment, as if she felt it was not her province to enjoy, only to serve the tender necessities of love. I never had to caution her to be quiet; indeed, it was she who at one moment laid her fingers gently on my lips, and whispered: ‘You’ll wake the baby,’ in amused, reluctant discipline. She was keeping her head, and it was just as well that this was so, since I was intent on losing mine.

I did not find out, till much later, the reason which lay at the core of this faint detachment; and I was not at all disposed to raise the topic, at such a moment, though my motives were entirely respectable – I wanted to return all her lavish courtesies, in the same measure. But she was not complaining; she was moving like a wild stream, she was clenching my exultant body as if it were the last prize left on earth … I need only take delight in the fact that she was there, to hold and to have, exactly when she was wanted; and being beautiful, agile and utterly unconstrained, she was, on that first night and for many nights thereafter, wanted a great deal.

Some time after dawn we walked back to her hotel together, plodding across the sands with the relaxed, wandering gait of all disbursed lovers at five o’clock in the morning. She was notably pale, and so, I felt, was I; but she looked very beautiful, very languid, very much mine, with that recognisable air of setback which could only be a source of pride to the executioner.

We stopped to kiss halfway, but it was very much a token salute; if the entire band of the Royal Marines had struck up their fortissimo version of Anchors Aweigh!, I could not have hoisted a butterfly net. At her hotel steps, we played a subdued balcony scene.

‘Thank you for all that, Susan.’

‘Thank you for all that … People are dead wrong about the English. Refer them to me.’

‘I’ll do nothing of the sort … Are you going to sleep now?’

‘Yes. And I can recommend it. Aren’t you really tired, Johnny?’

‘I might snatch a brief nap. But towards lunchtime …’

‘We’ll see.’ She reached up, and kissed my cheek briefly. ‘That’s for now … Tell me something. How do you like me to do my hair?’

‘Normal. Smooth. Simple. You’ve got a beautiful shape of head. It doesn’t need to be churned up.’

‘All right,’ she answered, with a curious air of gravity, as if she were agreeing a treaty which would bind us both for a hundred years. ‘From the next time I see you. Good night. Good morning.’

I walked back even more slowly, scuffing the wet sand, observing what seemed to be an entirely different kind of sunrise. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t collecting seashells any more. I was conscious of the usual male tristesse, and accepted it, and took good care to discount it.

This had been the first time, damn it, in six long years. A substantial record had been broken, a citadel of sorts breached and overthrown. A little while ago, I would have been very surprised. Now I was not, and that also was a measure of decline.

But beyond this small moment of mourning, the pangs of conscience could not and did not pierce very deep. Susan had been much too exciting.

 

She never stopped being exciting, not even when she moved into the cabin next door to mine, and the engagement became continuous. (My hotel, true to form, turned a benevolent eye on this arrangement, when I proposed it; perhaps they had very little choice – its general discouragement would deal a fatal blow to the industry.) She never stopped being exciting, and I did not cease to exploit the fact, on all possible occasions.

We seemed, in those days of dream and desire, to have everything going for us. The sun was constant in a cloudless sky; the sea washed us clean and innocent and as good as new, each morning; the afternoons were gentle pauses in time, yet full of subtle reminder, promising us all that we wished, and very soon, and then and there, if we had a mind for it; the nights were cool, and secret, and ours. At such signals, manhood returned with the full flood of virility, and a pounding eagerness to prove it.

This revival of mine had been instant and inevitable; I had only to put my arms round her to be reminded of a whole range of forgotten tastes and savours. It had a good deal to do with the feel of a different body, which, as always, made for the total renewal of many urges. Susan was taller than Kate, and put together differently, and, at twenty, a full twelve years younger; however little one wanted to make comparisons between the old love and the new, they were being stated all the time, by the response of one’s own body, one’s own instinct and appetite.

When we made love, it was a sensual contact between two people new to each other, never yet explored; and it was rendered wildly exciting by this novelty. She could drive me nearly frantic by a certain movement, or sometimes by a certain lack of it; it was as if she could invent, with her body, things I had to have, things I had to do; and she knew this, and she practised the fluent magic like some goddess-conjurer, dispensing gifts from her liberal store to those who had divined the right answer, and promises to those who had been tricked or blinded.

Sometimes, when in post-operative mood I tried to analyse this to her, and perhaps became over-involved in the minutiae of speculation, or clinically dull, she would smile like an indulgent teacher, and then contribute a chiding, realistic note: ‘You know, one of these days you’re going to talk yourself out of bed. The reasons for things don’t matter!’ And if the tide was right she would show me straight away that they did not matter, and indeed they did not.

She was a funny mixture of a girl. Many of the things I had expected, she was not. I had met beautiful girls, by the raftload, during the last few years; and beautiful girls were not my favourite characters, except to stare at when I had nothing better to do.

For the most part, these creatures grew unbearably spoiled; living on their looks, monstrously proud of them, scared to death of losing them; turning like animated toys towards every mirror in sight, as if to springs of water in the desert; absolutely self-centred, only happy if everyone in any given room was concentrating on them and them alone; and liable to turn into sulky bitches if this were not so.

Susan was not at all like this, though – in the category of good looks she was well entitled to be. She did not seem to give a damn who stared at her, or who did not, or what was happening to the current of her career, or how well she was doing in society, or in love, or in the span of life itself. She was generous, and outgoing, all the time; she could give her undivided attention to another person, and enjoy the process, instead of demanding the same concentration upon herself, as of sacred right.

She seemed content with whatever took place next, good or bad, hopeful or daunting; if she were broke one day, then tomorrow would be better – and if not better, then different anyway, and worth a girl’s living, a girl’s welcoming smile. She had to be very disappointed, or misused, or angry, to take a stand against fate in the form of man.

She knew that I was a celebrity of sorts, she thought that I had a lot of money; naive or not, I was ready to believe that this had made little difference to her, in the realms of seduction, and none at all in its lavish catalogue of sequels.

‘Everyone has the same income in bed,’ she once said, at a moment to match the metaphor. ‘A rich man doesn’t feel rich. He either feels good or bad, gentle or rough, sweet or mean.’ She listed, in her customary specific language, some of the other things which money could not replace. ‘What I like about you,’ she concluded, ‘is that you always do it with you.’

I suppose she had admired this element in a lot of men, that it was what she was always looking for, that this was why she had sacked the odious character who had brought her down to Barbados in the first place. Generally speaking, she was very fond of the male animal, by inference as well as by candid confession; and this was another thing which surprised me, for a particular reason.

It became clear to me, before very long, that in spite of apparent ardours, in spite of a leaping sensuality, she never actually turned the trick; and no divining rod was needed to establish this, once I started watching her progress in love, once I began to take some trouble. At the start, I did take a lot of trouble with her, because I was deeply grateful for all she was giving me, and I thought she deserved her return; and there were also the customary promptings of vanity which, if they did not separate the men from the boys, at least gave them all the same target to shoot at.

It did not work, and presently, in deep well-being and content, I grew lazy about it, and thought: ‘Hell, I don’t have to bother – it isn’t that sort of transaction.’ I tried to raise the question once, but all she said was: ‘Johnny, don’t think!’ and gave me, with prompt co-operation, something to take the place of thought.

I did not know whether she was being unselfish, or if this was all she wanted; I could not guess what impeded a consummation which, by her look and feel and touch, she might have been invented for. Before very long, I began to forget all about it, as she seemed to wish me to, and simply took the darling hand which had been dealt to me, and had a wild time with it.

If Susan really minded, if she missed something, if I was failing her in any particular way, she never showed it, never once withheld her cunning accommodation, and only spoke of it once again.

 

On a warm Barbados afternoon, when Susan lay asleep behind our slatted blinds, and I was trying to make the choice between waking her up, shaving, finishing the heel of a bottle of rum, or falling asleep myself, a letter came unexpectedly from Kate. It gave me a faint jolt – nothing worse – and then some news to which I lent all that I could muster in the way of dreamy, detached attention.

She was, she wrote, still in South Africa, in Johannesburg, where her father had now gone into hospital. He was very frail – ‘hanging on’ was the term she used – and terribly depressed about politics, and she was not too hopeful for his recovery. He just didn’t seem to believe that he had much to live for, any more. She would of course stay for as long as was necessary. She sent her love, and (here came a neatly loaded phrase) so did a lot of other people whom I used to know.

She ended with the cryptic message: ‘There are some disgusting things going on here. More when I see you.’

I read the last paragraph with wry recognition. Kate had no monopoly. There were some pretty disgusting things going on here, too.

 

Suddenly it was time for me to leave. The signal, which I had been hoping never to hear, was relayed by the booming voice of Erwin Orwin, telephoning from a city, New York, which seemed as nebulous and as far away as China or Peru. But I could not really pretend that his world of hard fact did not exist. Not any longer.

‘Mr Steele, I need you!’ was his opening chord, thundering above the minor squeaks and whines of Barbados’ overseas hook-up. ‘And I hope you have some good news for me. How’s my book coming along?’

‘It’s finished,’ I answered, caught off-guard. It was nine o’clock in the morning, and I had been summoned to the hotel lobby, with the utmost discretion, straight from a bed which was a sad one to leave at any time. I back-tracked a little, using the social courtesies as a screen. ‘Hallo, Mr Orwin,’ I said, with great heartiness. ‘Nice to hear your voice again! How’s New York getting on?’

‘New York’s all right,’ he said, ‘if you like rain, and a big row with Equity. How are things down there? How are all those babes in bikinis?’

‘Barely visible,’ I said, straight from the joke book.

The onslaught of his laughter could almost have been heard without the aid of science. I held the phone away from my ear till the paroxysm died away.

‘That’s good!’ he shouted. ‘Keep that one in … Did you say it was finished?’

‘Pretty well.’ I could not really tell him otherwise; I had been gone for six weeks, and writers with contracts and professional commitments did not throw away six weeks, nor any other span of time. ‘I’ve just been polishing it up a bit.’

‘I’d like to see what you’ve done,’ he said, rather more formidably. ‘I want to get things moving. And so do Teller and Wallace. They don’t like hanging about doing nothing, even on my payroll. When can you get back? Tomorrow?’

‘No,’ I answered, conscious of a slightly chill breeze in the warm morning air. I remembered Jack Taggart telling me: ‘Your rules aren’t breakable.’ This must be the translation. ‘That’s too soon,’ I went on. ‘I doubt if I could get a reservation.’

‘I’ll fix the reservation,’ he said, ‘if that’s all it is. What airline are you using?’

‘Don’t you bother,’ I told him. ‘I know the people myself. I’ll organise it.’

‘When?’

The wires and the air-waves hummed and throbbed between us. I had to make up my mind, to this and a lot of other things. ‘In a couple of days,’ I answered. ‘But I left my car down in Miami, and I’ll have to drive it up again. How would it be if I sent you the manuscript? Then I can be back home in about a week, to go over it with you.’

‘I guess that’s OK,’ he said grudgingly. ‘But don’t forget, I need you as well as the book. And Teller and Wallace will be needing you too.’

Everybody needed me.

‘All right,’ I told him, ‘I’ll mail the manuscript tonight, and start back on Wednesday.’

‘We’ll be looking for it. And for you.’ But once he had his promise, he seemed prepared to relax. ‘You know, I envy you creative writers, Mr Steele. A few hours in the sun, and the work’s all done. I’ll bet you didn’t even have to get yourself a desk.’

‘I can’t afford a desk,’ I said. ‘And I’ve been working like a – like an African field-marshal.’

‘Now then,’ he said, starting to wheeze. ‘No editorial comment.’

His laughter roared and crackled over two thousand miles of defenceless air, as the call faded, and I hung up. But it was not infectious; I wasn’t feeling much like laughter myself. I had given Orwin a promise which I did not in the least want to keep, which vaguely I had hoped to stall for another two weeks at the minimum. Yet now Icould not do so. One of my dies was cast.

There were several others already lining up, and as I went down the coral-stone steps into the hotel garden they began to crowd in on me. Under the towering palm trees, the pool was still deserted, and I sat down at the water’s edge to try to sort the thing out. I had known for many days that I would soon have to wake up, and that when I did so, I would be waking to a simple, central problem. The problem had arrived. I must make up my mind about Susan Crompton.

It was not going to be easy, whatever I did. Though she was not yet on my conscience, which was elastic, she certainly would be, as soon as I picked up and left her. It was going to be almost impossible to walk out, and still face the mirror in the morning – or, if that was too much of a cliché from the Boys’ Book of Priggery, it was safe to say that I would feel all sorts of a fool if I quit so early.

Much of that feeling could only be selfish; I simply did not want to bid her goodbye; she had become an endearing as well as a desirable member of our cast, and I wanted lots more of the same. Why should we part now? Why should I leave this feast, when the feasting had hardly begun?

There were other reasons, more admirable – or more arguable, by a man looking for arguments to justify what he was going to do next. There were all kinds of ways in which I could help Susan; there was so much that could be made out of a girl like this, if she were given a new compass and a fresh start; all it needed was a rescue operation, and a little non-opportunist love.

I felt splendidly capable of this, particularly at nine o’clock in the morning after a night of wakeful endeavour, in bed with the object of charity. But if this romantic relief work had Cinderella cast in a dual and somewhat dubious role (one wave of my wand, and we turned into a motel), yet the results might still be just as good as if the Fairy Godmother herself had mapped them out.

Susan had been snared, by her startling good looks, her generous heart, and by the most potent man-trap of all – man. If she ‘went on like this’, it could only be downhill, and she would end up as an old woman in a back alley, performing standing services for sailors. It did not have to happen, and it would not, if she were helped now, at a time when she had so many assets, so much promise, so fine a life to live.

There was an ancient, skinny Negro circling the pathway round the pool, dressed in a tattered white under-shirt and a pair of blue jeans faded to the colour of a rain-washed sky. He bore a rustic implement resembling a wire-mesh spoon on the end of a pole, and with it he was cleaning the surface of the water. Leaves, weed, patches of scum, palm fronds, dead insects – all were lifted out, piece by piece, one by one, with delicate, dedicated care.

Each time he passed me, he grinned, and raised his straw hat, and bowed. But while the grinning was automatic, the other thing was not; it was, on this bright morning, his life’s work. He was giving his whole soul to his act of purification.

There was a far-fetched lesson here, and I prepared to take it, nodding my head sagely like a man seeing the light – the light he chose to see. It was suddenly tied with something else, something more remarkable, which had only just occurred to me.

Years ago, when it had been desperately important that I marry Kate (and I would never have denied, nor reversed, that urgency), I had made up a story about a girl in Johannesburg, a traditional harlot with a heart of gold, who lived for love, and died of it. It had been a good story, designed to catch Kate’s attention at a crucial moment, and it had worked; along with some other things, it had injected just enough jealousy to propel her into marriage.

One of the points of my story had been that, with a mixture of motives, I had tried to set this girl up as something better than a corporate bed-fellow.

My heroine had started life as fiction, and now she was not. Suddenly she had arrived on my own doorstep, as Susan Crompton, with something like the same problems and all of the same appeal. The fairy-tale girl herself had taken flesh – and no one could deny that she had made a delicious job of the transformation.

All at once, duty seemed clear, and pleasurable at the same time – the way that all duty should present itself. I had to take this thing on. I could not do less for the fact than I had done for the fancy.

I jumped up from my chair, on swift impulse, endangering the balance of the old man, who was nearby. But he recovered, and raised his hat, and bowed again. He was not to be turned from his endeavours … There were obvious dangers and complications ahead, if I did take Susan to New York, which was a small town in certain ways, and a most resonant sounding board for the faintest whisper of gossip, particularly at the café-society level.

But the reasons for taking her back with me had suddenly grown bigger than the reasons for leaving her in Barbados, or saying goodbye in Miami, and I was walking down the garden path to tell her so.

Armed with a stiff drink which the occasion demanded, I crossed to her cabin, and peered inside. She was still asleep, curled up under the covers of our workshop; but the shapely mound was still recognisable as a girl. I patted the mound where it was most appealing, and she raised her head, and opened one sleepy eye.

‘Hi,’ she said. She blinked, and frowned, and pushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘Aren’t you the man who was here? What happened to you?’

‘A phone call.’

‘Tell her you’re all tied up.’ She was still fathoms deep, and not too keen to come to the surface. ‘Don’t call us,’ she mumbled. ‘We’ll call you.’

‘It was from New York,’ I said. ‘Erwin Orwin.’

‘What he want?’

I took a drink before I answered: ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to go back.’

‘Oh … When?’

‘Wednesday.’

She yawned cavernously, but the news had already broken through; both eyes were open now, and she was peering doubtfully up at me, as if the warmth of our bed were no longer sheltering her from the much colder world outside. ‘I’ve lost count,’ she said, though I did not think this was quite true. ‘What day is today?’

‘Monday.’

At that she really woke up, and sat up too. The view was charming, and if I had had any thoughts of changing my mind, I lost them then and there, in a stalwart determination to rescue everything in sight.

‘Why so soon, Johnny?’ she asked.

‘They need the play, and it’s ready for them. I can’t really stay on here any longer.’ I drew a long breath, the breath of determination. ‘But when I go, I want you to come back with me.’

Her face grew suddenly wary, and guarded. ‘You mean all the way to New York?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head, flicking the small bright curtain of her hair across her shoulders. ‘Give me my robe. I can’t think when I’m naked.’

‘I’m not surprised. And while I remember, thank you for last night.’ But something in her face told me that she was not in the market for this kind of reminiscence, and I picked up her silk robe, and put it round her, with a kiss on the top of her head for luck. Then I sat down on the edge of the bed, and waited.

‘I don’t know,’ she said again. ‘Maybe we just ought to–’ she was back to her old habit of not finishing sentences, and this time I could understand it. Her expression had grown more careful still. ‘I mean, we’ve had a lot of fun already.’

‘There’s more to come.’

‘Maybe. But I didn’t want this to grow into a problem … Look, I’m going back to Miami anyway. Why don’t we just leave it like that?’

‘What happens to you in Miami?’

‘I’ll get by.’

‘I don’t want you to get by. It’s not good enough. I want us to go back together. Then when we get to New York, we’ll do something about you.’

‘What about me?’

I tried not to make it sound too noble. ‘I want to help you somehow. I really do. It shouldn’t be too difficult. It just means a fresh start.’

‘I don’t need a fresh start.’

‘That’s all you do need.’

It was almost pathetic to watch her face as she considered what I was saying. I was reminded once again of an earlier thought – of how vulnerable was a girl like Susan, once she had stepped into this sleazy arena. Sitting on the bed, remembering last night and many other nights, I realised that I was not in the best shape for cold calculation. It was the sort of moment, the sort of potent situation, when one could be betrayed into all kinds of stupid decisions; decisions which, though grounded in pity, could flower into monsters of complication and deceit.

But I had, at the same time, a picture of her, standing outside the airport at Miami, waiting for the bus and the next pick-up, and I could not bear it.

As she said nothing, I spoke again. ‘It is all you need, Susan. Give it a chance. Come back to New York with me, and we’ll work out a plan.’

‘What sort of plan?’

‘I don’t know. You could take a course at one of the acting schools, something like that. Or have another try in television. They’re not all bastards, and I do know a few people who could help.’

‘They are all bastards … But you’re being very sweet. Wouldn’t it mean trouble for you? I don’t want to involve you in anything. I mean, being married, and tied up. That sort of thing never works out.’

‘It’s worked out all right so far.’

She shook her head, like a child refusing a treat for reasons it cannot really explain. ‘That’s down here. It could be different in New York.’ Suddenly she faced the test question, the thing we were both thinking about, and not mentioning. ‘What happens when your wife comes back?’

I didn’t know the answer to that, and I didn’t try to find it. ‘One thing at a time. Let’s get to New York first, and see how it works out.’

‘I’ll think about it … I’ll think about it all morning … I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but it is difficult.’ She stretched her arms high above her head, and the robe fell away from her shoulders, and she was a big girl again. ‘It’s nice to have a choice, anyway.’ She was eyeing me, and I was doing the same, without disguise. ‘Didn’t they ever tell you? – it’s rude to stare.’

‘I just don’t know where else to look.’

She leant back against the pillow, and asked, as she had, sometimes asked before: ‘Shall I get up yet?’

‘I’ll think about that,’ I answered, copying her earlier tone. ‘I’ll think about it carefully, for all of the next ninety seconds.’

‘Ninety seconds? What’s happened to the great trigger-man?’

‘He’s getting old,’ I said. ‘But that won’t last, either.’

Clearly, there were all sorts of dangers and complications in this idea of mine, and they might not be too far away. But once having made up my mind, I was ready to take them on happily. The death-wish, I thought, as I lay down beside her and prepared to show that I had not grown as old as all that, was not a novelist’s tiny spark of invention; it was a real thing. And to be worthwhile, it had to be strong.

 

We drove back a different way, keeping more to the west and avoiding the atrocities of the Florida tourist strip; it gave us one spectacular section, a scenic road called the Blue Ridge Parkway, which rollercoasted its way for more than three hundred miles from mountain top to mountain top, striding a loose-slung tightrope in the clouds, with fantastic views of the plainlands far below on either side, and slow-circling hawks to keep us company.

We were in high spirits, to match this vantaged eyrie; later on, when we had to drop down to lower levels, across the blue grass country of northern Virginia, we seemed to be bringing gifts from Olympus to the lowly earthlings. But happiness persisted, at whatever altitude; Susan was very good company by day, and, by night, a soft and sinuous pillow for a weary man.

When it grew cold again, in Washington, I bought her a fur coat, bringing comfort to her, and the total cost of the excursion to another well-rounded figure, $11,000.

Then suddenly we ran out of north-bound, home-going road, and it was April, and spring in New York.