‘Appease Priest? The words don’t sound right. Henry, you hear?’
Henry said, ‘I will tell you about this insurance. I don’t know how it happen on the island, but it becoming a social thing, you know. Like having a shower, like taking schooling, like getting married. If you not insured these days you can’t hold up your head at all. Everybody feel you poor as a church rat. But look. The man coming himself.’
It was Priest, wearing a suit and looking very gay and not at all malevolent.
‘Dropping in for a little celebration,’ he said.
Selma was awed, and it was hard to say whether it was because of Priest’s suit, the coffins, or his grand manner.
‘What are you celebrating?’ I said. ‘A funeral?’
He wasn’t put out. ‘New job, Frankie, new job. More money, you know. Higher commission, bigger salary. Frankie, where you say you living in the States? Well, look out for me. I might be going up there any day. So the bosses say.’
I said, ‘I’d love to have you.’
‘You know,’ he said, ‘how in this insurance business I have this marvellous record. But these local people’ – and here he threw up his beard, scratched under his chin, screwed up his eyes – ‘but these local people, you know how mean they is with the money. Then this new company come down, you know, and they get to know about me. I didn’t go to see them. They send for me. And when I went to see them they treat me as a God, you know. And a damn lot of them was white to boot. You know, man, I was like – what I can say? – I was like a playboy in that crowd, a playboy. And look how the luck still with me, look how the luck still in my hand. You know what I come in here to celebrate especially? You know how for years I begging Ma-Ho to take out insurance. And you know how he, Ma-Ho, don’t want to take out no insurance. He just saying he want to go back to China, back to the old wan-ton soup and Chiang Kai-shek. Well, he insured as from today.’
Henry said, ‘He pass his medical?’
I said, ‘Offhand, that man looks damn sick to me, you know.’
‘He pass his medical,’ Priest said.
‘He went to the doctor?’ Henry asked. ‘Or the doctor went to him?’
‘What you worrying with these details? You know these Chinese people. Put them in their little shop and they stay there until kingdom come. Is a healthy life, you know.’
Henry said, ‘Ma-Ho tell me one day that when he come to the island in 1920 and the ship stop in the bay and he look out and he see only mangrove, he started to cry.’
Selma said, ‘I can’t imagine Ma-Ho crying.’
Henry said, ‘To me it look as though he never stop crying.’
‘Offhand,’ I said, ‘no more coffins, eh?’
‘Let me not hear of death,’ Priest said in his preaching manner. He burst out laughing and slapped me on the back.
And, indeed, no more coffins and dead sailors and toy wreaths appeared on Selma’s steps.
I knocked on Selma’s door one day two weeks later. ‘Any coffins today, Ma’am?’
‘Not today, thank you.’
Selma had become houseproud. The little house glittered and smelt of all sorts of polishes. There were pictures in passe-partout frames on the walls and potted ferns in brass vases on the marble-topped three-legged tables for which she had a passion. That day she had something new to show me: a marble-topped dresser with a clay basin and ewer.
‘Do you like it?’
‘It’s lovely. But do you really need it?’
‘I always wanted one. My aunt always had one. I don’t want to use it. I just want to look at it.’
‘Fine.’ And after a while I said, ‘What are you going to do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, the war’s not going to go on for ever. I can’t stay here for ever.’
‘Well, it’s as Blackwhite says. You are going to go back, we are going to stay here. Don’t weep for me, and’ – she waved around at all the little possessions in her room – ‘and I won’t weep for you. No. That’s not right. Let’s weep a little.’
‘I feel,’ I said, ‘that you are falling for old Blackwhite. He’s talked you round, Selma. Let me warn you. He’s no good. He’s a virgin. Such men are dangerous.’
‘Not Blackwhite. To tell you the truth, he frightens me a little.’
‘More than Priest?’
‘I am not frightened of Priest at all,’ she said. ‘You know, I always feel Priest handles the language like a scholar and gentleman.’
I was at the window. ‘I wonder what you will say now.’
Priest was running down the street in his suit and howling: ‘All-you listen, all-you listen. Ma-Ho dead, Ma-Ho dead.’
And from houses came the answering chant. ‘Who dead?’
‘Ma-Ho dead.’
‘The man was good. Good, good.’
‘Who?’
‘Ma-Ho.’
‘I don’t mean he was not bad. I mean,’ Priest said, subsiding into personal grief, ‘I mean he was well. He was strong. He was healthy. And now, and now, he dead.’
‘Who dead?’
‘Ma-Ho. I not crying because I blot my book in my new job. I not crying because this is the first time I sell insurance to someone who dead on my hands. I not crying because those white people did much me up when I get this new job.’
‘But, Priest, it look so.’
‘It look so, but it wrong. O my brothers, do not misunderstand. I cry for the man.’
‘What man?’
‘Ma-Ho.’
‘He did want to go back.’
‘Where?’
‘China.’
‘China?’
‘China.’
‘Poor Ma-Ho.’
‘You know he have those Chinese pictures in the back-room behind the shop.’
‘And plenty children.’
‘And you know how nice the man was.’
‘The man was nice.’
‘You go to Ma-Ho and ask for a cent red butter. And he give you a big lump.’
‘And a chunk of lard with it.’
‘And he was always ready to give a little trust.’
‘A little trust.’
‘Now he dead.’
‘Dead.’
‘He not going to give any lard again.’
‘No lard.’
‘He not going to China again.’
‘Dead.’
Through the roused street Priest went, howling from man to man, from woman to woman. And that evening under the eaves of Ma-Ho’s shop, before the closed doors, he delivered a tremendous funeral oration. And his six little girls sang hymns. Afterwards he came in, sad and sobered, to Henry’s and began to drink beer.
Henry said, ‘To tell you the truth, Priest, I was shocked when I hear you sell Ma-Ho insurance. Is a wonder you didn’t know the man had diabetes. But with all these coffins all over the place, I didn’t think it was any of my business. So I just keep my mouth shut. I ain’t say nothing. I always say everybody know their own business.’
‘Diabetes?’ Priest said, almost dipping his beard into his beer. ‘But the doctor pass him in everything.’ He made circular gestures with his right hand. ‘The doctor give him a test and everything was correct. Everything get test. The man was good, good, good, I tell you. He was small, but all of all-you used to see him lifting those heavy sugar bags and flour bags over the counter.’
Henry asked, ‘You did test his pee?’
‘It was good. It was damned good pee.’ Priest wept a little. ‘You know how those Chinese people neat. He went into the little back-room with all those children, and he bring out a little bottle – a little Canadian Healing Oil bottle.’ Still weeping, he indicated with his thumb and finger the size of the bottle.
‘Was not his pee,’ Henry said. ‘That was why he didn’t want to go to the doctor. That was why he wanted the doctor to come to him.’
‘O God!’ Priest said. ‘O God! The Chinese bitch. He make me lose my bonus. And you, Henry. You black like
me and you didn’t tell me nothing. You see,’ he said to the room, ‘why black people don’t progress in this place. No corporation.’
‘Some people corporate in one way,’ Henry said. ‘Some people corporate in another way.’
‘Priest,’ I said, ‘I want you to insure Selma for me.’
‘No,’ Selma said nervously. ‘I don’t want Priest to insure me. I feel the man blight.’
‘Do not mock the fallen,’ Priest said. ‘Do not mock the fallen. I will leave. I will move to another part of the city. I will fade away. But not for long.’
And he did move to another area of the city. He became a nervous man, frightened of selling insurance, instilling terror, moreover, into those to whom he tried to sell insurance: the story of Ma-Ho’s sudden death got around pretty quickly.
Ma-Ho went, and with him there also went the Chinese emblems in his shop. No longer the neat crocodile left and entered the back door of the shop; and from being people who kept themselves to themselves, who gave the impression of being only temporary residents on the island, always packed for departure, Ma-Ho’s family came out. The girls began to ride bicycles. The insurance money was good. The boys began to play cricket on the pavement. And Mrs Ma-Ho, who had never spoken a word of English, revealed that she could speak the language.
‘I begin to feel,’ Blackwhite said, ‘that I am wrong. I begin to feel that the island is just about beginning to have an existence in its own right.’
Our own flag was also about to go down. The war ended. And, after all these years, it seemed to end so suddenly. When the news came there was a Carnival. No need to hide now. Bands sprang out of everywhere. A song was created out of nothing: Mary Ann. And the local men, who had for so long seen the island taken over by others, sang, but without malice, ‘Spote, spote, Yankee sufferer,’ warning everyone of the local and lean times to come.
The atmosphere at Henry’s subtly changed. Gradually through the boom war years there had been improvements. But now, too, the people who came changed. Officers came from the base with their wives, to look at the dancing. So did some of the island’s middle class. Men with tape recorders sometimes appeared in the audience. And in the midst of this growing esteem, Henry became more and more miserable. He was a character at last, mentioned in the newspapers. The looser girls faded away; and more wabeens appeared, so expensive as to be indistinguishable from women doomed to marriage. Henry reported one day that one of his drummers, a man called Snake, had been seized by somebody’s wife, put into a jacket and tie, and sent off to the United States to study music.
Henry, now himself increasingly clean and increasingly better shaven, was despondent. Success had come to him, and it made him frightened. And Blackwhite, who had for years said that people like Snake were letting down the island, adding to the happy-go-lucky-native idea, Blackwhite was infuriated. He used to say, ‘Snake is doing a difficult thing, beating out music on dustbins. That is like cutting down a tree with a penknife and asking for applause.’ Now, talking of the kidnapping of Snake, he spoke of the corruption of the island’s culture.
‘But you should be happy,’ I said. ‘Because this proves that the island exists.’
‘No sooner exists,’ he said, ‘than we start to be destroyed. You know, I have been doing a lot of thinking. You know, Frankie, I begin to feel that what is wrong with my books is not me, but the language I use. You know, in English, black is a damn bad word. You talk of a black deed. How then can I write in this language?’
‘I have told you already. You are getting too black for me.’
‘What we want is our own language. I intend to write in our own language. You know this patois we have. Not English, not French, but something we have made up. This is our own. You were right. Damn those lords and ladies. Damn Jane Austen. This is ours, this is what we have to work with. And Henry, I am sure, whatever his reasons, is with me in this.’
‘Yes,’ Henry said. ‘We must defend our culture.’ And sadly regarding his new customers, he added: ‘We must go back to the old days.’
On the board outside Blackwhite’s house there appeared this additional line: PATOIS TAUGHT HERE.
Selma began going to the Imperial Institute to take sewing lessons. The first lessons were in hemstitching, I believe, and she was not very good. A pillowcase on which she was working progressed very slowly and grew dirtier and dirtier, so that I doubted whether in the end any washing could make it clean again. She was happy in her house, though, and was unwilling to talk about what was uppermost in my own mind: the fact that we at the base had to leave soon.
We did talk about it late one night when perhaps I was in no position to talk about anything. I had gone out alone, as I had often done. We all have our causes for irritation, and mine lay in this: that Selma refused to exercise any rights of possession over me. I was free to come and go as I wished. This had been a bad night. I could not get the key into the door; I collapsed on the steps. She let me in in the end. She was concerned and sympathetic, but not as concerned as she might have been. And yet that tiny moment of rescue stayed with me: that moment of helplessness and self-disgust and total despair at the door, which soon, to my scratchings, had miraculously opened.
We began by talking, not about my condition, but about her sewing lessons. She said, ‘I will be able to earn a little money with my sewing after these lessons.’
I said, ‘I can’t see you earning a penny with your sewing.’
She said, ‘Every evening in the country my aunt would sit down by the oil lamp and embroider. She looked very happy when she did this, very contented. And I promised myself that when I grew up I too would sit down every evening and embroider. But really I wonder, Frank, who is afraid for who.’
Again the undistorted reflection. I said, ‘Selma, I don’t think you have ever been nicer than you were tonight when you let me in.’
‘I did nothing.’
‘You were very nice.’ Emotion is foolish and dangerous; the sweetness of it carried me away. ‘If anyone ever hurts you, I’ll kill him.’
She looked at me with amusement.
‘I really will, I’ll kill him.’
She began to laugh.
‘Don’t laugh.’
‘I am not really laughing. But for this, for what you’ve just said, let us make a bargain. You will leave soon. But after you leave, whenever we meet again, and whatever has happened, let us make a bargain that we will spend the first night together.’ We left it at that.
So now there gathered at Henry’s, more for the company than for the pleasure, and to celebrate what was changing, the four of us whose interests seemed to coincide: Henry, Blackwhite, Selma and myself. What changes, changes. We were not together for long. Strangers were appearing every day now on the street, and one day there appeared two who split us up, it seemed, for ever.
We were at Henry’s one day when a finely-suited middle-aged man came up hesitantly to our table and introduced himself as Mr de Ruyter of the Council for Colonial Cultures. He and Blackwhite got on well from the start. Blackwhite spoke of the need to develop the new island language. He said he had already done much work on it. He had begun to carry around with him a few duplicated sheets: a glossary of words he had made up.
‘I make up new words all the time. What do you think of squinge? I think that’s a good word.’
‘A lovely word,’ Mr de Ruyter said. ‘What does it mean?’
‘It means screwing up your eyes. Like this.’
‘An excellent word,’ Mr de Ruyter said.
‘I visualize,’ Blackwhite said, ‘an institute which would dedicate itself to translating all the great books of the world into this language.’
‘Tremendous job.’
‘The need is tremendous.’
I said to Henry and Selma: ‘You know, I feel that all three of us are losing Blackwhite.’
‘I think you are wrong,’ Mr de Ruyter said. ‘This is just the sort of thing that we must encourage. We have got to move with
the times.’
‘One of my favourite expressions,’ Blackwhite said.
Mr de Ruyter said, ‘I have a proposal which I would like to put to you, though I do so with great diffidence. How would you like to go to Cambridge to do some more work on your language? Oxford of course has a greater reputation for philology but—’ Mr de Ruyter laughed.
And Blackwhite laughed with him, already playing the Oxford and Cambridge game. Almost before the question had been completed I could see that he had succumbed. Still he went down fighting. ‘Cambridge, Oxford? But my work is here, among my people.’
‘Indeed, indeed,’ Mr de Ruyter said. ‘But you will see the Cam.’
‘A hell of a long way to go to see a Cam,’ Henry said.
‘It’s a river,’ Mr de Ruyter said.
‘Big river?’ Henry said.
‘In England we think big things are rather vulgar.’
‘It sounds a damn small river,’ Henry said.
Mr de Ruyter went on, ‘You will see King’s College Chapel. You will see the white cliffs of Dover.’
With every inducement Blackwhite’s eyes lit up with increased wattage.
Mr de Ruyter threw some more switches. ‘You will cross the Atlantic. You will sail down the Thames. You will see the Tower of London. You will see snow and ice. You will wear an overcoat. You will look good in an overcoat.’
At the same time Henry, rising slowly and furtively, began to excuse himself. He said, ‘I never thought I would see this.’
At the end of the room we saw a fat and ferocious woman who was looking closely at the darkened room as though searching for someone. She was the woman whose picture Henry often showed and around whom he had been in the habit of weaving stories of romance and betrayal. Even now, in this moment of distress, he found time to say, ‘She wasn’t fat when I did know she.’
Success, the columns in the newspapers, had betrayed him. He got away that evening, but within a fortnight he had been recaptured, cleaned up and brought back. And now it was Mrs Henry, if she was a Mrs Henry, who ruled. She worked like a new broom in the establishment, introducing order, cleanliness, cash registers, bill-pads, advertisements in the newspapers, and a signboard: THE COCONUT GROVE – Overseas Visitors Welcome.