The Green Flash

‘Thanks. That was what Trudi said in the end.’

  She jammed on her glasses and began to write. Then she crumpled the sheet of paper in her hand and threw it angrily towards the wastepaper basket.

  Still by the door I said: ‘Trudi had her eye on me. Who am I to beef about that? Can one help being maddeningly attractive? And the temptation was there for me, like hell it was; but for some goddamned bloody witless reason I backed off. In the end, I backed off! She didn’t like it. Nor in a way did I. Can I explain my reasons? Not at all. It can only have been pure nobility of character.’

  ‘Go away,’ she said.

  ‘My character, I know, has always fascinated you, hasn’t it? You have been puzzled by my pure natural goodness … So there you are, Lady Muck, you now have the answer to it all.’

  ‘If you do not go,’ she said, ‘I will ring for some member of the staff to turn you out.’

  Instead of going I came back from the door and stood over her. ‘And if you don’t believe any of this, you stupid cow, I suggest you ask Leo Longworth! After Trudi and I had supper at the Sacher I parted from her, and Leo and I spent an hour afterwards getting sloshed in the bar! I was not very pleased with myself at the time and I am not very pleased with myself now! Why shouldn’t I have enjoyed myself with Trudi while you were out exchanging tearful reminiscences over the samovar with her corncrake of a mother? What the hell are you turning me into, a bloody Presbyterian monk?’

  She did not speak for a few moments. Then she said:

  ‘There are no such things.’

  ‘What as?’

  ‘As Presbyterian monks.’

  I used a couple of four-letter words that I knew she particularly disliked. She gave a laugh, harsh and unamused.

  ‘Miss Baumgarten had rings under her eyes this morning.’

  ‘More than I had anyway. Unless they were rings of frustration.’

  ‘I am very sorry if you blame me for this situation – always supposing you are speaking the truth.’

  ‘D’you think I care enough to lie to you?’

  She stared at me between half-closed lids. ‘I don’t know, David. I think perhaps you do. Perhaps we both do. Perhaps it is better if I believe your lie.’

  II

  Business took over for the rest of the next day. Then at dinner the following night she said: ‘Let us go away.’

  ‘Away? Where to? What d’you mean?’

  ‘Away from business. Away from public relations. Away from other people. Will you take me, David?’

  She was looking at me with eyes softer than I’d ever seen them before. She hadn’t referred to Trudi during the day.

  ‘Where d’you want to go?’

  ‘Anywhere warm. Where is this place you go in the West Indies?’

  ‘Barbados?’

  ‘Yes. Will you take me? Just for a week or ten days.’

  ‘If you want to. What is it exactly you want?’

  ‘Just to drop everything. Ever since John and I started this business it has taken priority in my life over all other things. But it has been so long. Even our – affaire – even that has always been tied up, mixed up with the business of Shona and Co. – perfumery, lipsticks, night creams, the rest. Of course, it is my life. In a way I think it has become your life – or an important part of your life. It will always be so for me. But it has gone on too long without a break. I would like to forget it – never even mention it – for a week or two. Would your friends be in Barbados?’

  ‘No. It’s not our time of year.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Of course I know one or two who live there. It’ll be the end of the high season now. D’you seriously think you’ll enjoy it?’

  ‘If you would be seriously willing to take me.’

  ‘It’s up to you.’

  ‘No, it’s up to you.’

  ‘Well … Why not? I’m always ready for a break.’

  ‘How could we go?’

  ‘From here? You’d have to fly to New York. There are sure to be connecting planes.’

  ‘And from London?’

  ‘Oh, from there you can fly direct.’

  She put her hand on mine. ‘That is the way,’ she said. ‘If we stop in New York we shall get involved again in our business affairs.’

  It seemed as likely to me that going back to London would involve us just as quickly in business affairs, and I thought this trip was a sudden romantic whim of hers that would tick away for a few days when we went home and then quietly die off. However, the day we returned she asked me to telephone the hotel and to book plane seats. There was a rush then, much responsibility to be delegated, sports things shoved into bags and a taxi to Heathrow, and we were off.

  So there was a nine-hour flight; and a half-hour taxi ride brought us to the Pear Tree Club; adjoining cottages had been reserved for us and after a bibulous dinner we retired to them and only joined forces for breakfast on the terrace. It was warm. The sun shone fitfully among lambswool clouds, there was a glisten of night’s rain on the grass, and the sea thumped its occasional wave on the adjacent shore. We ate breakfast surrounded by insolent birds who tried to snatch the toast out of our hands and dug deep into the sugar bowl.

  Shona seemed to be appreciative of everything, but I kept a weather eye on her, not sure how far she was really going to enjoy it, how far it was going to be a sort of self-imposed ‘ I am Shona on holiday, this is me registering pleasure’. After all, nothing could have been much further from her scene. All her life she’d been around in cities, following a profession that was all glitter and high-society commercialism and superficial noise and hard-nosed balance sheets. Here there was little to appeal to her, at least for more than a day or two, and I wondered.

  We swam and walked along the sand and lay in the half-shade of the casuarina and the mahogany trees; and swam again and dozed, and drank daiquiris and lunched in the big open dining-room and took an extra sleep in the afternoon, and went out for another swim to the rafts and took tea on the terrace and watched the sun sink into the sea.

  I said: ‘Have you ever seen the green flash?’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Just as the sun does his disappearing trick, at the very moment of sinking, you can sometimes see a sudden brief green flash, or green point of light where the sun has been a moment before.’

  She took off her sunglasses and closely watched the sun until it was snuffed out.

  ‘I did not see it. Did you?’

  ‘No, not this time.’

  ‘Have you ever seen it?’

  ‘I know people who have.’

  She smiled at me. ‘ Then we will watch again tomorrow.’

  The clouds were congregating for the arrival of night. Still we sat there. In the afterglow the waves were an inky cobalt as they turned, against the polished bronze of the sea. The moored boats in the curved bay silhouetted themselves blackly, like cut-outs in a collage.

  ‘David,’ she said. ‘I like it here. Thank you for bringing me.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know if that’s the way it was, but I’m glad to take the credit.’

  There was no one I knew in the hotel except the proprietors; we had drinks with them the next evening, and they were deferential to Shona, as most people seemed to be since the products of her firm became known worldwide. There was a chap I wanted to ring in Bridgetown called Ronnie Baird, who was Deputy High Commissioner, but I waited until Shona was out of the way in case he couldn’t do what I asked.

  That evening at dinner Shona said: ‘Why is this called a club and not a hotel?’

  ‘Probably something to do with the local by-laws. In a hotel you more or less have to admit anybody. If you run a club you can pick and choose.’

  ‘So that you can keep out black people?’

  Hullo, I thought, here it comes.

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘I don’t think I wish to stay in a hotel that does not admit black people.’

  ‘Simmer down. It’s not just a
colour thing. A number of whites are probably kept out too.’ ‘But what is the proportion of white to black in this island?’

  ‘Oh … one to twenty. One to twenty-five.’

  ‘So.’ She breathed through her nose.

  ‘Anyway, it’s all very easy-going. Don’t work up a head of steam about something you don’t understand.’

  ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Well, if a respectable black man with money came here I don’t for a moment suppose he wouldn’t be admitted. Remember, this country is now run by the West Indians for themselves. If they objected they could soon stop it.’

  We were silent for a few moments while our waiter, a handsome, lightly bearded young man with the lissom walk of a fast bowler, served us our next course.

  ‘It must be sad,’ said Shona.

  ‘What?’

  ‘For someone like him. What is his name?’

  ‘Merton.’

  ‘It must be sad for Merton and more like him. After a hundred years or more when the white man was the master and the black man his servant, then the islands were given their freedom. But what has changed? Every diner in this room is white! Every waiter is black! So what has changed?’

  I cut into my succulent little hen bird. ‘What can you do about it? Sugar. Rum. A few cottage industries, They couldn’t maintain their standard of living on that. So it has to be tourism. And in the nature of present-day tourism ninety-eight per cent of the clientele is white. Most West Indians swallow the pill. There’s no way out.’

  ‘Hm.’ She sipped her wine. The character playing the guitar in the band had a deformed hip. He sat on a high stool with another for his feet. Oddly enough the waiters moving among the guests seemed to have no rhythmic feel for the music: they didn’t walk in time or seem to be aware of the calypso beat.

  I said: ‘Are you a communist, Shona?’

  She looked up, her eyes sparkling in the candlelight. ‘You ask me that?’

  ‘Well … it could be, couldn’t it? When you left Russia you were getting out from under Stalin, not necessarily from the system.’

  She was quiet, eating her food, until I wondered if she wasn’t going to answer.

  ‘It is possible that all good people ought to be communists – in principle. Isn’t that so? I don’t know, but it is at least arguable. But no one who has lived under such a system and escaped from it would ever wish to go back to what men have made of that principle – in practice. Does that make sense to you?’

  ‘It crossed my mind to wonder.’

  ‘There is a lot I do not like about the West, but the imperfections, in proportion, are small. As a considerable capitalist myself …’

  ‘I noticed the high time you had talking to the Baumgarten woman about the good old days.’

  ‘The old days. May I correct you?’ She patted my hand. ‘ Not the good old days. But of course youth looked back on always has its rosier side.’

  Did it, I thought? Not mine. ‘She seemed to go a long way back, your chum. Once I heard her talking about the early days of Stalin’s dictatorship. When would that be: 1926? 1930?’

  ‘Oh, Ilya, she is older than she looks, and she forgets that I am not so old. She rambles on. It was enough to see her again, though most of the people we knew are dead. She lost her first husband in the first year of their marriage. Then she came to Vienna as a secretary in the Russian military command, but by the time they withdrew she had married this Austrian, Joseph Baumgarten, and she was permitted to stay.’

  I said: ‘ May I trawl up the forbidden subject?’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Have you fired Trudi?’

  ‘Would you mind?’

  ‘I would mind if it involved me.’

  ‘Well, I did not. I have given her another chance. Does that please you?’

  ‘It pleases me not to be involved in the decision.’

  ‘You are not. I reasoned …’ Shona laughed deep in her throat. ‘I reasoned that we were far more likely to get the money she owed us if she remained in the firm than if she left.’

  Most days the weather was variable, with cloud and sun doing quick-change acts, and a sighing breeze. We went to sleep every night and woke each morning to the cracking of the waves on the shore. We hired a catamaran and sailed almost out of sight of land. We water-skied and skuba-dived; and I hired a yellow Moke and drove jolting round the island, up to the North Point, to Farley Hill, to the Andromeda gardens, and of course once or twice into Bridgetown. The surface of the roads was frightful. Shona said: ‘At least you cannot drive fast here!’ She seemed to look younger every day. The invitation came I’d been angling for: the Governor General and Lady Millerton wanted us to lunch with them next Monday at twelve thirty.

  ‘That will be a pretty ending to the holiday,’ said Shona. ‘But this you must have arranged!’

  ‘Ronnie Baird is in the British High Commission. I went to school with him, and he was one of the very few blokes I liked there.’

  ‘I often forget that you are so well connected.’

  Every night we drank too much wine, and every night we made love. Every evening at six we sat on the terrace and watched for the green flash as the sun went down.

  ‘Nothing!’ said Shona every time, and then, after a fellow guest had claimed he had seen it, ‘it is subjective! … But of course! One stares at the sun so long as it goes down that it is a delusion of the eyes …’

  ‘I wouldn’t think you’re far out.’

  ‘But then – why isn’t it our delusion also? Ah well …’

  There were dances at the hotel, and once or twice we made a few circles of the floor for form’s sake before retiring to our cottages. On the Saturday evening as the green flash once again failed to show up she said: ‘Do you know, I don’t think I want to go back at all!’

  I raised my eyebrows at her in the accumulating twilight.

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Not joking. More than half serious. I suppose it is a wish to stop time more than anything else.’

  I said: ‘This is a dreamer’s existence. Always better for being short. Another two weeks would be marvellous. But it’s specially marvellous because of the contrast. That’s why heaven would be such a bore.’

  ‘Perhaps this is better than heaven.’

  So it had worked for her. I really believed it now.

  She rumbled on her lap for the book there. ‘You know what I have been reading? You must have seen it.’

  ‘Balzac’s letters.’

  ‘I came upon this passage last night. May I read it to you?’ I nodded and she put on her other spectacles, held the book up to the fading light. ‘ ‘‘The sudden revelation of the poetry of the senses is the powerful link which attaches young men to women older than themselves; but it is like a prisoner’s chains, it leaves an ineffable imprint on the soul, implants a distaste for a fresh and innocent love.’’ ’ She lowered the book. ‘David, I have never pressed you for any display of your feelings in our affair. I have always been grateful when any sign of them occurs spontaneously. So I am not demanding anything extra now. But … does it seem to you that Balzac was right?’

  I stared out over the sea. A pleasure steamer, as big as a Mississippi riverboat, was drifting across the orange glow where the sun had sunk, with fifty or sixty rights winking in the encroaching dark.

  ‘God knows how old Balzac’s mistress was; how much older than he was, I mean. Balzac was right for himself. The only other thing I can say is that you seem to be right for me.’

  She said: ‘ When you first became my lover I was careful to keep the word love strictly out of it. I tell you that it has never entered into my association with any other man. Never. That it has entered this one, I have to confess – now. You must have known it for a long time. I have ceased to be the cool and calculating boss; I am at once dismayed and delighted at what has happened. I am at sea when jealousy and possessiveness break in. I know all the greater dangers of such an association. I ask not
hing more from you than what you can give. At the very beginning I was reluctant to begin because I sensed the risks. But now I am glad. Whatever happens in the future, I am glad for here and now. This has been the most wonderful period of my life.’

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘So. It’s not easy for me, Shona, to say much.’

  ‘Don’t try.’

  ‘I should try,’ I said. ‘ I should try.’

  Darkness comes quickly in the tropics.

  Shona said: ‘Do you know, every night when we have been watching for the green flash I have been saying something to myself. I have been saying, ‘‘If I see the Green Flash, David will love me till I die.’’ ’

  The band was drifting in for the evening session. The little cripple was fixing up his electronic drums.

  ‘We’ve four more days,’ I said.

  ‘Four more sunsets.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should both see it before we go.’

  III

  The wine was good, and at dinner we drank more than usual. We didn’t dance that night, but supported each other to the doors of the cottages. After some discussion we chose hers. There we did not make love but lay beside each other smoking and talking long into the small hours. In the end I told her what I had never told anyone else – about my father, and his jealousy of me and his bullying, the locking-up in the cupboard under the stairs. And then that final night when he had come home gassed and found me in the kitchen and got me in a corner, and then, when I was scared out of my wits, he had lost his balance and toppled over and cracked his skull on the iron bar of the stove. And his death, and the police and the inquest, and all the hoo-ha of that time …

  It was a struggle talking about it. I may put it down in so many words like that, all pat and easy; but it was as hard as breaking bones.

  Then later on other things came up, raked over from that last meeting with my mother, feelings that she wasn’t blameless in the nasty mess-up of our lives, that in some ways she was as jealous as he was, that it had become a sort of three-way scrap for possession and dominance which had suddenly, unexpectedly blown up in her face. I told Shona things I thought I’d forgotten, maybe things that were best forgotten … We droned on and on.