Coronach, page 88
I saw the girl later, and there were no revelations in her face; I saw Coventry; I did not see St. James, and when I did he was not alone. Coventry came and stood behind my shoulder, murmuring a compliment into my hair. He was a little, convivially drunk, impeccably dressed to the diamond in his stock, and he smelled of cigars and perspiration and female musk, which he had attempted to disguise with eau de cologne. There were acts of love in which, apparently, he still indulged with pleasure, and I sensed that this was not his first sexual adventure of the night.
“You give me joy, I hope, dear Margaret?”
“I wish you happiness. I wish it were within my power to confer.”
“Then confer a kiss, and that will be my happiness.”
I kissed him lightly on either cheek: his skin was moist with perspiration. If he sensed the slight hesitation, he would justify it by his own secrets and proclivities, not mine.
He summoned sweet champagne for me: the tray was proferred in immaculately gloved hands. The black face beneath the horsehair wig was sweating as profusely as the goblets.
“Do you see that woman?”
“Yes.” Then, sensing that something less curt was required, “Do you know her?”
“Oh, yes. And you should know her also. For many years she was ‘darling Lizzie’ to a gentleman of our acquaintance.”
Another small, exquisite torment: he enjoyed them, but she was nothing more to me than a shadow who moved in a dream. I would soon be gone, and they would remain, these dwellers upon the volcano, these, wealthy and anachronistic, whom emancipation and uprising would obliterate, these women preening in obsolete fashions, with jewels winking in unclean hair, these men who had built an empire upon despised humanity, these soft-footed slaves: all this, the great windows open to the moon and the mosquito, the heavy fragrance of night-blooming flowers and the iodine smell of the sea, all this would not exist when I had gone, as a dream disturbs and dies, and cannot threaten, because it is not real.
She was taller than I: her unpowdered hair was dark auburn, her eyes grey but not a grey like mine, her gown of pearl grey silk. She had never been beautiful but she was radiant; the very pale skin seemed incandescent. It was not possible to know her age: the face was wilful, passionate, with a strong, fine mouth and high cheekbones, and she was alive, vibrantly alive and responsive, even as I was dead.
She was Lady Elizabeth Hamilton, wife of the lieutenant-governor of Antigua, and Coventry emphasized her title and presented me to her, so there should be no doubt that, by birth more than marriage, she outranked me. She tapped her fan against her cheek: the lace and iridescence of the mother of pearl guards complemented her skin and the pearls she wore to enhance it.
“So... you are lately come from England. I envy you. That, and other things.”
“As you cannot know, madam, you cannot envy.”
I imagined Coventry’s enjoyment of this: card for card, stake for stake.
“We have a mutual acquaintance. I envy you his friendship.”
And I knew beyond doubt who she was. The faithless inamorata of seven years, the inflicter of pain and disillusion.
She said, “If you should see him, and I should not, commend me to him.”
“I am certain he will make himself known to you, madam.”
“Oh, I think not— I think not. He is no moth. And I am but an old flame.”
I found him upstairs on the broad verandah outside our rooms, smoking, and drinking brandy. There was heat lightning over the sea, and the perfume of the night seemed intense, the music a private concert, the voices and laughter inconsequential. The darkness here both salved and disturbed me, because I shared it with him.
He said, “Elizabeth is here.”
“I have met her.”
“I don’t want to see her.”
“That would be uncharitable, as she plainly wishes to see you.”
He watched the lightning, smoking; the music died briefly, and I heard the sea. He said, “You don’t care for parties, do you?”
“No. I have been too much alone not to feel like the ghost at the feast.”
The music resumed, the composer recognized, the composition familiar, a minuet once danced and unforgotten: unbearable memory.
“St. James.” He responded with the slightest movement of his head. “It is discourteous to keep her waiting.”
He crushed the cigar out on the balustrade and walked away into the heavy darkness.
I did not wish to witness the reunion of old lovers, but he brought her to the terrace directly below my room, so their conversation should be known to me. She opened with skillful coquetry; he responded with beautiful manners. I recognized in it a mutual salute. Then she said, “Time has been your slave.”
“And yours. The promise of beauty in the girl is more than fulfilled in the woman.”
“Still so gallant.... Your life agrees with you.” He laughed. Perhaps she was aware of the bitterness in it. “You should have stayed in the navy. You would have been an admiral by now.”
“I think not.”
“I think so. A rear-admiral, at the very least.”
“It was otherwise ordained.” It was written, even as this is written. “How is your husband?”
“The same, alas.”
“And what mischief are you doing here?”
“I am visiting— it is permitted occasionally. I return to Antigua within the month, the dreary duty to resume.” There was a rustle of silk, a gesture made and perhaps not rejected. “Oh, my dear, you look so well— so much better than the last time.”
“The last time was a lifetime ago. Another man, another world.”
She said, “Fletcher is at Fort Charles. We shall meet in Spanish Town— he has agreed to show me the cathedral. Come with me. I have spoken of you to him, as a friend. He remembers you.”
He said, with immense bitterness, “What, as your ‘cousin’? Is that how you want us to meet?”
“You may meet him as a man, or as your son. He is worthy of you.”
“Time has made you too generous in your memories of his father.”
Again a silence. Perhaps she touched him, or he her; perhaps their isolation from one another was as intense and inviolate as mine.
At length she spoke again.
“You have land here? Noel mentioned it.”
“An old investment, which proved prudent in the long view.”
“Prudence is a new departure for you.”
“One acquires it with age.”
“Shall I tell you what I think? I think you never change. I think you merely bide your time, waiting for some indication of the political wind’s direction.”
“There are portents enough for those who care to read them.”
“I read more than portents. I read what London writes, and what English Harbour answers. And I know you, Leslie— my God, how well. This is a whirlwind you cannot hope to reap.”
“I thank you for your observations, Lizzie.”
“They are given with a full heart. We are in a season of calamity. Remember what I have said.”
“I shall.”
“And me.”
“I shall remember you always.”
She did not say, and love me: the silence that followed was eloquent, the lightning over the sea stronger.
She said, “Do you think it will rain?”
“Almost certainly. Before dawn.”
“I must call for my carriage. I was invited to stop the night.... I knew you were here. Perhaps I hoped— too much.” Words were spoken, which were not meant to be heard. “Please don’t. I have none. I merely hoped— that was all.”
There was no further conversation. I never saw her again, except in his eyes, in the injuries she had afforded him and could still afford him, and in the obsessive imagination and hallucinations of the night. He was not seen again after one o’clock; I did not know he had gone to walk on the beach; I had not seen her departure and suspected that she was with him. Coventry took possession of me and exhibited me for more than an hour, relishing the elaborate foreplay of social intercourse and repeatedly requesting that I dance with him. Music was my passion, he said, he saw the memories like shadows on my face: why should passion be unfulfilled? I danced a set with him, the object of excruciating scrutiny, and retreated to my room: I knew then that I was ill, and my need for privacy was intense. It was four in the morning, still dark, and raining. The music haunted the delirium of the next hours.
I must, unconsciously, have called out to St. James: there was a door behind the door and both were locked, but they were opened from his side and my room was entered. Maica was summoned, and came alone; the house was quiet now, the guests departed or asleep, light rising from the sea. I heard him speak of malaria, fearfully: I heard her say that I was poisoned. Whether by design or mischance, or by what substance, was never known.
Sickness possessed me like a demon, every thirty minutes for seven hours. My bowels opened; welts broke on my skin, my eyelids, my ears, my labia, the soles of my feet, my lips.
She said, “Go away, man. You shame this girl.”
He said, “I have seen her ill before,” and then, “For God’s sake, do something for her.”
She said, “Minette, listen to me.”
He gave me water and I thanked him; the courtesy seemed to distress him. His face was drawn: he looked very old.
“Minette, I make you a little charm, somet’ing you wear against you heart. Somet’ing make you well.”
It was only a sachet on a cord. He lifted me in his arms to receive it.
She said, “You good man, Santiago.”
He held me and stroked my hair, I who had never spoken his name. And he caressed me with his voice, speaking of tomorrow or the day after that, when he should take me to the sea, and we would bathe together, we should walk naked in the sea, and there would be no more concealment, there would be no shame, and the sea would heal me and cleanse me, cleanse us both, and we would be baptised by the sea and reborn together. All this, he would do with me.
“Minette... what you dream?”
Leslie, I said. Leslie.
“He sleep, child.”
She bathed my body, brought it bitter liquid, gave me opium; the torment had not eased, although the violence of the spasms had abated. I did not know that he was sleeping within the sound of my voice. I did not speak his name again.
On the seventh day, he took me to the sea.
We spoke little: what was unspoken was understood. Our lives had altered, and this, feared and desired, was my committal, the absolute of my trust in him.
He walked naked into the sea and eventually I joined him: he had been swimming, strongly, unlike most sailors, granting me privacy. I stood with my back to him, my breasts hidden, my head bent; I was trembling, closing my eyes against the sea’s brilliance, closing my senses against him. He spoke my name, and his hands, cooled by the sea, anointed me with the salt gift of its water, until my skin burned and glittered with the sun and the sea’s reflections, and the ebb and flow of the water and the hands and the heat and the silence, the sea’s silence, were both sensuous and innocent: as naked as Adam, as naked as Eve, we stood in perfect communion, neither acknowledging the other. He kissed my shoulder and the nape of my neck, sensing that this could be given, and this, to caress my breasts, although I could not yet turn toward him, and then, gently, irresistibly, he compelled me to turn, and he gave himself to me in that instant, the salt and the sun in his hair and on his skin, the beauty of his naked body and of the sex veiled by the sea, the sea the only world around us, embracing and baptising, the lucid sea caressing as he caressed, the sea in his eyes.
He loved me, kneeling, his head bowed; my fingers loosened the black riband and it drifted and was lost, and I stroked his hair; what was offered he took with intense passion, unspeaking, with hands and lips: throat, nipples, belly, the concavity of bones. He caressed my hair, my other hair, although he did not enter me with his fingers, as though he sensed that I could not give this, then, kneeling still, he embraced me, my hips, my buttocks, his mouth against my skin, and came, my name a litany on his lips: his semen drifted, and the sea cleansed him; when he raised his head his face was transfigured. And I kissed him, as I had kissed him, as I kiss him still, in dreams of passion, of that place and that hour, which haunt and give no comfort, kissed his mouth and his eyelids and the scars on his face and the savage scars on his body, his hands and mouth and sex cool and salt as the sea, the burning heat of the sun on his skin. He did not watch me leave the sea; he swam a little, and then, naked, he walked from the water and dried his body with his shirt and dressed, and sat beside me, the salt drying in his loosened hair and on his skin, his face in repose youthful and refreshed, his eyes narrowed against the light. Although there was little tide, time and current deepened the iridescence of the sea.
He said, “I shall always hold this memory most sacred, and most precious. I never thought such beauty was possible.”
“I want to give myself to you... but I cannot.”
“If I never knew any more of you than what you have given me, it would be enough. It would be everything.” There was a silence: I knew what he was going to say. “I am going to Spanish Town to meet my son. I don’t want to, but I feel I must. I should be very happy if you went with me.”
“I met your mistress. I don’t want to see your son. I don’t want to be reminded of years I can never share.” He said nothing, gazing at the sea, the white hair and the dishevelled copper drying in the sun, the white his mortality, the promise of severance, the irretrievable years. “The past is a lost, sweet country. We cannot return, we cannot relive.”
“Your past is equally lost to me.”
“I could never have given you a child.”
“You are my child, and my sister, and my friend, and more than any of these, my lover. The past is your absence— you were not given to me. And if your past could be relived, or lived with me, I would give anything. Anything. You cannot know. You cannot know, Margaret.”
We remained until twilight, every hour evanescent, until they, too, day and evening, were lost, distilled, of the irretrievable sweetness of years.
V
There was little wind the morning of his departure for Kingston, from which he would ride the fourteen miles to Spanish Town. The weather was exceptionally hot, the sea calm under clouded skies. These conditions persisted for days until a light rain fell, and the sea quickened as though prophesying storm: the mercury in Coventry’s barometer dropped but there was no storm, only the smothering heat. Sleep was impossible. Coventry and I played cards on the terrace at midnight, the flame unwavering in the glass and thunder below the horizon. The weather oppressed him, and he attributed his unease to the barometric pressure, which he said affected the brain, but he was subdued and uncommunicative. Every inch it fell was an inch closer to hurricane, and he had cane to lose.
It fell further. The sea was flattened and swept with rain, the light grey, the days airless and intolerable. By night on my dishevelled bed I prayed for wind, not the great wind I feared, the serpent’s coil of destruction sucking its power from the sea, but a resumption of the cooling trades, an end to this dead calm. I prayed for St. James, for his safety, for his happiness, for his quietness of mind, listening to the rain, imagining rain in Spanish Town, rain on the face of the sea.
The season of calamity was upon us: it would claim its victims. I listened to the rain and remembered the baptism in the sea, my rebirth and his, and he seemed close to me in the living night: the sounds in the night were imagined or dreamed: the rain was only the rain.
It was a shadow on the mosquito netting draped around my bed, then the moon was obscured by cloud and the shadow became living flesh, not in the darkness of that moment but in the candlelight that would be shed on horror: the eyes, open and discoloured, their pupils grossly misshapen, the tumours and deformity of the face, from which part of the jaw had been amputated.
He was death animate, blind, consumed by cancers, repeating the word cunt, cunt endlessly so that I should comprehend it; and later, not then, as he strangled me, but afterwards, I understood. I remembered the word and that I had understood it, although it had not been spoken in English but in the language of another country, by another man I had thought would kill me.
But he was dying and insane, and I was not myself to him, I was not Margaret. I was only female, past, present, remembered or unknown. I was only what he called me: I had no name. I was nothing. As he had no name to me, was nothing to me when I killed him.
He did not die immediately. He was kneeling, entangled in the bloody netting, when they came. I had locked the door, although he had forced the jalousies open; the order of things is unclear; I cannot remember. Coventry, his hairy nakedness hidden only by a shirt, his mistress with him, also half clothed, as though she still shared his bed; the Muslim Estevan, whose holy day this was, carrying a machete; other slaves, their blackness overwhelming, bearing weapons perhaps more fittingly turned upon the white master than the white slave dying on the floor.
Supporting, embracing, she took me from the bloodied bed, pried the stinking pistol from my fingers: my hand and arm and chemise were soaked with blood. He was still breathing, tangled in the draperies, bleeding profusely from the wound. As she passed, she pierced his outstretched hand with the high heel of her slipper, and enough consciousness remained in his face to reveal a momentary anguish. Coventry brushed by me, smelling of sweat and marijuana; he carried the other pistol, the mate, which I had removed from the seat in the orchid house. He was leaning down: he looked into the face and spoke, although his words were inaudible, there was no sound, no sound, and then he placed the muzzle of the pistol against the head on the carpet and fired.
