‘You’re coming on fine with your backstroke,’ the young man said to the girl.
‘Oh, Chick, do you really mean it?’
‘I mean it, honey.’
A negro came half-way up the steps and held out two hideous pieces of wood-carving. Nobody paid him any attention and he stood there, holding them out saying nothing. I never even noticed when he went away.
‘Joseph, what’s for dinner?’ the girl called.
A man walked round the balcony carrying a guitar. He sat down at a table near the couple and began to play. Nobody paid him any attention either. I began to feel a little awkward. I had expected a warmer welcome in my mother’s home.
A tall elderly negro with a Roman face blackened by the soot of cities and with hair dusted by stone came down the stairs, followed by Marcel. He said, ‘Mr Brown?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am Doctor Magiot. Will you come into the bar for a moment?’
We went into the bar. Joseph was mixing some more rum punches for Petit Pierre and his party. A cook wearing a high white hat pushed his head through the door and retreated again when he saw Doctor Magiot. A very pretty half-caste maid stopped talking to Joseph and went out on to the balcony carrying linen cloths to cover the tables.
Doctor Magiot said, ‘You are the son of Madame la Comtesse?’
‘Yes.’ It seemed to me that I had done nothing but answer questions since I arrived.
‘Of course your mother is anxious to see you, but I wanted first to tell you certain facts. Excitement is dangerous for her. Please when you see her be very gentle. Undemonstrative.’
I smiled. ‘We have never been demonstrative. What’s wrong, doctor?’
‘She has had a second crise cardiaque. I am surprised that she is alive. She is a very remarkable woman.’
‘Oughtn’t we to call in . . . perhaps?’
‘You need not be afraid, Mr Brown. The heart is my speciality. You will not find anyone more competent than I am nearer than New York. I doubt whether you will find one there.’ He was not boasting; he was just explaining, for he was used to being doubted by white people. ‘I was trained,’ he said, ‘under Chardin in Paris.’
‘No hope?’
‘She can hardly survive another attack. Good-night, Mr Brown. Don’t stay with her too long. I am glad you were able to come. I was afraid she might have no one to send for.’
‘She didn’t exactly send for me.’
‘Perhaps one night you and I might have dinner together. I have known your mother many years. I have a great respect . . .’ He gave me the kind of bow with which a Roman emperor might have brought an audience to an end. He was in no way condescending. He knew his exact value. ‘Good-night, Marcel.’ To Marcel he gave no bow at all. I noticed that even Petit Pierre let him go by without greeting or question. I was ashamed at the thought that I had suggested to a man of his quality a second opinion.
Marcel said, ‘Will you come upstairs, Mr Brown?’
I followed him. The walls were hung with pictures by Haitian artists: forms caught in wooden gestures among bright and heavy colours – a cock-fight, a Voodoo ceremony, black clouds over Kenscoff, banana-trees of stormy green, the blue spears of the sugar-cane, golden maize. Marcel opened the door and I went in to the shock of my mother’s hair spread over the pillow, a Haitian red which had never existed in nature. It flowed abundantly on either side of her across the great double bed.
‘My dear,’ she said, as though I had come to see her from the other side of town, ‘how nice of you to look in.’ I kissed her wide brow like a whitewashed wall and a little of the white came off on my lips. I was aware of Marcel watching. ‘And how is England?’ she asked as though she were inquiring after a distant daughter-in-law, for whom she did not greatly care.
‘It was raining when I left.’
‘Your father could never stand his own climate,’ she remarked.
She might have passed anywhere for a woman in her late forties, and I could see nothing of an invalid about her except a tension of the skin around her mouth which I noticed years later in the case of the pharmaceutical traveller.
‘Marcel, a chair for my son.’ He reluctantly drew one from the wall, but, when I sat in it, I was as far from her as ever because of the width of the bed. It was a shameless bed built for one purpose only, with a gilt curlicued footboard more suitable to a courtesan in a historical romance than to an old woman dying.
I asked her, ‘And is there really a count, mother?’
She gave me a knowing smile. ‘He belongs to a distant past,’ she said, and I could not be certain whether she intended the phrase to be his epitaph or not. ‘Marcel,’ she added, ‘silly boy, you can safely leave us alone. I told you. He is my son.’ When the door closed, she said with complacency, ‘He is absurdly jealous.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He helps me to manage the hotel.’
‘He isn’t the count by any chance?’
‘Méchant,’ she replied mechanically. She had really caught from the bed – or was it from the count? – an easy enlightened eighteenth-century air.
‘Why should he be jealous then?’
‘Perhaps he thinks you’re not really my son.’
‘You mean he is your lover?’ I wondered what my unknown father, whose name – or so I understood – was Brown, would have thought of his negro successor.
‘Why are you smiling, my dear?’
‘You are a wonderful woman, mother.’
‘A little luck has come my way at the end.’
‘You mean Marcel?’
‘Oh, no. He’s a good boy – that’s all. I meant the hotel. It is the first real property I have ever possessed. I own it completely. There is no mortgage. Even the furniture is paid for.’
‘And the pictures?’
‘They are for sale, of course. I take a commission.’
‘Was it alimony from the count which allowed you . . . ?’
‘Oh, no, nothing like that. I gained nothing from the count except his title, and I have never checked in the Almanac de Gotha to see whether it exists. No, this was a little piece of pure good fortune. A certain Monsieur Dechaux who lived in Port-au-Prince was anxious about his taxes, and as I was working for him at the time in a secretarial capacity I allowed him to put this hotel under my name. Of course I left him the place in my will and as I was over sixty and he was thirty-five the arrangement seemed to him quite a secure one.’
‘He trusted you?’
‘He was quite right to trust me, my dear. But he was wrong in trying to drive a Mercedes sports car on the roads that we have here. It was a lucky chance he killed only himself.’
‘And so you took over?’
‘He would have been very happy to know of it. My dear, you can’t imagine how much he detested his wife. A big fat negress without education. She could never have run the place properly. Of course after his death I had to alter my will – your father, if he is still alive, might have been next of kin. By the way, I have left the fathers of the Visitation my rosary and my missal. I was never quite happy about the manner in which I treated them, but I was very pressed for money at the time. Your father was a bit of a swine, God rest his soul.’
‘Then he is dead?’
‘I have every reason to believe it, but no proof. People live so long nowadays. Poor man.’
‘I’ve been talking to your doctor.’
‘Doctor Magiot? I wish I had met him when he was younger. He’s quite a man, isn’t he?’
‘He says if you keep quiet . . .’
‘Here I am lying flat in bed,’ she exclaimed with a knowing and pleading smile. ‘I can do no more to please him, can I? Do you know the dear man asked me if I would like to see a priest? I said to him, “But surely, doctor, a long confession would be a little too exciting for me now – with such memories to recall?” Would you mind going to the door, dear, and opening it a little way?’
I obeyed her. The passage was empty. From below cam
e a chink of cutlery and a voice saying, ‘Oh, Chick, do you really think I could?’
‘Thank you, dear. I just wanted to be quite certain . . . While you are up, would you give me my brush? Thank you again. So much. How nice it is for an old woman to have a son around . . .’ She paused. I think she expected me courteously, like a gigolo, to contradict the fact of her age. ‘I wanted to speak to you about my will,’ she went on in a tone of slight disappointment, as she brushed and brushed her improbable and abundant hair.
‘Oughtn’t you to rest now? The doctor told me not to stay long.’
‘They have given you a nice room, I hope? Some of the rooms remain a little bare. For want of ready cash.’
‘I left my bags at El Rancho.’
‘Oh, but you must stay here, my dear. El Rancho – it wouldn’t do – to advertise that joint,’ she used the American expression. ‘After all – it was what I had to tell you – this hotel will be yours one day. Only I wanted to explain – the law is so complicated, one must take precautions – that it’s in the form of shares, and I have left to Marcel a third interest. He will be very useful if you treat him right, and I had to do something for the boy, hadn’t I? He has been rather more than a mere manager. You understand? You are my son, so of course you understand.’
‘I understand.’
‘I’m so glad you are here. I didn’t want any little slip . . . Never underestimate a Haitian lawyer, when it comes to a testament . . . I’ll tell Marcel that you’ll take over the actual direction immediately. Only be tactful, that’s a good boy. Marcel is very sensitive.’
‘And you, mother, rest quiet. If you can, don’t think any more about business. Try to sleep.’
‘They say that to be dead is about as quiet as you can get. I don’t see any point in my anticipating death. It lasts a long time.’
I put my lips again against the whitewashed wall. She closed her eyes in an artificial gesture of love, and I tiptoed away from her to the door. When I opened it very softly so as not to disturb her I heard a giggle from the bed. ‘You really are a son of mine,’ she said. ‘What part are you playing now?’ Those were the last words she ever said to me, and I am not sure to this day what exactly she meant by them.
I took a taxi to El Rancho and stayed there for dinner. The place was crowded, a buffet of Haitian food carefully adapted to American tastes was laid by the swimming-pool, a bony man in a conical hat performed lightning taps upon a Haitian drum, and it was then, on my first evening, I think, that the ambition was born in me to make the Trianon successful. For the moment it was too obviously a hotel of the second class. I could imagine the small tourists’ agents who included it in their round-trip programmes. I doubted whether the profits could possibly satisfy both Marcel and myself. I was determined to succeed, in the biggest possible way: I would have the delight one day of sending the surplus guests uphill to El Rancho with my recommendation. And the strange thing was that my dream did come true for a short time. In three seasons I was able to transform the shabby place into the bizarre high spot of Port-au-Prince, and through three seasons I watched it die again, until now there were only the Smiths upstairs in the John Barrymore suite and Monsieur le Ministre dead in the bathing pool.
I paid my bill and took a taxi back down the hill and entered what I had already begun to regard as my sole property. Tomorrow I would go through the accounts with Marcel, I would interview the staff, I would take control. I was already planning how best to buy Marcel out, but that would have to wait until my mother had gone on to her further destiny. They had given me a big room on the same landing as hers. The furniture, she said, had all been paid for, but the floorboards needed renewal, they bent and creaked under my feet, and the only thing of value in the room was the bed, a fine large Victorian bed – my mother had an eye for beds – with big brass knobs. It was the first time I could remember that I had lain down to sleep in a bed I had not paid for with breakfast included – or had not been in debt for, as was the case at the College of the Visitation. The sensation was an oddly luxurious one and I slept well – until a jangling hysterical old-fashioned bell woke me, while I was dreaming – God knows why – of the Boxer Rebellion.
It rang and rang, and now I was reminded of a fire-alarm. I put on my dressing-gown and opened my door. Another door opened at the same moment from the same landing and I saw Marçel emerge, with a half-asleep look on his wide flat negro face. He wore a pair of bright scarlet silk pyjamas and he hesitated just long enough for me to see the monogram over the pocket: an M interlaced with a Y. I wondered what the Y stood for, until I remembered that my mother’s Christian name was Yvette. Were the pyjamas a sentimental gift? I doubted that. More likely the monogram was an act of defiance on my mother’s part. She had very good taste, and Marcel had a fine figure to swathe in scarlet silk, and she wasn’t petty enough to mind what her second-rate tourists thought.
He saw me watching him and he said in a tone of apology, ‘She wants me.’ Then he went slowly, with what seemed reluctance, to her door. I noticed that he didn’t knock before he went in.
I had an odd dream when I got back to sleep – odder than the Boxer Rebellion. I was walking by the side of a lake in the moonlight and I was dressed like an altar-boy – I felt the magnetism of the still quiet water, so that every step I took was nearer to the verge, until the uppers of my black boots were submerged. Then a wind blew and the surge rose over the lake, like a small tidal wave, but instead of coming towards me, it went in the opposite direction, raising the water in a long retreat, so that I found I walked on dry pebbles and that the lake existed only as a gleam on the far horizon of the desert of small stones, which wounded me through a hole in my boots. I woke to an agitation that shook the stairs and floors throughout the hotel. Madame la Comtesse, my mother, was dead.
I was travelling light, my European suit was too hot to wear, and I had only a choice of gaudy sports-shirts to put on for the chamber of death. The one which I chose I had bought in Jamica; it was scarlet and covered with print taken from an eighteenth-century book on the economy of the islands. They had tidied my mother up by that time, and she lay on her back in a pink diaphanous nightdress wearing an ambiguous smile of secret or even sensual satisfaction. But her powder had caked a little in the heat, and I couldn’t bring myself to kiss the hard flakes. Marcel stood by the bed, dressed correctly in black, and his face dripped with tears like a black roof in a storm. I had thought of him simply as my mother’s last extravagance, but it was no gigolo who said to me in a tone of anguish, ‘It was not my fault, sir. I said to her again and again, “No, you’re not strong enough. Wait just a little. It will be all the better if you wait”.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Nothing. She just took off the sheets. And when I see her like that it is always the same.’ He started to leave the room, shaking his head as though to get the rain out of his eyes, and then he came hurriedly back, went down on his knees by the bed, and thrust his mouth against the sheet where it was rounded by her stomach. He knelt there in his black suit looking like some negro priest at an obscene rite. It was I, not he, who left the room, and it was I who went to the kitchen and set the servants to work again for the guests’ breakfast (even the cook was partly incapacitated by tears), and it was I who telephoned to Doctor Magiot. (The telephone frequently worked in those days.)
‘She was a great woman,’ Doctor Magiot said to me later, and ‘I hardly knew her’ was all I could say in my stupefaction.
The next day I went through her papers to find her will. She had not been very tidy: the drawers of her desk were given up indiscriminately to bills and receipts in no order that I could detect; there was a confusion even in the years. Sometimes among a pile of laundry-receipts I came on what used to be called a billet-doux. One in English, written in pencil on the back of a hotel menu, said, ‘Yvette, come to me tonight. I am dying slowly. I long for the coup de grâce.’ Was it from a hotel guest? I wondered whether she had kept it for the sake of
the menu or of the message, for the menu was a very special one for some July 14 celebration.
In another drawer, which otherwise contained mainly tubes of glue, drawing pins, hair-slides, fountain-pen refills and paperclips was a china pig-bank. The pig was light, but it rattled all the same. I didn’t want to break it open, but it seemed foolish to throw it away like that, unexamined, on the growing pile of lumber. When I cracked it apart I found a Monte Carlo roulette token for five francs like the one I had put in the chapel collection many decades ago and a tarnishing medal, attached to a ribbon. I couldn’t make out what it was, but when I showed it to Doctor Magiot he recognized it. ‘The medal of the Resistance,’ he said, and it was then that he added, ‘She was a great woman.’
The medal of the Resistance . . . I had had no communication with my mother during the years of the occupation. Had she earned it or had she filched it or had it been given her as a love-token? Doctor Magiot had no doubt at all, but I had difficulty in thinking of my mother as a heroine, though I had no doubt at all that she could have played the part, as she could have played the grande amoureuse with the English tourists. She had convinced the fathers of the Visitation of her moral rectitude, even against the dubious background of Monte Carlo. I knew very little of her, but enough to recognize an accomplished comedian.
However, though her bills were untidy, there was nothing untidy about her will. It was clear and precise, signed by the Comtesse de Lascot-Villiers and witnessed by Doctor Magiot. She had turned her hotel into a limited company and assigned a nominal share to Marcel, another to Doctor Magiot and one to her lawyer who was called Alexandre Dubois. She possessed the ninety-seven other shares, as well as the three transfers which were neatly pinned to the document. The company owned everything to the last spoon and fork and I was allotted sixty-five shares and Marcel thirty-three. I was to all intents the owner of the Trianon. I could begin at once to realize the dream of the night before – or only with such delay as the quick burial of my mother, a quickness entailed by the climate, presented.