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, sou
th 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.