Becoming Strangers Read online

  42

  BECAUSE THEY SELDOM SLEPT more than an hour or two after dawn, George considered it a weakness tantamount to deviancy to 'loll about in bed.' On Sunday morning, he called their eldest daughter, the one who was keeping an eye on the place. With five hours' time difference on her side he expected her to be halfway through her day.

  Dorothy was taking her first cup of tea, in bed, resting the saucer on her bosom. She had her teeth in, but no glasses. She looked lost in thought.

  'Bloody still in bed,' George was saying to her, his hand over the receiver, but Dorothy didn't seem to hear. 'I say, Carol's still lolling about in her bed. At ten-thirty of a morning, no wonder she never gets anything done. Shouldn't wonder if the geraniums are parched. I told her, morning and evening at this time of year.

  'Yes, still here,' he went on into the phone. 'You sorted yourself out now have you? Put the dog out. Poor bleeder, surprised it hasn't piddled everywhere. Fancy keeping a dog in till ten-thirty. Its bowels must be in a right state.' George winced, looking towards the toilet door.

  'Yes, lovely,' he sounded as though he was making a grudging concession. 'We're having a lovely time, but we're coming home soon, you know. Shan't want to see them flowers dead. Of course I worry, so does your mother. Yes, she's fine.' George looked at her, she was lying stock-still, unblinking; he thought for a moment she'd gone.

  'Dorothy,' he said sharply, 'are you with us?' Dorothy looked at him; her expression didn't change.

  'When are they coming round?' she said. 'I'll put on a joint for lunch.'

  'What are you on about?' he said. 'Hang on, Carol duck, your mother's talking.'

  Dorothy's mouth began to move anxiously, 'I can't remember if I did the shopping. Have we got any spuds?'

  'Pull yourself together, for Pete's sake,' George said, then, into the phone, 'We'll be home Saturday. Not long now. We'll see you then.' And he put the phone down.

  'What are you talking about?' he asked, standing. She looked at him with a frightened expression, like a rabbit cornered. He felt the heat of anger rise in him.

  'I was only saying, I didn't know what we'd got to cook for lunch, for the girls.'

  'We're on our bleeding holidays, woman, we're in the Caribbean. We ain't got to cook lunch. The girls ain't coming round here.'

  Dorothy's mouth continued to move but no words came out. With no one else there, he knew he had options, he could comfort her, he could shout at her, he could do anything he wanted. No one would see him, whatever he did, not even Dorothy, for she was not there either.

  He stood in front of her bed, like a colossus.

  'Come on,' he said, 'come on my old sweet, my old love, you've got to try a bit harder.'

  43

  WITH THE WORK ON THE NEW ANNEX COMPLETE, the terrace area in front of it was no longer roped off and so the dining tables and chairs that had previously comprised the outdoor seating there were reinstated. The residents could begin their day with breakfast by the pool. This was granted, edict-like, via posted bulletins on the restaurant double doors and the news was received with interest. Burns helped out on Sundays himself and he noted the chirruping excitement of the clusters of breakfasters with pleasure. He ought to think up something 'new' every mid-week, it need only be a rearrangement of seating.

  What creatures of habit human beings are that they find the mere act of eating a customary meal in a different location a great treat, Jan thought, standing at a remove from the residents who had filled the outdoor tables, looking for Bill. They can tolerate the curtailment of all sorts of freedom, so long as they have petty diversions. There was never a day that he woke and said, today I will choose liberty above all else, or justice, hedonism or even new experiences. No, he chose coffee or tea, albeit very good brands, and sometimes he screwed with the proper order of things and threw in a cube of sugar. Hospitals, prisons and schools—these institutions were crammed with human desire, desire that had been thwarted by other forces, immured and immolated. He and many more men and women like him were empty buildings.

  Suddenly his eyes came into focus and he saw that Laurie was looking at him, holding a croissant over her mouth in the shape of a smile. He laughed. There was a seat next to her with an empty cup and saucer and a space between a knife and fork. He had only to fit in.

  At the same table were the rest of the crew. 'Morning, son,' said George, looking up at him, then back down at his breakfast. A sinister expression on his face, George was penetrating the interior of a tiny jam jar with a large knife.

  'Hallo there,' said Dorothy brightly, wiping her mouth. There were tiny flakes of croissant in the small cracks around her lips.

  'How's the missus?' asked Bill, popping a triangle of egg-soaked toast into his mouth. Jan looked at him for a second, saw the tongue reach out to take whatever egg remained in the sides of the mouth, saw the beginnings of sweat on the mans brow, even at this early hour.

  'She is sleeping,' he said.

  'Sleeping it off?' asked George, turning the jam jar upside down and leaving it in the middle of his plate.

  'Why, yes, she is as a matter of fact,' said Jan.

  George looked at him quickly. 'You look fit.'

  'Why shouldn't I?'

  There was a silence.

  'No reason, son,' said George.

  'So you are joining Mr Moloney's Mystery Tours again, aren't you?' asked Laurie.

  'No mystery today. I'm going to church. There's a wee church, one of the first built outside the main town, all white, wooden, a real little gem, up on the northeast and I'm looking forward to the service. Anyone who wants is welcome to come with me. We'll have to get cracking though, we should be on the road within a half-hour or so.'

  'Well, I think I am ready,' said Jan, rather formally. He looked at Laurie, watching the slender sides of her neck move as she drank her orange juice. 'I'll finish my breakfast and meet you all in reception if you like?'

  'Jolly good,' said George, 'we've got to pop back to the room. I've got to see a man about a dog. Can't get on with the day till I've got it out the way.' He winced as he rose and helped Dorothy up.

  'Gently,' she said as he pulled at her, holding her underneath her arms.

  'Well, get a move on then,' he said.

  'All right, all right,' she was saying as they went off towards the hibiscus alley.

  'Pardon!' they heard George say loudly and the three of them exchanged glances and fell about laughing, Laurie folding her napkin and putting it on her plate, saying, 'Poor man.'

  Bill leaned forward, waggling his knife at them. 'He's a martyr to his digestive tract, that much he told me this morning when the breakfast was being served, warned me not to mess with the onions, told me he can trace a lot of discomfort to those villainous vegetables.'

  Just before they left, Annemieke joined them for a black coffee and a croissant. She waived the menu from the waiter. 'I won't be eating anything cooked, have you noticed there is no staff? I wonder if it's not Burns himself cooking,' she said, lifting her dark sunglasses and raising an eyebrow. Sitting back in her seat, she peeled layers off her croissant. 'I've been to better places.'

  'Well, we didn't pay for it,' said Jan.

  'That's not the point, Jan. For a businessman, you often miss the point, financially.'

  Bill and Laurie began picking up their breakfast things.

  'So where is your team off to, today, Mr Moloney?'

  'Will you not be joining us, Annemieke?'

  'Oh God no,' she said with a little laugh, 'excuse me, no. I don't get much holiday time and I don't like group tours. I'll be at the pool, reading, relaxing...'

  'Ach well, you've got it all worked out.'

  'Yes.'

  'How satisfying.'

  'Yes.'

  'We're going to a little church, it's three or four centuries old,' said Laurie, 'one of the first here.'

  'Well, when you're from Europe, churches they don't seem quite so appealing, every town has one that dates back a thousand
years or so. And I'm not religious. Neither is my husband. When you see what's been done in the name of religion around the world, it makes it hard to believe in a God.'

  'When I see what man has done to man, that's exactly why I believe in God,' said Bill. He sat back in his chair and smiled at her. 'Given the real depths to which mankind can sink, isn't it just amazing that the human race has survived at all?'

  Jan looked up at Bill from his plate, chewing, his mouth moving, his eyes still.

  'See, he's going to convert you this morning, Jan-tche,' his wife went on, crossing her legs. A little "mea culpa", some holy water and you'll be absolved, but then you'll have to live the exemplary life that Mr Moloney lives.'

  Bill moved his chair back, making a sudden scraping noise. 'Well now, I've already done most of the work. I got the four of them baptized yesterday, so I did. In the sea. Your man's born again.'

  44

  ON A TRIANGULAR LOT OF GROUND, next to a desolate roundabout and opposite one or two shops, a picture-book white church complete with steeple seemed to be on a cliff. In fact the land the other side of the church dropped slowly away to more of the sugar plantations through which they had driven to get there.

  They took a quick walking tour of the cemetery behind the church across cracked paving tiles, taking in the plastic flowers in waterless jars, the gothic white marble tombs and bread-slice gravestones with their sombre Victorian names—Ernestine, Archibald and Arnold—and the next generations sentimental diminutives, Nettie, Archie or Arnie.

  The church offered some relief from the heat and the group followed Bill up the aisle and sat side by side in a pew near the front. The Reverend was an elderly white man with an amiable manner and a habit of screwing up his eyes, a relief from his short-sightedness. The congregation was black for the most part, and the service, Bill told them, pretty standard for a Presbyterian church. They were amused, though, to hear the agreement of the congregation grunted and spoken freely during the sermon and prayers.

  'Yes, Sir,' a neighbour of theirs felt bound to say every few moments, 'mm-hmm.'

  Jan recalled going to see the priest of the church in which they chose to marry, just outside Brugge. Perhaps that was the last time either of them had participated in any sort of religious discussion. The meeting was a mandatory precursor to their getting married in the church. An old fellow had been pleased to offer them tea and take them through the service. He'd then thought, though celibate himself, to share some thoughts with them, some observations. He considered, he said, that along the road of married life they would meet obstacles that hindered their path; he had asked their permission to call these obstructions, 'elephants.' The analogy reeked of use. Jan had tried hard to listen. He knew from the set of Annemieke's mouth what she was thinking and he had held her hand; they were thick as thieves in those days. There would be big elephants and small elephants, he told them, and the point was to distinguish between the two and find a way around them, hand in hand. Even—or perhaps especially—as a relatively unsophisticated uneducated man in his late twenties, this had struck Jan as useless advice. Still, they'd been grateful that it had been so easy. It seemed that the best one could expect from any religious interaction was vague benevolence. They were relieved.

  Stepping outside and taking to the little Ford car that Jan drove in those days, they had gone to Brugge for a beer. In those days, beer tasted wonderful and the drunker they became the more she made him laugh and she had been able to make him laugh till his eyes watered. She was the opposite of his conscience, she was the wicked sense of humour he lacked but had sensed since childhood was vital equipment for the good life.

  Now, catching the drift of the sermon, rousing himself from his reverie, he was able to understand that the old vicar rummaged in his own bag of memories, re-counting tales from his youth in an industrial town in England, then chanced a small conceptual leap and begged the people facing him to be stoic in the face of adversity. Then he'd read a passage from one of Paul's letters and finished by sharing some good news he'd gathered from his congregation concerning the birth of twins and the cricket score.

  George was very pleased that when the Reverend came up the aisle shaking hands left and right, he had received a firm grasp and a quick chat. The two of them exchanged birthplaces and then regiments, shook hands again and George agreed on all of their behalves to join the old boy for a cup of tea afterwards. He turned to the others and told them what they'd just seen take place. 'He came right up to me, singled me out, as if he knew me, and would you believe he was in North Africa too during the war?' They'd nodded. 'He asked me back for a cuppa. Well, we're all invited, of course. Nice old boy.

  'Poor devil looks like he's on his last legs,' he said to Dorothy, turning to watch the Reverend leave. Dorothy remarked that although he walked with a slight hunching of the back he went at a better pace than either of them. 'You always have to gainsay me,' George grumbled.

  As Bill, Dorothy and George stepped into the meeting room just off the entry hall, Laurie turned around to say to Jan, who was standing behind her, 'Let's you and I go outside.'

  45

  BY LUNCHTIME ON SUNDAY, the sun was stretched, angry, shaking. Steve Burns stank. He'd been at the frying pans, dabbing damp on home fries, adding more and more vegetable oil to the pan, sending frozen potatoes to a sizzling hell. Brian, the Rastafarian, had kept up a monologue about the cost of living in a country like theirs.

  'We livin' in place with two economies, man. Gots to be cheap labour for the man to make a profit, gots to be expensive in da shops on account of the nothing which we make here ourselves. Man can't live like that. No matter how much he love his country. Gots to fly, fly away.'

  Steve had agreed with him without much interest. Money was just a score, that was all, the mark of your ingenuity. And luck. There was no point in complaining. He stacked emptied eggshells, half on half, with a sense of satisfaction. Over a hundred empties. As long as the chickens kept popping them out of their arses, as long as people sat with their knife and fork at the ready for an egg on toast, neither the chicken nor the egg was important, nor which came first, just the appetite of man. That was all that counted. He took an icing blade to the frying pan and scraped away at the debris, emptying a bird's nest of it into the sink, ignoring Brians cry of distress, and starting a new batch of the oil and potatoes.

  'Brian, keep an eye on this lot. Season it for me,' he said and he went out with an open steel tureen of the home fries. In the heat, the sweat dripped from his face into the platter. Salt on salt. He needed a drink, so he stepped down to the Hibiscus Bar and sat there to enjoy a cold beer.

  In three or four months' time he'd have built up a Sunday staff. There was no way a manager should be in the kitchen. It looked bad. But he was so keen to report higher profit margins that quarter, he'd have cleaned the toilets himself too if needs be. This was a crazy place to turn a profit. The costs! The only way to make money was to savagely overcharge the punters. Emma was right; he'd have to start 'churning' them, pushing them into additional activities, the profitable ones. It was no good them lazing about, sedated on booze, dead-weight at the pool. It was no good him being their mum, finding the missing ones, keeping them from fighting over each other's toys. He should be more like their personal banker, providing a return of fun, enlightenment, whatever it was they were after directly proportionate to their investments.

  He felt a prod on his back and turned round to find himself facing his nemesis. Jason.

  'Morning,' he said, 'join me for a beer? Oh, I thought you were off. Can I help with the cases?'

  'Not now,' said Jason, looking at the clock. 'We've got an issue.'

  Well, fuck me, thought Burns, what a surprise. Did a day go by that this man did not have an issue?

  'The Danish lady, she's coming out with us for a brunch cruise.'

  His wife put a long-fingered hand on Jason's shoulder. Saronged cannily to reveal an entire long leg and wearing another string bikini top,
she interrupted to say, 'Another one of your guests has gone missing.'

  'Just a minute, I'm about to explain,' Jason said to her abruptly, as if she were staff. 'She's not picking up, the Danish lady, Mrs De G., her phone's off the hook.'

  'Perhaps she doesn't want to go?' he smiled, lifting his shoulders. 'Perhaps she's avoiding you. Perhaps she needs some privacy.' He took a swig of his beer while he still could. He had a feeling it would be a short-lived sensation, the gaseous bitterness and mind-muffling torpor.

  'No, she wanted to go, she was enthusiastic last night.'

  Wasn't she though, thought Burns. 'Not to put too fine a point on it, but she had drunk a lot last night, perhaps she's feeling a little ropey this morning.'

  'Sure, it's possible. But your barman told us he'd seen her this morning, at the bar here, having a drink.'

  Benjamin, the barman, smiled nervously and shrugged, 'It's the truth.'

  'And then she went off with your buddy, the one who likes to mess with the female guests when he's not doing the floors and toilets.'

  'He tell her he gonna give her help home, she come over all sick looking,' said Benjamin, wiping the inside of a glass.

  'It's really none of our business,' said Burns, signalling with a flick of his head that Benjamin should desist.

  Benjamin stood still. He had a smile like an angel; in its warmth his tomato cheeks ripened. His eyes closed for a moment behind his glasses. Only the spectacles broke the sleek beauty of his face. They drank maybe two, maybe three Bloody Marys each one of them. Asking me for doubles to go in. I'm putting a little touch of sherry in these days. This is what makes a good Bloody Mary great.'

  'So what do you think, Burns? Maybe even you can add two and two together?'

  'I can, Sir, but I'm not keen to do so. I like to uphold the privacy of my clientele.'

  'Yes. I'm sure Mr and Mrs Davis were glad of their privacy the night the old woman was lost.'