Free Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath Page A

great sagging barn of a house. It had once been a banana warehouse, though it was empty when they’d got there. Buildings left empty in the tropics deteriorate fast, he said, but it was big, and also so cheap that enough money remained from what I’d last wired for them to lease it for several years. It was more a ruin than anything else, no question; but it was their ruin, and it was here, he said, that he’d properly learned to paint. The dirt road out front was called Pelican Road, and that was the name the house had acquired.
    They found a woman called Radiance to cook for them, and she brought three of her sons to rid the house of spiders and scorpions and various other unpleasant creatures which had taken up residence. They set to work with brooms and mops, and later with buckets of whitewash which they slapped onto the old silvered boards so as to make the inside of the building as light as possible. They replaced the rotting floorboards, installed a simple kitchen and slung hammocks. They bought a few sticks of furniture and as many oil lamps as they could lay their hands on, and after a few days the place was more or less habitable. A large teak bed was brought in by water then carried into the house in pieces and put back together on the top floor.
    The rolls of coarse burlap were unpacked, and enough of the powdered paint they’d purchased in Havana to last them half a year, and then at last they stepped out onto the deck, the two of them, into the sunlight, and gazed out over the river, and the harbour, and the sea beyond, and clinked their beer bottles and toasted their great good fortune. And so began their days in Pelican Road, the old banana warehouse that would be my brother’s home for almost twenty years.
    All this he told me in a tone of quiet satisfaction, and I realized that he regarded the acquisition of this shabby place as a real accomplishment. I was troubled by this. I asked him if Vera was as proud of it as he clearly was, and he said he remembered her stamping across a vastness of wooden floor, peering up into the gloomy rafters, sweeping her hand across what seemed acres of wall space and declaring that
ten
painters could work here and not get in one another’s way! She apparently liked the tropics, and for a year or two at least she’d liked living in this wreck of a house that lurched precariously over the river—
    There was no sign of her now.
    All this he told me that first evening, in tones, as I say, of profound satisfaction. I was more interested however in the man himself. The changes in Jack were dramatic. Most striking was the absence of that reckless energy which had been so irresistible in London, and not only to me. For it had been replaced by a kind of abstracted introspection, in fact it seemed as if all the flamboyance with which he had once come at the world was now turned in on himself. Why should I have been surprised, much less saddened? The last time I’d seen him he’d been a youth—a strong, splendid, wilful youth, but a youth all the same—and now he was a man. And if he had once been a romantic he was now, I guessed, a realist, or perhaps a cynic: Vera had made him so. We were both silent for a while. Something screamed in the jungle. Then he spoke again, and his mood had shifted.
    —I’m usually all right on my own, but this time I just felt so bloody cast down. She’s gone off again.
    I saw the self-pity rise in his throat, then get swallowed. I waited for more but that was all. It was of course impossible for me to say that I had guessed this would happen, that I had seen clearly what sort of a woman Vera was in those first heady days in London. So I asked the question that had been on my mind ever since I stepped off the ferry. I asked him why, of all the godforsaken spots on the face of the earth, they’d chosen this one.
    A bit of shrugging here, scratching of the head, a glimpse of teeth. Oh, one got used to it, one even grew fond of it, and besides,