Free Black Marina by Emma Tennant Page A

Scorpion – a white dry-snow-cauldron of rum and eggwhite and bitter-fresh lime. We have straws to sip it with and a gardenia floats in the middle. ‘Almost as good as Trader Vic’s in the Hilton in London,’ Lore said laughing when Jim Davy treated us both up there, and he ordered three in succession for us, as I remember. Jim Davy was asking Lore so many questions. How long had she lived in her friend Teza’s house? How about the great scandal of theFord–Teza elopement here that Holly had told him about over and over: the meeting in the village, the picnic at the lagoon, the long hours in the dusk and the night, with the fireflies lighting up the shore from where you sit out on the raft on stilts at the far end of the Coconut Bar. Did Lore see Ford in London now? Does Ford come round and see Teza … and isn’t there a little kid? So he’s heard anyway. A romantic story, really – and Jim Davy calls for more salted peanuts to aggravate the thirst. Lore got quite drunk, I know that. But don’t ask me what she said to him. Sometimes it feels like a relief, Jim Davy being off the island. ‘Marry me, Holly,’ he’ll say when we’re down in the bar and the jukebox plays ‘Autumn Leaves’. ‘I can give you a great life in Kansas.’
    A legendary tale, the Ford–Teza story by now, it’s true. No doubt because Ford became a famous poet – and involved in the black struggle too – and then disappeared off the face of the earth. It’s all too late now. But even so I see this girl coming to wreck the whole scene, to cut simple pieces out of a complicated puzzle and, by jamming them together, break everything up.
    So it’s Sanjay the wretched girl wants. To kill him no doubt, to force him to say if Ford is dead or alive. It’s Sanjay, poor Sanjay. I can smell the damp, woody smell of his shirt that day after the picnic at the lagoon when we walked back, tired, along the curve of the yellow beach to the house. Duchess Dora was tired too and she had gone to lie down. I followed Sanjay, skirting the verandah and the ropes of flowering clematis that hang down like Rapunzel’s hair over the balcony. We were shaded from sight. I watched his back as he went off to the far side of the lagoon. He pushed his way through trees into the creek again – I followed – this time on the far side and in thicker jungle than ever. How can they dare come and hack it down? Put an airport there? The jungle, the twisting ropes of liana and the big butterflies that go so slowly they’re like handkerchiefs raised and lowered inthe streaming green – the world has found more and more ways of eroding and destroying places like this.
    Sanjay had a house there. It was a sort of floor of spars and beams from an old ship that had been wrecked off the coast of St James, and there were natural curtains of hanging branches of tamarind tree and a window where you could look out between the leaves and see the creek, and opposite, in the still water, his child-size pier and the boat he’d made, riding at anchor. God knows what happened to that magical place all this time. The creek grew over entirely, I suppose, when little Pandora began to show signs of her illness and they didn’t go down to play boats any more. The jungle closed in over Sanjay’s forest shelter too. I don’t like to go down to the lagoon now and see the scar the tractor made into a hill of red mud, and trees dying that have leaned against each other and died and come up again for thousands of years.
    Sanjay and I made love on a bed of palm fronds on the floor of his house. I thought at first, what if the little girl runs in and sees us – but the jungle was too thick here for that to worry me for long. And Millie would have taken her in for her rest. Sanjay was quiet and sad and I cried when we’d finished because I felt the end of something and not the beginning, and there was something very bitter in that.
    Sanjay rubbed my eyelids with his finger and