Free Black Marina by Emma Tennant Page B

smiled.
    ‘Where were you when I was younger?’ he said. And I hardly hesitated at all. I said, ‘Dora …’
    Some men make the fact of their marriage like an inadmissible secret, which if ever spoken, would bring ruin and disaster to whoever heard it. It’s as if a congenital illness, a joint one, held the couple in its thrall. If at first I put Sanjay in this category it was because I sensed a weakness in him, a fierceness that had to be too strongly held down, a need for a reason for his strange life out here. Later I came to know better. I understood the shadow under which Sanjay lived,and I saw his escape into childish things – the making of miniature ships, the painstaking building of an artificial harbour, with stones and branches dragged along the jungle track – as his way of shutting out pain. And, too, he did try to love his daughter, Pandora. It was touching. When they used to come along to the Coconut Bar – when I was working there before the store was ready and Mrs Van der Pyck was issuing her fancy orders from above – Sanjay and the little girl would perch on stools, and Sanjay would wear this particularly shy smile, and the child would ask for a lime juice or a slice of water melon (we still didn’t have a freezer in those days).
    ‘You’ll grow up to help Holly in the bar, Dora,’ Sanjay said. ‘We’ll have ice-cream then, you’ll see.’
    ‘Ice-cream,’ the child said, because of course she’d never had one. And Sanjay would look me in the eyes and laugh. Then he’d grow melancholy again. All very sentimental, I’m sure – but I used to wait for the moment when Millie would appear along the beach or down the track from the village, usually with a bunch of other kids in tow, and swoop little Pandora up. Then Sanjay stayed on a while. He never drank much – maybe he’d just have fresh ginger and some soda to top it up. He never said much either. But he’d look pleased if you said the new houses were coming along very well, or there had been some interesting passengers on the Singer , keen to meet up with the manager of the consortium’s estate and buy, maybe, a plot of land for building a house. He was so cut off, poor Sanjay. As if old Allard had purposely condemned him to live out his lease in the tail end of the nineteenth century, while the new age thundered ahead in the north.
    *
    Dora. If I was asked what the shadow was which Sanjay lived all his time in fear of – when she was alive, of course, and then after that he was even more afraid – I’d make a fool ofmyself by saying it was the fear of her death. But that was the fact of the matter. Duchess Dora, with all her affectations and the clothes and the flowers that had to be exactly right, not vulgar, in the tropics where flowers do so terribly easily tend to be vulgar, was as delicate herself as a crocus on the equator. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. There was skin cancer – or the fear of it. And the symptoms were duly produced. There was pernicious anaemia and diabetes and hyperglucose and colitis and a womb upside down and, by the sound of it, about to fall out after the perilous experience of giving birth to Pandora. No one could count how many times a wireless signal went out to the Singer. Once there was even a helicopter, which landed up by the village on the flat patch where they play cricket – when there’s enough kids for two teams, that is. I think the helicopter time was the time of the womb – but I can’t stand the sound of the blades, as I’ve said, and it may all be connected with blood in my mind: blood in the sea when Ford was shot down, blood in the old bedstead in the wooden house by the lagoon; and Sanjay frightened stiff.
    It was all his fault, that was the point. In London he had been a successful entrepreneur, but his ideas had suited the sixties, and when the more austere years came, his ideas were redundant, too imaginative. Maybe he was tired of money – he’d bought fine