Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [16]
The girl Amélie said this morning, ‘I hope you will be very happy, sir, in your sweet honeymoon house.’ She was laughing at me I could see. A lovely little creature but sly, spiteful, malignant perhaps, like much else in this place.
‘It’s only a shower,’ Antoinette said anxiously. ‘It will soon stop.’
I looked at the sad leaning cocoanut palms, the fishing boats drawn up on the shingly beach, the uneven row of whitewashed huts, and asked the name of the village.
‘Massacre.’
‘And who was massacred here? Slaves?’
‘Oh no.’ She sounded shocked. ‘Not slaves. Something must have happened a long time ago. Nobody remembers now.’
The rain fell more heavily, huge drops sounded like hail on the leaves of he tree, and the sea crept stealthily forwards and backwards.
So this is Massacre. Not the end of the world, only the last stage of our interminable journey from Jamaica, the start of our sweet honeymoon. And it will all look very different in the sun.
I had been arranged that we would leave Spanish Town immediately after the ceremony and spend some weeks in one of the Windward Islands, at a small estate which had belonged to Antoinette’s mother. I agreed. As I had agreed to everything else.
The windows of the huts were shut, the doors opened into silence and dimness. Then three little boys came to stare at us. The smallest wore nothing but a religious medal round his neck and the brim of a large fisherman’s hat. When I smiled at him, he began to cry. A woman called from one of the huts and he ran away, still howling.
The other two followed slowly, looking back several times.
As if this was a signal a second woman appeared at the door, then a third.
‘Is Caro,’ Antoinette said. ‘I’m sure it’s Caro. Caroline,’ she called, waving, and the woman waved back. A gaudy old creature in a brightly flowered dress, a striped head handkerchief and gold ear-rings.
‘You’ll get soaked, Antoinette,’ I said.
‘No, the rain is stopping.’ She held up the skirt of her riding habit and ran across the street. I watched her critically. She wore a tricorne hat which became her. At least it shadowed her eyes which are too large and can be disconcerting. She never blinks at all it seems to me. Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either. And when did I begin to notice all this about my wife Antoinette? After we left Spanish Town I suppose. Or did I notice it before and refuse to admit what I saw? Not that I had much time to notice anything. I was married one month after I arrived in Jamaica and for nearly three weeks of that time I was in bed with fever.
The two women stood in the doorway of the hut gesticulating, talking not English but the debased French patois they use in the island. The rain began to drip down the back of my neck adding to my feeling of discomfort and melancholy.
I thought about the letter which should have been written to England a week ago. Dear Father …
‘Caroline asks if you will shelter in her house.’
This was Antoinette. She spoke hesitatingly as if she expected me to refuse, so it was easy to do so.
‘But you are getting wet.’ she said.
‘I don’t mind that.’ I smiled at Caroline and shook my head.
‘She will be very disappointed,’ said my wife, crossed the street again and went into the dark hut.
Amélie, who had been sitting with her back to us, turned round. Her expression was so full of delighted malice, so intelligent, above all so intimate that I felt ashamed and looked away.
‘Well,’ I thought. ‘I have had fever. I am not myself yet.’
The rain was not so heavy and I went to talk to the porters. The first man was not a native of the island. ‘This a very wild place – not civilized. Why do you come here?’ He was called the Young Bull he told me, and he was twenty-seven years of age. A magnificent body and a foolish conceited face. The other man’s name was Emile, yes, he was born in the village, he lived there.