Island in the Sun by Alec Waugh

Author:Alec Waugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1955-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

1

Maxwell woke with the room filled with daylight. Sylvia was turned toward him. He raised himself upon his elbow. She had never looked lovelier than now, in profile against the pillow. He bent and kissed her. She stirred, opened her eyes, blinked, then smiled a long, slow smile of recognition and remembrance. She raised her arms, folded them round his neck, drew down his face to hers.

“Darling,” she said.

At last, he thought, at last.

It was a peace, a happiness such as he had never known, then suddenly, shatteringly, he remembered. That body in the room behind the Court House. At this very moment Carson’s servant would be letting himself into the back room, to light the stove, to prepare the morning tea. At this very moment the alarm was being given; policemen would soon be in the house, searching here, searching there, finding heaven knew what. How did he know that he had left no clue?

Panic struck him, with a sense of the dramatic irony of his position. Here he was, in this soft warm bed with his wife’s arms round him, secure and loved and cherished, for the first time at peace, at the very moment when the structure of that happiness was threatened. His arms tightened about Sylvia’s shoulders, desperately, as though she were an amulet. “You’re everything I’ve got. Everything I care about in the world.”

Once again she felt herself relax, respond to these new accents in his voice, to this new tenderness of tone and touch. There was a tap upon the door. The maid with the morning tea. She drew back with a laugh. “Too bad,” she said.

She chattered happily as they sat up side by side, sipping at their tea. Usually she sat in silence: “I’m never alive till breakfast time,” she’d say: he’d hurry out to his early chores as quickly as he could. But today she was awake, bright-eyed, talkative, wanting to know who had been at the club and who’d said what. It was part of the dramatic irony of the situation that she would want to talk on this one morning when he had to be alone, to think. But he must not show her that. He mustn’t behave as though he was worried. In a month, a week, perhaps a few hours’ time, she might be forced to take stock of his behavior during the day ahead. He could hear counsel for the prosecution saying, “Now think back carefully, Mrs. Fleury. Wasn’t there anything in your husband’s behavior that night and on the following day that seemed unusual?”

Sylvia would of course deny it, but she had to deny convincingly. The jury must have no doubt that she was telling them the truth. He must behave as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, nothing except this miracle of self-discovery, of self-revelation.

“How I wish I were a gentleman of leisure; that I could idle here. Confound these planter’s chores,” he said.

Those chores began with the half-past seven roll call at the boucan.

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