The Rebecca Landon Novels by Rosamond Lehmann

Author:Rosamond Lehmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

A Sea-Grape Tree

A Novel

For Hugo and Mollie with love

Every evening, before the hour of sunset, Princess, the young maidservant, starts to light the lamps in the hotel: oil lamps, long glass funnels enclosed in brass containers with handles. Taking one in either hand, swinging them to the rhythm of her languid barefoot gait, she goes down, down the steep spiralling rock path to Captain Cunningham’s bungalow. As darkness falls she is enfolded in soft light, she becomes a lustrous image, a black Madonna with a golden aura, borne through waist-high hibiscus bushes by invisible bearers to the sea. Her black eyes catch a gleam; and moths and fireflies drift to the lamps and hover round her. Sometimes she has set some object or other nonchalantly upon her shapely astrakhan-capped head: a jug or a bowl for instance, or a roll of toilet paper, or the Cunninghams’ clean laundry. Down she sails through the electric air, through the thrumming, whirring, susurrating world of tropic nightfall; taking these beautiful lamps to the Cunninghams to give extra light to their verandah and their bridge table. This mosquito-proof verandah, its wooden pillars wreathed with bougainvillea, jasmine, clematis and flowering vines, is the social focus of the bay. Every three weeks or thereabouts in the winter months one group of visitors arrives at, another departs from the modest Victorian guest house which crowns the bay: British travellers mostly—stoutly upholstered middle-aged couples from the Midlands; occasionally a pair of honeymooners. But now and then appears a solitary person, a retired colonel maybe, or a naval captain (bachelor? —widower?), spry, alert, with innocent ideas and courtly manners; or maybe a woman on her own with paints and brushes; or botanizing; or convalescing; and self-sufficient; or a few wild, unsteady, wincing, patiently cherished or tolerated alcoholics, apt to linger; or just now and then, and usually male, someone who, though carrying a UK passport, and often seen around, and not overtly disreputable, broken, discredited or ignominiously labelled, continues silently, unassumingly to declare—but who notices or hears? who knows why or when? who asks? who cares? —‘I have resigned’; and to generate the miasma of failure and of humiliation; thereby causing social discomfort: or would cause it anywhere but here.

All these, going concerns and otherwise, quite a cross-section­­­­ as Miss Stay the manageress frequently declares, are shepherded, under her strong leadership, down to the Cunninghams­­’ bungalow, to add to the number of those who have signed their Visitors’ Book, frequently adding a grateful tribute, or an appropriate line or two of verse.

The island is one of the smallest in the Windward group, not at all fashionable. Up to this year, which is 1933, it has scarcely begun to emerge from a paradisal state. Birds, butterflies­­­, flowers, shrubs, flowering trees, and creepers abound in immeasurable splendour, profusion, and variety. No snakes. Idyllic isle. Only the natives do not correspond.

Princess is a physical exception—a perfect specimen, like a sudden rose in bloom on a waste patch; and some of the young children have a tender animal charm.

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