All at Sea, page 18
The plan comes unstuck at the very first dinner party to which I am invited. The host is a woman I knew at journalism school twenty years earlier, who moved to a nearby village with her husband and daughters several years ago. We haven’t seen each other since graduation, but she had read about Tony in the local paper and been hoping our paths might cross. When we run into each other one day, and she invites me to dinner, I am touched and terribly nervous.
At first it seems to be going surprisingly well. I sit next to an actor, and we swap anecdotes about mutual acquaintances in TV. I laugh in the right places, and begin to think I can carry this off. Look at me, I think – a perfectly normal, carefree party guest. He and his wife moved down from London only a year or so before we did, and the conversation begins to get trickier when he tells me that it has been quite tough, because she lost both her elderly parents within a year of arriving here.
Competitive misfortune is not something I had factored in when forming the plan to keep quiet about Tony. It is less than six months since he drowned, so in any contest I am almost certainly going to be stuck holding the trump card. I really like this actor and his wife; already I have started to hope we become friends. Sooner or later they are going to find out about Tony, and if I say nothing and let them keep talking about their bereavement, when they do they will feel mortified and I will feel culpable.
I’m wondering what to do when his wife and the woman sitting beside her ask me if my children’s father is in the picture. ‘Er, well, he was when we moved here,’ I flounder. The woman has recently endured a hellish divorce, and mistakes my hesitation for caustic irony. ‘Oh dear,’ she chuckles dryly, rolling her eyes, ‘not another one.’ Waiting for my witty punchline about what bastards men are, in anticipation they begin to laugh.
Oh God oh God oh God. This is too awful; I can’t let it go any further. Anxious for it not to sound like a rebuke, I tell them what happened with an insane smile plastered all over my face. Their faces freeze, and my attempt at dinner-party normality comes to a juddering halt.
Another problem I had not anticipated was the anxiety a single female in married circles can provoke. Most of the time it is subtle; a mild wariness about disclosing the husband’s phone number, an unavailability for children’s playdates when the wife is away. Occasionally, however, it is more direct. I am in the car with the boys one afternoon when a song comes on the radio that reminds me of an old friend I’ll call Nick. We went out briefly when we first met, but that was twenty years ago, and we have remained friends ever since. He was close to both Paul and then Tony, and when he married a couple of years ago I was looking forward to meeting his wife. The song makes me smile, so I give him a ring.
A woman answers. ‘Hi, can I speak to Nick?’ ‘Who is this?’ ‘It’s Decca.’ ‘Then he ain’t here.’ ‘Oh, well could you let him know I called?’ ‘No, I won’t.’ The line goes dead.
How weird, I think; some nutter must have got hold of his phone. When I try again later, the same voice answers. ‘What do you want to talk to him for?’ she growls. ‘I’m sorry, who am I speaking to?’ ‘I’m his wife.’ ‘Oh, hi, this is Decca calling for a chat. Is he there?’ ‘Listen, you’re his past. I’m his present. So you can delete his number now, cos you ain’t never speaking to him again.’
The only thing worse than women’s hostility is the suspicion that even if I were after their husbands they would have nothing to fear. To raise Jake and Joe alone and keep Tubslake going, I will need to find superhuman strength – and I worry that if I pull it off it will be at the price of ever feeling like a woman again. I will become sexless, a dried-up old boot. Already I am getting fat, and can go weeks without washing my hair, because it is hard to care what I look like when Tony can’t see.
Could yoga be the answer? It sounds like a good idea. Everyone I know who does yoga looks great, and they all promise it will reconnect and reawaken body and mind. So I find a yoga teacher. She comes to the house and gives lessons in the living room. I find the first three quite promising. The fourth lesson turns into an unsolicited lecture on Buddhism, the principal message of which is that my thoughts are responsible for ‘every single thing’ that ever happens to me, because I ‘attract’ events by worrying about them. Having never worried that Tony might one day drown in front of my eyes, I am doubtful that the cause of death can have been my faulty thinking. I get to my feet, tell her to leave, and my experiment with yoga ends there.
11
No one comes right out and says so, but I can tell they think I am making a big mistake. I have decided to take the boys back to Treasure Beach.
I have never subscribed to the trite fallacy of ‘closure’, yet most of the reasons I offer sound suspiciously like fantasies that it can be found waiting for us in Jamaica. I say I need to be back amongst the people who were present when Tony died. His death will not feel real until I do. I cannot know if the boys will ever recover their former wild fearlessness, but am certain they won’t while the horror of that day remains entombed in mystery and dread. Friends listen to all of this, and nod doubtfully. I don’t blame them. By any prudent risk analysis, none of it justifies the very real danger that the trip will be a traumatic disaster.
I don’t like to admit the real reason why I want us to go back. Under the circumstances I can see it must sound unaccountably frivolous. We have to return before the boys’ memories of Treasure Beach fade, because once it becomes just the place where Tony died they may never want to. To everyone else, Treasure Beach is just a holiday destination, but I am willing to risk putting us through hell there for a fortnight rather than risk never seeing it again. We have already lost Tony. I cannot bear to lose it too.
Plans for the trip fall into place with miraculous ease. The owners of Minerva offer us their house again, dissolving me into fresh astonishment at the generosity of these saintly strangers. Jake’s school agrees to let him go a week before February’s half-term. The memory of last year’s desperate visit does not deter Danielle from agreeing to come with us. Charlotte, the boys’ nanny, has not yet left to go travelling, and can come. Our dates coincide serendipitously with a US public holiday, allowing an old friend in New York, Nikki, to join us for a few days. In my newly superstitious way of looking at the world, I take all these to be signs that the trip is a good idea.
The day before we are due to fly I have thought of everything. The suitcases have been packed for more than a week. I have bought inflatable sharks, rubber rings, aqua shoes, armbands, and everything else I can think of to entice Jake into the water. I congratulate myself for remembering that I will be stopped at passport control because the boys and I do not share the same surname. Tony cannot write his usual letter authorising our travel, so I assemble a meticulous package of birth certificates, his death certificate, and a press cutting report of his death. When the online check-in opens twenty-four hours before departure, I am poised at the computer. Then I open my passport to type in the details, and go cold.
It expires in five months. I open Jake’s; the expiry date is less than four weeks away. Jamaica will not grant entry on a passport valid for less than six months. We are not going anywhere.
I think I am going to be sick. I don’t know what to do. I call the passport office and plead and weep, but it is hopeless; a new child’s passport will take at least a week. In a wild panic I try to think of any Home Office ministers I know, before remembering what happened to the last home secretary caught fast-tracking passports.
How can this have happened? I am beside myself. How am I going to tell the boys we are not going to Jamaica after all; what will I say to Danielle and Charlotte and Nikki? The thought occurs that perhaps this is some sort of Freudian self-sabotage; could my subconscious self have not wanted us to go? But of course, the explanation is more mundane. Were Tony alive he would have asked if I had checked the passports. It is one of those annoyingly pointless things couples always ask each other when they travel together, and never necessary. Only, this time it was. And he wasn’t here to ask.
The only option left is so absurdly far-fetched that I am almost too embarrassed to try. I email Jason at Jake’s. I don’t know which will make me look more foolish – forgetting to check our passports, or expecting him to do anything about it – and am just breaking the news to Charlotte that the holiday is off when my inbox pings. It’s Jason. ‘You’re good.’ He has contacted the head of immigration at Montego Bay airport, who has agreed to let us come.
Only now, I don’t know. In front of Charlotte I affect giddy elation, but as soon as she leaves cold panic sets in. If anything goes wrong on this trip now, it will be because we were not meant to go. And I will be responsible. I won’t be able to pretend I wasn’t warned. Fate did its best to intervene to spare us, and I did not listen. Something terrible is going to happen to one of us in Jamaica, and I will regret emailing Jason for the rest of my life.
I don’t believe this for a minute, obviously. Apparently, however, it is nonetheless what I think. I walk from room to room, recalling the day before we flew to Jamaica last time, marvelling at how Tony could not have known it was the last time he would ever see his home. The hubris of such innocence now feels so breathtakingly reckless that for one fleeting moment I seriously contemplate cancelling the trip.
I still haven’t quite shaken off the dread when we land in Montego Bay the following evening. The boys are sleepy but high on the sugar rush of airline food and ten hours in front of tiny TV screens, and flirt wildly with the porters in the arrival hall as I queue to collect the hire car. The man in front of me is talking about some virus called chikungunya, but I am paying no attention until he turns and asks if I’m not worried too. Until now I hadn’t even heard of it. It is a mosquito-borne infection currently sweeping Jamaica, apparently, and if you get unlucky can make you seriously ill for months. The man looks anxious, but I feel oddly reassured. If that is the terrible thing waiting for us here, then frankly I’m relieved.
The one good thing about Tony not being here is that we don’t have to stop at the airport to buy ganja. It didn’t usually take long – he even bought some from a customs officer once, and said it was the best he had ever smoked – but by this point I’m always desperate to be in Treasure Beach, and as we set off south towards the mountains through hot tropical darkness my old butterflies return, the first flickers of authentic excitement.
It is late by the time we reach the village. The lane is silent and deserted, and becomes more pothole than tarmac after we pass through Treasure Beach, until we are bumping along a track flanked by nothing but goat fields. I sense Charlotte beginning to wonder where on earth we are taking her when the white walls and wooden gates of Minerva catch in the headlights. At last we are here.
As we walk through the door, I’m afraid everybody was right. Muscle memory of excruciating misery grips my stomach as I look around at this chillingly familiar house, and I wonder if I really have made a terrible mistake. Jake and Joe shuffle inside, dazed and bleary from sleep; I watch Jake take in his surroundings, rubbing his eyes, and in his vacant expression I think I see shocked dismay. Sensing the atmosphere, Danielle and Charlotte summon a heroic performance of holiday cheer to get us through supper, and within the hour we are all in bed asleep. I don’t know it yet, but this night will mark the end of what I had honestly believed would last for ever.
‘Jakey, fancy coming for a walk on the beach with me?’
He glances up from the terrace, too thrilled by his reunion with Minerva’s cat to notice the synthetic breeziness in my tone.
‘Sure, coming.’
The last time I saw Jake on the narrow wooden steps leading from the pool down to the beach, he had been scrambling up them, tear-stained and howling. A few days after Tony died an old friend with a boat had picked us up on the beach and taken us out to Pelican Bar, a driftwood bar built on stilts out in the ocean on a sandbank. The trip was supposed to be a diversion for the boys, but had been calamitously misjudged; Jake became hysterical, hyperventilating with fright, and we had had to turn around and come back to shore. This time he takes my hand, babbling excitably about the cat, and together we walk down to the beach. It is mid-morning on our first day.
‘Let’s look for shells,’ I suggest casually. We find pink ones and white ones, and little black and grey ones, and as we gather them into a sun hat we inch closer towards the water’s edge. Then Jake spots a half-submerged rock covered in hermit crab shells that look like baby ice-cream cones. ‘Look at them! Can we go rock pooling, Dec?’
The water is perfectly still as he wades in up to his thighs. We explore the rocks, and he pokes at crabs, and after ten minutes or so turns and looks up. ‘Dec can we go for a swim?’ He glances down. ‘I’ve got my vest on, see?’ I take him in my arms, we glide into the sea, and moments later he is swimming ahead of me, paddling across the bay like a Labrador.
After lunch the five of us drive into the village to Jake’s. In the afternoon light the terrace is heartstoppingly beautiful, and while the kids throw themselves into the pool and charge up and down the pontoon I tumble into hugs with old friends. I have pictured this scene in my mind for so long, and worried that it might be leaden with awkward grief and the shadow of shared memories. But of course, this is Jamaica, and with each new embrace there are whoops and squeals and jokes. As I introduce Charlotte to everyone I sense her registering this unfamiliar new person I am becoming before her eyes.
Everyone refers to Tony’s death straight away; no one is embarrassed or unsure what to say. I have grown so accustomed to the uncertain dance of English discomfort around death that I am sometimes relieved when people pretend not to know, so they don’t have to bring it up. Even with those closest to me, I can often talk for hours about his death and afterwards almost wish I hadn’t, for the weight of others’ helpless concern can leave me drained and empty. But here there is no burden of anxious scrutiny to bear, and no one worries about how long the Tony conversation needs to last in order to satisfy some statutory minimum of respectful acceptability. Instead it soon draws to a natural conclusion with the same reflection, observed by everyone. ‘Part a’ life, Dec,’ they all say softly. ‘Part a’ life.’ Because death really is a part of life here. The presumption of longevity is a first-world luxury no one in Treasure Beach takes for granted; everyone is bereaved, one way or another, and at last I am no longer the tragic curiosity.
On Frenchman’s beach we go to Eggy’s bar, a tatty little shack owned by one of Tony’s dearest friends. Eggy is a tall and imposing middle-aged Rasta, magnificently majestic in his bearing but so sweetly gentle that the boys hurl themselves into his lap, surrendering themselves to the fold of his vast arms. To me, Eggy has always looked rather like an exquisitely carved wooden statue, but Charlotte says he reminds her of Tony, and as Joe cuddles up and plays with Eggy’s hat I wonder if the boys too sense something of their father in him.
Watching them barrel up and down the beach, what is unmistakable is their delight in the physicality of these big men. The boys’ world in England is populated overwhelmingly by women – teachers, nursery workers, other mums, my friends – but here there are men everywhere, and the boys bounce from one to the next, roughhousing and playfighting, intoxicated by this great carnival of masculinity. I have sensed for some time their craving for this sort of non-verbal rough and tumble, and been pathetically grateful to any relative or friend willing to roll around on the floor with them, or hoist one over his shoulder. It comes so naturally to these Jamaican men, I am not even obligated to feel grateful.
Later that night, when the boys are in bed, I take Danielle and Charlotte to the sports park. Live Saturday night football is new to Treasure Beach, and everyone has come out dressed to kill. In the breaks between games a touchline sound system blasts out reggae and dancehall; the DJ doubles as an enthusiastic if somewhat unorthodox match commentator, and after the final whistle there is a uproarious talent contest, in which one man balances a bicycle on his head, another lifts his shirt to display expert belly rolling, and some children compete in a sack race.
It is hard to pay attention when something even more eye-opening is unfolding beside me. I have been coming to Treasure Beach for twenty years, so could hardly have failed to notice the merry-go-round of romantic adventures involving local boys and female tourists. Treasure Beach is full of preposterously beautiful young men, many of whom have applied themselves to the art of the holiday romance with the sort of commitment young men in London might devote to computer games, perhaps, or skateboarding. Attentive and funny, they are irresistibly winning to a great many women who come here, and over the years the amorous melodramas have entertained me enormously.
But they have never been anything to do with us. When I first came to live here with my husband, I did have to see off a few hopeful advances from men who assumed – not unreasonably, based on previous experience – that the minor inconvenience of a husband in the picture would be no impediment. When this proved not to be the case, I was regarded for a while as something of an eccentric. But once everyone accustomed themselves to the novelty of my exemption from the romantic economy, I became socially androgynous – so much so that it had not occurred to me that bringing gorgeous young women with me, instead of Paul or Tony, might make for an altogether different kind of experience. ‘At las’ you bring gyal dem wit’ you Decca!’ an old friend applauds warmly, patting my back and laughing while we watch the football. ‘Well done, respec’.’ By the end of the night I am beginning to see what he means.
One of my biggest worries about coming back without Tony was whether we would know how to have fun. Left to my own devices, I am prone to forget that having fun is sometimes more important than being sensible. I hadn’t factored in the impact of turning up with Danielle and Charlotte.
