The Colonel's Daughter Page 13

  Optimism was an essential ingredient of George’s nature. Without it, he believed he might have suffered, particularly as he aged, the kind of despair that had driven his mother to hurl herself out of a flying fairground car at Clacton to a grossly foreseen death on a knitting of steel girders. He hadn’t seen her die, but his imagination supplied every terrible detail of the body’s fall, its breaking and bursting. Though forever afterwards afraid of heights, George knew that he was more afraid of the mind’s plummet to darkness, fearing that here was a phenomenon that might overcome him as easily, as seductively as his occasional cravings for young women. Sometimes, he imagined it in the form of a tornado hurling him upwards into a lonely twist of sky and from whose eternity there was no escape but the plunge down towards the faraway houses and the little ribbons of roads, dead, just as his mother had been, long before he heard the shouting and screaming of the watching crowds. George saw friends of his begin to exhibit the mannerisms of despair. He pitied and feared. He examined himself in his dressing-room mirror. He beamed. He thought of Jennifer’s wedding. He offered an imaginary Jennifer his arm. He remembered his mother’s flying body. He thought about Beryl’s birthday party. He drank imaginary champagne. He saw his office at the bank. He moved his imaginary body next door and placed it at the manager’s desk. He beamed at an imaginary customer. The imaginary customer was respectful and awed and anxious. He put him at his ease. He looked back at the mirror. His beaming smile had left him.

  So yes, he’d been forced to agree with Beryl, it hadn’t been a very promising year. The question of the gone-forever managership interrupted both his sleep and his continuing cheerfulness. The dingyness of his room at the bank began to irritate him. He filled in a request slip for a red desk lamp. When, after two subsequent requests, it didn’t arrive, he went to Ipswich and bought himself one. And it was while he was in Ipswich that he confronted the poster (‘confronted’ is precisely what George did: he stood absolutely still and stared at a photograph of sand, palm and gentle surf). ‘Florida,’ it said. ‘Seven heavens under one sky.’

  ‘Seven heavens?’ Beryl had commented, disbelievingly, ‘seven figures more likely.’

  Beryl’s pessimism, afflicting her more noticably after the menopause, served as an almost constant irritant to George’s struggle with his own sanity. His desire to be loved by twenty-year-old women had perhaps less to do with sexual excitement than with his faith in the buoyancy of youth. Like safe, wide rivers, his love affairs kept his spirit afloat. He would never, as long as he kept company with firm flesh, be tempted off the roaring roller-coaster. In this way, he absolved himself of all his betrayals.

  *

  The shiny new golf clubs in their heavy white and red leather bag were, for George, the most perfect expression of an intention: a recently matured insurance policy, begun in 1962, would buy him and Beryl a Florida October. They would stay not in some anonymous Holiday Inn, but at the unique Palmetto Village Complex between Boca Raton and Boca West. Here, a short drive from Miami Beach, George planned to ‘tee off for the experience of a lifetime’, a phrase he coined the day he brought home the Palmetto brochure and which he used constantly in the months preceding the departure, finding that it captured perfectly both his hopes and the envy of his listeners (this last a necessity when he reflected that he had actually been saving for this trip for twenty years). The travel agent promised temperatures in the 80s. Onto the brochure picture of a couple eating breakfast under a parasol he had, in his mind, superimposed his own face. (A sense of loyalty made him try to superimpose Beryl’s face opposite his own, but the woman under the parasol merely lost her identity, so that she was no longer the woman in the photograph, nor yet Beryl, but someone else, someone he could not actually put a face to.) He fondled the glinting golfing irons, felt their weight, putted balls across his sitting-room carpet, replaced them carefully and resisted any temptation to use them at the Woodbridge Golf Club. These were Florida irons. These were the tools of twenty years’ grind. With these he would swing four thousand miles away, while England crept to winter under her soggy burden of leaves. With these he would decide whether he was ever coming back.

  *

  A black security guard, wearing a stetson and barracaded into a wooden booth examined the photographs of George and Beryl. He looked from the photographs to the back of the Chevrolet cab where they sat. ‘Get out please, Sir,’ he snapped.

  The guard looked from George to the photograph and back to George. He saw a freckled, stocky man – the colouring of a Scot, the craggy build, perhaps, of a Welshman. Once powerfully blue and considered his best feature, George’s eyes had faded, strangely, with time. His hair, once red, had faded too, not yet to white, but to an odd mixture of chestnut and grey, the colour of a certain breed of horse the name of which he always forgot. He was quite proud of his hair because it was still thick. He loved women to touch it.

  ‘Can your wife get out please.’

  Massively unsmiling, the guard astonished George. His bulk, his blackness, his hat, his abrupt commands: all were astonishing.

  ‘He wants you to get out, Beryl.’

  ‘Do we have to sign something, or something?’

  ‘Dunno, dear. Careful of the clubs as you get out.’

  The guard picked up Beryl’s photograph. It showed a woman in a cardigan, hair newly set in a style resembling as nearly as possible the Queen’s. (In his limited experience of English tourists, the security guard had noticed that a great number of women adopted this identical royal old-fashioned fashion.) Now, in a summer frock, Beryl’s flesh looked very pale, almost blue-white at her ankles. In the blinding sunshine, she manoeuvred herself cautiously round the car and lined herself up beside George. The guard stared at them.

  ‘Know the rules, Sir, Ma’am?’

  ‘Sorry?’ said George.

  ‘No one gets in or out of the village without the security passes or a phone-in ID from a Palmetto resident. Day or evening guests are exempted, pro-viding they’re with you, okay?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll be having guests . . .’ began Beryl. ‘We don’t know anyone.’

  ‘Pass expires last day of October,’ the guard said with finality.

  ‘What if we want to renew?’ inquired George.

  ‘Re-new?’

  ‘Yes. If we decide . . .’

  ‘Take minimum two IDs to the PVC Office . . .’

  ‘PVC?’

  ‘Palmetto Village Complex Office, 3125 Oranto Boulevard, Boca Raton. Two IDs minimum, plus apartment rereservation documentation.’

  It was all a bit of a jumble to me, said Beryl ten minutes later, as she slowly took in the details of the apartment, her home-to-be for a month of her life. But George wasn’t listening. He was standing at a sliding window, gazing with awe at two smiling men in check trousers and white short-sleeved shirts embarking for the tenth hole on their motorised golf cart. George was open-jawed. No one had told him that the golf course would be spread out, like the Garden of Eden, in front of his veritable window.

  ‘What about this, Beryl!’ he exploded.

  ‘I like the bathroom, George. Do come and see the bathroom . . .’

  ‘Twenty-four hour round the clock bloody paradise!’

  ‘What, dear?’

  ‘It’s right here. Right in front of our balcony!’

  ‘What? The golf course?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think we’re members automatically, being Palmetto residents?’

  ‘Of course we are. It’s one of the privileges. Golf and the swimming pool. Free to all Palmetto inmates.’

  Beryl crossed the soft-carpeted room and stood next to George, looking out. As the two golfers drove off, a sudden wind frayed the inert palms and sang through the mosquito meshing. Beryl blew her nose. ‘I don’t expect those little carts are free’ she said.

  *

  George woke with a feeling of joy he couldn’t remember experiencing since he was twelve and sent one summer from a
morbidly quiet home to a seaside scout camp in Cornwall.

  He lay and admired the room. He sensed the different ways in which it had been designed with the privileged in mind: heavy drapes at the window, letting in no hint of the colossal day beginning outside them, wall-to-wall white louvered cupboards with heavy gold-plated knobs, built-in dressing alcove, complete with lace-covered tissue dispenser, additional makeup mirror and gilded ring tree (on which Beryl had hung her only ring, a faded bit of Victorian turquoise), heavy glass table burdened with heavy magazines and a piece of modern sculpture which George’s unpractised eye had privately christened “Man Copulating With Hoop”, chandelier style ceiling light, high pile white carpet, a framed bullfight poster, a set of eighteenth-century French prints, showing wigged aristocrats engaged in what seemed to be flirtation. It was worth it, George whispered to himself, worth every penny just to have got this far.

  His clock, re-set to US time, told him it was 7.10 a.m. Beryl slept her habitual hunched-up sleep, unvarying it seemed in any time zone. George crept to the bathroom, peed as quietly as he could (Florida lavatories seemed to echo less than English ones) and dressed quickly in brand-new lightweight trousers, holiday shirt and new canvas shoes. Picking up the apartment key, monumentally tagged to stop anyone pocketing it, he tiptoed out, pausing only to stare breathlessly at the quality of the light coming into the sitting room from across the golf course.

  The Palmetto apartment buildings, though near to each other, were each arranged around their own careful garden. The grass was constantly watered and very green; in sculptured stone basins, shaded by palms, apologetic fountains sent feeble jets of water onto ferns and lilies. Planted among the oleander trees in each central courtyard was a marble map of the village. Gold lettering informed George YOU ARE HERE. Thanking the Palmetto planners for their foresight and helpfulness, George began to follow the memorised marble path to the circle marked GOLF COURSE ENTRY.

  I am walking, he thought, with springy step. I slept a free sleep, uncluttered by any hint of nightmare. It’s seven in the morning of my first day and already I’ve shaken England off like jumble sale clothes, just chucked it away, the better to breathe, the better to relax my shoulders, the better to tap a miraculous new energy located if I’m not wrong, or rather, beginning, at my groin and going through me like spring sap. And I am, extraordinarily, alone. It’s as if, on this entire peninsular, no one is moving yet, unless it’s the security guard, housed up in his booth, gun at the ready to protect me and all those asleep including Beryl from marauders and rapists and felons. A light wind is making me wish I’d brought along my pale blue C & A poloneck, but this is no doubt a dawn wind, very likely to die down as the sun hots up. Someone, I can now hear, is vacuuming the swimming pool. I dare say this is done regularly every morning to leave it jewel-bright for my pre-breakfast swim. If I was wise, I would pop into the pool complex to ascertain the temperature of the water . . .

  A wagon, not unlike an enlarged version of the little golf carts, was parked at the entrance to the swimming pool. On its immaculate sides was written PALMETTO GARDENING INC. and George now noticed that the vehicle was stocked with every variety of garden implement, including heavy yellow hoses. Nothing looked dirty. He recalled the rusting rural slum of his own garden shed and marvelled. Hardly any rain, of course he remembered, that would explain the absence of rust, but not the astonishing appearance of newness. A hoe looked as bright as his No. 2 iron.

  Beside the wooden doorway to the pool was another marble map, again informing George, YOU ARE HERE. Wondering whether any resident of Palmetto had ever been lost anywhere in the village, he pushed open the door. The pool, roman-ended, was forty foot by eighteen. Gently moving the vacuum pole around its shallow end was a girl with long, colourless hair. She looked up immediately and stared at George. George stared. The girl was twenty. She wore skimpy, faded shorts and, above these, what looked to George like a home-stitched vest over ostentatiously milky breasts, damp nippled.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  *

  Beryl woke with astonishment and with the immediate certainty that she had a cold. Her throat was sore and her head ached. She called in the direction of the bathroom, ‘George, are you up?’ She waited. The only sound she could hear was a distant whooshing noise, perpetual, the Florida wind blowing in off the sea. Drawing back the heavy curtains, she blinked at the startling blue and green. The clarity of the morning made her wish that her own head would clear. She blamed this misfortune of a cold on altitude and climatic change.

  ‘GOOD MORNING, PALMETTO RESIDENT!’ said a plastic notice screwed to the kitchen wall. ‘You are reminded that we do not serve breakfast as part of our four-star Palmetto Hospitality Agenda, but we hope you will make the fullest use of your kitchen facility. Your PALMETTO SHOP is located on Square 3 and will be delighted to sell you hot French bread, butter, jelly, tea, coffee, chocolate, milk, and of course Florida oranges. Meat for your griddle may also be obtained from your PALMETTO SHOP, should you prefer a substantial morning meal. The SHOP is open Monday through Sunday, eight to eight. Have a nice day.’

  Beryl opened the fridge to see whether the previous Palmetto tenant had kindly left her anything in the way of breakfast materials, but the fridge was completely empty except for a cellophane-wrapped half bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne, given free with every reservation of a week or longer. ‘Drat it,’ she commented, and, crossing back to the bedroom to dress for shopping, was startled by an unexpected and quite unfamiliar noise. The telephone was ringing.

  Deciding that it must be George, and marvelling that he, who forgot important things with such regularity, had somehow memorised this number, she picked it up and said: ‘George? What are you doing?’

  ‘Beryl?’ said a near sounding English voice, ‘Brewer here. Brewer Smythe.’

  Beryl thought, I’ve been astonished by every single thing since we got here and now here’s Brewer Smythe astonishing me even more by ringing me when it was months ago that George wrote to Brewer and Monica, and as far as I know there’s never been any reply from them.

  ‘Heavens!’ said Beryl.

  ‘Surprised you, eh?’

  ‘Well, to be honest, Brewer, I was just saying yesterday when we arrived that we didn’t know anybody in Florida. And how wrong I was. I mean, I’d just forgotten about you. Isn’t that terrible?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about trivial things like that, Beryl. How are you, anyway? And how’s the old man?’

  ‘Fine. We’re fine. A bit jet-lagged, I mean I think I am because I seem to have got a cold, which I’m sure isn’t usual. George has just popped out to . . . survey the golf course.’

  ‘Well, listen. What about a plunge in at the deep end on your first day, eh?’

  ‘Plunge in, Brewer?’

  ‘Yes. Mr Weissmann wants me to take him up to River Kingdom for lunch. That’s the best seafood place between here and Miami, and I’ve got you and George invited on the boat. Set off at 10.30-ish. Have cocktails on board. Get to River Kingdom at 12.30. George’ll love it, Beryl.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know if I’m up to it, Brewer. I mean, with this cold . . .’

  ‘Course you are. Best thing. Blow the cobwebs away.’

  ‘Well, are you sure Mr Weissmann doesn’t mind?’

  ‘Absolutely! Told him George was not only an old friend, but a banker. He has the greatest respect for bankers.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you, Brewer . . .’

  ‘Monica’s coming. She’s really looking forward to seeing you.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Monica? Well, you wait till you see her! I tell you, Beryl, she’s a changed woman since we moved here. If you say Woodbridge to Monica now, she can hardly remember what you’re talking about!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Changed woman! But how are you and George finding it? Paradise, eh? Good first impressions, eh?’

  Beryl hesitated. She realised the hesitation made her sound somehow ungrateful.<
br />
  ‘I think it’s all . . . extraordinary, Brewer. It’ll take a bit of getting used to, but I’m sure once we do . . .’

  ‘You’ll never want to go home! Guarantee it, Beryl. Only to pack and get back here as fast as you can. You wait and see. But hats off to George for getting you here, anyway. So look, I’ll be round to fetch you at 10.15. Oh, and Beryl, lunch is on us.’

  Beryl sat down in the foodless kitchen. It’s the kind of day, she thought, when I’m going to find it quite hard to believe anything that’s happening.

  *

  ‘I’m new,’ George had said to the girl.

  ‘Yeah?’

  She moved the pool vac with a steady, practised motion. George watched her. Her feet were bare. Her legs were long and tanned, the hairs on them golden and flat and unshaven.

  ‘This is my first morning.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yes. I was just doing a little, you know, recky.’

  ‘Pool’s okay. I prefer the ocean, though.’

  The ocean. The thundering little word struck chords of magnificence in George’s willing mind. He saw the girl walking bravely into breast-high surf, hair flying and wet, mouth parted on gleaming teeth. America, he thought. She is vigorous America. He wanted to scoop her and the ocean into his lap.

  ‘You’ve got the lot here, I’d say.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Here. Climate, beaches, comfort, golf, ocean . . .’

  ‘Yeah, it’s okay. I miss the city, though.’

  ‘The city? Do you?’

  ‘Kind of. People want to learn in the city. Here, they’re just all hipped on forgetting.’

  George began to walk round the pool. Trying not to stare at the girl, he concentrated on its tiled blue depths.

  ‘I suppose you do gardening as well? I saw your truck. If I may say so, I think the Palmetto gardens are most attractive.’

  He heard her laugh. The young laughter made him feel suddenly old, and he stood still.