The Forever Girl

3



George and Alice Collins had little to do with the rest of the expatriates. This was not because they were stand-offish or thought themselves a cut above the others – it was more a case of having different interests. He was a doctor, but unlike most doctors on the island he was not interested in building up a lucrative private practice. He ran a clinic that was mostly used by Jamaicans and Hondurans who had no, or very little, insurance and were not eligible for the government scheme. He was also something of a naturalist and had published a check-list of Caribbean flora and a small book on the ecology of the reef. His wife, Alice, was an artist whose watercolours of Cayman plants had been used on a set of the island’s postage stamps. They were polite enough to the money people when they met them on social occasions – inevitably, in a small community, everybody eventually encounters everybody else – but they did not really like them. They had a particular distaste for hedge fund managers whom George regarded as little better than licensed gamblers. These hedge fund managers would probably not have cared about that assessment had they noticed it, which they did not. Money obscured everything else for them: the heat, the sea, the economic life of ordinary people. They did not care about the disapproval of others: wealth, and a lot of it, can be a powerful protector against the resentment of others. Alice shared George’s view of hedge fund managers, but her dislikes were even broader: she had a low opinion of just about everybody on the island, with the exception of one or two acquaintances, of whom Amanda was one: the locals for being lazy and materialistic, the expatriates for being energetic and materialistic, and the rest for being uninterested in anything that interested her. She did not want to be there; she wanted to be in London or New York, or even Sydney – where there were art galleries and conversations, and things happened; instead of which, she said, I am here, on this strip of coral in the middle of nowhere with these people I don’t really like. It was a mistake, she told herself, ever to come to the Caribbean in the first place. She had been attracted to it by family associations and by the sunsets; but you could not live on either of these, she decided, not if you had ambitions of any sort. I shall die without ever having a proper exhibition – one that counts – of my work. Nobody will remember me.


The Collins house was about half a mile away from David and Amanda’s house, and reached by a short section of unpaved track. It could be glimpsed from the road that joined George Town to Bodden Town, but only just: George’s enthusiasm for the native plants of the Caribbean had resulted in a rioting shrubbery that concealed most of the house from view. Inside the house the style was not so much the faux Caribbean style that was popular in many other expatriate homes, but real island décor. George had met Alice in Barbados, where he had gone for a medical conference when he was working in the hospital on Grand Cayman. He had invited her to visit him in the Caymans, and she had done so. They had become engaged and shortly afterwards she left Barbados to join him in George Town, where they had set up their first home together. Much of their furniture came from a plantation house that had belonged to an aunt of hers who had lived there for thirty years and built up a collection of old pieces. Alice was Australian; she had gone to visit the aunt after she had finished her training as a teacher in Melbourne, and had stayed longer than she intended. The aunt, who had been childless, had been delighted to discover a niece whose company she enjoyed. She had persuaded her to stay and had arranged a job for her in a local school. Two years later, though, she had died of a heart attack and had left the house and all its contents to Alice. These had included a slave bell, of which Alice was ashamed, that was stored out of sight in a cupboard. She had almost thrown it away, consigning that reminder of the hated past to oblivion, but had realised that we cannot rid ourselves so easily of the wrongs our ancestors wrought.

They had one son, a boy, who was a month older than Clover. He was called James, after George’s own father, who had been a professor of medicine in one of the London teaching hospitals. Alice and Amanda had met when they were pregnant, when they both attended a class run in a school hall in George Town by a natural childbirth enthusiast. Amanda already knew that she was not a candidate for a natural delivery, but she listened with interest to accounts of birthing pools and other alternatives, knowing, of course, that what lay ahead for her was the sterile glare of a specialist obstetric unit in Miami.

Friendships forged at such classes, like those made by parents waiting at the school gate, can last, and Alice and Amanda continued to see one another after the birth of their children. George had a small sailing boat, and had once or twice taken David out in it, although David did not like swells – he had a propensity to sea-sickness – and they did not go far. From time to time Amanda and Alice played singles against one another at the tennis club, but it was often too hot for that unless one got up early and played as dawn came up over the island.

It was not a very close friendship, but it did mean that Clover and James knew of one another’s existence from the time that each of them first began to be aware of other children. And in due course, they had both been enrolled at the small school, the Cayman Prep, favoured by expatriate families. The intake that year was an unusually large one, and so they were not in the same class, but if for any reason Amanda or Alice could not collect her child at the end of the school day, a ride home with the other parent was guaranteed. Or sometimes Margaret, who drove a rust-coloured jeep that had seen better days, would collect both of them and treat them, to their great delight, to an illicit ice-cream on the way home.

Boys often play more readily with other boys, but James was different. He was happy in the company of other boys, but he seemed to be equally content to play with girls, and in particular with Clover. He found her undemanding even if she followed him about the house, watching him with wide eyes, ready to do his bidding in whatever new game he devised for them. When they had just turned nine, David, who fancied himself as a carpenter, made them a tree-house, supported between two palm trees in the back garden and reached by a rope ladder tied at one end to the base of the tree-house and at the other to two pegs driven into the ground. They spent hours in this leafy hide-out, picnicking on sandwiches or looking out of a telescope that James had carted up the rope ladder. It was a powerful instrument, originally bought by David when he thought he might take up amateur astronomy, but never really used. The stars, he found out, were too far away to be of any real interest, and once you had looked at the moon and its craters there was little else to see.

But James found that with the telescope pointed out of the side window of the tree-house, he could see into the windows of nearby houses across the generously sized yards and gardens. Palm trees and sprays of bougainvillea could get in the way, obscuring the view in some directions, but there was still plenty to look at. He found a small notebook and drew columns in it headed House, People, and Things Seen.

“Why?” asked Clover, as he showed her this notebook and its first few entries.

“Because we need to keep watch,” he said. “There might be spies, you know. We’d see them from up here.”

She nodded. “And if we saw them? What then?”

“We’ll have the evidence,” he said, pointing to the notebook. “We could show it to the police, and then they could arrest them and shoot them.”

Clover looked doubtful. “They don’t shoot people in Cayman,” she said. “Not even the Governor is allowed to shoot people.”

“They’re allowed to shoot spies,” James countered.

She adjusted the telescope so that it was pointing out of the window and then she leaned forward to peer through it.

“I can see into the Arthur house,” she said. “There’s a man standing in the kitchen talking on the telephone.”

“I’ll note that down,” said James. “He could be a spy.”

“He isn’t. It’s Mr Arthur – Teddy’s father.”

“Spies often pretend to be ordinary people,” said James. “Even Teddy might not know that his father’s a spy.”

She wanted to please him and so she kept the records assiduously. The Arthur family was watched closely, even if no real evidence of spying was obtained. They talked on the telephone a lot, however, and that could be suspicious.

“Spies speak on the telephone to headquarters,” James explained. “They’re always on the phone.”

She had no interest in spies and their doings; the games she preferred involved re-enacted domesticity, or arranging shells in patterns, or writing plays that would then be performed, in costume, for family and neighbours – including the Arthurs, if they could be prised away from their spying activities. He went along with all this, to an extent, because he was fair-minded and understood that boys had to do the things that girls wanted occasionally, if girls were to do the things that boys wanted.

Their friendship survived battles over little things – arguments and spats that led to telephone calls of apology or the occasional note I hate you so much, always rescinded by a note the next morning saying I don’t really hate you – not really. Sorry.

“She’s your girlfriend, isn’t she?” taunted one of James’s classmates, a boy called Tom Ebanks, whose father was a notoriously corrupt businessman.

“No. She’s just a friend.”

Tom Ebanks smirked. “She lets you kiss her? You put your tongue in her mouth – like this – and wiggle it all around?”

“I told you: she’s my friend.”


“You’re going to make her pregnant? You know what that is? You know how to do that?”

He lashed out at the other boy, and cut him above his right eye. There was blood, and there were threats from Tom Ebanks’s friends, but it put a stop to the talk. He did not care if they thought she was his girlfriend. There was nothing wrong with having a girlfriend, not that that was what she was anyway. She was just like any of the boys, really – a friend. She had always been there; it was as simple as that; she was a sister, of a sort, although had she been his real sister he would not have got on so well with her, he thought: he knew boys, quite a few of them, who ignored their sisters or found them irritating. He liked Clover, and told her that. “You’re my best friend, you know. Or at least I think you are.”

She had responded warmly. “And you’re mine too.”

They looked at one another and held each other’s gaze until he turned away and talked about something else.