The Forever Girl

4



Amanda was surprised. The fact that she had fallen out of love with David seemed to make little difference to her day-to-day life. That would not have been the case, she told herself, if affection had been transformed into something stronger, into actual antipathy. But she could not dislike David, who was a kind and equably tempered man. It was not his fault; he had done nothing to bring this about – it had simply happened. She knew women who disliked their husbands, who went so far as to say that they found them unbearable. There was a woman at the tennis club, Vanessa, who was like that; she had drunk too much at the Big Tennis Party, as they called their annual reception for new members, and had spoken indiscreetly to Amanda.

“I just can’t stand him, you know,” she had said. “I find him physically repulsive – actually repulsive. Can you imagine what that’s like? Can you? When he puts his hands on me?”

Amanda had looked away. She wanted to say that you should never talk about the marriage bed, but she could not find the words. That’s private would have done, of course, but it sounded so disapproving.

“I’ll tell you,” went on Vanessa, sipping at her gin and tonic, and lowering her voice. “I have to close my eyes and imagine that I’m with somebody else. It’s the only way.” She paused. “Have you ever done that?”

The other woman was looking at Amanda with interest, as if the question she had asked was entirely innocuous – an enquiry as to whether one had ever read a particular book.

Amanda shook her head. But I have, she thought.

“That’s the only way I can bear to sleep with him,” Vanessa said. “I decide who it’s going to be and then I think of him.” She paused. “You’d be surprised to find out some of the men I’ve slept with. In my mind, of course. I’ve been very socially successful.”

Amanda looked up at the sky. It was evening, and they were standing outside; most of the guests were on the patio. The sky was clear; white stars against dark velvet. “Have you thought of leaving him?”

Vanessa laughed. “Look at these people.” She gestured to the other guests. One saw the gesture and waved; Vanessa smiled back. “Every one of the women – I can’t speak for the men – but every one of those women would probably leave their husbands if it weren’t for one thing.”

“I don’t think …”

“No, I’m telling you. It’s true.” The gin and tonic was almost finished now; just ice was left. “Money. It’s money that keeps them. It’s always been like that.”

“Not any more, surely. Women have options now. Careers. You don’t have to stay with a man you can’t stand.”

“No,” said Vanessa. “You’re wrong. You have to stay, because you can’t do otherwise. What does this tennis club cost? What does it cost to buy a house here? Two million dollars for something vaguely habitable. Where do women get that money when it’s men who’ve got the jobs?” She looked to Amanda for an answer. “Well?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“No, it is bad. It’s very bad.”

The conversation had left her feeling depressed, because of its sheer hopelessness. She wondered if Vanessa was at a further point on a road upon which she herself had now embarked. If that were true, she decided, she would leave well before she reached that stage. And she could: there were her parents back in New York – she could go back to them right now and they would accept her. She could take the children, and bring them up as Americans rather than as typical expatriate children living in a place where they did not belong and where they would never be sure exactly who they were. There were plenty of children like that in places like Grand Cayman or Dubai and all those other cities where expatriates led their detached, privileged lives, knowing that their hosts merely tolerated them, never loved them or accepted them.

But then she thought: she had no difficulty living with David. She did not dislike him; he did not annoy her in the way he ate his breakfast cereal or in the things he said. He could be amusing; he could say witty things that brought what she thought of as guilt-free laughter – there was never a victim in any of his stories. He did not embarrass her with philistine comments or reactionary views, as another friend’s husband did. And she thought, too, that as well as there being no reason to leave, there was a very good reason to stay, and that was so that the children could have two parents. If the cost of that would be her remaining with a man she did not love, then that was not a great price to pay.


“That poor woman,” said Margaret one morning. “She’s going to lose a leg.”

“What woman?” asked Amanda. Margaret was one of those people who made the assumption that you knew all their friends and acquaintances.

They were standing in the kitchen, where Margaret was cooking one of her Jamaican stews. The stew was bubbling on the cooker, giving off a rich, earthy smell.

“She works in that house on the corner. The big one. She’s worked there a long time, but they don’t treat her right.”

The story could be assembled through the asking of the right questions, but it could take time.

“Who doesn’t treat her right? Her employers?”

“Yes, the people in that house. They make her work all the time and then she gets sick and they say it’s got nothing to do with them. She twists her leg at their place, you see, and they still say it’s got nothing to do with them. Some people say nothing is to do with them – nothing at all. At their own place too.”

“I see …”

“So now the leg is fixed by that useless doctor. He kills more people than he saves, that one. The Honduran one. All those Honduras people go to him when they get sick because he says he was a big man back in Honduras and they believe him. You know how they are. They believe things you and I would laugh at – the Hondurans believe them. They cross themselves and so on, and believe all the lies that people tell them. No questions asked.”

She elicited the story slowly. A Honduran maid – a woman in her early fifties – had slipped at the poolside in the house of a wealthy expatriate couple. They were French tax exiles, easily able to afford for their maid to see a reputable doctor, but had washed their hands of the matter. They had warned her about wet patches at the edge of the pool, and now she had injured herself. It was her fault, not theirs.


The maid had consulted a cheap Honduran doctor who was not licensed to practise in the Cayman Islands, but who did so nonetheless in the back of his shipping chandlery. Now infection had set in in the bone and progressed to the point that the public hospital was offering an amputation. There was an ulcer, too, that needed dressing.

The leg could be saved, Margaret said, but it would be expensive. “You could ask Dr Collins,” she said. “He’s a good man. He could do something.”

“Has he seen her?” Amanda asked.

Margaret shook her head. “She’s too frightened to go and see him. Money, you see. Doctors charge a lot of money just for you to sit in their waiting room.”

“He isn’t like that.”

“No, so they say. But this woman is too frightened to go.”

There was an expectant silence.

“All right,” said Amanda. “I’ll take her.”

It was not onerous. And she realised that she wanted to see him. She had never been into his clinic – the run-down building past the shops at South Sound – but she had seen the badly painted sign that said Dr Collins, Patient’s at Back. She knew that he was not responsible for the apostrophe; that was the fault of the sign-writer, and she knew, too, that it remained there because the doctor was too tactful to have it corrected. The sign-writer was one of his patients and always asked him, with pride, if he was happy with his work. “Of course I am, Wallis,” the doctor said. “I wouldn’t change a word of it.” That had been told her by Alice.

Margaret arranged for her to pick up the Honduran woman, Bella. She did so one evening, waiting at the end of the drive while the maid, who was using crutches, limped towards her.

“My leg’s bad,” she said, as she got into the car. “Swollen. Bad inside. I’m sorry. It smells bad too. I can’t help that.”

She caught her breath. There was an odour – slightly sweet, but sinister too; the smell of physical corruption, of infection. She wondered how this could go untreated in a place of expensive cars and air conditioning. But it did, of course; illness and infection survived in the interstices even where there was money and the things that money bought. All they needed was human flesh, oxygen, and indifference; or hardness of heart, perhaps.

She reached out and put a hand on the maid’s forearm. “I don’t mind. I can’t even notice it.”

The maid looked at her. “You’re very kind.”

Amanda thought: am I? Or would anybody do this; surely anybody would?

She drove carefully. The road from the town centre was busy, and the traffic was slow in the late afternoon heat. She tried to make conversation, but Bella seemed to be unwilling to speak, and they completed the journey in silence.

The clinic was simple. In a waiting room furnished with plastic chairs, a woman sat at a desk with several grey filing cabinets behind her. There was a notice-board on which government circulars about immunisation had been pinned untidily. A slow-turning ceiling fan disturbed the air sufficiently to flutter the end of the larger circulars. There was a low table with ancient magazines stacked on it – old copies of the National Geographic and, curiously, a magazine called Majesty that specialised in articles about the British royal family. A younger member of that family looked out from the cover. Exclusive, claimed a caption to the picture. We tell you what he really feels about history and duty.

Amanda spoke to the woman at the desk. She had phoned her earlier on and made the appointment, and this had been followed by a conversation with George; now there was a form to be filled in. She offered this to Bella, who recoiled from it, out of ancient, instinctive habit. And that must be how you felt if you had always been at the bottom of the heap, thought Amanda. Every form, every manifestation of authority, came from above, was a potential threat.

“I’ll fill it in for her,” she said, glancing at the receptionist to forestall any objection.

But there was none. “That’s fine,” said the woman. “As long as we have her name and date of birth.”

They sat on adjoining chairs. She smiled at Bella. “It’ll be all right.”

“They said at the hospital …”

She stopped her. “Never mind what they said. We’ll see what Dr Collins says. All right?”

Bella nodded miserably. Then she seemed to brighten. “You’ve got those two children, M’am.”

“Not M’am. Amanda.”

“Same as me. Two. Boy and a girl. You have that Clover? I’ve seen her. Pretty girl.”

“Thank you. Yours?”

“They’re with their grandmother in Puerto Cortes. In Honduras.”

“You must miss them.”

“Yes. Every day. Specially now.”

A consequence of the expatriate life, Amanda thought – or of another variety of it.


The door behind the receptionist’s desk opened. A woman came out – a young woman, tall, with the light-olive complexion of some of the Cayman Islanders. She turned and shook the doctor’s hand before walking out, eyes averted from Amanda and Bella.

“Mrs Rosales?”

He nodded to Amanda; they had spoken on the phone about Bella when he had agreed to see her.

Bella looked anxiously at Amanda. “You must come too.”

Amanda caught George’s eye. “If she wants you in, that’s fine,” he said. “That’s all right, Mrs Rosales. She can come in with you.”

They went into the doctor’s office. The receptionist had preceded them and was fitting a fresh white sheet to the examination couch. Amanda felt what she always felt in such places: the accoutrements reminded her of mortality. The couch, the indignity of the stirrups, the smell of antiseptic, the gleam of medical instruments: all of these underlined the seriousness of our plight. Human life, individually and collectively, hung by a biological thread.

Bella lay on the couch, wincing as she stretched out her damaged leg. Amanda stood back. She wanted to look away, but found her gaze drawn back to the sight of George removing the dressing. His touch looked gentle; he stopped for a moment when Bella gave a grimace of pain.

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “This is very nasty.”

The wound made by the ulcer was yellow. She had not expected that. She had expected red.

He probed gently with an instrument. She noticed the watch he was wearing, a square watch of a sort the advertisers claimed as thirties retro. She noticed that the belt he was wearing had been incorrectly threaded, missing a loop at the back. She thought of him dressing for work in the morning; dressing for his encounters with his patients, dressing for whatever the day brought him – the breaking of bad news, the stories of physical discomfort and pain; while David dressed for his meetings, his daily stint in the engine room of money. She looked at the back of his neck; at his shoulders.

Suddenly Bella reached out a hand towards her. She had been on the other side of the room, only a few feet away, but crossed over immediately and took the extended hand. She saw that there were tears in the Honduran woman’s eyes.

George turned away from Bella and addressed Amanda. “She needs proper hospital treatment. Intravenous antibiotics at the very least. There might need to be some surgical excision of tissue. They’ll need to get the infection under control.”

She whispered. “There’s no insurance. They won’t send her off-island.”

He shook his head. “There are some good people in Kingston. Medical missionaries from Florida. They have a first-class surgeon who knows all about these infections. I’ve used them before. If we can get her to them.” He looked down at Bella and laid his hand on hers, the hand being held by Amanda. The three of them were holding hands now.


“I’ll pay the fare. It isn’t much.”

“Good. That’s nice of you. They’ll take care of the rest.”

He let go of Bella’s hand and turned to the receptionist. “Can you put on a clean dressing, please, Annie?”

He drew Amanda aside. “Why has this been allowed to get to this point? Was there nobody?”

She shook her head. “The employers washed their hands of it. You probably know them. That French couple on the corner.”

He raised his eyes. “They’re very wealthy.”

“Of course they are.”

He sighed. “You said that it happened at work? In the house?”

“She slipped at work.”

He asked whether she couldn’t get a lawyer. “There are enough of them. This place is crawling with lawyers.”

“They work for the banks.”

“Of course. They work for the banks.”

After the dressing had been changed, George helped Bella off the couch. He explained that he would try to make an appointment for her to see somebody tomorrow who would make arrangements for her to go to a hospital in Jamaica. Bella said nothing, but nodded her assent.

“A drink?” said George, as he showed Amanda out.

She felt her heart leap. “Why not? After I’ve taken Mrs Rosales home.”

“Yes. The Grand Old House?” he suggested. “An hour’s time? Six-thirty?”

“I haven’t been there for ages.”

The Grand Old House was a restaurant and bar on the shore near Smith’s Cove. At night you could sit out at the front and watch the lights of boats on the water. The staff tipped food into a circle of light they created in the water and large grey fish swam in to snap up the morsels in the shallows.


She thought about the invitation as she drove home. She should call David, perhaps, and tell him, and something would have to be done about the children. They were with Margaret, at her house, and they could stay there, perhaps, until she came home. Margaret fed them pizzas and other unhealthy foods; they loved eating there.

No, she would not call David. He had said he was likely to be delayed at the office because somebody had come in from London and there was an important meeting about one of the trusts they administered. He might not be back until ten, or even later.

Back at the house, after dropping off Bella, she had a quick swim in the pool to cool off. Then she washed her hair and chose something that she could wear to the Grand Old House. She chose it with care; with the fingers of excitement already tapping at the door, insistent, unmistakable.