"This term I teach every day at St. Brendan's."
"We'll find a day," the handsome Frenchman said.
She had married him and they had gone to Paris. Then she had become, as was said, an agent of influence, a tiny auxiliary of the socialist bloc, under the tutelage of her husband and the great Desmond Jenkins, the wizard of influence agentry in the Third World and at the United Nations. She had met Castro and Graham Greene. She had known their company.
Then she and her husband had changed sides and been bartered by the French services to the Triptelemos brigade. Bad luck, and now, she thought, it would be remedied, the hotel sold.
What was most important was that at John-Paul's retirer she might reclaim her soul, which he, her brother, had teasingly given over to the keeping of his own protective spirits. He had done it to punish her for going away to school in Switzerland, and for other things. She was in love, it seemed; she thought of Michael's body with pleasure. But the best thing was that she would be whole again.
Silvery barracuda darted around her in the inshore water. A pod of brown rays rose from under the sand as she waded out of the mild surf.
By the time she had showered and changed again, Roger was gone. The house had a floating population of servants and hangers-on, none of whom were anywhere in sight. The telephone was working and she called the hotel. Michael's flight from San Juan had not taken off. No one knew about the bus service to the capital.
The keys she had brought with her from the States still served their purpose. Checking the garage, she found the old Land Rover with three quarters of a tank of gas, not enough to make it to Rodney and back. There were some jerry cans of gas but she was afraid to drive the roads with them. If Michael needed fetching, she decided, she would go. Then, on impulse, she set off along the coast road toward the convent where she had taught school. On the road she passed no one except an elderly woman who was closing her soft-drinks stand, padlocking a battered tin shutter. A few miles farther along, a gang of young boys shouted after her.
As she pulled up at the gate, she heard the sounds of a football match inside. When the old Haitian servant let her in, she saw the game itself in progress on the parched field: two sets of teenagers playing Gaelic football. One side had been equipped with rugby shirts. Their opponents, playing bare-chested, showed the knotty frames of the poorer island people. Lara parked her machine in front of the two-story school building and watched for a while. On a veranda on the upper story, she saw Sister Margaret Oliver, in dark glasses, apparently absorbed in the game, poised on the edge of her rocking chair. It was so very like her, Lara thought, to set the boys at Gaelic football behind convent walls in the middle of an insurrection.
Another weight of memory stopped Lara on the way upstairs. The hallways still bore the foreign schoolroom fragrances she recalled from years before. Metal polish and candle wax, ink and cut flowers, ant spray and English soap. When she stepped out on the balcony, the nun was shouting something in Irish to the boys on the pitch. Lara paused before knocking on the frame of the louvered door.
The sister shouted down to her spalpeens. Her side, Lara thought, must naturally be the shirtless ones. Lara felt herself in a welter of all the crazed, promiscuous forces of her island. Nuns shouting in Gaelic to black children playing Irish games. Cane cutters singing in medieval French patois to the rhythm of their cutlass strokes. Here and there plastic radios running on tractor batteries playing rhythm and blues. From the school balcony, canefields stretched toward the purple ridge of the Morne Chastenet, where the descendants of Haitian Maroons served vodoun loas, African gods and savage Taino spirits in thin Christian disguise.
Meanwhile at St. Brendan's, for a hundred years the Marist nuns and brothers had been urging black and brown children to prodigies of valor at Gaelic football, shouting encouragement in the auld speech. Of course they had to offer cricket as well — the island passion — along with the sermons of Cardinal Newman and the speeches of Edmund Burke. During the seventies they had somehow obtained Manchild in the Promised Land for the library and a New York gang novel called The Cool World, these beside Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples and devotional pap like The Glories of Mary.
To go with religiosity and mildly Whiggish history there were manuals of etiquette and forms of address, so that should a St. Brendan's student wish to correspond with a marquess or any person of like degree, the appropriate salutations could be referred to and applied. Lara had ordered her third-form class to read Uncle Tom's Cabin together. It was still popular.
But during Lara's time as a teacher, the Marists, with the bishop behind them, had struggled to suppress the dread Rastas and their dread hairdos and the trappings of black power, which Sister Margaret Oliver called American rubbish. Eldridge Cleaver and Frantz Fanon had turned up on the library shelves in that period, the Fanon courtesy of Lara herself.
Noticing Lara's presence in the doorway, Sister Margaret turned and removed her round-framed dark sunglasses, so grotesquely fashionable on an old nun, more than slightly sinister, suggestive of American rubbish.
"Oh, dear Lara! Oh, bless you, darling girl."
Lara tried to keep her from standing. On the field there was an outcry; someone had scored.
"Goal," Lara said under her breath.
Sister Margaret shook her head in wonder. She called down to the referee.
"Jack? Can you carry on without my support, do you think?"
The young black man who was refereeing gave her a thumbs-up sign. The nun ordered tea from the country girl who served in the kitchen. There were no hugs and kisses. Irish Marists and their students refrained from embracing.
"Do you really think it's safe to have them all in today?" Lara asked. "I mean, shouldn't they be home?"
"Not at all," the nun said. "Not at all. The junta would be putting rifles in their hands. I'm keeping them here until Junot and the Americans get it under control. Not that I'm cheering, you'll notice."
"You're not for the junta, surely?"
Sister Margaret laughed. "What? With us responsible for Colonel Junot's education? He was one of ours, you know. An alumnus."
"Of course."
"But I don't want my lads used for target practice, and these walls have faced down as many armies as there are in the Book of Kings." She had a look at Lara. "I suppose you've come back to close the hotel."
"Yes, I'm saying goodbye to it all, sister. I won't be coming back."
"Well, you know I'm surely sorry to hear that now," said Sister Margaret. "I thought when I heard you were coming home to us… I thought what stories she'll have to tell. And there'd be something to do in the evening besides watch American rubbish on telly."
Tea arrived in its good time, hauled rather than carried upstairs by a petulant and out-of-breath teenager, overweight and surly.
"I hoped you'd come and teach here again," the sister said. "Now that you'd seen the world."
"How nice that would be," she said. "No, I've taken a job in the States. Political science."
They both watched the panting servant girl withdraw.
"You should have gone to medical school," the nun said. "You might well have done."
Lara smiled. "You had my life planned."
"I passed the time planning your life, Lara." She seemed really to be weeping. "Don't worry, it was a good life I planned you." Outside, the boys shouted again. Lara was touched, only for a moment, with grief and regret. It seemed she must be picking up the old woman's mood swings. Grief, regret and fear too. "Well now," said old Sister Margaret, sniffling aside her disappointments in Lara, "political science, is it? And in the States."