Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

French with a Marseille slur, and a disconcerting amount of English with an Australian twang. Officious, devious, an expert snitch and bully, he embodies the first mate of every pirate ship in B movie history. Shorter than Senna—who is not tall—he has a grand vizier’s belly that strains the waistband of his khaki shorts, a limp from some nameless catastrophe, a bulldog face purpled with rum, a bristle of stained mustache, and wispy, colorless hair bound back with a shoelace. And, like any stock character, he has props: a walking stick crudely carved with a coiling serpent; a neck chain displaying a coin he claims is a Roman aureus. When in the sun, he wears a sinister pink Panama hat.

Presented to the wife of his boss, he kisses the air over her hand as Europeans of social pretensions do. Behind his greeting there is a stony challenge that she’ll recall in future days, when she has begun to dread him. Why does he hate her so promptly? The answer is obvious: because her skin is as dark as that of the people he lords it over.

A thin smile crosses his lips as one of the younger housemaids hurries up to Shay and Senna with a tray bearing a pair of neon-colored drinks: canned pineapple juice tinged with grenadine syrup, served in tall glasses topped off with bougainvillea blossoms and plastic straws. This, he announces, is his own idea: to celebrate arrivals with a welcoming cocktail, as they do at swanky hotels in the Caribbean.

Shay and Senna exchange amused glances at this vulgarity. But Senna only says that they’ve thought from the start that it would be a fine thing to make use of the Red House, in the off-season, as a bed-and-breakfast, a chambre d’hôtes. That is their future plan. He adds that, now that Shay has arrived, the place will finally have the benefit of a woman’s taste. Shay is surprised by the mild tone which her husband—usually brusque with Italian employees—adopts with his manager.

“Ah, but Signora Shay must be completely on holiday when she is here,” counters Kristos smoothly. He spreads his ropy arms to indicate the staff who have scattered about their various duties. Around the edges of his squat, khaki-clad figure, Shay can glimpse the garden, a hortus conclusus dense with leaf and blossom. “The Signora won’t have to lift a finger,” adds the Greek.

6.

That night, when the watchmen have closed and locked the downstairs shutters, Senna undresses Shay ceremoniously by a flickering hurricane light in the master bedroom. Not exactly undresses, because she’s wrapped her naked self up in the embroidered bedcover so that he can unwind her, as Caesar is said to have freed Cleopatra from the fabled carpet. Senna has a hibiscus flower stuck behind one ear. It’s perhaps the best time they will ever have in the Red House. They’re drunk on Three Horses beer and vanilla rum; they’re stuffed from feasting on coconut rice and oysters chipped from rocks at the far end of the beach. They’re sunburnt from snorkeling. They’re worn out from looking over the house and playfully arguing about rooms for the children they haven’t yet had; from weaving plans for their friends who will arrive later in the summer, from discussing fishing trips, and overland treks, and motorcycle excursions into the backcountry.

When Shay stands stripped and giggling in front of him, Senna looks her over with an intent air of discovery.

“Well, monsieur le patron? Do I suit?” she demands. “I know you think I’m the last piece of furniture!”

“No, no—tu sei la madonnina. You’re one of those holy statues—you know, a Madonna, a saint—like the country people used to build into their farmhouse walls back in Vercelli.”

“A Black Madonna?”

“A professoressa like you doesn’t know about the wonder-working Black Madonna? She has shrines all over Italy!”

“Let’s forget about Italy,” says Shay, yanking the flower out of his hair.

Tired as they both are, they charge into each other like teenagers that night, with uncontrollable laughter and a transcendent feeling of arrival.

But deep in the night, Shay, a seasoned traveler who usually sleeps well even in bare-bones hostels, wakes up to the crash of the tide beyond the garden wall. Over the nocturnal chorus of frogs, it sounds annunciatory, as if a single solemn phrase were being repeated over and over again. She frees herself gently from Senna’s embrace and lies staring into darkness through the mosquito net of the huge four-poster bed. The disquiet she felt on the hillside this afternoon returns and becomes a wanderer’s desolation at waking in a strange place. The strangest of places, this Madagascar—whose very name, like Timbuktu or Samarkand, is used by Americans as shorthand for the very farthest away one can be. And suddenly Shay is homesick, but for where? For the shingled house in the Oakland Hills where she spent her happy childhood? For the assortment of East Coast student digs she occupied after that? For the Milan apartment where she has chosen to start a new life?

Certainly, this big barracks of a villa on the shore of the Indian Ocean could never offer such comfort. She pictures how the crested roof must look silhouetted against the night sky inscribed with Southern constellations. And then she imagines the dark island: cane fields whispering in the breeze, the forest alive with the glittering wakeful eyes of the small beasts; the villages sheltering the sleep of men and women like those she met today, all in mute dreaming conversation with ancestors. In those huts no one has to wonder where home is. From the ground under their dwellings their history rises and cradles them.

Lying there in the darkness beside her, Senna himself seems an unknown country. What does he feel about this house besides satisfied vanity? What does he find in this distant land, and in these people—and what of value is he bringing here?

And for herself she wonders: How the hell did I end up in this place? And: What