Port Mungo Read online

  —No I haven’t, he said.

  The room stank of perfume not her own, so his denial was not only useless, it was insulting. She was duly insulted, at the same time experiencing a sick, weary feeling that the banality of the row they were about to have was no different from that of the tens of thousands of infidelity rows being conducted in America at that very moment. She had thought they were different. She had thought they were transparent to each other. Now this. Vulgar perfume and vulgar lies. She was suddenly desperately sad. Jack sat on the bed, he made some sort of a sound intended to be comforting, and touched her. She rose up in a rage and at once he was out the door, leaving her alone with her breaking heart, without a friend in this pastel-colored city.

  Vera sat at my kitchen table gazing into her wine. Then she looked up at me and said a curious thing. She said she’d felt as though she’d lost her virginity. I understood exactly what she meant.

  When he came back two hours later he found her in front of the mirror putting on her makeup. He was ready to face the music and take his punishment like a man. He had bought her a bottle to ease the pain. He had prepared a speech. What he had not anticipated was her icy indifference, her tacit refusal to participate in some tawdry guilt-and-reconciliation scenario, nor did he know what to make of her evident intention to go out. She silently revelled in his confusion. For an hour she had allowed herself to be utterly ravaged by this calamity. Then she had risen from the bed a different woman, initiated, so she said, into the ways of Jack Rathbone and his shabby heart. It only remained to act on her resolve and do to him exactly what he’d done to her. He tried to come with her when she left the room, and that’s when she showed him a truly poisonous contempt. She told him she did not want him with her, she was going out by herself. He attempted to ask her where she was going and she was able, without uttering a single word—Not a single word, Gin!—to convey to him that he had lost the right to ask her any such question. She told him not to follow her, and then she left.

  It was all depressingly easy after that. In a bar on Ocean Drive she sat next to a plausible man and asked him for a light. He asked her if he could buy her a drink. It was just beginning to get dark. The palms along the beach were black against the deepening blue of the sky. The waves were hissing on the shore, huge open cars cruising down the street, bursts of music drifting from the beach. She’d sat on a high stool in a cocktail bar just off the lobby of a turquoise hotel, a woman with a breaking heart determined to seduce a stranger to make a point.

  She did. And actually, she said, giving me a large slotted grin, she liked it. A lot. This was a new kind of American for her. He was a salesman. His name was Richard. He came from Long Beach, California, and was in the swimwear business. When they lay side by side afterwards, smoking cigarettes, he showed her snapshots of his children. He wanted to see her again, but she told him no, it would just be the once. But to leave his room was not easy. Three times she tried to get dressed, and only the last time succeeded. He took her down in the elevator and they had a last martini at the bar. She said she had no idea what they talked about though he paid her compliments, and he must have considered himself a lucky man, I thought, to have pulled a good-looking woman like Vera with such ease.

  She was walking up Ocean Drive at midnight in the direction of their fleapit rooming house when a figure stepped out of the darkness and spoke her name. He had been wandering the streets looking for her. He was sober, miserably hangdog, but sober. She had never seen anything so pathetic in her life. Never before had he seemed so young, and it occurred to her that she had had a far better time of her infidelity than he had had of his, which made her generous, though not so generous as to tolerate anything resembling interrogation. He would have to use his imagination.

  —Do you want to walk on the beach? he said.

  She’d tried to be distant, to affect a kind of condescending detachment, feeling herself still the wronged party. She’d asked herself: Does it matter, sex? Or is it utterly inconsequential? Sex doesn’t matter, she thought, but the effects of it do. She allowed herself to savour her recent encounter, and smiled a private smile—and dear god, I thought, there can’t have been a lot left to Jack’s imagination! But she couldn’t keep it up. He moved her, she said, this wretched boy struggling by her side. She turned to him, and there by the seashore they clung to each other like the lost souls they were. Then they kicked through the surf with their shoes in their hands. He had prepared a new speech, one from the heart, the real thing. He would never do it again, he said, he truly meant it, and it was clear to her that nobody had ever dealt him so bald a retort as she had, and that it had stung him to the core. He was badly frightened of losing her, and he would never again take her for granted.

  All this she heard as they trod the damp sand, car horns and music drifting faintly across the beach, and Jack working hard, rousing as much moral purpose as she believed he had in him. Oh, but she didn’t care about moral purpose, she was just so relieved that this dreadful day was over and they were at peace again! I asked her if she thought he’d meant what he said, that he would never again be unfaithful to her. She shrugged. She said she supposed he might have meant it. She had given it no thought, nor did she then, I mean the night she told me about it at the kitchen table. And I thought: You may shrug, Vera Savage, but to keep a promise like that when your partner is as rampantly unfaithful as you have been, what kind of morality is that? A superior kind of morality, no? And that’s why I believe Jack told me the truth when I asked about his sex life in Port Mungo. I believe he had resolved not to ape Vera in her promiscuity, and I believe he held to that resolution.

  Their money came through the next day. They had slept well, orphan children clinging together in the night, and in the morning they were pathetically grateful to find themselves in the same bed. The arrival of the money was like a shaft of grace.

  Two days later they moved into a small hotel in Havana. As they walked the streets in their new lightweight tropical clothes America seemed a bad dream, a long night of excess in New York followed by a diabolical Florida hangover. But they had got away, they were together, they had a plan. Their hearts were light as they strolled arm in arm through the old town, Vera with a large cigar between her teeth, greeting the old men, the children, the prostitutes in her dreadful Spanish, and Jack thinking about studios, already searching.

  He never once spoke to me about his infidelity in Miami Beach, though I hinted at my knowledge of it often enough. He was, I think, in a way, a sort of monk.

  They became one of the few welcome features of the days I spent in Port Mungo, the conversations Jack and I had each evening when the sun went down, as did the level of rum in the succession of bottles without labels he produced from the kitchen cupboard. It was the beginning of the hurricane season, and by my third day the air had become oppressively sultry and charged with electricity. I yearned for a storm to relieve the tensions in the atmosphere. There were mountains to the north, south and west of us, and at night the lightning flared and flickered against these distant barriers. The air grew unbearably hot, and I would feel the perspiration break out constantly on my forehead and beneath my shirt. Later the storm moved in across the gulf and the sky was lit by sudden wide sheets of lightning which threw up in stark relief angry black fists and knuckles of storm cloud, and bright jagged flashes which hissed into the sea. The trees across the river flapped about in the rising wind, their broad leaves languidly enfolding one another, and then the blessed rain came.

  I was curious about Vera’s pregnancy, and asked Jack how she had responded to the prospect of motherhood. Had she been happy she was expecting a child? A glint of amusement in my brother. He would not belabour me with a detailed account of it, he said, except to say that waddling, emburdened, in a tropical climate would try the fortitude of any woman; and he did not need to add, never mind a woman like Vera. He told me they moved the big teak bed into her studio, and when the time came Peg was born amid a clutter of brushes
and pots and jars of turps, and one of the infant’s very first sights was an unfinished canvas whose theme was fertility. Painful, cumbersome, messy fertility.

  The local doctor was an Englishman called Johnny Hague. Lying on her back with her shirt unbuttoned, and that man’s cool fingers delicately probing the bulge of her belly, this was one of the few pleasant memories, Jack said, that Vera claimed to have of that time. I caught something in his tone. He was sitting forward, his elbows on his knees and his head sunk forward, staring at the deck so I couldn’t see his features. Then up came his face in the lamplight, and with it a most baleful expression, as he gazed straight at me, his mouth working with resentment and distaste.

  I understood what he was telling me.

  Silence here.

  Apparently she lost interest in motherhood rather quickly. Jack had anticipated that a child would draw them closer together, but within a few months she was up to her old tricks again.

  What old tricks?

  She’d developed a habit of wandering onto the docks in the early morning, and if there was a boat going down the coast she’d be away all day and come home drunk as a lord. Before Peg was born he had been making progress, he told me. The drinking was less grandiose in scale than once it had been, less apocalyptic in its effects, and she had even begun to voice a guarded enthusiasm for the relative moderation he was imposing on their lives. But after Peg was born all at once she saw him as a man tethered to an infant, and less able to oversee her activities. This provoked a bitter laugh as he talked about it, but it was not comic then, there was nothing comic about it at all. The first time he appeared in the doorway of a waterfront bar with Peg asleep in his arms—by god was she surprised! She was drinking beer with men from off the boats, and being dragged out of the bar, this was the price she paid for the assumption that he could not handle Peg and her both. For she did leave the bar—she knew better than to defy him—and after a short explosive row she sank for several days into a black sulk.

  But she went back to work, she stayed in her studio, until one night at supper, in the early gloom, by the light of the kerosene lamps, he put a bottle of rum on the table and suggested they celebrate.

  —Celebrate what? she said, for she was still sulking, despite the fact that at the sight of a bottle of rum and Jack being friendly her heart would have lifted in her breast.

  —God and all his works.

  —Oh fuck off, Jack. Why can’t you let me be?

  —I do let you be! Have a drink and don’t make trouble.

  So she had a drink, and when she drank with him now she drank like a normal person, she knew he would not tolerate the gulping of drinks. Then she talked about what she was doing in her studio, and at last he began to see the real Vera, the painter, that is, not the drunk. Her hair was stiff with salt from swimming in the sea, and she hadn’t brushed it for a week, this in protest at being hauled out of the bar, and the front of her shirt was smeared with paint. But filthy though she was, she looked like an artist, whereas after a few nights in the bars she just looked like a slut, despicable.

  Down to her studio they went and she stamped about in front of various canvases and spoke in a quick passionate flood about what it was she thought she was doing. When she faltered he came in with his questions and soon had her plunging forward again, and all the while he saw that she was working, rather than losing herself in alcohol, and knew he could take the credit for that.

  But as time passed his influence steadily weakened. She grew more and more restless, and then one day she announced that if she didn’t get out of Port Mungo she’d go stark mad. Jack was certainly unsympathetic to the spirit in which this ultimatum was delivered—hostile, defiant—and he responded with anger. The ensuing row only confirmed her in her determination to get away, and they parted unhappily. She’d spoken vaguely about “having a look at Mexico,” though he strongly suspected she wanted to get back to Havana and see if she could have as much fun under Fidel as she’d had before the revolution.

  —How old was Peg?

  —About two.

  —Was she fond of her?

  —She resented all the attention she got.

  Silence as we pondered this. Various flashes out on the horizon, a distant boom of thunder. We were still on the deck with our rum. Something bit my ankle and absently I slapped at it.

  —Does she have no maternal feelings at all?

  Again he sat forward, pushing his hand through his hair, frowning, groaning slightly, I presume because the question aroused such bitter emotion. He looked at me, he looked away, he muttered something under his breath. All this theatre. At last he spoke.

  —None.

  —Oh Jack.

  I leaned across and took his hand. He gripped my fingers hard for a few seconds. Then he said he believed he could have held her had she not been unfaithful to him. She was not at root a promiscuous woman, he said, rather her sexuality was stitched into her emotional dependence on the man taking care of her. But her affair with Johnny Hague created a disturbance which seriously damaged the connective tissue between them. She realized, unconsciously, he believed, that by destroying their sexual bond she could destroy his power over her.

  He sat there in the darkness after telling me all this and busied himself with the lighting of a cigar.

  —Your power over her, I said.

  —Christ, Gin, somebody has to control her!

  Chapter Six

  Jack’s revelations shocked me but they did not surprise me, I suppose because I had made my mind up about Vera in London, and my antagonism towards her, which I deluded myself into thinking was based on a cool assessment of her character, was in fact shot through with the resentment of a rival: she had taken the man I loved. Absurd and irrational, of course—I was Jack’s sister. What we had was not a romance, but it was a relationship of a profound and intensely intimate nature, and I did not recover quickly. My own move from London to New York a year after my father’s death was partly an attempt to draw closer to him, and I must acknowledge the pleasure it gave me at the time to think that I had been right about Vera—that she was no good. She was a bad mother, a faithless lover, a drunkard, a spendthrift, a drifter. I am not proud of this, but it did at least allow me to empathize with Jack in his constant worrying at what had gone wrong, why things had turned out as badly as they had. She grew increasingly restless, he said, and the time came when she was more often absent than present.

  —But why?

  He said he supposed she never felt she had a duty to stay at home. To stay at home when she wanted to be off, that would have seemed to Vera a kind of death, he said, a strangling of some vital impulse, and this was all tangled up with her idea of herself as an artist, which was the only part of herself that mattered to her. Mother, lover, teacher, muse—she cared nothing about her performance in any of these roles, none of it had anything to do with what she thought was the point of her. Anyone could be a good wife or mother, this was her argument, but nobody could be the artist she was, nobody could make the paintings she had it in her to make. Therefore anything was justified if it served the work, and if that meant setting off at two days’ notice to tramp across Chiapas, then the hardship suffered by those she left behind was of no real consequence.

  —Does she love you?

  Eyes down, shake of the head. Knotted silence.

  —God alone knows, Gin. After her fashion.

  —So what happens when she comes back from one of these trips?

  We were out on the deck, it was late in the evening, we were watching the Mungo. Lightning flickered in the distant mountains of Guate. All at once Jack became animated. His line was: Not so fast, lady! He had no time for any of her barroom philosophy, if she wanted back in his house she must earn it. First would come the row. She shouted and sulked, she refused to admit she had done anything wrong, she insisted she had never promised to be other than she was, she tried the sanctity-of-the-artist line, but it did her no good at all, she knew in the end th
at the only thing that would suffice was a sustained, sincere apology, and until she somehow found her way to the place inside herself where sustained sincere remorse could be awoken then her life would be hell, Jack would make it so.

  So they would hole up in Pelican Road and after a day or two she was forced to acknowledge what Jack had suffered by her absence. He did not rest. He said he scraped away at her denial like a sheet of industrial sandpaper. There was little sleep for either of them, there was much shouting, there was even—rich one, this!—the throwing of plates. She would threaten to go off again and never come back and he told her to go ahead, did she think she was the only woman he could procure if he wanted one? What was the point of a woman anyway? Someone to drink with, someone to take to bed, otherwise a distraction from the work.

  This sort of argument Vera could understand, of course. They shouted their existential slogans back and forth, they trumpeted their manifestos of artistic self-sufficiency, but in truth it was all bravado, though Jack knew it better than she did. And she was the one who’d come back. She needed him. And if, once, he had missed her badly when she went off, he had learned how to live alone, he had had to—

  When he said this, I lifted a sceptical eyebrow. Far from learning to live without her, he was plunged into such distress by this latest absence that he had been forced to send for me. Even his tone of voice belied what he was saying, for it was with a smile on his face, and a kind of fond nostalgia in his tone that he spoke of her homecomings, as though he actually took pleasure in these ghastly fights. I assumed this meant he was always glad to see her again, which was incomprehensible to me. What possible justification could there be for loving a woman who behaved like this?