The Forever Girl Read Free Page B

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 sameclass, 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