The World and Other Places Read Free Page B

I’m talking a lot about Gabriel Angel.
    If I were able to speak the truth, I’d say I had a fiancée before the War, and we’re going back to 1938 now. She had a thick plait of hair that ran all the way down her back. She could wrap her hair around her as though it were a snake. I was no snake charmer.
    She was a farmer’s daughter, had a heart like a tractor to pull any man out of himself. Her hair was red the way the sun is red first thing in the morning. She had a look about her that took everything seriously, even the wood pile. There were plenty of men who would have traded their bodies for a split log, just to be under her hands for five minutes. I know I would. We didn’t touch much. She didn’t seem to want it. When we said goodnight at the bottom of her lane she let me run my index finger from her temple to her throat. Such soft hair she had on her face, invisible, but not to my hand.
    If I were young again, I would have bounced up to Gabriel Angel on the dock and asked her to come with me on the later sailing. That would have been the Italian line, the real cruise ship. SS
Garibaldi
softly rocking the Mediterranean. Forgetthe direct Atlantic crossing, carrying workers and immigrants to a cold place they’ve never seen. I could have held her hand through Martinique, Las Palmas, Tenerife. I could have put my arm around her waist through the straits of Gibraltar. At Barcelona I would have bought her gem Madonnas and seed pearls. Then we would have continued by sea to Genoa and met the boat-train for England. That railway, through Italy, Switzerland and France, was laid in the 1850s and was one of the first to be constructed. I’m told that Robert Browning, poet, and Mrs Elizabeth Barrett Browning, also poet, travelled along its length. I would have enjoyed that connection. I should like to run away with Gabriel Angel.
    As it is, we’re on this ferry boat to Southampton, the short direct brutal route, and Gabriel Angel has never been in my arms.
    It turns out that the two lesbians are missionaries. Miss Bead, the one with a face like a love-note somebody crushed in his fist, tells me they have been in Trinidad for thirty years. Miss Quim, the cricket ball, has taught three generations of hockey teams. They are on their way home to buy a farmhouse together in Wales and get a dog called Rover. I realise they are happy.
    I am not sleeping well. Below my cabin is dormitory accommodation, the cheapest way to travel. That’s all right, what’swrong is the Barbados Banjo Band, twenty-five of them, on their way to the dancehalls of England. It isn’t easy to sleep well piled on top of fifty feet, five hundred fingers and toes and forty-six eyes. Above me are the maddening curves of Gabriel Angel.
    In the ship’s lounge, proudly displayed, is a large map of the Atlantic, threaded through with the red line of our route. Every day one of the stewards moves a gay green flag further along the red line, so that we can see where we are. Today we have reached the middle; the point of no return. Today the future is nearer than the past.
    I don’t have anyone to go to in England. No one will be waiting for me at Southampton or Victoria. I have a two-bedroomed terraced house in London. I have had it let for the past twelve years and I’ll have to live in a boarding house until it becomes vacant again next month. I won’t recognise anything familiar. I had the agents furnish it cheaply for me.
    Later, my cargo will arrive and I’ll start selling Caribbean crafts and trinkets and I suppose I’ll go on doing that until something better comes along or until I die. Looking at my future is like looking at a rainy day through a dirty window.
    ‘You must be excited, Mr Stewart.’
    ‘What about, Miss Angel?’
    She has been reading my copy of
Wuthering Heights
byEmily Brontë: and now she wishes she could live in Yorkshire. I must be careful not to lend her
Rob Roy
.
    Is compassion possible between a man and a woman? When I