“I haven’t seen anything like this, sir,” he said. “Not in Trinidad.”
Dr. Gardner was pleased. “It’s all for my daughter,” he said. “So she’ll know. She was three, you understand, when we left.”
Mumsford put his briefcase on the floor next to the armchair, drew his fingers down the front seams of his pants, and sat down. “It must have been difficult for you, sir,” he said.
“Difficult?” Gardner fastened his eyes on Mumsford.
“What with a three-year-old, sir.”
“My daughter, Inspector, is that for which I live.”
His words sounded strange to Mumsford’s ears, melodramatic, theatrical, but he nodded his head sympathetically. After twelve years in the Land of the Dead, it was to be expected. A man could be excused under those conditions for being melodramatic.
“Quite. Quite,” he said. “And that is understandable, sir.”
But Gardner was not finished. “I have done nothing,” he said, continuing to keep his eyes on Mumsford, “but in care of her.”
Strange words again, but it was clear that Gardner meant exactly what he said. The intensity of emotion in his eyes made Mumsford uncomfortable and he looked away. He did nothing except for her? In care of her? Still, Mumsford managed to say, “You must love your daughter, sir.”
“Immeasurably.”
When Mumsford looked up, he saw that Gardner’s eyes were misty. “I mean it is admirable, sir,” he said, feeling obliged to say something more. “All you have done here.” He extended his arm in a sweeping gesture across the room. “This room, this house. The furniture.”
The praise seemed to snap Gardner out of the sudden morose mood that had come over him. He turned his head, following the arc of Mumsford’s arm, and his lips curved upward in a self-satisfied smile. “I did my best,” he said.
“You should be congratulated, sir.”
“Music?”
Mumsford’s face flushed with pleasure and then he remembered he was on assignment for the commissioner. “If you please, sir, when we are done, sir.”
“Oh, I don’t mean calypso,” Gardner said, assuming there could be no other explanation for Mumsford’s discomfort. “Our music. Mozart’s concerto for oboe and strings. Do you know it? The concerto for oboe and strings?”
Mumsford did not know it. It was not his music; his music was not classical music. His music was popular music. He listened to Tommy Steele, Billy Fury, Cliff Richard. He liked Kenny Weathers and the Emotions, but he lied. It felt good to be in the company of a cultured Englishman, to be considered cultured himself. He was not in a hurry. He had time to ask his questions. “Haven’t heard it in a long time, sir,” he said.
“Then I will play it for you.” Gardner walked toward the console on the other side of the room.
“I’d like that, sir.”
“We have our own world here, you know, Mumsford.” Gardner picked up the record and balanced it between his open palms.
“In spite of the lepers, sir?” Mumsford asked, for it seemed miraculous to him that Gardner should have made a paradise here, in the Land of the Dead.
“The lepers take care of themselves.” Gardner put the record in the record player, raised the arm, and placed the needle carefully in the first groove. “Close your eyes, Mumsford. Listen. Be transported. England.”
He had dismissed his question about the lepers, but Mumsford did not mind. When the music poured out, encasing him in a warm cocoon, he, too, did not want to talk about lepers, he, too, did not want to spoil the moment by raising the specter of deformed flesh. He closed his eyes, as Gardner urged him to do, and let the music take him back across the Atlantic.
But Gardner allowed him only minutes before he pulled him back. “Now you will understand my distress better, Inspector,” he said.
Mumsford opened his eyes to see Gardner conducting, his arm rising and falling rhythmically through the air. “Now that you are here,” he said, still conducting the concerto with an imaginary baton, “you will know why I insisted that the commissioner send an Englishman, not a native.”
“I do, sir,” Mumsford said.
Gardner dropped his arm. “I wanted you to see for yourself. To understand the circumstances. My outrage. The depth of this insult to my person,” he said. He lowered the volume on the record player.
Mumsford sat up. “To your person, sir?” he asked. The music was barely audible now and he was no longer in a cocoon.
“To the person of all honorable Englishmen, Inspector. To the person of my daughter.” He closed the console and recrossed the room. “When you meet her, Inspector, you will find she will outstrip all praise and make it halt behind her.” He hummed a few bars of the concerto and sat down on the armchair next to Mumsford’s. “A piece of England for my daughter,” he said.
He meant Mozart, and at the very least Mumsford knew that Mozart was not English, but it did not matter. He understood.
“Before you get the boy, I will show you my orchids and the rest of my garden.”
Yes, Mumsford thought, he could get the boy when he was done, after he had taken Gardner’s deposition. But Gardner did not wait for his response. “Ariana!” he shouted.
She was still there. She had not left the room. Gardner need not have raised his voice. She stood near the back door, twirling a strand of her long hair between her fingers.
“Ariana, the drinks!” She dropped her hand and swung it behind her back. It was the only acknowledgment she gave that she had heard him.
Mumsford had not been unaware of her presence. From time to time, in spite of his pleasure over the furniture, the crispness in the air, the reassuring music, his eyes had strayed in her direction. A will-o’-the-wisp, he had thought. They flitted over the marshes on hot summer nights. A speck of light too fleeting to be brilliant.
Ethereal. That was the word he had been searching for, yet it was a word that was inconsonant with her deep brown skin, her black wavy hair. Consonant, though, with her slight frame, her small bones, her long arms that dangled from their sockets, her long legs, her bare feet, her long, long hair, her huge eyes, which one noticed next, or first, if one saw her from the front and not from the back. They were round and bright, and made the rest of her face—her satiny smooth cheeks, her flat nose, her tiny mouth—seem inconsequential. She was probably Indian, though something about the curls in her hair and the flattish nose bridge told him that perhaps there was an African parent or grandparent. Doogla. That was what she was. It was the name the native people gave to such mixtures. Yes, she was a doogla.
But a will-o’-the-wisp, too. She could be blown away with a puff of breath. The fabric of her yellow dress, which was tied to the back in a girlish bow, was thin, almost transparent. He glanced at her again. He could make out shadows behind the thin fabric. It struck him that there was no inconsonance between the word that had occurred to him and the person he was seeing, the brilliance of her yellow dress flashing now against her dark skin not unlike the ethereal light flitting across the dark night in the marshes in England.
“Gin and tonic for you, Inspector?”
Mumsford was so deep in his ruminations, unsettled somewhat by the likeness he had made between the slight woman before him and England (though the comparison he had made was not with her and England but with her and a fairy, not a person in England) that he literally jumped when Gardner’s voice cut across his thoughts.