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and theorchid house, and the open aviary very likely too, with the swooping keskidees and humming birds no bigger than a bright leaf in the thick, tropical growth. She was walking towards us, with the fixed smile of the permanently, insanely jealous and she was carrying, as if strolling on an English lawn, a pair of secateurs.
    ‘It’s for you, Dora,’ Sanjay murmured. He wasn’t speaking to his approaching wife, but to his daughter, who was as pale as a vanilla ice-cream and had wafer-yellow hair to match. Pandora, I can’t think why they called her that. ‘Dora’s lovely new boat,’ he said in a fond-father voice. I felt a bit sick, you’ll understand. The way men rub up to a girl, make a pass at her one moment and then speak in the same voice to a child the next. It smacks of something disgusting to me.
    But by this time Duchess Dora was just a few yards away. ‘Sanjay!’ She didn’t say my name; maybe she hoped she could disappear me into the creek like a soucriant if she thought hard enough that I wasn’t there. ‘Sanjay, we’re all longing to unpack the hamper,’ she said. ‘Bring Pandora with you. Millie’s laid it all out on the new coral table the other side of the lagoon.’
    It was a rotten shame to have to leave then really, and especially for one of those little Creole kids who was trying to totter along the pier and play with the model boat Sanjay had made for his daughter. She was so excited to see the ship with the sails up, and there was even a breath of wind, so the canvas puffed out and the ship tugged daintily at its string. But Sanjay had collapsed the sails before the poor little brat could get there. He wasn’t thinking, I suppose. And Duchess Dora – did she put on speed – she leaned over that toy pier and clouted the kid on the back of the head. So it went splash into the murky water, little pink dress and all.
    ‘Dora!’ Sanjay said in quite a different tone to his wife. But I reckon that kind of thing was happening all the time, because none of the other children paid a scrap of attention.And it was for Millie to come on those slow, heavy legs round the bend of the creek and pull the bawling creature out. I can’t say I go for kids, never have, and this wasn’t a particularly attractive specimen.
    ‘Take her up to the village, Millie,’ Duchess Dora said. ‘And tell Tanty Grace to keep a better eye on things. You hear?’
    Millie worked for the Allards then. Mrs Van der Pyck and her equally demanding régime were yet to come.
    We all sat on the gnarled beach stools Sanjay had fashioned from flotsam, and tucked into the picnic in silence. It was good – roti and beef with curry and samosas and soursops and mango, which for some reason don’t grow good on St James and have to come over from another island on the Singer ,just as they were supposed to yesterday.
    ‘I’ll tell you about the Sea Island cotton I’m considering reintroducing,’ Sanjay said. He kept his eyes away from me as he talked. Duchess Dora’s eyes were fixed on me, though, in fury. I want to get off of here, I remember suddenly thinking then. No one listened as Sanjay talked of crops and rainy seasons and the hurricane that hit Dominica a few years ago.
    *
    Sanjay is walking along the beach, and the helicopter hovers a moment longer before turning – in the opposite direction this time, over the island where no one will look up from the village at propellers cutting into the blue sky or look after it when it has gone down towards Laughing Gull Bay. ( Sometimes the pilot amuses himself, swooping right down to the sand, and last month, after a freak tide, he found what he thought was an arm or a leg sticking up out of the sand by the reef – he’s used to that kind of sight by now, I suppose. It was in fact the neck of a pre-Columbian urn. ‘So beootiful’ – I can hear Jim Davy now, when it was brought in to him bythe pilot. Wide, a warm brown, chased with pale painted whorls. ‘We’ll put it