The sun had set quickly, as it always does in the tropics, and the house was now plunged into darkness, but this time it was not due to a power cut. The garden came alive with the shrieks and chitterings of nocturnal life. How curious it was, he thought, that he, recently married and still childless, should be waiting for a grown-up Esmeralda to come to pick up her own young daughter from the maid Maria’s improvised daycare at her mother’s house. He felt a bit foolish. He was not a welcoming committee. This was Esmeralda’s childhood home, after all. Did she know there were guests there? It seemed likely. If so, why not let her take the initiative to approach them? But he knew from long acquaintance that she was not at all a sociable person, as he remembered her…
Esmeralda’s flood of tears in the pool, doubtless born of shock and pain, was cause for concern then, of course. Was she hurt, he asked her repeatedly as he swam with her to the ladder. She was so skinny he must have broken some bones. No, she kept saying, I’m not hurt. Leave me alone. Paul persisted, afraid she would report him to Mrs. Beck. He was not aware of any offers of assistance from poolside onlookers; perhaps they thought no harm was done, but Paul anxiously followed Esmeralda as she picked up a towel and limped to the women’s changing room, still crying out “Go away!” and refusing to acknowledge his profuse apologies, determined to put distance between herself and her penitent pursuer. Paul knew some of the boys thought her a crybaby, but he had always tried to make allowance for her.
To his great relief, Paul soon saw that Esmeralda had not told her stepmother. Perhaps she had not really been hurt at all. Perhaps she thought she should herself have been more careful, and not swum under the diving board. Maybe she was embarrassed by all his attention. Whose fault was it really? Perhaps it was as much hers as his, but it was he who had hurt her, albeit unintentionally, and she was so obviously a vulnerable friendless creature, emotionally and physically fragile. There was no lifeguard to discourage horseplay or dangerous activity around the pool. Last year, Ricky Arnold had dived on to a wooden flutterboard left to float into deep water. Ricky’s skull was crushed and a steel plate had been inserted in its place. The accident could have been worse, doctors said.
On Monday Esmeralda was her usual quiet self in class. A tall, thin, pale girl who monopolized teachers’ attention, she was easily moved to tears. She could have been pretty if she did not always look so woebegone. She had lost her mother in an accident on a dangerous mountain road when her father, in a rare moment of inadvertence, lost control of the car. In class she was often distracted, staring out of the window or taking frequent furtive looks at the faded photograph of her parents that she kept in the pencil case her mother had given her. Paul had once seen the photo when he sat in a desk behind her: a beautiful French lady swathed in expensive furs smiling radiantly at the camera, arm in arm with Hendrik her father, he looking so much younger then. Paul’s own parents had instilled in him the need for charity for victims of circumstance, but he knew that Irene Beck, who had married Esmeralda’s gentle father so soon after his wife’s death, was a no-nonsense believer in self-reliance: what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, she said. She herself did not ‘kill with kindness,’ and family meals were reportedly sources of tension, or so Paul’s parents had maintained. The expatriate community was small, and the school even smaller; parents had few secrets from one another, and there was always the inevitable gossip…
