Dragon Bay

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A TRIMyacht flying a Greek flag put into harbour at Fort Fernand, and some time later one of her passengers came ashore, followed by a sailor carrying a couple of suitcases.

The alighting girl was about twenty-one, slim, almost boyish, clad in a blue reefer jacket over beige slacks, with a jaunty cap perched on her long dark hair. Her eyes beneath the peak of her cap were deep and dark as peaty pools, and tiny gold rings glinted in the lobes of her ears.

‘That looks like a hotel.’ She spoke in Greek to the sailor and gestured at a building with ornamental balconies, batwing shutters, and red-flowering palms in its courtyard. ‘I will put up there for a few days,’ she added, and gazed around at her tropical surroundings. The sails of sloops and schooners bobbed in the harbour, and from out of salt and sun-faded sheds came a strong smell of fish, and tobacco in storage.

Poinsettias flowered gaudy and large against white walls, and the patches of welcome shadow were ebony dark as the Carib eyes of an old man who sat smoking a pipe on the cobbled wall of the waterfront. The girl met his gaze, and it came home forcibly to her that she was now in the French Caribbean and far from her own Greek shores.

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