The evening was tranquil, as all Saturday evenings at Appleton were. The sunset was not yet as dramatic as it would be in the second act, with golden streaks and violent pink swathes. It was not yet at that moment when the air became expectant, the sky a grand opera, when dry leaves rose without wind, suspended like the softest feathers, then falling to rest, prelude to some inspiring narrative. The swallows were waiting their moment whilst the white birds kept to the riverbank in civilised intercourse in tight little groups.
Mama’s legs were crossed, her eyes looking into the distance but not seeing the deepening shadows. She was dressed in a cream suit, white wide-brimmed straw hat with a low crown and a spotted navy blue band. Earlier in the evening, Boyd had watched as she anxiously applied red-hot lipstick from the black and gold receptacle and clicked her black leather bag firmly shut with that sumptuous click that only came from women’s handbags. But in the quiet of the bathroom, he thought he heard her weeping.
The swallows, as if at a signal, made their exit, leaving in two huge waves of shadow, their Kyrie rising heavenward, so remarkable that Mama and Papa hung their heads like children. And the Mitchison’s Jaguar chose that very moment to glide down the road. Papa and Mama stared at the receding car and said nothing. As they looked, a rousing wind, unusual at that time of the evening, drove the dead leaves along the foot of the hedge, backing them up in ominous dark mounds. Papa and Mama did not see this.
They retreated, awkwardly, to the Lloyd Loom chairs. Papa poured another drink. Mama had lemonade, giggling and holding her glass away while Papa tried to stiffen her drink with just a wee drop of rum. But they had stopped talking a little while ago. It was a forced performance, put on only for the watching children.
By the time Papa came in to announce that they were leaving for the Baldoo’s, the sun had died to purple bougainvillea flashes. And there was a chill in the air.
* * *
Mrs Baldoo said that there was no doubt about it, the Balaclava Academy was the best prep school in all of St Elizabeth and Papa had done the right thing in selecting it. Then she declared that the best children, the very best, went there.
‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I don’t know of any labourer’s child who goes there. Not a single one. Not that they wouldn’t be welcomed. Everybody deserves a chance. And Sister Margaret Mary is as kind and as honest as they come.’
‘They couldn’t afford it,’ Mr Baldoo said gruffly.
Papa’s chest had swelled till it was in danger of obscuring his face. He liked the idea that the riff-raff could be kept out, that none of those people’s children would have the chance to contaminate his own. He wasn’t against those people’s children going to the Balaclava Academy, he just wanted them to brush up first, learn some manners, be a little less vulgar, and he wanted their parents to acquire just a few values and principles. It wasn’t asking too much.
‘The children will love it,’ Mrs Baldoo said. ‘The garden parties, the concerts, the outings. Sister is very strict and she has good teaching staff: Miss Robb, for instance, Miss Casserly and Miss Skiddar. And there are several young nuns too.’
‘Some of the young mothers are frightened of her, Sister Margaret Mary.’ Mr Baldoo smiled. ‘She takes no nonsense. A cousin of mine sends his children there. They are boarders at the convent. And they’re coming along in leaps and bounds.’
‘Will all the children attend?’ Mrs Baldoo asked.
‘Only Boyd,’ Papa said. ‘Barrington will go to Munro. He’s almost twelve. Yvonne will start at the academy next year.’
‘The younger they start, the better, I always say,’ Mrs Baldoo scolded.
* * *
After a delightful evening, Mama and Papa were returning home. The Baldoos had talked about education and the importance of achieving one’s ambition. These were familiar topics of discussion for them. Mama had been impressed with Mrs Baldoo. Although she was a wife and mother (her daughter, Anya, attended the University College of the West Indies at Mona), she had a full-time job as a doctor at the local clinic. She sat on several committees and had confidence and intelligence in bucketloads. It made Mama think, with renewed confidence, of her own situation. And so, on their way home, she took a deep breath and returned to the subject of her own personal development. Papa sighed bad-temperedly and gave her one of his hard looks. Here he was trying to mend bridges, had gone out of his way, in fact, by encouraging the Baldoo dinner invitation, and there was Mama, as usual, making not the slightest effort.
‘I could learn typewriting and shorthand and get a job at Balaclava in a lawyer’s office,’ Mama pleaded. ‘When the children are settled at school,’ she added, trying to placate Papa.
Papa repeated that no wife of his was going out to work.
Mama then, bravely, even recklessly, suggested that if she couldn’t be a secretary she could actually take up dressmaking because she had a talent for it and it was what she really wanted to do. She would only make clothes for a few special clients. And she could sharpen up her skills at an academy in Mandeville that she had heard about.
‘You heard what I said,’ Papa growled.
‘I would work from home.’
‘I’ve told you a million times what I think about dressmaking. But you never listen, do you?’ Papa gritted his teeth. ‘Just imagine Miss Hutchinson taking up dressmaking!’
‘She’s employed in a job she likes,’ Mama said bravely.
‘And you’re not.’
Mama sighed and said nothing for a while. Then, giving Papa appealing little looks, and remembering Ann Mitchison’s work on the estate, she said that if it wasn’t possible to be a dressmaker, she could do social work with the poor people at Appleton. But only when the children were older.
‘And who would pay you for that?’ Papa asked.
Mama didn’t answer.
Papa’s response was to gun the motor and grip the steering wheel hard.
The Prefect hummed along, pistons punching away, taking them home up the dark roads. As they crossed the bridge, Papa glanced swiftly in the direction of the Mitchison’s house. He remembered the impossibly charged moments not long passed, the exploding passion and Ann’s pliant lips. Her searing, intoxicating image had been in his head all evening. Then he stared at Mama in exasperation. She was sniffling.
‘What’s the matter now? Jeezas! Here we are just talking and the next thing y’know – Gawd! Buck up, buck up, girl! Jeezas!’
Papa stopped the car. He saw Mama’s frightened face as he turned roughly towards her. He knew that he was overreacting but couldn’t hold back. The moment dictated his response.
‘Are you going to behave like a child? Victoria, answer me!’
Mama’s lips trembled and she said nothing. She sensed violence she had never experienced before, never envisaged, and moved away from Papa in slow motion.
‘Behave like a child and I’ll treat you like one, dammit!’ Papa shouted. He started the engine and the car sprang forward. Not a single word passed between them after that.
Mama sat silently, trembling. Disabling fears flooded in upon her.
CHAPTER 24
That Sunday morning, fears flooded in upon Vincent too. His secret plan made him tremble. More than once that day he sought to abandon it. But through the hole in his bedroom wall, the scene before his good eye told him that it had to be done. Not for the first time, he saw Boyd on the bed with Mavis in the afternoon heat, as the dry brown leaves rustled under the window. Mavis had her blouse open and her full titty out, nursing him like an infant, stroking his head and cheeks as he snuggled up to her, lips firmly round her taut nipple, gently sucking. Vincent took what pleasure he could from the scene, watching with his one eye, wiping it when it became too misty and returning it to the hole again and again. Then the cauchee sounded, shocking them all. Vincent saw Boyd pull away from Mavis and rush from the room.
Papa did not come speeding up the driveway as Boyd anticipated. The driveway stood empty and bright in the afterno
on sun and the blue of the forget-me-nots blazed along the path. Racing hard up to the house, he saw a boy at the kitchen door. The first thing he noticed about the boy was that he wore no shoes. A small, black bow tie hung limply from his collar. His hair had the look that Papa described as “peppercorn”, uncombed, each strand of black hair rolled up into a tight little ball. Boyd knew that sort of little boy. They could be seen in the company of higglers on their way to market. Sometimes the boys came to the house with the market women, trying to sell red beans. But Mavis always sent them packing.
‘Gud eveling,’ the boy with the peppercorn head said. He had dry lips and was standing on one leg with a black Bible in his hand.
Before Boyd could reply, a woman stepped from behind the mint bush, wearing dusty, black lace-up boots, a black dress with a frilly white collar and a black hat. Boyd remembered the woman immediately: she had visited their first house on the estate twice and was the only Bible woman that Perlita spoke to politely before slamming the door in her face, twice. She carried a black Bible, a much bigger version than the boy’s, and a neat stack of papers. The sun was clean and hot and her shadow lay crumpled on the ground.
‘Is your mama ‘ome, little boy?’
‘Who is it?’ Yvonne asked, suddenly at Boyd’s elbow.
‘Is your mama ‘ome, little girl?’ the woman repeated, turning to Yvonne, who seemed to her to be more forthcoming.
Yvonne would have replied but Papa drove up very quickly. Both she and Boyd stiffened unconsciously.
‘Is God in your ‘earts?’ the woman enquired. The boy wet his dry lips and shifted on the spot. His shadow seemed uneasy.
‘What is it?’ Papa came up behind the woman. ‘What do you want?’
The woman turned casually. ‘Are you saved, sar? ‘Ave you taken Christ as your personal saviour? Are you walking the straight and the narrow? ‘Ave you been dipped in the blood of the lamb? Is your place secure up yonder?’
‘Am I saved?’ Papa laughed, annoyed in the extreme. ‘Are you saved? Are you going to get your backside off my property? Are you going to do it now?’
The woman seemed not at all surprised and replied coolly, as if accustomed to this type of bad behaviour from all the sinners she had ever tried to save. ‘I bring the word of God to this ‘ouse, sar. Listen and you will ‘ear.’ The boy coughed, his shadow furtive.
Papa’s chest was heaving; the corrugated brows that the children knew and feared were fixed and dark. The boy drew quietly to one side. His eyes were sad. He just wanted to go home to his dinner.
‘Get yourself off this property,’ Papa said threateningly. He took a step towards the woman who stood her ground. ‘I have a good mind to – ’
Poppy chose that very moment to pop up from beneath the house, eyes crossed, teeth bared and snarling. Snarling at strangers was a peculiarity of his, developed out of a sense of having to prove his canine capabilities, about which he cared hardly at all. His intention was not malicious but the woman did not know it. She darted away, discarding her stack of papers. Tracts, Mavis later called them. The boy was already ahead of her and his shadow was already ahead of him. They ran down the path, Poppy close behind, growling low, surprised at the effect of his performance. Halfway down the driveway, he stopped, nonchalantly chased small grass birds into the hedgerows then bounded back.
‘Well, he’s not completely worthless,’ Papa observed. Then he faced the children. ‘The next time those Bible people come up here, slam the door in their faces. That boy should be getting an education, not wandering about the district with a Bible.’ Papa glared after the fleeing figures. ‘Trying to tell us how to live our lives. You think they know how to live theirs?’
They trooped inside the house, Papa straight to Mama’s room. When it grew quiet, Boyd tiptoed out the back door and together he and Poppy crept beneath the thick foliage under Mama’s bedroom window. The Baldoos’ dinner had not brought the improvement everyone hoped for. If anything, the tension appeared to have worsened.
‘Please, Harold,’ Boyd heard Mama say in a low, wounded voice.
‘Stop it,’ Papa retorted. ‘Stop it! You hear me?’
There was a long, worrying pause, then Boyd heard Papa’s stern voice.
‘Don’t you understand respectability? No, you Pratts have never understood this. Get it into your head, you’re not going out to work. We’re not common people.’
Boyd didn’t hear Mama’s whimpering reply. He only heard the bedroom door slam and the sound of Papa’s manly footsteps down the hall and out the kitchen door.
As the Land Rover sped away, Boyd saw Mama’s face appear at her bedroom window, seeking out the vanishing vehicle. Her eyes glistened. Racing to the back of the house, Boyd saw Papa’s Land Rover churning up the dust as it sped away along the valley road, through the green carpet of canes in the direction of Maggotty.
* * *
Ann arrived there first, on the green hillock under the shelter of trees overlooking the valley, the frothy white waters of Maggotty Falls in the distance. The Land Rover was parked a hundred yards away, camouflaged against the olive-green of the Lignum Vitae. She settled in the warm grass and felt fabulous and dangerous, as he would too when he arrived. And she experienced a transient sense of power which brought a smile to her lips, knowing that she was responsible for making him break every rule whenever he was with her. Doubtless, he felt the same. Waiting and wanting, she felt the warmth and the valley breeze up around her thighs. And she remembered Shropshire at the height of an English Summer: the lavender fields at Holdgate, near Much Wenlock; the snap, crackle and pop of the clean heat; the magnificent quiet. She thought, sadly, how they, the people who lived around Maggotty in their straitened little communities, never seemed to appreciate or enjoy the landscape, the magnificent greenery, the valley, the slopes, the grassy little dells and troughs. They were never there, in these little hideaways, enjoying a picnic, lazing about, reading a book, painting a picture, sketching, musing or quietly writhing in perfumed expectation, as she was then. They didn’t know, and did not see, the beauty of this paradise that she had found. And that was why she knew, from the first meeting there, that it was utterly safe. It was the last place the local people would have time for.
Ann removed her scarf and, glancing round, saw him arrive, dark in the sun in his sugar-scented khakis. Papa felt like a rampant estate lion, a cane-piece predator, as he mounted the hill. And long before he got to her in that temporary world that they had created for themselves, values and principles meant nothing. She had wanted first to point out the Maggotty Falls again and the rolling fields in the distance, where the sun and the clouds created shimmering waves. She had wanted to be restrained, as she had been in the Shropshire fields as a young girl, and savour the calm and the mystery before the pleasure. But the delights were immense and dramatic. She remembered the winking sun through the leaves, the sweet heat, the lime-scented aftershave and the silly distracting kling-kling birds screeching in the trees as they embraced forcefully like virgin youth.
And just as forcefully they pulled apart. A donkey and a dreadlocked labourer had entered the clearing. Seeing them in their delinquent intimacy, the labourer’s eyes, coal-fire red, widened, and he froze as shocked as they were. The man’s head dropped self-consciously and he eyed the ground, urging the donkey before him deeper into the bush, his machete held low at his side.
‘Christ!’ Papa said, more from relief than shock.
‘What?’ Ann seemed fascinated by the dreadlocks, not having seen hair like that before and imagined that she had seen a human Hydra. The man’s hair was matted but styled like coils of rope and rolled up tobacco about his head and shoulders. She gazed after the vanishing figure as if she wanted to detain him.
‘Ganja,’ Papa said. ‘Didn’t you smell it? That’s what they smoke, these Rastafarians. We’d better get out of here.’ And Papa led Ann quickly away, looking over his shoulder, thinking only of the honed machete held so casually in the man’s unpred
icatable hand.
CHAPTER 25
Back at the pink house, Boyd stroked Poppy and looked down towards the river while the kling-kling birds screeched eerily in the trees. He was more anxious than ever. The fear of Papa’s violence had reigned in his scheme on Susan and made even standing by the periwinkle fence a risky undertaking. He imagined that Papa could detect even his private thoughts without looking into his eyes. That was the most frightening thing of all. For several days, he’d been keeping away from the fence and giving not the slightest impression that his every thought featured Susan. Even though Papa was not at the house, Boyd felt as if he was always present and could tap him on the shoulder at any moment.
As he and Poppy looked down into the valley, they saw dust rising from the road, a single cloud of white. It came from the black dot of a figure on a bicycle, bent double, hands braced on the handlebars. It pedalled furiously, outrunning the dust and everything that might overtake – incidents, happenings, the things that men do, fate even.
The flash and wink of light on metal – a machete honed to razor sharpness strapped to the saddle – distinguished the rider, named him. It was Mr Ten–To–Six on his way home early from the factory. Poppy barked. This was unheard of, Mr Ten-To-Six going home at three o’clock. Never had he appeared before his time.
The shocking news reached them when Papa came home. The Bible woman he’d chased off the property had been savagely murdered by her common-law husband, the father of ten children, the man who kept himself to himself, the dark and mysterious Mr Ten-To-Six. Everyone faced Papa, horrified. Mama could not be consoled.
‘Her Bible couldn’t save her,’ Papa told them, remembering his encounter with Mrs Ten-To-Six. ‘Now we know she wasn’t walking the straight and the narrow. Yet there she was trying to tell us how to live our lives. Christ! What is the matter with these people?’
The Pink House at Appleton Page 21