Once Papa left, Boyd joined Vincent on the steps to his room. Not a muscle in Vincent’s body moved as he inhaled the intoxicating tobacco smoke. The smoke made his eye red and villainous. It left him contaminated with a strange scent that settled deep into his clothes, into his skin and into his mind. Boyd didn’t speak for a while but he knew why he was there. He desperately wanted to tell someone about Susan and all his feelings, to confess about how devastingly fragile his plight was, to confess to his inability to cope with so much intimate knowledge, so much passion, such enormous urges, so much beauty, so much fearfulness. He couldn’t tell Mama, not even Mavis. He could talk to Vincent because he was the Hunchback of Notre Dame, someone to feel sorry for. Such a person would never ask questions, never have a view, would never look you in the eye and be shocked. Boyd knew he could talk to Vincent because he just didn’t count. But even with that knowledge, he didn’t know what to say, how to talk about Susan, how to confess. So he told Vincent instead about H.M.S. Pinafore, the pretty songs, the forthcoming performance and explained his part in it. Once again, Vincent thanked God. Boyd’s news fitted right into his plans for Mavis. He started to count down the hours.
CHAPTER 35
That fateful evening, grey smoke from Vincent’s dubious tobacco hid his face but not the piece of paper in his hand. He gazed at the programme Boyd had given him:
Gilbert & Sullivan
H. M. S. Pinafore
A production by the staff and pupils of the Balaclava Academy
The Rt Hon. Joseph Porter (First Lord of the Admiralty): Miss Skiddar
Captain Corcoran (Commanding H.M.S. Pinafore): Miss Robb
Ralph Rackstraw (Able Seaman): Winston Wright
Dick Deadeye (Able Seaman): Errol Beckford
Bill Bobstay (Boatswain’s Mate): Anthony Darling
Bob Becket (Carpenter’s Mate): Frederick Spence
Josephine (The Captain’s Daughter): Verna Baugh
Hebe (Sir Joseph’s First Cousin): Diana Delfosse
Little Buttercup: Miss Casserly
(Soloists, Chorus and Sailors: Pupils of the Balaclava Academy).
Vincent did not know what was written on the piece of bright yellow paper. If he saw the word yellow he couldn’t tell that it referred in some way to that same piece of paper. A long time ago, he had worked out meaning and knew that it had nothing to do with words on paper. He knew that Boyd had left for school that morning, excited to bursting. Vincent knew that it was all to do with the piece of paper in his hand, H.M.S. Pinafore. He had heard the songs every day, seen Boyd walking around proudly in his sailor suit, seen the immaculate white trousers, the white stars in the corner of the solid blue back-flap, the black patent leather shoes and the sailor hat. Sir Joseph’s barge is seen. That morning Boyd had carried a small suitcase containing his costume. I am the monarch of the sea. He intended to change into the costume in the evening at school. Vincent understood that Papa would hurry home from work, pick up Mama and Yvonne and drive like the clappers to Balaclava, where they would join the other parents to watch Boyd on stage. Poor Little Buttercup, sweet Little Buttercup, I.
Vincent was impatient for dusk to arrive. He knew that sometime after the family left, Mavis would put the baby to bed. She would then be on her own in the house. He would do it then. A small bottle of the John Crow Batty lay on his windowsill. The rum had inflamed him, made him fearless, possessed of a force that terrified him. But Mr Brookes had not yet arrived. That was so typical of him – always letting Mrs Brookes wait. The wilful tobacco returned once more to Vincent’s burning lips. It was four o’clock.
* * *
That morning, the telephone operator at the factory transferred a call to Papa. It was from Ann Mitchison. Ann wanted to attend the concert but not on her own. Tim was still in Kingston and Susan at Monymusk. She had made a sizeable donation to assist with the production and, along with a number of the parents, had baked cookies and cakes and made enough sandwiches to feed a congregation.
‘If it wouldn’t be any trouble,’ she said to Papa.
Without thinking, Papa said yes. He didn’t really like the idea of Ann telephoning him at work like that. The practice was fraught with all kinds of danger and he always kept the conversations very short and brusque. Later that afternoon, there were problems with the cane shredder and the main roller mills. Some of the men who operated the machines were provoking dissent and agitating for better wages. In addition to that, the cane-feeder table had been blocked, unblocked and blocked again inexplicably. Towards evening, after the situation had been sorted out, small but worrying problems developed in the vacuum boiling pans and the centrifugal machines. Papa realised he might be at the factory all evening, so to be on the safe side, he asked Moodie to drive Mama, Yvonne and Ann to the school concert.
‘Of course, Harry,’ Moodie said immediately, already experiencing that peculiar satisfaction of driving a car of lovely women to a concert where a dozen other charming women waited to take advantage of him.
When Ann telephoned Papa, Mr Chin’s car had entered the driveway. He was there to pick up the cakes and cookies. He would take them, along with those that his wife had made, to the convent at Balaclava and drive back to Maggotty in time to pick up his wife and children for the return journey in the evening. But when he heard that Tim Mitchison had not returned from Kingston, he was put out.
‘He’s been delayed a couple of days,’ Ann said awkwardly.
‘How will you be getting to the school?’ Mr Chin asked, his dark hair forever falling into his eyes. ‘We could stop by and pick you up. It would be a pleasure. Please.’
Ann was about to thank him for the very kind offer and say she had already made other arrangements. But just before she replied, she thought how much more appropriate it would be to travel with the Chins. She had felt Papa’s unease when he had agreed to take her, an unease she understood. Mr Chin’s proposition offered the perfect way out. So, later in the day, she telephoned Papa again but got put through to the clerk, Dalkieth Hamilton.
Dalkieth Hamilton was good at taking messages. He listened carefully and wrote down, in what his government school teachers would have described as a ‘good fist’, all the words he heard. It helped that Mrs Mitchison spoke so clearly. He had taken several messages that afternoon and assembled them carefully on the desk before him. Walking into the senior staff offices with the little white square sheets of paper, he left one on Mr Moodie’s desk and several on Mr Brookes’ desk. Then the telephone rang and he raced back to answer it. He liked his job; answering the telephone, taking messages, dealing with clerical matters and never having to set foot in the cane-piece, where many of his schoolmates would spend the rest of their lives. His was a success story.
At a little past four o’clock, Mr Moodie, wiping the perspiration from his neck with a large floral handkerchief, entered the office intending to pick up some charts and his broad-brimmed hat and then leave early for home. He would then take a quick shower and get ready to escort Mama and Ann Mitchison to the Balaclava Academy. He put the charts under his arm and was walking out the door when he saw the note, in the centre of the large square ink blotter, with a drawing pin holding it down. The note read:
Not to bother about lift to school concert
Going with Mr Chin instead
Mr Brookes.
The note could only have come from Dalkieth Hamilton, clerk and message-taker. But Moodie was disappointed. He had been looking forward to carrying out his neighbourly duties. Papa wasn’t in the office when he put his head round the door so he rolled the note into a ball and flicked it accurately into the wastepaper basket. His original plans for the evening were back on the table. At the factory gates, instead of going home, his car turned right towards Maggotty.
* * *
In the drawing room at the pink house, Mama looked again at her watch, the one with the tiny round gold face and the black nylon strap. Across from her, Yvonne sat on the sofa in a white taffeta dress. Her bl
ack patent leather shoes, buckled at the side, were drawn up under her. She wore white socks and seemed very bored. Her bottom lip stuck out. They had both been dressed and waiting for over an hour for Papa.
In the kitchen, Mavis dried dishes while two moths flitted about the lampshade. The baby was asleep, lying peacefully on a bubbled rubber sheet in Mr and Mrs Brookes’ room. Later, Mavis would place her gently in the pink crib in the corner of the room and adjust the mosquito net to make sure her sleep was not disturbed. Mavis swallowed hard, conscious of the heavy silence in the drawing room. She hoped that the lovely evening at the school concert would drive away the bad feelings between Mr and Mrs Brookes. She thanked God that she had such a good job, really nice people to work for, nice children, especially that little Boyd. She felt close to them, like a member of the family, even with the troubles they were going through. Where she came from, husband and wife, legal or common-law, fought in public. Chairs would be thrown, bottles broken, knives drawn, machetes too; neighbours had to intervene to prise fighting bodies apart, sometimes in the dusty street, and pacify screaming children. Very often there was tragedy, a woman strangled or a man stabbed. But mostly men just walked off into the night, leaving behind a wife and five children. It only went to show how decent Mr and Mrs Brookes were, that their disagreements were expressed only in argument.
Mama looked at her watch again and groaned. Two hours. Yvonne sighed and put her head on the arm of the sofa, a sign that it was close to beyond waiting.
‘You looking really nice, ma’am,’ Mavis said, appearing at the door. Noticing Mama’s weak smile, she continued. ‘You’ll be the best-looking of all the mothers tonight.’
‘If we ever get there,’ Mama said.
‘Boyd will be on the stage looking for his Mama and Papa.’
Mama got up. ‘It’s getting very late,’ she said. In the bedroom she applied fresh lipstick and bit her lip. And then, not knowing what else to do, powdered her face again, listening with misplaced hope for the sound of the Prefect racing up the driveway.
In the drawing room, Mavis sat next to Yvonne, re-arranging her plaits, but all she was conscious of was the tension and the harsh waiting, Mama rigid and grim in the bedroom, Yvonne sullen, her dress creasing, the clock loudly ticking.
* * *
Boyd had a splitting headache. He hovered by the door watching the musicians tuning their instruments just below the stage. In the afternoon, he had snacked on grape-nut ice cream and Jureidini’s cream soda, as Sister Margaret Mary steered teachers and pupils through one last rehearsal. After that, everyone had gone home – the pupils, the teachers, the carpenters, the electricians, the painters, the florists, the keen mothers and assorted helpers – everyone. Boyd felt an unusual loneliness ever since Susan went away that second cruel time. But now he felt a sudden, special loneliness because everyone seemed to have somewhere to go to and had gone to it, leaving him alone in the classroom. Soon they would all return, in their best clothes, bathed and clean.
He had waited in the deserted classroom as one of only half a dozen children who had remained at the school all day. These children, like him, abandoned temporarily, lounged about aimlessly, sometimes kicking at trees in the grounds or at the walls of the school, or peering into Sister’s office which, although empty, still carried her powerful presence. They spied into corners, touched pictures of the Virgin Mary, fingered statues and looked about as if expecting Sister to suddenly appear. They wrote on the blackboard, sat at the desk in front of an empty class, drank water from a tap in the lunch room, pulled up their socks, gazed over the wall into the winding road near the school gate and wandered off among the plum trees and the gardens.
Boyd had gradually found himself on his own in the classroom, hoping to detect the scent of Susan and the in love Miss Casserly. He wandered about sniffing the air, the desks and the doorway. He touched Susan’s chair, her empty desk, the place where she had stood and breathed, and when he was sure no one was looking, sat at her desk, caressing, stroking and sniffing the brown ink-splashed wood, searching for her scent there. The afternoon passed mostly in this way. Soon shadows of trees moved slowly across the lawn. The temperature dropped, signalling the arrival of evening and sudden fright – Mama and Papa and Yvonne would be in the audience watching him; and the Mitchisons and Susan too. She was bound to return in time for the concert. Sweet Little Buttercup.
The musicians continued to tune up their instruments. Before them, the audience grew. People were whispering, pointing, taking stock, readying themselves to be entertained. Sister and her staff, the big girls and the big boys and the select few parents who helped out on these occasions, took charge offstage. The smell of stage make-up, new costumes and assorted scent contrived to excite. The mothers’ eyes were bright, the sound of the audience a steady hum. When Miss Skiddar appeared in her costume offstage, everyone gasped. Was this the same Miss Skiddar, their teacher, transformed into the tall, handsome Sir Joseph Porter? Little Buttercup was surely not their Miss Casserly, their in love Miss Casserly. She was like a pretty woman in a book, who walked and spoke and laughed and sounded like a real person. Captain Corcoran was a real burly captain, with a captain’s bearing and manner, not their teacher Miss Robb. How could this be? And Hebe, Sir Joseph’s first cousin, was surely not the gorgeous Diana Delfosse with red rouged cheeks. It was as if they were in a real-life film. Boyd and the other children, all sailors, all breathless, stood back against the walls, out of the way of the traffic and the flourishes of the major characters. They were in awe. From the beginning of term they had dreamt about this very evening. It was already more than they had imagined and the performance had not even begun. The sound of the crowd had moved up several octaves. Sister Margaret Mary’s rosaries played a symphony. Someone, a sailor, overcome with beauty and passion, or stagefright, was sobbing desperately.
Mr Burton took his place in the audience, dressed in a light woollen suit. He was in a good mood. And it wasn’t only because much of his fine work would be on display and that Sister Margaret Mary had recognised and accepted him as a man she could do business with by conferring on him the title of School Supplier. It was not only that he believed he had done a remarkable job for the school and the parents at Balaclava and at Appleton Estate, where his name was spoken at the club and at the dinner tables by men of importance. It was not only that he had managed, through his intelligence and his connections, to secure for his wayward nephew a reasonably well-paid position for a young man of his age and experience at the factory. It was true that Edgar had shown little gratitude and, because of some unfortunate recent domestic misunderstanding, was busy dragging his name in the gutter. But he would not allow that little blackguard to ruin it for him. He felt on the verge of greatness. And it was not only because his status had improved since he met Sister Margaret Mary. It was all of those things and a great deal more.
No one had respected him in New York, where they called him Negro and Nigger, words he hated with a passion. Sister Margaret Mary’s respect was invaluable to him. It was a certain path to establishing himself in the Balaclava community, not existing at the fringes like some people he knew. Respect, because he was upright, a responsible businessman who could be taken seriously. He had had a refreshing shower, splashed on some Royall Lyme cologne, whistled as he dressed with the radio on and had walked the half mile to the school up the Balaclava road, feeling satisfied with himself. And to top it off, there he was sitting among decent Balaclava people, especially those respectable women to the left and right of him. It was an experience to relish.
Mr Burton delighted in the presence of the women around him. Only women knew how to dress and present themselves in such a way that brought elegance, sophistication and civility to any scene. Some might ask, given such thoughts, why he wasn’t married or engaged in some purposeful relationship with a woman. But he didn’t think like that. He liked women, regarded them as the very best suits a tailor blessed with talent could make. The suits shouldn’t
be worn. They were too good for that. Like the finest art, they should be displayed to be admired, coveted, be fascinated by, put on a pedestal and be written about. The wonder of women, their charms, their inexplicability, their essential goodness as the giver of life; these were the things that he adored women for and the things that kept him away from them, because, after all, he could never be good enough for any of them.
Moreover, should he be lucky enough, he knew the resulting union would be his undoing. A long time ago, on the streets of Harlem, he learned that it was men who gave him the kind of pleasure others obtained from women. It was a desire he had tried to keep at bay because it had been so difficult to come to terms with, and he had succeeded, at least until a few months ago. The young man, Jarrett, seeming lost, on the road to the train station and a new life, leaving Appleton for good, had flagged him down for a lift. He had stopped. They had talked. And one thing led to another. But he had no regrets. He had only behaved true to himself. And so had Jarrett. Fate had brought them together.
‘Looking forward to it?’ the woman sitting next to him asked, with a smile that could only be the product of a decent upbringing.
‘Yes, indeed, ah sure am,’ Mr Burton replied, his American accent rising to the fore. It was amazing how when he was among women, he always seemed to behave like a young man. It was as if he were back in New York as a youth of twenty, opening doors for well-dressed, glamorous women, tipping his hat, bowing, smiling in acknowledgement across a table, standing back in deference to allow them to pass on the street.
The orchestra started up and there was a sudden movement through the audience, like quick falling leaves, rustling of paper, respectful hissing. The lights dimmed and darkness descended like a warm, gentle cloak.
The Pink House at Appleton Page 29