The region would not submit easily to measurement. The intentions of those who designed the canals and kokers – which looked like guillotines – and who attempted to measure the tidal gradation of rivers were insidiously confounded and the capital city seemed to have been stretched out beyond its ideal size to keep at bay the citizens’ terror of the land mass at its back. And so it smiled out to sea, believing that its future lay beyond the horizon, and ignored the lands behind it and the peoples who lived there.
One planter, Mynheer Nicklaus, who, in harmony with the streets of the city, possessed blue eyes set so wide apart that it seemed possible that the fields of his vision did not overlap – that there was a gap in the middle where he saw nothing, yet where something existed – tried to fasten his lids back at night in order not to sleep because he was so frightened of this ‘something’.
At night, in his enormous house, built from the profits of the slave trade, he had glass cones placed over the spermaceti candles so that they would not flicker in the breeze as he lay staring up through his mosquito net, struggling to focus on whatever he might be missing at the centre of his vision.
He developed the habit of moving his head from side to side like a scanner. But still, the feeling that he never managed to see everything that was there drove him into a frenzy. When he was sure he could see everything at the centre, he became convinced that there was something on the outer edges of his range of vision that remained just beyond his sight.
Hearing how the savannah Indians believed that everyday life was just an illusion behind which could be divined another reality, he ordered that one should be captured and brought to his house in order to prise from him the secrets of his philosophy. A Wapisiana Indian was seized and carried to Mynheer Nicklaus’s plantation house.
The captured Wapisiana man became so distressed that he stood on a stool, neither eating, nor drinking, nor speaking, until it became clear that he would die and the Dutchman was forced to release him without discovering what he wanted to know. The man then returned to the Rupununi with stories of the amazing round wooden doorknobs he had seen and the perfectly spherical wooden orbs that could be found at the bottom of banisters.
When the Dutchman, an expert in accountancy, lay dying, he tried never to blink because he was fearful of whatever might reveal itself when his lids were closed for a fraction of a second. In his last fever, he sustained such an enormous erection that his devout wife was obliged to avert her eyes from the death-bed and, when he did finally die, no one was able to shut his eyes at all. His wife returned to Holland, swearing that the Europeans could not ever see what was really going on in the place.
Feeling calmer, Chofy stood up and decided to find his bearings from the most familiar landmark of all in Georgetown, the great Anglican Cathedral of St George. The library where he worked was virtually next door to it.
He walked to the corner and caught sight of the topmost point of the building. Not that he could always find his bearings in relation to the cathedral either. It had tricked him on several occasions. The giant wooden structure, painted all over in dazzling white, never seemed to be in the same place twice. When he was walking around town, it would suddenly loom into sight close by when he was not expecting it. Then it showed itself a distance away when he had thought it would be nearer. The building seemed to be on elastic. Sometimes it vanished altogether.
This time, however, he located it and headed for the library. He knocked on the door of his new boss’s stuffy office and went in.
Carmella de Pereira was on the telephone. Carmella was a large, operatic woman of African and Portuguese descent. A bun of jet-black hair sat primly on the top of her head. Despite her weighty thighs, she walked with tiny steps which gave her the premature appearance of middle age. She stood with the telephone in her hand, as if about to launch into an aria, continuing the conversation on the phone while beckoning to Chofy who stood in the doorway. She put a hand to her full bosom and laughed a tinkling laugh.
‘Yes. Certainly. I will tell him to go to that address. He could come now. No problem. Yes. He is a McKinnon from the Rupununi.’ She nodded to Chofy as if he should know what it was about. ‘Not at all. Delighted to be of assistance. Please come and consult us at the library if it would help your research. Good morning.’
She turned to Chofy and gave him the piece of paper she had been scribbling on.
‘Greetings. Please zoom straightaway to this house in Brickdam. You can leave stacking the books for today. An English woman there would like to meet you – Rosa Mendelson or some such body. She is doing research into Evelyn Waugh and wants to meet some McKinnons.’
A quarter of an hour later, to his surprise, Chofy found himself once more outside the Mynheer Nicklaus Lodge where he had been sitting earlier. He now realised that the large house was run as a semi-hotel. The night watchman, still on duty, let him in through the wrought-iron gates.
Tables were laid out under one area of the bottom-house. At one of these tables sat a European woman in a kingfisher-blue T-shirt, eating breakfast in the open. He came and stood in front of the table. Unaware of his presence, she was leaning forward, reading a book balanced against a coffee pot and eating freshly cooked bakes.
Something his Uncle Danny had once told him during a drinking spree came unexpectedly into his head: ‘Always watch a woman eat because that’s how she fucks.’
He lowered his eyes for a moment in case she looked up suddenly and was somehow able to read his thoughts.
The bottom-house where she sat was divided by wooden partitions of various heights, all latticed and painted white. They stood at different angles like open-work screens. Some had a slanting diamond trellis, some had a finer grid of squares. The criss-crossing intersections created an intricate background like a mathematical puzzle. Behind this lattice fencing, ginger-lilies, hibiscus and heliconia burgeoned and tried to push their way through.
Chofy waited politely for her to look up. He noted her breasts under the T-shirt, framing the coffee pot. She ate slowly and delicately but with relish.
‘Excuse me. Good morning. I’m sorry to interrupt your meal. My name is Chofy McKinnon. I believe you want to see me.’
When she lifted her eyes, Chofy did not know whether he was dazzled by the apparent movement of the criss-crossing lattices creating some kind of optical illusion, or by the way she smiled at him. The smile was brimming with delight.
‘Oh how wonderful,’ she said.
It was love before first sight. The smile struck him with such familiarity that he felt he had always known it. Her hair stood out round her head in a bush of coarse black curls. Later, he found out that her father was a Russian Jew which accounted for the broad cheekbones and the wide mouth. Her blue eyes slanted and were large, dreamy and a little bulbous. The whites showed under the irises when she looked up, like a cartoon animal when it blinks.
Besides the smell of coffee and bakes, which made him hungry, he could smell something else sweet and unfamiliar that intoxicated him.
He apologised again: ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your meal. Is this a bad time to call on you?’
She rose to her feet and choked on a crumb, putting her hand to her throat, coughing and laughing at the same time. She was tall, wearing jeans.
‘I’m sorry. I’ve made you choke.’
‘There’s no need to keep apologising.’ She recovered herself.
‘I was partly raised by a priest,’ Chofy said defensively. ‘He taught us to say sorry as if it was the most important thing in the world. I was taught to say please, sorry and thank you.’
‘All words that make you feel inferior,’ she replied quickly. ‘My name is Rosa Mendelson.’
They shook hands. The sun pushed its way through the lattices. Chofy felt light-headed.
‘You can always tell the children of Jewish communists of a certain period.’ She made a jokey grimace. ‘We are all called after people like Rosa Luxemburg or Leon Trotsky.’
Ch
ofy laughed. Secretly, he was a little shocked. He had heard that communists were dangerous.
‘I’m doing some research on Evelyn Waugh and his journey here in the thirties.’ She sat down again. ‘I’m trying to find out if there is anyone still alive here who might have met him. Apparently, he spent some time with the McKinnon family.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that. But I know the name Evelyn Waugh – except that I didn’t know how to pronounce it. On Saturdays, when I was a youngster, I had to brush the priest’s books. There were books on the shelf by Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot, I remember. You’re lucky. Good timing. My Auntie Wifreda is in Georgetown for an operation. She would more likely remember.’
Rosa had the habit of rolling her eyes when she laughed.
‘Oh great. Could I meet her?’
‘Of course.’ Chofy hesitated for a moment, wondering how he could overcome Auntie Wifreda’s detestation of strangers. ‘She’s not well at the moment. Perhaps in a week or so.’
There was silence. It was then that Chofy McKinnon did something completely unexpected in the early morning sunshine, with the maids chattering in the kitchen like birds in the trees and the yellow hibiscus blooms lolling and letting their lustful tongues drool out behind the fence. Chofy leaned forward with his hands on the table, looked down at the milk jug, the bakes and the slices of paw-paw and took an enormous gamble.
He said in a voice lower than his own: ‘I love you. I’ve fallen in love with you.’
His tone was so matter-of-fact that Rosa Mendelson was not sure that she had heard him correctly. And he too was not sure what he had said. And so they both ignored the words that seemed to have come from nowhere.
Chofy thought fast.
‘Have you managed to visit the interior at all?’ he asked after another silence.
‘No. I’ve only stayed in Georgetown and travelled out to the university.’
‘Well, if you would like the chance, my cousin Tenga has married a girl in Pakuri village about three hours’ drive into the interior. I could take you there if you want to see something of the bush.’
‘I’d love to. Thank you.’
He arranged to pick her up the next Saturday and promised to ask Auntie Wifreda if she would mind talking to Rosa. Then he left, trembling slightly as he tried to control his excitement, and went to organise some transportation to Pakuri for next week.
I Cut Evelyn Waugh’s Hair
Rosa Mendelson preferred a degree of orderliness and rationality in her life. Soon after her arrival in Guyana she was warned by one of the other guests to prepare for life without either.
One morning she had been attracted downstairs by the sound of classical guitar music floating up from one of the rooms below. The door of his room open, Arthur Singh sat on his bed and introduced himself without ceasing to play. He was a languid, balding Guyanese musician, based in Trinidad, who returned to Georgetown once a year to teach classical guitar at Queen’s College.
‘I always stay here when I come back to Guyana. I act as informal major-domo around the house. It is a feature of this place that rooms are prepared for people who do not arrive and people arrive for whom there are no rooms. Sometimes I feel that it is because we Guyanese live in houses on stilts that we do not quite have our feet on the ground as a nation.’
And it was he who had told her: ‘You must know that this is a country where you will have to surrender to the unexpected. The ferry will break down but another boat will go. As your car sticks in a rut, a donkey-cart will miraculously appear out of the blue. You are at the mercy of the random. Don’t look for a pattern and don’t try to impose one. Wait until something happens and then go with it. In my opinion, the virus is king on this planet. We should take our cue from him. People only exist to be host to this master of the quantum jump which adapts so miraculously to what it had not anticipated.’
For all his homage to the unexpected, Rosa noticed that Arthur Singh hoarded tea-bags and powdered milk like a miser and occasionally arranged to invite himself upstairs for a cup of tea with her.
She had rented the whole of the attic space in Mynheer Nicklaus Lodge, because it had its own bathroom and a kitchenette where she could make herself coffee while she worked. Her research was on Evelyn Waugh’s attitude towards the colonies.
On the morning that Chofy McKinnon was supposed to take her to Pakuri, she settled down to put her work in some sort of order. She laid her papers and documents out in neat piles on the crabwood desk, on the bed, and piled some books on the rosewood dressing-table with its oval mirror.
She worked slowly and thoughtfully, compiling a list of what she had achieved so far.
The first item on the list said ‘Georgetown Club’. She crossed it off as completed. The day after her arrival, she had telephoned the elegant colonial club with its rows of white Demerara shutters all opening bottom-out at the same discreet angle, where Evelyn Waugh had stayed for a while during his visit to Georgetown. She discovered that one of the club’s old retainers did, indeed, remember Evelyn Waugh and she arranged to meet him there.
As she stood in the entrance of the club, the unmistakable atmosphere of the country’s colonial past rose up and enveloped her. The confidently unpretentious, almost shabby interior, with its faded photographs and cabinets of stuffed animals, its aura of an old boys’ club, the sound of rum swizzles chinking with ice in glasses both attracted and repelled her.
She waited in the large bar room for the man to arrive. A group of businessmen drank and talked noisily at a table nearby. It was impossible for her not to remember her father in these circumstances, a stunted little man, beaming and earnest, a die-hard communist who had stood as Communist candidate for the wealthy London suburb of Dulwich. She had been ten years old at the time. An embarrassingly small group of them had marched through the leafy streets of Dulwich Village with a poster displaying her father’s face, shouting ‘Vote for Mendelson’. Mortified at the idea of being seen by any of her schoolfriends, she had mooched along sulkily at her mother’s side. Her father had mounted a bench in Dulwich Park and made a passionate speech about Paul Robeson and colonialism to which nobody listened.
And now, her parents were dead and this colonial club still flourished smugly as if cocking a snook at her father’s memory. Rosa was glad that both her parents had died before the collapse of the Soviet bloc. They would have been bewildered. All their adult lives had been spent working in the hope of a socialist world.
A hearty guffaw of laughter from the next table made her look at her watch. Her interviewee was late. She wondered what her parents would have thought of the world turning into one enormous capitalist market.
Just before she left England, she had attended a dinner given by the Arts Council in honour of a noted East German actor, an old friend of her mother and father. He had finally defected to the West in the mid-eighties. As the coffee was being passed around, another guest had approached the distinguished white-haired actor, grasped his shoulder and congratulated him energetically on the defeat of communism in his country. The actor had pressed his linen napkin to the corners of his mouth and then risen to his feet to face the man.
‘You will never know,’ he said graciously, ‘how hard we tried to make it work. I did not wish to leave East Germany. In the end, I had no choice but to go. But many of us desperately wanted it to succeed. We preferred the idea of social justice even to our own freedom. What you are talking about so enthusiastically is the death of a great dream for us.’
And with that, he had nodded courteously and with dignity excused himself from the table, his small, shiny-haired wife accompanying him with frequent worried glances up at his face.
Rosa raised her head to see a spry, sallow, elderly man standing in the doorway, looking inquisitively around the bar where she sat. It turned out that the old retainer, a nervously camp, Brylcreemed chatter-box, could recall little about Evelyn Waugh except that he liked to have the ends of his cigars clipped to a certain length before
he smoked them. He had then asked Rosa if she would assist in buying him a ticket to England as he longed to see the Queen.
In the attic where Rosa worked, the windows were open letting in the warm air of morning. Outside, the voice of Bob Marley singing: ‘Every little thing’s gonna be all right,’ drifted up from a house at the back. Something flew across her vision. A tiny green frog, not more than an inch long, landed on the window frame, its throat delicately pulsing. She forced herself to concentrate on the notes she had made about the Georgetown Club.
The next item on the list just said ‘Find the McKinnons’.
Rosa Mendelson had come to hear of the McKinnons through a Miss Nancy Freeman, a Guyanese woman living in London. A friend had put them in touch.
‘Oh yes, I cut Evelyn Waugh’s hair when he was in the colony,’ she said proudly, on the telephone.
Rosa had tramped through the endless terraced streets of red houses in Acton, identical as rows of paper cut-outs, until she came to where Miss Freeman lived.
The tall, slim, athletic woman who bounded to open the door must have been in her seventies although she looked younger. Her crinkly grey hair was tied loosely at the back. She had light-skinned African features and an attractive snub nose. Rosa felt a sort of excitement at seeing the three-dimensional version of a woman she had read about in Evelyn Waugh’s diaries.
‘I gather you want to hear about my time in the savannahs,’ she said, after introductions.
‘I really wanted to know what you remember of Evelyn Waugh.’ Rosa took out her notebook.
They sat in a front room full of plants and knick-knacks. While she spoke, Nancy Freeman stitched away, embroidering a linen chair-back.
The Ventriloquist's Tale Page 4