‘How long?’ he shouted when he stopped, as if that was all that mattered. She didn’t answer because she couldn’t; she had thought she had lost him to the pool’s bottomless depths, and so she watched him swim back to her across the water, haul himself out of the shallows and step up towards her onto the bank. Then she seized him by his bony shoulders. Her fingers dug into his skin and it hurt. He writhed to get free, but she had him pinned.
‘Lord, chile,’ she said then, not gently.
‘How long?’ he said again, though he knew she hadn’t counted at all, and it was a shame, because he’d almost burst his lungs under there and he knew it must have been four minutes, maybe five. She released one hand, cuffed him on the side of the head and said, ‘Cu ya! Me thought you a dead.’
Roscoe thought, If she caught me talking in that way she’d smack me for that too. He was eight now and since the day he first opened his mouth to speak – early, Ruby said, taking the credit – he’d had standard English rammed down his throat and when he drifted into patois she fell on him like the wrath of God. The king’s English was the way to raise yourself on this island of Jamaica, she always told him; the king’s English showed your brains and your breeding. So when Ruby lapsed into the language of her childhood it was a desperate measure, a signal to Roscoe that his mother had moved beyond anger and into the realm of distress. He felt resentful, not sorry, but he swallowed the temptation to talk back at her, choosing instead the useful device of artful meekness.
‘Sorry, Ruby,’ he said. He called her by her first name because, although she was his mother, there were just fourteen years separating them and she seemed to the world, and to him, more like an older sister. His face was the image of abject contrition: large brown eyes full of pain; mouth downturned, full of sadness. It was an act, but he hated it when she was like this; the sooner he brought her back to him the better. She hesitated, and some of the tension left her face. She let go of his shoulder. He could feel the place on his skin where her nails had dug in and he raised a hand and rubbed, and Ruby capitulated. She pulled him to her and rubbed his head where she had struck him.
‘Come,’ she said. ‘Dry yourself off and get dressed. You’re making me late, and you know what a terror Mr Silas is about tardiness.’
She rolled her eyes and grinned, and Roscoe grinned back at her.
‘I wish you’d counted though, Ruby,’ he said, risking a complaint. ‘I was under a long, long time.’
‘Did you see the water dragon?’
He laughed. ‘Yes I did. He sends his regards.’
‘And did you touch the bottom?’
‘There is no bottom, Ruby.’ He’d always heard this, but now he believed it. ‘I swam and swam, but it never came.’
‘I thought I’d lost you,’ she said, suddenly serious again. ‘Don’t do that again. Stay away from the water.’
‘No. You stay away,’ he said. ‘You stay away.’
He was right, she thought. He shouldn’t be fettered by her fears for his safety. He should test himself, find his limits, explore life’s possibilities: and he should do it unobserved by her.
There was a path from Eden Falls, a narrow strip of vegetation trodden flat leading first up the mountain, through a tunnel of green, and then down again, to Port Antonio. Ruby and Roscoe, single file, picked their way along it and at the top, where it met the road, they fell in beside each other again. In due course, Ruby turned for the hotel and Roscoe continued on to school.
The Whittam Hotel was a fine building, the finest in Port Antonio, although there were plenty of locals who thought the town had done very well without it. Built in the style of a plantation house, it occupied the higher reaches of Eden Hill, which rose to the west of the town in a series of natural terraces. The hotel was a perfect distance from the port: close enough to afford a view of all its colour and bustle but far enough that its less edifying characteristics – the pungent smells, the ripe profanities – stayed where they belonged.
Beyond the port lay the Caribbean Sea, and Silas Whittam, hotelier and shipping magnate, could never look upon it without emotion. These peerless waters reminded him of his younger self: a ship’s lad, seeing the tropics for the first time and believing this to be an enchanted place. The years had passed and the fates had singled him out for special treatment. The fates, that is, and Sir Walter Hollis. His former boss at the Global Steamship Company had been so entirely won over by his protégé’s judicious mix of hard work and sycophancy that he had gifted to Silas a small fleet of refrigerated ships. With these, Silas had prospered and grown, wealth coming swiftly and easily as he sailed between Bristol and Port Antonio. He’d bought an old sugar plantation – they were going for a song by the time he was in a position to cast an acquisitive eye across Jamaican soil – and replaced the cane with bananas. In this way he had truly made his fortune, for the fruit he shipped was now his own, and the powerful growers no longer his concern. The hotel had come later, when he realised that his cargo ships could be equipped for passengers; or, rather, that luxury passenger liners could be equipped for cargo. He bought Eden Hill and, with machetes and manpower, had vanquished the jungle. The hotel had been built to Silas’s precise specifications and its grounds meticulously landscaped; now, where ferns and vines had once romped in unchecked abundance, there were lawns and herbaceous borders immaculately planted with English flowers. It was the garden of a proud colonialist, not the garden of a plantsman. The indigenous blooms – the poincianas, the alamandas, the trusty plumbago – were cast aside in favour of hollyhocks, delphiniums and Michaelmas daisies, whose pale hues seemed paler still in the unrelenting yellow light of the Jamaican sun, or the periodic onslaughts of warm tropical wind and rain.
A long path zigzagged down the terraces to the wrought-iron gateway at the road and as Ruby approached it from one direction a man was coming towards it from the other. He carried a great wooden box of provisions on his head and moved lethargically, like a soul burdened not with vegetables but with all the cares of the world. His face, when he saw Ruby, bloomed into a wide smile.
‘Good morning Maxwell,’ Ruby said, her words clipped and bright.
‘Miss Ruby,’ Maxwell replied, talking in the same way that he walked: slowly, lazily, taking all the time in the world. ‘How de pickney?’
‘Roscoe is very well, thank you.’
She smiled at the porter and waited with him while he leaned his lanky frame against the gate and lifted the box from his head. He placed it on the road at his feet and they both looked down at it: asparagus, carrots, celery, mushrooms – English vegetables shipped over from Bristol’s costermongers as if nothing grew in the fertile soil of Jamaica. Maxwell gave Ruby a look: a languid, disdainful roll of the eyes. The twisted cotton cotta looked ludicrous with the box gone, but he left it on his head anyway, and dipped into the pocket of his baggy trousers for a tin of Red Man. Ruby said, ‘Maxwell, that tobacco is turning your teeth the colour of wet mud,’ but he chuckled and with gracious irony held out the open tin to her as if she might be tempted to nip out a portion, as he had done, and pop it into her pink and white mouth.
‘It rots your body from the top down,’ she said sternly, and he laughed again, a full-throated, drawn-out, Jamaican laugh. He liked Ruby. She was full of advice that he hadn’t asked for, but she wasn’t as prim and proper as she made out. She was built for love, was Ruby, with her wide, slanting eyes like a cat and her beautiful round backside. When, like this morning, providence brought them to the hotel path together Maxwell always let Ruby go in front, waving her on in a gentlemanly manner then feasting at his leisure on the sight of her lovely buttocks, which moved against the fabric of her dress like two ripe mangoes in a bag.
‘Shall we?’ she said now, indicating the gate and the upward path.
Maxwell bent down, his long body folding itself in two, then, with a fluid, seamless movement, unfolding again to lift the box up and onto his head. ‘After you, Miss Ruby,’ he said and she nodded approval a
t him, pleased by his manners.
Halfway up the path, where it diverged so that kitchen staff and tradesmen could make their final ascent to the hotel’s back door out of sight of the guests, Silas Whittam was waiting, a scowl darkening his handsome features. He held a fine gold fob in one hand and he shook it at them as Ruby and Maxwell approached.
‘Here de harbour shark to wish us good day,’ said Maxwell none too quietly, and Ruby laughed. It was this insolence, as much as their lateness, which now provoked their employer.
‘God damn it! You were due here thirty minutes ago and you have the brass neck to mutter and smirk at me.’
They couldn’t deny it so they said nothing at all, and continued their measured pace up the path.
‘I should sack you here and now,’ Silas said. His face was hard with resentment. ‘I should send you packing, you useless, feckless, no-good pair. Thirty staff, and not a good one among you. Can you actually tell the time? Or do you just stroll along to work when the cock stops crowing or when the mango drops from the tree?’
Maxwell whistled through his teeth and Ruby nodded slowly as if to say, I hear you and I see you, but I don’t heed you. He had built himself a great house but it didn’t make them slaves, and the plain fact was he needed them more than they needed him. A hundred and forty-six arrivals today, the Whittam liner due in at midday; without Ruby in the kitchen they’d all go hungry, and without Maxwell and Scotty they’d all be carrying their own valises. All of this she expressed with her eyes, cutting the boss a cold, bold look as she passed. Ruby Donaldson had a friendly word for almost everyone, but not for Silas Whittam, no. He was a waste of good breath.
Chapter 2
‘Must the dogs be in the painting?’
‘Why? Can’t you paint dogs?’
Eugene Stiller laid down his brush.
‘I can paint dogs, yes. But what I can paint and what I choose to paint are quite different matters.’
‘But Eugene,’ said Thea Hoyland, who knew the artist well and as a result had scant regard for either his professionalism or his personal dignity, ‘you don’t actually choose to paint anything, do you? You paint what you’re paid to paint. Or at least that’s what I understood.’
She smiled at him to temper her rudeness, which was apparent even to her. He’d placed her on a cushioned window seat at such an angle that her face was on one side washed in natural light, and on the other almost wholly in shade. This, thought Eugene Stiller, was nicely symbolic, a representation of the good and bad in her, the sweet and the sour. It was how he entertained himself through the long hours of any commission: revealing, by the tilt of a chin or the glint of an eye, a facet of his sitter’s personality that other artists – perhaps less well tutored than he in the school of realism – would be unable to depict satisfactorily through the medium of oil on canvas. Selfishness, cruelty, kindness, avarice, loyalty: Eugene Stiller saw these traits as physical characteristics which, like a mole on the cheek or a missing finger, must be faithfully represented.
‘To a point,’ he said now, tartly. ‘Though I have been known to say no.’
‘But you won’t say no to my spaniels, I hope?’
‘Jittery creatures, spaniels.’
‘Well so am I, for that matter. If it’s jitteriness you object to, better paint that bowl of fruit over there.’
Eugene laughed. He’d forgotten how relentlessly sassy Thea Hoyland was; or, at least, he remembered the sassiness, but had expected it to be replaced with something more mellow and soberly aristocratic now that she was – of all things – a countess. Eugene and Thea were friends of the type whose shared history was of more significance than their shared interests. For twelve consecutive years their respective parents had rented neighbouring beach houses on Long Island, and every summer vacation of their childhoods had been spent in enforced proximity to each other; they would bicker tirelessly on the sand as they toiled, summer after summer, on the same joint projects – a hole, a castle, a pool for a captive lobster, a channel to the sea. When, one summer, Eugene’s parents came to the beach house without him, Thea’s first emotion had been relief that the holes, castles and channels would this year be done entirely her way. She had been disappointed to discover that, without Eugene, none of it was much fun: the bickering, she realised, was the part she most enjoyed. Now here they were, in the drawing room of Netherwood Hall, she the Countess of Netherwood, he a significant young painter with a gold medal for portraiture from the New York School of Art, and still they bickered. And yet the back-and-forth snippiness, the trading of snipes, possessed an excluding, confidential quality, as if, far from being an obstacle to friendship, it was absolute proof of it.
‘If you tip your head downwards a little, and look directly at the canvas, you’ll find we see more of your lovely eyes,’ Eugene said. He waited a beat before continuing. ‘And at the same time, the weakness of your chin is disguised.’
‘Beast,’ she said. She pulled the spaniels closer as if for comfort, one on her left side, one on her right. They gazed up at her adoringly, resting their muzzles on her lap.
‘They should at least face me,’ Eugene said. He felt the need to assert his authority; she had treated the whole exercise as something of a joke ever since his arrival. ‘I’ll sketch them in and see how they look. I’m absolutely not convinced.’
Behind them, the door opened and immediately both dogs sprang down to the floor, further proving their unsuitability for the project. Eugene shot Thea a look of smug justification, which she ignored. Instead she stood up and stretched extravagantly, as if all her joints were stiff, although their session had really only just begun. Her husband wandered in – another aggravation for Eugene, these constant and casual interruptions – and stooped to fondle the silken ears of the dogs at his feet. He then said, rather flatly and as if they were already mid-conversation, ‘I’m going to see a man about a yacht.’
‘A yacht?’ Thea said. ‘For sailing?’
‘Of course for sailing.’ The earl answered his wife but looked at Eugene, who said, ‘Kinda landlocked for that caper, aren’t you?’
Tobias smiled at him. ‘I don’t propose to sail through Yorkshire. The yacht’s moored at Portsmouth.’
‘You don’t sail. Buy another car if you need a diversion.’
This was Thea, and her voice seemed altered, Eugene thought: not cold exactly, but bored. He had noticed this, living, as he currently did, with the earl and countess. Sometimes Tobias and Thea spoke to each other like a couple with no expectation of mutual amusement.
Tobias looked at her now, and said, ‘I’m quite sure, when you’re fully apprised of the facts, that you’ll take a different view,’ and then he turned and left the room, leaving the door open so that the spaniels trailed out after him, until Thea called them back in a petulant voice that reminded Eugene very much of his contrary little playmate on the Long Island beach. He raised his eyebrows at her.
‘Hmm, chilly in here,’ he said.
And Thea, who was now thoroughly put out by her husband’s cryptic announcement, said, ‘Oh button it, Eugene,’ and walked from the room too, leaving the artist alone with the spaniels. They sat side by side in front of his canvas, as if waiting for direction, watching him closely. Eugene pushed the hair out of his eyes – he grew it long, because he was an artist – and blew a low whistle of exasperation. ‘What a madhouse,’ he said to the dogs.
With Toby gone, it was hardly worth setting the table for dinner. This, at least, is what Thea told Parkinson, the butler. And although he did as instructed and prepared to serve the evening meal in the morning room, it was with profound misgiving bordering on reluctance. In his view, the morning room was so named for a very good reason; east facing, it caught the best of the early sun and held on to it until midday, after which the natural light travelled westward through the house, concluding its daily duties by alighting on the crystal and silver plate in the dining room. These long early-summer evenings meant that candles need not be l
it nor chandeliers switched on until almost nine o’clock. The morning room, however, was another matter: gloomy by evening, and the table barely big enough for the tureens.
‘It’s not as if it’s any less trouble,’ he said to Sarah Pickersgill, the cook. ‘If anything, it’s more so. All the glasses to be moved, all the china, all the silver; and it’s that bit further from the back stairs.’
She nodded. The best way, with Mr Parkinson, was to agree. At least then there was a possibility that the conversation might move towards something more interesting than the countess’s unreasonable requests. Sarah regarded him across the top of her cup of tea. He had aged in the three years following the terrible death of the sixth earl and his son’s succession. Mr Parkinson’s preternaturally blond curls had, at last, lost their youthfulness and turned a peppery grey; his once unlined skin had succumbed to wrinkles, which gathered at the corners of his mouth and eyes, and ran in spidery lines across his brow. It was ironic, thought Sarah, that the more grave and dignified Mr Parkinson’s appearance had become, the less like a butler he behaved. Eight years ago, when Sarah had first come to Netherwood Hall as kitchen maid, he had been a perfect living template for the job – discreet, efficient, unswervingly loyal – yet in appearance he had resembled nothing so much as an overgrown choirboy. Now, when the cherubic twinkle had at last been replaced by something more apt for his age and position, Mr Parkinson had turned into an inveterate grumbler. It had happened by degrees: a tart comment here, a disapproving remark there, until his occasional pique had grown into a permanent state of disgruntlement which was quite unlike his old self and, truth be told, entirely inappropriate in an elderly family retainer. At least he confined his outbursts to a limited audience; Mrs Powell-Hughes, the housekeeper, was his preferred confidante but, in her absence, Sarah Pickersgill would do. She was a placid listener, rarely interjecting or contradicting. Now she sipped at her tea and ran through the evening’s menu in her head while appearing to share his troubles. There was little need to concentrate; his was a one-note song. His criticisms and complaints were always directed at the countess, at whose feet he placed all perceived ills: lapsed standards, dismantled traditions, flouted moral codes.
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