‘What are you afraid of, Mr Sykes? That the women of Ardington might vote you out of office?’ She sounded shrill and disparaging: a little of the control had left her voice. For all her articulacy and quick wit, Amos was simply more practised in gladiatorial debate. He had her on the run; he felt it.
‘My only real concern is that parasites like you and your ilk continue to leech the lifeblood from the working classes. I’m not against women having the vote. I’m against women like you demanding it when there are still working men who’re not entitled to an opinion on polling day.’
On the platform, Christabel Pankhurst stepped forwards and whispered something to Henrietta, who cast a final, filthy look in Amos’s direction then stepped back, leaving Christabel to pick up her abandoned theme and carry it through to conclusion. She strove valiantly to reclaim the moral high ground, but Amos had beaten her to it and, in any case, the gentlemen of the press, who surged out of the hall behind him, had their own clear idea about what the story for tomorrow’s morning editions would be.
Amos gave the journalists short shrift – ‘My position is t’Labour Party’s position, and those views have already been widely aired’ – then waited outside for Anna, who took her time. When she did appear, she was with Henrietta. Amos stared at the pair of them, walking together out of Caxton Hall like bosom pals. Perhaps they would part company before they reached him, he thought. But no.
‘Mr Sykes,’ Henrietta said, extending a gloved hand, which he took, but without enthusiasm. ‘Thank you for coming this evening, and I’m sorry we led each other into so public a disagreement.’ Her face wore a gracious smile, and he felt like a churl by comparison. Still, he thought, no Swiss finishing school for the likes of me, so what does she expect?
‘Don’t be sorry. I’m not,’ he said. ‘Those things needed saying, and I can’t speak for you, but I feel better for it.’
‘Amos,’ Anna said. That was all, but it was filled with meaning. He didn’t catch her eye, but looked steadily at Henrietta and said, ‘I shall never be able to hear you speak of injustice without bile rising in my throat. This is just the way it is; the way I am.’
‘There are many forms of injustice, Mr Sykes. I can’t address them all at once, and neither can you. May we at least part on friendly terms?’
He laughed. ‘We’re natural foes, you and I. Prefer to keep it that way, if it’s all t’same to you.’
‘Very well,’ said Henrietta. She turned to Anna, who had stepped away from Amos, putting a little distance between them. ‘Sylvia sends her good wishes, and asked me to thank you. She’ll need the canvas a day or two before the exhibition, if that’s possible?’
‘Of course,’ Anna said. ‘Tell her, it’ll be my pleasure.’
Henrietta nodded silently at Amos, and said a warm goodbye to Anna. They watched her go.
‘What was that about?’ Amos said. ‘What canvas?’
‘You,’ she said, ‘are a pig.’
He stared.
‘A pig and a bigot. I am embarrassed for you and by you.’
He bridled at this. ‘I speak my mind, that’s all. You should know that by now.’ He did, truly, feel wronged by his wife. He’d said nothing to Henrietta Hoyland that he wouldn’t say again, given the chance. ‘Come on,’ he said, softening, holding out a hand. ‘I never meant to fall out with you an’ all.’
She folded her arms. A cold, insidious rain had started to fall; these were poor conditions for a stand-off. Behind them, the yellow Daimler slid by, slowly enough for Henrietta to say, as she passed, ‘Can I offer you a lift back to Bedford Square?’
As Amos said no, Anna said yes. The motorcar drew to a halt and she got in, without even a glance of farewell. Amos turned up his coat collar and began to walk towards home. The rain, needle-sharp where it found bare skin, fell from a dark cloud that seemed to hang over him alone.
Chapter 12
There were still bargains to be had in Jamaica, for someone with vision. Silas had tried to talk Hugh Oliver into buying a property here, but his second-in-command lacked an adventurous spirit, or rather, a speculative one. Hugh’s interest in property began and ended in Bristol; his money was safe there, he believed. He didn’t trust Jamaica. He’d once been forced to sit out a hurricane, and had seen an entire house and its contents lifted and carried through the air. At least when he returned to his Clifton townhouse, he knew it would still be there, anchored to the earth by its foundations.
In any case, since Silas had a house and a hotel on the island, there was always somewhere for Hugh to stay. Unlike the boss, who had never yet spent a night at the Whittam, Hugh preferred to lodge at the hotel. He was possessed of greater natural charm and sociability than Silas; guests – even dissatisfied ones – seemed drawn to him. Also, Silas’s house, though beautiful, was isolated: the jungle, and its creatures, felt too close. Hugh liked an establishment with a well-stocked bar and the likelihood of company. He liked to know that the people around him outnumbered the lizards.
When Silas had bought the plantation fifteen years ago, the house that had stood at the heart of it was all but derelict. The agent who’d shown him the property seemed to be trying to talk Silas out of the sale and himself out of the commission: you’d need a small fortune to restore it, he said; that, and a failsafe plan for the future. Silas, as it happened, came with both.
He sat now on the veranda of his own great house, and it was immaculate: white-painted, pristine. The jalousies were new this year, and the porch furniture too; oiled teak, with white and green cushions. It had replaced the cane pieces with which Silas had grown bored, and which now stood, incongruously chic, on the rudimentary wooden platform outside the low bungalow where Justine and Henri lived. His housekeeper and handyman had come as a pair – a matching set, Silas said – from Martinique: refugees, in 1902, fleeing the destruction of St Pierre, a city swollen with people and swallowed whole by the eruption of Mount Pelée. People always said there were just two survivors of the disaster, but Justine and Henri knew this to be untrue, for they were not the only ones who had walked away almost unharmed from the fringes of the devastation. Their provenance – their strange patois, their Catholic ways, their manner of dress – set them apart from the locals, and kept them tight-knit, bound together by shared differences and the memories of shared horror. They had not been a couple in Martinique; indeed, they had been strangers, flung together only by fate and the urgency of their escape. But now, in Jamaica, they were inseparable, though as brother and sister, not husband and wife. Silas had found them on the wharf in Port Antonio and something in their faces showed a predisposition to servility, easily recognisable here, where it was such a rare commodity. He had brought them home and kept them to himself, teaching them what he required from them and no more. Their gratitude, and their self-imposed isolation, kept them loyal. As far as Silas knew, they spoke only to each other, and to him, though the latter only when it was unavoidable. The day he gave them the cane furniture, Justine had looked at the floor and bobbed a curtsey, and Henri had said, ‘Mercy, Masser,’ which was his version of a French thank you; at least, Silas assumed so.
Where once there had been acres of sugar cane, there now were banana plants, but Silas’s house was still called Sugar Hill, the name given to it a hundred and fifty years ago, when it was first built. He liked it: liked the sense of history and continuity, and also the hint of a hidden meaning – Sugar Hill, where life is sweet. Like most growers on the island, he cultivated Gros Michel bananas: they were vigorous and thick-skinned, a little like himself. They grew well, travelled well, sold well, and he could ask nothing more of them. So far, the hurricane season had come and gone fourteen times and left his banana plants in the earth, to which he attributed his own lucky streak rather than the blessing of the Lord. It was a long time since Silas had prayed for anything. Look to your own resources, was his philosophy. Or, put another way, every man for himself. In any case, he knew planters whose entire crops had been obliterated by w
inds, and who had been back in business two seasons later, so obliging was the crop, so fertile the soil.
He had his feet up and his eyes closed, but he was thinking, not sleeping. Hugh had written to him from Bristol, suggesting, not for the first time, that they bail out of the hospitality trade, and concentrate on what they did best. The American-run Mountain Spring Hotel, which was owned by the mighty United Exotic Fruits, had made another offer.
‘They want the Whittam, Silas. They’d take it lock, stock and barrel, and the price they offer is excellent,’ Hugh had written. ‘Enough, in fact, to build another ship for the fleet and increase our banana export capacity in a controlled and profitable manner. The figures speak for themselves. Let’s not fall victim to that old, colonial trap of believing that an Englishman should never admit defeat.’
‘Masser?’
Justine stood before him, and she spoke tentatively, almost fearfully, as if he was convalescing from a long illness, there on the porch. He opened one eye. Her sad face was fixed on him, waiting for an answer. She would never simply state her business. He closed the eye again, then said, ‘Mmm?’
‘Masser, dayj’nay ready.’
‘Well I’m not, quite,’ he said. ‘Leave it on the table, under a cover. I’ll take some punch first.’
She nodded, and walked backwards away from him, as if in the presence of the monarch. He hadn’t taught her this behaviour: he seemed simply to inspire it, and had done nothing to correct it. He liked it, in fact. He pushed the footstool a little further away, the better to stretch his legs. He opened his eyes, and even that fractional movement felt like an effort in the late afternoon heat, which pressed against him like a physical weight. He had acquired the native way with it: acceptance, indolence. The usual insect cacophony rose from the grass and the shrubs around his veranda, and an iridescent cloud of doctor birds weaved and darted about the hibiscus; it grew abundantly from a large stone pot on the porch and its mass of flowers flopped like a soft magenta bedspread over the balustrade.
Truly, this is a remarkable place, thought Silas. He thought about Evie, his sister, thought about bringing her here, plucking her from the granite-grey North of England and dropping her into paradise. He thought about Hugh, bleating from Bristol about cutting their losses and bailing out. He thought about United Exotic Fruits and how he would sooner gouge out his own eyes than let them have the Whittam. Hugh was a decent man, but limited, hampered by his own narrow horizons. Silas, if anything, suffered from the reverse condition. He could see a day when the Whittam Hotel would rise to glory, in direct proportion to the Mountain Spring’s fall from grace. Indeed, he saw Whittam Hotels throughout the island, from Montego Bay to Spanish Town, offering sea views and casting elegant shadows across landscaped gardens while pouring profits into the company coffers. Granted, this image was hazy and distant, but the difficulty of achieving a goal had always increased its appeal to Silas rather than diminished it. He had begun life with no material advantages; he was his own living proof that anything was possible.
The screen door swung open and Justine edged out on to the porch once more. She carried a tray bearing a tumbler, a bucket of ice and a jug of her Martinique punch: white rum, cane syrup and lime – an infinitely superior cocktail, in Silas’s view, to the fruit-filled concoction the Jamaicans liked. She poured, and as she did so he watched her face, which was serious and steady, as if she dispensed communion wine. Her skin was a burnished blue-black and she wore a white scarf in her hair, tied with a flourish at the front, not at the back. She was young, still; that is, she wasn’t old. Henri was lined, and his hair was turning grey at the temples. But Justine had the soft, dewy skin of a purple plum. Silas wondered if she tasted as sweet, wondered if Henri had ever taken a bite.
‘Justine,’ he said.
She looked up, though her eyes settled just below his. You might think she was a blind woman, following sound, not sight. She had hoops in her ears: brass, Silas assumed, not gold.
‘Masser?’ she said, and immediately looked down again, at the tray.
Silas sat up, leaned forwards and cradled her chin in his hand, lifting it so that their eyes met. ‘Look at me, when you speak to me,’ he said. His hand remained there, cupping her chin and he wondered how it would go if he pulled her to him and took a taste for himself. But he shifted his hand and, with a quick flick of his fingers, dismissed her.
He would sip the punch to the music of the cicadas, he thought, then drive to Port Antonio and find himself a whore.
He saw Ruby and the boy as he weaved recklessly down Eden Hill in the gentleman’s roadster he’d recently had shipped from America. Silas was new to driving. At home in Bristol he shunned the motorcar as the root of all idleness, and whenever he travelled to Netherwood – he had a colliery there, as well as a sister – he took the train, since the rail network in industrial Yorkshire delivered him almost to the doorstep of the inn at which he liked to stay. But here, in Jamaica, he needed a vehicle. It was an hour’s walk from Sugar Hill to the Whittam, and an hour and a half’s uphill trudge back. At first, Henri had driven him about, and this had suited Silas’s vanity, as well as neatly sidestepping the small issue of his inability to handle a motorcar. But on occasions such as this one, when his destination was a harbour-front brothel, Silas had found it demeaning to have the car parked outside and the patient bulk of Henri waiting motionless at the wheel. Nothing was ever said when he returned, but the silence was thick with meaning: at least, Silas felt this, especially if he was back within the quarter-hour.
So, instructed by Henri and on the private tracks of his own land – if indeed they could be called private, with all his banana-pickers surreptitiously watching the show from under the brims of their straw hats – he had picked up the rudiments of driving, and was beginning to look ever more comfortable at the task. This hill, though, this precipitate slope, which must be navigated between his home and his destination, seemed often to fox him; between braking speed and changing gear, he sometimes forgot to steer, and with four tumblers of Martinique punch inside him, he always did. Ruby watched his progress, and all her face was a sneer.
‘Cha! Drunk,’ she said.
‘Pie-eyed,’ said Roscoe, who listened closely to the English guests at the Whittam Hotel. He laughed. ‘Drunk as a skunk.’
The motorcar wended its way towards them, filling the road with its meanderings. In the driving seat Silas reclined like a man in a deck chair, and he held the wheel with one hand only. He was yawning, and his eyes were closed.
‘Roscoe!’ Ruby shouted as the Ford Model K seemed to pick up speed just as it ought to have been slowing. She saw them both, mother and son, flattened in the road by this fool-fool Englishman; she seized Roscoe’s arm and pulled him backwards, so that the boy fell smack on his backside in a patch of ram-goat roses. Silas, eyes open again, saw at last that he didn’t have the road to himself, and to Ruby’s utter dismay he came to an untidy halt and clambered out.
‘Well I never,’ he said. The roadster was skewed at an angle across the lane, and he leaned on it with one hand, to steady himself. ‘Ruby Donaldson and her fine young son.’
She set her mouth into a hard line and walked on, saying, ‘Come along Roscoe,’ though he was still sprawled among the flowers and in no position to follow her. Silas picked an unsteady path over to the boy and held out his hand. Roscoe took it.
‘There,’ Silas said, pulling him up. ‘A helping hand. Who doesn’t need one from time to time?’
He turned to look at Ruby, but slowly, because his head felt heavy with the effects of the rum. ‘Mmm? Don’t all of us need a helping hand?’
‘Roscoe. Come.’
There was something like fear in her eyes and Roscoe didn’t know why, since his mother was afraid of no one. He said, ‘Thank you Mr Silas,’ and moved away from him, towards Ruby.
‘How’s school, boy? How’s your studies?’
‘Very good, thank you, Mr Silas.’
‘You a bright bo
y?’
Roscoe, puzzled at the attention, nodded his head very minimally, torn between truthfulness and humility.
‘I say, Ruby,’ Silas said, in a pointed way that was hard to ignore. They were already walking away from him, but she stopped and turned. ‘He’s very light, isn’t he?’ His smile called to mind a crocodile, she thought. She let his question hang in the humid air, took Roscoe by the hand, and marched away. She was so brisk that the boy struggled to keep pace.
‘Ruby,’ he said, ‘did he mean I’m not very heavy, or did he mean I’m not very dark?’
‘Hush, child,’ Ruby said.
‘But which?’
She knew he would demand an answer, would keep asking until one came. ‘I expect, as he’d just pulled you to your feet, he meant light as a feather.’ She was just ahead of him still so he couldn’t see her eyes, which was a shame, because they always told the truth.
‘I am light-skinned, though Ruby, aren’t I? Because my daddy was a white man.’
Ruby stopped and turned to her son. Silas was out of earshot and, anyway, he was cursing his starting handle.
‘You are who you are,’ she said. ‘You are Roscoe Donaldson, and there’s no one else in the wide world like you.’
‘And you’re Ruby Donaldson, and there’s no one in the wide world like you either.’
‘Exactly so.’
‘But it’s a good thing, Ruby? That I’m light brown?’
She crouched, now, so that their faces were level. He waited with serious eyes for her answer.
‘It’s of no account whatsoever,’ she said evenly. ‘All that matters is what you feel here,’ – she touched his chest – ‘and what you know here,’ and she laid a hand on his head. ‘Fill your heart and your head with good things, and the colour of your skin will be the very least important thing about you.’
Behind them, the gleaming red roadster sprang noisily into life. Ruby and Roscoe, smiling at each other, barely heard it.
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