Eden Falls

by Sanderson, Jane

  ‘We didn’t tie, it was a draw,’ Amos had said.

  ‘Is there a difference?’

  ‘I’ll say,’ he had replied, and while he explained the variety of possible outcomes of a cricket match, Anna had designed murals in her mind’s eye, then dozed off.

  She would miss her next turn on the tea rota, she had realised, as her train headed south towards Barnsley and beyond. She had smiled wickedly and wondered whose wife would step into the breach. None of them would find it the imposition that she had, she was sure. Outside, a gust of steam belched from the chimney and wrapped itself around the train, and for a moment the view was lost. Anna thought about the boilerman, wielding his shovel back and forth, feeding the hungry firebox with coal while she sat here in perfect comfort, in a carriage that was empty but for her, and warmed through by the sun. Its plush seats were the colour of port wine, and there were pleated curtains of the same, rich colour at the window, held back with brass clasps. Anna had cast an approving gaze around her, and wondered how she might occupy the carriage in such a way as to discourage anyone else from coming in. She spread her coat out on the opposite seat and brought her bag down from the luggage rack to put next to her, then she settled down again, stretched out her legs and allowed herself a few moments’ admiration of her new boots – cream leather, soft as butter, better suited to London than Ardington – before delving into her bag for a notebook, in which she started a list of everything she must accomplish before returning to Yorkshire.

  The following day, she met William at Charing Cross Station, and together they travelled to Kent. Lady Marcia de Lisle lived in a Jacobean manor house in the soft green countryside near Tunbridge Wells. By the recent standards of Anna’s commissions this was a modest property, with only five acres of grounds surrounding a house with no pediments or porticoes, no colonnades or cupolas. It was unimposing in the best possible way, which is to say it was a house one could imagine oneself living in and growing to love. It was a pinkish colour, which gave it the permanent appearance of standing in the light of the setting sun. The windows were of mullioned stone and there were red tiles on the roof. Its most remarkable feature was a grave old door, carved four hundred years ago from Kentish oak and so heavy and wide that another, smaller door had been cut into it for the practical purpose of coming and going.

  Anna only accepted commissions at places, and for people, she liked. This could be extremely awkward when, as sometimes happened, she walked away from a spluttering, titled lady of the house whose drawing room, or ballroom, or personality, fell short in some indefinable yet critical way. Marcia de Lisle had written to Anna in praise of her work at Houghton Hall in Derbyshire, where she and Clara had painted a Mediterranean citrus grove on the long dining-room wall. The illusion was startling; lemons and oranges bright against the green gloss of abundant leaves, the fruit heavy and ripe on their bowing branches. So Anna had journeyed down to Tunbridge Wells to meet Marcia, who was dark-haired and olive-skinned, and who told Anna that she had seen the painted citrus grove and wept because it reminded her of Spain, and her childhood. Her husband was away all week, working for the Colonial Office, and she had too many evenings on her own thinking about the bustle of family life in Seville. She had shown Anna into the dining room, but Anna shook her head sadly; too dark, and anyway, she made it a rule not to duplicate work in the homes of other clients.

  ‘Each piece is unique,’ she had said. ‘Houghton Hall, I’m afraid, get the lemons.’

  They had walked together around the ground floor of Ashdown Manor, and then had toured the upstairs rooms, looking for a place to paint. Marcia had felt panic rising in her Andalusian breast, plus a certain confusion at the artist’s scruples. Anna herself had been concerned that, lovely and personable though Lady de Lisle undoubtedly was, none of the rooms in her charming house quite lent themselves to the purpose. Then, from the window of an upper-floor dressing room, Anna had seen the summerhouse, a beautiful six-sided wooden building with a shingled roof and the mellow patina of great age. It seemed to be marooned in the centre of a pond, but in fact, when Marcia took her out there, Anna saw that there were two paths across the water, one on each side, made from duckboards hammered on to sturdy posts hidden in the weedy depths. The slatted wood appeared to float on the surface of the pond.

  ‘Here we are,’ Anna had said, as if it was hers, and Marcia was the guest. ‘Isn’t it perfect?’

  And Marcia, who had realised almost as soon as they met that this idiosyncratic woman was beyond her influence, had said, ‘I suppose it is, yes.’

  Now, inside the summerhouse, Anna stood and turned, very slowly, to absorb the impact of their work. It began with a dawn mist and would end with a wash of silver moonlight, the phases of the day shown through a panoramic painting of the de Lisles’ pretty garden, each of the six panels a continuation of the last, but each quite different in light and feeling. She was pleased. The panels, though entirely non-religious, gave the little building a holy air, like a tiny Renaissance chapel. Anna had designed it, drawn out the plans, sketched them on to the wooden walls and, with Clara, had got the project under way. But then she’d let Clara and William take over, so it was a while since she’d seen it. She looked at William, who stood beside her, waiting for her verdict.

  ‘It’s very fine,’ Anna said. ‘Really very fine.’

  William, relieved, smiled at her. ‘It is, isn’t it? Classic English pastoral.’

  ‘But it looks Italianate, too, doesn’t it? Like the Sistine Chapel. This blue distemper, it’s remarkable.’

  She touched the panel, completed weeks ago, showing the garden under the hot, clear blue sky of a summer noon.

  ‘Clara’s,’ William said loyally.

  Anna looked at him sadly. ‘We need a new Clara,’ she said.

  ‘I may have found one for you. She’s better at life drawing than landscape, but that’s what we need, I think.’

  ‘Good boy. Come. We’ll stop for tea.’ She put her arm through his and led him out of the summerhouse and on to the duckboards. He was only five years younger than she was but she treated him with a maternal air, to which he responded like a dutiful son. She patted his arm with her free hand and asked him who he had in mind, and he told her – Jennifer Hathersage, a third-year fine art student at the Slade, poor as a church mouse, rich in talent, easily the best of the women and possibly the best of the men – as they took a circuitous path back to the house where a small wing off the kitchen had been made available for their use.

  They stayed one night and two days at Ashdown Manor, then Anna left William with the cleaning and finishing and returned to Bedford Square. Marcia de Lisle had clasped Anna’s hands and breathed effusive thanks, promising to sing her praises far and wide. ‘Not too far, not too wide,’ Anna had said, alarmed. At this rate, she said to William, she would have to hire everyone at the Slade.

  She let herself into the house, took off her coat and hat in the quiet front hall and hung them on the empty stand. It was odd, being here alone: the small noises – the tock of the grandfather clock, the clip of her heels on the tiles – were hollow-sounding and amplified. All the post that she hadn’t had time to look at when she first got to London was heaped on the hall table, and there was a new batch on the floor. She picked it up and added it to the pile, which she carried through to the sitting room. There she sat in Amos’s armchair, to see if she could discover why he was so attached to it. Herself, she would have everyone sit anywhere, just as she would as happily sleep on the right-hand side of the bed as the left. Amos, though, was a man of dogged habits, and he was encouraged in them by Maya, who liked to plump up his cushions and declare his chair ready whenever he walked in from work. It was a decent-enough wing chair, but nothing out of the ordinary, Anna decided. However, she stayed where she was and began to shuffle through the envelopes, looking for somewhere to begin. All the letters for Amos she collected in a separate pile to take with her back to Ardington. All those for Anna Sykes Interiors she
placed on her lap, not yet in the mood to contemplate more work. And then she saw Eve’s left-sloping handwriting, in blue ink, on an envelope scuffed and scarred by its long voyage from Jamaica, and she let everything else fall to the floor.

  She tore at the seal with a pounding heart. For no very good reason she felt certain that the letter contained bad news, and she wondered if Daniel’s concerns, irrational though they had seemed, had perhaps stolen into her own consciousness, so that where she had previously imagined Eve in an adventure lit with permanent sunshine, now some indefinable darkness played at the fringes of the picture.

  ‘My dearest Anna, she read, ‘Well, the Whittam is now the Eden Falls Hotel, I’ve learned how to make curry goat with rice and peas (though the peas are not peas, but kidney beans) and Angus is learning how to swim…’

  Anna smiled, and breathed a long sigh of relief. She read on:

  I wish you were here with us, in this remarkable place. Jamaica is so beautiful, Anna! The colours are so vivid, and the weather extreme. The midday heat hits you like the slam of air when you open the door of the top oven on the range. The rain, when it comes, soaks you as thoroughly as if you stood in a water butt under a downspout. The winds – I’m told – can lift a building off a hill, and carry it away through the skies. All being well, we’ll be home before the hurricane season, because if a house can be swept off I’m fairly certain an Angus can be too! It’s hard enough to keep an eye on him, without fretting about the wind whisking him away too.

  Now Anna shifted in the chair, and curled her legs beneath her like a contented cat. She could hear Eve’s voice, as clearly as if she were in the room.

  At the hotel, it’s all go. Silas isn’t happy, because I’ve made him change the name to the Eden Falls Hotel, and he likes to see Whittam written on the things he owns. But with the help of the Jamaican staff I’m turning this place into a Jamaican hotel, rather than an English hotel in Jamaica. Heaven knows what our guests are going to make of it when the transformation is complete. Ruby – you’d like her; she’s the cook here, and finally I can call her a friend – says we should ply them with rum from the moment they arrive, and I believe she may have a point. Or perhaps Ruby and I should have the rum, and then we shan’t care what the guests think!

  Ruby, thought Anna: who are you? She looked up from the letter, and tamped down a small flash of childish envy that Eve’s adventure was being shared with a friend other than herself. She looked down at the letter again. There were three more pages of writing paper, and both sides of each were filled. She shivered with anticipated pleasure and gratitude, and then she dived back in.

  Chapter 32

  The first guests to arrive at the Eden Falls Hotel had of course booked to stay at the Whittam, so they all had to be briefed by Eve in the charabanc on the way from the port. She had explained to them, brightly and with no suggestion of apology, that they were privileged to be on the brink of a new adventure at this English-owned hotel, which aimed to celebrate all things Jamaican. Their comfort would remain paramount, but many things would be unfamiliar. The staff, the food, the decor – all would reflect the vibrancy and colour of this tropical island.

  ‘If the staff seem a little informal,’ Eve had told them, ‘it’s only because it’s their way. If you’re looking for a starchy doorman, you’ll be disappointed. If you snap your fingers at a waitress, she’ll probably ignore you. But a smile and a “please” will get you everything you wish for. There’s no formal English service at dinner because it’s not t’Jamaican way. But I think – in fact, I know – that what you’ll find at t’Eden Falls Hotel is something far more memorable, and entirely unique.’

  Still, when they arrived and the guests stepped down from the running board of the bus, they looked about with trepidation, as if they’d been told there were savages with poison-tipped spears. There was something inherently and comfortably English about the name Whittam; something familiar and dependable and, after all, it was also the name on the liner that had carried them over the sea. Eden Falls, on the other hand … perhaps it alluded to man’s expulsion from paradise, said one gentleman, quietly, to his wife, who blushed at the suggestion of sin.

  But their qualms evaporated in the Jamaican sun and their inhibitions, met with exuberance, were quickly vanquished. Rather than an indifferent version of their own gracious homes, the Eden Falls Hotel presented them with something quite different. There was Scotty on the top terrace, in a clean shirt and shorts, playing the guests into the hotel with jangling riffs on his old banjo, accompanied by Wendell shaking a dried calabash filled with seeds. Jamaican punch came out on rattan trays, in glasses half filled with crushed ice. The cold of it, chased by the heady warmth of the rum, made people gasp and smile. Little plates of sweetmeats, unimaginably exotic to the English palate, were passed around the gathering: guava doasie, tamarind balls, coconut drops. They were roughly made, in the country style, and heaped in bowls in bountiful quantities, so that they begged to be tasted and sighed over, and tried again, then washed down with more head-cooling, belly-warming punch.

  Laughter bubbled and brewed and floated out through the jalousies and into the hot, damp air. The staff, some of them new, drawn by the promise of a different ethos, still moved languidly about their business, but they smiled as they went and nodded at the guests; the atmosphere was of harmony, not mutiny. The Constables and the Gainsboroughs were still on the walls, and poppies and peonies still bowed their heads sullenly in the borders, but it was early days: one step at a time.

  Eve watched from a distance. There were two new girls, Precious and Patience, circulating with icy pitchers of punch. They were summer leavers from Port Antonio School, the memory of scripture lessons still ringing in their ears, and they carried the rum punch reverently and poured it with infinite care. They wore name badges to discourage anyone from calling them ‘girl’. Everyone had badges now, first names only, and it had become a game among some of the new wide-eyed guests, to lean tipsily forwards and read aloud what they saw.

  ‘Rrrrrrruby,’ said a tall, foppish man with a blond fringe, who peered at her badge through a monocle. ‘Jolly good name for a gem of a woman, ha!’ Pleased with his flattery, he rocked on his heels and looked around, hoping vaguely for praise.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ruby said. ‘It is. Tamarind ball?’

  It sounded a little like a threat, and he hastily declined. Ruby crossed the room to Eve and said, ‘These badges encourage the gentlemen to take liberties.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘They encourage them to be too familiar.’ Ruby puffed out her chest and gave a creditable imitation of her admirer: ‘Jolly good name for a gem of a woman.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Eve said, smiling. ‘That sounds ’armless enough. Quite nice, even.’

  ‘One thing can lead to another.’

  ‘Ruby,’ said Eve, ‘I think you’re looking for things to complain about.’

  Ruby considered this, and thought it might be true. She had fallen into the habit of finding fault, and perhaps, in the absence of real grievances, she was inventing false ones. Already Eve had managed a miracle; there were callaloo fritters and jerk chicken on the menu of Silas Whittam’s hotel. Callaloo fritters, jerk chicken, turtle stew, boiled crabs, curry goat, fried plantain … all the food of Ruby’s childhood, cooked as her own mother had cooked it, in the duchy pot and over a flame, and even – this truly was remarkable – over a smouldering pit of pimento wood in the garden. The dining-room tables were decorated with small vases of poinciana and jacaranda flowers, and where there had once been starched white linen on the tables there were now humble tablecloths of printed cotton, bought for a song from Musgrave Market.

  Ruby said, ‘Perhaps so.’ She studied Eve’s face for a moment and said, ‘You look weary.’

  ‘I am,’ Eve replied. ‘I could lie down right now and sleep.’

  ‘You should rest. I can manage tonight’s dinner.’

  Eve laughed. ‘I should say you can. You could do
it all blindfolded. You don’t need me any more.’

  Ruby regarded her, as if weighing things up. ‘Need, perhaps not. But I do prefer it when you’re in the kitchen.’

  ‘Why, thank you.’

  ‘You’re most welcome.’

  They both laughed, but Eve had blue shadows under her eyes and Ruby felt a twist of concern. Life at the hotel had taken a sharp turn for the better, but they’d been run ragged to achieve it. When the new name went up, each letter picked out in green on a board painted as blue as the Caribbean Sea, Ruby had felt a rush of fierce gratitude to Eve that she hadn’t expressed, except in her smile. But she knew what they owed her, for showing Silas Whittam how to honour the island he seemed to think he owned. It struck Ruby that Eve would be going, perhaps sooner than planned. You don’t need me any more, she’d said, and Ruby found it pained her to think of Eve and Angus gone from Jamaica.