by Sharon Maas
‘Not a terribly ladylike occupation, I dare say,’ she replied. ‘Jane, dear, I do congratulate you on your beef. Your cook is a pearl. May I steal her from you?’
‘Certainly not!’ laughed Aunt Jane.
‘And you taught yourself the Morse Code, you say?’ said Mr Courtney, across the table from me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Someone gave me a leaflet with the code and I practised and practised until I could do it.’
‘Goodness gracious! Why ever would it even occur to you to do such a thing?’ Mrs Courtney wrinkled her nose as she spoke. I shrugged.
‘I had a lot of time on my hands on the plantation. I was bored, I suppose. But it’s also terribly interesting. Like learning a new language. I’m good at languages.’
‘Winnie’s quite the little linguist,’ put in Aunt Jane. ‘She achieved top marks in French in her School Certificate, and she’s fluent in German. Bilingual, in fact. Her mother’s Austrian and the two of them used to chatter away in German.’
‘Austrian! Well, that’s not a very nice thing to be in this day and age, is it, Henry? Or German, for that matter. Henry’s always going on about those dangerous Huns. He’s convinced there’s going to be a war.’
‘Take my word for it,’ said Mr Courtney. ‘War is inevitable. My prediction: give it another year. Two at the most.’
‘That’s the reason we’ve persuaded Thomas to come back home,’ said Mrs Courtney to Aunt Jane.
Aunt Jane looked at me. ‘Thomas is their son,’ she explained. ‘Their second son. He’s just finished his Law studies in London . A lovely boy.’
‘We’re very proud of him,’ said Mrs Courtney. ‘Of course, he could have had a far better career in London. He would have ended up in Whitehall, I should think. But London isn’t a safe place at the moment. Come home, we told him. Come home until the war’s over, at least.’
‘I think he should settle here,’ said Mr Courtney. ‘He can have quite a brisk business in Bridgetown. Who wouldn’t want to live in Barbados?’
‘He can’t have the plantation, of course. That goes to Richard. But we’re going to give him the Sunset Bay property. The beach there is perfectly delightful, and near enough to Bridgetown for him to travel to town quite easily for work.’
‘I’m sorry to hear Miss Cartwright broke off her engagement,’ said Aunt Jane. She threw me a significant look. I had long caught on to her tactics. This was not the first eligible young man she had manoeuvred into conversation in the three weeks I’d been here. I had even met one or two of them – Barbadian versions of the spoilt brats of the senior staff compound.
Mrs Courtney snorted. ‘I’m not sorry at all. The truth will out – that young lady was a fortune hunter right down to the tips of her toenails. The moment she found a better prospect, off she trotted. The Governor’s son, no less. A pompous fool twice her age.’
Aunt Jane smiled brightly at me. ‘You must all come to dinner with Thomas once he’s back, and you too, Winnie. It’s time you met some young people your own age.’
Mrs Courtney grasped what Aunt Jane was hinting at. She swung around to stare at me again.
‘I really don’t understand why a girl like you needs to work, Winnie. A telegraph operator – my word! You say her father owns a British Guiana plantation?’ She turned to Aunt Jane to ask the question, who nodded in reply.
‘One of the last privately owned ones. You must have heard of him – the Honourable Archie Cox, second son of Lord Cox of Camberley?’
Mrs Courtney grew quite flustered. ‘Oh – oh really? Oh, how very interesting! Very interesting indeed! And you say, dear …’ she turned to me again, and in a much more affable tone of voice, ‘I suppose that this Morse Code business is really a sort of hobby? You’re not working because you have to – but just as a sort of pastime?’
And so it continued. I fled the table as soon as I could do so politely, and vowed never to dine with the Courtneys again, Thomas or no Thomas.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I had lived 18 years on earth without ever having had a best friend. A real best friend, not a bossyboots of a younger sister, and Emily Stewart didn’t count, being an only rather than a best friend. The moment I met Sibille Hart I knew what I’d been missing.
She was in our room when I returned from my first day at work, exhausted but contented.
She was sitting before the vanity mirror, unplaiting her hair, and swung around as I entered. She sprang to her feet; tall, thin, gawky, she stood there with one plait hanging over her shoulder and the other half-undone, ending in a copper fan of frizz. Her face was perfectly oval, its silky sapodilla-brown skin splattered with freckles. Big brown eyes, and a smile so wide and welcoming I could not but return it.
‘Hello! You’re Winnie! I’m Sibille!’
She stretched out a hand and came towards me; I took that hand and met her eyes and smiled back. I had no choice but to embrace her; it was involuntary, two pairs of arms opening up to each other. It was like meeting a long-lost sister. She spoke easily and freely, in a clipped up-and-down Barbadian accent and a rich dark voice. Soon I was helping to brush out her hair. That hair! A glorious mane that sprang outwards as if alive to frame her face. I loved it; it drove her to the edge of insanity.
‘I got to comb it twice a day!’ she complained, ‘evenin’ an’ mornin’, mornin’ an’ evenin’, nicht an’ day. I don’t know why I don’t jus’ cut the whole thing off. Run around like a boy.’
‘Oh, no! It’s beautiful!’ I said, pulling a brush through it. ‘You should just wear it loose, like this.’
‘Eh-heh, and then they throw me in the loony-bin,’ she replied. ‘An’ you know how much it tangle if it loose? Nah. Got to tie it down. You plait that side, I plait this.’
Later, we went down to the kitchen and she cooked me a meal. She had bought a fish on her way home from work.
‘Is enough for two,’ she said as she cleaned it.
‘What can I do?’ I asked.
‘You can fry them plantain. And boil the rice.’
‘Oh – yes, of course – ah – how do I do it?’
‘You never fry a plantain before? Never boil rice?’
I shook my head. ‘I can peel the plantain I suppose; just like a banana. But then?’
She left the fish and moved over to me and showed me what to do. Cut a slice of plantain to show me the width, and measured out the water for the rice.
‘The rice don’t need pickin’,’ she said. ‘I always pick it on Sunday for the whole week. Just rinse it out and throw it in the water once it boil.’
We ate on the back veranda. Other young women had joined us in the kitchen, cooking their own meals, laughing and joking together and discussing their day. Their initial formality towards me soon melted; they seemed to sense my reticence was shyness rather than conceit. They reached out to me, asked me questions, told me about themselves: Janette, a clerk in the Ministry of Health. Babsy, a nurse. Antoinette, a secretary in a shipping company.
Sibille herself was a primary school teacher. I told her of my efforts to find a teaching job, and she laughed.
‘You’re not going to find any violin pupils in the local schools,’ she said. ‘Where the parents going to find money to buy the instruments? You would need to find private English pupils.’
She squinted at me. ‘Violin. My, my! You must come from some high-class family. So what you doing working, living in a house full a coloured girls? You parents throw you out, or what?’
And so, later, as we lay in bed, I told her my story. It came out easily, but not necessarily in sequence, for Sibille listened carefully and with both ears, and asked questions; questions that made me jump back and forth in my story, to Mama, and Yoyo, and the Indian problem, and Uncle Jim, and Aunt Dolly. To Bhim and the strikes and riots, and my conflict with Papa. But most of all I told her about George. George was the golden thread that held my story together. George was the beginning and the middle and the end of my story. George was everyt
hing.
‘You got it bad, girl!’ she said at one point.
‘Have you ever been in love, Sibille?’
She nodded. ‘Sure. I still am. In fact, I’m engaged to be married!’
‘Oh!’ I glanced at her hands, those long slim fingers that would have looked beautiful on the keys of a piano or holding a paintbrush.
‘No ring,’ she laughed. ‘Actually, it’s a secret engagement. Because my parents wouldn’t be too pleased.’
‘Why not? What’s wrong with him?’
‘Nothin’. Nothin’ at all. Everythin’s right. But he got the wrong job. He’s a house-painter by day, an artist by night. My parents wanted something better for me. A senior civil servant, or a businessman. Good coloured middle class, preferably light-skinned. Not black like my Max.’
‘Oh!’ I said again.
‘See, not only you white people is racist. We’s racist too. We got it ingrained in we heads that white skin better, white skin more beautiful, white skin more valuable. We girls got to marry up, into white skin. We can’t marry down. So basically, I got the same problem as you. But you got it worse, of course. Much worse.’
‘But if you’re actually engaged to him it means that you believe, like me, that we can get over it. We can overcome the prejudice and marry the man we love!’
If I was hoping for encouragement from her, I was to be disappointed. She shook her head.
‘Is different between you and me, Winnie. See, once I’m married and settled and once Max and I manage to get recognition for his painting – and he will get it one day, because he’s good, really, really good – my parents will come around. I’m not really marrying outside my class, outside my clan. Max’s parents are poor, but he’s intelligent and had a good education and all he wants to do is be an artist. When he finally finds recognition he’ll end up middle-class, like me.
‘See – my parents ain’t got no reason to be high-and-mighty. Their parents were poor, and struggled, to give them a better life. He’s just a generation behind, that’s all. As for me being brown, he black: all it means is that in my family some poor slave-gals got raped by some arse of white slave-drivers. I don’t see that’s something to be proud of. So you see, between me and he is not too much difference. All my family got to overcome is a bit of snobbishness, a bit of artificial pride, a bit of prejudice. When I get my first baby all of that going to vanish like mist.
‘You, though. That’s a different story. That’s like – like trying to span the Atlantic with a piece of string. The gap too wide. Your people will never, ever accept your George. Never. You and you babies going to be outcasts. You got to make that clear in your mind.’
I shook my head in defiance. ‘I don’t care. We love each other. That’s enough.’
‘Love! Hah! A bit of emotion. You think that’s really enough? Chile, you don’t got no idea what you lettin’ youself in for. Sounds to me that he got a better idea than you. That’s why you is the one runnin’ after he, when he should be the one courtin’ you. He knows you can’t manage. This thing too big for you, girl.’
‘No! I …’
But she wouldn’t let me have my say. ‘You say he keep tellin’ you it can’t work, it can’t work, it can’t work. Why you don’t listen to him? For once? What you don’t understand is this: if you marry George, you ain’t just marrying one man. You marrying his people, his people’s past, his whole history. You marrying one huge burden. You jus’ ain’t got the shoulders for it.’
‘How can you tell that? You don’t know me!’
She chuckled, and picked up my hand. ‘That’s how I know. This hand today cut a plantain for the very first time. It throw rice in a pot-a boilin’ water for the very first time. It never hold a mop. It never pluck a fowl.’
‘I did! I did pluck a fowl! And I caught it myself, too!’
‘Ha! Once! And you mighty proud of that one-time pluckin’, right?’’
She stroked the back of my hand, held it up, inspected it in the lamplight’s glow. ‘Soft, delicate, precious. That’s you. You can’t help you past, but you can’t live in George’s world with those hands.’
She chucked the hand back into my lap, and sucked her teeth. ‘Listen, girl: I giving’ you a piece of free advice: find some nice uncomplicated white Bajan boy and settle down here an’ forget George. That’s the best thing you could do. Everything else is looking for trouble. There ain’t going to be no happily ever after with Georgie-boy.’
‘And what if I’m carrying George’s baby?’ I patted my tummy. I hoped and hoped.
She stared at me, frowning.‘That’s a possibility?’
I nodded, smug in my anarchy, certain she’d be impressed.
She wasn’t. ‘Well, girl, you better get down on your knees and pray it ain’t so. Because if you think you got troubles now … ’She shook her head slowly in a blatant expression of utter disdain at my foolishness.
I wasn’t carrying George’s child, and I grew to be relieved. Over the next few weeks, Sibille took me in hand. She brought me into her circle of friends: an eclectic group of writers, artists, musicians, teachers, politicians, would-be revolutionaries, male and female, young and old. We met mostly at Oskar Greene’s big, rambling, slightly ramshackle house near the seafront; there he lived with his one-legged mother, his sister Viola, and his friend Ivan.
Oskar was in his early forties; he worked in one of the ministries, though I never found out which one, and wrote poetry in his spare time. As his mother was black as ebony, and he was light brown, I assumed his father – long deceased – had been white, and rich; whatever the case, Oskar was a lawyer, trained in London, and up to his ears in politics, and when the subject turned to politics it was Oskar who kept us all riveted.
It was Oskar who told me gave me some very interesting information. We had been talking about George, one evening. Oskar and Ivan and all my new friends, of course, knew the story of George; all were sympathetic, but basically pessimistic. But that night Oskar said, ‘You do know, don’t you, that it might be possible for you to be appointed a ward of court. Then you could possibly get permission to marry without your father’s permission.’
I sat up. ‘No, I didn’t know. What’s a ward of court?’
‘Well, put simply, it means you must prove to the court that you are mature enough to make your own decisions regarding marriage – which you obviously are, with a job and living on your own, earning your own keep. That you and your father are estranged. Which you are. In that case, the court can grant you permission to be married before you have reached maturity.’
I flushed with pleasure. ‘Really! No, I didn’t know that. Thanks, Oskar. I think that’s what I’ll do.’
‘Don’t rush back home, Winnie!’ Valerie, a colleague of Sibille’s warned. ‘Take your time.’
‘I will,’ I said.
‘We don’t want to lose you yet,’ said Johnnie, a journalist at the Barbados Star. ‘And anyway, why don’t you ask George to come here? We’d love to have him.’
‘And he could stay here, with us. We’ve lots of room,’ said Ivan. ‘Haven’t we dear?’
He looked at Oskar, who nodded, squeezed his hand, and smiled. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘He’s welcome.’
Ivan was sitting next to Oskar on a wicker settee on the sea-facing veranda. They were holding hands. Ivan was a tall, gangly, very handsome man who tried to make a living as a musician, but otherwise seemed to fill the role of housekeeper and cook to Oskar, and more.
‘Oskar and Ivan behave like a married couple,’ I said to Sibille one day. ‘Isn’t that strange?’
She only laughed and shrugged. ‘Not for them,’ is all she said.
It was Ivan who played the upright piano in Oskar’s living room, Ivan who sang the songs of his own composition that fuelled our parties, and Ivan who told ribald jokes that made me blush.
In an upstairs corner room Sibille’s fiancé, Max, had his studio. It seemed that Max, too, was sponsored by Oskar. Oskar bought
his paints and his canvasses, arranged his exhibitions, and managed his career. Max’s paintings were as wonderful as Sibille had said. He painted everyday scenes on enormous canvasses, his subjects almost – but not quite – in full height. A fisherman mending a net. Two market-woman arguing behind a stall of pineapples, one with her finger raised in admonishment, the other glaring back, arms akimbo. Boys playing cricket in a field of goats. Sibille was right: one day, Max DeVere would, must, find the recognition he deserved.
I listened and I learned and as the days and weeks crept by I relaxed into carefree, buoyant island living, a melange of gravity and nonchalance, hedonism and political fervour. My new-found friends were kind to me, yet at the same time distant. They accepted me, yet kept me at arm’s length. I was with them, yet apart from them. They loved me, but locked me out. And yet, slowly but surely, what felt like an invisible wall began to crumble. Gradually I morphed into another – into a truer, more genuine version of myself, the person I was meant to be. Not through an actual change of character, but through shedding one layer after the other of the person I had once been, to discover she who had always lived in the shadows. I loved it here. I felt at home. I even relaxed enough to adopt, just a little, the melodic Barbadian dialect they spoke among themselves.
Maybe, just maybe, Ivan was right: George and I could make our home here. He could come and join us, join this happy carefree community, free of the troubles and travails of British Guiana. Hope sent its rays through my being. My spirits lifted. I wrote to George to tell him of this new version of our future. ‘Come,’ I said to him. ‘Come to Barbados! We can make a life together here.’
And then came the letter that burst my little bubble of contentment. It was from Yoyo.
* * *
Dear Winnie,
I don’t know if the news has reached you over there, but Papa’s in great trouble. Do you remember that bother with the coolie who got killed? Well, it’s not going the way we thought; things are coming to a boil. For a start, Papa wasn’t able to convince the Police Chief in New Amsterdam that it was self-defence; it’s a new chap, who seemed to believe the coolies more than he does Papa! Can you believe it? They’re all denying it was self-defence. They say that the dead coolie was unarmed. So it’s Papa’s word against theirs – and Mr McInnes, of course, confirms that the fellow was attacking Papa with a cutlass. And so the matter was taken up in Georgetown and there have been all sorts of demonstrations and even riots, negroes and coolies picketing the Law Courts for ‘Justice’. And worst of all, they’ve put the case in the hands of a new Crown Prosecutor, a Mr Bhattacharya, and he’s an Indian! Can you imagine it! So of course he’s terribly biased against Papa and is out to get him. Papa was even in jail for a day or two but his friends got him released on bail. He’s now staying in Town at Government House. All our friends support us, of course. Everyone is horrified at the lies these coolies are spreading, just to make the whole thing political. The trial is in a few weeks time – in the New Year …