The Bigger Light

by Austin Clarke

  “So, what are you studying, man?”

  “Law.”

  “I going tell you something. The day you hang up that shingle, call me. Call Boysie Cumberbatch. I am going to give you your first job.”

  “Brief,” the young man said.

  “Brief?”

  “Brief is the word for it.”

  The atmosphere was less tense now. The young man saw a friend in Boysie, perhaps his only friend in the room. He also felt some pity for Dots. He understood what she was doing to Boysie through her vulgarity. And he tried to put all this in perspective, taking Bernice into the picture too. Bernice was proud of him, he knew that. He very often had to restrain her from spending her money on him. He knew the function he performed in her life and to her body. But in a way, which he could not help thinking would take away from the lustre and the freedom of his relationship with her, he felt it was an obscene relationship: he, a young law student, completely broke, and only twenty-six, as the boyfriend, the lover, the man of this woman in her early fifties, or late forties, with a body of a twenty-five-year-old woman, but with the frustrations and the depressions of a woman who had gone beyond that stage of life, when her body itself was cautioning some pause in sensual and sexual activities. Deep down, he loved Bernice. He would continue to love her, for the duration of his penury, and even after he had graduated; even after he had married another woman, which he knew he would do: there was no question about it. Sometimes, however, he hated her because she was old. And she loved him. He looked at Dots, and could not make up his mind whether he loved her, too. But he knew he would readily take her to bed.

  “Aren’t you drinking, Mr. Cumberbatch?”

  “Oh yeah, man!” Boysie did not realize before this that his wife had not made him a drink. Dots did not apologise for the oversight: perhaps it wasn’t an oversight at all. So Boysie got up: “What’s that you have there?”

  “Rum and Coke, I think.” Dots liked rum and Coke. And so did Bernice, sometimes.

  “What about Scotch?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Come, man, let’s do some serious drinking.” He got up and went to fix their drinks.

  “Bernice told me that you have very good records and a good record player, with a nice tone, so if you don’t mind, I’ve brought along some sides …”

  “Sides?”

  “Records.”

  “Christ!”

  “… you don’t mind, eh?”

  “What kind o’ records you bring?” Dots asked him. The situation was getting completely out of her control, and she wanted to do something about regaining her position in her house. “Boysie don’t listen to every kind o’ music these days, yuh know.” She was talking now as she used to talk. Free, easy, and in her Barbadian language. She knew she could gain the upper hand among them. “Boysie only plays one record. One record. You would think that something was wrong with his head. Bernice, gal, my husband plays one, one record these days. And it isn’t no calypso, neither!”

  “Now, that’s strange! Very strange!” The young man sipped his Scotch, liked its strength, and continued. “Very often, I find myself listening to only one record out of all that I might have been listening to before. And I find, personally, that it depends upon a certain mood. I even gave away a box of classical records once, when I was in third-year economics at the University of Toronto, and a week later, as I was crossing the campus, I heard a piece of music that I used to listen to every Sunday morning, instead of going to chapel … ahhmmm, it was the New World Symphony, I heard the New World Symphony being played on a record player in the women’s residence as I was passing it, and you know, Mr. Cumberbatch, I stood up for a while listening, and the thing hit me in a certain way, and I could then understand what that piece of music meant.” He paused to take another sip of his drink. He held the napkin which Boysie had given him with the drink in the same hand as the drink, at the bottom of the glass. Bernice was listening very attentively and with more pride than she had shown earlier; and Dots was bending over to catch each word. But the impression on her face seemed to suggest that she was waiting to catch him on something. “I mention the name of the music because I had been going through a period. You know, depressions and things like that. No money, no possibility of any, either, and my finals just around the corner. And I had been listening to classical music all the time. Nothing but this kind of heavy music. The other fellows used to laugh at me, and call me white man. And in my state, that got to me. And I woke up one morning and said, You know something? They must be right. And I must be wrong. What is a West Indian, a Jamaican whose father didn’t even reach Fourth Standard in the elementary system back home, whose father didn’t know how to spell university, what am I doing up here listening to classical music, and so on and so on. You see, and I ought to mention it, it was during the period when the blacks in the States first started talking about Black Pride, when even in Jamaica we were beginning to understand the meaning of our local music, you remember? The Ska. Well, I gave away all my classical albums. But I was saying. I stood up that afternoon and listened for a while to the New World Symphony, and then at the window that the music was coming out of, through which the music was coming, there appeared this West Indian girl. Shhhiit!” He immediately apologised for using the word, and added, “Shoot! A West Indian girl. Well, when I got to know who she was, I found out that she was studying classical music at the Royal Conservatory here. You see what I mean?”

  “Go on, talk.”

  “Talk, boy,” Bernice said, somewhat unnecessarily, enraptured by the cleverness of her young man. He had every intention of talking more. “Take yuh time and talk.” And with pride, she turned to Dots, who was still holding over, and she said, “You see the brains that this boy have? This boy is going to make the most smartest lawyer in this country.”

  “What did I begin telling you about?”

  “You was talking ’bout playing only one record,” Dots said.

  “Oh yes! So you see, Mr. Cumberbatch, it is nothing strange that a man plays one record all the time. I remember playing a song by Sarah Vaughan day after day until I had to buy three more albums just so I won’t wear out …”

  “What song? What classical song did you play when you played only that one piece o’ music?”

  “Something from Wagner.” Boysie was disappointed that it was not one of his favourites. The young man seemed so capable of calling all these strange names without making them seem strange. He was capable of talking in a powerful way, so it occurred to Boysie, without making much effort. This, Boysie surmised, must then be the meaning of language. And education. The kind of education they give you in universities, he concluded, must be a rather strange thing, because it made you able to choose tit from tat, just as this young man was doing, with no effort at all. “And what is the piece you listen to, to which you listen, Mr. Cumberbatch?”

  “Floes and floes and floes,” Dots said. “Boysie does only listen to floes and floes.”

  “Better than that,” Boysie said. “I going put it on for you now.” Before he reached the record player, the cat which had been hiding all afternoon emerged from the bedroom and came to Dots and rubbed its body against her legs. You goddamn cat, Boysie said to himself.

  “He still living, eh?”

  “Yes, Bernice, girl. This is all I have to keep me company when the nights come.”

  “You feeding it good? Giving it the Pampers cat food that I brought you from the place I works?”

  “Meeeeoooooooowwwwwww!”

  “Wha’ kind o’ breed o’ cat you say this cat is?”

  “Sia-sia-something or other,” Bernice said.

  “Meeeeeeese!” her young man told her. “Sia-mese.”

  “It is a Siamese cat, Dots. You didn’t know that?”

  “Child, without this Siamese cat, my nights would be lonely.”

  Floes and floes of angel’s hair, and ice cream castles in the air, feathered canyons everywhere, I look at
clouds that way … The young man was engrossed in the song. When it was over, he took a sip of his drink and beamed.

  “I know now what you mean, Mr. Cumberbatch. This song is by a white singer, right? Now, I never heard it before, but I know by her voice, I don’t mean the way her voice is, but by the timbre in her voice that she is white, and there is a sadness in the song …”

  “That’s what I tell Boysie!”

  “… so that if you were listening to songs by Aretha Franklin or Nina Simone, well … you know what I mean?”

  “Is that what it is, boy? Be-Christ, gimme the black singers, any day!” Dots continued.

  “I do not mean that she is a bad singer because she is white, she is a very good singer, and her rendition is brilliant, but you are talking about the aspect of culture and background and social context, which are all mixed up in the song, and it is a different perspective from that of a man who lives in a ghetto, if you see what I mean?”

  “Man, don’t say no more!” Boysie felt he had an ally. He did not understand exactly what the young man had said, but he understood enough of the language and its sound to give him confidence in playing the song again, alone. “Man, look, don’t talk no blasted more, man! Man, you don’t have to tell me no more. You hit the nail on the fucking head!” He felt he could afford to be expansive in his own house, and with his new friend.

  “Good!” said the young man, as Boysie selected now a calypso by the Mighty Sparrow. This was one of the records the young man had brought with him. This changed the atmosphere in the room to one of ease and a little joy. Dots eventually got up and went into the kitchen. Bernice followed her.

  “Let me treat you this time.”

  “Treat me? To what?”

  “Don’t worry yourself to cook.”

  “Well, what we going eat, then? I know my duty is to cook and to wash and to clean. You don’t want me to look after my duty? Tha’s all I am worth. You don’t know that? And I don’t have no young man to make me feel young and as if I am somebody.” Bernice wondered whether she could be heard in the other room. “You all right, girl. I’s a married woman,” Dots continued; and it sounded very bitter to Bernice. “I past the young-men’s stage!” She passed her hand to her cheek, and when she took it away, Bernice saw the tears. Her eyes were red, too. “I have every convenience. The rent gets paid every month on time. Food, as you see,” she said, opening the refrigerator, “is always in this house. Drinks. A job. Everything. But what the fuck do I have, after all?”

  “Dots, you don’t mean to tell me, you don’t mean to tell me that you are really unhappy, or jealous …”

  “Who, me? Of you? Looka, don’t make me laugh!”

  “Let we send out for something to eat. Let the men go out and bring in something to eat.” Dots nodded, as she wiped her eyes. “Lew, darling, here’s twenty dollars. Go and buy some chicken or Chinese food, or.”

  “Chicken?”

  “What about Chinese food?” Boysie suggested.

  “Chinese or chicken!”

  … he gi’e the donkey first, second and third, and then tell Lion flat, if you was the king o’ the beasts, you’d be toting that!

  The young man got up a bit groggily, put down his glass after he had drained it, and prepared to go with Boysie. Boysie went into the bedroom, made sure he had the small leather case with the keys for the new car, and came out to leave. The moment they were through the door, Dots began to talk to Bernice … Who tell them to let Monkey judge? Monkey have an old personal grudge, since the days they make him bring water … “Sometimes, Bernice, I wish I was right back in the domestic system.”

  “What would make you wish such a judgement on yourself?”

  Dots turned on the tap, and as the water filled the sink with the breakfast dishes, she held her hand in the water, testing its heat and the amount of detergent in it. She held her hands in the sink for a long time, as she was talking, and she did not look at Bernice. “When I was in the domestic scheme, you know, things were a lot better. I had Boysie under control then. I uses to worry about him running after the Canadian girls, and spending my money on gambling with Henry … may he rest in peace!” She made the sign of the cross on her chest, all the while the suds dropping down on her dress front. She allowed them to remain there, and eventually they burst. “I uses to be so jealous. And so vexed. You know what I talking ’bout? Me, making the little money which I thought was the end of the world. And Boysie spending it on women. I was jealous, but I was in control. And in a strange way, I had some love for him.” She began to wash the dishes. “But now, with Boysie making all this money. And feeling free … you want to know something? Boysie doesn’t even ask me now for a dollar for cigarettes! Not even for that. I mean, Bernice, a man could be working for the most money in the world, and his wife could be working too, and there must come a time when one or the other o’ them must be broke and don’t have a dime to save their soul. And one would have to ask the next one for a loan. You see what I mean? You must. You uses to ask me for streetcar fare, when you worked for the Burrmanns and I for the Hunters. Or I would ask you for taxi fare. It seems we was always broke. But there was money. And we thought that money could buy everything under this sun. Including happiness. And a man! Now Boysie is so independent! So independent, Bernice. I do not even have the power over him to tell him that the rent ain’ paid, that there ain’ no groceries in the house. And he has never ask me for a dollar since he start that cleaning business. I don’t even have that chance to get vex as hell with Boysie, and refuse to lend him that dollar bill, so that maybe he might be forced to treat me different, or behave different from the way he might be behaving, or …” The cat was rubbing itself against her leg. “This cat. Did I feed this cat since you come? Cat-catty-catty-cat!” Bernice nodded. “Child, I am getting so absent-minded and forgetful! And at my age?”

  “Well, yuh know, Dots, women our age have to make the most outta life. You see Llewellyn there? He is my present insurance ’gainst going stark raving mad in this place. The older you get, the more lonely you get.”

  “He’s a good boy.”

  “I think so. You really think so?”

  “Gal, I just say so. I watched him as he come in here this afternoon, and at first he did look a bit nervous and cocky, as if he think we wasn’t going to approve o’ him and you. And all that talking ’bout listening to only one record, and calling me Mistress Cumberbatch. I hope he don’t think that I am out to get him in bed with me?”

  “God, Dots!”

  “ ’cause they is thousands o’ orderlies and intern-doctors at the hospital where I works! I only have to turn round to see how they does be looking at my backside when I pass. The lust in their eyes! And horny as hell. It seems that they only have to see my backside shaking before they don’t have a hard-on, Christ, child, heh-heh-heh.” She took her hands out of the detergent water. And she shook them into the sink. “There’s one. A orderly. From Trinidad. I think he say he come from there. He is after me, a woman my age. Like he is in heat. Half my age, you hear! Every blasted day I go to work, he have something to give me. A chocolate. A flower. A bouquet that he thief from some patient’s bedside. Some damn thing. He must greet me every morning with some gift. And the first two or three times that this bastard pushed that flower-bouquet in my face, and started grinning, I nearly spit in his blasted upstart face! I am a married woman. But after all a flower is a flower. And when a man gives a woman a flower, it takes a very hard-hearted woman not to notice. So, talking ’bout this thing ’bout being a woman of my age, I decide one afternoon to test this little force-ripe bastard. Child, he would have spend all his wages on me that afternoon. Good thing that the place he took me to, to have lunch, was only a half-dirty place where they sell patties.”

  “What happened, what happened? Dots, what happened?”

  “Nothing! Not one damn thing!” But she could feel that she did not fool Bernice. And so she had to add, “Nothing at all.”

  “Some
thing happened, something happened.”

  “Meeeoooooowwwwwwww!”

  “Cat-catty-catty-cat!” She took up the cat, and patted it, and put it down almost immediately. “I wish that this cat was a child. Bernice, I wish this blasted cat was a child. I need something to tie-down Boysie with. Having another man isn’ going to do it. And it isn’t going to prove nothing. I would just lose him by doing that. He might even kill me first! He just might!”

  “What is this you talking?” They were now like the two close friends of years ago: Bernice comforting Dots, and Dots comforting Bernice. In their earlier years of friendship, they had come together in such moments of confusion, and they had tried to talk the problem right into the open of greater understanding and humility. And now they were again close. “Something happened that afternoon when you went for lunch with orderly.”

  “How you know that?”

  “Because I am a woman.”

  “While crossing-over the street back to the hospital, and we was only in that dingy place for fifteen minutes at the most! … and the flies in that place, and in the middle o’ winter, too! … I don’t know. But I had to come straight home and look into Boysie’s clothes cupboard to make sure that the person I see wearing …”

  “Oh my God!”

  “… a grey three-piece suit …”

  “Boysie saw you?”

  “That is what I don’t know. I am not sure. Bernice, this isn’ a thing you could come right out and ask a man about. If he saw me in a place where I wasn’t suppose to be … I am not talking about unfaithfulness, in me, or in any other woman. I talking ’bout the disappointment. Well, even if it was a decent place, like the Park Plaza where my husband takes me, or the, the …”