Honeyville

  ‘About four of us went out there,’ Max Eastman nodded. ‘The camp guards let us in without a fight.’

  ‘I’ll bet you didn’t get much information out of them.’

  ‘Nothing but lies,’ agreed Max. ‘We need to find some characters not so well primed in talking to the press. Don’t we Jack?’

  Jack Reed nodded sagely. ‘Some honest people,’ he said.

  ‘Well, the general’s men, who you will have found up there guarding the burned-up site today: they’ve been lying so long they can’t distinguish what’s truth any longer.’

  ‘That was clear enough,’ Jack said. ‘They were smooth as – whatever’s supposed to be smooth … Very, very smooth. It was creepy. Are you drinking? If you’re joining us, you have some catching up to do.’

  Lawrence shook his head. ‘Don’t want to interrupt your evening. I just wanted to say – here I am. Lawrence O’Neill, at your service. I’ve been with the Union these past five years and if there’s anything you need while you’re here in Trinidad, any information, introductions – just let me know. Leave a message for me here at the Toltec. Or at the Corinado. I’m staying at the Corinado.’

  ‘You moved?’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘Too crowded here. Otherwise you can get me at the Union. Where are y’all staying?’ And then, while they collected themselves to answer, he glanced down at Inez, whose shoulder must have felt the warmth of his body, standing so close behind her. He said: ‘Miss. You should put that away. Like the gentleman says – we have enough guns in this town already.’

  ‘Oh, you bet there are enough guns,’ Inez said. ‘You bet there are.’ She sounded angry, but only for a second, and then her lips curved into a smile and the moment was gone. Slowly, she put the little gun away. She didn’t look at Lawrence. She waited until her new friends had answered his question: most were staying here at the Toltec or at the Corinado, same as him. It was only thirty or so yards further down the hill. They invited him again to sit down but again he refused. He said it had been a bad day, and they discussed that for a while, and that he was turning in, and that he hoped to see them all again in the morning. And all the while his hand rested on the back of Inez’s chair, and it seemed to me that she leaned back, and it seemed as if his fingers were tangling softly with her hair. But I asked Xavier afterwards if he had noticed and he had not. He said I was probably drunker than I realized – which of course I was – and that my protective instinct, when it came to Inez, had led me to imagine things.

  There was a pause while the men (and the lady reporters) chewed on whatever solemn words they had most recently agreed upon. Inez broke the silence. She leaned forward, away from Lawrence, and announced to them all: ‘By the way, I have written a poem … It’s about today. And yesterday. And all the terrible things that are happening. And seeing as there are some terrific poets here this evening,’ she looked at Max, ‘I wondered if anyone would object to my reading it? Would anyone like to hear my poem?’

  At which point Lawrence smiled for the first time, and said: ‘I think I will head for bed.’

  And Max and Xavier and I groaned simultaneously.

  But she read it anyway. With a great show of literary passion; and I watched Max Eastman bite his lip and lower his head, and try his hardest not to snicker, or wince, or howl. And when it was over, Upton Sinclair said:

  ‘That, my dear, was quite possibly the worst poem I ever heard. I insist that you read it again!’

  And they all cheered, and chanted, ‘Again, again, again!’ And Inez giggled. She honestly didn’t care! As long as it was fun and everyone was smiling at her, and Max kept his hand on her elbow.

  Max said: ‘Inez, sweetheart, they’re being odious. But it’s only because they’re jealous.’ And then his face cracked into an almighty grin. ‘Upton, you’re an idiot. It’s the finest poem I’ve read this century!’

  And we ordered more liquor. And then we ordered more. And the more liquor we drank, the more remote the world outside appeared to us, and the more ludicrous and joyful Inez’s poem.

  For the strikers shall fight and they shall fall …

  Fight Freedom!

  And they will rise

  And they will call –

  Fight Freedom!

  ’Til all

  In America is fair

  And the wind in the trees blows freedom to our streets and all

  Good-Americans-take-care-and-pledge-forever-themselves-to-share …

  ‘Y’all wait and see,’ she said. ‘It’ll catch on!’

  It was growing light by the time we parted company, and for a little while the streets were quiet. Inez had sent a message home hours earlier, and informed her helpless aunt that she was staying the night with Xavier, and so the two of them set out to walk back to the cottage together. There were plans to meet up at the Toltec again the following evening.

  ‘Will you be able to join us tomorrow?’ Xavier asked.

  ‘You better had,’ said Inez. ‘I’ve been cooking up some important plans to aid Max in his work here, and I’m certain we’ll need your help.’ She stopped, just for a moment. ‘You look tired, darling,’ she said. ‘Will you be all right, walking home alone? Perhaps Xavie and I should walk you home together?’

  ‘Of course not!’ I said.

  But she insisted. They both insisted.

  So we walked together to Plum Street. For once, Inez stopped chattering, and it was wonderful. Peaceful. We walked together through the silent streets, lost in our own thoughts. My two good friends and I.

  27

  Inez was back at my door just four hours later. This time she didn’t wait in my parlour for me to appear. I opened my eyes, in my own bedroom, and there she was, staring down at me, and already talking. Her clothes were changed, but she obviously hadn’t slept.

  ‘Dora, wake up. For crying out loud! This isn’t a time to sleep. Our entire world is falling apart – right outside your window. There are entire battalions of revolutionaries marching up down the streets, with guns and everything. And here you are, slumbering in bed. Shall I order Kitty to bring you coffee? Drinking chocolate? Which?’

  ‘No. Go away.’

  She opened the door onto the landing and shouted down. ‘Kitty! Dora needs chocolate at once! Make it two cups. And some pastries.’ She returned to my bedside.

  I smiled, without opening my eyes. ‘Phoebe will have something to say about that,’ I said. ‘She told me you were never to come back here.’

  ‘Oh. Well. Too bad. Dora, I thought I would pay a visit to poor dear Cody’s mother. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you should be staying inside your house,’ I muttered. ‘And lying low.’

  ‘Nonsense, Dora. You’re such a fusser! They’re not interested in us. I just walked right past a bunch of them, and I might as well have been invisible … Their fight isn’t with us, darling. It’s with the entire capitalist world … Do you suppose Kitty will be long with that chocolate? I am almost dying of thirst.’

  ‘I think you should leave Cody’s mother well alone. If you’re asking me. Which I don’t suppose you are, really … I think you should keep to your own business.’

  She wasn’t listening. ‘Yes. I think it would be nice to go see her. She might rather like to think that Cody and I were friends. Perhaps I could make a donation of some sort. I know they’re not rich. Cody’s pa was a miner. Did you know that?’

  ‘Probably could’ve guessed.’

  ‘He lost both legs in a mine explosion in … I think it was the mine at Engleville. Fifteen years ago. And not long after he went out and shot himself.’

  ‘Inez!’ I groaned. ‘Please. I haven’t even woken up.’

  She pulled back the coverlet. ‘Get up!’she said. ‘Lazybones! I am going to see Cody’s ma. He told me she lives down by the river, and I reckon if I ask a few people, someone will surely know where to find her … And I’m taking Max Eastman with me! If he’s willing. Otherwise I’ll probably meet up with him later. He
says I can help him, gathering information and so on. Due to my local knowledge. Don’t you think he’s the most delightful man who ever breathed? So educated and handsome and – I adore him!’ When I didn’t reply immediately, she sighed, went to the window, pulled back the drapes and opened the window wide. Sunshine poured in. ‘Wake up!’ she said again. ‘It’s a beautiful day!’

  ‘But why,’ I asked, reaching for a pillow to put over my head. ‘Why must I wake up? Why have you come here to tell me all this? Can’t it wait?’

  ‘I wanted you to know how much I completely adore Max. And how completely and utterly recovered I am from … the other fellow. Ha! Can you believe? For a moment I actually forgot Lawrence’s name. Well. And that just about proves it, doesn’t it? I, Inez Dubois, do adore Max Eastman.’

  ‘All right …’ I said. ‘I think I know it. Will you go away now?’

  ‘He’s magical though, isn’t he? Imagine – to be so full of ideas and wisdom and passion, and to be such an elegant, handsome, charming man. And then to be such a fine writer and poet.’

  ‘Have you read his poetry?’

  ‘Of course I have.’

  I laughed. The sun and fresh morning air were beginning to bring me round. ‘Liar,’ I said.

  She ignored it. ‘And he’s funny and charming. And he makes me feel … as if I were the only woman in the world he cared for! Do you think he does it to all the women? I wonder …’

  ‘He has a lot of charm.’

  ‘He believes in Free Love,’ she said, half bursting with pride. I think she was hoping I would ask her to tell me what it meant.

  ‘Bad news for us hookers,’ I said.

  ‘He’s married. To a sort of … very serious woman indeed. But he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t love him. Or that is, they do love each other. But it’s a free love … So they can love … freely. If it pleases.’

  ‘Whatever works for folks. Has my breakfast arrived?’

  She bustled back into my parlour and opened the door onto the landing again. ‘Kitty!’ she yelled, just as Kitty appeared at the door, bearing a tray laden with steaming cups of chocolate, fruit compote, iced water and sweet pastries … I lived in luxury at Plum Street. It was hard, sometimes, to remember quite how good I had it, living under Phoebe’s roof.

  Kitty laid the tray onto the table in the parlour, and finally I submitted to the irrepressible will of my uninvited guest, and climbed out of bed. She passed me my silk kimono and, as she did so, she said: ‘You know, Dora. There are sides to your life – that breakfast, this kimono – which make me quite envious, and that’s the truth.’

  ‘I can’t complain,’ I said. But I was touched. It was a generous thing for her to say.

  ‘Well then?’ I said, picking up my chocolate and flopping onto the couch. My head ached. ‘I am up. I am awake. Now tell me why.’

  She’d fought with Xavier after dropping me at Plum Street last night. On the way back to the cottage, she’d told him about a plan she had cooked up with Max, and Xavier had been ‘thoroughly loathsome’ about it, she said. ‘Because he doesn’t care, Dora. Because he is so wrapped up in whatever it is that keeps that miserable look on his face when he thinks nobody’s looking, he can’t even see the wickedness and the suffering that is all around him. Innocent children were killed, Dora.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about it.’

  ‘Xavier doesn’t seem to realize.’

  ‘Of course he realizes. Just because you insist on making a bigger noise about it, doesn’t mean you feel it any more than he does.’

  She sent me a queer, irritable look and continued: ‘What happened at Ludlow the day before yesterday has tainted our city for ever,’ she declared. ‘Trinidad will never be the same. And I don’t even care if he disapproves. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t even know how to make a movie as far as I can make out. Or whatever it is he’s been trying to do over there in Hollywood all this time. And he can disapprove of me as much as he likes. But Dora – I have to do it. My conscience is telling me. And I need you to help me. Will you help?’

  ‘It rather depends on what you are trying to do,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I am going to be their researcher,’ she said grandly. ‘Their person-on-the-ground, so to speak. The Union can provide our reporters with plenty of grieving victims, and that’s essential, for a balanced argument. But what I can do, Dora, from my socially privileged position in Trinidad, is to provide the reporters with people on the other side … Do you see?’

  In a nutshell: what Max and his writer friends required – what the press always required – was villains. And if the company-hired guards and the company-funded general’s army (as good as the same thing) were too worldly to fulfil that role, reporters would have to look further afield.

  So Max had decided to arrange a tea party, to be made up of the gentlewomen of Trinidad most likely to provide him with the self-incriminating quotes he needed. Inez knew all the gentlewomen of Trinidad, and if she didn’t already know their addresses, she could easily unearth them from library records.

  ‘I can give him the best names, and I swear my head is bursting with all the dreadful ladies I could send to him – I mean only the worst ones, of course. Not my darling Aunt Philippa. Certainly not. In any case, she has to take care of her heart – and goodness knows … But I can think of plenty of other ladies, and I’m sure you could too, after our music club fiasco. Weren’t they ghastly? I love them dearly, of course … In any case, Xavier’s livid about it because he’s a dreadful old bluenose, isn’t he? Underneath it all. But never mind him. We desperately need you Dora – to be present at the tea party with Max, and to help him, you know? Because I can’t be there, of course, and you understand this town like nobody else, and you can help Max to winkle out the most dreadful remarks—’

  ‘Was this your idea, or his?’

  ‘What?

  ‘That I should be present at this horrible event. Was it your idea? Or his?’

  ‘Well it was …’ She paused to think about it. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I had finished my chocolate, and between us we had polished off the pastries. Over our empty plates I felt a sudden and violent dislike for her. I stood up. ‘It’s about the stupidest, nastiest idea I’ve heard yet, Inez, and no, I’m certainly not helping you. And, by the way, if you’re inviting the women from the Ladies’ Music Club, as you say you are, I would be no use at all. You forget that they have already met me. What disguise would you have suggested I use this time? Or did you envisage I simply turn up as the hooker I really am?’

  She gazed at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Oh, but you’re not just a hooker Dora!’ she said. ‘You’re … better than that!’

  I sighed. ‘The tea party,’ I said. ‘Have you sent out invitations already? Is it too late for you to back out?’

  ‘But I don’t want to back out of it!’ she snapped. ‘Why would I? Those ladies deserve whatever they get! They prance about our city, thinking they are better, simply because they are fortunate enough to have been born with wealth. Max met a miner’s wife yesterday who overheard two ladies – and they were actually delighting in what had happened at Ludlow.’

  ‘I heard him tell us so.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well? Honestly, I think either Max, or the miner’s wife – or both – were wickedly exaggerating. And I’ve watched your beloved Max. He’s handsome and charming as anyone I ever met. I should think he could persuade just about any woman in the world to say just about anything he wants them to. That’s what I think.’

  ‘He is charming,’ she said, looking pleased.

  ‘Inez, have you ever heard any ladies celebrating what happened at Ludlow? Can you even imagine it would be possible?’

  She wouldn’t look at me. ‘But I bet they would,’ she said, ‘if they thought they could get away with it. I mean – you heard them at the music club. They’re hardly sympathetic to the working man’s cause.’

  ‘It’s not
the same as celebrating mothers and children being burned alive. And you know that.’

  ‘You’ll see,’ she said. But I thought there was a moment when she wavered.

  ‘Oh, Inez, can’t you stop it?’ I asked her again. ‘Can’t you see how he is taking advantage of you?’

  She stood up. ‘First it’s Lawrence you think is taking advantage, then it’s Max. You’re like my mother, Dora. And it’s a bit rich. Frankly. Considering all the men who take advantage of you. Every single night.’

  ‘They don’t take advantage,’ I said.

  ‘Yes they do. On a nightly basis.’

  ‘For which I charge.’

  ‘I have to go.’ She glanced at me, uncertain and unhappy. ‘I hate it when we fight. And you are wrong, you know. You and Xavier are wrong. You just can’t see how important it is that the world understands—’

  ‘Understands what? That your neighbour, Mrs Ingleby on Third Street, whom you have known all your life, turns out to be a dreadful bigot? And that Max Eastman, because he is a charming, ambitious reporter, who will make her feel important for a minute, is going to take her idiotic chatter and twist it round and turn her into a fiend for all of right-thinking America to feed on?’

  Inez seemed to watch the words flow from my mouth as if they were some strange and unpleasing curiosity: a cloud of tiny mosquitoes. It was hopeless. She couldn’t hear me. She gave a sad, defensive shrug. ‘You don’t seem to like Max very much,’ she said finally. ‘Whereas he likes you awfully …’

  ‘Of course I like him. How could anyone not like him? He is funny and charming and clever. I only think we should remember why he is here in Trinidad. He is a reporter. We should never forget that.’