Honeyville

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very much. I have just come from the morgue. Mr Adamsson was very kind. Very helpful. Very kind and helpful. You should have gone to the morgue, Xavier. You’re her brother.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  We waited but he said nothing more.

  ‘Is that it? You’re sorry?’

  ‘I should have gone to the morgue. I didn’t think. At least I did. I thought …’

  ‘You didn’t think. You didn’t think at all.’

  I thought he was about to cry. I couldn’t bear it for him. I said, ‘Mrs McCulloch, I know he meant to go. I’m afraid I delayed him.’

  She shot me a look: through the fog of grief, a spark of pure hostility. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should leave.’

  ‘Don’t leave!’ Xavier said. ‘Stay.’ He sounded desperate. ‘We are all grieving. There is no reason why you should leave. You loved Inez too. I know you did. We all loved her. We should stay together.’

  Mrs McCulloch, bolt upright on the couch, looked at the wall opposite and said nothing.

  ‘I’ll go get dressed,’ I said.

  ‘You do that,’ she fired back. And then the strength left her; her shoulders hunched, she put her hands to her face and wept. She looked so pitiful I stopped, kneeled down and wrapped my arms around her. She rested her head on my shoulder, on the paisley silk that smelled of Xavier, and for a moment it was so simple. We helped each other.

  Xavier loped off back to the kitchen to fetch his aunt a glass. He returned to the parlour, polishing it with his shirtsleeve, and carefully filled it to the very brim before holding it out to her. She lifted her head from my shoulder, wiped her eyes and swallowed it in one – like an old cowboy.

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ Xavier said, returning to his seat. I noticed he had fastened the buttons of his shirt. Somehow, in those few moments, he had managed to make himself look respectable. It rendered my own dishevelled and informal state even more uncomfortable.

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘I should go get dressed.’

  Mrs McCulloch stared vacantly at the hearth. I padded across the parlour into Xavier’s bedroom, and returned as soon as I could, hair tidied with the help of Xavier’s combs, yesterday’s clothes back in place. I could smell the morgue on them. At least – of course I couldn’t. But I could feel it. And there was a speck of something on my cuff that looked like Inez’s blood.

  I intended to pick up my purse and slip away, but Mrs McCulloch said:

  ‘Xavier tells me you have a letter. From Inez to that delightful gentleman, Mr Eastman. Are you going to deliver it to him?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. I was surprised that Xavier had mentioned it to her. ‘I had forgotten you met him.’

  ‘Xavier brought him round, didn’t you darling? I thought he was exceptionally charming.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, he is, isn’t he?’

  ‘He talked of the deep affection and esteem he held for Inez …’ The tears began to roll again, but her voice didn’t change. She continued to speak normally. ‘He was going to take her to work for his little publication in New York. She was going to lodge in his sister’s apartment, and –’ she frowned uncertainly – ‘in the fall, they were going to marry. It’s what Inez said. But he was in mourning. Which is why there was no date set.’ I could hear her doubts growing with each new word she uttered. ‘He was a very handsome gentleman,’ she said. ‘Quite delightful. And the son of not one minister of the church but two! His mother is also a pastor! Imagine that!’ She took another slug from her glass, found it empty, and held it towards Xavier to be topped up. ‘I have tried to imagine it,’ she added. ‘But it’s rather hard. Well. Nevertheless. What does it matter any more? Darlng Inez had finally found her love. I never saw her so happy as these past days, did you?’ She glanced at us both but didn’t seem to expect a reply. I didn’t agree with her in any case. ‘Mr Adamsson assures me he will provide the finest casket for her. Teak. Or ebony. Did he say ebony?’

  ‘Ebony seems unlikely, Aunt. Mahogany perhaps?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She glances at me, a fleeting look, sly and fearful. ‘Well Miss – I don’t even know what I am supposed to call you any longer. What name are you going by today?’

  ‘My name is Dora Whitworth. I have told you before.’

  ‘Yes indeed. Well, Miss Whitworth. I must admit I am not quite certain why the letter is still in your possession in any case. Or why it ever was in your possession. But it hardly matters any more. Are you going to show it to us?’

  ‘Max’s letter?’

  ‘I don’t know what other letter. Are you going to show it to us?’

  I hesitated, looked at Xavier for guidance. But he was making a study of his fingernails. ‘Well, Xavier has already seen it,’ I said.

  ‘So I understand.’

  ‘Xavier?’ But he wouldn’t look at me. I wondered what had possessed him to tell her about the letter in the first place. ‘I’m not sure I should …’ I said. It sounded feeble. ‘Xavier, don’t you agree? It was a private correspondence, after all. Between herself and her beloved. I probably shouldn’t have read it myself.’

  ‘But you did read it,’ she said. ‘And I would like to read it too. Very, very much. If you please, Miss Whitworth. I would be grateful.’ Her chin was trembling. ‘If it helps to explain what she was doing halfway to Forbes, in the middle of a battlefield …’

  ‘But that had nothing to do with Max,’ I said. Again, I glanced at Xavier. He was lying back on the couch, dancer’s body as limp as a ragdoll, looking from one to the other of us, an expression of immeasurable sadness on his face. ‘Say what we will about Max,’ I said to Xavier, ‘but it was something to do with Cody – or maybe Cody’s mother – that sent her out there. We can’t blame it on Max.’

  Mrs McCulloch began to cry again: this time, with every living part of her. Her face and shoulders crumpled. She held her head, whiskey glass in hand. ‘I don’t know anything about any Cody,’ she said. ‘Who is Cody?’ Helplessly, I put a hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off, as I knew she would. She sobbed louder, until her body shook, and still, Xavier did nothing.

  ‘Xavier!’ I snapped at him. ‘For heaven’s sake don’t just sit there! Help your aunt. Explain to her who Cody is. Won’t you? I don’t know what to tell her …’

  He said, as if it were obvious: ‘Tell her the truth. I’m so sick of all the lies.’

  I laughed. It occurred to me he wasn’t talking about Inez. ‘The truth? About what, Xavier? How can I tell her the truth? I don’t even know what it is myself. You want me to show her Max’s letter? Why?’

  ‘She wants to know. We all do. Don’t we? Aren’t you sick of the lies?’

  ‘What lies? Xavier, you’re drunk. I don’t know what you’re talking about, but we are talking about the letter. You should shut your mouth if you can’t keep a hold of what’s coming out of it.’

  ‘What was she doing all the way out there?’ Mrs McCulloch cried. ‘Yesterday, of all the days in the year? Why?’ She looked at me as if I not only knew all the answers but I was responsible for them, too. Responsible for everything that had happened.

  ‘I honestly don’t know,’ I said.

  I knew I should leave, and yet I couldn’t do it. The thought of being any place where the world hadn’t stopped for Inez was unbearable. So I sat still, not moving, knowing I should go, eyes lowered, drinking up the other woman’s hostility: a price for being allowed to share in her grief.

  Xavier’s cold voice broke the silence. ‘Don’t look at her like that,’ he said. At first I wasn’t certain which of us he was addressing. I kept my eyes down, felt the itch of a tear rolling down the side of my nose but did nothing about it. ‘Aunt Philippa,’ Xavier said, ‘I said: don’t look at Dora like that. As if this were all her fault.’

  ‘How can I not?’ she began to sob again. ‘Everything was all right until she came along. She thinks I don’t know –
but I do! I know everything!’

  ‘What do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘I know that you have spent the night corrupting my nephew.’

  ‘We were consoling each other, nothing more.’

  ‘You were corrupting him.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I know that you are a whore.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘And that a woman like you has no business being a friend of my niece. Nor of my nephew. And –’ her hysteria rising – ‘most certainly not of me. How dare you remain in this room with me, while I am grieving my niece and you are a whore? Have you no sense of propriety?’

  ‘Miss Whitworth is here because I have invited her here,’ Xavier broke in. ‘Which is more than I can say for you.’

  ‘You!’ she said to him. ‘You!’ And in the tumult of her anger and grief, she seemed to lose her capacity for speech. In a moment her face seemed to lose its colour and then she began to cough and choke, as if on her own breath. It was time for me to leave. I picked up my purse.

  But her choking grew frantic – too frantic to ignore.

  I hesitated, unsure what to do. ‘Xavier?’

  He was already on his feet. She had began to rasp and to clutch at her chest, and then, slowly, and yet so quickly that somehow neither of us prevented it – she rolled forwards, landing on her knees in front of the couch. Her head and neck, already white, turned from grey to deeper grey, and all the while her eyes were fixed on Xavier, an expression of helpless incomprehension on her face.

  Xavier and I had both dropped to our knees, one on either side of her. Xavier held her shoulders. I scrabbled to loosen her corset. I don’t know how many seconds or minutes passed. Her breath was still rasping when I ran to the kitchen to fetch her some water. It took a moment to locate a glass, and another moment to rinse it – and when I returned she was lying still, her eyes glazed, her head resting on Xavier’s lap while he tenderly stroked her forehead.

  ‘Oh dear God …’ I said.

  ‘She’s fine.’ But he sounded terrified. ‘She’s breathing. She’ll be fine. She’ll be just fine … You’re going to be just fine, Aunt Philippa, you hear me? You stay exactly where you are. We’re going to fetch you a doctor.’

  There was no telephone at the cottage. I left the two of them on the floor by the hearth and ran to the nearest drugstore to call for a doctor.

  I didn’t go back again. I wanted to spend the rest of the day with Xavier and his whiskey, in his dirty house, beside his empty hearth. But it was impossible. Xavier knew where I was. I would wait until he came for me.

  35

  Two more days passed. The strikers had taken possession of the hospital. They helped themselves to whatever they liked from supply stores around town. Mrs Carravalho lost the side of her face when a stray bullet whistled through the glass window of the drugstore on North Commercial. The anarchy made front pages of news- papers across America and, in Trinidad, we stayed inside as much as we could.

  Through all of it, Plum Street remained stubbornly open. But I never knew the place so quiet – nor Phoebe quite so bad tempered. She used to stand in the kitchen while the cook prepared our food, snarling at her to cut back on the ingredients, and in those bleak days, Phoebe’s impotent, mean-spirited fury was the only thing that made me smile.

  At the end of the third day I couldn’t wait to hear from Xavier any longer. It was dusk and still too dangerous for ordinary folk to venture out. President Wilson had ordered up the troops and they were on their way at last, but they wouldn’t arrive in Trinidad for a few days yet. Finally, after a glass of bourbon for Dutch courage, I made a telephone call to the McCulloch house.

  It was the housekeeper who answered. She told me no one was available to talk. She told me Philippa McCulloch had died that morning.

  ‘Of the shock,’ the old woman reported, sniffing back tears. ‘Her heart gave way. It was too much for her.’

  ‘Well … that’s terrible news. I’m so very sorry …’

  ‘We all are.’

  ‘And the funeral?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s for family only. May I enquire who I am speaking with?’

  ‘I meant – I’m so sorry. I meant for Inez.’

  And then the line went dead. It was impossible to know if the housekeeper had ended the call, or if – as often happened back then – the connection had simply cut off by its own accord. I called again. It took a half-hour to get a line through. The same voice answered. I wanted to know if I could speak with Xavier.

  ‘I just told you. It was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘The family doesn’t want to speak with anyone for the moment.’

  I asked if there was a date set for Inez’s funeral. The housekeeper said the two women would now be buried together.

  ‘When?’ I asked desperately. ‘Where?’

  ‘I already told you,’ she said. ‘It’s for family only … It’s you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I know it’s you so there’s no good denying it anyways. You’re the lady who’s the cause of all the trouble. Aren’t you? You came sniffing round here when Inez was sick.’

  ‘I’m not the “cause” of any trouble,’ I said. But it was a struggle for me to keep my voice even. ‘This is Dora Whitworth.’

  ‘That’s right! I know who it is. The one who came round here dressed like a wop, pretending to be someone she wasn’t. Next thing you came here dressed as … something else. But I know exactly what you are. And so did Mrs McCulloch.’

  ‘Excuse me. You must have me confused.’

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing!’

  ‘Leave this family alone. What’s left of it. If you’d a grain of pride in you, which I doubt, you’d leave us in peace …’

  I took a breath. ‘I haven’t rung to speak with you. I have rung to speak with Mr Dubois. Please go and fetch him at once.’

  ‘They can’t abide you and that’s the fact of it. And nor can I. Mrs McCulloch spoke about you these past days. All the time, when the fever was with her.’

  ‘I don’t believe you … Why would she?’

  ‘The whore who dressed up as a wop, who came to this house pretending to be someone she wasn’t, corrupting Miss Inez, then corrupting Mr Dubois …’

  ‘Nonsense!’

  ‘They can’t abide you.’

  ‘No … Xavier – Mr Dubois – is my good friend.’

  ‘No, ma’am. He ain’t your friend. No one in this house is your friend.’

  ‘Is he there?’ I asked her. ‘Please! Won’t you let me speak to him?’

  But the line had gone down again and this time there could be no doubt that she had cut me off.

  After that, I paced the house and gnawed at my finger ends, strummed at my harpsichord and stared blindly at my filthy French novel. The minutes crawled by. If I braved the streets (which for this, of course, I would) and went to call at the McCullochs’, then the housekeeper would no doubt close the door in my face. She would refuse to take my letter from me. So I could either post it through the door without announcing myself, and scurry away, and only hope that the hateful woman didn’t intercept it. Or I could deliver the letter to the cottage.

  Strikers tended to congregate a few blocks north of it, and the route was more dangerous, but the cottage was perhaps the best way.

  Finally, I wrote out the letter twice. Affectionate and brief, I expressed my regret for the death of his aunt. I told him how I longed to hear from him, and how much I hoped to be able to attend the funeral, if it was permitted. I waited until dark and set out to deliver them – one copy through the McCulloch front door and a second through the letterbox at the cottage.

  The early spring warmth had abandoned us again, and there was a fresh dusting of snow on the ground. It was an hour-long round trip, the coldest and the most frightening I can remember taking. Every sound, every breeze made my heart stop; and, in the
midst of it all, the odd gunshot, sometimes close by, sometimes from several blocks away. On Beech Street, two idling men pointed their rifles at me as I scurried past: I could feel the noses of their guns follow me, burning into my back, until the moment I turned the corner out of sight. On my return, I never felt so happy to walk through the doors at Plum Street.

  It was a wasted effort. Xavier didn’t reply to either letter. I discovered the date and location of the funeral only after Lawrence O’Neill dropped by to ask if I was attending. He hardly stayed a minute, but I cannot overstate what an extraordinary and welcome thing it was that he came at all. That week the Union was waging war, not on a single coal company but on American capitalism itself, or so we understood. Its call to arms – to union members nationwide – had brought men by the thousands into Trinidad. Every attack on every mine, on every scab and every company guard, needed to be planned and executed … And yet, there stood Lawrence O’Neill in my crimson hallway once again, his hat in his hand, asking about Inez’s funeral.

  An announcement in the Chronicle had stated that the service was for close family only, but he had thought, considering our friendship, that I might have been made an exception.

  I laughed. ‘You seem to forget—’

  He shook his head. Of course he hadn’t forgotten. ‘I just thought maybe – because you were friends with her brother, too. But I guess not. Have you seen him lately? How is he doing?’

  ‘He’s doing fine,’ I replied. ‘That is, so far as I know. He won’t see me. I called the house – I think he has turned against me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he shrugged.

  ‘I thought we were friends.’

  Lawrence nodded. ‘Well – these are difficult times,’ he said blandly. ‘The man has lost his family. Maybe he’ll soften.’