One afternoon, the front doorbell buzzed. The puppies barked and dashed out to the gate. I was alone with Venus, frightened at first. I made her gather the children before peeping out from behind one of the pillars in the courtyard. The bell rang again; I advanced cautiously down the drive.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Hello,’ I heard a woman’s voice call through the wrought-iron bars.
The puppies danced and jumped up at the gate, woofing and wagging their stubby tails.
Behind it stood a woman dressed in a brown, much worn, maid’s uniform.
I drew closer. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’m looking for work, madam.’
She was a big red-skinned Negro woman with frizzy grey hair. One eye was still, unmoving. Between us, the thick iron bars of the gate. Where’d she come from?
‘What kind of work?’
‘Cooking, housekeeping. I’ve work for many years as housekeeper. I have a reference.’
‘Well . . .’ Her face was open, placid. I could see she wasn’t going to beg: she hadn’t used the word maid and she spoke differently, a soft song in her voice, a version of the dialect which was milder than the way Venus spoke. Venus had come to me as lively as the puppies at my feet. This woman was at the other end of living, she’d slowed. Her girth was wide and her eyes were melancholy.
‘I could use some extra help. We’ve just moved here . . .’
She nodded.
‘Where do your live?’
‘Just down so, in Santa Cruz.’
A rural area, full of grapefruit and orange orchards. You drove through the saddle cut into the mountainside to get there.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Lucy, madam. Mrs Lucinda Bartholomew.’ She thrust an envelope through the bars.
I took it from her and pulled out a letter, reading it; it was from an English employer just gone. I didn’t know them. Lucy had lost her job when they departed.
‘Come in, Lucy.’
That day, Lucy joined the fort. Venus was pleased. It meant she no longer cooked or cleaned, just looked after the children. Sebastian was six and Pascale four; they were a handful. Lucy stepped into the role of cook and housekeeper, walking in every day from the valley beyond the saddle. Venus and Lucy were as different as could be in age, appearance and demeanour, Venus considering herself above Lucy, even though, clearly, Lucy had accrued more gravitas. Venus had been with us seven years, the main difference; she was the Second Lady of the house and Lucy was content to let her see it this way at first.
Quickly, we got to know of Lucy’s countrywoman genius.
A wart appeared on Sebastian’s finger. I ignored it at first but it grew bigger and quite hard, bulbous. He picked at it all the time.
‘Horrible thing,’ I said to Lucy. ‘So hard to get rid of. I’ll get some acid from the chemist.’
But the next day Lucy arrived with some sprigs of a shrub she began to clean and split, the milky sap oozing.
‘What’s that?’ I enquired.
‘Cactus hedge, madam.’
I watched as Lucy made a splint from two milky stems and bound them to Sebastian’s warty finger.
Three days later the wart had disappeared. Sebastian was amazed, assuming she’d performed a magic trick.
George chuckled. ‘Our very own bush doctor.’
Venus changed her attitude to Lucy considerably. ‘Granny Seraphina know dese tings, too,’ she mused. ‘It old time ting, dis bush medcin. It black people ting. Come from Africa.’
Like a Paris chef, Lucy was open and yet mysterious about her tonics, never revealing the entire recipe. When Pascale cut open her knee, Lucy boiled up pomegranate flowers into a tea for her to sip and the cut healed quickly. When the children had diarrhoea, she gave them pomegranate bark to chew. Colds and coughs Lucy cured with a cool beverage of hibiscus petals. Jackfruit, if they were constipated. Spinach leaves for poultices on boils. Ginger for gas, slices of aubergine, melongene, for minor sprains. All Lucy’s cures worked. I wrote many of the ingredients down. She often explained what was what but, when I tried to boil up my own potions, they failed. I began to examine every leaf and blossom in my garden, trying to detect what was alkaline and what was acid.
‘Half is an inherited knowledge, the other half is a gift,’ Jules explained to me one afternoon. ‘Not all of them use it or can use it. Venus would probably make a botch of things just like you.’
‘Lucy is a very gentle soul,’ I mused.
‘You’re lucky then.’
‘Why?’
‘I expect she knows poisons, too.’
‘No!’
‘Of course,’ he laughed. Jules had a vivacious way of speaking, a sing-song accent like Christobel’s, except more expressive, emphasising his words with great knowing. This was common amongst Trinidadians of every persuasion, this emphatic nature. No maybes.
‘She wouldn’t harm us, surely.’
Jules rolled his eyes.
‘She doesn’t seem the type. I sense she’s had a hard life. She sings a lot and sometimes tears fall as she sings.’
‘Listen to me. You have an ol’ Shango woman in your home. You keep your eyes open.’
But Jules was wrong. I knew whatever wickedness Lucy could conjure with her herbs and plant tonics, she wasn’t going to harm us. Something was amiss with Mrs Lucy Bartholomew, but she was past revenge.
Lucy, Venus, the children and the puppies, too. We were a household. Having Jules a tramp away, through the bush, made me feel safer. Occasionally, a car rumbled past, or a donkey cart pulled up at the gate selling milk from a large tin vat. The hill woman watched us, lying on her side, half earth, the other half mountains. Yellow pouis trees exploded like fireworks in her hair. Herons floated out of the canopy of her shoulders. Once, a wild duck arrived from the hill; it landed in the swimming pool. The children fed it chunks of bread and it became quite tame. Another time, two huge porcupines wandered in from the foot of the hill, across the porch, shooting their quills at the puppies who pranced and barked around them. We plucked quills from their muzzles for days afterwards. One hot sunny afternoon I spotted a long black shadow moving out near the front gate. When I got closer I shrieked and fled.
‘A macajuel,’ Venus identified it as it slithered away, the local name for a boa constrictor.
Birds flocked from that hill to the house. Red-bellied macaws chattered up in the palms and hummingbirds, colibri, hummed through the house, piercing the hibiscus I’d arranged in vases. The mountain above our home was not static or still. It provided cover and harbour to communities which were invisible from where I stood out on the porch. Communities of human squatters, of beasts and birds and reptiles. The mountain woman looked placid, but in fact the opposite was true. The mountain woman teemed with life.
Slowly, not overnight, conversation died between George and me. Our heads were filled with very different ideas.
‘How was work, dear?’
Silence. George’s head was deep in a book.
‘How was work . . . darling?’
Silence.
I stood directly in front of him, miming his reply.
‘What?’ He looked up and smiled to be polite.
‘Any new ships in?’
‘No, dear.’
‘What would you like for dinner?’
‘Anything.’
I stared. ‘Boiled cabbage? Jam sandwiches?’
He snapped his book shut. ‘What’s got into you?’
I want to leave, my heart whispered. These words in my throat, swirling in my mouth.
‘Eric Williams has disappeared.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t you agree? He’s hardly ever in the country. Meanwhile . . .’
‘Meanwhile, what . . . what are your theories? Eh? Please, enlighten me.’
I glared, standing above him, gazing down with contempt. Pour l’amour du ciel, I whispered. I turned on my heel and stalked away and then deliberately burnt his st
upid English mashed potatoes. I thought about George less and less. I no longer looked to him for guidance. He had his cricket team, his books, his rum and his pool. I had Lucy and Venus. I thought about those hills more and more. About Granny Seraphina and Eric Williams. I often wrote to him:
This is a small place. You have made yourself accessible. Granny and I know you, have encountered you at the University. You went there to meet your people, heir apparent. Prince in waiting. You have encouraged a sense of familiarity. But now you have disappeared. Where are you? And what are you doing? I am interested, we all are.
My son Sebastian said mash up and bol’ face and steupsed when he was agitated. Pascale was going the same way. I couldn’t stop it.
‘Watch at me!’ Sebastian once called to his sister.
That was the limit. ‘Look!’ I bellowed. ‘Look at me!’
The maids did it. My children took on their mannerisms and repeated their jokes, believed their fairy stories. The maids spoke of jumbies and soucouyants, unearthly creatures, part firefly, part vampire. My children knew about dwens, children who lived in the forest, children whose feet had turned backwards. They ran around barefoot, the soles of their feet black and greasy. They sucked on pig’s trotters; gulped down callaloo. They devoured pawpaws, guavas, mangoes and soursop ice cream. They were nothing like the children I’d dreamed of. They were white in skin but black in culture. Venus was their black mother. Lucy their black grandmother. When Venus’s sons came to stay I was outnumbered.
‘Here, drink this.’ Lucy handed me a chilled red tonic one day.
‘What is it?’
‘It will help you, madam.’
I was suspicious.
‘It make you strong. You will feel better.’
I took the tonic, sniffing it. It was sweet, syrupy. ‘Thank you, Lucy.’
I slept soundly that night, hardly moving a limb, waking with the dawn. George snored lightly next to me and when I tried to get out of bed he hugged me to him, mumbling, wanting to keep me there. Instinctively, I pulled his hand up under my ribs, kissing it. I loved him still: or did I love him again after not loving him for a time? Either way, I loved George and my love for him felt like a memory flooding back, overwhelming me. Tears pricked in my eyes. Images came. George, when we met, dancing over to me with a glass of champagne. George, in tears, at the births of our children. George on the cricket pitch, smashing the ball and tearing across the pitch. His terrible dog-paddle swimming. His booming laugh. The time he stroked the sea turtle’s head so lovingly. The first night we made love, so hot and urgent I was frozen, hands and limbs clumsy, grasping. We fell over onto the bed and then off it, to the floor. We knocked over potted plants, a small brass table, its collection of shells scattering all over the carpet.
George moved closer, curling round me, our curves fitting together like a puzzle. How had I come to reside in Trinidad? The Cavina? That day was hazy. I had been smuggled into the island, just like one of those great Samaan trees. A seedling on arrival, a sprig. I had taken root, grown into the earth of the island. George sighed in his sleep, and I sighed, in love with George again, filled with hope again. I lived in Trinidad now. I whispered these words to myself. I was different. And I still loved my husband. That old Shango woman had given me a love potion.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
VALIUM
George wanted to throw a house-warming party on New Year’s Eve, 1964: a Spanish night for a Spanish house. The children were excited. Irit promised to sew us costumes, George and I would be Zorro and his wife.
‘I will make you look gorgeous, dahling, in your little suits.’
Jules and George walked into the bush, cutting down some young coconut trees, dragging them into the house; they stood as pillars on the dance floor. George ordered a suckling pig for the spit. The maids received a Spanish cookbook with recipes for tortillas, paella and sangria; both were bemused. Lucy rose to the challenge but Venus thought we were mad, especially with the coconut trees. ‘Allyuh white people tek too much sun, allyuh crayzee.’
A party. A fête. George had designed his castle for parties; they were what he loved best. Parties are all about people. You can serve spaghetti Bolognaise and cheap vin de table if the mix of guests is right. No one will notice. I made a list of all the best people we knew, those still left, amazed to see how many hadn’t departed for civilisation, and not all were white. Our friends, by then, were a mix: remaining expats and a varied local creole society.
Everyone entered into the spirit. For a night, women were seňoritas, hair piled high, tresses snagged in mother-of-pearl combs or draped with lacy mantillas, eyes kohled, drawn to look like a bird’s. Lips were rouged, bosoms buffed and bulging from tight bodices. Cinched waists, long flouncy skirts. They snapped and batted their fans. Men dressed up as bandits in sombreros and ponchos and gun belts and moustaches were dabbed on with a burnt cork. George drew a straight line with black eyeliner across his top lip. He danced with every woman apart from me, and, to hide my annoyance, I danced with every man.
At midnight, we drank toast after toast to the New Year. There, in the bush, at the foot of those magnificent hills, fairy lights and champagne and dancing and Jules jumping into the swimming pool. His moustache melted down his face and his sombrero hung from his neck. He held up a glass of rum in his hand and sang, ‘Sabine, oh beautiful neighbour, come to me.’
‘You stupid French Creole.’ I laughed and jumped in, too, and together, both quite drunk, we slow-danced in the shallow end of the pool, fully clothed, a bandit and his seňorita, Jules proclaiming his love to me and serenading the stars. My mascara ran and my wet blouse clung to my breasts and I pressed my cheek against Jules’ chest. Jules, a big man, was lovely to dance with. From the pool I watched my husband on the dance floor, dancing groin to groin with Vera de Lima, a half-Carib, half-white woman, her black hair piled high, her hips luscious, the hips of the green woman. How could George resist? I watched my husband dance with another captivating woman, like all the women there at the party, like all the women in Trinidad. All the women on the island were made to be looked at.
I reached up to kiss Jules full on the lips and he kissed me back, tender and knowing and loving but not lascivious, not like the way George danced with Vera de Lima.
‘You are my good friend, Sabine,’ he murmured.
Oh, good and lovely Jules. He didn’t want to take part in anything between his neighbours. We danced in the pool and sang French songs till we were shrivelled with water.
Our New Year’s Eve parties became infamous and we threw many more. The 1960s beckoned a new era and, even in Trinidad, this meant a more sexually liberated time. Marriage wasn’t what it had been. For those who were unhappy, marriage was no longer a life sentence. For those who were happy, the sixties allowed opportunity to experiment. Words like wife swapping buzzed at cocktail parties. We met couples who were not married, incredibly. White women and black men together ‒ this was more and more common. Previously this was unimaginable, just like the couple I had seen at the market from my green bicycle. A love that was still taboo in Europe was unavoidable in Trinidad. I loved George but our marriage was always under threat. Other men wanted me and other women wanted George. This was both thrilling and worrying.
At a crowded party, once, I noticed a young Spanish-looking woman standing near to George on the opposite side of the room. Too near? Her skin was reddish-brown and polished, her black hair hung to her waist. Her face was small and intelligent. Her breasts were pert and bare under her gauzy dress. She stood next to George in a manner that could have been perfectly innocent and yet there was something in her manner, in George’s manner, that spoke of an intimacy between them. Yes, they were too close, their bodies angled towards each other. I was just about to dismiss these thoughts when her manner changed. Quickly, nervous as a bird, she scanned the room. I moved to one side and partially hid behind another guest. Satisfied, she laughed and glanced up at George. From her Martini glass she fished ou
t the olive, popping it into his open mouth. George blushed. He closed his eyes and relished the salt of the fruit. When he opened his eyes he smiled and stroked her face with the back of his hand. He didn’t seem to mind her public act of daring. It happened in a moment and no one saw it happen but me.
I came to understand that George slept with other women. He did so in the name of modernity, of this new age’s allowances and celebration of promiscuity, but most of all because of the feast that was on offer to him.
Black men frightened me. I feared them for reasons I couldn’t articulate. I didn’t realise it at first, but I also felt threatened by black women: this was jealousy. A sex-love existed between white men and black women. This was an old love, as old as the hills around me. For centuries, white men had spread their seed as they pleased, had taken as many of their slave concubines to their beds as they could: blacks, mulattos, women with skin the colour of coffee, cinnamon, muscovado sugar; women the colour of mahogany, so black they were purple. This habit hadn’t ceased. The white man still strutted, still behaved as father, overseer: the white man, I suspected, carried a deep carnal longing for the black woman. I saw it, smelled it, felt it, even understood it. But I couldn’t compete. And what, just what did black women think of the white man’s attentions? What did they say behind his back? I dreaded to think.
I wrote to Eric Williams. It was becoming a compulsion.
I think you’ve been right about a number of things. The white man should leave, should stop interfering with the course of things here in the West Indies. My husband acts like a horse put out to stud. He fucks whoever he wants. He behaves in a manner he wouldn’t back in London, where he grew up. The women in England, those of his class, behave quite differently. He must know this. Here, he’s in a pleasure garden. He knows he’ll never leave. The plants, birds, animals, especially those on two legs, these are what he came for. He doesn’t care for politics. He came to enjoy the sights and smells. He turns a blind eye. He doesn’t really care about you ‒ why should he?
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle Page 27