by Chris Dolan
“D’you think she will do well, George?”
“I’ve yet to see Miss Baillie in action; off-duty, she’s mesmerising.”
Elspeth watched Coak stare for a moment at Lisle’s face. If there was jealousy lurking in that glance, she could not detect it. Perhaps he considered it in his interests to encourage a liaison between his apprentice and a young gent above her station. George’s mind was working along the same lines as her own: “Albert believes he can create true talent the way he can refine sugar. No doubt he feels more processing needs to be done in your case.”
“I’m not sure I want to be processed.”
“You’re raw cane to him. There are processes you must go through in order to meet his expectations.”
“Do you have an example?”
“A bit of tragedy seldom does an actress harm.”
“Suffer the slings and arrows of outragous fortune. Of an intimate kind, you mean?”
“For an actor, is there any other?”
“So I am supposed to love and lose like a comic heroine of the bard’s?”
“My guess is your chosen victim will be the ultimate loser. But, yes. Coak is a sugar planter first – never forget. A period of pulverising, followed by some distilling, package the whole thing up, then he’ll pour you like syrup onto his audiences. And you can count on me, Mistress, to be in the front row, eyes and mouth agape.”
The Overtons’ town house was in an area just south of Bridgetown called Garrison Savannah after the barracks situated between the mansion and the sea. Returning from the dampness of Nonie’s lodgings Elspeth realised the beauty of the place. Her quarters looked out onto the back of the house, over gardens towards the sea beyond a broad stretch of open common land, home to bizarre wildlife. Vividly plumed birds strutted, reminding Elspeth of Joeys, the clowns of Scotland’s fairs and festivals, as they tumbled and bowled along, legs parading disjointedly. The stunted little doves of this island looked like circus midgets. Yellow-breasted waders cackled like an act she had once seen where a man played the whole of “Scots Wha Hae” by tapping on his chin, the sound echoing from his toothless mouth. Tall trees bent in the breeze like strongmen straining under unimaginable weights. Misshapen squirrels scampered below her window. George, at breakfast the next day, supplied her with the names of things. They walked together in the garden, and he pointed out a tiny bird which Elspeth had feared was an enormous insect.
“Hummingbirds. You can hardly see their wings they beat them so fast. Look at their long beaks, for drinking nectar.”
“They’re beautiful,” she said, and was aware of how quickly she had changed her opinion of the creature. The nectar, he informed her, came from petunias and prickly pear and snake-lilies. And the scampering little animal was not a distorted squirrel but a mongoose. The Flame Trees lit the morning like red and pink candles; an old fig sat at the back of the gardens like an ancient giant, weeping private grief into its beard.
George had to return to his own estate that afternoon, in the Parish of St. Thomas, not quite as remote as Coak’s Northpoint. Now that he was home from his travels, however, he would see her regularly at the Lyric. “Nonie and Christian haven’t taken you to the Ocean View yet? We shall rectify that on Monday evening.” He bowed, breathed a kiss on her hand, and left. Coak himself had a meeting scheduled with shippers in the London Naval Club in town, so Elspeth had all Saturday afternoon and Sunday to continue settling in her new home.
Left to herself, she marvelled at the gliding and distant crying of birds wheeling over the ocean. She stared for hours at the bright orange and red breasts of smaller birds outside her window: glowing blue and purple crests, feathers that looked black in one light, deep green in another. The plants in the gardens grew in shades from subtle silvers and emeralds to roaring reds and smouldering violet. There were tiny petals and implausibly large leaves, bigger than her own body, fruits that bulged in odd shapes, succulents stabbing the air, stamens quivering in the warm breeze. From her new home, Elspeth could look out on all this activity, and fill her senses with colour and the dreamy scent of frangipani and coconut.
Lord Coak had negotiated, on her behalf, the use of two of the Overtons’ servants. Dainty and Tuesday were as exotic to her as the flora and fauna outside. She had assumed that these shadowy people she had glimpsed by the careenage and serving drinks in lounges could only understand a series of simple orders, and that, otherwise, they confabulated in their own African idioms. She was astounded now to learn that they spoke a category of wild English. Moreover, she could understand them, and they comprehended every word of hers. She asked them the names of things as she noticed them, and began to learn a new vocabulary: aloe, sea-grape, alamander, cochineal.
“Them’s called upside-downs,” Dainty told her. “See how de flowers hang?”
She went out with them to the garden, and touched and smelled all the flowers there. “Sea grape, ma’m. Taste a berry, it near ripe.” Tuesday, the younger of the two bent down and tore a few leaves from a thick bushel. “Use it fuh wash yuh hair, make it soft soft and glow like a cane-fire by night.”
“This be aloe. Put it on yuh skin, it like a babbie’s kiss. Suds up well, too.”
Ackees and ginneps, booby-birds and hummingbirds, mango and avocado: the names were as bizarre as the things they denoted. Dainty and Tuesday brought her selections of all the fruits that grew in the orchard, or wild on the savannah. Papaya, grapefruit and mango – the sweetest taste ever to have touched her lips. The alarming golden curved tuber the girls called plantain, which she had heard of as banana but had never seen. She peeled the skin as she was shown and put the bared flesh in her mouth declaring with a giggle that surely this must have been Eve’s forbidden fruit, not the dull and boorish apple. The black girls laughed with her, but she knew they thought her as strange as she thought them.
Dainty, Elspeth reckoned, was about the same age as herself, Tuesday no more than fifteen. “Unusual name. Tuesday.”
“The day I was borned, Ma’m.”
And to Dainty: “I can see why you are called Dainty. But how did your mother know you would be petite?”
“I don’ know what me mother call me. Mister Overton named me Dainty jus’ a while back. ’Fore that I was Nursey. And ’fore that Toadie ’cause me used t’ leap aroun’ like a frog when I was a chile. You can call me somethin’ new if you like.”
“Dainty is fine.”
On the Sunday after the party, Elspeth got to know a third servant – the most impressive of them all. The gardener, Henry, measured, she calculated, more than six and a half feet in height.
“I from Barbuda, Miss.” He allowed her to follow behind while he pruned and raked, silent until he was asked a question. His back was like no human’s she had seen before: muscles bulged under his shirt where she never thought even the strongest of men possessed muscles. His skin was so brightly black that she thought she might see her reflection in it, as one does in highly polished dark wood. She discovered that he had been bought by the Overtons and brought to this island when he was a boy. Were it not for his lack of colour, she thought, he would be the perfect model of a working man. Tall and strong, but gentle in speech. He was the father of several children whom Elspeth caught sight of from time to time. She could not tell his age as he displayed none of the natural signs of ageing: his skin was taut around his eyes, his hair black and he showed no sign of stoopage or stiffness. Yet one of his children was nearly full-grown, and Henry himself spoke like a man who had distilled some wisdom from many years of life. His presence was more substantial than that of most white men she knew, even amongst the burly, wealthy planters she had met since coming to the West Indies. With his air of authority, his strength, and the sense he gave out of being somehow absent, she could envisage him on stage as the Creature in Shelley’s Frankenstein. She had not read Mary Shelley’s book, but had seen reviews at the Lyric of a recent London production of the play, coinciding with a reprint of the book. The idea lodged i
tself deep inside Elspeth. Henry’s distance, the strangeness of his appearance in conjunction with the pleasantness of his manner, reminded her of the sad, terrifying creation of Dr. Frankenstein.
Lord Coak, during the two days before his boat sailed for Cuba, called on her at her rooms, where they discussed theatre, Elspeth’s great future in the Indies, and her eventual triumph in the whole of the Americas. He told her that he spent only a couple of months of each year on the island, the rest of his time being spent in Europe inspecting sugar refineries, negotiating shipments, and visiting the great theatres of France, Italy, and Germany. For the foreseeable future – for reasons to do with the sugar business – he would be more often visiting Havana.
“As a result, my dear, I will not be here for your first performance. You will not be angry at me?”
No, she would not. Though it was Coak’s agency which had led her to this unexpected point in her life, his significance beyond financial support had already decreased. Nonie’s, George’s and her colleagues’ influence were now more important to her; the opinions of the Philbricks, Denholms and Bartlebys unwelcome, but more crucial now than Coak’s. “Think of me. It’s all I ask.”
“I do little else, my child.”
The Ocean View was a small hotel on the outskirts of town, run by an American couple from the city of New York. They had fashioned the establishment in classic New World style: simple wooden furniture within a plain, stern wooden structure perched on an outcrop of rock. Sitting on the view’s balcony was like being on the prow of a new-built ship. The Börgmanns had “set the place up”, they said, “for commercial opportunists, salesmen and speculators”. It seemed to Elspeth that it housed only gamblers and drinkers.
Of the latter, the Lyric’s players, when George Lisle was in town and spending, were the mainstay. The rooms above the balcony were used by the gamblers, Americans in the main who sat over endless hands of cards, their play interrupted occasionally by shouting, swearing or even out-and-out fisticuffs. The owners were never in the least dismayed by these outbursts. Mr. Börgmann could be seen on a morning calmly fixing broken furniture in the breeze of the hotel’s porch; Mrs. Börgmann inside sweeping up glass, coins and even blood, singing some old German song to herself. The proprietors never raised an eyebrow at the potions mixed by Virginie, Isabella and George on their premises.
“You’ve never had a Dalby’s Turbo! What kind of a tomb is this Scotland of yours?” Virginie handed Elspeth a muddy-coloured liquid. “Loathsome-looking, n’est ce pas? Believe me, there’s naught better in the whole world.”
Elspeth raised the cracked glass to her lips, the brew’s caustic smell almost causing her to sneeze, and what looked like skelfs of wood making her wonder if she were the butt of a practical joke.
“Course it should be mixed with sarsaparilla, but this dump of an island is as free of sarsaparilla as it is of any other civilised thing.”
“We make it with bark from the mauby tree,” said George. “Drink up, and you’ll see just how the eye can be deceived.”
The first sip was shocking, due to the sharpness of the mauby sap, but quickly turning fresh on the palate, perfectly invigorating for a warm evening. Two sips more and Elspeth agreed it was one of the finest things she had ever tasted.
“What else has it?”
Virginie, proud to be reckoned the best mixer of Dalby’s Turbo, listed the vital elements. “Tonight’s particular mix, ma’am, includes fine Italian gin imported by our illustrious Lord Coak, a phial of pure bush rum lovingly and illegally distilled by the Belle Estate slave-gang and procured by Derrick here, a dousing of Mrs. Börgmann’s own mauby, a little juice extracted from the cactus plant – and some few drops of the elixir of which the poet said, ‘The poet’s eye in his tipsy hour hath a magnifying power.’”
Elspeth had no idea who the poet in question was, or what the elixir was he was praising, but soon felt the promised effects in Virginie’s Dalby’s Turbo Calmative. The Caribbean breeze that wafted their balcony became gentler, cooler but still warm and nurturing, as if the dark velvet sky were exhaling perfumed breath. The tartness of the mauby electrified and enlivened her bones while relaxing her flesh and making her arms and legs buoyant, as though she were floating on the sea. The draught even seemed to improve her eyesight: as night closed softly around them, the features of Virginie and Isabella, Nonie and Christian, Mr. Denholm’s understudy Derrick, and George, all darkened and, in contrast, their eyes brightened. She felt surrounded by stars, gleaming gazes and flashing glances, white teeth sparkling between ruby, kissable lips.
“We are pilgrims of the soul, don’t you think George?” Isabella lounged over the balcony rail, black hair loose and trailing over her cheeks and neck. “We come from everywhere and, in our work, become everyone.”
“And thus no one in particular,” said Christian, his arm hung limply around Nonie’s shoulder.
“Precisely! Don’t Mohammedans believe that truth resides in nothingness?”
Elspeth had never heard such conversations before. Words skimmed freely like stones across water, and she watched them jump from Isabella to Derrick to George. It was a game she knew she could play: “I imagine,” she ventured, “in the case of Mrs. Bartleby, whoever she is supposed to become, becomes her. She’d turn Cordelia into the Wife of Bath.”
“Juliet the Procuress!”
“Jeanne d’Arc as played by La Celestina!”
It seemed whatever Elspeth said – whatever, as her mother would have said, “came up her hump” – was perfectly acceptable to these people. She felt knowledgeable; found she could pursue an argument, never thought of before, and end in unexpected places. If she could recall to mind only half a speech, or a fragment of a verse, miscalled an historical event or mistook one writer for another, no one cared. The words and thoughts themselves were enough, emancipated from the dull Scotch addiction to common sense and gravity. Only the style in which a thing was said was of any import. Language was all, if you were draped over a chair sipping on Dolby’s Turbo.
“It is the followers of the Buddha, I think, who follow the path to nothingness,” George gently informed the company. “Fools like Bartleby and Denholm are clay statues – on stage and off. Too rooted, heavy, nailed-down on their little plinths. For you – true artists – on nights like these you are the children of everythingness. Pure sensation. Your power is being of the world, not denying it.”
Elspeth was the first to laugh. She didn’t know why, only that George’s seriousness struck her as funny. The others fell silent for a moment, looking at her, but she couldn’t stop herself. At last Nonie joined in, then Derrick, and finally George, his laughter the most raucous, as he had been the cause of it.
“Thank the good Christ!” he cried, “for Elspeth Baillie, or I’d have carried on all night talking…”
“…Die Kacke!” cried Elspeth, easily imitating the American-accented German of Mr. Börgmann, and causing more laughter.
And yet Elspeth’s intention had not been to inhibit their talk. Whether it was truly clever and learned or not made no difference to her. The experience was new, and free, and open to her. She could heedlessly follow the peculiarities of her mind and speak them out loud. If admiration or laughter followed, so much the better. In the lull that followed the laughing, she looked towards the dark horizon, at the other side of which she thought Scotland might lie. “At this very moment my sisters and cousins are singing ballads in some Lowland fair…”
“Not at this moment, quite. It’s afternoon in the mother country.”
“And a Mohammedan somewhere is praying on his mat…”
“While we fly on ours.”
“…and that Buddha fellow circles the earth.”
The mention of ballads inspired Nonie to sing an old Irish air, Christian humming and thumping his chair in accompaniment.
“I’m a roving young blade
I’m a piper by trade
And there’s many the tunes I can play.”
Virginie suggested a swim. They drank down the dreamy concoction in gulps and filed down wooden steps to a patch of sand in front of a treacle sea, Nonie and Christian singing in duet.
“So come fill up your glass
With brandy and wine
Whatever the cost, I will pay.”
George led the way, tearing off jacket and boots. Derrick stripped down to his breeches, Nonie to her shift. Elspeth kicked her shoes far across the sand and ran, frightened, having never swum in the sea at night before, when it seemed like a deep crevice from which you might never emerge.
“So be easy and free
when you’re drinking with me
I’m a man you don’t meet every day!”
They splashed and yelled and squeaked. Derrick baptised them each in turn, immersing them wholly in water that felt thick like cream. When it came Elspeth’s turn she sank deep under the warm blackness, the slow tide sticking her garments to her skin here, billowing them there. She could see up through the dark ocean, her friends undulating noiselessly above her.
“I baptise thee Elspeth, young Princess of the Lyric and Queen of the Song!” shouted Derrick as she splashed back up, catching her breath. They fought in the water together, hand-cupping the precious black liquid, hurling it from one to another. Nonie’s hair covering her face, George’s breeches contouring his broad thighs and – Elspeth was sure – swollen sex. Isabella, naked to the waist, turned around and around in a private trance that might have been Buddhist or Mohammedan, her brown breasts sailing. A distant moon turned their bodies to gold and the empty night sucked their shouts and laughter up into the sky.
On the Tuesday night, after a day of watching the rehearsal she had now seen countless times, the same group set off towards the Ocean View to continue Monday’s festivities. After only a single glass of Dalby’s, however, Mrs. Börgmann brought her a note from Lord Coak, informing her that he was leaving the next day and would very much like her company at the Overtons’ that evening.