Eden Falls (22 page)

Eve had smiled and said, ‘See you soon, sweetheart.’ Seth, feeling like a twelve-year-old, had sloped away to his quarters while Silas showed Eve the residents’ lounge, the dining room, the shady veranda, the bar. Occasionally, from his room, Seth could hear his mam exclaiming with pleasure at the unusual beauty and elegance of the place, and it made him feel sullen and resentful, that he had no part in these first delighted impressions. Also, no one had thanked him for unblocking the drains.

Later, scrubbed clean and sweet smelling, clad in a casual linen two-piece and a soft cotton shirt, his dignity took the first steps on the road to recovery. New arrivals drank fruit punch and fresh lemonade in the bar, and Seth made his way through them towards Eve, stopping here and there to exchange the sort of small talk that he knew he must practise. He felt her eyes on him as he moved among the guests, and because of this he made rather more than he might have done of each new encounter: overdoing it slightly, like a ham actor playing an urbane party host. Seth had his father’s features – vivid blue eyes, soft brown hair with the same unruly cowlick, ears that jutted out like wing nuts, a tendency to scowl even when he was perfectly happy – and they were the sort of looks that no one ever coveted for themselves. But there’s more to a man than his face and, just as Arthur Williams had done, Seth now presented a pleasing whole to the world, in the way he carried himself, the things he said, the careful way he listened to what people had to say. The Jamaican sun had given his naturally pale complexion a honeyed glow. He looked well, and he knew this.

Now and again he glanced across the room at his mam as if to say, I’ll be with you just as soon as I can, and each time she smiled at him with evident pride. It was odd to see her here at the Whittam: odd, and a little unsettling, like witnessing a friendly apparition. She was beautiful, his mam, and he was glad of it now. In this room full of fashionable English folk she would not be found lacking. It worried him a little that her Yorkshire accent was undiminished, though he could hardly have expected otherwise. His own accent was more neutral these days, the result of a concerted effort to sound less like himself. Only rarely did he drop an aitch. He hoped he wouldn’t lapse under his mam’s influence. And he must remember to call her mother. Uncle Silas had made it clear that while mam was all very well in the kitchen of Ravenscliffe, it was unprofessional in the context of the Whittam Hotel. Seth had agreed, although he wasn’t absolutely sure that it could be managed.

He reached Eve’s side and she gave him her lovely smile, which made him entirely glad that she had come.

‘Look at you,’ she said.

He glanced down, as if to remind himself what he looked like.

‘You’re taller now than your dad was,’ she went on. ‘You’ve shot up.’

‘Everything does in Jamaica,’ he said, and she laughed fondly, filled with pleasure at seeing him, her first boy, her first born. Already she felt an ease between them that was new, and she supposed it must have emerged from the distance between them: that and, she hoped, some personal contentment. When Silas had offered to take him on at Whittam & Co. – out of the blue, with his usual certainty of success – Eve had baulked at the idea. Seth had been in his second year at a college for young men in Sheffield, a quietly conscientious student, cleverer than any of them had realised. An academic life seemed to beckon; Cambridge had been mentioned. But Seth had very often chosen whichever path seemed least appealing to his mother, and he had done so again, accepting his uncle’s offer with alacrity, turning his back on his books. Yet, thought Eve, here he was in Port Antonio, as comfortable in his own skin as she had ever seen him.

‘It’s so beautiful, Seth,’ she said now. ‘I’ve many a time tried to think what it might be like, but I didn’t have enough imagination for it. It’s so … so…’

‘Lush, verdant, tropical,’ said Silas, slipping into place beside her and laying claim with the palm of his hand in the small of her back. ‘Fertile, hot, wet, green, pink, purple, blue. It’s everything you could possibly imagine, then more so.’

‘When I first came I thought I’d landed in paradise,’ Seth said. Eve noticed the alteration in the way he spoke: more like Silas, less like her. Perhaps this was a good thing, she thought.

‘A paradise within reach of sinners,’ said Silas. ‘Well – sinners who can pay their passage on my ships. Do you like your room?’

She was billeted in the hotel, of course, the better to accomplish her mission.

‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘I shall feel like a princess under them muslin swags.’

‘Mosquito nets,’ said Silas. ‘Close them, won’t you? Make sure there are no gaps, or they’ll eat you alive.’

Across the room a man whose pallid, newly arrived complexion bore a sheen of perspiration said, ‘I say, boy!’ in exasperated, carrying tones and Silas, ever alert to imminent discord, hurried over to nip it in the bud. A lanky Jamaican porter seemed to be the source of the problem; he leaned against the wall, picking his teeth and feigning deafness, and Eve watched as Silas spoke first to the guest and then to the porter, whose expression remained a study in boredom. He flicked his brown eyes in Eve’s direction and grinned in a louche manner; she looked away quickly. Seth said: ‘You see, this is what happens.’

‘What?’

‘The Jamaicans won’t lift a finger if they’re not spoken to nicely.’

‘Well, and do we blame them?’

‘We pay them to fetch and carry,’ Seth said, not answering her question. ‘We shouldn’t be required to stand on ceremony.’

‘Is that you talking, or Uncle Silas?’

He ignored her again. ‘But they don’t like it. They don’t have the temperament. They look at us and see white slave masters.’

‘I ’ope they don’t see a slave master in me. I shan’t get on very well in that kitchen if that’s t’case.’

Seth looked uncomfortable, but Eve wasn’t paying attention; instead she gazed about, taking in her surroundings. A fancy room, a little overdressed. Fancy folk, ditto. It was done up in the English style, which surprised her. She would not, if the place were her own, bother with chintz and Chippendale. The ceiling fans were nice, though: like the paddles on a pleasure boat. The blades silently stirred the humid afternoon air and made it tolerable. A small brown boy in grey shorts and shirt wove a path through the gathering, carefully dispensing lemonade with an endearing expression of great concentration. Eve watched him for a moment, charmed. He looked about the same age as Ellen, she thought, though it was hard to imagine the little girl being half as obliging as this child. As he passed he looked at her quite suddenly, as if she’d spoken to him, and he smiled broadly, offering up the frosted jug.

‘More lemonade, lady?’ he said brightly. Eve laughed and let him refill her glass.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And who are you?’

‘My name is Roscoe Donaldson.’ He spoke with a sweet formality and held out his free hand for Eve to shake.

‘Thank you, Roscoe,’ Seth said. ‘Move along.’

‘Sorry, Mr Seth.’

He dipped his head and slipped away, and Eve shot Seth a reproachful look. ‘He was just answering me, you know. There was no need to be unkind.’

‘If the adult staff were more reliable and efficient he wouldn’t be here at all.’

‘Oh, listen to yourself.’

‘I’m just saying.’

‘Aye, well I think that bairn’s doing a smashing job, and look…’ – she pointed at the boy, who was now standing uncertainly on the fringes of the gathering – ‘…you’ve taken t’wind right out of ’is sails. Somebody should tell ’im well done.’

Seth regarded her a little coolly. He hadn’t expected to be reprimanded, and so soon after her arrival; he had only expected to be admired. He looked away and saw that Roscoe was now leaving the room, draining, as he went, the last of the lemonade directly from the jug into his mouth, and it struck him how little his mother knew about the Whittam Hotel: how very much she had to learn. He could try to explain, or he could let her discover for herself the problems inherent in trying to bend the will of uncooperative Jamaicans. He thought, perhaps, the latter course held more appeal.

‘Would you like to see the kitchens?’ he said now, but she shook her head.

‘I’ll get to work tomorrow. I’d like a stroll, though. Will you come with me, outside?’

So they left, arm in arm, through the French windows, out on to the veranda and down the steps into the English garden that Silas had insisted upon. Here and there Eve smiled and nodded at other guests, people she’d become acquainted with on the ship, and she said to Seth, ‘Everybody looks content, broadly speaking. I can’t see that things are as bad as you think.’

Seth thought of Ruby in the kitchen and Batista waiting on, and merely smiled in a non-committal sort of way. He led her down a herringbone path that was shady and almost comfortable, and which opened out onto a bed of unhappy pink peonies, whose pale-hued petals belonged in the garden of a Cotswold vicarage. Overhead, a great white and black frigatebird wheeled and cried and swept off towards the sea. The heat pressed down from the sky and up from the earth, and the cicadas’ incessant racket filled the air.

‘You’re a long way from home,’ Seth said. She was like the peonies, he thought: transplanted into tropical soil. He hoped she’d fare better than they had.

‘That letter,’ Eve said. ‘Daniel was certain you hadn’t written it.’

Seth blushed. He had never yet successfully fooled his mam, and he wasn’t about to try now.

‘They were Uncle Silas’s words, but it was my idea that you come,’ he said. ‘Are you sorry you did?’

She reached up and placed a tender hand on the back of his head, drawing it down on to his neck and holding it there for a moment. ‘No,’ she said, and she meant it. She wasn’t sorry, she was glad: more than glad, and not just for Seth, but for herself. Easier, much easier, to be the traveller than the one left behind. She felt almost ashamed to admit it, but already, merely hours after docking, she was feeling the intoxicating effects of this island: the mixed and unfamiliar fragrances on the wind; the strange calls of birds the like of which she had never seen; the vast, dense, glossy greenness of the mountains beyond the town; the startling, infinite, changing blues of the sky and the sea. All these things stirred in her an excitement at the unfamiliar, a curiosity she was impatient to sate. She was in a hurry to become properly acquainted, aware, suddenly, not how long a time she would be away from Netherwood, but how short. She had never in her life felt confined or dissatisfied at home, but she felt now that she had sailed from the mundane to the extraordinary. Angus was upstairs in their room, in a deep sleep on a soft mattress under a tent of netting, but Eve felt wide awake, all her senses alive to this extraordinary new place.

‘Evie!’

Silas had come looking for them, and he stood now on an upper terrace of the garden, his hands in the pockets of his loose, linen trousers, a baffled smile upon his face as if he couldn’t for the life of him understand why she wasn’t where he’d left her.

‘Don’t be outside without a hat,’ he called. And Seth, feeling a pang of anxiety at his uncle’s tone, took his mam – his mother – by the arm and led her back up the path to the hotel.

In the kitchen, Ruby said to Scotty, ‘Well? Does she have her brother’s crocodile smile?’

‘She certainly fell from de same tree,’ he said. He snuck a finger into a bowl of custard and sucked it lasciviously. She slapped his wrist, but it was a half-hearted gesture because her mind was on this sister of the boss, whose imminent – and now actual – arrival filled her with apprehension. A female version of Mr Silas at her shoulder by the stove; she shivered, though her skin was delicately laced with beads of sweat and the kitchen shimmered with heat.

Ruby turned back to the haunch of roast venison, which she regarded with distaste: the colour and texture of a coconut husk, and just as dry. She wouldn’t feed it to a stray dog.

‘Carve this, Scotty,’ she said. ‘Then send it up.’

L
ady Henrietta Hoyland, denied bail by a magistrate who detested suffragists in general and suffragettes in particular, was being held at Holloway Prison until her trial at Bow Street Court at the end of June. This harsh decision was, of course, the very thing she had craved, bringing as it did increased notoriety for herself and yet more publicity for the cause.

She had baulked, though, at the sullen grey crenellations of the jail; its alarming resemblance to the Tower of London gave her pause for thought as she was driven through the portals. However, thus far she had borne her incarceration stoically, and her situation had been somewhat eased by the fact that Tobias had arranged for a meal to be sent to her from the Ritz Hotel at seven o’clock each evening. Toby was with her now; they faced each other across a scarred wooden table, cheek by jowl with their near neighbours; privacy was a privilege of the innocent and the free, Henrietta had learned. Toby, in his crisp new lounge suit and spotted silk necktie, was out of context in this harshly dreary institution. He was sleek and groomed, his reddish hair grown longer than usual, his face clean-shaven; women, the other prisoners, stared. Henrietta, unadorned, felt a small pang for her rooms, her clothes, her jewellery, her maid, but it came and went unremarked upon and from their expressions, he might have been taken for the prisoner.

‘Cheer up, can’t you?’ Henrietta said. ‘You have a face like a wet weekend.’

‘I can hardly bear it,’ he said.

‘Well if I can, you certainly ought to be able to.’

‘There’s a permanent stink of old sprouts and piss pots.’

She grimaced. ‘I know, and it’s odd, because sprouts aren’t even in season. Perhaps the smell lingers from last Christmas.’

He looked around the room dolefully. The other prisoners – all clad, like Henrietta, in dowdy frocks of grey striped ticking – looked more at home here than she did; their visitors too. He looked at their pale, plain faces, their lank hair, their dull, lightless eyes, and he thought that their presence here must surely be less of a shock, less of a disaster, for them and their families than Henry’s presence here was for him. He looked back at her, and though he had never thought her beautiful – no one did, generally: Isabella was the beauty, Henrietta the brains – she looked finely made by contrast with her surroundings.