Small Island (10 page)

‘Michael Roberts,’ I said.

‘Michael Roberts, yes. This young man has been officially reported as missing.’ She spoke slowly, emphasising each word with a small jab of her index finger pressed against her thumb.

‘Oh, he will soon turn up,’ I assured her. ‘I know Michael. He is always off doing some mischief.’

Closing her eyes, she leaned her head forward on to her two hands, which were clasped together as if in prayer. ‘Miss Roberts, there is a war on. When the family of a serviceman is told that their relative is missing in action, the intention is to prepare them for the news that the young man may be dead.’

‘The letter says nothing of him being dead,’ I said, but foreboding was trembling my hands.

‘God willing he is not dead. But prepare yourself and take comfort in the fact that many people, of whom I am one, believe that no matter what their colour, no matter what their creed, men who are fighting to protect the people of Great Britain from the threat of invasion by Germans are gallant heroes – be they alive or dead.’

She held out her hand for me to return the letter to her. But before it had passed from my grasp into hers she did the thing I had a dread of – she smiled on me directly. And all at once this woman appeared devilish to me. So devilish I stood stupefied and gaping as my slackened mouth, like a terrified infant’s, quivered with the effort of trying not to weep.

Five

Hortense

The moment I saw him the pawpaw I carried slipped from my grasp, its orange-pink flesh smashing open against my foot, splattering my leg with the pebble-black seeds. He rode a bicycle. The frame, too small to take his long legs, forced his knees to bend like a frog’s. Unfamiliar with the machine, he wobbled dangerously, ringing the bell to warn people of his hazardous approach. I ran so I would not lose him – borne on a euphoria that flew me through the street while the sticky pulp from the pawpaw seeped into my shoe. And I called, ‘Michael, wait.’ Many heads looked but not his. Raising himself from the bicycle seat, he stood to pedal faster.

I turned a corner, and the bicycle – wheels still spinning – lay abandoned in the road, sprawling disorderly as if dismounted at great speed. He was moving through a crowd: a raggle-taggle throng of men pressing together all the way down the street, men stretching their necks, craning for a better view, demanding hush, sucking on their teeth, spitting on the ground, gently jostling each other in this cramped place. He nudged people with his shoulder as he tried to make a steady path through this ragged assembly. And, like a thread pulling between us, I followed in his feet. Soon I was behind him, my hand, with stretched fingers, just an inch from his shoulder when I saw a chair – a part of a chair, the seat and two legs – tumbling through the air towards me. And suddenly I was looking at the dirt floor, a crushing weight on my back and a pain at my knee. Someone was covering me, the pressure of a hand pushing on my head, the vile odour of perspiration filling my mouth. Yelling came in vibrations through a protective chest while an arm slipped round my waist and lifted me from the ground.

The street erupted in commotion. The black men who had been a moment earlier an orderly crowd were now shouting, cussing, jumping and straining to send stones and rocks and wood arching high into the air. Then ducking and skipping to avoid the reply of smashing bottles and sharp projectiles that came back in volleys. A man, his head gashed, oblivious to the pumping blood that ran down his ripped shirt, bent to pick up a jagged stump of a bottle, lobbing it as casual as a ball game. And above this riot a megaphone boomed with words so sonorous and distorted they could not be understood.

I was carried through this chaos. My feet tried desperately to search for a footing so I might run along the ground. But I was enclosed as firm as a knot. Then, rounding a corner, all at once everything was peaceful. People went about their business unaware of the mayhem that could be glimpsed along the next street. In this harmonious place it was a peculiar sight for a man scruffy with dust to be carrying a grown woman whose knee was trickling with scarlet blood. So he placed me gently down and I saw his face. It was him. It was the man I thought was Michael. But it was not Michael. It was a stranger.

‘What you doing at this meeting? It’s not safe,’ he said.

‘Get off me,’ I replied. His skin was darker than Michael’s. His nose was broader than Michael’s. His lips were thicker than Michael’s. His eyes were rounder than Michael’s. His moustache was bushier and his smile was not crooked.

‘You hurt?’ he said, noticing my bleeding knee.

His open mouth revealed a gold tooth that shone from within. I could have screamed. I shooed his hand away as he reached out to touch my leg. To think that I mistook this uncouth man for Michael Roberts. ‘What is all that commotion?’ I found I was shaking. The words did not come out with the force I required of them – they rang with tremulousness.

‘Busta speaking.’ I had no idea what this man was talking about. ‘I just come to see what him have to say. But every time we meet there is this rough stuff.’

I was not interested in his explanation.

‘Your foot,’ he shouted, his face grimacing. ‘Your foot is mash-up.’

Calmly I told him, ‘That is pawpaw.’

For an instant he gazed on me as if I had mislaid my senses. ‘Pawpaw?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I replied, offering this man no explanation.

His gold tooth glared as he smiled. ‘Your mother never tell you pawpaw is to go in your mouth and not on your foot?’ And his smile then became a chuckle at his own joke.

A young man running to the battle line – his arms laden with two big stones and several branches of a tree – tripped in front of us, spilling his load. From his mouth a stream of cusses poured, turning the air rancid. The man who was not Michael grabbed this cussing man by the throat. Their noses only one inch apart, he said, ‘You no see there’s a lady here? Hush your mouth.’ I feared a brawl would begin in front of me. The man who was not Michael released the cussing man’s throat, pushed him, and for a second these two stood snarling like savages until the terrified cussing man backed away and ran.

Taking a composing breath, the man who was not Michael looked on me and said, ‘Sorry, Miss, for you to hear such language,’ before his attention was drawn once again to the uproar that was happening in the next street.

‘Go,’ I said. ‘I am fine.’

‘You sure? I can leave you here? You no gonna come back throwing bottles and roughing up the men?’ Again he laughed at his own joke as he walked away. And as his back rounded the corner I had to shake myself from the belief that I was once more seeing Michael.

I had sat a quiet vigil for Michael long after the war had ended. The festive balloons deflated, the ribbons lost their sheen. People stopped talking of the shortage of rice and, oh, those miserable days when the condensed milk ran out. Up on the hillside the boats docked below. Even from that distance, if he had been there among the crowd that alighted from the vessels, I would have seen him like a pinpoint of light on a cave wall. Those men who left for the war with spirited cheer returned looking around them as bemused as convicts. In their ill-fitting suits or uniforms that would soon no longer be theirs, they studied the surround as if this were a foreign place – a momentary reluctance trembling in their feet as they stepped on to the dock. Mothers hugged these sons to them while abashed wives looked guilty on the eyes of their returning men. And still he was not there.

What would Michael look like on an aeroplane? I had no picture to conjure with. Was he inquisitive – straining to make out the curve of a coast far below? Or did he gaze skyward, shielding his eyes against the sun as he counted the clouds that slipped past his view? In England the houses are placed so close together, I had been told, that it is possible to look on your neighbour in the adjacent and opposite dwelling. Was someone staring through a window to see Michael sipping at a cup filled with hot tea? Was the window open, a breeze caressing his cheek, or was the closed glass almost opaque with rain? What did Michael do when he was cold? Did he shiver, shaking himself like a dog fresh from a stream, or did he stand erect, wrapped warm in a thick coat? In the eye of my mind Michael Roberts – with his thin moustache and crooked smile – could belong in no other place than on this Caribbean island.

Six

Hortense

My dream was and always had been that I should find employment teaching at the Church of England school in Kingston, for it was there that light-skinned girls in pristine uniforms gathered to drink from the fountain of an English curriculum. But my interview for a position saw the headmaster of that school frowning, concerned not with my acquired qualifications but only with the facts of my upbringing. I evoked my father’s cousins and told him of Lovell Roberts, my father, a man of character, a man of intelligence, noble in a way that made him a legend. The headmaster unwittingly shook his head as he asked me of my mother, my grandmother. His conclusion – although no word on the matter passed between us – was that my breeding was not legitimate enough for him to consider me worthy of standing in their elegant classrooms before their high-class girls. It was my old college friend Celia Langley who eventually found me employment teaching in the scruffy classrooms of Half Way Tree Parish School.

Through those first weeks, my hand was clasped by Celia as tightly as it had been on our first encounter in the washroom of our teacher-training college. So popular at the school was she that small boys lined up to place gifts before her every morning. Little girls jostled and pushed so they might find themselves closer to her at the front of the class. Other teachers whispered to me how lucky I was to have Celia’s expert guidance. And even the headmaster implored me to watch and learn from everything Celia did. But it was not my first, second or third choice to be returned to that school for scoundrels. The spectre of Percival Brown and those wretched black faces grinning before me for the rest of my days made me feel quite sick. All at once my lofty dreams had soured to pitiful torment.

‘“The Lord moves in mysterious ways – his wonders to perform.”’ Celia tried to comfort me.

‘He surely does, Celia, he surely does,’ I said.

For none was so mysterious to me than how, in God’s name, a woman such as I found herself residing in the household of people like the Andersons. It was the wife of the headmaster at the school – a woman who not only had received her education at a boarding-school in Scotland but who was well known for having once been invited to take tea with a member of a royal household – who informed me of a room available in the home of a respectable family. I was convinced that such a recommendation would find me lodging with gracious people. Instead I was soon engulfed by the uncouth antics of this boorish family. So shocked was I by their ill-bred behaviour that I invited Celia to their dinner table so she might witness the manners of these vulgar people for herself.

The old woman, Rosa Anderson, began eating her chicken. Taking the cooked bird in her gnarled hands she stripped off the flesh with the few teeth she still had left in her head, gnawing on it with a vulturine concentration until it was just grey bones. Then sucking, sucking, sucking, as loud as water down a faulty drain, while the rest of the family and Celia behaved as if they were not hearing this revolting noise.

Displaying the food she had just put in her mouth Mrs Anderson, Rosa’s daughter-in-law, told Celia, with embarrassing detail, about the birth of her twin sons. Shot out and deftly caught by the nurse, these two boys, Leonard and Clinton, looked so alike I puzzled on the need for both of them to exist. Fussing over her little sons, Mrs Anderson cut up their food, stealing pieces from their plates, pinching their cheeks. And then, without warning, she rose from her seat, grabbed these boys, smothered them in loud, greasy kisses while tickling them saying, ‘You good enough to eat – just give me a kiss of that neck.’

Mr Anderson pushed back the table at the end of the meal and shook his shoulders, clicking the fingers of one hand while carefully putting on his record with the other. Jazz.

‘You like jazz, Celia?’ he asked.

Mr Anderson was a public-works officer – a government man, he told Celia with pride, but who, as far as I could tell, spent every day of the week staring and scratching his head over holes in the road. Celia tapped her foot to the noise that came from the gramophone but sensibly declined the offer to dance. She made no conversation at the table, only smiling or nodding or passing or chewing as was politely required. When we were alone she leaned in close to me to say, ‘But I like this family very well.’ And this family liked Celia so well that Mrs Anderson, who badgered me beyond torment to call her Myrtle, invited her to dine with us on many more occasions.

‘Hortense, perhaps you should take the time to know the Andersons,’ Celia advised me. But it was not her that had to live in the midst of their cackle.

‘So,’ Mrs Anderson asked Celia, ‘you a pretty girl, you have a young man, Celia? Someone to walk out with?’

Celia blushed and wisely let forth a little lie: ‘Oh, no, Myrtle,’ she said.

For it was to me, and only to me, that Celia Langley ever talked of the RAF man she had become friendly with. He had been in the thick of the war in England. He knew not only of guns, air-raids and bully beef but of the wintry winds that blew across the English moors, freezing his moustache hair so stiff that he could snap off the brittle strands. She could talk of nothing else. ‘Have I told you, Hortense?’ she would commence, in that whispering tone of hers, before the descriptions of his eyes, his mouth, his hands, his hair were breathed from her lips in elaborate prose. His voice, she said, lilted with the soft melody of a baritone. Whenever she spoke of him her eyes wandered dreamy, her arms hugged tight round her body holding her together as she rocked from side to side. She had met him in a shop when he asked her, ‘Excuse me, don’t I know your sister?’ And she, forgetting that she had no sister, told him her name. Celia said his face smiled with a hundred happy lines. His eyes sparkled like polished glass, he was charming as a prince. He was a Leo while she was an Aries. This, she assured me, made them very compatible. ‘A Leo man will always want to go far. And Aries women are of a similar nature.’ But what aroused her more than anything else about this man was the thrill of knowing that he wanted to make a life for himself in England. She could see herself finally ringing the bell on that tall house. ‘He wants to return to England soon.’ She would sail far away from this island, safe in the arms of her handsome RAF man, to a place where he had told her everyone walked on a blanket of gold.