The Pink House at Appleton (19 page)

The rain pelted down all the next day and Vincent kept out of Mavis's way, wounded and despised, like an old dog left behind by a cruel, departing family. He sat behind the garage, watching the young corn leaves, apple-green in the light, listening to the rain. While he listened, a kernel of an idea emerged deep in his head. It was revolting but he did not care. The rain drowned out all sound, and he returned to the comfort of his room and his new cigar. An hour later, in drugged ecstasy, as the rain ceased, he heard the Land Rover's splashy approach. But he did not see Papa walk quickly into the house, slightly unsteady, smelling of drink.

‘All your shenanigans will end when I get you out of this house and back to school.' Papa stood with both feet apart, hands on hips, glaring at Barrington, who sat on the sofa in the living room, frozen. ‘All your nonsense will stop when you have to do some work at school. You hear me?'

‘Yes, Papa,' Barrington stammered, eyes wild, body primed, ready to run.

‘You understand, do you? Then you'll be glad to know that I paid the fees at Munro today. You'd better start doing some book work now – arithmetic, science. You've got the books, so get with it.'

‘Yes, Papa,' Barrington said, eyes fixed on Papa's gesticulating hand.

‘And you, Boyd.' Papa turned his attention to the small, self-conscious figure lying on the floor, head down, looking at a picture in the encyclopaedia, entitled
The Persistence of Memory, oil painting by Salvador Dali, 1931
. But Boyd had stopped looking at the picture the moment Papa entered the room. He had been listening hard, expecting violence, and so when he heard his name, his head snapped up. ‘Yes, you,' Papa said. ‘Don't think you're out of it. Don't think I haven't seen you hanging about at that fence like a little good-for-nothing. You just make sure you stay on this side of the fence. Don't think that because Mr Mitchison is the assistant general manager it's alright to go over into their garden.'

‘But I didn't go over there, Papa,' Boyd interrupted, astonished. How could Papa have found out that he'd been trying to get to Susan?

‘I didn't say you did. I just don't want you over there getting into other people's business. I know what you get up to so don't play the fool with me. You stay on this side of the fence where you belong, so that you don't get into mischief. You hear me?'

‘Yes, Papa,' Boyd said, thinking that after such a warning, his only chance to meet Susan would be at school.

‘You're off to the Balaclava Academy. I've put your name down and paid the fees. Get education into that empty head of yours.'

‘What about me, Papa?' Yvonne sprang forward, believing that yet again she had been passed over.

‘You'll go to the academy too, but not next term.'

‘When then?'

‘Next year.'

‘Next year!'

‘You heard me. Now, don't be difficult.' He gave Yvonne a hard look and continued down the hall to Mama's room. Yvonne's lips and chin trembled so that she couldn't face her brothers. The rain drowned out her stifled sobs.

‘Shh!' Barrington said, five minutes later. ‘Papa's quarrelling with Mama again.' As one, they all fell silent.

They had always known fear from an early age. But since their arrival at the pink house, the fear they experienced and believed to be the most natural thing that parents, particularly fathers, inflicted upon their children, had taken on a strange permanence. It was there in the house even when Papa wasn't there. It was as if they were just moments away from disaster. The door would open suddenly one day and they would all be put out on the street. And it was because Mama and Papa weren't friends any more.

‘I'm going to my room,' Boyd said, struggling with the encyclopaedia. In his room, he put the book down on the bed and climbed out the window. Poppy joined him. They crouched outside Mama's bedroom and cocked their ears up to the window. From their place in the drawing room, Barrington and Yvonne pricked up their ears.

‘Why can't you be like other women?' they heard Papa's slurred voice say.

Raindrops dripped from the end of leaves and dropped with loud plops in puddles close to the verandah. Quiet lightning razed the sky. It had been cosy in the amber light of the living room until Papa arrived. He had returned to find Mama in her pink dressing gown, the dressing gown of the housebound, with that bedclothes smell, redolent of everything he would rather not be reminded of. Behind him at the club were women of Mama's age in soft linen, wearing perfume more tantalising than
Evening in Paris,
women who were making their mark, not lazing about with long faces and dark brows.

‘You married me,' Mama cried, feeling the tension, knowing the look in his eyes, sensing the background to it. The pressure had been growing before Barrington's beating and she had wondered when it would erupt. ‘You told my mother I was the only girl in the parish for you.' She stared at him, trying to quieten her voice. ‘Now you want me to be like other women!'

‘You're always at home, you never go out like other wives.'

Mama would have laughed if Papa's comment hadn't been so pathetic. It was obviously the drink.

‘Go where?' Mama was mystified. ‘I thought you wanted me at home. Now you want me to spend my time at the club like other women? I should walk there, four miles away, and then do what? Who would look after the children? You've always said only maids and loose women walk. If you want me at the club, why don't you take me and the children there more often? The only time we ever get to go there is when I complain that you never take us anywhere. You hardly get home before ten, when it's too late to go out. You often get home in the early hours. And mostly you're drunk. As you are now.'

‘Me, drunk?' Papa was incensed. His expression declared that a man couldn't talk to his wife calmly about the things that mattered without receiving unwarranted criticism. But that was women for you.

‘Almost every Sunday morning,' Mama continued. ‘The children know. They see you lying drunk on the bed with the chamber pot full of vomit on the floor. And they sing that Harry Belafonte song,
Mama, Look-A
Boo Boo
, making fun of you.'

Papa sprang to his feet, enraged, trembling, pointing his finger in Mama's face. ‘Do you know how hard I work?' he growled. ‘All this' – he indicated the house, the grounds, the firmament. ‘I am responsible for this. You hear me? Without me this doesn't exist. You hear me? You hear me?' He saw Mama recoil at behaviour that was increasingly alarming.

He couldn't hold back. The words tumbled out. Their quarrels had never taken such a ferocious tone before. Mama kept looking at him from under her eyelashes, silently asking him to stop, to not let it go any further, trying to connect, trying to make him understand. He didn't want to understand. His guilt saw to that.

Mama stood back, breathing hard. She felt that she was partly responsible for the state of things. Secretly she believed she deserved it, creating tension with her suspicions. In her heart she believed that her husband was as straight as an arrow, not given to anything underhand. She believed that his only faults were his impatience, idiosyncrasies and his belief that he was always right. All the men in her life, her father and brothers, anyone of note, behaved in that way. But she never quite understood Papa's revulsion when they argued. This was something new.

She just wanted things to go back to what they were before the Mitchison's arrival. It was all because Ann Mitchison was a live wire and had been to college, drove a Land Rover, did this and that about the estate and frequented the club with her pearls and perfume and political talk. Papa wanted her to be like Ann Mitchison. He didn't say so but she knew. He wanted her at home yet he wanted her out and about. He wanted her to be a woman of the world yet he refused to let her even contemplate establishing her design work. What he wanted, or what he imagined he wanted, was impossible. He was just confused. She was sorry for him in a way, but felt terribly bruised because it was so unfair. And his new anger and disdain frightened her.

Papa said nothing. Mama said nothing. Boyd heard nothing. Papa sat back in the chair, contemplating his brogues against the polished floor. The waters drained away.

‘All I am saying is that you need to get out more. So what if I've changed my mind? Can't a man change his mind?'

‘And do what?' Mama's voice broke in its appeal. ‘Where would I go? Get out like other women. What do you mean?'

‘Go out for walks with the children.' He said this grimly, without conviction. It was he himself who had laid down the law that no respectable woman should walk about unescorted. The servants should take the children walking. None of the estate wives went walking except in their gardens and on their lawns. Poor people walked, labourers walked, beggars walked and everyone who could do no better walked. And those who walked only did so in the dust of the miserable roads to and from the factory, walked behind slow donkeys to market, to the rum bars and back to their small, wooden, paint-peeling houses. Papa did not mean that sort of walking. Maybe he imagined a wonderful kind of walking that did not take place on the roads of Appleton. Perhaps Ann Mitchison had told him about her walks in the smart squares of London. Maybe he had been listening to Miss Chatterjee talk at the club about how she strolled in Hyde Park and other London parks with suitors in tow on a pleasant evening. Perhaps he heard Miss Hutchinson say she'd regularly sauntered about the streets of Paris and the suburbs and how delightful that was for a woman like her. On her walks she visited bookshops, art galleries, theatres, restaurants and tea and coffee-houses. But Appleton was neither Paris nor London.

‘We live miles from the club,' Mama continued. ‘We've only been there together as a family about four times. The other husbands take their wives and children out every weekend; to Maggotty Falls, to the cinema, to family and friends, visiting new places, to concerts. The Baldoos are always off to Mamee Bay on the north coast. It's lovely up there – private cottages, private beach.'

‘The Baldoos this, the Baldoos that. They are gods!'

‘Well, you're forever talking about them,' Mama replied. ‘They're your gods.'

Papa sucked his teeth.

‘The Mitchisons go out as a family,' Mama informed him. ‘Tim Mitchison is as busy as anybody, always away on business, yet he finds the time. They were at Rose Hall Great House only last week, from what I hear.'

‘You heard wrong,' Papa said with conviction.

‘And how would you know?' Mama retorted, imagining scenarios of every sort.

‘That's enough,' Papa suddenly commanded, with new vehemence, the veins at his temples visibly throbbing.

‘
We
don't go out, but
you
are always going out, here, there and God knows where,' Mama said. ‘Who knows where you go?'

‘I said that's enough!' Papa's eyes were smouldering.

Mama faced him, unable to disguise thoughts now written large on her face. She knew what she wanted to say but couldn't. It would hit low and could be fatal. The Lluidas Vale secret lurked at the back of her mind, and Enid's words,
if he's capable of this, he's capable of anything
, loomed like a fearful warning. She felt a deep urge to say something outrageous, but the belief that that would be wrong was far stronger.

Papa sucked his teeth again and left the room. It was the second time he'd sucked his teeth that evening. He did not care for her. Mama cried quietly in her pink dressing gown, hoping the children did not hear. They would only worry, the poor things. She was amazed at how frightened she became as she remembered Papa's threats, meant for the children: ‘I'll put you on the streets to beg your bread.' These were words the children were accustomed to hearing. But they were words that were now meant for her.

Later that evening, Barrington and Yvonne fidgeted in their rooms while Boyd sat in the chintz armchair waiting for Papa to leave the house. Beside him, the Mullard radio droned and buzzed. The news drifted in from the world, the events of that week, but he heard nothing of it.
Russia launches first intercontinental ballistic missile. Heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson knocks out Tommy ‘Hurricane' Jackson in New York in round ten to retain world heavyweight title.

As soon as they heard the Land Rover gurgle to life, they were at the window, tracking the olive-green shape, the red rear lights vanishing down the hill. They went to Mama like frightened rabbits, while the scent of Angels' Tears from the garden filled the room. And they believed their days at the pink house would end soon and that nothing would be the same anymore. Barrington would go off to boarding school, far away from Mama. Outside, the sound of dripping water continued, against a background of incessant night noises. Mama did not speak. The night drew in rapidly, chilly and cruel.

* * *

Much later that night, if Mama could see Papa, she would see a tidy, respectable arrangement on the Mitchison's verandah. The night air was clean and scented, and nocturnal creatures sang in the garden. Papa sat with Ann Mitchison, sipping tea. He would have preferred a double gin and tonic with a slice of lime and a chunk of ice. He hated the tea, although it was light and fresh and without milk and served in an elegant china teacup. Tea only reminded him of the revolting
cerasee,
its bitter leaves growing wild in the back garden, that his mother used to force upon him as a child once a month. It was what some rural Jamaican families used as a laxative, a “wash-out” for their children. The most repellant aspect of
cerasee
tea was the smell. It made grown men tremble. But tea was tea. Yet, here he was with calm deliberation, seeming to relish cup after cup. It might have had something to do with the person who served it because at one point in the conversation he was flattering.