The Pink House at Appleton (20 page)

‘Excellent tea,' Papa said, with a knowing nod.

Ann accepted the compliment with a smile that squeezed her eyes shut.

They talked quite a bit after that, and if Mama were watching she would see Evadne clear away the tea things as it got late. If she could hear, as Evadne could, she would know that Mr Ramsook and his companions' days of unemployment were over and that the estate would provide them and their children with medical support. They got that out of the way early. Evadne locked the windows in the kitchen and in the pantry and closed the shutters. Then she said goodnight, looked in on Susan fast asleep under the mosquito net and went to her room in the servants' quarters at the back of the house. If she were still looking, Mama would see Papa rise to go because he'd seen the time and wanted to be circumspect. And she would note the subtle, restraining arm of Ann Mitchison and see Papa sink back into his chair.

Papa sat alone smoking and looking out into the night as Ann busied herself in the kitchen pouring late drinks, real drinks. She returned to the verandah with two nine ounce cut glass tumblers, and Mama, if it were possible that she still watched, would see them draw just a fraction closer to talk. Papa mostly listened while Ann spoke. Then they both spoke animatedly after that and had one more drink. Then Papa really had to go.

A chill wind came up from the valley as they left the verandah and walked along the path towards the garden gate. The night noises were hushed. There was no moon. It might have been because Ann pressed just a centimetre closer upon him or because her night perfume touched him in the right place. It might have been because it was a risk he wanted to take, or it could have been because of any number of things. All he knew was that she was in his arms, her breasts against his chest, his hungry mouth upon hers. It was short and urgent. It was the first time at the gate, in the open, on home territory. They broke apart, breathing hard, said goodnight and hurried away.

Papa remembered the shocking silence as he walked off, not once looking back. Ann remembered the short walk back to the verandah, how cool and refreshing the air was, how calm she felt with her child asleep in bed and her husband away from home, the fourth time in three weeks.

Whether it was contrived to make up to Mama, or whether it was a genuine invitation, no one knew. But when Papa made the announcement at lunch, he was noticeably uneasy, speaking in the manner of a man at the centre of a clever scheme to beguile an innocent.

‘The Baldoos expect us at dinner on Saturday,' he said.

‘The Baldoos?' Mama said, surprised.

‘That is what I said, Victoria,' Papa replied.

‘Well, that's nice of them.'

‘Are we going too?' Yvonne glanced from one to the other.

‘No, just your mother and me.'

The Baldoos were respectable people. Mr Baldoo was respectable because he was one third bald, wore glasses, had a bit of a tummy and looked important. Mrs Baldoo was very pretty, as only people of Indian extraction could be. Elegance and restrained femininity came naturally to her. Her lipstick was sparingly applied to a small, attractive mouth. And she wore linen suits and silver jewellery, not the common silver bangles worn by the coolies down the hill. There was nothing fanciful about either of them.

‘It's a Humber Hawk,' Barrington said, indicating the solid two-tone car resting under the papaya tree when the Baldoos first visited.

‘It's very nice of them to invite us,' Mama repeated, glancing pleasantly at the children. They returned her glance, not looking at Papa, who, observing this and knowing the reason behind it, set his knife and fork down. His hand trembled.

‘When I get angry with you it's because I care,' he said, facing them. ‘And when your mother and I argue it isn't because we don't love you. We argue because that is what grown-ups do.'

The children continued to look away from him, at their plates, in their laps or at the other end of the table. Coldly, Papa put aside his napkin, rose from the table and walked down the hall to the bedroom. And that night there was another harsh exchange of words, about something Mama had said at supper.

‘Are the Mitchisons going to be there?' she asked.

‘The Mitchisons?' Papa turned on her. ‘Why should they be there?'

‘I only asked,' Mama returned, wounded.

‘Well, why not the Dowdings or the Pinnocks. Why the Mitchisons?'

‘Harold, I just wondered.'

‘But why them?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Liar,' Papa growled, and left the table.

Mama, stunned, saw the shock on the faces of the children and went after Papa, tears stinging her eyes. The children left the table too, chairs tumbling, Mavis suddenly next to them like a mother hen, huddling together on the sofa in the drawing room. They could not make sense of the shouting.

* * *

That Saturday afternoon, Papa sat with Mama on the front lawn in the shade of the house in jacaranda-scented air. Frosty glasses sat on a dark-green wicker table, ice slowly melting. It was the calm after the quarrel. But it was a fragile calm. A million swallows sat on the telegraph wires a hundred yards away and moving shadows were long on the ground. Poppy stayed back at a safe distance while the children watched from behind bedroom curtains. The Mullard radio, in the drawing room, radiated yellow light and Pat Boone,
when the
swallows come back to Capistrano
. Vincent observed the scene from a solitary place. He knew whose side he was on.

At the rear of the house, the poinsettia sun in the first act of the evening, dipped, blazing furiously, wonderfully. White birds in formation dipped too, in crimson, making for the river in one swift swoop to join their mates already strung out on the grassy banks, yellow beaks and yellow feet jousting. There were sad birds among them and Boyd heard their moaning for someone lost that very day.

The evening was tranquil, as all Saturday evenings at Appleton were. The sunset was not yet as dramatic as it would be in the second act, with golden streaks and violent pink swathes. It was not yet at that moment when the air became expectant, the sky a grand opera, when dry leaves rose without wind, suspended like the softest feathers, then falling to rest, prelude to some inspiring narrative. The swallows were waiting their moment whilst the white birds kept to the riverbank in civilised intercourse in tight little groups.

Mama's legs were crossed, her eyes looking into the distance but not seeing the deepening shadows. She was dressed in a cream suit, white wide-brimmed straw hat with a low crown and a spotted navy blue band. Earlier in the evening, Boyd had watched as she anxiously applied red-hot lipstick from the black and gold receptacle and clicked her black leather bag firmly shut with that sumptuous click that only came from women's handbags. But in the quiet of the bathroom, he thought he heard her weeping.

The swallows, as if at a signal, made their exit, leaving in two huge waves of shadow, their Kyrie rising heavenward, so remarkable that Mama and Papa hung their heads like children. And the Mitchison's Jaguar chose that very moment to glide down the road. Papa and Mama stared at the receding car and said nothing. As they looked, a rousing wind, unusual at that time of the evening, drove the dead leaves along the foot of the hedge, backing them up in ominous dark mounds. Papa and Mama did not see this.

They retreated, awkwardly, to the Lloyd Loom chairs. Papa poured another drink. Mama had lemonade, giggling and holding her glass away while Papa tried to stiffen her drink with just a wee drop of rum. But they had stopped talking a little while ago. It was a forced performance, put on only for the watching children.

By the time Papa came in to announce that they were leaving for the Baldoo's, the sun had died to purple bougainvillea flashes. And there was a chill in the air.

* * *

Mrs Baldoo said that there was no doubt about it, the Balaclava Academy was the best prep school in all of St Elizabeth and Papa had done the right thing in selecting it. Then she declared that the best children,
the very best
, went there.

‘Do you know,' she said, ‘I don't know of any labourer's child who goes there. Not a single one. Not that they wouldn't be welcomed. Everybody deserves a chance. And Sister Margaret Mary is as kind and as honest as they come.'

‘They couldn't afford it,' Mr Baldoo said gruffly.

Papa's chest had swelled till it was in danger of obscuring his face. He liked the idea that the riff-raff could be kept out, that none of
those people's
children would have the chance to contaminate his own. He wasn't against
those people's
children going to the Balaclava Academy, he just wanted them to brush up first, learn some manners, be a little less vulgar, and he wanted their parents to acquire just a few
values and principles
. It wasn't asking too much.

‘The children will love it,' Mrs Baldoo said. ‘The garden parties, the concerts, the outings. Sister is very strict and she has good teaching staff: Miss Robb, for instance, Miss Casserly and Miss Skiddar. And there are several young nuns too.'

‘Some of the young mothers are frightened of her, Sister Margaret Mary.' Mr Baldoo smiled. ‘She takes no nonsense. A cousin of mine sends his children there. They are boarders at the convent. And they're coming along in leaps and bounds.'

‘Will all the children attend?' Mrs Baldoo asked.

‘Only Boyd,' Papa said. ‘Barrington will go to Munro. He's almost twelve. Yvonne will start at the academy next year.'

‘The younger they start, the better, I always say,' Mrs Baldoo scolded.

* * *

After a delightful evening, Mama and Papa were returning home. The Baldoos had talked about education and the importance of achieving one's ambition. These were familiar topics of discussion for them. Mama had been impressed with Mrs Baldoo. Although she was a wife and mother (her daughter, Anya, attended the University College of the West Indies at Mona), she had a full-time job as a doctor at the local clinic. She sat on several committees and had confidence and intelligence in bucketloads. It made Mama think, with renewed confidence, of her own situation. And so, on their way home, she took a deep breath and returned to the subject of her own personal development. Papa sighed bad-temperedly and gave her one of his hard looks. Here he was trying to mend bridges, had gone out of his way, in fact, by encouraging the Baldoo dinner invitation, and there was Mama, as usual, making not the slightest effort.

‘I could learn typewriting and shorthand and get a job at Balaclava in a lawyer's office,' Mama pleaded. ‘When the children are settled at school,' she added, trying to placate Papa.

Papa repeated that no wife of his was going out to work.

Mama then, bravely, even recklessly, suggested that if she couldn't be a secretary she could actually take up dressmaking because she had a talent for it and it was what she really wanted to do. She would only make clothes for a few special clients. And she could sharpen up her skills at an academy in Mandeville that she had heard about.

‘You heard what I said,' Papa growled.

‘I would work from home.'

‘I've told you a million times what I think about dressmaking. But you never listen, do you?' Papa gritted his teeth. ‘Just imagine Miss Hutchinson taking up dressmaking!'

‘She's employed in a job she likes,' Mama said bravely.

‘And you're not.'

Mama sighed and said nothing for a while. Then, giving Papa appealing little looks, and remembering Ann Mitchison's work on the estate, she said that if it wasn't possible to be a dressmaker, she could do social work with the poor people at Appleton. But only when the children were older.

‘And who would pay you for that?' Papa asked.

Mama didn't answer.

Papa's response was to gun the motor and grip the steering wheel hard.

The Prefect hummed along, pistons punching away, taking them home up the dark roads. As they crossed the bridge, Papa glanced swiftly in the direction of the Mitchison's house. He remembered the impossibly charged moments not long passed, the exploding passion and Ann's pliant lips. Her searing, intoxicating image had been in his head all evening. Then he stared at Mama in exasperation. She was sniffling.

‘What's the matter now? Jeezas! Here we are just talking and the next thing y'know – Gawd! Buck up, buck up, girl! Jeezas!'

Papa stopped the car. He saw Mama's frightened face as he turned roughly towards her. He knew that he was overreacting but couldn't hold back. The moment dictated his response.

‘Are you going to behave like a child? Victoria, answer me!'

Mama's lips trembled and she said nothing. She sensed violence she had never experienced before, never envisaged, and moved away from Papa in slow motion.

‘Behave like a child and I'll treat you like one, dammit!' Papa shouted. He started the engine and the car sprang forward. Not a single word passed between them after that.

Mama sat silently, trembling. Disabling fears flooded in upon her.

That Sunday morning, fears flooded in upon Vincent too. His secret plan made him tremble. More than once that day he sought to abandon it. But through the hole in his bedroom wall, the scene before his good eye told him that it had to be done. Not for the first time, he saw Boyd on the bed with Mavis in the afternoon heat, as the dry brown leaves rustled under the window. Mavis had her blouse open and her full titty out, nursing him like an infant, stroking his head and cheeks as he snuggled up to her, lips firmly round her taut nipple, gently sucking. Vincent took what pleasure he could from the scene, watching with his one eye, wiping it when it became too misty and returning it to the hole again and again. Then the
cauchee
sounded, shocking them all. Vincent saw Boyd pull away from Mavis and rush from the room.

Papa did not come speeding up the driveway as Boyd anticipated. The driveway stood empty and bright in the afternoon sun and the blue of the forget-me-nots blazed along the path. Racing hard up to the house, he saw a boy at the kitchen door. The first thing he noticed about the boy was that he wore no shoes. A small, black bow tie hung limply from his collar. His hair had the look that Papa described as “peppercorn”, uncombed, each strand of black hair rolled up into a tight little ball. Boyd knew that sort of little boy. They could be seen in the company of
higglers
on their way to market. Sometimes the boys came to the house with the market women, trying to sell red beans. But Mavis always sent them packing.

‘Gud eveling,' the boy with the peppercorn head said. He had dry lips and was standing on one leg with a black Bible in his hand.

Before Boyd could reply, a woman stepped from behind the mint bush, wearing dusty, black lace-up boots, a black dress with a frilly white collar and a black hat. Boyd remembered the woman immediately: she had visited their first house on the estate twice and was the only Bible woman that Perlita spoke to politely before slamming the door in her face, twice. She carried a black Bible, a much bigger version than the boy's, and a neat stack of papers. The sun was clean and hot and her shadow lay crumpled on the ground.

‘Is your mama ‘ome, little boy?'

‘Who is it?' Yvonne asked, suddenly at Boyd's elbow.

‘Is your mama ‘ome, little girl?' the woman repeated, turning to Yvonne, who seemed to her to be more forthcoming.

Yvonne would have replied but Papa drove up very quickly. Both she and Boyd stiffened unconsciously.

‘Is God in your ‘earts?' the woman enquired. The boy wet his dry lips and shifted on the spot. His shadow seemed uneasy.

‘What is it?' Papa came up behind the woman. ‘What do you want?'

The woman turned casually. ‘Are you saved, sar? ‘Ave you taken Christ as your personal saviour? Are you walking the straight and the narrow? ‘Ave you been dipped in the blood of the lamb? Is your place secure up yonder?'

‘Am I saved?' Papa laughed, annoyed in the extreme. ‘Are you saved? Are you going to get your backside off my property? Are you going to do it now?'

The woman seemed not at all surprised and replied coolly, as if accustomed to this type of bad behaviour from all the sinners she had ever tried to save. ‘I bring the word of God to this ‘ouse, sar. Listen and you will ‘ear.' The boy coughed, his shadow furtive.

Papa's chest was heaving; the corrugated brows that the children knew and feared were fixed and dark. The boy drew quietly to one side. His eyes were sad. He just wanted to go home to his dinner.

‘Get yourself off this property,' Papa said threateningly. He took a step towards the woman who stood her ground. ‘I have a good mind to – '

Poppy chose that very moment to pop up from beneath the house, eyes crossed, teeth bared and snarling. Snarling at strangers was a peculiarity of his, developed out of a sense of having to prove his canine capabilities, about which he cared hardly at all. His intention was not malicious but the woman did not know it. She darted away, discarding her stack of papers.
Tracts,
Mavis later called them. The boy was already ahead of her and his shadow was already ahead of him. They ran down the path, Poppy close behind, growling low, surprised at the effect of his performance. Halfway down the driveway, he stopped, nonchalantly chased small grass birds into the hedgerows then bounded back.

‘Well, he's not completely worthless,' Papa observed. Then he faced the children. ‘The next time those Bible people come up here, slam the door in their faces. That boy should be getting an education, not wandering about the district with a Bible.' Papa glared after the fleeing figures. ‘Trying to tell us how to live our lives. You think they know how to live theirs?'

They trooped inside the house, Papa straight to Mama's room. When it grew quiet, Boyd tiptoed out the back door and together he and Poppy crept beneath the thick foliage under Mama's bedroom window. The Baldoos' dinner had not brought the improvement everyone hoped for. If anything, the tension appeared to have worsened.

‘Please, Harold,' Boyd heard Mama say in a low, wounded voice.

‘Stop it,' Papa retorted. ‘Stop it! You hear me?'

There was a long, worrying pause, then Boyd heard Papa's stern voice.

‘Don't you understand respectability? No, you Pratts have never understood this. Get it into your head, you're not going out to work. We're not common people.'

Boyd didn't hear Mama's whimpering reply. He only heard the bedroom door slam and the sound of Papa's manly footsteps down the hall and out the kitchen door.

As the Land Rover sped away, Boyd saw Mama's face appear at her bedroom window, seeking out the vanishing vehicle. Her eyes glistened. Racing to the back of the house, Boyd saw Papa's Land Rover churning up the dust as it sped away along the valley road, through the green carpet of canes in the direction of Maggotty.

* * *

Ann arrived there first, on the green hillock under the shelter of trees overlooking the valley, the frothy white waters of Maggotty Falls in the distance. The Land Rover was parked a hundred yards away, camouflaged against the olive-green of the Lignum Vitae. She settled in the warm grass and felt fabulous and dangerous, as he would too when he arrived. And she experienced a transient sense of power which brought a smile to her lips, knowing that she was responsible for making him break every rule whenever he was with her. Doubtless, he felt the same. Waiting and wanting, she felt the warmth and the valley breeze up around her thighs. And she remembered Shropshire at the height of an English Summer: the lavender fields at Holdgate, near Much Wenlock; the snap, crackle and pop of the clean heat; the magnificent quiet. She thought, sadly, how they, the people who lived around Maggotty in their straitened little communities, never seemed to appreciate or enjoy the landscape, the magnificent greenery, the valley, the slopes, the grassy little dells and troughs. They were never there, in these little hideaways, enjoying a picnic, lazing about, reading a book, painting a picture, sketching, musing or quietly writhing in perfumed expectation, as she was then. They didn't know, and did not see, the beauty of this paradise that she had found. And that was why she knew, from the first meeting there, that it was utterly safe. It was the last place the local people would have time for.

Ann removed her scarf and, glancing round, saw him arrive, dark in the sun in his sugar-scented khakis. Papa felt like a rampant estate lion, a cane-piece predator, as he mounted the hill. And long before he got to her in that temporary world that they had created for themselves, values and principles meant nothing. She had wanted first to point out the Maggotty Falls again and the rolling fields in the distance, where the sun and the clouds created shimmering waves. She had wanted to be restrained, as she had been in the Shropshire fields as a young girl, and savour the calm and the mystery before the pleasure. But the delights were immense and dramatic. She remembered the winking sun through the leaves, the sweet heat, the lime-scented aftershave and the silly distracting kling-kling birds screeching in the trees as they embraced forcefully like virgin youth.

And just as forcefully they pulled apart. A donkey and a dreadlocked labourer had entered the clearing. Seeing them in their delinquent intimacy, the labourer's eyes, coal-fire red, widened, and he froze as shocked as they were. The man's head dropped self-consciously and he eyed the ground, urging the donkey before him deeper into the bush, his machete held low at his side.

‘Christ!' Papa said, more from relief than shock.

‘What?' Ann seemed fascinated by the dreadlocks, not having seen hair like that before and imagined that she had seen a human Hydra. The man's hair was matted but styled like coils of rope and rolled up tobacco about his head and shoulders. She gazed after the vanishing figure as if she wanted to detain him.

‘Ganja,' Papa said. ‘Didn't you smell it? That's what they smoke, these Rastafarians. We'd better get out of here.' And Papa led Ann quickly away, looking over his shoulder, thinking only of the honed machete held so casually in the man's unpredicatable hand.