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.

‘Well, Celia,’ I told her, ‘you must let me meet this man who would take you far away from here.’

Standing, leaning against a wall, casually rifling the pages of a newspaper yet perusing the contents with a concentration that made him oblivious to our approach, was Celia’s airforce man. Her voice cracked with elation as, momentarily holding me back, she whispered, ‘There he is.’ The man lifted his hand and pushed a finger into his ear. His face contorted so with the effort of digging round this cavity that he looked to be killing a buzzing fly in there. It was when he removed his finger, carefully inspected the tip then wiped it down his trouser that I recognised him.

‘Well, hello again,’ this man said – not to Celia but to me.

Celia, confused, almost squeaked, ‘You have met before?’

I heard a plain voice – no lilting baritone – when the man said, ‘This is the woman who likes to put pawpaw on her foot.’

I protested, ‘I do not. I accidentally step in the fruit,’ while Celia’s eyes were fixed on me for an explanation.

But this man just kept on jabbering. ‘You step in it? Let me tell you, Celia, about this woman. But wait, this woman is not the friend you tell me of?’

Celia, nodding, tried to say, ‘We teach at the same—’ before this man was off again.