As I stood she rolled her eyes with the other women in the room. But I paid them no mind. I fixed my hat straight on my head and adjusted my gloves. ‘Thank you and good day,’ I called to them all, as I opened the door to leave. Each woman returned that pantomime greeting as if I had meant it. I opened the door and walked through. Suddenly everything was dark. I was staring on a ladder, a mop and a broom. I put out my hand and touched shelves stacked with bundles of paper. For one moment I wondered how I would find my way out through this confusion. Only when my foot kicked against a bucket did I realise I had walked into a cupboard. I had stepped in with all the confidence I could grasp, while the women watched me.

All three were giggling when I emerged from the dark of the closet. One behind a hand, another with a sheet of paper lifted up so I might not see. The older woman was, of course, smiling but pity encircled the look. ‘It’s that door,’ she said, pointing her spiky finger at the other wooden opening. I thanked her, bade them all good day once more and passed through the correct exit, untroubled by the sound of their rising laughter.

Fifty-one

Gilbert

It was in bewilderment that Hortense walked from the place. Clutching her bag, her head held high. Four strident steps she took before she stop to look about her. Dismayed, she stand, fingers trembling at her mouth. She change direction for two steps. Then stop once more. She look up the street one way, then down the street the other. A paper drop from her hand on to the ground. She stoop to pick it up. Then bump against a big man who call at her, ‘Oi, watch where you’re going.’ And the paper slip from her again. She chase it. Struggling with the clasp from her handbag she stuff the paper in before she start anew. Four paces this way then two paces the other.

I call out to her, she see me. All at once this woman finally know which way she is going. Anywhere that is away from me. Tripping along the road I try to keep a steady course beside her.

‘How you get on?’ I asked. She dodged round me to walk on. ‘They tell you you have a job?’ She feigned a deaf ear. And, man, she is walking faster than any Jamaican ever walk except when they run. I have to call after her, ‘Hortense,’ for I was out of puff. ‘What they say to you?’ Still this woman has no word for me. Cha. I am following on behind her like a lame dog. ‘Wait, nah,’ I called. She quicken her pace. So, as Auntie Corinne taught me when chasing a chicken round the yard, I make a jump to grab this woman. Two hands I use to seize her then swing her round to face me. ‘Wait,’ I said. Stiff as a rod of iron, her neck twisted misshapen to turn her eye from me. ‘So what they say?’ I asked. Suddenly she look on me, her nose go up in the air and, man, I am ready to duck. Aah, I knew that look.

‘Why you ask me all these question? What business is it of yours?’

What little wind was left in me she cause to expel. Come, this was a good question. Why was I asking anything of this wretched shrew? I was ready to walk away. Plenty boys would by now be chasing the next pair of pretty legs that passed their eye, not wasting their time listening on a lashing tongue. So why I bother to say, ‘You are my wife,’ only for her to look on me like this was one pained regret?

‘Leave me alone. I can look after myself. I was doing it for many years before you came along . . .’

So what was it? A quickening breath? A too-defiant shrugging shoulder? The gentle pout of her lip? Who can say? But something beg me stay. ‘Hortense, no more cuss me. Tell me what ’appen.’

She purse her lip tight. Cha, I could do nothing but shake her. Not hard, for I am not a brute. But I rattle on her bone. It was the teardrop that splash on my lip, warm with salt, that cause me stop. She was crying. Steady as a rainpipe, the crystal water ran from her eye. She start contorting again to hide her face from me. A woman passing by begin staring on us. But it was not concern for Hortense’s welfare, she was just ready to walk a wide circle around we two.

‘What happen?’ I asked her.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

So I tell her, ‘Nothing is a smile, Hortense. You no cry over nothing.’

And the woman scream, ‘Nothing,’ at me again.

Man, let her burn. Come, this was probably the first time the woman’s cheek ever felt a tear. She was insufferable! I walked away. Two paces. Then a hesitant third before I turned to look back on her. She was snivelling and trying with all her will not to wipe her nose on her good white glove.

I thought to smile when I hear it: Hortense reeling wounded after a sharp slap from the Mother Country’s hand. Man, I was ready to tell her, ‘Pride comes before a fall.’ To leap around her rubbing me hands while singing, ‘Now you see . . . I tell you so . . . you listening now.’

But her breath rose in desperate gasps as she mumbling repeated over, ‘They say I can’t teach.’

Come, no pitiful cry from a child awoken rude from a dream could have melted a hard heart any surer.

I guided her to a seat in a little square, she followed me obedient. So did a little scruffy boy whose wide eye perused us all the way. Softly delivered in my ear, Hortense informed me that she was required to train all over again to teach English children. And I remembered the last time I saw Charlie Denton. My old RAF chum grinning on me because he was happy he said, oh, he was tickled pink that he had become a teacher of history. Now, let me tell you, this man once argue silly with me that Wellington had won the battle of Trafalgar Square. And yet there was he, one year’s training, and they say he can stand before a classroom of wriggling boys to teach them his nonsense. Hortense should have yelled in righteous pain not whimper in my ear. And still the goofy boy was staring on us. ‘Shoo,’ I told him. He poked out his tongue and wiggled his big ear at me, then ran away. But other eyes soon took his place. An old man was so beguiled by Hortense that, gaping on us, he leaned his stick into a drain and nearly trip over. A curly-haired woman crossed her eyes giddy with the effort of gawping. A fat man pointed, while another with a dog tutted and shook his head. Come, let me tell you, I wanted to tempt these busybodies closer. Beckon them to step forward and take a better look. For then I might catch my hand around one of their scrawny white necks and squeeze. No one will watch us weep in this country.

‘What you all see?’ I shouted on them. ‘Go on, shoo.’

Hortense’s hat had slipped forlorn on her head, just a little, but enough to show this haughty Jamaican woman looking comical. I straightened it for her. She composed herself, dabbing her eye with the tip of her white-fingered glove. I got out my handkerchief so she might wipe her face. However, this item was not as clean as it might have been. For several days I had been meaning to wash it but . . . Hortense held it high between her finger and thumb to pass it back to me. As she took out her own handkerchief from her bag, I saw the pretty white cloth had Sunday embroidered on it. ‘You have the wrong day there,’ I told her. Then, oh, boy, she blew her nose into that poor cloth with the force of a hurricane, before telling me quietly, ‘I walk into a cupboard.’

‘Why you do that?’ I asked her.

‘I thought it was the door to leave by.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said.

‘But it was a cupboard and the women all laugh on me.’

My mind conjured the scene but instead of laughing hearty on the joke of this proud woman’s humiliation, my heart snapped in two. ‘And tell me,’ I said, ‘what was this cupboard like?’

Her expression flashed ‘What is this fool man saying?’ but she answered, ‘There was a bucket and perhaps a mop.’

‘Ah. Now, that was a broom cupboard. I have walked into many broom cupboards.’ Reddened and moistened with tears, her eyes gazed upon me. And I believe this was the first time they looked on me without scorn. Two breaths I skipped before I could carry on. ‘It true! I walk into broom cupboard, stationery cupboard . . .’