She looked to me for all her knowledge of England.

‘Miss Jewel,’ I told her, ‘you should learn to speak properly as the King of England does. Not in this rough country way.’

‘Teach me nuh, Miss Hortense?’

I taught her the poem by Mr William Wordsworth that I had learned to recite at school.

I wander’d lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils.

Even though she asked, ‘Weh yoh seh it name – daffodil?’ and did not stop fussing until I had drawn the flower in the dirt, she learned every word. Watching my lips like a child enthralled, moving her own to form the same shapes. Recounting every perfect word with her chin high and her arms folded under her breasts. But soon she was rehearsing her own version as she went about her day. ‘“Ah walk under a cloud and den me float over de ill. An’ me see Miss Hortense a look pon de daffodil dem”.’

My government upper school had to lose its star pupil when I reached the age of fifteen. Upon leaving I was pressed by Miss Ma and others to continue improving myself by assisting with the education of young children (from good families) at a private school. I marked their dictation, underlining any wrongly spelt word and supervising as they rewrote the offending item six times. I listened to the reciting of times tables, correcting the bright pupils and encouraging the backward ones to speak up during the repetition of their mistakes. My favourite task was to hand out the books at the beginning of term. Those children all had new books, whose turning pages wafted a fragrance of sun on sweet wood; a scent of knowledge. They did not have the musty stench of decay that emitted from the dog-eared Nestfields grammar books at my government school.

This private school was run by Mr and Mrs Ryder, a married couple who had sold everything they had in America to set up the school.

‘It is for the poor people that we have been sent to do this,’ Mr Ryder told me, on our first meeting.

Mrs Ryder, in her movie-star accent, remarked, ‘Someone must help these poor negro children. Education is all they have.’

Many people wondered if Mr and Mrs Ryder were aware that their school took only the wealthiest, fairest and highest-class children from the district. Or whether these polite, clean and well-spoken pupils nevertheless still looked poor to them.

The Ryders were evangelists and Mr Philip had no time for evangelists. He did not like the way that people moved by the spirit of the Lord threw themselves to the ground shaking and frothing at the mouth like beasts. He could not understand that, as the service came to a close, those same people could be seen politely shaking the preacher’s hand as they left the church. He said, ‘The spirit of the Lord cannot come and go in people so quickly.’ I asked him to make an exception of Mr and Mrs Ryder as the spirit only ever moved them to raise their eyes to heaven and sway.

Mrs Ryder was, without any doubt, the whitest woman I had ever seen. Her short blonde hair sat stiff as a halo around her head. Her delicate skin was so thin that in places it revealed a fine blue tracery of veins. But her mouth looked unfinished – a gash in her face with no lips to ornament the opening. Mr Ryder had so very little hair that a naughty boy from the school claimed to have counted the strands that were left. Sixty-five was the number that escaped from the schoolyard out into the town. His poor shiny hairless head was red as a berry ripe to burst, and when the sun caught his face a fever of brown freckles was produced.

They had a car, which was the envy of every black man who ever walked from the fields in slip-slop shoes. Even Mrs Ryder drove this car, sitting low at the wheel in a hat adorned with a long brown bird’s feather. The car drew head-turning stares from anyone it passed. So it was to no one’s surprise that gossip about the Ryders followed close behind: in shops, under the shade of trees, on street corners, at food tables, busybodies discussed when they last saw Mr Ryder where Mr Ryder should not have been. When a pretty young woman produced a fair-skinned baby with a completely bald head, the men who sat at their dominoes sucked their teeth and whispered that Mr Ryder was spreading more than just his love of learning. Some looked in pity on Mrs Ryder as she sauntered through the district unescorted. Although plenty of young men would leave their game of dominoes undecided to rush to her assistance.

For Michael’s homecoming, I wore a pink floral dress that was given to me by Mrs Ryder. She had no more need of it so I asked if I might take it to have something pretty to wear for Michael. I sat into the night in the feeble flicker of a candle, adjusting the bust for a tighter fit, attaching ribbons of lace and sucking my pricked finger to avoid staining the garment red.

On the morning of Michael’s homecoming we assembled ourselves on the veranda. Mr Philip and Miss Ma fidgeted nervously as the Daily Gleaner van could be heard crunching along the stones of the path.

Michael had been home for holidays many times before. Once he even appeared when Mr Philip had a fever. He read the Bible to his father, talked close into his mother’s ear until she was consoled and left only when Mr Philip demanded his dumplings. But each time he visited something of him had altered.

‘Michael Roberts, what is wrong with your voice?’ I had teased him. We were sitting in the tamarind tree swinging our legs.

‘You can see Cuba from here,’ he said. But his voice cracked like an instrument with a loose string.

‘You sound funny – like this.’ I sang high like a girl, low like a man and something like a goat in between. ‘What is wrong with you?’

He jumped silent from the tree and did not speak until it was time for him to leave. I did not recognise the deep bass noise that came from his mouth the next time I saw him.

‘Come, Hortense,’ this growl from within him said. ‘Stand on my shoulders and see the woodpecker’s nest.’ He was firm and solid under me. ‘Can you see?’

‘I can,’ I said, looking on the empty hole. When I got down I gazed up at his face, him realising at the same moment as I that there was no chance he could stand on my back to look. He would snap me in two.

Was it the suit, the crisp white shirt, the brown-and-green-striped tie held in place by a pin? Was it the hat tipped at an angle on his head? His thin moustache, perhaps, or the crooked smile that lit his face? His eyes, it may have been his black eyes where a mischievous boy could be glimpsed laughing within. Or perhaps it was Miss Ma’s breathless exclamation, ‘Look at you, son. I send a boy to boarding-school and see what they send me back – a man!’

He stepped down from the van in his shiny city shoes. He shook Mr Philip by the hand and bowed his head politely, like a man of class, a man of character, a man of intelligence. Noble in a way that made me want to shout, ‘Michael Roberts! Have you seen Michael Roberts?’ Or perhaps it was the way he looked at me then. Over my curves, across my breasts, up and around my lips as he said, ‘But, Hortense, you are all grown-up.’ Whatever it was, I knew – from the moment my eyes first beheld this handsome, dapper, newly made man – I knew that I loved him.

Michael was gazing on me as we all sat down that night at our usual places for dinner. His eyes willing me to look up into his. I did once – briefly. He smiled so sweetly I nearly pass out at the honeyed taste of it on my lips. Miss Jewel arrived in the room carrying a plate of fried chicken. Michael’s eyes closed as he inhaled a waft of fragrant air. ‘Oh, boy, Miss Jewel,’ he said, ‘how I miss you’ spice-up chicken.’ Mr Philip looked up as startled as if a bird had flown through the window. A voice at the table – a child of his had dared speak at the table. But Michael simply patted his stomach as if unaware of this transgression.