A View of the Empire at Sunset Read online

  6

  The Mango Tree

  She peers down at the washerwoman standing in the yard beneath the huge mango tree and decides that if necessary she will stay up in the branches all night. Miss Ann points at her. “You think I can’t see you up there, hiding like a damn monkey.” The woman puts both hands on her hips and continues to look up at the raggedy head of the great tree, which casts a heavy shadow across the whole yard. “Child, you can play big woman with your mother, but you don’t fool any of we. Why you can’t behave your backside and come down? You too damn willful.” Eventually Miss Ann gives up and sits on a stool next to Josephine the cook, and the two servants begin to laugh.

  Whenever people suggested to her mother that girls were more trouble than boys, her mother always expressed surprise. After all, her first child, Edward, had gone off to study medicine and seemed disinclined to communicate with anybody, while Owen’s waywardness continued to embarrass the family. It was Owen who kept her mother awake at nights, for the second son seemed determined to do whatever he pleased without any regard for the consequences. He was habitually absent without explanation, and when he did show his face, one could be sure that complications, almost invariably connected to local Negresses, would soon follow him in through the door. The girls were easier; the eldest, Minna, had been sent to live with relatives in the Bahamas, which left just herself and her younger sister, Brenda, who besported herself as an obedient angel. These days, however, it was her own stubborn eleven-year-old behaviour that was making her mother fretful and causing her to wonder if perhaps there was, in fact, some truth to the belief that girls were more trouble than boys.

  On the day the island learned that the Empress had died, her mother decided that she would hold a small tea party on the veranda for her group of ladies. The men had hurried off to Government House to mingle on the manicured lawn and raise their glasses and begin to make plans for a more official event, but it seemed important to her mother that the formally gloved ladies of the island mark the passing of Queen Victoria with an impromptu gathering of their own. To this end, her mother had asked Miss Ann, the washerwoman, to lay out Sunday-best dresses for Gwendolen and Brenda on their beds, and she instructed the woman to thereafter join Josephine in the kitchen and set about preparing tea and cakes for no more than a dozen guests. As she sat on the edge of her bed and watched a skittish Brenda eagerly changing into her dress, she decided there was no reason for her to take part in this ridiculous afternoon tea. She tossed her clean dress to one side, and then marched purposefully downstairs and out into the yard, where she saw the rangy cook scraping yams while crouched unsteadily on her three-legged stool.

  “Child, why you looking so vex?”

  The question surprised her, for she was trying hard to appear as though she didn’t have a care in the world. Josephine scratched her squat nose and then hitched up her shapeless sackcloth dress and laughed at her.

  “I already tell you if you want to survive in this world you mustn’t let people read what you thinking. Now change your face.”

  She looked at the barefoot woman, who she feared was some kind of obeah woman, and then she began to scurry away, for Josephine had from time to time tormented her with cockroaches and spiders and centipedes, all of which she knew terrified the young mistress.

  “You just wait a minute.”

  Josephine put her provisions down on the ground and stood up. “Look at me and straighten up your mouth.” She stopped and turned to face the cook. “Good, now your mouth is fixed I want you to look yonder with your eyes, and don’t blink. That is how your face must be when you talk with people, you hear? Make your eyes dead like so.”

  She did as Josephine suggested.

  “Good. That is good. Everything is in the eyes.”

  * * *

  Her frustrated mother stood in the doorway to the bedroom and shouted at Brenda and demanded that she go and bring her sister inside, but Brenda began to cry. Feeling as though she might at any moment burst with anger, her mother passed quickly downstairs and out into the yard and approached the cook, who, having repositioned herself on her stool, spoke without looking up.

  “Mistress, I believe the child just gone up in the mango tree.”

  Knowing that her ladies would be arriving imminently, her mother strode across the yard to the foot of the tree, flapping a garden hat to fan herself.

  “Gwendolen, I insist you come down here this instant.”

  Miss Ann returned from the bakery with a basketful of goods, and she entered the yard and began to talk rapidly with the cook, but her mother had no idea what the two Negresses were saying. Then a still-sobbing Brenda appeared, and conscientiously holding the hem of her dress clear of the dirt, she joined her mother, and together they craned back their necks and squinted up into the bushy underbelly of the tree.

  “For heaven’s sake,” continued her mother, “the Empress has died. Show some respect.”

  She ignored her mother and looked at the red rust on the roofs which, from this height, she could see leafing their way downhill towards Mr. Bell’s pier, where an old launch had been moored for the greater part of the day. As she stared out towards the horizon, she knew that soon she would be able to witness the final defiant ignition of the sun as it slid into the sea and flashed its farewell for the day. This was her town, and from her perch in the mango tree she could see the full extent of the capital and she couldn’t understand why anybody would want to board a ship and leave such a place. Then, confident that nobody could see her, she rubbed a hand across her chest and once again made sure she was finally budding. It wouldn’t be too long now, and she imagined that her mother’s anxieties about her would only increase once she began to secure the attention of men. Suddenly a fruit plummeted with a heavy thud from an overladen branch into the yard below. She looked directly down through the branches and could see that her mother was beginning to appear foolish, for her eleven-year-old daughter was hidden away out of sight, and to any onlooker it would appear as though her mother had taken leave of her senses and was addressing a mango tree.

  “Please, you must come down here where I can talk properly with you, or your father shall hear about this.” Brenda gently touched her mother’s arm. “Young lady, do you hear me?”

  Dusk fell at the same time each evening, and it did so swiftly, as though an expert finger and thumb were snuffing out a candle. Thereafter, a theatre of noise established itself as the air was filled with a discordant fracas of cicadas and frogs. She listened attentively, while, to both sides of her, bats began to swoop and whistle around the mango tree. She could hear the low hum and clatter of the ladies taking tea on the veranda, and she could see the agitated shadow of her mother fluttering about and trying to steer the evening along a course that might be considered both solemn and convivial. She knew her mother would be assuring them all that although they had suffered a great loss, there would indeed be a new beginning. Her father, on the other hand, would be standing under one of the great saman trees in the garden of Government House and accepting yet another glass of whisky from a silver tray borne by one of the liveried Negroes who had been trained to serve. Her father’s mind would be unruffled by what he would regard as sentimental tosh about the passing of Queen Victoria. After all, death was a physical fact, and even though in the case of this particular individual it marked a moment of incontestable historical significance, it remained an occurrence that was a familiar part of his professional routine. She slapped a mosquito off her arm, and then inhaled the sickly sweet aroma of the night lilies, which drifted up in her direction. Immediately beneath her she could hear Miss Ann and Josephine talking as they sat together in the yard waiting for the tea party to conclude.

  “The child something, eh?”

  Miss Ann shook her head. “It look to me like Miss Gwendolen catch somewhere between coloured and white.”

  “Maybe so, maybe so.”

  They were silent for a moment, and then the cook reached down and
rubbed a foot whose skin was as calloused as that of a horned toad before lighting a small clay pipe.

  “Mind you, if a child of mine ever speak to me like the girl speak to the mother, then the child going feel my hand.”

  Miss Ann nodded in agreement and then used the front of her apron to wipe the perspiration from her brow. The washerwoman stood and stared up into the tree. Then she pointed.

  “You think I can’t see you up there, hiding like a damn monkey.”

  7

  The Day Trip

  For the past hour, she has sat anxiously on the edge of the pier with her legs dangling over the side, studiously ignoring the end-of-the-day bustle along the bayfront. Instead, her eyes have been firmly fixed on the horizon, hoping to catch sight of the boat in which her father is journeying home. At the height of the afternoon, when the sun is at its most cruel, the young girl from across the street shouted and disturbed her as she sat reading on the covered veranda. The girl suggested they play a game of hopscotch, and so she put down her book and let the Negress into the yard, but after a few minutes the stubborn girl abruptly lost patience with being told what to do and turned on her and called her a “white cockroach.” Without hesitation she dispatched a stone in the direction of the girl, but it missed and clattered against the iron gate, whereupon Josephine appeared. The forbidding woman looked from one child to the other before targeting her with a cold stare and promising to put an obeah spell on her. “You little white devil, maybe it’s only this will fix you for good.” She was familiar with the cook’s idle threats, but this time there was something unnerving about the way in which Josephine glowered at her. She darted past both the cook and the Negro girl, and ran into the house and bound up the stairs where she shut the door to her bedroom and sat trembling on her bed. She sat in silence and waited until late afternoon before hurrying downstairs and passing straight out onto the street. When she heard her mother call to her from inside the house, she hitched up her skirt and began to scamper in the direction of the bayfront.

  Finally, she sees her father’s vessel, which to her squinting eyes appears to be a distant black smudge mournfully steaming its sluggish way north towards Roseau. As it moves closer, the ship achieves only an indistinct outline, for by now the sun has already slipped into the sea and above her head the tired pelicans are little more than gliding silhouettes. As the men begin to step from the bobbing steamer, the twenty or so members of the Executive Council seem relieved to have survived the squally passage, and they chatter excitedly now that they are home. However, she is surprised to detect any gaiety in the air, for after all, the purpose of their day trip has been a sombre one. The steamer had left Roseau at dawn, and together with the other men, her father had undertaken a journey to inspect the site of the tragedy that had occurred some six weeks earlier when Morne Pel ée had erupted on the neighbouring island of Martinique, killing all the inhabitants of the capital, Saint-Pierre. She makes a visor with her hand and can see that her father is one of the last to step ashore. Like the other council members, he seems reassured to have once again returned to Dominica, although he is clearly taken aback to see his daughter waiting for him on the pier. As he moves towards her, he offers his child a hesitant wave.

  “My dear, is everything alright?”

  She nods her head and then smiles weakly, unsure if her presence is displeasing to him.

  “I take it your mother knows where you are?”

  She ignores the question and surveys the stooped greyish apparition that is her father. His clothes and boots are coated with a thin layer of ash that the channel crossing has evidently failed to blow off. Noticing her quizzical scrutiny of his condition, her father apologizes for his appearance and then turns and slowly points a finger in the general direction of Martinique.

  “Let me tell you, the southernmost portion of the island is burned grey and hideously disfigured, as though a mantle of green skin has been peeled back from the body.” He pauses as though embarrassed to have resorted to such a gruesome medical image, but his daughter stares at her father and silently encourages him to continue. “And the city itself, which I remember as a decidedly pretty and civilized place, is reduced to a smouldering heap of black stones and mud, above which there hovers a ghastly stench of rotting flesh. But, my dear Gwennie, let us please talk no more of this. The whole day has been too much.”

  He looks down at her and smiles, and then it becomes clear to her that her father has been drinking. As ever, he lacks companionship, and had she not made the effort to meet him coming off the steamer at the completion of this most distressing of days, the poor man would have been abandoned to walk home by himself. She studies her glassy-eyed father and decides to wait until tomorrow to tell him about the young Negress calling her a “white cockroach” and Josephine’s subsequent threats. Her father brushes some ash from his jacket before the pair of them begin to move off, and for the initial part of their journey they are accompanied by a visibly ribbed dog who walks jauntily beside them with the devil-may-care air of a nomad.

  As the evening gloom inks the final streaks of light from the sky, they leave behind the bayfront and enter Roseau proper. They pass by neat houses which she knows boast tiny bougainvillea-choked gardens, and every second or third property proudly displays a chained basket or two of orchids hanging below the elaborate gable fretwork. When they reach the elbow where Old Street crosses Cork Street, her unsteady father suddenly stops and produces a pair of small gnarled brass candlesticks from beneath his jacket.

  “I pulled them from the ruins of a church. You may hold them if you wish.”

  He passes the partially melted objects to his daughter, who takes one in each hand.

  “The heat must have been passionate to cause such disfiguration, don’t you think? Apparently, in just forty-five seconds, and with little in the way of an announcement, the Paris of the Antilles was rendered a total ruin. Can you believe that thirty thousand people were stifled by just one deadly cloud? Furthermore, in the avalanche of sliding earth I tell you not a building has been left standing. We have all, every last man jack of us, spent a whole day scrambling about in mud, but to what purpose?”

  Her father realizes he is talking too much and gently touches the crown of her head with an open palm. He then turns to move off, but as he does so, he stumbles and she throws out a reed of an arm to prevent him from falling, but he quickly rights himself and then retrieves the candlesticks from her.

  “I thought your mother might like them. As a souvenir of the day.”

  But they are both fully aware that her mother will look upon her father’s gift with derision. Should she be pressed to take the candlesticks, her mother will undoubtedly push them to the back of a cupboard and immediately forget about their existence, and so perhaps the reality is that her father has brought the candlesticks for her. Is this possible?

  When they arrive at the door to the house, her weary father experiences some difficulty placing the key in the lock. He shouts for his wife ( “Minna!”) , but his voice echoes weakly in the night air and his halfhearted plea-cum-announcement remains unanswered. She surreptitiously glances up and down the street, for her father appears to be oblivious of the fact that he is in danger of making a spectacle of himself. Fortunately, the key turns on her father’s second attempt, and she ushers him into the tomb-like silence of the house and closes the door behind them. Miss Ann, the washerwoman, would have long ago gone home for the evening, and her mother and sister have evidently retired to their respective bedrooms. Once again her father passes his daughter the twisted candlesticks.

  “Take them and set them where your mother might see them in the morning.”

  She waits until her bleary father has slumped down into a wicker chair on the veranda, and then she passes into the living room, where she gently sets the candlesticks down on the table and then turns up the flame of a small kerosene-oil lamp. Glancing over her shoulder at her father, she realizes that she has made the correct decision;
this is not the time to complain to him about Josephine or the girl. After all, the tiresome cook has intimidated her before, and she will do so again, and her father is mindful of the woman’s bizarre disposition. Last month, when news reached them of the tragedy on Martinique, the strange woman fell to her knees in the yard and proclaimed the volcanic eruption to be an act of divine punishment. “Everybody know the town is a wicked place and the women don’t have no shame. Lord have mercy, Judgment Day reach.” As the fine grey ash continued to fall from the sky and coat Roseau in a chalky layer, Josephine’s doleful lament was taken up in other yards, so that by dusk everybody in town was subject to a mournful outpouring of biblically inspired grief that echoed across the full breadth of the small capital.

  She steps back onto the veranda and realizes that her father’s snoring has suddenly achieved a deep, sonorous regularity, which means that it will be extremely difficult for her to rouse him. When he breathes out, the thick bristles of his heavy moustache ripple as though being moved by a light breeze. She stares at her father and notices that a few shadowy bars, created by the moonlight slanting through the jalousies, appear to be imprisoning him in his chair. She decides she will take the candlesticks with her when she goes upstairs to her bedroom, but before doing so she kneels before her father and begins to unlace his ashy boots, which are tightly strapped on his feet. Having eased them off, she places the boots neatly to one side and then covers her father in a blanket. Miss Ann will find him at dawn when she comes to work. It will be Miss Ann who will help him to stand up, and then Miss Ann will point her father in the direction of the staircase so that he can shamble upstairs and join his wife, who will no doubt still be sleeping. In truth, this vigilance over his well-being is something that she would happily undertake if only her father would ask. She knows that in the morning, once her father is safely upstairs, Miss Ann will compose herself and thereafter take charge of all household matters. Miss Ann will do her best to make sure the day unfolds for the master and his family both smoothly and with a minimum of fuss.