Eden Falls (13 page)

She nodded, and walked backwards away from him, as if in the presence of the monarch. He hadn’t taught her this behaviour: he seemed simply to inspire it, and had done nothing to correct it. He liked it, in fact. He pushed the footstool a little further away, the better to stretch his legs. He opened his eyes, and even that fractional movement felt like an effort in the late afternoon heat, which pressed against him like a physical weight. He had acquired the native way with it: acceptance, indolence. The usual insect cacophony rose from the grass and the shrubs around his veranda, and an iridescent cloud of doctor birds weaved and darted about the hibiscus; it grew abundantly from a large stone pot on the porch and its mass of flowers flopped like a soft magenta bedspread over the balustrade.

Truly, this is a remarkable place, thought Silas. He thought about Evie, his sister, thought about bringing her here, plucking her from the granite-grey North of England and dropping her into paradise. He thought about Hugh, bleating from Bristol about cutting their losses and bailing out. He thought about United Exotic Fruits and how he would sooner gouge out his own eyes than let them have the Whittam. Hugh was a decent man, but limited, hampered by his own narrow horizons. Silas, if anything, suffered from the reverse condition. He could see a day when the Whittam Hotel would rise to glory, in direct proportion to the Mountain Spring’s fall from grace. Indeed, he saw Whittam Hotels throughout the island, from Montego Bay to Spanish Town, offering sea views and casting elegant shadows across landscaped gardens while pouring profits into the company coffers. Granted, this image was hazy and distant, but the difficulty of achieving a goal had always increased its appeal to Silas rather than diminished it. He had begun life with no material advantages; he was his own living proof that anything was possible.

The screen door swung open and Justine edged out on to the porch once more. She carried a tray bearing a tumbler, a bucket of ice and a jug of her Martinique punch: white rum, cane syrup and lime – an infinitely superior cocktail, in Silas’s view, to the fruit-filled concoction the Jamaicans liked. She poured, and as she did so he watched her face, which was serious and steady, as if she dispensed communion wine. Her skin was a burnished blue-black and she wore a white scarf in her hair, tied with a flourish at the front, not at the back. She was young, still; that is, she wasn’t old. Henri was lined, and his hair was turning grey at the temples. But Justine had the soft, dewy skin of a purple plum. Silas wondered if she tasted as sweet, wondered if Henri had ever taken a bite.

‘Justine,’ he said.

She looked up, though her eyes settled just below his. You might think she was a blind woman, following sound, not sight. She had hoops in her ears: brass, Silas assumed, not gold.

‘Masser?’ she said, and immediately looked down again, at the tray.

Silas sat up, leaned forwards and cradled her chin in his hand, lifting it so that their eyes met. ‘Look at me, when you speak to me,’ he said. His hand remained there, cupping her chin and he wondered how it would go if he pulled her to him and took a taste for himself. But he shifted his hand and, with a quick flick of his fingers, dismissed her.

He would sip the punch to the music of the cicadas, he thought, then drive to Port Antonio and find himself a whore.

He saw Ruby and the boy as he weaved recklessly down Eden Hill in the gentleman’s roadster he’d recently had shipped from America. Silas was new to driving. At home in Bristol he shunned the motorcar as the root of all idleness, and whenever he travelled to Netherwood – he had a colliery there, as well as a sister – he took the train, since the rail network in industrial Yorkshire delivered him almost to the doorstep of the inn at which he liked to stay. But here, in Jamaica, he needed a vehicle. It was an hour’s walk from Sugar Hill to the Whittam, and an hour and a half’s uphill trudge back. At first, Henri had driven him about, and this had suited Silas’s vanity, as well as neatly sidestepping the small issue of his inability to handle a motorcar. But on occasions such as this one, when his destination was a harbour-front brothel, Silas had found it demeaning to have the car parked outside and the patient bulk of Henri waiting motionless at the wheel. Nothing was ever said when he returned, but the silence was thick with meaning: at least, Silas felt this, especially if he was back within the quarter-hour.

So, instructed by Henri and on the private tracks of his own land – if indeed they could be called private, with all his banana-pickers surreptitiously watching the show from under the brims of their straw hats – he had picked up the rudiments of driving, and was beginning to look ever more comfortable at the task. This hill, though, this precipitate slope, which must be navigated between his home and his destination, seemed often to fox him; between braking speed and changing gear, he sometimes forgot to steer, and with four tumblers of Martinique punch inside him, he always did. Ruby watched his progress, and all her face was a sneer.

‘Cha! Drunk,’ she said.

‘Pie-eyed,’ said Roscoe, who listened closely to the English guests at the Whittam Hotel. He laughed. ‘Drunk as a skunk.’

The motorcar wended its way towards them, filling the road with its meanderings. In the driving seat Silas reclined like a man in a deck chair, and he held the wheel with one hand only. He was yawning, and his eyes were closed.

‘Roscoe!’ Ruby shouted as the Ford Model K seemed to pick up speed just as it ought to have been slowing. She saw them both, mother and son, flattened in the road by this fool-fool Englishman; she seized Roscoe’s arm and pulled him backwards, so that the boy fell smack on his backside in a patch of ram-goat roses. Silas, eyes open again, saw at last that he didn’t have the road to himself, and to Ruby’s utter dismay he came to an untidy halt and clambered out.

‘Well I never,’ he said. The roadster was skewed at an angle across the lane, and he leaned on it with one hand, to steady himself. ‘Ruby Donaldson and her fine young son.’

She set her mouth into a hard line and walked on, saying, ‘Come along Roscoe,’ though he was still sprawled among the flowers and in no position to follow her. Silas picked an unsteady path over to the boy and held out his hand. Roscoe took it.

‘There,’ Silas said, pulling him up. ‘A helping hand. Who doesn’t need one from time to time?’

He turned to look at Ruby, but slowly, because his head felt heavy with the effects of the rum. ‘Mmm? Don’t all of us need a helping hand?’

‘Roscoe. Come.’

There was something like fear in her eyes and Roscoe didn’t know why, since his mother was afraid of no one. He said, ‘Thank you Mr Silas,’ and moved away from him, towards Ruby.

‘How’s school, boy? How’s your studies?’

‘Very good, thank you, Mr Silas.’

‘You a bright boy?’

Roscoe, puzzled at the attention, nodded his head very minimally, torn between truthfulness and humility.

‘I say, Ruby,’ Silas said, in a pointed way that was hard to ignore. They were already walking away from him, but she stopped and turned. ‘He’s very light, isn’t he?’ His smile called to mind a crocodile, she thought. She let his question hang in the humid air, took Roscoe by the hand, and marched away. She was so brisk that the boy struggled to keep pace.

‘Ruby,’ he said, ‘did he mean I’m not very heavy, or did he mean I’m not very dark?’

‘Hush, child,’ Ruby said.

‘But which?’

She knew he would demand an answer, would keep asking until one came. ‘I expect, as he’d just pulled you to your feet, he meant light as a feather.’ She was just ahead of him still so he couldn’t see her eyes, which was a shame, because they always told the truth.

‘I am light-skinned, though Ruby, aren’t I? Because my daddy was a white man.’

Ruby stopped and turned to her son. Silas was out of earshot and, anyway, he was cursing his starting handle.

‘You are who you are,’ she said. ‘You are Roscoe Donaldson, and there’s no one else in the wide world like you.’

‘And you’re Ruby Donaldson, and there’s no one in the wide world like you either.’

‘Exactly so.’

‘But it’s a good thing, Ruby? That I’m light brown?’

She crouched, now, so that their faces were level. He waited with serious eyes for her answer.

‘It’s of no account whatsoever,’ she said evenly. ‘All that matters is what you feel here,’ – she touched his chest – ‘and what you know here,’ and she laid a hand on his head. ‘Fill your heart and your head with good things, and the colour of your skin will be the very least important thing about you.’

Behind them, the gleaming red roadster sprang noisily into life. Ruby and Roscoe, smiling at each other, barely heard it.

I
t was a curious phenomenon, but in England, one felt lonelier in a crowded place than a quiet one. This was Eugene Stiller’s theory, and he was currently feeling the truth of it, sitting alone at a table for two in the midst of the chattering customers at the Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street. He had been there for the best part of an hour, and apart from the waitress – who didn’t count, since she was obliged to speak to him – no one, not a soul, had so much as nodded at him. The English leisured classes were a very buttoned-up lot, he thought. If he’d been in New York, in a similar establishment, he would have made enough new friends by now to hold a party. Here, however, it was impossible to catch anyone’s eye.

Eugene had always been uneasy in his own company. He needed the stimulation of other people to keep him jolly; alone, he tended to brood. He blamed this weakness on his artistic temperament – a certain insecurity that was part and parcel of his sensitive nature. It had ever been thus. An only child, he had, early in life, fallen into the habit of always making friends, and he had found this easy as he was pleasant-looking without being actually handsome, amiable without being overbearing. But he wished he were more self-sufficient. Even now, as a young man of some account in the world, he craved the attentions of others; indeed, he almost seemed to dwindle with the lack of it, growing paler and somehow less substantial, like a sun-loving plant placed in the wrong part of the garden. So, two months after the Cunard liner had deposited him in Southampton, he was missing the easy familiarity of New York, where strangers in the street might pass the time of day without fear of overstepping an invisible social mark. For it was snobbery, he was convinced of this, that dictated the terms here; the famous rigid social hierarchy, which prevented one fellow speaking to another for fear that encouragement might be given to the wrong sort of person. He missed the democracy of America in general, and the specifics of New York in particular. He missed Central Park and pastrami sandwiches, Broadway and Brooklyn Bridge; the longer he was away, the rosier and more perfect were his recollections.

He should, in truth, be making plans to return. The portrait was finished. He could, perhaps, add a scrap here, a dab there, but he had left it on its easel in the drawing room of Netherwood Hall, and if he didn’t return, it wouldn’t suffer for it. It was a fine piece and, in the end, he’d been glad to have the spaniels. Thea was throwing a challenging stare directly out of the canvas and the dogs were gazing up at her, their liquid brown eyes fixed on their mistress’s face; it was a neat composition, and symbolic – Eugene liked to think – of Thea’s place in the world. Plumb centre, with an audience. She had loved it. She wanted him to paint another one, of the earl standing by his new Rolls-Royce. ‘I don’t work with motorcars,’ Eugene had said, and she had laughed, not as if he’d made a joke, but as if
he
were the joke; she mocked him most of the time.

Yet here he was, still, in England; and if it wasn’t work that held him here, what was it? He couldn’t say for sure. A relationship, of sorts, but not a courtship, certainly; not even a love affair. Rather, it was a monstrous physical urge: a consuming obsession that he once naively believed only true love could inspire. It had turned out that, within Eugene’s pure and idealistic soul, there was a seam of rather filthy-minded lust, which had him completely enslaved. It thrilled and intoxicated him, but also it disappointed him. He had thought himself a higher being; not superior to other men, exactly, but driven by an artistic imperative, not a physical one. He was compelled to adapt and accept this new self, since he seemed powerless to escape it.

He looked at his watch. She was late, by half an hour. The waitress, three times now, had passed his table, glancing at him meaningfully, and it was true that a line of people stood at the entrance to the restaurant, waiting to be seated. Perhaps he should order more coffee to justify his presence? But then, if he drank more coffee, he feared he might drown in it. Five more minutes, and then he would leave. Ten, perhaps. But he mustn’t be played for an utter chump. These thoughts ran seamlessly through his mind, while all about him the mêlée of conversation and laughter ebbed and flowed, reminding him of his solitude and making him feel miserable. Absently, he picked up a starched white napkin and spread it flat on the table, then began to fold, roll and tuck. It was a trick his father had taught him: a few deft twists of the cloth produced a little oblong body and a long tail. Frank Stiller used to make little Eugene laugh by resting the mouse on the flat of his hand and offering it to his son to stroke. Gently now, he would say; he’s a timid little fellow. Then, with an imperceptible flick of his fingers, he would send it shooting up the length of his arm. Eugene smiled at the memory. He was almost done. He tugged at the tail to secure it.

‘Busy?’

Thea – for it was she for whom he was waiting – had appeared at last and now regarded him with a look of arch amusement, as if she’d caught him in the act of something faintly embarrassing; which, in fact, she had.

‘It’s a mouse,’ he said, a little too defensively, and regretted it instantly. He sounded absurd. He looked at her, feeling thoroughly disadvantaged. Not only was he holding a linen mouse by the tail, he was also seated while she was standing. Plus, with her back to the window, her gauzy silk dress was quite transparent. He could see the outline of the lace edging on her underclothes, and he knew that she was probably aware of this, and its riveting effect. So, then: here was the reason he had not yet left English shores. The Countess of Netherwood, famously irresistible, had, in the course of their interminable sittings, decided to seduce the artist. She had done this casually, with an emotional detachment that was, in an odd way, part of her charm: this is of no consequence, her eyes had said as she peeled off her blouse the first time, and lifted her chemise over her head. This is something and nothing. She’d done it before, with others; that had been very clear. Eugene, not entirely inexperienced, but no Casanova, had felt himself in expert hands. Thea had reeled him in like a bass and now, to continue the analogy, he was flapping at her feet, waiting to know his fate. Actually, he thought, a bass would’ve put up more of a fight. Eugene had capitulated the moment Thea cast the line. He was not without conscience; he liked Tobias, and by nature Eugene wasn’t a deceitful person. But any qualms he had were as chaff in the wind against the power and pull of Thea Hoyland.