The Sugar Planter's Daughter (25 page)

‘Don't worry about the loan,' I said, stroking his hand. George had long slim hands; the hands of a pianist. He had a musical streak; with a few more advantages he would certainly have mastered more sophisticated instruments than the banjo. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, I'll buy the house. You can pay me back at your leisure. But it won't come to that. I will speak to Yoyo. I won't let this happen, George. I promise. Yoyo is naughty but she's not a devil.'

He shook his head and said nothing, as if he disagreed with those last words. But then he looked up with eyes bleeding anguish and said, ‘If you can help me save the house, Mama… if it comes to that – if I lose my job – if they try me and find me guilty – oh Mama! It's not just the house. It's everything. You can't save my marriage and that is a thousand times more than my job or the house. It's my all!'

I continued to stroke his hand, and all I could say was ‘Shush, George, Shush. Winnie will calm down and when she hears the true story she will forgive you. She will. I know it.'

‘But – the baby! The baby! It was all she wanted! She will never forgive me for that!'

That is indeed troublesome. That little girl lost. How will Winnie ever recover? Ever find it in her heart to forgive George for THAT loss? His faithlessness can be explained and forgiven; the consequences of this tragedy will remain for ever. I knew from my own loss that a mother can never recover fully from losing a child – and I knew that Winnie might well pin the blame on George.

But I am a mother, and a grandmother. Mothers contain a power in them, the power to put together the pieces of their child's heart. The power to heal. The power, sometimes, to pull out the weeds from a soul that is all a-tangle, weeds that have been allowed to grow; no, nurtured and nourished until they strangle every noble impulse in that child's heart.
Mother
is a not only a noun: it's a verb. An
active
verb. I had not done much mothering when my girls were growing. I had to do it now.

In my children's youth I had not been mother enough. I had failed them. For years I had been in withdrawal from my role in their lives. Winnie had weathered those years well enough, and grown into her own woman as a result. But Yoyo. Yoyo had pretended not to care but perhaps, deep inside, she did. Perhaps my neglect was the barren earth that had allowed these weeds in Yoyo's heart to grow; weeds that now strangle the truth of who she is, that have allowed this second Yoyo, this ugly parody of herself, to flourish. If my neglect was the root cause, so, perhaps, my care now can provide the balm that will heal.

I am Yoyo's mother. I must save her from the weeds that are smothering her.
Mother
is contained in
smother.
I must un-smother Yoyo, or die doing so.

T
he children are all taken
care of. Winnie will still not speak to me, and I sense this will still be the case for days to come. When the time comes, as a mother who has known the ultimate grief myself I can hold Winnie's hand through the process of slow recovery. I had no one in my days of loss and grief; she will have me, and that will be the difference. Winnie will not fall into the abyss, as I did.

George is in the best of hands with Andrew.

I must hurry to the child who needs me the most – Yoyo. I must return to Promised Land.

W
innie is forgiving by nature
, but she will never forgive me for
that.
Those are the words I spoke to Mama, and in my heart I believe they are true. I think, in time, she can forgive my infidelity – once she knows, and believes, the truth. It was wrong to keep the truth from Winnie. I should have told her the true reason for my avoidance of Yoyo right from the start. Between a loving couple there must be no secrets – not even secrets that might hurt. I now became fully aware that in cultivating this fiction, I allowed Winnie her indulgence of Yoyo, allowed her to believe that it was only my stubbornness that prevented a reconciliation. I took the blame, exaggerating a small quarrel into something momentous.

In allowing her a false image of her sister I was not trusting my wife to be adult enough to cope with the truth. I was treating her like a child. I should have told her right from the start. But it's not too late for her to know the whole story, and one day – soon, I hope – she will be prepared to listen.

But the death of our daughter! How will she, will we, ever recover from that! The daughter we have dreamt of for years; the daughter Winnie had longed for with every fibre of her being. Now it is not Yoyo who needs forgiveness, but me. My weakness alone has caused this. Yoyo's disloyalty is nothing, nothing at all, compared to my own. And the result, the death of our daughter, is beyond forgiveness.

At the hospital I was permitted to see, and to hold, Gabriella Rose.

I wept over that cold little body. That perfect little dead thing. But these remains were not my daughter. My daughter had disappeared into the ether. I wept and laid her down, but then I was called to sign papers and I was given the body and told to take it; to bury it.

Still weeping, I went to a funeral parlour and they made arrangements for a burial. I signed some more papers. What hymns did I want? What prayers? But I could not think about hymns and prayers. How could I bury our daughter without Winnie at my side? What hymns, what prayers, would Winnie want? Could we not wait for Winnie to decide?

No, they said. Gabriella Rose must be buried immediately. Bodies decay very quickly in the tropics. She must be placed in the earth today, or tomorrow at the latest. I must choose a coffin and pay for it. I must bring clothes to dress the body. I must

I chose a coffin, paid for it and for the burial costs, and turned away. This was not my daughter.

‘Just bury her,' I said.

A
ndrew was magnificent
. He rallied several people who had been guests at the party. He himself remembered talking to me immediately before the incident – as the terrible thing was now called – and others remembered Yoyo going upstairs a few minutes after me. What a good thing that Yoyo was such an eye-catching figure, a woman who captured and held people's attention! She had, apparently, been part of a small group chatting near the stairs. When I went upstairs, Andrew joined that group. And it was
after
he did so that Yoyo, suddenly silent, had excused herself and gone upstairs.

‘And just about everyone remembers Yoyo afterwards, standing at the top of the stairs, looking down and laughing,' he said to me. ‘She did not look like a woman who had just been raped. She looked like a woman triumphant, George. Five people have given statements to that effect. Tomorrow you must go before the judge, but there is no evidence at all that anything untoward has happened. Nothing.'

‘But who reported that I had assaulted Yoyo? Someone must have! Did Yoyo do so herself?'

‘That report, unfortunately, is confidential. But I believe it was that friend of hers, Margaret Smythe-Collingsworth. Yoyo herself has not made a statement.'

‘And what if she does? What if she lies to make it seem that I did what they are accusing me of? Andrew, there were no witnesses. It's her story against mine. Who will believe me, a black man? Who will believe that a white woman of high society would have seduced her sister's black husband? No one will believe me! No one!'

Panic gripped me, cold fingers tightening round my throat. I could hardly breathe, and my heart thumped so hard I was sure Andrew must be able to hear it.

‘George, you must remain calm. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. At present, Yoyo has not made a statement. She has not accused you of anything. She returned to Promised Land the next day and no doubt the police up there will question her. We must wait for whatever she has to say.'

‘But she will accuse me. She will. That woman is evil! She is out to harm me, harm us. Of course she will accuse me. How else can she save her reputation?'

‘Ha! From what they say about Yoyo, she's a woman who doesn't care a fig about her reputation. The things I've heard – rumours, of course, but still. No smoke without fire.'

‘But if she's out to damage me, that's what she'll say. What she'll do. Andrew! I'm lost. My life is over. Everything I've worked for, everything I've cared for, I've lost.'

It was as if the whole world was crashing in against me. I would end up in prison, just like Winnie's father.

How could I? How could I have been so weak, so feeble? Why had I not pushed that woman away, struck at her groping hands? Escaped? Escaped just as I had at Promised Land that dreadful Christmas Eve? Knocked her down, if need be? But no – that would only have given her more ammunition. Had I been violent she would surely not have hesitated to accuse me of that dreadful crime – or at least, of attempting it.

But why had I been like putty in her hands? Why had my body reacted the way it did? The spirit is strong but the flesh is weak, the Bible says, or something like that. In Yoyo's hands, my body had had a life of its own. Surely, had my spirit been stronger, my
no
more genuine, my body could not have reacted that way? Was there some tiny spark in me that
wanted
what had happened?

What kind of a man am I, to do this to the wife I adore? What kind of a man am I, to be led not by his love but by his lust? Where is the strength of heart I once knew, the force that placed me at the forefront of a mighty battle for freedom? The George of old would not have succumbed in this way. The George of old was a man of substance; his head held high, he would have walked away from temptation. The George of old would not be a whimpering mass of tears and self-pity. Where has the spirit fled that had me side by side with the bravest man I ever knew, my friend Bhim; the George who had once told Winnie, ‘This fight is bigger than us both, and bigger than our love?'

Where is my spine?

Y
oyo's
first words to me were cynical, her glare defiant.

‘Well? How is my dear sister?'

I would have none of it. I saw through her as if she were made of glass. This is not the real Yoyo. She pretends to be strong and above it all. She's not. There was a telltale red rim to her eyes, so I knew she had been crying. There was a quiver in her voice. I knew she was about to lie. There was falsity in the role she projected, for that was all it was: a role. I refused to play her game.

‘Johanna, stop it. Stop it at once.'

She wavered.

‘Stop what'?

‘You know very well what I mean. Stop this nonsense.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Don't give me that story. I can see through it at a glance. I can see through you. Johanna, tell me: how could you?'

‘How could I
what?
'

That's when my own act collapsed. Fury took over.

‘Don't play your silly little games with me! I am your mother – I know you inside out! Don't you dare pretend you don't know what you have done! Deliberately made a play for your sister's husband, deliberately trying to lure him into your web, deliberately playing on his weaknesses as a man! I saw you doing it when he was here, that Christmas years ago. Do you think that makes you strong? Do you think that because you turn heads you are some kind of a – a goddess, with the power to destroy hearts at the snap of your fingers? Hearts, and lives? How could you do it, Johanna? How could you!'

When I started my tirade Yoyo had been standing still as a statue; her gaze lowered, for her eyes could never have withstood the fire of my wrath. Halfway through, her bottom lip began to quiver. At that last word she let out a deep gasp, turned and fled. Out the front door, down the stairs to the garden.

I
hadn't even told
her yet of the trouble George was in.

I walked to the window but she was not in sight. Running away from the truth, as she always did. I stood at the window, waiting; I knew what would come next, and it did. Whenever Yoyo was upset as a young girl she would go riding. Sure enough, a few minutes later I heard the clatter of horse's hooves on the driveway leading from the stables. Yoyo came into sight, seated on her gelding Vitane. She was not dressed for riding, and her skirt was halfway up her legs, exposing her calves. The stirrup leathers would pinch her bare legs, and by the time she returned they would be red and painful. But that pain was nothing to that which I knew would be burning in her heart. I smiled to myself. My treatment was working.

It is not love to help those one loves to hide from the truth. It is not love to indulge them in their own illusions; and to remain silent is to indulge. Good sense might tell me I should have given my little lecture in a calm, collected manner. But letting my emotions, my rage, take over had been exactly right. Because that rage had definitely hit home, in a way calmness never could have. Had I been calm Yoyo would have kept on her mask and argued with me; my fury had given my words exactly the thrust they needed to puncture her at the core of her iniquity. And that was what was needed. A laceration. The lancing of an abscess.

I moved away from the window, satisfied. We would talk, but later.

T
he police arrived
before Yoyo returned. Not a local policeman from New Amsterdam – they had sent one up from Georgetown, which was some indication of the seriousness of the case. When Yoyo finally walked in, her clothes dishevelled and limp with sweat, her face dusty and tear-streaked, her hair falling out of its bun, she stopped and stared and her face turned hard.

‘What's
he
doing here?' she said, pointing with her chin, as she plopped her riding crop into the umbrella stand.

The officer, who had been seated on the bench in the front hall, rose to his feet and walked towards her. I had been talking casually with him; offered him some lime juice, and avoided the topic we both knew he was investigating.

‘Ma'am, I came from Georgetown to discuss the alleged assault that took place Saturday night last.'

‘Assault?
Assault?
Is that what they're saying now? Poor little Georgie-boy was
assaulted?
I'm telling you, he
wanted
it! He wanted it! How could it have happened if he didn't want it? I'm not saying a word without a solicitor!'

‘Yoyo! Just hold your mouth for a second and let the officer speak!'

‘Ma'am – It's not'

But Yoyo had taken the bit between her teeth, and was running with it. In a way I was horrified, but on the other hand I rejoiced. With her own words Yoyo was throwing cold water on the case against George.

‘All right – arrest me. Put me in handcuffs and drag me down to jail. Make a laughing stock of me. Who cares? Not me. My reputation is shot anyway. Go on, put on the handcuffs. I'm a terrible terrible person. I'm a slut and a harlot and whatever other names they can hurl at me. What do I care? Go on. Arrest me.'

She held out her hands to the officer, upturned wrists together, and at last she left enough silence for him to get a word in.

‘Ma'am, I'm not here to arrest you,' he said very gently. ‘No one is accusing
you
of anything. It's the other way round. The – er – gentleman concerned has been accused of violating you and I'm here to take your statement, to find out the truth of the matter. So that he can be charged with rape. If you wouldn't mind…'

Yoyo turned a whiter shade of pale. She stared at him, struck dumb for a moment.

‘George – raped me?'

‘Yes ma'am, that is the allegation. I would like to take a statement from you as to what occurred last Saturday night at the home of Mr Andrew Stewart, if you don't mind.'

She fell silent, and I watched her face as one emotion after another passed over it. Yoyo has always managed to keep a stony mien even under pressure, even as a child, and I had not always been able to read what went on behind that. But today the inner upheaval was visibly cracking the hard outer casement, and I could read her like a book: guilt, surprise, calculation, hostility, fear and, again and again, guilt. I realised, as she must have done, that Yoyo possessed now the power to twist everything to her advantage. To salvage her reputation, and bestow the final punishment on George and Winnie. She held an axe in her hand, and George's neck was on the chopping block. I held my breath, waiting for her next words. And I realised that Yoyo had reached a fork in her road. Her next words would determine which way she would go. What would she say?

She whispered one word. ‘
Margaret.
'

All at once the shifting emotions fled from her features. Her eyes turned hard as rock, and she spoke the words of absolution: ‘I have nothing to say. You can put your notepad away.'

‘But, ma'am'

‘Didn't you hear me? I said I have nothing to say. Nothing happened. Go back to Georgetown and tell them that nothing happened. Nothing.'

And for the second time that day she stormed off, this time up the stairs, two at a time.

And I let go of the breath I had been holding.

A
fter the officer
had left I walked upstairs and knocked on her bedroom door. When no answer came I walked in. Yoyo lay face down on the bed, sobbing her heart out.

I walked over and placed a hand on her heaving back.

‘Dear,' I said. ‘Would you like to talk?'

‘What's there to say!' she spluttered between sobs. ‘I'm just a horrible horrible person, a mean nasty horrible person. I'm bad, through and through bad. Everyone hates me, everyone, and I deserve it because I'm just so horrible, horrible, horrible!'

‘No darling, you're not horrible. You just made some terrible mistakes, that's all. But we all make mistakes. The thing to do is, when we recognise that, go back and put things right.'

‘How can I put things right?' She sat up and glared at me. ‘How can I put it right! Winnie has lost her baby. How can I put it back into her womb, alive? It's all my fault but it's not what I wanted. It's not what I wanted at all! I'm sorry, so sorry, so sorry, Mama!'

She flung herself at me then, and howled into my breast, repeating again and again the words she had just said: words of regret and rue and repentance, words of sorrow and grief and compassion for another. Words of healing. I held her then, and let her weep and bitterly sob, and as I held her I felt a tide of darkness leave her body and wash against my own heart. I felt a greater love for Yoyo at that moment than I had ever felt, greater even than the love I felt when she was first placed in my arms as a newborn. Love filled me through and through, and welcomed her darkness. Absorbed it into itself. And after a while the sobs subsided and Yoyo simply lay in my arms, like a baby. It was an absolution – of sorts.

B
ut it wasn't
as easy as crying on Mama's shoulder; it wasn't over. Yoyo still had work to do. The next morning, after breakfast had been cleared away and Clarence had slipped off to work, Yoyo stood up to go. I reached out for her hand. ‘No,' I said. ‘Yoyo, please stay a moment. Let's talk.'

She hesitated, then sat down again, a quizzical look in her eyes. Contrition does not wear well with pride, and by the look in her eyes I could tell that some of the old Yoyo had reasserted herself.

‘What is it?'

Defiance flared in her eyes, as if she knew what was coming, and already resisted. She had been subdued all through breakfast, but humility did not sit well with Yoyo. She liked to be on top; on top of everyone and everything. Which is exactly what had led to the present fiasco.

I hesitated. This might be difficult. The last thing I wanted was to provoke a Yoyo-rebellion. Even as a child, she had never liked to be
told
what to do; she liked to be led by suggestions; she liked a move to be offered mildly so that she felt she had a choice, so that it appeared to originate with her. She liked her pride protected, the reins of control firmly in her hands. As a parent, tact had been required. One had to say, soothingly, ‘Yoyo, don't you think it would be a good idea to…' Anything else was likely to produce the very opposite of what was required; often a tantrum.

Now, I took a deep breath and the words emerged: quite different ones to the mild encouragement I had planned. Words with a life of their own, unplanned, and most direct.

‘Yoyo: you must go to Winnie. You must confess. You must open your heart to her as you did to me last night. You must.'

She gasped. Her eyes opened wide. But it was not rebellion or pride I saw there, but panic; and I knew I had said the right thing. I had caught her while she was down; I had encountered the true Yoyo, the Yoyo unprotected by pride.

‘Oh Mama! No! I can't! How can I face her? How can I tell her the things I've done?'

‘I thought you were so strong, Yoyo? Then prove it. This is a strong thing to do. You must save what can be saved, and the first thing you can help save is Winnie's marriage. Neither she nor George deserve to live with the consequences of what you did. You must put it right.'