The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (37 page)

‘Here, drink this.’ Lucy handed me a chilled red tonic one day.

‘What is it?’

‘It will help you, madam.’

I was suspicious.

‘It make you strong. You will feel better.’

I took the tonic, sniffing it. It was sweet, syrupy. ‘Thank you, Lucy.’

I slept soundly that night, hardly moving a limb, waking with the dawn. George snored lightly next to me and when I tried to get out of bed he hugged me to him, mumbling, wanting to keep me there. Instinctively, I pulled his hand up under my ribs, kissing it. I loved him still: or did I love him
again
after not loving him for a time? Either way, I loved George and my love for him felt like a memory flooding back, overwhelming me. Tears pricked in my eyes. Images came. George, when we met, dancing over to me with a glass of champagne. George, in tears, at the births of our children. George on the cricket pitch, smashing the ball and tearing across the pitch. His terrible dog-paddle swimming. His booming laugh. The time he stroked the sea turtle’s head so lovingly. The first night we made love, so hot and urgent I was frozen, hands and limbs clumsy, grasping. We fell over onto the bed and then off it, to the floor. We knocked over potted plants, a small brass table, its collection of shells scattering all over the carpet.

George moved closer, curling round me, our curves fitting together like a puzzle. How had I come to reside in Trinidad? The
Cavina?
That day was hazy. I had been smuggled into the island, just like one of those great Samaan trees. A seedling on arrival, a sprig. I had taken root, grown into the earth of the island. George sighed in his sleep, and I sighed, in love with George again, filled with hope again. I lived in Trinidad now. I whispered these words to myself. I was different. And I still loved my husband. That old Shango woman had given me a love potion.

George wanted to throw a house-warming party on New Year’s Eve, 1964: a Spanish night for a Spanish house. The children were excited. Irit promised to sew us costumes, George and I would be Zorro and his wife.

‘I will make you look gorgeous, dahling, in your little suits.’

Jules and George walked into the bush, cutting down some young coconut trees, dragging them into the house; they stood as pillars on the dance floor. George ordered a suckling pig for the spit. The maids received a Spanish cookbook with recipes for tortillas, paella and sangria; both were bemused. Lucy rose to the challenge but Venus thought we were mad, especially with the coconut trees. ‘Allyuh white people tek too much sun, allyuh
crayzee
.’

A party. A fête. George had designed his castle for parties; they were what he loved best. Parties are all about people. You can serve spaghetti Bolognaise and cheap
vin de table
if the mix of guests is right. No one will notice. I made a list of all the best people we knew, those still left, amazed to see how many
hadn’t
departed for civilisation, and not all were white. Our friends, by then, were a mix: remaining expats and a varied local creole society.

Everyone entered into the spirit. For a night, women were seňoritas, hair piled high, tresses snagged in mother-of-pearl combs or draped with lacy mantillas, eyes kohled, drawn to look like a bird’s. Lips were rouged, bosoms buffed and bulging from tight bodices. Cinched waists, long flouncy skirts. They snapped and batted their fans. Men dressed up as bandits in sombreros and ponchos and gun belts and moustaches were dabbed on with a burnt cork. George drew a straight line with black eyeliner across his top lip. He danced with every woman apart from me, and, to hide my annoyance, I danced with every man.

At midnight, we drank toast after toast to the New Year. There, in the bush, at the foot of those magnificent hills, fairy lights and champagne and dancing and Jules jumping into the swimming pool. His moustache melted down his face and his sombrero hung from his neck. He held up a glass of rum in his hand and sang, ‘Sabine, oh beautiful neighbour, come to me.’

‘You stupid French Creole.’ I laughed and jumped in, too, and together, both quite drunk, we slow-danced in the shallow end of the pool, fully clothed, a bandit and his seňorita, Jules proclaiming his love to me and serenading the stars. My mascara ran and my wet blouse clung to my breasts and I pressed my cheek against Jules’ chest. Jules, a big man, was lovely to dance with. From the pool I watched my husband on the dance floor, dancing groin to groin with Vera de Lima, a half-Carib, half-white woman, her black hair piled high, her hips luscious, the hips of the green woman. How could George resist? I watched my husband dance with another captivating woman, like all the women there at the party, like all the women in Trinidad. All the women on the island were made to be looked at.

I reached up to kiss Jules full on the lips and he kissed me back, tender and knowing and loving but not lascivious, not like the way George danced with Vera de Lima.

‘You are my good friend, Sabine,’ he murmured.

Oh, good and lovely Jules. He didn’t want to take part in anything between his neighbours. We danced in the pool and sang French songs till we were shrivelled with water.

 

Our New Year’s Eve parties became infamous and we threw many more. The 1960s beckoned a new era and, even in Trinidad, this meant a more sexually liberated time. Marriage wasn’t what it had been. For those who were unhappy, marriage was no longer a life sentence. For those who were happy, the sixties allowed opportunity to experiment. Words like
wife swapping
buzzed at cocktail parties. We met couples who were
not
married, incredibly. White women and black men together ‒ this was more and more common. Previously this was unimaginable, just like the couple I had seen at the market from my green bicycle. A love that was still taboo in Europe was unavoidable in Trinidad. I loved George but our marriage was always under threat. Other men wanted me and other women wanted George. This was both thrilling and worrying.

At a crowded party, once, I noticed a young Spanish-looking woman standing near to George on the opposite side of the room. Too near? Her skin was reddish-brown and polished, her black hair hung to her waist. Her face was small and intelligent. Her breasts were pert and bare under her gauzy dress. She stood next to George in a manner that could have been perfectly innocent and yet there was something in her manner, in George’s manner, that spoke of an intimacy between them. Yes, they were
too
close, their bodies angled towards each other. I was just about to dismiss these thoughts when her manner changed. Quickly, nervous as a bird, she scanned the room. I moved to one side and partially hid behind another guest. Satisfied, she laughed and glanced up at George. From her Martini glass she fished out the olive, popping it into his open mouth. George blushed. He closed his eyes and relished the salt of the fruit. When he opened his eyes he smiled and stroked her face with the back of his hand. He didn’t seem to mind her public act of daring. It happened in a moment and no one saw it happen but me.

I came to understand that George slept with other women. He did so in the name of modernity, of this new age’s allowances and celebration of promiscuity, but most of all because of the feast that was on offer to him.

 

Black men frightened me. I feared them for reasons I couldn’t articulate. I didn’t realise it at first, but I also felt threatened by black women: this was jealousy. A sex-love existed between white men and black women. This was an old love, as old as the hills around me. For centuries, white men had spread their seed as they pleased, had taken as many of their slave concubines to their beds as they could: blacks, mulattos, women with skin the colour of coffee, cinnamon, muscovado sugar; women the colour of mahogany, so black they were purple. This habit hadn’t ceased. The white man
still
strutted, still behaved as father, overseer: the white man, I suspected, carried a deep carnal longing for the black woman. I saw it, smelled it, felt it, even understood it. But I couldn’t compete. And what, just what did black women think of the white man’s attentions? What did they say behind his back? I dreaded to think.

 

I wrote to Eric Williams. It was becoming a compulsion.

I folded the letters up. Sometimes secured them with ribbon or string. I kept the letters in a box hidden in the back of a cupboard in the office, camouflaged by stacks of papers. Once, George appeared in the office just as I was closing the cupboard door, arranging the stacks to hide the box.

‘Hiding something, dear?’

I turned and scowled. ‘Yes.’

‘Oh, really? What?’

‘Letter to my
love
r.’ I let the last word drop. He stared. I felt a flush of pure hatred rise through me. On the desk in front of me was a heavy paperweight.

George was clearly taken aback. ‘And what lover is this?’ he replied, half jesting.

‘He’s young. Spanish. Black hair. He likes to tease. You know. At a party, maybe, he will put an olive in my mouth.’

George reddened.

I picked up the paperweight. ‘You little
shit,
’ I whispered as I took aim. I hurled the object as hard as I could at George’s head.

George ducked.

The paperweight smashed on the wall behind.

 

Irit became a personality in artistic circles. She exhibited local art in her boutique; it was a liming spot in arty circles. She rang us one evening.

‘Come to the Hilton, dahhlings, tomorrow night, by the pool. For a little drink. I’m organising a gathering for a friend to try and sell some of his paintings. Wear a nice dress.’

The Trinidad Hilton was famously built upside down: the reception at the top, the rooms underneath. We arrived around 6 p.m. as the sun was setting into a vast rose sky. The pool was floodlit, shimmering; the Samaan tree above it was an immense chandelier of fairy lights. Under it was a gazebo bar. Black barmen dressed in Hawaiian shirts mixed cocktails with the discretion of spies.

‘Darlings.’ Irit greeted us in a lilac kaftan. Her face was caramel brown, her eyes shaded with peacock blues.

‘Look, look, look, at this view, look at Port of Spain. Come and see.’ Behind the bar a narrow path led out to a glass-walled patio. We followed Irit along to a wide balcony. Port of Spain lay demure and diffident below us, acres of savannah grassland, the mauve city skyline further off. Beyond it the busy wharf, the Gulf of Paria. A cool breeze fell on us.

‘What a marvellous country, eh?’ Irit purred.

My eyes prickled.

‘I am so
proud
to be living here,’ she grinned. ‘No wonder they called it the Paradise Estate originally. Imagine what this must have looked like when the Spanish first arrived, eh? And then the British. Imagine how they rubbed their hands. Now it belongs to the people.’

‘White men are still buying up this island,’ I snapped. ‘Some now even belongs to George.’

‘But George is
staying
,’ Irit corrected me, winking with approval at my husband.

George nodded broodily.

I was in a foul mood, wanting no more of Trinidad; I wanted to jump from that wretched balcony.

 

When we returned to the bar area more guests had arrived, a mixed and fashionable crowd, black and white, young and old.

Then, a commotion behind me, a thrum of movement, voices raised, an Arrival of some sort. Standing not too far from me, under an umbrella, was a knot of besuited black men, drinking rum, laughing loudly. They were glamorous somehow, like a Trinidadian Rat Pack. Several moments passed before I recognised the figure in their midst. The thick-rimmed spectacles, the hearing aid. A small man, joking, the centre of things, enveloped in blue furls of smoke. My eyes photographed him. Eric Williams. Feet away. Relaxed and enjoying himself. Everyone, not just me, acutely conscious of his presence, as though he pulled invisible strings on the heads and shoulders of those gathered. Everyone peeped, they couldn’t help it. Eric Williams gleamed with the success of himself. He was polished, scrubbed. Off duty.

A hot and miserable shame flooded up in me. Almost a decade of snipping and cutting him out. Writing him letters! Letters ‒ as though he were God.
Papa.
Father of the Nation. Smoking and drinking rum and ol’ talking and lapping up the adulation of his gang of cronies, some of whom I began to recognise.

‘Darling, look who it is,’ George said, thrusting a rum punch into my hand.

I wanted to leave immediately.

‘Now’s your chance. To go over and speak your mind.’

Eric Williams glanced in our direction. I quailed. Our eyes met briefly but he didn’t recognise me at first, not from that day on the bike down in Abercrombie Street. I was all made-up, wearing a cocktail dress.

‘George.’ Irit appeared. ‘Come, come with me. Come, Sabine, you too.’

George followed and pulled me along with him, stumbling, trying to resist. I watched as in a dream as dear Irit, with the grace of a giant butterfly, alighted on the group, parting it, introducing George to Eric Williams. Williams shook George’s hand.

‘And this’ ‒ Irit turned to me, her eyes twinkling with mischief ‒ ‘this is his lovely wife, Sabine Harwood. A French woman. Eric, Sabine is very interested in the PNM, aren’t you, Sabine?’