The Pink House at Appleton
Jonathan Braham
Copyright © 2015 Jonathan Braham
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For my sister,
Kimberley Ashbury Portland-Tobiaz,
who would have loved Yvonne.
Contents
Cover
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
PART TWO
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
PART THREE
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Braham was born John Lascelles Braham in Jamaica in 1948, the second of the six children of Harold Braham, industrial chemist, farmer and company director, and Victoria Braham (née Pratt) whose great great-grandmother was believed to have been a slave. Braham’s paternal great great-grandfather was an English gentleman farmer and Jamaican estate owner.
Braham spent his formative years at Appleton Estate. He was educated at the Balaclava Academy, a Catholic prep school; Lewin’s Prep, whose headmaster was the great Jamaican educator and historian, R.J.M. Lewin, the father of Dr Olive Lewin, concert pianist, author and social anthropologist. He also attended St Thomas More Prep, in May Pen, and later the private Anglican secondary school, Glenmuir.
In his last year at school he wrote his first novel, and short stories for the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation radio programme, “Jamaica Woman”. Interviewed by the presenter, the popular actress, Leonie Forbes, he accepted the award “Man of the Week”.
At Mico University College where he was secretary of the students’ council and a member of the Drama Society, he flirted briefly with the theatre, both as playwright and director, but continued to write for national newspapers and the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation weekly radio magazine programme, “Rendezvous”. His poetry won awards in the annual Literary Festival and published in the Jamaica Journal.
In 1976, after marrying the English photographic model, Christine Barling, Braham left Jamaica for London with one purpose: to become a published novelist. But “life got in the way”. He studied Art History at the Open University, Television at London University, English literature at the University of North London and was, for over twenty years, chief education welfare officer and head of service in the London Borough of Brent. The Pink House at Appleton was published in 2011.
PROLOGUE
Some things you cannot forget, even those you think you’ve deleted permanently. The slightest impulse brings them back, every detail, every sound and smell, the deepest feelings in digitally enhanced, high definition reality.
Boyd Longfellow Brookes lived his special memory, planted in him over forty years ago, in Technicolor. A tragedy, it recurred even in dreams, in the dead of night, sometimes with such force that he lived the ordeal as a child, before it became memory.
That October afternoon it was the music that triggered it. He sat at his Apple Powerbook G4, trading stock on Schwab-Europe.com, tapping into the black keys, mouthing into the black telephone, sipping from a glass of red wine. He liked these pleasurable wine-satiated afternoons at home for they, peculiarly, heightened and sharpened his risk-taking.
Beyond the window, restive trees rustled, yellow leaves soared and fell away, and the first grains of rain landed on the windowpane. Out on the King’s Road, Routemasters 11s and 22s passed like red shadows. The rousing wind, setting the trees in a rhythmic dance as the sky darkened, ruffled the feathers of the late pigeons as they dashed for home and Trafalgar Square. And suddenly the rain came down in white, belligerent streaks.
He quit the Apple Powerbook and ran to the balcony, enveloped in a sudden frisson of expectation. Stopping impatiently in the kitchen, he poured hastily from the half-empty bottle, a tasty Chateau Figeac, resting on the corian worktop. He supped the wine but did not reach the balcony. Music stopped him: the Saint-Saëns Violin Concerto No 3 in B minor, the Andantino quasi allegretto. Out from the little Bose radio on the bookshelf poured the haunting strains, heard over forty years ago in silence and distress. He stumbled onto the rain-swept balcony, the wine glass heavy in his hand.
He was eight years old again in the house at Appleton Estate, petrified. In that dark scene he stood alone in the drawing room, Mama weeping while Papa raised the strap and said, ‘Boyd, did you molest Susan?’
The world stopped. Mavis, lovely Mavis, smelling of garlic and escallion, rushed from the kitchen, protesting his innocence. ‘Lawd, have mercy!’ And when that wasn’t enough, she accused them. ‘But who could say such a thing, sar?’
Mrs Dowding could, that small-minded gossip, their next door neighbour, who thought the Tropic of Cancer was a sex book, a bad book. Evadne could, Ann Mitchison’s maid. She saw any association between a boy and a girl as lust of the flesh.
The world turned against him the moment the alien word, molest, slid from Papa’s lips. He did not know the true meaning of the word but saw it in their eyes, his family, gathered in the room around him, the one word, guilty. And something else too – the realisation that he, Boyd, was capable of such a monstrous thing, that all his living had been meaningless, untrue.
He could not tell Papa what it meant to see Susan’s eyes like pretty marbles, inhale the scent of her, see her pinkness and her gingham dress. It was impossible to tell Papa about his big feelings, his secret thoughts, the inner sanctum where the music came from, the part of him that had gone out to Susan. That was what Papa wanted to know, the very things he himself could not talk about.
He had run from the room that day because he could not explain. And that night, distraught, alone in his room, he heard the heart-clutching music from the Mullard radio. And there was a certain comfort in hearing the music, lying in bed, knowing of the anger and indignation that prevailed, knowing that he had been utterly condemned, and knowing that he was totally innocent. But it was the events of that day that had quickened the end of Appleton because, after that day, the disaster was unstoppable. Papa, the great man, could not prevent it. He was involved in the destruction from the very beginning, as the facts later revealed.
In the final days, Papa never once returned home from the club till the grey of dawn. The Land Rover deposited him to the pink house, full of Appleton rum and a singular vision of the future for his family, his knee-length socks in heavy brown brogues, short khaki trousers crumpled, cotton shirt drunk with Royal Blend tobacco. He put the key in the lock, made a noise in the pantry to signal his arrival and continued down the hall in the dark to the bedroom where Mama lay, dried tears on cheeks, questions unanswered. And he mounted her in the dark under the covers, her flesh hot like the virgin sugar in his hands at the factory.
Papa thought not of Mama but of Miss Chatterjee at the club, whose smooth thighs rippled as she stroked the tennis balls. Miss Chatterjee, small of ankle, with the lipsticked mouth and a womanliness only travel, education and class could confer. It was Miss Chatterjee who Papa penetrated during the early months at Appleton, while Mama gave everything that she knew to give, and would have given more if asked. She was there to serve. But it was Miss Chatterjee who Papa saw and felt beneath him until the English family, the Mitchisons, arrived. Then it was Ann Mitchison with her quivering, seductive, kiss lips, all through the summer. Ann Mitchison changed everything.
At nights, unable to sleep, Boyd listened and heard the trembling music, whatever the hour that Papa arrived in the Prefect or the Land Rover, and Mama’s submissive moans and cries as if she called out to him. Very often he was at their bedroom door in the dark, seeing their contortions, the moonlight splashing the sheets and silver-lining the dark furniture. And always there was Papa’s vigorous back, bringing the music to an abrupt, discordant end, drumsticks and cymbals clattering down to the ground.
Standing and looking out from a rainy balcony in Chelsea, in October 2003, that was what he remembered. But that wasn’t everything.
PART ONE
The Beginning
CHAPTER 1
They lived in a pretty little house in the heart of the Black River valley, on a grassy slope overlooking Appleton Estate sugar factory in St Elizabeth parish. The house was painted in deep green and cream gloss, popular colours of the period and for houses of that sort. Papa said that it was a gingerbread house. Mama didn’t think so and she should know; she was born in a gingerbread house, chalk-white with fanciful fretwork, deep in forty acres of gardens in St Catherine. Mama’s mother, Grandma Rosetta, still lived there along with Mama’s two brothers, Uncle Haughton and Uncle Albert.
When Mama left the gingerbread house as a young married woman, she moved to an estate house set in a field of pink bougainvillea at Worthy Park. Later, as Papa’s prospects advanced, they moved to Appleton, driving a hundred miles in a single day in the grey Ford Prefect with the three children in the back, through the dusty roads of Clarendon, Manchester and St Elizabeth, to this house with front and back verandahs and balustrades. Papa was thirty-one and Mama twenty-nine years old. It was 1957.
In that year, Jamaica was still a British colony. Sir Hugh Foot, in starched white ceremonial uniform and exotic plumed hat, was governor of the island. Norman Manley, the Oxford-educated Jamaican lawyer, was Chief Minister and tireless advocate of “full internal self-government”. But independence was still five long years away. In those days, the sugar estates teemed with white English managers and other professionals and their families, living for the most part in pastoral civility with their black Jamaican counterparts.
‘We Brookes are first rate,’ Papa boasted at the dinner table in their little Appleton Estate house. ‘Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. We are not one of those hurry-come-up families, and there are plenty of them about, especially in Kingston, with little education and no background. The name Brookes means something. And Pratt, too,’ he added, making a concession to Mama’s side of the family. Mama’s family were landowners, small farmers. Papa’s were plantation managers, professionals. He believed that the Brookeses had the edge in social ranking because they were sophisticated and skilled, not because, like the Pratts, they had had vast acres of agricultural land handed down to them.
Papa’s smile was mischevious and as broad as his forehead, but there was hardness in his eyes.
‘Where’s that boy?’ he asked, looking about.
‘Go and get Boyd,’ Mama said quickly.
The little girl left the table instantly and they could hear her rushing feet on the polished wooden floor of the house heading in the direction of the drawing room.
‘Didn’t you hear the dinner bell?’ the little girl asked the small boy curled up in the chintz armchair with a book at his face. ‘Perlita rang the bell five times.’
The boy didn’t hear for he remained curled up, forehead furrowed, not moving.
‘Didn’t you hear the dinner bell?’ his sister repeated impatiently. Then she said cunningly, ‘Papa wants you,’ the stress on Papa.
The small boy reacted at once, took just enough time to fold the page at the correct place then leapt out of the armchair and hurried out of the room behind his sister. At the table their big brother sat upright, not amused. As they took their seats Papa paused and said, ‘Hmm.’
‘I didn’t come to Appleton to fool about,’ Papa continued, everyone at the table giving him their full attention. ‘Education, ambition, hard work. That’s what it’s about. Some people only know how to waste time and not apply themselves. We Brookes will leave our mark here at Appleton.’ He was an only child, the last of that line of Brookeses, without any property to his name and, although he would never admit it to anyone, he believed that he was a man alone against the world, but born to win. His three children, from the earliest days, heard the words of Longfellow from their father’s lips at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sometimes before bed:
The heights of great men reached and kept
were not attained by sudden flight,
but they, while their companions slept,
were toiling upward in the night.
The Appleton sunset painted a soft crimson upon the windows and against the white, freshly ironed cotton tablecloth. It added a dramatic edge to Papa’s firm brown face. Through the French windows a valley breeze brought the tantalizing smell of boiling sugar, the exotic perfume of sugar estates, and quietly in the background the Mullard radio whispered Love is a many-splendored thing.
Mama, dressed in light maternity clothes, looked up. She had brothers and sisters aplenty and felt no passion, perhaps being a woman, about her family name, or about having to prove herself. She certainly didn’t believe that there were any battles to be fought. But she wanted to leave her mark. She wanted to become somebody, an ordinary somebody, but somebody of her very own, not just a housewife and mother. But she said nothing. When Papa had the floor, impassioned and impatient, delivering his little lectures, it was best to listen, even if she had heard it all before.
‘Brains, intelligence, class,’ Papa reminded them, his big, even teeth bared in a self-congratulatory smile. ‘Gawd! That’s what we Brookeses are made of. I could run the whole shooting match down here.’
The move from Worthy Park Estate was a timely one. As deputy assistant chief chemist, Papa’s chances of advancement at Appleton were good. His ultimate objective was to leave Appleton after a few successful years and take up a senior appointment, possibly as chief chemist or general manager, at another big sugar estate like New Yarmouth or Monymusk. But the move was good for another reason. It put a lot of distance between him and a certain matter
, an indiscretion, which took place in an outlying district, Lluidas Vale, one reckless night almost eight years ago, after he’d been drinking a little too much. He was not proud of it and, in fact, had only known about the result of his misdemeanour shortly before he left for Appleton. He didn’t think Mama knew about it – there was no way in which she could know. But women had a way of knowing.
‘It’s nice here,’ Mama said tentatively, now that the lecture was over. ‘Doctor, dentist, pharmacy, shops, a reliable train service, the nursing home at Maggotty, good hospitals in nearby Mandeville, and a design academy too.’ Her eyelids fluttered like a bashful girl’s. This bashfulness, this little-girl quality in her, was what appealed most to Papa when they first met. But now, after many years, he found it debilitating and was impatient with it. He wanted a little haughtiness from his wife. He wanted just a teeny- weeny bit of snobbery, a little malice, which should bring about the sophistication and the fascination he so wished she possessed. Mama was far too trustworthy, too innocent. He wanted stimulation, challenge, but all he got was fidelity, devotion.
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