A View of the Empire at Sunset

by Caryl Phillips

  At Christmas she was happy once again to remain at the school with the “orphans,” her aunt having written and suggested that she might find it more convenient to be among those of her own age. Myrtle went off to Switzerland, having announced that her mother was in the process of securing a divorce, and her former adversary wrote to her from Geneva. “Dear West Indies,” she began. It transpired that Myrtle not only wished to apologize, she appeared eager to let her know that her performances on the stage had impressed them all. Did she know, asked Myrtle, that she might now be considered to be one of the more popular girls? She diligently folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope. Unfortunately, when Myrtle returned to the Perse School in January she would very quickly discover that there was no longer any possibility of her developing a friendship with the now popular “West Indies.” The immigrant girl would already be in residence in London at a boardinghouse near Mr. Tree’s school that a frustrated Aunt Clarice had selected for her.

  15

  In the Name of Love

  Aunt Clarice asked the woman on the other end of the line to please wait a moment. She put down the telephone and quickly threw open the door that led from the hallway to the dining room. The flustered maid appeared to be dusting the teak cabinet, but the young girl wouldn’t meet her eyes. “You may begin upstairs now, Gertrude.” The young girl speedily gathered up her feathered contraptions and muttered, “Yes, ma’am,” but she continued to avoid looking at her employer. It was clear that the maid had been loitering near the door and eavesdropping, and unless she changed her ways, the girl would soon have to seek new employment. She would speak with her later. If Miss Kennett was irritated by this break in their telephone conversation, she showed no sign of it. The headmistress continued and explained that after the audition at the Academy of Dramatic Art, her seventeen-year-old niece claimed to have spent the remainder of her time in London wandering the streets, but admitted to doing so without a chaperone of any description. The girl adamantly insisted that there had been no secret congress with anybody, and Miss Kennett said that she saw no reason to disbelieve her, but she remained irked. “Gwendolen caught the very last train back to Cambridge.” She paused. “It would, I think, be fair to conclude that the excitement of her adventure affected her judgment in a most unfortunate manner.”

  She listened carefully to the woman and tried to understand the implication of her words. Was Miss Kennett really suggesting that her gawky niece might have attracted the interest of a suitor? The girl dawdled and occasionally dragged her feet, and she had noted that the child seemed to take pleasure in deliberately scuffing the toes of her shoes. When a person addressed her, the queer fish stared at a point six inches above their heads and any fool could see that there was something simple and impossibly willful about her.

  “I take it you’ll be coming up to the school to speak with her? I would rather not bring this matter before the governors until you are perfectly satisfied with Gwendolen’s side of the story.”

  “I see.” She was startled, for it had not occurred to her that the episode under discussion might merit any further investigation. “And so the matter is not closed?”

  “Well, hardly. The child is refusing to explain herself beyond these vague claims of meandering aimlessly in the theatre district after her appointment at Mr. Tree’s establishment. Her word alone will not suffice. We require some confirmation from a parent or guardian. Otherwise the school’s reputation might well be at stake. I take it you do see the dilemma?”

  “I understand.”

  Having closed down the conversation with a pledge that tomorrow she would call back and announce her intentions, Aunt Clarice returned the telephone to its cradle and peered abstractedly through the diamond-shaped leaded-glass panel in the front door. She blamed her brother, who, since establishing a life in the colonies, had never troubled himself to maintain the correct standards of decency that might serve as an example for his children. The rumours of his own increasingly slipshod behaviour had, during her last visit to Dominica, begun to assume the authority of fact as she witnessed for herself his excessive drinking and prolonged and unexplained absences from the family home. She was sure that his unhappy choice of a wife had most likely contributed to her brother’s decline, and it was now irrefutably clear that his renunciation of decorum and restraint had most likely influenced the behaviour of this wayward child. That said, try as she might, she still could not picture Gwendolen skulking about London in the company of a strange young man, let alone secreting herself away with such a person for a few hours of shabby communion. It was a preposterous hypothesis to think that Gwendolen might stir the interests of the opposite sex. As far as she was aware, the child knew nobody in London, and the kind of men who massed near the train stations of the capital looking for girls to prey upon would most likely never display any interest in a cautious thing like her niece. They were on the lookout for bright-eyed girls from the provinces with fresh faces and a spring in their steps; girls who were relieved and exhilarated to be beyond the choke hold of their hometowns, and eager to please any Jack-the-Lad who promised to introduce them to the bright lights. Timid maidens who didn’t know how to groom themselves properly would surely be overlooked.

  A year or so ago, on that first morning in London, she had tried to speak with her niece when she returned to the hotel. She sat opposite the unrepentant runaway as the girl poked at her haddock and poached eggs. “If you wish to wear your hair like a golliwog, then I can’t stop you, but in England it is customary for a young lady to spend some time preparing herself before she enters the world each morning.” The discovery that her niece had stolen away from the hotel without any announcement had frayed her nerves, but as she watched the vacant child nonchalantly push her eggs from one side of her plate to the other and then back again, she realized that with this young madam her words would most likely always fall upon deaf ears. On the train journey to Cambridge the obstinate child showed no desire to put aside her bag of sweets, and her warnings about the inevitable effect of such indulgence on one’s figure were rudely ignored. Her private hopes that a well-regulated school might produce improved strength of character had now been thoroughly dashed. Clearly the girl had inherited the stubbornness of her father, but the truth was, she had already noticed these distasteful traits on her first winter in the tropics, when the child could have been no more than seven or eight years of age. The atrocious table manners, and the strange guttural tongue, had now blossomed into a delinquency which made her short time with the girl, travelling across the Atlantic Ocean, and then chaperoning her from the ship to London and then on to the Perse School in Cambridge, among the most trying interludes of her life.

  Harold arrived at seven o’clock precisely. He placed his umbrella in the stand, hung his hat on a peg, and only then did he begin to unbutton his heavy coat and hand it to her. As she slipped it onto a hanger, he positioned himself in front of the hallway mirror and adjusted his bowtie and then thoughtfully finger-combed the bristles of his moustache. He had told his wife that on Monday evenings he had to spend the night at the university hospital supervising junior members of staff and so his wife had come to understand that she should not expect him until sometime on Tuesday. As a result, over the course of the past decade he and Clarice had established the rhythm of their Monday evenings, with the only interruptions being those to accommodate Harold’s annual summer fortnight in Dorset with his wife and two children, and her own occasional winters in the West Indies with her brother and his family. They used to meet at one of the two acceptable restaurants that lay on the main square in the shadow of the Methodist church, but after the first year Harold decided that in a small town it was not worth risking the possibility of falling victim to prying eyes and loose tongues, and so it was she who made the necessary arrangements that would enable them to dine at her house. Once he took up a seat in the living room, Harold generally complained about the patients he had seen during the day, and although he was
judicious enough not to malign anybody by name, it was clear that he had now reached the stage in his career where he had little to offer beyond reciting an entirely predictable list of woes concerning what he and other physicians were expected to do for the lower orders, who invested little time or energy in taking the trouble to keep themselves in the pink of physical condition.

  Because she lived off a small independent income and had no children, and did little more than intermittently involve herself in the affairs of the Women’s Institute, Harold felt it unnecessary to ask Clarice about her week or to playact any interest in her life in general. He enjoyed the spice of secrecy that surrounded their arrangement, and he revelled in the guilt-free pleasure of being the centre of attention and she, understanding his need to be indulged, played along and made sure that their conversation remained as uncluttered as possible with the detritus of her own existence. As usual dinner was prepared by Gertrude and left in the oven for her to serve once Harold had finished washing. The meal always involved some form of meat, usually beef, infrequently chicken, with a fruit tart of some variety for dessert. As he shovelled up the food, he spoke and chewed at the same time. He told her about the new Scottish nurse who possessed the most exquisite hands—the hands of a surgeon—although of course the poor thing could never become a surgeon. It soon became clear that it wasn’t only her hands that Harold was interested in, and as he continued to speak, she looked attentively at him and smiled, knowing that this was his way of testing her. Only by continuing to smile would it be possible for her to pass this particular examination.

  After their dinner she cleared away the plates, and then they both made their way to the living room, where Harold mixed himself a brandy and soda, but he remained puzzled. “Would it really be so awful if the girl had spent the afternoon with a man in a hotel room?” She poured milk into her coffee and waited for him to continue. “You know, get the blasted thing over and done with. Isn’t that what you did?” She almost let go of the milk jug and was forced to carefully regrip it. She had shared with him the problem of her niece only in the hope that he might have some opinion as to how best to deal with Miss Kennett when she spoke with the woman in the morning.

  “Oh come along now. Don’t look at me like that. Girls have needs and worries, and a decent and diplomatic young gent might prove to be quite an asset. Tell me, wasn’t there such a fellow for you?”

  Later that same evening, they lay together in bed with their feet touching and the fingers of their hands linked together.

  “You know,” she began, her eyes fixed firmly upon the ceiling, “I was extremely fond of a boy who one day went away and took up some kind of low-level administrative appointment overseas. He attended the school across the fields from our own, and we would often meet covertly at the end of the day. Of course, nothing untoward transpired. We were young, sixteen or seventeen, a little younger than Gwendolen, but the boy was very keen and insisted that we should run away together. I knew full well that my parents would never survive such unpleasantness and so I broke it off, but the girls at school were merciless and referred to me as ‘knickerless.’ The boy’s name was Nicholas. They thought it very funny. Actually, I still see some of them from time to time, although by now they’ve most likely forgotten all about the episode.”

  Harold unlaced their fingers and then propped himself up on an elbow. “You little minx, you.” She glanced over at him and could see that he seemed quite pleased. She looked now at her moderately fleshy hands and very gently brought them together.

  “After some time in India they moved Nicholas on.”

  “Oh really, to where?”

  “He wrote on occasion, and then I stopped hearing from him. And then some time later I got the news that he had been killed in South Africa in a terrible mining accident and I cut off all my hair. Not all of it, of course, but it no longer fell towards my waist. My mother cried for a week, but I never explained to her why I’d done this damage to myself. Once I realized that Nicholas wasn’t coming home, I knew that in all probability I had already enjoyed my hotheaded moment in the sun.”

  She felt a small crease of consternation begin to spread across her brow. “I’m sorry, Harold, I have no right to bore you.” She offered the doctor a resigned smile, but decided not to tell him anything further. He winked.

  “What do you think the girls would call you if they could see you now?”

  16

  The Island Simply Doesn’t Exist

  She watched as the Turkish girl continued to stare into the hand glass, the loose tumble of her semi-pinned hair obscuring half her face. The girl had made no effort to apply any makeup, or even take off her coat, and the call was in ten minutes’ time. “She telephoned last night. He’s disappeared again with a new woman, and you know the type. One of those who when she crosses her legs shows her stockings, and it’s no accident. Mummy’s too ashamed to go out and face the servants, and so she’s locked herself in her room.” The girl wiped away her silent tears with the back of a gloved hand. “After Daddy died I told her that she should leave Paris and come and stay with me in London, but she refused. She said she didn’t want to interfere with my life, and then because she was lonely she married this stupid Count.”

  Mr. Tree’s stage manager knocked and threw open the door. The Turkish girl raised her voice in protest, but the man ignored her and continued to make his way down the corridor knocking and pushing at doors as he went. She looked over as the distressed girl now quickly removed her gloves and then slipped off her rings and dropped them into a lacquered jar that stood behind the cluster of creams and ointments that the girl no longer had time to apply. She already understood that after the curtain fell the girl’s gentleman would come to the dressing room and the two of them would leave without saying a word to her, but in the meantime it now appeared that the girl had suddenly discovered a sense of urgency. The animated young actress threw off her coat and then yanked the pink satin blouse over her head and turned pleadingly towards her and asked if she would please help. Of course she would, but it irritated her that her dressing-room partner would once again be stepping out onstage with her mind not on the performance, relying on others to cover for her when she forgot her lines. She fastened the last snap on the girl’s waistcoat before standing up, and with a flat hand she straightened out the wrinkles in her own costume. She thought about Harry, whom she still hadn’t heard from. “I admit I worry too much about Mummy,” said the girl, who had now stationed herself in front of the full-length looking glass, “but I’d worry more if it wasn’t for Mummy’s poodle. Ten years in dog years makes Lucky something of an old man, but she had him before she met this Count, and I’m hoping that he’ll be with her when she finally leaves the fool. I suppose Lucky’s her real consort.” Again there was a rapid knocking at the door, but this time the stage manager didn’t bother to poke his head inside, and then a bell began to screech and they both heard feet scampering down the corridor. “My gentleman says I ought to get a dog of some kind, but I don’t know. He’d have to walk it, and what are the chances of him agreeing to do such a thing?”

  She had initially set eyes on Harry six months ago on the cold January morning that she registered at Mr. Tree’s school. Her Aunt Clarice had reluctantly agreed to follow her father’s wishes and help her remain in England, although her aunt would have clearly much preferred her nuisance of a niece to have taken a passage back to the West Indies. Having settled into a respectable boardinghouse for young ladies which her aunt had recommended, she realized she had nearly a whole week in London by herself before Mr. Tree’s school was open for registration, and so she fell into the habit of taking daily walks in Regent’s Park, where she learned to bend into the blustery wind as she made her way up and down Primrose Hill. One afternoon she happened upon a bandstand where a musical concert was already under way, but the audience seemed to be mainly comprised of the elderly and the deaf, who were sitting as closely as possible to the musicians. She lingered for
a brief period, but felt gauche standing hesitantly behind the rows of deckchairs and intruding upon what appeared to be a private recital. She soon came to understand that sitting on a bench by herself was not a good idea, and so when the weather was unkind, and the pale January sun refused to appear in the sky for even an hour or two, she grew accustomed to spending most of her time in her small room at the boardinghouse, with its divan bed, and rickety wooden chair and table, and a washstand with an enamel jug and bowl, idly leafing her way through her well-stocked pile of fashion magazines.