by Isobel Chace
“Mr. Dan, sir!” she cried out. “Mr. Dan, it’s never you! Why, if I’se known you’se was here—!” Tears poured down her cheeks and she brushed them away impatiently. “Mr. Dan, sir!”
Daniel submitted to her embrace, warmly kissing her on the cheek much as he would have done a favourite aunt.
“Hullo, Patience,” he greeted her. “How are you?”
“I’se fine! But I’se worked out working for Ironsides. I’se Hendrycks woman, jest like always!” She broke into a comfortable laugh and he laughed with her, slapping her on the back and laughing all over again, while I looked on with fascinated disapproval. How could the Ironsides ever win if they employed traitors in their own household? I sniffed, but they only looked at me and burst out laughing all over again.
“You should see your face!” Daniel roared at me. “Come on and help me get the luggage!”
CHAPTER SIX
Daniel drove us straight to the refinery in his Mustang. Patience sat in the back, whooping with pleasure as we went round every corner, while I sat in a grim silence in the front.
“Cheer up, long legs,” Daniel said after a bit with a sly smile. “I’m very pleased to see you!”
“I wish you would not refer to me by that ridiculous term!” I grunted. “Weren’t you ever taught not to make personal remarks?”
He laughed delightedly. “Touché! But you have such lovely legs that I thought you wouldn’t mind.”
“Well I do,” I said, swallowing madly at a lump that had somehow formed in my throat “I know I’m far too tall for most men, but that doesn’t mean I want to be reminded of it all the time.”
He managed to look both repentant and amused at the same time and said casually: “You’re not too tall for me.” There was no answer to that, so I relapsed back into silence. But I was excited by the sights and sounds of the town despite myself and I quickly forgot my grievance as we travelled along the spacious tree-lined streets, past the roasting cobs of corn, and the hot roti-makers with their anxious Indian owners slapping the thin dough with wooden spatulas before dropping them, sizzling onto griddle-topped charcoal fires. The smells that came from the stalls were delicious. The spice-filled air drifted past my nostrils and made me aware of how hungry I was. I began to hope that they meant to feed us at the refinery, but I didn’t like to ask because I didn’t know what arrangements Pamela had made for us.
The refinery was some way out of the town. It was surrounded by small experimental fields where scientists were trying out the different types of cane under varying conditions. Cane grows best, Daniel told me, in a slightly acid soil, providing that the water supply is both sufficient and constant. It grows, when the conditions are right, very fast indeed. On an average the growth rate is between half and three-quarters of an inch every day, but a fall in the soil moisture through a lack of proper irrigation or some calamity can mean that the growth is slowed to about a tenth of that much. The experimental patches were visited every other day by the scientists and were solemnly measured. In that way the various canes were categorised as being suitable for this or that soil. Nothing, it seemed, was left to chance on the Hendrycks’ estates.
“We’ll be cutting in the spring in most of our fields,” he said, pointing out one or two endless fields of what appeared to me to be fully-grown canes. “We plant in the fall of one year and cut some fourteen to sixteen months later in most of our fields. Some of yours allow for cutting every twelvemonth, I believe.”
It was all very strange to me. I tried to think of myself as an owner whose living depended on the crop that was all around me, but I failed entirely. Camilla Ironside wasn’t that kind of a girl! It was as simple as that.
We walked past the giant silos where the raw sugar was stored and went inside the office block that was the nerve centre of the whole industry. At the end of the corridor I saw a door with Daniel’s name on it inscribed in gold, but he ignored his own office and took us instead into the room next door where Pamela was waiting for us. She held out her face for his kiss as a matter of course and then greeted us with the same pretty smile that I remembered so well from our meeting at the Blue Basin and at the airport.
“How glad I am you could come!” she gushed. “Is this your maid? Will she wait for you here?”
I looked at Patience who had already settled herself on a chair, a colourful magazine in her hand that she had picked up from somewhere. “I wait,” she said agreeably. “I wait here.”
Pamela nodded agreeably. “Daniel will come with us,” she said brightly to me. “He knows much more about all the processes than I do.” She giggled easily. “To tell you the truth I’ve never been able to get wildly excited about anything mechanical!”
Daniel however took his duties as guide very seriously. He insisted that I should see everything whether I understood the process or not.
“It’s important that the growers should know what we’re about here,” he said solemnly. “This is the only refinery on the Island. The rest of the raw sugar has to be shipped out to various centres in other parts of the world. But it’s obviously better if we can finish the whole product here in Trinidad. It brings more money into the economy and it provides more employment.”
I tried to look interested as we watched the first process known as affination. The sugar was brought from the bottom of the silos on conveyor belts. To it was added raw syrup, produced from a previous load of sugar, and the resulting mixture of crystals and syrup is called magma. That much I could understand. I watched it being taken away to the centrifugal machines where it was rotated at up to twelve hundred revolutions a minute. The centrifugal force drove the mixture through a mesh in the outer casing which caught the sugar in a great wall of crystals. Hot water is squirted on to wash the sugar which falls into a great trough below the machine. More hot water is added and the syrup which has been thus spun and washed is divided into two groups, the larger amount to be boiled in a vacuum pan to recover its sugar content, the rest being kept back to help make the next lot of magma.
“Makes you hot just to look at it, doesn’t it?” Pamela sighed. She was bored and she looked it. She had none of Daniel’s fervour for the complicated process that resulted in the sugar crystals that appeared on her table. She had been brought up on sugar and was heartily sick of the sound of it. You could tell that by just looking at her.
“Why do you work here?” I asked her curiously.
She blushed faintly. “It suits me,” she answered with a pretty shrug of the shoulders. “I shan’t soon. There are other things to do in Trinidad besides make sugar!”
I looked at Daniel’s eager face and felt sorry for her, much to my own surprise. Daniel was wrapped up in sugar and his wife could hardly escape the backwash of his enthusiasm. The words of a pop song I had heard some years before in London kept buzzing around in my head: Sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at half-past three. Sugar, sugar, sugar, that’s what you are to me! It could very well have been Daniel’s motto.
“The next process,” he said as if to prove my point, “is called carbonatation. The syrup we have just seen is strained and then it comes here.” He walked with a bouncy step towards where the sugar was just beginning the next process. “Look,” he admonished me. ‘You can see better from here.”
He explained carefully exactly what was happening as the mixture was treated with lime and carbon dioxide gas. Next it was filtered again, after which centrifugal pumps conveyed the liquid to large tanks in which it is passed through a number of cisterns filled with charcoal.
“Why charcoal?” I asked, now completely bewildered.
Daniel fell on the question. “Charcoal has been found to be the best substance for absorbing any impurities and colouring matter which is still in the sugar.” His eyes snapped with excitement. “As a matter of fact it’s rather interesting,” he said apologetically, aware that Pamela’s attention had long since strayed irrevocably from the point at hand. “You see, charcoal gets tired after a
few days. We can tell because the liquid begins to be faintly discoloured when it emerges from the cisterns. We have to shut the cisterns off then, clean out the sugar and remove the charcoal to the kilns where it’s burnt clean again. We use the same charcoal over and over again for as long as four years!”
I stared down at the liquid that was coming out of the cisterns, rather hoping that I would be able to see a noticeable change in it, but I couldn’t. It was as colourless as water.
The next stage was to crystallise this liquid. The boiling of the sugar was the most complex and specialised process of the lot. It was done in vacuum pans in which were set glass windows so that one could see the whole process. The pansman can control the size of the crystal and it depends on his skill that the crystallising process is done at an even rate. After that the massecuite, as the sugar is now called, goes through yet another series of centrifugal machines where the syrup is thrown off. Syrup from the first and second spinnings goes through the charcoal again to produce more sugar, but the later spinnings were more discoloured and so were used for making golden syrup and the soft, moist coloured sugars.
There was little more that could happen to it after that, beyond being dried in the granulators, which turned out to be large rotating drums that dropped the grains through a wire mesh into vibrating sieves. I must say I enjoyed seeing the cube sugar being moulded into large slabs, spun in the centrifugal machines, dried in ovens and then, best of all, chopped into cubes by a guillotine that crunched its way through the hard sugar in the most satisfactory manner. Daniel dipped his hand in and retrieved me a lump of still-warm sugar for me to eat.
“Sugar for the sweet!” he said with a smile.
I tasted it and found it unbearably sweet, much sweeter than any sugar I remembered having tasted before. I noticed that Pamela put her lump firmly in her pocket and began to saunter to the door. Our visit, I gathered, had ended. We had seen all we were going to of the refinery for that day.
Pamela led us firmly back to her office. “Would you like to wash?” she asked me. “I’ll have some coffee made and that will revive us a bit.” She had her own wash place that led off from her office, dolled up in pink and white. I thought she had probably chosen the colour scheme herself, for it reflected very adequately her own pretty, plump personality. She stood making a face at me while I washed my hands. “Daniel is a bit of a freak, making you look over the place!” she said suddenly. “Who wants to know?”
“I suppose he thinks I ought to know something about it,” I answered uncertainly.
“I think he just can’t resist going round the place himself,” she confided. “It’s bad enough having to deal with all the office side, but the heat in there always reduces me to a frazzle.”
A frazzle was not how I would have chosen to describe her. She looked completely cool, even her dress had fewer wrinkles in its ironed perfection than mine did, and she wasn’t really the soignee, immaculate type to have achieved that effect by art.
“Coffee will certainly be very welcome,” I said firmly, secretly hoping that there would be something to eat as well.
“I suppose it will,” Pamela agreed without interest. “I’d love to take you straight home, but of course I can’t leave here until the working day is done. Do you mind?”
“Perhaps I could help you?” I suggested, dismayed by the prospect of doing nothing all afternoon.
“Yes, I expect you could,” Pamela said thoughtfully. “But what about your maid?”
“Patience?” I was annoyed that I had forgotten all about her. “I really don’t know,” I admitted. “Perhaps Daniel will have some suggestion.”
“Well, he might do,” Pamela agreed with a twist to the lips,” but I don’t think we can shower all our problems on him, do you?”
“What do you mean?” I retorted.
“Oh,” she said, “perhaps I’ve got it all wrong, but isn’t he going to run your estate when you buy it from my parents? A trustee of something? Isn’t that what he’s going to be called?”
“He will have a say in the management,” I said stiffly. “But he certainly won’t be running it. My uncle will be doing that, with the help of my two cousins.”
Pamela laughed without amusement. ‘You surely don’t expect me to believe that!” she snorted. “Oh, really!”
“Well, believe it or not, that’s what’s going to happen,” I replied as calmly as I could. “Shall we go and get that coffee?”
Patience and Daniel were swapping reminiscences when we went back into the office. Patience was in full flight about some incident involving Daniel and his aunt and sheer happiness radiated out of her.
“You’se was a pickle and thatsa fact!” she laughed at him.
“I wasn’t too bad really, was I?” he humoured her.
“You was bad!” she waved her finger at him. “But you wasn’t all bad like some others!”
“Well, that’s something!” he laughed. He looked up and saw us and beckoned me to a chair by his side.
“She can sit here,” Pamela said quickly, pulling out the chair behind the second desk in the room. “She’s offered to help me this afternoon anyhow.”
Daniel stood up and brushed down his elegant trousers. “That isn’t why she came,” he said pleasantly enough. “I shall drive her and Patience to the estate to meet your parents. There are various things which we shall want to discuss together and then I can telephone the results to Aaron tonight.”
Pamela pouted. It was the first real glimpse I had had of the temper that lay behind her prettiness.
“It isn’t fair!” she said sulkily. “I asked Camilla to come and I shall be the only one who doesn’t see anything of her!”
Daniel smiled faintly. “That is bad luck,” he admitted. “Never mind, you won’t be a working girl for much longer!” He watched with a satisfied eye as Pamela’s cheeks coloured, making her look more like a chocolate-box beauty than ever. “Where’s this coffee we were promised?”
The coffee duly came and Pamela, her good humour recovered, poured it out for us, fussing over the cups as she did so to make sure that we all had enough sugar and enough of the thick yellow cream she had somehow conjured up from a drawer in her desk. Patience and I drank eagerly, for both of us were famished by that time, and vied with one another to be offered a second cup before Daniel said we had to go.
Daniel hurried us out to his car as soon as he was able, looking meaningly at his watch as he did so. It was not yet four o’clock, but I had to agree with him that it was late enough if we were to explore all the possibilities of the Longuet estate that day. He pointed out the first fires that were burning over the sugar that was to be mine, getting rid of the unwanted trash before the serious cutting began. It gave me a physical thrill to see the flames licking through the bright green of the cane a thrill that had nothing to do with ownership but was physical in its excitement, a combination of the noise the sight of the orange flames, and the dirty smoke that settled all over the land for miles around.
“Do Mr. and Mrs. Longuet regret having to sell?” I asked, feeling suddenly sorry for my host and hostess at having to lose all this.
“I shouldn’t think so,” he answered. “They’re not born sugar people. They’ve made the required improvements on their estate, but it’s never been their whole life as it is with some of us.”
I was able to witness to some of these improvements myself as we drove through the long lines of sugar towards the house where the Longuets lived. There were a number of shacks made of fruit boxes and palm leaves that housed the occasional workers who came during the cutting and planting seasons and then went again. But these were already outnumbered by recently built two-roomed houses which, Daniel assured me, had running water, showers and a small garden. They were better than the shacks, far better to live in, but frankly rather dull in appearance.
The Longuet house, though, was one of the prettiest I have ever seen. It was a two-storey house that rose with graceful lines above th
e sugar which completely surrounded it and the garden that grew with a wild abandon, full of flowering shrubs and large trees that gave shade from the sun. The house had a curly roof that looked vaguely Chinese and there were two Chinese stone lions that guarded the gates that had been left open for so long that I doubted if they would close now even if anyone wanted them that way.
Daniel parked the car under a tree. He ushered me into the hall and shouted the fact that we had arrived to the empty room. There was the sound of a door slamming upstairs and a few minutes later Mrs. Longuet came rushing down the stairs, an older and less pretty version of her daughter, her high heels tapping on the polished wood of the stairs.
“My, so there you are! But you haven’t got Pamela with you? Didn’t you go over there first? Daniel, how nice to see you!” She turned to me, appraising my appearance and everything else about me in one comprehensive glance. “Pamela has told me all about you. Not pretty, she said, but definitely someone! Now, do I agree with her? What lovely legs you have, child! No wonder you wear mini-skirts! You can afford to!”
I smiled a not very confident smile and gave Daniel a furious look. He was openly laughing at me while I tried to pretend that my skirt was several inches longer than it actually was, though why I couldn’t imagine. I had worn mini-skirts ever since they had come out and this one woman’s disapproval wasn’t going to stop me.
“Doesn’t Pamela wear short skirts?” I asked aggressively.
Mrs. Longuet emitted another giggle. “I don’t suppose they’re as popular in Trinidad as they are in swinging London,” she laughed, somehow making London sound like somewhere on another planet. “Besides,” she confided, “Pamela hasn’t got your lovely legs!” She made that sound too as though it were a decided advantage not to have legs that were long enough and shapely enough to have been used in the average stocking advertisement.
“She certainly hasn’t!” Daniel chimed in. He was having a hilarious time. It was no wonder that he liked the Longuets so much.
