by Jane Arbor
He sketched an ironic bow. ‘For the courtesy of consulting you,’ he said.
‘Euh!’ The sound was one of disgust, and in the silence which followed Hope apologised for having to leave and waited for her hostess to tell Tina to summon the chauffeur. But it was Craig who offered. ‘I’ll drive you,’ he said. ‘I have to go back to the office.’
‘Thank you.’ Hope was uncomfortably aware of Tina’s knowing wink and thinking she could read it aright as saying, ‘What did I tell you? Any excuse to get out to Barbara Paul’s cottage, even on the prosy errand of taking you home!’ Tina had won that round.
On the drive Craig Napier showed no curiosity as to how Hope had spent her day, but suddenly without preliminary questioned, ‘Before you left London, were you briefed as to my precise authority with regard to Belle Rose?’
Not understanding the purpose of the question, ‘I think I understand it, yes,’ she told him. ‘That you’re Madame de Faye’s estate manager—isn’t that right? And why do you ask?’
‘Because I think it necessary that, as my confidential secretary, you should appreciate quite clearly just where I stand in the matter of executive decisions about the estate. For instance—the discussion of which you happened to hear the upshot just now. It had been on the question of a proposed merger with a minor sugar estate—the Friole—which in my opinion could show no advantage whatever for Belle Rose, though Victoire de Faye tends to favour it. And in my making it clear that the decision, when it comes, must be solely mine, it seemed to me that you may have thought that I was unnecessarily pulling rank. Did you?’
Hope queried, ‘You mean—overriding Madame de Faye about it? But how could I judge, from the little I heard? And would it matter if I had thought so, anyway?’
‘Matter?’ he took her up sharply. ‘Your opinion matter? Of course not. The reason I asked was because I needed to be quite clear that you understand exactly that in any decision regarding the estate, my word goes. Finally. And assuming the full support of my staff—which includes you. You in particular, as the aide nearest to me. Do you understand that?’
Hope said quietly, ‘I think so. In fact, you can rest assured I’ve never doubted your right, as manager, to arrogate to yourself all the authority you need. Though I must say—’ She checked. ‘But you aren’t interested in my opinion, are you?’
He shrugged. ‘As long as we’re clear on the major issue, I daresay I can bear to hear it. Well?’
‘Just that I’d have thought you owed the owner of Belle Rose rather more than the mere courtesy of being consulted, that’s all.’
He nodded. ‘As I thought. As well then, isn’t it, that I decided to pinch the possible small canker of disloyalty in the bud?’
Hope had to bite back a sharp retort. ‘If you thought it necessary to warn me as to whose side I’m on in any dispute—just as well,’ she agreed.
But ironic as she had tried to make her tone, seemingly it did not register with him. He said briskly, ‘Good. As long as you recognise that, whatever my personal relationship to Victoire de Faye, I am the final arbiter in anything concerning the estate, and you, with all the other people I employ, are four-square behind me.’
At which piece of cool dictatorship Hope could not resist a murmured, ‘And surely no despot could ask more?’—only to hear him laugh outright, as if in genuine amusement.
‘You show a pretty line in repartee,’ he said. ‘But don’t be too sure, will you, that I can’t sometimes match it?’ And then from amusement at her expense to the practical, ‘Anyway, to work tomorrow. I’ll expect you at the office at half-past eight.’
At the bungalow he switched off the engine and went in with her, meeting Barbara almost on the threshold, as had happened the previous night.
They kissed. Barbara said, ‘Craig! Why, how nice!’
He said easily, ‘If that drink is still on offer, I’ll take it now if I may.’
‘Of course,’ she smiled.
‘I’ll get them,’ he offered. ‘What are you having? And you?’ he asked Hope.
It seemed to her, as she told him and as she saw his familiarity with Barbara’s drinks cabinet. That Tina had also won round two.
CHAPTER THREE
Hope took care to be punctual the next morning, but the evidence of Craig Napier’s parked car showed that he was at his office before her. When she had ridden in through the gates she had joined a group of West Indian girls, also on mopeds and bicycles, and when she dismounted, one of them, who said she was a junior clerk, showed her where to wheel her machine alongside others in an opensided shed.
Hope went in by the door she had been taken to on the night of her arrival. The other girls had used another one. Craig Napier was already at his desk. He looked up briefly and half-rose as Hope entered, then spoke to her, having seemingly returned most of his attention to the papers before him.
‘You managed the ride over all right?’
‘Yes, thank you, and one of your staff showed me where to park. She spoke to me in English,’ Hope added.
‘She would, having heard you’re Tina’s cousin. Most Madeninans are bi-lingual in French and English, though they may use the patois among themselves.’ Continuing to sign sheets and flip them from him, he went on, ‘Normally you will work in here with me, and absent yourself when I tell you to.’ With a nod, ‘That’s your desk over there. If you’ll settle yourself in, I’ll attend to you in a few minutes.’ Another nod indicated an inner door. ‘Your cloakroom, and a cubbyhole with a chair and a desk, to which you can adjourn when I don’t want you here.’
The view from her desk, facing a window, was of a scene which the premature darkness had hidden from Hope the other night. In the mass it was a sea of green on a far-stretching plain; viewed more particularly, the ‘sea’ was rank upon ordered rank of sturdy, heavily fronded shoulder-high plants—the all-prevalent sugar-cane which was the island’s business and was to be hers for as long as she stayed in Madenina.
She had stepped to the window to look out at it and did not hear her chief’s approach until he was close behind her. Echoing her thoughts, he said, ‘Well, there it is—our be-all and end-all, and the stuff that shows up at home as coloured coffee-crystals and blankets for Christmas cakes—not to mention Demon Rum. Is it much as you imagined it, or have you seen it growing before?’
She shook her head. ‘Only in photographs. There’s a series of them in the boardroom in London. And does it go on and on—endlessly like that, all over the estate?’
‘Oh no. At this eye-level it may look so. But it’s broken up between each plantation by roads for vehicles—some horse and mule-drawn, some motorised—for bringing up fertilisers and shipping the cut cane to the processing-plants. See from here’—his hand familiarly at her shoulder and his finger guiding her glance—‘there’s a truck moving through there on the right. The road is one of the limits of this nearest plantation; you can’t see as far as title boundaries of the next.’
‘And what’s happening now?’ she asked, as much as to hide her awareness of the unnecessary tightening of the pressure on her shoulder, as to show her interest. Once he had gained her attention for what he wanted to point out, she would have expected his hand to drop indifferently away. And even when it did as she turned to face him, he did not step back, but remained close, rocking back on his heels, his eyes intent upon her. For the moment there was an ease to his manner which she could reconcile neither with Tina’s view of him as an ogre, nor to her own conception of him as an aloof employer with somewhat inflated ideas of his magnetic effect upon his female employers.
No wonder, she thought fleetingly, that those impressionable girls he claimed to despise should have warmed too much to such occasional camaraderie which they didn’t expect from him and of which they hoped disproportionately. Almost she was in danger of melting to it herself...
He answered her question. ‘This and that. We’re about through with our big ratoon. Come New Year, we’ll be working up to our next i
n March or April. We cut twice a year, with the autumn ratoon the more important.’
‘Ratoon?’ Hope queried.
‘Crop. Harvest Cutting. Ratoon is a more or less universal sugar word.’
‘And do the canes yield again, once they’re been cut?’
‘For several seasons more if they don’t fall victim to disease. Deteriorating gradually, of course, when they’re replaced by cuttings from youngish canes.’
‘How are they processed for the sugar?’
‘By crushing. The solid content is sugar; the liquid comes down as molasses, the best quality of which goes for rum. You’ll know of course that the sugar is shipped in its raw state, for refining in the importing countries?’
Hope said, ‘Yes, I know that end of it. It was this end I only knew in rather vague theory.’
‘Well, you’ll witness the whole cycle here.’
The whole cycle? How long did he suppose she was prepared to stay? Hope wondered as he went on, ‘You show a refreshing interest, I must say. Usually I’ve had to make a continuous lecture of my briefing. But you ask intelligent questions, and it makes a pleasant change.’
As he spoke he had left her to return to his desk, and she went over to hers. ‘Thank you,’ she said. (What did he expect of a ‘plain jane with her head screwed on’ than that she should want to know something about the raw material of her job?) Deciding to risk a snub if she put a more personal question, she asked, ‘Have you always worked in sugar yourself?’
He nodded. ‘I did a year of research after I took my science degree, and then came out here. Roland de Faye’s father was the owner of Belle Rose then, and Roland and I worked up from the ground floor together, so to speak. Roland had married for the first time before he inherited, when he offered me the managership. His wife, Irene, died when their boy Crispin was five. He and Victoire were married only a couple of years when he was drowned. Meanwhile, I carry on for Victoire.’ He paused. ‘Anything else that you feel might put you in the picture?’
Hope thought, then said, ‘Only something which concerns myself. I know you said my hours must be elastic, but what free time might I normally expect?’
‘Hadn’t Tina told you?’ he questioned. ‘You should be free from about noon on Saturdays through Sundays. We break at half-noon every day—in theory—and there’s a canteen. Back again at three, when we work until sundown—around seven or so. And if that interferes with your evening leisure, as Tina claimed it did with hers, then I’m sorry. It’s the custom of the country, and you must conform.’
‘I see,’ said Hope calmly. ‘That sounds generous, and in that long lunch-time, I suppose I could go back to Mrs. Paul’s?’
His reaction to that suggestion was so swift and decided that she was startled. ‘I shouldn’t plan that as a regular thing,’ he advised. ‘Barbara Paul likes to have a session of work before breakfast—’
‘Yes, I know,’ put in Hope.
‘Starting again after she’s done her morning chores, and I don’t think she would welcome the interruption of getting a meal for you.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think. I’ll eat at the canteen,’ said Hope. She hadn’t asked Tina what her routine had been, but if her chief had put a similar veto on her midday habits, she thought she could guess what Tina’s petty cynicism would have read into it—that quite possibly he visited the cottage himself at that hour.
Hope started, and knew she had quite visibly shaken her head, in rejection of the suspicion that the thought had crossed her mind too. She glanced over at Craig Napier. But evidently he hadn’t noticed that involuntary movement of her head, for his next remark was detached, businesslike. ‘Well, if that’s all, I’ll put you to work. What filing systems do you understand?’ he said.
She was occupied that morning with compiling pay-slips. The plantation hands were paid by piece-work, so that each pay-slip was different and had to be checked with the hourly rate for the job. Once he had explained the system to her, Craig Napier left her to it. He went out and returned to the office several times, taking no more notice of her than if her desk had been unoccupied, and leaving Hope to wonder if Tina, used to the easy camaraderie of the London office, had seen his treating his secretary as a mere adjunct to his own job as one of his major brutalities. And those several others who, he claimed, had hoped for a warmer relationship with him—had they too had to make do with the occasional word of praise tossed their way? As she herself had been encouraged by his dry appreciation of her interest and by the hearsay of his having told Barbara that she had a pleasant voice? Encouraged, but not bowled over, by any means. Just—pleased. No more than that...
He was still at his desk at noon when she went to the self-service canteen, and his car was again outside when she returned at three o’clock after getting acquainted with some of the other clerks and listening to their volatile French chatter which she wished she were going to have time to understand.
They were dressed so gaily too—in reds and yellows, flirting dirndl skirts and wearing cheeky topknots in their black hair. When some of them wheeled off to their homes they looked like a flight of exotic birds and made as much concerted noise as so many starlings. Watching them and revelling in the sunshine, Hope thought of how, at this season, she and Tina would have gone in winter boots and wrapped in topcoats to their lunch, and marvelled that Tina could possibly have allowed Craig Napier to spoil this idyllic place for her.
Back in the office Hope finished the pay-slips and told her chief so.
‘Then take them down to Winston Fortune, the pay-clerk, in the boucan—that’s the pay-office at the other end of the building. Tell him to check the total and go to the bank for the cash. That’s Thursday routine, of course, but he won’t be expecting to see you.’
‘Does Mr.—er—Fortune speak English?’ Hope hesitated.
Craig Napier laughed dryly. ‘What do you suppose—with a name like Winston? British to his grass-roots, he claims—though he’s never travelled farther than to Barbados on our island-hopping plane. He’ll welcome you as he would a long-lost sister; as he did Tina, who made it clear she was Not Amused and lost a lot of his respect in consequence.’
When Hope came back she was laughing. ‘Mr. Fortune was quite wistful about the Royal Family,’ she said. ‘When he heard I lived in London, he wouldn’t accept that I hadn’t the chance to see one of them at least every day.’
‘Yes, that’s his cult—he knows all their intricate relationships, right back to the Georges,’ Craig agreed. He stood up. ‘I have to see some of the foremen on the plantation now. If you’ll come along, you can get some idea of the layout of the estate. You’ll need to know it.’ They went in his car. As he drove he made informative conversation. ‘Boucan is interesting,’ he said. ‘It’s the old Carib name for an open fire where the boucaniers—French refugees from the Spaniards—used to gather for a common meal of spit-roasted meat. The boucan became a central point of business in the sugar trade, and for an estate office the name still holds.’
He described for Hope the work that was going on—the weeding by women as well as men, the clearing of trash after the autumn crop, the traffic in fertilisers for the spring crop to come. He made a detour to show her the workers’ living quarters—neat one-storey cottages, part-owned with pride by their occupiers. Belle Rose, he told Hope, had been the first of the Madenina estates to get rid of the shanty-town image. That had been Roland de Faye’s ambition, and he, Craig said, counted himself privileged to have seen the project through.
There were long intervals during which Hope waited in the car while he waylaid various men and sometimes walked away with them, still talking. It was evening before he drove back to the office, when he told her she could call it a day and offered to drive her home.
She demurred, ‘I have the scooter, and I shall need it for coming to work in the morning. Besides, I’ve only done one journey on it, and I must get used to it.’
‘Very well,’ he said indifferently, and let h
er go to the bicycle shed which was empty of all the machines but her own, showing she was the last of the girl-clerks to leave. She had only been on her way for a very few minutes when, with astonishing force, and out of an apparently almost clear sky, the rain came down. Clouds piled swiftly; the downpour worsened; the rutted road, already studded with half-filled pools from previous rains, became a quagmire, and after a plunge into and out of one of the potholes, the scooter’s engine gave a couple of warning splutters and died.
‘Water in the plug,’ Hope diagnosed, giving the starter an optimistic kick. No response. Another kick, with the same result. She dismounted, debating whether to deal with the plug or, as she hadn’t much farther to go, to walk on and push the machine. Doing either, she was going to get soaked through, but had just decided to walk when a car—the one in which she had spent the afternoon—overtook her and stopped.
Craig Napier got out of it, opened up its back, took the scooter from her grasp and heaved its weight aboard. ‘That’ll teach you to trust the weather of a whole Madeninan day,’ he said. ‘Get in.’
She obeyed, wiping rain from her hair, her face and her bare arms with a handkerchief which became a mop-wet rag. When he joined her he offered her his own. ‘How could I know it was going to rain out of that sky, and before I’d gone much more than half a kilometre?’ she complained.
‘You couldn’t, but you’ll learn,’ he said unsympathetically. ‘Anyway, how do you suppose we grow crops as lush as sugar if we don’t have rain and plenty of it?’
She wondered why, if he were on his own way home, he had followed her up; the Great House and his quarters were in quite a different direction. When he had offered to drive her, had he intended all along to drive to Barbara Paul’s, and so hadn’t cared whether she accepted a lift there or not? If it hadn’t rained, would he have sketched a salute to her when he passed her and have already been with Barbara when she did arrive? She frowned, annoyed with herself for following Tina’s speculations for the second time that day. Craig’s petite amie, Tina had called Barbara, making an ugly slur out of the simplicity of ‘little friend’ and implying, without saying as much, that the bungalow was their love-nest. And here was she, Hope thought with distaste, actually wondering too. And she would not—would not! From here out she was forgetting it. She didn’t want to know.
