The Secret Life of Winnie Cox

by Sharon Maas

  I have often noticed that, once a decision is made in thought, outer events fall into place even without further planning; it is as if the individual, in forming that resolve, has simply fallen into line with a greater plan and must wait only for it to unfold. So it was on the following day.

  Unusually, Papa joined us for breakfast. ‘Girls,’ he said before long, ‘I promised to take you for a drive in the motor car – do you remember?’

  Yoyo beamed. ‘Yes, Papa! Of course!’ Her eyes shone with expectation.

  ‘Well, today is as good a day as any – the sun’s out for the first time. I’m driving down to Albion Estate to speak to Mr Bee – plantation business. How would you like to come along for the drive? The last few weeks have been so dreary – I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. I’ll be gone all day – I’ll free you from lessons, and we’ll have lunch at Albion. Miss Wright, you’re welcome to come along as well. Maggie, of course, is also welcome. What do you say?’

  He looked from one of us to the other. Yoyo leapt from her seat, rushed over to his chair at the head of the table, and hugged him from behind. It was as if all memory of the logies and Nanny and the whipping had fled from her mind; as if she had forgiven him everything. Miss Wright flashed Papa a huge smile before frowning and looking at me.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘Winnie has fallen behind in her studies …’

  ‘Oh, fiddlesticks!’ cried Yoyo. ‘She’ll catch up in time; she can’t miss this. Can you, Winnie?’

  Papa looked concerned. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Miss Wright, do you think …’ Then his face cleared. ‘Yoyo is right. Fiddlesticks! You’re girls – what’s a few missed lessons?’

  But I would not let this opportunity pass. I spoke up, firm and clear, the mature, responsible daughter.

  ‘No, Papa, Miss Wright is right. I really need to catch up. There’s some reading I need to do, and some French conjugations to learn; I’m happy to stay and study on my own. I’m sure there’ll be lots of chances to drive in the motor car in future. The four of you – just go. I’m happy to stay at home alone.’

  ‘Oh, Winnie! No! Don’t be a spoilsport! What a bore!’

  I smiled at Yoyo. ‘I’m still a bit shaky on my feet, Yoyo; I think it’s a bit early for an excursion. Don’t worry about me. You know I’m just a boring old fogey who likes to be buried in books.’ After more discussion – needless in my eyes for I was quite determined – my decision was accepted. With many kisses and exclamations of regret and apology, Yoyo and Miss Wright, in a flurry of goodbyes and hugs and kisses and a splattering of gravel under wheels, drove off in Papa’s car, and the house was empty of all but the servants and me. I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome if I had deliberated for weeks.

  They left. I stood watching till the vehicle was out the gate, and then sprang into action: up the stairs, back into the house, up to my room, a quick change into outdoor clothes and shoes. I grabbed Mama’s letter from my desk, then went down again and on to my bicycle. Only once did I indulge in a sense of guilt – where had the innocent, guileless me gone? Never in my life had I had need for subterfuge, secrecy, and lies, and now I was up to my neck in all three. Does love change a person that much, for the worse? But no, I argued with myself. It was not love that had changed me; it was the knowledge that this perfect love of mine would be seen as less than perfect by those who would never understand. Subterfuge, secrecy and lies were necessary to protect that which was pure and good and grand. One day, they would all understand.

  I reached the village, and the post office, and placed my bicycle on its stand. Then I took a deep breath, reached into the pocket of my skirt to remove the letter and the postage money. I stepped into the open doorway already smiling – and came to a full stop.

  My Beloved was not there, sitting at the desk, with his back to me. I saw instead grey grizzled hair, and recognized the familiar hunch of an ageing back. I knew that figure.

  ‘Mr Perkins?’ My voice faltered as I spoke, as if I doubted the evidence of my eyes.

  He turned around, and, seeing me, stood up with some difficulty and, taking up a stick that leant against the desk, hobbled over to the counter. He smiled broadly as he came.‘Ah, Miss Cox!’ he said. ‘You see! Can’t keep an old dog down! Here I am again!’

  ‘Mr Perkins …’ confusion made me stutter. ‘It …it’s good to see you back but-but … I thought …’

  Mr Perkins had taken the letter from my hand, peered at the address, and bent down to remove the cardboard box containing stamps from under the counter. He opened the box, tore several stamps from a sheet, and proceeded to prepare the envelope for dispatch.

  ‘Sitting around all day …not for me. I insisted. And me wife complaining – she tired of me moping around. And we need the money too. Nobody can’t live from twopenny pension. So, I said, I goin’ back to work! I goin’ to deliver letters till I fall down dead! Brought me grandson to help me – I deliver in the village, he can deliver to the estate on he bike.’

  He stamped the letter firmly with the date, hobbled back across the room and tossed it into a wire basket.

  ‘That’s nice, that’s good, but …’ But George had summoned me! Where was George?

  ‘I missed it you know! Missed it somethin’ terrible. I suppose one day I’ll have to retire but till then …oh, by the way, seein’ you reminds me …’

  He raised the flap on the counter and moved out into the customer’s space. Gesturing to me to follow, he shambled across to the open door. Once there, he placed his fingers to his lips and emitted a piercing whistle, once, twice, three times. He stood watching the house across the road for a while. A woman appeared at a window. He waved, she waved back, and a few seconds later a small darkie boy, no older than six or seven, emerged from the house and ran over the street to join us.

  ‘Hello, Freddie-boy!’ said Mr Perkins, and gestured to me. ‘Here’s the lady. Off you go, Miss Cox! I’ve been left instructions for you – you’re to follow this little boy. There’s somebody waitin’ to see you.’

  It seemed as if I’d been holding my breath all this long time, for I gave a sigh so deep it must have been audible to Mr Perkins. All right, so the old postmaster was back at work but that didn’t mean that George himself was gone. He was waiting for me, somewhere; he had sent for me. This little boy …

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said to Freddie, and descended the steps to the street. Freddie, who, it seemed, could not speak, gestured to me to follow and off we went on foot. Freddie himself was barefoot, and wore nothing but a ragged pair of short trousers and a torn singlet. His limbs emerged from those rags like twigs covered in a layer of shiny brown skin. His shoulder-blades were sharp, his neck piteously thin. In spite of these signs of undernourishment he showed no lack of energy, sprinting forward down the village street. I ran behind him in shoes that seemed far too heavy for the task.

  ‘Wait, wait,’ I called. ‘Not so fast!’

  The boy slowed down without a word and I caught up with him. We walked down the village street. A few heads turned as we passed, and people smiled; though of course I did not know the villagers by name – except for the shop-owners – they certainly knew me, and greeted me with their usual deference, though obviously surprised to see me on foot. Whenever we came, Yoyo and I, it was on bicycle or horseback. I smiled politely back at everyone. There was no need to stop and exchange greetings and words. All cordiality with the villagers stopped short of conversation, except with the shop-keepers. That was the established order.

  I followed Freddie to the end of the little village. The houses – cottages, rather – now were wide apart and straggled along the road; balanced on high thin stilts, top-heavy like the spindle-legged herons that fished in the paddy-fields. They looked ready to collapse at any moment, folding backwards at the knee. Some of them leaned precariously to one side. They had staircases with missing treads that led up to minute porches, open doorways, and empty window frames. They were of wood, but unpainted. They had garde
ns of unkempt bushes that reached over the broken-down palings and up the banisters, sometimes brilliant with bougainvillea or hibiscus. Houses as tiny almost as dolls’ houses. I had seen them before but never noticed them. I realised now that people lived in them. Whole families. I saw faces at the windows: women, children, old men, babies in arms. Small dark hands waving. I waved back.

  Presently, Freddie turned left into a lane between two houses. I followed. Soon we were in the fields: a cow paddock here, a vegetable patch there, a hut, a shack. On we walked. By now it was mid-morning. It was the first day in weeks that the sky was cloudless – which I thought a good omen – and by now the sun had risen high enough to warm the land. Steam rose up from the moist earth and from the flooded paddy-fields that now bordered the path, brilliant green from the young emerald shoots rising up through the water. The recent rains had obviously brought forth new life. A few East Indian women stood bent double in the fields, weeding. Freddie walked on.

  ‘How far is it now, Freddie?’ I asked after we had walked for some twenty minutes. Freddie only shrugged and pointed to a group of trees in the distance before us, and indeed, as we approached I saw a large white house hidden in the greenery. We approached the gate and I saw it more clearly: a two-storey white Dutch colonial house on grand white pillars that looked as if it had been uprooted from Main Street in Georgetown and plonked down here in the middle of this wilderness. Its Demerara windows were all painted green, as was the banister of the stairs leading up to the front porch and wide door, which, like all the other doors hereabouts, stood wide open.

  The house stood in a garden of bounties. Flowering shrubs lined a pathway to the front stairs that led through a garden teeming with colour – all the flowers in our own garden. Yet, because it was so much smaller and compact, this one seemed much more profuse in its celebration of nature’s abundance, and less immaculate. Hibiscus in all hues vied with red frangipani for attention, and marigolds trailed all over the ground. Beyond, the same compactness held true for the orchard. I identified at a glance at least five fruit trees: mango, guava, sapodilla and paw-paw, and two huge genip trees laden with bunches of plump ripe genips just waiting to be plucked. A ladder leant against one of the trees. As for the mango tree, it was a child’s delight; its branches forked low enough for small scrambling limbs to climb up, and a rudimentary swing hung from one of the sturdier horizontal boughs. A blue-and-yellow macaw, unfettered, flapped and flew towards the front garden; it landed on the bottom banister post where it fluttered its wings in great excitement and called out ‘Robert! Robert!’ Just gazing into that garden made me want to be a child again; I felt strangely at home, glad to be here, welcome. But we could not yet enter.

  A white paling fence surrounded the house, and the gate, unlike the front door, was closed against the road, chained to the gatepost, and locked with a mighty padlock. Several dogs rushed up barking, and flung their bodies against the gate. They raised the alarm, for immediately a woman appeared at a first-floor window and a man came hurrying out from under the house, calling to the dogs to ‘Get back!’ Which they did, cringing around his feet with their tails tucked in, and then disappearing behind a lattice-work screen behind the front stairs.

  The man was Mad Jim. He walked up to the gate, smiling and waving at me.

  ‘Hello, hello, hello,’ he said as he pulled a key out of his pocket and turned it in the padlock. He unwound the chain from the gate and swung it open. He held out his hand. ‘I’ve been wondering if you would make it – glad you could come so quickly. Welcome, Miss Cox, welcome!’

  I was more confused than ever. Instead of entering or returning his greeting with a smile and stretching out my hand to shake his, I stood rooted to the spot, frowning.

  ‘George …?’ I managed to say. ‘Is he …?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’ll explain everything. Come on in. Freddie, you come too – you can wait for Miss Cox and take her back to the village later. Auntie will give you some genips.’

  I followed Mad Jim back to the house. As we approached, a man slunk out from underneath, a tall thin coolie in an unbuttoned shirt and worn-out long trousers; quite young. He looked somehow familiar – and then I recognised him. The man from the post office, the man who had so rudely stopped my Morse lesson – I couldn’t recall his name. As he passed by he glowered at me; such scorn was in that look that I flinched. What was he doing here?

  ‘All right, Uncle, ah gone!’ he said to Mad Jim, who simply raised his hand and said,

  ‘See you tomorrow, Bhim. Close the gate when you leave – don’t bother with the chain. Come, Miss Cox, come on upstairs. My wife will make you some lime juice – you must be thirsty after that walk in the sun. You too, Freddie!’

  We all trooped up the stairs, with Mad Jim leading the way and Freddie bringing up the rear. We entered the house and I looked around, expecting George to emerge from the shadows and take me in his arms. No such thing happened. Instead, a coolie woman with a baby on her hip came forward. She was smiling.

  ‘Welcome,’ she said, almost in a whisper. She took my hand and led me to a group of rattan chairs in the front gallery. I sat down. I wondered who she was – not his wife, certainly. The woman I had seen with him, so many years ago, had been black as coal, African. This woman was Indian.

  This was all wrong. A lump rose in my throat. I swallowed it, and said again, ‘I don’t understand! Tell me … Mr – Mr …’ I didn’t even know what to call him. I could hardly address him as Mad Jim, and Jim would be too casual. He was, after all, a stranger. I was in a stranger’s house and I had no idea what was going on.

  ‘Booker,’ he said, ‘Jim Booker. Me wife, Bhoomie. But you can call me Uncle Jim, if you like. Everyone ‘round these parts call me that.’

  He spoke Creole. It was the first time I’d ever heard a white person speak in that lilting, broken English; it seemed incongruous. Ludicrous, even. The huge bush of his beard shook as he laughed. Bhoomie, by this time, had placed a glass of lime juice in my hands. I sipped and waited. Silently, she handed Freddie, who had plonked himself down on the polished floor near the window, a bowl full of plump green genips, which he grabbed and placed before him on the ground, and set to work at the business of eating them: cracking open the firm outer skin with his teeth, plopping the golden fruit into his mouth, sucking off the tart-sweet flesh, and spitting the stone into his hand. The woman, who had disappeared for a moment, returned and handed him a saucer, for the sucked-out stones. She placed a plate of biscuits on the glass-topped table before me. She slid away again, noiselessly.

  I watched all this in a sort of daze. Nothing made sense. Why had George lured me here, only not to be here himself? What had this man, this Mad Jim, this … suddenly, the name clicked.

  ‘Mr … Booker?’ I said with a start. ‘You mean …THE Bookers? Booker Brothers? You’re one of them?’

  He laughed again. ‘Yeh – I got the Booker blood all right, and the name. But that’s all. Black sheep; the one the family don’t want to know. Mad as a hatter, they say.’

  ‘Oh,’ is all I could say. So, then, the rumours were true, and even more scandalous than I had thought. Mad Jim, a member of the most prestigious family in BG – a pariah for marrying a darkie woman – it was all beginning to make sense. One thing I was sure of now was that he was not mad. Not in the least. The calm and humour in those blue eyes of his were anything but mad. Mad Jim, Mr Booker, Uncle Jim, whatever I would eventually call him, had a soothing effect on my confusion. I instinctively trusted him.

  ‘George,’ I began, ‘The note he sent – I thought …’

  ‘You thought he’d be here. But he ain’t. George gone back to Georgetown. He can’t see you again. He wrote you a letter and he asked me to give you it. It’s here. Read it – now. And when you finish readin’, if you still don’t understand, I’ll explain.’

  He handed me a small white envelope. I took it, hand shaking. Mad Jim stepped away and left me alone in the gallery to read. Not quite alone – Fre
ddie still sat there, munching on the genips, a pile of sucked-out stones growing on the saucer.

  Slowly, dreading what was to come, I removed a sheet of paper from the envelope, unfolded it, and read it.

  * * *

  Dear Miss Winnie,

  I apologize deeply for the liberties I took with you. I am very sorry and I should not have done it. I promise not to bother you again.

  Yours truly,

  George Theodore Quint

  * * *

  Mama’s Diary: Norfolk, 1891

  Liebes Tagebuch

  Archie writes to me often, and his letters are full of enthusiasm. A lovely big house, made of wood, is waiting for me. Fields of green, and a vast blue sky! It seems there is little else to recommend the place beside these two things: green fields and blue skies. Oh, and sun, of course! And rain! These four elements of nature are the components of my new home: fields, sky, sun and rain. It sounds rather dull, but of course Archie will be there. And Kathleen is growing bigger by the day, a little person in her own right! She is so droll! I can hardly wait for her to be with her Papa.

  And that will be soon: our vessel leaves in less than a month! Oh, what an adventure. I look forward to it with all my heart. The lack of distractions will only forge Archie and me closer together. In his letters he tells me how much he misses me – that I am the backbone of his life, and without me he is lost. Imagine that! My big strong husband, complaining that he has no backbone! That his little wife, she who has accomplished nothing apart from a little skill at the piano and the violin, and giving birth to a daughter, should be the mainstay of his life! I am happy to play that role. It gives me worth and value.