The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “And Clotelle . . . remember Clotelle? You can’t forget Clotelle. She went to an early grave. An early death. And a tragic death, to-boot! . . . and Mr. Courtenay Babb, father to the boy, the Constable, who was just here . . .”

  “Courtenay Babb-the-first?”

  “I wonder if he know that I knew his father?”

  “He too young to know things, Miss Mary-Mathilda,” Sargeant says.

  “. . . as children, we used to have summuch fun, on moonlight nights . . ..Well, I had better call Gertrude and get something for you to drink . . .”

  And she moves to the small heart-shaped, polished table; and she lifts the bell, a heavy, metal bell with a brown handle of dark- ened wood, to clang its tongue against its side; this same bell, the same size as that one, similar in manufacture, and used by the Headmistress of her school, and the Headmaster of his, to summon girls and boys to the platform for floggings, and for rewards; all these bells in Flagstaff Village being rung as if there was such an urgency to be called, to be halted, to be roused from the bed, from the dead, from the cane field, to be always on time. And always “summonsed,” as Miss Mary-Mathilda says to Gertrude.

  Mary-Mathilda lifts the bell from the table and rings it, with a quick flick of her wrist, two times. Sargeant sees this bell as a miniature of the bell of Sin-Davids Anglican Church that tolls at six every evening, that sounds the alarms of hurricanes and cane-fires, for ships in danger on the sea; the sea that is everywhere, visible from every corner of the Island, that bell that tolls for the dead, in slow step with the fall of black shoes on the macadam road, polished to a blinding indulgence, slow to match the march of pallbearers and the reduced speed of the dead, always loud and mournful, from the tall steeple of the Anglican Church.

  The bell in this Great House has a hollow sound. As if there is a crack in its small girth. But perhaps this kind of a bell, manufactured intentionally to “summonse” servants, may be able to sustain this hollowness in its ring, and still be used, deliberately and daily, to “summonse” Gertrude from the large, dark, smoky kitchen, with its pleasing tingle, much unlike the rebellious, violent, loud and ear-shattering cuh-lang-cuh-lang-cuh-lang clang-cuh-lang-cuhlang of the bell in the Plantation Yard. That bell is nailed onto a piece of wood, onto the limb of a strong tree, the tamarind tree, and a thick short length of rope is attached to its tongue and knotted at the end so that any hand, the hand of the Plantation’s children, the hand of Mr. Bellfeels, or his wife, but the hand of someone with privilege, might reach it easily just above the head, and hold the knot of the rope which is like an extended tongue itself, and send the tongue of iron cuh-langing against the steel of the thick-girded bell. The bell was fired in cast-steel in England.

  Sargeant shakes his head, as if indeed there is seawater in his ear; and is once more paying attention to the beautiful things surrounding him: chairs, tables, settees, pictures on the walls; and ornaments of glass and China and clay, all in the shape of animals, leopards, crocodiles and lions and tigers which he has never seen —he knows only horses and jackasses and mules and cows and sheep and goats and dogs, yes dogs, Alsatians and Doberman-Pincers, and stray cats, mongrels and bitches—but all these animals, the leopards and the tigers, in lifelike permanence, are now surrounding him in the front-house of this Great House.

  From a room within the large house, noiselessly along a hallway, comes Gertrude walking like a cat; silently; dressed in maid’s uniform of black poplin, without the starched white cap, without the starched white apron that goes with the uniform; but informal in a black dress that is long to her calves, and blacker than its natural blackness against the heavy black complexion of her sturdy smooth skin. And she walks in her bare feet, bold and secure; and after Sargeant sees her enter, he is fascinated how her feet, black on the instep, and pink and thick round the heels, touch the Persian carpets on the brown-stained, shining hardwood floor; and make no noise.

  “Evening, sir,” Gertrude says.

  “Evening, Gertrude. You getting on, all right, Gertrude?” he asks her.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Gertie-dear,” Miss Mary-Mathilda says, “Sargeant Stuart is a bit thirsty. What we have in the house to slacken his thirst?”

  “Something soft, Mistress?” Gertrude says; pauses, and adds, “Or something hard?” She manages to send a glance in Sargeant’s direction, quick and furtive. Sargeant gives no indication that he has noticed.

  “What you think, Gertie-dear? You be the judge. You think Sargeant Stuart should have something hard? Or something soft?”

  She is not looking at Gertrude as she says this.

  “Something hard,” Gertrude says, putting the stress on “hard.” And Sargeant does not, still, give any reaction. “Something hard, Mistress.”

  “Do we have it?”

  “We have everything, Mistress! We have the twenty-year dark rum Mr. Bellfeels bring back from the Rum Bond. We have some Mount Gay Special. We have something that Master Wilberforce bring back from his last trip, from . . .”

  “Israel.”

  “Jerusalem, it was, Mistress. The bottle say ‘Made in Jerusalem.’”

  “Thanks, Gertie-dear. You know more about this House than me. The mind, Sargeant, the mind . . . not good any more. But, Israel-Jerusalem, or Jerusalem-Israel, that boy o’ mine goes all over the world! What he trying to find in Israel?”

  “. . . and we have our usual private stock, Bellfeels Private Stades White Rum. And there’s some brandy, Mistress. We also have the Wincarnis Wine that Master Wilberforce buy for the house, plus the dry Australia sherry that Master Wilberforce bring back from down in Demerara . . . and don’t forget the wine that Master Wilberforce bring us from over in Italy and Europe. We stock-up good, Mistress.”

  Mary-Mathilda smiles at Gertrude’s litany of drinks.

  “What you would like?” she says.

  She is aware that Gertrude is playing a game with Sargeant. But she does not let on she is aware of this. This is the first time this evening that she feels safe.

  Gertrude and Sargeant’s game relaxes her. But she feels herself in control knowing the power she has, and has become accustomed to having, which she wields over her servants—excepting Gertrude, who is closest to her in the Great House—she feels this power and authority .Well inside her body, and take over her disposition; and residing once more within her is her characteristically bold, independent and carefree “temperriment,” the frame of mind she said she had when earlier tonight, she walked to the Plantation Main House.

  Now, as “mistress” of the Great House, it is time to have some refreshments.

  She does so every Sunday evening at this hour. By herself. Sometimes, she would invite Gertrude to sit with her; and they would drink their rum in silence, as the BBC played hymns from St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. Sometimes, she and Wilberforce would sit together. So, why be different tonight? Even “under the circumstances”?

  But still, she is a little saddened to see this little game she knows they are playing about the drinks come to an end.

  “A lil Mount Gay won’t kill, Miss Mary-Mathilda, please,” Sargeant says.

  “Make it two.”

  “Yes, Mistress,” Gertrude says.

  And when Sargeant hears Gertrude speak these words, in this strange, big, beautiful Great House, and knows that in all the years he has known her, he has never heard her talk like this, if he could put form and construction now to her words, Gertrude, by her own words, would have created some delicate and valuable token, some expression of love, of loyalty, of devotion, some demonstration of her closeness to Miss Mary-Mathilda. And this could be called quite frankly a small, short, beautiful curtsey.

  “How you want yours?”

  “Lil ice water on the side,” Sargeant answers.

  “Soda in mine, Gertie-girl.”

  And when Gertrude has served the refreshments, she leaves in the same silence as she had entered. In the same fading silence like the picture in a magic lantern, going out
of focus and then completely disappearing. And then is forgotten.

  And at this time, on a Sunday night, normally Sargeant would be in the Choir; and she, sitting by the window, where her chair is now, her arms spread on the windowsill, her chin placed on her arms, listening to the broadcast of church service on the Voice of Bimshire Radio Station. And when the local Church service is not broadcast because of “a technical difficulty”—she got to know that this meant the Chief Technician was drunk—she would listen to religious music, hymns and sacred songs from Sin-Martin’s-inthe-Fields, from the Mother Country, from in Englund. Yes, from Englund!

  She has never visited Englund. But she knows Englund “by heart,” as she always says. She knows its best radio, the BBC; its best magazines; its best education, through Wilberforce’s success; its best music; and its best, proper accents of speech.

  She looks through the London Illustrated News regularly as they arrive “by surface mail,” into the Island of Bimshire.

  Every Sunday, she hears her own Vicar, Reverend Mr. M. R. P. P. Dowd, M.Th. (Dunelmn) Third-Class Honours, as he stands in the pulpit, tall like the water tower in the Plantation Yard, talking about sin and the poor. “‘They shall inherit the kingdom . . .’” Yes, listening on a Sunday night like tonight, “but under different circumstances”; she is, through her closeness to the singing coming through the radio speaker, and her closeness to the songs and hymns themselves, able to imagine that these songs and hymns were coming from across the knoll, over the green Pasture, and the green fields of sugar canes just a few yards from her Great House. That the music is born out of the burnt grass and old rocks and stones, the walkedover gravel in the Church Yard, beside the graveyard of the Church. She does not have to look farther than this tall structure of coral stone and mortar, of stained-glass windows showing birth and death; defeat and conquest; crucifixion and resurrection in its paints and colours which come to palpable life in the sun, and bleed; yes, thick red blood, red as wine, comes pouring down, as if the tree and the spear and the diadem of thorns, and the voices of abuse and submission that the afternoon sun blazoned forth from the stained windows that give this history is being witnessed by her, and takes place, in its full pageantry and panoply of history, in the yard of the Plantation Main House.

  And in addition to this pageantry taken from the Old Testament in her Bible is her own saga, which began in this very Church Yard so many years ago, also on a Sunday.

  But tonight, life is under different circumstances. The radio is turned off. She cannot remember having listened to it at all today.

  Missing the voices in the radio does not upset her, nor cause her to think long upon it. But in the short space of time, like the tightening of a muscle in the calf, she can hear the words of her favourite hymn. Hymn 332. “There Is a Green Hill Far Away.” But it is the second-last verse she likes:

  There was no other good enough,

  To pay the price of sin,

  He only could unlock the gate

  Of Heav’n, and let us in.

  It is a hymn written for her moods, to reflect her day when it has been a good one, when the running of this Great House is smooth; when Gertrude is not complaining about “the hard-work you putting on me”; when Master Wilberforce comes home late to luncheon; and in the same day, early to dinner; and brings five friends; when he and his friends eat Gertrude’s “sweet-sweet” food, and smile, pat her on her shoulder and leave in their roaring cars, kicking-up pebbles and dust against the large panes of glass windows—and into the front-house parlour she had just cleaned —when the French doors are open; after her coconut bread comes out..Well, and “cloiding” and delicious, the smell that brings Master Wilberforce and his friends into the kitchen, large as the galley on an ocean liner bringing “them cheap-ass, tight-ass English tourisses” to “feck-up my fecking Island!”; when Wilberforce and his friends would break off chunks of the warm coconut bread; and disappear, in clouds of dust.

  She never sat at table with Master Wilberforce and his friends. And she did not sit with him when he dined at home alone. She sat always in the kitchen, at a smaller table Gertrude set formally, with silvers, butter knife, main course knife, dessert knife; soup spoon, salad spoon, dessert spoon, two forks, one for the main dish, the other for dessert; and a small spoon placed at right angles to the other implements—even when she was taking only split-pea soup, for luncheon. And a warm, white, damask napkin folded in three, in a long rectangular shape, in the middle of the three white plates bordered in royal blue. Each crystal glass, and each plate and the tips of the handle of each implement bears the coat of arms of the Plantation: two sugar canes with their tops attached, crossed vertical on a shield. Triumph is written in gouged-out letters, under the shield.

  She and Gertrude prepared meals together, sitting at the unpainted deal-board table, cutting the pork and seasoning it; gutting the chickens, leaving on the head and the “feets”; “leave on the feets, Mistress, the sweetest parts”; kneading the dough for the coconut bread; laughing in spite of the smokiness in the kitchen; eating dunks and ackees and golden apples, in season; and suggesting how the food might have tasted better, if they had added “just a lil more o’ tumbrick,” or “a piece-more salt-beef,” or a “lil-less water in the rice, Gertie-girl!”; talking about everything that went on, over at the Plantation Main House, that week; at Harrison College and the schools; at the Vicarage, and in the Selected Clienteles Room of the Harlem Bar & Grill, down the hill, in the Village.

  Gertrude fed Miss Mary-Mathilda with the gossip and scandal of the Village; and Miss Mary-Mathilda regaled Gertrude with the “wirthlessness you behold mongst the rich.” With this information exchanged between the two women, Miss Mary-Mathilda learned a lot about Sargeant from Gertrude’s lips; and she invented the rest; and during the day, alone in her bedroom, Mary-Mathilda trained a powerful spying glass on the front door of Sargeant’s house, focused it on the shield made of tinning that showed the name of the company that insured his house; even picked out his chickens moving round outside his house; yes; and she got to know Sargeant in recent years from this distance, through her telescopic lens; and Gertrude learned “how many nights when you in your warm bed sleeping, and I up here, can’t sleep for the screaming and the shouting coming from the direction of that Main House, girl; like two people fighting . . .”

  Miss Mary-Mathilda drank at each meal, except breakfast, a snap of dark rum, with a glass of chipped ice on the side. Sometimes, she drank three snaps. Gertrude drank dark rum with chips of ice in a half-pint crystal glass, drowned in fresh coconut water— with each meal, including breakfast, especially when Miss Mary-Mathilda did not come into the kitchen.

  Master Wilberforce had stopped eating a breakfast of two fried pork chops, three strips of fried plantain, two bakes, sliced cucumber with lime juice, fresh parsley, white vinegar, salt and nigger-peppers— he called this cucumber dish, “prickle”—and two large cups of strong Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee. In recent days, he was now eating his breakfast standing up (“I got to fly this morning, Gertzie-love!”): one slice of brown toast spread thick with homemade sweet butter and gooseberry jam, and a small amount of coffee, in a very tiny coffee cup, which Gertrude called a “semi-glass,” holding less than a gill, of very strong coffee from overseas.

  “Expresso!” Gertrude reported to Miss Mary-Mathilda, the first morning.

  “Expresso?” Miss Mary-Mathilda asked.

  “Expresso!”Gertrude repeated to her mistress. “A Eyetalian habit he say he pick-up in Italy. And him a big man, Miss Mary-Mathilda, and a doctor, to-boot, who should know more better! Forsaking the breakfast that I prepare for him, a real Bimshire breakfast! And telling me he having a Continental breakfast instead! Expresso, Mistress? And eating stanning-up! For the food to lodge in his ankles and his two feets? Mistress, you could tell me what so special about this Continental breakfast that consist of only expresso coffee?”

  “Well, when he get run-down, we will see. He will rever
t-back to eating real food!”

  “I really hope so, Mistress. I like Master Wilberforce too good for this tragedy to befall him.”

  “Civilization, Gertie-girl. Civilization . . .”

  Gertrude had turned away, hurt; and she left behind her, as an indication of the injury to her status in the kitchen, which Wilberforce had compromised with his European habits, a vexatious stewpsing of her mouth: when she sucked her teeth in disgust, it came out as stewwwwwpsse.

  Gertrude was off usually at three o’ clock in the afternoon, every Sunday, except when Easter and Christmas fell on a Sunday. On normal Sundays, Miss Mary did the cooking herself.

  The meal is served at twelve-thirty, after Church, whether she had attended or not. She feels she is a better cook than Gertrude: but she will never tell her so.

  And when she has a bad day; when she would stand alone in her bedroom, and look towards the largest house on the Plantation estate, the Main House, which stands on a hill, a quarter-mile through the fruit trees that seem to guard it, she would think of her life, of her days at school, ended in Standard Seven, too soon; without being able to take up the scholarship to St. Michael’s School, if she had sat the Secondary-to-Second-Grade examination, which she would have passed, and landed her in a secondary school for girls only; paid for by the Social Committee of the Vestry. But she could not, because she had to work in the fields and help the household, consisting of Ma, and Ma’s mother, Gran; and her; and because women were not encouraged to pursue higher learning beyond elementary school (learning to read and write, and the Ten Commandments, was sufficient); so, when she had a bad day, she would stand for hours in her large bedroom in the Great House, and look at the Main House, and at Sargeant’s small chattel house; and see the brightness of day taken over by the sombreness of gold and thickening, rich, heavy colours, the sun touching the sea, the coming on of dusk. The approaching blackness of the end of the day. She would become enveloped in this engulfing sad, veloured house; and her thoughts would wander over the unending fields . . . of the nights, after she had washed her face-and-hands; when the shine on the long handle of the hoe did not satisfy her, did not shine bright enough; when she passed the middle finger of her right hand over the blade of the hoe, to test it, she knew easily that it was razor sharp, because it left a line of red, thin as the thickness of a page, on her finger. Her hoe had to have the same sharpness of any knifeblade in her kitchen.