by Tobias Hill
‘London.’
‘No one’s just from London.’
‘My mother was Irish.’
‘Was she soft like you? Giving strangers favours?’
‘You’re not a stranger.’
‘No? What’s my favourite song? What’s my favourite food?’
‘Jerk chicken?’ he hazards, that being what she’s having, and she laughs.
‘Sydney, it wasn’t a real question. You don’t know me, I don’t know you. You could be anyone. I could.’
He stops eating to think it over. He starts to speak and stops. He says, ‘I’ve never done anything like this. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. I don’t think it’s foolish. I don’t think you’re anyone.’
What about you? she wants to ask, but a waiter is beside them, is asking if he might suggest a fresh drink for the lady, a pick-me-up for the lucky gentleman, a toast for a honeymoon, and as he speaks the charm of the moment passes. They leave quickly, like failed imposters, and drive on.
Downtown there are guest houses. ‘Two rooms,’ Sybil says to the proprietress at Dadlani’s Blue Moon Inn, and the woman shakes her head as if two rooms are a scandal, and once she’s shown them up she bustles back with a tray of rum-and-lime and just-cut flowers, as if to bring them courage. They sit on their shared balcony and wait until she’s gone.
‘You’re not drinking.’
‘No,’ Sydney says. ‘I used to.’
‘Oh.’
‘I don’t need it any more.’
‘My dad does. Maybe if he was back here he wouldn’t.’
Sydney moves carefully in the dark. As if to slake his thirst he draws a line in the wet on his glass. ‘I don’t think it helps,’ he says, ‘to run away.’
‘Is that what we’re doing?’
‘It’s what people do,’ he says, and Sybil feels her hackles rise, her hope tested.
‘We could be running towards something. People do that too.’
‘Towards what?’
‘Something better. Isn’t this better?’
For a while he doesn’t answer. He is looking at the inland stars, which are ardent, unpolluted by anything but moonlight. ‘This is beautiful,’ he says.
She wakes once in the night. It is so hot. In her sleep she has pulled off the sheet and lies naked to the air but for a satin of sweat.
Unbidden she is thinking of Sydney. Their conversation, the day he offered her more than he had any right to give. You don’t know me, she told him. Hardly, he answered.
It nags at her, the memory, but she is too tired, she drifts. She thinks again of running. Her elders and betters, long ago, though not so far from here. Neville, Clarence and Bernadette, leaving home for the mother country and all that awaited them.
When she stirs again it’s late. For a moment she is placeless. The shutters are ajar: between them, when she turns her head, she can see two great black birds wheeling in a sky as blue as touch-paper.
She folds away the shutters and looks out on Jamaica. It still seems a dream to her, and this morning a disquieting one. What is she doing here? She knows no one but Sydney, a man she hardly knows at all. You never know, with men. She has the name of the place where her mother was born, the name of her grandmother, and neither is real to her. They’re like coloured plates from Uncle Neville’s books, larger than life and brighter: they’re stories an old man told a needy child in rainy London.
She goes down for breakfast. Sydney is there before her. The sight of him is unwelcome: dimly, she recollects having drunk and said too much last night, and anyway he looks so English, so forlornly out of place, still dressed in what might be his only clothes, his small concessions to the heat a chair in the dappled shade and his jacket hung on it.
The proprietress is sitting by him, as if she doesn’t mean to let him go until he has eaten everything. ‘This is Mrs Dadlani,’ Sydney says. ‘This is my friend, Sybil.’
Mrs Dadlani looks at her like a cat disturbed at its meal. ‘You breakfasting, Miss?’ she asks, and goes sulkily when Sybil says she is.
‘So I’m your friend now?’ Sybil asks, and isn’t sorry when he blushes.
‘What should I say?’
‘Friend is fine. You’re making more of them.’
‘We were just talking. There was a bird as well. It sat up here, but it went . . . somewhere. I think you might have missed it.’
‘I’ll live,’ she says, sitting, and he looks at her hesitantly and goes back to his food with what is today a satisfying awkwardness. Mrs Dadlani comes out with a fresh haul from the kitchen.
‘Mr Marsh tell me you leaving so soon.’
‘Mr Marsh is right,’ Sybil says. ‘I don’t want all that.’
‘Ackee and saltfish,’ Mrs Dadlani says, laying dishes like penances. ‘Bammy bread, that’s fresh, you eat it up. Callaloo, plaintain, pawpaw.’
‘It’s a fruit,’ Sydney says, and Sybil glares at him.
‘I can see what it is.’
‘You two keeping company,’ Mrs Dadlani says, benignly dictatorial, ‘and not even breakfasting together. You want anything else, Miss?’
Oh, she does. Sybil wants more coffee and less talk, more pawpaw and the bill; and everything she wants, she gets.
It’s Sydney’s turn to drive. Sybil takes the top down, mans the map and the radio. The breeze and music soothe her. She is still tense, the way she gets before a fight, but it isn’t Sydney’s fault, she was wrong to blame him. It is what lies ahead that is a worry to her, the vital unknown that steels her, and all that is lessened here, out on the road, between places.
They go west along the coast. Boulevards and limewashed palms give way to wharves and breakwaters, golf links to gas containers. An inlet of white sand crescented with flotsam, a river mouth crisscrossed with mangroves. A woman at a stall, by Hopewell, who lifts her hand to them and makes the sign of the cross in blessing or aversion.
At Lucea they stop for a lunch of fried fish and plantain chips, parcelled up in pages of The Jamaica Gleaner. Afterwards they sit on the beach, digging their toes into the sand, making the most of it: the road ahead tends inland. Sydney dozes in the sun.
‘Fish and chips,’ Sybil says, ‘just like home. We could be down in Brighton.’
Sydney cracks open his eyes. ‘It’d be raining there.’
‘Too right! Soggy newspaper.’
‘Soggy chips.’
Sybil guffaws. ‘Look at you, wind in your hair. You should be in a film,’ she says, and he combs his fingers through his thinning strands: he is no good with teasing. ‘Sydney, I’m sorry about this morning.’
‘Oh no, it’s alright.’
‘I was just worrying,’ she says, and Sydney looks out at the surf, the glitter beyond, as if puzzling at what there could be to worry about. ‘I don’t know about my family here. It’s just my grandmother. She could be horrible. I don’t think my dad ever liked her. To tell the truth I think he was always scared of her.’
Sydney nods. ‘But you’re not.’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘Because you’re not scared of anything,’ he says, and she leans back on the sand and laughs again, freely.
‘At least I’ve got you,’ she says, ‘to believe in me.’
‘I do.’
‘I’m not complaining.’
‘Tell me about her,’ he asks, and so she does, the way that she was told it. Mrs Jarrett, who she should be thanking any time it comes down to fighting, who returned with cold regards all that was sent from England. Who might return her granddaughter, if that is how she is.
They drive south. Bit by bit the signs of habitation thin: a last stallholder; a last house where men sit smoking in the yard; a figure in a field, bent-backed, bare-chested, cutting, cutting; then nothing but the fields themselves and the road shimmering between them.
The hills rise but keep their distance. They are into forest now. Sometimes it comes down to the road, only to draw back again around some tended acreage like a v
ast, cautious animal. The road follows the valleys but rises imperceptibly, so that now and then they catch flashes of the sea, westwards and far away through trunks and canopy . . . and neither says so, but they miss it. You know where you are with the sea: you could be looking out at Brighton. The forest brings home to them how far from home they’ve come, and how little they belong. Sydney fidgets at the wheel. Sybil mutters at the map, which is a playful tourist thing, showing an island of hotels, highways and waterfalls, cocktail hours and parasols, and not these crags and clefts and unpeopled inland valleys.
They crest a rise. Below them, by the road, an old man sits in the shade. He is cotton-haired, shirtsleeved, alone, working something into a bucket between his feet. He stands as he sees them and waves them down unhurriedly.
‘Miss Malcolm?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mrs Jarrett expecting you,’ the man says. ‘This way,’ he says, and where he points they go.
They turn along an unmarked track, under an avenue of high dark trees. The man is walking up behind them, coming on but dwindling, and when Sybil looks round again there is the house ahead, already looming up, the manse of her uncle’s stories. Sydney is turning in between lawns of Bermuda grass, a row of Spanish jars, a raised ironwork terrace. There is a porch above them, shadowed with bougainvillea, and a figure stepping out into those shadows at the sound of them; a woman, straight-backed, dressed in mourning, shading her eyes at their coming.
They sit in the drawing room. Sydney has been sent to put the car away, to take their cases to their rooms and Sybil doesn’t know what else. It is just the two of them. The man, Cornelius, has brought them lemonade.
Sybil thinks, She’s not that old. The way Neville told it – the way she heard it – her namesake was a crone, a witch out of fairytale. Here in the flesh she’s handsome. She can be seventy at most.
‘Sit up straight,’ Mrs Jarrett says, ‘no. There, in the light. Let me look at you.’
Her eyes are healthy, steady. For a long while all she does is look. It would make anyone nervous.
‘You take after her some,’ her grandmother says at last, and Sybil murmurs thanks – though it’s hardly a compliment, the way Mrs Jarrett says it. It’s more like something the customs man might have said. You’ll do. You can sit there on my chair, for now. ‘You wear no ring.’
‘No.’
‘Who is that man outside?’
‘Sydney.’
‘You make no mention of him.’
‘When would I –’
‘In your letter.’
‘Oh, no. He’s just a friend.’
‘You keeping company with him?’
‘People here keep saying that. I don’t know what it means,’ Sybil says, but Mrs Jarrett moves her mouth, as if probing meat for shot, and waits her out. ‘I don’t know. No, alright?’
That makes the old woman grin, at least. She barks wholehearted laughter. ‘Ha!’ she says, ‘ha! Ha! You got her temper, too.’
‘I heard that.’
‘Talking back just like her! You remember how she talked?’ Mrs Jarrett asks, and for the first time it occurs to Sybil that her grandmother is older than she looks.
‘She died when I was born,’ Sybil says, and the old woman’s smile fades, her eyes going flinty again, as if she expects no better from the world than such folly and wilfulness.
‘What do you think? That I don’t know how my child passed?’
‘No. I didn’t mean to –’
‘I’ll have some lemonade now.’
Sybil pours. Her hand trembles, as if her grandmother’s vigour has taken something out of her. A perilous silence falls between them. Outside a bird starts singing. There are cages on the terrace, hanging from the eaves like lanterns. Mrs Jarrett drinks her drink and pouts at its sourness.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘here you are. Flesh and blood, no doubt. You planning on staying long?’
‘I don’t have plans exactly. I just wanted to see –’
‘This man of yours, he works?’
‘He’s a librarian.’
‘He can put his hand to things?’
‘I don’t think he minds what he does.’
‘Cornelius could do with help. He be getting on,’ Mrs Jarrett says, and then, ‘You do be like her, except the hands. You have your father’s hands. Workers’ hands,’ she says, and as Sybil clasps them, ‘I never thought much of the Malcolms. White collar folk when they tried. Most of them never did. The schoolmaster, your uncle, he was the best of them. He still teaching?’
‘He died, too.’
‘The men do that.’
That’s it. That’s enough of you, Sybil thinks, or feels; there’s not much thought in it. ‘I didn’t come here,’ she says, ‘all this way, to listen to you disrespecting my father.’
Her grandmother gives a rougher laugh. ‘It respect he wanting now?’
‘He earned it.’
‘About time he earned something. He never did earn my daughter.’
‘You don’t know nothing about him.’
‘I’ll speak my own mind in my own house,’ Mrs Jarrett mutters, and peers out from under her brows. ‘You sure you won’t remember her?’
‘Of course I don’t!’
‘Girl, don’t you raise your voice to me. Not anything? Folk must have told you things.’
Sybil takes a slowing breath. ‘She looked after us. She chose my name. She didn’t like London, didn’t get on with it. She loved my brother. She was big-hearted. Brave, that’s what people say. They say how she was ready to stand up for us . . .’
Already she is trailing off. Is this all she has to share of her mother? It is too awful to think so.
Her grandmother is still leant forward, avid. ‘I don’t know,’ Sybil says, ‘I’m sorry,’ and at last the old woman’s gaze slackens, idling around the gloomy, polished room.
‘You’ll be tired. Cornelius has made up rooms for you,’ Mrs Jarrett says, and with that Sybil is dismissed, to retreat out of the dark into revivifying sunlight.
Out front the car is gone, and Sydney with it. Sybil thinks, He’s left me here. It isn’t true – she knows that – but as she steps into the light there is a moment when she fears it.
What would I do? Walk, she thinks, as she goes in search of him. I’d start walking right now and I wouldn’t stop until I saw the sea again. No way would I stay here alone.
She finds him sitting in the car, parked up beside a garage. Cornelius is making room, reversing out a flatbed truck. Neither man sees her. There is a clearing down below – across a narrow valley – in which a figure is at work. When the truck stops, the sound of an axe comes clear across the wooded distance. Sydney is watching, listening, and his face is peaceful.
‘Where did you go?’ she says, and he jumps.
‘Just here. How was it?’
‘I don’t know. Come on.’
‘I should put the car away. Cornelius –’
‘He can wait, can’t he?’
‘But where are we going?’
‘I don’t care. Just walk with me, will you?’
They cross the lawns into the woods, lifting a bough, a latch. Overgrown, under the trees, are ruined storehouses, a dry mill-race, a cane press left to rust.
By the press they sit. Yardfowl pick at the dirt. The house is out of sight behind them. Sybil lights a cigarette.
‘Everyone was right,’ she says. ‘They all told me not to come. I should have listened. I don’t know what I’m doing here. You were right and all, weren’t you?’
‘When was I?’
‘Saying we should stay at the airport. I wish we had!’
‘I didn’t mean it, not like that.’
‘I don’t belong here. And you! You came all this way for nothing.’
Sydney glances around. ‘I don’t think this is nothing. It doesn’t look that way to me.’
Sybil stamps out the fag. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘give us a hug.’
He does. It is aw
kward at first; then he relaxes, and it becomes effortless.
‘She doesn’t want me here.’
‘Did she say so?’
‘She didn’t need to. It’s my mum she wants.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘So what if I do? She isn’t here, alright? So I can’t have her either, can I?’
‘No,’ Sydney says, ‘but you can have this.’
Stay the night, at least, he says, and Sybil says alright, alright. At table there is nothing but the smallest of small talk; the car, the roads, the post office, the busybodies of Glasgow town. No one asks again how long the two of them might stay. No one asks how long they might be given welcome.
Sydney is a silent third. What passes, passes over him. His eyes meet Mrs Jarrett’s once, and hers are sharp, but that is all. He is at one remove from the bone-china conversation. If anything is settled – if anyone is reconciled – it seems nothing to do with him. Despite his place between the women he is closer to the man, Cornelius, who brings them in what they might eat and takes away what they do not, snuffing the candles in their wake without a word.
The next morning, and the next, Sybil is woken by the birds. The hills are full of cockerels which crow all night at dogs or lamps or moonlight – Sybil doesn’t know – but there is something else that has made the house its territory. Sybil comes to know its song, which is shy and fine. It starts before first light, when the hills are at their quietest: aside from the cockerels it’s the first singer, and it’s the best. Every day she listens, drifting in and out of sleep, and in that state it seems to her that it must be a lucky thing, that something beautiful watches over her here. She wishes she knew its name.
Once she asks Cornelius – she tries to sing the song – but it’s no use, she can’t do it right, and all he does is beam. ‘We are blessed,’ he says, and goes on about his business.
Her room is her mother’s room. It comes to her only when her mind has resolved the fact: she knows nothing, she knows nothing, and then she has no doubt.
There are pictures on the walls: English ladies and their lovers, walking arm-in-arm through a London that never was. There is the Marble Arch, the Embankment, the Monument, each of them precisely drawn and nothing like itself. There is a dressing-table at which she sits, looking at her three reflections. Roses are painted on the glass, bordering her with English buds and blooms.
