Prospero's Daughter (2 page)

“He will take the side of the colored man against the English girl,” he said to Mumsford without the slightest trace of irony. “You’ll have to do this alone.”

Mumsford shut his notebook and reached for the official statement the commissioner had prepared for the press just in case Ariana had been indiscreet. He had placed the statement next to his brass desk lamp with the bottle-green glass shade, along with two sharpened pencils and his navy blue Parker fountain pen, which he had filled earlier that morning with black ink in preparation for the notes he would take later when he arrived in Chacachacare. Carefully, and reverentially, he unfolded the paper. It was the original copy. It bore Her Majesty’s seal and was typed in blue ink on expensive ivory linen stationery. In the official statement, the commissioner had avoided the word
rape
altogether. Instead, he had written
attempted assault.
He had not named the victim, referring to her only as “a young, innocent girl, a fresh flower, an English rose,” but he had identified the assailant: “Carlos Codrington, a colored man on the island of Chacachacare.”

Mumsford’s pencil-thin lips curled downward, an inverted U on a face on a cartoon, and he shook his head in disgust.
Carlos Codrington.
They were two names, he was sure, which would never be found together in his beloved England. But, as he had resigned himself to accepting, he was not in his beloved England. He was here, on this mixed-up, smothering, suffocating, sultry island, on this stifling, godforsaken, mosquito-ridden, insect-infested, sweat-drenched outpost, with its too, too bright colors, its too, too much everything: too much rain in the rainy season, too much sun in the dry season, too much blue in the sky, too much green in the grass, too much red in the creeping flowering plants, too much turquoise in the sea, too much white on the sand. Too, too many black people. And here there would be a Codrington who was a Carlos.

Mumsford had not come to Trinidad for the black people, of course. He came for the sun, the warmth, when the thought of another winter, another month of gray skies, of the perpetual drip, drip of rain and the smothering fog in England, threatened to drive him insane. These days it often crossed his mind that he had indeed gone crazy, mad, to think this would have been better. This would have been what he needed to end the ceaseless colds that pursued him season after season in Birmingham, and the damnable pollen in the spring that found its way always to his sinuses, leaving his eyes bleary and itchy, his nose red and runny.

The muscles at the base of his head formed a knot, and he reached for the pair of silver tongs his housekeeper had placed on a silver tray on his desk, as she did each morning before he left for work, along with a crystal bowl filled with ice cubes, an empty glass, and a pitcher of water. He was a fairly young man, not much over thirty, slender, but already with a middle-aged paunch from too many beers in the pub after work. He had thick, light brown hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, hazel eyes, and a complexion that was naturally ruddy, his cheeks rosy as apples in England, though here, under the constant sun, sweat dampening his face no matter how often he mopped it with his handkerchief, he looked baked, or, rather, boiled, his skin a startling pink as if it would erupt.

And it was startling pink now as he thought of the brochures that had lured him here, pictures of happy English families frolicking on the beach, their blond hair swept by tropical breezes, which he knew now to be either blisteringly hot or so thick with moisture they would hardly have been able to breathe.

Wielding the tongs between his fingers, he lifted two ice cubes out of the bowl, dropped them in the glass, and filled it with water. His head was throbbing. Behind God’s back, that’s where he was. They should be shot, lined up one next to the other in front of a firing squad, those liars who wrote those ads, who ensnared innocents like him to this outpost.

He had jumped at the chance to escape England’s soggy weather when he was offered the post of assistant to the commissioner of police in Trinidad, and since he was an only child and his father was dead, he had brought his mother with him.

“The sun is not the only advantage,” the recruiting officer had pointed out to him. When he looked puzzled, the officer clarified. “You can improve your class, your station in life. In the colonies, young man, every Englishman is a lord.”

Yes, Mumsford thought, remembering, the Empire was still standing, crumbling, weakened at the knees—they had lost India, most of China, Africa was slipping from their hands, and there were rumblings in the West Indies and the East Indies—but there were still years left for an Englishman in the colonies.

He brought the glass to his lips and drained it. The cold water coursing through the heat in his chest felt good. The knot in the back of his head loosened. He had to admit it: Aside from the sun and the crawly things, he lived like a lord—housekeeper, cook, chauffeur, gardener, a house with three bedrooms, an English car with leather seats, tennis and ballroom dancing at the Country Club, tea at four at Queen’s Park Hotel, golf at St. Andrew’s, yachting down the Grenadines. He began to feel better, his nerves soothed, as they had been soothed in the past, by the realization that it was not all a loss. There was much to gain. Why, last month, for example, there was an invitation to cocktails at the Governor’s House when a relative of royalty was visiting. What stories he would have for the people back home in his English village! He, Mumsford, rubbing shoulders with royalty! The sickening humidity and the too, too bright colors were almost worth the sacrifice. He gathered the papers on his desk, his mood much improved. He had a job to do and he would do it well. The brute, after all, was Carlos, not Charles. A dead giveaway.

He was practically smiling when he bent down to put his papers in his briefcase, consoling himself with his conviction that even without meeting this Carlos, anyone who mattered would know “he was not one of
us.
” Charles Codrington would have made perfect English sense; Carlos Rodriguez would have been logical. But Carlos Codrington? He was still mumbling happily to himself, reassured by the false comfort he had given himself, when he saw the ants, tiny little russet ones, so small as to be almost invisible, crawling up the sides of his briefcase, from a brown trail that began at a quivering mound in a corner of the mahogany wood floor, and his mood swung back. He had done it again. Last night, tired, his head reeling from more alcohol than he should have had, he had left the briefcase on the floor—a habit he had not broken from his life in England.

It was probably no more than a crumb or a speck of jelly from a tart. In England it would lie there until someone had noticed it. Here, in an instant, an army of ants appeared out of nowhere. His mother no doubt had had her tea in here. He had warned her. Drop the tiniest spot of food and in seconds they would swarm over it. Peel an orange, put it down, turn away for just a few minutes, and they would materialize. In the wet season, they were bigger, fatter. After a rainstorm, some grew wings. At night, they flitted around his bedside lamp before landing on the walls, their flimsy new-made wings fluttering nervously. In the morning, the floor was covered with them, their wings discarded, their bodies like tiny cargo trains, carriages and all, heading toward the next pickup, the next port of food. He had made it a practice to check for them, especially for the tiny russet ones that were the most insidious. Often he would find them when it was too late, when he had already opened a book and they had crawled down its spine into the shafts of hair on his arms, when they were in the folds of the papers he had put into his briefcase. Or when, after he had put on his pajamas and was safely under his mosquito net, they would scoot up his back like thieves, their tiny legs tingling his skin.

This was not a place, Mumsford had discovered, where a man could go to the lavatory in the dark. In the daylight, spiders, lizards, centipedes, water bugs, cockroaches hid in the crevices near the pipes in the bathroom, but at night, they were everywhere: next to the sink, next to the lavatory where more than once a water bug had scuttled across his bare feet when he was sitting down, his pants at his knees, his bare bottom exposed, his legs tucked under unprepared for flight. He had learned, finally, from these unpleasant experiences not only to turn on the light but to wait behind the closed door, even if his bladder was bursting, giving them time to scatter back to their hiding place.

Last week, just as he was stepping into the shower, naked as he was born, he was attacked again. A thing had fallen, or jumped, from the ledge of the window near the shower, onto the shower floor. Splat! He heard the disgusting sound. It was not a water bug. It was larger and uglier than a water bug, six inches long, with a multitude of feet.

It was the two fangs—he was sure they were fangs—jutting out of its head that caused his heart to lurch and the veins in his neck to flood and bulge out thick. He flew out of the house, barely managing to wrap a towel around his waist, which nevertheless loosened when he clutched the gardener by his shoulders, exposing his soft penis nestled against a scraggly bush of long, thin red pubic hairs.

“Is just a millepatte, sir.”

Terrified, but humiliated also by the gardener’s casual response to the fear that gripped him (not to mention the exposure of his penis, which he was certain would become fodder for gossip), Mumsford could only stutter out a command: “Get it out of here!”

But the gardener’s face broke into a wide grin. “Is your lucky day, sir. Kill it, sir. Is good luck, sir, when you see a millepatte yourself, sir. You get plenty money if you kill it yourself, sir.”

It took all of Mumsford’s English stiff upper lip to get the gardener to understand he wanted the thing removed from his bathroom.
Now!

He would learn later that a millepatte, as his gardener called it, was a kind of scorpion. If it had stung him, he would have been in the hospital burning with fever. He could have died. But it was a millepatte to his gardener, a lucky charm, called simply millepatte because of its many feet. Mille, the word for a thousand in French.

How they remembered everything, these people, though they never got the history right! Their capital was Port of Spain, but England had won her wars with Spain more than three centuries ago. They had villages with names like Sans Souci, Blanchisseuse, and Pointe à Pierre and yet the French were never their colonizers. Their singsong sentences ended with
oui,
which, at first, though it made no sense to him, Mumsford understood as
we: I tired, we. I gone, we.
Then he found out that it was
oui. Oui,
as in the French, meaning
yes.

In the country districts, they spoke a patois, French laced with some African words they remembered and the English imposed on them. They had Amerindian and African blood in them, and though Mumsford shivered to think of it (but he knew what had happened in those battles for conquest of these islands, and in the days of slavery), they had European blood in them, too—Spanish, French, Dutch, and, as he was forced to admit, English.

Now it was fashionable: the impurities. Now, the days long gone when his people could pick off the best of them, the prettiest, and she would lie down for the man who had ordered her to, who had demanded, because he was master, because she was his slave and had no choice, the tables were turning. They would choose. Carlos, the colored boy with the English last name, would choose, would think he could choose. The chief justice would choose, the chief medical officer would choose. They would think they could pick out the prettiest, the best. They could marry an English rose.

For that was what they had both done, the black chief justice and the black chief medical officer. His mother was with their wives that very morning, at the Country Club, playing croquet as if nothing had changed, as if it were natural, the normal evolution of things, that black men would marry white women now that England was about to relinquish yet another colony (indications were everywhere in Trinidad), now that her reign was about to end. But it would never be normal for him. Never for him.

I tell you he love she and she love him back.
He would see about that. He would trap that lying Ariana.

Mumsford brushed the last of the ants off his briefcase. He was ready to go. He pulled up his khaki knit high socks over his pink calves, adjusted the wide brown leather belt on his khaki shorts, patted the gleaming buttons on his well-pressed khaki shirt, lifted his stiff khaki policeman’s hat off the hat rack, checked it for ants before putting it on his head, picked up his polished dark brown policeman’s baton, gave himself a last look over in the mirror, made a soldier’s right turn for Good Old England, there, in his drawing room, to the surprise of no one, not to his housekeeper, and certainly not to the driver who had come to collect him, and marched down the steps.

Left, right. That was what he did to show his loyalty to England before this ungrateful lot, biding their time until he was gone, until all the English were gone. Well, let them have it. He, for one, would not be sad to see independence come. Let them have the whole damn place, damn insects and all, damn miserable, stifling weather, damn mixing of bloods. Bloody impurities.

March. He would march down the steps. He was wearing Her Majesty’s uniform.

“Mr. Inspector, sir. Your briefcase, sir.”

He turned to see his housekeeper, one hand over her mouth, choking back her laughter, the other extended with his briefcase. He snatched it out of her hand. Let them snicker. He was an Englishman.

Once inside the car, he breathed in deeply, closed his eyes, and leaned back against the plush, dark brown leather seat. He would set things right. He would see about the choosing Carlos Codrington had done. It would be his word against the word of an Englishman. In Chacachacare he would settle the score for every Englishman whose daughter and sister had become prey these days of the colored man.