Redlegs (5 page)

When Lord Coak eventually returned to town he heard about the comments Elspeth had made to Mrs. Bartleby about the Lyric’s
production
, and of a growing division between the two women. “Now that’s a storm I’d like to have witnessed,” he smiled to Elspeth. It seemed he was not unduly concerned by his protégé’s forwardness, although there might have been a tincture of reproach in his look. Elspeth felt she still could not read Coak as well as she could other people. She would not have much opportunity to rectify the matter, as she was destined to see even less of the planter in the coming
months. A business expedition to Havana was pressing, to which city he would be sailing at the end of this visit.

“I had no idea you would be absent so much,” she said, and heard a five year-old’s whine in her own voice.

“I am the owner, Elspeth dear, of the Lyric. Not its manager. You will inhabit its soul much more than I ever could.”

During his short stay, Elspeth moved back into the Overtons’ servants’ quarters, while Coak took a room, for a few days, in the house proper. She was brought again into the drawing rooms not only of the Overtons, but also of Belles, Seallys and Grahams – Barbados’s high society. Coak showed her off like a new medal, his very own Daurama, White Witch Woman of the North. He spoke enthusiastically of her “native talent” and her unblemished gift. With not much more than a week or so behind her in the
company
of professional, sophisticated actors, Elspeth already wished to show she possessed more than “native talent”.

She had had no time to properly increase her knowledge, having only watched a few rehearsals before whiling away the evenings in the prop room and Nonie’s lodgings. Her new friends had taught her the trick of pretending expertise. The naif of only a fortnight ago was already being replaced by a confident young woman
quoting
“Prometheus Unbound” and “The Ancient Mariner” – though she knew nothing beyond those brief, memorised passages – and flirtatiously asserting her new-found, liberating atheism. In return, she was admired more openly for her prettiness, and complimented on her outspokenness. Colonial gentry apparently delighted in their artisans’ nonconformism where their Scots counterparts
abominated
it. It was at one of these functions that Elspeth met George Lisle – the son of the rich planter who had come to inspect her on her first night on the island.

“Master Lisle has been on vacation in London,” Mrs. Overton informed her, when the heir to the largest fortune on the island arrived, dressed unremarkably, a tousled and distracted bearing about him. “Normally, he can’t tear himself away from the theatre – as you’ll soon discover.”

She had already heard his name; had gathered he was a
favourite
of the young actors and stagehands, who referred to him as a
bosom buddy, regardless of their status in comparison to his. Nonie, Virginie and Isabella giggled at the mere mention of him. At first sight, she could not see why. Master Lisle was not particularly tall – unlike his father – nor refined in feature. Heavier set than she had expected of a man both high-born and a favourite of her girlfriends, he blended a little too easily into the set of thick-bodied colonials. He was also, she reckoned, a little older than she had been given to believe. Once introduced, though, she quickly felt at ease in his
company
.

“I hear you’re quick with advice to the Lyric’s luminaries, Miss Baillie.”

“I merely made a passing remark.”

“Make more of them!” he beamed widely, leaning in innocently as a brother or cousin might. “Too many fresh talents have buckled under the weight of the Denholms, Philbricks and Bartlebys.”

As he said this, he smiled genially towards each of those doyens in turn, nudging Elspeth lightly, and she began to see why the
company
had taken so much to him: he lacked the stuffy formalities of his peers. Expressions flew fast across his face, unchecked by
duplicity
or calculation. George Lisle talked hard and enthusiastically, but he listened hard too: his minute reactions to her every word meant either he was genuinely engaged with what she was saying, or that he was a fine actor in his own right. “Perhaps you’re just saying what you think it is I want to hear, Mr. Lisle. In a few moments you’ll be over there with Mr. Philbrick saying something quite different.”

“Of course.”

“Then you’re a fake.”

“Nothing wrong in faking, if you’re aware that’s what you’re doing. Look at these planters and administrators and shopholders. They’re all fakes and don’t even know it.”

“But you’re different?”

“I know how to keep on Philbrick’s good side, so that I can run free around the theatre, but I’m only too aware of what bunkum it is to be a colonial planter’s son. Live as long as I have, Elspeth, in a world as dreary as this – at the slightest flicker of intelligence and energy, I’m a mosquito on the scent of blood.”

George seemed a genuinely open and pleasant man, with that
same whiff of candour and rascality she loved so much already in her colleagues. They chattered amiably in a corner of Mr. Belle’s hall, long enough for Nonie, in passing, to raise an eyebrow, and Christian Bloom to give them both a knowing look. Lord Coak passed them from time to time but gave no indication of
displeasure
. Elspeth felt a flush of anger at this patent lack of interest. Was she to believe that her patron’s audacious request in Greenock amounted to no more than it pretended to be – a test of dramatic ability and resolve? Having seen what he had seen, how could a middle-aged unmarried man not be nettled by the sight of her
giggling
in close intimacy of a younger man? Close on the heels of that spasm of anger followed a further, stronger one, of shame. Coak was what he seemed. And what need had she for the lustful gape of a soft-fleshed old coof?

Eventually Coak did look around at the pair of them, and George, as if reading her mind, remarked, “Don’t be fooled by his businesslike air. At this very moment he is seeing you, in his mind’s eye, naked.”

She considered telling George that the businessman would not need much of an imagination to conjure up that sight; that he had already sat back in his armchair and studied every part of her meticulously. She might even have acted on the impulse – not in order to create a scandal, but for the sheer adventure of being bold with a young, rich, stranger – had not Coak broken way from his party to approach them.

“D’you think she will do well, George?”

“I’ve yet to see Miss Baillie in action; off-duty, she’s  mesmerising.”

Elspeth watched Coak stare for a moment at Lisle’s face. If there was jealousy lurking in that glance, she could not detect it. Perhaps he considered it in his interests to encourage a liaison between his apprentice and a young gent above her station. George’s mind was working along the same lines as her own: “Albert believes he can create true talent the way he can refine sugar. No doubt he feels more processing needs to be done in your case.”

“I’m not sure I want to be processed.”

“You’re raw cane to him. There are processes you must go through in order to meet his expectations.”

“Do you have an example?”

“A bit of tragedy seldom does an actress harm.”

“Suffer the slings and arrows of outragous fortune. Of an
intimate
kind, you mean?”

“For an actor, is there any other?”

“So I am supposed to love and lose like a comic heroine of the bard’s?”

“My guess is your chosen victim will be the ultimate loser. But, yes. Coak is a sugar planter first – never forget. A period of
pulverising
, followed by some distilling, package the whole thing up, then he’ll pour you like syrup onto his audiences. And you can count on me, Mistress, to be in the front row, eyes and mouth agape.”

The Overtons’ town house was in an area just south of Bridgetown called Garrison Savannah after the barracks situated between the mansion and the sea. Returning from the dampness of Nonie’s lodgings Elspeth realised the beauty of the place. Her quarters looked out onto the back of the house, over gardens towards the sea beyond a broad stretch of open common land, home to bizarre wildlife. Vividly plumed birds strutted, reminding Elspeth of Joeys, the clowns of Scotland’s fairs and festivals, as they tumbled and bowled along, legs parading disjointedly. The stunted little doves of this island looked like circus midgets. Yellow-breasted waders
cackled
like an act she had once seen where a man played the whole of “Scots Wha Hae” by tapping on his chin, the sound echoing from his toothless mouth. Tall trees bent in the breeze like strongmen straining under unimaginable weights. Misshapen squirrels
scampered
below her window. George, at breakfast the next day, supplied her with the names of things. They walked together in the garden, and he pointed out a tiny bird which Elspeth had feared was an enormous insect.

“Hummingbirds. You can hardly see their wings they beat them so fast. Look at their long beaks, for drinking nectar.”

“They’re beautiful,” she said, and was aware of how quickly she had changed her opinion of the creature. The nectar, he informed her, came from petunias and prickly pear and snake-lilies. And the scampering little animal was not a distorted squirrel but a
mongoose. The Flame Trees lit the morning like red and pink
candles
; an old fig sat at the back of the gardens like an ancient giant, weeping private grief into its beard.

George had to return to his own estate that afternoon, in the Parish of St. Thomas, not quite as remote as Coak’s Northpoint. Now that he was home from his travels, however, he would see her regularly at the Lyric. “Nonie and Christian haven’t taken you to the Ocean View yet? We shall rectify that on Monday evening.” He bowed, breathed a kiss on her hand, and left. Coak himself had a meeting scheduled with shippers in the London Naval Club in town, so Elspeth had all Saturday afternoon and Sunday to
continue
settling in her new home.

Left to herself, she marvelled at the gliding and distant crying of birds wheeling over the ocean. She stared for hours at the bright orange and red breasts of smaller birds outside her window: glowing blue and purple crests, feathers that looked black in one light, deep green in another. The plants in the gardens grew in shades from subtle silvers and emeralds to roaring reds and smouldering violet. There were tiny petals and implausibly large leaves, bigger than her own body, fruits that bulged in odd shapes, succulents stabbing the air, stamens quivering in the warm breeze. From her new home, Elspeth could look out on all this activity, and fill her senses with colour and the dreamy scent of frangipani and coconut.

Lord Coak had negotiated, on her behalf, the use of two of the Overtons’ servants. Dainty and Tuesday were as exotic to her as the flora and fauna outside. She had assumed that these shadowy people she had glimpsed by the careenage and serving drinks in lounges could only understand a series of simple orders, and that, otherwise, they confabulated in their own African idioms. She was astounded now to learn that they spoke a category of wild English. Moreover, she could understand them, and they comprehended every word of hers. She asked them the names of things as she noticed them, and began to learn a new vocabulary: aloe,
sea-grape
, alamander, cochineal.

“Them’s called upside-downs,” Dainty told her. “See how de flowers hang?”

She went out with them to the garden, and touched and smelled
all the flowers there. “Sea grape, ma’m. Taste a berry, it near ripe.” Tuesday, the younger of the two bent down and tore a few leaves from a thick bushel. “Use it fuh wash yuh hair, make it soft soft and glow like a cane-fire by night.”

“This be aloe. Put it on yuh skin, it like a babbie’s kiss. Suds up well, too.”

Ackees and ginneps, booby-birds and hummingbirds, mango and avocado: the names were as bizarre as the things they denoted. Dainty and Tuesday brought her selections of all the fruits that grew in the orchard, or wild on the savannah. Papaya, grapefruit and mango – the sweetest taste ever to have touched her lips. The alarming golden curved tuber the girls called plantain, which she had heard of as banana but had never seen. She peeled the skin as she was shown and put the bared flesh in her mouth declaring with a giggle that surely this must have been Eve’s forbidden fruit, not the dull and boorish apple. The black girls laughed with her, but she knew they thought her as strange as she thought them.

Dainty, Elspeth reckoned, was about the same age as herself, Tuesday no more than fifteen. “Unusual name. Tuesday.”

“The day I was borned, Ma’m.”

And to Dainty: “I can see why you are called Dainty. But how did your mother know you would be petite?”

“I don’ know what me mother call me. Mister Overton named me Dainty jus’ a while back. ’Fore that I was Nursey. And ’fore that Toadie ’cause me used t’ leap aroun’ like a frog when I was a chile. You can call me somethin’ new if you like.”

“Dainty is fine.”

On the Sunday after the party, Elspeth got to know a third
servant
– the most impressive of them all. The gardener, Henry,
measured
, she calculated, more than six and a half feet in height.

“I from Barbuda, Miss.” He allowed her to follow behind while he pruned and raked, silent until he was asked a question. His back was like no human’s she had seen before: muscles bulged under his shirt where she never thought even the strongest of men possessed
muscles
. His skin was so brightly black that she thought she might see her reflection in it, as one does in highly polished dark wood. She discovered that he had been bought by the Overtons and brought to
this island when he was a boy. Were it not for his lack of colour, she thought, he would be the perfect model of a working man. Tall and strong, but gentle in speech. He was the father of several children whom Elspeth caught sight of from time to time. She could not tell his age as he displayed none of the natural signs of ageing: his skin was taut around his eyes, his hair black and he showed no sign of stoopage or stiffness. Yet one of his children was nearly full-grown, and Henry himself spoke like a man who had distilled some wisdom from many years of life. His presence was more substantial than that of most white men she knew, even amongst the burly, wealthy
planters
she had met since coming to the West Indies. With his air of authority, his strength, and the sense he gave out of being somehow absent, she could envisage him on stage as the Creature in Shelley’s Frankenstein. She had not read Mary Shelley’s book, but had seen reviews at the Lyric of a recent London production of the play,
coinciding
with a reprint of the book. The idea lodged itself deep inside Elspeth. Henry’s distance, the strangeness of his appearance in
conjunction
with the pleasantness of his manner, reminded her of the sad, terrifying creation of Dr. Frankenstein.