Sugar in the Morning (10 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

“I mean
—well, really!” she protested. “What
are
you doing
?
”

Daniel had the grace to look ashamed of himself. “I was giving Camilla a lesson in harmonious relations,” he said with a quaint dignity that tore at my heart-strings. “Why not? We’re cousins of a sort,” he added.
“
Kissing
cousins!”

“Don’t be disgusting!” Pamela said quite mildly, though her eyes filled with impotent rage. “One day someone will misunderstand your motives, Daniel, and then where will you be?”

“Where indeed?” he agreed meekly.

“That’s enough, Pamela!” the older man who was with Pamela said sharply. I had barely noticed his presence before, but now I really looked at him for the first time. He was very stooped and tanned a rich dark brown by the sun. In contrast his white hair gave him a handsome air. His expression was that of a tired, saddened man, with a network of laughter lines around his eyes that were etched deep into his skin and were quite white in contrast to the brown tan of his face.

“Mr. Longuet?” I asked him shyly, more embarrassed now than I had been before when I could still feel the power of Daniel’s lips on mine and that had been enough for me.

“That’s right,” he said briskly. “I presume you are Camilla Ironside?”

I nodded, blushing before his sharp eyes, and we shook hands gravely.

“I hope my wife made you properly welcome,” he
s
aid formally. “I suppose Daniel was just coming to show you the estate?”

“Yes.” I could not for the life of me have said more. I was too intent on watching Daniel and Pamela, both rigid with rage, as they sized each other up. They’re in love, I thought dismally. I turned my back on them. “Perhaps you’d like to show me round now you’re here
?
” I said to Mr. Longuet.

“No, I’ll leave that to Daniel. He knows the place quite as well as I do, and you will have matters to discuss between you as to how to run things and so on. No, Pamela and I will go inside and get some drinks laid on for when you get back. Have you had anything to eat since you arrived?”

I shook my head, but he already seemed to have lost interest and had turned away to his daughter, taking her firmly into the house.

“A nice pickle you’ve got us into!” I glared at Daniel. “Did you have to?”

He grinned. “I rather enjoyed it.” He tried to look contrite but succeeded only in laughing. “You don’t have to worry about the old man,” he told me. “He’s more broad-minded than his wife!”

“That isn’t the point,” I said bitterly. “How do you think I like looking like a girl who
enjoys
that sort of thing?”

He took me by the hand and led me down the drive. “Didn’t you?” he asked me mischievously.

Our conversation was reduced to a strained silence. How dared he? I wondered. How dared he? But of course I was normal and healthy, and I had enjoyed it. What I had disliked was Pamela’s prying eyes and knowing that she had every right to be displeased. “I think you ought to tell her that it won’t happen
again,” I said at last in such subdued tones that he had
to duck his head to catch what I said.

He gave me a look of deliberate astonishment.

“Mrs. Longuet?” he asked.

“No,
Pamela
,” I said crossly.

“Oh, I see. I’ll think about it. But tell me, how are we going to guarantee that it won’t happen again?”

“Of course it won’t!” I said stoutly.

He
smiled, not at all put out. “It might not, but then supposing it did? We might find it bigger than both of us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous
!
” I snapped.

“I prefer to call it realistic,” he answered. He looked as easy and as
r
elaxed as ever. I wondered, impatient with myself, why I had ever
a
llowed him to kiss me. It
wasn’t as if
—I
pulled myself up sharply. Such
thoughts were dangerous. It would be very much better if I concentrated on the business in hand and gave all my attention to the production of sugar. But it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy at all when I was so conscious of him standing beside me, the width of his shoulders and the comical twist to his mouth, and, most of all, the dark, secret look in his eyes that I had glimpsed the meaning of and wanted to know again even if he did belong to Pamela, even if I had no right to want it, even if he had only been trying to teach me a lesson that had somehow misfired and had set our whole beings alight.

“They haven’t got their own factory on this estate,” Daniel said, and he sounded distant and very formal. “They use mine. I’ll show it to you some other time. It’s much smaller than the refinery, of course—really a kind of boiling house where the cane is crushed, separated from its juice and where the juice is boiled into sugar and molasses and syrup in various stages.”

“And from there the raw sugar goes to the refinery?” I suggested.

He nodded. “More or less. Some of it’s shipped
abroad to refineries there. But here it’s only grown and cut. The Longuets didn’t want to do more than that. They ran the place pretty well as an extension of mine.”

“I suppose that’s how it’s going to be run in the future?” I began mutinously.

“Why not?” he said.

“Why not, indeed?” I echoed. Because I didn’t want it run that way! Because it was going to be mine, and not his and I wanted to do things in my own way, even if I made mistakes. It was mine money, wasn’t it, that was buying the
place
?
Surely I ought to have some say in its management and what went on there
?

“It won’t be as bad as you think,” he said. “Where do you want to begin our tour?”

I pointed vaguely at a collection of buildings. What did it matter where we began? I didn’t care if I never saw another cane of sugar ever again
!
“
Shall we begin there?” I said indifferently.

I was surprised t
o
discover that there was a very active office that went with the estate. Every worker who had ever worked there, no matter how short the time, was card-indexed so that one could pick out the good workers from the bad at a glance and could see too how much or little each man was paid. Their pay seemed abominably low to me, but I remembered that money went further here than in England, and that those who were unemployed were far worse off than those who worked.

The office itself was small and attractive. Mr. Longuet had kept it going, preferring that kind of work to being out and about in the hot fields. Those he had left mostly to his foreman, visiting them only when he had had to.

“Do you think you could manage this side of things?” Daniel asked me, as I explored the typewriter and
r
eassured myself that the filing system had been kept up to date.

“I should think so,” I grunted. I had found a map which gave the yield per acre of each of the fields that the estate owned and I was busy studying it.

“You’ll need far more irrigation on this side,” Daniel remarked, pointing at the map. “Possibly some drainage on the far side. The soil is a bit heavy over there. Mr. Longuet could never be persuaded that it would be worth while, but it would put up the yield quite a bit.”

“Oh,” I said blankly. Despite myself, I was beginning to get interested in the fascinating graphs that covered the walls of the office and I could see that if I was going to have a real say in the estate there was an awful lot that I would have to learn first.

We went from the office to look at the houses where the regular workers lived. A small boy, singing at the top of his voice the latest calypso from the wireless, greeted us at the gate. He rolled his eyes when he saw Daniel, but he never even paused in his song. He was wearing a single garment that came a litt
l
e below his waist, but this didn’t perturb him in the slightest, and he followed us round, belting out the same words again and again until we left.

The houses were grouped round a central area and were each equipped with running water and a small garden. They were small and the lack of privacy inside them must have been almost unbearable, but they were all beautifully clean and the gardens were full of colour and exotic vegetables which the Trinidadians took as a matter of course.

In the centre of the houses was a small medical clinic which was visited regularly by a nurse and every so often by the doctor as well. It looked to me to be adequately equipped, and Daniel told me that the standards of medicine were pretty high considering how
far we were from any main hospital where most of the medical talent gravitated naturally enough. A small queue of pregnant women, some Indian and some Negro in origin, watched with curiosity as we looked round the small verandahed house that served as the clinic. Daniel called them over and told them who I was, whereupon they all burst into wide, happy smiles and greeted me warmly in the slow rounded accents that everyone slipped into after a while in Trinidad.

Beyond the houses was the sugar. It stretched in straight lines for as far as one could see in every direction. Somewhere in the midst of all that sugar lay the boundary between the Hendrycks’ estate and this one, but from here one could see no sign of any border, only the sugar waving back and forth in the wind with a gentle rustle that sang in the warm, sweet-smelling air.

We walked round the sugar fields until the sun slipped from the sky. Here and there was a field that was already being harvested. There were some tractors being used to haul away the piles of cane, but there were just as many drays and bullocks being used for the same job. It was a colourful scene. The black-charred leaves of the cane, the green of the crop itself, the rust red soil reflected in a rusty evening sky, and the bright coloured shirts of the men and boys, more brilliant than ever in the last rays of the sun. I
w
as
surprised to notice that some of the boys who were doing this man’s work were very young indeed. They ran about the fields, grinning broadly at all who came their way, and yet when it came to laying into the cane, their young arms rose and fell in rhythm with their elders, stroke for stroke.

“Why isn’t this cut mechanically?” I asked Daniel, suddenly cross that these boys who should have been at school were having to work so hard.

“It could be,” he said. “It uproots a lot of the cane so one’s planting costs are correspondingly higher.”

“But these boy
s—”

“They’re bringing good money into their families’ purses,” he reminded me. “Many people couldn’t live at all if they didn’t spend the season cutting cane.”

I had a sudden vision of my own family coming here and working as hard as these men were doing. Cutting the cane and transporting it to the factory, mostly by hand, and getting so little for it at the other end.

“Is this where Uncle Philip comes?” I asked through stiff lips.

“And Wilfred, and Cuthbert,” he insisted. “Not to this estate, but they have been to the Hendrycks’ estate amongst others.”

“And you allowed it?” I asked him bitterly.

He nodded. “I not only allowed it, I encouraged it. They had to earn a living somehow, didn’t they
?
It was the least I could do
!”

“But they could have worked in the office, done all
sorts of things
—
”

He drew himself up, finishing the conversation with an autocratic lift of his head. “Your cousins,” he said distantly, “are the next best thing to illiterate.”

“I don’t believe it!” I shouted at him. “I don’t believe it! And what’s more I won’t believe it
!”

He shrugged. “You’ll find out,” he said. “Shall we go back now?”

I dragged behind him all the way back to the house. How dared he say such things about my family? There were moments when I hated Daniel! I hated his natural superiority and most of all. I hated him because I thought, as far as the Ironsides were concerned, he was probably justified.

As we walked up the drive the last light of the day was fading. There was the last feverish activity among the birds as they made their preparations for the night, and the first of the evening sounds, an owl hooting in
a
distant tree and a small nocturnal animal scurrying across the open ground, hoping to gain sanctuary before any predator saw him. The house stood out against the darkening sky, the curious Chinese look more obvious than ever. Then someone turned on a light and it was followed by others until the whole house was lit from the inside and one could no longer see its outside shape against the horizon beyond. I was suddenly afraid that Daniel was not coming in with me and that I should have to face the Longuets alone.

“Daniel
—
” I said. His hand came out immediately
towards me, giving mine a comfortable squeeze.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve been invited to dinner, too.”

I gave a quick sigh of relief, ashamed though I was that my feelings should be quite so transparent.

“I—I only thought
—
”

“Yes?” His amusement was justified, I supposed, but very hard to bear.

“Well, you know,” I said, “I don’t think Mrs. Longuet thinks much of the Ironsides. It might be awkward.”

“I’m flattered that you want my support,” he said easily. He still looked quite unbearably pleased with himself.

“I want to do whatever is best for my family!” I insisted.

“Oh, of course!” he agreed. He pushed open the front door and allowed me to enter the house before him. “Mr. Longuet will look after you,” he said. “There’s no need for you to worry. He’s a good man.”

Somewhat comforted, I didn’t mind so much when Pamela came running out into the hall to meet us and bore me away up the stairs to the room that had been got ready for me.

“I hope Daniel hasn’t
exhausted
you!” she breathed
. “
I expect everything around here is pretty strange to
you. It must be very different from living in London!”