The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (6 page)

Sabine exhaled. ‘I almost did, once.’

‘Das what Mr Harwood say. Das what Venus say before she lef.’

‘I can’t even remember those days, Jennifer. I was another woman then. Young. Naive.’

‘You wanted to go?’

‘Yes. I missed my son. And there was trouble here in 1970. Mr Harwood’s business was burnt down. They poisoned our dogs. Oh, and worse . . .’

‘You still vexed? Venus say she miss livin’ wid you and de chilren.’

‘Yes. Me, too. We were great friends.’

‘Aunt Venus say you used to ride a green bicycle all over Port of Spain. You was famus ridin’ on dat bike.’ She chuckled.

‘Yes, I think I was.’

‘De same bike all rusted in de garage?’

‘Do we still have it?’

‘Must be.’

‘I thought we gave it away. Didn’t we? So much I can’t remember.’

Jennifer steupsed. Jennifer never liked it when Sabine talked around things, what she called
English-talk
. Even though she knew the Harwoods well, she disapproved of any vagueness; she saw it as cowardice, somehow even as lying. Trinidadians had the tendency to be explicitly honest about everything.

‘I mean it,’ Sabine repeated. ‘I’ve forgotten myself.’

‘Forgotten Eric Williams, too?’

Sabine winced. ‘Eh, eh. Why do you ask?’

‘Aunt Venus say you used to write to him, always. Letters. She say you like to put dem in a box. Put Dr Williams in a box.’

‘Oh.
Venus
told you that?’

‘Long time ago.’

Sabine felt blank about it all. She felt none of her long-ago feelings, nothing of those early days. ‘Venus was right.’

‘So, you forget about him?’

Sabine had never spoken to anyone about him at all, only Venus. Careful, she looked at Jennifer, trusting her. ‘No.’ Her eyes welled. ‘No. In fact, you know what? I
dream
of Eric Williams. From time to time.’

‘Wow.’

‘Funny, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, man.’

Sabine laughed at herself. ‘Don’t tell Mr Harwood.’

‘He would be vexed?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t care, either. But sometimes I dream of Eric Williams, you know. In Woodford Square. He was impressive then. A sight to see.’

‘You
saw
him then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wow. Legend time, man. A famous man.’

‘Yes.’

Jennifer looked at her, as if she had lit upon a sudden idea. ‘You stay here in Trinidad because you love Mr Harwood?’

Sabine stared away from her, out through the jalousie shutters at the car park. Love Mr Harwood? What a question. Did she? What had happened between them? She could no longer be sure of things any more. She knew she loved him once, long ago, loved him fierce as a hurricane, fiercer. But now? Hard to tell, hard to know anything.

‘The truth?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t remember, Jennifer.’

Midnight. A clamorous hour in the house beneath the hip of the green woman. The temperature had dropped causing the cicadas to make a sound like constantly shaking maracas. Tiny tree frogs croaked, brassy. Crickets shouted, trying to compete. The house groaned, shifting with the coolness of the night’s shade. Sabine snored in their bed down the hall. The dogs whimpered in their dreams, chasing the iguana round and round.

‘Now
where
is that file on Brian Lara?’ George muttered. Sabine used the office in the mornings for letter writing; he used it in the afternoons. It worked well enough, except for her tidy-ups.

‘Bugger,’ he cursed, finding a torch in the desk drawer. He climbed up onto the office chair, sliding back the hatch to the storage space above. Everything ended up stashed there but he’d never dared search the space, left it to Sabine; it was her hidey-hole.

‘Jesus,’ he gasped, as the beam swept across the cavern.

Boxes, mostly, stuffed with letters, postcards, papers, cards. Years-out-of-date bills. Piles of magazines:
TIME, Newsweek, Vogue
. Sabine’s rusted Remington typewriter.

Then, in a corner, an uneven stack, covered with what looked like an old tablecloth. He shone the beam across it. The cloth was filthy, lacy with cobwebs and mould; the stack appeared hunched over, like a tramp crouching in the dust. He pushed himself up so half his body was in the darkened space and tugged at the cloth. It slipped off easily, revealing a dust-caked pile of small boxes, shoeboxes, twenty or so, each with the same two words written across the side:
Eric Williams
.

‘Dear God.’ He reached forward and pulled one of the boxes towards him. There was a date on the lid:
1958
. Years ago. Decades.

‘Oh, no . . .’ he whispered, dragging more shoeboxes towards him. Each bore a different date.

George dragged more and more across, throwing them down onto the desk below, silky grey dust cascading, powdering the office floor. Quickly, he pulled down every single box in the stack, until the desk below was a shipwreck of hidden loot, piled high and precarious. Dust everywhere. His hands were blackened, his hair caught up with cobwebs. He got down and roughly lined the boxes along the floor, running in order of year. Each box bulged, heavily stuffed with papers. Each was precisely marked up. Eric Williams. Twenty-six years, twenty-six boxes. Williams had ruled for twenty-six years. Each box was precisely dated.
Sabine, Sabine, what on earth had she been doing?

1956
. The year the boxes started. They arrived in Trinidad that year. January 1956, to be precise. Eric Williams launched the People’s National Movement the same month and won his first election later in the year; a famous year in the history of Trinidad. Eighty per cent of the nation turned out to vote him in and the British out.

George snapped open
1956
.

Newspaper clippings. Yellowed and crisp. Hundreds of timeworn
Trinidad Guardian
clippings. Tidily snipped. Each dated in Sabine’s hand.

He scooped the whole lot out in one. Kneeling down, he spread them across the office floor.

‘Jesus Christ.’ A compendium of Williams: comment, op-ed, reports, photos of him with members of his cabinet, with the Beatles, for God’s sake, with the Mighty Sparrow. With Harold Macmillan, with Gerald Ford. Phrases, comments underlined in blotted blue ink. Sabine’s hand. An asterisk in the margin. An exclamation mark.

George groaned long and loud, expelling a grand and pent-up disappointment, a disappointment held in for so long he’d almost forgotten it. Stupid fucker. He knew. Sabine had seen Eric Williams speak in Woodford Square, once, maybe even twice, early on when Eric Williams was in his prime; she had been overwhelmed. Sabine had so many theories about Eric Williams. But he’d blocked them out after a while. They had even
met
Williams at the Hilton once, a strange meeting. They’d fought afterwards. Then 1970, Black Power: Sabine was never the same again. Granny Seraphina ‒ his wife had caught something from that old slave woman.

 

Everything was in the box. Not just his political career, but photos of Williams’ daughter, Erica. His dead wife, Soy. Photos of Soy and Williams together.

George opened
1957
. More sheaves of yellowed newspaper cuttings. More Eric Williams. Quickly, he opened box after box in the row: everyone the same. Fragments of Eric Williams’ life. His speeches. His essays and commentaries in the
Trinidad Guardian
. His comings and goings. Photo-portraits. Eric Williams had been a striking man, as imposing as Churchill or Chairman Mao. His glued-on hearing aid, the heavy dark glasses.

The
1962
box felt lighter. He opened it.

‘Dear God.’

Letters! Tied with a red ribbon, twenty or so. A few newspaper clippings beneath them. Letters, letters. All
addressed
to Eric Williams. George scrabbled at the ribbon’s knot, his fingers stiff.

Dear Mr Williams
, the first letter began.

George dumped the box upside down, shaking it. Clippings tumbled out. Letters from his wife to Eric Williams, the Prime Minister of Trinidad. He stared at Sabine’s delicate handwriting. So nonchalant, evoking another woman. Sabine, writing as she talked, free as a schoolgirl. Independence Day. Memories of that day. They’d watched it all on TV. The red, black and white flag hoisted up, the Union Jack fluttering down. Sabine, here in his hands ‒ writing to congratulate Eric Williams, saying something bitchy about Princess Margaret, something very Sabine. His first wife, here in his hands. The wife he’d lost.

George opened the box for 1963.

More letters, a bigger sheaf.
Dear Mr Williams
. He couldn’t read past this opening line. What had been going on? This was madness. Had the letters been
sent
to Williams? Then sent back? Opened? Unopened? Had there been a correspondence? An affair? He thought hard. Those years, long ago; difficult to know any more. Bad years between them, and then they had almost left Trinidad. And then Williams had died. Had Williams written
back
?

On his hands and knees George crawled across the office floor, opening box after box. In each, like a corpse, a sheaf of beribboned letters. Sabine! Her questions, her voice. What had happened? He knew. He’d turned a blind eye. Crisp curled pages of Sabine’s writing on her favourite onion-skin paper. Sabine’s hand. His wife’s outpourings to the Prime Minister of Trinidad.

 

George read till dawn. Sitting on the office floor, his back against the wall. He read every letter, mouthing the words. Three hundred and fifty-eight letters in all.
Dear Mr Williams.
Nothing as straightforward as a love affair: passion, guilt, betrayal, all the usual to and fro. No. They were far worse. He stopped several times to ponder, lost in reveries of their life together. He only knew the half of it, only half her despair.

The letters were originals. Unsent. Communiqués to the self in some respects. He found no replies and wondered if they were in another stash, other boxes hidden elsewhere in the house. From what she had written, he began to understand.

Some of the letters were eloquent tirades. Others were pleas: tender, touching, moving, letters only a woman could write to a politician. She had been worried about Williams at times, early on, genuinely concerned. Many, though, were lacerating critiques. Some were inane ramblings, losing themselves like a drunk mid-speech. There were conversations, too, diary entries. Every letter was personal. They brought on an ache of loss, of grief. When, when had he lost his wife?

George was still sitting there when Sabine woke. He looked up and she was standing in the office doorway, her short hair in grizzled tufts, her blue cotton nightie clinging to her bulging form.

She quailed visibly, bowing her head, holding it with one hand. She was too ashamed to look at him. The office floor, the desk was coated with soft grey dust.

‘I was looking for my file on Lara,’ he explained, his voice tender. ‘You cleared up.’

‘Those boxes are private! None of your business.’

‘They are indeed.’ Letters were scattered around him.

Sabine covered her face with her fingers, peering through them. ‘Leave them alone. They’re my affairs.’

Bombs, they were letter bombs. He stared up at his wife, in awe. ‘All these letters, Sabine?’

‘I stopped writing them long ago, when . . . he died.’

‘Sabine,
why
?’

‘I started one day, and then I just carried on. They helped.’

‘Helped?’

‘To understand this stupid country.’

George gazed at her, at the wife he no longer touched, made love to.

‘Sabine, all those other women I’ve . . . been with. They have meant nothing to me.’

Sabine’s face twisted.

‘Do you want to leave me?’

Tears fell from her eyes.

‘You can go now, if you wish. We could sell the house, I’d give you half of everything. You can go back to England, live near Sebastian, wherever you like.’

‘It’s too late.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re too late with that, too.’

‘What about all
these
?’ He held up a fistful of the letters.

‘I cared.’

‘Cared?’

‘Yes. I cared about him once.’

‘About someone you didn’t know, only met once, at the Hilton?’

‘I knew him.’

‘What?’

‘We met again.’

‘
What?
’

‘Once or twice. We . . . talked.’

‘Talked?’

‘Yes.’

‘You met to
talk
with the Prime Minister of Trinidad, for God’s sake?’

‘Yes.’

George stared. ‘When?’

‘It doesn’t matter . . . I can’t remember any of it any more.’

‘Was it . . .’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

‘What, then?’

‘I don’t want to explain it. What does it matter now? It’s history.’

‘But all these letters, you never sent them?’

‘No.’

‘Not even one?’

‘Yes. I sent one.’

‘It’s . . . absurd.’

Sabine glared at him then, her eyes bloodshot. ‘To you. You’ve never cared about anything here. You fell in love, lost your senses.’