What Was Promised (38 page)

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 awkward 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.

She goes to the window. In the yard Sydney and Cornelius are leaning, talking. They have been working at the car. Tomorrow they will drive to Montego Bay and take the truck back home together.

‘Might be you could fit her dresses,’ Mrs Jarrett says.

‘You kept them?’

‘No doubt. Don’t ask me where. Cornelius will know.’

‘I’m not her. Are you listening?’

‘No one asking you to be.’

‘That’s not what it feels like, sometimes.’

Mrs Jarrett looks her up and down. ‘You’ll do, child, as you are. You’ll just have to breathe in some.’

She does. Her grandmother helps. The dresses are beautiful.

The cagebirds are bananaquits. The great dark ones are John Crows. The morning sentinel she never finds – later she thinks she must have dreamt him. She studies hummingbirds instead, the mango, vervain and scissorstail. Even the yardbird cockerels demand attention, strutting their dusty finery.

She never knew she cared for birds, but here they are so bright, like flowers. She paints them with a set she finds in her mother’s chest one evening. It’s a child’s paintbox, old, pre-war, and the brushes have dried hard, but bit by bit she soaks and kneads them back to suppleness. Sometimes, when she paints, she licks the bristles while she’s thinking, forgetting what she’s at, staining her tongue with tinctures.

She thinks: everything is brighter here. Even the nights – which frighten her at first, plunging her into darkness – even they have a clarity. You see cars passing miles away, beyond the reach of sound, and on clear nights the wash of stars.

In Mrs Jarrett’s albums every other picture shows their daughter, their mother. In one, lights hang in swags along a nighttime promenade, though Bernadette herself shines brighter, her dress surf-pale and surf-fine, her smile flashing.

‘Kingston,’ Mrs Jarrett says. ‘We were dined at the Liganea. Afterwards she danced. The men you can imagine. She had that dress made up. It did look fine on her.’

Across each page of photographs a ghostly second lies, imprinted with faint designs – cobwebs, forget-me-nots – which sigh and lisp as Sybil’s grandmother lifts each of them away.

Bernadette in a crêpe dress, hardly more than a child. A handsome man stands just behind her, smiling, one hand on her shoulder. ‘Your uncle,’ Mrs Jarrett says.

‘His finest student. That was what Neville called her.’

‘He was fine himself. My child was never taught better.’

‘I wouldn’t have known him,’ Sybil says, and then, shyly, ‘I wouldn’t have known her.’

‘Well,’ her grandmother says, ‘leastways you know her now.’

One day – it is her idea – they walk up Cromwell with a picnic, her grandmother staunch and stiff, the chair they bring for her turned west to look down on all she owns – the fields let to Glasgow men, Kendal and Cessnock men. And beyond the Jarrett acreage – see the roofs there? – Green Island, where Bernardette was schooled; and beyond that the gleam of the sea, out at the end of things.

‘I like it here,’ Sydney says, and Mrs Jarrett says, ‘I’m glad’ – first to him, then to Sybil. She grabs Sybil’s hand in her own (which hurts, the old woman’s being all rings, skin and bone). ‘Thank you for coming,’ she says, and Sybil gives some awkward answer she mutters and forgets. ‘Thank you for having me.’ That’s what it might have been.

The days pass so easily. The sun at six: the sun at seven. Cutlassfish for Friday supper. Sydney and Cornelius, clearing land beyond the lawns, playing dominoes at night, pruning the pepper trees with their leaves like burnished leather. The downpour that comes on them all just as September ends, rain hemming the eaves. Four days of October breeze in which the young trees buck and sway. Then clear days again, like a bounty, the earth still warm, the nights like velvet.

The night she goes to Sydney’s room for the first time. He opens the door. There she is, barefoot, blue-lit, her lamp guttering.

He shivers when she touches him. He sweats and sweats under her hands. Ssh, she says, ssh, but still he is abject, grotesque, not to her but to himself. He breathes so fast it is as if he might be drowning.

Then the hunger takes him. Thought leaves him, and leaves him graceful. He is strong and sure as he has always been, alone, in the darkest places. His skin smells of smoke and resin.

‘I have to tell you something,’ he says afterwards, and he does. He tells her everything. Her head is on his chest. Sometimes she weeps. Later she sleeps and wakes to find him still talking of things she has never known. Her brother playing made-up games, her mother in the street of flowers, the songs men sing in Erith. There is no end to what he needs to tell, nor she to hear from him.

Letters come from London.
When are you coming home?
they say, and Sybil writes back.
Soon
, she says. At first it is the truth, and later it is still a truth, but not one they will understand until, given time, it sinks in.

Here is something you could know
, Clarence writes, his script crabbed like his fingers by the wretched English winter.
This is from when I was younger than you. I was working nightwatch at Frome sugar factory, which maybe you can see it now. It used to be we hitched down and walked back if it came to it. It was five miles. It was three fellows together.

Coming home it was still dark but getting on for dawn. It was the morning after I asked your mother for her hand. I saw her from a way off and when she saw me – how she smiled!! She was standing at the Glasgow crossroads. I saw that and I knew, how she smiled to see me come, that she meant to be mine. There she was, waiting for me, shining like a firefly.

She is on the terrace, fixing washing. Inside her gran is pottering, singing badly to herself some buoyant old island song. Down the drive Sybil sees their truck rattling home to them, its dust and flashes through the flametrees. Sydney is bringing up supplies, ice and fish and bottled gas and no doubt something small to make her smile from Green Island: there are always treats with him. Letters from England, too, if her luck is in.

But then it is in any case. Sybil needs no letter, no reminder to count her blessings. You make your own luck, alright, but you better cherish it. Maybe it comes in now and one day it draws out again. Sybil means to mind her blessings, to make the best of each of them.

Soon Sydney will walk on up, her gentle handsome man. He will lean into her kiss, sit and talk awhile, and when he goes from her he will leave reluctantly, as if nowhere but by her side is he at home in the world. It is a life. It is their life to come, and there is good in it.

5. Dora in October

She is thinking of happiness. Happiness, Dora thinks, isn’t at all like joy. Joy grasps you so fiercely, catches you up and sets you down before you know what’s happening, as if there has been some mistake and joy was never meant for you. You’re too fragile to live with joy: you bear it for no more than seconds. Joy feels as if it must be meant for angels, or animals.

And happiness?
You must be happy
, people tell her, and Dora wonders, must I be? Am I to be happy, then?

Joy, you know it when it grips you, you feel it so palpably that you might die of it. But happiness . . . to Dora, it’s less a feeling than a thought. There are days when she wonders if she even believes in it. She doubts it as others doubt love. It’s what people are meant to want. It’s so mild and virtuous. Happiness ever after: it’s the child’s consolation when the story is all said and done.

What if you had to choose? What if – Dora asks herself – you could have only one thing forever, what would it be for you, would it be joy or happiness?

*

She’s in Rantzen’s Fashions – not to buy at Dudley Rantzen’s prices; she only stopped to spend a penny – and there is Mary Lockhart, from the old days, from the Buildings.

Hide!
Dora’s body says, and it doesn’t give her time to argue, it’s creeping crabwise back along the aisle towards the changing rooms – rump swishing through the coats – but it’s too late, Mary’s waving.

‘Dora!’ she calls, ‘Dora Lazarus? It is you, isn’t it?’

‘Mary,’ Dora says, emerging weakly. ‘I didn’t recognise you. Except you haven’t changed a bit.’

‘Oh, don’t,’ Mary says, and it’s true, the lie is clumsy.
An English rose
, Solly used to call Mary,
with the thorns left on
. Dora wonders what he’d call her now. Certainly she’s still handsome, still lovely in the bone . . . but there’s too much bone on show, too little softening flesh. As she leans in for a kiss Dora flinches at the smell of her: an evening perfume, the cloy of too many cigarettes, and something nastier beneath their musk and ammonia.

‘Are you in a hurry?’ Mary asks. ‘Could we go for tea?’

‘I’m sorry, Mary, I have a meeting of the residents . . .’

‘Oh, that’s a pity,’ Mary says, and it’s peculiar, but she sounds as if she means it.
Did we ever once sit down together?
Dora asks herself.
So if not then, why now? We made strange neighbours then, and now we are only strangers
.