The Secret Life of Winnie Cox Read online

  In the meantime my poor Archie was marched off to some other meeting among the men: his father, elder brother, an uncle or two. Two other brothers arrived in the course of the afternoon. I can hardly tell them apart at this point in time, but I expect I shall soon learn.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ dear Archie told me on the way here, ‘There is nothing they can do to tear us apart. It is too late.’ For of course, the Main Event has taken place in Paris, as he promised, and no, dear Tagebuch, I shan’t give you any details on that as you should know there is such a thing as privacy! Suffice it to say that now, more than ever, I am his.

  Now two days have passed by and things have calmed down considerably. They are all still worried about the scandal, and about my Jewishness. But Lord Cox – for that is Archie’s father’s title, goodness me! – has sent a telegram to Father informing him of the situation, and we will all await his instructions. They have put me up in a lovely room in the guest wing, and though Archie and I are separate at night we do spend many hours together during the day and I could not be more content. I am learning more English day by day. I have also decided to become a Christian. Father won’t like it but I understand that I must adapt to the English ways.

  For me anyway, it is all one God – what does it matter in which way we worship, or what label we place on him? Surely it’s the heart that counts, and God can see into that, and know whether there is love there or not? Yes, I will become Christian. It is decided. That will make them love me more.

  Chapter Seven

  I spent the next two days in a state of complete and utter turmoil. One emotion after the other chased through my mind: hope, courage, elation would swing me up to the heights of euphoria; the meeting with George had opened some hidden spring within my soul out of which gushed the most delightful of waters, all rushing at top speed into the gap left by Mama’s departure. And no sooner would I find myself swinging among the stars, than a net of black despair at the hopelessness of it all would fling itself around me, holding me captive, dragging me down to earth where I would wallow in a swamp of doubt and despair.

  I could not love this man! But I did! Oh, I did!

  I reasoned with myself, sternly. After all, I had only met him once – no, twice, counting the first encounter on his bicycle – and Love cannot grow from such casual acquaintance! Oh, but I can! I can! Love cried within me. I am here, see! How can you deny me!

  No! I called back. I cannot permit you! You have no reason, no foundation! Get away from me! Go back whence you came! And I would push Love back into the cave of my heart, to wait for a more suitable recipient, a more appropriate prospect. But Love would only bounce back into my being, fresher and more spirited than ever before, lifting me into previously unknown heights. Here I am! It would call, kindly mocking, smiling, forcing me to smile.

  Until now I had known love only second-hand, vicariously through the characters in the books I devoured. I had understood it in theory, and longed for the direct experience. This had to be it, surely! But no. It could not be! Not from so fleeting an acquaintance, and for such a forbidden subject! And so, when despair washed through me as it did time and time again, it was total: total blackness, total hopelessness, leaving me an abject puddle on the ground.

  I hid this all from Yoyo. Never could I share this with her. I was able, through superb acting, to continue as ever before, playing the character of myself while under the surface this inner battle raged. Only at night when I could not sleep, and she lay lost to the world beside me, I let myself go, pressing my face into my pillow while the tears soaked into the softness. Oh, help me, help me! The cry came from the bottom of my soul as I tossed and turned in my bed, and I bit into the fabric of my pillow so that no sound would escape me. Who was I crying to? Mama? God? It did not matter. The silent cry rose up into nothingness, and there came no reply, and no help.

  Sometimes I left my bed and paced the floor, walking to the window and gazing out into the moonlit sky, to the north, towards the ocean and the village and him. When would I see him again? If ever? I dared not go to the village, the Post Office – what would I do, what would I say! I could not bear it!

  Ironically it was Yoyo who took the next step in this most impossible of romances. On Monday morning, before we went down to breakfast, she said to me,

  ‘Let’s go and visit George again, this afternoon!’

  ‘George?’

  ‘Yes – don’t you remember? That friendly darkie in the post office. The one with the Morse machine. He’s so interesting, and I’m so bored!’

  ‘Oh! But … why? I mean, what purpose do we have? What shall we tell him?’

  ‘Nothing! We’ll just visit, and ask to see that Morse machine again, and play with it. Do you have anything better to do? A book to read, perhaps? Violin practice?’

  Her last words were mocking; Yoyo thought books and music a complete waste of time, possibly because when I indulged it left her with nothing to do and nobody to do it with. Yoyo disliked being on her own. She liked to talk, and needed someone to talk to, constantly, and that was, more often than not, me. Mostly, when left alone she would go out riding and talk to Tosca.

  ‘All right,’ I said now. ‘Let’s go.’ And as I said it my heart turned somersaults because I could not wait to see his face again, and I would have hugged Yoyo and squeezed the life out of her in gratitude, if only she knew.

  We parked our bicycles and climbed the steps to the post office, and entered through the open door. As before, George sat with his back to us, bent over his Morse key. We could hear it clicking away in rapid staccato.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Quint!’ called Yoyo. Startled, he leapt to his feet and his chair fell backwards. While bending to pick it up he turned and looked up and, seeing us, stumbled and dropped it again. We approached the counter, he righted himself and the chair, and came up to us.

  ‘Do call me George!’ He said. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Winnie and Miss Johanna! You are back already! You have more letters to post?’

  ‘No,’ said Yoyo. ‘We just thought we’d come. We wanted to see that Morse machine again. Didn’t we, Winnie?’

  She looked at me for confirmation, and I gave it with a vigorous nod of my head. Just like the last time, my tongue seemed stuck to the bottom of my mouth, and I knew I was blushing. He looked straight at me, into my eyes, and held my gaze for just a second. And then he smiled, turned and fetched the machine, and was about to bring it to us when he stopped, and pointed to a table pushed against the back of our half of the room. It was a wooden table with a single chair pushed up against it, its surface scuffed, scratched, and ink-stained, and on it lay a fountain pen on a chain next to a round jar containing ink, as well as a smaller jar containing glue with a brush sticking out of it, and a wad of blotting paper.

  ‘Let’s sit over there,’ said George, placing the machine on the table. ‘I’ll bring more chairs.’

  He returned for his own chair and walked around the counter towards the table. He set the chair down, pulled out the one already there, and gestured for us to take a seat.

  ‘I’ll just go and get another chair, from the back office!’ he said, and dashed off while we sat down on either side of the table. In an instant he was back, bearing a stool, which he placed before the third side of the table, facing the wall, between the two of us.

  He had brought something else: a folded piece of paper, which he now unfolded and laid on the table next to the machine.

  ‘The Morse code!’ he said, and a moment later he had launched into his lesson. He was a good teacher. He passed the machine from one to the other of us, letting us tap in the dashes and dots for each letter, letting us create words, of three letters, then four letters, then, even little sentences. It was fascinating; the most interesting thing I had done in weeks. We were so totally absorbed in our tapping that we did not notice when a customer entered the post office; but George did, and jumped to his feet to serve the customer. I looked up; it was Mr Persaud, the greengrocer, buyi
ng stamps. He was staring at us in curiosity, no doubt wondering what we were doing there, but I did not care.

  Having served Mr Persaud, our teacher returned to us and continued his lesson. Another customer entered, and this time I heard him for he came in with a loud, ‘Hello, hello, hello, Georgie boy!’ I looked up, as I was facing the door. It was Mad Jim, who stopped just inside the building, placed his hands on his hips, and guffawed.

  ‘Well, well, well, Georgie! Lady visitors! Don’t let me interrupt!’

  George seemed embarrassed; he jumped up from his stool and opened his mouth to speak, but Mad Jim had turned and walked out again. George sat down, his demeanour flustered. I remembered seeing Mad Jim here the last time I came, which was only three days ago. He must write a lot of letters, I thought.

  George quickly regained his composure. ‘You know what?’ he said, ‘You take this paper with you and practice at home. Next time you come you might be fluent!’

  He folded the paper and handed it to me; it seemed the lesson was over. It was strange; being here with him this time was completely different from the last time, and not what I had expected. Gone were the eddies of emotion that had plagued me these last few days. Today, once I had stopped blushing and my heart stopped pounding, I had settled into a state of complete – what can I call it other than normality? I felt calm this time, relaxed, at home in George’s presence. And though I felt a quickening whenever his eyes caught mine – as they did, frequently – or his hand touched mine – seemingly by accident – that too seemed not something extraordinary but simply right. Perfect. As if I were, somehow, at home within myself. Grounded. And even my disabling shyness had flown, and I found my tongue, now, at last.

  ‘Thank you!’ I said. ‘That was so interesting! It must feel like a miracle to send a real telegram – I mean, one with the wires attached – and to know someone in a far off country will receive it!’

  ‘One day, I gon’ be doing that!’ said George, laughing. ‘If all goes well. When I return to Georgetown.’

  ‘You’re going back to Georgetown?’

  ‘One day, Miss. When they find someone permanent for here. And then I gon’ to try and get a job in the telegraph office, sending messages around the world. And receiving them.’

  My heart dipped a little when he mentioned leaving – but what about me! – it cried. And I looked at him with a question in my eyes: do you? And clearly, so clearly, I saw the reply in his own eyes: Yes, oh yes! I saw it as clearly as if he had spoken the words. Yes. There was something there between us, something so fine and yet so strong there was no need of words, of verbal confirmation. I relaxed once more.

  Morse: in itself it seemed a code for what we had between us. A metaphor for the secret messages we sent each other, reading each other’s eyes, and, I was sure, even each other’s mind. The covert joining of hearts by wires so thin they had to be felt rather than seen. A connection in which words and touch were nothing more than decoration, so solid the innate knowledge of its presence. I smiled, and he smiled back, and in that moment Yoyo, who had been tapping away at the machine, looked up and spoke, destroying the moment of intimacy.

  ‘How does it work?’ she asked. ‘How do the messages get delivered? I mean, how do they get from place to place? It does seem extraordinary!’

  ‘Through cables,’ he answered. ‘Cables linked between overhead posts, or buried underground, even on the ocean bed!’

  ‘On the ocean bed!’ I was astonished.

  ‘Yes! At the bottom of the ocean!’

  ‘How?’ Yoyo asked.

  It was the cue he was waiting for.

  ‘Oh, Miss! That is one of the greatest achievements of the last century! The laying of the transatlantic cable! The linking of the continents!’

  And he was off. Off on the story of the almost insurmountable difficulty of laying the cable, the failed attempts. Two ships, one from the continent of North America and one from Ireland, setting sail to meet in mid-ocean, each one laying cable. The cables had then to be spliced, he said, linking the continents beneath the sea. But one attempt after the other failed; the ships had to return to shore.

  ‘The problem,’ he said, ‘was weight. See – the copper cables that transmit the signals had to be protected so they’re enclosed in a kind of rubber: gutta percha from Malaya. There was many types of cable dependin’ on water depth; the shore ends were real heavy – sixteen tons per mile!’

  The cable was so heavy, he said, that it kept breaking; it had to be paid out slowly, over a wheel above the propeller at the stern of the ship. And then, on August 5th 1858, the miracle: the cable was complete! The continent of Europe was connected to North America! It reduced the communication time between the continents from the ten days it took to deliver a message by ship to a matter of minutes. Congratulatory messages passed between Queen Victoria to the American President James Buchanan, and the world would never be the same again.

  George’s excitement was palpable; his eyes glistened as he spoke, and his voice filled with a fervour that lent a thrill to every word he spoke.

  ‘And then,’ he continued, ‘they laid the cables joining islands of the Caribbean. Just imagine! Imagine all those islands connected to each other and to the mainland by submarine cable: from Cuba to Jamaica to Panama and all over. Jamaica had two lines going off from Kingston: to Puerto Rico and Antigua; Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Barbados. And then St. Vincent, Grenada, Trinidad, and from Trinidad across the mouth of the Orinoco to British Guiana. The line passes from Georgetown all the way down the coast, through New Amsterdam to Dutch and French Guiana, and then by more land lines down Brazil to Rio de Janeiro and Monte Video in Argentina!’

  By this time he could hardly contain his excitement.

  ‘Imagine it! BG is the entrance for the entire East Coast of South America. That cable to Jamaica connects us to North America and from there to Europe and India and the whole world! Think of it! Think of someone in Rio sending a message to India or China in the blink of an eye! And it passes right under our noses, up the coast to Georgetown. Think of all those messages flying around the world! Think how small the world has become! Messages going here and there and everywhere! Anywhere you want to send a message to, it can get to the recipient in minutes, instead of days and weeks and months! The world is growing smaller – the continents closer!’

  His eyes glowed with ardour. The words poured out of him; I could hardly follow, for he used words I had never heard before. He spoke of electromagnetic pulses, and magnetic permeability and ferromagnetic material, and I heard the words without knowing their meaning. He wove images with words, metaphors to describe the disappearance of distances in the giant world – he said it was a spider-web, a wide-flung network linking countries and continents, a crocheted doily, threads criss-crossing and linking and messages shooting back and forth along them. He told us of the flood of information moving across the globe with the speed of light. He used his hands to demonstrate, fingers zipping back and forth. He formed his hands into a wide ball, fingertips touching, to show the cable lines that bound the globe, and then slipped them into each other to show the closing of the network. It was beyond belief; not even the horseless carriage, he said, could match the importance of the telegraph. News could pass from one country to the next in the wink of an eye. What a difference this would make for commerce! For the stock market! For international politics! For personal relationships! If someone in Russia died who had a relative in Chile, that relative could find out in a day instead of a month!

  ‘And all because of this little machine!’ And he held up his crude little home-made Morse machine with the pride of someone who had walked on the moon.

  Yoyo and I left soon after. I let her walk out first, just so that I could linger a little longer with George, share a little moment alone with him. And so I was the only one of us who heard his last words, spoken quietly when Yoyo was already out of the door, his eyes fixed on mine:

  �
�Come again – I’ll give you another lesson if you like!’

  Were those words meant for me alone? Oh, how I wished they were! I clung to him with my eyes alone. We just stood there, both of us, smiling, our gaze locked. His eyes were like deep dark pools, soft as water, luring me to fall into them, let myself go. Lose myself. Is that what love is? Letting go of self, to melt into the Beloved?

  Yoyo called, and I pulled myself away, reluctantly. Some enormous thing had shifted within myself, and somehow I had to find my way forward.

  Mama’s Diary: Norfolk, 1890

  Liebes Tagebuch,

  It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? More than two months, and now I have so much to tell you! First of all, we are married! Yes, officially (the Notre Dame wedding wasn’t enough for them, unfortunately.) Father came for the wedding! And though he pretended to be angry, he wasn’t half as furious as I had thought – in fact, he told me I should have confided in him! And I would not have had to run away after all! And then he told me a big secret – Mother was a gentile! He met her in Berlin and fell in love and she converted to Judaism in order to satisfy his parents’ conditions for their marriage. Her German parents, however, disowned her, and that’s why I don’t know my maternal grandparents – they are not dead, as I was led to believe.

  It was a very quiet ceremony with a Justice of the Peace. Of course, every girl, Jewish or not, longs for a beautiful big wedding but I have long accepted that it was not to be, and so Archie and I are now officially man and wife, and share a bedroom.

  More exciting news: it seems – but I dare not say it out loud for fear I will somehow jinx it – that we are to be parents! But I will say no more on that.