The Secret Life of Winnie Cox Read online

  Indeed, after dinner we all retired to the drawing room. The chauffeur – whose name, we now learned, was Poole – brought several large packages wrapped in brown paper into the room and carefully deposited them on the carpet. Papa instructed us to open them. That we did, with the usual oohs and aahs of gratitude; but mine, at least, were artificial. I was playing the game, for Papa’s benefit.

  Yards of silk and satin spilled on to the carpet: yellow and blue and pink, bolts of it, enough for several ballroom dresses. We opened hat-boxes, shoe-boxes, producing delicate bonnets and silken shoes, all in the latest fashions. More aahs and oohs and thank yous emerged from our lips. We tried on bonnets and shoes while Papa looked on in satisfaction – and held up yards of silk against our skirts. Yoyo was beside herself with glee, but I – I was pretending. Any other day, any day in the past, I would have been truly delighted. Not today. As for Yoyo – she was young, so young. She lived in the moment, and this moment was one of rare glamour and genuine delight. How could it not be, among such gorgeous gifts?

  Papa smirked and clapped. Miss Wright fingered the silk and declared it Best Quality. ‘Really, Mr Fogarty is outdoing himself!’ she added. Papa complained that the ladies in Georgetown were wearing their skirts so short their ankles showed and declared that we wouldn’t have any such lasciviousness on Promised Land. I was too upset to care. Yes, I loved fashion and new clothes and radiant silk and bonnets like any young girl anywhere in the world, and any other day in the past I would have been squealing in genuine pleasure. But now, distress outweighed pleasure.

  When it was all over Papa slapped his forehead. ‘I almost forgot to tell you!’ he cried. ‘The biggest news of all! You haven’t forgotten Mr Smedley, I hope?’ He winked, and with a jolt I remembered – our would-be suitor, chosen by Uncle Percy! Papa looked from one to the other of us to make sure we understood, and when we nodded, he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. A telegram! He waved it at us, and continued.

  ‘Mr Smedley is sailing for BG this summer – he shall be arriving in September!’

  The words hardly sank in. I was staring at the telegram itself. When had it arrived? Had George come to deliver it without my ever noticing? Had I missed him? When? My heart thumping wildly, I dared put the question: ‘When did the telegram come, Papa?’

  ‘Oh, it didn’t come here. I sent my ‘Yes’ telegram from Georgetown and that’s where Archie sent his reply – care of the Georgetown Club.’

  Mama’s Diary: Norfolk, 1890

  Liebes Tagebuch,

  And now our darling daughter is with us – her name is Kathleen! Our joy would be complete, were it not for the fact that Archie is to leave in a month’s time for this sugar plantation I told you about. I made a mistake – it’s not in Africa at all, but in South America. My geography is terrible! He showed me where it is on the globe and I am no longer as sanguine about it as I was. It is across the ocean, in the New World! I am terrified about the Atlantic Crossing. One hears such things. Sometimes in church – for I am now a regular church-goer! – we sing this hymn:

  Oh hear us when we cry to Thee

  For those in peril on the sea!

  And indeed there is great peril – not only pirates, but storms, hurricanes, great waves that will toss the ship around as if it were but a leaf. He will go first on his own and once he is settled there he will send for me, and then it is my turn, our turn, mine and Kathleen’s! I am terrified!

  Sometimes at night I cry and he takes me in his arms and comforts me, and reminds me that most ships do cross safely; that worrying will not change one little thing. We must have faith, he says. Faith will make us strong. What a gentle, caring, kind husband I have! He adores me. And he is such a good father to our little Kathleen!

  Father came to visit, and he too is delighted with his granddaughter. He is not delighted by the news that we are to be sent away; in fact, he was quite angry with my father-in-law but nothing can be done about it now. All the arrangements have been made.

  Archie says it’s because he’s the younger son. The plantation is not as profitable as it could be and it needs a family member to run it, and that lot falls to him. There is a smaller plantation owned by the family, and this is in Barbados. Archie’s youngest brother Donald is to be sent there. So it is not Archie alone who is being banished.

  The family, in the meantime, have accepted me completely. They love me, and I love them. It’s a good thing, for otherwise I could not bear to be left behind. It will break my heart to part with Archie but there is nothing to be done, except pray for his safe passage. And that I will do.

  Chapter Ten

  It rained all night. I fell asleep to the rattle on the roof and woke up to the very same rattle. A deep melancholy descended into my being and took root. Everything seemed so hopeless, so unfinished, so impossible. Everything in my life fed into the misery that engulfed me. The coolies, the discovery of Papa’s secret cruelty, Mama’s absence – and then, yes, George.

  The moment of Truth that had overcome me in the Post Office – that exquisite moment when I had known to the depths of my being that I loved George Theodore Quint. That I would love him forever. That sense of communion that had lent me wings, had vanished completely. It all now seemed only like the hysterical imagination of a silly, overwrought girl. It had only been an illusion. That last meeting with him had told me all I wanted to know. The black despair that had crept over my spirit intermittently in my days of trust and hope and confidence had finally seeped through my being and taken possession of it. It was as if the sheer joy of love had gouged a hole into my soul, which was now filled with a dark, heavy sludge from which I could not escape.

  The darkness gnawed at me from the inside; I stood at my window and gazed out northwards, at the huge sheets of water gushing from above as if from an inexhaustible source. I had managed to push him from my mind for a short while, but now it was back, the longing, the yearning. Oh, for just a glimpse of that lost joy!

  My yearning was that of the watchman waiting for dawn, my emptiness that of the landlocked seaman far from the ocean. I visualised eyes that melted deep into my own; I heard a rich deep voice that spoke of conductor-wires but resonated with – but no. There was a word I dared not say even to myself. A thing that forced its way up through smothering layers of dark, like a rosebud covered in earth and bearing upwards to the light, its petals pushing outwards as they unfold. Something tight and closed within my soul swelling with an indomitable force. I would not, could not name it again. Love was an illusion, a delusion, a figment of an overwrought imagination. Pure emotion, unstable, as a house built on sand, transient, and ultimately false. I had fallen into a trap that day in the post office. Imagined things that did not exist. In me surged an ocean of unreleased tears. George was no more. I must banish him from my mind, banish all hope and allow darkness to settle in my mind.

  Somewhere out there was a village and a post office and a young man whose eyes spoke louder than words. It was that silent voice I yearned to hear, not the roar of rain; I yearned to feel again what I had once felt, but the moment had come and gone and it would never return. It had been a dream. Unreal. Lost forever.

  Papa drove off into the rain soon after breakfast. He returned just before lunch, his humour entirely restored.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ he announced. ‘I’ve taken care of it. I spoke to Chief Inspector Armstrong and he agrees that the whole matter has been atrociously exaggerated – a man has a right to defend himself, his castle and his family. All charges have been dropped. No need to worry.’

  Mildred placed a bowl of steaming hot potatoes on the table and Papa slid several on to his plate, cut them open and drowned them in gravy.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he continued, ‘I want you girls to be careful. The coolies are getting restless – not just here, but up and down the Courantyne, and in Demerara. Ours wasn’t the only plantation where they rioted that day – imagine! Dieu Merci and Glasgow had troubles too, and even as far up as
Skeldon, but not as serious as ours. It was almost as if there was some sort of conspiracy – but hardly possible, considering the distances involved. And in Demerara there have been strikes. These coolies will never understand. If we were to give in to their ridiculous demands …’ He stopped mid-sentence.

  ‘Then what, Papa?’

  ‘Then the entire sugar industry would break down. The plantations would fold. It would be over. BG would collapse. But – that’s not for you girls to worry about. We planters are taking care of it. They don’t call us sugar kings for nothing. Government supports us. Great Britain supports us. That’s all you need to know. But – that’s enough. Remember the rule – no business at the table. So what have you girls been up to while I was away?’

  ‘Papa, what are their demands?’ I had not forgotten the logies. Why was everyone telling us not to worry, not get involved? Not only Papa, but Gopal too, who just like Papa had told us – warned us – not to worry. Both sides were telling us to keep away; it was beginning to bother me that there was a huge situation brewing away right on our doorstep and we weren’t allowed to think about it. Thinking about it was what I needed to do.

  ‘Winnie, I said, don’t worry about it. It doesn’t concern you. You don’t need to know these things. It’s a complicated situation and nothing for young women to worry about. There’s all that beautiful silk I brought for you. That will give you enough to think about – a perfect occupation for a rainy day. Think about what dresses you’ll have made. Now we have the car I can have Miss Whatever’s-her-name brought up from New Amsterdam and back in a morning. I want to see you looking beautiful – there’ll be a big party at the Georgetown Club once the rains are over, and I want you two to be the most beautiful girls there. It’s a good thing women are still women here in BG – none of this suffragette nonsense. A plague of harridans is the last thing we need.’

  Yoyo and I let him talk on for the rest of the meal. Eventually, he and Miss Wright entered into some conversation about the situation in Europe – it seemed there was trouble brewing there too, and Papa had brought back a stack of newspapers from Georgetown. Miss Wright was eager for his opinion, which he gave as pompously as ever. I felt as if I had awakened from a dream; that my kind, sweet, perfect dream Papa had turned into this stranger whose every word made me want to curl up in embarrassment or anguish or even revulsion. In that dream I had been blind to the faults of my beloved father; faults that in any other person would have been as glaring as if they had been wearing horns and carrying a pitchfork.

  Could I still love Papa, with all these faults? After all, he was still my father. And he loved me; there was no doubt about that. Papa was a family man; we were everything to him, and he let us know it without reservation. How could I detest someone who loved me? Was it possible to love the person, but detest their personality? How did that work? Did George have faults I would detest, if only I were not too blind to see them? Did Mama love Papa in spite of his faults? Had she seen them as clearly as I now did? Was it those faults that drove her away, rather than the reasons Yoyo and I had surmised?

  So many questions. So few answers. And so much rain.

  The rain came down and the floods came up. The kokers opened and closed. The water on the land rose and fell. The ditches and canals overflowed. The roads were awash with water, emerging from the floods only when the kokers opened. From the sky, water poured down. It plunged and plummeted, sometimes in a perpendicular rush like a one-drop waterfall, sometimes, when the winds were high and fierce, slanted and biting, a vicious horde of silver mosquitoes. It seemed there would be no end to it; that there was an inexhaustible ocean in the sky filling all of the universe; that heaven’s sluice-gates had opened and all there would be was water till the end of our days. That the ocean up there was trying to drown the earth, and here were we in this mansion, trapped in a dry bubble while around us the ocean on earth filled up. But then the kokers opened and the water sank but more water came from above. Water, water, water.

  Papa went off to work each day in his car – how he loved that car! – but I had no idea what work could be done in a solid downpour that never let up for more than a few minutes at a time.

  Rain. Days of it. A solid week of rain. I watched it, listened to it, smelt it, and breathed it. Even our dry spaces were damp, the air moist and warm, sticky with vapour; but sometimes cool, so that I drew my shawl around my shoulders and pulled it close and shivered. My hair and my clothes hung limp as I paced the floor, wandered up and down stairs, stood at windows staring out into the rain, curled up in armchairs with books whose pages were soft and tired, soaked with humidity. I tried playing the violin, but the roar from outside drowned out the sound and I gave up.

  Was it my imagination; that this was the heaviest rain we had had in my memory? Or did it only appear that way because of my longing to escape it? Because it so mirrored my soul, the melancholy that flooded me.

  And in my misery a crack appeared and I remembered the logies, and I knew that for all my gloom and all my misery, here in my white wooden mansion, I was still high and dry and privileged beyond measure. Guilt flooded through me, soul-destroying guilt, and I wept. I wept for those out there in the rain and the mud, for the weightlessness of my own complaints, for my helplessness in the face of true suffering. I wept for my doomed love; how trivial it seemed in the light of that comparison! And I walked out into the rain and stood there weeping, allowing it to soak me down to the skin in a feeble, foolish and pathetic attempt at solidarity.

  As for Yoyo: every morning Papa sent the motor car to the senior staff quarters to fetch Maggie McInnes, and Maggie would spend the rest of the day with us, learning with us in the mornings and playing with Yoyo in the afternoons, retuning home only in the evening. She and Yoyo found enough to occupy themselves through all the rain. They played games: Chinese Checkers, and Ludo, and huddled together giggling and chatting, unconcerned with the weather.

  As a distraction, I had only my books. But I soon finished all the books. I had a pile to be returned to the library and exchanged for new ones, and I would have to wait for a long enough pause in the rain to venture out. It did not take longer than twenty minutes to walk from the gate, north up the road, and through the senior staff compound to the library. I had already made my way through most of the novels there, for it was a small library; however, it was constantly replenished by books donated by staff members. I had not been back for several weeks, and I hoped to find a few that would lure me into faraway worlds, allowing me to escape, if only for a few hours a day, the melancholic vacuum of my real life.

  Finally, one morning, during the lessons, the rain gradually diminished to a light shower, then to a sprinkling, and then, after lunch, it stopped completely and the layer of clouds covering the sky thinned out to a glowing white veil bearing the promise of sunshine – a thing we had not seen now for almost two weeks.

  I quickly changed into an outdoor skirt and blouse, and put the five or six books to be returned into a cotton bag. I went out the back door, through the kitchen porch, stopping only to pull on a pair of wellington boots, for the road, though drained, was wet and full of puddles. Breathing in the sweet damp air, I set off buoyed by a sense of freedom, freedom from the cloying tedium of the house.

  But hardly five minutes past the gate my footsteps faltered and my heart gave a deep lurch and my breath stood still. I had rounded the corner and turned north and I saw him immediately – cycling towards me – sailing nearer by the second. I stopped altogether. My feet refused to walk. I could not breathe. My heart hammered and my thoughts stopped.

  I could only watch in stillness as he drew nearer. His gaze, fixed on me, was a magnetic thread that pulled him closer, closer, closer until he was right there in front of me. His leg swung over the bicycle saddle and he sprang to the ground before me. There he stood, and our eyes locked. I held my breath and swallowed the lump in my throat. I wanted to say something, anything, a greeting, his name. Nothing came. He too was sile
nt. And yet we spoke; oh, how we spoke! I could read his eyes like a book. They had been so cold and blank that last day in the post office, yet now they spilled over with feeling, saturated with that thing I could not name; they melted me with their eloquence. The lump rose in my throat again and I swallowed. I tried to speak but only a croak emerged.

  The sky darkened and growled. We both looked upwards. Shadowy clouds had gathered and now huddled into an angry dark shroud thick with rain. A deafening crack like a whiplash rent the air, and thunder grumbled. The softness in George’s eyes turned to concern, and finally the spell broke and he spoke.

  ‘Rain gon’ fall in a minute,’ he said. ‘You have a raincoat?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You better go back home,’ he said. ‘You gon’ get soaked.’

  I shook my head again. The thought of returning to the house to be cooped up again for however many weeks it would rain when it started again was unbearable. Now I was out I would continue to the library. I would get wet. So what!

  ‘I’m going to the library!’ I said, and my voice was a croak. ‘In the senior staff quarters – it won’t take long. I’ve got some books …’ I patted the bag hanging over my shoulder.

  ‘Then take my raincoat. I don’ wear it anyway. I don’ mind getting’ wet. You can’t let the books get wet!’

  Still speaking he opened one of his saddlebags and removed a roll of material; it turned out to be a big midnight-blue mackintosh. He placed his bicycle on its stand, shook the mac open, and stepped towards me with it, holding it up by the shoulders. Truly, I hadn’t thought about the books; and they indeed would get wet if I continued through the rain; and so I allowed him to dress me in his mackintosh. He held it up as I pushed one arm then the other into the sleeves; then he buttoned it up the front, and raised the hood so my head was covered. He never once touched my body while doing all this; but all the while his eyes clung to mine and mine to his. Neither of us spoke as he dressed me.