The Secret Life of Winnie Cox Read online

  Papa seemed not to have noticed that this time, we had not come to him. We were not perched on his knees, drinking in his words and nodding at their wisdom. We still stood, facing him, stiff and speechless, our hands still joined. All of this a clear signal to him, had he been observant enough to notice, that we were united against this new entity, this stranger who had, I now realized, always lurked in the shadows of Papa’s geniality. The stranger had always been there, but hidden from our eyes, kept away from our awareness. A cold shudder passed through my body, which might have given me away, but Papa did not notice.

  He sighed. ‘I know you girls miss your mother. She has not been a mother at all these last few years. Misfortune has changed her almost beyond recognition; at this time in your lives she should be with you, guiding you, advising you, helping you to take your first steps into the world of adults, which in the case of a female means ushering you into the social world where you will eventually find your husbands. It’s not easy in British Guiana, which is why we decided to send Kathleen back to England – it was anyway, her wish. The social world among the planters is a rather isolated business here, especially on the Courantyne Coast. There are no young people of your own age and standing on Plantation Glasgow or Dieu Merci and we can hardly expect you to mix with overseer’s children or even senior management … not at this stage in your lives. Much less find your husbands there.’

  He paused, and scratched his chin. Yoyo and I looked at each other; I raised my eyebrows, she mouthed words I could not decipher. Papa continued.

  ‘It’s difficult, being a father of girls. Especially so for a planter. Now, if you had been boys it would have been different; I would have introduced you into plantation affairs long ago so that one day you could take over from me. But now your education is drawing to a close – Miss Wright has done an excellent job and I expect you both to pass your School Certificates; but what then? Miss Wright has intimated that you are both capable of attending Bishops’ High School in Georgetown to get your Higher Certificate, but I do believe that education is wasted on a woman – what will you do with a Higher Certificate as the wife of a planter? One hears such atrocious stories of these suffragettes in England – all due to too much education. No. I can’t send you to Bishops. Were we in England you would long have been part of the London scene, even if you had not officially come out. But here – I can hardly send you to your uncle, as I have done Kathleen – you are both far too rough around the edges. You’re such wild things. I dare say you would not be happy in London. Yes, Mr Smedley will be coming soon, but you are still too young to marry.’ He paused. Yoyo and I looked at each other, wondering what was coming next.

  ‘Don’t mind me, girls. I’m just thinking aloud. These are worrying times in many ways. But remember your interests are my first concern and I will find a solution before long. Now do come here and kiss your Papa goodnight. I do love you so much, you know. Don’t worry your little heads about anything you may have seen – remember that this is your home, and my whole life is dedicated to your comfort and well-being. Trust me. Now run along both of you.’

  That night I could not sleep; there was just too much to digest. The events of the last two days tumbled over and over again in lurid pictures; my thoughts were not in words but in bold images of brown bodies scrambling against a gate, horses plunging, whips cracking, men shouting and screaming; and then the logies, silent and grim and lined with coolies whose hostile gazes burned my flesh. And coolies with cutlasses sweating in the cane fields. Coolie women up to their waists in water, pushing the punts along the canals. Coolie men carrying loads of cane. The story of Moses Roper.

  And there was yet another thing I couldn’t put my finger on, that large looming Something that refused to show itself.

  Hour after hour I tossed and turned. But as the night grew deep and old, the violent knots within my mind began to unravel and their noise became less thunderous. The night chorus of beetles settled into a steady silver buzz. A darker sound punctuated the night, a deep rhythmic pulse so natural it was like the earth’s heartbeat. The drums. I listened to the drums for a while, and my breathing calmed and the next thing I knew it was morning.

  Mama’s Diary: Salzburg, 1890

  Liebes Tagebuch,

  Archie loves the idea of an elopement! He has already started planning – we must lose no time, he says. Almost a year has passed since we met, and he can wait no longer. He is supposed to be going to Paris next month to visit an aunt. He will pretend to go, but instead, make his way to Salzburg. I am to write back to him and suggest a good place to meet, and a date and a time. We will then make our way to London, posing as a married couple.

  I am so thrilled I can hardly sleep, but at the same time a little bit scared. This is such a preposterous thing to do! Father will be devastated, and so worried – but when he knows I am alive and well he will be so relieved he will finally bless the union and we can be married properly. I will write to him as soon as we are at some distance from Salzburg, and let him know I am safe with Archie. No – I will leave a note. It is the only way. I will write to Archie tonight with my instructions – and a date! Oh, how I hope nothing goes wrong!

  Chapter Five

  Sometime in the early dawn I woke up with the words poring through my mind: German words, addressed to Mama. German was our secret language; our special bond, for my sisters had refused to speak it, and eventually forgot whatever they had learned. Not me; I loved German, for it connected me with her. So Mama had ensured that I not only speak but also read and write German; she shared her precious books with me, and taught me the words to Schubert’s songs, to Bach’s cantatas and to Rilke’s poems. When I was ten, she arranged for me to correspond with the daughter of the woman who had been her best friend back in Austria, and even now, Miriam Gottlieb and I exchanged at least three letters a year.

  Mama grew up in Salzburg, in an upper class Jewish family. She grew up in a world of music, ballet, theatre and opera, and everyone told me that I had inherited my quiet nature, reserved disposition and love of artistic beauty from her. She was a gifted violinist, and had it not been for her prolonged mourning the two of us would surely have enjoyed many hours of exquisite music-playing – duets, and with Miss Wright’s arrival – trios, for like Mama, Miss Wright was an excellent pianist, and she also played the flute.

  The upright piano in Mama’s morning room now stood mostly closed and silent. Her Stradivarius – given to her as a wedding present by her devastated but forgiving family – had returned to Europe with her; Mama had often hinted that the tropical climate would destroy it; perhaps it could now be rescued from that ruin.

  How different from the old days! In the old days, before Edward John’s death, on some special evenings, we would push the drawing-room furniture against the walls, roll back the carpets, and Mama and Papa would dance. Oh, how they would dance! There was no music, no one to play the piano for them, much less an orchestra, but we would all sing the music, and sometimes I would play my violin: Da-da-da-da-da, da-da, da-da! Da-da-da-da-da, da-da, da-da! Laughing, they’d waltz to the Blue Danube, Papa’s long legs in his evening suit striding out as he swirled her around the room, Mama bent back over his arm, her head thrown back, her skirt swishing around her legs, her dark hair swinging, and always laughing. They would glide through the room as if on air, laughing, singing, and we children would clap and laugh too, and sometimes we’d join in and dance with them, spinning barefoot around the polished drawing room floor. Sometimes Mama would twirl herself free of Papa’s arms and dance alone, arms swinging, eyes closed, and we’d know she was back in Salzburg under the chandeliers in an exquisite, sparkling gown, dancing to a full orchestra. Papa would watch with eyes glowing in admiration. Then he’d step up to her with open arms and she’d sail back to him and they’d dance the last coda together, ending it all with a flourish, she with a dainty curtsy, he with a deep bow, removing an imaginary hat; and we girls would clap excitedly and cry for an encore.


  ‘Wunderbar! Ach, how I wish you girls could hear the orchestra!’ she would cry, and sigh in frustration, for this she could not offer us; there was no orchestra in the whole of BG. But we could hear the music by the way she danced, by the light in her eyes, by her radiant beauty, by her cries of ‘Wunderbar!’

  And then the singing stopped, and the dancing, and the cries of Wunderbar! I missed those evenings so much, the gaiety and the joy of seeing Mama and Papa, such a beautiful couple, happy and dancing together, palpably in love; but when I tried to speak of them to Yoyo, she would only sneer.

  ‘Schmalz!’ said Yoyo of my nostalgia. ‘Pure Schmalz.’

  If Papa missed those dance evenings he never spoke of it to us; Kathleen had moved on to a better, more exciting life; and so it was left to me alone to yearn and pine for better days, and for Mama.

  Mama and I, I always believed, shared a special link in spite of her sorrow. Of her three daughters, Kathleen and Yoyo were fair, like Papa, whereas I was dark-haired, like her. There was the music we both loved, the violin lessons she had given me from the time I was a small child; Kathleen and Yoyo were bored by music. Then there was language. Mama had spoken to us all in German when we were little. It was our first language, literally our mother tongue, but after a while, my sisters refused to speak it, and Papa forgot the few words he had learned as a youth, forcing her to switch to English. So German became our own private language. Mama clung stubbornly to her little German gems of comfort, such as pronouncing Yoyo’s full name, Johanna, the German way – Yohanna – and sprinkling her speech with ja’s and nein’s and calling us girls Liebes or Schatz, and Papa, Liebling.

  In the old days, the good days, that language was our link. Even through Mama’s silences, and the sadness that clung to her like a miasma, I felt it. I was the one who could best reach her. I shared her beloved books; I understood her melancholy; I knew her depths. When Mama sat at the piano and sang those wistful Schubert Lieder, I tuned in to the wellspring of yearning at the core of her being. When she spoke longingly of the Austrian seasons, I could empathize.

  ‘Schnee!’ Mama would sigh, and in her clipped Austrian accent, add, ‘Snow! There is nothing in the world so beautiful!’ conjuring up a vision of a thick white silent blanket that covered the world in cold pristine beauty. Mama’s Heimat: her home. Not mine. I never longed for that Heimat; I was happy right here, in my own. Mama lived in a world that was purely emotional, consisting of nostalgia and homesickness and grief and memories of friends and family and places she would most likely never see again. Young girls never think much about their own mothers’ cares and sorrows, and it was only much later that I pieced together Mama’s story and understood how unhappy she must have been in BG.

  Now, lying in bed, I longed for her so much that tears pricked my eyes. I wanted to deposit the entire burden of this dramatic day in her lap. Have her guide me through the storm, tell me what to say to Papa, how to manage a situation that was far too complicated for a girl of sixteen. Even in her withdrawn, sorrowful state, she was still Mama, and I could draw strength from her. Mama – the real, original Mama, not the ghost of her we had known these last few years – would do something about those logies. I was sure of it.

  The logies! Oh, those logies! And Nanny! Living out her life in the midst of such foulness! The memory of Nanny burst into my consciousness with the immediacy of a bomb blast, casting out all worry of Mama; grief overcame me for the first time, the grief that had been displaced by the general shock of what we had seen. Her face, gleaming brown with coconut oil, loomed before me: the kind eyes wrinkled around the edges, the thin greying hair tied back in a plait down the back of her neck, her softness when she gathered us into her arms, Yoyo and me. The Hindi words we had learnt from her; her voice, always warm, always calm: ‘don’ worry, beti, everyt’ing gn’ be all right.’ But everything wasn’t all right for her. She never said … she never spoke. She never told us of her real home in the logies.

  And then Papa. His fury. The whipping of the coolie. It was just too much.

  I needed to talk to Mama. I needed to talk to her desperately. And since I couldn’t I had to write. In the half-light, I slipped from the double bed I shared with Yoyo, taking care not to wake her as I ducked beneath the mosquito net and tiptoed barefoot across the floorboards to the door. Across the hall to the schoolroom, avoiding the board that creaked, into the schoolroom, and straight to the desk. I removed a pad of paper from the top drawer, found my pen, and dipped it into the bottle of Quink. I did not have to think; it was as if it were already written and all I did was to take dictation.

  * * *

  Liebe Mama, I wrote, and continued, in German:

  It has only been a few months since you left us and already it seems like a lifetime since we waved goodbye on the Georgetown wharf. How I miss you! I have so much to tell you and I wish so much you were here! …

  It was an outpouring; words erupted from me such as I would never have been able to say to her face. It was the longest letter I had written in my life. I told her everything. I told her of my loneliness and isolation; I told her of the logies and the whipping and Miss Wright. I told her I remembered the Troublemaker, the book about slavery. I did not stop writing once. I did not read it over to correct spelling or other mistakes, as Miss Wright would have insisted. It was not a well-written letter. But it came from my heart and it said all the things I wanted Mama to know; so before I could have doubts and second thoughts I folded it, pushed it into an envelope, sealed it with red sealant, and stamped it with the Promised Land stamp. There. It was done. I slipped it into the neck of my nightgown and returned to bed, at peace. The next thing I knew it was morning.

  After breakfast, I told Yoyo what I had done – that I had written to Mama and wanted to go to the post office to post it.

  ‘You wrote to Mama? Why, you should have told me – I would have added a few words and then she would have heard from both of us. Really, Winnie, you can be so selfish at times. Wait a few minutes and I’ll add a letter of my own. Or have you already sealed the envelope?’

  For a moment, I held my breath: would she insist on opening it? Read the letter? It was so private, so intimate! Then I remembered it was in German; she could not read German. I nodded.

  ‘Bother!’ said Yoyo, and, ‘really, you should have told me. We could have written together. I do hope you told her what is going on here! Did you? Good. Well, then that’s done and I won’t bother to write this time – I do hate writing letters. Especially since I’m sure she won’t write back – but she does need to know the situation here. I hope you told her in no uncertain terms what we think of Papa! Really, I’m quite furious and I don’t know if I can ever forgive him. Very well, then, let’s go down to the village.’

  So we collected our bicycles and rode down to the village. Usually Harry our house-boy did this, but it was Saturday, so there were no lessons, and we had our weekly pocket money to spend. Papa had left for Georgetown before dawn, so we did not see him before we left, and I was glad of it; the more time passed between the incidents of the last few days the less inclined I was to meet Papa face to face. The inevitable confrontation was postponed, and I was glad of it. I now realised how carefully we had to tread. Papa had become a stranger.

  It was good to escape the house, which more and more was beginning to feel less like a home and more like a prison – a place that kept us away from a world briskly striding forward. I had never thought about this before – that out there, across the river that separated us from the more progressive county of Demerara and across the ocean that lapped almost to our doorstep, events took place – that the dramas I read about in my beloved novels had their counterparts in real life. And that, but for the accident of our birth and the isolation of our geography, we too would have been a part of that bustling world, knowing things, seeing things we could only dream of, and living lives worthy of being written about in novels.

  As we rode along the sandy path towards the vill
age, I noticed for the very first time the coolies working in the cane fields that lined the road. I mean, really noticed them, which is different from merely seeing. I had never really seen them before as people; they were simply an integral part of the landscape; their dark shiny bodies glistening in the sunshine were as familiar to me as the emerald green cane or the cobalt blue of the sky. I even had thought it beautiful – part of the Courantyne charm. I had taken them for granted.

  But wait – no. A young child takes nothing for granted. I had noticed them, when I was very young. I had asked questions. Who are those brown people? I had once asked Mama. Why are they not wearing clothes? Why are they cutting cane? Why are they in the water? Why are they so unfriendly, not greeting us?

  ‘They are the Poor Unfortunate,’ Mama had replied. ‘We must pray for them.’ And she had. Every evening when Mama led our prayers at our bedside she had added, after we had prayed for all our family members, ‘and bless the Poor Unfortunate’. After Edward John’s death Mama had no longer led the prayers, and we had forgotten the Poor Unfortunate, and that is when they became part of the landscape. Only bodies. A part of the background of my existence: not really people, with homes, families, children, cares, sorrows, and the propensity to be happy and love and plan and care about their own lives.

  Guilt struck me as a bolt from heaven. How could I have been so blind, so wrapped in my own world? How could it be? It was like emerging from a thick black fog; like sight returning to the blind. A great sense of helplessness and despair descended on me. I was a prisoner of history, of my ancestry. It held me captive within thick walls that I, alone or even with Yoyo, could not break down. What would we do? What could we do, two young girls dependent on the very keeper of that fortress for their own survival?