The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (36 page)

 

George loved his swimming pool most of all. He swam in it every day, cleaned it with loving care, scooping the vermilion immortelle blossoms from its surface in the dry season, scattering all the right chemicals into it. He tested the water, vacuumed the pool’s floor. He sat beside the pool for hours, on a sun lounger, reading, his white skin grilling like sirloin steak, drinking rum after rum. Jules, our neighbour, came over to welcome us but mainly to see if our home was any fancier than his, if we’d be any disturbance. Jules, dear Jules. He was fifty or so, kind-faced, grey wiry hair, wiry moustache. His skin, like so many of the local whites’, looked diseased, had become a mosaic of brown flecks of melanin. He survived mostly off a small family inheritance. He was researching a family biography, he explained. His French family had fled from Haiti; they were once
ancien régime
, very grand, very much a part of things in the West Indies. Jules spoke a little French and I took to him immediately; he became my companion and ally out there in the bush.

 

George still went out to work every day on his scooter. George, so likeable and alert. When the big cruise ships came in, amongst other duties as Deputy Director he had the job of entertaining the more prominent passengers, those the company wanted to impress. Sometimes these were businessmen, once even a famous movie star.

‘Darling, can you meet me at the Country Club?’ he said on the phone, quite breathless, one day.

‘When?’

‘In an hour.’

‘I’m not sure if I can.’

‘It’s important. We have an actor on the boat. Here with his wife.’

‘Oh
God.
Do I have to?’

‘Please.’

‘OK. OK.’

‘Wear a nice dress.’

I struggled into a green low-cut cocktail dress and powdered my face, half resentful. I drove to the Club to find some commotion outside, the car park jam-packed. The valet took the car and I was ushered in through the throng. I found George sitting at the bar. His face visibly shone when he caught sight of me. He rose and I kissed him on the cheek.

‘This is my wife,’ he said proudly to the man sitting beside him, who I recognised instantly. It was Cary Grant.

 

George’s job took up more of his time, became more exciting. Meanwhile, I rattled about in that house. We didn’t have enough furniture to fill such a large space. It was three times larger than the one we’d left behind, with smooth terrazzo porches all around. A huge parquet living-room floor George had intended for all the great fêtes we would host. Our four armchairs were scrawny in the living room. Our tiny television set, our one coffee table, our sideboard, all like doll’s furniture in a museum.

‘Go out and spend.’ George waved his chequebook at me. ‘Go and spend my money, woman.’

And so I hunted around for all we needed for our new existence. Irit helped me. Rugs and lamps and paintings and sofas and patio furniture and two of those peacock-backed chairs Irit had in her boutique. Even a big fish tank on a stand, full of coral and angel fish. Irit wasn’t the least bit envious of our new home. She and John still lived at the tiny Bergerac Flats with their chaos and their violet Persian cat. She grew richer by the day, but her lifestyle never changed.

‘Who go clean all dem frou-frou tings you have now, madam,’ Venus pointed out one day. ‘Not me,’ she asserted. ‘I ent polishin’ no fish!’

Until then Venus had managed to hold herself in. But she was right; I was filling our home with mad things. Crystal, vases, all manner of cooking equipment for the kitchen, a soup tureen, a parsley grinder, a fish kettle. And all the while I stared through those bars, hundreds of them.

 

One afternoon, the front doorbell buzzed. The puppies barked and dashed out to the gate. I was alone with Venus, frightened at first. I made her gather the children before peeping out from behind one of the pillars in the courtyard. The bell rang again; I advanced cautiously down the drive.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Hello,’ I heard a woman’s voice call through the wrought-iron bars.

The puppies danced and jumped up at the gate, woofing and wagging their stubby tails.

Behind it stood a woman dressed in a brown, much worn, maid’s uniform.

I drew closer. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m looking for work, madam.’

She was a big red-skinned Negro woman with frizzy grey hair. One eye was still, unmoving. Between us, the thick iron bars of the gate. Where’d she come from?

‘What kind of work?’

‘Cooking, housekeeping. I’ve work for many years as housekeeper. I have a reference.’

‘Well . . .’ Her face was open, placid. I could see she wasn’t going to beg: she hadn’t used the word
maid
and she spoke differently, a soft song in her voice, a version of the dialect which was milder than the way Venus spoke. Venus had come to me as lively as the puppies at my feet. This woman was at the other end of living, she’d slowed. Her girth was wide and her eyes were melancholy.

‘I could use some extra help. We’ve just moved here . . .’

She nodded.

‘Where do your live?’

‘Just down so, in Santa Cruz.’

A rural area, full of grapefruit and orange orchards. You drove through the saddle cut into the mountainside to get there.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Lucy, madam. Mrs Lucinda Bartholomew.’ She thrust an envelope through the bars.

I took it from her and pulled out a letter, reading it; it was from an English employer just gone. I didn’t know them. Lucy had lost her job when they departed.

‘Come in, Lucy.’

 

That day, Lucy joined the fort. Venus was pleased. It meant she no longer cooked or cleaned, just looked after the children. Sebastian was six and Pascale four; they were a handful. Lucy stepped into the role of cook and housekeeper, walking in every day from the valley beyond the saddle. Venus and Lucy were as different as could be in age, appearance and demeanour, Venus considering herself above Lucy, even though, clearly, Lucy had accrued more gravitas. Venus had been with us seven years, the main difference; she was the Second Lady of the house and Lucy was content to let her see it this way at first.

Quickly, we got to know of Lucy’s countrywoman genius.

A wart appeared on Sebastian’s finger. I ignored it at first but it grew bigger and quite hard, bulbous. He picked at it all the time.

‘Horrible thing,’ I said to Lucy. ‘So hard to get rid of. I’ll get some acid from the chemist.’

But the next day Lucy arrived with some sprigs of a shrub she began to clean and split, the milky sap oozing.

‘What’s that?’ I enquired.

‘Cactus hedge, madam.’

I watched as Lucy made a splint from two milky stems and bound them to Sebastian’s warty finger.

Three days later the wart had disappeared. Sebastian was amazed, assuming she’d performed a magic trick.

George chuckled. ‘Our very own bush doctor.’

Venus changed her attitude to Lucy considerably. ‘Granny Seraphina know dese tings, too,’ she mused. ‘It old time ting, dis bush medcin. It black people ting. Come from Africa.’

 

Like a Paris chef, Lucy was open and yet mysterious about her tonics, never revealing the entire recipe. When Pascale cut open her knee, Lucy boiled up pomegranate flowers into a tea for her to sip and the cut healed quickly. When the children had diarrhoea, she gave them pomegranate bark to chew. Colds and coughs Lucy cured with a cool beverage of hibiscus petals. Jackfruit, if they were constipated. Spinach leaves for poultices on boils. Ginger for gas, slices of aubergine, melongene, for minor sprains. All Lucy’s cures worked. I wrote many of the ingredients down. She often explained what was what but, when I tried to boil up my own potions, they failed. I began to examine every leaf and blossom in my garden, trying to detect what was alkaline and what was acid.

‘Half is an inherited knowledge, the other half is a gift,’ Jules explained to me one afternoon. ‘Not
all
of them use it or can use it. Venus would probably make a botch of things just like you.’

‘Lucy is a very gentle soul,’ I mused.

‘You’re lucky then.’

‘Why?’

‘I expect she knows poisons, too.’

‘No!’

‘Of
course
,’ he laughed. Jules had a vivacious way of speaking, a sing-song accent like Christobel’s, except more expressive, emphasising his words with great knowing. This was common amongst Trinidadians of every persuasion, this emphatic nature. No maybes.

‘She wouldn’t harm us, surely.’

Jules rolled his eyes.

‘She doesn’t seem the type. I sense she’s had a hard life. She sings a lot and sometimes tears fall as she sings.’

‘Listen to me. You have an ol’ Shango woman in your home. You keep your eyes open.’

But Jules was wrong. I knew whatever wickedness Lucy could conjure with her herbs and plant tonics, she wasn’t going to harm us. Something was amiss with Mrs Lucy Bartholomew, but she was past revenge.

 

Lucy, Venus, the children and the puppies, too. We were a household. Having Jules a tramp away, through the bush, made me feel safer. Occasionally, a car rumbled past, or a donkey cart pulled up at the gate selling milk from a large tin vat. The hill woman watched us, lying on her side, half earth, the other half mountains. Yellow pouis trees exploded like fireworks in her hair. Herons floated out of the canopy of her shoulders. Once, a wild duck arrived from the hill; it landed in the swimming pool. The children fed it chunks of bread and it became quite tame. Another time, two huge porcupines wandered in from the foot of the hill, across the porch, shooting their quills at the puppies who pranced and barked around them. We plucked quills from their muzzles for days afterwards. One hot sunny afternoon I spotted a long black shadow moving out near the front gate. When I got closer I shrieked and fled.

‘A macajuel,’ Venus identified it as it slithered away, the local name for a boa constrictor.

Birds flocked from that hill to the house. Red-bellied macaws chattered up in the palms and hummingbirds, colibri, hummed through the house, piercing the hibiscus I’d arranged in vases. The mountain above our home was not static or still. It provided cover and harbour to communities which were invisible from where I stood out on the porch. Communities of human squatters, of beasts and birds and reptiles. The mountain woman looked placid, but in fact the opposite was true. The mountain woman teemed with life.

 

Slowly, not overnight, conversation died between George and me. Our heads were filled with very different ideas.

‘How was work, dear?’

Silence. George’s head was deep in a book.

‘How was work . . . darling?’

Silence.

I stood directly in front of him, miming his reply.

‘What?’ He looked up and smiled to be polite.

‘Any new ships in?’

‘No, dear.’

‘What would you like for dinner?’

‘Anything.’

I stared. ‘Boiled cabbage? Jam sandwiches?’

He snapped his book shut. ‘What’s got into you?’

I want to leave,
my heart whispered. These words in my throat, swirling in my mouth.

‘Eric Williams has disappeared.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t you agree? He’s hardly ever in the country. Meanwhile . . .’

‘Meanwhile,
what
. . . what are your theories? Eh? Please, enlighten me.’

I glared, standing above him, gazing down with contempt.
Pour l’amour du ciel
, I whispered. I turned on my heel and stalked away and then deliberately burnt his stupid English mashed potatoes. I thought about George less and less. I no longer looked to him for guidance. He had his cricket team, his books, his rum and his pool. I had Lucy and Venus. I thought about those hills more and more. About Granny Seraphina and Eric Williams. I often wrote to him:

My son Sebastian said
mash up
and
bol’ face
and steupsed when he was agitated. Pascale was going the same way. I couldn’t stop it.

‘Watch at me!’ Sebastian once called to his sister.

That was the limit.
‘Look!’
I bellowed. ‘Look at me!’

The maids did it. My children took on their mannerisms and repeated their jokes, believed their fairy stories. The maids spoke of jumbies and soucouyants, unearthly creatures, part firefly, part vampire. My children knew about dwens, children who lived in the forest, children whose feet had turned backwards. They ran around barefoot, the soles of their feet black and greasy. They sucked on pig’s trotters; gulped down callaloo. They devoured pawpaws, guavas, mangoes and soursop ice cream. They were nothing like the children I’d dreamed of. They were white in skin but black in culture. Venus was their black mother. Lucy their black grandmother. When Venus’s sons came to stay I was outnumbered.