HF - 05 - Sunset (2 page)

'Thank God.' Richard Hilton lay back with a sigh. 'We shall call him Christopher. Aye. This plantation, this country, needs another Kit Hilton, by God.' He raised himself on his elbow again. 'It
is
a boy?'

Percy stared at the huge, gaunt, distorted face in horror. No one knew for sure how Richard Hilton had received the blow which had altered his features; suffice that it was difficult to imagine any man surviving such an injury, much less living for sixty years afterwards.

'Well?' Richard demanded.

'I
...
I ain't knowing that, Mister Richard,' Percy confessed, trembling.

'For God's sake
...'
Rich
ard Hilton's head half turned. ‘
Why are they ringing the bell ?'

For now the tolling of the chapel bell cut across the morning. The two butlers looked at each other.

'Well, sir, I ain't knowing,' Absolom admitted. 'But I will find out.' He turned to the door, listened to the feet on the stairs. 'But it is Mister Tony.'

The two black men stood respectfully to attention as Anthony Hilton entered the room.

'Tony.' Richard Hilton heaved himself into a sitting position. 'Congratulations, boy.'

'Congratulations ?' Tony's voice was bitter.

'It is what we have all prayed for,' Richard said. 'But this
foolish chap does not know whether it is a boy or a girl. A boy, is
it?
We shall call him Kit.' 'It is a girl, Grandfather.'

'A girl ? Ah, well, can't be helped. Then she shall be called Marguerite. If we cannot have a Kit, then we must have a Meg, eh? One was as good as the other. Oh, yes. Anyway
...'
He gave a short chuckle. 'There'll be others.'

'No, Grandfather.' Tony Hilton's voice was terrible to hear. 'There will be no others. Can you not hear the bell? Janet is dead.'

CHAPTER TWO

THE INHERITANCE

'THANK you, children. That will be all for today.' Helen McAvoy stood up, closing her book as she did so. She was a tall, spare woman; the streaks of grey in her tightly coiled hair, and the absence of colour in her sallow cheeks, made her look several years older than her thirty-seven years. But that was a common enough fate for an Englishwoman who had spent her adult life in the Jamaica heat.

'Good afternoon, Mrs McAvoy.' Margaret Hilton led the procession, not only because, at fourteen, she was the oldest girl in the little school, but because of her name. Her father owned this building, as he owned this plantation. Her schoolmates were the children of his employees.

Yet, Helen McAvoy thought as her features relaxed into a half smile, one would never have known it. Oh, the girl was pretty enough, already possessing the Hilton height, and more important, those fine, exquisitely carved features, those wide-set grey eyes, that pointed chin. She already possessed, also, the attributes of a woman, too much so, in Helen's opinion. But then, her mother had been far too busty. And undoubtedly Margaret would one day be beautiful, were she ever given the chance. But who would give her the chance ? Her complexion was more brown than pink and white, and was overlaid with a smothering of freckles. And beauty required good clothes. Margaret's white cotton gown was crushed and stained where the other children's were at least pressed; her boots were scuffed and dirty, and the stockings above were full of holes. Helen
shuddered to think of the possible condition of her drawers.

She sighed. Even more than clothes, beauty demanded breeding. Margaret Hilton should be
at
some school for young ladies in England, or at the least plans should now be being made to send her to Paris or Switzerland for a season.
At
the
very
least, she should be taken
in
hand and convinced that hair needed to be brushed, especially hair like hers, which was
splendidly
long, reaching the middle of her back, and possessed a glowing brown colour which suggested it was coated in new varnish, but which
at
present resembled a tangled forest vine; or that fingernails needed to be trimmed and kept clean. Either task she would have been happy to undertake herself, lacking a daughter of her own. But Anthony Hilton would permit
no
one to interfere with his domestic arrangements, such as they were.

'Good afternoon, Meg,' she said. 'You'll give my regards to your father.'

She said this every day, although she saw Anthony Hilton almost every day as well; her husband was Hilltop's Field Manager.

Margaret crammed her straw hat on her head, stepped outside, blinking in the glare; at five o'clock the sun was just beginning its sudden droop towards the hills; there was not a breath of air.

She waited at the top of the steps; the schoolroom was Helen McAvoy's own living room, in the centre of the white compound. The Simmonds girls came out, gave her half a curtsy, and scampered down the stairs to run home. They were twelve and eleven. Then Jimmy Pilling, who was only eight, blushing as he saw her waiting there, before also scampering for his home.

Alan McAvoy was last. And he was Helen's son, he needn't have come out at all, and only did so because he knew Margaret would be waiting for him. Almost a year older, he was no taller, and not as strongly built; his dark hair was lank. His features were rounded, and surprisingly soft; the charm extended to the wide mouth and the gentle brown eyes. But unlike her, his shirt and pants were neatly pressed and clean, however threadbare they might be, as his boots were polished, although he had managed to get his braces twisted.

'Race you to the Grandstand,' Margaret said, and ran down the steps. She held her straw hat on her head with one hand, gathered her skirt in the other, and scampered up the street, past her father's bungalow, out the gate, and then over the meadow, scattering first of all the chickens who had their run close to the compound, and raising inquiring glances from the sheep who browsed on the gentle slope leading up to the Great House. There was a furious barking, and Hannibal, the Hilton's hound, leapt the fence surrounding the compound to join in the chase. Meg did not look behind her. She knew Alan would be following. There were no other children on the plantation of their own age, and so they were forced to be inseparable companions; Kingston might be only twenty-odd miles away, through the mountains, but visits to Kingston cost money.

Now she panted, and stumbled in a hole and nearly twisted her ankle. Hannibal passed her with a joyous explosion of sound. And now she heard Alan behind her, also panting, but moving far more easily. Well, he didn't have a skirt wrapping itself round his ankles. But now she could see the racecourse. At least, that was what Father called it. It was actually a large area of wild long grass and thorny bushes, from the middle of which the rotting structure of the Grandstand pushed itself up like some long-forgotten relic of a previous civilization, which, indeed, it was. Once upon a time, in the great days, the Hiltons had here matched their own horses against the best in Jamaica, and fortunes had changed hands in a single afternoon. Margaret wrinkled her nose as she approached; what exactly was a fortune? she wondered.

'Got you.' Alan threw both arms around her waist and brought her to the ground. He had, of course, waited until they were out of sight of the compound, or of anyone else.

And so, exhausted as she was, she twisted in his arms, closing her hands on his shoulders and endeavouring to push him off, careful not to use her nails or her teeth. He liked to wrestle, and she was willing to go along with him, because he was her friend. She panted, and gasped, and flicked hair and sweat from her eyes, and tried to get up a leg to interpose a knee between them, because he was working his body up and down, pressing her as if intent on crushing the life out of her, his cheek bumping against hers while he gasped for breath. And his hands had somehow become trapped between their bodies, against her chest. They always did that, and left her bubbies - as Prudence called them - feeling at once tender and
aware.

And now Hannibal, not to be left out, came back to lick her face.

'Pax,' she gasped, and lay still. Alan's weight seemed to envelop her. But amazingly, as always happened, although he also was now quiet, his body still seemed to move against her groin, as if there was a gigantic pulse down there, but one which rather worked its way slowly over her flesh. 'I can't breathe.'

He slid off her, lay on his stomach beside her. Now she could see his face, only inches away from her, cheeks pink and eyes momentarily dilated.

She pushed Hannibal away. 'You won,' she said. 'You always win.'

He heaved himself to his knees, looked down on her. How serious his face was, when he looked at her. It was quite disturbing.

'Race you to the top,' she said, and rolled away from him, gaining her knees and then her feet, running into the paddock and reaching for the old wooden stairs. Now she had to be careful, because the Grandstand was more than a hundred years old, and however good the wood had originally been, it was now nearly all rotten.

'Got you,' he said again, and seized her ankle. She wished he wouldn't do that Wrestling was all very well, but legs, well, legs were different. Besides, he was holding on to her calf, and therefore her drawers, and he could very well pull them right down. She had no idea what she would do then; he was underneath.

'Oh, let me go,' she said, kicking down with such force that he did let her go, and she was able to clamber up to the first level, an empty expanse of sagging wood, although once it must have supported row after row of comfortable cane chairs.

Hannibal, unable to climb, began to bark.

'Meg.' Alan crawled behind her, and there was such anxiety in his voice she stopped to look at him.

'Meg,' he said again, and sat down, feet dangling over the edge, holding on to her wrist now.

She pulled a face and sat beside him. 'What on earth is the matter?'

Once again he peered at her, while his tongue slowly came out and circled his lips, and most remarkably, his face turned quite crimson. 'Have you ever stopped to think that one day all this is going to be yours ?'

She stared at him, frowning. The words had come out in a terrible rush, and she was sure he hadn't meant to say anything like that. 'All what?'

'Well
...
the plantation. Hilltop. There's one in Antigua too, isn't there?'

Meg shrugged. 'There's the land.' Green Grove had been abandoned long before she was born, because the blacks would not work regular hours after they had been emancipated, and because the price of sugar had sunk so disastrously low that it had no longer been economic to grow it

'Well, Hilltop, certainly.'

'I'll sell it,' she decided.

'Sell it?' Alan was aghast.

'Well, for Heaven's sake,' she said. 'It doesn't earn anything much. Your dad only stays on because he's that loyal.
Mr
Simmonds and the others are only here because they wouldn't get any employment anywhere else. The blacks wouldn't care whether we were here or not. And the East Indians, ugh. They give me the willies.'

'Bananas,' Alan said. 'What about the bananas?'

'I don't like bananas.'

'But witho
ut them, we'd, well, you'd reall
y be in trouble.'

'So who wants to make a living out of growing bananas?' she asked, and got up. 'I'm going home.'

He didn't move, remained sitting at the top of the steps, looking after her. And this evening she didn't feel like looking back and waving. Something had happened to their relationship, quite without warning, quite without her knowing what it was.

But now she wished he had said what he had meant to say, instead of going off about the plantation.

She went home by way of the cemetery, Hannibal trotting at her heels. To reach the graves, surrounded by a white fence and shaded by tall tamarind trees, she had to climb the shallow hill until she was almost in the shadow of the Great House. The cemetery was a place of refuge whenever she felt in the dumps, which was often enough. Here she was sure to be alone, because none of the blacks would visit the graves once the sun began to set. Dusk was a time for
jumbis,
especially where dead people were involved. Because
jumbis
were merely dead people themselves, walking about? Meg had never been quite sure about that. But dusk was also the time for the drums. Sometimes. She could hear them this evening, a low, distant throbbing. The noise came from the mountains, beyond the limits of the plantation. She rather enjoyed the rhythmical hum, but the black people were afraid of it, and so, she suspected, were most of the white people as well. Yet no one would tell her why.

She clasped her hands behind her back, stared at the weathered stones. Richard Hilton, born 1785, died 1871. Great-Grandfather had died
the year after she had been born
. He had been a legend in his own lifetime, at once because of his military
prowess and because of his dis
figured face. And he had named her, so Prudence said. Janet Hilton, bora 1850, died 1870. Poor Mama had never had the chance to name her. Papa hated her for that.