‘Thank you, Ruby. I’m with you.’
Ruby leaned towards Eve across the table. ‘He is full of disdain,’ she said. She drew back her lips as she spoke, giving each syllable its own and equal weight, investing the words with bitter meaning. ‘And the English people who stay here are disdainful too. They have been raised to believe themselves superior.’
‘They ’ave, aye. There are plenty of ’em looks down on me for my Yorkshire accent.’
‘Then perhaps you understand something of our situation,’ Ruby said. She hadn’t realised Eve’s version of English was considered inferior, although privately she thought it so herself. Did God give us the letter aitch in order for us to carelessly drop it? Ruby thought not.
‘You see, in England an extra shilling goes further with a chambermaid or a porter than a please or a thank you,’ Eve said.
‘While in the West Indies, we have not been free from the slave owners long enough to accept a coin in place of courtesy.’
‘I see. So, to wait on white people—’
‘Is gall and wormwood to our dignity, yes. Unless, that is, they can be civil-tongued.’
‘It doesn’t seem a lot to ask.’
‘And yet, somehow, it is.’
Batista’s song drew to a close and she did what she always did, and began again, from the beginning.
‘Sometimes I feel discouraged,’ she sang, her magnificent voice invested with devotion to the Holy Spirit, ‘and think my work’s in vain.’
‘Join t’club,’ Eve said ruefully. Ruby threw back her head and laughed, which Eve took as a sort of acceptance, hard won and, more than likely, easily lost.
Wendell appeared through the back door, with the loafing gait he admired so much in Scotty and was keen to imitate.
‘Wen-dell Bai-ley,’ said Ruby ominously.
The boy looked at her, his eyes big as carriage lamps.
‘Over ’ere please, Wendell,’ said Eve.
The boy was confused; he was inclined to disobey Eve, yet didn’t like to under Ruby’s menacing gaze. He tried to honour both instincts and came towards the table with a scowl. Eve confused him further by smiling.
‘Next time we meet on t’stairs,’ she said. ‘You must say, “Excuse me,” and I shall say, “Certainly.”’
‘Do you understand, Wendell?’ said Ruby. The boy nodded, although bewilderment and resentment still vied for supremacy in his face.
‘Also,’ said Eve, ‘you can rearrange your features into something more pleasant. I won’t put up with you looking daggers at me, as I never look daggers at you.’
‘Do you understand?’ Ruby said again.
‘Do as you would be done by,’ said Eve.
The boy looked from one to the other miserably. Something fundamental had shifted and altered in the short space of time between putting out the garbage pails and returning to the kitchen. He felt caught, like a coney with its head in a trap: pulling away would only tighten the wire.
‘Off you go, Wendell,’ Ruby said now.
‘And thank you,’ Eve added.
‘Fo’ wha’?’ he said, his face clouded by incomprehension.
‘For being the last straw,’ Ruby said. ‘Now, go about your business before we lose Batista underneath a mountain of potato peelings.’
Wendell smiled at last. ‘That gonna be one big moun’n,’ he said.
I
t was later on the same afternoon that Eve had her eureka moment, and it was so brilliant, and so simple, that she laughed as the thought formed, and clapped her hands together gleefully.
When this happened, Ruby was busy with fondant potatoes – a terrible, shameful waste, those identical squat cylinders of potato that could only be created by carving half of them straight into the compost bin. She had resisted them when Eve first arrived, arguing that they would do just as well baked whole. No, Eve had said, not for fine dining. Flat on their bottoms, flat on their tops, like little barrels. She had stood over Ruby until she turned out a tray of perfect fondants, and now she turned them out in dozens, buttery, rich, drunk on chicken stock. Roscoe was also in the kitchen, which meant that Angus was too, and the two boys had been put to work washing spinach leaves at the sink. Angus’s contribution to the task was questionable – he stood on a chair and played with the water – but Roscoe was compensating for him as he always did. Batista was seated as she could only stand for short periods before her ankles ballooned, and happily employed stringing runner beans while talking to the Lord, while Scotty was setting Wendell a bad example, standing at the open door of the larder and juggling with five onions. He was deft and sure, and deaf to Ruby’s reprimands.
Roscoe looked at Eve and started laughing too, because there is something infectious about another person’s amusement, whatever its source. Angus, with a small boy’s self-importance, assumed that he must be the joke and began to toss wet leaves higher up into the air, in an exaggerated version of what he had already been doing. One of them landed on Roscoe’s head like a dark green cap, and Angus bent double in the throes of unbearable mirthful bliss.
‘What on earth?’ said Ruby, looking between the spinach at the sink and the onions at the larder, and then at Eve, who grinned at her idiotically, full of the joy of her scheme. ‘What variety of madhouse is this?’
Eve said nothing, only smiled; Ruby, impatient with her, tutted and rolled her eyes, and returned to the potatoes. Eve went to the dresser where she kept a wooden box containing the menus from the past few weeks. She had instigated a simple filing system of the dishes they served, in order to keep an eye on their balance, variety and originality, and now she pulled them in a bundle from the box, a month’s worth of meals, all of them based on the elegant traditions of an English luncheon or dinner party: sole
à la crème
, vermicelli soup, pot-roasted pheasant, rolled breast of veal, apple charlotte, greengage jelly. The menus were printed on cream paper vellum of the best quality, because Silas Whittam could be accused of many things, but not miserliness. Their quality, though, worked against Eve now, making them difficult to rip in half, which was her intention. At first she tried to tackle the whole bundle in one go. Then, when they resisted, she took batches of four or five and tore up the menus with a sort of grim pleasure, as if the task were long overdue.
‘There,’ she said when the job was done. ‘Very good riddance.’ She dropped the remains into the bin and dusted off her hands.
Ruby, all eyes again and the potatoes temporarily forgotten, said, ‘Too long in the sun?’ Scotty chuckled and said, ‘Little man An-goose, your mamma gone cray-zee.’ Angus, interested only in spinach and water, was oblivious, but Roscoe stared, shocked by the episode; it seemed to him too close to vandalism, too much like the sort of offence that at school would result in a caning.
‘Now, Ruby,’ Eve said – quite rationally, for she was still perfectly sane – ‘This is t’plan. We continue as we ’ave been doing for this coming week. Then you and I will compile an entirely new menu, of Jamaican dishes. Food you make for yourself, food you eat at ’ome. Nowt – I mean, nothing – will be cooked in this kitchen that ’asn’t been raised or grown on this island. You won’t be needing Mrs Beeton, except for what she can teach you about English.’
There was a short, stunned hiatus, broken by Batista, who took up her strange half-wheeze, half-chuckle and said, ‘E-e-e-e-e, bakra ’im no like curry goat in ’im hotel, ’im no like rice ’n’ peas an’ mackerel rundown.’
Eve felt her announcement, her great scheme, had been somehow undermined. Needled, she said, ‘Why do you call Mr Silas “bakra”? What does it mean?’
Scotty and Wendell looked at their feet and Ruby coughed. Only Batista, to whom the question was addressed, seemed unabashed.
‘Bakra, ’im plantation slave masta, laang time ago,’ she said, giving her words a singsong lilt. ‘Bakra ’im crack ’is whip on flesh, mek de slaves work all de laang day.’
Scotty, emboldened by Batista, chipped in with a plainer definition. ‘Bakra: back raw,’ he said. ‘Raw from de sting of de whip.’
‘I see.’ Eve looked at the faces in the room, at Batista, Scotty, Wendell, and at Ruby and Roscoe. They were all watching her, wondering what her reaction might be to this small but significant insight. At the sink Angus made
plap-plap
noises in the water with his hands.
‘Well, do you think you might stop it? Only, if we’re to make this ’otel a better place to stay it first must be a better place to work. If you can all show willing, I’ll make sure my brother does too. I’ve seen what ’e can be like; I’m not blind. Everything in this hotel must change, even Silas Whittam. Leave ’im to me. But please’ – she paused, and looked at them all, looking back at her – ‘don’t keep calling ’im bakra.’
There was a long silence, which she decided to take for agreement, and smiled. ‘So. Next job, tonight’s dinner. Roscoe, is that spinach still fit to eat?’
He nodded.
‘Good, then drain it and dry it off. I need to pop upstairs.’
She left, and Batista drew a long, noisy breath through her teeth.
‘Call ’im whatever, ’im bakra by nature.’
Ruby, who couldn’t in all conscience disagree, said, ‘But his sister has a good heart.’
Batista pursed her lips and shook her head, and settled back to the beans.
Silas had left the hotel for the day, Seth told her: gone to Sugar Hill, on business pertaining to bananas.
‘Why do you want him?’ he asked.
He was sitting in Silas’s office, behind his uncle’s desk, and – to his mother, at least – he looked for all the world as if he were playing at being in charge. Eve almost said, Mind your own business, but then she remembered he was not only her son but also assistant manager. Even so, she wasn’t quite willing to disclose her plan.
‘Just an idea, that’s all, a possible way forward. When will ’e be back?’
‘Tomorrow, perhaps. Or the next day. He has to show his face at the plantation from time to time, otherwise they’ll start taking liberties.’
‘Who will?’
‘The pickers,’ said Seth unthinkingly. ‘Constitutionally idle.’
She looked at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Really? And I assume you’ve witnessed this for yourself?’
He flushed a little, and said, ‘All right, Mam, I know what you’re saying.’
‘Right. Well, think on before you start voicing your uncle’s opinions. Now, I need you to keep an eye on Angus for me, and I need a lift to Sugar ’ill. I shan’t be there long.’
‘What’s your idea, then? Must be good if it can’t wait.’ His voice was truculent, his expression sulky. The little boy was very near the surface of this young man, Eve thought.
‘It is good,’ she said. ‘You’ll ’ear it soon enough.’
Now he looked disconsolate, and she relented, but only fractionally.
‘The thing is, love,’ she said, ‘I’d prefer to speak with Uncle Silas first. Now, who can take me?’
‘It’ll have to be the trap,’ Seth said and, pleased to be able to exercise some authority in front of her, he fetched Maxwell and issued him with instructions: Hitch the mule to the cart and convey Mrs MacLeod to Sugar Hill without delay.
‘Please,’ said Eve to Maxwell, though it was rather transparently for the benefit of Seth, who was beginning to find this chastising habit of hers very wearing, not to say undermining. The assistant manager of the Whittam Hotel should not, he felt, be subjected to daily lessons in good manners from his mother. Maxwell sloped off to lead Edna to the cart, and Seth called after him to take the coast road, restoring to himself a modicum of self-regard with this display of local knowledge.
‘It takes longer,’ he said, turning to Eve, ‘but it’s less rutted.’ At least he had this, he thought; at least he knew where the potholes were.
Eve, bumping along on the seat of the trap, wondered what the rutted track might be like if this were the better one. Beside her, Maxwell chewed tobacco and, from time to time, squirted a jet of brown saliva from the corner of his mouth. There was no conversation, and the silence was the uncomfortable type, quite as intrusive in its own way as unwanted chatter. She kept her eyes on the road and was glad when Edna slowed and turned, at a sharp tug on the reins from Maxwell, into the gates of Silas’s estate. This was only the second time that Eve had been here; Silas seemed to see no reason to entertain his sister in his home when the hotel served perfectly well. Her previous visit, in her first days on the island, had been at Eve’s suggestion, not his. Silas had driven her and Angus down tracks lined with banana plants, explaining, in terms too technical to follow, the process of cultivation from rhizome to mature, fruiting crop. Afterwards his housekeeper had served them tea in a drawing room so pristine that it felt like an assault to leave a dent in the cushions. Eve thought about this now, as Maxwell drove her up to the great house; thought, too, about Silas’s solitary life up here at Sugar Hill. He had welcomed Eve and Angus on that day, but his smile had seemed warmer when they left than when they arrived. She was fond of her brother, but she didn’t claim to understand him.
‘I shan’t be very long,’ Eve said to Maxwell, hopping down from the seat as the mule slowed to a halt at the sweeping curve of the steps outside the house. ‘No more than an hour, anyway. I need to get back.’ But Maxwell shook his head and was already moving on. He turned his head and spoke over his shoulder.
‘Me kyaan wait here,’ he said – the first words he’d uttered since they left the Whittam. ‘Edna take fright at de duppies.’
‘What?’ she said, in some alarm. ‘What’s Edna afraid of? Maxwell? I’m going to need a lift back soon.’
‘Me kyaan wait here,’ he said again, and he chivvied the mule into a trot with a rattle of the reins. ‘Me take de trap to de lane, an wait dere.’
Helplessly, she watched him retreat. There was dust on her skirts and sweat ran in warm rivulets through her hair, down her neck, down her back. She’d been bitten on the journey: mosquito hour, Ruby called it, this point in the afternoon when day began to meet dusk. Two hot red lumps had risen on Eve’s wrist and another on the back of her right hand. She stood, feeling overheated and uncomfortable and – and this was irrational, since she’d asked to be brought here – abandoned. Maxwell had unsettled her with his silence and, now, his flight.