Authors: Chris Dolan
Redlegs (31 page)
Now there were mean little hotels next to grander ones, the Seamen’s Mission, rumshops and boarding houses. She turned away, having seen all she had come to see. Like the end of a theatrical performance: having been Juliet or Cleopatra for a few nights running, the last curtain call is taken, and the actor returns to earthly reality; to the dullness of an existence where no great love, or murder, or tragic death is required. Juliet shrivels inside the breast, Miranda seeps away like candle-smoke, and the truer tragedy of life without accolades or drama insists on its proper place.
When evening fell, she followed a sign for Parris Hill and watched the sun go down behind the tall sugar-cane.
“Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” It must have been autumn, for the trees were dropping their leaves like undergarments. Coming down the hill she met the sea and stopped.
“The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked
I cried to dream again.”
She took the letters from her coat, and noticed for the first time that among them was Shaw’s Essay. She placed it and the women’s epistles on the wash, like children’s paper boats, and watched the tide suck them out. Words. Words on water. She wondered as she watched them sail away – black scrawls on white parchment – what happened to words once they were spoken. They lived in the air, becoming ever fainter but never dying. The very air she was
breathing
at that moment was full of all the words she and everyone she knew had ever uttered.
Perhaps Fate had chosen red for her own twilight – she had no comprehension of her own mania for it. If the other women – those who had not left and never would – had been turned slowly into fig-trees, ruddy, stout, and dry like vines, rooted and immobile, then Elspeth Baillie was a flame tree, the pride of Barbados, blowing red to the end of her days.
March 2012
I gave Martha Ruddick a copy of Jean Alexander’s book the day before I left Barbados.
“An old aunt,” she said, “used to tell about something that happen when she was a chile. Be about 1910. Two women came out o’ the blue, stopped by for a few weeks. The older was white and
silver-haired
, the young ’un a dark-skinned picky-head, but they tell unna they was mother and daughter. Mrs. and Miss Armstrong.”
Martha said these women claimed no connection with Roseneythe, having arrived in Barbados from a distant island and choosing to pass some time here on account of the famous beauty of the place, and the solitude and serenity they found. The daughter spoke uneven English, her sentences peppered with Spanish words. The estate rarely had visitors, but it was proud of its hospitality. From the moment they arrived, the Misses Armstrong were made welcome and comfortable, and the ladies in return demonstrated a willingness to learn about their hosts. They sat and listened to stories, barely talking themselves, but nodding their heads encouragingly at anyone who spoke with them.
“Keen artists they was. Apart from one li’l suitcase between them, all they brought was easels and watercolours.” They wandered around the grounds sketching, in pencil or paint, the woods, the fields, the house, and the bay. Especially the bay. “The mother, my auntie say, drawed that cove every single day she was here.”
They also painted portraits. As people spoke to them and told them their stories they would ask permission to draw while they listened. So, while Beatrice Johnson or Jemima Lode sat talking of the old days, retelling tales about Nan Miller and Rhona Douglas, and the last sad days of Diana, and Junior Wickham spoke of Captain Shaw and Lord Coak, the women would listen and smile and nod, and paint unobtrusively.
Martha poured me a glass of mauby in the room where the portraits still hung. “These be the pictures they left behind.”
“Was the mother Bathsheba Miller?”
Martha shrugged. The strangers, according to her old aunt, built a little cairn of stones down by the cove. “It still there – least till the developers come, and rub everything out.”
I went to the window and looked out at the bay. Plans had already been made for Northpoint Bay Holiday Complex. The cove will be a water-hazard over the fifth hole of a manicured golf links. The figs and jacarandas will be gone. There’ll be luxury chalets instead of wooden chattel-houses. “I just keep a still tongue and a fuzzy eyebrow,” Martha said.
“What became of Elspeth?”
“Nobody knows. No grave marked out to her here. Some say she die in Shaw’s cabin. Some that she become a procuress down Baxter Road way. My auntie swore she die on the road ’tween here and town. Elspeth Baillie be like salt in sauce. She’s everywhere and nowhere.”
Martha joined me at the window. “We’ve had enough of this place. Everywhere you look you feel the crack o’ the factor’s whip and the taste o’ bitter planter’s punch in your mouth. Everyone wants to go home, don’t they? Like you doing today, sir. No place like home.”
I asked where home would be for her and the Rosies now. “We’re still a long way off. But folks are waiting. Cousins up by where you come from, mister. People still lookin’ for we back there.”
This story was conceived twenty-one years ago when, working for UNESCO in Barbados, I met my first “Redleg” (properly, poor white; and the “Rosies” are entirely of my own making). I have accumulated far too many people in that time to say a proper thank you and sorry to. But certain names should be mentioned: Cheryll Seally in whose various homes I worked, and who introduced me to Jill Shepherd (famous for The Redlegs of Barbados and her rum punches), Fiona Morrison Graham for the RLS Award to write this book (sorry, I wrote a film), Dr. Gavin Wallace for the grant (sorry, I wrote another novel) and Lydia Conway for cajoling me into writing Barbado'ed which got this fiction going again.
Redlegs became a kind of personal travel book. Written over various trips to Barbados, and; in Grez-sur-Loing, Sanlucar, and Pamplona, as well as my family home when my elderly mum was living alone. Both she and the home have gone now. By chance I finished the novel in Japan visiting my daughter. A generational novel indeed.
Less thanks to the various people who tried to make me change the book in ways I wasn't equipped to do and which the book itself didn't like. But a heartfelt thanks â and sorry â to my ever-patient family. And to Rosemary, Ana, Carolyn, Bruce, and others who believed I might write something worthwhile sometime (even if this isn't it).
But my greatest debt is to Mike Gonzalez and Allan Cameron. Mike, for years of advice and friendship and for his continuing belief in this book. Allan, of Vagabond Voices, for his passion and unstinting commitment and, together with Janice Brent, for the gift of an extraordinarily meticulous and astute editing process. Mike and Allan gave me the confidence to finally publish; without them Redlegs would never have seen the light of day.
© Chris Dolan 2012
First published in June 2012 by
Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd.,
Glasgow,
Scotland
ISBN 978–1–908251–09–1
The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.
Cover design by Mark Mechan
Typeset by Park Productions
The publisher acknowledges subsidy towards this publication from Creative Scotland
For further information on Vagabond Voices, see the website,
www.vagabondvoices.co.uk