The Pink House at Appleton Read online

  ‘Nice?’ Papa said, thinking it a strange word to use to describe a place that would determine their future.

  Mama paused, not quite knowing how to deal with Papa’s reply. ‘Will the electricians come tomorrow?’ she asked, changing the subject. ‘There’s no light in the pantry. And we could do with an outside light by the ironing room and the laundry room.’

  ‘Dixon will see to it,’ Papa said brusquely. ‘Didn’t I say so? He’ll do it, or send one of his lackeys. They have nothing to do but stand about.’

  ‘And the stove smokes. It makes poor Perlita cough and sneeze.’

  ‘Cough and sneeze? She should be so lucky. Can’t she get, what’s his name, Delroy, that brother of hers, to look at it? Lazy son of a gun. He’s always idlying about with his long hands at his sides and that lazy look in his eyes. I don’t understand these people. They can’t do anything without being told? And what is he doing hanging around the property day after day for? If he wants to be a yard-boy he needs to get to work.’

  ‘He doesn’t come here anymore. Perlita said he got a job with the Public Works Department, breaking stones on the road.’

  ‘I’d like to break stones on his head, that lazy good-for-nothing,’ Papa said. Then he sighed. ‘All right, Victoria. I’ll see to it. Probably hasn’t been cleaned since the day they put it in. People don’t seem to understand that the only way to maintain anything is to clean it. That kind of attitude can only hold back the country.’

  ‘I could bring back the gloss with a little Vim and steel wool,’ Mama said.

  Papa’s response was swift. ‘I didn’t take you all the way from St Catherine to Appleton to clean house. That’s maids’ work.’

  Mama, aghast, opened her mouth to speak but closed it as a sudden movement caught her eye. The curtains at the door parted and Perlita appeared, having been listening keenly to the conversation from her place in the kitchen. From habit she wiped her hands carelessly and lethargically on her apron. She was a St Elizabeth rural woman, not given to speaking with care and restraint.

  ‘Mr Brookes, sar,’ she said with insane boldness, ‘who going to deal with the travelling salesmen, sar? They come from off the road, through the gate and right up into the verandah, sar. Three, four of them a day, selling things Mrs Brookes don’t need. And them don’t take no for an answer. Them is hooligan, sar. Poor Mrs Brookes have to deal with them all the time, and she is expecting. The house too close to the road, sar, too close.’

  Papa considered this interruption shocking impertinence and paused long enough to demonstrate it. ‘Don’t you have work to do in the kitchen?’ he asked, glowering.

  ‘Yes, sar, ma’am,’ Perlita said, bowing slightly as she left.

  Papa’s expression was one that Mama knew well. Perlita was walking on thin ice.

  ‘It’s your job to train her,’ Papa hissed, leaving the table. ‘Do you expect me to do everything?’

  Papa, who at first liked the new house, had quickly grown to dislike it. All he heard from the brief interlude with Mama and the hapless Perlita were house problems. The house did not say Harold Brookes. It did not say Home of the Brookeses, a first rate family. It said ordinary. Papa wanted a house in a pastoral setting, with a garage, gardens, an expanse of lawn and a long driveway. His house should reflect not only his status on the estate but the level of his intelligence, his savoir-faire. And, frankly, he did not expect to wait forever. He learned from his father, the great Lascelles Brookes, banana plantation manager, dead now, that prosperity did not come to the meek, to those who stood in line.

  * * *

  Appleton was green and blue. Vast fields of sugar cane stretched into the distance, their green shoots steady in the wind on the valley floor. All day long the lemonade-sweet heat shimmered across the valley. Blue mountains crouched on the sunny horizon and green hills reached up from the open spaces, cut through by the snaking Black River. In the warm perfumed evenings the sunsets were radiant pink, painting the powdered faces of the estate wives sitting on the terrace at the club drinking Babycham and gossiping, while ignoring their restless husbands lined up at the bar. And at night a million stars, like golden sugar crystals, crowded the sky.

  On the grassy slopes stood the big houses of the managers, smaller houses for staff on their way up the management ladder and houses for others just beginning the climb. Papa’s house was in-between. It was solidly built, facing the road and the sprawling, silver, steaming factory: a giant engine down in the heart of the valley. In the mornings, as the sun crept up the hill, the verandah lay in soft shade. The three Brookes children liked to sit there and wave to the people who passed. The children.

  A small, glossy, perforated black and white photograph of them in the family album showed the eldest child, Barrington Winston Brookes, looking grave and grown-up at eleven years old, the plumpest of the three, in pepperseed trousers and starched white shirt. He held the hand of his sister, Yvonne Elizabeth Brookes, the youngest at five years old, forehead round and intelligent, hair pulled back, polka-dotted dress well above dimpled knees, a mischievous smile about her lips. Boyd Longfellow Brookes, the smaller of the two boys, dressed in short linen trousers buttoned to a white shirt, stared into the camera, brows knitted, enquiring, troubled. He gripped his little sister’s hand tightly. His feelings and his thoughts, mostly in grey and blueberry-blue, dwarfed him. He was eight years old.

  Every morning at this new house at Appleton they looked at the people passing by: the estate postmen who arrived on rickety red bicycles, zigzagging across the road, shirt-tails flapping in the breeze. The Bible women, dressed in dusty black, who relentlessly tried to save souls, having the front door slammed in their faces by Papa or an enraged Perlita. Mrs Moore, the chief engineer’s wife, with a pretty parasol, flowery dress, and a hat encrusted with artificial fruit, who waved and waved even when they thought she’d stopped waving. Miss Casserly, the young teacher with the sun on her face, cotton skirts like spread hibiscus, and always picked up by a punctual car long before she got to them. Mr Dixon, the electrician with gloved hands and tools sticking out of his pockets, who lived at the Bull Pen, the batchelors’ residence, but was to be found on the hill daily, fixing fuses, plugs and switches, wrapping black tape over wires and joking extravagantly with the maids. Mr Tecumseh Burton, the tailor from Balaclava with the American accent (Perlita called it a ‘twang’) who, touting for business with his nephew, Edgar, drove up in a black Chevrolet with bales of cloth, took Barrington and Boyd’s measurements and delivered well-cut short trousers a week later, saying to Papa, ‘At a good price, suh’. Mr Jarrett, the sprayman, his magnificent brass spraying equipment heavy on his shoulders and his fragrant, gorgeous smell. He visited often to pump up his apparatus and spray the air. The children loved him the most, because he was tall and thin with sleepy eyes and praying-mantis features. They smelled him before they saw him. His aroma was of the lovely spray fumes and DDT. As he slowly passed, the sun glinting off him, they breathed deliciously, waving deliriously. He always turned to look with mock surprise as if seeing them for the first time, his cigarette never leaving his lips. Sometimes he presented them with sweets: Mint Balls, round and white with pink stripes down their sides and covered in white sugar, vivid pink and white coconut candy that crumbled in their hands, sticky Staggerback that clung joyfully to their teeth and Paradise Plums wrapped in crackling greaseproof paper. The Paradise Plums he took out one by one from a paper bag like a naughty but wonderful magic trick, each one pink on top and yellow underneath, as the children trembled with unsurpassed delight.

  Other people passed by too. The maids in pairs, chattering and gay, laughing like carefree birds by the water’s edge; and higglers, market women, their breasts heaving and their bottoms in a shocking rhythmic romp, bankras heavy on their heads. And there were gardeners in overalls, more casual in their walking, handymen and beggars and peculiar people whose business they could not determine. And there was one other person.

  This person wore
dark clothes and rode by the house on a black bicycle every day just before ten o’clock. The only thing that was not dark about him was his machete, two and a half feet of steel, white sharp in the light, strapped to the bicycle frame. The children found him mysterious. They had their eyes on him every day, daring him to look so that they could wave, but they never waved because he never looked.

  ‘He’s not nice,’ Yvonne said, exasperated, after five mornings in a row fixing him with a steady eye and getting no response.

  ‘You mustn’t say that,’ Perlita cautioned, a picking finger up her nose. ‘Him is as straight as a arrow. Everybody say so.’

  ‘But he’s not looking at us,’ Yvonne remonstrated, not interested. ‘He’s blind. And deaf and dumb too!’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Barrington told her. ‘Blind people don’t ride bicycles.’

  Watching the dark figure disappear down the lane, Boyd knew why he didn’t look. It was for the same reason he himself didn’t always look people in the eye. Papa said it was because of lack of confidence, but it wasn’t anything of the sort. The eye revealed everything. People could look straight into you, deep down into the secret pinkness where you lived. The bicycle rider concealed things he did not want anyone to know about. Boyd knew. He had secrets too. Great Expectations lay opened on his bed at a certain page. He couldn’t wait to get back to the book and to the two fascinating characters in it: the pretty girl, Estella, who made his heart flutter, and the boy, Pip, who really was Boyd Longfellow Brookes. And so, as he hurried away, he did not hear Perlita’s final remarks.

  ‘Him keep himself to himself,’ Perlita said of the bicycle-rider. ‘Him don’t drink at rum bars all night like some of the good-for-nothing men. Him don’t smoke or gamble. Him is a strange man but him don’t busy himself in other people’s business.’ Perlita said he arrived at the factory at ten o’clock every day and left at six every evening. People set their watches by him. His name was Mr Ten-To-Six.

  ‘Ten-To-Six!’ Yvonne laughed, unbelieving.

  * * *

  It was wonderful at first, this standing about on the verandah of the new house, waving cheerfully at all and sundry. Yvonne even pretended that the balustrade was a bucking horse and rode it, shouting ‘Giddyap, giddyap!’ brown legs and feet in misbehaving imaginary stirrups.

  ‘Those lovely little children,’ Mrs Moore said. And the maids commented to their mistresses, who mentioned it to their husbands, who repeated it, in their way, at the club. Papa got wind of it, interpreted it as only he could, and put a stop to it forthwith. Driving home early from work one day he towered over the children, scowling, in short khaki trousers, knee-length socks, and heavy brown brogues smelling of Nugget polish.

  ‘Get inside the house. You’re not little vagabonds. If I ever catch you out here again fooling around, I’ll put you on the streets to beg your bread!’

  The words were so shocking that the children stumbled backward into the house. They knew (from peering out the rear window of the Prefect) what it was like to beg for bread. Mr Rawhog, the local vagabond, did it. And look at him – forever crouching in the gutters, dirty, his crotch wet and smelling of wee, always hungry and desperate-looking, no home to go to, always at the mercy of the rain, and no roast beef, rice and peas, cabbage and fried plantains cooked by Perlita for Sunday lunch.

  ‘Get out of my sight!’ Papa marched after them. ‘Here I am trying to teach you values and principles and there you are trying to drag me into the gutter. You want to behave like those people? Go on. You’ll see where that will get you.’

  Papa was values and principles. He talked about values and principles at the dinner table when everyone was there to hear, and in the car when no one could get away. He said that those people would never amount to anything because they lacked two very vital ingredients, values and principles. Those people were degenerates who had children (little bastards) in every town and village and who walked away from their responsibilities. Those people, Papa had said, lowering his voice, were all busy committing adultery, which was all they were good for. None of the children knew what adultery meant. But they guessed it meant something bad, and because Mama seemed very uncomfortable, never dreamed of asking her. The dreadful people committing adultery were so disreputable that they made no plans for their children’s education. That, Papa said, was the most irresponsible thing of all. Large numbers of them were leaving Jamaica for England by banana boat. Good riddance.

  From the safety of their bedrooms they heard Papa’s strident voice. Mama’s was low and whimpering. They heard Papa’s heavy brown brogues firm and quick upon the red Polyflor-polished wooden floors. Hidden behind drawn curtains they saw him lurching in the yellow Willys jeep down the winding road, back to the factory with its white steam that said Shhhhh, Shhhhh, Shhhhh day after day, and the pervasive smell of boiling sugar that lulled everything into pastoral calm.

  When Papa was gone, the children came out from their rooms and Mama came to them. It was in that magical period of the morning between nine and eleven o’clock. At that time fathers were at work and maids dusted and polished and the Mullard radio played Housewives’ Choice, music by Harry Belafonte, Doris Day, The Platters and Jimmie Rodgers (Oh, Honeycomb, won’t you be my baby, well, Honeycomb, be my own). The verandah opened upon the world and Mama herself wanted to be in the world, not locked away in an estate house. But that was where Papa wanted them to stay, not standing idly about on the verandah like common people. Mama herself now watched for the yellow jeep with its big, baby-round headlamp eyes and warned the children as it laboured up the slope. But she was sad.

  Mama did not want to end up like her mother, alone in that house in St Catherine, unfulfilled, with only death to look forward to. She wanted to realise her little dream.

  ‘A dressmaker!’ Papa said, shocked, when she first brought it up. ‘You want to be a dressmaker?’

  ‘More like a designer,’ Mama calmly suggested, desperately wanting Papa to show just a flicker of genuine interest.

  ‘You’ve never said anything before.’

  Mama was silent, thinking about Enid, her sister. Enid led a fantastic social life, had a smart house in an upmarket district of Kingston, knew people, had travelled abroad and had the sort of experience Mama could only dream about. Enid had realised her dream.

  ‘And where would you do your dressmaking?’

  ‘I would work from home,’ Mama replied eagerly, immediately seeing orders for her clothes being dispatched by train to Daphne’s and Issa’s in Kingston, and Sunday newspaper articles raving about her designs.

  Papa had laughed and stared at her hard. You are a mad woman, his eyes said. Papa knew about dressmakers. They were small-town, peasant women, who sat before aged Singer sewing machines in the untidy front room of their modest little houses, surrounded by cheap-smelling materials and half-finished clothes for even less dignified women and various odd people. It was not an image that complemented his vision of big house and garden and servants, and delightful evenings at the club. He found it hard to believe that Mama could contemplate such a thing. He wouldn’t hear another word about it after that.

  CHAPTER 2

  After that dressing-down from Papa, the children kept well away from the front verandah. Mama too. She felt as if she’d received a dressing-down herself, and decided that if she couldn’t go into the world, she would invite the world in. So she invited Mrs Moore for a chat one morning. Boyd peeped in at the door, sniffing and savouring the drifting woman fragrance of Mrs Moore. It was a spicy-camphor sort of smell, nothing like his Aunt Enid’s frangipani scent. The radio played Que Sera Sera, Whatever Will Be Will Be while Mrs Moore talked in her older woman’s voice. And she showed ankles and smooth upper arms that stirred feelings and thoughts that Boyd had never known.

  ‘Victoria, you must come up to the club and meet the rest of us,’ the older woman’s voice of Mrs Moore said. ‘You can’t stay shut up in the house forever.’ She laughed and Mama laughed too, liking Mrs
Moore with her colourful hat, encrusted with artificial fruit.

  ‘I see you’ve already got yourself a maid,’ Mrs Moore observed. ‘It took me six months to get anyone decent. Good maids are hard to come by in St Elizabeth, and you have to teach them everything. Is she any good?’

  ‘Oh, she seems fine,’ Mama replied, not wanting to mention Perlita’s frequent nose-picking and the many nasty little habits she was fast discovering, like the endless hawking and spitting. Mama was tired of telling Perlita to wash her hands before she kneaded the dough for the dumplings. Perlita didn’t think much of that advice. She went to the bathroom to do number two and didn’t wash her hands there either, and she coughed and sneezed at will. Sometimes wriggly strands of her hair were found in the sauce at dinner. Perlita was on borrowed time. One more slip and she was out, to beg for her bread on the hot, dusty roads of St Elizabeth. That was what Papa said.

  ‘Hmm,’ Mrs Moore murmured. ‘Never let anything fester. If they have to go, let them go.’ She slapped her fleshy thigh to make her point and Mama’s head snapped back. ‘Get rid of them. On the spot!’

  ‘She seems fine,’ Mama repeated meekly. ‘Very pleasant.’

  ‘Without a good maid,’ Mrs Moore told Mama gravely, ‘it’s difficult to run an estate house, as you know. And it’s more difficult here in St Elizabeth with the poor quality of the maids. The laziness. The gossip! Everyone on the estate knows your business. It’s all they’re interested in. And the thieving! They’ll steal the clothes off your back.’