Chapter Five
Sometime in the early dawn I woke up with the words poring through my mind: German words, addressed to Mama. German was our secret language; our special bond, for my sisters had refused to speak it, and eventually forgot whatever they had learned. Not me; I loved German, for it connected me with her. So Mama had ensured that I not only speak but also read and write German; she shared her precious books with me, and taught me the words to Schubert’s songs, to Bach’s cantatas and to Rilke’s poems. When I was ten, she arranged for me to correspond with the daughter of the woman who had been her best friend back in Austria, and even now, Miriam Gottlieb and I exchanged at least three letters a year.
Mama grew up in Salzburg, in an upper class Jewish family. She grew up in a world of music, ballet, theatre and opera, and everyone told me that I had inherited my quiet nature, reserved disposition and love of artistic beauty from her. She was a gifted violinist, and had it not been for her prolonged mourning the two of us would surely have enjoyed many hours of exquisite music-playing – duets, and with Miss Wright’s arrival – trios, for like Mama, Miss Wright was an excellent pianist, and she also played the flute.
The upright piano in Mama’s morning room now stood mostly closed and silent. Her Stradivarius – given to her as a wedding present by her devastated but forgiving family – had returned to Europe with her; Mama had often hinted that the tropical climate would destroy it; perhaps it could now be rescued from that ruin.
How different from the old days! In the old days, before Edward John’s death, on some special evenings, we would push the drawing-room furniture against the walls, roll back the carpets, and Mama and Papa would dance. Oh, how they would dance! There was no music, no one to play the piano for them, much less an orchestra, but we would all sing the music, and sometimes I would play my violin: Da-da-da-da-da, da-da, da-da! Da-da-da-da-da, da-da, da-da! Laughing, they’d waltz to the Blue Danube, Papa’s long legs in his evening suit striding out as he swirled her around the room, Mama bent back over his arm, her head thrown back, her skirt swishing around her legs, her dark hair swinging, and always laughing. They would glide through the room as if on air, laughing, singing, and we children would clap and laugh too, and sometimes we’d join in and dance with them, spinning barefoot around the polished drawing room floor. Sometimes Mama would twirl herself free of Papa’s arms and dance alone, arms swinging, eyes closed, and we’d know she was back in Salzburg under the chandeliers in an exquisite, sparkling gown, dancing to a full orchestra. Papa would watch with eyes glowing in admiration. Then he’d step up to her with open arms and she’d sail back to him and they’d dance the last coda together, ending it all with a flourish, she with a dainty curtsy, he with a deep bow, removing an imaginary hat; and we girls would clap excitedly and cry for an encore.
‘Wunderbar! Ach, how I wish you girls could hear the orchestra!’ she would cry, and sigh in frustration, for this she could not offer us; there was no orchestra in the whole of BG. But we could hear the music by the way she danced, by the light in her eyes, by her radiant beauty, by her cries of ‘Wunderbar!’
And then the singing stopped, and the dancing, and the cries of Wunderbar! I missed those evenings so much, the gaiety and the joy of seeing Mama and Papa, such a beautiful couple, happy and dancing together, palpably in love; but when I tried to speak of them to Yoyo, she would only sneer.
‘Schmalz!’ said Yoyo of my nostalgia. ‘Pure Schmalz.’
If Papa missed those dance evenings he never spoke of it to us; Kathleen had moved on to a better, more exciting life; and so it was left to me alone to yearn and pine for better days, and for Mama.
Mama and I, I always believed, shared a special link in spite of her sorrow. Of her three daughters, Kathleen and Yoyo were fair, like Papa, whereas I was dark-haired, like her. There was the music we both loved, the violin lessons she had given me from the time I was a small child; Kathleen and Yoyo were bored by music. Then there was language. Mama had spoken to us all in German when we were little. It was our first language, literally our mother tongue, but after a while, my sisters refused to speak it, and Papa forgot the few words he had learned as a youth, forcing her to switch to English. So German became our own private language. Mama clung stubbornly to her little German gems of comfort, such as pronouncing Yoyo’s full name, Johanna, the German way – Yohanna – and sprinkling her speech with ja’s and nein’s and calling us girls Liebes or Schatz, and Papa, Liebling.
In the old days, the good days, that language was our link. Even through Mama’s silences, and the sadness that clung to her like a miasma, I felt it. I was the one who could best reach her. I shared her beloved books; I understood her melancholy; I knew her depths. When Mama sat at the piano and sang those wistful Schubert Lieder, I tuned in to the wellspring of yearning at the core of her being. When she spoke longingly of the Austrian seasons, I could empathize.
‘Schnee!’ Mama would sigh, and in her clipped Austrian accent, add, ‘Snow! There is nothing in the world so beautiful!’ conjuring up a vision of a thick white silent blanket that covered the world in cold pristine beauty. Mama’s Heimat: her home. Not mine. I never longed for that Heimat; I was happy right here, in my own. Mama lived in a world that was purely emotional, consisting of nostalgia and homesickness and grief and memories of friends and family and places she would most likely never see again. Young girls never think much about their own mothers’ cares and sorrows, and it was only much later that I pieced together Mama’s story and understood how unhappy she must have been in BG.
Now, lying in bed, I longed for her so much that tears pricked my eyes. I wanted to deposit the entire burden of this dramatic day in her lap. Have her guide me through the storm, tell me what to say to Papa, how to manage a situation that was far too complicated for a girl of sixteen. Even in her withdrawn, sorrowful state, she was still Mama, and I could draw strength from her. Mama – the real, original Mama, not the ghost of her we had known these last few years – would do something about those logies. I was sure of it.
The logies! Oh, those logies! And Nanny! Living out her life in the midst of such foulness! The memory of Nanny burst into my consciousness with the immediacy of a bomb blast, casting out all worry of Mama; grief overcame me for the first time, the grief that had been displaced by the general shock of what we had seen. Her face, gleaming brown with coconut oil, loomed before me: the kind eyes wrinkled around the edges, the thin greying hair tied back in a plait down the back of her neck, her softness when she gathered us into her arms, Yoyo and me. The Hindi words we had learnt from her; her voice, always warm, always calm: ‘don’ worry, beti, everyt’ing gn’ be all right.’ But everything wasn’t all right for her. She never said … she never spoke. She never told us of her real home in the logies.
And then Papa. His fury. The whipping of the coolie. It was just too much.
I needed to talk to Mama. I needed to talk to her desperately. And since I couldn’t I had to write. In the half-light, I slipped from the double bed I shared with Yoyo, taking care not to wake her as I ducked beneath the mosquito net and tiptoed barefoot across the floorboards to the door. Across the hall to the schoolroom, avoiding the board that creaked, into the schoolroom, and straight to the desk. I removed a pad of paper from the top drawer, found my pen, and dipped it into the bottle of Quink. I did not have to think; it was as if it were already written and all I did was to take dictation.
Liebe Mama, I wrote, and continued, in German:
It has only been a few months since you left us and already it seems like a lifetime since we waved goodbye on the Georgetown wharf. How I miss you! I have so much to tell you and I wish so much you were here! …
It was an outpouring; words erupted from me such as I would never have been able to say to her face. It was the longest letter I had written in my life. I told her everything. I told her of my loneliness and isolation; I told her of the logies and the whipping and Miss Wright. I told her I remembered the Troublemaker, the book about slavery. I did not stop writing once. I did not read it over to correct spelling or other mistakes, as Miss Wright would have insisted. It was not a well-written letter. But it came from my heart and it said all the things I wanted Mama to know; so before I could have doubts and second thoughts I folded it, pushed it into an envelope, sealed it with red sealant, and stamped it with the Promised Land stamp. There. It was done. I slipped it into the neck of my nightgown and returned to bed, at peace. The next thing I knew it was morning.
After breakfast, I told Yoyo what I had done – that I had written to Mama and wanted to go to the post office to post it.
‘You wrote to Mama? Why, you should have told me – I would have added a few words and then she would have heard from both of us. Really, Winnie, you can be so selfish at times. Wait a few minutes and I’ll add a letter of my own. Or have you already sealed the envelope?’
For a moment, I held my breath: would she insist on opening it? Read the letter? It was so private, so intimate! Then I remembered it was in German; she could not read German. I nodded.
‘Bother!’ said Yoyo, and, ‘really, you should have told me. We could have written together. I do hope you told her what is going on here! Did you? Good. Well, then that’s done and I won’t bother to write this time – I do hate writing letters. Especially since I’m sure she won’t write back – but she does need to know the situation here. I hope you told her in no uncertain terms what we think of Papa! Really, I’m quite furious and I don’t know if I can ever forgive him. Very well, then, let’s go down to the village.’
So we collected our bicycles and rode down to the village. Usually Harry our house-boy did this, but it was Saturday, so there were no lessons, and we had our weekly pocket money to spend. Papa had left for Georgetown before dawn, so we did not see him before we left, and I was glad of it; the more time passed between the incidents of the last few days the less inclined I was to meet Papa face to face. The inevitable confrontation was postponed, and I was glad of it. I now realised how carefully we had to tread. Papa had become a stranger.
It was good to escape the house, which more and more was beginning to feel less like a home and more like a prison – a place that kept us away from a world briskly striding forward. I had never thought about this before – that out there, across the river that separated us from the more progressive county of Demerara and across the ocean that lapped almost to our doorstep, events took place – that the dramas I read about in my beloved novels had their counterparts in real life. And that, but for the accident of our birth and the isolation of our geography, we too would have been a part of that bustling world, knowing things, seeing things we could only dream of, and living lives worthy of being written about in novels.
As we rode along the sandy path towards the village, I noticed for the very first time the coolies working in the cane fields that lined the road. I mean, really noticed them, which is different from merely seeing. I had never really seen them before as people; they were simply an integral part of the landscape; their dark shiny bodies glistening in the sunshine were as familiar to me as the emerald green cane or the cobalt blue of the sky. I even had thought it beautiful – part of the Courantyne charm. I had taken them for granted.
But wait – no. A young child takes nothing for granted. I had noticed them, when I was very young. I had asked questions. Who are those brown people? I had once asked Mama. Why are they not wearing clothes? Why are they cutting cane? Why are they in the water? Why are they so unfriendly, not greeting us?
‘They are the Poor Unfortunate,’ Mama had replied. ‘We must pray for them.’ And she had. Every evening when Mama led our prayers at our bedside she had added, after we had prayed for all our family members, ‘and bless the Poor Unfortunate’. After Edward John’s death Mama had no longer led the prayers, and we had forgotten the Poor Unfortunate, and that is when they became part of the landscape. Only bodies. A part of the background of my existence: not really people, with homes, families, children, cares, sorrows, and the propensity to be happy and love and plan and care about their own lives.
Guilt struck me as a bolt from heaven. How could I have been so blind, so wrapped in my own world? How could it be? It was like emerging from a thick black fog; like sight returning to the blind. A great sense of helplessness and despair descended on me. I was a prisoner of history, of my ancestry. It held me captive within thick walls that I, alone or even with Yoyo, could not break down. What would we do? What could we do, two young girls dependent on the very keeper of that fortress for their own survival?
The village started with a few straggling cottages. A darkie woman in her front garden waved and smiled as we rode past, and a man carrying a bulging bag across his shoulder removed his cap; we were well known. The post office was on this main road. We dismounted, placed our cycles on their stands, and entered.
It was no more than a single room on ground level, divided by a waist-high counter, the larger portion of the room being behind the counter. The walls of the behind-counter area were lined with shelves and cupboards; there were drawers and cubbyholes and a rather large desk with a chair; and at the desk someone sat with his back to us. Strange clicking noises seemed to be coming from the desk. The front door was wide open, and we made no sound as we crossed the threshold, and so this someone did not hear our entry, and jumped when Yoyo called out, ‘good morning’. He sprang to his feet, almost toppling his chair, and turned towards us.
My heart stumbled unaccountably as I recognised him. It was the lad who had delivered Uncle Percy’s letter. Of course it was! Hadn’t he said that he was replacing Mr Perkins? The various dramas that had followed in the wake of our first encounter had wiped his memory entirely from my mind, and only now I remembered – what? Nothing, really; nothing real. Simply an acute sense of his presence, and bemusement at his entire demeanour, and an odd sensation I could not identify for I had never known it before; not ever, not with anyone, and certainly not with a darkie. The nearest I can come to describing it is this: it was an overwhelming sense of recognition. As though I already knew him, even though I didn’t. As if we had already met, even though we hadn’t. As if we were already friends, even though we weren’t. All of those feelings, combined and vague, and distinctly foreign: it was the other Big Thing of the last few days. And that Big Thing was back. My breath stopped as he leaped across the room to join us at the counter.
‘Good mornin’, ladies, Miss Cox, mornin’; what can I do for you?’ he said, and looked from me to Yoyo and back, smiling that very same smile as before, a grin that Papa would certainly have described as ‘too familiar for a darkie’, and yet it wasn’t: it contained nothing but simple friendliness. A heart-warming smile that made you want to smile back, so I did, and, I’m afraid to say, I blushed; at least, my cheeks grew hot so I knew that they were red. Ashamed of that blush, I lowered my eyes from his; I was strangely sure my eyes gave me away, that he could read me like a book.
When I looked up again I found he was engaged with Yoyo, who, unlike me, seemed perfectly composed; she had, apparently, looked beyond him to the desk at which he had been sitting.
‘What’s that thing?’ she asked, pointing.
‘What? Oh, that. I’ll show you.’
He bounded over to the desk and back and placed the object in front of us. It was a strange, rather crude contraption: a small wooden board, on top of which a wooden lever was balanced on a metal hinge; it had a knob on one end, and on the other a metal spike on the lever, which touched a small metal plate on the board. Underneath it was a spring. As he showed it to us he grasped the knob end and tapped a few times; the noise that we had heard emerged, an arrhythmic staccato sound.
‘It’s a Morse machine – a Morse key,’ he said. ‘I made it myself! I’m practicing the Morse code. Look, see, you tap this li’l thing here, and normally, it would have wires attached to it that you send out long and short pulses down the wire, codes for letters, words. And someone on the other end of the wire, even far away, gets the message and writes it down. Hey presto: a telegraph! You have to learn the combinations of dots and dashes – really. They’re called dits and dahs, but we like to call them ‘dots’ and ‘dashes’ anyway. Look how it works:’
He tapped several times on the machine again, and then looked up with an expression of pure delight. ‘See? You know what that was?’
I watched him as he spoke, taking in his features; they pleased me. Today he was without his khaki postman’s cap; his hair was cropped short, in the darkie style. His hairline started far back on a shiny high forehead – a stark black curving line that swept in and out along the natural contours of his forehead, the hair springy like black moss against the smooth dark brown of his skin. His eyes were large, set wide apart beneath finely drawn brows. A generous smile revealed pearly white teeth set in a strong jaw with a dimple in the middle. On the counter, long-fingered hands moved in time to his speech to demonstrate his words, tapping at the machine.
‘No,’ said Yoyo. ‘What was it?’
‘Everybody knows that! SOS! Dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot: ‘S-O-S’. Save our souls – the emergency call!’
‘Oh, well, our souls don’t need saving.’
She nudged me then, and I woke up. All this time, while he had been speaking, he had looked from one of us to the other: mostly to Yoyo, as she had posed the questions and he was, officially, answering her; and yet he kept glancing at me as if to include me in the conversation, or as if to – oh, I don’t know. It was more than that. It was as if there were two conversations going on, one on the surface, a spoken one, with Yoyo, and another beneath the surface, a silent one, with me; and only he and I knew the silent one. But then again maybe it was all my own rabid imagination, this thing about a silent conversation, and I was just being silly and over-sensitive and taking my ‘inner feelings too seriously’, which is what Yoyo would say.
The nudge she gave me was as good as an accusation. ‘Oh!’ I said, as I jumped to attention. ‘I have a letter!’ And pulled it out of my purse.
The young man looked even more delighted. ‘A letter!’ he said, and, looking at the address, ‘to Norfolk, England. That will be twopence.’ He pronounced Norfolk phonetically, Nor-folk, which I found endearing.
But Yoyo laughed. ‘It’s pronounced Nor-fuck,’ she said.
I gasped in shock, my ears burning. I’m sure I turned beetroot red. How could she say that word! In a man’s presence! A word we’d heard whispered about, giggled about, with the other youths from the senior staff compound, the dirtiest word of all! Yoyo only giggled, enjoying her moment. I met his eyes; his lingered in mine, and I saw embarrassment there. I turned away, fumbled in my purse, and handed him the money. I watched as he tore a stamp from a large sheet, brushed it with glue, and stuck it on the envelope.
I was scrambling for something distracting to say, for Yoyo’s last word still hung in the air. I reached for the Morse key, and tapped a few times on it. Each time, it clicked.
‘So every letter is made up of dots and dashes?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, relief in his voice. ‘I taught myself. It’s easy – after a while you know the whole alphabet just as dots and dashes, so you could theoretically write a whole letter an’ sen’ it by telegraph. This letter, for example. You could write it in Morse and the recipient would get it mebbe even the same day. Think of it! Normally it would take weeks to get to Norf … to England, right? But the same day!’
‘But I thought telegrams were always short?’ That was me again; I had finally found a way out of my debilitating embarrassment, for I was genuinely curious. What if I could write to Mama and have my letters delivered the same day! What a miracle! How wonderful! But how could I write to her in telegraph form? Telegrams, after all, leave out all the superfluous words, and thus all the essential emotion.
‘That’s why I said theoretically,’ he replied. ‘Telegraph can’t replace letter-writing; it is a short-cut, like an instant message, with only the really important words. In a letter, you get to say everything with all the words you want; you put all your soul into the envelope. I like delivering a letter into somebody’s hand, ‘stead of into a letter-box. It makes people smile – mostly, people are happy when they get a letter. It’s true, sometimes it’s bad news – but still!
‘A telegram is different. It’s only for urgent news, the essentials. Let’s say a boy wants to tell his sweetheart how much he loves her. He can’t do that in a telegram. It wouldn’t work. He would have to write a letter. Say he wants to propose marriage. He would just say, ‘marry me’. And that’s the best way to get a marriage refusal – it sounds rude. So, letters are better for feelings. Telegrams are better for information – urgent information, news. Telegrams are just for important things, and you say it in a few words. I think if you were to get a telegram you would be frightened – because – is it bad news?’
He now spoke in a curious melange of simplistic Creole, multisyllabic vocabulary, bad grammar and educated content, all spoken in a rich, melodic voice that was somehow fascinating and – to me at least – hypnotic.
He tapped again into the machine.
‘What was that?’ asked Yoyo. Her eyes, too, sparkled; she seemed every bit as fascinated by the young man’s story as I was.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘dash-dot-dash-dash-dot-dot-dot-dot.’
‘What’s no?’
He tapped it out quickly, speaking as he tapped: ‘dash-dot-dash-dash-dash.’
‘So you know the whole Morse alphabet?’ Yoyo asked. ‘By heart?
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I taught myself. All I got to do now is practise, practise, practise so I can do it quick on the machine. As quick as handwriting. Quicker. I tryin’ to increase my speed. See, this machine isn’t connected to a cable so I can use it to practise. When it’s connected it sends electrical currents through the cable, and the person on the other end gets the signal and interprets it and writes it down in words and sends it to the recipient in a telegram. Easy!’
‘What about telephone?’ Yoyo asked. ‘Have you seen one? I heard some people are getting them in Georgetown. Surely that’s even better than telegraph? I mean to actually speak to people over a distance – that’s even more miraculous, isn’t it?’
But he shook his head in dismissal. ‘The problem with telephone,’ he said, ‘is that you got to set up a cable between the people who want to communicate. Plenty people got it in Georgetown, is true, and they even got lines all up the coast to the Berbice River. They ain’t yet manage to get it to New Amsterdam. And to cross the sea – country to country? No. I can’t imagine that happening. Maybe, a long time from now – who knows? No – telegraph is the thing. And one of these days I goin’ to be a telegraph operator. I goin’ to work for the West India and Panama Telegraph Company, Limited. And one of these days, I want to be the one runnin’ de whole telegraph company.’
Such pride in those words, such ambition!
‘Really!’ said Yoyo. ‘Can you – I mean – usually – I mean to run an office …’
She stopped, plainly embarrassed, but I knew what she meant and so too did the young man, for he scratched his head in obvious discomfort and rushed to explain.
‘I know is maybe too high-up for a coloured but I got a good education an’ if I can get some experience an’ learnin’ I can do it.’
‘What education do you have?’ I asked
‘Queen’s College!’ he said, and his grin spread wider than ever; Queen’s College, as everyone knew, was the most prestigious boy’s secondary school in the colony, and few darkies attended it.
‘I won a scholarship and I was able to attend till I got my School Certificate. An’ then I had to leave an’ the only job I could get was postman. But don’t matter – I like it. I was postman in Georgetown for a year, deliverin’ letters in North Cummingsburg. An’ then this job in Berbice came up an’ nobody wanted to take it, because it’s so far away, not even for six weeks till they find someone permanent from up here and train him in Georgetown, an’ I took it because I reasoned, if I do it, when the time come, an’ I want to work in the telegraph office, they gon’ remember me.’
‘So you don’t like it here?’ I asked. ‘I dare say it must be a bit lonely for you.’
‘Oh, I love it here!’ said the young man. ‘Nice and quiet an’ it gives me time to study, an’ the people are nice and friendly, not so rough like in Georgetown. Already I got a hundred friends in the village.’
I could easily believe that. He seemed to me the kind of person who drew others to him like a magnet, who might light up a room the moment he walked in. Like Mama. Like Mama used to be, that is. Yoyo was one of those people as well. There were such people, and there were shrinking violets, like myself, those who went unnoticed, a plain little weed.
There were only two differences to that situation on this occasion. He was the only darkie sunflower I had ever met. And he had definitely noticed me.
As he spoke his eyes drifted back to mine again and again, and I felt, I knew, that it cost him an effort to turn back to Yoyo, that he did so only for the sake of politeness; that he would rather look at me, even in silence; that he did not find me stupid and awkward and nondescript. He told me so with deep dark eyes more eloquent than a thousand words; eyes I could read as I read a book for they spoke a plain language uncomplicated by subterfuge; nothing hidden, nothing masked. All else, speech, language, words, were as a fog drifting above that essential clarity. I knew, without being told, that what I felt, this connection so intimate it was beyond speech, beyond all common methods of communication, was shared by him. He knew. I knew. It was something secret, powerful, and completely and utterly preposterous.
So preposterous it had to be all my imagination. I was making it up. It was only my starved romantic longings running wild. I was just a foolish little girl. Yes, that was it. Foolish, silly me.
‘What’s your name?’ I heard Yoyo ask the question through the fog, and I was glad of it, for in this new country of secret power and shattering doubt I was a stranger, and speechless.
‘George Theodore Quint,’ he replied, glancing from her to me. From the first I loved that name. It had something noble and strong and independent about it. Something different; something unique.
‘How old are you?’
‘Nineteen, Miss. Twenty next month.’
‘And already running the Post Office?’
He chuckled. ‘Young, yeah; but you know how it is in BG. Nobody don’ wan’ to go into the country. Nobody wanted to work in de Courantyne, not even for two-three months. I volunteered to come because it gon’ help me later on, when I look to become a telegrapher. An’ another thing – I got lines.’
He leaned forward and almost whispered the last word, hinting at some mysterious process by which influential people of anonymous identity had placed him into high position. This was the way many promotions worked in BG, though in this particular case it seemed less of a promotion than banishment to an unpopular post that nobody else wanted.
I would have loved to hear more about his lines, more about him, but Yoyo was growing restless, and bored, adjusting her clothing and tapping her fingers on the countertop. She looked at me and arched her eyebrows, asking if we should go. I nodded; not that I really wanted to go, but a nervous Yoyo was not good company.
‘Well, George, it was lovely speaking to you,’ She said now, and held out her hand for him to shake. He took it.
‘You are Miss …?’
‘Miss Johanna,’ she said firmly. ‘And my sister is Miss Winnie.’
It was my turn. I hesitated before I took that outstretched hand. His long fingers curled around mine and it was as if a current ran between us, passing from one to the other as if for those few moments we were joined, one entity, and my eyes met his again and I knew that he knew. Those eyes of his! They drew me in, and told me things that words could never tell. His hand lingered around mine, and I did not pull away. For those few moments we stood in silence, linked by our clasped hands, those locked eyes, and I sensed a parting of the ways, as if a river coursing down a mountainside suddenly discovered a new path, a hidden one between the rocks and off its well-worn course. As if our joined hands and locked eyes sealed some momentous pact with history.
An outsider, looking on, might see this: the Honourable Archibald Cox’s oldest daughter lowering herself to shake hands with the postman, a common darkie: a travesty. I knew only that there was no higher or lower. No white lady and darkie postman. There was only this: one soul. Unity. I had read of love at first sight, and doubted its reality. Surely it was mere imagination? Surely love came slowly, after long acquaintance, long conversation. Yet here it was, instant, and real.
‘Come on, Winnie; let’s go.’ Yoyo was already at the door. How could I pull my eyes away? His were hypnotic; they held me bound. We stood still for several seconds, joined by our gaze, our smiles. Then I took a deep breath, summoned all my strength, pulled away both my gaze and my hand. I smiled with secret knowledge, and turned to leave.
I was so much in a daze as I left the Post Office that I didn’t look where I was going and ran straight into a giant of a Someone as I turned to retrieve my bicycle. The next thing I knew, two giant paws were gripping my arms and I was looking up at the bluest eyes and the bushiest beard I ever did see. The eyes were set in a leathery face as brown as a light-skinned darkie, but the wild hair that surrounded it was brown, not black; and anyway the eyes’ brilliant blueness gave him away as European. And the beard! It was at least a foot long, all crinkles and frizz, darker than the hair on his head but still dark brown rather than black, fanning out from his chin in a glorious semi-circle of bush.
I cried out in shock: shock, first at the collision itself, then at the sight, then at the realization of who this was; who it could only be: Mad Jim.
I had seen Mad Jim before, several years previously; Papa had pointed him out one Sunday as we drove in our coach over to Sunday lunch at Glasgow. He – Mad Jim – had been walking along the road towards us, leading a donkey. On the donkey was perched a darkie woman. She had looked up at us as we passed; one glimpse of those striking dark eyes, and then she was gone; they were both gone. I looked backwards once we had passed, but Papa called me to attention.
‘Mad Jim,’ he said. ‘That’s what becomes of a man who abandons his own people. Pah!’ He spat over the edge of the coach. ‘Mad as a hatter.’
But I had heard of Mad Jim, and even if Papa wouldn’t tell us more, the rumours in the English compound told me enough. He was, indeed, mad; a white man who had lived in the fearsome bush, the jungle backlands, for several years with a darkie woman, and produced a horde of children from her – a pack of wild animals, they said. Then for some reason, he had moved to the outskirts of Promised Land village and mixed only with darkies and coolies; which, it seemed, was the chief symptom of his madness.
Now, as I looked into those sparkling bluer-than-blue eyes, I saw no madness but only keen interest; and the moustache that concealed his lips curved upwards in what could only have been a smile.
He pushed me gently away, still holding my arms in a firm, yet gentle grip. He seemed to search my face as if looking for some secret characteristic; and then he let go, touched his head as if to remove a hat, and said only, in a voice that was deep and gruff and tinted with a Creole melody, ‘Watch where you goin’, Miss Cox!’
I mumbled a quick apology and a good-day, grabbed my bicycle, and wheeled it to the road where Yoyo stood waiting. I looked back at Mad Jim; he was still looking at me and grinning. Then he touched his hat again, made a slight bow, turned and continued on his way. Yoyo and I rode off.
Only when we arrived back home did we realize: we had forgotten to buy our sweets.
Mama’s Diary: Salzburg, 1890
Liebes Tagebuch,
Tonight is the night! I am so excited! Tonight, the first Tuesday of the month. Papa will be away from home till midnight, for it’s the night his favourite chamber music quartet plays. He is always there, winter and summer alike; we will have an early dinner, as always, and then off he will go to the Mozart Hall, and I will be alone at last. My bag is already packed – I have hidden it away so that Else, the maid, will suspect nothing. I have also already told Else that I have a headache and I might sleep in late tomorrow morning. That way my absence won’t be discovered till late tomorrow. I have written a note to Father, which I will hide in my bed, under the covers, for Else to find. Hopefully by the time he reads it I will be halfway across Germany!
Just as Archie, right this minute, is halfway across Germany, on his way to pick me up! He is taking various trains from Paris – but tonight, once he has picked me up, we shall be boarding the Orient Express, back to Paris! How romantic that sounds! I can hardly believe it – Archie and I, on the Orient Express, to Paris! He will come to my house at nine; the coach will wait for him around the corner, and he shall come on foot, and I shall escape and meet him on the street.
I am beside myself with trepidation. Will all go according to plan? Yes! It must! I will be his tonight! (Though we will wait till Paris for The Main Event – I’m not quite sure what that means, but it’s what Archie said.) We will exchange our marriage vows in Paris – he says we should do it in Notre Dame Cathedral. He seems to have forgotten that I am Jewish. I will have to remind him. And I thought Notre Dame is Catholic, and he isn’t? But it is his God, and he will know what to do. I will have to let him know, though. Perhaps we can find a rabbi in Paris.
After that we move on to Calais, cross the English Channel, and on to Norfolk, his home.
He says his parents will be shocked but will get over it once it is all a fait accompli, and once they see how pretty and charming I am. I certainly hope so! And so, Liebes Tagebuch, I say goodbye to you for now. I don’t suppose I will have time to visit you in the next few days – the next time, it will all be over, and I shall be in Norfolk!
Poor Father. He will be frantic. But he will read the note and know that I have not been kidnapped by bandits, or anything like that. Though no doubt it will appear that way to him.
I am simply bursting with excitement!!!