Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [0]
By
Jean Rhys
First published in 1966
Part One
They say when trouble come close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said.
She was my father’s second wife, far too young for him they thought, and, worse still, a Martinique girl. When I asked her why so few people came to see us, she told me that the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate where we lived was very bad and that road repairing was now a thing of the past. (My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed – all belonged to the past.)
Another day I heard her talking to Mr Luttrell, our neighbour and her only friend. ‘Of course they have their own misfortunes. Still waiting for this compensation the English promised when the Emancipation Act was passed. Some will wait for a long time.’
How could she know that Mr Luttrell would be the first who grew tired of waiting? One calm evening he shot his dog, swam out to sea and was gone for always. No agent came from England to look after his property – Nelson’s Rest it was called – and strangers from Spanish Town rode up to gossip and discuss the tragedy.
‘Live at Nelson’s Rest? Not for love or money. An unlucky place.’
Mr Luttrell’s ho was left empty, shutters banging in the wind. Soon the black people said it was haunted, they wouldn’t go near it. And no one came near us.
I got used to a solitary life, but my mother still planned and hoped – perhaps she had to hope every time she passed a looking glass.
She still rode about every morning not caring that the black people stood about in groups to jeer at her, especially after her riding clothes grew shabby (they notice clothes, they know about money).
Then, one day, very early I saw her horse lying down under the frangipani tree. I went up to him but he was not sick, he was dead and his eyes were black with flies. I ran away and did not speak of it for I thought if I told no one it might not be true. But later that day, Godfrey found him, he had been poisoned. ‘Now we are marooned,’ my mother said, ‘now what will become of us?’
Godfrey said, ‘I can’t watch the horse night and day. I too old now. When the old time go, let it go. No use to grab at it. The Lord make no distinction between black and white, black and white the same for Him. Rest yourself in peace for the righteous are not forsaken.’ But she couldn’t. She was young. How could she not try for all the things that had gone so suddenly, so without warning. ‘You’re blind when you want to be blind,’ she said ferociously, ‘and you’re deaf when you want to be deaf. The old hypocrite,’ she kept saying. ‘He knew what they were going to do.’ ‘The devil prince of this world,’ Godfrey said, ‘but this world don’t last so long for mortal man.’
She persuaded a Spanish Town doctor to visit my younger brother Pierre who staggered when he walked and couldn’t speak distinctly. I don’t know what the doctor told her or what she said to him but he never came again and after that she changed. Suddenly, not gradually. She grew thin and silent, and at last she refused to leave the house at all.
Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. Twice at year the octopus orchid flowered – then not an inch of tentacle showed. It was a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see. The scent was very sweet and strong. I never went near it.
All Coulibri Estate had gone wild like the garden, gone to bush. No more slavery – why should anybody work? This never saddened me. I did not remember the place when it was prosperous.
My mother