Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [11]
Still Aunt Cora stayed by my bed looking at me.
‘My head is bandaged up. It’s so hot,’ I said. ‘Will I have a mark on my forehead?’
‘No, no.’ She smiled for the first time. That is healing very nicely. It won’t spoil you on your wedding day,’ she said.
She bent down and kissed me. ‘Is there anything you want? A cool drink to sip?’
‘No, not a drink. Sing to me. I like that.’
She began in a shaky voice.
‘Every night at half past eight
Comes tap tap tapping –’
‘Not that one. I don’t like that one. Sing Before I was set free.’
She sat near me and sang very softly, ‘Before I was set free.’ I heard as far as ‘The sorrow that my heart feels for –’ I didn’t hear the end but I heard that before I slept, ‘The sorrow that my heart feels for.’
I was going to see my mother. I had insisted that Christophine must be with me, no one else, and as I was not yet quite well they had given way. I remember the dull feeling as we drove along for I did not expect to see her. She was part of Coulibri, that had gone, so she had gone, I was certain of it. But when we reached the tidy pretty little house where she lived now (they said) I jumped out of the carriage and ran as fast as I could across the lawn. One door was open on the veranda. I went in without knocking and stared at the people in the room. A coloured man, a coloured woman, and a white woman sitting with her head bent so low that I couldn’t see her face. But I recognized her hair, one plait much shorter than the other. And her dress. I put my arms round her and kissed her. She held me so tightly that I couldn’t breathe and I thought, ‘It’s not her.’ Then ‘It must be her.’ She looked at the door, then at me, then at the door again. I could not say, ‘He is dead,’ so I shook my head. ‘But I am here, I am here,’ I said, and she said, ‘No,’ quietly. Then ‘No no no’ very loudly and flung me from her. I fell against the partition and hurt myself. The man and the woman were holding her arms and Christophine was there. The woman said, ‘Why you bring the child to make trouble, trouble, trouble? Trouble enough without that.’
All the way back to Aunt Cora’s house we didn’t speak.
The first day I had to go to the convent, I clung to Aunt Cora as you would cling to life if you loved it. At last she got impatient, so I forced myself away from her and through he passage, down the steps into the street and, as I knew they would be, they were waiting for me under the sandbox tree. There were two of them, a boy and a girl. The boy was about fourteen and tall and big for his age, he had a white skin, a dull ugly white covered with freckles, his mouth was a negro’s mouth and he had small eyes, like bits of green glass. He had the eyes of a dead fish. Worst most horrible of all, his hair was crinkled, a negro’s hair, but bright red, and his eyebrows and eyelashes were red. The girl was very black and wore no head handkerchief. Her hair had been plaited and I could smell the sickening oil she had daubed on it, from where I stood on the steps of Aunt Cora’s dark, clean, friendly house, staring at them. They looked so harmless and quiet, no one would have noticed the glint in the boy’s eyes.
Then the girl grinned and began to crack the knuckles of her fingers. At each crack I jumped and my hands began to sweat. I was holding some school books in my right hand and shifted them to under my arm, but it was too late, there was a mark on the palm of my hand and a stain on the cover of the book. The girl began to laugh, very quietly, and it was then that hate came to me and courage with the hate so that I was able to walk past without looking at them.
I knew they were following, I knew too that as log as I was in sight of Aunt Cora’s house they would do nothing but stroll along some distance after me. But I knew when they would draw close. It would be when I was going