Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [35]
‘You don’t have to give me money. I do this foolishness because you beg me – not for money.’
‘Is it foolishness?’ I said, whispering and she laughed again, but softly.
‘If béké say it foolishness, then it foolishness. Béké clever like the devil. More clever than God. Ain’t so? Now listen and I will tell you what to do.’
When we came out into the sunlight, Jo-jo was holding Preston near a big stone. I stood on it and mounted.
‘Good-bye, Christophine; good-bye, Jo-jo.’
‘Good-bye, mistress.’
‘You will come and see me very soon, Christophine?’
‘Yes, I will come.’
I looked back at the end of the path. She was talking to Jo-jo and he seemed curious and amused. Nearby a cock crew and I thought, ‘That is for betrayal, but who is the traitor?’ She did not want to do this. I forced her with my ugly money. And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
I can remember every second of that morning, if I shut my eyes I can see the deep blue colour of the sky and the mango leaves, the pink and red hibiscus, the yellow handkerchief she wore round her head, tied in the Martinique fashion with the sharp points in front, but now I see everything still, fixed for ever like the colours in a stained-glass window. Only the clouds move. It was wrapped in a leaf, what she had given me, and I felt it cool and smooth against my skin.
******
‘The mistress pay a visit,’ Baptiste told me when he brought my coffee that morning. ‘She will come back tonight or tomorrow. She made up her mind in a hurry and she has gone
In the afternoon Amélie brought me a second letter.
Why you don’t answer. You don’t believe me? Then ask someone else – everybody in Spanish Town know. Why you think they bring you to this place? You want me to come to your house and bawl out your business before everybody? You come to me or I come –
At this point I stopped reading. The child Hilda came into the room and I asked her, ‘Is Amélie here?’
‘Yes, master.’
‘Tell her I wish to speak to her.’
‘Yes, master.’
She put her hand over her mouth as if to stifle laughter, but her eyes, which were the blackest I had ever seen, so black that it was impossible to distinguish the pupils from the iris, were alarmed and bewildered.
I sat on the veranda with my back to the sea and it was as if I had done it all my life. I could not imagine different weather or a different sky. I knew the shape of the mountains as well as I knew the shape of the two brown jugs filled with white sweet-scented flowers on the wooden table. I knew that the girl would be wearing a white dress. Brown and white she would be, her curls, her white girl’s hair she called it, half covered with a red handkerchief, her feet bare. There would be the sky and the mountains, the flowers and the girl and the feeling that all this was a nightmare, the faint consoling hope that I might wake up.
She leaned lightly against the veranda post, indifferently graceful, just respectful enough, and waited.
‘Was this letter given to you?’ I asked.
‘No, master. Hilda take it.’
‘And is this man who writes a friend of yours?’
‘Not my friend,’ she said.
‘But he knows you – o says he does.’
‘Oh yes, I know Daniel.’
‘Very well then. Will you tell him that this letter annoy me, and that he’d better not write again for his own sake. If he brings a letter give it back to him. Understand?’
‘Yes, master. I understand.’
Still leaning against the post she smiled at me, and I felt that at any moment her smile would become loud laughter. It was to stop this that I went on, ‘Why does he write to me?’
She answered innocently, ‘He don’t tell you that? He write you two letters and he don’t say why he is writing? If you don’t know then I don’t know.’
‘But you know him?’ I said. ‘Is his name Cosway?’
‘Some people say yes, some people say no. That’s what he calls himself.’
She added thoughtfully that Daniel was a very superior man, always reading the Bible and that he live like white people. I tried to find out what she meant