was related by blood to himself and their mother. Nothing of Duncan’s abrasive nature was ever evident in his sister.
May knew she would never return to Barbados. The presence there of her father had been one deterrent. Now the absence left by her mother’s death and the opportunities offered by her new life in England gave her two more. As well as the deep affection she felt for her cousins and the endless challenges and excitements of her job, there was her growing interest in one particular individual who occupied her thoughts more every day.
Eventually Sam said he wanted to walk to the river that May had told him about so often. The prospect of being by water always calmed him, and he set off, oblivious to the irony that it was water which had taken his mother from him so recently. Exhausted by trying to restrain her tears May went to lie down on her bed in Mrs. Cage’s house, where she stroked each of the little forget-me-nots in turn as they hung on the sliver chain round her wrist. At last she allowed herself to weep wildly and loudly and without control, before burying her face in the paisley quilt, soaking the edges of the silky material. Picking up her diary she pressed the blue cloth covers against her face, and knowing how her mother had held the small lined book in her own hands, she willed her mother’s touch to be somehow preserved within the binding.
The storm of crying was over with the suddenness with which it had begun, and May became still, the blue book still held to her cheek. New images began to jostle for space in her thoughts and the previously sharply focused picture of her mother became suddenly elusive as memories of her father returned with a rush. Hard as she tried to will Edith to fill her thoughts, the cold touch of Duncan’s ever-damp hands continued to fill her mind. She remembered how he would interrupt conversations when she was alone with her mother. He had been jealous, she now realised.
“What’s going on here?” he would ask angrily, a pool of sweat gathering across the top of his forehead, from which two tributaries would run down onto his nose. His long tongue would flick out through the gap in his teeth and catch the drip, his lips glistening with the moisture. “Got all the time in the world to waste, have we? All right for some.” His ill-matched front teeth enhanced the muffling of his words.
“Secrets.” May now said the word aloud, slowly. The sound, with its snakelike consonant at beginning and end, contributed a sinister meaning to the word. Her life was littered with secrets, but the story-time nip had been the first.
Opening the blue book she turned to the pages at the back and for the hundredth time, she tried to cheer herself up by reading through a list of notes she was making for herself headed “Qualities Necessary for True Love.”
Must not rule out short sight, snorers or strange tastes in food.
Cherish and be cherished.
Listen as well as hear.
These initial points had been inspired by her mother, of course, but May decided that now was the time for some of her own additions. First, there were to be no secrets between her and the man she chose to marry. And secondly, she would have to find him infinitely desirable. The concept made her feel nauseous. One man’s body had evoked feelings of revulsion for so long. How could the hairiness of a male body, and the sensation of her skin crawling and pricking as if infected by some termite as he stroked her, ever be a source of pleasure? How could she trust her own nakedness in the hands of someone so much bigger than herself? How could she be sure she would not be hurt? Her curiosity about Julian and her fascination with the beauty of his mouth was invariably eclipsed by the nightmares of those “little nip” moments in her childhood bedroom.
Suddenly she remembered Sam and, standing up, she brushed her hair and washed her smudged face, before going over to the house. Sam was sitting in the hallway pretending to read a newspaper, waiting for her, trying to smile a lopsided smile. She drove him to the station and clung to him on the platform before promising they would be together on Oak Street soon.
Florence was sitting in front of an empty bowl at the kitchen