Hat wouldn’t reply.
About half an hour later Dolly would say, ‘Hat, you coming or you ain’t coming?’
And Hat would say then, ‘I coming.’
I wondered what life was like for Dolly. She was nearly always inside the house and Hat was nearly always outside. She seemed to spend a great deal of her time at the front window looking out.
They were really the queerest couple in the street. They never went out together. We never heard them laughing. They never even quarrelled.
Eddoes said, ‘They like two strangers.’
Errol said, ‘Don’t mind that, you hear. All you seeing Hat sitting quiet quiet here, but is different when he get inside. He ain’t the same man when he talking with Dolly. He buy she a lot of joolry, you know.’
Eddoes said, ‘I have a feeling she a little bit like Matilda. You know, the woman in the calypso:
“Matilda, Matilda,
Matilda, you thief my money
And gone Venezuela.”
Buying joolry! But what happening to Hat? He behaving as though he is a old man. Woman don’t want joolry from a man like Hat, they want something else.’
Looking on from the outside, though, one could see only two changes in Hat’s household. All the birds were caged, and the Alsatian was chained and miserable.
But no one spoke about Dolly to Hat. I suppose the whole business had come as too much of a surprise.
What followed was an even bigger surprise, and it was some time before we could get all the details. At first I noticed Hat was missing, and then I heard rumours.
This was the story, as it later came out in court. Dolly had run away from Hat, taking all his gifts, of course. Hat had chased her and found her with another man. There was a great quarrel, the man had fled, and Hat had taken it out on Dolly. Afterwards, the police statement said, he had gone, in tears, to the police station to give himself up. He said, ‘I kill a woman.’
But Dolly wasn’t dead.
We received the news as though it was news of a death. We couldn’t believe it for a day or two.
And then a great hush fell on Miguel Street. No boys and men gathered under the lamp-post outside Hat’s house, talking about this and that and the other. No one played cricket and disturbed people taking afternoon naps. The Club was dead.
Cruelly, we forgot all about Dolly and thought only about Hat. We couldn’t find it in our hearts to find fault with him. We suffered with him.
We saw a changed man in court. He had grown older, and when he smiled at us he smiled only with his mouth. Still, he put on a show for us and even while we laughed we were ready to cry.
The prosecutor asked Hat, ‘Was it a dark night?’
Hat said, ‘All night dark.’
Hat’s lawyer was a short fat man called Chittaranjan who wore a smelly brown suit.
Chittaranjan began reeling off Portia’s speech about mercy, and he would have gone on to the end if the judge hadn’t said, ‘All this is interesting and some of it even true but, Mr Chittaranjan, you are wasting the court’s time.’
Chittaranjan made a great deal of fuss about the wild passion of love. He said Antony had thrown away an empire for the sake of love, just as Hat had thrown away his self-respect. He said that Hat’s crime was really a crime passionel. In France, he said - and he knew what he was talking about, because he had been to Paris – in France, Hat would have been a hero. Women would have garlanded him.
Eddoes said, ‘Is this sort of lawyer who does get man hang, you know.’
Hat was sentenced to four years.
We went to Frederick Street jail to see him. It was a disappointing jail. The walls were light cream, and not very high, and I was surprised to see that most of the visitors were very gay. Only a few women wept, but the whole thing was like a party, with people laughing and chatting.
Eddoes, who had put on his best suit for the occasion, held his hat in his hand and looked around. He said to Hat, ‘It don’t look too bad here.’
Hat said, ‘They taking me to Carrera next week.’
Carrera was the small prison-island a few miles from Port of Spain.
Hat said, ‘Don’t worry about me. You know me. In two three weeks I go make them give me something easy to do.’
Whenever I went to Carénage or Point Cumana for