must have been reeling from his past two weeks – and me, mocking my own mother, rude when he tried to be nice about my poem—
‘Anyway, that’s that,’ he said. ‘But she was spirited, and she did a lot of things, and enjoyed herself a great deal, and that’s really why she reminds me of you. And now there’s her painting.’
‘Yes.’
‘So.’ He exhaled brusquely. ‘I’ve told you that. Jesus. I promise you that’s the worst. Now you tell me something.’
‘I don’t have anything.’
‘Everyone has at least one thing, Delly.’
I stayed quiet. He leaned back in his chair, fishing around in the dresser drawer behind him. ‘A-ha. Gerry always leaves a few lying around.’ He brandished a box of slim cigars. ‘Care to join?’
We went to the back room and Lawrie pushed open the French windows. The night was still fragrant with the smell of damp grass and wood smoke, bats dipping in and out of the garden.
‘It’s like paradise,’ I said, even enjoying the smothering scent of Lawrie’s cigar. I sat on the sofa and watched him, propping himself against the window frame.
‘I don’t know about that,’ Lawrie replied. ‘But one thing is – you can’t hear the road. When I was little, my favourite book was Peter Pan. I used to pretend this garden was Neverland.’
‘And was Gerry Captain Hook?’
‘Ha, no, this was before Gerry. It was just me and Mum at that point.’
‘I was just with my mother too.’
He turned to me. ‘What happened to your dad in the war?’
Given what Lawrie had told me about his mother’s suicide, I felt I had to dredge it up, although I really didn’t want to. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘My dad sold his bicycle and trumpet to pay for his passage to England in ’41. He walked to the Air Ministry, passed the medical, and got himself twelve weeks’ basic training. He served as an air gunner in the RAF. Then three years later, my mother found his name chalked on the death board in Port of Spain.’
He came over, and put his hand on my shoulder; it was warm, and I focused on it with particular concentration. ‘I’m sorry, Odelle,’ he said.
‘Thank you. I don’t remember him, but I know what it was like not to have him. My mother took it bad.’
He sat beside me. ‘What was it like, on the island, in the war?’
‘People were terrified what would happen if Hitler won. We’ve got one of the largest oil refineries in Trinidad. U-boats were already torpedoing British ships off our coastline.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘We knew what Hitler wanted; the plan for a master race. We were always going to want to fight. My dad was no exception.’ I sipped on my cider. ‘England wasn’t too keen on the colonies helping out at first, but as things turned bad they wanted the help.’
‘Do you think you’ll go back?’
I hesitated. Most English people I’d met would ask me questions about the island with the expectation that I should fit the complexity of Trinidad into my single body for their benefit. None of them had ever been there, so to them we were specimens of curiosity, realities risen from a tropical Petri dish that until very recently sat under a British flag. Most of the time, as with Pamela, the Englishers’ interest was not malicious (except when it was) – but their questioning always served to make me feel different, when I’d been brought up to feel perfectly understanding of British ways, because I was a child of empire too.
In the time I’d known him, Lawrie hadn’t asked me a thing about Trinidad. I didn’t know whether he was being polite, or whether he was genuinely uninterested – but either way, I was mainly glad of his failure to highlight our differences in life experience. I’d learned Latin and read Dickens, but I’d also seen the lighter-skinned girls get more of the boys’ attention, in a way the boys probably didn’t even understand themselves. Most of our ‘differences’ had been created by the white skin of the English. And yet, by the shores of the Thames, the complexity of our island life was reduced to one phenotype: black.
Practically every Englishman, even the enlightened ones, believed we would have more in common with a Sudanese than with them. But what did I know of the Sahara, of a camel or a Bedouin? My ideal of beauty and glamour for my entire childhood was Princess Margaret. With Lawrie, I’d talked about James Bond