Black Cake: A Novel (14 page)

O
n June 7, 1692, three
powerful earthquakes struck the island. The soil turned to putty and a large tsunami sucked the island’s richest city, a famed haven for pirates, into the sea. Three thousand people were killed. Another two thousand died in an epidemic that followed.

In the spring of 1961, a group of orphans took turns dipping a small plastic bucket into the shallows at the marina. The girls were scooping up water full of tiny fish, waiting to begin a day trip to a minor island, when one of them cut her foot on the remains of a three-hundred-year-old gate. Regulars knew the gate was there below the surface, but these girls were from the interior. They had never been to the marina before and some had never even seen the sea up close.

Elly didn’t know it then but when she sliced her foot open on that gate, she set her life on a new path. She ended up in the hospital with an infection and fever that, the sisters later claimed, nearly killed her. After the fever passed, Elly would watch each day as the morning nurse unwound a bandage from around Elly’s foot, patted at the area ringing the cut with a piece of gauze doused in something that stung, and wrapped her foot again in clean cotton.

“Do you like being a nurse?” Elly asked one day.

“Why, yes,” said the nurse. “It’s a respectable profession for a young woman. And I get to help people.” The nurse snipped at the
bandage with a pair of scissors, then looked at Elly. “Do you think you would want to do this someday?” she asked.

Elly shrugged. “I want to go to Britain, to study,” Elly said.

“Well, there’s a great need for nurses in Britain,” the nurse said. “And the government is recruiting our women to study there. You should think about it.” Elly was already aware that the health service in Britain was sponsoring women from the Commonwealth to complete nursing certificates there in exchange for a minimum work commitment. She had heard it on the radio in the kitchen at the children’s home. Going to nursing school could be her first step toward fulfilling her destiny. Elly emerged from her stay in the hospital with a plan.

She still had a couple of years to go before finishing secondary school, but now she knew what to do. She would study hard in high school and when the time came, she would travel across the ocean to take up nursing. She might find a job in a hospital or a doctor’s office. And then she would apply to a university where she could study what she really wanted to do. There was a name for what Elly was destined to be, she had seen it in books. Elly was going to be a geologist.

Her timing was fortunate. In those days, the benefactors of the orphanage were still generous enough to fund her overseas passage. Her exam results were better than almost anyone’s on the island and this was the kind of thing that made a sponsor proud. By the time she met Coventina Brown six years later in England, Elly was finishing her nursing studies and already in the midst of formulating a new plan.

“Go on, Elly,” Coventina said.

Elly closed her eyes but could still see the light from the candles through her lids. She took a deep breath and blew. She was twenty-one years old. Not long ago, she was just a skinny pickney living in an orphanage thousands of miles away.

Elly at ten, always hungry, never sleeping.

Elly, walking barefoot on cool tiles in the dark.

Elly, praying for no scorpions in the hall.

Elly, at the kitchen door, searching for the tin.

Elly, breathing in the smell of rum-soaked fruit.

Elly, scooping cake crumbs out of the tin.

Licking her fingers, closing the lid.

Rushing toward her bed, praying for no nuns.

Now she had her very own cake. The birthday candles were for her. The applause and hugs were all for her. The girls who shared the kitchen in this London bedsit had been soaking the fruits for weeks and setting aside the eggs, just for her. Elly was still motherless, still fatherless, but not alone.

“Here,” Coventina said, handing her a knife to cut the cake. Coventina had made the cake and Edwina had done the icing and Elly the Orphan was happy. She had found a new family in a chilly, damp city, an ocean away from her island home.

Elly didn’t know when she would get back to the island. It might be
years yet. She kept a picture of a butterfly tucked in a Bible that Sister Mary had given her. She kept a cardboard box with a letter from Sister Mary and some shells from the garden at the orphanage and the old hair comb and coins that she’d found while digging in the dirt. One day, she would go back and show Sister Mary her photograph of the girls from the nursing school. They were smart-looking and smiling and standing in a row as if they had always been together and always would be.

W
hen Covey first met Eleanor
Douglas at the teaching hospital, Eleanor said, “Call me Elly, like jelly, or belly!” She was such a serious-looking
gyal
but she’d come out with things like that to make Covey smile. Covey knew that she was taking a chance, striking up a friendship with someone from the same island and agreeing to move into lodgings with women who all knew one another. Still, by the time Elly said, “Why don’t you come live with us?” it seemed like the most natural thing to do.

It was only then, in the cottony air of Elly’s laughter, in the pots of stew peas and rice on the kitchen table, in the novelty of walking down the street together, that Covey realized just how bad she’d been feeling until then. She hadn’t been part of any kind of group since the swim club. She hadn’t had anything like a real friend since Bunny.

“Shhh,” one of the other girls said through the door of their room one night, rapping lightly on the partition wall. She and Elly had been chatting too loudly, as usual. There were rules about such things. Better to have their housemates warn them than the landlady herself. They should have been in bed but instead, they were both sitting on the floor between their respective cots, peering at the map that Elly had smoothed out over the rug.

“So this is where we are,” Elly said. “See, here? The rocks in this part of England are some of the youngest. Mostly covered by clay and other soils left behind by glaciers.”

“Glaciers,” repeated Covey. The idea of a force of nature so vast and slow and cold, shaping the world, intrigued her. It made her think of the sea, of how they’d been taught as children that the world was land surrounded by sea when in fact, it was the other way around.

“This piece of land, here,” Elly went on, shifting her finger along the waxy surface of the map, “was pushed into existence by violent processes and rose up to become what it is today.” She raised her eyebrows. “Not so different from what happened to our own island, see?”

Covey nodded. She tried not to smile. In that moment, Elly’s expression made her look more like a middle-aged schoolteacher than someone hardly older than Covey.

“Everything is connected to everything else, if you only go far enough back in time.”

Covey thought of the ocean that stretched from where they were now to the faraway place where they’d both grown up. And without intending to, Covey found herself talking about her life before. “I used to swim,” Covey said. “I used to swim in the sea. For miles and miles.”

“Did you really?” Elly said. “How exciting!”

Covey revealed that she really was from the north coast of the island and not the south, as she’d told everyone who’d asked. “We had the most beautiful bay.”

Until then, Covey had stuck to the invented story about her past. She had never told Elly or anyone else about the forced marriage to Little Man or his murder or even Gibbs, though she’d told Elly that she’d left home because of an unhappy family situation. She willed herself, now, to say no more.

“Have you tried to swim here?” Elly asked.

Covey scrunched up her face. “I tried but I couldn’t. Too cold. Not for me.”

“I’ve never learned to swim,” Elly said. “I’ve only been to the beach once.”

Covey’s mouth softened into an
oh.
It was something she couldn’t imagine, especially not on a small island like theirs.

Elly told Covey then that she’d grown up in the interior, high above
the sea where cockle shells had been left in the ground by a prehistoric ocean. She reached into the pocket of her cardigan then, eyes gleaming.

“Look.” Elly opened her palm to reveal three pink-and-white shells. “This,” Elly said, leaning closer to Covey, “is what I’m going to do. This is what I’m going to do after nursing school.”

“Collect shells?” Covey said.

“No,” Elly said, laughing. “Study them. Geology. Everything about the Earth. The oceans and volcanoes and glaciers,” Elly said. “Only I’ll need to get a recommendation first, to convince a university to let me study there. They’ve had some women, but…” She stopped short, breathed out sharply. Covey nodded. Elly didn’t need to say it. By now, she knew what was often left out of their conversations. The way people saw them and how it determined the roles that they were expected to play in life.

In lowered voices, they shared their dismay at some of the name-calling and other forms of prejudice they had faced in the mother country. Because that was what Great Britain meant to them, the mother country, even five years after the island’s independence. They had spent their childhoods under British rule and had received a British education.

Covey and Elly agreed that they belonged, first, to the hills and caverns and shores of the island where they had grown up, but they also felt that they were part of the culture that had influenced so many aspects of their daily lives. Moving to Great Britain was supposed to be like coming to stay in a relative’s home. A safe harbor for two young people who had lost everything else.

Of course, it wasn’t quite that way once they’d crossed the Atlantic. In London, Elly said, she had discovered herself to be a dual entity, a sort of hybrid, someone who was both at home and foreign, someone who was both welcome and not. At the end of the sixties, postwar relief and optimism were beginning to wear thin. People were worried over limited resources. This added fuel to ongoing bigotry, despite repeated reports of labor shortages, which the government had called on immigrants to help fill.

“Don’t worry, Elly,” Covey told her. “You’ll find a way.”

“I know,” Elly said, folding the map now. “I will. But what about you?”

“Me?” Covey breathed in slowly, deeply.
Say nothing, Covey. Say nothing.
“Well, the nursing is a fine opportunity for me.”

“But with the certificate that you’re getting, you won’t get the better wages and you won’t get the promotions. You know they won’t let many of us island girls go for the higher-level certificates.”

Covey looked down at her hands, dry and cracked where her fingers met her palms. She seemed to be spending more time cleaning bedpans and commodes than treating patients. Was Elly right?

“It’s fine for me, for now,” Covey said. She kept looking down. “I’m not sure what I would do otherwise.” Which was the truth.

But Coventina wasn’t cut out to be a nurse, Elly could see that. Just as Elly was not. For Elly, the nursing was a means to an end and she was already planning her next steps. She had never shared her ambitions with anyone until the night she told Covey about her plans to study geology. She’d never even told Sister Mary.

When the time came, Elly approached her advisor about helping her to enroll in a university course in geology. True, her science background was limited to mostly biology and chemistry, she said, but she had done quite a bit of reading in geology on her own. She was convinced that she could qualify for the course of study that she wanted.

Elly fingered a shell in her jacket pocket as she laid out her argument. She had realized that it would take some convincing, but she hadn’t expected to fail. The same woman who’d told her what a fine mind she had for the sciences was now refusing to give her a recommendation. Elly squeezed the shell so hard between her fingers that it snapped.

Her advisor reminded her that the national healthcare system offered ample opportunities to promising young islanders with her training. Perhaps, her advisor said, she could recommend Elly for an advanced nursing course? But Elly was already walking out of the matron’s office. Elly had a dream to realize.

Walking home that evening, Elly told Covey about her plan.

“I need to go where they won’t force me to remain a nurse. I need to go back across the Atlantic, Covey. They’d take me in Canada.”

“Canada?” Covey said. “But how?”

“Maybe I don’t even need Canada. But I do need to leave here, if they won’t help me, and I need to find better wages or pay less money for lodgings. I need to save money and figure out how to get into another university.”

“But you’re supposed to stay. It’s part of our training agreement.”

“Yes. Which is why we need to get far away from here, and as quickly as possible.”

“We?”

“Yes, Coventina. We.” Elly stopped walking, blocked Covey’s path. “What are you doing here? Half the time, you don’t even sleep at night. You think I haven’t noticed? Why would you stay? We could change cities. It could be nice.”

There was a train they could take to another city, another cold city, yes, but on the sea, and Elly knew someone who knew someone else who could get them both clerical positions in a wealthy trading company.

“They trade with the islands,” Elly said. “There are people from the Caribbean there.” Her eyes were gleaming now. “You might meet a nice lad,” she said.

Covey was tired. She felt as though she’d had enough change for a while. But Elly was ready to go and where would Covey be without her? Elly was Covey’s friend. And because Elly was determined to take her true place in the world, Covey let herself be caught up in her dream. The two of them packed their bags and set out for Edinburgh. The train sped through an impossibly green countryside that lightened Covey’s mood. Covey told herself that it was the way to survive, to keep putting distance between her and her life before. To stop looking back, to think about Gibbs a little less every day.