Ravenscliffe (6 page)

‘Is that right? So where you from?’

‘Grangely,’ said Silas. The seaman laughed.

‘Grangely,’ he said, imitating the boy’s Yorkshire brogue. ‘An’ where the fuck’s tha’?’

‘I reckon you can’t carry bananas cos they’d rot, comin’ over,’ said Silas, who knew that the seaman had no real interest in exactly where in England Grangely might be. ‘But they grow ’em, in Jamaica. I’ve seen it in a book.’

The seaman, losing what little interest he’d had, shrugged and strolled away into the throng. Silas stayed put, gazing at the vessel with calculating eyes, watching the rhythm of the activity on the gangplank, waiting for his moment. The steamship had one great, fat chimney at its centre, white with a band of blue around its top. There were two masts festooned with a complex cat’s cradle of rigging, and the broad hull looked newly painted, glossily blue to match the trim on the flue. In white lettering along the bow was painted
Adventurer
, which Silas took as final proof that this ship was where his life would begin.

By nightfall he was on board, squeezed into the top third of a barrel of apples, munching contentedly on the fruit. And by the time he was discovered forty-eight hours later, the ship was steaming at full tilt for the Indies, already too far out of Liverpool, too far from land, to bother doing anything but put the little blighter to work.

He was thirty now. A success in the world, you could see that. His suits were Henry Poole and his hats were Locke & Co. He had a small townhouse in Mayfair, a plantation house in Kingston – Jamaica, that is, not Surrey: he always had to explain this, laughingly, because no one ever thought he could possibly mean the West Indies – and the end property in a Georgian terrace in Clifton, because much of his time was spent in Bristol where his small shipping company was based.
He wasn’t tall but neither was he short: he was lean still, but not painfully so, as he’d been as a lad. His clothes hung well on him: he was, said his tailor, a pleasure to dress and these past eight years his measurements had stayed the same, for all his love of good wine and food. He was handsome, no doubt about that. Eyes that undressed you and a smile – crooked, engaging – that got him what he wanted. There was no Mrs Whittam, and wouldn’t be any time soon. He liked to be free, unshackled, at liberty to jump on one of his own ships whenever he pleased.

His accent, his flat, broad Yorkshire vowels, had long gone, eradicated by years of travelling the globe, of trading with foreigners, of mixing with successful merchants and men of business. He had found it easy to reinvent himself, because he hadn’t really known what he was in the first place. But he knew what he was now all right: Silas Whittam, a gentleman of means, with his own name on a brand new warehouse full of half-ripe bananas at Bristol docks, and a fleet of steamships – the
Dominion
, the
Trinity
, the
Emperor
and the
Antonia
– cutting through the oceans between England and Jamaica on his behalf. They were fine vessels, models of their kind, all of them fitted out with the latest innovations in refrigeration: when the bananas were lifted out of their packing crates to hang in the warehouse, they were cold to the touch, no further on in the ripening process than when they were picked. It was a marvel, really, as if time stopped for the duration of the voyage, starting again only when the cases were unpacked. There were vertical iron poles in the warehouse, hundreds of them, their surfaces studded with hooks, and on to these hooks the cold, green bananas went, losing their chill in the mild Bristol climate, clinging to their man-made trees and slowly, obligingly, turning yellow, even though they were so very far from home.

They had made Silas a fortune, these bananas, and they continued to do so. Extraordinary that it had all started with a picture in a schoolbook. He was fond of saying this, elaborating and embellishing as people do a small, insignificant detail of childhood and making it into something portentous. The story went that he had seen, aged seven, a picture of a banana palm, and it had ignited a spark of ambition in his youthful self that, burning ever stronger, took him across the world in pursuit of his dream. The full account of the past fourteen years was, of course, rather less romantic: a man couldn’t get as far as Silas in so short a time without recourse to ruthlessness. But, still, there was much to admire about the man, and all of it was on the surface, the better to appreciate it.

His train arrived at Netherwood Station one week to the day after his crate of bananas had been delivered to Eve at the mill. He’d sent them on an impulse from Bristol, hoping she’d remember what he said to her in those last few days before they both left Grangely. When I get to t’West Indies, I’ll send you a bunch of bananas. Well it wasn’t a bunch in the end, it was a crate, because he was a wealthy man and fond of a flamboyant gesture. He wished he could have been there to see her face.

He stepped off the train in the clothes of a gentleman so that people turned to look and the stationmaster asked if he needed a carriage.

‘Thank you, no. I shall walk,’ he said. Then he remembered that, of course, he had no idea where in Netherwood Eve and Arthur lived, so he added, ‘But could you tell me where I might find Mr and Mrs Williams?’

The stationmaster’s face reddened a little and turned grave.

‘Mr Williams passed away some time ago, sir, sorry sir. An accident like, down at New Mill. But Mrs Williams, now,’ he said, his expression brightening with the relief of imparting good news, ‘she’s at Beaumont Lane. Number five. Anyone’ll show you, once you’re in town.’

Arthur dead, thought Silas. The fact aroused no emotion in him: he hadn’t really known Arthur, and it was so long ago. But he was sorry for Eve; he wondered how she’d fared without her husband’s wage. He wondered, too, whether he might have helped, in this regard. It was so very long since he’d seen her and he could, in truth, have come sooner. And yet, and yet, life had a habit of swallowing time, and in any case, thought Silas, there had never been a good, sound business reason to come to Netherwood until now. He was not a man governed by emotion; he would not have come for Eve alone. Neither was he a man given to regret, so his spirits remained buoyant and he smiled as he strolled up Victoria Street, cutting a dash in his linen suit, white and tan spectators and a panama hat at a rakish tilt: people stared. Lilly Pickering, Eve’s neighbour in Beaumont Lane, was buying scrag ends at the butcher’s and she said: ‘That’ll be one o’ t’king’s men,’ with such authority that Mavis Moxon, behind her in the queue, believed her, even though King Edward’s visit was still three weeks away.

He found Beaumont Lane without asking: the town wasn’t so large that an hour’s exploration wouldn’t reveal its basic geography. There was a small posse of children at a spigot in the street, larking about, turning it on and ducking their heads under. He had half a mind to join them. The day was devilishly hot, even for a man familiar with the Jamaican climate.

‘Any of you belong to Eve Williams?’ he said. They hadn’t noticed his approach, being too busy squealing and splashing, so they were astonished at his voice, which cut through their
play with cultured tones. They stopped, abruptly, and took a step away from him. For a moment none of them spoke, then: ‘Me, I do,’ said a young girl, prettier than her friends, with chestnut plaits and wide eyes that stared at him audaciously.

‘Shurrup,’ said a boy, scowling first at her, then at the new arrival.

‘Well, I do,’ she said without taking her eyes off the stranger. ‘You do an’all.’

‘Right,’ said Silas. ‘Well, I don’t know who you two are, but I’m your Uncle Silas.’

It was the first time he’d uttered that – the first time he’d thought it, even – and he liked the way it sounded. It had an amusing, cosy ring to it, a sound of belonging. It had little visible effect on the children, however; they seemed quite unmoved. The girl looked at the scowling boy now, as if for guidance, though he offered none.

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you both,’ Silas said, unfazed. ‘Could you take me to your mother—’ He hesitated, thought again, corrected himself. ‘I mean, to your mam?’

‘She’s up at t’mill,’ said the girl. ‘Anna’s in, though.’

‘’e dun’t know Anna, does ’e?’ said the boy contemptuously.

‘Come on,’ said the girl, ignoring him. ‘It’s over ’ere.’ And she set off with an encouraging smile at Silas, crossing the street and disappearing up a wide, covered entry. He followed, closely tailed not by the boy – who held his ground and his scowl – but by another little girl, much smaller than the first: this one sucked on her thumb and met his smile with neutral solemnity. The entry opened on to a cobbled yard and a series of back doors, all of which stood open on this summer afternoon.

The girl, the older one, called out, ‘Anna!’ and almost immediately a woman appeared at one of the doors, her fine
blond hair plaited in the same style as the child’s. She looked as if she’d been interrupted in some effortful domestic task, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, her face flushed with exertion. Silas wondered if his sister had a maid of all work until she spoke, in a confident, authoritative voice that dispelled any thought that she might be a servant.

‘Silas, I suppose?’ she said, smiling crisply like a society hostess and extending a hand still damp with suds from the sink. ‘Mystery banana man. You’d better step inside.’

Two hours later and unforewarned, Eve came home. Anna had been all for sending Eliza up to the mill with the news, but Silas had argued persuasively in favour of surprising his sister; it would be diverting, he said, to witness her reaction. In the event, though, both he and Anna thought Eve might die of shock when she walked in and saw him sitting at her kitchen table. She froze and stared at him as at a ghost: a ghost from her past, her lost brother, clad in finery yet looking at her with the same face, the same features, that she had held clearly in her mind through all the years of his absence. Silas stood up abruptly, feeling some alarm. The sight of her – her lovely face, their mother’s face – had ambushed him, and a rush of emotion threatened to undo his composure. He stepped towards her and wrapped her in an embrace, and this seemed to break the tension because she began to laugh and to cry at the same time, quite swamped by her mix of emotions.

‘Evie,’ he said. ‘The bananas were meant to be a visiting card. I thought you’d be expecting me.’

‘And I was,’ she managed to say, though she was weeping properly now because no one had called her Evie for fourteen years and the shock and the joy of it were greater than she
could have imagined. She stepped backwards out of his arms to look at him properly.

‘You look so grand,’ she said wonderingly. She sniffed, fumbled for a handkerchief, blew her nose. ‘You were such a ragamuffin in Grangely.’

He smiled at her. ‘Evie,’ he said. ‘It’s so good to see you.’

T
here was a very strong case for moving to Barnsley. A very strong case indeed. Amos leaned on the handle of his spade for a breather and silently ran through the familiar argument yet again. One: the Yorkshire Miners’ Association employed him, and he now had a desk at the regional office in Barnsley. Two: Netherwood marked the furthest boundary of Amos’s remit, so most of the collieries he now found himself responsible for were closer to Barnsley than not. Three: the time he spent on the train travelling to wherever he needed to be was beginning to amount to several hours each week.