Sugar in the Morning (2 page)

“Well, Mr. Hendrycks?” I answered casually.

“I was thinking how well you brighten this winter’s day,” he smiled. “You look positively festiv
e!
”

“I feel it!” I responded cheerfully.

“Meaning that you still have no regrets that you’re going to look up your family in Trinidad?” he said bleakly. “What about your family here in England? Aren’t you sorry to be leaving them?”

I tripped lightly down the steps, turning to look at him as I did so. “Not that it’s any of your business,” I reminded him fiercely, “but it so happens that I haven’t any family in England. My parents died some years ago and
I
have no brothers and sisters. Satisfied?”

“I’m truly sorry,” he said, flattened.

“Good!” I replied pertly, and boarded the bus. I sat as far away from him as I could, but to my annoyance I was still remarkably aware of him.

The drizzle had turned to sleet as we were escorted out of the airport building to the waiting Boeing 707 that was to take us to Trinidad. Visibility was reduced to a few yards around the aeroplane and the stewardess who greeted us at the top of the gangway was obviously concerned as to whether we would be able to get off at all.

I had only flown once before and then it had been to Dublin which takes no more than an hour, so I was excited at the thought of going abroad properly for the very first time. Rather cleverly, I thought, I managed to get myself a seat beside one of the windows and was able to peer out at the winter scene outside. Eddies of rain and sleet came and went and the sky remained a uniform dark grey hovering over the airport and threatening to turn the sleet to snow at any moment.

So intent was I at staring out at the activities that were all centred on getting the great giant I was seated in into the air that I didn’t notice who it was who sat next to me. When I did notice, it was too late to do anything about it.

“You don’t mind, do you?” said Mr. Hendrycks. “I
want to apologise for being so heavy-handed about your parents. I’m truly sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I answered. “It all happened a very long time ago.” I gave him a straight look that he didn’t seem to resent in the slightest. “You do rather jump to conclusions, though, don’t you?” I added.

“Do I?” He sounded surprised.

“Are you always so right in your opinions that you have the right to criticise everyone else, on the very merest acquaintance?”

“Oh, surely not!” he protested. “Have I really given you that impression?”

“Well,” I said, determined to be strictly just, “you’ve criticised my relations, implied that I’m a goose and not very loyal besides, taking myself away to the sun just because I won some money, and all, as far as I can make out, without knowing any
o
f the facts—”

“I do know about your uncle,” he said meekly.

That rather put me off my stroke, because I knew nothing at all about my relations in Trinidad. All I knew was that my father’s brother had gone there when still in his teens with his head stuffed full of romantic ideas of pirates and pieces of eight. I hadn’t even thought about him until I had won this twenty-five thousand pounds and then I had thought that I would rather like to see something of the world, and Trinidad had seemed the obvious place to go. I had written to my uncle the same evening that the announcement of the winning number had been made over television and had got a reply back from him in a matter of days.

His letter had been written on a scrappy piece of paper, but his writing had been reminiscent of my father’s, so it hadn’t mattered to me at all that the information in it was sketchy in the extreme beyond the fact that he was highly tickled that he had a niece of means who was coming to visit him.

“A fortune in our family is just what we need, my dear,” he had written. “I have always thought so and have done my best since my youth to acquire one. How happy I am for you. Come as soon as you are able and we shall all be waiting to give you a true Ironside welcome when you get here.”

It had sounded warm and comforting to me and I wasn’t going to have Mr. Hendrycks spoil it for me. I didn’t care what he knew about my uncle
!

“You make my relations sound like a bunch of layabouts!” I complained. “And they’re
not
! As a matter of fact my family is in sugar.”

He puckered up his mouth in thoughtful disapproval. “Is that what they told you?” he asked at last.

“It’s what my
father
told me,” I said flatly.

“It must have been a good while ago!”

I bit my lip. It had been quite a long time ago, I supposed, but it didn’t make any difference, did it? “Isn’t it true any longer?” I asked him, a hollow pit forming in my stomach.

“In a manner of speaking it’s
true,” he muttered.

“There you go again!” I exploded with wrath. “Either it’s true or it’s not true! Which is it?”

“Well, if you want to put it in quite such black and white terms,” he admitted handsomely, “they’re in sugar. But—”

“I won’t listen to another word
!”
I cut him off. “I won’t have you spoiling it all for me!” I turned my back on him and stared out of the window at the banks of cloud beneath us. So intent had I been on our conversation that I had barely noticed the protracted take-off. It was difficult to believe that somewhere down there, beneath those layers of cloud, was the whole of England. Later there would be the Atlantic. I wondered if we should see any of it or if the clouds would accompany us the whole way. It was so odd to think of
the threatening snow down below when here the sun shone brightly in a blue sky, away above the wintry
weather below.

Mr. Hendrycks slept after a while. It was only when I saw him asleep and defenceless that I realised how tired he was looking. His face was thin and drawn and the
little
lines in the corners of his eyes had been deeply etched in in a way that should not have been in a man so young. And yet his hair was completely black. There was not a single silver strand anywhere to be seen.

The Atlantic was not the dull grey I had expected. It varied from the colour of gun-metal to vivid shades of deep green and blue. But the best experience was kept to the last. The West Indies lay beneath us just as the sun was setting. It was like a stage set with a gamut of reds and greens, blues and orange, violet and splashes of silver topping the picturesque waves as they broke against pure sand shores. It could have been a different world from the one we had left that morning. Here winter was unknown and only the occasional freak storm spoilt the equable days that followed one another in this paradise.

Mr. Hendrycks leaned across me to get the first glimpse of his homeland. “That’s Trinidad!” he said
at last.

“But it’s so close to the mainland,” I exclaimed.

He laughed. “It probably broke off a few thousand years ago,” he suggested. “That’s Venezuela over there.”

I stared at the piece of South America that I could see out of the window. It gave me an odd feeling to think that this was the New World that I was seeing, a world that I had never expected to visit in my whole life. I knew so little about it. The only thing I knew about Venezuela was that it produced oil in staggering quantities and so was a rich country by any standards.
Beside it, Trinidad was small and inconsequential, but I was prepared-to fall in love with the island just the same. It was to Trinidad I had come.

“Is anyone meeting you?” Mr. Hendrycks asked.

I nodded confidently. “My un
cl
e is. I wrote him that I was coming.”

“I see,” he said stiffly.

I felt obliged to be polite. “Are you being met?” I enquired.

“Oh, sure. If she hasn’t got tired of waiting for me. She’s probably met every flight this week!”

It was the first time I had heard about this mysterious “she”. Was she his wife? I longed to ask him, but remembering that it was none of my business, I refrained.

“You’re lucky!” I murmured.

“In a way,” he sighed. “She’s certainly beautiful, and her father is a friend of mine.”

“But
?
” I prompted him.

He smiled rather sadly. “I’m not sure that there are any buts,” he said abruptly. “Why should there be?”

I shrugged. How was I to know
?
But I thought there was a but somewhere if he would only admit it. He didn’t sound entirely enthusiastic about this beautiful unknown she!

The plane banked sharply downwards and I lost all interest in everything except our landing. Beneath us was the small city of Port of Spain, looking small and remarkably free of skyscrapers. I thought I saw the Hilton Hotel standing back from the city in a park which might even have been the hotel’s own grounds, and I wondered what it would be like to stay there. Quite a different experience from the small place where I planned to spend the night, I thought with a smile.

We touched down beautifully. I was hardly aware of
when the tyr
es
hit the strip and then we were taxiing
along towards the airport buildings and we were all straining to get a first look out and to catch a first glimpse of our families and friends who were waiting to greet us.

It was a nervous moment when we passed through the various controls. How would I recognise my uncle? Perhaps it would be one of my cousins who would have come to meet me? How on earth would they recognise
me?
I must have looked a bit panicky, for Mr. Hendrycks said
:
“You’re sure you’re being met?”

“Oh yes! Someone will come,” I answered certainly, more to reassure myself than him. “I’ll just wait a few minutes, though, because we might not recognise each
other immediately.”

He was obviously impatient to be gone. He glanced across the one remaining barrier that stood between ourselves and the crush outside and waved to someone. “I don’t see your uncle,” was all he said.

“There’s quite a crowd, though, isn’t there?” I observed. I sounded nervous now, almost as nervous as I felt. It was rather a pretty crowd. The people ranged in colour from the fairest blonde to chocolate brown. There were obvious Negroes, those of a paler hue, descendants of Europeans, and quite a number of Indians, the women in saris and their men in shirts and trousers just like everyone else.

We escaped through the barrier in a sudden rush and found ourselves in the thick of the waiting crowd. Mr. Hendrycks was engulfed by welcoming people— especially, I noticed, by one person in particular. He had been right in describing her
as
beautiful. She was. Her fair hair had been bleached in the sun and her blue eyes showed to perfection against the tanned skin of her face.

“Dan darling,” she said clearly as she kissed him. “What
happened
? Did you have to stay away so long?

“I missed my connection,” he said gruffly.

I tried to move away from him. It was time, I felt, to leave him tactfully alone, in fact to lose him altogether. Besides, I wanted to meet my own family away from his watchful, observant eyes. But I was not quick enough. His hand shot out and grabbed my arm even while he kissed her back with slow, enjoyable deliberation.

“Pamela, this is Miss Ironside. She won a fortune on the football pools, or something, and has come out to visit her family.”

The girl’s eyebrows swept up her forehead. “Did you say Ironside?”

“I did. Have you seen them at the airport? They’re supposed to be meeting her.”

Pamela shook her head. She looked at me curiously. “I’m Pamela Lon
g
uet. Have you another name besides Ironside?”

“It’s Camilla,” Mr. Hendrycks supplied.

“Hullo, Camilla!” Pamela smiled at me, but I knew she wasn’t entirely pleased to see me. “I do hope your family soon turn up. You must forgive us if we rush away, but we’ve been expecting Daniel for days and the ice in his drink must have completely melted by this time
!”

“Of course,” I smiled back. She wasn’t a particularly small girl, but I felt like a lamp-post beside her. “I’ll wait for the crowd to thin out somewhat—”

“There they are!” Mr. Hendrycks cut me short. He dived into the crowd and grabbed a rather shabbily dressed man by the arm. They spoke to each other for a moment and then the man turned to look at me. He wasn’t in the least like my father. He was small, with thin dry hair that had fallen out in patches. His clothing had been worn so long that it had taken the shape of his body and his boots badly needed a polish
and probably repairing as well. Could this be my uncle?

Mr. Hendrycks brought him right up to me, a pleased smile on his face. “There you are, Miss Ironside! May I introduce your uncle?”

It was Pamela who pulled him away, and I was grateful to her, for my face must have been a study. I didn’t know whether to hold out my hand or kiss him on the cheek. And he was just as much at a loss. “Are you really Camilla?” he said at last.

I nodded and sniffed because emotion always reduces me to tears. “Uncle Philip
?
”

He laughed suddenly. “You’re Camilla!” he agreed. ‘You’re the spitting image of the Ironsides!” He made a face at me. “I was an outsider from the moment I was born. You can’t go by me!”