The Bigger Light (17 page)

“This boy always studying,” Dots said.

“Oh,” he said, and tried not to look as if his attention was straying. He glanced around the room, took in the furniture, and liked the standard of living of his woman’s friends. He could be comfortable in this home.

“We are going to a concert later on,” Bernice was saying. Dots felt she was behaving like a girl in love. “We are going to hear the Toronto Symphony play. Lew says that they are playing a very good symphony this evening, and he wants me to hear it.”

“You living good, girl! You living!”

“I don’t know if you are versed in classical music,” the young man began; and Dots said to herself, Looka this young bastard! “But the concert is pure Haydn.”

“Hiding?” Dots said, ready to burst out laughing. Boysie inside the bathroom had heard the young man, and he liked him for his preference in music: he and this young man could have something to talk about. Boysie, too, was on the verge of another explosion.
“Hiding?”
Dots asked again, waiting for the correct moment to pull off this joke which was an old one among them. All except this young man. “Hiding?” she said;
and when the moment never came, she added lamely,
“Hiding from who?”

And they all three of them burst out into a laughter that shattered their souls and their bodies of any pretence. The young man, who was now at ease, uttered a curse just below his breath, the joke was so good. And inside the bathroom, Boysie, who was laughing, felt the time was opportune for his own explosion into the toilet bowl. And he did just that, and felt relieved, and certain now that he had come to the end of his panic. They were laughing outside. He regained dominion over his kingdom.

“Where Boysie?” Bernice asked.

He did not hear Dots’s answer. He was pulling up his trousers.

“Estelle says she sorry she couldn’ come. But as soon as she gets Mbelolo off, she coming, she says.”

They had changed their minds about christening Estelle’s son “Boy,” which was Boysie’s choice (but not a serious one); and instead they had spent weeks searching through a book on African names, until they came up with, and decided upon, “Mbelolo.” Mr. Burrmann, the child’s father, was with them during the search for names, and it was he who actually chose this one. Nobody could remember what “Mbelolo” meant, but they liked the name nevertheless.

“Today is visiting day, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Mr. Burrmann comes as regular as the postman. The way how that man looks after his son! And after Estelle! And the things he does for Mbelolo. Sometimes, I have to ask for forgiveness for all the things I said in the past against Mr. Burrmann.”

“Well, that happened a long time ago. Still, I can’t stomach his wife, Mistress Burrmann.” Boysie was listening. It was
the first time he had heard such compassion from his wife. He was alarmed to witness it. For Estelle had got pregnant from Mr. Burrmann, and Mr. Burrmann had treated Estelle a little roughly before he had been able to face the responsibility of his action. Boysie was the only one in their group who had tried to understand Mr. Burrmann’s reservations; and the others gave him hell for it. Dots was outspoken in her condemnation. Mr. Burrmann, she said, was nothing more than a blasted criminal. Boysie listened now to hear what more she would say about Bernice’s former employer. She surprised him so much lately about her views on things which, although they never discussed them, were yet matters of great importance to her. “Estelle loves Mr. Burrmann, he takes care of her and looks after his son, and I don’t see nothing,
anything
, wrong with that.” She appealed to the young man for support. The young man nodded. “How old Mbelolo is now?”

“Four, going ‘pon five,” Bernice reminded her. “And suppose you see him! Bright? Child, that boy is so bright? Bright isn’t the word, then. His father have him going to the Toronto French School, and already he tell me, the boy’s name is down on some private school’s list. I think the name he mention’ was Upper Canada College.”

“Well well well, if it isn’t Bernice!” Boysie was standing in the middle of the room. His face was washed, his shirt pushed too tidily and tightly into his trousers, he was feeling relieved and very expansive in his greeting. “And who is this young gentleman who likes classical music so good?”

“Where was you? Listening to people’s conversation?” Bernice teased him.

“Emptying his guts, that’s what,” Dots said from the kitchen. Boysie waited to see whether she was saying it in a teasing manner, or whether she had already begun her practice
of “bad-talking” him in front of strangers. He was not sure which way she had said it. But he made a point to be watchful. “Gal, all this man been doing all morning is running from the kitchen to the toilet!”

“Pleased to meet you,” the young man said.

“You too!” Boysie said, sizing him up. “The name is Boysie.”

“This is my young man, Boysie.” The young man winced in his heart. “Boysie, this is Llewellyn Prescott that I was telling …”

“I know, I know. Llewellyn, pleased to meet you. My name is Bertram. But around here, they call me Boysie.”

“Don’t let that man fool you!” Dots said, bringing the drinks. “From the time I know this man, he was Boysie. What is so bad about the name, Boysie?”

“Well, you know, Missis Cumberbatch …”

“Call me Dots! I not ashamed o’ Dots!”

“Well, all right, Dots, but I still have to call you Missis Cumberbatch, as a sign of respect, seeing you are older …”

“Old?”
Dots was screaming now. Months before, she was able to make a joke about this too; but with Bernice sporting this young man all over Toronto, and with her own private grief over getting old before she had accomplished what she wanted in life, and with Boysie now outstripping her … “Old? Looka, boy, who the hell are you calling old?” And very wickedly, she patted herself on her backside, and came very close to him as she did it, patting herself again and again, the sound of her hand on her fat body, making a noise which was like whiplashes on Boysie’s sensibilities. “You call
that
old?”

“Oh my God,” Boysie said in his heart. “Something is happening to this woman.”

“You were telling me something very important, Llewellyn.”

“Yes, I was going to say that, that … I was going to say that in my own opinion, it is extremely important that a person determines what name he wants himself to be called by, by which he wants himself to be called. There are great psychological reasons for that.” Bernice was looking very proud at her man. Dots, who felt she had got the worse in the exchange, merely handed the young man the drink, and chose a seat opposite him. Boysie was paying attention. “Thanks, for the drink. The whole question about names is that it is the first stage of self-determination. For you see, if you could be called by any name which anybody wants to call you by, by which anybody wants to call you, then you see that you are not free, in a very delicate sense of the term.”

“Oh God,” Boysie said in his heart, “he is a gorilliphant.” This is the kind of talk he wanted to hear a long time ago. Could this young man also explain the new language he was seeking to understand and master? Could he also explain, in those same psychological terms, exactly the meaning of the strange woman with the brown winter coat?

“Yuh know something, the way you just put that tells me you are a damn bright man.”

“Didn’t I tell you so, Dots?” Bernice said. Dots was left out of the conversation.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said.

“I am sorry, Missis Cumberbatch, if you feel that I have slighted you,” the young man began, speaking in the way Boysie himself wished he himself could use language, with that amount of ease, as if the words were completely in his command. His wife’s efforts to speak properly in strange company were actually not very successful, he realized, since her words did not come out as naturally as this young man’s. Perhaps you had to have a lot of education to put your words, and the
thoughts those words had to convey, in the way this young man was doing.

“So, what are you studying, man?”

“Law.”

“I going tell you something. The day you hang up that shingle, call me. Call Boysie Cumberbatch. I am going to give you your first job.”

“Brief,” the young man said.

“Brief?”

“Brief is the word for it.”

The atmosphere was less tense now. The young man saw a friend in Boysie, perhaps his only friend in the room. He also felt some pity for Dots. He understood what she was doing to Boysie through her vulgarity. And he tried to put all this in perspective, taking Bernice into the picture too. Bernice was proud of him, he knew that. He very often had to restrain her from spending her money on him. He knew the function he performed in her life and to her body. But in a way, which he could not help thinking would take away from the lustre and the freedom of his relationship with her, he felt it was an obscene relationship: he, a young law student, completely broke, and only twenty-six, as the boyfriend, the lover, the man of this woman in her early fifties, or late forties, with a body of a twenty-five-year-old woman, but with the frustrations and the depressions of a woman who had gone beyond that stage of life, when her body itself was cautioning some pause in sensual and sexual activities. Deep down, he loved Bernice. He would continue to love her, for the duration of his penury, and even after he had graduated; even after he had married another woman, which he knew he would do: there was no question about it. Sometimes, however, he hated her because she was old. And she loved him. He looked at Dots,
and could not make up his mind whether he loved her, too. But he knew he would readily take her to bed.

“Aren’t you drinking, Mr. Cumberbatch?”

“Oh yeah, man!” Boysie did not realize before this that his wife had not made him a drink. Dots did not apologise for the oversight: perhaps it wasn’t an oversight at all. So Boysie got up: “What’s that you have there?”

“Rum and Coke, I think.” Dots liked rum and Coke. And so did Bernice, sometimes.

“What about Scotch?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Come, man, let’s do some serious drinking.” He got up and went to fix their drinks.

“Bernice told me that you have very good records and a good record player, with a nice tone, so if you don’t mind, I’ve brought along some sides …”

“Sides?”

“Records.”

“Christ!”

“… you don’t mind, eh?”

“What kind o’ records you bring?” Dots asked him. The situation was getting completely out of her control, and she wanted to do something about regaining her position in her house. “Boysie don’t listen to
every
kind o’ music these days, yuh know.” She was talking now as she used to talk. Free, easy, and in her Barbadian language. She knew she could gain the upper hand among them. “Boysie only plays one record.
One
record. You would think that something was wrong with his head. Bernice, gal, my husband plays
one
, one record these days. And it isn’t no calypso, neither!”

“Now, that’s strange! Very strange!” The young man sipped his Scotch, liked its strength, and continued. “Very often, I find
myself listening to only one record out of all that I might have been listening to before. And I find, personally, that it depends upon a certain mood. I even gave away a box of classical records once, when I was in third-year economics at the University of Toronto, and a week later, as I was crossing the campus, I heard a piece of music that I used to listen to every Sunday morning, instead of going to chapel … ahhmmm, it was the
New World Symphony
, I heard the
New World Symphony
being played on a record player in the women’s residence as I was passing it, and you know, Mr. Cumberbatch, I stood up for a while listening, and the thing hit me in a certain way, and I could then understand what that piece of music meant.” He paused to take another sip of his drink. He held the napkin which Boysie had given him with the drink in the same hand as the drink, at the bottom of the glass. Bernice was listening very attentively and with more pride than she had shown earlier; and Dots was bending over to catch each word. But the impression on her face seemed to suggest that she was waiting to catch him on something. “I mention the name of the music because I had been going through a period. You know, depressions and things like that. No money, no possibility of any, either, and my finals just around the corner. And I had been listening to classical music all the time. Nothing but this kind of heavy music. The other fellows used to laugh at me, and call me white man. And in my state, that got to me. And I woke up one morning and said, You know something? They must be right. And I must be wrong. What is a West Indian, a Jamaican whose father didn’t even reach Fourth Standard in the elementary system back home, whose father didn’t know how to spell
university
, what am I doing up here listening to classical music, and so on and so on. You see, and I ought to mention it, it was during the period when the blacks
in the States first started talking about Black Pride, when even in Jamaica we were beginning to understand the meaning of our local music, you remember? The
Ska
. Well, I gave away all my classical albums. But I was saying. I stood up that afternoon and listened for a while to the
New World Symphony
, and then at the window that the music was coming out of, through which the music was coming, there appeared this West Indian girl. Shhhiit!” He immediately apologised for using the word, and added, “Shoot! A West Indian girl. Well, when I got to know who she was, I found out that she was studying classical music at the Royal Conservatory here. You see what I mean?”

“Go on, talk.”

“Talk, boy,” Bernice said, somewhat unnecessarily, enraptured by the cleverness of her young man. He had every intention of talking more. “Take yuh time and talk.” And with pride, she turned to Dots, who was still holding over, and she said, “You see the brains that this boy have? This boy is going to make the most smartest lawyer in this country.”

“What did I begin telling you about?”

“You was talking ’bout playing only one record,” Dots said.