The Far Side of the Sun (7 page)

So, what happened?

How did she end up in a backwater like New Providence Island? Right now there was a war on in Europe, tearing countries and lives apart, and part of her hankered after driving an ambulance. Or taking down important radio messages. Delivering packages of secret documents. Anything… anything to break the crushing tedium of her life.

She swerved to avoid a rail-thin dog that had chosen to take its nap in the middle of the road in the sun. Tilly opened her eyes but closed them again, and Ella thought she must have a very clear conscience, the way she could fall asleep faster than a lizard. On each side of the road the trees dozed lazily in the heat above an underlay of young palmetto, a fan-shaped palm whose leaves were used for thatching and weaving. A roadside stall selling yellow melons shot past and the dark-skinned woman behind it waved a hand. Ella waved back.

So what happened? Why wasn’t Reggie in the war cabinet?

Everything changed, that’s what happened.

‘I will of course release you from our engagement, Ella,’ Reggie had announced stiffly in her mother’s drawing room, ‘if you wish.’

‘No, darling Reggie.’ She had walked up to him, taken his face between her hands and kissed his mouth. ‘It is not what I wish. Not at all.’

His eyes had filled with tears. In the twenty years that she had spent with him, it was the only time she’d seen her husband cry. He didn’t offer the details and she didn’t ask. They never discussed it again. Some financial misdealing he’d got mixed up in, that was all she knew, but it was bad enough for him to withdraw discreetly from Parliament. Instead he was sidelined into the Colonial Office, shunted out to postings in far-flung corners of the Empire to keep him from being snubbed in decent London drawing rooms. So instead of hacking her way to the source of the Nile, she had hacked her way through cucumber sandwiches and polite conversation year after year.

That’s just the way it was.

The school, when she found it, was small, only twelve pupils, and ill equipped. There was a blackboard in the schoolroom but a shortage of slates for the children, some of whom were perched on upturned wooden crates. Ella greeted each child and talked with the black female schoolteacher about the need for books for them to read and chalks for them to write with. Maybe even a few stick-pens and inkwells. A notebook and ruler each would make such a difference.

‘I’ll see what I can do for you,’ Ella promised.

‘The School Commission ain’t goin’ to like that I went behind their backs to you, Mrs Sanford.’

‘I expect they’re white and male and like their own rules. But don’t worry,’ Ella smiled with respect at the fresh young face of the teacher, who was no more than nineteen or twenty herself, ‘we won’t tell them.’

The young woman’s eyes were excited. ‘I appreciate that. Thank you, Mrs Sanford.’

The children sang ‘God Save Our Gracious King’ to Ella not once but twice, and as she was leaving, the schoolteacher said, ‘Goodbye, Mrs Sanford. Do take care in town.’

Ella halted. ‘Why? What’s happening in town?’

‘Nothing much. It’s just some construction workers again.’

‘But the pay dispute and all that trouble was settled last year,’ Ella pointed out. ‘Aren’t they being paid enough now?’

‘It depends on what you mean by enough, doesn’t it?’

Ella made no comment and climbed into the car. ‘Wake up, Tilly. We have a race to watch.’

It wasn’t until she was approaching town once more, motoring along West Bay Street with the sea sprawling away to their left in a dazzling patchwork of emerald and midnight blue, that Ella suddenly sat up straight behind the steering wheel. Alert and watchful.

‘Tilly, what exactly did she mean when she said “Take care in town”?’

Downtown Nassau was pretty. No other word for it. Pretty as a picture. All pastel-painted façades and shady canopies to shield shoppers from the inconvenience of sun or rain. Bay Street was the broad tree-lined main thoroughfare of Nassau that ran parallel to the ocean, and Ella was struck yet again by its elegance and its unadulterated prettiness.

Bay Street was where the money was. The Bay Street Boys – that’s what they called them – were the greedy men in cool linen suits who ran this island. They smoked fat Cuban cigars together in their offices above the rows of stylish shops and sometimes Ella caught sight of them gazing down from their upper windows with self-satisfied smiles. They were the men who controlled the economy and the House of Assembly, the lawyers and land agents, accountants and merchants, traders who made fortunes and knew exactly where to go for an official government stamp on their contracts.

They were male and white-skinned, and much of their power depended on keeping the blacks in their place and the island’s agriculture primitive. Yet Ella had to admit that one of the qualities she loved most about the island was its free spirit. It flaunted its indifference to any kind of rules. Its history was riddled with illegal rum-running and bare-faced roguery, all the way back to the time when formidable pirates such as Blackbeard stalked its dirt streets with a pistol strapped to each thigh, or when wreckers lured ships on to rocks to plunder their cargo.

It took the appointment of Woodes Rogers as the first British Governor of the Bahamas in 1717 to knock some law and order into the taverns and brothels of Fort Nassau. But the island always remained a magnet for risk-takers. For blockade-runners to the Confederacy during the American Civil War, and more recently for bootleggers of illegal alcohol making a quick buck out of Prohibition in the United States. Those glory days – when a boat packed with crates of rum could make more money in one dangerous night spent sailing across to Miami than it could in six months of hard fishing – were gone now.

But the standard of living for the island’s black population continued to be woefully low and Ella could understand all too well why the riot had occurred last year. It was over inequality of pay between black and white construction workers on the new airfield. The physical damage inflicted on Bay Street had been repaired, broken glass and masonry rapidly swept out of sight, but the damage to the islanders’ trust in the fairness of the system went beyond the reach of a broom and a bucket of cement. Black Bahamians by nature were easy-going people, always ready with a smile and eager to break out their infectious calypso music over a beer. It took an awful lot to get them riled up, but the unrest was growing, just below the surface.

‘Do you know what happened to me yesterday, Tilly?’

‘I know you’re going to be wearing that surrey’s pretty little fringe on your bonnet if you don’t slow down, darling.’

In front of them was one of the decorated horse-drawn surreys that trotted up and down Nassau’s main streets, used as taxis by locals and as sight-seeing vehicles by visitors to the island. Ella braked hard. The heat was billowing through the open window and the high wheels of the surrey were churning the road-dust into a soup that stuck between her teeth.

‘So what happened, Ella?’

‘I was in Walker’s Haberdashery yesterday. That toffee-nosed wife of his refused to serve a black woman who wanted to buy a pair of gloves.’

‘Christ!’

‘Exactly.’

‘Did you say anything?’

‘Of course. I closed my account there.’

‘Good for you.’

‘Gwen Walker is such a damn hypocrite.’

Tilly lifted her sun-hat from her lap and fanned her face with it. ‘Did you inform Reggie?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘I bet he was cross.’

‘He telephoned Rob Walker immediately.’

‘What was his —’

A noise like a slap made Ella jump in her seat, and abruptly the world turned bright red. She blinked hard. Still red. She put a hand up to her face and pulled it away at once, her heart hammering.

So much blood.

What was the smell?

Dodie inhaled sharply. A distinct odour of sadness seemed to seep out of the woodwork. It made the hairs prickle on the back of her neck. She had stood, rigid with indecision, outside the pink building with its green shutters and its blue glass lamp. It certainly didn’t look like a police station on the outside. In front of it a monstrous cottonwood tree stood in the middle of the buildings that made up Nassau’s administrative centre in Rawson Square and Parliament Square. With their pink and columned façades arranged as charmingly as a doll’s house, the Assembly Hall, the Supreme Court, the fire-brigade HQ, the Post Office, were all gathered behind a grand statue of Queen Victoria.

But inside the police station it was no doll’s house. Dodie walked forward nervously towards the counter where the duty sergeant was deep in conversation with a spiky-haired woman who seemed to be relating a complicated account of her dispute with her neighbour.

‘Then the bastard chopped down my fig tree,’ she complained loudly, flapping a handkerchief to her face. ‘I just loved that tree.’

‘That doesn’t give you the right to let your goats trample all over his…’

Dodie stepped back to where a line of hard-backed wooden chairs waited. Three men were seated on them, two black, one white. The white one was old and drunk. The other two were young and silent, their mouths tight, like they had something to hide. Neither even glanced at her. It had not occurred to Dodie that there might be a queue. She wanted this whole thing to be over quickly.

She took a seat and waited. The minutes crawled past. Her hands kept fidgeting, plucking at the material of her skirt, so she sat on them to keep them still. She was supposed to be at work now. Olive Quinn would already be snapping at the other waitresses at the Arcadia Hotel because she was short-staffed. Dodie eyed the telephone on the desk. Maybe she could ask to use it to explain why she was late, but when she glanced at the sergeant she changed her mind. He had the intractable look of someone who enjoyed saying no.

‘Can I help you, miss?’ A face loomed over Dodie. It belonged to a tall white man with an English accent, in a lightweight suit and tie. She could see
policeman
printed all over him, in the way he stood with feet planted firmly apart as though confident of his claim to this piece of territory. His mouth was polite, friendly even, but his grey eyes were so direct and intrusive that for a split second she looked away.

‘I’m Detective Sergeant Calder,’ he said.

Before she could answer, the entrance door burst open with a crash and two women ran – literally ran – into the station covered in blood.

Everyone stared, but it was the tall policeman in the suit who reacted first.

‘Call an ambulance, Sergeant,’ he ordered, as he stretched out a hand to the taller of the two, a dark-haired woman who was clutching a hat in one hand with blood trailing from its wide brim like scarlet ribbons.

She seized his wrist, leaving smears on his sleeve. ‘This is an outrage,’ she shouted.

Blood was slashed across one side of her face, over her shoulder and blouse, puddling on her skirt, but the blonde woman was worse. Her face was a mask of crimson, glistening on her eyelashes so that the intense blue of her eyes was startling in the midst of it, yet she was the one who remained calm. The top half of her summer dress was plastered against her breasts.

Dodie leapt to her feet. ‘Can I help?’

‘We’re not hurt,’ the blonde woman announced. ‘It’s not our blood.’ Her blue eyes glittered, bright with anger. ‘Fetch Colonel Lindop at once,’ she ordered.

The detective gave a quick nod to the desk sergeant who ran for the stairs, and then he slipped off his jacket and draped it around the scarlet shoulders of the blonde woman. She pulled the jacket tight around herself, hiding her body from public gaze.

‘Thank you.’

‘What happened?’ the detective asked. His voice sounded steady and comforting.

‘We were attacked in the street.’ The woman smacked her palms together, as if she would crush the offenders.

Sharp footsteps sounded and an older man with military bearing marched into the room, effortlessly drawing eyes to himself. All over the world men like him were propping up the Empire on their shoulders. He was wearing the khaki uniform of the island’s police commissioner with a black gunbelt and highly polished boots. Immediately the atmosphere in the room altered.

‘My dear ladies! Dear God, what the devil has happened to you?’

He advanced on them with outstretched arms, but Dodie noticed he didn’t touch, didn’t risk spoiling his crisply ironed uniform. Not like the one who gave up his jacket.

‘There were five of them, they threw a bucket of blood over us,’ the blonde woman declared. She had herself under control now, no more smacking of hands.

‘Whoever did this, I shall come down on them hard,’ Lindop assured her.

‘Black workers shouting at us, hurling blood at us,’ the dark-haired woman said angrily. ‘I’m telling you, Colonel Lindop, we’re lucky to be alive.’ She had released the detective sergeant and her hands fluttered through the air like crimson butterflies in a panic.

‘Tilly,’ the blonde said, suddenly embarrassed, ‘don’t exaggerate. Other than… this’ – she gestured at their ruined clothes – ‘they did us no harm. They ran off immediately.’

Colonel Lindop waved a hand towards a door at the far end of the room. ‘Come, ladies.’ He glanced around the spectators, his gaze skimming over Dodie, before returning to make a quick assessment of the two women. ‘Blake,’ he said briskly to the desk sergeant at his elbow, ‘fetch a doctor. And a photographer. At once.’