Irie: It was a such a good film. The end was great!
Hortense Bowden (tearfully): And dem dat expeck such an end to dis world will be sorely disappointed, for He will come trailin’ terror and Lo de generation dat witness de events of 1914 shall now witness de turd part of de trees burn, and the turd part of de sea become as blood, and de turd part of de…
And then there was Hortense’s horror of weather reports. Whoever it was, however benign, honey-voiced and inoffensively dressed, she cursed them bitterly for the five minutes they stood there, and then, out of what appeared to be sheer perversity, proceeded to take the opposite of whatever advice had been proffered (light jacket and no umbrella for rain, full cagoule and rain hat for sun). It was several weeks before Irie understood that weathermen were the secular antithesis of Hortense’s life work, which was, essentially, a kind of supercosmic attempt to second-guess the Lord with one almighty biblical exegesis of a weather report. Next to that weathermen were nothing but upstarts… And tomorrow, coming in from the east, we can expect a great furnace to rise up and envelop the area with flames that give no light, but rather darkness visible… while I’m afraid the northern regions are advised to wrap up warm against thick-ribbed ice, and there’s a fair likelihood that the coast will be beaten with perpetual storms of whirlwind and dire hail which on firm land thaws not… Michael Fish and his ilk were stabbers-in-the-dark, trusting to the tomfoolery of the Met Office, making a mockery of that precise science, eschatology, that Hortense had spent over fifty years in the study of.
‘Any news, Mr Topps?’ (This question almost invariably asked over breakfast; and girlishly, breathlessly, like a child asking after Santa.)
‘No, Mrs B. We are still completing our studies. You must let my colleagues and myself deliberate thoroughly. In this life there are them that are teachers and then there are them that are pupils. There are eight million Witnesses of Jehovah waiting for our decision, waiting for the Judgement Day. But you must learn to leave such fings to them that ’ave the direct line, Mrs B., the direct line.’
After bunking for a few weeks, Irie returned to school. But it seemed so distant; even the journey from South to North each morning felt like an almighty polar trek, and worse, one that stopped short of its goal and ended up instead in the tepid regions, a non-event compared with the boiling maelstrom of the Bowden home. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. You become so used to extremity, suddenly nothing else will do.
She saw Millat regularly, but their conversations were brief. He was green-tied now and otherwise engaged. She still did Marcus’s filing twice a week, but avoided the rest of the family. She saw Josh fleetingly. He seemed to be avoiding the Chalfens as assiduously as she. Her parents she saw on weekends, icy occasions when everybody called everybody by their first names (Irie, can you pass the salt to Archie? Clara, Archie wants to know where the scissors are), and all parties felt deserted. She sensed that she was being whispered about in N W 2, the way North Londoners will when they suspect someone of coming down with religion, that nasty disease. So she hurried back to No. 28 Lindaker Road, Lambeth, relieved to be back in the darkness, for it was like hibernating or being cocooned, and she was as curious as everyone else to see what kind of Irie would emerge. It wasn’t any kind of prison. That house was an adventure. In cupboards and neglected drawers and in grimy frames were the secrets that had been hoarded for so long, as if secrets were going out of fashion. She found pictures of her great- grandmother Ambrosia, a bony, beautiful thing, with huge almond eyes, and one of Charlie ‘Whitey’ Durham standing in a pile of rubble with a sepia-print sea behind him. She found a bible with one line torn from it. She found photo-booth snaps of Clara in school uniform, grinning maniacally, the true horror of the teeth revealed. She read alternately from Dental Anatomy by Gerald M. Cathey and The Good News Bible, and raced voraciously through Hortense’s small and eclectic library, blowing the red dust of a Jamaican schoolhouse off the covers and often using a pen knife to cut never-before-read pages. February’s list was as follows:
An Account of a West Indian Sanatorium, by Geo. J. H. Sutton Moxly. London: Sampson, Low, Marston amp; Co., 1886. (There was an inverse correlation between the length of the author’s name and the poor quality of his book.)
Tom Cringle’s Log, by Michael Scott. Edinburgh: 1875.
In Sugar Cane Land, by Eden Phillpotts. London: McClure amp; Co., 1893.
Dominica: Hints and Notes to Intending Settlers, by His Honour H. Hesketh Bell, CMG. London: A. amp; C. Black, 1906.
The more she read, the more that picture of dashing Capt. Durham aroused her natural curiosity: handsome and melancholy, surveying the bricks of half a church, looking worldly-wise despite his youth, looking every inch the Englishman, looking like he could tell someone or another a thing or two about something. Maybe Irie herself. Just in case, she kept him under her pillow. And in the mornings it wasn’t Italianate vineyards out there any more, it was sugar, sugar, sugar, and next door was nothing but tobacco and she presumptuously fancied that the smell of plantain sent her back to somewhere, somewhere quite fictional, for she’d never been there. Somewhere Columbus called St Jago but the arawaks stubbornly re-named Xaymaca, the name lasting longer than they did. Well-wooded and Watered. Not that Irie had heard of those little sweet-tempered pot-bellied victims of their own sweet-tempers. Those were some other Jamaicans, fallen short of the attention-span of history. She laid claim to the past – her version of the past – aggressively, as if retrieving misdirected mail. So this was where she came from. This all belonged to her, her birthright, like a pair of pearl earrings or a post office bond. X marks the spot, and Irie put an X on everything she found, collecting bits and bobs (birth certificates, maps, army reports, news articles) and storing them under the sofa, so that as if by osmosis the richness of them would pass through the fabric while she was sleeping and seep right into her.
As the buds came with the spring, so like any anchoress she was visited. First, by voices. Coming crackling over Hortense’s neolithic radio, Joyce Chalfen on Gardeners’ Question Time:
Foreman: Another question from the audience, I think. Mrs Sally Whitaker from Bournemouth has a question for the panel, I believe. Mrs Whitaker?
Mrs Whitaker: Thank you, Brian. Well, I’m a new gardener and this is my first frost and in two short months my garden’s gone from being a real colour explosion to a very bare thing indeed… Friends have advised flowers with a compact habit but that leaves me with lots of tiny auricula and double daisies, which look silly because the garden’s really quite large. Now, I’d really like to plant something a little more striking, around the height of a delphinium, but then the wind gets it and people look over their fences thinking: Dear oh dear (sympathetic laughter from the studio audience). So, my question to the panel is, how do you keep up appearances in the bleak midwinter?
Foreman: Thank you, Mrs Whitaker. Well, it’s a common problem… and it doesn’t necessarily get any easier for the seasoned gardener. Personally, I never get it quite right. Well, let’s hand the question over to the panel, shall we? Joyce Chalfen, any answers or suggestions for the bleak
