Death of a Unicorn

‘How marvellous!’ I said. Did you manage to get the plantation going again? Was it very beautiful?’

She looked at me half-sideways over her glass. Knowing B as well as I did I thought she was pleased. I guessed he had brought me along because it would give her somebody new to tell her story to. Judging by the few words they’d said to each other so far, they didn’t find tête-à-têtes very easy.

‘If Amos had stayed we might have done it, with the Lord’s help,’ she said.

‘We’d have needed that,’ said B. ‘Sugar’s been in the doldrums for five years. The places which had built up a bit of fat during the war have managed to keep going, but Halper’s was run right down and mortgaged twice over.’

‘Now they are giving us the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement,’ said Jeremy. I expected him to add ‘Hallelujah,’ but he didn’t.

B shot him one of his looks. I thought he was about to snap at him to clear out, but perhaps he wasn’t quite prepared to take that line with his step-uncle. Instead he just growled, ‘Too late. Tell Miss Millett what it looked like, Mother.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It is an old house, built by my forebear Cleck Halper in the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and twelve. Built and well built, but my father neglected it. I did not think it beautiful when I was a child, but when I returned and saw it in its ruin my heart went out in grief. The fields around are fields of cane, with cuts between, beautiful in the green and gold of their season. And beyond the road is a little bay with a beach, where my mother used to take me when I was a child and teach me my letters in the sand. That was surely beautiful, according to the beauty of this world.’

She was talking now in a much less here-endeth-the-second-lesson style, but with her drawl more pronounced. I thought perhaps this was part of the story that she didn’t often tell.

‘It sounds lovely,’ I said. ‘Can we go and see it?’

‘Waste of time,’ said B. ‘Miss Millett is going to inherit an old house, Mother. That’s why she’s interested.’

‘Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth,’ she said.

‘It seems to be more a case of laying up for yourself troubles upon earth,’ I said. ‘Besides, I didn’t do the laying up. It all happened before I was born. Perhaps one day I’ll run away for love, like you did.’

In fact B made very little fuss about driving me out to Halper’s Corner. I felt that he actually wanted to go, but at the same time not to seem to want to. It was difficult to be sure. He’d been more than usually unpredictable these last few days.

The house we were staying in—I never found out who it belonged to, but B said it wasn’t his, and it had a used feeling, half-full bottles in the drinks cabinet, recent copies of Life and Harpers, servants and a gardener—also provided a vast squashy American car, a convertible. We drove up the West Coast Road in the middle of the afternoon. B was in one of his withdrawn moods, so I fantasised about being a film star being taken by my director to look at the location for a lush plantation romance—brutal planter, sullen-seeming daughter, noble young missionary—there’d have to be an alternative lover, of course, spit image of Mark Babington—he would be the one who rode frantic to the quay as the ship sailed for England—finish in misty glow as lovers embrace at Liverpool with Salvation Army Silver Band for background, and skip the grinding years in Halifax—not Hollywood material . . .

Before I’d come to Barbados I’d created it vividly in my mind’s eye, white beaches and palms round the fringe, and a hinterland of steep jungly mountains, brilliant with parakeets and hibiscus. Quite wrong. It turned out to be a landscape rather like one of the duller English counties, rolling, undistinguished hills given over to farming. It obviously wasn’t England, because of the blueness of the sky and the blackness of the people and their crowdedness and poverty, and the height of the sugar cane in the fields; the beaches and hibiscus were there too. So one was abroad, but not very. Mrs Brierley’s flat still felt far more foreign than anything else I’d come across. Up the West Coast Road, where the land was poorer than elsewhere, there were certainly unfarmed patches, but even these had a scrubby, battered look. The sheer number of people on the island meant that there was almost nowhere really wild and lonely. It was all a bit like a town, with fields instead of houses. I had prepared myself to be disappointed well before B turned up a track between cane-fields. The lie of the low hills enclosed a flat triangular area. The sea dropped out of sight behind us and for once I felt here was a place of isolation. A black man on an old bicycle came bumping down the track towards us, pulled aside to let us pass and gaped as we went through. A hundred yards further on, as the track rose to one of the boundary hills, it was barred by rusted iron gates hanging askew between a pair of grand stone gateposts. B stopped and we climbed out.