T. Boyle - The Women

It wasn’t fifteen minutes and there was a knock at the door and the dishwater man standing there to lead them through the maze of that house and into the presence. Gertrude kept her eyes down the whole way. She’d changed into her best dress and the white apron she’d found hanging beside the jacket and she had her lips bunched in that monkey way of hers that showed she was nervous and he called her out on it, hissing “Monkey, monkey” till she shot her eyes at him. They went back out into the rain, across the courtyard, quickstepping to keep out of the mud — cows lowing, and a smell of them too — then into a door on the other side, which led through a sitting room for the workers. Then there was the long expanse of the studio and two men — he recognized the one from the courtyard — seated there at their big desks with their drawings on sheets of paper the size of tablecloths spread out before them and neither one even bothered to look up. Outside again, but with a roof over their heads — the loggia — and on into the main house and a big pot-cluttered kitchen there with a greasy wood range and a mess of plates and dirty silverware in the sink and the lazy fat bluebottle flies clinging to the walls and windows as if they didn’t have a care in the world. “This is the kitchen,” the dishwater man said and they made one rotation of the room and followed the bony twitch of his shoulders out the door and through a dining alcove festooned with enough artworks, statues, rugs and animal skins — and what was that, a badger? — to stock a museum, and then took a sharp left turn into a great grand room crammed with even more foolery and bric-a-brac and the lake livid as a bruise out there beneath the windows.

They saw her before she saw them. She was sitting at the window in a strange kind of high-backed chair slatted like a lobster trap, her rum-colored hair pinned up in a coil so that her ears stood out like scallop shells, white as white. There were books stacked round her, both on the low table to her left and on the floor at her feet, and she seemed to be inscribing something in the ledger in her lap. He shifted his eyes to Gertrude and there she was making those monkey lips again, her hands knitted in front of her as if she were in the side pew of the church, her eyes gaped wide at the sight of all the fine things in the room — the grand piano, the fabrics and paintings and colored-glass lamps and the books in their polished wooden cases that fit them just so — and he wanted to hiss at her but he didn’t.

He was feeling the same thing she was: they were inside, in the inner sanctum, the place where the white elite lived at their leisure, and it was a new world to both of them, as fantastic as Captain Nemo’s submarine or that spaceship H.G. Wells sent off to the moon. What did they know? They were Bajans. Ignorant and small. And even as the thought came to him he saw himself as a boy filled with shame and excitement as he crouched in the horse nicker and thatch palm outside the grand big house of the landowner, Mr. Brighton, and half the village there ducking down shamefaced to see how he and his white guests took their tea out on the patio, how they lifted their little fingers over the thimble-sized teacups and how the ladies arched their backs and cooed in their little birds’ voices and took their tea cakes up to nibble at them without dropping a crumb or staining their perfect white gloves with even the smallest single spot of sweet cream butter or a granule of sugar. So that was how it was done, they were all thinking and thinking too of their banged-together wood-slat houses listing over the white limestone foundations and picturing their neighbors sitting there, all black, black as the night of the hurricane, lifting their little fingers over the cups that were no bigger than the ones in a dollhouse.

The dishwater man cleared his throat. “Uh, Mrs. Borthwick,” he said, and he was shuffling the toe of his shoe on the carpet as if he was all nerves too, “I’m sorry to disturb you but you said to bring the new help around, and I—”

She started — a quick jump of the shoulders and the blood flushing those scallop-shell ears — and it was as if they’d burst in on her in the bath or in her bed, and she swiveled round in the seat and dropped the heavy book to the floor with a dull reverberant thump he could feel all the way across the room through the soles of his shoes (which he’d wiped up as best he was able, though the shine was dead and gone, maybe forever). “Oh, yes,” she said, up on her feet now, smoothing down her dress, two white hands fluttering to her hair, “hello.” And then again: “Hello.” She paused, drew in a breath. “But how you startled me — I was so deep in my work. .” Her smile swept all three of them like a lighthouse beacon until it landed on the dishwater man. “But, Billy Weston, how you do creep up on a body.”

They stood at the edge of the carpet. No one moved. Then she laughed in a way that was loose and unbridled, almost flirtatious, and let her gaze fall first on Gertrude and then on him. He watched to see her smile fade, but it didn’t. “And you must be the new people.”

He heard himself say, “Yes, ma’am,” but he wasn’t fully present, or not yet, anyway. He was trying to gauge her, mental arithmetic, trying to add the sum of her parts and reach some sort of accounting because she was a young woman, younger by a good measure than the architect with his big head of gray hair who’d expended a whole three minutes of his precious time questioning them about the island before he hired them on. . but she was old too, a kind of chameleon, he saw that now in the light that leached in through the window and trembled along her cheekbone — old as his mother but with the face and figure of a girl yet to bear children. And that was another conundrum, because she had borne children, that’s what he’d heard — two of them, by another man altogether — and she was standing here in her pretty dress and her silky pinned-up hair as if she were something high when she was nothing more than common, common and worn-out and old.

And what sort of comment was that, or question or whatever it was: You must be the new people? Who else would they be, standing there on the edge of her carpet, their black faces shining with sweat above the servants’ costumes she’d hung on a hook in the bathroom?

“Well,” she said, “good,” and she took a step forward as if to see them better. “You must be Julius, then—”

“Julian,” he corrected her.

“Julian, yes. And you are—?” She’d turned to Gertrude and she was young again, graceful, sweet.

Gertrude was bunching her lips. For a minute he thought she was going to curtsey. “Gertrude, ma’am.”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course, Gertrude. ” The way she said it, the way she pronounced his wife’s name as if she’d taken it up like a pewter pin she’d found in the dirt and then polished it on her sleeve so it glowed like silver, made something seize in him. “And you’ll be cooking for us, then. You’ve seen the kitchen?”

Gertrude nodded, then dropped her eyes.

“You do understand that you’ll be expected to serve as many as ten to twelve people at meals, three times a day — Mr. Wright told you as much, I take it?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “And that you’ll have to handle the meats and the produce and make use of what we’re growing here on the farm, as well as take on all the housekeeping, you and your husband, that is. Do you think you’re capable of all that?”

“Oh, she’s capable, ma’am.” He was standing there at the edge of the rug as if it were a precipice — and for a second it was, waves crashing on the rocks below, gulls screaming in the void. He held himself absolutely rigid. “She may be young, but she’s the best cook in all of Bridgetown, a real paragon.”