Black Cake(34)

Miss Eunice’s advice was explicit: “You never know who around you could be a blabba mout, right? Don’t forget that you going to a place where the people dem not all black. You a woman from the islands and you need to behave better than dem.”

Covey was to keep her hair and shoes tidy, keep her dresses at the knee or not too far above. She was to stay away from the dance halls and the concerts. She was to stay away from the street demonstrations. There were more and more protests in Britain, these days, by colored people tired of slumlike housing, tired of being hit with police clubs, tired of receiving training and then being turned away from jobs. She should avoid the big market where islanders liked to shop. She was to reduce the chances of running into someone from back home. Be discreet, Miss Eunice said. Keep safe, stay out of trouble.

In other words, Covey thought, be lonely.

But Covey understood. She needed to stay as far away from Little Man’s family as possible. Stay out of sight, let time go by. Eventually, she might be able to resume her studies overseas. Eventually, she might be able to look for Gibbs. On the bad days, on the nights when she couldn’t sleep, Covey thought of all the plans that she and Gibbs had made together. But she couldn’t risk trying to contact him too soon; maybe one day. Maybe not.

Not being able to swim made everything more difficult to bear. Whenever she could, Covey would go out walking and the surprise of her surroundings helped to distract her. She had grown up seeing photographs and news films of London and thought she knew the city, but now she saw that she’d had no idea what it would be like. The traffic, the advertisements, the brick-walled shops. The living mannequins, young women, modeling clothing from inside a window. Office girls walking down the street in short-short skirts, even in winter. The lead-colored river slicing through the heart of it all, the smell of coal almost everywhere.

Once in a while, Covey would come across a block of crumbling buildings, piles of rubbish spilling onto the sidewalk, and people, white and brown, bracing themselves against the cold in a level of squalor that she had never seen in her hometown. It made her think of all those things that she could no longer enjoy. A warm, silky feeling to the air, a hint of ripening fruit, the sweet-salt smell of the Caribbean Sea. On some days, she missed even the tang of cow patties drying in the sun, the sound of flies buzzing around. It would take some time for Covey to get used to her new surroundings.

And time to get used to being stared at.

To being muttered at.

To being ignored altogether.

To being treated like a woman from the islands.

Living this way for months softened Covey’s resolve to keep to herself. It wasn’t long before she made the acquaintance of other young women like her, girls from the Caribbean who warmed to the sound of her familiar accent. There was a large house where people from various countries would gather to socialize and swap information, though, thankfully, no one from her own small town.

As Covey listened to their stories, she came to understand how fortunate she had been with the family that had hired her, with the boots and gloves they’d given her to shepherd her through that first damp, frigid season. Covey’s employers gave her books to read from the family’s library. Instead, other girls had struggled to find accommodations, had been turned away from doors with Rooms to Let signs out front, were paying much more for a room with a washbasin than the white girls at work.

Covey’s employers talked to her as if she was someone because they were friends with a well-placed government man whose connections went all the way back to Pearl. The government man’s wife knew Miss Eunice, and Miss Eunice, it turned out, was the former school friend of the wife of the wholesaler who sold supplies to Covey’s father and other shopkeepers. None of the men had ever heard of Miss Eunice, but each of the women had turned to her for help at some point in their lives. And all of them had purchased or tasted Pearl’s black cakes.

Unlike Covey, most of the island women she’d met planned to go back to the Caribbean as soon as they’d completed their studies or saved enough money to return, but the reality was, few would have the means to do so. Some would fall in love and still others would disappear, the rumor being that they may have gone off somewhere to have a child.

“And Judith?”

“Judith? Haven’t seen her for a while.”

Then silence, a nod, a few looks exchanged. They knew not to ask more than once.

Each of the women talked about their lives before England. Unable to tell the truth about her own past, Covey spoke, instead, of a childhood that she had invented. Without a chiney father, without a runaway mother. She painted a vague picture of growing up with a grandmother who had lived much longer than her own grannies had. She spoke of living in a rural part of the island that she’d never seen.

Some of the women had been recruited from the islands to study nursing.

“The National Health Service is always short on nurses, you know,” one of them told Covey. “You should think about it. I could help you.”

Soon, Covey was convinced. She would leave the nanny position to enroll in nursing school. She wasn’t sure that this was the profession for her, she only knew that she would do whatever it took to move forward, to take control of her life. She thought of her father. Her father had lost control of his life and here Covey was, paying the price.

Covey had wanted to come to Britain, but not this way. The loneliness hit her hardest at bedtime. Sometimes, when she was too upset to read, she would sit on the edge of her bed and run her hand over the top of her wooden box, its ebony lid as smooth to the touch as a child’s arm, its carved edges tickling her fingertips. She would lift the lid and let it fall shut, lift then shut, over and over again, thinking of her mother. Thinking of home.