Black Cake(38)

“Here,” Coventina said, handing her a knife to cut the cake. Coventina had made the cake and Edwina had done the icing and Elly the Orphan was happy. She had found a new family in a chilly, damp city, an ocean away from her island home.

Elly didn’t know when she would get back to the island. It might be years yet. She kept a picture of a butterfly tucked in a Bible that Sister Mary had given her. She kept a cardboard box with a letter from Sister Mary and some shells from the garden at the orphanage and the old hair comb and coins that she’d found while digging in the dirt. One day, she would go back and show Sister Mary her photograph of the girls from the nursing school. They were smart-looking and smiling and standing in a row as if they had always been together and always would be.





Covey and Elly





When Covey first met Eleanor Douglas at the teaching hospital, Eleanor said, “Call me Elly, like jelly, or belly!” She was such a serious-looking gyal but she’d come out with things like that to make Covey smile. Covey knew that she was taking a chance, striking up a friendship with someone from the same island and agreeing to move into lodgings with women who all knew one another. Still, by the time Elly said, “Why don’t you come live with us?” it seemed like the most natural thing to do.

It was only then, in the cottony air of Elly’s laughter, in the pots of stew peas and rice on the kitchen table, in the novelty of walking down the street together, that Covey realized just how bad she’d been feeling until then. She hadn’t been part of any kind of group since the swim club. She hadn’t had anything like a real friend since Bunny.

“Shhh,” one of the other girls said through the door of their room one night, rapping lightly on the partition wall. She and Elly had been chatting too loudly, as usual. There were rules about such things. Better to have their housemates warn them than the landlady herself. They should have been in bed but instead, they were both sitting on the floor between their respective cots, peering at the map that Elly had smoothed out over the rug.

“So this is where we are,” Elly said. “See, here? The rocks in this part of England are some of the youngest. Mostly covered by clay and other soils left behind by glaciers.”

“Glaciers,” repeated Covey. The idea of a force of nature so vast and slow and cold, shaping the world, intrigued her. It made her think of the sea, of how they’d been taught as children that the world was land surrounded by sea when in fact, it was the other way around.

“This piece of land, here,” Elly went on, shifting her finger along the waxy surface of the map, “was pushed into existence by violent processes and rose up to become what it is today.” She raised her eyebrows. “Not so different from what happened to our own island, see?”

Covey nodded. She tried not to smile. In that moment, Elly’s expression made her look more like a middle-aged schoolteacher than someone hardly older than Covey.

“Everything is connected to everything else, if you only go far enough back in time.”

Covey thought of the ocean that stretched from where they were now to the faraway place where they’d both grown up. And without intending to, Covey found herself talking about her life before. “I used to swim,” Covey said. “I used to swim in the sea. For miles and miles.”

“Did you really?” Elly said. “How exciting!”

Covey revealed that she really was from the north coast of the island and not the south, as she’d told everyone who’d asked. “We had the most beautiful bay.”

Until then, Covey had stuck to the invented story about her past. She had never told Elly or anyone else about the forced marriage to Little Man or his murder or even Gibbs, though she’d told Elly that she’d left home because of an unhappy family situation. She willed herself, now, to say no more.

“Have you tried to swim here?” Elly asked.

Covey scrunched up her face. “I tried but I couldn’t. Too cold. Not for me.”

“I’ve never learned to swim,” Elly said. “I’ve only been to the beach once.”

Covey’s mouth softened into an oh. It was something she couldn’t imagine, especially not on a small island like theirs.

Elly told Covey then that she’d grown up in the interior, high above the sea where cockle shells had been left in the ground by a prehistoric ocean. She reached into the pocket of her cardigan then, eyes gleaming.

“Look.” Elly opened her palm to reveal three pink-and-white shells. “This,” Elly said, leaning closer to Covey, “is what I’m going to do. This is what I’m going to do after nursing school.”

“Collect shells?” Covey said.

“No,” Elly said, laughing. “Study them. Geology. Everything about the Earth. The oceans and volcanoes and glaciers,” Elly said. “Only I’ll need to get a recommendation first, to convince a university to let me study there. They’ve had some women, but…” She stopped short, breathed out sharply. Covey nodded. Elly didn’t need to say it. By now, she knew what was often left out of their conversations. The way people saw them and how it determined the roles that they were expected to play in life.

In lowered voices, they shared their dismay at some of the name-calling and other forms of prejudice they had faced in the mother country. Because that was what Great Britain meant to them, the mother country, even five years after the island’s independence. They had spent their childhoods under British rule and had received a British education.