Prodigies Page 2

  It was Alexine, with her extraordinarily acute hearing, who first heard the carriage. She threw down her cards on the table, with such force that some slithered to the floor, and then ran to peer out through the rain-spattered glass. The carriage drew up under the porte cochère, the horse tossing its head. Then the coachman descended and hurried over to open the door. Before she could see who was in the coach, Alexine shrieked, ‘It’s Papa! Papa! I know it’s Papa!’

  Mama and Aunt Addy leapt up, their cards still in their hands, and hurried over to join her. All of them peered out. Papa, his hat pulled down low over his forehead and a voluminous grey cloak swirling about him, jumped out, refusing the outstretched hand of the coachman. Despite his age, he hated to be physically dependent on anyone.

  ‘Yes, it’s him! It is! It is!’

  Aunt Addy had already gone over to the bell-pull to summon Daan and the footman.

  It was then that Harriet put to herself the question that she was so often to put, in one form or another, to her husband and to others in the days ahead: Why on earth hadn’t he warned them?

  Suddenly and simultaneously, she, Addy and Alexine realized that there was someone else in the coach. Papa had turned to peer into its interior. They could see him beckoning, head lowered, to whomever it was who still lurked inside. What he was saying, though they could not hear from behind the glass, was: ‘Come! Come! Come on! Don’t be frightened!’ Again he beckoned, this time in command, not invitation.

  Eventually, a figure not so much stepped as stumbled out of the barouche. He was wearing a brown, billycock hat and a military-style brown overcoat with elaborate frogging. Daan had now arrived, and in the fight of the flambeau that he was holding aloft, the teeth of this sturdy but diminutive figure – at first, because of the adult style of his dress, all three women had, in their amazement, assumed him to be a dwarf – gleamed as though phosphorescent. His face was black.

  Now all of them rushed out to greet Philip. Alexine was the first: ‘Papa! Papa!’ She threw herself into his arms, feeling the dampness and roughness of the cloak against her cheek, before he whirled her up and away in his arms. He began to kiss her wildly, making her first giggle and then scream in joy as he pressed his lips to her cheek, her forehead, the side of her neck. His companion stood silent and impassive beside him, while all this was going on. He seemed unaware that the two women, in their fashionable Paris frocks, and the two menservants were staring at him, each wondering: ‘Who is this? Who is this?’

  It was only after he had set Alexine down and had embraced Harriet and Addy that Philip said: ‘Now let me introduce to you all …’ He put a hand on the shoulder of the figure that everyone had by now realized was a boy of twelve or thirteen at the most. ‘This is Samuel. Sammy. He comes from Jamaica. From Kingstown. His family saved my life, and in return I promised to bring him to Europe with me. He has been looking after me all through my travels since I left Jamaica, and I want him to go on looking after me.’

  Was he to be a servant or a member of the family? All of them, even the two servants, wished to put the question. None of them dared to do so.

  Harriet extended both hands to the boy. ‘Welcome to our home.’ His already muscular body held stiffly erect, the boy made no response. He did not even smile or nod.

  Addy was staring at him, in frowning bewilderment.

  Impulsively Alexine stepped forward. ‘Do you speak Dutch or English, Sammy?’ she asked in English. Then, when he impassively failed to make any response, she repeated the question in Dutch.

  ‘It’s no use speaking to him. He doesn’t speak English or Dutch. Or any other language. He’s deaf and dumb.’ Philip tapped the boy on the shoulder with commanding forefinger and middle finger and then indicated to him that he should enter the house. The boy hesitated for a moment, glancing around him. Then, with a little shrug, he did as he was bid, preceding the two women, the girl and his master.

  In the hall, decorated by ten large paintings by a painstakingly mediocre mid-century artist, representing the history of the sugar trade from its earliest years to the present, Philip slowly and silently took off his cape and hat and handed them to Daan. He had all the appearance of someone not returning to his home but arriving for the first time at a house which he has rented. He looked about him. The two women and the child watched him anxiously, as though afraid of what he might do next.

  Sammy crossed the hall to a round-backed fauteuil and, having stared at it for a while, then placed himself on its edge, legs wide apart and large hands dangling between them. Addy gave him a look of distaste, then turned her head away. How dared he sit down when the rest of them were standing? In her mind, it was already decided: he was a servant and should be treated and behave as one. The boy, a dreamy expression on his face, appeared to be totally at his ease, even though a house built on such a scale and crammed with objects of such value was something that he could never even have imagined, much less entered.

  Suddenly, Philip was smiling around at them all. ‘Well, how have you all been? The last letter to reach me was Harriet’s at St Thomas. Oh, I’m tired, tired. But it’s wonderful to see you.’

  ‘You probably want something to eat.’

  ‘No, no, nothing. I ate something at Josquin’s before coming on.’ The restaurant, popular with the richer sort of traveller, was by the harbour. Harriet was taken aback that he should have stopped off to eat there, instead of returning home immediately. ‘But I should like a drink.’ He turned to Daan and ordered some cognac. Then he put one arm around Alexine’s shoulders and another around his wife’s and began to propel them forward into the drawing-room.

  Addy, bringing up the rear, called out: ‘Philip – what about the – the boy?’

  He turned, striking his forehead with the palm of his right hand. ‘Yes, the boy, the boy …’ It was as though, on an impulse, he had bought some piece of furniture in the course of his foreign travels and now, having had it shipped home with him, did not know where to put it. He again turned to Daan. The boy was to be taken up to a seldom used guest-room above the study. He was to be given whatever he needed. That trunk – Philip pointed at a brand-new valise – was his. Daan could help him to unpack it.

  Help him to unpack it? So perhaps, the two women thought with alarm, he had indeed arrived so surprisingly at the house not as a servant but as a guest.

  As Daan picked up the valise, his fury barely concealed – couldn’t the nigger rascal carry it for himself? – Philip turned to the boy and with a few, decisive gestures indicated that he should go along with the servant. Reluctantly the boy slowly got to his feet. Perhaps, Harriet thought, his dreamlike manner was the result of exhaustion.

  Suddenly Alexine was pulling at her father’s sleeve. ‘Oh, Papa, Papa! Can’t he come with us?’

  ‘No.’ The monosyllable fell like a sword-blade. ‘He must go to his room. Tomorrow Daan will show him the house. And then – somehow – he must learn his duties.’

  Duties? What duties? The women could only surmise what they would be.

  Alexine watched the boy as, at last removing the brown billycock hat, he followed Daan out of the hall and up the staircase. Harriet wanted to protest that surely the boy could relieve the old servant of the valise, but she had by now learned when it was propitious to say such a thing to her husband and when it was not. It was not propitious now.

  As he sipped at his cognac, one fork of his beard glistening from some drops that had spilled from it as he had first tipped up the glass, Philip answered, with increasing weariness, all their questions about his travels. Yes, he had visited his sons in Liverpool, they had turned out well, he was pleased with them, business was thriving. Irene, the daughter-in-law who had recruited Nanny Rose, had been delivered of twins, identical boys. The other daughter-in-law was suffering from anaemia, but the consumption of raw liver every day had made a marked improvement. Alexine pulled a face at the mention of the raw liver. She hated liver even when it was cooked.

  No, h
e went on, the hard part of his journey had been in Jamaica. There was a new governor, a popinjay, his only interests being the collection of rare plants and butterflies. Can you imagine? The young fool was far happier with a butterfly net or a trowel than with a gun. No wonder there was so much unrest.

  It was then that Alexine asked: ‘Papa – tell us, tell us! How did Sammy’s family save you?’

  He sighed. ‘Oh, it’s too long a story to tell you when it’s long past your bedtime.’

  ‘No, please, Papa! Please!’ The mystery of Papa’s deliverance was part of the greater mystery that the boy, with his black face, his brilliantly white teeth and his inability to communicate in any way, already represented for her.

  Philip told the story hurriedly, almost negligently, as though he had told it many times before and was no longer interested in it. He had been out riding, alone, because his companion’s horse had gone lame, and then, all at once, this gang, this gang of lawless ruffians, men whom he had sacked from the plantation because of their utter uselessness, had surrounded him. Like a fool, he had gone out unarmed, he did not even have a riding-crop with him. Well, he thought that was the end. But then miraculously, out of nowhere it seemed, these three men appeared. They were workers, not on his estate but on a neighbouring one, and they were carrying machetes. At first he had thought that they were allies of the others but in fact they had proved to be his rescuers. There had been an altercation, no, not a physical fight, and then, mercifully, the gang vanished as swiftly and silently as they had first appeared. The leader of the three rescuers was Sammy’s father. He was a carpenter, so skilful that he had even been able to copy for his English employer some Windsor chairs brought out from England. When Philip had tried to reward this man with some money, he had instead proposed that Sammy should accompany him back to The Hague. ‘He wants me to make a gentleman of him. Or, at least, a gentleman’s gentleman.’

  As a guest or as a servant, the women again wanted to ask; and again neither of them did so.

  There was a silence. Then Philip said: ‘Apart from his – his disability, his cruel disability, Sammy is an extraordinarily intelligent little fellow. Like you’ – he turned to Alexine – ‘he forgets nothing once he’s learned it. But’ – his eyes softened and saddened – ‘when he can’t hear, there’s a limit to what he can learn.’

  ‘Are they all like that?’ Alexine asked.

  ‘Are all who like that?’

  ‘These black people. In Jamaica.’

  He laughed, and the two women joined in. ‘Of course not! You talk of them as though they were animals. The problem with a lot of them is not that they can’t talk but that they won’t stop talking.’

  ‘Perhaps he and I can find some way of talking to each other.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  Again the two women and the so much older man laughed, while Alexine looked at them in hurt, reproachful bewilderment.

  Chapter Three

  WAS HE A SERVANT OR A GUEST? Still, no one could be sure. He seemed to have no specific duties. At times, all by himself, he would be wandering the house and garden, throwing sticks by the canal and even into the canal for the golden retriever brought back by Philip, like so much of the furniture, from his visits to England, or turning over the pages of some picture book discovered in the library. At other times he would be laying out Philip’s clothes and even helping him to dress for dinner, accompanying him as gun-bearer when, on some clammy winter afternoon, he practised shooting at the gulls on the flat, dun polder that stretched behind the house, or tidying, with slow, finicky care, the papers on Philip’s desk or his bedside table. Harriet and Addy had expressed to each other the fear that, savage that he was, unused to washbasins, let alone baths, he would be dirty; but in fact he was scrupulously clean, washing his clothes for himself and then manoeuvring the iron, pink tip of brown forefinger having first gingerly touched its base to make sure that it was hot, back and forth with an artistry far superior to the laundry maid’s.

  For many days, Alexine merely watched him – lingering on the threshold of the library or the laundry-room, peering down into the garden from an upstairs bedroom, looking across at him as, in a far corner of the room, he turned the crisply rustling pages of a newspaper as though he could read them. He would avoid meeting her gaze; but, as soon as she looked away, she would become aware, with a tingling, embarrassed pleasure, of his scrutiny.

  There was a cat in the household, a huge tabby stray, adopted by Nanny Rose after it had slunk into the kitchen and miaowed imperiously for food. Its tail had been broken and it had lost one eye. These disabilities had only endeared it the more to her. Because Addy had a terror of cats it was barred from any of the rooms frequented by her and spent most of its time either in the kitchen regions, up in the attics, where the servants slept, or on Nanny Rose’s bed. To the jealous fury of Nanny Rose, this cat, which she had called Ginger, a name inappropriate for a creature so lethargic, fell passionately in love with Sammy, following him about the house and continually jumping into his lap whenever he was seated. Mademoiselle, wrinkling her nose, said that the improbable attachment must have something to do with the smell of ‘those people’. More than once, in search of him, Nanny Rose had eventually stormed into Sammy’s attic bedroom to scoop the cat off his narrow truckle bed. ‘Naughty boy!’ she would scold Sammy as much as the cat.

  One day, looking out through the glass of the veranda, Alexine saw that Sammy was seated out on one of the elaborate wrought-iron benches flanking the rose-garden, Ginger on his lap. He was staring out ahead of him, lips slightly parted to reveal those extraordinarily white teeth of his, with that dreamy expression, or lack of expression, that, during many days of observation, she had come to know so well. With one hand he was rhythmically stroking the cat, from time to time pausing in the movement to tug at a burr of fur. Each time that he tugged, the cat raised its head and emitted a squawk, whether of pleasure or protest it was impossible to say. For a long time, observing but unobserved, Alexine watched the brown hand, the cat and that wholly uncommunicative face. She might have been watching not one animal but two, the second so rare that she was terrified that with any movement she might frighten it away forever. Then, on an impulse, she went to the door from veranda into garden, pulled it open and slowly and, as she hoped, silently descended the steps.

  At the sound of her feet on gravel freshly raked by one of the two gardeners that morning, Sammy looked up. But it was the cat, leaping off his lap and scuttling off into the privet hedge behind the bench, that was alarmed, not he. Sammy did not turn his head; after the brief glance he went back to staring out at the roses. The only movement that he made was to place the hand that had been stroking the cat on the back of the bench. It rested there, oddly inert.

  Alexine seated herself on the bench beside him, turned her head and smiled. It was the first time that she had ever smiled at him, indeed shown him any acknowledgement of his presence. But the smile was unreturned. His head averted, he might even not have noticed it. The cat now crept out from the bushes and, with its single, rheumy eye, gazed up unwinking at her. There was something eerie about the animal’s total stillness, as there was about the boy’s. She had never tried to make friends with the cat, because she had sensed that, possessively, Nanny Rose would not have wished her to do so. Again she turned her head towards Sammy and again she smiled. Then, since there was still no response whatever – his face, glistening in the spring sunlight, never changed from its somnolent expression or lack of expression – she nudged him.

  At that, he turned and abruptly jerked up from the seat, as though to run off. She put out an imperious hand and grabbed at a sleeve. ‘It’s all right. Don’t worry. Sit.’ She then realized the futility of saying these things to someone who not merely could not speak Dutch but who was incapable of hearing her. She tugged at the sleeve, once again smiling. With the hand not tugging, she patted the seat beside her.

  Reluctantly he sat. She noticed that the hands that,
leaning forward, he had rested on his knees, were trembling and that his wide nostrils were quivering. She put out her left hand and tremulously, as though she were making the first contact with a wild animal, placed it over his right. She patted, patted again. With joy she sensed, through the hand, that his whole body was beginning to relax.

  She raised the hand and pointed at the cat. Then she faced him. She mouthed, exaggerating the two consonants, ‘Cat, cat, cat!’ She pointed once more. Again she pointed, again she mouthed the word. He was staring at her in panicky bewilderment. She pointed at his chest, then at his mouth. ‘Cat!’

  After many attempts, she suddenly saw, with delight, that his lips were moving as hers had been moving. But, instead of the expected word, what emerged was merely an incoherent grunt, followed by an effortful groan.

  She persevered for a long time, until Mademoiselle called to her from the upstairs window of the schoolroom, to ask what she was doing, she was late, hurry, hurry! Through all Alexine’s efforts with Sammy, the only response had been a series of other incoherent noises, while the dark, mysteriously handsome face had increasingly glistened with sweat and that once somnolent expression had become an anguished one.

  ‘I must go now. She wants me.’ Again Alexine had forgotten that he could not hear, much less understand, anything that she said to him. She patted his hand in reassurance and, bursting with an unreasoning joy, scampered back into the house.

  ‘What were you doing with that boy?’ Mademoiselle demanded. She already had her suspicions about that little savage’s presence in the house. Later, she would pass those suspicions on to Nanny Rose, the two women would discuss them, as they discussed everything concerning their employers, and eventually, overheard, the suspicions would come to circulate among the servants, and through them to other people’s servants, the tradespeople and the whole outside world. ‘I’m sure you’re not supposed to be with him.’