Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [11]
All the way back to Aunt Cora’s house we didn’t speak.
The first day I had to go to the convent, I clung to Aunt Cora as you would cling to life if you loved it. At last she got impatient, so I forced myself away from her and through he passage, down the steps into the street and, as I knew they would be, they were waiting for me under the sandbox tree. There were two of them, a boy and a girl. The boy was about fourteen and tall and big for his age, he had a white skin, a dull ugly white covered with freckles, his mouth was a negro’s mouth and he had small eyes, like bits of green glass. He had the eyes of a dead fish. Worst most horrible of all, his hair was crinkled, a negro’s hair, but bright red, and his eyebrows and eyelashes were red. The girl was very black and wore no head handkerchief. Her hair had been plaited and I could smell the sickening oil she had daubed on it, from where I stood on the steps of Aunt Cora’s dark, clean, friendly house, staring at them. They looked so harmless and quiet, no one would have noticed the glint in the boy’s eyes.
Then the girl grinned and began to crack the knuckles of her fingers. At each crack I jumped and my hands began to sweat. I was holding some school books in my right hand and shifted them to under my arm, but it was too late, there was a mark on the palm of my hand and a stain on the cover of the book. The girl began to laugh, very quietly, and it was then that hate came to me and courage with the hate so that I was able to walk past without looking at them.
I knew they were following, I knew too that as log as I was in sight of Aunt Cora’s house they would do nothing but stroll along some distance after me. But I knew when they would draw close. It would be when I was going up the hill. There were walls and gardens on each side of the hill and no one would be there at this hour of the morning.
Half-way up they closed in on me and started talking. The girl said, ‘Look the crazy girl, you crazy like your mother. Your aunt frightened to have you in the house. She send you for the nuns to lock up. Your mother walk about with no shoes and stockings on her feet, she sans culottes. She try to kill her husband and she try to kill you too that day you go to see her. She have eyes like zombie and you have eyes like zombie too. Why you won’t look at me.’ The boy only said, ‘One day I catch you alone, you wait, one day I catch you alone.’ When I got to the top of the hill they were jostling me, I could smell the girl’s hair.
A long empty street stretched away to the convent, the convent wall and a wooden gate. I would have to ring before I could get in. The girl said, ‘You don’t want to look at me, eh, I make you look at me.’ She pushed me and the books I was carrying fell to the ground.
I stoop to pick them up and saw that a tall boy that was walking along the other side of the street had stopped and looked toward us. Then he crossed over, running. He had long legs, his feet hardly touch the ground. As soon as they saw him, they turned and walked away. He looked after them, puzzled. I would have died sooner than run when they were there, but as soon as they had gone, I ran. I left one of my books on the ground and the tall boy came after me.
‘You dropped this,’ he said, and smiled. I knew who he was, his name was Sandi, Alexander Cosway’s son. Once I would have said ‘my cousin Sandi’ but Mr Mason