Here’s the mad thing: poets from Barbados, Trini, Jamaica, Grenada, Antigua – any part of the British Caribbean – would send their stories all the way to Bush House on London’s Aldwych, in order to hear them read back again in their homes, thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean. There seemed no local facility to enable these stories to be processed, a fact which impressed upon me at a very young age that in order to be a writer, I would require the motherland’s seal of approval, the imperial sanction that my words were broadcastable.
The majority of the work was by men, but I would listen enraptured by the words and voices of Una Marson, Gladys Lindo, Constance Hollar – and Cynth would pipe up, ‘One day you be read out, Delly’ – and her little shining face, her bunches, she always made me feel like it was true. Seven years old, and she was the only one who ever told me to keep going. By 1960 that programme had stopped, and I came to England two years later with no idea what to do with my stories. Life at the shoe shop took over, so I only wrote in private, and Cynth, who must have seen the piles of notebooks which never left my bedroom, simply stopped her pestering.
She and Sam had found a flat to rent in Queen’s Park, and she’d transferred to a north London branch of Dolcis. Up to that point, I’d never really known loneliness. I’d always had my books, and Cynth had always been there. Suddenly, my thoughts were enormous in that tiny flat, because there was nobody to hear them and make them manageable, nobody cajoling or supporting me, or holding out their arms for a hug. Cynth’s absence became physical to me. Do you have a body if no one is there to touch it? I suppose you do, but sometimes it felt like I didn’t. I was just a mind, floating around the rooms. How badly prepared I’d been for the echo and clunk of my key in the lock, the lack of her sizzling frying pan, my solitary toothbrush, the silence where once she hummed her favourite songs.
When you saw a person every day – a person you liked, a person who lifted you up – you thought you were your best self, without trying very hard. Now, I saw myself as barely interesting, not so clever. No one wanted to hear my poems except Cynth, no one cared or understood where I was from like she did. I didn’t know how to be Odelle without Cynth to make me so. Cynth had done so much for me, but because she was gone, I still managed to resent her.
Her work commitments and mine meant we were only meeting once a fortnight, in the Lyon’s on Craven Street round the corner from the Skelton. I barely credited Cynth for the fact it was she who always arranged it.
AT THE COUNTER, THE WAITRESS had slopped our cups so the liquid had spilled onto the saucer, and the bun I’d asked for was the most squashed. When I asked for a replacement saucer, the waitress ignored me, and when I paid for it, she wouldn’t put the change in my hand. She placed the money on the counter and pushed it over, not looking at my face. I turned to Cynth, and her expression looked familiar; closed. We walked to find a spare table, as far away from the counter as we could.
‘How is it at the work?’ she asked. ‘You still trailin’ after that Marjorie Quick?
‘She my boss, Cynthia.’
‘So you say.’
I hadn’t realized how obvious it was, the impression that Quick had made on me over the recent weeks. I had tried to find out more about Quick from Pamela, who could only tell me that Quick had once mentioned the county of Kent as her childhood home. What she did between being a girl and a woman in her fifties was a grey sketch. Perhaps she had been destined for a genteel, Kentish life, a magistrate’s wife or some such, but she chose instead to find a different kind of fortune in the rubble of post--war London. Her name was not in Debrett’s: she was not a Skelton descendant, one of my initial lines of thought. Her impeccable sartorial choices exuded power, a care of herself that was for nobody’s benefit but her own. Each perfect blouse or scarf, each pristine pair of trousers was a pre--emptive self--narration. Quick’s clothes were an armour made of silk.
I knew she was unmarried and she lived in Wimbledon, just off the common. She smoked constantly, and appeared close to Reede in the sort of way that water is close to a stone that it has worn down over decades. Pamela said that Quick had been here as long as Reede had, when he’d taken the directorship of the Skelton in 1947, twenty years ago. How she had come to meet Reede, or why she decided to take employment, remained a mystery. I wondered what sort of battle it had been to get to where she was now, and whether she’d read those Roman histories to give her some lessons in war.
‘She not like anyone I ever met,’ I said to Cynth. ‘Friendly one minute, a sunlight beam. Then she like a hog--brush woman – she bristle so, it pain you to be near.’
Cynth sighed. ‘We bought G Plan for the flat.’
‘G--what?’
‘Oh, Delly. Sam work hard hard, so me say, let we buy we a nice G Plan sofa so he can put up him feet at the end of the day.’
‘Hmm. And how your feet doin’?’
She sighed, stirring her lukewarm tea with a spoon. ‘Oh, let me tell you a thing. So our new postman get the letters mix up, and our neighbour knock with them.’ Cynth cleared her throat and put on a posh English voice. ‘ “Oh, hell--air. Yes, these must be yours. We saw they had a black stamp.” It a letter from Lagos, Delly. Me name not on it, and me no know no one from Nigeria. “Black stamp”, I ask yuh.’
Her laugh died. Normally we would have discussed something like this in order to remove its barb, but after the waitress neither of us had the energy.
‘Tell me about the feller you were talking to at the wedding,’ she said, looking sly.
‘What feller?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Lawrie Scott. The white one; handsome, skinny. He friend to Patrick’s Barbara. Me didn’t drink that many Dubonnets – I saw you in the kitchen.’
‘Oh him. He real dotish.’
‘Hmm,’ she said, her eyes taking on a secret glow, and I knew I’d given myself away. ‘That strange.’
‘Why?’
‘Patrick told Sam he been asking ’bout you.’ I shut my mouth tighter than a clam and Cynth grinned. ‘You writin’?’ she asked.
‘You only start asking me that, now you’ve left.’