Black Marina by Emma Tennant Read Free Book Online

Americans mango ice-cream, not too fibrous, to give the idea of local colour at Carib’s Rest. How to make croissants, éclairs, the little things for which the visitor, if he begins to miss them, will all at once decide to pack up and go home. And for the British, although there were every year fewer of them in number at St James, a Queen of Puddings as heavy and significant as the Empire at the height of its glory.
    *
    You know [Lore said in a letter about that time], I went round to Teza’s house. It was raining cats and dogs. I think I’ll come and join you in the glorious Tropics, Holly, if you’re not careful. Ask Sanjay if he doesn’t need someone to invent new cocktails in his famous Bar. Everyone’s so miserable here, too.
    The door was opened by a big black woman and she looked pretty sad as well. Fancy being sent over here to learn to cook! But she said Teza was kind to her and there was another friend, Ford, who had found her a room in a squat where he is in Stoke Newington. It turns out the woman who owns the posh hotel on your island didn’t give Millie nearly enough to live on in London, as well as pay for the course at Cuisine Française, School, which is quite near where Teza lives, as it happens. Anyway, I put two and two together and I remembered your searing account of the day you went up to the village and Teza met Ford hanging around up there, and there’d been a good, kind woman who gave Teza a bed. So that’s Millie. She tells me there are smart houses now on St James with French tiles on the roof and Italian tiles on the floor and Spanish tiles, oh Lord, all over the bathroom and she started me off laughing – the first time for a month or two, I can tell you.
    I asked Millie why Ford was living in this squat some way away. But she just shrugged. ‘I thought Ford and Teza lived together here,’ I said. Mind you I hadn’t been around for longer than I thought. I don’t know what it is in London: in Chelsea you just feel you’re under the river all the year round and the seasons never change, and then you go up Portobello way and you find there’s cherries and melons in the market and the last time there was leeks and spuds. This time it was corn on the cob, hazelnuts, blackberries, Cox’s orange pippins. I’d bought a bunch of those Michaelmas daisies for Teza and a punnet of blackberries too. ‘You making blackberry and apple tart at the Cuisine Française?’ I asked Millie but she just shook her head and rolled her eyes like a fruit machine. ‘Flan,’ she said at last in a really comic voice and we rolled about again.
    Then she got up and went to the door and opened it, and sure enough her ears are sharper than mine and there was someone standing out there. Just as I said, fancy that, Holly, the funniest looking little kid. So I was right – Teza had been kind of restless last time I saw her – it wasn’t that she was likely to have a baby to pass the time, if you know what I mean, it was that she had one hidden away already. ‘Why on earth didn’t she say so before?’ I said to Millie when I’d recovered from staring at the little creature. ‘What’s been going on here anyway?’
    It turned out that Teza’s aunt, her mother’s sister, was pretty elderly and lived in a great house in Suffolk or somewhere and was due to leave her remaining fortune to Teza. ‘Now aren’t some people greedy?’ I couldn’t help thinking, when Teza’s mother had already left her enough to buy this house off the Portobello Road and money for donations to Black Power too, I wouldn’t wonder. This aunt was a strict Baptist, Millie says – and there’s some respect in her voice. There’s a lot of all that in the islands, I suppose, so you can see why Millie would understand what seems pretty barbaricto me, i.e. covering up the birth of your illegitimate half-caste (for that’s how Teza’s aunt would doubtless label the child) in order to inherit later. Now, evidently, the aunt has