Eden Falls Read Free

hand, cuffed him on the side of the head and said, ‘Cu ya! Me thought you a dead.’
    Roscoe thought, If she caught me talking in that way she’d smack me for that too. He was eight now and since the day he first opened his mouth to speak – early, Ruby said, taking the credit – he’d had standard English rammed down his throat and when he drifted into patois she fell on him like the wrath of God. The king’s English was the way to raise yourself on this island of Jamaica, she always told him; the king’s English showed your brains and your breeding. So when Ruby lapsed into the language of her childhood it was a desperate measure, a signal to Roscoe that his mother had moved beyond anger and into the realm of distress. He felt resentful, not sorry, but he swallowed the temptation to talk back at her, choosing instead the useful device of artful meekness.
    ‘Sorry, Ruby,’ he said. He called her by her first name because, although she was his mother, there were just fourteen years separating them and she seemed to the world, and to him, more like an older sister. His face was the image of abject contrition: large brown eyes full of pain; mouth downturned, full of sadness. It was an act, but he hated it when she was like this; the sooner he brought her back to him the better. She hesitated, and some of the tension left her face. She let go of his shoulder. He could feel the place on his skin where her nails had dug in and he raised a hand and rubbed, and Ruby capitulated. She pulled him to her and rubbed his head where she had struck him.
    ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Dry yourself off and get dressed. You’re making me late, and you know what a terror Mr Silas is about tardiness.’
    She rolled her eyes and grinned, and Roscoe grinned back at her.
    ‘I wish you’d counted though, Ruby,’ he said, risking a complaint. ‘I was under a long, long time.’
    ‘Did you see the water dragon?’
    He laughed. ‘Yes I did. He sends his regards.’
    ‘And did you touch the bottom?’
    ‘There is no bottom, Ruby.’ He’d always heard this, but now he believed it. ‘I swam and swam, but it never came.’
    ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ she said, suddenly serious again. ‘Don’t do that again. Stay away from the water.’
    ‘No. You stay away,’ he said. ‘You stay away.’
    He was right, she thought. He shouldn’t be fettered by her fears for his safety. He should test himself, find his limits, explore life’s possibilities: and he should do it unobserved by her.
    There was a path from Eden Falls, a narrow strip of vegetation trodden flat leading first up the mountain, through a tunnel of green, and then down again, to Port Antonio. Ruby and Roscoe, single file, picked their way along it and at the top, where it met the road, they fell in beside each other again. In due course, Ruby turned for the hotel and Roscoe continued on to school.
    The Whittam Hotel was a fine building, the finest in Port Antonio, although there were plenty of locals who thought the town had done very well without it. Built in the style of a plantation house, it occupied the higher reaches of Eden Hill, which rose to the west of the town in a series of natural terraces. The hotel was a perfect distance from the port: close enough to afford a view of all its colour and bustle but far enough that its less edifying characteristics – the pungent smells, the ripe profanities – stayed where they belonged.
    Beyond the port lay the Caribbean Sea, and Silas Whittam, hotelier and shipping magnate, could never look upon it without emotion. These peerless waters reminded him of his younger self: a ship’s lad, seeing the tropics for the first time and believing this to be an enchanted place. The years had passed and the fates had singled him out for special treatment. The fates, that is, and Sir Walter Hollis. His former boss at the Global Steamship Company had been so entirely won over by his protégé’s judicious mix of hard work and