Once in a while, Covey would come across a block of crumbling buildings, piles of rubbish spilling onto the sidewalk, and people, white and brown, bracing themselves against the cold in a level of squalor that she had never seen in her hometown. It made her think of all those things that she could no longer enjoy. A warm, silky feeling to the air, a hint of ripening fruit, the sweet-salt smell of the Caribbean Sea. On some days, she missed even the tang of cow patties drying in the sun, the sound of flies buzzing around. It would take some time for Covey to get used to her new surroundings.
And time to get used to being stared at.
To being muttered at.
To being ignored altogether.
To being treated like a woman from the islands.
Living this way for months softened Covey’s resolve to keep to herself. It wasn’t long before she made the acquaintance of other young women like her, girls from the Caribbean who warmed to the sound of her familiar accent. There was a large house where people from various countries would gather to socialize and swap information, though, thankfully, no one from her own small town.
As Covey listened to their stories, she came to understand how fortunate she had been with the family that had hired her, with the boots and gloves they’d given her to shepherd her through that first damp, frigid season. Covey’s employers gave her books to read from the family’s library. Instead, other girls had struggled to find accommodations, had been turned away from doors with Rooms to Let signs out front, were paying much more for a room with a washbasin than the white girls at work.
Covey’s employers talked to her as if she was someone because they were friends with a well-placed government man whose connections went all the way back to Pearl. The government man’s wife knew Miss Eunice, and Miss Eunice, it turned out, was the former school friend of the wife of the wholesaler who sold supplies to Covey’s father and other shopkeepers. None of the men had ever heard of Miss Eunice, but each of the women had turned to her for help at some point in their lives. And all of them had purchased or tasted Pearl’s black cakes.
Unlike Covey, most of the island women she’d met planned to go back to the Caribbean as soon as they’d completed their studies or saved enough money to return, but the reality was, few would have the means to do so. Some would fall in love and still others would disappear, the rumor being that they may have gone off somewhere to have a child.
“And Judith?”
“Judith? Haven’t seen her for a while.”
Then silence, a nod, a few looks exchanged. They knew not to ask more than once.
Each of the women talked about their lives before England. Unable to tell the truth about her own past, Covey spoke, instead, of a childhood that she had invented. Without a chiney father, without a runaway mother. She painted a vague picture of growing up with a grandmother who had lived much longer than her own grannies had. She spoke of living in a rural part of the island that she’d never seen.
Some of the women had been recruited from the islands to study nursing.
“The National Health Service is always short on nurses, you know,” one of them told Covey. “You should think about it. I could help you.”
Soon, Covey was convinced. She would leave the nanny position to enroll in nursing school. She wasn’t sure that this was the profession for her, she only knew that she would do whatever it took to move forward, to take control of her life. She thought of her father. Her father had lost control of his life and here Covey was, paying the price.
Covey had wanted to come to Britain, but not this way. The loneliness hit her hardest at bedtime. Sometimes, when she was too upset to read, she would sit on the edge of her bed and run her hand over the top of her wooden box, its ebony lid as smooth to the touch as a child’s arm, its carved edges tickling her fingertips. She would lift the lid and let it fall shut, lift then shut, over and over again, thinking of her mother. Thinking of home.
All that Covey had left of the island was this box and whatever she could keep closed away in her head and heart. She tried not to think too much about whether she would ever see Pearl or Bunny or Gibbs again. She told herself that, sooner or later, things might change and she would be free to live her life again. But until then, her life was not only hers to live. Covey had ended up here not only because of her father’s foolish ways and Little Man’s cruelty. She was here, too, because of the kindness of others. She owed it to them to stay invisible.
But as the months went by, she found it harder to resist the awareness that Gibbs was out there somewhere, that they were back on the same piece of land. Sometimes Covey would say she was going to the cinema when instead, she rode the bus line up to the university where Gibbs was supposed to be studying, staring out the window as it pulled up in front of the old quadrangle and taking her seat on the bench to search for Gibbs among the students who followed the paths that led toward the green.