‘Tell her I wish to speak to her.’
‘Yes, master.’
She put her hand over her mouth as if to stifle laughter, but her eyes,
which were the blackest I had ever seen, so black that it was impossible to
distinguish the pupils from the iris, were alarmed and bewildered.
I sat on the veranda with my back to the sea and it was as if I had
done it all my life. I could not imagine different weather or a different sky. I
knew the shape of the mountains as well as I knew the shape of the two
brown jugs filled with white sweet-scented flowers on the wooden table. I
knew that the girl would be wearing a white dress. Brown and white she
would be, her curls, her white girl’s hair she called it, half covered with a
red handkerchief, her feet bare. There would be the sky and the mountains,
the flowers and the girl and the feeling that all this was a nightmare, the
faint consoling hope that I might wake up.
She leaned lightly against the veranda post, indifferently graceful, just
respectful enough, and waited.
‘Was this letter given to you?’ I asked.
‘No, master. Hilda take it.’
‘And is this man who writes a friend of yours?’
‘Not my friend,’ she said.
‘But he knows you – o says he does.’
‘Oh yes, I know Daniel.’