Honeyville. Daisy Waugh
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hate that. Just wouldn’t feel right, you know? To live off other people’s discontent. Whereas the ranchers aren’t like that. They’re altogether …’ She frowned. ‘Well, anyway, they’re not the same.’
Inez Dubois looked and behaved much younger than her age. She was twenty-nine years old, she told me that night (making her eight years my junior), the orphaned child of Mrs McCulloch’s sister, who died alongside Inez’s father in what Inez described as, ‘one of these train-track accidents’. She didn’t go into details, and I didn’t ask for them. Her parents died back in 1893, in Austin, Texas, and after the funeral Inez and her older brother Xavier were sent to Trinidad to live with their only living relation. The McCullochs had no children, and though Richard McCulloch was aloof and uninterested, his wife treated her nephew and niece as her own. Inez never moved out. Her brother Xavier, on the other hand, had left town some ten years previous, at the age of twenty-five, and though he wrote to Inez once a week, often enclosing a variety of books and magazines he believed might educate or amuse her, he’d not returned to Colorado since.
‘He’s in Hollywood now. Silly boy,’ Inez said, though by my calculation, he was a good six years her senior. ‘He’s making movies,’ she said. ‘Though I’ve never actually seen any, so I don’t suppose he really is. He says I would love it in Hollywood. It’s summertime – only cooler – a cooler summer, all year long. Sounds heavenly doesn’t it? Shall we go there together?’ She giggled. ‘After what happened today, I tell you I’m just about ready to leave this place. I wasn’t far off ready before. And now … Truthfully. I’m sick to death of it. Are you?’
‘Kind of …’ I laughed. It must have sounded more mournful than I intended.
She looked at me with her big, earnest eyes. She said, ‘You do realize, don’t you, that there are about a million questions I want to ask you. About everything. Only I guess I have a pretty good idea what it is you do.’She looked so uncomfortable I thought she might burst into tears again. I had to bite my lip not to smile. ‘And I don’t mean to pry. It’s probably why I’m yakking on like this. It just makes me nervous, that’s all. Because here we are, sitting here, and we’ve been through this terrible, awful thing together, when normally we wouldn’t even speak. And I was impolite to you in the drugstore, but you know I didn’t mean to be. I guess I just didn’t know any better. Because we can’t live more than a handful of miles apart and yet …’ She took a breath. ‘I don’t quite even know where to begin.’
‘Well you could begin,’ I said, ‘by asking my name.’
She opened her mouth—
‘And maybe even hushing up long enough to find out the answer.’
She discovered my name eventually. Though I’m not convinced she really registered it until some time later. I told her a little about myself – as little as I could – and watched her wide eyes watering, torn between outrage and pity.
‘You don’t need to feel sorry for me,’ I said, when her pitying expression was too much.
‘Oh but I don’t,’ she cried quickly, eyes sliding away.
‘After all, I am freer than most women and freer than any wife. I have money of my own. A wife doesn’t.’
‘Yes of course!’
‘A husband can beat and rape his wife and there is nothing she can do to prevent it. If a man beats me or rapes me, it is against the law. And even if it weren’t, here in Trinidad, we girls have friends who can make his life a misery. I have freedom. And one day,’ I told her, ‘when I have saved enough, I can stop this work altogether. And do what I have always planned to do—’
‘Yes?’ Inez asked, brightening. ‘Yes, and what is it?’
In truth the ‘plan’, if I could even call it such a thing, was no closer to fruition than it had been the first day I’d dreamed it up, seven or so years ago. I regretted mentioning it, and felt aggrieved with myself for having done so. But she wouldn’t let it go. She demanded to know what it was, my secret plan: what I might otherwise do that would save my wicked soul. I told her. I was a singer once.
Instant tears sprung. ‘A singer!Why, and you can be again!’ she cried. ‘You could sing at our own opera house! I just bet you could! You’re so dashing and beautiful and everything … I’ll ask Mr Haussman. He’s the manager. He’s quite an acquaintance of my uncle. I just bet you—’
‘But I don’t want to sing at the damn opera house,’ I snapped.
‘Well, of course you do!’
‘I am sick and tired of people looking at me—’
‘Even so …’
‘However, I admit it – I would love to teach others to sing.’
‘Well then!’ Inez was irrepressible: ‘You could start today! What’s stopping you?’
‘Plenty of things.’
‘Well? Name them!’
But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to talk about my dreams. I didn’t need to be saved by her. ‘I don’t want to start today. I enjoy myself,’ I said. Or at any rate (I didn’t add), I used to. But a girl can have too much of a thing. ‘I earn good money. And I never have to cook or clean – or listen to any man bellyaching … or at any rate not for long. And then,’ I leaned in and winked, ‘well, they lay down their dollars. And then they fuck off. Out of my bed, out of my room. Out of my life.’
She gasped, as I had intended.
‘Better a whore than a wife,’ I said. ‘Any day.’
Inez was neither of course. She was a lady with a rich and indulgent aunt, who volunteered her time at the library. Inez could do whatever and go wherever she liked. It made my head spin to imagine it.
She was ‘looking for love’, she told me. (I could have told her to save herself the trouble.) Instead we spent much of the evening talking about that. Inez and her search for love. Her search for adventure. Her search for a bigger life. She was restless.
‘Aunt Philippa has almost despaired of me,’ Inez said with a hint of pride. ‘She’s utterly convinced I’m going to die an old maid. And I tell her – well of course I shan’t!But you know, Dora, I do begin to wonder myself sometimes. I know I look younger than I am. People always say I do. But I’m going to be thirty next birthday – it’s old. For a lady. Don’t you think?’ She glanced at me. ‘I mean to say – you probably … Maybe you—’
‘Oh, I already have a husband,’ I muttered. I hadn’t intended to confide in her. Certainly not. But there it was: the effect of her warmth, surprising me, inviting me to reciprocate. I had no close confidantes, and didn’t want any. But she was difficult to resist.
‘You do?’
‘Somewhere. I haven’t laid eyes on him in seven years or so. But I certainly had a husband. Until I woke up one morning … And there – he was gone!’ I looked at her astonished face, eyes filling with sorrow yet again, and I burst out laughing. ‘Inez,’ I declared – and I think by then I had almost come to believe it. ‘It was the best morning of my life!’
‘But why? Did he? Was he—’
‘A louse. He ran off with our savings.’
‘No! And … children?’ she asked, tentatively. ‘What happened to the—’
‘No children.’
‘Oh. Well. I guess that’s something.’
A silence fell.
‘Well!’