A View of the Empire at Sunset by Caryl Phillips

Author:Caryl Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

28

Less of a Man

Earlier in the evening, after the departure of his manservant, and during the quiet time when they usually sat together in the drawing room, he asked about her father. However, the abruptness of her answer (“He’s dead”) caused him to look across at her and then, not wishing to cause any upset, avert his eyes and decide not to ask anything further. Sadly, he knew full well that his own father would have regarded the girl as a “mongrel” who could never be part of their world and who therefore did not deserve his son’s time or attention. After a fitting period of silence, he coughed quietly in an attempt to break the tension, and then he relit his cigar. “When my own father returned from South Africa he informed my mother that he would collect me from school, even though my mother insisted that it had been arranged that, as usual, one of the servants would be travelling to Eton to escort both myself and my trunk home. However, my father would have none of it, and one snowy December morning after breakfast I discovered him lurking furtively in the hallway outside my rooms with a black felt hat in one hand, while with the other hand he was adjusting his Gladstone collar, which was fastened by a simple gold stud. When he finished we shook hands rather stiffly, and then he said we must hurry, for he had promised Mother that we would return home in time for a family dinner.

“As the carriage proceeded to move off towards the train station, the snow began to fall with increasing vigour and thicken around the wheels, which naturally enough caused us to slow down. Father speculated that the train might well be late, but even so, at this pace we were sure to miss the connection. Suddenly the carriage drew to a halt, and the driver dismounted and opened the door so that the swirling snow blew in on us. He pointed a short distance up the road and announced that a tree was down and blocking our path. According to the driver, if we doubled back and took the side road we might still catch the train, but the man seemed to think it best to stay put, for he deemed it quite likely that the potholed side road would also be impassable. The driver let my father know that in such conditions it was customary for the local farmer to hitch up a pair of horses to a cart and venture out in search of those in distress. The man was confident that help would soon arrive and the tree would be cleared from the road, but ‘soon’ was never going to be good enough for my father. He shouted impatiently to the driver that we should try the side road and so, after a momentary pause in which the man obviously determined that it was pointless to say anything further to my father, we unhurriedly turned and made our way through the snow in search of the alternative route.

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