Jean Rhys, “Voyage in the Dark”
…It was funny, but that was what I thought about more than anything else—the smell of the streets and the smells of frangipani and lime juice and cinnamon and cloves, and sweets made of ginger and syrup, and incense after funerals or Corpus Christi processions, and the patients standing outside the surgery next door, and the smell of the sea-breeze and the different smell of the land-breeze.
Sometimes it was as if I were back there and as if England was a dream. At other times England was the real thing and out there was the dream, but I could never fit them together.
…
“I’m sure it’s beautiful,” Walter said, “but I don’t like hot places much. I prefer cold places. The tropics would be altogether too lush, for me. I think.”
“But it isn’t lush,” I said. “You’re quite wrong. It’s wild, and a bit sad sometimes. You might as well say the sun’s lush.”
Sometimes the earth trembles; sometimes you can feel it breathe. The colours are red, purple, blue, gold, all shades of green. The colours here are black, brown, grey, dim-green, pale blue, the white of people’s faces—like woodlice.
…
“I’m a real West Indian,” I kept saying. “I’m the fifth generation on my mother’s side.”
I know, my sweet,” Walter said. “You’ve told me that before.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “It was a lovely place.”
“Everyone thinks the place where he was born is lovely,” Walter said.
“Well, they aren’t all lovely,” I said. “Not by a long chalk. In fact, some of them give you a shock at first, they’re so ugly. Only you get used to it; you don’t notice it after a while.”
He got up and pulled me up and started kissing me.
“You sound a bit tight,” he said. “Well let’s go upstairs, you rum child, you rum little devil.”
…
Francine was there, washing up. Her eyes were red with the smoke and watering. Her face was quite wet. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and looked sideways at me. Then she said something in patois and went on washing up. But I knew that of course she disliked me too because I was white; and that I would never be able to explain to her that I hated being white. Being white and getting like Hester, and all the things you get—old and sad and everything. I kept thinking, “No… . No… . No… .” And I knew that day that I started to grow old and nothing could stop it.
—Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark.
