Grounds for Tenure: A Novel

By Barbara Lalla

A gifted young scholar clings desperately to part-time employment at a Caribbean university. Then, a post opens up on an unknown offshore campus in Portmore, Jamaica. Into this harsh yet delicate terrain ventures Candace Clarke, bent on taking root in an academic world. As her relationship with her dysfunctional father grows more fraught, she draws comfort from her longstanding friend, Randall (a medievalist and would-be novelist), and she confides in him about her troubled past and bewildering present. Around her, insecurity and absurdity prompt malice, panic and redeeming wit.

Alongside the lighter moments of college life, Grounds for Tenure discloses the diverse cravings of the ultra-smart and unexpectedly foolish, as well as their self-absorption and bottomless generosity. This tale of inner and outer landscapes marks a new departure in Caribbean fiction. Humorous, critical and compassionate, Barbara Lalla turns her keen gaze to the habitats for rising intellectuals in the Caribbean world of letters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of the West Indies Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9789766406233

Barbara Lalla

Barbara Lalla is Professor Emerita, Language and Literature, the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Her many publications include the novels Grounds for Tenure, Uncle Brother, Cascade, and Arch of Fire, and the scholarly works Postcolonialisms: Caribbean Rereading of Medieval English Discourse, Defining Jamaican Fiction: Marronage and the Discourse of Survival, the companion volumes Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole and Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (co-authored with Jean D’Costa), and Caribbean Literary Discourse (co-authored with Jean D’Costa and Velma Pollard).

Book preview

Prologue to a Tale

And turnen substaunce into accident

Watch me. It have no such thing as solid ground. The earth is riddled with oil and guano and dead bones, enriched through rot and scoured away by wind or water. This book, though, this book rests on bedrock. At the mercy of the subcommittee as I am, I admit what follows is a story and not a treatise, but it came first hand from those concerned. I too was connected indirectly though crucially – even though the thought of using first person sets off all sorts of bells jangling in my head.

That said, I adopt as objective a stance as I can. To say these matters came to concern me closely is not to say I was there at all the critical moments. I pass on what I heard, and errors that slip through are not, strictly speaking, my own. Also, as an academic (apart from a teller of tales), I can’t let slip the chance for critical comment, so at this point, readers uninterested in scholarly observation should skip to chapter 1.

But I’ll be brief. What concerns me most is plot, but since some people of letters nowadays look down on suspense, I’m prepared to tell you from the outset: It ended, according to a more prominent scholar than I, in catastrophe. Nothing melodramatic about that to my mind, however snootily modern critics wave plot aside. True, accident plays a part in plot, but accidents happen every day, some set in motion millennia before, and others we stubbornly bring on ourselves – now and then along the dimensions of a visitation (which suggests there are no accidents but only mortal error).

Accident, curiously enough, is what accomplished storytellers centuries ago might have called the sort of cataclysm that lies ahead – accident, as distinct from substance. Substance was not what you felt firm to the touch; it was an intangible reality beyond our faulty senses. And the material world? Only a trick of physical sensation that made the slippery ooze seem solid: accident – the stuff of fabliau or of farce. The fact that we divine substance only through accident is what prompts the moral tale I feel called on to relate.

Chapter 1

Headhunter

To been avysed greet wysdom it were,

Er that he dide a man dishonour.

Morgan Shade was lying in wait for her in the car park, when she left her evening class at the Learning Resource Centre. She could not possibly have known what he was, with his brisk all-inclusive grin, except that the flash of teeth remained fixed a few seconds longer than need be and did not light the deep-set eyes in his somewhat hollow face. In dark no-name jeans with a black T-shirt and worn shoulder bag, he bore no reassuring mark that might encourage her to talk to him – unless it was supposed to be the carefully preserved accent of a man educated in Britain decades before. But a few warmed-over diphthongs were not enough to win around Candace.

Having materialized from behind a traveller’s palm and edged up to her car under the low trees that dripped rain water and fine sodden yellow flowers, he slid his card across the worn bonnet of her foreign-used Toyota with the stern gesture of one serving a subpoena while, somewhat irrelevantly, baring another swift cold grin. I’ve been authorized to seek out appropriate persons, he said, and to invite them to apply for truly attractive positions in tertiary learning that are about to open up.

Dr Candace Clarke was bone-weary after chasing back and forth across the St Augustine campus in the most waterlogged month of Trinidad and Tobago’s rainy season so as to deliver a course in academic writing to a thankless generation. Outside of the few students with any interest in language, all too many cared nothing for distinctions between valid and invalid logic, let alone the proposition that such distinctions might reside in adverbs. Candace gloomily suspected most students of eyeing adverbs with contempt and repulsion, if, indeed, they ever eyed them at all.

The University of the West Indies had increased student intake in recent years, though not along lines that raised the proportion of fluent writers. On other campuses the relatively new Accelerated Foundation Programme had drawn off large numbers from the traditional courses, but the AFP had caught on less at St Augustine and throughput was still slow. Even at seven-thirty p.m. in late November, when class attendance was falling, parking on campus was tight enough for Candace to wonder where this character – Shade, he called himself – had found a place for his car, and whether he would find his wheels clamped when he returned to it. Despite her parking permit, she had come on campus half an hour early so as to circle monotonously until a space came free. So she could hardly suppress the feeling that a clamped car wheel would serve him right for taking space better deserved by those with work to do. A twinge of guilt for the ungracious reflection prompted her to accept his card, but she took it mainly to be rid of him. When shaking Shade off proved complicated, she mendaciously arranged to telephone him by Friday.

Naturally, she did no such thing.

She was amazed on Saturday morning, when Cassidy announced him at her modest town house in Curepe, first by the two brief, low-toned, businesslike barks reserved for strangers who paused outside the gate, a voice for conveying straightforward and unbiased information. The dog was so clearly located inside the house that Shade did not hesitate long about entering the front yard. At the creak of the wrought iron gate, though, Cassidy, an impetuous ridgeback, leapt up with a deeper bass volley of expletives. These cut off abruptly at a nod from Candace. Brief enquiries about Shade had confirmed that he might get on her nerves but would do no physical damage. Still, she washed and cleaned on Saturdays and had no time for him. When Candace unlocked the door, her voice coldly polite, Cassidy relaxed momentarily, but then, at Shade’s nervy glance about the room, she tensed again, muscles tightening to a quivering knot of suspicion.

A minute or two, then, Candace said, to leave whatever information you must. She drew the door back grudgingly, a mere slot through which his narrow frame slid smoothly as if immune to physical resistance, as if he could have oozed in under the door had she not opened it at all. But, once in, he seemed to take over and fill up the small sitting room, unpacking and spreading brochures, tokens and glossy flyers liberally on couch and side tables. When Candace’s icy response cracked to betray annoyance, Cassidy’s expression (misleadingly mournful, normally) tightened at the jaw, narrowed at the eye and wrinkled around the muzzle to one of loathing.

It ent going to bite, right? It looking kinda miserable. Candace could not repress the chuckle that escaped her, as Shade flipped endearingly from British English to Trinidad Creole. He positioned himself to ensure an armchair between him and the dog, betraying his limited understanding of the more athletic breeds. Is a pothound, ent? Not so? To me, all dem skinny brown dawg is pothoun. Big, though. Is bad? He peered more closely. What wrong with it back? What it have down the back there?

" She wasn’t exactly expecting visitors," Candace replied, with such good-humoured emphasis on her friend’s personhood that Shade, riding the crest of his own smooth apologies for the intrusion, missed the rebuke entirely. Before she could gather herself to dismiss him, he fanned out more handbooks, and invitations in bold black font to apply for the position of Lecturer at the Institute of Tropical Studies in Portmore, Jamaica.

He began to reel out figures surprisingly higher than UWI salary scales. Yes, tenure track. She could apply for tenure by her second year at the Institute of Tropical Studies, instead of waiting through two three-year contracts as she would at the University of the West Indies – if she ever did land a full-time, tenure-track post on a UWI campus.

Sharing out complimentary ITS pens and flash drives, Shade assured her he had studied tertiary institutions in the region and taken advice from Professor Dexter Danraj, who would obviously be clued in on that kind of thing and on Caribbean institutions in particular. As one of the luminaries in the Caribbean world of letters (besides being everybody’s pardner and having their good at heart), Professor Danraj had lectured far and wide and knew the people who counted. Based on Dexter Danraj’s assessment, Shade said UWI’s days of being top dog in Caribbean tertiary education were numbered.

Who should know but Dex? Shade rolled his eyes at the obvious. The whole bureaucracy for admissions, examinations, appointments and promotions – and tenure, most of all for tenure – stifled creativity at every level. As he grew more expansive, Shade lamented that this tenure thing turned the oldtime universities into a niche for has-beens, and when some of these senior people stopped producing, it was hell to dislodge them. At the Institute of Tropical Studies, one progressed on merit and that was that. If Candace joined up, she would see for herself.

She watched, rapt, as Shade concluded with a final flourish of knobbly fingers and another grin that was little more than a revelation of teeth. Droll and creepy at the same time, he gathered his hoard of oddments with the promise that they would meet again to sew things up, and he slid back out the door. Candace regarded him in silence as he inched past Cassidy towards the gate, but Cassidy turned her back and squatted to send a stream of urine surging down the drive. Suppressing an inclination to snigger, Candace reached for the hose she kept on standby. Still, she was as much annoyed at herself as at the man who had invaded her weekend. The irony was that her own search activity had called this vulture down.

In her midnight siftings through university websites for vacancies, she had hunted out job search engines – all the while swatting away pop-ups advertising a range of trash. In the process, Candace had left behind a virtual trail for university recruiters, and some had sent advertisements or solicitous enquiries. But she had visualized such recruiters as snappy, well-heeled experts in educational data systems, the type that sought and screened job seekers, analysed résumés, tracked training grant customers and liaised with fulfilment teams in wealthy institutions.

Candace doubted whether this Institute of Tropical Studies in Portmore, Jamaica – the very Portmore where she had passed her earliest years – was laying out even the US$50,000 per year on one recruiter for academic staff, however rich the parent of the offshore campus might be. Besides, surely no institution would invest in anything as unprofessional in appearance as Morgan Shade. Yet she could not suppress some sneaking gratification at being sought out at all. She had, after all, been waiting to be discovered for seven years – well, five to be more realistic (but there were people who landed posts before completing their doctorates). Since the award of her PhD in 2004, each year had been an eternity. So. How unimpressive could this place be, anyway?

As she strode back to the house, Cassidy plunged alongside her, a droopy ear lifted, apparently in doubt. But suppose it’s on the level, and I ignore it, Candace insisted. Cassidy swerved in front of her, then heaved a sigh and slumped across the doorway, making it clear Candace was on her own as far as that decision was concerned. Candace stepped across without grumbling, because the dog was trying to shield rather than trip her. You must want to go back to JA, Candace insisted, with a mischievous poke of her toe at a satin flank. More work for you too.

Precisely. Cassidy closed her eyes. There was work to be had outside of academia. Some people refused to consider the options.

Candace could not help it. She was born into an academic family – or rather, her father was academic to the bone. Earl Rider had graduated in 1972 with honours in literature and history along with a few courses in economics, then headed straight on to an MPhil, his 1975 thesis on something to do with the migrant male in the emergence of a Caribbean world of letters. From there it was inevitable that he contemplate a doctorate, and he began toying with the title Money, Machismo and the Written Caribbean. His supervisor cast a look askance at such frivolity, for it would be a while before titles like that stopped attracting disparaging glances from traditional scholars.

From what her mother said, alongside his initial reading Earl had practised unstintingly on his own machismo until a Tobago girl with a wide, playful grin confided that she loved Jamaica rhythm but that her favourite song was still Louisa Marks’s Caught You in a Lie, and what did he think of that? He said what she was missing was a firm grounding in rocksteady and that he was the tutor to take her education to new heights. Or perhaps they could begin with a quiet evening beside his new record player? Was she ready for a little Burning Spear?

Sheena Candace had not come along until 1979, a couple years into their marriage, which was already straining under the pressure of Earl’s focus on the doctorate. Her mother, Patrice Rider, yearned to join the flood of migrants putting as many miles as possible (and preferably the whole Atlantic) between themselves and the Manley experiment with democratic socialism. You want to stay here while Michael turn Jamaica into another Cuba? she demanded.

Not if you have a tenure-track position at Oxford for a black Portmore boy, Earl replied irritably.

It was an exchange Patrice quoted and re-quoted later when he complained of getting nowhere at UWI. Still, his 1980 PhD came just in time for an appointment as Assistant Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, on the Mona campus, fixing his domestic life firmly on the back burner.

Often enough as a child, Candace had thought of striking off on her own. They sailed away for a year and a day, she intoned, and perhaps she could as well. She fantasized about directing affairs, especially in the evening at around five-thirty when it was cooler but still light. There she sat on the rocks, a leggy seven-year-old with her underlip caught anxiously by upper teeth that were still a bit large for her face and a determined set of her jaw, looking out to sea and imagining herself an admiral overseeing the defeat of the French, for someone had given her a book called A First Story of Jamaica, and she had recast herself as Admiral Rodney. Or she huddled behind a tree, a maroon lurking in wait for the enemy, scrutinizing the shadows on the stony faces of the hillside for Taino ghosts she would marshal to a massive uprising that would turn history around. Outside she had been in charge of the battle. Inside her parents’ two-bedroom house, the bickering over-whelmed her. Sometimes when it got too late to wander outside, she sat just beyond the door, mentally relocating to the inside of a favourite tale, preferably in verse: The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.

She had begun what she could remember of that life in Portmore only a limestone hole or two away from where this new campus had grown up. Candace thought back to the landscape of the Hellshire coast that had provoked her wildest imaginings. Perhaps if her parents had left the old house for her she could have scrambled down over some rocks to the grounds of the Institute of Tropical Studies. Perhaps not. The decades had muddled whatever sense of local geography she had gleaned before leaving Jamaica as a child. Despite the intervening years, she had never grown to feel at home in Trinidad.

Perhaps that was unfair, for she felt at home once she retreated into her head, usually by way of a book. Her earliest bookshelves had been in her bedroom under windows that the helper, Eudine, called jealousies, first a simple white case that she decorated with pressed ferns, for it was hers alone and little taller than herself – The Three Billy Goats Gruff Robert Louis Stevenson The King’s Stilts . . . The next stood so tall she needed a chair to reach the upper shelves. Mr Toad Scrooge Escape to Last Man Peak The King Nobody Wanted. Then, there was the story of the cat that walked by himself.

And all places were alike to her. Well, not true either. It had been different outside, beyond the sad confines of the Portmore house. It came back to her, the pale grey structure on level rocks that reached to the back of the Riders’ land, curved down towards the sea and then crumpled into jagged stone interspersed by tufts of whiplike vegetation. Behind that, the hard ground fell away to the sea that churned and sprayed up at her on Saturday mornings, when she lay on her belly to peer over the edge for small pinky-orange crabs scuttling in and out the crevices below. Some ventured unwittingly within reach of the homemade net she slapped down to pull them up and flick into her bucket. Washed with salt and lime, seasoned and fried, they had no meat to offer, only the flavour of shellfish teasing the tongue, while she drew on the meagre claws and then spat the shell back out. It was a sort of self-inflicted torment, this sucking at the merest taste that left the mouth empty and intensified the craving. Make no sense, Sheena, her mother muttered, before shrugging and searching the fridge again for limes.

In Tobago, the crabs were dark grey blue and heftier, and she did not catch those. During Candace’s visits each July from the mid-1980s to 1990s, Silver, her grandmother, would bring the crabs in from a man who sold them with their claws laced tight with coconut fronds. After a long scraping of hairy legs and scouring with lime and salt, they were curried with big flat dumplings that soaked up the flavour, so you ate and ate until you could barely crawl onto the cot under the window and collapse there, dazed by the fullness of your belly and confused by the lingering flavour of curry and shadon beni, the sting of salt, pepper and sea wind, and of Silver’s wit, swift and penetrating beneath her hard deep laughter that drummed down like rain on galvanize.

Through Silver’s house lay a path beaten by relatives or neighbours stopping for portugal juice or sweet drink, dropping a bag of eddoes or picking up a helping of warm pone. Among them were those who thought a young girl should be learning the household, busy with pot spoon or needle and thread; but as far as Silver was concerned, Sheena Candace could climb a mango tree and read herself to sleep in it. Not that Silver didn’t loathe idleness of every sort; only nothing could bring her to believe that reading was idleness. Certainly not the reading of thick books of verse or novels from every age, not that avid sort of reading in which the child submerged so deep that she came back out with her eyes wide and dark, the pupils dilated like those of someone summoned from an unfathomable place.

Candace’s father being from Portmore, at that time a small forerunner of what was to become a flourishing dormitory town of Kingston, it had been natural enough for him to settle his family there, as the area developed. Earl Rider was only a temporary part-time lecturer at UWI Mona before the award of his doctorate in 1980, when what he described as a lucky death in the faculty opened up the rare vacancy into which he fitted himself seamlessly.

Right away, he published feverishly from his thesis or on related topics he worked up along the way; then he began to branch out more daringly – at times in areas well off his usual path. So, as a child, she would hear him holding forth on the phone to a colleague regarding some snide remark – one that had filtered back from a subcommittee meeting on assessment and promotions – about whether he actually had an area of specialization. A comment like that was born not just of ignorance regarding the disciplines involved, her father would say. These people had no concept of interdisciplinarity. And what was so dangerous, he continued, was this blindness lay at the heart of his own faculty, so there was scant hope of understanding when the case went further up in the system to committees and boards populated by those philistines in science and technology.

Candace had taken down her Pocket Oxford English Dictionary (third shelf from top, extreme right) and found the word interdisciplinary, but through the intervention of her grandmother, she had already met the Philistines in her Bible. How they now came to be working at UWI was unclear, but she realized they were what Eudine would have termed iignorant people, reinforcing that with a prolonged suckteet. It was a category in which Eudine fitted all employers, especially Dr Rider, who objected to her playing dub music while she ironed. Plodding and unoriginal was what he called dub, when Patrice protested that the woman was not playing it loud enough to disturb him at his desk. He would have thought, he said, that his wife could see the need to balance a certain aura of refinement against the (unavoidable) celebration of indigenous culture. Candace looked up indigenous and decided that was what she was.

Meanwhile, her father concluded he was getting nowhere because of academic jealousy and spite, so when a full-time post opened up in Trinidad on the St Augustine campus in 1988, he pounced on it. Patrice gave herself up to the euphoria of contemplating life in easier reach of her mother, because even if Tobago was a different island, at least it was still the same country – which meant, Patrice said, having the sort of support she had craved for years. Most of all, Candace’s mother basked in the promise of domestic bliss. For appreciation was what Earl had needed, Patrice explained to the neighbour who came to help pack up. Earl had been utterly undervalued by his colleagues at Mona, and now, here it was: he would be happy at work and come home to them, well, content.

At first Candace did not want to leave Jamaica, but it was different when her mother pointed out how much more time Earl would spend with them.

We’ll be happy, Sheena, her mother said in that wheedling voice.

Why can’t you call me Candace like everyone else? She pulled away, but looking back she recalled anticipating long talks, questions her father would no longer brush aside but pause over, conversation.

Candace had always liked questions more than answers, and most of all, she liked questions that had no answers. She collected them the way other children collected stickers, gossip about film stars or pictures of rock singers with shiny hair. She uncovered questions like those wherever they cropped up in her mind and dusted them free of whatever rubbish adhered, to take them to her father and hold them up – not so much for him to answer as to consider. Except, she would discover, he found all this provoking to the nth degree.

One particular question that sidled up during her early years and followed her through her teens had to do with words – which seemed adhesive and manoeuvrable (for how else could they connect and rearrange) as well as wildly variable in texture. The question, which she could not for a long time articulate, clung and nudged at her, and rubbed itself along her mind almost like the words that she turned over in her thoughts and played with, marvelling at the hard, clear transparent ones that scattered light in dim places, and others that sliced sharp, cut deep or echoed hauntingly. Then there were those that felt silky, like the stray kitten she had cried and cried to be allowed to keep, but the tiny mewing in the box came to her fainter and fainter, as the gardener bore it off obediently to the pitch oil tin full of water, and a neighbour distracted her with his puppy, all smooth damp nose and velvet ears, like words of incredible softness and tenderness that smoothed the jagged ones.

She grew more and more susceptible to words and to the formations in which they came together, in which they could be brought together to stir and govern how people felt, thought and behaved. Or wanted others to behave. Or seem to behave. How was it possible to control the insides of people with words? Candace wanted to know.

She locked herself up with them the way a few of the older brothers or sisters of children she knew locked themselves up to smoke or even locked themselves up with each other to find out . . . whatever it was – she had not known or cared. At first most of the words that attracted her came in writing from other places. Pulling the curtains as wide as she could, so the light could come in, and she could see the kiskidee alight weightlessly and then soar off again, she shut herself in her room with snatches of language that darted near, and she surrendered to them. Rendered light-headed by the lilt of Meg Merrilies and the interlocking narratives of The Hobbit, she dipped into books for older people, and she found herself breathless with the ripple of meanings that spread and intersected in some lines from what seemed a longer poem, called A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was the sort of thing she intended taking a few bits of to her father, when they finally got to Trinidad and he was . . . content.

Only, once they were there, he said, Yeh. Great. Run along now. Only, he immersed himself deeper in his publications and graduate students so as to cross the merit bar and nail tenure fast.

And more and more Candace retreated from her parents’ unrelenting discord, reeling herself up into a space in her head that vibrated with words and the sounds of words and the rhythm of sentences. There she occupied herself contentedly, hung up on verse, rocking on anapaests, lulled by unravelling iambic pentameter. There she declaimed The Ancient Mariner loudly to herself in the one solitary place that was hers, where she could shout without anyone hearing, only herself listening for the twang or thud or swish or chime of consonants, the echo of vowels. There she hovered, strung out on the way phrases clung together or broke loose suddenly, hurling her aloft; or she might just let go and float, soar, plunge – there was a sort of free fall one experienced in some sequences. Words, sentences – she unwrapped them greedily, sense after sense. It was her own, secret, space.

In a few years, she tried to throw herself into the bustle of Trincity Mall, to complain about extra lessons in maths, to share the flap over a male teacher as old as her father and equally uninterested in her, to yearn admission to hot spots and all-inclusive fetes. At home she looked longingly at the hills barely visible from her window, leaning out dangerously, remaining motionless so long that a swallowtail wafted up drunkenly and settled on her arm. When it fluttered off again, she drew back inside and surveyed herself in the mirror without satisfaction, feeling herself too tall, wondering whether her breasts would ever fill out, doubting whether she cared. She loved clothes of cool colours in light fabric, but not transparent or clinging. She loathed the constriction of a bra but put up with it for Silver’s sake. Her eyes were dark, bright, wide as if taken by surprise. Her hair curled disobediently in every direction, whatever she did with it. But what really occupied her thoughts was how it was possible to word the wind howling Heathcliff ’s anguish, and whether the letters Man-man inscribed on Miguel Street were a sign of his madness or some part of the cause.

Silver seemed unfazed when Candace’s interests swerved off the beaten track, but at school it had been weird sometimes, being bright. Twinges of guilt or self-consciousness cramped the thrill of catching on more quickly than the rest in subjects that came easily to her; then, when she floundered in some area that was not her own, an irrational shame pinched her, as if she had found herself out and was small and commonplace after all.

By the time she outgrew that, there was the pretending – to the other girls, her parents, even sometimes herself – tapping her foot to music turned up to the level of gross noise so she couldn’t make out the lyrics, let alone carry a separate line of thought in her head. Tapping her foot, bobbing her head, as if she were into it. Talking about a boy who played football for Hillview, when neither he nor football interested her one jot, and shutting up about things that did but were boring to normal young people, like her conviction that Hamlet was no madder than most people she knew.

I always want to go to the party, she admitted to Silver. "I think, It’s going to be different this time. But it never is. And it’s me: I don’t know how to . . . be fun."

"You are fun. Silver’s face tightened to grim loyalty. Who can’t see that, is because they stupid. She stopped and stroked a cheek. And it have nobody worthwhile could help looking at you."

Silver had something to say about everything, and when she pursed up her lips and clenched her mouth in silence, it was because the subject was too fraught for the caustic remarks it warranted. Her son-in-law, Earl, inevitably prompted this voluble silence. But nothing else was safe from her tongue, not the slack lyrics that accosted them from the radio, nor the skimpy dress Candace’s mother had bought her for Christmas, nor the rude glance of the porter at Crown Point Airport. Silver never hedged, never said, We’ll see. There was enough we’ll see at large already, Silver pronounced, and it spawned wutless men and miserable women, subjects on which she let fly unstintingly. That is one good-looking boy, Silver said once, following Candace’s eye, as they sat under the almond tree watching passersby on the beach. Soft-spoken and nice. He fool up two young girl already and leave them with they baby to mind by themself. Like he now looking for another fool. Make him come round here, let me put him out of business for good.

Some women never managed to take charge of themselves, Silver reflected. For that was what she had done, when her husband had persisted in his own wayward life, flitting from woman to woman in Port of Spain and drinking out every penny he made, while she struggled to bring up the little girl-child. She had left him right there, gone back to her mother’s tiny house in Tobago and taken care of the old lady as well as the child. Not everyone had the belly for that.

Husbands, Candace concluded, were pure crosses, and since husbands went along with routine plans for a home with children, she turned her dreams instead to a life immersed in books. Meanwhile, from mid-July into August, year after year, Silver made her a home with real food every day and church on Sundays. Sometimes the rain set in, and they read and played rummy. Otherwise – sky, sea, sand – everything that was the make-believe of travel magazines was the one real place of her childhood, when she and Silver read to each other under the almond tree until their voices croaked. So, in yearly instalments, Silver grew her up, strait-laced and private.

At fifteen, Candace might sit still, poker-faced in the midst of heated conversations, while her brain cavorted around, nipping at fallacies, tearing into weaknesses of content and mauling preconceived positions and stereotypes in the verbiage that flowed by. Occasionally she let go of herself and closed ferociously on whatever had provoked her.

She was studying for CXC, when it became apparent to her father that UWI ought have promoted him to Senior Lecturer, and he glimpsed the post he deserved, in Canada – by which time verbal cruelty and whining were years deep in the Curepe house. (Sometimes Candace could lock it out. Works of Jane Austen Wide Sargasso Sea Collected Poems Emily Dickinson In a Green Night Crick Crack, Monkey. ) When the University of Toronto turned down Earl Rider’s application, he moved to a more comfortable house in Valsayn, coming back and forth only for food and laundry, so it was possible almost to ignore him. Yet still Patrice and Earl tormented each other, one suffocating and the other slashing away.

Till Candace met Randall, there was no one but Silver with whom to discuss books, dogs, parents, the nature of debate itself or the efficacy of words. Hers were not views most people would engage with, so she hugged them to herself. Her temper did not, like his, take ages to ignite nor burn on even when there was nothing left to consume. But teased, she snapped hard. Randall discovered that procrastination particularly agitated her and meandering argument brought on some intellectual equivalent of motion sickness. She was incapable of polite circumlocution. But how, Silver demanded, would any child who didn’t sit down to regular Sunday lunch with her parents learn how to talk to people in a civilized way? As usual Silver had seized on the meat of the matter and then boiled it down dry. It was true, though, that having established her father had no interest in any debate with her, and her mother no spirit for it, Candace kept her more exciting thoughts to herself unless forced out of silence. Only, when that happened, she found herself unable to back off; instead she plunged on, worrying the argument, diving after its most elusive detail like a mongoose at a snake.

Silver’s moral framework being the only one available, Candace grew up viewing her father’s more obvious flaws through the eyes of her grandmother. Earl Rider, amoral and coldly self-absorbed, proved ruinous in his effect on women, especially the wife who idolized him until he wearied of her, and who clung on obsessively. After the Riders moved from Jamaica to Trinidad, Candace’s recollections of her early life concentrated over years like the Salt Pond at Portmore, and eventually she wondered whether her memories had reshaped, even distorted under the intense conditions of her childhood, so as to enable her to survive. It had been a relief, however Candace resented it, when her father left and set up an independent establishment. But Candace’s mother, long teetering on the verge of collapse, fell apart. And ever afterwards, even after she recovered, he belittled her for weak-mindedness.

Ever fair-minded, Silver pronounced that Patrice’s story was the tragedy of a woman unable to command respect. Patrice was her daughter, and she, Sylvia Veronica Clarke, should know her own child. Not that that was any excuse for the Mr Earl, she added.

Candace stayed on with her mother and gave not a thought to Earl Rider’s polished house in Valsayn. During Candace’s last year in secondary school, she encouraged her mother to take a job in the registry on campus and employ a Guyanese illegal to clean once a week. Earl Rider’s full-time position allowed his daughter to enrol in 1997 free of tuition costs. Patrice’s salary covered the books and entitled her to hold forth on Candace’s choice of programme. Linguistics? What is that? And English? But you not serious, Candace. By that time, her mother had given in and was calling her Candace. You have the grades to do law. Bad enough you refuse to choose the sciences in school. You could have got into med school easy, easy. But no – you cling to these arts subjects, and now, with a string of As, you refuse to do the law. And where you will get to with an arts degree? Into some paltry teaching job. I can’t believe you have so little ambition.

By the time Candace was nineteen and one year into her bachelor’s, all she wanted or could remember wanting was for either or both of her parents to go away.

Then they did.

Chapter 2

Spent on Books and Learning

gladly wolde [s]he lerne and gladly teche

When Earl Rider stopped by on the way to the airport, to announce his departure for Canada and leave his forwarding address, her mother did not hesitate.

You’re almost ready to graduate, your courses are paid for, and I’m leaving you the house, Patrice said to her daughter the next day, as she rifled frantically through a cupboard for warm clothes to take with her. What it is you want me to do?

Candace proclaimed their departure a good riddance. Her father’s blatant infidelities disgruntled her, and her mother ricocheted between agony and denial, incapable of dumping him. Candace could block it out – in softly lit corridors, book-lined. She wrote an essay on Shakespeare’s Gertrude as a criminally inept mother, and the first marker declared it fanciful, while the second argued that Gertrude came through in the end. But for scrupulous research and intrepid argument, it drew an A–. Candace chuckled and bled. She pressed on the wound, immersing herself in morphology and semantics that slowed and then staunched a flow invisible to everyone else. She threw up a sturdy schedule for her existence – a time for everything under the sun.

She immersed herself in her courses but otherwise clung to the margins of campus life, a fascinated observer. She registered the smell of hot oil, pepper and garlic, the rustle of grease-proof paper, the crunch of fried channa. She picked up the rhythm of the Soc Sci student who hoisted a thick Econ text in one hand while dipping French fries in ketchup with the other. All the while, his right leg jiggled so furiously that the bench shook, and a girl sitting farther along it slung on her backpack and then swigged a Gatorade and took off, two free fingers curled around a brown bag of doubles.

Candace wandered back into the library. She kept off from fetes, cricket, protests. She would have gone on hikes, if it had not meant throwing in her lot with strangers. She would have driven up into the Northern Range, if she had a car. She received an occasional call from her mother and tried to listen. But nobody interfered with her or quarrelled over her head. Safe place. Immovable mountains presided over meticulously labelled trees and bush that outlasted dry season to spring and bloom again. Between lectures she sat on a bench under the shade of a samaan with her laptop and a bag of crumbs to scatter occasionally at her feet. Candace nailed her routine in place and felt quiet descend.

There were students who pursued a UWI degree only for the security of a certificate, and now and then, someone grumbled about the odd staff member for whom UWI amounted to a shelter, a sure salary and pension plan, juggled against another life in business, politics or industry. Perhaps priorities wavered and reformed in situations where rules existed but were not rigorously enforced, but the staff Candace encountered proved a decent lot – not that one knew or speculated on their personal lives – and she found her lecturers accessible, knowledgeable, mostly caring. If there were others, she never encountered them. The campus seemed as good a place to be as any other, and her father’s discontent with it inexplicable.

Although August of 1998 saw Dr Earl Rider relocate with the stated intention of taking up a good position in a Canadian university, Candace’s mother quickly found herself domiciled in Toronto on her own. Earl had simultaneously negotiated two contracts and had moved to Texas, where he selflessly accommodated their divorce. Patrice had a comfortable home, provided she remained where she was, unless she preferred to return to Trinidad.