An Evil Eye

89

Talfa advanced to the divan and performed a temmena, not quite brushing the floor.

“I hope you are well, valide.”

“As can be expected, Talfa.” The valide took a long breath. “And you, I hope, continue in good health?”

“Inshallah, by the grace of God,” Talfa replied automatically. “I grow a little every day,” she added, with a giggle.

“You were always too fond of sweetmeats,” the valide remarked. She glanced past Talfa, to the slender little girl who stood quietly to one side. “And who have we here?”

Talfa half turned. “My daughter, valide,” she said in surprise. “Necla. I said I would bring her.”

“Of course you did.” The valide held out her hand, and Necla stepped forward to kiss it.

“Very pretty,” the valide said.

Talfa frowned slightly. “Her skin will get lighter. Girls of her age are often a little dark.”

Her eyes flickered about the valide’s chamber. The valide gestured to some inlaid stools, and patted the divan.

“Please, be seated.”

Conversation languished while the serving girl brought in coffee on a tray, and pipes.

“You may smoke, Talfa. I find it disagrees with me, but I quite like the smell,” the valide remarked, truthfully. The whiff of tobacco reminded her of Martinique: of stinky carriages, and Creole weddings, and of her father talking business on the veranda, with a cigar. Sometimes she would creep onto his lap and fall asleep there, listening to the rumble of male conversation and laughter. In the still, dark air a lamp would be burning. The men drank rum and played bezique. Down in the lines, the African slaves were beating their drums softly. A tac-tac bird screamed in the trees beyond the garden.

She started. She opened her eyes and was surprised to see a dumpy woman sitting beside her, puffing on an amber stem held between her teeth.

“Who have we here?” she said; but perhaps she only imagined she had spoken, because the dumpy woman kept puffing away and darting her eyes about the room.

“Aimee! Aimee!” She could hear them calling for her, a long way off, but she didn’t care. They would make her sit in a close, stuffy room to do needlepoint with Tante Merib. It was nicer in the soft grass, once she’d kicked off those little shoes with wooden soles. She pulled off her calico trousers and chucked them into a bush, and then her bonnet, and her ribbons.

She felt the sun hot on her face and on the top of her head.

She stepped into the brown water with her hands raised.

“Aimee! Reponds-moi! Ou est-tu? Aimee?” A little closer now. The water was as warm as it looked and the mud was squishy between her toes. All the little blacks played here, and Aimee knew why.

The fastenings on her bodice were the hardest to undo. She was only six, after all. She wriggled and pulled, but the dress caught under her arms and then, as she tottered forward in the water, it puffed up around her and she went off sailing… Sailing like a little boat!

A big black man had jumped in to get her out when she was already half sunk, and the family had arrived at the bank of the waterhole. They’d followed her trail, they said.

After, Papa used to call her his petit paquebot. She smiled. She’d forgotten that.

Talfa cleared her throat, and stood up.

“Say goodbye nicely, Necla.”

They performed temmena politely, and withdrew backward.

Talfa was, in her way, a grand personage; but the valide outranked her.

“Come, Necla. Hyacinth can take us to visit the other ladies now.”