Eden Falls by Jane Sanderson

ears, and there was Amos, detracting in public from the irreproachable wife of Ramsay MacDonald; like sitting in a chapel and heckling the minister, it just wasn’t done. He lowered his voice to not much more than a whisper.
    ‘Do you want to know your problem?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Your problem is, you let a bit of personal strife cloud your professional ’orizons.’
    ‘Nice one; put it in a pamphlet,’ Amos said, but he knew it, really, and he didn’t need lessons in psychology from Enoch. He was out of sorts with Anna, and therefore out of sorts with the world – Enoch Wadsworth and Margaret MacDonald included. His opposition to Anna’s chosen career, his resentment of her clientele, had the power to make blue skies grey. It wasn’t a permanently debilitating condition; rather, like heartburn or gout, it would flare up at some outside provocation, which, today, had been the letter from the alderman. If she would just consider how it looked to the wider world when the wife of a Labour MP counted earls and countesses, dukes and duchesses among her friends. Clients, Anna would say. Clients and acquaintances, not friends. And yet every Christmas, cards, in red velvet lavishly embossed with gold foil, dropped onto their doormat, bearing festive good wishes from one or another titled family. Maya would cut them up for collages: Amos would rather they went on the fire.
    ‘When Keir ’ardie ’ad ’is appendix out,’ Enoch said now, ‘King Edward sent ’im a letter of sympathy.’
    ‘And what’s that got to do wi’ t’price of fish?’
    ‘I’m just saying,’ said Enoch. He drained his pale ale, wiped his mouth with his cuff and exhaled with pleasure at the simple satisfaction of a good pint. ‘And, as far as I know, it was accepted with good grace.’ He gave Amos one of his pointed, piercing looks. ‘So think on.’

Chapter 8
    E verything in the Whittam Hotel had been shipped from England; even the pink roses, which blushed, palely English, in the guest drawing room. To encourage British entrepreneurs in this colonial outpost, the government at home had lifted all duty on imported goods, which had saved Silas a small fortune, as the rigorously upheld aesthetic in his Jamaican hotel was that of a large country house in the South Downs, perhaps, or the Cotswolds.
    It was a veritable haven of Chippendale and Chesterfields, of chintz, silk and damask. Paintings played a key role in the deception: a Gainsborough,
Conversation in a Park
, which hung in the entrance hall, was of course a reproduction of the original, but it hit precisely the note of nostalgic elegance for which Silas strived. In the dining room a trio of Constables evoked rural English summers. On the walls of the wide first-floor landing pale-faced English heiresses gazed soulfully from verdant gardens and sumptuous boudoirs, and in the billiard room gun dogs held dead birds in their soft mouths while men in Norfolk jackets aimed their rifles at the sky. No English traveller could arrive at the hotel and feel displaced. True, the ceiling fans and mosquito nets were quite out of step with the theme, but they could not be done without, and in any case, they were so comprehensively eclipsed by rose bowls, ottomans and Wedgwood vases that their incongruity was minimal.
    However, if the
objets
were reassuringly English, the staff most certainly were not. The duty on imports had been lifted, certainly, but there was a proviso: if Silas Whittam was to benefit from the British government’s tax exemptions, he must also hire all his staff from the local population. And none of them, Silas had fast discovered, would cooperate with guests who believed themselves vastly superior to the servant class. It was an unhappy chemistry: the Jamaicans demanded basic courtesy before they’d stir themselves to action, while the English demanded instant service at the most peremptory signal. And any number of interior trappings, be they ever so authentic, could not