Wide Sargasso Sea

I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

, I said I was always happy in the morning, not always in the afternoon and never after sunset, for after sunset the house was haunted, some places are.

But there must be something else I can do.’

She looked gloomy. ‘When man don’t love you, more you try, more he hate you, man like that. If you love them they treat you bad, if you don’t love them they after you night and day bothering your soul case out. I hear about you and your husband.’ she said.

They confuse matters by telling lies if pressed. The white people, sometimes credulous, pretend to dismiss the whole thing as nonsense. Cases of sudden or mysterious death are attributed to a poison known to the negroes which cannot be traced. It is further complicated by …’

‘You are safe,’ I’d say. She’d liked that – to be told ‘you are safe.’

‘If this is a sad story, don’t tell it to me tonight.’

myself, my wife Antoinette and a little half-caste servant who was called Amélie.

Now the thought of her is mixed up with my dream.

How could she know that Mr Luttrell would be the first who grew tired of waiting? One calm evening he shot his dog, swam out to sea and was gone for always.

she told me that the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate where we lived was very bad and that road repairing was now a thing of the past. (My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed – all belonged to the past.)