No Telephone to Heaven

Chapter 5 primarily deals with Clare’s experiences as a student in London, England: a country she chooses “with the logic of a creole. This was the mother-country” (109). She moves into an international boarding house and leads a quiet life, immersing herself in studies of art and literature, seeing plays such as Death in Venice and The Ruling Class, and reading books such as Coming Up for Air and Jane Eyre. In other words, she commits herself to the process of “bettering herself” (117), internalizing her own colonization.

Slowly, however, Clare begins a process of awakening, discovering strange connections in classic works of art. Through these discoveries, she begins to release some of her repressed grief surrounding her mother’s death and desertion: “When she read how Marguerite de Navarre sat by the bedside of a dying friend to detect the exact instant the soul departed the body, she wept” (118).

After some time in England, she accepts an invitation from her uncle and his wife to visit Kingston (which is how she ends up attending Paul H.’s party). Her uncle sold his house in Barbican and moved with his wife into a condo for safety after Christopher murdered Paul H.’s family. Clare’s uncle invites her to stay with them and work in their antique shop when her studies are complete.

Looking down from the condo balcony one evening during the holidays, Clare sees a group of children from a local orphanage (the orphanage she later tries to adopt a child from). The children’s light skin strikes her attention, and Clare’s aunt explains that they are “outside children” from “the finest families in Jamaica” (120).

Over drinks with Harry/Harriet later that evening, Clare shares her feelings of complex sadness at seeing the orphans. She remarks on her aunt’s description of them as “outside children … like they belonged to the past” (127). Harry/Harriet replies:

But we are of the past here. So much of the past that we punish people by flogging them with cat-o’-nine-tails. We expect people to live on cornmeal and dried fish, which was the diet of slaves. We name hotels Plantation Inn and Sans Souci. … A peculiar past. For we have taken the master’s past as our own. That is the danger’ (127).

Then, a white tourist approaches them with a question, and Clare and Harry/Harriet jokingly pretend to be royal visitors from a made-up kingdom. During this conversation, Harry/Harriet (using the pronoun “they”) also reveals an incident in their childhood wherein a white English officer raped Harry/Harriet while their parents were out of town. They explain that their adopted mother—Hyacinth—took them in when they confessed the incident to her, as she knew Harry/Harriet’s biological parents would see them as “ruined” (129). As Hyacinth aptly explained, “Wunna is on sufferance here” (129).

Clare and Harry/Harriet continue to bond in a friendly and romantic way, sharing a picnic the next day on the coast. Amid kissing and touching, Harry/Harriet asks Clare if she finds them “strange,” and Clare reflects, “Of course I find you strange; how could I not? You are a new person to me. At the same time I feel drawn to you. At home with you” (131). During this connection, Harry/Harriet also continues to develop Clare’s awareness of Jamaican history, showing her a slave hospital behind a cane field and encouraging her to reflect on the past: “T’ink of de duppy [ghosts] in such a place, eh?” (132).

When Clare returns to England, she finds her perspective changed by her conversation with Harry/Harriet and has trouble reconnecting with her studies. She befriends another student named Liz, who invites her to an “old girls’ weekend” (134) at her old boarding school in Gravesend. The prospect of seeing an English boarding school intrigues Clare, who has romanticized such institutions during her own girlhood (wherein her Jamaican school friends passed around a comic book set in an English boarding school).

In Gravesend, Clare is confronted by Dickensian workhouses—a far cry from the “ivy-entwined thatched roof buildings” (135) she’d hoped for—and feels alienated from Liz’s friends. This sense of alienation only deepens when she wanders away from the gathering and comes across a statue of Pocahontas, who was renamed “Rebecca” when she moved to this part of England. Clare thinks of Pocahontas—“her youth, her color, her strangeness, her unbearable loneliness” (137) and wonders what became of her.

Back at school, Clare witnesses a noisy anti-immigrant protest on the National Front wherein people wave signs with racist language. This protest deeply upsets her, and Clare confides in Liz, who expresses annoyance, but little more. Liz’s lack of emotional response disturbs her.

Clare begins to receive letters from Harry/Harriet that urge her to return to Jamaica. As Harry/Harriet explains, “Jamaica needs her children. Manley is doing his best but people are leaving in droves—those who can” (140).