Prospero's Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez Page A

except from pictures his teachers had shown him and in the books he had read in school that reassured him of his heritage.
    “I haven’t seen anything like this, sir,” he said. “Not in Trinidad.”
    Dr. Gardner was pleased. “It’s all for my daughter,” he said. “So she’ll know. She was three, you understand, when we left.”
    Mumsford put his briefcase on the floor next to the armchair, drew his fingers down the front seams of his pants, and sat down. “It must have been difficult for you, sir,” he said.
    “Difficult?” Gardner fastened his eyes on Mumsford.
    “What with a three-year-old, sir.”
    “My daughter, Inspector, is that for which I live.”
    His words sounded strange to Mumsford’s ears, melodramatic, theatrical, but he nodded his head sympathetically. After twelve years in the Land of the Dead, it was to be expected. A man could be excused under those conditions for being melodramatic.
    “Quite. Quite,” he said. “And that is understandable, sir.”
    But Gardner was not finished. “I have done nothing,” he said, continuing to keep his eyes on Mumsford, “but in care of her.”
    Strange words again, but it was clear that Gardner meant exactly what he said. The intensity of emotion in his eyes made Mumsford uncomfortable and he looked away.
He did nothing except for her? In care of
her?
Still, Mumsford managed to say, “You must love your daughter, sir.”
    “Immeasurably.”
    When Mumsford looked up, he saw that Gardner’s eyes were misty. “I mean it is admirable, sir,” he said, feeling obliged to say something more. “All you have done here.” He extended his arm in a sweeping gesture across the room. “This room, this house. The furniture.”
    The praise seemed to snap Gardner out of the sudden morose mood that had come over him. He turned his head, following the arc of Mumsford’s arm, and his lips curved upward in a self-satisfied smile. “I did my best,” he said.
    “You should be congratulated, sir.”
    “Music?”
    Mumsford’s face flushed with pleasure and then he remembered he was on assignment for the commissioner. “If you please, sir, when we are done, sir.”
    “Oh, I don’t mean calypso,” Gardner said, assuming there could be no other explanation for Mumsford’s discomfort. “Our music. Mozart’s concerto for oboe and strings. Do you know it? The concerto for oboe and strings?”
    Mumsford did not know it. It was not his music; his music was not classical music. His music was popular music. He listened to Tommy Steele, Billy Fury, Cliff Richard. He liked Kenny Weathers and the Emotions, but he lied. It felt good to be in the company of a cultured Englishman, to be considered cultured himself. He was not in a hurry. He had time to ask his questions. “Haven’t heard it in a long time, sir,” he said.
    “Then I will play it for you.” Gardner walked toward the console on the other side of the room.
    “I’d like that, sir.”
    “We have our own world here, you know, Mumsford.” Gardner picked up the record and balanced it between his open palms.
    “In spite of the lepers, sir?” Mumsford asked, for it seemed miraculous to him that Gardner should have made a paradise here, in the Land of the Dead.
    “The lepers take care of themselves.” Gardner put the record in the record player, raised the arm, and placed the needle carefully in the first groove. “Close your eyes, Mumsford. Listen. Be transported. England.”
    He had dismissed his question about the lepers, but Mumsford did not mind. When the music poured out, encasing him in a warm cocoon, he, too, did not want to talk about lepers, he, too, did not want to spoil the moment by raising the specter of deformed flesh. He closed his eyes, as Gardner urged him to do, and let the music take him back across the Atlantic.
    But Gardner allowed him only minutes before he pulled him back. “Now you will understand my distress better, Inspector,” he said.
    Mumsford opened his eyes to see