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.