He horned her royally ad eventually she gave him up because of it, yet when he got sick with HIV she kept the promise they had made to each other as teenagers, that they would always look out and care for each other.

"How could I do otherwise? It's somebody that you love deep."

The person making the statement is Ruthlyn Dickson-Boxhill, the woman who was married to Dennis Franklyn Williams, better known as the calypsonian Merchant. Luckily for her she left him and the relationship before he could pass his HIV to her.

She is a tall, well-built, dark woman who looks straight into your eyes. She walks proudly with an upright carriage and you can see traces of the athletic, trim figure of the netball-playing teenager who Dennis Franklyn Williams first caught sight of at practice on the courts by the Princes Building.

We are doing the interview at the comfortable home Merchant sometimes shared with her at La Horquetta. A huge framed photo of Bob Marley hangs on one side of the room (Merchant loved Marley's music), and the cushions he would at times throw himself on are still scattered next to the large television. The breeze blows through the window, lifting and blowing the curtains against Ruthlyn and as we speak she holds one end of the blue lacy cloth and rubs it reflectively between her fingers.

I ask if she didn't feel as if she had got revenge for all the times he had been unfaithful when she herd he'd got HIV.

"Revenge?" She looked shocked by the question. "I'm not God." She looked angry, then she laughed. "You don't worry, I was accustomed getting my own revenge. Aids? Oh God, that is too hard a thing for somebody. It was too hard. Too hard. That woman, she knew she had Aids, she should be quarantined. She destroyed the life of a good composer. I did really love him."

Theirs was not just a teenage love affair. They bonded when they met. He'd grown up in the orphanage and although her mother and father had ten children, her parents had separated. She'd grown up with her father and another brother. "I felt orphaned because what kind of mothering could a father give? Now don't get me wrong - my mother was always there for me, but my father was a womanizer and he fought my mother in court. I guess he wanted to spite her and he took me and my brother."

But her father was strict. He did not approve of Merchant who was about 18 years older than his daughter. But Ruthlyn was attracted by what she saw as the similarities in their upbringing. Her father was a carpenter with the Ministry of Works; Merchant's father, who died in his infancy, had also been a carpenter. Merchant's mother Marion died when he was a little boy; Ruthlyn had no mother residing in her home.

So Merchant, who used to sing by the Princes Building, started coming to look for her when she had her netball matches and practice. In those days she played for Malvern. She was 16 and also attending commercial school and he would come by after school.

She laughs when I ask if merchant took her to parties. "You want my father to kill me? I had to hide to be with Dennis. I couldn't go to parties. We had to meet in the day, like after netball. And sometimes if I get a little chance we would go cinema. You could have been home by 8:00 or 8:30; anything else was out of the question."

But people started seeing them and used to tell her father. Her father started warning her about Dennis. They started falling out about Dennis, and at one time she was put out of the house. Her father hoped these tactics would mash up the relationship.

But the opposition brought the couple closer together.

Did she find he was handsome?

"In my eyes, yes."

Eventually she moved out from home, having passed the subjects she studied at Ogle's Commercial. She started to work in Chaguanas in 1981. She rented a one-room apartment and they started to live together. Emotionally, it was not easy.

"Merchant and I had a lot of ups and downs in our life. He had other women. We used to fall out. He would go and he would come. I remember one time telling him, I am not going back in this relationship no more, you are always hurting me. The next thing he went and put up banns. He was a kind of person, you could not fall out with him. The way he would talk. He was smooth."

But marriage did not cool down Merchant and as he became more popular, especially around Carnival, the women would flock around. One time she was so vexed with him, she cut up his clothes and took it to Kitchener's tent where he was singing. She flung the clothes at him. Ruthlyn says he lived with a lot of women but somehow he preferred me. "He would always come back. But the year he sang "Rock it with me" she decided she had had enough. She moved out of their Coconut Drive, Morvant home and went to live in a "Wafda" (the connected houses) at Phase 7, La Horquetta. She kept away from him thinking he would never be able to find her.

"I had no lights in the house and I was sitting in my neighbour's yard. Suddenly she said, 'Look Merchant coming up the road'. I could not believe it."

He came up to her and simply said, "I come to tell you I coming back home."

But he did not stop running round and by then he had another love as well, cocaine. At first she did not believe people when they told her he was on 'coke'. He hid his habit from her too. Eventually, she caught him in a coke den with other divorce him and it is around this time a childhood friend gave her the advice that she believes saved her life.

"My good friend, Anthony Thomas, we called him Marble, told me, 'If you want Merchant out of your life, Lyn, get a man, he has to see that you have a man, even if you don't like the person, even if it is just to pose with', because all that time, although he had so many women, I never went with anybody and it is Marble who is responsible for me not getting Aids. I took his advice."

While we've been talking her second husband, Franco 'Brian' Boxhill, has been sitting quietly on a couch taping the interview as they've been advised to do by her lawyer. He is a tall, slim man with big, patient eyes. His voice is deep and he articulates slowly.

I ask how they met and they both begin to talk. They look at each other. Stop. Laugh. She gestures: "Brian you let me tell it" and he lets her begin, picking up the tale to correct a detail. Eventually they both tell the story, at the same time, in their own way.

She and Merchant had been on a break. It was during the Carnival season and she was determined to go in town by the tent to see what he was doing. She took a taxi. Brian was the driver. He'd already seen her around and was interested - but she didn't know that. On the way she talked of her frustration with Merchant, her hurt, the pain. He advised her to stay away from him at this time and to out with her friends instead. That night when Merchant came home, they had a huge row. Some time after she and Brian started to live together.

Brian begins to talk slowly, thoughtfully.

"Merchant was a very powerful man in getting people to do what he wanted, but you could not hate him for long - that was one of his basic strengths."

Brian, who admired and respected Merchant as a composer, did not mind him coming home to visit Lyn. And Merchant would admonish him if he heard him disagreeing with her. He would tell Brian: "You hush!"

How did Brian tolerate this?

"It has to do with my ideology and philosophy of life. If I was in such a position I would have liked him to allow her if she was the only person to help. Basically, I respected him for who he was and what he did for T&T. I like to dwell on human existence and what makes people dot he things they do. I do a lot of soul searching."

Looking back on Merchant's life, Ruthlyn pinpoints the loss of his mother and his hit song "Norman is that you?" as subconsciously being responsible for the irresistible urge he had towards women.

"After he sang it, people said he was a bullerman. I remember he took me with him to see the picture in De Luxe, and he got the idea to do the song. He regretted singing that song and he never sang it after that season. It was as if he felt he had to have as many women as possible to prove them wrong. He was not bisexual."

He also never got over the death of his mother Marion, who had three older children whom Merchant grew up not knowing.

"Had she lived, these things would not have happened."

The family lived at Upper Bournes Road, St James. As a child he attended Newtown Boys'. When she died Merchant was sent to the Belmont Orphanage, taking into the home the memory of his mother always putting a hat on his head when she dressed him to go out. The hat would later become one of his trademarks as a performer.

Ruthlyn also says she knows who gave him Aids. She saw the woman once when she went to visit him in hospital.

"There was this woman and she drank from his glass and ate from his plate. It made me suspicious. I asked her, Is it you who give Merchant Aids? And she tell me, yes. But if you see her, she does look better than me, she is a healthy carrier and she is living in the States, I don't know how she get over there with that disease."

Now that Merchant is dead Ruthlyn wants to ensure that his wishes are carried out. She made sure that he had the kind of funeral he wanted. One regret is that she could not get David Rudder to sing one of merchant's songs at the funeral. "He always wanted that and for SuperBlue to sing one," she says, but Rudder was out of the country when Merchant died. Had she known he was at the funeral service, "I would have gone to hi then and there and asked him to sing." Merchant had treasured the memory of Rudder coming to see him in hospital when he first took ill with HIV.

She also made sure his body was not treated roughly by the hospital attendants after he died. "He always spoke to me about how the attendants would throw the body of patients who died of Aids onto the trolley and I got to the hospital in time, he got what he wanted."

He told her he did not want people touching up his body at the funeral and she made sure it did not happen. "People were not nice to him when he was alive."

She also intends to see that the request he made of Eddy Grant is carried out. "Before he died Eddy Grant came here to this house in February this year. He came with Gabby and two other guys. Merchant asked him to clean up his affairs for him, to ensure all his royalties are collected and he gets the credit for the work that he did."

Ruthlyn said she heard Sparrow say on the radio he never did any of Merchant's work. But she says she knows differently. When he was in prison in 1966/67 he used to compose under the name of Swallow. A man used to take his songs and sell them to calypsonians. Ruthlyn said the man sold the following Merchant compositions "Donkey and Lion", "Ah Coming Dong", "Miss Mary" and "Bad John".

She paid tribute to PlainClothes for taking him to Robert Elias (Trini) who took him to Rebirth House for rehabilitation from his cocaine adiction and to Explainer who first showed him where he should register his compositions. She wishes now she paid more attention when he talked about the people who took his songs.

She faced ridicule caring for him after he got the disease. A woman openly asked her, "You have Aids?"

"They made me decide to get fat," she joked. "You think I was always like this?"

And this is why during the interview she did not want to talk about the children she had with Merchant. She hastily put covers over their photos. "Leave them out of it. People are so cruel in this Trinidad."

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