Monsoon Summer (23 page)

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CHAPTER 31
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A
nd it seemed for a while that it was the old Anto who came home: the one who made me laugh, who confided in me, the one whose beautiful tortoiseshell green eyes would squeeze shut when he laughed and open in a gleam of mischief, not the Anto in flight, distracted and grumpy, who was beginning to make me feel like a dangerous pet. His new job paid a decent salary of four hundred and fifty rupees per month. His title: junior physician at the Holy Family Hospital at Kacheripady in Ernakulam. He was also to work with Assistant District Medical Officer Dr. Sastry on a newly funded research trial, the details to be supplied later.

Later that week, Uncle Josekutty, the distinguished-looking Thekkeden who owned our house, asked if he could call on us. Our arrangement with him had never been properly finalized, so we were both shockingly nervous, thinking our good luck had run out, but when, at the end of a leisurely conversation, Anto asked if we could possibly secure a year's lease, Uncle Josekutty, who was recently widowed and with no children of his own, said, “That's what I came to say. I think you should buy my house at a peppercorn price.”

When Anto politely protested, Uncle Josekutty patted him on the arm. “That's enough! I believe in giving gifts warm, not when I am cold in the ground.”

We danced around the kitchen once he had gone. Couldn't believe it. Shortly after that, the deeds were handed over, the house
blessed, and the entire family swung into action, not stinting with advice or help. Amma spent a day in the storage room behind the granary at Mangalath, a room crammed with rosewood and teak furniture, linen chests, mosquito nets, old mangles, Anto's first cricket set. She found a beautiful old rosewood table for our main room, and a carved four-poster bed for the guest room that would only need a few repairs before it was serviceable, a lamp to hang in the hall.

She was fantastically bossy about where to put everything, and so happy that it made me think about my own Ma, with her fierce high standards about carpet cleaning and the right hangers and mothballs and mattress turnings. Amma, rapping out orders about how much air to leave around the furniture, telling us our bed should face either south or west for health and luck, suddenly reminded me of her. Uncle Josekutty's workman came over to repair a couple of loose struts of wood on the veranda, where the men smoked their cigarettes. Thresiamma brought us a
kindy
, a brass utensil with a spout, filled with water, for cleaning the feet of those who enter the house. Pathrose came with fresh soil and cow dung and planted up the
ankanam
, the little courtyard, with hibiscus and jasmine and frangipani.

Exhausted by this whirlwind of advice and people, when they left, we sat on the swinging chair on the veranda. Anto put his arm around me. “Alone at last. Thank God.”

When we got up, we walked slowly around the house together, admiring our bed, freshly made up with scented sheets; our whitewashed kitchen full of sparkling pots and saucepans from Amma's house; our own courtyard with its swinging chair, our guest room; our veranda with freshly watered plants plus a pot of cow manure from Mangalath. Anto turned to me with glowing eyes and said, “Can you believe this is ours?”

His salary plus my stipend from the Moonstone was easily enough to run the house and keep on Josekutty's two servants, so Anto was high as a kite when he got home from his second inter
view at the hospital. Dr. Sastry, he said, was young, progressive, and unblinkered. He took a great interest in ayurvedic as well as Western medicine and was about to undertake a funded three-year research project into the efficacy of both systems—right up Anto's street. He was to start work immediately. When I asked Dr. A. for a week off so I could unpack and settle in, she sighed mightily and made it clear it was at great cost and inconvenience to her.

On his way home from the interview, Anto tried to buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate but only managed to track down one dusty bottle of German wine at the Malabar Hotel; he told me it was playful without being impertinent. We gave the servants the night off, ate supper together, and drank all the wine. Afterwards, we wound up the gramophone and played the Louis Armstrong and Chic Chocolate records that Mariamma gave me. She had the best music taste in the family.

While we were dancing, he touched the salwar kameeze I was wearing. “I like you in that.”

I joked that there were whole days now when I forgot I was English.

“Mostly English,” he reminded me.

“Well, OK, three-quarters English, Mr. Pedant,” I said. “But it's strange. Yesterday, I was in the market and about to buy myself a marigold-colored shawl, when I held it up to my face in the mirror and thought, Crikey, I'm white, this won't do. It was the oddest feeling.”

“I used to feel like that when I was buying plus fours in Harrods,” he said. “I'd see this impertinent brown face in the mirror and think, Um, maybe not.”

“Liar!” I said. We were both a little drunk; we hadn't had wine in the longest time. “You never bought plus fours in your life.”

When we got too sticky to dance, he said, “Let's go down to the waterfront. I want to see our house lit up from the road and think, What lucky brutes own that palace?”

It was lovely down there: a crescent moon, colored lights bouncing on the sea; some stalls still open, selling fruit and vegetables and fish. Two fishermen waved at us as we passed, their faces reflecting the glow of their paraffin lamps.

As we sat in a little café watching this, I was intensely, almost painfully aware of him: the sheen of his hair, his arm resting on the table, his hands around a glass.

He took a bath when we got home. Mani had come in to fill it while we were out. We were like children with many new toys as we admired the claw-foot bath—six feet long with beautiful brass taps, another gift from Uncle Josekutty. I washed his back and later we lay in our new, west-facing bed and enjoyed each other as never before.

“That has never left us has it, KK?” Anto said, in sleepy satisfaction afterwards. KK. Kittykutty, Kitty darling.

“Can't talk,” I said, “too happy, no brain.” I was lying in the crook of his arm, looking through the curtains at a sky bursting with stars.

“Not fishing, but do you mind it's just us here?” I asked him sleepily, “Will you miss Mangalath?”

He took so long to answer, I thought he'd gone back to sleep.

“I couldn't live like that again,” he said eventually and a little sadly. He stroked the inside of my arm. “Anyway,” he added as he stroked my breast, “with any luck, we'll have company soon, won't we?”

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CHAPTER 32
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B
reast:
sthanam
(singular)
sthanamgal
(plural). Womb:
udaram/garba paatram.
Stomach:
vayar.

My Malayalam notebook was beginning to fill up, and I was growing in confidence, but when I returned to work, on the following Monday, Dr. A. was in such a stinking mood that I felt back to square one. Ten deliveries had, she said, made the previous week their busiest ever. The emergency midwife they'd had to call in from the Victoria Gosha Hospital had been expensive, and with three more training classes on the cards, “The Home is in the red.” I must write immediately to Daisy, she demanded, and see whether the Settlement ladies could tide us over. Without funds, the Home was, once again, on a knife edge.

This time I plucked up the courage to tell Dr. A. straight that I was sorry, but I didn't think that would be possible without turning over the Moonstone books. Daisy had asked three times for accounts of money spent and I had not been given them, so I doubted there would be more money without them.

Dr. A.'s right nostril widened into an incipient sneer when I said this, and when she bundled me into her study and locked the door, I wouldn't have been surprised if she'd slapped me as I'd seen her slap one or two of the nurses.

“You are forcing me to tell you a very unwelcome thing,” she said, in full finger-jabbing flow. “Something I have been keeping back in respect of staff morale, and in respect of gorement funding.”

“What is it?”

“Someone is taking money from the Home and I don't know who.”

“That's horrifying,” I said. “We must tell the police immediately. Why didn't you tell me before?”

“Because I don't want any gossip about this at the Home or to your family. It could ruin us, and we have so much good work to do.”

“Does Maya know?”

“Maya knows, of course.” She closed her dark eyes.

“I have to tell Daisy,” I said.

She gave a great shrug. “It will be a shock, so tell her also what great work we're doing.”

“It will be more than a shock.” I found myself shaking with rage at the almost blasé look she was giving me. “She's put hours and hours of work into fund-raising. You may think of her as a rich white woman. She's not.”

“Listen!” She was glaring now too. “I have two hours sleep a night, trying to run this place, and I am doing everything I can to find the miscreant; tell her that.”

When I offered to help her find the thief and also the missing accounts, her scowl deepened. She told me to stop going on about the accounts, that she had far more important things on her mind. She would write to Daisy herself.

* * *

I didn't believe her, and I wrote to Daisy that night telling her about my strange conversation with Dr. A. and asking for advice. Several weeks later I was relieved to see, on a brass tray in the hall, Daisy's familiar slashing handwriting on pastel-blue Basildon Bond notepaper. Our letters must have crossed on the high seas, as hers answered none of my questions. Instead, it was uncharacteristically full of bad news. Without urgent and expensive repairs, Wickam Farm was on its last legs: high winds had blown most of the roof off the north barn, flooding the office;
a ceiling in the main house had collapsed, narrowly missing Ci Ci's bedroom.

“Also,” she wrote, “I'd been hearing a strange munching sound for ages but had no idea it was the deathwatch beetle. Did you know they have fierce little jaws; you can actually hear them?”

I did sense a sort of panic beneath the jocular tone, but nothing prepared me for what came next.

“So, Kit, I am so sorry, but we've had to move all our boarders out for the duration, and I am in a quandary about your mother, who has had a very nasty bout of flu and who, I fear, can't go on working for much longer in this climate.”

I almost stopped breathing when I read what came next.

“She is now planning a trip to India, with money she has been saving. I am not sure how you will feel about this, but the sun, to put it bluntly, may save her life. For God's sake, Kit, don't tell her I've warned you,” Daisy concluded. “You know how proud she is.”

Another letter, in a sealed envelope, lay inside Daisy's, my name written on it in a beautiful italic script that I recognized immediately. But now the writing, taught to my mother by the Pondicherry nuns, had a slight tremor, as though penned during a minor earthquake.

Wickam Farm, May 5th

Dear Kit,

This letter is to let you know that I have come into a little windfall—the details later. I plan to use some of it to come out and see you and maybe look up a few old chums at the same time, and get some SUN. The weather's vile here. I've been staying off and on at Wickam Farm, where we've had the usual dramas of burst pipes and, of course, the barn roof.

Daisy, who is getting more dotty by the year, tries to laugh at it all, but it's no joke, particularly with three guests staying—Ci Ci, plus Flora again after a broken engagement.

I hear from Daisy that you're doing well and are up to good works and tip my hat in your general direction. I've had flu but it was too cold to stay in bed as Daisy demanded. If she writes making a fuss about it—ignore. More news later when I hear from you.

Your mother,

Glory

I didn't know whether to scream or laugh or cry when I read this. Not a dickey bird from her since I left home: no reply to any of my letters, no messages via Daisy, no telegrams. A big fat nothing, and now this odd missive, so blasé and peculiar-sounding that I wondered if Ci Ci hadn't helped her write it, making her sound more like a person wanting to be asked to a cocktail party than a mother who had told her daughter she was dead to her.

But I knew too she was always at her most peculiar and unreal when she was ill, for the simple reason that she hated me to see her like that.

I stood in shock, the letter in my hand. She was coming and the timing felt cruel because in spite of my anxieties about the Moonstone, I was learning all the time, and things were finally settling down between Anto and myself. He was loving his job, very busy with a research paper, and it was wicked of me to confess this, but being dead to her had become, in itself, a kind of freedom.

My mind raced about for the rest of the day. How had she financed her trip to India? I wondered in sudden panic, knowing her predilection for helping herself to “treats” from other people's houses. Shoes and scarves, the odd pilfered belt were one thing, but a windfall big enough to blow you to India sounded unlikely. Dear God, I hoped it hadn't come from Daisy, who could least afford it. And what if this flu of hers was something more serious? And round and round it went.

* * *

“I'm terrified,” I told Anto at dusk that night, when we'd joined the slow, peaceful crowd that strolled down the waterfront most evenings. The sun, melting like a fat peach, would soon flop over the horizon, and the evening breezes were soft and silky, except now I could imagine only too well my mother walking with us, paying attention to all the wrong things: the broken drain near the park with a few evil-smelling fish heads stuck in the grilles, the skinny dogs, the beggars. She'd be remembering why she hated India—its mess, its muddle, its Indianness—in the first place, and she'd be restless, wondering where all the amusing people were. Much as I'd resist it, I knew I'd feel her confusion too and feel responsible for her, because, damn it, I still wanted to make things right for her.

When we sat down on a bench to talk, Anto put his hand next to mine.

“This is the first chance we've had to be properly together,” I moaned. “And I'm quite sure she'll hate it and make us miserable.”

He didn't answer for a while.

“Make us miserable,” I repeated, thinking he may not have heard.

“Come on, Kit.” My husband looked at me almost in surprise. “She's your mother. You have the power to make her happy.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I looked at him suspiciously in case he was teasing me, but he wasn't. His face, colored by the setting sun, looked weary after a long day at the hospital, weary and infinitely precious to me.

“Now I feel like a heel,” I said, relieved he was taking it so well. “It's just such bad timing, and I've never heard her say a good word about India—
ghastly place
,” I said in her voice.

“You're making her sound like Margaret Rutherford, who never
said anything horrid about anyone,” he said, doing his Madame Arcati.

The small boy who ran up and down the seafront every night with his arm full of bangles was delighted by our laughing and joined in with a loud cackle.

“Anto,” I warned him when we'd stopped, “I'm not laughing inside. I'm terrified, and I wish I wasn't. There's just so much about her I don't know.”