Monsoon Summer (30 page)

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CHAPTER 42
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B
urns, I knew from my training, don't hurt in the way you might imagine. First-degree burns can hurt like hell: they catch the top layer of nerve endings. The more serious second-degree burns are often less painful, because the damage is greater and the heat seared through the nerve and the sweat glands. Most serious of all: third-degree burns, which can send a patient's body into a state of shock that resembles coma.

The second-degree burns to my arms and lower legs felt like being stung by a thousand bees but were not serious enough to keep me in the General Hospital in Ernakulum for more than a couple of days. A much worse pain for me, as I lay in my room on the third floor, watching my skin turn chalky and white, was the knowledge that I'd been so stupid.

I kept imagining the conversation I might have with Daisy, who would turn herself inside out not to blame me.

“So you were told by Neeta before the fire that funds were definitely being embezzled?”

Yes.

“That the Home had clear enemies?”

Yes.

“That arson, or some kind of attack, had been threatened.”

Yes.

“And you decided to do nothing.”

Yes. Or was it no, or maybe?

The facts were so shot through with holes and uncertainties that my mind, like a bird trapped in a windowless room, dashed around for excuses. I had definitely dropped hints, tried openings, made tentative suggestions to Dr. A., and asked many times for accounts. But I should have been clearer, braver, less anxious about being the know-all memsahib, and although nobody had been killed, the Home was now a smoldering wreck, and that was partly my fault. I'd behaved like a coward.

* * *

On my third day in hospital, it was Glory who, to my horror and amazement, turned up to drive me home. Pale and thin in the blinding sunlight, she was wearing a green silk suit and white crocheted driving gloves, and when I saw her behind the wheel of Appan's car, I thought at first I was hallucinating.

“I didn't know you could do this,” I said nervously, as she threaded her way through a street market, hand on horn, shouting
“Kazhutha!”
Donkey! at a careless rickshaw driver.

“Well, there's quite a lot you don't know about me,” she said with a pert look. “I did this all the time when I worked in Ooty for Major General Willoughby and his wife.” Another employer floating up from the mists of her past. “He loathed driving up hills and rather liked me.”

I looked at her in amazement: a pale shadow of herself a few weeks ago, now double-declutching and flipping out her indicator at the crossroads. The mother I thought I'd imagined had flared into life again.

“D'you promise me Anto and Raffie are all right?” I said, when we stopped to let a bullock cart go by. I'd worried about them obsessively in hospital but felt Raffie was too young to visit me. The burns unit was a frightening place.

“Fine and dandy.” She was checking her lipstick in the rearview
mirror. “Raffie and I played trains yesterday. I think he quite likes his old grandma now.”

“Anto?” I gripped the handle on the side of the car.

“He phoned again yesterday, from some godforsaken place. Typical man, never bloody well there when you need him,” she added, with a flash of her old bitterness.

* * *

She made me rest on the sofa all afternoon, joking I was her “little dolly” again. She played with Raffie and bossed Kamalam, telling her I was tired and to take Raffie for a walk. She went upstairs to find me a decent nightdress to wear. The nighty she brought down, cherished in tissue paper like some holy relic, was Christian Dior. A present from an admirer? Something she'd borrowed and forgotten to take back? Hard to tell. She said she'd never worn it and was keeping it for her funeral.

As I lifted the tissue, the faint musky sweetness of dried lavender floated in the air.

“Wickam,” I said, hearing the click of Daisy's secateurs as we stripped the plants and poured the flowers into small muslin bags. I began to cry.

“Whatever's the matter?” my mother asked.

“The Moonstone,” I said. “I've got to tell Daisy about it.”

“Well, Daisy won't blame you.”

“She should.”

“That is absolute codswallop,” she said. It was strange to feel her arms around me. “How could it possibly be your fault? You didn't do it.” The mother tiger again, eyes blazing with indignation.

“I could have done more. I'd heard rumors from the moment I got there.”

“Oh, stop that.” She adjusted the ribbon on my nightdress and glared at me. “Stop it immediately. There are always rumors. You can't spread panic. Besides, Indians love a drama.”

I let it pass. The days were long gone when she could kiss and make it better. “Do you promise nobody died?” I'd asked for the umpteenth time that day.

“Nobody died.” My mother said this in a firm voice. She put one hand over her eye, which was never a good sign. “And I actually meant to tell you this: I got a telegram from Daisy this morning. She knows and she says the main thing is you're safe, and you're not to worry about a thing.”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“Can I see the telegram?”

She put her cup down and gave me her hurt look. The one I'd dreaded for years. “You never believe a word I say, do you?” she said. “And that's quite upsetting, you know.”

I chose my words carefully, knowing the wrong ones would send us both tumbling into a dark and frightening place.

“I believe . . . I think you sometimes tried to make the world seem nicer than it is.”

“Oh, really?” Her eyes narrowed. “Can you give me an example of that?”

I thought for a moment. “Well, I seem to remember an incident when we saw a dead rabbit on the road, and when I asked what had happened to it, you said it was having a little sleep on its way to a party. That might be one example.”

It felt like a high-board moment, but Glory flung back her head and laughed, the first time I'd seen her do that in a long time.

“I do remember that. Flat as a pancake on the road, and you crying your silly eyes out. We were off to Northumberland: that widower, ex-Navy, who couldn't, in six months, ever quite get the hang of my name. Rude bugger. The car broke down twice. We had to walk the last mile or so with our suitcases.”

“I don't remember that bit,” I said.

“No,” she said quietly. “Of course you don't.”

“It wasn't easy for you, Mum,” I broke the silence that followed. “I can see that now.”

“My fault,” she said, almost brusquely. “And please don't call me Mum, it's common.”

“Your fault for what?” I said. She was clutching at her pearls, twisting them.

“I was feeble, really.”

“Feeble! I'd never call you that!”

“I was.” She scratched her head. “I've lived my whole life in a sort of dream. At least you were brave.”

Sweat broke out along my hairline and scalp. My mother making me into some sort of martyr felt completely unbearable.

“No.”

“Brave enough to make mistakes, I mean, to defy me.”

“Well, that.” We smiled in a wary way at each other. “I suppose. Not often.”

Another long silence fell between us. “Anto wasn't one of my mistakes, Mummy,” I said at the end of it. “You do know that, don't you? I love him.”

“Oh, love,” she said vaguely. She took off her pearls and examined their gold clasp. “We'll see,” she said, laying them down. “I can certainly see the attraction. He's very good-looking.” Her smile was hard, defiant, her don't-think-you-invented-sex look.

I let it lie. We'd come as far as we could today without hurting each other too badly. Now I hoped she'd go away and have a rest, and I could spend some time with Raffie, whom I could hear upstairs playing with his train with Kamalam, but instead, and to my alarm, she kicked off her shoes and lay beside me.

“One more thing.” She sounded breathless again. “You know that story I told at lunch about finding the extra room at Wickam? The one we didn't know about? I don't suppose you believed a word of that either.”

“It was a good story,” I said, meaning, I'm too tired, don't make
me think about it. The clutch of her hand, the frantic look in her eyes signaled more emotion than I could cope with.

“People dream about that,” she said. “Don't they? Discovering a marvelous extra room in their house—a place they knew nothing about before, a place that makes everything feel more spacious.”

Actually, I'd never heard of this but I let it go. “What was it like? I mean, was there even a hidden basement?” I asked, more out of politeness than anything. “Daisy hadn't mentioned it.”

“Well, there is one and it's horrible,” she said. “There was a nest of squirrels in the ceiling and their peepee had dripped through the floorboards, so it stank, and all we found at first were heaps of clothes and a dead rat. But here was the thing.” She clutched my arm now. “When my eyes had grown accustomed to the light, there were three pictures stacked against the wall. As I said at lunch, Daisy's father was an art student at the Slade before the war. I actually joked to Daisy, ‘If there's a Picasso here, all our troubles will be over.' And there it was, suddenly, this tiny canvas, with his signature on the corner. We took it towards the light to check we weren't going mad, and it really did crumble like sawdust in Daisy's hand, and I wanted to scream.” Glory shifted on the bed, her sharp hip bone sticking into mine. “I was so livid with Daisy for being so careless. I suppose her mind was on higher things, but what a fool.”

“She has an awful lot to think about,” I said woodenly. I couldn't bear hearing Daisy described like this.

“Clever women are often very stupid.” A favorite theme of my mother's. “It would have paid for
everything
: the roof, the barn, the new fences. And she longs of course to come back to India.”

“Wickam felt like the only real home we ever had,” I said. “You must have felt it too.”

“I know you like her better than me,” Glory said suddenly. “I don't blame you; she's better than me.”

“Mummy, no!” And then words failed me and we gazed miserably at each other.

“That's not the point. Let me finish what I wanted to say.” She hauled herself up on the pillows and clutched my hand again. “Daisy gave me something else that day you might be interested in.” She got up from the bed, sat down in a chair, and faced me. “A box of letters.” Dramatic pause.

“Love letters, bills, what?” I was sticky hot again and weary of her.

“Not love letters, not bills.” Another pause pregnant with meaning. “Letters from your father.”

She licked her lips and stared at me. “Enclosing money for you.”

“
Money
for
me
?”

“Yes.” I could hardly hear her now.

“Ever since you were born, he sent it over, every three months: enough to keep you ticking over. I made Daisy swear never to tell you, so she gave it to me as wages.”

My mind went perfectly blank.

“Why couldn't Daisy let me know? And why wages? I don't understand.”

“Because your father was a shit.” She spat the word out. “Oh, don't look at me like that. He let me down badly, so I sent him away. I told him . . .”

“No, don't tell me! Let me guess . . .” I still felt surprisingly calm. “He was dead to you.”

When I tried to get up, pain flared in my hand, and I felt dizzy.

“Why tell me now?” I said to her after an incredulous pause. “What in the hell is the point of that? God, I wish Daisy, at least, had told me, or even showed me the letters!”

“I told her we'd leave if she did, but that's not the point. The point is this,” she said in a flat voice. She raised her head and looked at me. “He lives in Ooty. Not far from here. Have you heard of it?”

I had of course. Every one knew about Ootcatamund—snooty Ooty—the butt of many jokes about gin fizzes, polo, brigadiers, retired boxwallahs.

“Are you sure?” I stared at her, feeling nothing: not thrilled, not grateful, not relieved. A big blank nothing. “I don't understand.”

“He stayed on. It's a long story, and he stopped sending the money ages ago.” I could almost feel her deflating, regretting this already. “And don't expect a fairy tale,” Glory continued, voice squeezed. “He'll be old and tired like me. Daisy, who gets the odd note from him, says he doesn't have a bean.”

“Well, that's wonderful news.” I was angrier than I'd been in a long time. She might have been talking about a distant friend's lost dog. “Anything else I should know? I don't know, a twin I haven't met or something?”

“Not a thing,” she said with a defiant look. “And no need to take that tone with me. I'm going to go and have a zizz. I've had enough of today. I just thought you'd want to know,” she added in a huffy voice as she left the room, as if I were the one who was being unreasonable.

After she left, I felt so unhinged I wanted to scream. Instead, I sat and stared wide-eyed at the darkness, and then I put a pillow over my head and fell into a strange sleep that was like falling into a deep hole. There were no brilliant dream rooms where I went, just dread, and shock and suspicion, and a sense of swooning shame before my mind shorted out.

* * *

The slam of a door woke me up. Anto's footsteps ascended the stairs. When he dashed into our room, I put my good hand over his mouth.

“Have you spoken to my mother?” I couldn't bring myself to tell him about my possible father, in case this proved another version of the dead rabbit story; I couldn't risk the pain.

“Haven't seen her.” His words tumbled out. “I wanted to see you first. How is your hand? I'm so sorry I was away. I won't do that again.”