Monsoon Summer (8 page)

-
CHAPTER 10
-

W
e didn't stop. For the next few months we lived by day like dutiful workers and by night like pagans. He'd creep into my room after lights out, and in the dark we made love with a sweetness and abandon I'd never felt before, or we'd talk in low whispers for hours about our lives so far and our families, almost anything but our future, because everything seemed heightened and either impossibly happy or desperately sad.

Our time was running out; he was going home. The actual date set was November 16. His mother was disappointed because he'd miss the festival of Onam. He'd showed me her letter, as if to make it real for both of us. When I asked what the festival was like, he said, “It's something to look forward to, like bonfire night, or Christmas. We play games, have big feasts.” And again, I noticed how his voice sounded warmer and slightly buttery when he spoke of India, how the word
fire
became a soft purr. It frightened me.

“I thought your family were Catholics,” I said, wanting to make them sound more normal.

“They're Catholics but they're Indian too,” he said. “They are Nasranis, who got their faith from Saint Thomas the Apostle in the first century.” When I asked what most did for a living, he said now most of the men were lawyers or bankers or doctors; before that they'd had coconut plantations or traded rice or tea.

These snippets of information, delivered in his public school
voice, thrilled me, of course. My Indian with green eyes. My Spanish Grandee. My exotic lover. Oh God!

“What does Travancore look like?” I asked one night. I liked saying its exotic name, and I was feeling fuzzy and contented after making love.

“That I remember? Lie still, voman. I am giving you a geography lesson,” he said in the mock Indian voice he'd amused the boys at school with.

“My country has three mighty rivers.” He drew his hand down my breast and rested in on my ribs.

“Beside them are lush paddy fields and palm groves.” His finger traveled down slowly from under my chin to my belly and made me shiver.”

“You're making this up.”

“I'm not. I'm not. Lie still. No talking in class.”

“The dark shadows here are the Southern ghats.”

“What's a ghat when it's at home?”

“Hush. I'll tell you later. Don't laugh, you'll be tested on this.”

“The Western ghats.” He circled my right breast.

“Anto, Lord, you're the corniest creature on earth.”

“And here,” in a Pathé News voice, “is the source.” He ran his hands down my belly, and I was pulling his hair and stifling a laugh when the door opened and my mother burst in, so angry she'd forgotten she had her hairnet on. She stood in the doorway, breathing heavily, eyes going like searchlights across our naked bodies, the rumpled bed, the candle we'd lit in the saucer the better to admire our flickering bodies in.

I pressed my face into the pillow, my heart thumping like a generator, and then turned to look at her.

“May I ask,” she said after a deathly pause and in her smallest and most terrible voice, “what you're doing in my daughter's bed?”

She remembered her hair net and shot me a look of pure rage as she snatched it off.

Anto sat up and pulled the blanket around him. “Mrs. Smallwood.” His voice, subdued and low, seemed to come from a great distance. “I am so terribly sorry for this, and it is not how I planned to say it, but I love your daughter, I have prospects now and was hoping to ask, with your permission, to marry her.”

If he could have clicked his heels under the sheets, he would have. The air went very still around us, we were waxworks in a tableau. I closed my eyes, not sure whether to be aghast or delighted. It was such a strange way to hear your proposal but, in the ticktocking moments that followed, I found, to my surprise, I was smiling inside.

And even stupid enough to think she might be pleased, Anto being a proper doctor now, her being half Indian. The silence lengthened.

“You stupid bastard,” she said at last, the first time I had ever heard her swear in public. “I could have you arrested for this.”

“Don't you dare talk to him like that,” I said. “He's done nothing wrong, and I love him too.”

“Oh, love.” She snatched at her hair in frustration. “That's a joke?”

“Maybe for you.” I sat up ready for a fight. “What do you know about that? I don't even know my father.” My mouth was so stiff with rage I could barely speak.

“Well, that's just as well,” she said. “Because if he knew about this, he'd get a gun and shoot him.”

“Oh, so he's risen from the dead, has he?” I said, coldly sarcastic. “Last thing I heard was he'd succumbed to a fever in Hyderabad.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said vaguely, which made me even angrier.

“So where is he?” My voice rose. “
Where is he
?
”

It wasn't even a conscious effort to knock her off track, just the way my mind worked, like a blindly flying bird, when it was most disoriented.

Somehow, during all this, and the exchange of words that fol
lowed, Anto managed to get dressed. He stepped out of the shadows, wearing his shirt and trousers again.

“Kit,” he said in a stern voice, “stop it. This is not a discussion for now, and your mother is right to be worried for you. We've all had a shock. We should all go to bed, unless”—he turned to my mother—“you would like me to go to Miss Barker and explain all this to her now.”

This, I realized later, was a brilliant move, handing back to her authority and humiliation in one swoop. It worked in a way that apologies never did with my mother.

My mother pulled her satin dressing gown tightly around her.

“I feel quite sick. I will go to bed and think about it. And you, miss,” she said, “I'll see in the morning.”

* * *

“Say it quickly,” I said to him before he left, “I won't blame you. Say it quickly if you don't mean it.” Meaning marriage, meaning me for the rest of his life.

“I mean it,” he said, very quietly. “I love you.”

But he looked exhausted and pale, as if there were other things he should say but couldn't find right now. In the end, we kissed like two sleepwalkers, and during the sleepless night that followed, I seemed to run through the full catalog of human emotions: confusion, and a kind of crazed delight at Anto's unexpected proposal, embarrassment that my mother had caught us red-handed, fury at her for exhuming my father so unexpectedly and then pretending it didn't matter.

Out of this tangle I could only pluck one clear idea: that in the morning, I must tell Daisy before my mother did. Daisy loved Anto; she would understand.

* * *

Daisy was in the office the next morning, when I, foolishly happy, dropped the news at her feet, like a cat bringing a dead mouse into
the house. She was in her overalls, gloves on because her chilblains were bad, wrapping up kidney dishes in brown paper. She straightened up, the expression in her eyes moving from their usual look of quiet pleasure at seeing me, to bewilderment, then horror.

“Oh, Kit, oh Lord,” she said, when I had finished. She clapped her hand over her mouth and stared at me. “Don't worry,” she said. “You can still get out of it. Have you spoken to him this morning?”

“He meant it,” I repeated. “I know he did.”

I was still feeling a kind of victorious expansion and babbled on for a bit about how we loved each other and how, in India, I could work at the Home, which was what Daisy had suggested all along.

“It won't happen.” Her head was shaking even before I'd finished. She looked ashy white. “It can't. His family won't allow it.”

“But Daisy, they're not
Indian
Indians.” I tried to explain to her. “They're educated. They're Anglophiles. His father lived in En­gland. He trained to be a lawyer here.”

She sat down and put her head in her hands and groaned. “I know that. Oh, my dear girl,” she said, looking up, “you're stepping into a bear pit.”

“I thought you'd be pleased.” I sounded like a child even to myself.

“It's true I'd hoped you might consider being a worker there, on a very temporary basis of course, you know, a month or two months, part of a team, with a small salary, not as a wife, not as an Indian wife. And of course Tudor will be desperately disappointed too. He's such a dear.” She put on her glasses and stared at me, looking very sad. No, he's not, I thought. Tudor was definitely Daisy's blind spot.
Not in a million years
, my mind clanged, only I loved her too much to say it.

“And it will kill your mother,” she added. Unusual for Daisy to try emotional blackmail; it made me realize how desperately she minded.

“She'll come round, Daisy.”

“No, she won't.” Daisy was shaking her head, looking sadder than ever.

“You don't know that.”

“I do.”

“How?”

There was an extra intensity in her gaze, which linked with other things I felt I didn't understand: my mother's half-truths, the occasional sly dig from Tudor and Ci Ci.

And I was sick of it suddenly: this unspoken thing that seemed to follow me round like a whiff from a drain.

“Daisy,” I said, “what are you talking about? If you know something about my mother that I don't, why won't you just say it?”

“You must ask her yourself.” She got very busy rustling papers and putting her pens away in the old Stilton jar she kept on her desk. “It's nothing to do with me.”

“So there is something?”

“I don't know . . . I don't know.”

I'd never seen Daisy look more furtive or trapped.

* * *

I ran to the kitchen, where my mother was chopping spinach with her usual economy of movement. Two dead pheasants lay on the table, their necks flopped over, their little eyes all blank now. From the door I surveyed her quickly: the neat waist, the trim ankles, the beautiful black hair, caught this morning with a marquisette comb. The apron was the jarring note: an actress cast in the wrong play.

“Mother, I need to speak to you.”

“Well, I don't want to speak to you.”

She may as well have added “you revolting slut,” her look was so shuddery and thoroughly disgusted. She carried on chopping.

“Mother,” I announced grandly, “I'm terribly sorry about last night, but we are in love and I'm leaving soon. I really am, you know.” Did I really believe it then, the grandiose words, the con
crete travel plans? I don't think so, but it felt important to make a stand. She stopped chopping and laid the knife down.

“Shut up, Kit,” she said. “I refuse to talk about it here with all those blasted nosy parkers listening in.”

She was almost levitating with rage as she took off her apron, put on her coat and a head scarf, and we walked out together into a raw autumn morning to have it out with each other.

“Oh, don't you bloody well come,” she said when the poor old Labrador tried to squeeze through the door with us. There was a yelp as she slammed the door shut and caught his front paw.

* * *

We took the track that led through the avenue of elms and into Shakenoak Wood. Autumn leaves lay in brilliant soggy piles under our feet, and when two fallow deer did grand jetés across our path and disappeared into the woods, neither of us remarked on them.

At the end of the track, I undid the hunter's gate, and when we stepped into the wood, I was close enough to hear her breathing, which was hoarse and labored.

“I am going to marry him,” I said. “Try not to mind too much.”

“Well, I do mind,” she said. Her eyes were very black, her skin very pale. “Because if you marry him, you will be dead to me.” Those were her exact words.

“Are you serious? Is it so bad to marry the man you love?” I said.

“Oh, love,” she said, as if it were some dog mess she'd stepped in. “It will be an absolute disaster. You know nothing about it.”

My mother always refused to wear galoshes or Wellingtons, saying they made her feel “elephanty,” and now, walking blindly ahead of me, she stepped into a puddle, splashing her good shoes and stockings with mud.

“Don't touch me.” She flinched as I tried to lead her to drier land. “I'm so ashamed of what you've done.” A tear rolled down her face.

“Mummy,” I said, as she dashed it away with the corner of her
head scarf. I felt cold and determined to keep myself separate from her in a way I'd never felt before. “There's something else I must ask you because I keep thinking people know something about me that I don't know.”

“People will say what they want to say.” She spat; her complexion had gone the sort of khaki-green color it went when she was really upset. “They're spiteful.”

“But what is it they're not saying?” I was the tearful one now.

She shook her head violently. “About what?”

“You? My father? Why is it always so bloody mysterious?”

“Why do you go on like this,
on
and on and on
at me.” She made a stabbing gesture with her hand as if I were eviscerating her.

“Because I'm leaving and I have to know.”

“You won't like it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's not nice.”

A mizzling rain started to fall as we stepped into a deeper part of the wood. I stared at the silk head scarf my mother had retied under her chin. It was a hideous but posh thing, patterned with brown and gold horseshoes and very distinctive. I was almost certain it had once belonged to Laura McCrum, the wife of a businessman she'd worked for near Bromley. These items had a worrying way of turning up in her wardrobe after we'd left, a small gesture of revenge maybe, but it shamed me on her behalf.