Monsoon Summer (9 page)

“Let me tell you one or two things about India,” she said. “It's the most complicated, class-bound country on earth. Any European putting one toe in the country and thinking they can understand it is a complete clot.”

“I know that,” I said. “I've talked to Daisy about it.”

She poufed at this nonsense, and when I protested I was one-quarter Indian myself anyway, she snapped, “Why do you bang on about that? Your skin is so pale you could pass for English anywhere.” Her face was all squeezed under the head scarf, her teeth
bared, and then another thought brought dismay. “Do you go on about it to Tudor? Because if you—”

“I can't remember,” I interrupted her furiously, “and I couldn't give a damn. He's got nothing to do with what we're talking about.” She groaned as if I were the thickest person on earth.

“Tell me about my father.” It came out louder than I intended, and a pheasant scuttled out of the tangled undergrowth, clucking and complaining.

She started sighing and pacing around. I looked through the wet autumn leaves at a darkening sky with huge clouds roiling in the west.

“Kit.” She closed her eyes like someone locking herself into a cell, and when she came out her eyes were very black. “I'm only ever going to tell you this story once, because it makes me feel like the worst bloody twit in the world, and if you are rude to me, I will stop.”

“I'm sorry, Mummy, please don't.”

I waited in terrible suspense. The rain was coming down more heavily and any moment now I expected her to run for the house.

“God, I hate this climate.” She tied the knot on her scarf again.

“When Tudor marries,” she said, “he'll own all this wood, plus almost one hundred acres of prime Oxfordshire land. Daisy told me that, she spoke to me this morning before you got up. She's as upset as I am.”

“Really.” I could not resist the sarcasm. “Well, always nice to have company in your opinions. And just to make things perfectly clear, I wouldn't marry him if he was the last man on earth. I don't even
like
him.”

“She knows Indian men as well as I do,” she went on, as if I hadn't said a word. After a breath, she spoke again. “First, I was not born in Wrexham.” This hardly came as a great shock to me. I'd forgotten, or discarded, the Wrexham version of her story.

“I was born in Pondicherry on the southeast coast of India,” she
said, taking on the queenly drawl I thought of as her telephone voice. “My father, your grandfather, was an Englishman, a high-up engineer on the railways there. I don't have any pictures of him, so don't ask.” A flash of anger there. “My mother was an Indian woman.”

I knew that already but didn't want to stop her.

“My mother died giving birth to what would have been my sister. I don't remember ever meeting my father. I was sent to an orphanage in Orissa, an English convent. I don't know who by, I was just sent. Is this the kind of information you're after?”

She gave me a look of muted fury, as if I were an impertinent journalist, not her child.

“Mummy, I'm sorry.”

“It was a home for half-caste children.”

Half-caste. I'd certainly never heard her say that before, and the word fell in an ugly way—like a dead bird or a turd between us in the woods, and for the first time I wanted her to stop because I hated hearing it applied to her, and in a way, it interfered with my dream of her because when I'd thought of my mother in India, I'd thought of cocktail parties, and tiger shoots, and pink and peach skies. Now I thought of a girl I hadn't thought about for years: Dymphna Parry, a miserable little thing who'd arrived midterm at my Derbyshire school. She'd been adopted by the vicar and his wife from somewhere in Africa.

I saw Dymphna's face again: gray-green with cold, the terrible tweeds she'd been togged out in, the woolly hair pulled into plaits that looked like unshorn sheep.

She wasn't exactly bullied, but she was one of the never chosen: not for rounders, not for special seats on the school bus. I'd discussed her frequently in pitying, condescending tones with my mother.

“Why didn't you say this before?” I felt sick because my mother's eyes looked wild now and somehow unhinged, as if I'd cut the rope that kept her safe.

“It was nobody's business but my own.”

Yes, it was
, I shouted inwardly.

“Our school was a convent.” My mother's tone was frigid; she had not forgiven me. “The English nuns encouraged the English side of me, just as I have with you.” She flung me a look of great bitterness. “Or tried to. We learned grammar and Shakespeare and manners. We ate shepherd's pie, toad in the hole. They were right to do so. The Indian towns around us were filthy places.” My mother shuddered. “The people so poor and full of disease. There was a smallpox epidemic there.”

“How did you meet my father?”

“I was clever, ambitious. I had good punctuation, so I secured a job with the British government. I was personal assistant to a resident, a delightful man.” My mother's voice took on a certain swagger here. “I've forgotten his name. He was cultivated, kind, good to me. My pale skin, my English name meant my background was never discussed. I went to their parties as the spare girl, the decorative girl. I was pretty.”

“And my father?”

“We met at an elephant hunt. Look at me, Kit, I'm soaked, I'm cold. Do you want me to get pneumonia telling you this?”

“Five more minutes, please.”

“All right, an elephant hunt. A horrible affair. They built a cage for this beautiful creature and they smoked him out and then they stabbed him to death.” She looked at me as if I had personally driven a stake through the elephant's heart. “That's your Indian. He is two steps away from being a savage.”

“Your father was an army officer, good regiment.” Again, the showy drawl. “Good job—aide de camp to General Smythe. I thought he was the bee's knees. Why should I talk about him? He behaved so appallingly.”

“Please, Ma, I hate feeling other people know and I don't.”

“Only Daisy knows,” my mother said. “And Daisy won't say either, so don't bother asking her.”

“Did you love him?”

“It doesn't matter. I'm freezing. I'm not going on.” She was like a horse scampering on the spot in agitation.

We had come to a bench in the woods, its seat shiny with rain and old bits of moss. There was a clear view of the hills beyond: the heap of stones that had once been a Roman fort, a peaceful farmhouse in the arm of a placid field, a farmer on his tractor followed by a sheepdog.

When my mother almost collapsed on the bench, I wanted to put my arm around her and make her better. She was so upset, and I'd always had this haunting sense of her: of something fragile that I, her only child, could break. The idea of her as an orphan explained so much: her defensive hauteur, her longing for nice clothes and the outward trappings of respectability, her angry admiration for En­glishness, even her mild case of kleptomania.

I'd planned to ask more about my father: specifically, Is he dead dead? Or dead to you? But instead I said, “You're cold, Mummy,” because she was shaking. I wished she could have a bath when she got in but knew she couldn't. We'd been having trouble with the thirty-year-old boiler again, but Daisy hadn't wanted to call out a workman in case of a huge bill.

As we limped back to the house together, I hated suddenly this feeling of female powerlessness. I wanted action, change, the competence, the money to fix things, a new life, even if it was risky.

“Look at my shoes,” my mother said, taking my arm at last. “Completely ruined, raking all this up.” We'd stopped on the grass verge near the drive. Daisy drove past us in the Austin. I saw the dim outline of Anto—hat, dark overcoat—sitting in the front with her. We looked at each other, but none of us waved.

“Where do you think they're going?” I watched the car disappear.

“To the railway station, I hope,” said my mother. She tightened her grip on my arm. “It will hurt for a while but not for long. I've been through it myself.”

“They're probably only going to the post office,” I said. I was frozen to the bone with cold by now and not sure what I felt myself as the glint of the rear mudguard disappeared around the corner. “They'll be back for lunch.”

She turned on me.

“You don't believe me, do you?” she said. “You'll be dead to me if you do this. It's everything I didn't want.”

I made myself look at her.

“You don't know the first thing about him,” I said, feeling removed from myself and heroic and not a million miles away from Olivia de Havilland in
They Died with Their Boots On
. “He's clever, he's kind . . .” I might have added “and besides, I love him,” when she interrupted me with a jabbing gesture of her hand.

“Mixed blood is like oil and water,” she said, her face very pale. “Everything bad that has happened to me in my life comes from it. It's a taint.” Her eyes were wild.

“Mother,” I said, “how many dead people can you afford to have in your life?”

“As many as I need to get by,”she said.

-
CHAPTER 11
-

“I
know about my father,” I lied to Daisy that afternoon. We were sorting clothes for the jumble sale. “My mother told me pretty much everything this morning.” Daisy's head shot up like a startled horse. She was sitting in a sea of moldy riding clothes, tennis racquets, pith helmets, and several rotting canvases: her father had been a successful artist before the war, and we often joked about the undiscovered Matisse we'd find in the attic that would change all our fortunes.

“Golly,” she said. She put down the cardigan she was folding and looked at me. “What a time you're having.”

“She's furious about Anto,” I said. “Absolutely spitting mad. She's cut me off.” I was trying to sound jaunty and not cry. Her look was steady and kind, the same old safe shore.

“Come on, Kit,” she said, “you know what she's like. She won't keep it up for long.”

“I think she means it this time, but I am going to marry him, you know.” I was trying to hang on to the Olivia de Havilland feeling—heroic, dignified, quietly determined—but it was slipping like an actor's greasepaint in heat, though I was too proud to say so, and confused. Somehow my father and Anto had become jumbled in my mind, if only as places of escape.

“Did you know him?” I'd never asked her before.

“Briefly.” A child's Fair Isle pullover fell to pieces in her hand. She put it in the bin.

“Is he . . . was he . . . a good man?”

“I honestly hardly knew him.” Daisy's eyes stared into mine, terrified of causing me pain. “I think he tried to make amends.”

“For what? How?”

“Kit, if I could tell you I would, but it's not my story to tell.”

“I'd like to write him a letter. Do you know his address?”

“I'm sorry, Kit.” She put a hand on my arm. “But why now after all these years?”

“Because she told me I was dead to her this morning, not once, but twice . . .” I was having trouble breathing. “And because I am going to marry Anto.”

Daisy shook her head and sighed. “Kit, are you sure this is what you want? It's a hell of a thing to take on.”

“Yes . . . if it's still what Anto wants.”

“It is. I spoke to him this morning.” She gave me an anguished look, and I could hear her groan as she tried to stuff a bell tent into a canvas bag.

“Forgive me for overstepping the mark here, Kit, but I do understand how addictive a physical attraction can be . . .” She was pink suddenly and daring-looking and starry-eyed and stuttering and I was mortified and wanted her to stop. “It's the most wonderful thing, like being plugged into the universe or something. But it has to be more than that. So are you quite sure?” Her eyes were gleaming and moist behind her glasses.

“Yes, Daisy,” I said, frozen with embarrassment at the thought of those sensible square hands touching a man. “You know the other things about him,” I said in a steadying voice. We seemed somehow temporarily to have swapped roles. “How clever he is and hardworking.”

“Well, there is that,” she said uneasily.

And the thought came like a flash of sunlight inside me,
Bugger the lot of them, I love him, I don't have
to explain.

Daisy sighed again as she wound the guy ropes into a neat
figure-­of-eight. “Well, if his parents are liberal,” she said after a long and thoughtful silence, “and if you can work for the Home, I suppose you could do worse . . .” Her voice tailed off. “And who knows? The new India is terra incognita for all of us, and it's not much fun here, is it?” I could see her struggling and leapt in eagerly.

“Oh, Daisy, thank you. You're the first person to sound even slightly pleased. Did he seem happy when he told you?”

Daisy hesitated. “No, Kit. Not really. He hardly said a word all the way to Oxford. I think he's terribly worried. He wanted to go on his motorbike but the roads were too slippery. He said he'd take a taxi back.” And then I wondered if he was on the train already, running while he could; some part of me would not have blamed him.

“I love him,” I insisted stubbornly, and then, “Didn't you ever want that, Daisy—a husband? Children?”

“Only once,” she said. She hugged the bundle of clothes she was carrying. “He died young . . . a fine person.” She looked through me at some dusty ghost beyond. “He was twenty-five. One day when I've had a few glasses of whisky, I'll tell you about it.”

“Oh, Daisy.” I took the clothes from her and said foolishly because I didn't know what to say, “I don't drink whisky.”

“Nor will you ever again,” she said, recovering her old teasing self quickly. “Not if you are to be an Indian wife.”

* * *

Anto tried to have one sensible conversation with me before we married, in which he warned me how different our life might be in Travancore, and how I mustn't mind if his mother took a while to warm to me, and how Daisy might be embarking on a dangerous enterprise with her Moonstone Maternity Home, but we were lying in each other's arms at the time, him stroking my hair, my hand on his flat stomach. Somehow that dreamy post-lovemaking daze seemed to short-circuit the worry centers in both our brains.

* * *

And so we married, more in the spirit of two cars dashing through a green light before it turned red than in the spirit of, well, what? Thoughtfulness maybe, or a long and considered courtship, in which we carefully weighed up each other's assets in the way you might if you were buying a car or a house: value for money, enduring qualities, good workmanship, suitability for the job, and so forth. We seemed to be running on our own unstoppable electricity supply, one we could neither explain nor deny. And he did make me laugh too, have I mentioned that? A great aphrodisiac always, so it was more than youthful impetuosity, and it was true what I'd said to Daisy, I respected him: the dogged way he worked, the gentle way he'd deflected Ci Ci's and Tudor's barbs.

But now, since this is a confession of sorts, I'll admit that part of me opened like a flower at the thought of sunshine and blue skies and new experiences, an escape from rationing and bomb sites and the thought of going back to London and into digs with nurses again. I was longing for new things to happen. I wrote that night to Josie, asking if there was any chance she could be my maid of honor. “Dear Dark Horse,” she wrote by return of post, “I'm going to miss you so much. As soon as you have a date, let me know. I'll twist Matron's arm and get the day off.”

* * *

But Matron's arm was not for twisting, and Daisy was, in the end, our only guest. The wedding took place on a cold Thursday afternoon at the Oxford Registry Office. It cost us one and sixpence to hire it, two shillings extra for the use of a vase of yellow dahlias the last wedding party had left behind.

And I did drink wine at my wedding: Elderflower '47, as Daisy joked, bringing two bottles from the cellar to wash down some sausage rolls and a fruitcake. She was our only guest: my mother had
stayed in bed, claiming she had a tight chest, possibly pneumonia coming on. Ci Ci, who'd been noisily sympathetic to my mother, declined to come and forbade Flora to come too, all of which was a relief. Tudor, who when he heard had suggested to Daisy that both of us be asked to leave the house, went shooting for the day. My last image of him was him standing in the hall, looking like a Victorian rent boy in his plus fours and peaked cap, his father's dead animals all around him. He could hardly speak he was so angry.

“Good luck,” he said stiffly, picking up his gun and making a rattling sound with the cartridges on his belt. “I think you'll need quite a bit of it.”

“Thanks, Tudor.” I pretended he'd been nice. “I absolutely can't wait.” In spite of the guns and the shooting paraphernalia, there was something oddly prissy and flouncy about the way he walked out to the waiting car; it made me think that maybe all the matchmaking females in the house had been barking up the wrong tree anyway.

* * *

After the wedding, Anto and I, strangely quiet and shy in the car, went to a guesthouse, the Culford, where they also bred budgies. It was on the edge of a soggy plowed field near Burford. Nothing special: we were saving all our pennies now.

I was worried immediately that our landlady, a stout farmer's wife, would notice that Anto was Indian and make a fuss, but he looked very distinguished in his one good suit and gray hat, and was even paler than usual due to the tension of the day. In an upstairs bedroom with a swirly carpet and sagging bed, we stood, side by side in front of the wardrobe mirror. He took my hand and turned my wedding ring around my finger.

“I love you, Kit,” he said gravely. “I'm going to take care of you forever.”

“Yes,” I said, but perversely, I couldn't stop thinking about my
mother in bed now and alone and almost certainly sobbing her heart out. “Thank you.” I couldn't think of anything else to say. It was cold in that room. It smelled of mothballs, and I could hear rain lashing against the window.

“Your ticket came yesterday,” he said. “My mother sent it to me with a letter.”

“Oh, good.” But it felt peculiar being sent a ticket by someone I didn't know, and I foolishly hoped he'd say something else: that she was happy, that she was looking forward to meeting me.

“Did you say I'd pay her back when I was working again?” The Home's trustees had agreed a working wage of sixteen pounds a month when I started in India, but I hadn't had enough in my bank account to cover the seventy-pound ticket to get there on the
Kampala
.

“Not yet.” His face in the mirror looked guarded, his voice distracted. “It's not the right time now.”

“November sixteenth,” he said, as if the date of departure wasn't blazed on my mind.

“Yes. I love you, Anto.”

“I love you too.”

“You're frightened,” I said, as his face swam out of view. He'd grown quieter and quieter over the past few hours. “I don't blame you. It's all happened so quickly.” I felt a great big blank as I said this, as if we were in a play and acting very badly. He didn't say anything, just held me tight, our two shadows meeting and closing in the mirrored door.

“We've crossed the Rubicon,” he said in his Pathé News voice.

“What exactly is the Rubicon, clever clogs?” I asked him later, trying to keep things light. We'd gone to bed early and were lying in each other's arms.

“A river in Italy,” he said. “A place of no return. When Julius Caesar crossed it, he said to his troops ‘
Alea iacta est
.' ‘The die is cast.' He knew if he didn't triumph, he'd be executed.”

“A cheery tale,” I murmured half-asleep, and then, “Were you always an egghead?”

“I'm not clever,” I remember him saying sadly. “Not clever at all.”

We went to sleep and woke to the tiny cheeps of hundreds of colored budgies singing inside their cages.