Sail Upon the Land (36 page)

Now it was time to clean up. Hari had gone to sleep. Hesitating only for an instant, she slipped out of the room, this time looking for a bucket, cloths and disinfectant. She ran around the house gathering what she needed, going back to the sitting room to check on Hari and, she realised, his grandfather, to whom she gave further sips of fluid.

In the kitchen, she managed to light the stove, filling the kettle and putting it on to boil.

When she returned, Hari was beginning to grumble in his cradle He didn’t like being confined, or lying on his back for too long with nothing to play with but his toes. Clearly feeling better, Ronny had rolled slightly on to his side and was peering in Hari’s direction.

‘What have you got there? A baby? Why did you bring a baby up here? Who are you?’

‘Right, my name is Damson Hayes. I stayed here in 1987.’ She hesitated, watching him. He registered no recognition.

‘Why are you here now? I closed the Guest House twenty years ago.’

‘I’m not sure really. Various things happened in England that made it seem like a good idea. Now just relax and I’ll make you more comfortable.’

She pulled on silicon examination gloves and cleaned up the vomit with disinfectant. Then she turned her attention to Ronny, washing his face and hands. He submitted, murmuring, ‘Something is wrong with my legs. I was very ill and came to lie down in here.’

Damson let him carry on talking about himself for a bit. He seemed to have forgotten why he was interested in her presence at all.

Hari was beginning to cry intermittently which added to the stress of the situation. She found a narrow necked jug in the kitchen and offered it to Ronny as a urine bottle. She threw everything that smelt out of the front door and opened the windows to let in the clean sunny air.

Once more she went out to the kitchen to boil yet another kettle and wash and disinfect her own hands before picking up Hari and a jar of pureed vegetables for his lunch. In the now Dettol-scented room, she pulled up a chair beside Ronny and prepared to explain her presence while she fed Hari.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘If you’re feeling better, we need to talk. First, as I mentioned before, I am Damson Hayes. When I was staying here in 1987, we spent some time together, riding and so on, and there was an incident. After which I ran away.’

He turned towards her.

‘You. You’re Damson?’ He looked shocked. ‘I remember. Oh God, I am so sorry.’

Tears started to course down his drooping cheeks. Nothing was left of the virile man she had fallen for so catastrophically.

‘Yes, I am Damson.’

They were silent for a bit. Then he said, ‘I will go to the police as soon as I am better. Turn myself in.’

She shook her head.

He explained he’d been bitterly ashamed and upset when he found her gone the next morning and had tried to trace her. He hadn’t had the heart to continue with the Guest House after that and it had dwindled to nothing quite soon. He told her that he felt as if a monster had been unleashed, and he didn’t trust himself ever again to have young European women staying in his compound. She looked at the broken heap of a man on the sofa and an old anger stirred inside her.

‘But you always had a choice. You could’ve stopped yourself.’

She might have done all she could to help him medically but she wasn’t going to let him off the hook. She knew it was wrong to stir up strong emotions in a sick and ageing man, someone whose relationship to her was that of patient to doctor, but there might not be another opportunity.

After a while he asked her who she’d married and where was her husband.

‘I never did marry,’ she replied, explaining that the baby wasn’t hers. That he was in fact her grandson. Then she said: ‘He’s your grandson too.’

The look on his face was one of the purest astonishment and then to her surprise a smile moved his sore lips.

‘Grandson?’

‘Yes. What passed between us produced a daughter and this is her child.’

He rolled stiffly on to his back and put his hands over his face.

‘There are no descendants. The family dies out after my brother and myself. And now this.’ He sighed, wiped his eyes with back of his hand and began to explain.

‘None of this is any excuse, but you must know that I had a wife long ago. It was a suitable arranged marriage and we were very young. At that time, my mother was still alive and we all lived in the
haveli
down in Rikipur. They couldn’t get my brother to marry, so the idea was that Tara and I would produce lots of heirs to the whole bang shoot. She had a good dowry and we were happy for a while. I’d been educated in England and I realised my brother was homosexual. But of course nothing was said to our mother. She went on presenting suitable girls, and the story was that he was just very fussy.’

‘Is he still alive, your brother?’

‘Oh yes, he still lives in a small part of the
haveli
. I don’t see him very often. He never did marry and our mother was very sad, but then she died. And Tara never got pregnant, and after a very short while she wouldn’t let me into her bedroom. Then she began to stay up later and later, and finally all night, sleeping during the day. It was impossible to lead any kind of normal life. She would blunder all around the
haveli
or disappear and turn up in the Bombay Hilton days later, having spent so much money.

‘So we were divorced, and her family, which was old, rich and powerful, began to spread rumours about me. I was threatened with public disgrace. They pretended to believe her stories which were fantasies from her diseased brain. Certainly no other family would accept me as a bridegroom.’

Ronny appeared to have no empathy for the poor girl's illness. He was thinking only of himself. It was all of a piece with what he had done to her.

He stopped and looked at her, saying, ‘Given what I did to you, you may not believe me.’

Damson nodded. Hari had finished his lunch so she gave him a cup to drink from.

Ronny went on: ‘I had to come up here to get away from it. The family had always known she was sick but had managed to conceal it for long enough to marry her off. That’s where most of my money went too.’

He lay back again exhausted. She hadn’t known anything about him she realised, just the rumour that he was educated in England and related to a local
thakur
. It had seemed rude to ask somehow. This was the first personal conversation they’d ever had. Then he was speaking again.

‘I remember enjoying your company,’ he said.

Damson looked at him. She felt it was much too late for that.

‘You had a daughter? Mine?’

‘Yes, yours,’ she said briskly, irritated by his questioning tone.

‘What did you do?’

‘I had to have her adopted.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He didn’t ask why, he could probably imagine. She cuddled Hari close. He twiddled her growing hair and sucked his fingers while she talked.

‘She was fine,’ she reassured him. ‘An Indian family took her. Doctors. She was very happy. But then she found she was going to have a baby rather by mistake so she came to find me for help. She left Hari with me to look after and I decided to come back here. I’m not sure why, something to do with closing the loop.’

‘Lucky for me you did as you’re a doctor,’ he said.

‘Your daughter is a doctor too or at least studying to be one.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Leeta Delapi. I called her Mellita and her parents gave her a name that sounded like her birth name.’

Ronny said nothing. Damson wondered what he was thinking but then decided she didn’t really care. This had all been for her not for him. His rescue had been incidental. She broke the silence:

‘It was a long time ago, nobody died and I have Hari now. You’ll probably recover. But I don’t think we can meet again.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. He seemed sad and resigned, too ill for extreme emotions. He’d stepped so close to death. Then he summoned up some strength: ‘But the baby,’ he said. ‘Please write to me about the baby and his mother.’ She nodded.

‘No one left. No descendants. The family was dying out until now. It’s important.’ He reached out and touched Hari’s head. ‘Thank you for coming back and bringing him to me.’

Damson was startled to realise she hadn’t factored in the blood relationship between Hari and Ronny, let alone Leeta, and that it might be important to them all in terms of family. She’d known nothing about the Viphurs and their
haveli
in Rikipur. Another complication. Nothing could happen without consequences. She would think about that later. So this wasn’t – this couldn’t be – a closed loop.

They heard the sound of the bike arriving at the front door. Damson went to greet the paramedics, having put Hari back down in his cradle. She left them to prepare Ronny and move him on to a stretcher, packing a few things for his stay in hospital while they did so. He said little, just confirmed his name. Thankfully, the men didn’t think to question what she was doing there. She’d simply introduced herself as Dr Hayes.

She got herself and Hari organised, changing his nappy and giving him a wash, and then followed the carrying party up to Hunters’ Halt for the four o’clock train. The two men positioned the stretcher in one of the carriages, and one paramedic stayed with Ronny for the journey, while the other went back through the trees to follow them on the bike down to Rikipur. Having said a brief goodbye to Ronny, and promising to write care of Viphur Haveli, she went to a carriage at the other end of the train.

The villa was surrounded by palm trees about five minutes’ walk from a beach strewn with coconut husks, and half a mile from the village. It belonged to a schoolfriend of Noonie’s called Susannah Hall, a trustafarian and latterday hippie, who had bought it for fun but then found the attitude of the local police to cannabis a bit restricting. Now they rented it out when they were organised enough to get a tenant.

Damson had told Noonie that she was off to India for a sabbatical, although not who was with her, and Noonie had mentioned the villa in passing. It was ideal. Painted a soft blue-green, with white window frames and a wide balcony, it harked back to the Portuguese style even though it had been built in the last ten years.

Susannah had had children by various fathers, so the house was full of cots and changing trolleys, everything Damson needed to look after Hari, and there was a sweeper who came in daily, and an ayah on call, plus a guard. Damson was ready to let go completely under the palm trees and accept some help with Hari. She had been immersed in him for months, attending to his every need and keeping him safe. Now she had some work to do on herself, sorting herself out before she went back to England to face up to the turn her life had taken. A profound sense of peace was hers as if more than two decades had passed in a dream.

She lay in a broad canvas hammock on the veranda looking out over the sea with Hari tucked into her left armpit. They both dozed. A breeze frolicked across her skin, waking her up. She looked down at what she was wearing and laughed.

When she had put on the white cotton sundress for the first time, her uncovered legs pressed themselves together with embarrassment. But the warm sea breeze had tickled her unaccustomed skin and she found herself spinning in the sunshine, spinning and spinning until she was dizzy and tears ran down her face. Now those legs, so long hidden in trousers, had been threaded to a pearly smoothness and tanned to a pleasing gold by the Indian sun. She didn’t have to prove anything to anyone any more. Not that she ever did.

Damson remembered Munty, during one of their London lunches long ago, looking a bit bewildered, asking, ‘Are you, what do they call it these days, gay?’

‘No, Munty. Not gay. Just not feeling very womanly these days.’

He’d accepted that, and never mentioned what she was wearing again. Nor did he mention the baby that Margaret had so neatly managed away, although he must have wanted his only child to marry and have more children. Her strange appearance had clearly caused him to abandon hope that she ever would.

Her laptop stood open on the Biedermeier desk. As she went over to it, Margaret glanced at her softened reflection in the old Venetian mirror. Not bad for sixty-four, although a subtle touch of Botox helped. It was March, and the daffodils that her landscape designer had succession-planted on both sides of the lawn edged her vision with trembling gold. She sat and focused on the screen and noticed she had two new emails.

The first was a long newsy one from Noonie, who was having a late skiing holiday with her husband in Verbier. Ottie and her younger brother Hector were both boarding at Brantham Prep now, so no need to come and spend time with Granny these days when their parents were abroad.

The second was a rare one from Damson, writing to Margaret because Munty didn’t do email. In his late sixties now, Munty still preferred paper and asked Margaret to print out anything interesting. Damson knew this, and was aware that Margaret had always preferred to put her excellent shorthand and typing to good use for his correspondence rather than employ a secretary.

The subject line read ‘Please print for Munty’. Damson was singularly uncommunicative as a rule, but a month ago, she had emailed to say she was going to be in India on holiday for a few weeks. Margaret had been surprised that her stepdaughter wanted to go back to India after the unfortunate consequences of her last visit.

Dear Munty and Margaret, I need to ask you a favour, and hope this is going to be OK. I would very much like to come and stay to discuss my plans with you both. I am still in India, but will be back in a week.

How odd, she’s never asked for anything before.

My news is I have decided to take a sabbatical and maybe retrain.

Maybe she’s lightening up a bit at last.

I want to make some serious changes to my life.