Kansas in August

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Just about,’ he said after a moment’s thought.

  ‘Then hand in your notice and go on the dole at the end of term. You’ve only another term to teach this year anyway, isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yes. If the woman I replaced is coming back.’

  ‘Get Mrs Chammy-thingy to look after him during the day for the last few weeks. Explain when you sign on why you had to leave work. They’ll give you just about enough a week to live on, plus something for Dan – milk and so on – plus your rent. If you really can’t manage, then bloody well ask your father. He’s not as square as he was – Marie-Claude has seen to that – he’s rich as Croesus and you’ll have given him a grandchild. After the first year, you’ll be free to start going to auditions again. And if the whole thing’s absolutely dire and you decide that children are an abomination after all, you can get the poor thing adopted again.’

  ‘But how do I adopt him in the first place?’ asked Hilary, excited.

  ‘Oh, that’s the simplest part. In a couple of days that little man will get a summons sent to you, demanding your appearance before a DHSS tribunal. Go, explain that you’re adopting Dan. They’ll try to dissuade you with phoney arguments about stability, emotional security, rates and so forth. Ignore them. Just tell them you’re being represented by Dr Hannah Flowers, whose card you’ll find in that box on my desk. No the red one. That’s it. Tell them that, read anything they ask you to sign, then leave. You don’t have to sign anything immediately – you can even ask for a day to think it over or consult your lawyer. Hannah will do the rest.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘An old friend of my poor Huw’s from Cambridge. Batty American lawyer moved to London. She specializes in custody and adoption; especially gay cases.’ Hilary felt himself redden. ‘She’s just finished winning a child from the husband of a friend of mine.’

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘My friend and her friend, Emma.’

  ‘Ah.’ Hilary bent Hannah Flowers’ card between his fingers. ‘Won’t she be terribly expensive?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really. Anyway, she’ll send the bills to me.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Happy birthday, darling.’

  ‘You can’t possibly.’

  ‘Of course I can. I’m rolling nowadays. Well, relatively rolling. More rolling than you’ll ever be.’

  Hilary laughed and hugged her. She held him tighter than he had expected. He wondered when the insufferable Seth had last paid her a visit. She suggested a walk on the Heath. He offered to walk her a part of the way, but reminded her that he had to be back to say good night to Dan.

  ‘Of course. You’re on your bicycle.’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘I’d forgotten. You’d better go now. I won’t go for a walk. Bids has been once already today and it’s turning rather cold again.’

  ‘Oh, but it would be fun.’

  ‘No. And you must get back before it gets dark. The roads are so dangerous now.’

  He felt he had spoilt something. The least he could have done was to walk with her. He knew from experience however that, once decided, she was immovable. She stood in the doorway as he walked back to his bike.

  ‘Evelyn.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How much do you know about adoption? Is there a chance I won’t get him?’

  ‘Very little. It would be different if he were from a home or had parents or, let’s be frank, were white, but abandoned babies are much simpler; fewer strings attached. There’ll be legal forms to sign, and a hearing. I’ll see Hannah about it tomorrow. She’ll get in touch after you’ve given her name to the tribunal thingy.’

  ‘Right.’ Seeing her gaunt frame leaning on the doorpost, hands rubbing against the cold, he wanted to make amends and say thank you. He had an idea. ‘What are you doing tonight, about eight-thirty?’ he called out, swinging a leg over his saddle.

  ‘Nothing. Why?’

  ‘Come round. I’m going to organize a sort of christening supper. Please come.’

  ‘Yes, please. I’ll find something special in the cellar.’

  He launched off down Haverstock Hill again. Poor thing, he thought. He lived so far away, yet she had accepted with alacrity.

  Chapter eighteen

  Sumitra sat on her bunk bed over the freezers, swinging her legs and holding a book.

  ‘Unsex me here,’ she said, staring absently at her pillow, ‘and fill me … fill me.’ She glanced at her book, then looked back at the pillow with a frown of private impatience, continuing with a metrical nodding of the head, ‘Yet I do fear thy nature it is too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way thou wouldst be great art not without ambition …’

  She knew that her bedroom was different from those of other children. No one else she knew slept with a brace of chest freezers for company. No one else she knew was a handmaid of the Prince Goddess; it was meet and right that her bedroom should be strange, for so was the truth to which she bore witness. All the same, Sumitra was grateful that her parents did not encourage her to bring home friends. The only children to visit her were those of their own acquaintance, and they had not penetrated beyond the airless formality of the sitting room with its religious statuettes and gaudy calendar. She disliked these children for their shyness and stupidity, and would scare them by speaking only English. If pressed, she would take them out to the yard to play ikki dukki, but never would she take them to her room.

  At a birthday party she had once seen a white girl’s bedroom and been scandalized at its bridal luxury. Her own was set out from the main body of the terrace, at the end of an extension which housed the main bathroom and garage. It would have been the garage, in fact, but they had no car. Her mother had taped up the sliding door to keep out draughts, and had a bunk bed fixed on one wall. It was an eccentric arrangement with which the girl had grown up. She cherished it. She was proud of the ladder she climbed to bed, and of the smart linoleum patterned like green crystals. She had a stretch of rug between her bunk and the door so that she could walk barefoot to the bathroom without chilling her feet. Three pictures were pinned above her bed. One was a little poster of Amabaji, the divine mother, who seemed so sad now that the Narendra had proved her redundant. The others were old black and white photographs of the house in Surat where her father had grown up, and of he and Ba with Dadaji and Ma on their wedding day, solemn in the sun. Ma had been forever telling her about the Indian sun, and the smells and the flowers, but Sumitra had smiled as she had smiled at her grandmother’s funny tales of the elephant god and the monkey general, without belief. Born in Hammersmith, she knew nothing of Greenwich, let alone India. The sea, too, she had dismissed as a myth, until she saw it on a television in a shop window and asked Ba what it was. She had a white wardrobe for her clothes and a wooden chair where Ma, her grandmother, used to sit to tell her stories of Ganesh and Hanuman. Ma was dead now, and the Narendra gave her Shri Shakespeare’s strange play to read instead.

  In the main body of the house her father swore suddenly, and a plate smashed on the kitchen floor. Sumitra stopped her recitation and listened. He had shouted little since the days before her sister, Kamala, left. Tonight he raved because he had guessed that Ba had been to see her in secret. Ba was hopeless at lying, and so Baba was smashing a plate.

  Kamala was eight years Sumitra’s senior. She had rebelled and was officially dead. First she had refused to wear Hindu clothes, changing from her school uniform into a pair of borrowed jeans or a mini-skirt. Then she had rubbed off her tilah, and taken to wearing eyeshadow and splashes from a bottle of scent called Charlie. She had cut off her glossy plait so that her hair was like a boy’s. Every night there had been appalling arguments as she hurried through her homework, then got dressed to go out with white friends from school. Baba would shout and say she was no daughter of his, Ma had cried that her grandchild was a disgrace, Ba had wept in a corner and Kamala had shouted louder than any of them, calling Baba an old fool and a
tyrant. When she left school she had ignored Baba’s arrangement for her to marry Prakash, the handsome boy whose father owned the electrical shop in Wood Lane, and she had taken a job as a sales assistant in Oxford Street. Sumitra had only been there once, when her mother had wanted to buy more of the thermal underwear she wore beneath her saris. It was at the time when the English celebrated their dying god’s first birth and the trees had been full of lights and delicious hot air had blown from the top of the shop doors. It was unutterably lovely, and she could not see why her father pretended that it was such an evil place where Kamala would meet her ruin. For a while Kamala had lived beside them in the house, coming home only to sleep and eat, barely acknowledged by Baba, then Prakash’s father had come round in a rage and said that a wealthy white man dropped her off every evening and kissed her in public as if she were a whore. There was a final battle, which ended in Kamala admitting that the man was the owner of her shop and that she was pregnant by him. She was thrown out the same night, and the family had to go into mourning. This had not been difficult for Sumitra, since she had worshipped her sister and missed her sorely.

  That had been months ago and Sumitra hadn’t seen her sister since. She suspected that her mother paid her secret visits, but was only told so tonight. Ba had slipped into her room half an hour ago, looking frightened, rain on her hair. Kamala was well, she said, and living in a flat in Brook Green. She had sent her little sister a perfect white cardigan from the shop. It had tiny buttons of plastic ivory. Baba was not to be told. She was to tell him that the garment was a present from her Aunt Lakshmi in Southall.

  As she listened to her voice rising against his once more, Sumitra was happy that her mother had been on secret missions. The woman’s tearful compliance with Baba’s severity had made her fear lest she took his old-fashioned ideas seriously. What he called Kamala’s ‘sin’ was perfectly understandable. White men like Shri Metcalfe were far more beautiful than Baba’s dreadful friends and cousins in their ugly anoraks and flared trousers. Western women, like Lady Macbeth and the women teachers at school, were overblown and awkward however, and she saw no point in mimicking their style of dress. Her mother’s thermal underwear solution was the best, although the Wellington boots spoiled the effect.

  There were steps in the corridor and her parents came in. They had macs on and Ba was trying a headscarf.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘your Baba and I are off to the Centre to see a film. Can we trust you to go to bed on your own?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sumitra, hiding Macbeth since they wouldn’t approve of the cover, let alone the subject matter.

  ‘Within the hour?’

  ‘Yes, Baba.’

  ‘Nightie-night, then.’

  “Night.’

  She leaned forward on her bunk and kissed her mother, then presented her forehead for her father’s kiss.

  ‘We’ll lock the front door after us,’ he said. ‘Sleep well.’

  She could hardly believe her luck. She waited until she heard the front door close, then scurried down her ladder. She peered out of the window, through the pouring rain to the Narendra’s flat. All the lights were on and she could hear the usual music. He was celebrating. She would celebrate too. Standing on tip-toe, she thrust a hand beneath her mattress and pulled out a thick brown envelope, then hurried to the living room. Without turning the light on, she lifted back the curtain and looked along the street. Ba and Baba were waiting at the stop for the Gujurati Centre. As she watched, they boarded a bus. She let the curtain fall and switched on the standard lamp.

  There was an old gramophone behind the sofa. Ma had liked to play records of religious songs and of music from Indian musicals to remind her of the sun and the flowers. Sumitra tugged it out and plugged in its flex. It was a second-hand model and took some time to warm up. Eyes alight, she reached into the envelope and pulled out the possession she prized next only to the photograph from the Starbright Agency. It was evil of her, really; even handmaids to the World were not meant to steal. The spare key to Shri Metcalfe’s flat, which dangled on a hook in the kitchen, had proved too much temptation though, and last week she had crept up there when she knew he was out. It was so small, she was sure he would not miss it quickly, and she promised herself she would replace it before the month was done. For the first time that day she stared at the little record’s cover. She had to read the words before she played the mystic song.

  ‘“Capital Stereo Record”,’ she mouthed. ‘“The Full Spectrum of Sound. From the soundtrack of the motion picture Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I, a Twentieth Century-Fox Cinemascope-55 Picture.”’

  Breathless, she flicked the old brown lever and watched the tone-arm jerk out over the forty-five. She sat back and stared at every lovely detail of the cover picture as the strings played the four-bar oom-cha oom-cha introduction.

  A woman sat on a footstool. She had bright ginger hair, scarlet lips and the biggest dress Sumitra had ever seen, off the shoulders and spread out like a cinema curtain down below, in violet silk. A handsome bald man, with Asiatic features, in equally splendid clothes (though in brown and gold to match the footstool), stood with one foot on the stool beside her and his forefinger pointing curiously at the ceiling. She was looking down in modesty. Sumitra had decided that he was proposing they go upstairs to make a baby at once. The woman’s voice was high and extremely English, like a newscaster.

  ‘It’s a very ancient saying, but a true and honest thought,’ she enunciated over the music, ‘that if you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught.’ Here she launched into the loveliest singing voice Sumitra had ever heard. She was undoubtedly Shri Metcalfe’s heavenly mother. ‘As a teacher I’ve been learning, you’ll forgive me if I boast, that I’ve now become an expert in the subject I love most; getting to know you.’

  ‘Aah!’ laughed the Siamese princesses.

  Chapter nineteen

  The afternoon’s downpour had been such that the car park under her building was awash. Stepping out of her car, Henry had found it deeper than she had imagined. She had pegged up her tights over the bath and was stuffing her shoes with newspaper when the telephone rang. It was Marie-Claude.

  “Allo, darling.’

  ‘M – C, how are you?’ she laughed, falling back on to the chaise-longue.

  ‘I ’ave the most terrible cold, but I feel all the better for ‘earing you.’

  ‘Oh. Poor thing. I’ve got so much news though!’

  ‘Dis-moi, alors.’

  ‘You’ll never believe it.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I’ve got a man.’

  There was a satisfying pause, then Marie-Claude asked cautiously. ‘Is ’e there now?’

  ‘Course not.’

  There was a delighted whoop from the other end. ‘But minou, that’s such fun! What’s ’e like?’

  Smiling despite herself, Henry swung her bare legs up so that she could lie down. ‘Well,’ she began, ‘he’s tall – about six two – and broad-chested, and he’s got dark brown hair and a marvellous, rather sly face, and he’s younger than me, probably a commando in secret and he’s called Andrew. Oh, and he’s married, too.’

  ‘My dear! Isn’t that … er … Can you cope?’

  ‘M – C, it’s wonderful. I feel younger than I’ve …’ She was interrupted by the door buzzer. ‘Oh Christ, M – C, that’s him now and I haven’t heard any of your news. I’ll try and ring you later, OK?’

  ‘OK, my dear,’ her stepmother laughed. ‘Ciao.’

  ‘’Bye.’

  She skipped to the intercom and looked at him on the video screen. He was carrying something. He was drenched. She could eat him.

  ‘Come on up,’ she said and pressed the lock control. She went to her wardrobe, unzipping her work skirt, and tugged on an old pair of jeans. Suddenly there was a high-pitched bleeping from her briefcase. She swore and limped back to the telephone. The jeans were on the tight side.

  ‘Hello. Dr Metcal
fe. You paged me.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ chirped the answering service girl. ‘We’ve had a call from the police. Residential complaints on the Grosvenor Estate, Lillie Road. Apparently it’s one of yours. Nancy Phelps. She’s making too much noise and the police suspect she’s anti-socially deranged. Can you go?’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  She heard Andrew open and shut the door. He put his hands around her waist and ground himself affectionately against her rear. She reached an absent-minded hand onto his thigh as she talked.

  ‘I said “Damn”. It’s not terribly convenient.’

  ‘You’re the only person on, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But what about Helen and Jock?’

  He walked into the bathroom and shut the door.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What about Dr Stevens or Dr Jonas?’

  ‘She’s having to work late and Jock’s off with ’flu.’

  ‘OK,’ she sighed. ‘What’s the address?’

  ‘Flat 47,’ whined the girl, ‘Walpole Tower, Vanbrugh Drive. Have you got an A to Z?’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ Henry snapped. ‘Tell them I’ll be there in ten minutes, would you?’ Perhaps this would be a good time to explain what she really did. Perhaps not.

  ‘Right you are, then. Police Constable Rivers will be waiting by in case there’s any difficulty. We’ll send a van down, too.’

  ‘Great,’ she said, dead-pan.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  She turned to face Andrew as he emerged from the bathroom. The lavatory was flushing.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘you’re soaked.’

  ‘I know,’ said he and pulled her towards him. They kissed. He pulled back for a moment, his eyes searching her face.

  ‘Again,’ she said, and they kissed again. There was something musky splashed on his jaws. It was bitter on her tongue. ‘I stink,’ she said, ‘I haven’t had a bath yet.’

  ‘Well, you have a bath,’ he said, and pecked her forehead, ‘and when you return I shall have made,’ he produced a carrier bag from behind his back, ‘supper!’ he exclaimed, and imitated a fanfare.