“God, no,” I said.
She must have noticed something in my face. “I’d like you to do a sample,” she said, handing me a jar. “The loo’s over there.”
I blundered out, through the waiting room, into the cramped toilet. When I came back a few minutes later, I gave her the jar and sat down. I watched while she took a strip of paper and dipped it in.
Please, no, I thought – but I knew the result already.
“It’s positive,” she said.
I watched her behind the messy desk, trying to figure me out.
“Is there anyone you want to call?” she said.
I shook my head. “I’m on my own.”
“I can see it’s a shock. You need to go away and have a think. Decide what you want to do, then come back and we’ll talk.”
“I want an abortion,” I said.
“You need to think about it first.” She scribbled on a piece of paper. “Here’s my number. Call me when you’re ready. If you want a termination, we can arrange it. But I want to talk more about your other symptoms too.”
On my way back to the flat, I passed a playground full of kids: little streaks of colour running, climbing, sliding, their high-pitched voices spilling through the railings and onto the street. Women stood with prams in groups of two or three, calling to their children, wiping noses, dusting down knees, doling out water and snacks.
I can’t become one of those women in the park, Suze. I’d go mad. I get my groceries from airport supermarkets. I chain-smoke on balconies in dark and dangerous places. I’m not – I can’t be – a mother. I wouldn’t know how.
My mother didn’t know how either. She never really liked children – or perhaps it was the way we pulled her away from her work. She’d fought hard for it: a doctorate in biology against her parents’ wishes, insisting on marrying Dad despite him having no money, then taking us all to the forests of Uganda to carry on her research. She and Dad were happy. They kept my little sister Emmeline in a basket nearby, and she was happy too. I liked being able to play outside all day with no one telling me what to do, but I didn’t like it that Mum was never there if I fell over or got spooked by the forest and wanted a cuddle. She’d look at me over her glasses and tut – or, worse, not even notice I was there.
I remember lying in my tent at night, feeling the air on my skin, heavy with night-time damp, smelling of old earth and new shoots, and the embers of our campfire. The sounds of the forest went on long after dark: there was always an animal or an insect busy hunting food or just going about its business – bats shifting, night flies flitting. I grew up unafraid.
I never told you what happened next, when I was eight, how Idi Amin had insisted on foreigners leaving, how my parents had ignored it, sure they’d be overlooked, and how I ran back to our camp one day with a monkey skull that I’d found under a tree, so excited, and discovered the bodies, two big and one small, on the ground, each with a slash to the throat.
It was chance and luck and a lot of determined walking that got me to the nearest village. I was taken by kind people to a convent, and eventually put on a plane to London. Then it was boarding schools and holidays with Aunt Jane and Uncle Edward, who became my guardians but never really knew what to do with me. Edith was my favourite relative, the one who took me to interesting places, who’d spent her life all over the world, just like Mum and Dad.
Sometimes I lay in bed at night and wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. Still can’t.
So you see, Suze, I don’t think I’d know how to be a mother. I never really had one myself.
The obvious thing is to get rid of it, have an abortion, as soon as I can. It’d be crazy to try to combine my work with a child. There isn’t space for both.
But you know what, Suze? I’m tired. Tired of lugging around my cameras, of my sensible packing, my Swiss Army penknife, my head torch, my universal sink plug. I’m tired of eating functional food and wearing functional clothes. I’m tired of airports, of fighting for visas and working out bribes. I’m tired of sleazy hotels and taking pills to help me sleep at night. I’m tired of men with guns.
Could I really give it up? Could I swap leaping over ditches and running through jungles and hard drinking and plain talking for changing nappies and puréeing vegetables and going for walks in the park? Because here’s that guilty little secret, the one I’ve never liked to admit to, the one you always suspected: my work’s bloody good fun. I know what Robert meant when he told Elizabeth that he missed the trenches, that it was where he felt alive. That surge of adrenalin that you get when you’re in a tricky situation, the thing that keeps you up and going, it’s addictive. Being at war makes everything extreme, I feel things more. Everything matters. You see it in the eyes of a killer with a Kalashnikov. You see it in the eyes of a photographer running towards a mob. Normal life just doesn’t compare.
Maybe it’s time to stop the highs and lows. Perhaps it’s time to wean myself off this, my drug of choice.
But by having a baby? Is that my happy ending?
Jesus, Susie, I don’t know.
Twenty-Four
ELIZABETH WILLOUGHBY’S DIARY
25th February 1915
Another letter from Robert:
Dear Elizabeth,
Here I am, writing to you on yet another dark Flanders day. I suppose that soon the afternoons will start getting lighter, and spring will arrive, but not yet. It looks like perpetual autumn here: it’s the barbed wire, which is everywhere, rolls and rolls of it, rusted brown like October woods.
I am worried for my men. They are excellent soldiers, but they are trained for Frontier fighting, not this. They know how to keep watch for snipers’ bullets, how to look out for an ambush on a lonely mountain pass or a sudden charge of tribesmen with their knives at the ready. Here it’s shells, machine guns and mortars. They are used to mountain cold, night desert cold, but not this dreary, everlasting damp, in trenches that are knee-deep in water. They can go without food and drink for longer than I would have thought possible, but their food at home is sheets of warm bread dipped into mutton stew, not cold rations they get from a tin.
They say very little. I never hear them grumble. At night I go up and down the line trying to keep their spirits up. Their suffering is evident without them having to say a word: they sit there, hunched, silent and miserable, wrapped in whatever rags they can find in an attempt to keep warm. I find that somehow worse than if they complained.
Yesterday, I saw poor Fateh Ali Shah lying dead, trampled into the mud. I thought of him in his village in the hills of northern India – an only son, the pride of his parents. I moved him myself and was amazed at how little he weighed. But there is no time here for thinking too hard about these things: I left his body to be dealt with by the sepoys and went to help a lad who’d been hit in the head by a piece of shrapnel. He’d been lying on the battlefield for a long time and was almost dead from exposure. I called for some hot rum and water, and fed it to him. We chafed his limbs for what seemed like an eternity, and slowly he came to.
I debated whether or not to send him to the first-aid post so the orderlies could have a look at him. First-aid post! I thought of your Pavilion with its order and calm, how clean it is kept. Starched sheets, clean floors, tea at four o’clock. Here it’s two medical orderlies crouched in some shell hole or behind a wall of sandbags with a stretcher and a pile of bloody bandages.
There’s not much point in trying to tell you: I haven’t got the words. I don’t know if there are the words. When I came back on leave, I know you wanted to ask me about it, but I couldn’t have answered your questions. Sometimes it’s difficult: at home one is with people who don’t understand, can’t understand, what it’s all about. One feels an odd mix of anger, because things at home are so easy and unchanged, combined with something close to pity, because it all seems a little dull. Does that sound odd? I can’t think of how better to explain.
I should go now. I think I’ve said enough. But please know that
you are very much in my thoughts.
Yours affectionately,
Robert
I felt rather sad after reading the letter. I wish he had not said that he finds things dull at home: I cannot help but feel that includes me. I wish that he could truly confide in me. He says he can’t explain, but if we have a lifetime of marriage ahead of us, would it not be better to try?
His men know more about his life than I do. I have often thought that if only I could speak Urdu or Hindustani or Punjabi, I might be able to ask them about the reality of it, without always having to go through an interpreter. Today I almost managed. I was in the old Music Room, bringing an extra blanket to Lakshman Khan, one of Robert’s Pathans, a stern-looking fellow, very tall, whose one remaining leg stretched almost to the end of the bed. As I smoothed the blanket, tucking it in around the mattress, his face remained impassive, but when I straightened up again, he suddenly smiled.
“Merci mademoiselle,” he said.
I tried to remember my schoolgirl vocabulary.
“Vous parlez français?” I stumbled.
“Un peu.”
“Moi aussi, je parle français un peu.”
We beamed at each other. There was a pause, then:
“Je voudrais une bouteille de vin rouge.”
Despite myself, I giggled.
“Non?” he said, pulling a sad face.
“Non,” I said. “Je suis désolée.”
Feeling rather delighted with myself, I immediately went to tell Hari. He said Lakshman Khan probably learnt to speak French when he was billeted at the Front. Lots of the men had picked up a bit, he said, at least enough to buy drinks.
I rather liked to think of the stern old Pathan going to a café and ordering a bottle of red wine. I wondered, out loud, what the barmaid would have thought.
“She was probably surprised—” Hari said.
“Of course.”
“—that he wasn’t ordering cognac. That’s what I’d expect a Pathan to drink, something stronger than wine.”
He had a twinkle in his eye as he said it, and I giggled, realizing that serious Hari had made a joke. The next moment, I felt sad again. I cannot remember the last time Robert and I shared a joke together, or found the same thing amusing.
I mustn’t make comparisons: lately I have found myself doing that too much.
I remarked that I was impressed that the men had picked up French so quickly. Hari said they are good at languages and that they all speak two or three as a matter of course. I asked how many he could speak, and he said five: Bengali, English, Hindustani and Urdu plus, like the Pathan, French, because his mother’s family was originally from Pondicherry, a small town on the eastern coast of India ruled by the French.
“It’s a little like Brighton,” he said, “with white buildings along the seafront, all rotting in the heat and humidity. Every time my family went there, my mother insisted that we speak French. But my favourite language is Bengali, because it reminds me of Calcutta, of home.”
“Tell me about it,” I begged. “Calcutta, I mean.”
“When I think of Calcutta, I think of small things: the clack of rickshaw bells in the lane by the side of our house; lying in bed listening to the monkey wallah’s drum; the smell of samosas frying at the side of the road, washing spread out to dry on roofs.”
I nodded eagerly, transported to India by his words.
“My family lived in north Calcutta, in what used to be known as the ‘Black Town’” – he raised an eyebrow – “just off somewhere called the Chitpur Road.”
The road itself, he said, was rather busy and crowded, but his family’s house was spacious, set in gardens behind a high wall and built around a courtyard with an inner balcony running around the first floor. Green shutters kept out the sun, and he smiled as he remembered how he used to get into trouble as a boy for wiping his fingers along the dust that used to settle thick on the slats.
“Outside it was always busy,” he went on. “As soon as one leaves the gates one is surrounded by the crowds. But there are quieter places too, like College Street, just around the corner from our house, full of bookstalls, or the Maidan, which is as big as London’s Hyde Park. On Saturday afternoons we’d go to the Botanical Gardens to visit the biggest banyan tree in the world and walk along avenues of palms.”
“It sounds wonderful,” I said.
He smiled, and said that there were plenty of bad things about Calcutta too, and that I’d probably heard all about them.
“The Black Hole, that sort of thing.”
That reminded me of Robert, whose great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather, I couldn’t remember which, was supposed to have died in the Black Hole.
“Robert says that Diwali is the happiest time of year there.”
“In that case he isn’t a true Calcuttan. For us it’s the Durga Puja.”
I repeated the name, rolling the words around in my mouth. Hari said that it was the city’s most important festival, and that Durga was the supreme mother goddess, married to Shiva.
“The destroyer,” I said, remembering it from the concert.
He nodded. The puja, he said, marked her annual visit to her father’s home, and her victory over a terrible demon. Each neighbourhood would build a house – a pandal – for the goddess to live in. Meanwhile, in a special place in the north of the city, potters took clay from the river to make each goddess: a complicated process, full of rules such as fasting for a day before they painted their eyes, in order for them to be pure.
“When the goddesses are ready,” Hari said, “they are put in their pandals and people make offerings to them of flowers, money and food. They burn incense, beat drums and sing. Then, at the end of the puja fortnight, the idols are cast into the river to symbolize Durga’s return to her husband in the mountains of the Himalayas.”
I liked the thought of seeing the puja, but Hari said that the British tended to stay away, disliking all the incense and noise.
I told him about going to my schoolfriend Violet’s grand country house, which had a chapel in the grounds with a statue of the Virgin and incense burning near the altar. When we had gone to mass on Sunday there had been all manner of chanting in Latin.
“Not so very different to your puja,” I said.
He smiled and said that most of the Raj British were Protestant, and wouldn’t go in for such things.
“We still have the crib in church at Christmas with all those little figures of Mary and Joseph and shepherds and kings.”
He looked at me for a moment, and we both burst out laughing. Then I asked if he would go back after the war.
“Of course,” he said. “I want to work in one of the Calcutta hospitals, to make it the best in the city, perhaps in the whole of India.”
“Maybe we’ll meet,” I said. “I hope we do.” And I meant it.
Twenty-Five
I guess I’m going to have to tell you everything, the whole messy truth, how I ended up here pregnant and alone. It was part of the Kabul story I’d decided to edit out – I thought you didn’t need to know – but I guess that’s not an option any more. It’s a long story, Suze, so here goes.
I went to Faisal’s house, in a nice neighbourhood near the university. Sonia, his wife, was beautiful, and his children, Farida and Farrukh, very cute. I handed over a box of pastries and the presents that I’d brought from London: toys for the children, face cream for Sonia and, for Faisal, a DVD of Titanic.
We sat together on cushions around a tablecloth spread on the floor. Sonia brought out a feast: rice with a dark, meaty stew, enormous naan breads, little side dishes of aubergine and carrot, a yoghurty sauce.
I was gobbling it down, happy to be eating with my hands again, glad to be back with Faisal, when I sensed a movement at the doorway. I looked up. No one said anything, so I went back to my food. But after a while I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a flash of blue.
Faisal’s forehead creased into a frown. The rest of the fa
mily stopped eating.
“Faisal,” I said. “Who’s that?”
He bowed his head a little, his features suddenly tight. “It’s Leila.”
“Your sister?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know she was here. Why isn’t she eating with us?”
“She’s not hungry.”
“I’d still like to see her.”
He let out a long, exhausted sigh.
“Leila,” he called.
There was a pause, then a pale-blue figure came into the room. Faisal said something in Pashto. The hunched shape lifted the cloth.
It was hard not to gasp at what I saw. Beautiful, laughing Leila, who ten years before had told me off for my ragged nails, now had a face that was tight and pulled over to one side, the skin puckered, raw and pink. Her right eye was closed, her eyelashes and eyebrows had disappeared.
“What happened?” I blurted out.
Everyone was silent.
“Faisal?”
“It was very bad,” he said. “I’m ashamed to tell it.”
“Please,” I said, “I want to know.”
“I can’t…”
“Faisal, it’s me.”
“All right. But it is not a pleasant story.” He sighed again. “Soon after you were last here, Leila was married. Her husband was from a good family, and we were pleased with the match. The family was not from Kabul but Herat, four hundred miles away, and so after the marriage Leila went to live there. She was sad to leave us behind, of course, but happy to be with her new husband.” He cleared his throat. “At first things went well, and soon she was expecting her first child. The pregnancy was uncomplicated, and she gave birth to a baby daughter. A year later she gave birth again, to another daughter. This was when things turned bad.”
I glanced over at Leila, who sat very still, her face turned away.
“The family blamed Leila for giving birth only to daughters. They began to abuse her, especially her mother-in-law, at first with words, but then they began to beat her. Everything she did was criticized, and she was given more and more housework to do, which she could never finish, and so she was beaten even harder. Her husband, who before had been a kind man, listened to his mother and turned against her too. He began to beat her as well, in the cruellest ways he could think of. When she became pregnant again, the beatings stopped, and for a while she found some hope, and prayed for a boy.” Faisal cast a look at his sister. “It was another girl, and the family was very angry. Two days after the birth, her husband beat her so badly that she thought she would die.”
The Repercussions Page 10