by Heather Burt
She rolled onto her back. The water bottle, now lukewarm inside its towel wrapping, pressed on her bladder, so she pushed it aside. The pain had spread itself thinner, around her lower back and down her thighs. There was a dreary predictability to these episodes: first the writhing beast, which no pills could tame, then the settling in and spreading out—calmer, but still crippling, as if the treacherous organ had grabbed hold of every muscle between her navel and her knees and was clenching as hard as it could. Eventually, paracetamol would relax the clenching enough that she could do other things. In another hour or so, she expected, she would hoist herself up, open the window above the bed, and have a cigarette. She’d wobble to the toilet to change her pad and brush her teeth. Then she would join her parents and Jean for tea. In the meantime, though, she would endure her punishment as she sometimes did when nothing else worked, by imagining she was giving birth—for the pain of that ordeal, Isobel was certain, could not be any worse.
HER MOTHER SERVED OX TONGUE FOR TEA. Recalling again her rendezvous with Patrick Locke, Isobel poked feebly at her food.
“Are the pains still troubling you, pet?” her mother said.
“Mmm.”
“I hope you’ll be all right for the ceilidh tomorrow. Alastair’s mum says he’s keen to meet you again.”
Jean giggled, and Isobel glared at her across the table. Sallow-faced, dull-witted, plain, her sister seemed a personification of everything Isobel despised about Stanwick. Alastair Fraser, the son of her mother’s new friend from the Women’s Guild, was another choice specimen. She’d met him during coffee hour after the Easter Sunday service. He wasn’t a regular and he’d looked so awkward and out of place that Margaret’s father, the minister at Stanwick Abbey, had asked Margaret and Isobel to go sit with him. But then Margaret, who wasn’t much good at small talk herself, had been called away, leaving Isobel alone with the fellow. He’d blushed furiously, even on his scalp where his blond hair was already thinning, and the only subject he’d seemed comfortable discussing was the knitwear factory where he’d been a foreman since 1960. He was very polite, though, which was something.
Isobel dug a pit in her mashed potatoes and filled it with peas. “He’s too old, Mum.”
“Oh, aye, there’s no getting away from that,” her mother said. “He’s a grown man. But nobody’s asking you to marry him.”
Again Jean giggled; Isobel sawed her meat.
Musingly, their mother continued. “Aye, these are modern times. You girls are young, and I believe you should get to know as many lads as you can before you settle down with one.” She glanced at her husband chewing silently across the table then turned to Isobel. “You might even decide to do higher studies, pet. Think of all the folk you’d meet there! Anyway, there is one nuisance with this Alastair, even if you were to fancy him.”
“What?” Isobel said.
“Well ...” Her mother paused, dabbing at her cardigan with her serviette. “Mrs. Fraser tells me he’s very likely away to America. Perhaps quite soon.”
“Ooh, you should marry him, Izzy!” Jean squealed. “You could go to America, just like Archie! And I could visit you!”
“Don’t be stupid,” Isobel said.
“Enough o’ that,” her father muttered.
She gave up on her food and reached for the teapot, noticing for the first time the appalling dinginess of the crocheted brown cap it was bundled in. As she poured, she pictured Alastair Fraser walking down Fifth Avenue in his ill-fitting tweed jacket, and the image, though laughable, pricked her with envy.
“I don’t even ken the man,” she said, her voice even. “And how does his mother know he wants to meet me again?”
“Oh, we were just blethering about this and that at the Guild meeting,” her mother said. “She’s a very interesting woman, Mrs. Fraser. Apparently she used to be a Catholic. But she converted when she was your age, Isobel. Just because she fancied the idea.” She paused again, waving a forkful of mashed potato lazily back and forth. “Imagine that—being one thing for all those years then just deciding one day you’re going to be something else. I don’t think I could—”
“But what about Alastair?” Jean interrupted, and for once Isobel was grateful for her sister’s impertinence. “How does his mother know he fancies Isobel?”
“Aye, well,” Mrs. McGuigan continued, “she happened to mention that Alastair was thinking of going to the ceilidh and that he wanted to know if Isobel would be there. She said it took the poor lad all evening to get his question out, and that he’d never have troubled himself if he wasn’t smitten.” She smiled teasingly, then ingested her hovering mashed potato and signalled Jean to sit up straight.
Isobel rested her teacup on her still-aching belly and pondered her mother’s remarks. The idea of meeting as many men as she could, of sorting through roomfuls of them and enduring their groping hands and tongues in search of one who would satisfy her, was oppressive. Moreover, the task seemed impossible. A person such as Alastair Fraser could not possibly make her happy; she understood that clearly. But could anyone, she wondered. Did anyone have the power to make her one thing or another? She thought admiringly of Alastair’s mother—deciding one day to become a Protestant, shaking off everything she’d been brought up with. She gulped her tea. It was bitterly strong, but it came from Darjeeling, somewhere on the other side of the earth. Repeating the magical-sounding name to herself, Isobel glanced at the cluttered sideboard, where her cousin’s latest postcard had been deposited, and imagined herself boarding an ocean liner from a crowded, noisy port ... watching the trodden grey landscape of her homeland disappear over the horizon.
APRIL 1945
“We use only the tenderest of these leaves,” said Alec’s father, the Tea Maker, employing expert fingers to pluck two pale green leaves and a bud from the waist-high tea bush. “Can you see the difference between the mature leaves and the tender ones, Alec?”
Alec nodded and dragged the back of his hand across his forehead, setting off streams of sweat. The difference between the leaves was obvious and, to him, uninteresting. He was bored. He’d been desperate for Easter holidays to begin, but now, tedious as school was, he imagined being back there, where at least there were boys his age and cricket matches. Powerless to change anything, he blew his hair from his eyes and watched the tea pluckers, bobbing like mermaids in their sea of green. They moved along the rows of bushes, deep baskets harnessed to their backs, each woman carrying a long rod, which marked the lower extremity of the tender leaves by resting atop the sturdier mature ones.
The pluckers’ husbands and brothers were labourers in the tea factory, a two-storey light green building that overlooked the hills. During the cold August holidays, when banks of cloud swallowed the hill country, Alec would have his tea lessons in the shelter of the factory. He would follow his father up the metal stairs to the top floor, where the labourers emptied bags of leaves into the withering troughs, spreading them out with their lean, muscular arms.
“What happens during the withering, Alec?” the Tea Maker would ask.
“All of the water evaporates from the leaves,” his son would reply, too well rehearsed in this unchanging script.
“And how many hours for the withering?”
“About twelve.”
“What happens next?”
“Rolling, fermenting, heating, sifting, tasting, packing, shipping,” Alec would recite—to which the reply could be any combination of “There’s a good chap,” “You’ve got a fine brain,” “Keep it up,” or “Wits, principles, and discipline: they’ll take you far in this life, son.”
From the withering troughs they would descend to the dim ground floor rooms, where machines loomed like beasts of war. Alec liked the rollers best. With a secret thrill he imagined evil Nazi officers feeding their prisoners through such contraptions then transporting the flattened bodies by conveyor belt into ovens like the ones used to arrest fermentation of the tea leaves. Of course, he knew better than to share t
hese thoughts with his father, a man for whom tea making was sacred. Rollers were used for crushing withered tea leaves into small particles, breaking the cell walls to begin the process of fermentation. Conveyor belts carried the particles during fermentation, a delicate process, which would decide the flavour and colour of the finished tea. And factory ovens were operated not by hard-faced German soldiers but by placid labourers who followed the instructions of their superiors without question.
The status of labourers was one of the countless sources of conflict between Alec’s brother, Ernie, and the Tea Maker. Gazing out over the green monotony, Alec recalled the lunch, a day or two earlier, when his father and Ernie had exchanged words on that very subject.
“Since the labourers actually do the work that produces the tea,” Ernie had mused in his slow, contemplative manner, “wouldn’t it be a good thing to involve them more fully in the cerebral side of things?”
Alec had understood little of his elder brother’s comment, but his father’s response, punctuated by a snort, was quite clear.
“You’re not to involve yourself with those people or their concerns,” he said. “I won’t have you jeopardizing my career with your misplaced affections. Don’t think such things go unnoticed, Ernie. At any rate, labour has no interest in the thinking side of this business. You’d only be putting ideas into their heads.”
For the first time ever, Alec noticed in the set of his father’s lips a tightness of worry, perhaps even fear.
“I’m telling you, Ernie,” he went on, “one day you’ll have sons of your own and then, I assure you, you’ll understand my point of view. You’re eighteen years old, almost a man. As long as you’re living in my home, you’ll respect the values and reputation of this family.”
Ernie cleaned his plate with a stringhopper, said “Yes, Dada,” and filled his mouth. The Tea Maker simmered through the remainder of the meal, speaking only once, to his wife, to demand how it was that her children had forgotten how to use cutlery.
That evening, he summoned Ernie to the sitting room for a talking-to. Alec and his sister hovered in the corridor, listening—Alec measuring the possibility of a real battle; Mary, diplomatic middle child, nervously chewing the end of her long plait in anticipation of the usual stalemate.
The voices behind the door were low but audible.
“I’ll never understand you, Ernie,” was the Tea Maker’s opening remark, though the acid of his tone gave the impression that he indeed did understand Ernie. He just didn’t approve. “You’ve been given every opportunity to make a damn fine life for yourself. Schooled at Trinity, introduced to important men. I’m telling you, you’ve got a planter’s life being handed to you on a silver platter.”
“I know, Dada. I’m grateful for the things you’ve given me.”
“Then tell me, Ernie, why is it that you seem virtually indifferent to these opportunities? Go on, you’re a clever fellow. Tell me why it is that when you’ve been brought up like the best of the English, you choose to behave like a simple labourer or a low-country Sinhalese?”
On previous occasions Ernie had been known to say that the English were no better than the Tamils or the Sinhalese, and that one day the country would be ruled by those very people his father so often criticized. But his response on this particular evening was, quite simply, that he chose to behave like Ernie Van Twest.
“And who the hell is Ernie Van Twest, then?” the Tea Maker goaded, his frustration at boiling point. “Is he someone who cares to make a decent life for himself ?”
“Yes, Dada.”
To the ears in the hallway, Ernie’s reply was barely discernible through the closed door. The Tea Maker, however, boomed.
“Yes Dada, yes Dada! You nod your head and agree with me, but where will you be next time the P.D.’s sons come around to invite you to the club? No doubt, you’ll be loafing about with your low-life friends, or hidden away painting pictures like a child.”
“Yes, Dada. I mean, no. If you’d like me to go to the club, I’ll go.”
“That isn’t the point, Ernie! Do you not see the problem with your attitude?”
The problem, as Alec saw it, was that there were two Ernies living in the bungalow beside the tea factory: the dapper, up-and-coming Ernie of the Tea Maker’s imagination, and the real Ernie. In some ways, the former was more of a presence in the house than the latter. Listening to this lopsided battle of the Ernies, bored by a script he knew as well as the tea making scripts, Alec willed his brother to erupt, vowed silently to defend him even. But the real Ernie said nothing. In the silence that followed, Mary spat out her hair and opened the sitting room door.
There had been no mention of the matter since.
Wilting in the fierce April sun, Alec felt a familiar resentment toward his brother. Ernie’s strangeness—his musings, his paintings, his chumminess with servants and villagers—served only to increase the Tea Maker’s expectation that he, Alec, be a normal chap. Not that he wasn’t normal. He was—a good cricketer, a reasonable student, a boy’s boy, as adults sometimes called him. But the extra watchfulness weighed heavily on his shoulders. The presence of his sister was little consolation. One day she would marry, and her responsibilities to the Van Twest family would come to an end.
Alec kicked at the dirt pathway and turned to his father. “Dada,” he ventured, interrupting the Tea Maker’s briefing on soil fertilizers, “could a labourer ever become a manager? A P.D.?”
His father emitted a sound, part snort, part laugh, that told Alec his question was a stupid one.
“It won’t happen during my time,” the Tea Maker said. “These people are ignorant, Alec. A different breed. They’re not suitable for education and social advancement the way we are. The British did well to go shopping for their labour in India. Provided you treat these people decently, they’ll work for you and won’t cause trouble.” His eyes travelled to the distant hills of the neighbouring plantation. “But one must treat them decently.”
Alec understood his father’s allusion. Though just turned twelve, he knew something of the unmentionable scandal that had caused the labourers of the neighbouring plantation to descend upon the manager’s bungalow with the intention of killing him. The man escaped, but his reputation was ruined—an upheaval that Alec found deliciously exciting. If his older brother wished for the estate labour to have more power as a matter of fairness, Alec wished it for the turmoil of it all. The idea of a lowly Tamil labourer bucking fate and rising to a position reserved exclusively for the British tickled him in a way he would have found difficult to explain. But his father’s reply had dismissed the possibility, so he altered his course.
“Dada?”
“Yes?”
“Could a Tea Maker ever become a manager?”
Alec took pleasure in the slow smile that spread across his father’s face. His father, the Tea Maker, was lord of the factory, the brain behind the labour. In his starched white shirt and dark pleated trousers, he answered with a dignity befitting his refined presence in the field.
“I have every intention of becoming a Peria Doray, Alec. These British won’t be staying here forever. And when they go, the country will need reliable men to take their places. Educated Burghers, like us, Alec. In the British eyes, we’re the next best thing.” He mopped his face with a limp handkerchief. “But you and I know we’re even better, don’t we? We have their standard of education and upbringing, but we’re part of this land. We know it better than any Englishman ever will.”
Alec followed his father back to the factory along the red dirt path, gauging his pace to remain within the shelter of the Tea Maker’s long shadow. At the weighing station next to the factory’s front entrance, his father left him with directions to go home and check the short-wave for any news of the war. Alec watched the Tea Maker mount the iron staircase to the withering room, then he drifted around to the tasting room at the side of the factory, hoping to find Amitha.
Tea tasting was very serious work,
and Amitha was no less serious about it than the other tasters. But unlike the others, he had a sense of humour. In the spartan white room where teas were assessed like fine wines, Amitha made faces. Examining the twist and cleanliness of the dry leaves, the brightness of the infusions, he would contort his lips like a chimpanzee. Or, after testing a steaming liquor with the vigorous slurps and swishes of a good taster, he might puff his round cheeks and cross his eyes before spitting into the tall refuse urn, while Alec, convulsed with laughter, would shrink to a quivering lump in the doorway.
At moments of such conspicuous silliness, Alec would laugh without hesitation. But he had to be cautious. Amitha was a clown, true, but his facial contortions and stark gestures didn’t always signify humour. More often than not they were critical comments on the tea, questions or instructions for the other tasters. In the three years he’d been at the estate, Amitha had conveyed his undisputed expertise without ever uttering an intelligible word. The tea jargons of Sinhala, Tamil, and English were unknown to him. And so, in the little time it had taken for his reputation to blossom, the tasting room had become an almost wordless place, and the assessment of leaf, infusion, and liquor using hand signs and facial expressions became an accepted practice. Left index finger scratched across the right palm: too much stalk. Eyebrows raised: a sufficiently bright infusion. Right fist drawn across the left palm then stopped with a chopping motion: fermentation too short.