“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 tha
n 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.
- PART TWO -
Cochin,
South India
- CHAPTER 12 -
New husband, new country, new climate, new mother-in-law, and whoopee! one hundred and seven new relatives all speaking a new language. When I opened my eyes in room four of the Malabar Hotel in Fort Cochin, I closed them again quickly. I lay in an elaborately carved rosewood bed, a dazzling light stabbing my eyes. The fan above me shifted air that smelled of the sea and old drains, and still feeling the sway and tilt of the sea in my blood, I longed to go back to that dreamy indeterminate place where it was just Anto and me on the ship together.
I could hear Anto splashing around in the vast antiquated bathroom next to our room. The concentrated energy with which he washed every part of his beautiful honey-colored body was a source of silent fascination to me. Ears, teeth, armpits, toes, nothing was missed, then the fierce scrubbing of the nails, the startling garglings when his tonsils got sluiced.
Once, during our early days on the ship, I’d called through the bathroom door, “You’re worse than a girl.” The door had opened and he’d given me an odd, intimidating look, and I’d made a mental note not to joke about this again.
I looked at my watch. Nine o’clock and I was already slippery with sweat. A slender lizard dashed up the wall. From the bathroom: splash, gargle, throat clearing, the slap of a towel. We’d made love twice during the night, but now my brain was waking, fear was releasing like a drug in my veins.
We’d come alive on the ship. Released from home, from war, rationing, people, we’d made our tiny cabin a secret cave where, on some nights, we’d gone to a level of wildness and freedom with each other that left us both gasping, laughing, speechless, and a little afraid. And knowing in some secret cell of myself that we might never be this free again, I’d stored it all inside me: the hours lying in deck chairs on the top deck, dreaming between sea and sky; the flaming sunsets; the new cities; our small cabin on F deck with the salt-smelling sea racing by. Long, whispered conversations; fresh fruit, the new taste of mangos, bananas, melons; moonlit walks with the night skies so close and bursting with stars; cocktails in the Sunshine Bar.
We lived like kings and made no new friends on the ship. We only wanted us; now the thought of sharing Anto with dozens of inquisitive strangers made me pant with alarm.
It’s an adventure, I tried to tell myself, but my insides were swirling. Now that we were back to some sort of reality, I found myself worrying about my mother again. After staying in a more or less permanent sulk since our wedding, she’d promised, in a special cracked voice, to come to Tilbury to see us off. On the day we left, she’d worn her tweed traveling suit and a beautiful silk scarf. The paleness of her makeup, the scarlet lipstick gave her face a startling, almost Oriental look—like a Kabuki actress in a play. She’d toyed with her food over breakfast and later, in the freezing hall, announced, “I’m not coming to the station with you. I’m too busy here.”
She’d flung me a look of wild accusation. “Thank you for ruining my life,” she might as well have added, and then she gathered herself up, pecked my cheek, and said in a stagy drawl, “So, the very best of British, darling,” possibly for the benefit of that old bat Ci Ci, who was peeping around the door, her eyes full of a kind of malicious glee at the horrors ahead for both of us.
“Don’t forget to let me know how it goes,” my mother had continued in the same vein, as if I’d planned nothing more than a trip to the dentist. “There’s a pet.”
God, I was furious. “I will. Thank you, Mummy,” I said.
I knew my mother well enough to know she became more English than the English when she was scared, but this was more than I could stand. She ignored Anto altogether, didn’t even shake his hand, and at the moment when I needed her most, I hated her for playing to the gallery.
Ci Ci contrived an equally stagy farewell: “Darling honeybun, farewell,” she’d cried with more warmth that she’d ever showed me before. The clawlike hands she wrapped around my shoulders smelled of nicotine and her large ring nicked my cheek. She’d kissed me for the first time ever. “Give ’em hell,” she’d added, a remnant maybe from some cowboy film she’d watched.
Daisy stood apart and watched us, warily and sadly. She knew the limits of her own embracing hospitality. And it was Daisy who drove us to the railway station, the back seat of the Morris stacked high with our luggage, and the boot jammed with medical supplies for the charity, labeled Not Wanted on Voyage. Two large tea chests had gone ahead of us.
The fields were frozen on either side of us, and the sky without color. Daisy broke the silence. “She’ll miss you, Kit, I know she will.”
“Do you think she’ll write?” I was too shaken to say much.
“I don’t know, but I’ll keep you informed, I promise.”
For that moment, I wished Anto wasn’t with us in the car, because I’d kept the silly idea in my mind that my mother would crack before she left, and hug me, or give me some kind of blessing, maybe even some more information about my father, because although this trip wasn’t like dying, it felt like a point where you wanted to get things straight in your mind. But he was there, looking pensively out of the window, thinking his own thoughts.
During our brief courtship, I was aware that although we’d thought each other soul mates and talked about many things both small and large—books we liked, films, the war, the
life we wanted to live—he’d asked me very little about my background. When I’d raised the subject, knowing he must want to know something, I told him my father had died during the Great War, but I wasn’t absolutely sure because my mother didn’t like talking about it. He hadn’t pressed me for details, and the death of loved ones was such a commonplace since the war, I’d accepted his reticence as tact and been grateful for it.
And later, when I’d tried to take another run at it and be more open, something had always stopped me: a cringe of shame, a sense of guilt, a feeling that my admission might lessen me in Anto’s eyes by making him feel he’d been sold a pup, a half-breed at that.
It felt like a long trip to the station. I wiped away a line of condensation from the car window, Anto still silent, and I stared at frozen fields, at ponies with breath like plumes of smoke being fed hay. I thought, Now you’re a married woman, you must stop thinking about your parents, because your mind could whirl on this particular hamster wheel forever and it’s quite possible you will never know the truth. I took my glove off and put my hand down on the leather seat hoping Anto would hold it, but he was not a natural hand holder.
* * *
Three waiters leapt forward with bowls of fruit and offers of tea or coffee as we walked into the Malabar’s cavernous dining room for breakfast. A strange embarrassment came over us because neither of us had stayed in a hotel before, and in between the clinking of our cutlery, I could hear myself making stilted conversation about the furniture (massive, ugly), the fruit (tiny, delicious bananas), and the heat, which was, even this early in the morning, a startling ninety-two degrees.
I was hungry but didn’t want to eat too much. Between us we now had a grand total of one hundred and twenty-three pounds. He’d counted the notes out on our mattress that morning, and I was aware that if I hadn’t been there, he would have already been enfolded in the bosom of an ecstatic family and spared the expense of this.
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