“Mr. Villiers, I’m here also.” She put down the spade as if a bit of shed tidying was all she planned to do.
“Oh Lord!” He looked up, dotty-looking in his surprise. His mouth began to work violently, like that of a child determined not to cry. “Oh God.” He pulled a spotted handkerchief out of his pocket, buried his face in it. “Sorry,” he said in a muffled voice. “Can’t go home like this.”
She touched his arm. “Don’t dash off,” she said quietly. “Take your time. We’ll be saying prayers for her soul tonight.”
“I shouldn’t have come,” he said. “It’s made everything worse.”
“It was what Glory wanted,” Amma said.
“For herself? For the girl?”
“I don’t know.”
This was true. During the long night when Glory had raged incoherently about this man, she had told Amma that he should come, that she needed to tell him things, and Amma had indulged her. As for Kit? God knows: she’d played her cards very close to her chest regarding this father of hers.
“Over there was Glory’s gin and tonic spot.” She pointed at a bench near the water. She picked up his sodden handkerchief and handed it back to him. “She liked looking at the water and the trees.”
He stood up, shifting the ripe smell of distress and pipe tobacco towards her.
“Such a shock, you know.” He fumbled the handkerchief into his pocket. “Didn’t see her for years, decades, and then all this.”
“I understand,” she said, although the messiness of it appalled her. To give him time to start breathing normally again, she offered to show him her orchid garden.
“These are my invalids.” She led him to her row of flowers planted in coconut shells. “My husband brings them from all over India. They take awhile to find their feet. This one,” she said, pointing to the orchid tree, glowing against the darkening sky, “is a miracle worker. Stems are used for leprosy, or ulcers, paste from leaves for headaches. You can also eat it as a vegetable.
“And this is my dancing girl,” she said at the next plant. “Glory loved her. She was a wreck when she came from Bangalore, now look at her—eight new buds on the stem.”
William knelt down obediently with a great cracking of knees and touched the flower. As he did so, his regimental signet ring flashed and fell into the earth. “Damn thing doesn’t fit me,” he said, as she passed it back. “I’m bound to lose it one day.” He shoved it in his pocket and sat back on his heels looking at the garden with a bemused expression. “I never thought she’d come back,” he said.
“No way of contacting her?” Amma said with a lemony look. This was going too far.
“I tried. Wrote for years. Never got a reply. Only from her friend, Miss Barker.” She heard the clicking in his throat. “Sorry,” he wheezed at last. He was at it again, helpless before an unstoppered tide of grief. “Sorry.”
She waited until he could talk again. “What would you like to do now?” she said gently.
“I want to go home,” he said. “My driver’s waiting in the village.”
“Will you come back?”
“I don’t think so.” He looked down at his brogues; they were covered in dust. “There are a few . . . complications.”
“I know.” Glory had told her about the wife in Ooty. “But not even to see Kit?” She looked at him directly. “Your grandchild?”
“I don’t know.” There was question in his eyes, and an apology. “Do you think I should?”
“That’s for you to decide.” She smiled her practiced smile, thinking, What an absolute bloody fool—another phrase that Appan had taught her. Be a man, find out for yourself.
- CHAPTER 54 -
I spent a day at Mangalath with Amma, who was sorting out her linen cupboard and wanted to give me some new sheets and tablecloths, and—hint, hint—some baby clothes that might be useful to me in the future. It was exactly the sort of task Glory would have enjoyed: the folding, the scenting, the doing something undemanding but practical with me. The thought of how, in the last few years, I’d denied her these small pleasures was like a knife in my heart.
Saraswati’s arrival later in the day cheered me up, though Amma was clearly annoyed. The Nasrani custom, she reminded me in a tight voice, was to mourn the dead for nine days during which time no one came to the house. “This is not normal.”
Well, Saraswati was not normal. With her charming and brilliant smile she apologized to Amma, put a bulging briefcase down on the floor, and as soon as Amma had left the room, exploded with plans.
“I’m twisting the arms of more local businessmen. My sales pitch is straightforward: ‘Wake up. See the situation plainly.’” She demonstrated, eyes flashing. “‘Too many babies are dying all over India; share the knowledge we have gained in our training centers.’ Only one or two have given me some stick. ‘Why change old ways?’ they say, or, ‘Are you a man-hating feminist?’ ‘Man hater?’ I tell them, ‘We’re here to protect your male babies too, by the way. Your indifference will kill them.’”
Her next rabbit from the hat was a set of plans, donated by an architect she knew. The drawings showed a fifteen-bedroom unit to be built in breeze block with a properly tiled roof and enough room inside for three consulting rooms, a dispensary, a reception area, and a large veranda.
To ensure “no jiggery-pokery” about the Moonstone’s ownership of the two acres of land it stands on, she’d also undertaken a search at the local Land Registry office.
She was pretty sure the actual deeds got lost in the fire but also asked me to write to Daisy in case they were at Wickam Farm. The thought of the chaotic attic there made me shudder.
The dark rings under her eyes had grown. When I asked if she was getting enough sleep, she said that with her husband gone and no mother-in-law to please, “I have plenty more hours in the day, and I’m using them.”
But the biggest fly in the custard, the one we avoided discussing until the last possible moment, was that we were practically broke. Saraswati estimated that the new home, plus fixtures, fittings, and restocking the pharmacy would cost in the region of one hundred and thirty thousand rupees, the equivalent of ten thousand pounds in English money. An impossible amount, a pipe dream.
Saraswati, busily scribbling the sums down, saw my expression, put her pencil down, and stuck her finger in the air.
“First it was impossible. Then it was difficult. Then it was done,” she said, adding, without a glimmer of a smile and with an intensity that frightened me, “It has to work, otherwise I will throw myself on the funeral pyre.”
* * *
Four months after my mother’s funeral, I got a big scare when a khaki-colored official-looking envelope arrived covered in unfamiliar handwriting. Saraswati had told me not to worry too much about the Medical Tribunal, telling me they were months behind with cases and would probably forget me. But in that panicked moment I pictured jail or deportation, or at the very least, a fine we couldn’t possibly afford.
It turned out to be a brief note in a large envelope from my father. The spidery hand informed me he was back in Ooty and wanted to give me “one or two things of Glory’s that you might like. Nothing precious, mementoes.” I was to write back to Box Number 36, the Ootacamund Club.
When I read the letter, anger flared up inside me, and I thought, Stay where you are, you slippery old fraud, with your aliases and your box numbers. I didn’t want my phantom father breezing in again and stirring things up.
When Anto read the letter, I watched his expression change from frowning concentration to sympathy.
“Poor old man,” he said. “Let him come or at least send whatever it is. This could be the Hope diamond.”
“Poor man!” I exclaimed. “The khaki envelope scared me to death, and anyway, what about poor Glory, poor me? He behaved appallingly.”
“You asked me what I thought.�
� Anto trained his green eyes on me. “I am saying what I think.”
“I’m fed up with you being nicer than me,” I said after a while.
“Me too,” he said. “It’s a burden I bear.”
I was pulling his hair. “Gray ones, please!” he said, when he held me close. “When are we going to have another baby?” he whispered.
“Soon,” I said, ruffling his hair. “Will you mind if it’s a girl?”
“No,” he said. He looked hurt, because I get this wrong sometimes and assume things about him that are crude approximations based on what I think I know about Indian men. These are the moments when we make each other foreign and I deeply regret them.
“I’d like one too,” I whispered, as he stroked my stomach. “I love my silly old man,” and then he looked around like a guilty schoolboy because we were in his mother’s house and he was her son too.
“Anto,” I teased him, stroking his hair, “how old are you?”
He knew exactly what I meant. “Six years old when I am here,” he said.
* * *
The next job was to sort through the sea trunk Glory had left in the spare room at Mangalath. As we opened the lid, the rush of something both spicy and sweet came from a half-finished bottle of Shalimar, one of Glory’s “little extravagancies” during the grim years, the kind of thing (the Baccarat cut-glass bottle, the little velvet ribbon, her snooty expression as she dabbed it here and there) that had once made her seem, to me, so impossibly glamorous.
Her clothes made a pathetically small pile in the end. Two tweed skirts (Donegal tweed, as she’d been fond of pointing out, donated, or maybe not, from the vicar’s wife in Durham), the dull cardigans and liberty bodices worn at Daisy’s to stop her “freezing to death.” A few light cotton dresses, and underneath them, wrapped carefully in layers of scented tissue, the good clothes: remnants of a life lived for one shining hour, and never again.
Amma and I laid them out on the bed: a slippery green satin dress, a silk suit with a Swan and Edgar label, a shagreen brush and comb set with a chipped handle, lipstick samples, a pair of jodhpurs, an Aertex shirt, a tin of Coty talcum powder with a carefree, brilliantly laughing woman on it, a pair of beautiful gold leather sandals (Charles of Lewes), still in their original box, an invitation for a free facial at the Belle Rose beauty parlor in Chelmsford.
The green satin dress had tiny heart-shaped mother-of-pearl buttons stitched on its waistband. I imagined her wearing it at a garrison party, and the hectic preparations beforehand. Her weapons: the tweezers, the comb, the wax strip. It mattered, really mattered, getting it right.
Inside a faded floral box, I found her wedding veil wrapped in pink tissue. Its brittle fabric was edged with crumbling dried flowers shaped like violets, the final symbol of her humiliation.
I wondered where she’d gone, after the Colonel had driven her away from the church. At what point in this whole horrible shamble had she learned that I was on the way? I ached to find out more, and now I never would.
“Shall I throw these away?”
Amma held out a few faded brown invitations: a pantomime in Braintree, a garden party at Major someone or other’s—the name was past reading—house, The Palms, in Malabar Hills, on June seventh, on the occasion of his return to England, a ladies’ coffee morning at the Bombay Yacht Club, five days after the canceled wedding.
What a meaty bone of gossip Glory must have thrown to the ladies at the club to gnaw on: “A chichi girl, can you imagine, darling?”
“The poor man had absolutely no idea whatsoever, she does look very pale.” I hated them all.
At the bottom of the trunk, there was a book, The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford. The inscription on the flyleaf read, “To my darling fiancée Glory, with grateful thanks for her eternal lightheartedness. Love, William.”
Bits of me too: a smocked pink romper suit, a rattle shaped like a horse, a letter with a wonky drawing: “When you die Mummy, I will die wiv you.” Dramatic child! and finally, right at the very bottom, a picture of me in my nursing uniform, aged nineteen, posing for a photograph on the day I got my certificate. The photo was half-hidden under the lining. It was not her dream for me, and never would be.
* * *
My father turned up at Mangalath later that week, unannounced, uninvited, and on the flimsiest of pretexts. He said he’d brought a box of teas from a planter friend, who happened to be driving by, and wanted to give them to Amma, who had been so kind. He’d smartened himself up for this outing: polished brogues, a worn but clean suit, a paisley tie. When he held out the box of teas to Amma, he shot me a quick hangdog look and I could barely look at him. It was Amma who offered him refreshments, a chair, a bed for the night. I would have shown him the door.
After he’d drunk his tea, I asked if he would like to see my mother’s things. I don’t think I was being deliberately cruel, but my ears buzzed with anger as I took him upstairs. I wanted him to see how little she’d ended up with, that there had been consequences.
Inside the spare room, he looked at her dresses, shoes, and knickknacks in silence for a while. He picked up the jodhpurs.
“I’d promised to teach her to ride,” he said. When he started to paw the green dress, I wanted to scream and snatch it from him.
“I’ve got a lot to do today,” I said. He was sniffling again.
He blinked at me like some sort of woodland animal coming out of a hole. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I must let you go on. I’ve been meaning to ask you, do you have any other children?”
“No, but we will.” I was stung by how little interest he’d taken, and wanted the silly old fool to leave.
“But when we do have girls,” I said, “we’ll send them to the best school we can afford.” The words were bursting out of me like hot water from a geyser.
“Good idea,” he said. He folded her Aertex shirt, pressed it to his face.
“I want them to have a good job. Something solid and clean. Being defenseless is for the birds.”
He looked at me warily. “I thought Glory got rather good jobs. Friends were always very kind and so forth.”
“Oh God.” That’s when I really wanted to strike him. I could feel the blow run like an electrical current through my fingers. But he wasn’t listening. The tips of his fingers were running over her green dress, a dreamy expression on his face.
Why did you dump her, if you felt like that? I almost said, but my anger was frightening me, so instead I took a deep breath, said I was tired and wanted to eat. To take a memento if he wanted it. The rest I’d give to charity or chuck away. He winced at that. I wanted him to.
He picked up The Good Soldier.
“I’d like this,” he said. He was breathing strangely, and I thought for God’s sake don’t have a heart attack here, and how, if he did, I’d have to tell his wife and cart him out, and all manner of hard thoughts because I didn’t want him in my life. Not now. “It was the first present I ever gave her.”
“I read what you wrote inside it,” I said. “Sweet.” I was breathing heavily now too and felt I might at any minute explode with tears.
He touched the dress again. “She wore this at the Willoughby. Turned a lot of heads, I can tell you.”
And a fat lot of good that did her.
“ ‘This is the saddest story ever told,’ ” he said in a faraway voice. “The first line in the book. I only read the thing last year. I gave it to her to impress her. Turns out it wasn’t about a soldier at all.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s about betrayal.”
In the silence that grew between us, I heard the clink of pots from the kitchen where Pathrose was cooking. He’ll be gone soon, I thought, and you won’t have to think about him ever again because he doesn’t want to know you, not really.
Before he left, he took a small box out of his pocket and said, “I’ve bro
ught you something.”
His shaky fingers struggled with the catch, and then he held up a nondescript gold ring with tiny pearls in it, and a few chips of what looked like garnet. It was dented on one side.
“It was all I could afford on a captain’s pay. One of the stones is loose, and one is gone,” he said. “I think she bashed it before she sent it back.” The hangdog look again. “And this”—he pulled out a silver chain with a milky-colored stone at the end of it, the size of my little thumbnail—“is a moonstone. Common as muck over here, but very pretty.”
“They’re supposed to be lucky,” I said.
“You won’t get rich on it.” He dropped it into the palm of my hand. “But you might give it to your daughter.”
“I’m not sure I can keep them if she sent them back.”
“Please have them,” he said in a low voice.
Part of me felt like a traitor as I put them in my pocket. I couldn’t bring myself to thank him for them. They felt like such paltry gifts, when we could have had a life together.
- CHAPTER 55 -
And then I was arrested. At the time it felt as sudden and jarring as that. I was sitting on the veranda at Rose Street catching up on some paperwork when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a dusty black car draw up outside the house. Two men got out, cocky, self-assured. It took me a while to see they were wearing policemen’s uniforms and had lathis stuck in their belts. They were walking towards my house.
And even then I wasn’t too concerned. There had been a spate of robberies in the street, and they were smiling at me in a friendly way, so I assumed they were doing house-to-house inquiries.
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