Writing on Skin

by Sara Banerji

  ‘I quite like them,’ Hermione said. She nearly added, ‘Because I have Indian blood in me,’ but only said, ‘Go on, Slug.’

  After she had washed the last of the dishes she stood for some time, suds popping comfortably round her wrists, waiting for something to happen to give her balance. She felt wrung, tired, raw so that anything could have made her cry, yet she needed to redefine herself now, before she made another move.

  She needed to be alone surrounded only by the anonymity of the two young men who did not know her, who had taken no part in her life, and would be able to exert no influence over her future.

  She looked out of the kitchen window and saw Gerald trying surreptitiously to turn the spent food under the fallen leaves and old annuals, where the rats wouldn’t find it.

  She had been afraid of rats once but, as though she was a different person, she now thought of them almost with fondness. Feeling insecure at the idea that she was altogether changed, and not the person she used to be, she went over to the looking glass and, leaning on the dresser, her hands dripping bubbles on to the polished pine, tried to examine her face in the half-dark shadows of the glass as she had done all those years ago when she’d wanted to know if she had Indian blood in her.

  Feeling like a car with slipping gears, she told the face, ‘You are free.’ The face that looked back, waiting for response, surprised her, as though seventy years of looking in the glass had left something out. It was tall with long lolloping features, narrow nose, high forehead, small square chin, the soft sheeny skin stroked over with age so that it had the appearance of slightly crumpled comfy satin. Age, helped by the sun, had scrawled graffiti on brow, nose, bony peaks of cheekbones, mapping out in miniature even the outlines of India on her hands.

  ‘Why’ve you got Donald Duck on your nose, Granma?’ Dinah had asked her during the funeral tea.

  Hermione had once thought that if she lived to be two hundred and went on like this the pigmented areas would meet and her face would become totally black. In this mapped face on which nothing of importance was allowed to be written in case her secret should be discovered, the long dark eyes, seated in bony sockets, looked sad. She pondered on this, trying it out for losses, and managed just in time to quench the words, ‘Too late’.

  ‘I shall never,’ she told herself aloud, and was probably overheard by canapé-fed rats, ‘take such a lot of trouble over a funeral again. At the next one I shall give them ham sandwiches and be done with it.’ Then she felt a lurch of the stomach because the next one would probably be hers.

  Chapter Four

  In spite of Hermione’s protests, ‘You’ll catch a chill; haven’t you got a home; why don’t you use the bike shed,’ Slug had insisted on sleeping in the garden.

  ‘I can hear the stuff growing in the dark,’ he had mysteriously explained.

  The day after the funeral Hermione found him asleep in the garden and as the great tattooed head emerged from its heap of rags she told him conversationally, ‘A very beloved dog called Percy is buried there, you know.’ Instantly, to Hermione’s amazement, Slug leapt up, shedding sacks and paint-stained coats, and rushed off emitting a series of small high shrieks like a dog being kicked.

  ‘He’s got a complex about death,’ explained Gerald understandingly. He and Hermione were going through seed catalogues, planning for next spring.

  ‘Everyone’s afraid of something I suppose,’ murmured Hermione, not really listening, her mind on Himalayan blue poppies. ‘Do you think they’d grow in our woods?’ The Himalayas in her garden. Oh, glory.

  ‘I was afraid of Hugh,’ Gerald said suddenly, cracking through her thoughts. ‘He expected exactitude.’ He was silent for a moment then added, ‘But I could tell you weren’t completely satisfied.’

  Suddenly he looked different to Hermione, less pernickety and rigid, and a gust of warmth for him passed through her.

  ‘You would like the garden to be fuller. Overflow more,’ said Gerald, and he threw his arms out in a dramatic generous gesture that she recognized, so that in her mind’s eye her garden began to gush, like a river bursting its banks, out of its present priggish borders.

  ‘Slug will help me.’ Gerald signalled with his head to where the skinhead was digging. ‘He’s got a feel for flowers. We could work together pretty well I think,’ said Gerald.

  Hermione listened, speechless. Then, seeing after a moment that this was his way of offering compassion to the bereaved, she smiled, not giving the suggestion any serious consideration, but all the same touched.

  ‘I mean it,’ Gerald repeated seriously.

  ‘Oh,’ said Hermione.

  But in the days that followed Hermione began to feel that her garden was growing bald, and to wonder if the skinhead’s vision was matched by his horticultural performance.

  ‘Are you sure Slug is doing the right thing in the garden?’ she asked Gerald.

  ‘He has an eye,’ Gerald told her firmly. ‘Colour sensitivity.’

  ‘He is ripping a lot of stuff out. There are gaps everywhere.’

  ‘They will be filled,’ cried Gerald, almost joyfully.

  Hermione felt quite alarmed at his change of mood, at the way his eyes sparkled, and even felt a stab of regret that he had not retained his pre-Slug repression and pedantry. Because of the violence of the changes that had overwhelmed her own life since Hugh died, she found Gerald’s new unpredictability unnerving. Her soul, her consciousness, her body, even her grief, required a period of absolute stability while she regained her footing.

  In the days after Hugh’s death Hermione began more and more to dread nights. The sheets felt solid and dead like old skin, the bed huge, the area that had been taken up by Hugh for almost fifty years now a gap like those that Slug was creating in the borders. Winds blew down this space so that Hermione, half asleep, would think she understood why people believed in ghosts and imagined their appearances to be heralded by chilly air.

  She missed his hugs. When Hermione first met Hugh she had been reminded of a Viking. Large size and public schools had given him a supreme self-confidence so that he did not expect any bad consequences to result from his loving embraces. He had kissed the cleaning lady during their first week back in England, tickling her all down her throat with the ends of his radiating beard, and booming, ‘Dear lady! My gratitude is eternal!’ because she had found his missing cuff link between the floorboards.

  Panting, she had at last disentangled her stout body, pulled her headscarf back on, straightened her stockings, and fallen wildly in love. The fact that she had five children and fifteen grandchildren did not prevent this lady, thereafter, from dreaming of Hugh, her hand held frozen above a piece of being-polished silver, or standing as though in a trance because she had caught his eye while serving up the boiled potatoes.

  ‘A lovely, lovely man!’ she had told Hermione enviously. She had had to leave in the end, telling Hermione some unconvincing tale about her blood pressure, when Hermione knew, from personal experience, that she was unable to endure the pain of unrequited love any longer.

  Hugh had been like this with the children when they were little, blowing into their tummy buttons until they got hiccups from laughing, while the ayah nervously tried to intervene, fearing her charges were about to choke.

  Hugh’s booming angers were as all embracing as his hugs, and equally alarming.

  ‘Wore my blazer?’ he would roar at some wincing son. ‘How dare you!’ leaning over, so that the power of his fury was hot like a blaze of flame in the terrified youth’s face. Or, ‘Been into my study?’; ‘Spilled tea on my Times?’; ‘Scratched the car?’

  Hugh’s nickname, in the early years of his career, had been ‘Cuddles Crombie’, but after he became general manager he was called this only secretly and, gradually, as the force of his personality began to bite deep and fear overwhelm warmth, the name was changed to ‘Killer Crombie’ who would hug you at breakfast, and sack you at lunch. In the middle of his career he had become quite fero
cious and tyrannical. Golden benevolence turning savage made Hermione think of the honeyed tans that first beautified the British ladies, and later killed them. And she would feel gratitude, in her more tranquil moments, that the sun and her husband only showed their benevolent faces to her. But now even his anger would have been better than the windy bed and empty days.

  She rang her daughter-in-law, Anne, who had more shopping to do before returning to the Gulf. ‘Why don’t you all come for the weekend. Bring the grandchildren.’ And was seized by wild regrets the moment she laid the receiver down. She was not ready for the grandchildren, visualized them striding sullenly round the grounds, pacing like wild dogs in the zoo, counting the moments until their wasted weekend was over, staying grimly because their parents had told them to.

  David, Rupert and Anne’s son, had stayed once. He was soft, plumpish, blond, and Hermione knew that on his upper lip, very soon, would rest a transparent moustache. He was vain and Hermione had caught him taking frequent and apparently satisfied glances at his reflection in passing mirrors and windows. He would run swiftly to bring his grandmother her glasses, get her book from the bedside table, accompany her at a patronizingly slow pace on her tours of the garden. He was the product of one of those public schools in which pupils are taught to be extra kind to those less exaltedly educated.

  ‘But what an absolutely fascinating jacket!’ he said of Slug’s garment that resembled a half-killed and still-struggling sea lion, or ‘How well you manage to understand what’s going on in the modern world, Granma.’

  Gerald, half intellectual, double educated though not in the right way, confused David, much as a talking dog might have done, so that the boy never seemed able to think of a suitable compliment. Once he had tried to praise the extreme straightness of Gerald’s Tagetes row, put in when Hugh still ruled, but a glance at Hermione had informed him he was on the wrong track. Hermione was relieved when, ‘Now are you sure you will be able to manage without me, Granma?’ he had left.

  Hermione rang Anne again. ‘Actually, dear, I’m sorry, but after all I can’t have you all next weekend. I’ve suddenly realized I’m doing something. What? Well I am …’ It was not their business, but their concern made it necessary for her to say something. ‘I thought I might go and look at the travel agents. Perhaps a little holiday abroad …’ She could hear, almost feel, the sighing breath of relief from the other end. Putting the receiver down she thought that she might really do it. One of these days. Go to the travel agent. There might just be time left for her to find an India of her own, not her mother’s, father’s, husband’s, but Hermione’s India … She imagined finding her other family, her Indian relations on her father’s side, and formed little lifeless plans involving Unity, roaming India together and stumbling on the relatives by chance.

  * * *

  Lalia, welcome where Anne was not, came with Dinah, and worked with Hermione in the garden. She was wide and her face was covered in freckles, not the spreading geography of darkness that age was printing on Hermione, but tawny dustings as though some holy hand had showered her with approval. She had a soft and mobile mouth that had expected laughter but nowadays was sometimes pinched. Her thick hair had turned imperceptibly from blonde to grey like a symbolic cloud shadow.

  ‘I love doing this garden with you, Hermione,’ she said. ‘It makes up for having none in London.’ She was silent for a moment then added bleakly, ‘Edward says he’s going to buy a big house with a garden after he retires.’

  ‘If we get a huge house can David live with us too?’ cried the besotted Dinah. She had never forgotten the big boy at Hugh’s funeral.

  Hermione and Lalia sat on a log and planned with Slug and Gerald where the pond would be.

  Slug became seized with enthusiasm and appeared next morning with one Welly on, carrying the other carefully while sounds of wet thrashing came from inside it. Grinning with pride, he reached in, made a grab, and pulled out a large and struggling golden fish which Hermione recognized instantly as one of Bunty’s prize-winning orfes.

  Dinah went wild with delight, pulling off her orange boots, offering them to Slug, shouting, ‘I want a fish in my Welly too! I want a fish in my Welly too!’

  ‘Get it back into Lord Lewis’s pond instantly,’ commanded Hermione. ‘It’s not going to be that sort of pond at all. This will be a wild area to which feral deer may come and drink.’ And then she became filled with panic, imagining Slug raiding the local safari park.

  Slug became increasingly enthusiastic about the garden and would wave his arms around, expressing vistas of pleached beech culminating in statues or demonstrating combinations of weeping birch combined with cherry and forsythia.

  ‘It’ll look like a splash in the summer,’ he explained incoherently.

  He would appear at Hermione’s window, gobbling with excitement at the idea of planting great nodding bushes of old-fashioned roses. ‘They’ll smell gorgeous.’

  He would nag at her to order saxifrages for spilling out of cracks in the old stone walls, or start a dance of desire at the thought of having a flat white cherry tree planted in the paved yard, so that it would look like a roof above tubs of dwarf pale pink tulips just as he had seen in Lord Lewis’s garden in spring. He also planned an enclosed garden in which only blue-flowering and silver-foliaged plants grew.

  ‘It will seem like a dream,’ he explained. Untrained, with only his eye, he was economical in plan, avoided brash designs, complicated outlines.

  ‘All those bright colours put together looks brassy,’ he tried to explain. ‘Gardens should be soft or the magic goes.’

  Sometimes Hermione would protest, ‘How shall we fit in all these new trees?’

  ‘It’ll look great … big … the edges will go secret with all these trees and bushes. Sort of deep.’

  ‘But it’s wonderful, darling!’ Lalia cried, ‘I love the sound of those great soaring climbers mixed together, and as for the border of nothing but yellow and gold, it’ll be gorgeous.’

  ‘He says it has to have a little splash of chilly blue here and there, though,’ wailed Hermione.

  ‘Oh,’ groaned Lalia, too impressed to be coherent. ‘How did he know?’

  On Lalia’s last day Hermione was at her window with Dinah, looking into the garden. She held the child’s waist, ‘Be careful darling, or you’ll fall!’ and tried to remember what it was like to be a granma.

  ‘Why is Slug doing that, Granma?’ asked Dinah, peering through the misted glass. Following the child’s gaze, Hermione was surprised to see Slug snatching at Gerald, the big bulky fool ripping the double-breasted jacket of the qualified gardener.

  ‘They’re fighting, aren’t they, Granma,’ said the child wisely, and Dinah’s words made Hermione realize that she had really employed the skinhead not because she had thought that he would solve the labour problem, but because he was dangerous. As with Percy, the dog she’d loved, she had decided to admit into her life a violent creature that no one else could handle. She had thought that through their combined sensitivity to flowering plants she would control Slug, as she had managed to control Percy through his love of chocolate biscuits. She had expected Gerald, if he refused to accept the skinhead’s services, to depart, outraged at being supplanted by such a mess. Always contrary, and having suffered much from India’s minor officials and stultifying bureaucracy, she had anticipated from Slug a satisfactory overwhelming of officialdom by violence and incompetence.

  ‘Couldn’t you pretend you never saw, Granma,’ pleaded the child. ‘Slug’s nice really, even if he has torn Gerald’s coat.’

  ‘All right darling, for your sake,’ said Hermione, glad for an excuse to say nothing.

  When Lalia and Dinah eventually left and Hermione was once more alone, the days began to be as bad as the nights, so that in the morning when she woke she found, not the servant in India with the tray of tea, but a thin sour sadness unconnected with events awaiting her. It was a tickle of sorrow that filled her nervous system in
an instant, like air rushing into a vacuum, and it lodged under her ribs all day, cold and sore as though she had been pierced by a steel needle.

  She would get up and try to fold something here, tidy something there, but often felt too lethargic even to open her letters. Nothing anyone wrote to her could change anything. The only possible change, she knew, was in herself, and it was too late for that.

  She would try not to look at Hugh’s slippers still by his chair, the cushion still dented with the shape of his body, his stick and hat hanging in the hall as she went round the rooms performing ritual rearrangings. She would take some action about Hugh’s things soon, give them to Cancer Research or something. Or so she had promised her sons when refusing their help. But not today. Not today. Then there came, quite soon, it seemed to come each day sooner, the moment when there was really nothing more that she could possibly do and she would go over to the window and watch what was supposed to be the progress of the garden.

  It did not rain for two months after Hugh died then, in November, it poured suddenly and heavily. Rain clattered on to the laurel leaves, thundering down in a thick despairing sort of way that was no use to anything. The summer had gone now and the plants had all suffered then died, the roses hadn’t done well, the bedding plants had frizzled, and when the rain fell too late there seemed to Hermione, watching emptily from her window, a contemptuous bitterness about the way it had escaped providing richness and was now leaving in its wake mud-filled cavities, and open cracks.

  At first the water only slipped and skidded over the surface on a rink of dust too dry for speedy moistening, rushing in filthy fingers on to the drive, spurting waste-fully off the high borders on to the lower paths; but after a while although it managed to start penetrating the soil, the dryness proved too complete, too long standing. The shrunken drains burst, the split lawns flooded, and the little eighteenth-century summerhouse that had been Hugh’s joy and had stood secretly on its marble pillars for so long, slipped suddenly sideways like a cocked hat because the drought had cracked the clay beneath it, leaving it unable to cope with newly arriving water.