The Tea Planter's Wife

by Dinah Jefferies

  Gwen blinked rapidly to hold back the tears.

  ‘When Verity came to me with the story of Liyoni and your supposed affair with Savi Ravasinghe, and asked for her allowance back, I already knew it wasn’t true.’

  ‘But you gave her the allowance and then let me think it was because I’d asked you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Has Verity seen this wedding certificate?’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Gwen. I’m sure she has, but I didn’t want to tell her I knew about Sukeena until I could find the way to tell you first.’ He frowned. ‘I just didn’t know where to start.’

  She shook her head. ‘Verity knew the truth, but she still tried to blackmail me. Why did she need her allowance so badly?’

  ‘I think she was afraid to remain married to Alexander in case she too gave birth to a coloured child.’

  ‘But she fell in love with Savi?’

  ‘I don’t think she loved him. It was just that a mixed marriage would, in some circles, have been an acceptable reason for a coloured child. She needed money to live independently. She’s not strong like you, Gwen, the shame would have destroyed her. When you didn’t give in to her, she came to me.’

  Gwen let out her breath slowly. ‘But I did give in. I asked you about the allowance.’

  ‘I don’t think Verity believed you would.’

  Gwen paused. ‘She was taking money too, Laurence, by fiddling the accounts. Must have been stockpiling for years before I warned her that I knew.’

  He hung his head. ‘I can’t begin to make excuses for her.’

  Gwen sipped the warm tea and thought about what he’d said.

  He looked up. ‘I think on some level I had begun to see the truth the day I carried Liyoni to swim in the lake, though I denied it to myself. But once the records arrived and I really opened my eyes, I saw how much like you she was.’

  Gwen felt a wave of loss pass through her, so intense she didn’t know if she could bear it. This was how it would be now, yet at the same time she knew she had to find courage for Hugh’s sake.

  ‘So where do we go from here?’ she managed to say.

  ‘We carry on. For now, only you and I and Naveena know the whole truth about Liyoni.’

  ‘And Verity.’

  ‘And my suggestion is that we don’t tell Hugh until he is old enough to understand.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right, though I think he’d understand perfectly well that his playmate was actually his sister.’ She paused. ‘What do you want to do about Verity?’

  ‘Whatever you feel best, Gwen. I am ashamed of her, but I can’t completely turn my back on her. She’s very troubled, I’m afraid.’

  Gwen shook her head but almost felt sorry for her sister-in-law.

  ‘We can go back to England if you want,’ Laurence said. ‘It’s still some years off, I believe, but we may have little choice once independence comes.’

  She looked up at him and smiled. ‘I seem to remember saying that if the plantation was where your heart belonged, it was where my heart belonged too. Ceylon is still our home. Maybe we really can improve conditions here. Let’s stay until we’re forced to go.’

  ‘I’ll do whatever I can to make up for the past. All of the past.’

  ‘Can we keep the path to their resting places clear, and the view of the lake from there?’

  He nodded.

  ‘We can plant flowers,’ she added, with a lump in her throat. ‘Orange marigolds.’

  He took her hand. She leant against him and gazed through the window at the deep lake, where water birds were gathering. Herons, ibises, storks.

  ‘There was another thing I found in my mother’s papers. Something I never knew.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Naveena’s mother and my grandmother were cousins.’

  Gwen felt shaken. ‘Does Naveena know?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘She’s had a good life here,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I feel heartbroken that I didn’t have enough time with Liyoni, and that I never had a chance to love her.’

  Gwen took a deep breath. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you. At least in the time she did have here she was happy.’

  ‘It could have been so much better.’

  Laurence looked at his feet before speaking again, in a low voice. ‘There is one more thing, and I don’t know if you’ll be able to forgive me for not telling you before.’

  Gwen closed her eyes. What else could there be?

  ‘I was too ashamed. I’m dreadfully sorry. It’s about Caroline.’

  She opened her eyes. ‘Yes?’

  ‘And Thomas.’

  He paused and she watched a muscle in his neck pulse.

  ‘You see Caroline’s son, my son … Thomas. He was coloured too.’

  Gwen’s hand flew to her mouth.

  ‘I’m so sorry for not telling you. I think that’s what tipped Caroline over the edge. She was such a beautiful and sensitive woman, and I’d have done anything for her, but she was fragile emotionally. Soon after Thomas was born she had prolonged crying spells and terrible panic attacks. They were so bad she was actually sick. I sat with her night after night holding her, trying to find a way to comfort her … but it was impossible. Nothing I did helped. You should have seen the haunted look in her eyes, Gwen. It broke my heart.’

  ‘Did she talk to you?’

  ‘No, though I tried to get through to her. Outside the family, only the doctor knew about Thomas, and Naveena. We’d kept him hidden from the rest of the servants, though, of course, McGregor found out when he retrieved Thomas from the water. Verity was home. It was the school holidays.’

  Gwen drew a little apart from him and shook her head. ‘Verity knew?’

  ‘It had a terrible impact on her.’

  ‘That explains a lot.’

  He nodded. ‘I think it’s probably why I’ve always given her so much leeway.’

  ‘Why didn’t Naveena tell me?’

  ‘I had begged her never to speak of it.’

  ‘But she was the one who came up with the idea of sending Liyoni to live at the village.’

  ‘She’d seen what had happened to Caroline. She must have wanted to ensure you wouldn’t go the same way.’ He paused and closed his eyes for a moment, before speaking. ‘There’s more, I’m afraid. You see, I’m to blame.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  He shook his head. ‘It was. When I first saw Thomas I felt betrayed and I accused Caroline of having an affair with Savi Ravasinghe when he painted her portrait. Even though she absolutely denied it, I didn’t believe her.’

  Gwen pressed her lips together hard and squeezed her eyes shut in shock.

  ‘I promise you I still loved her and tried so hard to help her.’

  She opened her eyes and scrutinized his face. ‘Good God, Laurence, there must have been something more you could have done?’

  ‘I tried, really tried. But she’d lost all interest in her appearance. I helped her wash, I helped her dress, I even helped her feed the baby. I did everything I could think of to pull her out of the blackness, and I thought I had succeeded, Gwen, because just before the end she seemed to recover enough for me to leave her for the day …’

  There was silence as he swallowed rapidly.

  ‘But I was wrong … that was the day she took her own life. The awful thing is that even after she died I still didn’t believe her denial of the affair. That might have been the one thing that could have made a difference.’

  Gwen suddenly understood what he was saying. ‘You think she killed herself because of you?’

  He nodded. His face crumpled and his eyes filled with tears but he brushed them away. ‘She had been telling the truth all along, though I only knew that after I sent for my mother’s records and found out about Sukeena. I wanted to talk to you then, tell you everything about Caroline and Thomas … bu
t I felt as if I had taken them to the pool under the falls and pushed them into the water myself. I couldn’t bear to tell you.’

  Hardly able to believe what she was hearing, Gwen was in absolute turmoil. She watched him shudder as he tried to control his emotions. The moment seemed to last for ever.

  When he spoke again, his voice was shaking. ‘How do I live with this, Gwen? How can you forgive me?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s not only Caroline’s death. She felt she had to take our baby with her, that she couldn’t trust me to care for him. A tiny, defenceless baby.’

  As Gwen listened to the wind blowing the water about at the edge of the lake, she felt crushed.

  Laurence took her hand. ‘I know I should have told you at the start, but I was certain I would lose you too.’

  She removed her hand from his and held her breath for a moment before speaking. When she did it was with sorrow in her voice. ‘Yes, Laurence, you should have.’

  There was a pause during which she didn’t trust herself to speak again. If he had told her about Thomas at the beginning, would she still have married him? She had been so young, far too young really.

  ‘I’m desperately sorry you’ve had to go through all this alone. And sorrier than I will ever be able to say for what I drove Caroline to do. I loved her so much.’

  Gwen closed her eyes. ‘Poor, poor woman.’

  ‘Can you forgive me for not telling you everything?’

  While she tried to take it in, she opened her eyes and for a moment watched Laurence staring at the floor with his head in his hands and his shoulders hunched. What could she say? Outside the birds had silenced and even the wind had dropped. She had to make a decision that could mean the end of everything. She understood so much more now, but images from the past were crowding her mind and she felt such utter loss that she couldn’t respond.

  The silence dragged on, but when she glanced at Laurence again and saw the depth of his grief, that made her decision easier. It was not up to her to forgive him.

  ‘You should have told me,’ she said.

  He looked up and swallowed rapidly.

  ‘But it was a mistake.’

  His brow creased as he nodded.

  ‘There’s nothing I can say to change what happened to Caroline. You have to find a way to live with that. But, Laurence, you’re a good man and to keep on blaming yourself won’t bring her back.’

  He reached out a hand but she didn’t take it at first.

  ‘You’re not the only one. I made a terrible mistake too … I gave my own daughter away.’ Her eyes burned and she choked on her words. ‘And now she’s dead.’

  She looked deep into his eyes and then took his hand. She knew what living with guilt and fear could do. It hurt. It hurt so much. She thought of all he had been through, and all she had been through too. The day of her own arrival in Ceylon came back to her, and she remembered that girl who had stood on the deck of the ship and met Savi Ravasinghe. Everything had been in front of her, with no hint of the terrifying fragility of happiness.

  She recalled the moment of utter peacefulness when she had stared at the bruised and wrinkled red face of her newborn son, his baby hands trembling and juddering as he screamed. Then, as if it was only yesterday, she remembered unwrapping the warm blanket covering Liyoni. She experienced again the shock at seeing those little fingers, the rounded belly, the dark, dark eyes.

  She thought of the years of guilt and shame, but also of everything that had been beautiful and glorious about Ceylon: the precious moments when the smell of cinnamon combined with blossom; the mornings when the sparkling dews of the chilly season sent her spirit soaring; the monsoons with their endless curtains of rain, and the sheen of the tea bushes when the rain had gone. And then tears spilt down her cheeks again, and with them a memory she handled with infinite tenderness: Liyoni, swimming like a fish across to the island, whirling in the water and singing. Free.

  For such a small girl, Liyoni had left a long shadow; her ghost would not simply vanish, and Gwen wouldn’t let it.

  As Laurence stroked her hair soothingly, as you would a child, she thought of Caroline, and felt such an affinity with her it took her breath away. And, finally, she remembered the moment when she no longer noticed the colour of her daughter’s skin. She felt her husband’s warm hand on her hair, and knew she would carry Liyoni’s last words in her heart for the rest of her life.

  I love you, Mama.

  That was what the little girl had said, the night before she died.

  Gwen wiped her tears away and smiled as she watched a flight of birds take off from the lake. Life goes on, she thought. God knows how, but it does, somehow. And she hoped that one day, maybe, if she was very lucky, she might find a way to forgive herself.

  Author’s Note

  The idea for this novel came as my mother-in-law, Joan Jefferies, reminisced about a childhood spent in India and Burma during the 1920s and early 1930s. As she told stories passed down by her family, which included tea planters in both Ceylon and India, I began thinking about attitudes to race, in particular the typical prejudices of that time.

  My next stop was the audio collection at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, where I found wonderful recorded voices which brought the period to life. Once I’d written the first draft of the book, I went to Sri Lanka. Although Hatton, Dickoya and Nuwara Eliya are real places, Hooper’s Plantation is an amalgamation of several locations and is placed at a higher altitude than Hatton or Dickoya really are. And while I stayed in a Ceylon Tea Trails planter’s bungalow beside a reservoir, it is, of course, not the lake of the novel.

  In the hills of a romantic tea plantation, swathed in mist, my ‘Tea Planter’s Wife’ would have lived an extraordinarily privileged life, but I created a predicament for her that would test all her assumptions about racial differences, and that would explore colonial attitudes and how they spelt such tragedy for her.

  It is medically possible for two different men to father non-identical twins, but regarding the birth of a distinctly dark baby to an apparently fully white couple, the best documented case is of Sandra Laing – born to white Afrikaaner parents in 1950s South Africa but who looked typically black in skin colour, with tight curly hair and other distinctive features. To read more about Sandra, see Judith Stone’s When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race or pages 70–73 in Who Are We – and Should It Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge.

  In the early days it was quite usual for British men going out to work in India and Ceylon to take a ‘native’ bride, as it was felt the men would settle and be better able to deal with the local population. This situation changed, however, especially with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. As more unmarried white women began to travel out to ‘fish’ for a wealthy husband, those born of mixed race were less well tolerated; it was also thought that they might not be as loyal to the Crown.

  Those familiar with the history of Sri Lanka will notice I have shifted the timing of a couple of events to better suit the purposes of the narrative. One was the riot over the language to be taught in schools and one was the battle of the flowers.

  Richard and Judy ask Dinah Jefferies

  The detail you provide of life on a 1920s tea plantation is extraordinary – everything from local wildlife to the bedtime and cleaning rituals of the day. The research must have taken months!

  I loved entering into a vanished world and learning about the intricacies of lives marked by contradictions: part jaw-dropping affluence, part intense isolation. The initial research took a couple of months of total immersion, but the thrilling part was listening to the crackly recordings of men and women who lived in Ceylon and India in the early twentieth century. Their voices melded together as they spoke of certainties, yet their world was on the brink of change; and while many still clung to the old power-structure, I made my main characters, Gwen and Laurence, more enlightened. I read, watched films,
and finally I created the atmosphere of the setting by staying on an enchanting tea plantation in Sri Lanka, complete with flashing fireflies and singing cicadas.

  You were born in Malaysia and lived there until you were nine. How much of your personal memory of life there is woven into your story?

  The colour and the heat maybe, though more of my memories of life in Malaysia found their way into my first novel, The Separation, which Penguin published last year. This time I based Gwen’s struggle to understand her new unfamiliar world on my mother’s experience of going out to live in the East, at the age of nineteen. My mother couldn’t even phone home and missed her family terribly. I think you either fitted in to the colonial world or you did not, and my impression is that although my mother tried hard, she did not.

  Is Gwen ‘of a type’ – did you base her on anyone specific, or on a more generalized idea of the kind of young woman who would have had the determination and guts to make a life (and a marriage) halfway around the world?

  Gwen wasn’t consciously based on anyone specific. She is a naive young woman who falls head over heels in love and, like many women, yearns for adventure. She popped into my head fully formed, but I didn’t think of her as being of a type either, other than that she ‘lived’ when opportunities for women were much more limited than they are now. But her new life certainly calls for determination, and she needs guts to face the emotional fall-out of the story. I set her in the 1920s and 1930s because I’m fascinated by the lives of women then, and by how they handled the period of rapid change and unease between the two world wars.

  Your writing of this period is so vivid … does that betray a secret wish to have lived in such times and such circumstances?

  Now there’s a thought! I did love writing the book and would have happily lived in such a paradise, and at a time when life was less frantic. I’d have relished the adventure too, but I’d have made a terrible colonial wife. I’m not very domesticated and would probably have been off riding elephants rather than taking care of my poor husband. What it really betrays is my longing for the East. For the smells, sights and sounds of it. For the feel of it on my skin. And I wanted to seduce my readers with the sense and texture of the place, the same way it seduces me.