by Glen Duncan
‘Grandpa?’ she says, not loudly, sensing movement again outside her door.
‘Aye?’ her grandfather calls back. Uncle Cyril releases her–then suddenly draws his right hand across his chest in preparation for belting her. His face is dead except for the top teeth biting the bottom lip, as at the beginning of a violent F or V. The monkey eyes are lifeless.
She doesn’t flinch. Closes her eyes and says, conversationally: ‘What time do we need to leave tomorrow?’
Her grandfather coughs, approaches the doorway just as Cyril drops his hand and steps back. For a moment, silence, the old man sheepishly deducing. Kate bends and picks the book up, moves round her uncle, puts it in the open trunk, on top of her neatly folded clothes, starched white blouses and blue pinafores, white knee-socks snugly folded into themselves.
‘Need to leave around ten,’ the old man says. The room’s still clogged with the moments before; his croaky voice abraids, beautifully as far as Kate’s concerned. ‘Don’t worry, lass, I’m up at cracker dawn any road.’
Cyril looks out of the window. ‘No point in calling for Kalia,’ he says. ‘I’ve given that little bastard his marching orders.’
Leaving the room he avoids touching the old man in the doorway.
‘Here,’ her grandfather whispers, producing the letter, sealed and addressed to the Silverses. ‘I’ve signed it for you.’
Stairs, handrails, newels, benches, trestles, desks, kneelers, sills–Jesus and Mary Convent School has been Kate’s introduction to things with a sad history of touch. The pathos of these objects is that they stay and you leave. Every year girls’ palms and fingertips and feet and knees, intimacy–then gone. You can feel sorry for a coat-hook, a doorknob, a bowl, a chair. When you sit on the stairs alone with your arms round your shins and your palms or calves on fire from the cane, the dark wood offers you its inarticulate sympathy, a moment you take, consume and forget but which it absorbs and will remember, uselessly, for ever. Some future girl will sit here and feel the same sympathy, years from now. You’ll be a part of it, but she won’t know and neither will you. That’s the objects’ sadness, that they connect the private moments of people who will always remain strangers.
Kate goes through the first half of term convinced every day something’s going to go wrong. Nightly, when the other girls in the dorm are asleep, she checks that the little bundle of notes (it seems an increasingly paltry sum as the time for flight nears) is safe in its skirting-board cranny, that her locker’s stash of tinned sardines and dates and raisins and corned beef and chocolate remains unmolested. These are strange hours, God in frigid vigilance over her. Just give me a chance. Silence. The star eyes unblinking. She reverts to the old prayers. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb…
Eleanor Silvers can’t stop yammering about the wedding. (‘Silvers’, the rumour is, has been strategically altered from the Goan da Silva. If true Eleanor ought by rights to be in the school’s other division–perversely called ‘English-speaking’, to denote pupils who are neither European nor Anglo-Indian, but who none the less speak English. Since her fees are paid promptly, however, the nuns dismiss the rumour.) ‘What are you wearing?’ she asks Kate, the week before they’re due to leave.
‘My mother’s dress. I’ve told you. White, with red poppies.’
‘You should see my frock,’ Eleanor says. ‘Mummy made it. Lilac, with puff sleeves and a fitted bodice. And the gloves, my God. They’re too perfect!’
Countless times Kate’s on the verge of blabbing: I’m not coming back. One morning in Lahore you’ll wake up and I’ll be gone. But Eleanor can’t be trusted. You tell her a secret and twenty-four hours later it’s all over school. Kate imagines the family–these Silverses she’s never met–coming to the shocking realization that she’s missing. There’s the bed cold, no sign; satchel, shoes, clothes, all gone. Eleanor’s prim face with its almond eyes and pointy little chin quivering on the edge of tears. She’ll think it’s her fault. What kind of crazy child did you bring here? Your sister’s wedding day, for God’s sake. They’ll call the police. A telegram will go to the school, and from school to Bhusawal…
Just let me do this, Kate thinks, pleads, demands. Just give me a chance. She’s waiting for some sign of God’s endorsement, a signal, a stroke of luck. But the school, the objects around her, buzz with His ambiguity.
Then, the day before she and Eleanor are due to leave, something happens.
From inside you.
In the toilets, bending to pull up her underpants after a pee, she feels a trickle down her thigh. Looks. Disbelieves.
Blood.
From inside you. Put your hand there. You’ll see.
Obedient, incredulous, weak-kneed, she touches with her fingertips. Blood again. Knuckles seem to move inside her, the cramped fist of someone who’s been asleep and is now awkwardly waking up. Another hot trickle, an intimate warm wet thread as when you feel a tear running down your cheek.
For what feels like a long time (the bell for afternoon lessons rings, to Kate a representative of the old friendly useless world, the world before this–her death, she thinks) she stands trembling in the cubicle, dabbing with her hanky, stopping herself crying.
Bizarrely, Sister Anne knows what she’s trying to tell her. She takes Kate to the infirmary and shows her how to fold the cotton square between her legs like a nappy. ‘This means you’re a young lady now, Katherine, a young woman, do you understand?’ Kate doesn’t. Sister Anne lowers her voice. ‘“Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception,”’ she says. ‘“In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” This is part of the sorrow, you see? Every month now this’ll happen for a few days. It means that when you meet a man and get married you can have a baby. But every month now you’ll get a little reminder of Eve’s sin.’ ‘Do the boys get a reminder of Adam’s sin?’ Kate asks. ‘The boys don’t,’ Sister Anne says in a tone of finality.
‘Yes, but why does the blood come?’ Eleanor Silvers wants to know, that night.
‘It’s so you can have a baby,’ Kate says. This realization, that she’s capable (technically, Sister Anne had stressed, big-eyed, index finger raised) of having a baby, has entered her confusedly, like a mild, fuddled demonic possession. She still has no idea how she can have a baby, how a baby gets inside you. It had been utterly incredible. For a few moments, listening, wrapped in the ridiculous cotton nappy, she’d thought Sister Anne had gone mad. But at the same time knew she hadn’t, that the shape this garbled knowledge made was distantly familiar, her mother sometimes taking to her bed for a day or two, lying on her side curled up and her father very tender, saying, Poor girl, what can I get you?
‘Let me in,’ Eleanor says. She’s a smart, mercurial, fidgety thing, sassy in the playground but prone to nightmares. One night a year ago she’d woken Kate and asked, tearfully, to get into her bed with her. Kate had been surprised and hadn’t liked the idea of anyone else in her bed (the beds were small enough as it was); but she’d been so intrigued by the reduction of cocky bright Eleanor to snivelling pleading Eleanor (and, if she was honest, flattered that Eleanor had come to her) that she’d said all right, and Eleanor had climbed in and snuggled up against her. It’s happened three or four times since. Kate doesn’t mind. The only danger is both of them sleeping through until the nuns come with the bell for morning prayers. So far, by the grace of some inner clock, they’ve managed to wake up in time for Eleanor to scoot back to her own bed.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Eleanor says.
‘It’s true.’
‘I’m going to ask my mummy.’
‘Don’t!’ Kate says. No queries that’ll draw unnecessary adult Silvers attention. ‘You mustn’t. It’s a private thing.’
Eleanor’s quiet for a while, then says: ‘I saw Lillian and Anthony kissing and he had his hand up her skirt.’ Lillian is the bride-to-be, Anthony the fiancé. ‘Lillian w
as wriggling like she had an itch.’
Kate says nothing. Closes her eyes. The cotton pad isn’t comfortable; she can’t imagine getting used to it. Sister Anne’s given her a dozen, for which she’ll have to make room in the already crammed satchel.
‘It’s what they do,’ Eleanor says. ‘Boys. Try’n touch you down there.’
Eleanor’s brother comes down from Lahore to fetch them. He’s a taciturn, bespectacled youth of twenty studying for a physics degree, keeps his nose in books the whole journey. From deep within her current state–rich but unfocused preoccupation–Kate is dimly aware that Eleanor feels cheated, is regretting having asked her to come. She, Eleanor, had been waiting for a mood of anarchic holiday. Instead she’s got her boffin brother’s indifference and Kate’s self-absorption. ‘I could have asked Vera, you know,’ she says in a huff at Jaipur where, after several hundred miles, she’s come close to the end of her patience. ‘I thought we were going to have fun, for God’s sake.’ Kate, hauling herself up, determines to make an effort, for an hour or two plies her friend with questions about her family, but sinks back into herself. She doesn’t know what’s going on, only that something is confusedly coming into being in herself. Her mind returns to a handful of thoughts repeatedly: the blood’s warm trickle; her uncle’s hand drawn back to hit her; technically it means you can have a baby; you’ve got so tall, which turned out to be the last words.
She has four days with Eleanor before the wedding, largely spent mooching about, Kate drifting in and out of the here and now, Eleanor in and out of sulks. At night Kate lies awake, rehearsing the moment she knows must come. She sees herself sweeping an empty hotel room, washing dishes, bathing the children of strangers. Practical potentialities creep in and thrill her: the guests will be wealthy. She’ll ask someone for domestic work. She’ll do anything. She’ll be free. It’s a matter of days, hours. At night the city murmurs, surely a confirmation? Meanwhile Eleanor sleeps with her mouth open and her limbs thrown wide. There’s talk of going to see Casablanca (the Metro gets Hollywood movies as they’re released) but in the end it doesn’t happen. Mostly the girls spend their time lying on their bellies in the garden moving their bare shins back and forth while leafing through Mrs Silvers’s old Photoplays and Screen Idols. Eleanor’s mother (by the number of Fonsecas and Devazes and da Souzas and Mesquitas who’ve descended on the home, there seems little doubt that the Silverses are indeed Goans, not that Kate cares) is a willowy good-looking woman with an elaborate chignon, whose pleasure in her elder daughter’s advantageous match (the bridegroom’s family owns property and a flour mill) translates into a general goodwill to everyone, flits around the place with a glassy smile that drives Eleanor mad. Mr Silvers, on the other hand, remains in a state of pessimistic anxiety, responds to every hiccup as if it’s the catastrophe he’s been expecting, the disastrous detail that will bring the whole of his daughter’s remunerative future crashing to the ground.
‘Anthony’s not as handsome as Father Fonseca,’ Eleanor says of her soon-to-be brother-in-law. ‘Personally I don’t know what Lillian sees in him.’
Because she’s jealous, Kate knows. The older Silvers sister is a supple girl of twenty-two with her mother’s good looks, slender hands and a thick fall of lustrous black hair.
‘You can bet when I marry,’ Eleanor says, ‘it’ll be absolutely for love.’
The morning of the wedding Kate wakes late, weak with nerves. For a while she lies in bed, listening to the traffic and the household’s bustle. Until now she’s stopped herself noticing the city–even this suburban bit; some instinct has told her not to let the reality of it in until the moment she throws herself on it. But now the moment is almost here she feels the city itself (alerted by God, perhaps) putting out a strand of vague enquiry, as if it’s noticed her presence, a new soul among its millions. Who are you? What are you doing here?
Eleanor tries on a dozen different pairs of earrings, clomps rapidly around the upstairs rooms from mirror to mirror in her high heels. They’re slightly too big for her, Kate can tell. Mr Silvers keeps screaming at his wife to come and settle the bleddy cook, who despite specific instructions has failed to make any curry puffs. There’s a terrible confusion when the gharis come, what feels like an hour of shuffling and reshuffling, of determining who travels with whom, of false starts and forgotten buttonholes, but eventually Kate is allocated a place with cousins from Sukkur, and in a moment (the same moment in which Ross and his friends are setting off for Mrs Naicker’s and Ho Fun’s) is on her way. Details of the unfamiliar streets are vivid whether she likes it or not: a red and white striped awning; a rickshaw having its buckled wheel changed; two fat ladies waving the procession on with white handkerchiefs; a tiny lone fruit stall crammed with oranges and limes.
The church ceremony goes by Kate in a dream. Again details flare and gleam: the bridegroom’s extraordinarily delicate lifting of the veil; Mrs Silvers’s hat of pink silk leaves; a brass candle stand when a cloud moves and releases its glow; Eleanor’s sister on the arm of her new husband walking back down the aisle with her head bowed but then lifting it and giving a shy smile to Kate thought her but it was someone next to her.
Outside in the church’s sprawling front garden where there’s endless kissing and handshaking and embracing and kids running around in the sunshine glad only that all the shush, quiet, shush of the church is behind them, Kate in her mother’s poppy print dress drifts at the perimeter. Throughout the service she’s oscillated between nausea and tremulous excitement. You can bet when I marry…As an afterthought (slyly, it might have been) Eleanor had said: What about you? Will you marry for love?
The bride and her new husband stand facing each other, her hands in his, for a photograph. It’s what you’ll never have, Kate tells herself, unless…
The thought fizzles out. Your first period. My what? she’d asked Sister Anne. Your menses, dear. When a girl becomes a woman, don’t you see? Very gradually over the last few days (it was happening all the long train journey up here, a gentle insistent transformation somewhere in her middle) the realization that this, her womanhood, her future, is the future she’s never been able to quite believe in. Her satchel is packed. The thirty rupees are rolled and rubber-banded in the bottom of her purse. Tonight, in the small hours just before dawn, she’ll creep from the Silverses’ house and melt away into the city. She looks up at the sky. She’d forgotten it, the purer northern blue, the height of it. She remembers the Quetta winters of her childhood, the nights black and silver, the distant mountains gashed with snow. Her mother in thick socks and with the sleeves of her pink cardigan pulled down over her hands. The wall map in Mr Silvers’s study says Quetta’s only about 250 miles away. It’s never occurred to her that she could go back there, seek out Edwin Hawes (poor Margot gone in the earthquake), ask for help. She remembers the fuss they used to make of her, the reservoir of untapped love their childlessness had left them with. She’d been aware of it, dimly, something she’d had no use for at the time–but when she thinks of it now the memory works like a talisman she never knew she had. Margot used to braid her hair, give her little trinkets to wear. They were kind.
Kate breathes deeply, lets the first filament of freedom settle on her. Thinks, knowing it’s a sentimental indulgence and a provocation: I’m almost home.
‘I suppose you think you’re bleddy smart, don’t you?’
At the voice she goes rigid. Fingers lock round her left arm. They feel strangely cool. Cyril, standing close behind her, takes a ceremonial-style step backwards, forces her to step back with him. There’s a line of trees behind them, a narrow avenue of cinnamons separating the church grounds from a football pitch that’s turned to dust. Three more paces. This is impossible. Her mind begins to plot the trajectories of explanation–then gives up. The how doesn’t matter. He’s here. One way or another he’s found out. The first band of trees is between her and the wedding guests. He wants them out of sight. She’ll never be free of him. This is the developm
ent God’s been waiting for. Now that it’s here Kate understands it’s been there in potentia for years. Perhaps ever since she went to Bhusawal.
‘You bleddy ungrateful little wretch,’ Cyril says, yanking her round to face him. ‘I suppose you think you’re the cat that gets the bleddy cream with this little adventure.’ His fingers have tightened on her bare arm. There’ll be bruises, dirty fingerprints. She pulls against him. He hits her, once, backhanded across the face, the pinkie ring leaves a scratch like the scar of a struck match. ‘You’ve got your bleddy granddad to thank. What do you think? What’re the odds? You’d have gotten away with it, madam, but he’s sick. Came to the bleddy school to fetch you, didn’t I, like a Joe Soap? Thenwhat? Oh, no, sir, not here. Up in bleddy Lahore, if you please.’ He laughs as if genuinely tickled. He is pleased, she can tell, the satisfaction of having at long last a rationale.
Three of the let loose children burst through the trees, one with a length of pink ribbon clutched in his fist, the other two chasing, laughing. For a moment his grip loosens. She tears herself away from him and runs, blindly, for what feels like miles, her chest empty.
Dusty buildings and broad streets funnel into a warren of narrower ways. There’s a rickshaw stand, her purse clutched tight. The Old City, she tells the driver. It’s the only destination she can think of. She and Eleanor were supposed to go there with her mother two days ago. In her panic she fishes out a dirty five-rupee note and tries to pay before they’ve even set off. No, no, miss, when we get there. Don’t worry, I give you fair price.
Something is finished in her. The image of the bride and groom standing together for the photograph blooms, repeatedly, in her head.
I told you, God says–and in the moment of hearing this Kate accepts the thought that for a long time, possibly years, has been amorphously present in her head: that as long as Cyril is alive she’ll never be free.