Dignity

by Alys Conran

  Mrs Greenson is not long here before she gets her way in most things. She convinces Benedict absolutely, within a matter of hours as far as I can tell, that the lion’s share of my child’s time should be spent with her, rather than with me.

  ‘Evelyn should occupy herself like a lady,’ she says, with heavy emphasis on the ‘like’. ‘She has plenty of embroidery, sketching, socialising to do. Her child’s education should be left to a professional.’

  ‘But it isn’t all education,’ I say to Benedict. ‘It’s showing her love.’

  I’m not sure he knows what I mean. The way he responds to Mrs Greenson with such approval makes me suspect that his own mother, who died when he was a very young man, was cut from the same, rigid cloth. His father was already an old man when Benedict was born, and a colonel. Benedict himself had nannies. Three in total. When I asked what they were like, he spoke of them with varying degrees of approval, but little affection, as if affection were an irrelevance – and perhaps it is.

  Magda’s growing so big. I look at her often, and think, where did it go? Her babyhood. Where did it go? I feel it’s passed me by. I’ve missed so much of it, although she’s the sole reason that my time has not been wasted. Despite what I often feel, on the long, sweaty nights, when the sound of mosquitoes keeps me awake, my time has not been wasted.

  ‘Oh Evelyn, you’re so soft,’ was all he had to say. ‘You’re soft, and it’ll make your child as useless as you are yourself.’

  I’ve learned to expect the words, but I didn’t expect what happened in the library. I was getting over my second lost pregnancy since Magda. I’d stopped bleeding, but my breasts were still sore, and my body heavy. I was looking through the window, pretending to be taking a note down of the various jobs and alterations that needed to be done, a pen in my hand just hovering above the blank paper, with nothing to say. I’d been at it for a week, trying to find ways of putting our house back in order. Order, that was it. That was what was required.

  It all seemed to sag around me. The decor and furniture looked tired and rough and imperfect and Indian. Looking at the garden, I couldn’t fathom a single way to make it seem more real. More lifelike and English.

  Then, suddenly, Benedict’s hands were around my waist. It was so quick. His mouth at my throat. His teeth at my ear. His hands now reaching around my breasts.

  I tried to say it. No. But I couldn’t breathe. I tried to push him away. But he just gripped at me. Pushed me down against the table.

  Afterwards, when I stood up, my dress was covered in blue ink, and the paper where I’d written the order of things was nowhere to be found.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Self is the wall which keeps the creatures from breaking in.

  ‘The Doctrine of the Chhāndôgyas (Chhāndôgya-Upanishad)’,

  The Ten Principal Upanishads,

  Translated by Shree Purohit Swa¯mi and W. B.Yeats

  Because this is abortion, I expect there to be placards, protests. I expect there to be crazy bible-bashers screaming blue murder. I expect this to be something. But this isn’t America, and isn’t the films, the place is a clinic in a hospital department that’s just like any other one.

  I pass nurses, porters, doctors, cleaners. I follow the signs that say ‘Gynaecology’. A poster on the corridor wall announces that herpes is on the increase again. Another talks about diabetes. I check in at the desk that says ‘Drop-in’.

  ‘I don’t have an appointment,’ I say.

  ‘That’s fine, love,’ says the nurse on reception. ‘Just take a seat.’ She motions towards a half-empty waiting area.

  I take a seat on my own on a row of four blue plastic chairs that are clumped together on a metal frame. A couple sit opposite. She’s in work clothes, a smart suit, and has a name badge; her ankles are neatly crossed underneath her seat. She looks at her partner next to her, and they try to smile at each other. He’s in a suit too. He has kind eyes, and holds her hand, strokes her thumb with his own wide thumb. Perhaps they have kids already, and this was one too many, or perhaps there’s something wrong with the one she has in her belly? Sometimes things like that happen, don’t they? Another younger woman, maybe only my age, sits nearby too. She plays with her phone. When she looks up, her eyes are like a mirror, and I have to look away. At least the nausea’s gone, these past two days.

  There are a few magazines. Homes & Gardens. Reader’s Digest. I could do with something else. Politics, or travel, something to remind me of how fucking big the world is.

  They call the girl and she walks to the double doors where a nurse is standing, waiting to lead her off down the corridor.

  ‘Hello, love,’ says the nurse to her. ‘Come through. Don’t worry, we’re not here to scare you,’ she laughs. The girl hesitates, but the nurse gently presses a hand to her shoulder, and they turn into a doorway and disappear.

  Like the girl had, I take my phone out. Four messages. Ewan. I switch it off without reading them, but the first words of the last message had flashed up on my phone. Please please call me.

  ‘Susheela Gupta.’

  I get up, walk towards the nurse.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘We’re not here to scare you.’ I hear myself laughing brittlely.

  She points to a chair in the corridor, and reaches out to me with a clipboard, a form on it. ‘Fill this in. Dr Stevens is just with another patient, he’ll call you in when he’s done.’ She leaves me on a chair outside his office.

  I sit and stare at more health posters. Keep Our Patients Healthy. WASH YOUR HANDS. I start blindly ticking the boxes on the form. They prove I’m still healthy. I’d score top marks, if there were marks. I leave the space where it says ‘Reason for visit’ until last. And then I write in it. Abortion.

  After a few minutes, the doctor pops his balding head around the doorway.

  ‘Come in,’ he says, with a smile.

  I walk into his pale green room. Just an examination couch, a desk, computer, a couple of those yellow hospital bins, and a chair for each of us. He takes the form on the clipboard. I sit down. Two minutes or so pass while he checks through it.

  ‘How many weeks are you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘When did you have your last period?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘OK,’ he says, frowning slightly. ‘Roughly, then.’

  ‘Maybe two months, maybe three,’ I say.

  He nods. ‘We’ll need to do some tests,’ he says in a flat, calm tone, ‘just to work out where exactly you’re at.’

  ‘OK,’ I say.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he says, looking at me carefully and smiling a bit, ‘a couple of people have cancelled appointments today, so there’s some space in the schedule for tests. I can send you for those now, and then we can talk through your options. Does that sound OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘So,’ he says, standing up and walking to the door, ‘you just go and wait out there, and a nurse will call you in for an ultrasound.’

  ‘Ultrasound?’

  ‘Yes. We just need to take a look at the foetus and see about what stage you’re at.’

  Foetus. I hate the word suddenly. Foetus. ‘OK,’ I say numbly, and leave the room again.

  They take a while to call me for the scan, but there are no thoughts in that time. Only that word. Foetus. Foetus. Foetus.

  I have to walk with a nurse all along the corridors to the ultrasound unit.

  ‘Sit down here,’ she says, ‘and we’ll call you when it’s your turn.’

  Another waiting room. I’d forgotten this about outpatient treatments with Mum, how you bounce between one plastic chair and another for hours. One of the things no one tells you about terminal illness is the huge amount of precious time you waste, waiting.

  This time the waiting area’s full of couples. Some almost middle-aged, some young like me. Most of these look happy. Happy to be pregnant. Why are we sent to the same place? I sit, staring at my
phone, my only portal to something else.

  A feeling in my belly. A sudden movement.

  I must have jumped, because the lady opposite me, whose pregnancy is pretty far along judging by her bump, smiles at me and strokes her own belly fondly. I just stare at her. And then stare down at my phone again. And Ewan’s messages. I go on Facebook for the first time today. Pictures of Leah and the others out last night. Blurred, too much flash. Leathered. Pissed. Fucked. I put my phone down and stare straight ahead until they finally call me.

  ‘Just come in and lie on the couch here,’ says an older-looking nurse, motioning to a raised examination bed beside her, covered with a roll of blue hospital-issue paper. ‘Have you got anyone with you today?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘That’s fine,’ she says. ‘Plenty of girls come on their own.’ She sits down in front of a monitor. ‘Now, I’ll just tell you what’s going to happen,’ she says. ‘I’ll need you to roll up your top, and just open your trousers so they’re low on your hips and I can access the whole abdomen. I’ll put a bit of gel on your belly, which will feel a bit cold, and then I’ll just press this across the whole area.’ She holds up a kind of torch. ‘So we can see what kind of shape the baby’s in,’ she smiles. ‘OK?’

  I nod.

  I roll up my top, and open the top button of my trousers.

  ‘That’s fine,’ she says. She rubs a bit of slimy gel on my belly, and then pushes the torch around.

  ‘OK.’ she says, with a smile, turning the monitor towards me. ‘Here it is!’

  ‘I don’t want to see!’

  Little thing, green on the screen, moving and moving like a real human, or a small frog in water. I stare at you. I stare at you.

  ‘OK,’ she says, turning the screen away from me. ‘Seems fine,’ she says quickly. ‘Has all the right bits. I’d say at least fourteen weeks.’

  I reach out and turn the monitor back towards me, stare at the screen.

  I stand up suddenly, rolling down my top.

  ‘Hang on!’ she says, but I’m already out of the door, running along the corridor, through the double doors, towards the big turnstile entrance and out into the car park and life.

  Book Two

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  She will be zealous in guarding her children from promiscuous intimacy with the native servants, whose propensity to worship at the shrine of the Baba-log is unhappily apt to demoralize the small gods and goddesses they serve.

  The Englishwoman in India,

  Maud Diver

  Mummy hits me because of Daddy. Daddy’s eyes are hot hot hot like chillies when they look at Aashi. But pretty Aashi is like yoghurt and cools right down, walking away from him and trying not to be in the same room, although he’s the most important. Here Daddy is the most important of all and so I’m the most important child.

  Mummy says I’m not to be mollycoddled. Mollycoddled means saying yes to the sweets when Anwar and Madan slip them under the table like a secret. On my tongue the sweets melt and pop, and are sometimes sour and spicy so I can pull my secret face and Anwar and Madan laugh like this. Huh. Trying not to make a noise.

  Daddy’s angry that they laugh because he’s working. He’s drawing the railway. Daddy’s lines are all perfect and just right. He’s clever like me. He uses the brass draughtsman’s tools from his wooden box. They’re pretty, his little tools, but they’re sharp and too sly and so I’m not allowed to touch unless Daddy’s hands are there too, showing me how to do it. One is a compass, which we use to draw a circle which is like the world with India on one side of it and Home on the other side.

  Home is where there is no spicy food and no Indians and where Mummy says we are very happy. It’s not so very far on my perfect circle from India to Home but Mummy says it takes weeks and she would be sick almost the whole way and so might I and so we won’t go until the baby.

  The doctor will come with his gloves and take the baby from Mummy’s apple stomach and I shall have a little brother. Mummy says we don’t know which we are having but Anwar says Daddy is a big strong man so it will be a boy. He tries to give Mummy lots of a sweet drink he makes with rice and almonds to make sure of it, but she bats him away like a fly and won’t look at the drink. Why does Anwar want Mummy to have a boy? I’m a girl and I am just so.

  Mummy is growing every day like a fruit that is being blown up and up by the sun, and while her stomach grows her eyes sink back and turn grey. Her hair is not often put up in the pretty way and Daddy doesn’t notice her any more. Lucky that Aashi does my hair for me. Aashi’s is always beautifully combed. Aashi combs my hair and sings a pretty song about the leaves and the trees and the sun in the morning. Sun is ‘sūrya’ and leaves are ‘pātā’. Daddy and I both know this but Mummy does not, and if she knows I know then she will rap my knuckles. But how could I not know when I’m with Aashi so much and she sings over and over the same songs? Singing them like the bluebirds in the morning in Mummy’s book of British birds.

  Every week we learn about different British birds. The great tit. The blackbird. The nightingale. The owl. I know them all. Here there are different birds which sing in the morning and the evening, and sometimes in the night, but I’m to learn the British birds for when I go Home. Mummy says we are like the white storks we see at the lagoon which live between many countries. We have come all the way from England to India to stay but our Home is not here. But I am here and so I’m singing like Aashi. Why not? Singing is good and it fills your arms and legs and head with the song. Why not turn and turn like this when I sing it, Aashi’s song?

  This time it’s Anwar who stops me.

  ‘Your mummy will rap your knuckles if she sees you doing that, little Magda,’ he says, and he shakes a finger in the air like Mummy. When I stop and say ‘I’m not little Magda any more,’ he just laughs. ‘Big girls sing too. Why not sing “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, or another English song?’

  All right. I’m singing and turning and turning until my thoughts and all the words spin up together. Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

  When I fall and break Mummy’s plant pots there is trouble anyway. While she shouts and cries at me I stand with the singing and singing in my head, watching the brown earth from the pots slip and slide onto Anwar’s perfect floor. Anwar will not be angry. I will be mollycoddled with more sweets if I cry because of Mummy.

  Mummy’s angry. Mummy’s angry because she has come a long way from Home on a ship to be here and have me and the new baby and be married to Daddy. She’s angry with everything here because it’s not hers and she cannot go Home. Except for Daddy we’re all afraid of her – Anwar, Madan and me and all of the other servants – but most of all Aashi, because Mummy hates her. Perhaps it’s because of Daddy’s hot eyes. I think it may be. I think maybe Mummy is unhappy.

  I ask several people. I ask Raja. Raja comes to the garden to play when Mummy and Daddy are away and I’m left with the servants. Aashi lets him. It’s because she is his mother, Raja says. Raja likes my garden. He likes my little house in the garden. He says it is so big, he cannot believe it is only a playhouse.

  ‘Gosh!’ he says. ‘Gosh, madam!’ and I am proud. He teaches me a lot of Indian games, and I teach him English, although he’s already very good because his mother works for us.

  ‘My mother is a whore,’ he says. I do not know what that means. Why don’t I ask Raja? Because I think perhaps Raja is even more clever than me. This is the first time I have had a friend who is clever. All the children at the Sunday school, for example, are as dim as blown-out candles. I’m the best at everything, at reading and writing and even at the Bible and saying prayers.

  Everyone tells me Raja is dirty. ‘Raja is dirty and will make you sick,’ Mummy says.

  But Raja is still my friend. And Raja never touches me anyway. If my hand touches his hand by mistake, or if I brush against him, Raja jumps away. When he leaves I wash and wash my hands and my face so that
I do not get sick. I do this every single time he comes and so far, so good.

  I want to ask Raja what a whore is. But I don’t. I ask him similar but different questions:

  ‘Was Aashi always a whore?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘She was respectable. And then she was a wet nurse.’

  This time I do ask. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a woman who gives her breast to other women’s babies. Her milk.’

  ‘Whose babies?’

  ‘That depends. Rich women. Englishwomen.’ He grins. ‘Your mother, perhaps.’

  ‘Did I have a wet nurse?’ I ask Mummy.

  Mummy is a little shocked. She goes a little quiet.

  Then, ‘Yes,’ she says, because she knows I am very clever, and will know if she lies. ‘I did not have enough milk.’ She looks at me, and she laughs because I am looking so surprised. It makes me feel strange inside to think of drinking milk from an Indian breast, even from Aashi who is marigolds and roses. And why did Mummy not have enough milk?

  ‘Don’t worry, Magda. Your wet nurse wasn’t Indian,’ she says, because sometimes like me Mummy can hear other people’s thoughts.

  I’m happy to hear this. I would not like to think I had Indian milk. Everyone says Indians are dirty and not as bright as I will be one day, and I should not think their milk would be so good for you.

  ‘Do you think Mummy is unhappy?’ I ask Raja one day when we’re playing a slow crisses and crosses game on the dusty floor of my playhouse.

  ‘No,’ he says. He looks surprised. ‘She is English. She has a big house and a rich husband.’

  ‘Our house isn’t that big,’ I say. Because Elizabeth has a bigger house. Her father is a lord.

  Raja looks at me. He shakes his head. ‘Madam,’ he says. ‘You are stupid.’

  ‘I am not!’ I say. ‘I am not stupid.’

  ‘Madam,’ he says, with a flick of his hand. ‘You know nothing.’

  ‘I do!’ I say. ‘I expect you don’t know where England is on the globe.’