Dignity

by Alys Conran

  ‘Food,’ he says, honestly. ‘We struggle to buy enough for the servants.’

  ‘Good lord, Anwar,’ I say. ‘Is it so bad?’

  ‘Terrible,’ he says.

  After that we request a few more rations, claiming that Mrs Greenson has a son staying. We manage to tell the fib so well it’s unquestioned. We can’t have servants passing out while serving us the tea.

  I find out from Mrs Burrows that the government is coming under censure for the impact of some of our infrastructure on farming. The allegation is that railway embankments, roads, dams, have disrupted water tables and harvests. It sounds farfetched, even to me.

  ‘Of all the ungrateful …!’ exclaims Mrs Burrows. ‘India was nothing before the British.’ And I must say that I do agree. For I have not seen a road or a train or a dam or a decent bridge here built by anyone else, though their grand palaces and temples are admittedly very impressive. But really, they aren’t infrastructure, are they? Whereas we are.

  William is once again invited to tea. This time I join them, briefly.

  ‘It’s very nice to meet you,’ he says again.

  ‘Ah, but we’ve already met,’ I say. I don’t take his hand this time. I’ve learned. Give them an inch, and they take a mile.

  He looks confused. Of course he doesn’t remember, for I was just one memsahib among a hundred at the gala. Gosh, to think that then he was one of the only Indians. How opportunist they all seem to have become. Now, whenever we have society gatherings, there are several among the gentlemen and ladies. At times you almost forget they are Indian at all.

  ‘How are you enjoying the work?’ I ask him.

  ‘Very much,’ he says with a smile.

  ‘Is it not terribly difficult?’

  He shakes his head, looks exasperated, and then seems to remember himself. ‘It has its moments,’ he says, looking at Benedict.

  Benedict smiles, then does something strange. He calls Aashi in.

  She stands awkwardly in the doorway. For a second her eyes meet her husband’s. You get a sense they know that together they are being ambushed. I feel sorry for her suddenly, though I frequently ambush her myself.

  ‘Come in, girl. Come and sit down,’ says Benedict. ‘Have a cup of tea like a real lady.’

  She sits down beside her husband.

  Benedict makes Anwar, who stands by the tea trolley presiding over the occasion, give her a cup of tea, and a slice of cake too. She bows her head to Anwar, for thank you, and sits, holding her cup and saucer, too afraid to drink the tea.

  ‘Drink it,’ says Benedict with his hard, cold voice, watching her intently.

  ‘Sir!’ William is on his feet.

  ‘It’s only a cup of tea,’ says Benedict evenly without taking his eyes from Aashi.

  William stands for a few moments, and then sits down again. His eyes meet mine for a second. We’re both appalled.

  ‘Drink it,’ says William to Aashi in Bengali.

  She does, she drinks a sip or two.

  ‘Don’t you want the cake?’ asks Benedict. And then he watches as she eats it, one mouthful at a time, her hand shaking each time she raises it to her small mouth. None of us speak.

  ‘Lovely,’ says Benedict, when she’s finished.

  There’s a long silence, during which Benedict simply continues to observe her, his eyes wandering at leisure as she sits, hers cast down. William is pale with rage. But he can do nothing. We still hold all the cards.

  As for me, what do I do?

  ‘Nothing,’ I once told my pupils, all those years ago, ‘is not a verb.’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Ants have wonderful laws, obey their queen, and keep their cows, and pet beetles, their slaves, and their soldiers.

  How Girls Can Help to Build up the Empire:

  The Handbook for Girl Guides,

  Miss Baden-Powell and Sir R. Baden-Powell ‘Have you told him, the father?’ Magda sits, under the clock. I’ve combed her hair into a blur of white. She’s dressed. She’s had tea, toast. She’s ready for a fight.

  I nod.

  ‘Well? What did he say?’

  ‘He hung up.’ There’s a sore, rough place in my voice.

  She sighs. We sit. The hollow ticking of the clock. ‘What’s he like, this young man?’

  ‘What d’you mean, what’s he like? He hung up when I told him I was pregnant.’ My voice is high. I taste dried lemons.

  She bats at the air with a hand as if that’s nothing, completely unfazed by how worked up I am. ‘Is he kind, or generous?’ She’s looking at me like I’m some kind of specimen in a jar. Examining me and my bloody awful situation.

  ‘I used to think he was.’

  ‘Before he left you?’

  I nod again.

  ‘What’s wrong with him? Hmm?’

  A silence. How the fuck did she know? I try to think of clues I’ve given off, nightmares of his I’ve mentioned. But there’s nothing, only her steady grey eyes, acute as a microscope.

  ‘He’s been in the army,’ I say.

  She nods instantly. A pleased expression. She’s getting somewhere. ‘Broken, is he?’ As if she’s got a tick list. As if this is all half expected.

  ‘Deaf.’ I say it flatly. ‘Well, pretty much. And he gets bad dreams.’

  She nods. Thinks for a bit. You can feel the thoughts clicking by methodically, second by second.

  ‘Bring him,’ she says, finally. It’s a command, not a question. I don’t tell her there’s no way in hell he’ll come. Magda won’t take no way in hell as an answer.

  Perhaps because of that conversation, or just because I need to hear something other than the thrum of blood in my ears and feel something other than this tightness in my chest, I answer Ewan’s call tonight.

  ‘Hi,’ I say.

  A delay.

  ‘Oh!’ says his voice. ‘Is that really you? I thought it was voicemail again.’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘it really is me.’ Although I don’t actually feel that’s true. Who the fuck am I?

  ‘Su, are you OK? Can I come round? We need to talk.’ He sounds like he always does: clever, gentle, easy to break.

  ‘No,’ I say. Just no. My whole body is so heavy. My head’s like lead.

  Then I start to cry, holding the phone, holding it. The phone to my ear is the closest thing to a person I’ve got.

  ‘Are you at your dad’s?’

  I say nothing.

  ‘Su, are you at your dad’s?’

  I close the door of my phone on him finally, click it shut.

  The doorbell rings. I look through the side window. He stands there, in the dark and rain, his coat shining under the streetlights. When he sees my face in the window, he’s like someone shut in who suddenly feels the touch of fresh air. His eyes go wide, frank.

  ‘Who’s there?’ calls my dad from upstairs.

  ‘Salesman!’ I say, and slip out.

  His body, standing there, tall and warm against the cool night.

  ‘Su,’ he says, as I grab his arm to move us both away from the house. The words come tumbling, ‘It was a mistake. I shouldn’t have finished it. I’ve been sick. In the head … hang on, where are we going?’ as I drag him down the road, gripping the warmth of his arm through the raincoat.

  ‘Anywhere,’ I say. ‘To the sea.’

  We walk fast.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he keeps asking. ‘Su, are you OK?’

  Eventually I stop. I want to smack him across the face, but that’d be too easy.

  ‘No,’ I say. I look at him, his vulnerable, beautiful face, dark circles under his eyes from not sleeping, from the repeating dreams. ‘I’m not fucking OK, at all. I’m not OK, Ewan.’

  We walk along the seafront, whipped by the wind and sea spray, and I tell him: Dad’s debts.

  ‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Don’t you start.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  We walk again in silence. We walk past the arcades and their plinkety sound
s, of coins falling.

  ‘I told Dad about college too,’ I say.

  ‘Really?’ he says, stopping. ‘Well done.’

  He’s almost smiling, and I’m not ready for his smile. He must sense that, because it fades like a lowering sun.

  ‘You don’t have to get rid of it, Su,’ he says quietly, turning to me. ‘We can do this, you know?’

  ‘No we bloody can’t. But I can’t get rid of it anyway. It’s too late, Ewan.’

  A space opens between us as we stare at each other. I look into his soft, lost eyes.

  When he opens the door of his flat, I think for a second that thieves have been in. The pictures are skewed on the walls, two pot plants have been upset on the floor. There’s a smell of gone-off things.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ve been in a weird place.’

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘Bad,’ he says, and sighs. Standing there, in the middle of the kitchen, he looks out of the window, takes a deep breath. ‘I can’t study, too jittery. And it happened at the garage the other day. Someone came up when I was under a car, and when I saw their feet there, I fucking screamed.’ He starts trying to clear a space to make food on the kitchen worktop. ‘I’ll be all right now you’re here,’ he says, throwing empty tins and old packets of cheese from the counter into the bin.

  We make pasta, silently. We sit down at our plates, at the table. Ewan looks at me and puts his warm hand on mine. His hand has a slight tremor. We sit, bracketed by each other. Unsafe.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature.

  No Name,

  Wilkie Collins

  Aashi is starting to show. I hate her for it, that easy pregnancy. She hides it well, under the pleats of her white serving sari, but even if I did not notice the new weight she carries around her middle, I would have known by the heaviness of her face, her air of torpor, and the way she is so quiet when they’re preparing food, as if overtaken by disgust as the smells waft through the open doors of our house. Apart from these subtleties, she carries on as before.

  It only occurs to me that there is anything untoward about it when Magda comes with her strange question.

  ‘Mummy,’ she says. ‘What is a whore?’

  I’m shocked to hear such a word from her, since she is home-schooled so far, and rarely hears expletives of any kind. It is like seeing a real weapon in her hand, that word, ‘whore’.

  ‘Magda!’ I say.

  She looks shocked, having evidently no idea what she’s said.

  ‘Is it a bad word, Mummy?’

  ‘Very bad, Magda. You mustn’t repeat it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, looking veritably unhappy, for she does like to please, my little girl.

  ‘Where did you learn it?’

  At first she will not tell me, and I have to shake her hard for an answer.

  ‘Raja,’ she says, crying.

  This friendship has been trouble from the very start.

  ‘And where did he learn it?’

  She shakes her head, at a loss.

  There’s a silence. And then.

  ‘He said his mother was one. His father said so.’

  I’m taken aback. William didn’t seem the type to throw insults around. So polite and charming. And as for Aashi? The epitome of propriety, except for that day with Benedict and the cake.

  ‘Well it’s a terrible thing to say, Magda. Next time, you must tell him that.’

  She nods, and goes back to setting her flowers in the press, her tongue in the corner of her mouth. They are buttercups and daisies we have grown with such care you would think they were made of glass. Now they are flat to the pages of the press, like a frozen alphabet. They spell meadow. Outside it’s red dry.

  That was the first indication, and perhaps I might have been more prescient, but I didn’t really begin to realise that Aashi was in trouble until I saw her crying.

  When I looked out of the door across the veranda and the parched garden that day, I saw Aashi, sitting alone on the edge wall of our valiant little pond.

  Aloneness is not something they seek out, on the whole, our servants. Partly, presumably, because I keep them so busy. As anyone, and any manual will tell you, idle hands make idle minds; and idle minds, tongues; and tongues gossip.

  But Aashi is sitting alone, and, by the way her shoulders move up and down and up, she’s weeping.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ I ask Anwar, who is sweeping the veranda.

  He looks out at her. ‘Nothing, Memsahib,’ he says, as densely as he can.

  I’m not taken in by him.

  ‘Nothing isn’t a verb,’ I say.

  He smiles. Looks troubled, and gives up his denseness.

  ‘She’s crying, madam,’ he says.

  I nod. ‘Any idea why?’

  ‘No, madam, not really,’ he says. When I turn to him, I see that he looks genuinely perturbed.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I say. I look him straight in the eye. He doesn’t avert his gaze.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, and starts sweeping the corner with vehemence.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Anwar. You clearly do. I can tell by your manner.’

  ‘Must go, Memsahib. Must get the shopping,’ he says quickly, diving out of the door.

  ‘Come back here,’ I say furiously after him, but I don’t want to raise my voice and alert Aashi that we’re watching her. Anwar ignores me. Usually he is more polite than this, though the other servants do often neglect to obey me these days, as they see how Benedict is with me and so judge me inconsequential.

  Today Anwar leaves me there, looking out across the veranda to Aashi, sitting beside the pond.

  I open the door, step out and tread gently towards her. She must hear my feet on our grass, which despite constant watering has turned as crisp as straw in this heat, for she turns around.

  ‘Memsahib. So sorry. I’m coming directly,’ she says, jumping to her feet. Her face is swollen and there are tears in her eyes. Over one eye, a bruise.

  ‘Good lord, Aashi. What have you done?’

  ‘I fell, Memsahib,’ she says quickly. ‘So foolish.’

  It’s a lie.

  ‘What’s wrong? You’d better tell me.’

  ‘Nothing, madam.’ A second lie.

  ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’

  ‘No, madam.’

  ‘Then tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘Nothing, a small fight. My husband … nothing.’

  ‘You’re pregnant.’

  She stares at me, her eyes dry now. She looks terrified.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘It’s not a crime, woman!’ She’s still speechless.

  ‘Isn’t your husband happy?’ I ask.

  That starts her off all over again, crying.

  I feel impatient with her. She shouldn’t come to our house in such a state, and to sit in the garden where the Burrows next door might see and think our servants have free rein to lounge around. It’s unforgivable. Only … I’ve come to care for her a little, over the years, despite the small and huge resentments. Something like tenderness.

  ‘Take the week off,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll explain to Sahib.’

  Her eyes well up again.

  ‘Only, take care to come back in a fit state to work. There’ll be no more allowances.’

  She nods, trying to wipe her eyes.

  ‘Go!’ I say.

  She jumps up, scuttles through the garden and into the house to get her things.

  Midway through the following week, I’m about to enter the dining room when I hear Magda talking to Benedict.

  ‘Why is Aashi sick, Daddy?’ she asks, simply.

  ‘How should I know?’ he says.

  ‘Raja said it was your fault,’ says Magda. ‘He said you did something dirty to her to make her sick.’ Her words make me think of her father’s cruel hands on my body.

  Benedict is silent a moment. And then, ‘That
boy deserves a whipping,’ he says.

  Magda gasps. There’s a small kerfuffle, and I hear her cry out, ‘Let me go, Daddy!’

  I’m about to spring into the room, to her defence, when I hear him say, ‘Don’t you dare mention this to Mummy, Magda. Do you hear me? Never mention this to anyone.’ He says it with the hard voice he usually reserves only for me or the servants. ‘If you breathe a word of it you’ll be in terrible trouble, do you hear me?’

  Then Magda runs out of the room like a wild animal released, not seeing me as she runs up the stairs saying, ‘I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry,’ and crying her little eyes out. She will have to learn as I have.

  I go to her room secretly that night, for I am forbidden by Benedict ordinarily, and I get into her bed, and I hold her. When Mrs Greenson has long gone to bed, when Benedict is sleeping soundly, either in his quarters or elsewhere, with some other poor woman, I hold my child, and Evelyn Roberts shares with Magda then, she shares quietly a few rare tears of her heart.

  When Aashi comes back to work the following Tuesday afternoon, arriving at my bedroom ready to help with my bath, I make short shrift of her dismissal. I take her by the arm and march her up the corridor to the kitchen.

  ‘Go away,’ I say to her in Bengali once we’re at the back door. It’s the only thing we all know how to say to them in their own tongue: Go away, shoo. We call it to the children, the beggars and the dogs. And now I say it to her. And then in English: ‘Get out of here, you little bitch.’

  She gasps. And turns to run. I stand in the doorway and watch her, stumbling her way across the garden and out onto the road, her feet kicking up dust. I watch her white sari, her sandaled feet, her black hair turn the corner and disappear.

  Oh, Aashi. What have we done to you?

  Chapter Thirty

  The chief function of the child – his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life – is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses …

  Home Education,