by Alys Conran
I sit with her in the window, and look out at all the pretence. ‘Mummy,’ she says. ‘Daddy hurt you.’
It is so sudden, and not a question, but a simple statement.
She follows it with another: ‘And now he’s dead.’ As if the one thing led, quite naturally, to the other.
My daughter knows something. The realisation is cold and heavy. If they find this out, my daughter and I will come apart completely.
‘I should like to go Home,’ she says, offering the solution.
Two, three seconds. And then I nod, once.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Just now as I looked out of the window, I saw a big, perfectly round, red sun sinking behind the trees. I have told him to give you my love when he sees you in a few minutes.
One of the children of the Raj, in a letter to her mother in India
I remember the ‘Return Home’ clearly. Perhaps remember is the wrong word. I bear the shock of it as a fault line, just as a ripped continent bears the scars of a devastating earthquake that has islanded one part from the other and broken everything between. In my house, poised above Bay’s Mouth, I often sit and feel the scarred ridges of these memories, tracing the break of them again, again.
The light at Home is dull and flat like when, in high wind, the dust in Kharagpur blows out the sun. I sit on my own, in the empty classroom. All the other children have gone to the dormitory but I stay, to read Mummy’s long, long letter in which she says, again and again, nothing. The Colchester School is like a cage. The lights make an echoing sound. Thrum. Like when a person can’t make up their mind, and you can hear their thoughts working. Past the lights there’s only the clipping of heels up and down the corridors, the teacher’s high voice next door, and feeling the years and years of children in that classroom, imagining their small writing scratching across lined paper in lines and lines of black, empty words. I am unloved again, in the school. One of the unloved ones.
They say it is a good school. They say we are still special, although there are only the old nuns to teach us and we are made to fold our own clothes, and even to put them in the washing pile ourselves. I am shown how to change my bed, and how to do my own hair each morning. The nun, as she shows me, tugs and pulls at my hair. ‘Fearful idleness,’ she mutters, twice, under her breath. By which she means that Mummy and I and the other society ladies, in Kharagpur and Calcutta and Darjeeling and all the other proper places in India, are lazy.
In her letter, Mummy says one thing of note. She says Grandpa will come to see me. Grandpa. This sounds as if I might belong to him now.
To begin with I am unkempt. The nun scowls when she sees me.
‘Magda,’ she says, ‘you have become accustomed to an unnatural level of service, and must learn to stand on your own two feet.’
She means to survive without servants. But without Anwar and Madan, I am like a person who has no coat on in winter.
I learn slow as a snail, until the other children begin to laugh at me. Then I am quick as a flash, for their mean words are like whips.
They call me Maharaja. They are stupid and do not know that a Maharaja is a boy and that I, if I am anything here, am a Maharani.
I wish there were other Indian children in my school – British Indian children, that is. But they are gone to another school which is even more expensive. Mummy said, in her letter, that we must be thrifty now Daddy is dead. She didn’t send me to the original school, the one Daddy had reserved, but to this one, because we must be thrifty.
One day the girls have an idea that because I was born in India, I must smell, and after that they hold their noses at me. I ignore them. I imagine they are simply servants, to ignore. I imagine they are a different kind of person, untouchable, and so not to be taken into account.
It is several weeks of this before I make my first friend. She is called Hilda and is very ugly. She wears a thing called a brace on her teeth. It is a metal invention which, one day, will give her a beautiful smile but, at the moment, makes her mouth all black and shiny. She smiles at me as I cross the small yard towards her. She scratches her elbow, and smiles her smile, metal and kind. I imagine that she is half machine.
She agrees that we may play hopscotch in the correct way, and listens to my rules. We begin to play. Jumping in the correct way. Hop, skip, hop and land. I win, and we are friends. Hilda is dull. But she is someone at least. I tell her about India, about the servants, but I don’t tell her about Papa, about Aashi and Raja, for Mummy said I must keep my mouth closed like a zip or It. Will. Be. Frightful.
Sometimes I sit in class, and imagine that the Indian sun is high above the fields outside, making them yellow like our dry lawn in Kharagpur – which Anwar said was grass with turmeric. That was his Indian joke. He said he was also with turmeric, and that was why he was so much more spiced-looking than me. ‘You, little Memsahib,’ he said, ‘are all sour milk.’ And he laughed, and patted me on the head.
I imagine all kinds of bright birds in the skies here, as in India, and then realise I never knew the names of any of them, any of those birds. Instead I learned the ones here. The black-bird. The blue tit. The owl.
Sister Latham says that I am nostalgic.
‘You are terribly quiet, child. What do you think of?’ she asks me one day when we are darning our socks together. Each week one girl goes to help the sister with her darning.
‘Of India,’ I say.
She nods. ‘That’s understandable,’ she says. ‘It has been your home.’
This is a strange, stupid thing to say. I think of Mother, in a corner of the sitting room, like a rabbit in its burrow. She is scowling over her lace, her belly swelling and then returning to flat over weeks and months and years. She was certainly not at Home. But then I think of Anwar. I think of the long, soft pleats of Aashi’s sari, and I wonder if Sister Latham is right.
It is Sunday, and I am led to him, in the hallway of the school, and he wears trousers that are so old-fashioned they make the other girls laugh. How will they believe me, seeing him, that I am truly as grand as can be? How will they ever believe what I was in India? My teacher, with her high forehead, and her tight bun, tells me not to be conceited, and makes me sit with him in the school library.
‘How is your schooling, love?’ he asks me again, looking up at the tall, crooked shelves of books.
‘It is well.’
‘Do you like English best, or Mathematics?’
‘I like Chemistry,’ I say, for we have started to do it, and it is terrific and all magic.
He whistles in a terribly common fashion, his rucked face closing in on itself as he laughs, the laugh running through me with a slow shudder.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘girls nowadays, they can do what they like. I should think that rich mother of yours could pay for your tuition if you’d like to be a chemist.’
That rich mother of yours.
It is the head teacher who makes the announcement one day after morning assembly, when the older children are preparing to marshal the younger ones out of the hall.
‘Remain seated, girls,’ she says. ‘I have an important announcement to make.’
A general impatience rustles through the school. The girls shift on their chairs, play with the holes in their tights, scratch at the seats in front of them, send Chinese whispers ricocheting along the rows, stare at the ceiling, wriggle.
‘We are at war,’ she says, quietly.
I remember how her words dropped onto us, one by one, and made a cold stillness. Faces froze, clothes emptied, hands stilled, hearts solidified. The word ‘war’ closed around my spine.
War? What did it really mean?
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Most people at one time or other of their lives get a feeling that they must kill themselves; as a rule they get over it in a day or two, and find that it comes from nothing worse than an attack of indigestion, bad liver or influenza …
How Girls Can Help to Build up the Empire:
The Handbook for Girl Guides,
Miss Baden-Powell and Sir R. Baden Powell Bay’s Mouth’s doing a bloody brilliant job of representing this country, just not in the way it used to. Along the seafront there’s rubbish blowing about, and black bags that haven’t been collected on the promenade. The council’s not taking as much care of the place these days. No money. No one has any money. It’s not just Dad. Walking down here, we passed three newly closed shops.
Ewan’s doctor’s surgery is in one of the old B&Bs on the seafront, so while he’s there, I sit on a bench on the promenade and watch the wind turbines turning like cogs, measuring out the time smoothly in their slow whirl as if there’s nothing really changing and time just moves round and round, not forwards towards the time when I’ll be due and there’ll be a baby to push out and, somehow, to look after.
Two guys come out of one of the pubs on the seafront, shouting and shoving at each other. They fight on the ground for a while. No one comes to pull them apart. The smaller one manages to get away, and scarpers off round the corner into Bay’s Mouth proper. The other man stands up, still looking angry. Lately you can feel it everywhere. Everyone’s so pissed off. Angry and skint.
Still, when Ewan comes out, his smile feels like coming to land.
He grabs my hand.
‘Let’s walk, Su.’
We pace side by side against the wind. He has to shorten his stride a bit to match mine. The air rushes past and through us, clean and uncomplicated, although my body, against the wind, is still all mixed up. The sickness went for a while, and then it came back.
We walk along the promenade and onto the pier before Ewan says much. The slatted walkway passes under my feet like an old film reel. Looking down through the slats you can see the sea swill back and forth.
‘He says it’s PTSD, Su.’
I nod. We both knew that already.
‘He’s given me some pills and referred me. Says I’ll be on a different list because of the army.’
I nod, and keep walking, pacing it out, this pier, three slats to each step. I don’t say anything about what Darren told me. That none of that shit works.
At the end of the pier, the small pavilion’s closed. We lean against the railings. The horizon’s not saying anything.
‘He says we get better, Su,’ turning to me. ‘He says we can crack this.’
The word ‘crack’ sounds.
‘Course we can,’ I say. But we’re quiet then, both looking out to the unsteady sea, listening to the wash and wash of it.
Dad calls the next day with a weak, broken voice which carries the inevitable news that, ‘The bailiffs are coming.’
They’re going to ransack Mum’s home. They’ll take her furniture, her mod cons, the TV, everything.
‘We have to get her stuff out of here,’ he says.
Her stuff is her jewellery, her shrine, the photographs.
‘We’ll come round with some boxes,’ I say, after a silence. ‘We can store stuff at Ewan’s for the minute.’ Although where, I don’t know. Ewan and I already manoeuvre around each other in his tiny flat like two climbers passing on a ledge. There’s not really room for anything else on our ledge, but …
‘You can stay here too,’ I say.
There’s a silence.
‘You’ll have to,’ I say.
‘I can get a room somewhere.’
‘How?’
‘I mean in a hostel,’ he says. ‘I called the council. They have a system … for people like me.’
‘For god’s sake, Dad. You’re not homeless. You’re coming here.’
But he doesn’t answer.
When I tell Ewan, he bites his lip, asks for Dad’s mobile number and calls him himself. I listen in from the kitchen as he speaks on the phone.
‘Look,’ he says, ‘I know we’ve had our differences. But you’re family. We’re all family now.’
There’s a silence. A sigh. And a couple of seconds later, Ewan comes through.
‘What did he say?’
‘Not much.’
At the door, two days later, his small suitcase in his hand, Dad looks old, and very alone.
‘Can I come in?’ he asks, when I look at the case.
I move aside to let him pass into the kitchen, where Ewan’s filling the kettle. This is between them.
‘Listen, s—’ Dad starts.
‘Don’t,’ says Ewan. ‘Don’t worry about any of it. Just put your stuff there. We’ll make a bed up in the lounge.’
I do what Magda suggests, get my head down and start on a piece for the module Ewan and I take together. Ewan doesn’t seem to be doing his. I don’t ask. College is the least of his worries at the moment.
Ewan’s not got broadband in the flat but I buy enough data on my phone for the research, and Leah lends me her laptop, so I get a lot of it written over the weekend. But when I look at it for any length of time, the writing feels unfamiliar again, like my body as it changes and changes with the baby. I go over the same paragraph in the article about twenty times, and it gets shorter and shorter until there’s almost nothing on the page.
Dad, who’s nervous about being here, and feels guilty, is in permanent, full-on butler mode; he spends his whole time trying to fix everything, clean everything. It’s helpful, and it’s great that the place shines like the bloody British Hotel when Mum was in charge, but it’s a false shine. It doesn’t feel like our place any more. Ewan seems to feel penned in by Dad. He’s got a nervous tick with his leg; as he sits at the table, his heel bounces against the floor. I can feel how he’s just balancing on his nerves, trying not to let any of it show.
‘Shall I mend that cooker?’ asks Dad, about a week in, pointing at the oven door, which has been hanging off at an angle for yonks. ‘I can give it a good clean out tomorrow too.’
Ewan dives out of the room.
Later, when Ewan turns out the light, I lie in the dark listening to the sound of his breathing, and past it, Dad’s steady snore in the lounge, marking time to the night. And I wonder, where on earth will we put you?
‘Babies don’t take up much space,’ Leah said doubtfully yesterday, on the phone.
I looked at my swelling belly. Could have fooled me.
Despite the sedatives he’s been prescribed, the flat, in the build-up to Ewan’s psych assessment, is like a pressure cooker. It’s like Ewan’s charged. He practically gives off static, jumping with sudden movements or noises. The air crackles with it.
‘Is he always like this?’ snaps Dad when Ewan leaves the kitchen one day.
‘He’s having a bad week, Dad.’
I’m washing the dishes, my hands swilling in the hot water up to the wrists so that the sleeves of my jumper wick up the suds.
‘Why? Aren’t you? Aren’t I? Isn’t everyone having a bad week?’ he says, putting the plate he’s been drying away in the cupboard and shutting the door on it quick and hard.
‘Oh for god’s sake, Dad!’ I splash a washed mug down in the water, and whirl round.
There’s a long silence. I’m livid with him, and he’s staring at me. The kitchen’s very small and very bright.
We stand in silence. I take a deep breath. Two. I sit down slowly.
Then, the air’s thin as I say it. The thing I’ve not wanted him to know: ‘Ewan’s got post-traumatic stress, Dad, from the army.’
Dad’s looking at me. ‘How long’s he been like this?’ he says, sitting down too.
‘Two years, I don’t know.’
Dad sits back. Inhales sharply. Exhales. Then, ‘He’s got symptoms?’
‘Bad dreams. He sleepwalks. These sudden intense feelings from nowhere.’ My throat is too full as I reel it all off, all the out-of-place feelings that come over him like storms in summer.
‘You say he walks in his sleep?’ says Dad.
‘Only once or twice. It’s more the hallucinations that are a problem.’
‘Hallucinations?’ Dad’s voice is a cliff edge.
‘Sort of; hal
f-hallucinations. He’ll think for a second he’s seen something. Heard something. Smells. Blood. Gunshots. Stuff from the army.’
Some of the hurt Ewan’s seen forces itself into the kitchen. I look out of the window, to where between two buildings you can just see the edge of the big wheel on the seafront. I think it then, that his hallucinations are the dark, bleeding negative of the perfect British picture we all try to make in Bay’s Mouth. Ewan just can’t stop seeing it for what it is. Soon, if things keep getting worse in this country, we’re all going to fucking see it that way too.
‘He tells you?’ Dad’s voice is level now, under control.
‘Not really. He can’t really talk about it.’
We sit in silence.
After a long while, Dad gets up, and switches on the kettle.
‘Yet,’ he says. ‘He can’t talk about it yet.’
The next day Dad cooks, a new recipe: Thai curry with heaps of ginger and chilli. He doesn’t put any music on, but he does cook. Just as we’re finishing our plates, our eyes watering from the heat, he says this: ‘My uncle came back from the war with shell shock.’
There’s a silence. Ewan and Dad look at each other. Dad smiles a tight, sad smile.
‘The war?’ says Ewan, his pupils dilating slightly just at the word.
‘Second World War,’ nods Dad. ‘He was a soldier. He came back to Kolkata pretty damaged. Had nerve damage in his right hand, but the worst was his mind. There weren’t the treatments available then. You just went home and waited for it to go away. If it was bad enough they gave you sedatives.’
Ewan’s staring at Dad, as if he’s seeing him for the very first time.
‘A lot of people in Bengal were sick with that kind of thing, after the war; Partition, and all that stuff.’ Dad’s lips close, grimly. ‘You get yourself sorted out, Ewan. There are ways and means here, now.’
Later in bed, whispering so that Dad can’t hear through the partition wall, Ewan says, ‘I’d forgotten Indian soldiers were in the British army during the war.’