Dignity

by Alys Conran

  I nod. All I know about Dad’s uncle is that he was ill, and that Dad always goes quiet whenever he’s mentioned. He died when Dad was young. Dad kept a photograph of him tucked away in a drawer. A formal picture in his army clothes, poised and stiff for the camera, a far-off look in his eye as he fades away from us.

  Ewan comes home from the assessment looking like empty clothes.

  ‘How was it?’ I ask him in the kitchen, my voice a bit too high and tight.

  He stands, leaning against the sink, a half-felled tree.

  ‘Intense.’

  Intense. One of those words that’s had too many airings to mean anything any more. It falls apart, blank.

  ‘Is she nice?’

  ‘He.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, shrugging. ‘I can’t really tell. Says there’s a couple of options. This thing called EMDR, which sounds fucking weird, or trauma CBT, which sounds a bit more normal.’

  ‘Well, did it help?’ I sound desperate. I feel fucking desperate. He raises a glass of water to his mouth, his hand shaking.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe a bit.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Oh housebuilder! Now you are seen.

  Siddhārtha Gautama

  She left with Mrs Greenson. Her small case, and Mrs Greenson’s dark, heavy one heaped into the boot of the car, and then her climbing into the back seat, a pallid, shadowy version of the child she used to be. I ran to her and bent to the window, wanted to reach a hand in, but she had receded so far from me over the preceding weeks and months and years of her life that she shrank now, from my touch, and felt a thousand miles away already, withdrawn, turned inwards.

  ‘Be a good girl,’ I said, more sternly than I intended. ‘Don’t give the school any trouble.’

  ‘No, Mother,’ she said, with a kind of cold meekness.

  ‘I’ll follow as soon as I can.’ Though they told me in no uncertain terms that I should stay until someone is charged at least.

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  The engine started. That was it. I watched the black car as it kicked up dust along the road, and finally turned into India and away. I was hollow, watching.

  The Raj is unsettled. There are constant reports of war at Home, and I don’t know whether it’s that that fills me with this dread – the threat of another war trampling across Europe and towards Home – or whether it’s the other reports, perhaps more insidiously worrying, and at any rate closer to us in this provisional world of ours, of native anger and constitutional reform. Benedict’s murder, despite everything, is unsettling, even to Mrs Burrows, who looks at me with hooded eyes across the hedge, and when I look back, continues on her business with her small cutters saying nothing, acknowledging nothing.

  The main thing, is freedom. We have few sources of news, and can’t even ask the servants, as it would be horrid to discuss politics with them. Part of me hopes for it. The demise of Benedict’s world. Although I know I’ll sink with it like a stone.

  When I asked Mrs Burrows what she knew of the political situation she simply said, ‘Best not to think of it, my dear,’ and carried on pruning her rose bush, muttering, ‘Temporary. Temporary,’ to herself.

  But I’m not sure I believe her. The radio, which I listen to in my room, plays the anthem brittlely these days. And I can detect a hint of doubt creeping into the voices of almost all the British officers interviewed about The Situation.

  There are food shortages, that much is clear. Even Anwar is unable to procure sufficient food from the market, and we must use the army supply lines, which are, as at Home, rationed ever more tightly.

  They arrest Anwar first, when he is serving the tea. He sets down the pot, carefully, and offers his hands to be cuffed, but they still manhandle him carelessly out to the car. I beg them not to take him. It wasn’t Anwar. It wasn’t.

  It takes Mrs Greenson three wretched days to come forward, and to acknowledge that he was waxing the floor under her supervision when the shots were heard. They take three further days to release him. I get the impression that they are disappointed. Or perhaps guilty. When Anwar returns half starved and with bruises around his eyes, I know the reason for the guilt. The Raj doesn’t like its brutality witnessed. It is unseemly and coarse.

  Early on Tuesday morning, two men come to arrest me. I am so shocked when it happens, so unprepared for the fact that there is no one, no one to defend me, not even a cruel and pompous husband, that I say nothing in my own defence. We are halfway to the army car before I begin screaming, ‘It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!’ I’m drawn out between their hands like a hung garment flung about in the wind. ‘It wasn’t me!’

  I hated him so. Perhaps I walked into his study. I imagine him, bent over the desk, his head ready for the shot. I imagine the punch-back of the gun’s recoil. I imagine that I made that perfect hole in his mind and the wood panelling.

  But I didn’t. I am only Evelyn Roberts.

  Chapter Forty

  If you hear a policeman’s whistle sounding, run and offer to help him; it is your duty, as he is a king’s servant.

  How Girls Can Help to Build up the Empire:

  The Handbook for Girl Guides, Miss

  Baden-Powell and Sir R. Baden-Powell

  War, I learn, means that Mother cannot come. The days and weeks and months take India slowly further away. The other girls in the school begin to call me pale, and I am always cold. I miss my own big, red sun. We celebrate Christmas with turkey. The big bird, sitting on the long school table. We are each afforded a tiny portion of meat. One New Year passes, and we begin to head towards the next, and although I am accustomed now, to making my bed, washing and dressing, doing my own hair, even washing my own cutlery and darning socks, I always know: this isn’t my life. This isn’t my life. I try to tell the girls how grand I truly was, but only Hilda listens. The other girls look at me and whisper and giggle from behind their hands. Maharaja. Maharaja. Maharaja.

  The Maharani writes long, angry letters to her mother.

  Why? she rages. Why? Why? Why?

  Why have you left me here? You never loved me, you never loved me.

  The girls begin to speak of boys. How they like so-and-so, who they have seen at church, how they would like to marry. I do not want to marry. Not ever. Why? To be like Mummy and Daddy? In a magazine Sister Latham gives me, I read about a woman who has become a great scientist.

  ‘Women can do great things,’ says Sister Latham.

  I should like to be like that woman. A great scientist, with no need for a Home.

  One day, Sister Latham comes into class and requests that I come to the office with her. The office is a tall room, with small high windows, and a big desk.

  ‘Magda,’ she says, from the other side of the desk, ‘I have something to tell you. It is something a little frightening, but I want you to be brave.’

  I nod. For I have been brave a long time now, without Anwar and without Aashi.

  ‘Your mother is to appear in court, for the murder of your father.’

  I look at her.

  ‘Are you all right, child?’ she asks. There is no air in the room and I cannot breathe.

  Still, I do not say, about Raja.

  The next time he comes, this man they call my grandfather, I ask if we might walk around the grounds, away from the other girls and their happy, respectable families. That is when he begins to tell me about mother’s life before, before India. He is almost crying.

  Mother was kind. She was a teacher. Mother was soft with her pupils. Mother didn’t care for nice homes, for money or frocks.

  In his stories he makes a person for me to like. It hurts. Mummy was never really soft with me. She was not really kind.

  It hurts to hear the stories. I refuse to leave the dormitory to meet him the next time he comes, and the time after, although Sister Latham says I should because he is my grandfather.

  Eventually he stops, and there is no one, only school and all this cold Ho
me. And Mother’s letters, all blacked out by the censor, which say nothing in reply to all my fear. There is only the chemistry book from the library, and the chemicals it speaks of. Helium, nitrogen, gold. I’m a witch with a book of spells.

  War, it seems at first, means simply that we will be eating fewer eggs, and almost no sweets. I write to Mother to complain, hoping that she might respond, and I might feel a little better, but as is usual lately I get nothing back.

  Then they make us hang pitch-black curtains in the dormitory, and stop up the classroom windows with cardboard each evening.

  This is because of German bombers who circle above the school all night, silently like hawks. If you go outside during the night-time, one of them will pick you off and blow you to smithereens.

  I don’t fully learn that war means an emptying out, until they start leaving. School slowly empties. The girls are taken to the country to stay with family, one by one.

  Sister Latham asks me one, two, four times if I will go to Bay’s Mouth. To them, my mother’s family. To him with his dirty, old clothes. But I shan’t go. I shan’t. Not to that strange, common man with the hands that are so big and so rough from what he called the ironworks.

  Iron. Formula ‘Fe’, it says in my book of chemistry. Latin name Ferrum. By mass the most common element on earth.

  At the end there are only two of us. Hilda, who as well as having bad teeth is an orphan, and I.

  To look after us there is one elderly nun, Sister Josephine, who mainly sleeps.

  We spend several weeks like that. It is very dull.

  Hilda has an obsession with mice and is convinced we will all be eaten alive now the other children are gone. She has become very quiet. She is paler and paler and her legs turn to blotches at the slightest cold. I know several card games, which comes in handy since even I run out of imaginary things to tell us after a while and Sister Josephine doesn’t really teach us, but sets us endless exercises from the book, telling us to work them out for ourselves.

  ‘You’re lucky to have a family to go to at all,’ says Hilda as we sit, alone on the tarmac of the schoolyard. ‘I’m going to a Barnardo’s home in Scotland.’

  ‘You haven’t seen my grandfather,’ I say to her. ‘He’s a brute. A savage. I’ll be living like an animal.’

  Hilda slaps me across the face.

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ she says.

  I carry that slap still. Burning and honest on my cheek.

  I only hold out in my refusal to go to the people they call my family until Sister Josephine is taken ill. One day she simply does not wake. She is teaching us Geography, or rather she is sitting at the desk dozing and making her creaking breathing sounds while we attempt exercises from the book.

  We have finished the exercises and she still doesn’t wake.

  Eventually Hilda says it.

  ‘Excuse me, Sister Josephine,’ she says. ‘Can I go to the bathroom?’

  There’s no response.

  ‘Sister Josephine?’ she says.

  Sister Josephine is very quiet and very still and very pale. Her body looks heavier and more solid now, as if it belongs to the ground, as if it has no light things in it, no liquids swarming, no breath, no thoughts to lift it from the chair.

  Hilda and I prod her and poke her. We shake her. We shake her again. We shout in her ears. Then we’re silent. We don’t know what to do. It is like Papa, but there’s no blood.

  ‘She’s dead.’ It’s quiet Hilda who says it. ‘We had better phone a doctor,’ she says, and Hilda is the one who goes to the office, who dials the number, who speaks to the operator and then to the police, the doctor.

  I am frozen, thinking of that day, and Papa.

  When they come, I tell them. I tell them everything.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Ni wnawn, wrth ffoi am byth o’n ffwdan ffôl, Ond llithro i’r llonyddwch mawr yn ôl.

  ‘Dychwelyd’, T.H. Parry-Williams

  Fleeing forever all our fuss and foolery, Into the stillness our selves slip surely.

  ‘Return’, T.H. Parry-Williams

  At Kharagpur police station there are two white officers, and one Anglo-Indian secretary, who looks at me, despite himself, with curiosity.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ I say, to him, to them, to the Raj. I think frantically of Magda.

  ‘Tell us about the day your husband was killed.’ It is the large man, with the small eyes.

  We sit on opposite sides of a substantial wooden table, their hands hovering above their notes, mine still in my lap so that the table hides their shaking from view.

  I pause, take a deep breath. There must be no room for doubt.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I was doing nothing, only sitting, and looking out of the window. Then I heard a shot. And when I went in, there he was.

  ‘Were you shocked?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Only Mrs …’ he consults his papers, ‘Mrs Greenson says that you were mainly concerned with the mess.’

  ‘I am fairly particular,’ I say.

  They look at each other.

  ‘He was killed with his own gun,’ says the large one again. ‘Army issue.’

  I stare at them. ‘Really?’ I say.

  They nod.

  ‘You knew he had a gun?’ asks the small one. He has a mean little moustache, which he plays with in a way I find unsavoury.

  ‘Of course.’ It was the quiet threat. The ultimate control. Benedict always gave off a lethal assurance. That was his power. His power sat in the drawer on the right-hand side of his desk.

  ‘You knew where he kept it?’

  I nod.

  ‘Did you love your husband?’ The moustache quivers as he leans forward.

  I’m silent. I won’t lie. I’ll never lie about him again. ‘He was a brute,’ I say.

  They look at each other.

  He sits back again. ‘He beat you?’

  I silently acquiesce. Though the worst wasn’t the beating.

  ‘Did you kill him?’ He leans towards me again, conspiratorial and preying.

  I want to be able to answer yes. Yes. I killed him. I killed him.

  But, ‘No,’ I say quietly. ‘It wasn’t me.’

  The other one springs up. ‘You expect us to believe that?’ Fierce and booming.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I do.’

  They try another tack.

  ‘Did he have many enemies?’ The moustache is black, wired and slightly curved at its corners.

  ‘Oh, plenty. He was that kind of man.’

  ‘Servants?’

  ‘They fear him.’ Then I correct myself. ‘Feared.’ The past tense is delicious, even here.

  The big one takes a deep breath in, inflating himself, ready to launch a question. ‘And he didn’t lock the drawer where the gun was kept?’

  ‘No.’ I say this steadily.

  The fact seems surprising now. Why not? Why wouldn’t he lock up a lethal weapon in a place where we fear mutiny daily? But perhaps because we fear mutiny daily. Benedict was always ready to draw it out, aim it, fire.

  ‘Who else knew where the gun was kept?’

  I think about it.

  ‘No one,’ I say.

  Magda.

  They nod. ‘Madam, we’re arresting you for the murder of your husband …’ They begin their refrain. I listen to them numbly till the end.

  Then I say, ‘Can I possibly have some tea?’

  They bring in tea and little sandwiches for the long wait.

  That night they keep me in a small cell set apart from the ones where the Indians are. I barely sleep, I think, for there is such a din of coughing and so many mosquitoes. In the darkness I find myself unsure of who I am.

  I feel perhaps I have gone native.

  There is the sensation of my skin darkening overnight, and my mouth swelling with odd syllables which, the few times I do doze off, wake me as they spring from my lips unintelligibly. It is a great relief, when dawn comes, to see that I am stil
l an Englishwoman.

  I am released mid-morning. I get a talking-to by an army officer. Very grand he is too.

  ‘We’re releasing you … It just won’t do.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘We can’t keep you here with the other prisoners. And this kind of thing causes such a furore. Sahib killed by his wife. Good lord. It won’t do. Not this week. We have enough trouble,’ he says gloomily. ‘We’ll put it on hold until things are more secure.’

  He means they’ll put charging me on hold, to save face, at least temporarily. Is this it? The best the Empire can do?

  ‘But you still think I did it?’

  He shrugs.

  I get up. ‘So I’m free to leave?’ I say, haughtily.

  ‘Yes, madam,’ he says. ‘But stay in Kharagpur.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I say. And walk out into the heat and doubt.

  Mr Burrows – who claims he always believed the whole thing to be ‘poppycock’ – says I ‘should not under any circumstances live alone with the male servants’.

  He says it sternly. ‘Not in India,’ he says. ‘It won’t do. Go and live with one of your friends.’

  But I have given up on doing what is proper, and besides, Anwar and Madan, who I believe are also convinced of my innocence, are perfectly impeccable and loyal. I trust them more than I trust the house-proud vultures of the Raj.

  The talk of war has become frequent, and indeed never lets up. Hitler is up to no good.

  Talk of Free India raises the little hairs on our necks too. The main commercial ships are stopped. Magda feels infinitely far and I am very lonely, especially since no one ever drops round with a visiting card any more. I begin with a slight cough.

  As the war progresses it becomes more common for other homes of the Raj to be without their man. Men are called up to command the Indian regiments, to prepare to go to Europe. Though a certain suspicion hangs over my situation, and I feel the cold shoulder of the other memsahibs rather intensely, I am, at least on the face of it, not in such an unusual position these days.

  In the absence of some of our best men, the women are called to join more committees. Committees on neighbourhood order, examination boards, music schedules, committees on refuse collection and drainage, and even highway patrols. This is all terribly dull.