Dignity

by Alys Conran

‘Her friend?’

  ‘I know,’ says Glenda. ‘Shocking, isn’t it?’

  What the hell is she up to? Up the overgrown driveway, pacing quickly, to the house. The key’s in the usual place behind the flowerpots.

  ‘Why’ve you cancelled the carers, Magda?’ I ask her straight away, walking into the bedroom to find her propped up in bed, in her curlers again, not a hair out of place.

  She looks up at me, smiles sweetly and says, ‘Because I have the two of you to look after me.’

  She’s lost her mind.

  I don’t know what she means until I look at the piece of paper she hands me. In a shaky hand she’s drawn a complete floor plan of the house, like an uneven chessboard. She’s filled in the essentials of furniture, including the beds. Number three Victoria Drive reduced to shapes and lines. She looks proud of it, as if she’s got the place under control.

  It takes me a few seconds to realise the diagram’s divided into two parts. Her own wing, marked ‘ME’, in capitals, and defined by a fierce, cross-hatched pattern, and then another part, made up of several rooms, including the kitchen, two bedrooms and the library, which she’s marked ‘Susheela’ in small letters and covered meticulously in tiny dots.

  ‘Just until you get yourselves sorted,’ she says. ‘Now go and toast us some hot cross buns.’

  I’m so stunned, I do what she says without a word.

  ‘Magda, it’s so generous of you,’ I say, bringing the tea and toasted buns back into the room. ‘But we have the flat and anyhow there’s no way they’ll let me move in. They’ll fire me!’ I imagine the expression on Glenda’s face.

  ‘Your father can have the flat,’ she says. ‘And as for this terrible job … are you in line for maternity benefits from them?’

  I shake my head. ‘It’s zero hours.’

  Magda looks blank.

  ‘I don’t get stuff like that,’ I say.

  ‘Sharks!’ she says. ‘Well then, stop your panicking. We’re awful work anyway,’ she continues, motioning to her legs, listless in the chair. ‘You don’t want to be doing this forever.’

  I don’t know how to tell her what the rough kindness of it’s come to mean. Old, proud Henry. Sweet Mrs Jenkins and the others. Her.

  ‘It’ll be a kind of holiday!’ she says, her eyes shining. I’ve never seen her so excited. ‘Like camping!’ Underneath the pink curlers, her skin is unusually peach.

  A holiday for you perhaps, I think. The twenty-four-seven of Magda’s needs. I catch myself seriously considering the idea. The light in her bedroom’s soft.

  ‘No way, Magda,’ I say, after a while. ‘There’s just no way.’

  She looks cross.

  ‘No way,’ I say, again.

  We drink tea in silence, her sitting up in bed in her nightdress and me on the yellow upholstered chair. I feel rooted here. It’s like my belly’s homing for the ground of the house. She sulks slightly, and I feel a bit sulky myself. I have to hold the silence until she knows I bloody well mean it.

  ‘You won’t tell them, will you? You’ll keep coming?’

  ‘As long as you restart the care package I will.’

  She nods. I feel sorry for her suddenly, pale after all the effort she’s made, and because of the disappointment.

  ‘Susheela,’ she asks me, ‘tell me your full name.’ And when I do, ‘Spell it out for me?’ taking up a notebook from beside her bed.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want it for my records. I need to make sure I keep everything in order. I tend to forget, lately, you know, who people are.’

  She’s never forgotten a face in her life.

  But she looks at me with such a pathetic look, a different kind of Magda, vulnerable and old. I think perhaps she is, perhaps she’s losing it. It scares me. I think of how she called me Aashi, again and again. A sad feeling rises to my throat. I try to swallow it away.

  I begin to spell my name, patiently, as she writes it out with her tangling hand. She looks up afterwards, dog-tired, and waves me away. She’ll need to sleep again. The sleeps are more frequent since she was in hospital. I find myself fighting back tears as I let myself out of her house. How long can we hold on to each other through all her ghosts?

  Chapter Forty-Three

  In these days, when we are all beginning to concern ourselves with essentials and to discard the things that do not matter, it is essential to remember these two facts:

  1. What we can get is good for us.

  2. A great deal of what we cannot get is quite unimportant.

  Food Facts for the Kitchen Front,

  author unknown

  Mother is coming.

  Having spent several weeks alone with Sister Latham in the echo and quiet of the school, refusing, and pointing out that we have paid fees and so I should be cared for, I am finally to go to Bay’s Mouth to Grandmother and Grandfather’s and to await her there.

  When I arrive, at the end of my own long train ride, from Colchester, the sun is shining. I had not expected that, for the sun to shine.

  My train arrives at the same time as another, smaller one, which comes in the opposite direction, carrying families for a sunny day at the seaside. Their apparel is terribly shabby, and there are no men, only women, as the fathers are away. Still, they are happy. A brass band comes onto the platform to meet them and there are several characters dressed up and doing mini pageants. The little children are absolutely agog with it all. And even I find it splendid and almost forget that I should be being met by someone. It’s a long time since I’ve seen small children with their parents, and perhaps I have never seen them so at ease. The casual gestures of kinship between these people, the linked arms, the held hands, the pats on the head, are rather a sore sight. And there is a man, in army clothes, with strong, good shoulders. Oh, how he hoists his small son up onto his shoulders, and how the boy laughs. And there, a woman kisses her child’s hair.

  Aashi would stroke my hair as I fell asleep on her lap.

  When I think of my mother, there are just recipes, needlework, and a feeling of things shut away.

  And yet I have chosen the one over the other. Raja will be in trouble, and Aashi will be broken-hearted.

  ‘Magda?’ It is a woman with grey hair, a round, comely figure, cheeks like red apples.

  I extend my hand, but she grabs me and pulls me to her. I feel momentarily embarrassed. But when, after a few seconds, she doesn’t let go, I find myself sinking into her. Her hair smells of rose soap, the same one Mother used. She holds me tight.

  When she eventually lets me go, and pulls back to take a good look at me, her eyes are pooling.

  She says, ‘I knew it was you. He said you were the spit of her, but I hadn’t imagined how much. Only …’ she trails off, looking at me strangely, as if she suddenly realised something. Then she grabs my arm and lifts my case in her other hand, and walks me down the platform. ‘It’s like having our Evie here.’

  I only once heard her called Evie, by my father, I remember that he said it, and he stroked her face. Mummy winced as if his fingers were ice.

  This woman, my grandmother, takes me to a bus. A bus! Which we board. The driver slings my bag into the luggage compartment. He speaks to the woman kindly, as if they were friends. A bus driver, and my grandmother. But it is nice that he smiles at me, honestly, not as a servant might. I try to smile back, though I’m out of the habit.

  When the bus stops to let us off, we’re in a broad street with meagre-looking red-brick houses. They are ‘separates’ at least, not a terrace or semi-detached. It reminds me a little, in fact, of Kharagpur, though in comparison Bay’s Mouth is like a dinner gone cold.

  I must lug my own suitcase to the door. Grandmother, who says I must call her Granny though I can’t imagine doing so, pushes the door open and calls,

  ‘Here we are!’ into the hallway.

  Upstairs, there’s the sound of excited voices. A woman’s, a man’s, and I should think a great number of children by the din, though only
two emerge, two boys with bits of chocolate all over their faces. Chocolate. I have not seen chocolate since the rationing started. I stand, silent. The house is not grand, but not shabby. It is these people. They are looking at me as if I belong to them.

  ‘Jack and Henry, come here this instant,’ says Grandmother. ‘You’ll have to have your faces cleaned before you can kiss your cousin.’ She pats me on the shoulder. ‘She’s a lady, you know.’ Her voice breaks. ‘A real lady.’

  I look at her sharply. Why is she crying?

  It is only later that day, after I have begun to unpack, and after a good supper of pork chops and potatoes, that they tell me, of Mother.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  … and they were so madly in love with the little house that they could not bear to think they had finished it.

  Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens,

  J. M. Barrie

  The house is breaking into its tiny bones. It leaks dreams everywhere.

  At night, just before I fall asleep, I can see Raja. He is standing on a small dusty street in The Real India. He has no shoes. He has a stick in his hand, and he’s pointing it at something that’s behind me. I turn round, and there’s nothing, and when I turn back, Raja is gone. There are only two footprints in the dust. Two small footprints and no Raja. He was pointing at Papa who follows me everywhere too. In my dreams Papa is angry. He makes Mummy scream again as he lifts her dress, and as he does it death comes out of his head again, whirring and blurred and red.

  When I awake my hands are briefly numb, and my chest.

  I have always yearned towards completeness and so am urged to tie up loose threads. Susheela’s situation bothers me. So messy. What I must do therefore becomes amply clear. Deus ex machina: I will make it all tidy. When Annette comes, I ask her to take me to the telephone, but first to go to the study and take out a file, marked accounts. In it there’s the name Jeffers & Co, and the number. She agrees, because I myself agree to be co-operative, and don’t even comment on the appalling state of the fried egg, which she serves me with a look of fear.

  At the telephone, I ask Annette to use the wheel to call the number. She laughs at my old phone, with its proper dial.

  ‘Haven’t used one of these in years,’ she says, passing me the receiver.

  ‘You and me both,’ I say between breaths.

  I confess I feel a little intimidated, calling into the town, the world outside the house. I confess I feel the cogs of my house turning, setting the bricks all in disarray.

  The phone is, incongruously, still functional.

  ‘I need to make an appointment as soon as possible,’ I say in my best memsahib. ‘A pressing matter. I haven’t much time. Today would be better, I’ll pay double. Triple … Magda Roberts … anytime … yes, that will be fine … yes … number three, Victoria Drive. I’ll order a taxi.’

  Behind me, Annette gasps.

  ‘You’ll come with me,’ I tell her, putting down the receiver.

  No one says no to me. And besides, I have saved up a complaint against poor Annette, who I have been tipping several illegal little pounds a week for quite some time. She needs the money, and I was happy for her to have it in exchange for poached eggs, cinnamon butter, and now this outing. She hasn’t got a leg to stand on.

  When I put the phone down, the house shifts. There’s a whole kerfuffle around it. The sense of old servants, stirring in preparation. What I am about to do is deliciously implausible, and yet, it is – it is possible in the way that unlikely scientific results sometimes are, and implausible is my favourite kind of possible.

  In pursuit of my tenuous plan, I have broken my own hard and fast covenant. The house holds out when I try to leave it, tripping up the wheels of my chair and catching at Annette’s knuckles as she pushes it through the porch. ‘Damn,’ she says, ‘damn,’ as it scrapes and judders. I think it is Anwar, behind us, who finally gives the chair a quick shove over the threshold of the world.

  There is an awful lot of sky. I almost dissolve in brightness. My body, in cahoots with the house, protests against the fresh air, the openness, and wants to cough and seize like some rusted cog. I persevere against the cough quietly. Annette will take fright at the slightest sense of infirmity, and the house will have won. The ramp into the taxi is terror, the taxi driver and Annette panting and swearing. I am a tiny, quiet ship on a bad sea.

  We drive through a devastated landscape. Behind us, in the taxi, my Victorian house stands firm in the shadow of highrises. Rounding the bay in the taxi, the gruff driver thankfully silent now, we pass the closed art deco dance hall with its four green copper domes, a cherub balancing pointlessly on top of each one. At the foot of the big wheel, we are forced by roadworks to stop a long time, the wheel stopped too, like a broken clock. It stands unturning above my memories of the gardens that used to be here along the centre of the promenade. Now the promenade is an illegible road with junctions, traffic lights and signs, and the wheel stands in a traffic island, above the cars. I stare at it almost unable to breathe at its stillness, until, perhaps, it begins to turn again, above the remembered people in their bonnets and their Sunday best, above the little dogs on leads, above the patent shoes and best hats, and above the smartness of it all. Between its segments, the separated times. And as we begin to drive again, though the wheel has stopped again, I see that it still holds them, these segmented times, the parts of my life.

  We pass them, the hotels, the British, the Imperial, the Palace, the Burlington, slowly crumbling, boarded up like empty promises. And between my bad, short breaths, I’m glad. I’m glad also that the tennis courts, where the covered games were played, are thrillingly overgrown with giant hogweed and that the King’s Bowling Club, as we slow beside it, has a gaudy sign advertising mini golf. Real things have also sprung up in this place of memory. A technical college. Somewhere to buy phones. A shelter for the homeless. There are people of all shades, unholidaying and here to stay. They walk the pavements checking their phones. They are present and living. I feel suddenly very, very living too. Perhaps the homeless man we pass in our taxi, tripping in broken shoes, will tonight ignore the danger signs and break into the boarded-up pavilion to sleep. I hope so. I hope he will step out of his rightful place.

  I will. The air as I’m wheeled out of the taxi is cold again, impossible to inhale. I’m wheeled out of my past and into Jeffers & Co as I turn the cogs of my house, one last time. Turn them over.

  They stop.

  ‘Magda?’ says Annette. ‘Are you OK?’

  I sit up. I must sit up and speak to her and to the fat little taxi driver who peers at me worriedly, and who is to come in with us too if he wants the full, rather generous, fee I have offered him.

  ‘Absolutely, silly girl. I’m fine.’

  The wheels keep turning.

  It has been years since I’ve been here, in this cluttered legal office where I once filed for divorce, and where I also once dictated a letter to demand that Michael’s name be removed from one of my papers. He put up no resistance once the threat was sent. Didn’t want the fuss, the reputational damage of an academic furore.

  ‘Hello, Magda,’ says the clerk. I had entirely forgotten her, poor mousy little woman now, but I can tell by the servile tone of her voice that she has not forgotten me and my money.

  Though everything is now becoming blurred, I continue with the procedure I have planned out. I am methodical. I dictate to the clerk the types of precise legal phrases needed, and the dishevelled solicitor, a new one at this firm, who is sweating away across the desk, suggests minor tweaks as she types it all up. I repeat the name, several times. Susheela. Su-shee-laa, for the clerk. I bring out the small piece of paper, shaking in my hands, where I wrote the name. I pass it to them and they look at it, frowning. They disbelieve in me; these nitwits are incredulous at the way such legal phrases and technical terms drip from my old tongue. But they cannot rightly do anything, in view of my evidently sound mind and the wonderfully absolute, almost fairy
tale power of a last will and testament. I swear on the Bible through my heavy breaths – the last manual I will touch. And I sign a name with my unsteady hand – the legal one, which is, despite several deaths and a marriage, still Magda Worsal-Compton. God knows if it is legible, but a signature need not be. Annette tries to intervene, of course.

  ‘Are you certain, Magda? I’m not sure you know what you’re doing?’

  ‘I do,’ I say. ‘Perfectly.’ My voice is a stern whisper.

  She’s distressed, poor girl. ‘I shouldn’t have agreed to it. I shouldn’t have brought you here.’

  The clerk looks worried too. ‘If she’s not in her right mind, you can get an assessment to say so, and cancel it,’ she whispers to Annette, as if I’m not there.

  ‘Impudence!’ I say. So the stupid woman shuts up.

  The Bible sworn on, the papers signed, Annette a reluctant witness, and we’re all done. And I’m done in.

  With great effort, I reach my hand up and pat her arm, poor girl.

  ‘Well,’ I say, trying to sound brisk, ‘you can take me Home directly.’

  The ride home is unprocessed and quick. I shut it all out, focus on breathing.

  My house, once I am deposited back within it, is all settled down and empty, a receptacle ready to be filled. Annette wheels me into the living room to be steadied by the ticking of the clock and busies herself with getting the kettle on while I attend to the outside life, which, over these few days, has seeped in. I look at the room. It is different and sprung, even the seconds as they pass seem irregular, impulsive. Life, with its rebellious fronds, curls around the recipe books, the manuals, the club rules, the travel passes, the unnamed servants, the unmothered children, the haughtiness, the distaste for bodies, the fear, the fear, the fear.

  As Annette takes me to my room we pass the teak of the dressing table. I stroke it. Alive. Smooth and cool, like a young face, and I think of her. Of Mother.

  Mother succumbed to typhoid fever a day from land. She came Home as a body in a casket. Dying meant that she never had to face Home after all. None of it ever came out in the cool grey wash of British daylight. She was one more to add to the repatriated corpses of the war.