Dignity

by Alys Conran

  Perhaps Mother would understand Susheela’s young man and his shell shock. She knew how painful a Home is when you’ve become the wrong shape for it and can no longer fit back in.

  In her things, a letter addressed to me. And, in brackets: (to be opened only if they find him).

  I opened it.

  It was a kind lie. It was a tenderness I could not find, at the time, in any memory I had of her.

  I think it again, how my packing-case dressing table is not the only thing that did not survive that journey intact.

  We buried her in the cemetery at Bay’s Mouth. Grandmother and Grandfather wept dismally. I was silent standing in that cemetery, far from Kharagpur, wanting Aashi.

  And Raja, oh what of you, Raja?

  I sit with the old guilt and mystery of it. The old never knowing. They didn’t find him. In the archives there is nothing, no record of him, of his life, of his death. Perhaps Raja escaped them into The Real India? I hope it again. Again. Perhaps he was only ever a dream and so wouldn’t feel my betrayal if he knew?

  ‘Madam,’ he says, in the gloom of my closed rooms, ‘you are stupid.’

  The Raj was too stupid to find him.

  There is something wet on my face. I notice it without distaste.

  Between the familiar grain of guilt and sorrow, a new ache now, for Susheela. Oh how I want her to have a dignity that’s unlike this house. Perhaps she’ll make a recipe of it, its stairs and hallways, its cobwebbed rooms.

  Annette leaves me, settled in bed with Horlicks, a straw, and a book of British flora open to the middle pages of illustrations.

  The species rising from my mother’s book mingle around me in the semi-darkness as I sit in my bed. I watch them, watch their stems rise, their vines coil and their leaves gather and swell as they soothe the house and its resonant memories. Through the open windows, thrown wide, perhaps by Aashi, perhaps by Anwar, there’s the smell of nut oil, jasmine mixed with exhaust fumes, and the distant sound of a tannoy announcing ship rides: best ride of the day, leaving right away, two pounds all seats. There’s the sound of quick modern cars, and past them, of Bengali gasmen banging on canisters of butane. There’s the smell of cardamom and wild figs, and the sweet sound of Aashi singing her now unintelligible words. There’s the feeling of shifting ground, of a British seaside turning finally to dust, and of my house and its long-awaited homing.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Solutions are just mixtures in which two or more substances are well mixed.

  Culinary Reactions: The Everyday Chemistry of Cooking,

  Simon Quellen Field

  She bloody well thought she’d solved it all: my life.

  ‘Who’re you?’ It’s a small boy, standing in front of her closed door like some kind of old-fashioned doorman. He’s got red hair, holds a football under one arm, and looks at me as if number three Victoria Drive belongs to him.

  It’s the day after the paperwork has finally come through, when the house has transferred to me officially, like some kind of unlikely adoption.

  ‘Did she die?’ He says it as if he’s asking whether it’ll rain later.

  I nod.

  He bites his lip. ‘Can I still play here?’

  ‘Did she let you?’

  ‘Kind of,’ he says. ‘Are you going to live here?’ he asks, looking at the house and wrinkling his nose.

  ‘Why?’ I say, not sure I want him to know we’re thinking of selling, nor that it’ll be empty for a while probably, either way.

  ‘Spooky!’ he says, with a grin.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘Really spooky.’

  As Ewan and me let ourselves in to the dusty skeleton of number three Victoria Drive, I feel it brace itself against us. The door, from these past few months of being constantly closed, needs a good kick. We have to crack its ribcage to get in. We step through; Ewan feels reassuring and whole by my side. My body’s as layered as an onion as I dare myself over its step.

  Inside, the brollies and boots shuffle a bit when we brush past them. Magda could almost be here past the hallway, in the living room, sitting in her chair under the clock, which still ticks to the empty house. The hallway smells of polish and dust, a faint trailing memory of eau de cologne, and then something beneath it, gone off. The bins haven’t been taken out. The light in the hall won’t turn on, and I have this feeling of being underground with the roots and worms, buried.

  Ewan gets a lightbulb from somewhere, screws it in, and switches it on. We sigh together: a choir of two. Everything’s dirty and dusty and looks like bloody hard work. Slugs trail their way along the porch floor. Mould pixelates the walls. The kitchen’s an empty womb. The house’s staircase spine beckons.

  The house had been holding out against change all these years, and instead of changing on the outside, it sort of wilted in its own skin. The house was something to keep Magda in before. Now it’s our loot and our problem, with its diagnosis of dry rot in the attic, its old, slightly storm-damaged roof, the dangerous wiring in the kitchen, the damp around the skirting boards and architraves, its doors which need rehanging, and its long, slow ache. There’s no subsidence at least, as far as Ewan and I can tell. I was surprised about that. Magda’s body, which was so heavy when Annette and me tried to wake it that last morning, seemed to pull the house to the ground with a weight that was just impossible for it or us to bear without buckling.

  Magda tried to keep away from the cycle of it. Birth, death, birth. In the end, she gave in. I still can’t get my head around it. Dying in her sleep. No fuss, no bother. Seriously? I knew straight away there’d be some catch.

  I didn’t know about the house for a few weeks though. That day when we found her dead, when her body was taken away, I picked up the piece of paper from her bedside table, the neat little floor plan she’d drawn, and slipped it into my pocket, her crazy dream of how we were going to live together, her in one wing, and Ewan and me in the other. Leaving hers that day I felt like everything, everything, had come out of place. That floor plan was the most perfect, ordered idea, and I’d bloody well turned it down.

  So, when I finally got the solicitor’s letter and pulled the expensive, cream page from the watermarked envelope, my eyes taking in the classy letterhead and following the print across the page until I got to … has bequeathed to you her property: 3, Victoria Drive … the first thing I felt was fucking guilty. Then there was disbelief, the paper trembling as I took the words in again and again and tried to find a hole in them, turned the page over, looked to see if there was a note somewhere, some small print that made this untrue. Maybe it was a scam?

  It was impossible. But it wasn’t a scam. There was no one to fight it either. No family. Both her cousins were long gone, her ex-husband too.

  Only Glenda in the office made a fuss. It wasn’t the first time, apparently. Not the first time a home carer’s been cared for back by bequest. It’s not illegal, just ‘embarrassing for the company’. I smarted with the guilt of it. You didn’t even bloody know her that long, said Glenda over and over again in my head. And that was true.

  But past the guilt, the disbelief, and all the other abstract nouns I felt, there was something else. A kind of wild confidence in Magda, and in what had come to pass between us, that day, in the bathroom.

  Indignity. The word kept coming into my head. And that’s what it was. What we shared.

  Sometimes I still find myself laughing at it. At all this. At the ridiculousness of sharing a toilet, and then, of sharing a house.

  The bequest has been slowly ripening, like the baby, until here we are, facing her house down.

  Inside me, you kick against the house.

  The task of clearing the inside is a sad one. The furniture we can’t shift. How on earth did she get it in here? Huge, square wardrobes and awkwardly shaped dressing tables. None of them will fit through the doors. Each one says their name on the back, ‘Worsal-Compton’, with a kind of brittle pride. A badge of honour that’s irrelevant now.


  We get a joiner in, with the idea of pulling them to bits to get them out and putting them back together afterwards, and he tells Ewan that they were packing cases once.

  ‘But you won’t find a modern joiner who can put that lot back together if you take them apart,’ he says, running his wide thumb along their hinges and their tightly worked joints.

  These pieces, although they’ve travelled so far, weigh the place down with a stuck feeling now. No wonder she struggled to walk. We think about it for a while: do we want to keep them? But they’d weigh us down too. In the end, Ewan takes out a door to get the damned things through and into the removal van to the auction. They bring in a decent price. People like things with a story. The wood is quality Indian mahogany and teak. There’s a market for colonial relics. People want to fill their houses with the Empire. It weirds me out. It’s like they want to be a copy of a copy of a copy. Like Bay’s Mouth seafront, a kind of hall of mirrors.

  I could swear Mum’s shadowing us while we clean up, muttering, spic and span, spic and span, and Magda’s own traces and her memories hang about here too, so that the house never seems empty. We throw out curlers, we throw out clothes, because none of those things mattered to her. But I keep the photographs and the journals she’s published in. And I keep her mother’s false confession.

  She’d told me about it, but I didn’t expect to find it in a small drawer in the desk, quiet and yellow with time, like suddenly feeling the ridge of a scar on someone’s back. A reminder that the past is real and unsolved, like Ewan’s hearing.

  It took quite a few sessions with the counsellor before Ewan started talking to me.

  We were walking down the pier together again, after his latest visit to her. The day was smooth and drizzly. We were the only ones out in the soft, still rain. Half the booths were shut but we bought strong tea in polystyrene cups from the tiny cafe in the kiosk halfway along. The sea stretched wide around us.

  I don’t know what made me look at Ewan then, at his face, his beautiful, tired face, or what made me touch his arm. Or what made him choose this moment, between two sips of tea, to talk. His voice, when it came, was a tight string vibrating against all that stillness, ready to break. What he said ripped Bay’s Mouth open.

  ‘They found out I was good with machines pretty quick. Had me repairing anything in sight.’ He took a breath as if he was going underwater. ‘There were never enough real mechanics to go round. I’d get taken out to fix anything broken in the field.’ He stopped, and took another deep, shaking breath. ‘We were heading out that day. A normal day. As far as days out there are normal, you know. Routine. We loaded up the kit. It was blisteringly hot, I remember, but apart from that it was just like right now, in a way. Normal. “Parklife” was playing on the radio. We were joking with each other, laughing as bloody usual, driving in a convoy of three trucks along the dust road, passing donkeys and people carrying their shopping from the market, leading their goats.’

  He stopped. We breathed. The sea breathed too.

  ‘There was this static in the air, just before it happened. Even the goats at the side of the road were kind of taut. I asked Shaun, who was driving, to stop, but the guy on the radio said we needed to get out of open country. It was quicker to go forward than to go back.’

  The sea swilled. A seagull called.

  ‘When it went off, shrapnel from the blast went straight through Shaun’s eye and out of the back of his head. I just remember blood. Someone’s mouth opening and closing, like they were screaming and screaming but there was no sound. It was Ian.’

  The seagull was quiet. The sea too. He looked down as it swilled slowly under the slatted walkway of the pier.

  ‘Half his body was gone. He bled out.’

  I listened while he named it all, one word at a time. The other side of the Bay’s Mouth postcard. The hurt that usually just sits out there on the seeping horizon, but that right now slowly tore a big rip through the whole bloody place.

  After that lot of counselling was done, he’d gone for what we called ‘the weird therapy’ after all. Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. Something straight out of sci-fi. One of those things you can’t believe will ever work. Ewan had to sit practising these relaxation techniques they taught him, and then he went to sessions where they got him to focus on awful things he’d felt and seen out there, and follow something with his eyes at the same time, moving it back and forth like in old-fashioned hypnosis. I imagine that, when his soft eyes shift and shift, it’s like the shutter of an antique camera, making sepia pictures of his traumas till they behave more like bad memories usually do. Perhaps we won’t live as much half in them and half out any more.

  Perhaps. But they’re still faded shadows, waiting in the wings, not completely programmed away. And the army’s still a kind of desh for Ewan and the others; it’s always got a place in him, in the way he works here, at the house, methodically, doing everything that needs to be done, labouring at it with Darren – and Nathan too when he comes down to lend a hand. They jibe at each other like brothers, constantly ripping the piss, but they keep moving till the job’s done: one company, moving forward. They’ll bloody well hold on to each other, and to that belonging, fitting themselves to its old patterns. I don’t tell him that I’m wary of it, this desh of theirs, because although it holds them together, it sometimes holds me apart. I’ve learnt from Magda that desh can be an exclusion zone, like a home can be a fortress.

  In the end the red-haired boy and Darren help me and Ewan tidy up the garden a bit, pulling up weeds, roughly chopping back the hedges, till you can see the shape of the place again, pick out its bones. We’d been clearing the last patch of brambles together, when the boy finds it there, between the thorns.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says the boy, like a grown-up, lifting the cube for me to see.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says Darren, taking his fag out of his mouth to stare.

  A Rubik’s Cube, all the sides turned perfectly. Blue. Yellow. Red. Green. Orange. White.

  ‘She did it,’ says the kid, pointing at the house, at Magda. ‘I gave it to her, and she did it. She did it.’ He looks confused for a second. ‘Why did she throw it away?’

  It’s impossible, what he’s saying. I can’t imagine those old hands, turning it one millimetre at a time. Except that she was so, so stubborn and had so many long hours alone. What I can imagine, without any difficulty, is her flinging this cube into the garden from an upstairs window. Because making it perfect didn’t make it live.

  Ewan’s been at the back of the house, surveying the state of it. He comes to where Darren, me and the kid are standing and looks around at the garden of brambles, long grasses, wild bushes and straggly old roses which probably haven’t flowered for years.

  ‘The grass needs properly mowing before we sell,’ he says, like some kind of groundsman.

  I look at him and shake my head.

  I can imagine how much she’d relish it. The way we’re putting everything perfectly back in order for her, polishing the floors, making the garden perfectly controlled again. But: No. I smile at her in my head, I’m not going to dignify your bloody lawn.

  It’s Dad who comes up with the idea of what to do with it, today when I meet him from his temporary job in the Colonial.

  The place is all contemporary design and modern art, the punters mostly hip young couples doing Bay’s Mouth in a tongue-in-cheek way, so Dad’s butler routine’ll be doubly ironic if he’s got the guts to do it here. I’ve been hoping they’ll give him a proper job, because it’d be such a boost, and part of me’s expecting to see him in full butler mode when I turn up there. But he comes down the stairs behind reception carrying a mop and bucket and looking a bit awkward and out of place. The woman on reception, all asymmetrical hair and black lipstick, barely acknowledges his ‘Right then, that’s me done,’ like he’s not worth much. I’m so bloody relieved when he winks at me and rolls his eyes about the stupid cow.

  I give him a hug to m
ake up for her. He smells of jasmine air freshener and beeswax. My mum’s favourite scents.

  ‘How’s my girl?’ patting my shoulder and looking at my belly which is so big I can’t do up any of my coats.

  I shrug. Truth is I’m dog-tired after all the work at Magda’s. My head’s swimming.

  ‘You OK, love?’

  ‘I’m just a bit knackered; we’ve been doing stuff at the house.’

  In the hotel lobby the guests mill around us and the sound of the tannoy seeps in from the beach.

  ‘Dad, I don’t know what the hell to do with that garden.’

  He looks at me. He looks out of the big glass doors of the hotel, at the sea.

  ‘I do,’ he says.

  He shows me the formula for what to do with it on a website.

  To turn a difficult-to-maintain lawn into your very own wildflower meadow, first rake over it coarsely, sparing no pity for the green grass, then seed the lawn with yellow-rattle to choke it properly. You can now plant whatever wildflower seeds you like.

  Dad and me scatter packets and packets of seeds like confetti all over the grass and the rude-looking soil that shows through it like a flash of knicker after the raking. We’re whirling in circles and reciting the names on the packets like spells:

  Ramsons, cow parsley, thrift, harebell.

  By next summer there’ll be tiger moths in the evenings, red admiral butterflies by day. I can already see them out of the corner of my eye, fluttering like sprites around the garden.

  Dad whoops as he scatters the seeds. I’m laughing. It feels like we’re writing some kind of wild epitaph for Magda, for Mum, for number three Victoria Drive, for the goddam British Hotel. I keep incanting them, the names:

  Lily of the valley, lady’s bedstraw, forget-me-not.

  I stop, with my empty seed packet in my hand, and Dad stops too. I can feel it.

  Future.

  It billows out over Bay’s Mouth, messy with loose ends, contradictions and different kinds of desh, full of birds from other places, odd moths, and incomplete lives.