Dignity Read online

  Praise for Dignity

  ‘Dignity is an exquisite novel: compassionate, beautiful and unflinching. I’m full of admiration for the skill with which it draws connections between the past and present, and manages to feel both timeless and achingly contemporary’

  Fiona McFarlane, author of The Night Guest

  ‘Through three women’s distinct and wonderful voices Alys Conran explores the nature and meaning of home. The characters in this beautiful novel are fierce, compassionate, angry, but above all, heartbreakingly real. I was drawn in from the very first page’

  Claire Fuller, author of Our Endless Numbered Days

  and Bitter Orange

  ‘In Alys Conran’s second novel, she tells the story of Magda, an elderly woman beset with memories of her childhood in India and her growing concern for Susheela, the young woman who works as her carer. As Magda’s health fails and Susheela reveals struggles of her own, the women – difficult, complicated, sometimes unlikeable – draw closer in this surprising tale of the British Empire’s long reach. This is a beguiling book with a fierce, uncompromising quality to it – a novel that continues to unfold its meaning after the story has ended’

  Guinevere Glasfurd, author of The Words in My Hand

  Praise for Alys Conran’s debut novel, Pigeon

  (Parthian Books, 2016)

  Winner of the Wales Book of the Year, the Rhys Davies Fiction Prize and the Wales Arts Review People’s Prize.

  Shortlisted for The International Dylan Thomas Prize 2017, and longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award

  ‘An exquisite novel by a great new writer’

  M.J Hyland, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Carry Me Down

  ‘Deceptively simple … thoroughly engaging … a timeless quality … I should like to recommend that the unpretentious prose of Pigeon be read primarily for its humaneness and subtle poetical spirit’

  Wales Arts Review

  ‘Might have been authored by Faulkner … just as imaginatively capacious … Never overwrought, rather pitch-perfect’

  Omar Sabbagh, New Welsh Review

  ‘A quite brilliant and empathetic writer of both narrative and character. Pigeon is an extraordinary book about people, place, language and culture’

  From the Margins

  In memory of my father, Tony Conran,

  poet and translator.

  And for his friend, Shallu,

  who came to care.

  Contents

  Praise for Dignity

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Book Two

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Book One

  Chapter One

  An Indian household can no more be governed peacefully without dignity and prestige, than an Indian Empire.

  The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook,

  Flora Annie Steel & Grace Gardiner

  To my house at number three Victoria Drive the world outside is foreign. The gap between the inside of the house and what blurs past outside has been growing steadily throughout recent years until everything beyond the walls seems loud and staccato and completely out of time. Oh it is all whirring roads, fast-changing channels and quick shifts of sense so sudden there’s not a hope of finding a meaning in any of it. Oh it is all people darting and quivering with busyness, leaving every sentence half finished. Oh it is all in pieces. It is all simply shards.

  The house has to hold out against this small Britain, which has become so lax, and its unsteady world, which whirrs so. My house has to make a stand. It has to stand tall and upright with all its separate rooms. With its walls made of good brick from the days when brick was made right, its clean sash windows over which blinds are perpetually hung, and its door, painted with black gloss, with which the house says, in its own way, do not come in. Although I barely ever use the door, I know that still, at the foot of it, a brush doormat lies. On the doormat it simply says ‘Home’ in small stern letters. And perhaps it’s this that finally discourages the legions of those fidgeting people from the world outside to trespass up the path. For no one visits the house.

  No one save the girls in their yellow uniforms. The house can’t escape them; they come on professional business.

  We’re in the bathroom. The new girl, Susheela, tugs hard at my knickers to get them down over the thickened legs.

  ‘Sorry, Magda,’ she says.

  ‘You should be.’

  This is the first time we’ve been to the toilet together. I have tried, since she arrived on the scene, to avoid going with her. When I go with them, we must talk. I’m still unable to accustom myself to listening to the flow of urine in the presence of someone else, and so must make conversation.

  ‘So you’re Susheela, are you?’

  ‘Yes, Su-shee-la,’ the girl says now. A slight smile; she’s surprised and perhaps pleased that I know her name at all, I can tell. We have exchanged few words on her previous visits.

  ‘Did I say it incorrectly?’ I know I didn’t.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why choose to repeat it in that idiotic fashion?’

  She laughs. Surprised, is she?

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Didn’t mean to offend.’

  ‘Takes more than that, my girl.’

  I cannot think of what she’s presently doing, and so we must continue.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I ask. The other one was from Delhi, the other Indian girl, who lasted only one visit and was gone back out into the blur.

  ‘Just down the road,’ she says. ‘Bay’s Mouth.’ Her soft voice fills the bathroom.

  She has a North Indian look about her. Yes. I press it away, the longing, try to shut the door on it. But it’s come in, settled down and put its feet up. Damn this girl. Ever since she turned up she’s bothered me like a bite that won’t settle.

  Once she has me all back in order she wheels the chair out past the dressing table. I stroke the wood of it as we pass. When I could stand and walk alone, on my own path, I would linger here, beside it, the teak of the dressing table smooth and cool, like a young face. If you look into it for long enough, into the almost imperceptible grain, you can see it. The heat. And you can feel that this wood was once rooted. Touch
ing it, you can watch white storks pick across a grove. Feel the dry air in your mouth. And hear it. The thick air. The sound of it. The hum and muster of Bengal.

  The girl pushes my unlistening chair on and on through the house, at whoever’s pace but mine. Into the living room. Under the clock.

  Then she comes round to the front of my chair, and looks at me.

  Damn it.

  Damn it, I can’t escape seeing the world in their expressions, the ones that come. That world in pieces. And them, in pieces. There’s part of them here, with me, changing my blouse, or running my stockings up the varicosed legs like pulling over a shroud. And part of them elsewhere, in several elsewheres: clocking in, clocking out, checking the messages on their small black phones, driving, braking, driving, making microwave dinners and watching the TV channels change. You can’t help feeling sorry for them, the ones that come to care.

  Sometimes I wonder where it is in them, that part of a person that needs to be separate and bounded, needs to be itself alone and set within its own confines.

  I’ve even asked them. ‘What do you do to come to yourself?’ I asked the fat one last week, meaning How do you wind all this down? How do you survive it? And she looked at me and laughed, and then looked at me again, lost a demi-second before saying, ‘This and that,’ and some other obfuscating tattle.

  What they do, I realise from hearing them talk to each other at the changing of the guard, is have a glass of wine, and then another and another, and sink into it. Forgetting. Their many parts sagging, and still apart.

  I frighten them by asking these kinds of questions. Their only recourse is to behave as though I am as idiotic as I look.

  ‘Oh, Magda,’ says the short one almost every time she comes. ‘Are you in one of your moods again?’ Which is enough to make me want to belt her across the face.

  Or, ‘Oh, Magda. You do make me laugh.’ The more reasonable, tall one.

  Or – the most patronising square woman with the black hair – ‘Magda, are you causing trouble again?’

  Which I am. I most emphatically am.

  ‘Coffee?’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘Would you like coffee?’

  ‘I should think you could check your chart and see if it’s time,’ I say.

  She’s looking at me in that incredulous, blank way. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A timetable for everything now, isn’t there?’ I smooth my skirt as I sit. ‘Shouldn’t think it matters if I want it; I shall have it.’

  ‘But do you want it?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ I look up at her.

  ‘It matters to me, Magda.’ That small smile, as she says it, my Christian name.

  My bones feel it, the way she’s looking at me. Pity, is it? Is it? I look her in the eye, this new Indian girl, and make myself as upright as I can in the chair, stacking my vertebrae again, tall.

  ‘And are you of any importance?’ I say, as haughtily as my position allows.

  She leaves me here, under the clock, and goes to the kitchen.

  My name, I have tried to tell them, is Mrs Compton. I have a degree in Chemistry. I could once mix element with element and produce clouds of red vermilion, yellow cadmium, cobalt blue. I could write out a formula so correct that it sang. I could measure and weigh and make an equation balance, make it stand most properly to attention. I am all a balancing act, though lately I am having trouble, and my legs will no longer let me stand.

  But my house stands.

  My house has to stake its place against them. It has to hold out more stubbornly even than the old, declining hotels along the seafront at Bay’s Mouth, hotels called the British, the Burlington, the Palace, the Imperial, which have none of my discipline, and whose bones are more crumbled by dry rot than mine. Sandwiched between the new, brash seafront, with its stark, freshly built guest house called the Colonial and the frightful tower blocks which rise to the back of me, wholly beyond the pale, my house is upright and still proper. I enjoy their discomfort at it, these women contracted to care. They’re uncomfortable in my grand house, like peanuts in a chocolate box.

  And then this one, Susheela, who I can sense pacing now, in my kitchen, like a flutter in my belly. She has that dignity about her that Anwar had. I value that. Dignity in a person who serves.

  I wait a long time. There is the clock. There is me under it. Waiting under all that time.

  Around me the furniture and ornaments and belongings tell a story, if any of them could be still enough to listen.

  The beginning is this photograph of Mother, sitting, despite my anger at it, on the mantlepiece still. A sepia print, faded at the edges, and over-exposed to the bright Indian sun. Simply a wide expanse of lawn, blank canvas, and her at its centre. In the middle of the picture she sits, in a wicker chair, her feet tucked to the side, knees together, carefully, carefully. If any of these girls that come could be bothered to look at the photograph for any length of time, they might feel how she smoothed out that skirt a split-second before the shutter opened, how she brushed any fragments of disarray from her shoulders, shooed the servants from the frame, shifted her posture, drew herself more upright and took on that accusatory look, taut around the anger that kept her in place. It keeps me in place still.

  By the time I knew her she was either Mrs Benedict Worsal Compton or simply Memsahib. But on the back of the picture her name is written: Evelyn Roberts. My mother.

  The story continues in this houseful of heavy wooden furniture, which were our packing cases once, to come Home with. On the back it still says our name, stamped on the chest of drawers, the underside of the dressing table, the underbelly of the wardrobe. It was the only way we were allowed to bring that much good wood Home. There were quotas. India was finally clawing back its assets. And wood was one. So you had to turn your exquisite furniture into cases for the ship, and then back into furniture for Home. I remember my blind rage when the furniture at the end, at Home, did not match what we’d had in our grand residence in Kharagpur. The furniture was not the only thing that didn’t emerge from that journey intact.

  See. The house tells a story, tells it through from beginning to end. This end. And over my dead body will there be anything after.

  The girl doesn’t come back. I listen for her. Has she left? She hasn’t given me my pills. I need my pills. I listen for her. Yes. In the kitchen I can hear her sniffling, and then the low sound of sobbing.

  Already? I’ll get rid of her soon enough, will I? Damn her, and damn this longing. I wait with the grandfather clock. Another thing that’s whole. Its solid ticking keeps the house in order, keeps the presence of time here and keeps me sitting under it, under the pressure of the unifying tick and tock. Not the kind of time that separates, one minute from another, one hour, one shift, as time exists for these girls. No, this time is different; it binds, roots, links one second to the next, one age, one place to another. And the dead to the living.

  Chapter Two

  Lilium. LILY

  The bulbs do not bear being kept long out of the ground, and are sure to arrive here in a more or less damaged condition. Some were entirely decayed on reaching me; others in a tolerably sound condition never started, and some, one or two only, did so to die off speedily on the approach of the hot season.

  Firmingers Manual of Gardening for India,

  W. Burns

  I stand on the deck, dressed in my new name. No longer Evelyn Roberts, but Mrs Benedict Worsal Compton, wife of Captain Benedict Worsal Compton. Beneath the chenille skirt of my new name, its silk blouse and new bob cut, my body is the same common, pale, permeable collection of skin and muscle and bone and memory, my feet within its patent shoes still bare, and between my thighs I still ache and want as Evelyn Roberts always did.

  I am to wear his name wherever I go, like someone else’s too-big shoes, or perhaps a nun’s habit. But I stand on the deck, Evelyn, watching this strangely concrete India as we come into port, and thinking of that word he used for it: Fri
ghtful.

  ‘We mustn’t lose face in India, or it’ll be frightful,’ B had said, the last time I saw him, as we walked hand in hand along the seafront at Bay’s Mouth, the cold wind lashing at us and battening me to him like a tethered bird. When I asked what he meant he didn’t want to talk about it. And it’s this not talking about it that makes it become a spectre. Standing on the deck, I find myself turning his words over in my head. Frightful. It. Will. Be. Frightful.

  The ladies on board, once I had shared their table on the upper deck for several days, told me, over yet another milk and soda, of some of the dangers.

  ‘They are terribly foul minded,’ said the one called Eliza, who wears her grand dresses of beading as casually as if they were just kitchen pinnies. ‘One look at a white woman’s body, and they will never forget that we are flesh and blood.’ She shivered. ‘There are several recent tales of women dishonoured by a supposedly loyal Indian, though it’s difficult to know if they’re true. Who would ever admit to such a shameful thing?’

  The shock of this sank into my spine. I have never met an Indian man, but I shall have to steer well clear. And yet isn’t it inevitable that some of these copious servants we are to take on must be men?

  ‘Oh nearly all,’ Eliza told me. ‘Though you may have yourself an ayah or a nursemaid if you have children. Otherwise it will be all men, and all for you to keep in line yourself.’

  The manuals speak of the servants as infants, rather than as grown men. Standing on the deck, awaiting the first feelings of India, I think of my classroom of children in their short trousers shivering against the chills of early spring, their legs mottled like corned beef, and of how, in the schoolroom, little Jacob’s face closed up as he stood at his desk with his hand out to receive the lashes.

  I did give him the punishment, after a long moment of steeling myself against it: three sharp smacks with the cane across his little palm. I was meant to give him five. I can still feel the three hot stings on my own hand under this incongruous sun.

  The ship is coming into a wide harbour. Concrete jetties are arms reaching for us as the ship is taken back in to shore. We pass several other big vessels. Things become dense and solid again, and so loud. Some of the noise you would expect from such a mingling port: the industrious clang of sails and chains, the men hollering back and forth, the sound of engines and the sashaying sea. But there are other, unfamiliar things drifting up to the ship once we are stationed in the dock. The calls of indecipherable men, like the crackle of insects I don’t recognise. These intonations, strange in their vocabulary, rise from the portside, and gather to a low, swelling hubbub as we draw up to land. I begin to pick out individual faces on the dock, hieroglyphs in the crowd, as their voices become more pressing. Their opaque sounds twang and arpeggio at my gut. I look to the other women.