Dignity Read online

  I find myself quite uncharacteristically sentimental, when I think of the children at Home. Indeed any matter where feelings are involved seems to have an amplified effect on me at the moment. Perhaps it’s not surprising that I feel a different person. I have noticed other changes, for which I feel embarrassment, though I know them to be expected. My stomach hardens and distends. My breasts are paperweight heavy and full. My mouth doesn’t taste anything the same, as though it’s no longer my own. My usually nimble legs, which have always been relatively strong from all my walks across moorland and Welsh hills, are torpid when I take even the tamest of my customary strolls around Darjeeling. And as for my sense of smell, even Darjeeling’s flowers are now acrid. Yesterday I peeled a lychee and it smelled of copper coins. Mrs McPherson assures me this is normal. Normal? It’s not normal to me.

  B has also changed towards me. Though perhaps that too is unsurprising. After several weeks of horrific passion, he’s now sunk into his shell, and takes little interest. When I ask if he’s excited about becoming a father, he says, ‘Yes of course,’ a little too quickly. Mrs McPherson says that the nine months of gestation are a strange time for men.

  ‘For women do change shape and become different, and therefore can’t raise the same level of desire or love.’

  I’m a little shocked that she said this so directly. But I feel she’s right, perhaps. He’s less loving, less adoring, and I realise that he begins not to notice me, as if I were merely one of the servants. The other day I brought him tea myself, and he didn’t so much as look up from his paper. I don’t mention this to Mrs McPherson, for she would only make me feel more insignificant than I do already, and probably berate me besides for the very act of making the tea myself. But B’s waning attention, though I had pushed it away when it was at its height, does make me feel so alone, as if all the spaces of the house have stretched out vastly, and my voice and my body have become tiny, tiny in the house. I begin to write Home every day, and to await the replies with painful eagerness. But the letters take so very long. I would give anything for a conversation. I write to my parents, and I write to Helen, but have heard nothing back from her.

  My father, in his latest letter, tells me that he has given up work. With the money that B has sent and his pension, he has enough to allow him to finally stop. This is a great relief. His fingers were so knotted by arthritis he had trouble holding a hammer at all, and I winced at the thought of him beating metal with one.

  ‘When do you suppose we might think of a visit Home?’ I ask B.

  He looks up from his reading.

  ‘But you’ve only just arrived. You’re surely not wanting to leave yet, Evie? I thought you loved India.’

  ‘I do,’ I answer, for it’s still true that I’m exhilarated by what I see here, by everything that is not our life. ‘But I should so like to see my family.’

  ‘You can’t travel like this anyway,’ he says then, gesturing to my stomach.

  ‘No. But it might be nice to know when I could go with the baby.’

  B comes to me then, for the first time in days, and holds my shoulders.

  ‘You must get through the initial homesickness, Evie. It’s only a phase. You must learn to tolerate it, or it’ll win out.’

  I nod. He’s right, of course. But ‘Perhaps it would help to know that we are going, even if it is in a year’s time or more.’

  ‘Well then, let’s say we’ll go in a year,’ he says, sitting back down. But his assurances seem so provisional that they are unconvincing, and certainly do not stifle my longing. Longing has become my bedfellow already, for I keep to my quarters and B to his. The few words of endearment at the end of my father’s letters are rare gems now. I read them, the simple expressions of love, ‘our dearest’, ‘with love’, ‘dearest daughter’, I read them over and over, and hear them sing into the echo of the house. I lie at night waiting for these nine months to pass so that I can have my little baby companion. Someone to love and be loved by.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Rather, ten times, die in the surf, heralding the way to a new world, than stand idly on the shore.

  Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers After Truth

  Among the Artizans of England,

  Florence Nightingale Walls tumbling in the house, and an opening door. I am being wheeled out. There is a slot of sky, and another between green leaves, the sky winking. I wink back. What is this gale? It’s my breath. In and out. Close it out, the sky. Close out the breath. The girl, Susheela, is walking beside me as I am wheeled out.

  Out.

  Vertigo of roads. Something moves around my face, clasps my nose and mouth and fills them with cool, liquid air. An oxygen mask. I inhale. The gales slow, a cool breeze into my lungs. I’ll be kept alive again. I am surprised that I don’t struggle more, bury myself more deeply in the earth. The girl sits beside me. She pulls at me.

  When I start wanting to remain here, lying here beside her as she sits, is when I begin to lose it, the world, I begin to fall backwards into it after all. The sea. The thick sea. I’m sinking downwards, downwards into it, the thickening clouds, into the silt at the bottom, the earth.

  I hear her voice. Aashi’s voice. She sings to me, under her breath. It’s the sound of the wind, something elemental. And I want it. She is beckoning me back. Don’t leave me, says the girl. Don’t leave me, says Aashi, standing on our veranda, her eyes melting in hot tears. Don’t leave.

  I move towards her through the malarial sea, sinking and rising, rising again to the surface and air, and then, heavy once more, I sink.

  Chapter Fourteen

  To Raise a Weak Patient. Take 1 ¼ yards stout canvas or calico. Sew a runner at each end. Slip this under the patient; run a stout bamboo in each runner. Then with a person at each side the patient can be raised easily.

  The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook,

  Flora Annie Steel & Grace Gardiner What’s she had to eat, love? D’you know what medication she’s on? While the ambulance shudders, I look frantically through the file I’ve brought from the house, the one we all use which tells us how to care for Magda as if that’s all she is, a timetable, a set of notes. I read out to them the long strange names of the different-coloured tablets we serve up to her at regular intervals. They shake their heads. She shouldn’t be on all that, not all at once, one says to the other. She shouldn’t be on all that. I notice then that in the medication schedule, someone has written over some of the numbers with a thick black pen, diazepam has been upped to four from what looks like a faded one. I look at Magda buried beneath the blankets, an oxygen mask covering most of her face.

  ‘Fuck,’ I say.

  ‘She’s stopped breathing,’ the man says. ‘She’s stopped breathing.’

  An impulse in my gut. C’mon, Magda. C’mon. I’m holding her papery thin hand. Stroking it in a way she’d never allow. C’mon, Magda, don’t leave me. Don’t fucking leave me now. He gives her an injection. The needle’s so definite and strong going into her delicate bird’s arm. I feel it myself. ‘Breathing’s back’, he says. And the ambulance starts up again, its sirens screaming. I feel the man putting a blanket around me. ‘All right, love,’ he says. ‘All right.’ And I realise I’m breathing for Magda, the breath coming in and out of me in choppy waves. ‘All right,’ he says, his hand on my shoulder, until my breath and Magda’s are slow and steady, slow and steady as the ambulance pulls up outside the hospital and she’s wheeled in.

  ‘Family?’ asks a nurse, as they wheel her into triage.

  I shake my head.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to wait then, love.’ She says it kindly. ‘Have a cup of tea; we’ll keep you informed. Come and ask in an hour or so.’

  A long time. I can’t sit still, so I go off, wandering the corridors and around the hollow stairwells. The hospital echoes with those last few months with Mum, the illness that was a foreign land we all had to set up camp in, like refugees. It all feels so familiar: the dowdy mobility aids,
the adjustable cot beds, the repeating forms, the retro piles of still-not-digitised medical notes, the controlled violence of treatment plans and operations. And the other things, the warm things you don’t expect: the sudden gentleness of porters with their great bad breezy jokes, the precious candour of nurses, the feeling of watching doctors trying their best to think through the exhaustion. These tired, tired people pulling together like a bloody miracle to keep a badly funded hospital together by the skin of its teeth. I feel it, filling my chest and throat as I sit in one of the empty stairwells, my knees up to my chest: the intensity of that love we lived then, with Mum, on the edge. My body aches with it. She’s got to bloody well get through this. My fists are closed so tightly my nails dig red gouges in my palms. She’s got to.

  My phone rings. Glenda. I let it ring out, but I do get up, and start one step at a time down the stairwell.

  I go out of the turning doors and across to a grassy bit where a few old men are standing in their dressing gowns, smoking. I phone in.

  Glenda, on the phone, is so matter of fact.

  ‘Oh right. Right,’ she says. ‘Are you supposed to be going anywhere else now?’ she asks me. ‘To Mrs Jenkins?’

  ‘I’ve missed that already.’

  ‘Why?’ she snaps down the phone.

  ‘I came in with Magda … Mrs Jenkins will be OK. She usually insists on making her own lunch anyway.’ I realise how lame it sounds, as soon as it’s out of my mouth.

  ‘There’s no need for you to stay now, is there?’

  ‘I don’t know if she’s all right yet …’

  ‘That’s the family’s job.’ Glenda’s voice is tight and in its box.

  ‘Magda hasn’t got any, has she?’

  There’s a silence, the sound of papers rustling. ‘We’ve got a contact number here somewhere,’ she says. ‘She has to have a next of kin.’ She hangs up.

  I sit in the relatives’ room, sometimes staring at the wall full of posters, sometimes looking out of the window. You can just see houses, and the top of the big wheel, with no tourists in it. No wonder. No one fancies looking down on the marvel of Bay’s Mouth and its forgotten seaside extravaganza on this grey day. My nails have worked red sores into my palms from clenching. I open them and look at the marks, not taking them in.

  A young doctor comes out into the corridor.

  ‘I’ve got a Magda Roberts.’

  I leap up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you her next of kin?’ he says, looking me up and down. I can see him computing whether or not that might be, in any genetic way, possible. I want to say Yes.

  ‘No. I’m her carer. Her friend. I brought her in.’

  ‘Right. We shouldn’t really talk to people who aren’t family, but she’s asked us not to call anyone.’ She’s alive to give orders!

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Yes, and no.’ He looks at me. Perhaps it’s the worry he must see on my face that convinces him I fit with his confidentiality rules, because he decides to keep talking. ‘Her heart’s been a little irregular but seems to be settling. There were some contraindications in the medication she’s been on. Some of it shouldn’t be taken together. We’re sorting that out. And she also took far too much of it. Any idea how that happened?’ There’s almost a suspicion there. He isn’t much older than me.

  ‘I think she changed the amounts on the chart we use.’

  He raises an eyebrow because we should have been checking the right amounts on the packet, not just on the chart. ‘She’ll need to come off the diazepam, gradually,’ he says. ‘We’ll need to keep her in until she’s settled. Is there a number for us to call?’

  ‘I’ll give you my number.’ I reel it off. ‘Can I see her?’

  ‘If you let her rest for an hour or so, you could come back then if she’s awake. She’ll be in the high-dependency ward.’

  He strides off down the corridor, on to the next person, and the one after that.

  The hospital canteen is a mishmash of staff, patients, people looking happy – probably about a birth, I realise with a kind of off-note in my belly – and other people crying and sharing tissues, probably because someone’s dying – which makes my throat tighten up again. A strange, hyper-living place. I get a watery instant coffee and settle down next to the window. Outside there’s a gravel rockery, a few sad-looking plants, more smokers standing there. I decide to go through the door into the pale sunlight and phone Glenda again.

  ‘Have you found anyone?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Glenda sounds bored. Sometimes I wonder if she even knows people’s names.

  ‘Magda’s family.’

  ‘No. Tried, but the number’s not right. Doesn’t even ring.’ There’s a bit of a silence. I realise that Magda’s probably just fobbed them off with some made-up number. ‘Magda’s getting too difficult for us, and she’s got no family around worth speaking of,’ she says in a flat, empty kind of way. ‘Social services might decide to put her in residential care.’

  I try to imagine this for a few seconds. Magda leaving her house and swapping it for a room in one of those places. I can’t. It’d bloody kill her. When I worked in The Seaview, some of the residents barely seemed real. They just sagged all empty inside their clothes, which half the time were actually somebody else’s skirt and blouse the laundry’d mixed up. You got complaints from visiting relatives every time you came on shift. ‘You’ve not given Mum breakfast,’ or ‘Dad says he’s not had a drink all day,’ or ‘Poor thing’s been sitting there in his own urine all morning. Can you imagine?’ And you knew these things were true. They told me not to say sorry because it acknowledged that we were at fault. But I was sorry. I was sorry about the short-staffed shithole we worked in.

  She needs her house. Caught in one of those places, she’d just give up, like a fish on a hook that’s done with struggling.

  ‘I’ll talk to her,’ I say. And hang up before Glenda can kick up a fuss.

  On the ward, Magda lies on the bed. Her small body barely makes a lump under the blank hospital sheets. She’s still wearing the oxygen mask but her grey eyes are bright again. She pulls off the mask when I walk in.

  ‘Hi, Magda,’ I say. ‘How’re you feeling?’

  She doesn’t really answer. Too knackered. She’s still floundering, you can see that. Too tired even to send me away. She motions for me to sit down. I see her glance towards my belly. The pregnancy’s between us, holding me to Magda, and holding Magda to me.

  ‘You look better anyway,’ I say.

  Her eyes almost roll. She makes a huge effort to say something.

  ‘Stop the silly chit-chat,’ she whispers, then lies back on the pillow, breathing heavily with the effort.

  I almost laugh. She’s going to be fine.

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Thing is, Magda, we need to call your family.’

  She just shakes her head without lifting it from the pillow.

  ‘They need to speak to someone.’

  I don’t want to tell her what Glenda said, about the home. Not yet.

  There’s a long silence. Then she half lifts her head and tries to say something again. I crane my head forward to hear her whisper it: ‘Over my dead body,’ she says, into my ear.

  It will be, I think. That’s the sad thing.

  I give her a kiss before I leave. Her cheek is softer than you’d think, and warmer too. She still smells of eau de cologne, even here.

  ‘I’ll come back in the morning,’ I tell her. Magda reaches for my hand. She grips it, looks at me with those firm grey eyes of hers.

  ‘Get some rest, woman,’ she tells me, fiercely.

  ‘Ah! You get some rest.’

  She lets go of my hand and waves me away, like she’s swatting a fly.

  When I call the office, Glenda’s all in a fuss about it.

  ‘The next of kin she gave us was just a random number. I’ll get the hospital to call in social services in the morning. This isn’t in our remit. We don’t do hospital visits.’r />
  ‘I don’t mind, and someone needs to keep tabs on her.’

  ‘They’ll do that. We need to hand over now.’ Like a robot.

  I say it quietly: ‘Give her twenty-four hours.’

  Glenda sniffs. ‘It’s Saturday tomorrow anyway,’ she says. ‘They’re not around over the weekend.’ She puts the phone down.

  In the silence afterwards, I listen to my own quick breathing. One weekend, and then they’ll tear her from her house like a baby from a womb. She isn’t ready. I’m not ready for that.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Scouring drops. Mix 2 oz. rectified spirits of turpentine with 2 drachms essential oil of lemon or cloves. Rub on with a clean rag until the stain disappears.

  The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook,

  Flora Annie Steel & Grace Gardiner

  When I have surfaced through my opening eyes, coming up for air, I take in the small ward with its four bays, its four armchairs, its four standing bed tables, its jugs of water, its drips and tubes and machines, its two female nurses and the male nurse, and its transient, fleetingly important doctors. I lie blinking and monitored.

  When the male nurse comes by, I ask for Susheela.

  She comes.

  When I try to speak, and cannot, Susheela holds my hand. Her hand is firm. Her hand is Aashi’s hand. I close my eyes. Am I, momentarily, loved?

  ‘They’ll try to call your family,’ Susheela says. There’s a moment when I hope for it. And then I remember.

  When Susheela leaves, I lie on my side, watching the wall, and the shadows of the nurses dancing.

  Slowly, I become aware of her. She sits, my mother, Evelyn Roberts, at the end of my bed. Her brow is furrowed as it always was. She smells of lemon soap. My bed is covered in picked flowers. Cowslips and dandelion clocks, daisies. She has her Book of British Flora out, and is comparing them to the pictures.

  The nurses clip past, oblivious, as we always are to other people’s truths. They close the curtains around the bay opposite, and talk to the aged lady there, encouraging her onto the commode. Their tones are practised, reassuring. I can’t hear what the lady is saying, but her voice is tight with the fear of indignity. The ward darkens away again.