Dignity Read online

  When I wake, the ward sister is there, standing, checking my chart. She smiles at me briefly and continues to scribble. She comes around, holds my wrist, feels for the ebb and flow of me, and measures it by her wristwatch, the old-fashioned way. A trolley comes up the corridor, with smells of breakfast.

  I push the plate they put on my bed table, upsetting it. Scrambled egg and cooked tomato and toast make a broken stain across the bedclothes, the floor. I’m calling her, ‘Mother, Mother,’ into the dark ward. ‘Mother.’ But she isn’t there. They hold me down with their uniformed bodies, placate me with stifling words.

  ‘It’s all right, Magda. Calm down, love. It’s all right.’

  But it isn’t all right. This place is so empty. Only pollen stains remain on the white sheets, where the flowers were. Only my ragged breath, slowing again.

  Since I am the main guest, the main event in the quiet single bay where they’ve put me since the breakfast incident, they play me classical music through little speakers in the wall, and have made my bed as I like it (two sheets, two blankets, only the sheets turned down). I expect that tomorrow they will allow me to make selective alterations to the menu. Despite these conveniences, it is all still empty here. They will only give me coffee with a terrible thickening agent in it, to make sure I swallow it correctly and do not choke.

  Susheela comes, sits beside my bed. She holds my hand again, as no one has held it for so long. I keep my eyes closed, and feel the softness of her palm wrapped around my fingers. Her hand whispers to me, bringing me into the beckoning world.

  I need to grow, to grow in the bed. I need to take control.

  I take my hand away, and try to sit up. I fail.

  ‘Bring me coffee,’ I shout to the nurse. ‘Bring me coffee without that awful stuff.’ And when she refuses, shaking her head and offering the thickened slew instead, ‘Bring me real coffee. Coffee.’

  The nurse ignores me. But the girl, Susheela, she brings it secretly, wet and bitter and sweet to my lips. I take a long drink. I cough. I drink. I cough.

  ‘Good coffee,’ I say, my voice trailing after Susheela as she leaves me here, alone again among all this automatic nursing.

  My house is battling against the ward, and tries to draw its walls around me even here, its walls of memories and Mother. I don’t want to see her. It hurts to see Mother polishing the windows in the ward. Muttering about how to make my bed correctly (two sheets, two blankets, only the sheet turned down). Her drawn face, her anger and her fear. She doesn’t look at me as she speaks into the empty air of the ward.

  You’ll have to go, Magda, she’s saying, sitting beside me craning over her work, which she’s placed on a small table, and has lit with a small tassel lamp. You’ll have to go Home like the other children. She’s doesn’t look up from her copying, copying and copying the flowers in her book of British botany. The flowers, cowslips, dandelion clocks and daisies are pinned down and accurate in Mother’s book, and no longer like live flowers at all. I’m crying. I’m a child again crying, because I don’t want to go Home.

  ‘Calm down, Magda,’ the nurses say, pinning me to the bed. ‘It’s just the withdrawal. It’ll pass.’

  I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave India, the servants, Aashi. I hear it echoing from the other beds. Susheela’s voice. I hear her voice, saying it. They’ll put you in a home, Magda. They’ll put you in a home.

  How dare they. I hear my mother saying it. How dare they call it Home.

  Home is my big, unchanging house. It is my clock, my chair.

  On my lap, as I sit, propped up in my perfectly turneddown bed, is a book. I open it. The Complete, its yellowed pages. A recipe for scouring a stain.

  Chapter Sixteen

  After the first home, the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

  ‘Eighth Duino Elegy’,

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  It’s the same with all the women of class. The children are sent Home. And why do the mothers not go with them? Why do they stay? To begin with I couldn’t fathom it. But I begin, I think, to understand. Ever since I saw B with that woman.

  I was in the back of the car, leaving Mrs McPherson’s and passing across the square when I saw him. He was standing beside her on the street, a pretty girl with slim legs, wearing one of those tauntingly short flapper dresses popular with the faster girls at home, its shapelessness tempered by how it slunk from one of her shoulders and was gathered to her small waist by a patent belt. She was turning a curl of her short hair in her hand. He was smiling at her, and then he stepped towards her. He stepped, and as he did the distance between them closed beyond propriety. The sickness rose up my spine. My husband B held her half-bared shoulder and kissed her neck.

  The way he kissed her, full of lust and wanting, wasn’t love, I could tell that. He was a man who’d stray for lust. B fell right then from the stage of my dream. And I fell, quietly, out of any kind of love, if it ever was love that I was in.

  I didn’t challenge him on the matter. It seemed hopeless. If he’d stray now, in public, when I was with child and at my most needful, there’d be no reasoning with him, for he’d simply tell me lies as he evidently had already: he was working late, he was tired because of work, he loved me. I simply allowed myself to hate him quietly, and he paid me so little attention I barely think he noticed the difference, and won’t, I think, until a few months after the baby comes when he may begin to come to me with that needful pressure. I’ll not then be so forthcoming. My boundaries stiffen around me. My skin is terracotta hard. I think of it, of what Helen called ‘my ambition’, and feel frequently very sick.

  Mrs McPherson brings up the matter of infidelity suddenly, on one of our walks around the small shopping bazaar.

  ‘They all do it, you know,’ she says. ‘Well, perhaps not all. Henrietta’s husband is rather good. But many at least.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stray, my dear. Stray.’ She corrects the angle of the parasol she holds, resting like a hunter’s gun against her shoulder, the frills of its canopy hanging around her face. ‘There are just so many parties in the hills. So many opportunities for frivolity.’ She says this as though this particular frivolity, of the flesh, were just a delicious extra cocktail.

  I bite my lip. I’ve no urge to talk to her about it.

  We keep walking past the other ladies, doing their turns, and past the shopfronts, uncannily familiar and English. After a while I summon the courage to ask her something terrible.

  ‘Does anyone ever get divorced out here?’ My voice is high, desperate.

  ‘Keep your voice down!’ she says, grabbing my elbow. ‘Good lord no,’ she whispers fiercely. ‘Not in India. Can you imagine how we’d all bear the indignity.’ The spit-filled blast of that last word lands on my face. Cold aluminium. ‘No, even when a marriage is beyond redemption, there’s none of that kind of thing. Oh, the woman might get shipped Home, of course. But her husband out here will just carry on as before, or worse, and she’ll be left to her own devices in England.’ She turns to me. ‘We don’t do divorce. Can you imagine how it might be perceived? Weakness, my dear. We must put up and shut up.’ She pats me on the arm, in a businesslike way, and then stops me to view some rather pretty blouses in the window of the English draper’s.

  As we stand there she says, ‘You’d better stay in India and bear it. A woman like you could be left entirely abandoned in England with her children. And even if you did, somehow, have a divorce, you couldn’t then find a good position in any self-respecting school. And could your family afford to keep you, dear?’ She shakes her head. ‘Could you even bear the shame of return under those circumstances?’ She humphs dryly. ‘The guilt of needing your family’s money for the passage? Their house for a home, possibly forever? Would you be taken back as a schoolteacher? Surely not with a private life in tatters. No. In India it’s our lot to work hard to hold on to our husbands, whether we love them or not.’ She takes my elbow and we continue our walk in sile
nce. I hate her.

  I can feel the baby now, turning inside me. And as I wake, move, eat, sleep, I imagine myself turning around it with no thought for any Indian day’s horizon, only looking inwards towards my child. It becomes a pivot. It’s the only thing about me that’s still touched by love, at my belly, under my heart, its gravity tugging me inwards, and I make myself a nest for it, cradling my belly day and night, touching my child’s horizons with my hands, listening to its movements, waiting for the pull of its homecoming.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In this body, in this town of Spirit, there is a little house shaped like a lotus, and in that house there is a little space. One should know what is there.

  ‘The Doctrine of the Chhāndôgyas (Chhāndôgya-Upanishad)’,

  The Ten Principal Upanishads,

  Translated by Shree Purohit Swāmi and W. B.Yeats

  ‘Fuck it,’ I’d said out loud at the coffee machine in the corridor, and pressed the button for black coffee twice. I’d decanted the plastic cup into a blue hospital one, with a spout, which I’d smuggled from the ward. ‘Just fuck it,’ pressing the lid on tight.

  I’m sitting by her bedside, holding the plastic hospital-issue cup to her lips and feeding her strong coffee, despite what the nurses say.

  But my body’s less brave than my mouth and my hands shake a bit as they raise the cup to her lips. The nurses stopped me on my way in to tell me again not to give her coffee, so I told them it was juice. They couldn’t tell because of the lid.

  ‘Good stuff,’ she says, totally spent by the effort of sipping, and lets her head fall back to the pillow. She’d not have accepted anything less.

  I’m not sure how to broach the subject. The hospital, when I asked them again, said they couldn’t contact a relative against the patient’s wishes even if they had a number, and every sinew and varicose vein of Magda’s body’s is set against it.

  I tell her straight. ‘They’re determined to put you in residential care, Magda, unless we can argue against it.’ I’m too tired, too fucking stressed out to lie.

  Her lips make a tight zip. She’d been half expecting it, you can tell. Magda’s many things: stubborn, rude, aggressive, a bloody bigot, but she’s really not thick.

  ‘I shall argue against it myself,’ she says, all prim, bending her head to take up the straw again, and sucking more of the warm, rich coffee from the cup I’m holding.

  I sigh. ‘Not sure they’ll listen to you, Magda.’

  ‘I have money,’ she says.

  I wonder if this is true after all. ‘Not sure even your money can keep you at home any more, Magda, not without someone to keep tabs on it all. Your house is a bloody mess.’

  She turns slightly pale. ‘It is not!’

  ‘Magda, when was the last time you saw the inside of any of the rooms except your bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen and the living room?’ I say it gently, but still it’s like shining a searchlight into her dusty rooms.

  She stews over this so darkly that I feel guilty for bringing the house into it at all.

  ‘Why are you picking on me in such a way?’ she says eventually, sulkily.

  ‘You need to understand the situation.’ I sound like my mother.

  ‘I understand my situation perfectly well.’

  ‘So what’re you going to do about it?’ As if she was Leah. As if we were in Parliament together, over a bad coffee.

  ‘Stay at home!’ she says.

  I sigh. ‘Magda, they just won’t let you.’

  ‘They can’t stop me.’ She purses her lips.

  ‘They can refuse to care for you there.’

  ‘I shall care for myself.’

  ‘You can’t. You know that.’

  ‘I should manage perfectly well,’ she says and reaches for the cup again. This time she coughs for so long it scares me. ‘Good coffee,’ she says after it’s over, and then closes her eyes and lies her head back on the pillow, exhausted. I look at her weary face. Not even she believes what she’s saying.

  ‘Is there no one at all in your family who can come, Magda?’

  Silence.

  I’ll let her sleep on it, have a think. I get up to leave, but before I stand, her hand grips my wrist.

  ‘There’s no one,’ she says, in a fierce, sad voice, and then she falls back on the pillow. ‘That’s the truth.’

  I stand, looking down at her, not knowing what to say.

  ‘Go to the house,’ she says, ‘and get me my bank book. I’ll show you how much money I have.’

  The dark garden circles the house like armour. The door stands hard. I get the key. I turn it. It clicks. The house seems to breathe in quickly, getting itself ready for what’s about to happen: an invasion by part of the sudden world. I feel for it. I know what it’s like to have your body invaded by something alien. This time the gatekeeper isn’t here in her rigid chair, keeping watch and keeping me out. I let myself into Magda’s house. A thief. In college, they told us to build a character by describing the things they keep: letters, photographs, ornaments, keepsakes. Magda keeps this house. My hand shakes as I place it on the door, and push.

  I turn on the light in the small entrance hall. As it pours its odd brightness into the dusty space, my eyes fall on things that I’ve not noticed before: the coat stand filled with a surprising number of coats – several of them right for a tall man, not for a small, white-haired woman – and the umbrellas gathering dust: two umbrellas, one short with a paisley print, and one black, wooden-handled; and then the big boots, beside the little ones. Men’s boots.

  The possibility of Magda having relationships, affection or love, is like summer sun in midwinter.

  My heart’s counting down to something, and I can hear that steady tick and tock, the heartbeat of the house, way before I arrive in the lounge. The switch, when I press it, floods the room with a light that’s too refreshing, inappropriate, like opening a window in an old museum. The dark, exotic furniture, the tired upholstery, the cobwebs, the murk, things I know as Magda, light up electric and wrong.

  I turn around, back into the entrance hall. A breath. Two breaths. Up the long staircase this time, climbing the spine of the house, Magda’s backbone, vertebra by vertebra. I push the door to one of the closed rooms carefully. The house shudders with it. Disapproves. This door hasn’t been opened in years. Inside has that untouched, musty, silent smell. A few moths flutter, and there are cobwebs draping the door.

  I’m surprised that the bare bulb lights at all when I switch it on, but it spreads naked light to show an old study, bookcases around the walls and a bureau standing centre-floor. I wonder what Magda did in here. Did she sit at the desk? Did she study or write or keep accounts?

  I go to the bureau, open it carefully. They fall out. Letters. Piles and piles of them, shut away here.

  She’s carefully put the letters into sets, placed them back in their envelopes and circled each set with cord, like old-fashioned presents. If I take off the carefully tied string I’ll never be able to re-tie them right. Magda’s from before Sellotape and knows how to use string. My mum did too.

  She’ll never make it back in here anyway. I begin to take the old string off, to open the crumbling envelopes.

  Dear Magda, it says at the beginning of the first letter, and above it, a date: 1941. On the front is a stamp, which says Calcutta, and the letter is signed Mummy.

  I don’t read it. The stern house is telling me not to. I just grab her bank book from the drawer in the lounge like she told me to.

  I’m leaving; I do intend to leave.

  I find myself in the bedroom. Anything that matters, she’ll keep here, close, so that in the night, when the sound of cars and the light from the streetlamps outside can’t be shut away, she’ll know the pieces of herself are all around her. I want to know her. Raw Magda. I feel hungry for it.

  I open several drawers. Old stockings. Pale, old-fashioned underwear. Cotton buds. Curlers. Her scent bottles.

  Then, a drawer full
of the pills, the blister packs heaped up inside, and tied with elastic bands. Where on earth she’ll have got so much from I don’t know. Must have been stockpiling for years. I start heaping it out of the drawer into my bag. This stuff ’ll kill her. When I’ve finished, the drawer looks empty. I look at the brown paper lining briefly, and then just close it.

  I’m about to leave the room, when something suddenly makes me open the next drawer down.

  Nostalgia. I reach into it, tear memories out of the drawer and chuck them on the bed.

  Magda.

  The first photograph I lift from the pile is of a young girl. Must be, what, thirteen? Done up 1940s style. She’s pretty handsome, a jaunt to the way she dresses. Her cheeky kneelength skirt. Laughing, she looks a bit to the right of the camera. Someone’s making her laugh and then pointing and clicking the shutter.

  I turn it over. Magda, it says on the back in fountain pen. I’ve never seen Magda laugh before. I heard her, that day in the toilet, but she had her back to me. It was a stifled sound, out of practice.

  There’s a name after Magda, which has been crossed out. A double-barrel? Someone’s deleted it, and above it written just Roberts. Magda tells us to call her Compton, and that’s what they’ve got down for her, at the hospital.

  A heap of very old photographs. A black and white world. A couple with their dogs sitting on the veranda of a posh house. Parasols. Shade. A whole set of people in smart clothes, sitting on a lawn beneath a white, white sun, the table beside them all laid up with dainty little cakes, sandwiches and fruit, and two perfectly groomed grey dogs at their feet. It’s only when I look to the edge of the picture and see a line of three men standing in white tunics, their faces dark, dark below the white hats on their heads, that I realise it. My mum’s country stares back at me in Magda’s bony house.