Dignity Read online

  ‘What use can we have for one?’ asked B, as if I had asked for a trampoline, or my own car.

  ‘I would play it,’ I say.

  He snorted. B didn’t like Anna, calling her that drab woman, and had grown scathing of my affection for her.

  ‘I might teach the child,’ I said.

  He considered this.

  ‘Useless skill,’ he said after a long pause. ‘Have him learn something more practical.’ B is determined that it is a boy. ‘Engineering,’ he said.

  So, when her servants turned up carrying it between them, like some kind of revered corpse, he was unprepared.

  They did what the best servants will do, and pretended not to understand him. They brought it in anyway, and placed it in the corner with a great clanging.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop them!’ he shouted at me. ‘Stupid woman.’

  Those kinds of insults were becoming common, even then. I ignored them.

  I had already made my way over to it, and had sat down. I started to play Schubert’s seventh, as well as I could.

  It was sheer chance that Burrows arrived just then.

  ‘Beautiful! Beautiful, Evelyn. I didn’t know you played!’ he said delightedly. ‘You could play at one of our dinners sometime. What a boon to have a wife who plays the piano,’ he said. And I think perhaps it was that, the notion that B could be envied for me again, that made him soften, for the piano stayed, though he didn’t let me get away with it entirely.

  As a farewell gift to Anna, I had prepared a parcel of some of my best dresses (which I’d had altered especially for her, a book or two, and a new picture of her standing in her best dress which I’d been working on for several days. I was in my room, assembling the parcel, ready to be taken down to the station to say goodbye. I packed a few extra items, including a photograph of the two of us sitting on her pristine lawn with our dogs, as English as can be, and, picking up the parcel, I walked to the door.

  Turning the handle, I found myself locked in. I frantically felt for the latch of the door, then kicked at it. Then, when nothing gave, I shouted for B. For B and then for Benedict. No response. Only, somewhere far away in the house, the sound of servants chatting in Bengali. I shouted for Anwar, Madan. But although I knew they were there, no one answered. Scream and shout and kick as I might, no one answered.

  That day B became Benedict completely, and Benedict made my imprisonment in India clear.

  It was after that I got my first dose of the Indian flu, and they really feared I might lose the baby, though I didn’t. Thankfully I didn’t, or I don’t know what I might have done.

  I never saw Anna again, save for in the stiff, formal postcards she sent, signed Mrs McPherson. I couldn’t bring myself to write to her of what he had done.

  We move of course, with each shift of season, as is proper and correct in India. Shortly after Mrs McPherson leaves the hills, it is time for us also to go back down to the plains. This time we travel to our new ‘permanent’ house in the perfectly contained little England that is the European quarter at Kharagpur Junction, with its long flat avenue of English homes, its impeccable church and dull humped horizons, its tidy verandas and neat lawns, its rose bushes, tennis courts and bowling club, its bandstand and bustling maidan, its other well-to-do railway families, with their pageants and dances, its long days of gossip, its absent children and often absent men, its railway line like a precisely stitched scar, which neatly segregates us from the Indian districts, its nearby prison where steadily more rebels are kept, and the waiting servants who stand at its doors, lay its tables, make its beds, service its kitchens and stand awaiting Memsahib’s orders, watchful, coiled, ready to spring.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Poisoning by Narcotics, such as Opium, Datura, &c. Empty the stomach with the first emetic at hand – salt and water, if there is nothing else to be had; give strong coffee, some stimulant, and rouse the patient with smelling salts.

  The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook,

  Flora Annie Steel & Grace Gardiner

  When the doctor comes, I have difficulty distinguishing him against the other shapes in the ward, the other people, present and past, who crowd in.

  ‘How are you feeling today, Mrs …?’ he says, looking for my full name in my notes. Behind him there is something being beaten out, clouds of dust springing from it into the sunlight. The ward is broken into pieces by dust-glittered rays of Indian sun.

  ‘Ms,’ I say to the sun, to the doctor. ‘Ms Roberts.’ I know very little of the present day, but I know that this is now my name. I name myself after my mother.

  ‘Ah, on your notes it says—’

  I am my mother. We look from my eyes over his shoulder, we scowl with our mouth at the notes he holds. ‘I know,’ we snap. ‘They’re wrong.’

  ‘No problem, Ms Roberts,’ making a note in his file. The scratch of his pen is a mosquito itch.

  ‘Oh, just call me Magda.’ I swat my hand in the air, to kill him, this mosquito.

  It is Anwar and Madan behind him, beating out the rug, they beat it until dust eclipses the shapes of the other beds, golden and beautiful. It settles around us. But still, the doctor.

  ‘Magda. How are you?’

  ‘That’s for you to tell me.’ Under the circumstances I am proud that I hit the right pitch of peevishness.

  I make a determined effort to focus on him, because, I suppose, he is real, relatively speaking.

  Indian, or Pakistani, or Bangladeshi, as they are sometimes now – the ones from the north of my India. He is young, but not too young to be effective as a doctor. A lot of stubble. Black glasses. A clever mouth.

  He is sighing and raising an eyebrow. Good.

  He looks at my notes. ‘Are you still having hallucinations, Magda?’ he asks, quite gently. His English is clipped, perfect. He could be from Bengal himself. They get everywhere. They even get into my house.

  ‘What do you mean still?’ pulling myself up in the bed.

  ‘The nurses say you speak to people who aren’t there,’ gently again, coming to sit down beside me so that the bed gives, and everything begins to pour towards him. I look around for them, the servants, so they can shoo him away. But of course now, there’s no one. They’ve been emptied into the realness of him.

  ‘And who are they to judge?’ I say, as evenly as I can. They are the nurses, who watch and spy, and treat me with a practised kindness I find artificial.

  ‘There’s no judgement.’ He’s holding my look. He doesn’t flinch. The dust has now entirely gone and the ward is coming into crisp focus. A medicinal smell, and under it something bodily and vile. Me, perhaps.

  ‘Who are they to say one way or the other then?’ I insist.

  ‘They’ve seen you,’ he says, his eyes unwavering.

  ‘Yes, but who are they to say they aren’t there? The people I’m speaking to?’

  His eyebrow lifts again. He nods, says, ‘OK,’ under his breath. Looks down at his notes again, considering.

  A change of tack. ‘We believe there’s a deterioration in your liver tissue, Magda.’

  Finally? I give a dry laugh. Which makes me cough. Damned malaria. Damned typhoid. Damned Indian diseases that made me so damned weak. I always thought it’d be the paralysis that’d take me. Not that liver of mine. It’s followed me for three-quarters of a century and more, and halfway across the globe. The only other thing that’s been so persistently constant is the guilt.

  ‘Have you ever overdosed on diazepam?’ he asks, trying to work out if I’m upset by the news. They always find me unfathomable, these doctors. I am so undisturbed by my state of mind.

  I shake my head. Then I shrug. Finally I say, ‘It’s the malaria, the typhoid, not the tablets.’

  ‘How long have you been taking it?’ As if what I have just said is pure rubbish.

  ‘As long as I can remember.’ I smile brightly, for I must put on a performance to get him off this track. He is becoming heavier and heavier, sitting on my bed,
I shall tip into him and disappear.

  ‘I’ve had so many sicknesses, Doctor – they take their toll. Malaria. Typhoid. Diphtheria. The common cold. Did you know that a small dose of opium can cure the common cold?’

  He smiles slightly too. ‘Where did you contract all those?’

  Ha! ‘Bengal.’

  He nods again.

  ‘I was born there. My father was an engineer. I lived there as a child.’ It’s the first time in a while I’ve given anyone such reference points. The ward balances back into an ordered sequence, his weight no longer pulls so drastically at me, and the depression he makes in the bed becomes shallower, more reasonable. He looks at me, looks out of the window.

  I follow his eyes. The hugeness of the landscape fills me, for I had been so preoccupied with interiors before, and with mother, Aashi, Anwar and the others, that somehow I had not been able to process that there was any kind of beyond to the windows. The hospital’s perched on a hill, on the outskirts of the town, looking inland, away from the sea. The ward has a view across a broad stretch of fields, and then beyond them, to the hills. The hills are sugared lightly by snow.

  ‘It’s cold,’ he says suddenly. And turns back to me.

  He means out there. In here it’s stiflingly hot. I find myself shivering suddenly despite this, drawing my cardigan – which the girl must have brought – around my shoulders. ‘Yes,’ I say, as huffily as possible. ‘Yes, it certainly is.’

  A moment.

  ‘I expect you know that we can treat this liver problem, but we can’t cure it. And if you continue to take diazepam in such quantities, it could be fatal.’ His voice is flat and frank.

  I nod, pressing my lips together against my familiar rage.

  ‘Both the withdrawal and the drug itself will be affecting your perception. You may see things, even in waking life, that aren’t there.’

  I like this doctor. He is intelligent, and treats me as intelligent also.

  ‘Do you not think, Doctor, that everyone sees things in waking life that are not there?’

  He laughs. ‘Fair point, Ms Roberts. But not everyone talks to apparitions.’

  ‘Not everyone has the sense to.’

  Silence. He’s not going to entertain me much longer. He has a ward round to finish. I read impatience, anticipation maybe, on his face. Perhaps his shift’s at an end. Perhaps he has a sweetheart to meet. Love. Or perhaps just a cold bed and dinner made in one of those terrible microwave ovens.

  ‘We could give you other medication.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Calmatives – they would dampen the pain, and possibly the hallucinations too.’

  ‘Anti-psychotics, you mean?’ It’s an effort to be sharp. But I must be.

  He nods. Smiles. ‘You’re too quick for me, Ms Roberts.’

  I smile. ‘I’m too addicted to my apparitions, as you call them.’ I feel suddenly very leaden. ‘I’d rather you left them alone, Doctor,’ meeting his gaze as squarely as I can from the bed.

  He shrugs. ‘We’ll give you a small dose of diazepam for now anyway,’ he says.

  ‘Valium?’ Thank god.

  ‘Yes, basically. It won’t do any good to take you off it entirely right now.’

  ‘Perfect.’ That is good. ‘When can I go home?’

  He says nothing for a few moments. ‘Ms Roberts,’ he says, finally, ‘you have signs of liver failure. I would rather keep you here, or in the community hospital, where the care is accessible and close.’

  I just sniff. ‘Care? And what do I care for care?’ I close my eyes and lie my head back on the pillow, spent with all this logical talk.

  ‘We can talk about it again tomorrow,’ he says, suppressing a sigh.

  As he leaves, I hear a voice. It is ‘one of my apparitions’.

  That’s my girl, he says. That’s my girl. Give them hell.

  My husband.

  It was always between us, Michael and I. My wanting. We tried for a child for ten years. Ten years of unwanted blood and a bellyful of emptiness, ten years of watching the mothers of babies grow slowly younger and younger and feeling myself dry and age. I’d marvel at their bodies, fresh and unlined, how their pregnancies rose and fell effortlessly, and how their children grew into bloom. It was a ten-year war between my body and its own emptiness, of anger at myself, at Michael, of wondering every day whether I perhaps felt nauseous enough today to allow myself to dream myself pregnant, whether my bleeding might be just late enough yet for that addictive hope. It pervaded our whole relationship with its absence. Our home became a kind of tomb. A place where the child was not. I scrubbed and polished it, aligned its ornaments perfectly. I made it just perfectly right. I wanted a child with a kind of sickness that made me mad.

  Motherhood was to be a return to love, a return to Kharagpur, to Aashi, and perhaps, yes, perhaps to Mother.

  I haven’t felt Michael’s presence for many years.

  I discharge myself. I am within my rights to do so, they say reluctantly. I demand a taxi home. I have, as always, a quantity of notes beneath the insole of my shoe. The carers always find it a joke that I make them put them there, but it’s a travelling habit I’ve never shaken. If you have money you have a way Home.

  After a certain amount of argument, they phone the care company and it is, at length, agreed that I will be allowed back to my house.

  ‘On a trial basis,’ says the sister. She means out of pity, as this old bird is on her way out! Annette comes to keep me company in the taxi, to push me into my house again. Good, placid girl.

  ‘They’re not sure about this, Magda,’ she says uncomfortably. ‘Are you certain you can’t just stay a few more days, let the doctors keep an eye on you?’

  ‘I don’t need eyes, thank you. I need Home.’

  When we arrive at the house, I can tell instantly. The house has betrayed me. The house has been showing its guts to someone else. Its spilled secrets are in the unsettled dust that rises as Annette opens the door. From the shut wing where I no longer go, I can hear the secrets whispering. Someone has let the past out. I can hear servants padding up and down stairs. Yes. I can hear them walking. I know, without seeing her, that my mother is busying herself making a certain kind of floor polish and is telling some servants, who I cannot quite decipher, how to apply it. I can’t see the servants precisely, but I can hear them kneeling, and dragging their cloths across the woodblock floor, my mother’s chiding following their every move.

  When I look at the white wall of the dining room, it is suddenly covered by diagrams of the railway. Tracings appear wherever I look. And I see a compass in the middle of the table, poised to draw a perfect circle.

  Someone has been here. Someone has let the house know about itself. I am wheeled to the lavatory.

  Father’s broken body is lying on the floor. His blood seeps slowly out onto the tiles.

  ‘Stop!’ I hear my frayed voice shout as we arrive at the door. ‘I can’t go in there. No! I won’t go in.’ My voice is breaking, and I don’t care.

  ‘Why not, Magda? C’mon now. You need to go.’

  I refuse. I sit there for I don’t know how long with Annette’s pleading ringing in my ears. I sit there until the urine soaks my legs, the chair. And she has to mop it all up.

  ‘This is unfair, Magda,’ she says. ‘You mustn’t be like this. I’ll have to call it in. You need to go back to hospital. You’re not right.’

  I think of what Susheela said. They’ll put you in a home, Magda. They’ll put you in a home. I’m crying. I’m crying into my useless hands. I’m a child, crying.

  ‘Please, Annette,’ I whisper from between my fingers. ‘Please don’t,’ and then I take a breath in. Wrench my head from my hands, face her, and hold her eyes. ‘I just need time to settle, and I’ll be right as rain.’ My voice is as strong and hard as I can manage.

  Annette looks at me with her brown, soft eyes, considering.

  ‘You’ve really got to go to the bathroom next time.’
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br />   She strokes my arm. The imprint of her touch. Her heart. Pity. She’s one of the good ones. The ones who don’t calculate eventualities, who can be persuaded to do silly things.

  ‘I will,’ I say, thinking of Father’s body. Over my own dead body will I be wheeled into that bathroom.

  Annette stays and settles me in bed, giving me supper there on a little bed table. I feel grateful to her suddenly, Annette, whose life I find unintelligible. Her rather naive care is more valuable than I had realised.

  I feel tired, and weak, and I almost fall asleep midway through the small meal she’s cooked, of chicken and potatoes.

  Later, though, I can hear them talking downstairs. They’re sleeping in now. Two of them at a time, since I have signed to say I will, somehow, pay for it for the first few days. These tiresome women. My house will never be free of them, even in darkness. I need loneliness. Company closes around me like a net in the bed, and I dream that I am a sea creature, a porpoise or a whale, caught in a great mesh, thrashing and thrashing for dear, dear life, caught in my own deep sea.

  Chapter Twenty

  [A] child can never be as well nursed by a lady of rank and nervous and refined temperament – for the less feeling and more like an animal the wet nurse is, the better for the child.

  Queen Victoria, in a letter to her daughter Alice

  I am pushing to turn myself inside out. We are all – two nurses, the midwife, the two maids and I – focused on what will happen between my legs. The black pain is a fault line I tightrope along, trying to stop it splitting me in two. A downward inevitable pressure, something deep, deep, trying to come up for air. And my body, holding itself in from a lifetime of habit. My legs are open. They have been placed in stirrups. My belly is pressing downwards like a straining cloth, towards the split, opened now by a knife. I make a sound like nails down a blackboard.