Dignity Read online

  And then lie back, panting, the baby still inside and only one inch closer to oxygen they say. I will have to strain many more times before we break through the boundary of life between my legs, and make today a birthday.

  Push. She says. Breathe. Push. I ask for more medicine. The one they gave me is useless. She doesn’t answer. They have nothing else. I ask for my father’s bible.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ says the midwife. But I only want to see it, for strength, a small piece of Home to hang on to.

  The burning pressure comes down my spine, from my hips, my legs. It tries to set my weight behind the baby. To brace all of me against it. But we’re still one body. My cells, my womb, are still holding on, and the baby sinks back into me.

  I make the noise again. This is no longer your Home. There are imperatives written into my muscles, my womb, my thighs, and I follow them, until I’m a thousand pieces on the bed. Endlessly. Endlessly.

  And as it continues, I’m sunk back into the nothing else. It goes on, and I am aware, somewhere I am aware, but I’m drifted away, or sunk deep in an ocean. Perhaps I’m dying. There’s only the pain, my distant screams, far-off voices.

  Through my screams, its cries come, birds on a distant beach. Seagulls perhaps, on a grey Punch-and-Judy seaside. She takes it away to wash.

  When it’s returned to me, it smells of British India. Unnaturally clean. Disinfected. Soapy. A faint tinge of turpentine. No one tells me the sex, and it doesn’t seem important. At the tip of its head, I can smell a solitary daisy. I hold its little, spent body, swaddled in a pillowcase. I hold it weakly. We are together, sunk into our deep ocean. My whole body hurts. Its whole body is perfect.

  I hold it. I can’t hear what they’re saying. Around me, they speak and give instructions, but I can only hear their voices blend and mesh into flat notes, like the sound of a ship’s engine chugging. I’m in the sea again, rising and falling on the deep sea, and holding it. My my my my.

  She’s a girl. My girl is to be called Magda and to be loved. Her eyes are screwed tightly shut. Her legs and hands are beginning to punch and kick against the unhomeliness of the Raj. Despite our marathon, she still has fight. She has been born only to find herself lost, so far from Home. She punches and kicks against it.

  I don’t. I sleep.

  When I wake it’s because Benedict is in the room. A predator. My whole body reacts to him.

  ‘What’s wrong with you now?’ he asks me, as I reach out to stop him lifting my baby. What is wrong with me?

  Benedict is delighted. He lifts my baby in the air, forgetting to support her head, so that I cry out. He spins her, although she is far too new and disorientated to enjoy it, rocks her twice, and then gives her back to the nurse. She is as yet too uninteresting as something to play with. That’s a blessing.

  The nurse is watching me; she’s wondering.

  That is the last we see of him for a week. He’s off to Calcutta to discuss plans for the new embankment. This is a good thing because it means that for a few days, without his supervision, I can nurse and be mother myself. Of the many coldnesses, the first is that I am not allowed to feed her at my own breast. It is infrequently done here, Benedict said, as it makes Englishwomen seem too animal, and too undignified, and so we are to give her a bottle. Benedict himself was never fed at his mother’s breast of course. Indeed, from what he says of her, for she died of typhoid years ago so I cannot know her directly, she did very little mothering at all, but spent her time being a fine society woman. There is one of those plate photographs of Benedict as a small child. He is still, still, and done up like a lord in white frills. From the side of the plate a brown arm is extended to hold him firmly in place. A child of the Raj. His childhood would have been full of small powers.

  Benedict has sourced army-issue feed for my girl. It sits in its dull packaging in the kitchen. I don’t trust it. For the week that he’s gone, I feed her furtively. I hold her warm body to my sore breast, and feel the sure, stinging suck of my child. The midwife says nothing, for she’s a cold, bland creature, capable only of the kind of clinical supervision that’s tantamount to surveillance.

  ‘When your husband comes back, you’ll only have yourself to blame,’ she says. I hate her, and ignore her expertly. To think we were told she was the best English midwife in Kharagpur. Even an Indian one might have had more compassion.

  I sleep only in snatches, feeding Magda, and being fed by Anwar.

  He brings me great mounds of food, and smiles at me as I nurse her.

  ‘Memsahib makes a very good mama,’ he says. And when my little girl sleeps, he frequently strokes the soft down on her head. ‘Beautiful girl. Beautiful girl.’ And, although I am unable to walk or pass water without severe pain after the birth, I feel perilously contented. There are moments when I can almost make myself forget the discomfort, and enjoy these days of Home before Benedict returns. I write to Helen, or into the silence that she’s become. She is beautiful, I write. Oh Helen, she is so beautiful.

  The seven milky, sleep-blurred days pass too quickly, and Benedict comes back cruelly early, blustering into the house in his big boots on the morning of the seventh day (I think). It’s only now, when I have someone else so dear, that I realise how unlike love what I feel for him has become. It is ugly.

  I use what strength I still have to fight for her to be nursed. Not by me, as that is beyond question, but, as Anna McPherson advised, by an Indian girl. This is not customary advice these days, but Anna told me privately that an Indian nursemaid, if we can procure one, will give protection against diseases.

  Aashi, the nursemaid Benedict has brought in, arrives after only three days, during which time I am permitted to nurse, for otherwise Magda will be used to the bottle and won’t latch. I feed her when she wants for those days, despite everyone’s disapproval, for it should all be done according to the manual. I secretly hope that, as the nurse warned, she will refuse another woman’s breast if she becomes too used to mine, and that by some miracle, I will be able to keep nursing her in secret.

  There is something strange in Aashi’s appointment. She is not of the caste that would usually offer the service. She is the young wife of one of Benedict’s new Indian colleagues. We are to keep her secret.

  Benedict objects strongly to the growing incursion of Indians into the upper ranks of the railway service, but has no choice in the matter, for the crown is sure of itself in allowing at least that measure of competency to be fostered. So Benedict puts up with his new brown colleagues with a degree of contained resentment, and seems to relish the chance to pull rank. Aashi’s appointment is one such chance.

  Aashi, though she is only just eighteen she says, has a baby of her own who must now be weaned off his mother’s milk so that mine can take the breast. I feel unhappy at the thought, as I hear from her that he is only a few weeks old, but, as I understand it, Benedict has rewarded her husband famously for allowing it. And indeed her husband has been more than usually flexible. Benedict is adamant that it should be a high-caste girl. And I agree, for they are cleaner, and tend to be free of disease. The thought that there might be coercion involved doesn’t cross my mind until I hear Benedict on our new telephone, bargaining.

  ‘You’re lucky to have a job at all, my man,’ he’s saying. ‘Don’t you forget that. Indians aren’t generally promoted, as you’ve been. There’s many a damned sight worse off that’d jump at the chance, and then where would you and your wife and your baby girl be?’ Here, the other person evidently corrects him, for he says, ‘Boy, then. Boy. Whatever you please. It’s his future at stake, and your own. Are you telling me no?’ He’s silent a moment. ‘Are you telling me no?’ he says again.

  We have told everyone that Aashi is simply to be an ayah, and a maidservant for me, partly as having a native wet nurse is lately disapproved of by society, and partly as her husband would be shunned, and so he made it a condition of her service. There is great pressure now, from Benedict, from the doctor and nurses, fo
r us to make the transition from me to her as quickly as possible, or the baby will not feed with her, so I have the girl brought up straight away. I watch my baby’s pale mouth around the girl’s dark breast and feel Home sinking away from us all. Aashi and I both have tears in our eyes when they meet.

  Anna McPherson told me to follow the manual, which stipulates that the baby should be fed every four hours, on a strict rotation, and so I focus on this timetable, and on making the servants change her and rub her with lotion to a regular schedule too. I make a chart of her stools and the yield of her bladder. I make Aashi eat what I would eat myself, although I can tell that she balks at the strangeness of the English food, and I have to allow her, as a Hindoo, to forgo eating beef, though the iron would do the baby good. I especially forbid her to eat spices, for fear of giving my baby colic, and I sit awake with her as she feeds for half an hour every four hours at night, which I time assiduously by the little carriage clock that belonged to Benedict’s mother.

  My breasts grow terribly sore and I must cover them in a poultice and cool cloths. This is the only time that I let my child and the girl out of my sight. Aashi can’t meet my eye when I return, which leads me to guess that she knows what I have to do, and perhaps knows also how much I hate it, letting myself and my milk go sour so.

  Helen never replied to my letter, and now, I cannot believe I ever sent it. That I had such joy to share. Over the following weeks, as I am not allowed to feed, to change, to mother my baby, I become toughened like old meat into a kind of sergeant major, and, when I look at myself in the glass, I become, day by day, more like the hard-faced Englishwomen who have surrounded me since I arrived, my brow creased by resentment of him, the man I came to India to love.

  All love lost now, except for the tiny, gentle flutter of her sweet lashes, her shallow breathing, and the pulse at her soft, soft throat as she feeds quietly on the breast of the girl. Aashi looks at me fearfully, and, I believe, with a mixture of anger and terrible pity.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  But it will be asked, How are we to punish our servants when we have no hold either on their minds or bodies? – When cutting their pay is illegal, and few, if any, have any real sense of shame. The answer is obvious. Make a hold.

  The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook,

  Flora Annie Steel & Grace Gardiner

  Dad sits, head in hands.

  I sit next to him. All the mod cons Mum bought sit around us in the kitchen: the mixer, the rice cooker, the slow cooker, the cappuccino machine in pride of place with her last incense and offerings still beside it. There’s the whirr outside, of a bus passing. A blackbird sings.

  I don’t say I’m sorry. I know it won’t be enough. He says nothing for the longest time. When he looks up his eyes are two stones. He’s the butler, at the British Hotel. Businesslike, professional, slightly cold.

  ‘I suppose you’ll get rid of it,’ he says. His tone of voice is detached, ironic.

  Absence. The sore word comes into my head. Absence. Mum’s abandoned us completely.

  ‘Yes,’ I say quickly. ‘I think so,’ I add, in a tiny, child’s voice.

  ‘Right,’ he says, in his own voice again. ‘All right.’ Dad doesn’t look at me. He’s not himself. He’s not Dad.

  It’s only when he wipes his eyes, I know he’s still in there.

  I make another cup of tea.

  ‘Does he know?’ he asks, as I hand it to him. ‘The boy?’ As if he’s some kind of fourteen-year-old bad lot.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I told him.’ I stop, and then I say it. ‘He left.’

  He swears in Bangla. His fists are clenched. ‘I told you about that boy,’ he says. ‘I told you.’

  Then he sits, the silence stiffening around him.

  I push his cup of tea across the table towards him, waiting.

  ‘D’you think we can make it work, Dad?’ I say it into the echo of the kitchen. By ‘we’ I mean Dad and me. Not Ewan.

  He looks up at me. I notice then; his lip is trembling. And I feel a sensation in my belly. A feeling that’s like the feeling of falling.

  ‘Su,’ he says, ‘there’s something you need to know.’

  I’d known things were tight since Dad lost his job, but the debt he sets out, at our kitchen table, is a kind of tumour. The knots and tangles of Dad’s lies, to Mum, to me, make inky webs around us as we sit in her perfectly neat, perfectly dusted, perfectly polished house. He brings out the statements, one by one, and shows me, page by page, item by item, how nothing that we own is ours. Our walls and windows, our garden, our TV, my computer, practically our bodies, fingernails, our hair, our whole lives have been mortgaged. At the end of it, we sit, at the darkening table, my hand over my mouth, his head in his hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, his voice breaking.

  ‘How long? How long until we have to move out of the house?’ Mum’s house.

  ‘They say next month,’ he murmurs. ‘They say, unless I pay up, they’ll repossess next month.’

  I don’t say it. I don’t say any of the obvious things. Not, Dad, how could you? Not Dad, what were you thinking? I know full well. He was thinking he could keep Mum alive with his borrowed money. She always said we couldn’t afford those extra treatments. The trip to America. The expensive injections he kept her in at the end. I don’t need to ask him why he did it. When I think of her thin, thin body, how her hair came out in clumps, the translucent skin under her eyes, I know.

  We’ve lied to each other. That’s all that seems to matter now. We’ve sat at this table together. And he’s lied. And so have I.

  ‘I can’t afford to keep you and this baby,’ he says then, looking up at me with red eyes.

  ‘No,’ I say. He can’t. There’s a long silence before we both swear, me in English, and him, again, in Bangla.

  ‘Where the fuck will we live?’ Asking him, asking Mum’s kitchen.

  There’s a silence. He tries to make a joke.

  ‘We could start a band,’ he says.

  Neither of us can raise a smile.

  ‘Hopefully you’ll be a better businessman than I’ve been,’ he says, his voice flat again.

  I can feel the build-up of salt. My belly begins to quake, small tremor of tears.

  When I tell him about college, he barely flinches.

  ‘Oh god,’ he says, sitting at the kitchen table, his tea cold in his hands. ‘What a bloody mess.’

  I sit in my room and dial the number on the leaflet the doctor gave me. The flat, empty tone. Engaged.

  It feels impossible that anyone else could be in my situation right now, phoning the clinic, keeping the line busy. Phoning to get rid of a baby.

  I sit and listen to the engaged tone for a while. The sound of being on my own but one of many.

  As soon as I hang up, my phone buzzes. It’s Ewan.

  I can’t speak to him now. He leaves a message.

  ‘Su. I shouldn’t have hung up like that,’ he says. His voice sounds stripped bare. ‘It was just a shock,’ he sighs. He sounds so weary. ‘I wasn’t expecting it. Look, I hope you’re OK. Can you let me know you’re OK? Just call me. Please.’

  The walls of my room are tight round me, sitting listening to Ewan’s voice. I hurt so much. I hurt so much. I want my mum’s company. It’s like a thirst.

  I get to the student canteen just in time for dinner. I don’t usually eat there, but today I just need some space from Dad, so I spend some of the cash the office slips me for extra shifts. While I collect my food from the self-service counter, the other students are all on about a protest against fees.

  ‘It’s been on the news,’ says a blonde girl with bright eyes, standing in front of me in the queue. She turns to her friend. ‘It’s on Facebook, look.’ Holding out her phone.

  I scrawl through my phone to read about it online as I stand in the queue. Everyone’s posting videos and memes of it. Having Magda’s bank book in my pocket makes me feel separate from it, like I’m suddenly immune to
debt.

  From all the food on offer, the only thing I can stomach is a baked potato and butter. I sit with Magda’s bank book in my pocket. I can’t face it. I ignore its beckoning, and look up to the news on the telly again. Three of the women from the canteen are watching it too, in their pinnies, shaking their heads. All that anger. There’s a still image of a boy who’s just broken a window and holds the chair he broke it with as the glass slowly falls away, the shutter speed lightning fast and his face abstract and still with it, the fucking fury that keeps all these kids from sleeping.

  The news is all bloody rubbish, says Ewan in my head.

  He’d said it from under the van he was fixing.

  ‘They just tell stories,’ he said, ‘bad bloody stories,’ wheeling back under the van. He was good at mending stuff: engines, beaten-in car doors, windscreens. He’d finish work happy at the garage. That’d been his job in the army too. Mechanic. Mechanical engineer. He kept the tanks and four-wheel drives running. And the guns, he kept them in working order too. That was pretty much the only thing he told me about it. Satisfying, he’d say, whenever I asked him how work had gone at the garage. It cleaned him all up inside. Made him dirty as hell on the outside though. He had oil all over him every day.

  We walked back from the garage, him still in his overalls. He held my hand in his big oily one. The light was July.

  When we got back we had a bath together. He didn’t have a shower, just an old green bathtub, so he had to have baths even when it was hot in summer. I kept telling him just to buy one of those showers that attaches to your taps, but he’d got used to it, I think, and anyway, this was lovelier. We opened the windows wide to let the steam and heat out, and just hung towels in front of them so the neighbours couldn’t see us. I got out of my dress and slipped into the hot water, still a bit shy despite the months we’d been together.

  When he got in, the black oil from the garage made the water smoky, and there wasn’t really room for both of us, but I didn’t care.