Dignity Read online

  ‘They never say how it is really,’ he said, running a sponge up my arm.

  ‘What?’ He always did this, started a conversation in the middle, as if I knew exactly where his head was, when actually that was a huge guessing game.

  ‘On the news,’ he said. ‘Real news isn’t a good story. Like war’s not exciting or …’ he shakes his fist ‘fucking triumphant! Or brave. It’s just dull. Brutal.’

  I looked at him. I knew what he meant, but I didn’t really feel that way then, so I said nothing, changed the subject. I love the news, actually, and I’ve started buying one of those real broadsheets, like older people do, and instead of just reading bits of stuff on my phone and what people post, I read my way through it, grappling with how to turn the awkward pages, getting to grips with the complicated stories. You’d think, majoring in journalism, that he’d be the one doing that. But he was studying journalism exactly because he couldn’t fucking bear it, couldn’t bear the way they told the stories so wrong. Ewan, like Dad, is full of contradictions. Maybe that’s why I loved him so quickly, and so fucking much.

  Since I’d been at college, and with Ewan, everything had been thrown up in the air, shaken up, or shaken out like an old, mothballed blanket. The edges of it all were endless. Reading on the course, and with Ewan, was knowing that the way I felt wasn’t the only way to feel, was knowing that good and bad were all tied together in a way you’d not have thought. Now Bay’s Mouth, with its old pier, its long high street, its chain stores out of town and its complicated, stupid road system was all part of a changing picture that might just, if I held on to the details of it, make some kind of electrifying sense.

  He got up out of the bath, dried his hands, which weren’t oily any more, and got a cigarette from the packet he’d left by the window. He lit one, and sat on the chair by the bath, smoking, watching me. Something about this bullshit with grants recently, making him grovel around to get funding for note-takers and extra recordings of lectures, had made Ewan darker, made him distant.

  ‘Come back in,’ I said. But he didn’t hear. Despite the open windows, the steam had clogged up the air and muffled my voice, so he couldn’t hear much of anything at all.

  Ewan was miles away now, looking in my direction, but not really looking at me. Smoking and thinking and distant. He did this all the time. I hated it, and I felt sort of jealous of it. That he was there, and not with me. And it sapped him so badly. There was nothing left of him when he finished up thinking about it. And all the silence after it. He dreamed of it when he was asleep. He lived it when he was awake. It was something to do with me being here more. He’d not been sleeping before, been leaving the lights on all night, to stop him being so twitchy. Because I was there now, he couldn’t, and all this shit was getting worse and worse. Sometimes it stopped him in his tracks right in the middle of the street. I didn’t know what he was seeing or hearing, but I knew I had to get him moving again.

  So I got out of the bath, and went to him. I took the cigarette from his hand and laid it on the side of the bath. I stood between his legs as he sat on the chair, so that my stomach was level with his face, and I tilted his chin up to me and bent down to kiss him on the lips until he went soft again and held me, pulling my bare body to the heat of his.

  Now, sitting with my half-eaten jacket potato going cold on my plate and the sound of the other students seeping into my ears, laughing like hyenas, talking in loud, nervous voices and showing off to each other as they head out to town for their Friday night of two-for-one pints and drunk snogs, I look out of the window, over the plain car park, and the halls opposite emptying, the buildings faceless and dull, and I remember how he touched me then, in his quiet, gentle way. I remember how his bare body felt on mine.

  It takes me a long time to realise I’ve been crying.

  ‘Cheer up, love,’ says one of the canteen ladies, who takes my plate away. ‘Might never happen.’

  In Magda’s bank book, when I open it, there’s nothing good. Nothing. Absolutely. Nothing.

  I walk along the marina in a blur. The tannoy at the beach begs the tourists: ‘Last call then folks, the final call of the day. We’re leaving right away. Last call for the six-twenty, two pounds all seats ride.’ Over and over. ‘Last call of the day. Last call of the day.’ It follows me, fading, all the way up Magda’s hill and her drive, towards her solid house, which never changes.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’ asks Annette when I walk into the kitchen. I stare at her. I hadn’t considered that one of the others’d be in. ‘Oh, bloody hell! Have they mixed up again?’ shaking her head, hands on her wide hips. ‘Could’ve done with more time with Henry, too. Had to rush off to get up here.’ Her voice drops. ‘She’s being a bloody nightmare. Won’t let me change her or anything. Won’t eat. I’ve been at my wits’ end with her. I managed to send Shannon away, to give Magda a chance to come round, so we didn’t have to call it in yet.’

  I nod. Magda doesn’t realise it but Annette’s saving her bacon.

  ‘Why don’t you just go to Henry?’ I say to Annette. ‘Leave her with me. I’ve not got classes today. I can stay for as long as it takes.’

  She looks at me doubtfully. I’m not wearing my work pinny, and don’t really look the part.

  ‘One of them was sick on my uniform,’ I say. ‘Don’t ask.’ I roll my eyes.

  Annette laughs. ‘One of those days!’ she says. And grabs her bag from the back of the chair. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yup,’ I say, brightly. ‘One of those days.’

  When I go through to the living room, Magda’s sitting under the clock again, slumped in her chair. Tiny and white and fuzzy as hell.

  ‘Hi, Magda.’

  She looks up at me and I think I catch a kind of triumph in her eyes. The kind of high-up look Mum used to have when we played cards and she had a good hand. She looks away quickly.

  ‘Oh good,’ she says, through heavy breaths. ‘Don’t leave me …’ breathing ‘with that nitwit again,’ although they all like Annette, even Magda. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘make me an egg.’ She stops for more breath. ‘I want it fried, both sides.’ A breath. ‘In lard.’ Another breath. ‘None of that …’ a deep breath ‘wretched vegetable oil.’ Several breaths. ‘And plenty of salt and pepper.’ She runs out of air, slumps back again.

  ‘Righto,’ I say.

  ‘Actually, I’ll have it poached.’

  ‘OK,’ I say flatly. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Tea,’ she says, contrary as always. ‘Assam…’ breathing ‘loose leaf. And have a cup yourself ’ breathing ‘and an egg come to that.’ A couple of big breaths, looking me up and down. ‘You look a fright.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  ‘Good lord, girl,’ she says. ‘What do you want? Compliments?’

  ‘No,’ I say, which is true. I stand there for a few seconds.

  ‘Go and cook my egg,’ she says, smoothing down her skirt.

  It takes three tries before I get her egg just perfect, so I do help myself to one of the practice eggs, and a cup of Assam tea. Mum always had loose leaf too. None of that baggy rubbish, she’d say, flicking her hand and wrinkling her nose.

  Eating the egg makes me feel better. More whole again.

  ‘You’d have liked my mum, Magda,’ I say, sitting down opposite her, sipping from my cup. Then I feel stupid. Magda’ll say I’m being ridiculous. She doesn’t like anyone. And because it’s Mum it’ll hurt.

  She looks at me, about to say something, but she doesn’t.

  ‘The egg looks good,’ she says after a while. And then, suspiciously, ‘Did you use vinegar?’

  ‘No. No,’ I say.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Just salt in the water.’

  ‘That’s the way,’ she says. ‘Lots of salt.’

  I cut it all up for her, but she insists on trying to eat it herself with a fork, so I sit back and do the same. She tries to hold the teacup’s tiny handle, and can’t, so I hold it for her while she takes a few prim si
ps. Finally she waves me away.

  ‘Enough,’ she says, although she still has half her toast and egg left. She sits back, eyeing me with those small grey eyes. ‘Now then. What was it you wanted?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  ‘It’s the baby,’ she says. ‘Whether to get rid of it.’

  I say nothing.

  ‘Can’t help you there,’ she says, shaking her head. She goes quiet for a while. ‘But I can tell you one thing,’ she continues eventually, her hand on my arm, her grip surprisingly firm. She pauses, holding my eyes. ‘You’re going to be all right …’ a deep breath ‘either way.’

  There’s a silence. I’m not sure if I’ve been told off or complimented.

  ‘Perspective,’ she says. ‘That’s what you need. Perspective.’

  ‘Like you, you mean?’ It’s out of my mouth before I can stop it.

  She looks at me fiercely. ‘Watch your tongue,’ she says.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t apologise either.’

  ‘S—’

  ‘Dignity,’ she says. ‘Dignity.’ It’s funny, her sitting there in the chair, about to have the last few mouthfuls of toast and egg spoon-fed to her, and saying that.

  ‘I don’t want to have a baby,’ I say.

  She nods again.

  There’s a silence.

  ‘Not on my own,’ I say.

  She sighs. ‘Loneliness,’ she says, ‘isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

  There’s a silence. I feel the pressure of her memories suddenly. The feeling that there are perhaps other people, standing at the corners of the room, like me ready to jump to, whenever she needs them. Perhaps Mum is here too, with me.

  How the hell did you manage it? Annette asks when I text her to say Magda got off to bed for her morning rest all right. I reply saying, Don’t know. But I think I do. I think I’m getting Magda, more and more, the way she keeps that house, like armour, the way she grabs at any power that comes her way, her funny kindness and the fact that underneath it all, she’s grieving too.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Only the care of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows.

  ‘Walking in the City’, The Practice of Everyday Life,

  Michel de Certeau

  Everything is mottled by memories. While Susheela sits, opposite me, asking concrete questions with her quick, modern voice, and more liminal questions with her demerara eyes, the room dissipates around me, its fragments interspersed by fragments of another room, another time, in which Mother is busying herself polishing brass ornaments.

  This house, she’s saying, is a complete shambles. Coming to bits, all of it.

  I ignore Mother and focus on the girl. But part of me knows she’s right, Mother.

  When Susheela leaves, Mother’s gone too, though I can still feel her, rooting about the house, and at times I think I hear the sound of her commanding voice coming from the east wing, or from my own ribcage.

  ‘Mother!’ I call into the house. ‘Mother!’ But she doesn’t answer, sunk into the gaps between the floorboards in the basement, or slipped behind that loose skirting board I’ve been wanting them to fix for years, the servants.

  ‘We don’t do odd jobs like that,’ said that awful woman they call ‘the office’. ‘Personal care only, Magda,’ she said. ‘And your washing-up. You’ll need to get someone else in to do the rest.’

  I ordered in a cleaner of sorts. She comes once a week. Mrs M, she calls me. Asks me how I am and storms out of the room with her blasted hoover before I have a chance to answer. Doesn’t do a proper job. I used to keep these windows vinegar-clean. You could have eaten a banquet off my parquet.

  No longer.

  After Susheela leaves I spend hours distracted by a ball of dust that’s snowballing in the corner of the bedroom. There’s a cobweb in the right-hand corner above the window in the living room which has such longevity I almost feel affection for it. But oh so irritating to look at it and be unable to order anyone to do anything.

  Looking at it, that galactic ball of dust, things seem to fade and then refocus, fade and refocus and I think, for the first time in a long while, properly, about Michael.

  I rarely remember the early days. It is a cluster of things, which I tend to leave in their tangle, and not separate out into moments and particular things. There were, I know, long meals out and longer walks where we talked, mainly, of chemistry. There was a sense of people looking at us and seeing a happiness we didn’t perhaps fully feel. There was the feeling I had for him, my tall, clever husband, a kind of heady, competitive love. He was a professor. Not as good as me at the work, but more successful, moving swiftly through the carefully delineated ranks at the university.

  In those days I do believe he loved me. I can almost believe it fully. And he was more dutiful than most husbands. I could never quite allow myself to fully trust it, but there it was. We became engaged after a suitable period.

  Within the tangle, unlikely things. A film out. A dance. Days by the sea. Kisses and touch that I can no longer feel the traces of. The way we made love, though, was rudimentary, perhaps slightly functional, but still it was as close to affection as I could bear, and suited me very well.

  From the memories, galactic and barrelling, that are those early days, what emanates is a kinetic feeling, of momentum, our momentum together, and how, when I was with him, things progressed and fell into their allocated place. Our lives slowly blended as he lent his name to the papers I published, so that they would be quickly peer-reviewed, placed. We had our wedding reception at the university, and lived together at number three Victoria Drive, where that difficult thing failed to happen. A child. We finally became stuck.

  The anger over it built slowly. He couldn’t see what he was doing, messing up my house. Messing me up. The house became such a problem between us that, usually lacking in humour, he tried to make light of it.

  ‘Oh Memsahib,’ he said, poking me in the ribs after he walked dark footprints across my newly polished floor, ‘will you ever forgive me?’

  ‘Not sure,’ I said. ‘That’ll take some scrubbing.’

  I was expected to keep up with the work of a whole band of servants, or let standards drop. I could feel it, gathering at the walls of the house, pressing in towards us. Dirt, pollution, airlessness. You had to have standards against it. Our house in Kharagpur haunted me persistently even then, its million-times-polished floor, its bright cutlery, the way everything we ate was carefully weighed and measured by Anwar under Mother’s beady eyes. It was only that level of meticulousness that could make me feel held. Pursuing it gave me a sense of momentum at Bay’s Mouth. Though I never attained absolute control.

  I come to, in my house, in my chair, and think that. I didn’t manage it. Even now I haven’t managed it. My house rebels against me. I can feel the chaos groaning beneath the floorboards. The paint peels and makes patterns, which can be read. Joy, say the peeled bits in the paint, hilarity, they say, do you remember?

  Things with Michael were bad before he left.

  ‘You’re making us into some kind of model,’ he said one day, his voice tight and fierce, after I’d gone spare at him for leaving his shirt out. Not tucked in. ‘It’s not real, Magda. It’s not bloody real.’

  I remember the way he said it. Accusing. Bitter. I wasn’t what he’d hoped. I couldn’t be what he’d hoped.

  The laboratory felt like a haven by that point – the perfect, assessable struggle of the months of long lab-work, that white-coated measuredness, late nights of painstaking testing and balancing, the slowly turning reactions of elements spliced together in a cooled environment of sulphur dioxide at -112°F. I took comfort in precision, the delicate aim of pipettes, the containedness of carefully corked bottles and test tubes, and the long days of hiding as I tried to prove a hypothesis. In the lab, the aim was always to click things slowly into place, like that puzzle the boy brought, cogs turning all to face one
direction, all pleasing and logical as the results came in, and at the writing-up, to have language lined up obediently, without ambivalence or metaphor. I was perfectly suited to that kind of tirelessness and discipline. I fitted myself to it and it made me a regular shape. Distant. I can barely remember anything about Home during that period, except a faint anxiety, a sense of Michael as a receding satellite. The only reactive element left. He was to be contained and kept cooled behind glass.

  My last few memories of him, before he left, are still unsolved in my head.

  He was leaning against the kitchen counter, looking at me, perhaps searching for me. I try to look back at him, in memory, to see the shape of his scruffy jacket, his hair, which, from the years and years of trying and trying for a child, had greyed. I try to sense what it was to stand with him, here in our house. But there are only wisps of him, a few stray cells, a trace element left on the door handles, a sense of footprints in the hallway, and the shadows of his breathing. Michael is an old dream, a poorly recorded experiment, and I can’t recover him from memory.

  ‘Life can’t be lived from a bloody manual, Magda,’ he said, and walked out of the kitchen. Or I think that’s what he said. It was under his breath. It was outside my exclusion zone. But it must have been that, because those words, though faded and almost illegible, never seem to balance away, and my mind returns to them, their unsolvable thereness.

  That day we found an anomaly in the research; some leak, some trouble had crept into my lab-work, seeping perhaps through my protective clothing, out of my body and into the solutions we had painstakingly mixed. All the results were spoiled.

  He died of a sudden heart attack last spring. They sent a card to tell me.

  I come back to myself: my perfect English house as it rots around me. I sit held by the bed in a room filled with unsavoury dust. I’ll soon be dust myself.

  I think very hard of how I have ten rooms in all, and all have a plan made out for them.

  They are to be swept and aired daily.

  A cloth is to be wiped around the skirtings weekly.