Dignity Page 16

Any patches of wear on the wooden floors must be rubbed with a preparation I found in my mother’s old books.

  The silver is to be moved from room to room according to the season (the dining room is too damp in the winter, the front bedroom too bright in summer, and the study a waste of silver, for what is silver for, except to be seen?).

  The silver is to be shined monthly.

  The books are to be rotated twice a year to ensure that no one volume is left all year in the light.

  At this juncture each book is to be taken out and checked. If any spines sink they are to be repaired and made to stand upright, held together like a real lady in a corset.

  And the papers. The papers are kept. The letters and photographs, classified assiduously, and shut up.

  To guard against all that silence, I have kept my mother’s piano, which she’d had carted all the way back on the ship, and not disassembled like everything else. It did remain in tune for years thanks to Frank Matthews, a blind man with an ear for it. He passed away of some growth in his stomach so many years ago I’ve lost count. And since then the piano has sat, untuned and dusty, just a few yards away from me now, silent.

  There was a woodworm crisis the autumn before Michael left. It had to be dealt with immediately. I could tell you, step by step, the manner in which it was got rid of, tell you the exact quantity of beeswax required in the preparation I used, but I couldn’t be sure what it was that made Michael say to me that I was ‘bloodless, cold, and not like a real wife’.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The rod of iron with which he rules her never appears in company – it is a private rod, and is always kept upstairs.

  The Woman in White,

  Wilkie Collins

  Benedict insists that I go with him to the gala although I can’t face the pomp of it, or their insincere questions, for all the society women will ask me endlessly about my baby, as if I were a real mother. They will ask me, ‘Does she feed well? Does she have colic? Do you have to bounce her? Does she keep you up in the night?’ although they know perfectly well that just as they themselves never had to deal with these things directly, neither do I. Our children are all to be brought up by proxy. I try to get out of it by telling him that I have no dress to wear as my figure is still so altered by the pregnancy, but he simply says that I am being ridiculous as I have any number of dresses that can be adjusted within the hour by the deft Indian seamstress I always use. Which, of course, is plainly true.

  We go in by car. It’s strange to pass through the streets again after my confinement. I am beginning not to notice the Indians at all, and to take note only of fine Englishwomen. I catch myself wondering, as we pass a young girl with very pale skin, whether the hem and beading she wears is the latest fashion at Home. Although I have never been given to caring about fashions at all, catching that tracing of Home suddenly feels so compelling.

  It’s hot in the car. A pressurised heat. Especially as it is only Benedict and I together in the back. Especially as my baby is left at home in Aashi’s care, and so I am desperate to be back to supervise. Without me, will the girl keep to our four-hourly schedule? More than once, when I have fallen asleep mid-feed, I have woken much later to find Aashi still feeding, long past the time limit I set. She claims the baby has not fed properly and needs more time, but although I know it may be true, I find myself ruling with an iron rod, and making her set my girl down hungry. I can’t believe I do this, but I do. I’m failing, even at a distance, as a mother I’m failing. The baby cries forever.

  We see Mr Burrows, who, like Benedict, has been posted to Kharagpur to work on the Kharagpur-Nagpur line, and Benedict has the driver, whose name I have decided not to learn, stop. I have decided not to make an effort with names or communication any more. It’s too painful when all this wretched status makes us as distant as if we were two separate species, and makes me lonelier in the company of servants than I should be alone.

  ‘Benedict!’ says Mr Burrows. ‘A sight for sore eyes you are. I hear there’s good news?’

  Benedict smiles. He is more pleased about the baby than you would think. Magda is a demonstration of his virility, even if she is a girl. Why does a child confer such power on him, and not on me?

  ‘Eight pounds three,’ he says. And he pats my leg, appreciatively, with mock affection.

  I don’t smile. Mr Burrows only looks at me briefly. He will see a pale, swelled creature. An empty, distended body. Redundancy.

  ‘Will you be back to the office next week?’ asks Burrows, bending to the open window of the car.

  ‘I’m back already,’ says Benedict. And, at Burrows’ look of surprise, ‘There’ve been problems.’ This is the first I’ve heard of it. I glance swiftly at my husband. He’s frowning and leaning towards the window. ‘The new embankment,’ he says. ‘The farmers are upset. It’s affected the harvest, they say. The floodplain doesn’t fill because of it. They claim the water table is all out of whack.’

  ‘Blast!’ says Burrows. ‘A pain. A pain.’

  Benedict grunts. ‘We’ve had to put down a few Indians we’d promoted, to stop them stirring up a fuss.’

  Burrows nods. ‘It never really works giving them rank anyway,’ he says, shaking his head as if at ruined milk. ‘They have their own priorities, and lose sight of the long game.’

  The long game, of course, is the Empire. I don’t ask Benedict why they built such a railway embankment in the first place without considering water – which is, here in this dry-mouthed region, like gold. I don’t ask how bad the harvests were, or whether anyone went without food. These things used to worry me. They worried me because I believed them uncommon. Now they’re like summer and winter and just a part of life.

  When Benedict shuts the window, he turns to me angrily.

  ‘You might at least smile when the baby’s mentioned,’ he says.

  I nod. But he sits in stony silence for the rest of the journey. We sit hating each other all the way up the main boulevard, under the struggling trees.

  We stop at the grand house of the Lennetts, and I’m helped out of the car by our driver, who is faultless in his attentions, unlike my husband. When I see Mrs Lennett, I know why Benedict was so anxious to come to her gala. She is as pretty a little thing as I have ever seen, and swoons all over my husband, ignoring me as young women are liable to ignore women whose bodies have been marked by use. It’s only months since I was one of them, but the pregnancy and heat made me swell so, and I have a pallor that makes me seem drawn, and older than I would have thought possible.

  She and Benedict go inside quickly, to where I can hear the peals of laughter and the ringing tones of the women of high rank and class. Oh how they grate on me, although I’m now an understudy, learning their ways. In the foyer is Burrows again. He takes my arm and leads me up the wide staircase, introducing me to people as we go. I am being led through a gallery of wasps.

  I’m presented to around twenty new faces, who look at me uninterested until they’re told whose wife I am, at which point they turn on their Sunday charm. We are at the top of the staircase when I meet William. His name makes me think of one of the children I taught. Affection. At first I don’t look at him, and then when I do I wonder whether to give my hand, because this William is brown. Indian brown. Coffee and milk.

  I hesitate, and then extend my hand. And he takes it, and says, ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance,’ impeccably.

  He’s a strange creature. I find myself turning back to look at him, and our eyes meet. And it’s the strangest thing for him to be standing here amid all this pomp. I am reminded vividly of my own out-of-placeness, on that ship, among the unabashed snobbery of the upper decks, how I wanted to be down below and away from the society ladies, their censure and spite. I wonder if he feels that, this William. Does he want to be away from us all, and on the streets between his own kind? He will never really belong here, no matter how faultless his ‘how do you do?’s.

  ‘They’re gaining on us these days
,’ says Burrows, seeing my look. ‘We’re training them into better positions, and so the occasional high-flyer is let in, even here. That one’s real name is something Bengali, but he’s taken on William lately,’ he chuckles.

  ‘He must be a great talent.’

  ‘Oh yes – as an engineer, there’s none better.’

  ‘An engineer!’ I’m astounded. ‘But how does he manage?’

  ‘With a firm hand they make perfectly good students,’ says Burrows with a smile.

  I think of Benedict’s complicated calculations and how they sit on those sheets of white white paper, the numbers marked around his meticulous drawings, which I still find beautiful and mysterious despite how I feel about the man who drafts them. Could an Indian? But then I think of how my cooks follow a recipe these days, so adroitly and to the letter, with not an ounce misplaced, how they’ve learned to preserve and make custard the English way and set out a table, in just the few months I’ve been in India. And I think of myself, of how wasted my mind is between the gossip and frippery of womanliness in India. Perhaps the Raj is pointless. Or perhaps I’m just ill.

  ‘I feel unwell,’ I say, and find myself leaning on Burrows’ arm. Sickness.

  Benedict’s unhappy that we have to go home early. He’d been having a lovely time with Mrs Lennett and her glamorous friends.

  When we arrive home he, for once, comes up to the nursery with me. Aashi is nursing, sitting with our child at her bare breast. She doesn’t have anything close by to cover herself with properly when Benedict walks in. I give her a shawl.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Sleeping,’ says the girl, draping the wrap over her. ‘It was difficult to wake her for milk.’ Aashi speaks good English. Her husband and she use it at home, she says. These up-and-comings make such an effort.

  Although she smiles, I can feel the reproach. She doesn’t like the rota, which means forcing the child to wake for food, and then forcing her to stop feeding. Even the Indians think I’m a poor mother.

  ‘She looks strong,’ says Benedict, smiling. ‘She looks well.’ And then he actually leans forward and pulls back the wrap slightly to stroke my baby’s cheek as she lies at Aashi’s breast. He says her name: ‘Magda.’

  And I know then, I know that whatever his faults, he will love Magda. He will love my daughter.

  It’s a few more days before we hear of the riots at Bombay.

  When Magda is about to turn two, Benedict decides to contract a nanny. We need one, because Magda progresses at an unfathomable rate. She is so bright the servants don’t know what to do with her. She learns to speak late, but in full sentences. She seems to watch and copy in a way that makes the ladies of the club uneasy. She has the makings of a career woman already.

  Benedict seems rather proud of this. It will reflect well on him in these days when women can progress a little, to have a successful daughter, although he’d never countenance the idea of me working, of course. Still, ‘She will be a clever child,’ he says. ‘We must bring her on,’ he says. ‘We must have her well educated.’

  If Benedict were of lower rank, then I should simply avail myself of the help of one of the other women’s girls. But Benedict says it is not done to allow servants of lower-ranked men and women into our home. It’s like on the ship. I’m stuck within the snobbish confines of my class.

  It all happens more quickly than I had anticipated.

  Mrs Greenson takes it upon herself, at interview, to explain how she would first give the house a thorough spring clean according to the specifications of The Complete, and keeps repeating the fact that ‘It will be a Home from Home. A Home from Home,’ but saying it in the most stern way imaginable, so that I can’t imagine any place being Home so long as she is within striking distance of it.

  She had children herself, she says, though they were brought up by a sister in England, and it seems she has little to do with them.

  ‘It is better,’ she says crisply, ‘to let them be sent home, because the climate, the language, the morals of India are so very inclement,’ shaking her head and wrinkling her nose as if perusing cow dung.

  When she said this, ice grew in my gut.

  ‘I don’t warm to her,’ I tell Benedict.

  ‘She seems a very sensible kind of a woman,’ he says, in that closed way he has.

  ‘I don’t like her views on child-rearing.’

  ‘Which parts?’ He raises an eyebrow, looks at me as a teacher might, giving a test.

  ‘Every part. But especially how she believes we should send her home.’

  Benedict sighs. ‘Burrows said this would be a source of strife. Women do get all silly around the issue. It’s an inevitability, Evie. This place does them no good. Disease, bad manners, bad blood …’ Benedict himself was sent home as a child of course, to be disinfected of India in a boarding school on the south coast, where I expect he learnt something of cruelty and spite. ‘India’s no place for a child to learn to be a young girl, or for a young girl to learn to be a lady,’ he says now, with absolute conviction.

  I say nothing, but simply leave the room.

  I won’t have it. Would he have me be like Anna McPherson, whose son George had been away at boarding school so long she had trouble recalling his age? She had none of the trappings of motherhood, nor any of its softenings. I couldn’t bear to ask her about him. Three times she trotted out the same old anecdote, of how he loves to ride little ponies.

  I am shocked to hear from Burrows’ wife, Clarice, that Benedict has contracted Mrs Greenson after all. She tells me as we are taking one of our slow walks along Kharagpur Avenue, past the club and up towards the maidan. Clarice and I are acquaintances, since she finally came down from the hills, after her husband, but we will never be friends. She’s an Indian veteran, has been out here for so long there are no cracks in the armour. She makes little attempt at a life with her husband, and as I understand it spends her time between bridge clubs, other people’s weddings, galas and the Railway Institute. She has become entirely engineered by standards, class, and some idea of dignity which means simply coldness and pride. Talking to her is like speaking to a manual. About Mrs Greenson’s appointment she says:

  ‘You should know that I advised him to do so, as she is a sensible and conforming type,’ while swatting away some flies and correcting the fall of her blouse, as if what she is saying is of very little importance.

  I can’t reply for anger, with her, with him. I keep walking, silently. I save my arguments and rage for my husband.

  ‘I can’t believe you’d go against my wishes so callously.’

  ‘Evie, you raised no sensible objection.’

  ‘No sensible objection? I disliked her completely, and made that perfectly clear!’

  I can feel the anger, like spice on my tongue.

  Benedict looks at me, puts his work to the side for once. He holds his arms out to me, sitting there with an appealing, friendly look.

  ‘Come here, Evie,’ he says.

  I do so, because although I’m furious, it’s been so long since he’s called me to him like this.

  He holds around me. It feels strange. Like returning to a town I once knew, only to find it altered. I try to graft the B I once knew onto this face, which now seems so hard-lined and rigid.

  ‘We need her,’ he says. ‘She was the only woman of standing ready to do the job.’

  ‘She’d have me abandon this child in no time.’

  ‘We’ll not let her. Or at least not for a few years.’

  I step back. I’ve a sense that this is the time to make a bargain. I haven’t many chips to put on the table, but I try.

  ‘How old?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How old can Magda be before she’s sent Home?’

  Benedict hesitates. ‘It varies. It depends on her health, comportment, a myriad of factors.’

  ‘How old if she’s healthy?’

  ‘Five, six, perhaps seven.’

  ‘Seven,’ I
say it firmly. ‘Give us seven years with this baby, and Mrs Greenson can come.’

  On the day that Mrs Greenson arrives we also hear about the killing of Judge Beynon. It was brutal, so they say, and there is fear of more riots in celebration. Judge Beynon is a friend of Benedict’s and he seems angry, more than upset, about it.

  ‘Savages,’ he says, looking up at Anwar from behind The Times.

  ‘Why did they kill him?’

  ‘Oh they hate the judges,’ says Benedict.

  ‘Why?’

  Benedict stubs out his cigarette. ‘They have some jumped-up idea that the system is prejudiced against them.’

  I look at him blankly. There are moments when I think we are all fools.

  I have Benedict’s paper after him. Judge Beynon, it seems, presided over the trial where one of their so-called freedom fighters was put to death. The words ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘put to death’ – the whole debacle, in fact – seems surreal, here where our roses and dahlias are currently in full bloom.

  I write of it to Helen, though I have never had a reply to a single letter. As I write I try to imagine her soft body as it works at the mill, bending, flexing capably. I long to see the callouses on her hands and to hear the timbre of her voice. But she is fading; the small details are blurred now. I can’t remember whether that mole of hers was on the left or right wrist. Even Helen is not indelible. I try to write of the troubles here in a way that will thrill her into replying, so that she might come back into focus.

  It’s only when we hear of the shootings in the jail at Hilji, right here in Kharagpur, that I begin to worry that the whole Indian undertaking might come crashing down around our ears like a flattened bungalow. The inmates shot by our guards in the prison were celebrating Beynon’s white blood, and so now Benedict and Burrows celebrate their spilled black blood with several brandies and bad jokes. In The Times it says that there is an Indian writer who causes trouble over the affair; some of their ‘politicians’ want to come to collect the bodies themselves. I wonder what my servants think of it all. I wonder whether the thought of letting our white blood excites them. It rather does me.