Dignity Read online

  ‘That’s the temple, dear,’ says the old woman, whose name I can never remember, pointing at an oddly steepling roof between the other buildings, which on the whole are as flat roofed as the houses of Nazareth in our children’s Bible.

  ‘Oh how it does send shivers, to think what they’re doing in there,’ laughs the old woman, the beading of her blouse quivering slightly.

  But I feel very sombre and stripped bare. I’m not a church-going type, but I hadn’t much considered what it would mean to be so far from the God of my father’s church, His familiar threats, His violent possibilities, His manuals and rules, His England.

  The dream of this, in Bay’s Mouth, was romantic, and I had originally thought it was all Kipling and elephants. B has got rid of some of these dreams of India, laughing them into little pieces, and saying how modern it all is now, but I’m not quite ready to have it be all about keeping up with the neighbours, and oiling ‘the household machine’ as it seems to be for these society women, their English peppered with words in Indian. Sahib. Khitmugar. Musolchi. Without any of the sights and sounds that must surely be the backdrop to its determined ordinariness, their world has seemed to me, on the ship, to be leached completely of interest. It has been all gossip and frippery in sharp splinters. Who is flirting with who and what dress is the right one for which occasion. Who has best control over her staff, or the most presentable garden.

  At dinner last night, in the ballroom, as the Anglo-Indian girl sang and her pianist lover made waltzes and two-steps of her ribboning melodies, I looked around my table of ordered, married ladies and noticed the fierceness of their little white hands, how they all seemed to hold their fists closed as they spoke, gripping on to all their disapproval as if it was the only clothing they had. I hope to meet some women who are more like-minded once I am settled.

  I think of Helen, who I have left so thoroughly behind; that expression on her face, what was it?

  We wait at the dock for an hour or more before they begin disembarking. I go back to my cabin, where I am to await B.

  ‘Don’t, whatever you do, leave the ship alone,’ B had said as he stroked my hair and kissed me gently, the grey Bay’s Mouth sea raging to the right of us and his body firm and wanting against mine as we walked, B striding so surely, as only men from the best military families can, and me holding to him tightly as we moved towards this dream.

  I sit in the easy chair in my cabin between one story and the next, waiting for him to take me finally from this unromantic, limited ship and into his India. I feel a kind of hunger. I’ve grown so weary of this ship.

  ‘It’s just as well. I always knew you’d go on to better things,’ Helen had said, her voice a tight chord, twanging against the soft air with that sharp emphasis on ‘better’ and a bitter, dark look as she continued to knead the bread. The back and forth of her hands. The leavening smell around us. The faintness of the flour-tinged light. ‘He’s got real panache,’ she said of B, bitterly.

  And, although it was a bitterness she shared with my sister Lizzie and her husband, I can’t help but think that unlike their grumpiness, which was mainly jealousy over how rich I was now to be, perhaps Helen’s bitterness was more physical and violent, because B got to kiss me, and love me, while she did not – or not any more.

  I miss her now, with the ache of an empty stomach. Helen whose hardened hands touched me so softly, who, more than anyone, cares that I have interests and learning, who gives me books and keeps each of the drawings I make under her bed like the kind of thoughts you keep in your belly and in deeper places.

  On this ship any interest of mine is frowned upon. The very fact that I’ve brought from Home books that are not all romantic novels – and I have only five – is a source of great disapproval.

  The first is a housekeeping manual which, of course, we all must have, and is acceptable, though it doesn’t include a formula for my mother’s tears, salting the air as she held me that last day. Oh how she held and held me against her roundnesses, her warm body, against her pinny smell of baking and soap.

  The second is a romantic novel, which would be to their taste also, but that I chose because it seems thoughtful, and not overly sentimental for its type. Of the other three, one is a book on botany, for which I have scant use on board, and another is my father’s Bible, which they would only look on with disgust, because it is rather small and old and poor-looking. The final book is a concise history of art, given to me by Helen, which has plain but beautiful illustrations I am fond to look at, and fond to touch.

  In the event it is not B that comes to meet me, but Mr Burrows, a man of medium stature and wide girth who I have never before set eyes on, and who bursts in with great bluster, proceeding to introduce himself in that way military men have of speaking in half phrases, as if they are too thrifty and disciplined for ordinary grammar:

  ‘Burrows. A colleague of your husband’s. Come to take you safely in.’

  ‘But he said he would come himself …’

  ‘Ah, he’s unable. Work, I’m afraid, as so often happens. Better get used to it, madam – pardon the impudence.’

  I’m not sure that I do.

  ‘Have you papers to prove that you know my husband?’ I feel slightly afraid. My hands, which I now clasp tightly together, are shaking slightly.

  He laughs, in a single short breath, and draws from his pocket a note in B’s hand.

  Darling. So sorry I could not come. Burrows is a friend of mine, he will bring you to our lodgings. Yours, B.

  It takes a moment or two. I had been expecting an emotional reunion: my new husband, and I his new wife.

  ‘You’ll see him soon enough. Only a half-hour’s journey to your place in town. Where’s the cabin boy? Need him and several others to take all this in,’ he says, gesturing to my three packing cases.

  He ducks out of the cabin in search of hands. When he returns it is with my cabin boy and four other men with dark skin and eyes. My first close Indians. I try not to stare, and also not to smell. The ladies told me several times how they would smell. Suddenly my cabin feels very small and enclosed, just as the ship had struck me from the first, devoid of its expected romance, segmented and rigid against the fluid sea. In here with the ironwork windows, and surrounded by the railings of the decks, we women are birds in tiny cages. As is usual on all such ships, rank rises with level, and I am a pigeon making to be a monal pheasant. Every day as I’ve climbed the stairs to the first-class dining room, I’ve thought of what Helen calls my ‘ambition’. The ship makes it too real.

  Mr Burrows quickly has them all organised, bids them lift each of my cases and take them out on deck. I am to follow with only what I am wearing and my parasol. I feel for a second that it was silly to have worn my best dress since B is not to meet me after all, but within moments I’m glad of it, because the other women out on deck are so smart, and certainly not about to ‘let the side down’. They look at me with slight disapproval – perhaps because I’m not wearing a jacket? As they shuffle in a tight little group, the thickness and heaviness of their layered clothes insupportable in the heat, they remind me of corn in a closed pan, shuddering to pop. I can see, by the blush of their faces and the perspiration on several foreheads, how these stocks and stays, bonnets and other armour only put their bodies under more pressure.

  ‘Goodbye, dear,’ says Eliza, cool as a glass of water, and I kiss her hot, metallic cheek, partly to test if she’s real. On her skin I smell something human, and so smile at her before I step away.

  The sound of the port is even louder now, as they begin the unloading. There are men shouting in what I presume to be Hindustani, and a great clatter of cars and carriages. There is a smell of something unspeakable. Cries of joy ring out from our deck as the ladies spy friends and relatives among the small crowd of white faces awaiting them. But my eyes are taken, not by the Englishmen and Englishwomen standing waiting so thickly untranslated, but by the fascinating new lexicon of the dockworkers in their strange
nightshirts and pyjamas, their wrapped sarongs, their skin iron and deep rust under the sun.

  We begin to bake now that the ship has been still so long. The women around me are gathering their handkerchiefs to their noses, like so many grieving widows.

  ‘Oh it is a great trial, the smell. I had almost forgotten it,’ says the old woman.

  Mr Burrows offers me his arm and I take it, the ladies looking at me – no doubt wondering if this is my husband, and no doubt thinking what a gold-digger I truly am, for he’s twice my age at least. I half wave to them, but they barely acknowledge our passing friendship as it recedes. They are almost all to be taken to Bombay station, and from there to board a special train to Calcutta – while I am to take a car to B’s temporary residence in Bombay itself. It seems there will be several weeks when we are set up in temporary accommodation, and a great deal of moving of baggage, furniture and hearts before I can take root in a permanent Home of my own.

  Land, when I step onto it, is solid, deeply still in a way that is strangely unsteadying. I almost fall with its disorientating thereness. Despite the seasickness, I had learned to rely on the swell and retreat of the sea. This solidity is a new rulebook.

  Images slip and slide past as we make our way from the deck and down the staircase, beyond the waiting relatives and into it. Into it. Perhaps there are other bodies with us walking. And bodies walking the other way too. There is language everywhere, like a hundred bluebottles against a windowpane. These things surge and fade their way past me over and over. Men. Skin like the best wood. Eyes averting. Eyes averting. Mud eyes. I am the frightful thing. Oh. I am the frightful thing.

  A woman, passing, close enough for me to reach out and touch her brown arm. One of my wants for her, the softness of her skin beneath these fluttering fabrics. She passes wreathed in beautiful cloth, which hangs and drapes and winds, and her body leaves its imprint on my own beneath my prim clothes. I feel she has passed straight through me. Helen, I think suddenly, Helen. All at once there is a thin-looking white cow, of an unfamiliar, humped, camel-like breed, lounging in the middle of the crowded walkway. Is it really here? I feel sick with the confusion and onslaught, and with the impulse I felt for the woman, if she was actually there at all. But Mr Burrows has my arm and steers me through the crowd to where a line of cars and carriages are awaiting the new arrivals.

  Opening the door of a grey, irrelevantly grand motor car, he deposits me inside and climbs in himself, shutting the door.

  ‘There,’ he says. ‘That’s the worst of it over.’

  I can’t see the driver’s face, but by his dark neck, he is certainly an Indian. So they can drive.

  Through streets full of such people, it is a good hour’s slow creep in the sweltering car, the horn a constant refrain. I am feeling so unwell that I must sit with my eyes straight ahead, looking only at the cream fabric of the inner compartment, and not at what is outside which is so fleeting and confused I can’t absorb it.

  When Mr Burrows says, ‘We are not far now from where you will be staying’ – his first words of the journey – and opens the shutter on the window fully, it is to reveal things becoming focused again: a civilised and plain and English-looking drive, with planted trees lining its wide dusty avenue, clear and ordered and true. Surely enough, a minute or two later, the car stops and the door is opened and it is B!

  B. Smiling.

  ‘It’s so good to see you,’ I say, automatically. And I reach my hand, which is still my own hand, to his face, checking its contours, my breath slowing to steady again, and the line of his jaw becoming clearer by the second.

  ‘You too, darling. You too,’ he says. And he bends his head into the car and kisses me on the lips.

  His lips, here, in the warmth of India, feel like something foreign. A man I barely know. My husband.

  Chapter Three

  When the stomach is very irritable, a mustard leaf protected by muslin should be put at the pit of the stomach.

  The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook,

  Flora Annie Steel & Grace Gardiner

  I’ve just got Henry, Mrs Jenkins and Magda to do before uni. One breakfast (Henry), one cup of sweet, weak tea (Mrs Jenkins), and one of whatever the hell Magda wants today. In all, there’ll be twelve different-coloured tablets to be popped out of their blister packs (six pills for Henry and three each for little Mrs Jenkins and Magda), three trips to the toilet (if I’m lucky), two little chats, one each with Henry and Mrs Jenkins in their flats on the seafront, and then one stony silence in the big house on the hill.

  On the way to Henry’s, along the promenade, I stop and look out to sea: the wind turbines flailing their arms like pissed girls in trouble, the oil rig, the Victorian pier stomping out to sea on its black matchstick legs. Rain. Through the rain, there’s the far-away horizon. It tugs.

  ‘Fuck.’

  I say it to the horizon. To the big air. Salt. Memories.

  I walk along the seafront, feeling Ewan’s touch like tracings on my body: his hands stroking my back, my thighs, finding their way slowly to the places in me that wanted him back. I hold on to that, the want, but instead there’s the feeling of trying to hold his hand, and of his fingers going loose round mine, and the knot of his hand slowly slipping.

  And now, at sea level, in Bay’s Mouth, the horizon’s just empty and harsh with rain; and when I look down at my phone, yet again, there are no calls, no texts.

  ‘Fuck.’ I say it again. My mouth tastes of metal.

  The walk to old Henry’s helps my stomach settle. Henry lives by the park opposite the new marina. Usually, I like to stop and watch the kids mucking about, hurling themselves round the slides and roundabouts and see-saws in the park, skittles just made to fall over. But today I don’t want to see any kids or mums or round bellies, no thank you, and I’m glad the park’s dripping wet this morning and deserted. I’m relieved about that today.

  I pass some blue-rinse tourists by the entrance to the marina, looking soggy and fed up while they get off their bus and grumble their way towards our old hotel: the British Hotel, on the front, which has flaking paint now and a boarded-up window top right. I can feel Mum, grumbling. You’ve let the place go, she says. And you let yourself go too. The shame is exactly balanced with the sore comfort of imagining her saying it, busybodying about with all her nagging and affection.

  The old biddies getting off the bus are just a shade or two more spry than the ones I look after. A couple of them snoot at me, because Bay’s Mouth isn’t what it used to be. I read the thought in their looks when they shake their heads at each other like two bent old trees in the wind.

  Before she got too sick to think, Mum was worried about it, all the bullshit lately about immigration and the way people’ve got slowly more free with their dirty looks. She’d seen it get worse before, in the eighties. Skinheads with Sieg Heil tattoos. Sick messages stuffed through people’s letter boxes. Bricks through windows. She was right to worry. Last week two pissed guys shouted some fucked-up stuff at me from the pub doorway as I walked past. Their voices had that kind of hating that’s wanting too. Both the hate and the want made my skin creep. No one tried to stop them. Not even Keith, the landlord, who knows me. Like this wasn’t my town at all.

  Fuck them. I think that about these two old biddies too, as hard as I can, and turn left towards Henry’s. One day they’ll lose that small-town, sure-of-themselves feeling, when they’re old enough to need and need.

  Up the stairwell, to the grey, closed door.

  I let myself in. In the flat, the walls feel tight. Henry’s cramped home, although it’s on the fourth floor, always feels like being underground, and smells that way too. I stop trying to pull out the right words for it as soon as I hear him coming along the passageway from the bedroom to the kitchen, the only living space he has. They always take my full attention.

  I focus on him while he inches along, one step at a time, gripped to the rail the council put in.

  Henry can still ge
t about, at least inside the flat, furniture-walking, his arms trying to take a bit of the weight from his shivery legs as he shuffles along. Won’t use a Zimmer. Not that old, he always says.

  ‘Well hello, my dear!’ he says in his cracked voice. ‘What brings you here?’

  I don’t let him down by mentioning the council, or a rota or a shift. I just say, ‘Oh, I was in town, thought I’d pop by.’

  I don’t mind the constant changing, the plain, repeated cooking – boiled egg, poached egg, boil-in-the-bag fish, fish fingers – and all the other dull rhythms of their lives, but I do mind when they’re embarrassed of how their bodies wither like old roses, and when they’re ashamed of the hell of needing us, sometimes so fucking desperately, by the time we arrive for our quick half-hour visits.

  ‘Ah, what a treat!’ he says. ‘Can I trouble you to make me some breakfast, love?’

  I’m a demon at porridge these days. And poached eggs. They often like a poached egg.

  Henry likes scrambled. I break two eggs into a cup and whisk them up for his favourite. While I do this, I size him up. What kind of maintenance does he need? His hair looks greasy, and he gives off a whiff of something stale, but I haven’t got time to shower him before Mrs Jenkins and Magda. I can flannel round his neckline, brush those few strands of grey hair back over his crown.