Dignity Page 4

  The sound of the door, the feeling of the door opening. She stands in front of me.

  ‘You were afraid for your job?’ It is my voice asking.

  Susheela stands holding the paper bag. She’s still pale. I can see the shape of the box in the bag, with the test in it.

  ‘I didn’t want to be on my own.’

  She stands holding it, and starts to take it out of the bag. Then she stops. Puts it back in, and looks at me.

  ‘Will you come in with me?’ Her voice is small in the house.

  ‘Come on then, if you want me in there. I’ll keep my back turned.’ My voice again. And the house is completely solid now. I have been clear and authoritative. I have made my wishes plain to her, and to all and sundry, and I have held it together. I’ll keep my back turned while she does the test. Bracing and normal and matter of fact. No pity. No damned sympathy, and get it over with.

  In the lavatory, sitting in my chair, facing the wall, I can hear her opening the packaging.

  ‘Right. There’s the control window,’ she says, reading the instructions. ‘That has a line if the test has worked. And then the test window. A cross for pregnant. A line for not pregnant.’ She inhales deeply.

  I nod, the wall in front of me blank.

  ‘Fuck,’ she says to herself before she begins. And then, ‘Sorry.’

  There’s the sound of rustling. She’s taking the test out of the box. Then, a silence. The sound of her grappling with her clothes. Then the sound of urination.

  ‘So anyway,’ I say. ‘You’re Susheela?’

  She starts to laugh. The kind of laughter that only comes when things are this fragile. Despite myself, I laugh too. The indignity. The ridiculousness of sharing a toilet. The walls soften with it, and for a moment I don’t mind. I can’t remember the last time I felt this close to anyone.

  Then, a silence. She comes round to the front of the chair and holds it for me to see. We’re sobered now, watching the little test as it slowly turns: the little control window and that vital, indelible cross.

  Chapter Five

  Hyacinthus. HYACINTH

  Of the bulbs that are imported, some only produce a few leaves, while others, which appear to be forming for blossom, seem scarcely able to push themselves above ground, and instead of opening all the flowers in the cluster at once, open two or three first, which decay before the remainder expand.

  Firmingers Manual of Gardening for India,

  W. Burns

  This B is perhaps more handsome even than the one before. He is taller-seeming, and stands very upright and certain here between all his staff. I feel dizzied by him, as if he were some kind of a monument.

  ‘You shouldn’t try to do too much at first,’ he says, stroking my face. ‘The heat won’t be good for you. Take a half-hour or so to settle in.’ He is very clear in his mind, this B.

  It’s barely a minute before all my things are brought in by what must be five or so of them in white clothes. They blur past efficiently, and quietly enough. I am taken, on my request, to the latrine, which, horror of horrors, is a commode. But I shall get used to it, for that is all I have to do. Get used to all this, according to B. Though he says we shall have a proper lavatory in Kharagpur.

  Once I’m done, and have freshened up in the small washbowl brought by one of the servants, I go through to B.

  He looks up as I walk in, watching me as if he is a cat and I am some sort of small, dancing thing that has caught his eye. I walk to him until I stand directly beside him, and stroke his fine face again, testing whether he is really here. He is. He has stubble, as always by this time of day. He begins to be real, to have volume and weight.

  ‘So how was it, leaving the school?’ he asks me.

  ‘Not so bad.’

  ‘Even little Jacob?’ he asks with a smile.

  ‘Oh, I did cry a little afterwards, but not for long,’ I say (which is a lie as it was all night).

  ‘And the ship?’

  I roll my eyes, in a way that I hope is dismissive and haughty.

  ‘Were they kind to you?’ he asks me, with a look of concern.

  ‘They were perfectly civil,’ I say. And our eyes meet. I have already learned something of his India. He smiles grimly.

  Something, maybe, but over the next three days every task brings a fresh lesson of my own ignorance. There are so many things to learn and I can’t begin to feel I’ve absorbed them. We must check our shoes in the morning for insects or worse, before putting them on. We must not smile at the servants. We must remember what the individual role of each servant is, for the washerman won’t cook, nor the latrine man wash the floors, and we must do absolutely nothing ourselves, though frequently it would seem so much easier to do so, for the language barrier is almost insurmountable, and I was given a pancake today rather than a fried egg. Still, it’s not done to lift a finger, except to scold. Memories of Mother’s industriousness, comely and limited, as she busied herself around our home with her washday, her baking day, her day for mending, her day for cleaning, leave me feeling guilty and idle.

  B seems to have our plans all in hand from the conversations we’ve had so far, which haven’t been many, nor of many words. He’s so taken up with work. I’m uncertain when, in all these plans, he intends to sleep with me, as he makes clear I’m to keep to my own room in general until the church wedding, although we are married on paper already – which we did separately, me in Southhampton, before the passage, and he in a registry office in Calcutta.

  Perhaps it’s better to wait. Everything’s so new, and that other new thing is perhaps best put off as long as possible. I’ve a kind of horror of it, which I know to be quite unusual and old-fashioned these days. B will be put off by my prudishness. He calls me a modern woman, but I know that I’m not. The touch of flesh to me is intimate. I can’t imagine casual bareness, nakedness. There was only Helen. And that was different.

  There’s only B and I to share these huge rooms. B and I, and so many of these Indians. They seem to be everywhere I look, and behind every door. They walk into my bedroom without thinking to knock, and don’t even apologise when I jump with fright, but simply say something in their language which B says is not Hindustani but Bengali, for they have come all the way here with B from that part of India. It’s such a rigmarole of sounds. B appears to speak some himself, and I think him very expert. Therefore I assume at first that I must learn too, and am surprised when B resists my pressing him for little pieces of vocabulary.

  ‘You shouldn’t, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bother with the language. It isn’t proper that you’d have to. We have them learn English.’

  ‘But you speak it with them.’

  ‘And I’m a professional working man, which you’re plainly not. We need it. Women don’t.’

  I’m stung. Partly because the description of me seems so idle, and at heart I still work, I am a teacher to my core. Also, it’s not the attitude of the manuals.

  ‘It seems a little presumptuous not to try at all.’

  ‘Presumptuous of what?’

  I’m only me, and these men seem to know more of where they are than I do, so who am I to make them learn my language? But it is as if he has heard my thoughts.

  ‘You’re my wife, Evelyn,’ he says, smiling, ‘and some of the servants are from the lowest castes in India. For you to stoop to change your tongue for them looks weak. We can’t look weak.’

  It’s not the attitude of the manuals. But he takes my face then in his hands, and kisses me on the lips with such tenderness that I’m in a dream.

  ‘Do you mind this place awfully?’ he asks me, a note of timidity in his voice.

  ‘Mind it, B? But I love it!’

  ‘Good grief! Really?’

  ‘It’s so different. I’m exhilarated and full of … something. I’m unable to say it.’ I laugh. ‘I’m different and so are you. It’s quite … quite …’

  I feel my cheeks flush with the enthusias
m. And then I notice he’s frowning.

  ‘But what about the flies and the stench?’

  ‘I’ve barely noticed it! There’s so much to see. The other day, in town, when I was taken to the seamstress, I saw men forging chains right there on tiny hot fires, and there were women with their clothes put on in a way I can’t even begin to understand yet.’

  He’s watching me. Something is not as he expected. I fall silent, hovering on the edge of saying other things that are wrong. I’m afraid I may have been out of place.

  ‘Women need to be careful, dear Evelyn. The men, they lust after you.’

  ‘Not these ones!’ I say it with a laugh, for it seems ridiculous. The servant who walked into my room as I was changing had carried on his way as if my half-dressed body were no more than a piece of wood. And why would they look at a corpse like me when their women are so splendid?

  He’s stopped frowning and is smiling now.

  ‘I should’ve known you’d make a dream of it.’

  I’m laughing ‘What else should I do?’

  ‘And the latrine?’

  ‘At least I don’t have to empty it myself, and besides, I’ve seen worse. It’s the grandest commode I’ve set eyes on. At home we had an outside latrine only, and the stench of it in the summer, the spiders in the darkness, the insects!’

  ‘They have scorpions here,’ he says, opening his eyes wide to scare me. I laugh, and so he takes it as encouragement, putting a hand around my waist.

  ‘We seem to have an army of servants to keep us safe,’ I say, embarrassed that he’d be so affectionate in front of them.

  He looks around at the men who are stationed by the window, the fan, the buffet trolley and the door. It’s a look of almost blankness, as if he had forgotten there were other people present. And yet they have been standing for half an hour, and must have sore feet. He reaches for me again.

  ‘Can we send them away to rest for a while?’ I ask him.

  ‘To rest? They have no need of it. These men work a whole day and night with no rest.’

  Although they do not understand, I whisper to him: ‘But we could have some privacy.’ Part of me does not want to be alone with him. And yet, if intimacies are to happen, they had better happen without spectators.

  He laughs.

  ‘Privacy, I’m afraid, doesn’t happen much in India. There’s little hope of it. You must get used to that.’ But as he says it he waves to them to leave us, in a fluent gesture that speaks of the several generations his family have spent in the colonies. The servants depart obediently and quietly, so perhaps there is some hope of privacy after all.

  He follows them to close the door and then comes and sits so close that I have a flutter of fear in my stomach, which brings heat to my face. B takes my hand in his, and I’m overwhelmed by the feeling of his hand holding mine in its soft cage. The boy who was turning the fan has gone and the room is beginning to stew in the Indian air.

  B is looking at my face, his eyes looking all around me, my eyes looking at his.

  ‘We are to be married in two weeks,’ he says gently, and he leans over to kiss my mouth again.

  B is stroking my neck my face my hands my wrists my upper arms and now down the arch of my back. His hands are moving across me fearlessly because I’m his now. He unbuttons my blouse and begins to unhook my bodice. His hands, giving up that task for a moment while I take it over, trace their way up my legs under my skirts. It is so hot here. For a moment I feel his hands are snakes or spiders.

  Suddenly he’s up and across the other side of the room buttoning his trousers again.

  He is pale. His hand is at his crotch. For a moment, he’s ugly. I’m pulling down my skirt, and trying to recover some dignity; I’m a spilled vase, petals everywhere.

  ‘We’d better not,’ he says. ‘Evelyn, we’d better not yet.’

  I nod. It is better, oh yes, so much better to wait until the church wedding. The vice of my ribs relaxes slightly around my tight breath.

  Later, I wonder, is it really the church wedding B’s waiting for? Because he looks a little ill. He’s been tracking this intimacy ravenously for months, as if following its scent, closing in on my body, only to be prevented, by something unfathomable, from feeding on it.

  Chapter Six

  Swearing relieves the feelings – that is what swearing does.

  I explained this to my aunt on one occasion, but it didn’t answer with her. She said I had no business to have such feelings.

  Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow,

  Jerome K. Jerome

  ‘Will you get rid of it?’

  My belly goes tight with the shock of Magda’s question. Getting rid of it’s an idea that belongs to people my age, along with the morning-after pill, pot, and fucking around. While I sit with her, I feel her need weighing us both down to the house. God, she wants. She wants so much. I’m not sure what exactly, but I can feel this heavy pull from her. Needing. It holds this fucking house together.

  ‘You’re not the first in the world to be pregnant,’ she snaps. ‘Do you want it, or not?’

  Opposite me, she’s more real than before, neat in her blue cardigan and skirt. The shape of her shoulders is small against the square, canvas back of the wheelchair. Her wispy hair’s bright and her skin’s dull and crinkled. I remember that I used to feel sorry for her. How the hell did she fit into that feeling? Something like a laugh fizzes into my throat, some kind of bubbling muddiness, but it flattens like flat Pepsi while she sits, waiting for me to answer. The clock above us ticks. I sit, feeling desperate, racing on the inside in this still house.

  I look at Magda and at her half-dead body. Did she ever get periods? Did she cramp and bleed? Was she ever pregnant, sick? I try to think of her hollowed chest swelling with hormones and milk. But her body says nothing. Instead, her question hangs in the air.

  Abortion.

  Marie, when I was at school, had an abortion, a late one, and she said they sucked it out. The muscles of my belly knot thinking about it. I remember Marie’s pale face, how quiet she was for ages afterwards.

  I try to remember when I had my last period, but all the periods just fade into one, and you can’t remember when any of them started. Two months? Three?

  ‘Will you keep it then?’ She’s looking at me, a schoolmarm.

  A boiling feeling surges from my chest to my hands. I look at them, red from all the disinfectant handwash, and they’re not mine any more. My body’s a stranger. This must be rage. One hand starts to rise. It tingles with the smack it’ll give Magda for what she’s asking.

  I drag myself back to my body, reach out and pat her arm, so fucking ashamed of that hot feeling that just almost overflowed to burn her across her flimsy cheek. I take a breath and look at her. Her practical question’s like an anchor, dropping back to my belly. All I have to offer her as an answer is a stupid shrug.

  ‘Better be going now, Magda,’ is all I can say. My lips shake with all the other words. ‘Is there anything else you’ll be needing?’

  ‘Scrambled eggs and a pot of peppermint tea,’ she says, smoothing her hands over her skirt as she sits there, prim, like she’s in some kind of restaurant.

  Magda’s notoriously particular, insists I wheel her to the kitchen so she can sit and watch me make the eggs, giving me instructions on how much salt, butter, pepper to add. Turn the heat up, turn it down. You’d think I’d never scrambled a bloody egg before. But the instructions keep my head with it, dabbing butter into the pan, breaking the eggs, adjusting the heat.

  Apart from yes and no, I don’t know what to say to her. Don’t know where to start. I try to say sorry for what happened this morning: the tears, the stolen cup of tea, the test, and for letting my life leak into her house. But she just looks at me and I shut up, because I’m not sorry. And I think maybe neither is she.

  ‘Were you married, Magda?’ I ask her as I stir the scrambled eggs. It’s not what she wants, to talk about herself. But she’s muddled into my bu
siness and things aren’t as clear-cut now.

  ‘Yes. I was,’ she says, in a small, hard voice.

  I’m surprised she’s answered me, and the answer leaves an open space that sucks me in, so I can’t stop myself asking the next question, although I have a sick feeling I shouldn’t.

  ‘Did you have kids?’

  The silence after it pulls the air tight.

  ‘No,’ like a dart.

  She answers the next stupid question before I ask it. ‘We didn’t want one, OK? We didn’t damn well want one.’ Magda starts wheeling herself out. She’s breathing frantically as she goes, in and out, in and out, furious.

  ‘Oh. Right, I see. Sorry, didn’t mean to pry.’ It’s a lie, and too late anyway. Shit.

  ‘Those eggs will be burnt!’ she shouts at me as she goes out in the chair, wheezing and wheezing, and hitting it several times against the door-post.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry,’ but I know better than to go and give her a hand. Some things you just have to handle yourself.

  She’s right. I have burnt the eggs. The burning smell makes the nausea rise again when I try to get all the egg off the bottom of the pan.

  ‘Damned girl,’ she says, when I put the plate in front of her. ‘Damned stupid girl.’

  ‘Magda!’

  But she looks at me directly with those small, fuck-off grey eyes, and says it.

  ‘Damned stupid Indian.’

  I run down the driveway. Old cow didn’t even fucking believe what she was saying. She said it to hurt, to get me to leave and it bloody worked. My guard was right down and she’s played me like she plays us all. She found a soreness, and stuck in a knife.

  I stop halfway down her drive.

  ‘Shit.’

  I forgot the test.

  I’ll lose my job. I won’t be able to pay my fees. It all comes tumbling down, as I stand there, stock still in the middle of her leafy driveway, everything collapsing. One of the others’ll see the test when they come, in a few hours, to make her tea. They’ll go up to the bathroom, see it on the windowsill, sitting there with a story between its lines, and they’ll know it was me, they’ll tell Glenda and I’ll be taken into the office for a talk. Worse. We need this money; since Dad’s been off sick, we really fucking need it.