Dignity Read online

  I consider going back to Magda, to her house, and serving her those eggs properly. Cleaning the kitchen afterwards and re-filling the china teapot with tea.

  Fuck that.

  I’m not going back in to her. Not now. Annette’s in after me anyhow. Lovely, kind Annette. She’ll just put all sign of it in the bin.

  I stand there in the driveway. Slowly the worry about work, and the anger with Magda, fades into something sharper. That cold knowledge again. That being pregnant.

  I take out my phone. It’s so quiet and still and dead. I miss Mum.

  I scroll through the list of names. Leah.

  I’ve got a problem. Can you meet?

  I stand, frozen, holding my still phone. I don’t know how long I stand there, in the mouth of the driveway, where it joins the road. There are cars, a lorry, a little boy with red hair on a huge bike, three seagulls cawing overhead.

  My phone purrs.

  Three o’clock. Caffè Nero.

  I text back. Parliament instead?

  ‘Parliament’ is actually a greasy spoon, cheap as chips and down to earth in a way I feel a need for right now. It’s really called The Westminster Tearooms, and was probably quite a place once, but doesn’t live up to its name any more – the tea’s just builder’s, and there are no scones or little sandwiches, only obscenely huge breakfasts for workmen. We call it Parliament because it’s where all the important stuff gets an airing. All the stuff that makes either Leah or me hurt.

  ‘FUCK!’ She sits opposite me, her eyes saucers.

  I sit with my milky, instant, one-pound coffee, staring into the cup. ‘I know. I know.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Leah! Say something useful.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘C’mon, you can do better than that.’

  But this is actually the best thing she could do. Leah sits opposite me, warm and frank and totally beside herself about me. There’s no one else in Parliament today, except for a lone workman tucking into his full English. They’ve got the radio on in the kitchen. Top forty.

  ‘Sorry. Give me a minute … oh fuck, Su! What the fuck’re you going to do now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Does Ewan know?’

  ‘He left me.’

  Silence.

  ‘The fucking bastard!’ It comes out full of breath from behind the hand that covers her mouth. Her hazel eyes are huge.

  ‘He hadn’t even found out, Leah. Told me by text an hour before I did the test … See?’ I show her Ewan’s text.

  ‘Fuck,’ she says again, reading my phone. And then three more times. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’ Her head in her hands. ‘No. Sorry. I mean: it’ll be all right. Fuck.’

  ‘What d’you think I should do?’

  She looks at me, looks at the phone. Looks at me again. ‘I don’t know. Shit. I really don’t know.’

  I’m actually laughing. ‘Even Magda was more help!’

  ‘Who’s she?’ she asks, a jealous look in her eye. Leah’s insecure about the new people I meet at college, who she says are a bit up themselves. She means better off than she is.

  ‘Just one of the old biddies I look after. She was with me when I did the test.’ I keep my voice on a level. I don’t want to talk about what Magda said.

  ‘You did it with one of your old people? That’s fucked up, Su!’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with it?’ My voice is thin, strung out.

  ‘I dunno, professional standards … keeping your job?’ she says, crinkling her nose and waving her hand vaguely.

  ‘She was just there. I was upset. I got the test, and I didn’t want to do it on my own.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me then?’

  I don’t answer. How do you explain Magda to someone who’s never met her? I shrug.

  ‘Look, Su,’ she says, grabbing my hand. Her nails are coral blue today. ‘Call him. At least call him and talk to him. See what he says. He’s been sick again, hasn’t he? Maybe when he’s well, he’ll change his mind.’

  ‘He’s a mess, Leah. He left me by text for Chrissake!’

  ‘I know. But …’ She looks down. ‘Honey,’ she says softly, ‘you might need him now.’

  ‘Not if I get rid of it.’

  She doesn’t flinch. Just nods. ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ The milk in my coffee has a thin skin. I spoon at it, trying to lift it out whole, but it falls to bits and floats in the cup.

  ‘So talk to him, Su. Want to use my phone?’ ‘He’s not been answering for days.’

  ‘Yeah, but now he’s actually ended it, p’rhaps he’ll talk?’ She holds her pink phone for me to take. Leah has a contract since she started working at the estate agents, while I’m still on pay-as-you-go and always running out of credit. I nod, take her phone and press in the digits of his number, which I know by heart. I learned it, lovesick. In my hand the phone is tiny and cold, there’s no life there.

  He answers, surprisingly, after six rings. He doesn’t say hello but the ringing stops and there he is, breathing.

  We breathe.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, loudly. He’ll have the volume turned up to full, but you still have to speak up. ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Hi,’ he says.

  A long nothing.

  ‘I was going to call this evening and check you’re OK,’ he says. The voice in my ear is far, far away. I can’t pick out any detail in it.

  My hot, cross words come boiling into the phone. ‘Yeah, well, maybe it’d’ve been a good idea to call me in the first place, instead of just dumping me by text?’ My voice is quick, high. Leah’s making frantic motions with her hands for me to shut up. He’ll just hang up. I stop.

  Another long, empty time.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. Is there a slight break in his voice? I hold on to its rawness, a sore I can find my way through to get to him, to my Ewan. Some kind of apology plays into my ear. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you. Sorry for disappearing. I just, I can’t.’ His voice is a broken instrument; it stutters until there’re no more notes it can play.

  There’s a silence.

  I break it by asking him to meet me in town. He agrees. This part of the conversation doesn’t feel real. Phone conversations with Ewan never do, though.

  Leah looks at me. She presses her lips together and sighs through her nose, then she orders herself a beer. They don’t have a licence in Parliament, but they give her one anyway.

  ‘Sorry, Su,’ she says, ‘I was gasping.’

  I watch her as she slurps at the bottle with her pearly pink lips, Magda’s words still echoing in the great big silence left by Ewan.

  Damned stupid Indian.

  Chapter Seven

  Do not be alarmed at the dirty state of the house at the beginning of the season – it is English people’s dirt, not entirely natives’.

  The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook,

  Flora Annie Steel & Grace Gardiner

  The church wedding is to be in Darjeeling. Until then I make Bombay a temporary Home.

  B has determined to stay away from me, in that way, until our big day. This is made easier for him by some malady that means he takes to his bed for several days, leaving me to unpack and make Home as well as I can. Making Home in this India will be like climbing a mountain. And making a home to the standards of Home perhaps an impossible mission?

  And yet it’s not uncharted territory. I’ve already seen it done. We’ve spent endless nights already at the sumptuous houses of B’s friends playing backgammon and sipping lemonade and cream soda. At Lynne Mason’s house we were served real custard and, before it, Yorkshire pudding that would have put even my mother to shame. And Mrs Mason did not even seem to break a sweat, although her attire bore no concession to the forever encroaching heat. When I looked at Mrs Mason even I felt utterly convinced of it: her complete steadiness, and the honour of her Empire.

  Unlike my mother’s fluent, practised housekeeping in Bay’s Mouth, with her self-taught ch
eats and recipes, her pinnies, her rolled-up sleeves and the round-stomached comfort of her improvised home, unlike her kitchen sprung with cinnamon and clove smells, the speckle of the floured light, the chopping boards cut from old furniture, the clothes darned and re-dyed in spontaneous shades of newness, this kind of housekeeping, the Raj kind, happens by rule. It is fixed. It is a measure of civility. It is a crusade.

  Still, Mrs Mason drops a visiting card round, and I make an arrangement to visit her the following Thursday.

  I see something different, more fragile. When Sajid drops me there in the car I find her completely alone except for the servants, who even I sometimes forget to notice now. They are almost like ghosts, moving in a different world as they do, but all around us. They’re certainly not any kind of company for her.

  ‘Ah, Evelyn,’ she says. And her smile is warm, relieved. She’s pleased that I’ve come. I wonder, is she lonely here in this grand, perfect house? Her husband works, like mine will, so frequently away.

  ‘Make us some tea,’ she says to the tall servant. The butler. I still can’t remember the Indian names for the different kinds of servants. He slips out. There’s only the sound of the fans now. Whirring. Perhaps the one who’s operating them is outside the door? I mustn’t think of it too much. B says I’m still too distracted by them. It makes him impatient that I insist upon commenting on it constantly, all the backstage activity of the servants and of the real India, which keeps the Raj ticking over. He’s lived with it forever, that other life happening in the wings of his, and the best way to live with it, it seems, is to pretend it isn’t there.

  ‘So when do you plan to go up to the hills? Have you decided?’ Mrs Mason asks me, passing me a cigarette from her purse. It’s all they talk about at the moment. Which hill station is the best to spend the summer in? With the hot season fast approaching, soon none of the wives will be left here. I am no exception.

  ‘Yes. Next week in fact,’ I say, bending to let one of the footmen light my cigarette. I notice he smells of an English garden before he retreats quickly to his station by the wall, like a dream that fades on waking.

  ‘Very wise. And you will be married there then?’ with a smile.

  ‘Yes. In a church in Darjeeling. Will you be coming to the hills?’

  ‘Shimla,’ she says. ‘Another of the hill stations. So I’m afraid I won’t be near you. Though I would very much like to be.’ She smiles warmly.

  I feel unexpectedly sad. Although I’ve only known Mrs Mason these few weeks, and only in company until now, I should have liked at least one person I know to be at our wedding, however brief our acquaintance. Someone to make it a little more real.

  ‘You said the other night that you made botanical drawings?’ she asks.

  ‘Sometimes. They’re not very good.’

  ‘I’d love to see your sketches, if you wouldn’t mind.’ I nod. ‘Do you draw yourself?’

  ‘No, but I like to look at a craft like that. I respect it. You’ll find it very helpful up in the hills where sometimes there’s little to do but keep house, keep house and keep house.’ Her laugh is bitter.

  I nod. I’m already getting a sense of how boredom weighs on the women out here. And loneliness, too, as the men are so often away on the railway or out at the club. I feel a tenderness towards her, and straighten my back. I must be careful with this kind of feeling for other women. Helen taught me that.

  ‘Do you like to garden?’

  ‘Oh yes. Very much. I had a patch of my own at home – I grew rhododendrons, and roses, and ferns.’

  She looks delighted, her face flushes and she springs up: ‘I haven’t shown you around ours yet, have I? Come on. We can have a walk. Have my spare parasol.’

  Mrs Mason’s garden is marvellously English. You wouldn’t have thought so many honeysuckle and roses and pansies and other such flowers, that like a wet soil, would manage here.

  ‘Doesn’t it take an awful lot of water?’

  She nods. ‘When it’s hot they water them twice during the day, and once after sundown.’

  They’re lovely. I look at them and feel a throb for Home. Beside our house there was a meadow. I should like to grow some wildflowers. Or perhaps some tulips.

  There are several big pots. I’m surprised she uses pots, as they will get dry so quickly.

  ‘The pots make it easy to transport the garden when we move,’ she says, seeing the way I look at them.

  ‘You take all these with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says with a laugh, ‘I’ll take them up to Shimla, and bring them down again when the hot season’s over. Many of us do. It helps you to feel at home. You’ll see. I can even give you a pot or two to take.’

  I’m stunned at the willingness of this practical woman to bear such a complication. Fancy transporting your garden on a train! Life out here is so endlessly pernickety. Just to serve a basic breakfast you need several servants and a week’s planning. I kiss her cheek when we say goodbye. We are both flushed. I may not see her again.

  I take the car back home feeling once more alone. Sajid is a good driver, but I do wish we could speak to each other, whatever B says. It’s odd for me to be trailed by these spectral beings, who do not communicate. Or perhaps I am the spectre? The one trailing? Certainly I am tight-lipped around them.

  When we arrive there’s a gentleman leaving with a briefcase. He sees me coming and seems to hurry to his car.

  ‘Who was that man?’ I ask B as I walk in.

  B is reclining on the couch. ‘What m …’ he starts, his shoulders lifting as if in defence. Then he changes tack. ‘Oh, just someone from work.’

  It isn’t until I see the man again, when I’m taken by Sajid in the car to pick up my quinine from the doctor’s surgery, that I know there’s something wrong. The man is Dr Hammond himself. I see him, going into his room. His name is written up on the door. I don’t press B, however. It must surely be a small matter, and we’re not yet so intimate as to know all the details of each other’s health. I tell myself sternly not to worry. But sternness doesn’t come easily to me, and never did have much effect.

  B has me go up to the hills first with three of our men and a lot of our things, which we pack into huge wicker baskets, leather cases and wooden chests. He has reserved a whole carriage for me and all our paraphernalia. We’re taking everything up there for the hot season, including furniture and plants, just as Mrs Mason said. It seems absurd at first, and from what I hear is only done by the best families these days. But what I see through the windows of the train on our way into the Bengali hills makes me glad to be taking these things, as a kind of blunt arsenal against the unfurling complications of the detailed world outside.

  India, the tapered droplet to which I have pointed on the yellowed globe of my classroom, and of which I have reeled off primary characteristics (rivers, mountains, capital city) to be learned by rote by small, pale boys standing meekly at their desks, is, as I see it passing through the windows of my carriage, now intangible and impossible to digest. It is the varying perfumes that come through the window from outside. It is how they linger and penetrate. It is everywhere I look and will not form itself into a pattern.

  I struggle to fathom the scenes beyond the window of the train. I had thought, having read my Kipling and my Diver, that it would be somehow romantic and therefore somehow always remote and distant. Perhaps I lack the right approach? All I see is dust and poor people living their poor lives. Is that a house? Is that a real dwelling? Are these real people living on this dry ground? How do their bodies fold so neatly as they squat by the brown river to wash their things?

  I’ve never seen so many thin and half-starved children in my life, despite the mining towns, and although, during my teacher training in Liverpool, we had children at school who came regularly without breakfast, and even in Bay’s Mouth I used to take Jacob some biscuits, slipping them into his hand before we started the lesson. Those needs now seem so tiny. Thinking of that small effort for Jacob
’s breakfast against the scale of the Indian undertaking, I’m dizzy and appalled. Our small island pitched against the attempt to breakfast and teach an immense land like this when we don’t even know how to feed little Jacob. I find myself wondering why B never really described the poverty, and wondering slightly if it is like the servants, something he disregards and therefore doesn’t see. The thought has an unfamiliar sourness about it. A pickled taste. I ask Sajid for water.

  As we pass a long heap of uncollected rubbish where more white, humped cows stand to their supper, there’s a sour smell which permeates the carriage when I open the window to smoke. A smell of things putrefying in the heat. Keeping all this from our home will be hard work. The walls of my carriage are very thin against all this India. We will need a house with a thick skin.

  The servants, as a matter of course, avoid my eyes still, and so I’m completely alone, although they do everything I ask and keep me in the greatest physical comfort possible, as if I am some kind of delicate fruit tree which blossoms unreliably and only when subjected to impeccable and idiosyncratic treatment. I am to be given air at the right moment, and watered regularly; fed cucumber sandwiches for my distressed roots.

  The servants also treat me as some kind of dangerous specimen. On this journey they spring away from me whenever it seems we might come within sniffing distance of each other, and I swear they would wear gloves to touch my clothing and my food if it were proper. My attempts to reach beyond the remote planet that is my body, even by small expressions of warmth or gestures of vague affection, seem to occasion them to recoil like burnt moths. They have, after all, been schooled by B, who is vehemently protective and believes a wan smile between me and a servant to be a perversion of propriety. A little less propriety and a little more warmth wouldn’t go amiss now that I’m speeding away from B among all this equipage in my private carriage, my body deadened and comfortable to the point of being completely extinguished by their dedicated service.