Dignity Read online

  Now, parted from B, I begin to long for the steadiness of Home, the smallness and familiarity of Bay’s Mouth. I haven’t stopped moving, or the world hasn’t stopped, ever since we left shore at Southampton. Compared to the ruddy ground outside, and the dry air, and the constant unruliness of every scene that flits by, the ship was a bastion of groundedness. On this journey, which lasts only days but which seems to extend endlessly, I am constantly swimming in unfamiliar things, with no coordinates for which way is up. And it is not like reading of it in a book, not so much exotic as assaulting.

  It’s only when we change trains at Siliguri to take the famous mountain railway up to Darjeeling that I feel we’re finally travelling through the high dream-world of those stories I’d previously heard of India. The landscape outside has changed, and now we curl upwards on our own steam through the most lush and dramatic scenes. It’s quite a feat of engineering that takes our steam train up into the steep Darjeeling hills. A system of pulleys and pumps drags the train through and up the gullies and embankments, and I know, if B were here, he would point to each of the carefully engineered contraptions outside on the rails.

  But he is not, so I focus on the dream-world beyond the tracks. It is far colder, and I must ask Sajid to bring me my woollen coat. I sit and watch as the hills gather and pleat around and below us, with little wooden houses perched perilously on their slopes between plantations. It grows greener, and I feel I swell lush again too. I see several species of ferns that I recognise, and many, many that I do not. There are a number of the trees of Home, and others I don’t find even in my book of botany. I shall have to get a volume that explains the local flora and fauna, for my own will not suffice in all this exoticism. I find myself smiling at the greenness of it all, and at the wide, more oriental faces that I see at the sides of the track as we pull through mountain villages and up and up towards Darjeeling.

  The lady who gets on the train to greet me after we finally come to a halt at a station bustling and wild, is the wife of a colleague of B’s. Mrs McPherson has brought her servants to help with our luggage and, as she ushers me out of the carriage and along the platform, driving the servants and the luggage ahead of us, she tells me briskly that, ‘The ladies of Darjeeling are already in preparation for the wedding. They have a dress in mind and have decided on the cake and the catering. The church is booked, and the drink is bought.’

  How strange that they should throw themselves into it when I’ve never met them. How strange that there should be no one I know at my own wedding. Mrs McPherson seems much taken with the whole occasion, though she doesn’t seem to be interested enough in me to ask me anything about myself. In the car that takes us up to the house, she talks endlessly about the wedding as though I was nothing whatsoever to do with it. I have no sense of who she is at all.

  She is, I suppose, kind to come to get me, and kind to follow me around our new bungalow, although I could happily do without her sighs of mock exasperation as we open each of the rooms and see its state of staleness and dust. Afterwards, when she finally leaves, having ordered her servants and my own around for a fair half-hour, I find, standing in my new, empty dining room, that I struggle to remember what Mrs McPherson looked like. Unusually, her presence has left no physical impression on me at all, and has not called to me in the deep and soft tones that most women’s bodies do, as if she was entirely empty, a mannequin of the Raj.

  After a night’s vertiginous sleeplessness, in a camp bed that stands alone in the only bedroom that Sajid has yet managed to make presentable, I finally find a pivot to turn around, by thinking of B, my fulcrum in this disorientation. The knowledge that I’m to be married in just a few days rises frothily to the top of my thoughts, and thrills me, because marriage is to make of me something else. Following the thrill, there is the terrible fear at the prospect of making a home amid all this.

  I am to make it tidy. We are to have three servants here, as well as Sajid, who has come with us from Bombay, and I quickly set them all to work on the house as if they were small pupils, to be caned if they are lazy. We’ve beaten out the curtains and soft furnishings and polished the windows, and I’ve had them brush and scour the carpet – for one portion, which was badly stained by damp, we have had to make a special detergent from scratch, a recipe I found in The Complete, to scrub it with until it comes clean. We’ve polished what is to be polished, and supplemented the soft chairs with several new cushions and throws, and I’ve had Sajid go to the bazaar to buy a birdcage and three little birds, which sing from their cage in the sweetest way. Our home is taking shape, and though there is still something distinctively Indian about it, which I can’t root out, I fancy I’ve done my portion to create a little bit of Home on this hillside so far away.

  Within days I begin to like Darjeeling. I like the town itself with its little square and promenading ladies, I like the tennis club, the gymnasium, I like the restaurants, the shops, the hotel, which stands guard over the town, and most importantly, the bookshop, which has as fine a selection of English books as anyone could ask for – quite a miracle, really. Most of all I like the mountains floating in the sky.

  Generally they appear in the morning, before the humidity settles in and makes them invisible, hanging above the clouds, like some kind of dream kingdom. The Himalayas are sublime. Sublime. And I am both a grand lady and newly tiny.

  Things are settling into a kind of neatness, at least within the boundary of our home. Our sitting room is comfortable enough and Sajid sits me down each morning, and serves tea with remarkable efficiency. Looking out at the garden, at the servants organising our plants on the veranda, I find myself perturbed by the approach of a wedding that seems not to belong to me at all. The yearning for my parents is heavy and sinking.

  My dress needs some small alterations, which are done by a local seamstress remarkably quickly and, I’m assured by Mrs McPherson, at a negligible rate. There seems very little else to do, for the women here have taken care of it. I don’t need bridesmaids, and B isn’t to have a best man. Just him and me and a church full of strangers who seem to delight in the whole affair in a way that’s quite odd, if rather generous. I’m beginning to assume that the various women who make friendly overtures here will not become lifelong friends. Life in India is so transitory. People move on and on from season to season, and with their husbands’ work. I should have liked to have made friends with Mrs Mason, in Bombay, but who knows when our paths will cross again? Yet strangers here act as if I, barely an acquaintance of theirs, am a lifelong friend, and should hang on their approval or lack thereof.

  So I’m embarrassed, walking into the church on Mr Burrows’ arm, with everyone staring at my dress and discussing the cut of it and the arrangement of the little clutch of flowers I hold, as if I myself were just a doll and this marriage just play-acting in which they can delight.

  It is worth the discomfort to see B’s face. He does love me. I can see it by his looks. We repeat after the minister our ‘I do’s. The minister is rather stern. He’s a missionary, and therefore, I’m told, rather overzealous. But we don’t mind. Because we are getting married, and for love. Sweet heaven, for love! I’ll never forget the brazen feeling of our first kiss in public.

  The wedding feast is laid on at the McPhersons’ house, whose servants have really put their backs into the work, so that I should like to thank them personally if it were proper. But instead, of course, I thank Mr and Mrs McPherson themselves – who, to be fair, have been very generous in donating their immense garden and parlour to the occasion. There is even a string quartet playing. Our very own brown string quartet.

  Everyone speaks to me of my dress, and the wedding, and so far no one has so much as asked me where I’m from, or about how B and I came to meet. Which is as well, because it was not really overly romantic. We met several times before we took note of each other in particular. I had thought him far too grand to notice me, and I still don’t know what made me take his fancy.

  Lucki
ly B is impatient for us to go home, and so we leave promptly, amid knowing looks. As we get into the car I can hear the wedding party, for which we were only really an excuse, getting into full swing. Now that the musicians have gone, a gramophone is being set up. There will be dancing.

  B has his arm round me as we sit in the back of the grand car that we have borrowed from the McPhersons. And then he begins to kiss me, with hot, demanding lips, although Sajid is sitting in the front.

  ‘B,’ I whisper. ‘It isn’t decent.’

  ‘Why?’ he asks, as though genuinely confused.

  ‘What about Sajid?’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, as if he’d simply forgotten the man was there. Having remembered, he waits until we’re in the house, and in our room, and then he begins to undress me, baring one part of me after another to the cool air, and then moving towards the bed, touching me, and telling me to lie down. He unbuttons his trousers. I don’t look. Then he pushes himself heavily onto and into me. He doesn’t take too long, and, although it hurts in a bruising, smarting way, it’s not as bad as I was afraid it might be, though I still bleed, and feel very sad somehow, perhaps because it is my wedding day and the dreaming is over.

  Chapter Eight

  Do what you will, this life’s a fiction,

  And is made up of contradiction.

  William Blake

  A few weeks after Mum died, and months after I met Ewan, Dad and me were sitting in the kitchen over two cups of undrunk tea, having one of those days when time going on without her was like catching a train we couldn’t bear to board.

  On these kinds of days it felt impossible to drink, or to eat either. Bread turned to cardboard, all butter tasted rancid; even the pizzas we occasionally ordered smelled of a kind of life we were miles away from.

  Neither me nor Dad could bear to talk to Mrs Marsden next door, who peered at us over the slatted fence and popped by with jars of jam or pots of soup, worried because our garden had turned into a tangle of brambles; because Dad’s car had been towed away; because our bins hadn’t been brought back in and our post gathered in worrying piles against the PVC door. The days when Mum was here, nagging Dad to get his model train sets and heavy-metal memorabilia cleared into boxes in the shed, or telling me to get off my phone and look her in the eye, seemed to move away from us more quickly if we took part in the smallest rituals of daily life, even opening a letter or answering the phone. We wanted to stay put, do nothing and nothing and nothing.

  On the few occasions that we switched on the telly in those hazy weeks, the news just talked about cuts again; more cuts. Neither of us ever mentioned the bigger things that tied us to time: the shifts he was missing at the hotel, the classes I wasn’t going to at college.

  This was one of the many days Dad had taken off, because he was ill, with grief, before the American company that really owned the British Hotel finally put him on long-term sick leave.

  Dad was particularly bad that day. When I called up to him to ask if he wanted a cuppa, he’d not answered, and I’d gone into his room to find him curled up on his bed, a hurt bird, plucked and defenceless. He didn’t answer when I said, ‘Dad. Dad!’

  As Mum’d lost weight he’d got thinner and thinner too. And in the weeks since she’d died he’d gone from being my wide-shouldered, heavyset, booming Dad, with his big grin and his rough affection, to being something almost flimsy. There’d been no music in the house for months. No fucking noise. No air guitar and no trains.

  Enough. Mum, in me, saying it. Enough! I ripped the blanket off him, stepping into my mum’s place. She was a pretty fearsome wife sometimes.

  Mum wanted me to marry well.

  ‘I’m not into arranged marriages and all that stuff,’ she said to me, looking up from her Homes & Gardens magazine as she sat opposite me at the kitchen table, her hair still thin from the last round of chemo, ‘but a good match. A nice young man.’ She reached across the table to stroke my cheek. I smiled along. Early on in the cancer, we’d all realised that any worry over me or Dad made her worse. Little lies just crept in slowly, to keep her safe. Now she’s gone, they’re still there, between Dad and me, lots and lots of little lies. On my cheek there’s the feeling of her cool hand, stroking it, the slight scratch of her callouses from all the cleaning.

  ‘That one’s gone cold, Dad,’ I said now. ‘Shall I make you another one?’

  ‘No, it hasn’t,’ he said. And then, after trying a sip, ‘Yes, it has.’

  He’s always been full of contradictions, Dad.

  On the one hand, he’s a massive metal fan. Took me to see Iron Maiden as a teenager. I was one of the youngest in there between the old headbangers. Dad was pretty much the only bloke with a brown face, not that you could see most of their faces for the hair. Headbanging when you’re going bald on top doesn’t really work and they all looked pretty funny, but he bloody loved it. We had kebabs afterwards on the esplanade, and between bites he lectured me on the difference between American and British heavy metal.

  ‘Dad, you’ve got sauce dribbling down your chin,’ I said, totally bored.

  He shook his head to himself. ‘Metal’s wasted on the young,’ he said.

  True. I think it’s bloody awful.

  The other side of the coin is that he used to dress up in tails and act the butler better than anyone else at the hotel. He used to do a kind of silver service where the punters paid a bit more per night. Dad had a way of making all the blue-rinse guests feel like empresses of half the world again. He could give them back their glory, just with his voice. Steady.

  ‘I presume madam would like another Lambrini?’ he’d say, and deliver it with a flourish from his tray. ‘And perhaps some sausage rolls?’

  They’d not pick up on the irony at all. It was his tongue-in-cheek elegance, not theirs, but it gave them a sense of borrowed dignity and they’d feel great, sip their Lambrinis and their cheap gin and own-brand tonics and have a really royal time at the British Hotel. He’d chuckle about it at home. ‘No skin off my nose,’ he’d say, kicking off his shoes.

  Since he loves anything old-fashioned and British, he’s got a weird thing about narrow-gauge railways. Trains, for fuck’s sake – trains. Before Mum got sick, he’d be up in the attic with his train sets most weekends, playing air guitar to himself, with that Iron Maiden song ‘Run to the Hills’ blaring as the little trains wiggled their way along the tracks through the green rolling countryside and little picture-postcard villages he’d made for them. The soundtrack made it fucking mental. That’s Dad through and through. Those trains on the one hand and that soundtrack on the other.

  Now he looked old, though, all the contradictions smoothed away. They’d been a team, Mum and Dad, running the hotel together. He did everything official, and the front-of-house work, and she was behind the scenes, keeping the housekeeping going, keeping an eye on the chefs. ‘Spic and span,’ was her favourite expression. ‘Keep it spic and span,’ she’d say, which always made me laugh because she sounded so bloody cut-glass Bengali. She also loved to say ‘As clean as a whistle’ a lot.

  He’d take off the butler stuff and stick on his Black Sabbath T-shirt to walk home in. Dad in work and Dad outside were two different men.

  Leah thought it was bloody hilarious.

  ‘Su,’ she said to me once, ‘you do know your Dad’s a fucking legend?’

  But it was Mum that let him carry on with the whole thing really. She genuinely wanted the hotel to be the best of British and wanted British to mean something that wasn’t fucking skinheads and all that. Something old-fashioned and reliable. The reason her folks had wanted to come here in the first place. Mum still had their high hopes of the UK. Somehow the hotel had healed some of the disappointment: her genuine belief in the insanely civilised project that was the British Hotel, and Dad’s ability to support her, however ironically, in the dream. He loved to tease Mum about her hopes for ‘an old-fashioned way of life’ in a Britain that never fucking existed in the first place. But he play
ed along, because what she was making bloody worked, and it made her happy. The hotel raked it in, right up till she got sick.

  She’d be so ashamed of the way the place looks now, the B of BRITISH hanging at an angle, the S missing some paint.

  Today I got him downstairs by telling him off in a voice as close to Mum’s as I could get it, full of her sayings and cleaned-up swear words. But opposite me he was still in his boxers, like the husk of something.

  ‘She was my bloody life, Su.’ He shook his head, tearless and lost.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘D’you know what, Dad? She wouldn’t want you sitting here like this. She’d want you getting this place together. Getting yourself together. I’m not having it. I’m not bloody having it.’ I’d sprung up from my seat, a cobra looking down at him, sitting at the table. It was the first time I’d ever spoken to him like this. For all his sense of humour, Dad’s traditional that way. You don’t cross him. You don’t answer back. He stared at me. Then he got up and left the room. I sat in the kitchen, trying to imagine that we ever fucking laughed.

  When I came home next day, he had supper ready in two pots. Dad had always been pretty much barred from the kitchen by Mum, so this was a shock. It wasn’t much. Just some boiled veg and some chicken stew made with ready-made stock from the shop, but it tasted of food and of home, and he looked pretty proud.

  ‘So, how’re things at college?’ he asked, sitting down awkwardly in Mum’s apron and shaking out a napkin to lie it across his lap. Such a simple thing, his question, but it let in life. I looked into his face, and for the first time in a while, there was a bit of his old odd wholeness.

  ‘Not bad you know, not bad,’ I said.

  ‘Liar,’ he said, with almost a grin. He came round the table and gave me a hug. It was the first time I thought it. We’ll be all right. Eventually we’ll be all right.

  So I told him my problem as honestly as I could, while we sat there.