Monsoon Summer

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  For Sarah, Charlotte, Hugo, Natasha, and Poppy

  - PART ONE -

  Wickam Farm,

  Oxfordshire

  - CHAPTER 1 -

  When I was young, and we were very alone, my mother tried her hardest to make the world seem a nicer, gentler place for me. Once during a terrifying thunderstorm she told me I was not to worry, it was only God moving his furniture in heaven, a thought that kept me rigidly awake all night.

  Another time, in Norwich, where she was taking care of an elderly widower, I saw, on our way home from the cinema, what I now realize were two people having vigorous sex in an alleyway. They were playing trains, she said, and when I said it looked nothing like the trains we sometimes played, when we put the soles of our feet together and cycled them round and around, she laughed, or maybe she smacked me. You could never quite be sure with her.

  But that time, driving to North Oxfordshire on a wet November night, she was fresh out of cheerful things to say. We were going to Wickam Farm, home of Daisy Barker, my godmother, my mother’s friend and sometimes employer when all else failed. Daisy had invited us down “for reasons, we’ll discuss when you get here,” which was more than fine by me, not just because London, bombed out, boarded up, rationed, was so depressing but because I loved the farm. It was for me a place of refuge, but for my mother, for reasons I didn’t understand, a place of shame.

  Sheets of rain fell on our taxi’s windscreen faster than the wipers could keep up; on either side of us, hedges as high as small houses narrowed the world down to wet lanes ahead, gray skies above. It was quiet there too—just the whoosh of water, the croak of a wet pheasant.

  A herd of Jersey cows, steaming from the rain, stopped us at the Roman ruin crossroads. Our taxi driver, a dear old boy who’d earlier looked as if he might die happy under the weight of my mother’s suitcases (she had that effect on men), burbled away, trying to catch her eye in the rearview mirror. Lately, he said, he’d driven all sorts to Miss Barker’s: missionaries, school teachers, nurses, even some black people. “Doesn’t she run some sort of Indian charity there?” he asked.

  I felt my mother stiffen beside me. “No idea,” she said in her most Home Counties discussion-closed voice. “Haven’t seen her for absolutely ages.”

  Behind his head, she dug her nails into my hand and rolled her eyes. The impertinence of the common man was one of her themes since the war, even regarding conversations she’d started. But that was my mother all over, a medley of mixed messages.

  We’d come to the iron fences that marked Wickam Farm’s boundaries, and around the next corner, when I saw the long drive, the pollarded ash trees, the dark woods beyond, my heart stirred. We were here: Wickam Farm, the closest place to home I’d ever known. Daisy was here.

  Daisy, with her large and generous teeth and her honking laugh, had become something of a mother figure to me, though she had no children of her own. It was Daisy who’d encouraged my nursing ambitions: “Something solid and useful to go back to when the war is over.” And Daisy who when I was accepted at Thomas’ took me up to Garrould’s to buy dresses and aprons, the navy blue suit and little hat.

  Daisy, who looked endearingly like an overgrown schoolgirl, had before the war run an orphanage in Bombay, written books and political pamphlets, and during the war, come home to manage the farm, which had been requisitioned by MI6 and become a boisterous dorm for a cast of artists, bohemians, and academics who’d lived there. I’d spent as much of my hospital leaves as I could down here, and when I’d listened to her debating with the clever men around the kitchen table, I’d seen their equal in intelligence and bravery. I couldn’t wait to see her.

  The porch light went on as we drove up the drive. Daisy, wearing a man’s coat and galoshes, dashed down the drive shouting to the driver, “Ware! Ware!”—an old hunting cry—to warn us of a new and enormous pothole in the drive. She flung her arms around my mother.

  “Glory, how wonderful to see you!” That made me happy. I wanted other people to love my mother even when I couldn’t. I buried my face in the old tweed coat. “Daisy.”

  Daisy said the drive was so dangerous now, it was safer to walk the last hundred yards. “Would you mind frightfully carrying their cases to the house?” she asked the driver. “Oh, aren’t you kind!” He trotted off happily. It was one of Daisy’s many gifts to make everyone feel they were an essential part of whatever action they were involved in.

  Wickam Farm was a handsome, three-story, late-Victorian building with low gabled roofs. Tonight rain had left a halo of mist around it, giving it a ghostly look. Its peeling windows wore a shaggy gown of Virginia creeper through which four faint lights peeped.

  A horse cantered to the gate to greet Daisy.

  “Bert was demobbed after the war.” Daisy rubbed him between the ears. “His owner was killed, so we bought him for nothing, didn’t we, Bert? At the world’s largest horse auction, the Elephant and Castle sale. Half the poor loves go for horse meat now.” She handed me a piece of bread to give him. I felt the soft velvet of his lips in my hand, and I saw his dark eyes gleaming in the half-light, and I took a deep breath.

  “I’m so glad to be back, Daisy,” I said with more emotion than I’d intended, aware that my mother was standing, shivery and taut, beside me.

  “We’re a job lot at the farm at the moment,” Daisy said, as we crunched up the drive. “I seem to be running a sort of ex-Raj boardinghouse—I say, do watch out.” She flashed her torch down another large hole. “Ci Ci Mallinson’s back from Bombay with her daughter, Flora, she’s rented the upstairs bedroom, plus I have various doctors coming and going from Oxford, and of course Tudor, my half-brother.”

  My mother’s grip tightened on my other arm. She’d told me in a deliberately casual way on the train down about Tudor, aged forty, old by my standards, unmarried. Owner of half the twenty-acre farm; Tudor whom we’d never met and who might, just might possibly . . . Well, I knew the rest, because as my mother, an incorrigible matchmaker, never failed to point out, men were a scarce commodity after the war and I was approaching the fatal abyss of thirty, when “a woman loses her bloom. Not you, darling—and don’t you dare roll your eyes at me! I’m only thinking of you.”

  “Tudor was at boarding school most of the time I was in India,” Daisy continued, “so we’re getting to know each other again. We’ve delayed supper in your honor.”

  “Sorry if we’ve held you up,” my mother said, on the defensive already. She went on about the cows, the rain, the shocking condition of the road.

  “Glory,”—Daisy put a steadying hand on my mother’s arm—“I’m just so happy you’re here.”

  The shadowy hall was as I remembered it: The crunchy fur of a lion skin beneath our feet. The severed heads of foxes, deer, a tiger, staring coldly down. (Daisy’s father, a civil servant in Mysore, had been a keen shot.) The sweet familiarity of dog smells, bacon, soups, and damp raincoats.

  “We’ll need the smallest room first,” my mother told Daisy, whisking me into the downstairs cloakroom. “Won’t be a sec.” She locked the door, whipped off my hat, and got out a lipstick—a sample with no proper lid—and tried to dab a little surplus lipstick on my cheeks.

  “Mummy, for God’s sake,” I said. “I can do it myself if I need to.” I pulled away from her
, washed my hands, and tried to control myself.

  “Trust me, darling,” she said, “you do. You’re so pale, we must get you on a tonic soon.”

  “Not the tonic!” I said in my pantomime voice, knowing we mustn’t fall out now. Her gorgeous black hair crackled like a forest fire as she brushed it and she was breathing hard. To calm her I put a slick of lipstick on.

  “There.” She straightened my dress, shot her big brown eyes up at me. “All done. What a fuss you make about nothing.”

  Conversation stopped as we walked into the dining room. Four pairs of eyes swiveled to look at us, not in a friendly way.

  “So . . . introductions”—Daisy’s amiable smile did not falter—“before we tuck in.”

  “Close the door first,” said an impatient male voice. “There’s a hell of a draft.”

  “Tudor, my love,”—Daisy closed the door with her heel—“this is Kit! The wonderful nurse I was telling you about.” She twisted the knob on the oil lamp so I could see him, a thin man dressed in shooting clothes, plus fours, and a green waistcoat, with one of those very pink English skins that look as if they could peel off in damp weather, a high forehead, and gingerish hair that was already receding. He didn’t look or seem like Daisy at all, but then he was only her half-brother.

  “Tudor,” Daisy said, “is frightfully interested in archaeology and knows all the Roman sites around here.” When Tudor raised a languid arm in my direction, my mother gave me a little dig in the back. Sparkle, its message. Go bendy.

  “Soup, please,” he said to the figure on his right, “before it gets cold, butter when you’re finished.”

  “And that is Ci Ci passing the butter,” Daisy continued. “Or Mrs. Cecilia Mallinson if she prefers. Recently home from Bombay.”

  An old lady, late sixties I guessed, dressed in a lurid kimono, waved vaguely in our direction. There was a King Charles spaniel at her feet. “I hadn’t quite finished with it, Tudor, but as you like it.”

  “Kit and Glory,” Daisy continued, “have kindly agreed to help me with the charity.” My mother’s eyes flickered in my direction. Daisy, who’d bailed us out at intervals over the years, was always good about explaining our presence here without denting our pride. “But Kit’s been nursing at Saint Thomas’,”—she smiled at me—“so she deserves a bit of a break first.”

  “Oh, well done, you, that must have been ghastly,” said Ci Ci. “Is the mother the Anglo-Indian one?” she added, making me think Daisy had briefed them before we arrived to avoid any conversational pitfalls. “Looks awfully white to me.”

  I felt my mother flinch. Of all forms of introduction, this was her least favorite. “And this is Ci Ci’s daughter, Flora,” Daisy continued smoothly.

  A plump girl, early thirties, made her way crabwise to her place and sat down.

  “It’s the pea and ham again,” her mother said. “Did you wash your hands?” She took a scrap of ham rind from her own plate and put it in the dog’s mouth.

  “Flora was a land girl in Wiltshire during the war,” Daisy explained. “Fearfully hard work.”

  “Hello, both.” Flora, who had a kind, sweet, hopeful face (“gormless,” my mother described it later), held out her hand across the table, her dirty knuckles visible for all to see. My mother, who had a horror of germs, took it gingerly.

  “Are you still nursing?” Flora said, handing me the soup. Same old lovely Royal Worcester tureen and battered silver ladle with grape vines on it.

  “Yes and no,” I said. “I’m studying again hoping to go back to . . .” I could see my mother silently shaking her head. I’d promised, on the train, not to mention the midwifery course too soon. “To London soon. And you?”

  “Well . . . not actually sure.” She crumbled her roll. “Now Mummy’s back, I’ll probably stay with her for a while, which is nice. You see, I was in school before the war, while Mummy was in India, so tons to catch up on.” Her smile that of a mongoose being left with a snake.

  “I like your shoes,” the old lady said, looking at my mother, who was sitting very regally, her legs on a slant like a model’s, displaying the exquisite, almost finicky table manners she’d tried to pass on to me.

  “Thank you.” My mother glanced at her snakeskin pumps. “They are rather fun, aren’t they? I can’t remember where I got them.” I’d last seen the shoes on the high-arched feet of the wife of the solicitor she’d worked for in Norwich. She finished her jam roly-poly and custard in silence, and when everyone else had finished theirs, Daisy explained it was cook’s night off. My mother and I rose automatically to help her.

  “Stay where you are,” Daisy commanded. “House rules: no work first night.” She piled the tray with our dirty dishes.

  “It’s been impossible getting servants since the war,” Ci Ci complained. “Everyone thinks they’re too good for it.”

  Flora looked at her mother uncertainly and half rose. “Should I ?”

  “Sit down, Flora,” the old woman snapped in a we’re-paying-for-this kind of voice. “My husband,” she told Tudor after pouring herself another glass of damson wine, “had twenty years in the jute industry and loved his job. Flora only met him twice, which was sad. You never stop being a mother, you know.” She pronounced it ironically, as Muthah, as if worried she might sound sentimental.

  I saw the heat rise in Flora’s cheek and thought, Poor creature. No father, no visible husband, no home, no job now that the war had ended: just a future of rooms in boardinghouses and cheap hotels with this strange old bird. But then we were all feeling the aftershocks and the strain, and hungry too, with rationing being worse than it had been even during the war.

  After another glass of wine Ci Ci tried to lift her dog into the lamplight, and I saw how strangely she’d put her lipstick on. It extended far beyond the corners of her mouth and in the half-light looked like a wound.

  “And where are all these people going to sleep?” she asked the dog, giving him a kiss.

  “In Nannie’s old room at the top of the house.” Daisy had returned with the coffee. “You can see all the fields and the woods from there.” She produced all her friendly teeth at once.

  “Bless you, Daisy,” my mother said, sounding every bit as regal as the old crone. “It’s splendidly quiet too.”

  * * *

  “I hope you don’t mind the attic,” Daisy said to me the next morning as we were walking across the farmyard. “I would have given you separate bedrooms, but I’ve had to rent out all the others since the war, and you’ve seen the drive!” This was said with an aristocratic lack of shame: Daisy was never furtive about money.

  “How did you meet Ci Ci?” I said, circling round a large puddle.

  “In Bombay, at a party. She had a splendid house then, servants, a husband. He died of a heart attack doing up his shoes, and then of course everything ended shockingly fast after Independence. She can barely boil an egg, poor love.”

  Four geese waddled across the yard, and in the distance, mile upon mile of fields lay bathed in pale sunshine. The rumor was that in the valley below us, seven Roman charioteers had burned to death. A headless man smelling of charcoal was said to haunt the house.

  “I’m happy in the attic, Daisy,” I said, and meant it. I didn’t believe in the ghosts, and I liked my room’s whitewashed plainness with its sloped ceiling, the washstand, the small, soft bed that had once belonged to Daisy’s parents. But what I most liked was the expanse of open country outside, the silver flash of the river that ran through it. The quiet of the space (so quiet you could hear an apple drop from a tree at night) was a blissful luxury after four years in nurses’ dorms in London. My last dorm—spluttering gas fire, clotheshorses crammed with other people’s dripping underwear—was claustrophobically small. Nowhere quiet to cry there, with about two feet between each bed and the next.

  And I was crying, uncontrollably at times, and I nee
ded to think. It wasn’t, I told myself irritably and often, as if I were going through some special kind of interesting crisis. It was the war. It was life, and nobody’s fault that my year at Saint Thomas’ had been catapulted straight from the classroom into the Blitz. In my first year on the wards, when London was bombed for fifty-seven continuous nights of horror and bedlam, the hospital, plum opposite the Houses of Parliament, was a sitting duck. One night we’d seen what looked like the whole of the Thames—houseboats, warehouses, park benches, trees—on fire.

  And now the war was over, and this great quiet blank had opened up. I wasn’t the only nurse to still feel in the deep muscles of my legs, in my brain, and my spirits, extraordinarily tired, as if I’d gone from twenty to seventy in a few short years, or to wake suddenly in the night to the nerve-shredding sound of screaming ambulances, or to find there were times when it took all my mental strength not to give in to the series of gruesome snapshots pooled at the bottom of my mind: burns with a rotting meat smell, the young fireman injured by shrapnel in the gullet, who gargled blood before he died, and of course the girl.

  Everyone tells you, if you are a nurse or a doctor, that mistakes happen, that we’re only human, but the girl was the one who took me to the edge, and I can’t write about it, can’t think about it now. All I can say is I found it hard to forgive myself and probably never will.

  * * *

  Daisy beamed at me as she unlocked the door to the barn.

  “I’ve been dying to show you this,” she said. There was an immediate smell of dust and hay and I remembered feeding lambs here during bad weather—the muscular suck of their tongues, the way their eyes rolled when the milk entered their mouths. “It’s been our greatest challenge so far.”

  The barn was freezing inside, almost colder than outside. She switched on a naked bulb festooned with cobwebs and the first thing I saw was a large blackboard with the words The Mother Moonstone Maternity Home Fort Cochin chalked on it in ­Daisy’s slashing hand, with a column of figures beside it. Next to the blackboard were two battered school desks piled high with files, three boxes labeled Medical Supplies and Not Wanted on Voyage. Tacked to one of the walls behind was a large chart, one I recognized from R. W. Johnstone’s textbook on the internal workings of the pregnant woman at term.