Monsoon Summer Read online

  “I do prefer the office to be separate from the house, don’t you?” said Daisy, seeing my dubious gaze. This office was arranged like a small stage set in the middle of a few bales of hay and stacks of old gates.

  “It’s essential to get the house out of your head, at least for part of the day.” Daisy, I knew for a fact, was often up at five, feeding animals or cooking stews, in order to clear this time for herself. She knelt to light the stove in the corner, brushed a dozing farm cat off her desk.

  “That’s yours.” She pointed to the chair opposite hers and handed me a rug to wrap myself in. “But Kit,” she said, looking at me steadily and kindly, “before I bamboozle you, how are you, honestly?”

  There was a time when this kind of invitation had led to some of the best and frankest talks of my life. Not now.

  “So much better, Daisy,” I said. “It’s so good to be here.” The vague idea I had had about confiding in Daisy already felt like self-indulgence. Sharing the house with dispossessed strangers was no piece of cake either, and I thought she looked tired and had lost weight since I’d last seen her a year or so ago.

  “I wonder if it was a mistake,” she offered, “for you to plunge so soon after the war into the midwife course. What does Glory think?”

  “Not thrilled,” I said. The truth was my mother hadn’t spoken to me for a week after I told her. Her plans for me ran along the lines of something sanitary and secretarial, maybe a doctor’s receptionist, in a place where you wore nice clothes and met men and flirted discreetly with them.

  “Hm, I didn’t think she would be.” Daisy sucked in her lips.

  “But I was enjoying the training.” I faltered, “I really was,” furious that my mouth was wobbling. “I want to finish it. It’s not that. I got tired, I think,” I added lamely. “And this awful winter . . . you know . . . normal things.” I closed my eyes tight to blank out the memory that followed me everywhere: the girl. Her screaming mouth.

  “Well, we don’t have to do any of this today if you don’t want to. And don’t let me bombard you.” The expression in her eyes was so kind, I had to take a deep breath.

  “Honestly, Daisy,” I stood up. “My brain’s going to turn to dust if I don’t work again soon, so spill the beans.”

  She laughed as if I’d made a splendid joke, opened the desk drawer, and said, “Let’s get cracking.”

  * * *

  In the next hour Daisy, intent and serious, sketched out what seemed to me a dangerous plan. “Do you remember me telling you about the orphanage I ran in Bombay in the late ’twenties?” she began.

  “Of course!” I’d enjoyed her stories about Tamarind Street.

  “Well, it was a marvelous time. I set it up with a group of egghead women I’d met at Oxford, and we ran it with Indian volunteers. We all got on splendidly, and I was very happy there, and although it was a drop in the ocean, we did at least do something. Not nearly enough.” Daisy, who never blew her own trumpet, looked sad at this.

  “In August, after Indian Independence, I think we thought we would be kicked out, or worse—but something’s cropped up.” Her eyes flashed. “Something very exciting. I’ve been asked by my very good South Indian friend, Neeta Chacko, to continue to help a mother and baby clinic at a small hospital in Fort Cochin. The plan is to work alongside their Indian staff and develop a short course to share Western knowledge with the local village midwives, the vayattattis. So we’re on the hunt for English midwives to go back to India. The right kind.”

  “The right kind?” I asked cautiously. “Meaning . . . ?”

  “Well, not pigheaded know-it-alls. We can learn a lot from the local women.”

  “But who would go?” I asked. In the last few months, the papers had been full of lurid accounts of the mayhem that had followed Independence: the three hundred thousand Muslims hacked to death, the slaughtering of innocent passengers in burning trains, neighbor killing neighbor, and so on. “Don’t Indians loathe us now?”

  “Well, you see, that’s rot,” Daisy said. “Some do, with some justification, but the others, we worked with them for years, they were our friends, and besides they need all the help they can get.”

  “Don’t they want to cut the apron strings?” That’s what my mother had told me, a bitter note in her voice.

  “Not entirely.” Daisy put a kettle on top of the range. “God, it’s cold in here. I’m going to make some tea. It’s partly our fault that India still has an appallingly high infant mortality rate. Tackling it wasn’t high on our government’s list of priorities when we were there, and sensibly, their government wants foreign midwives from America and from Britain, to fill in the gaps.”

  I must have looked skeptical. Handing me a mug of tea, she said, “The situation, frankly, darling, is dire. The riots and killings have placed a tremendous strain on local hospitals. Neeta has begged us to come back, to bring equipment, books, money, anything we can.”

  She got up and put a piece of rotten gate on the fire.

  “Are you going?” I felt my mouth grow dry.

  “I can’t.” She looked stricken. “I have to run the farm, else it will collapse, and anyway it’s important that the Moonstone have its own Indian administrator. It’s midwives they need. Have a flapjack.” Daisy’s flapjacks were good: moist and chewy with just enough golden syrup in them to make them sweet.

  “I’m not a proper midwife yet.” I took a flapjack from the tin. “I have two more supervised deliveries to do before I sit my part twos.” The rule was that pupil midwives who were qualified nurses had to take responsibility for twenty women during labor, ten of these in the patients’ own homes, so a total of thirty deliveries over a year. I’d taken part in twenty-eight, and then, because of what happened, I’d dropped out.

  “So, almost there.” Daisy tucked the blanket around my knee. “I was trying to remember if you’d ever actually been to India with your mother,” she said innocently, while I was chewing.

  “Daisy,” I said warningly. I had an inkling where this was heading and had already decided to say no. “I was never there, or if I was, I was too young to remember.”

  My mother’s stories about India were so odd and variable, that I always felt, to use her own word, “eggshelly,” when the subject cropped up, not wanting to casually blurt out what she had carefully concealed.

  “I think Mummy went to school there.”

  “She did,” Daisy said.

  “Did she work for some governor there or something? A good job.”

  “Maybe.” It was Daisy’s turn to look wary. “You’d better ask her.”

  A gust of wind made the barn door fly open. Three ducks waddled across the mud, the wind flattening their feathers. Daisy bolted the door shut, put another log on the grate.

  “So, back to the Moonstone.” She stood up and wrapped a blanket mummy-fashion around herself. “What Neeta and I are working on is a simple training program that won’t mystify the local midwives, some of whom are illiterate, and joy! I think we may have tracked down the proverbial needle in the haystack by finding a young doctor at Oxford who speaks Malayalam, the local language in Cochin. He’s going to help me with the translations. It is a bit of a minefield out there at the moment, and we must avoid any hint of English women bossing their women. We want to train their best and brightest, but you know, it can be terribly tricky: some high-caste Hindu women have to go through complicated cleansing rituals if they so much as touch the bodily fluids of another person.”

  “Daisy,” I said, “it sounds insanely difficult.”

  “That’s what Tudor says.” She smiled sadly. “He’s completely mystified at my spending my time on this, and probably best we don’t discuss it at mealtime. It can be an explosive subject.”

  “I think my mother would say amen to that, but I’m not mystified, Daisy,” I said, looking at her: she was the best person I’d ever
met, though she’d have hated me to say it.

  She looked at her watch. “I’ll get through this quickly—lunch in half an hour. Our most desperate need is coin,” she said urgently, “to get the Home up and running and show what wonders we can achieve. If we can do this, I’m sure that in time, the new government will support us. I’m sending out begging letters to everyone I can think of. Can you help?”

  “Of course, of course!” I felt shamefully relieved to hear that was all she wanted. “I can type one hundred and twenty words a minute,” I boasted. My mother had insisted on it at the Balmoral typing school in Oxford Street. “When do we start?”

  “Today.” She moved a pile of files from the empty desk. “Let’s start by making a list of supplies. Nothing too taxing.”

  - CHAPTER 2 -

  And so it began. For the next month, every morning after breakfast, wearing three pairs of socks, every sweater we could lay our hands on, sleeveless gloves, and long johns, Daisy and I dashed off to the barn as quickly as we could. We read textbooks, wrote to student midwives, went methodically through the telephone directory for possible donors, and typed begging letters. We wrapped parcels that, when the lane cleared, the postman would take on the first leg of their trip to India.

  We kept replies to our begging letters in two old Bath Oliver biscuit tins on Daisy’s desk, one labeled YES! and the other NO. After three weeks the yes letters didn’t even reach the ten-biscuit mark, but Daisy looked joyful as she showed them to me. A ten-bob note and a “Well done, Daisy,” from an aunt. A hard-earned fiver from an ex–India nurse, now retired with stomach problems to Brighton. The promise of twenty packets of swabs from a local chemist, and some aspirin. That sort of thing.

  The letters in the no tin, on my desk, all but burst with rage at our stupidity at continuing to help an ungrateful India.

  “Here’s a beauty,” I said to Daisy.

  “Dear Miss Barker,” wrote Col. Dewsbury (retired) from Guildford. “(Am assuming you’re a Miss.)

  “In receipt of yrs 20/10/47, am frankly flabbergasted that you still consider India has the right to bleed us dry anymore. I don’t know if you read the newspapers, but after enjoying the railways we built for them, the schools we set up, and a thousand and one other advantages we fought and died for, THEY HAVE KICKED US OUT.” The colonel had underlined this so emphatically, he’d gone clean through a sheet of Basildon Bond. “Two generations of my own family have given their lives to the country (Father in Innis­killins), Great-Grandfather caught in the riots up North, where Indians holed us up for two days without water and food. So sorry. NO, from now on, charity begins at home.”

  His stabbing signature left another bullet hole in the paper.

  “So, I think we can safely assume the colonel won’t be putting us in his will.” I shut him firmly in the no tin. “Colonel, I can hear you shouting,”—I put my ear to the lid—“but you can’t come out.”

  “Oh, Kit,” Daisy said, after series of schoolgirlish snorts, “don’t leave too soon.”

  I didn’t want to. I loved working with Daisy, and cocooned by the snow and immersed in this exciting project, I was secretly dreading that the roads would be cleared soon and I’d have no excuse for not going back to Saint Andrew’s, the nursing home where I’d gone to study midwifery after my general nursing training at Thomas’. I wasn’t frightened of the study, which I enjoyed, or the exams; I was resigned to the temporary claustrophobia of being back in an all-female dorm. The particular horse I had to get back on was the idea of delivering another child on my own, which made me feel sick and light-headed, not a good feeling for a pupil midwife.

  “You can stay forever as far as I’m concerned.” Daisy patted my arm. “Your mother’s occupied. Tudor likes having you around.”

  “So not stinking fish?” I tried to avoid the hopeful glance that nowadays went with any mention of her Tudor’s name. It was an awkward thing, but I’d really taken against him, his languid manner, his prissy way of eating as if the food were some sort of insult, when my mother was trying so hard, the way he treated Daisy like a skivvy.

  Daisy tried to twang my heartstrings with excuses for his boorish behavior: Tudor wasn’t used to so many women around after the army, and before that Oxford and an English boarding school. Tudor found it hard to talk at the table (at which my inner censor sagged and said, Oh, poor ickle bickle Tudor). He was fearsomely intelligent and didn’t do small talk. He was half owner of this farm too.

  “You could never be stinking fish,” Daisy said stoutly. “You’re family, not guests.”

  “It’s been good for us,” I said, and meant it. “Mummy and I were barely speaking on the way down, and being together every day means . . .” I was faltering as I said this because it already felt disloyal. “We’re at least under the same roof and I’m not so worried about her.”

  “That’s good.” Daisy’s look was steady and kind. “She loves you, you know.”

  “I just wish,” I said eventually, “she could find something to do that she really liked.”

  “It’s not ideal”—even Daisy couldn’t deny this—“but she’s saved my bacon with the housekeeping and she’s a wonderful cook.” I felt the old glow of reflected pride when she said this, and it was justified. Maud, Daisy’s regular cook, was off with her recurring bronchitis, and when snow had threatened to cut off our food supplies, Ma had performed small miracles with sinister-looking bottles of peas and vegetables she found in the cellar, making them into creamy soups with a pinch of this and that, and delicious stews from unpromising scraps of lamb and muddy carrots, or the odd chicken retired from egg laying.

  A shame then that my mother, a practiced hand at nipping the hand that fed her, complained ceaselessly about Daisy’s hopelessly inadequate kitchen utensils, the Rayburn, the heating, the dreariness of the gray skies, but I was used to this. And at least she and I were talking again.

  When I’d tried to tell her a little bit about the charity, she’d crumpled her forehead and said, “Not now, darling,” maintaining she was too squeamish, but then I’d hear her from another room, boasting about my cleverness at school, delighting in the fact that I was typing again, triumphant vindication of her original plans for me.

  If I wasn’t too tired at nights I took the typewriter up to my room and, fingers flying over Daisy’s battered Remington, wrote to Josie, my dearest friend at Saint Thomas’, the straight-as-a-die farmer’s daughter, with whom I’d shared so many laughs, confidences, and when we could afford it, nights out with during the war. It was Josie who had been with me on the night it happened and told me endlessly it was not my fault.

  Sometimes I wrote in my diary too, and when I finished I’d cross the hall to my mother’s room and kiss her good night. If she was sitting at the dressing table, I’d sometimes brush her beautiful black hair and she’d whimper in appreciation, which made me feel so sad.

  She was so beautiful, my mother then, have I said this? The Indian blood she tried so hard to hide had given her wonderful, smooth, pale caramel-colored skin and glossy hair. And she was tremendously well-dressed considering how broke we were—the quintessential Englishwoman, from a distance, only much, much better-looking; my glamorous princess once, green satin dress, diamond necklace (paste). She was my cook, storyteller, exotic traveling companion too: funny and superstitious with sudden bursts of gaiety that reminded me of a cat dashing up a curtain. She had the sudden spitting furies of a cat too.

  Some nights, when I went across the hall to say good night, she’d slide her tortoiseshell eyes up at me and say in a little-girl voice, “Read me a story.” She carried with her always a small collection of romantic books; her then favorite was Georgette Heyer’s The Spanish Bride. And so, huddled under the eiderdown together, just like in the old days, I did all the voices—Juana’s, Lord Wellington’s, Harry Smith’s—and she was happy again.

  Sometimes she’d try to persua
de me to try on one of her pretty dresses (some of them donated by rich employers, others—how to put this?—self-donated), saying it would cheer everyone up downstairs, meaning Tudor, I suppose. She pleaded with me to let her polish my nails. “A lady is always judged by her hands.”

  (When I’d told Josie this, she’d said, “But what about this?” pointing at her wild red off-duty hair, “Or this?” holding herself erect so the world could admire her bosom.)

  But Josie was working the night shift in London and not available for jokes about my mother, and knowing I’d be leaving soon, I sat patiently (a huge effort) while my mother frowned at my cuticles, and pushed dead skin away with a special little pointed dagger from her shagreen case, and finally held my hand.

  The bigger things between us we brushed away under the carpet like so many unpleasant toenail clippings.

  “Kit, you’re awake,” she said one night when she walked in and found me wide-eyed at three a.m.

  I’d been thinking about the girl again—her red hair, her screaming—but said something vague about night shifts at the hospital, and how it was hard now to sleep normally again. Sensing distress, she cut me off with a strange fake laugh that was as bad as a slap and said, “Oh, Kitty, let’s not be morbid. The war’s over now.”

  * * *

  On the day when things began to shift and change for me, there was a thaw outside. The cook, Maud, arrived midmorning, red-cheeked, puffing, and with a barking cough, saying it was still blooming cold out there but the snow was melting in the lanes, which made Daisy and me happy. We’d been wrapping parcels of maternity packs, books, and wall charts, which could now leave for India.