Monsoon Summer Page 3

  When I walked in for lunch, Tudor and Flora were framed like silhouettes against a bright window, Tudor behind the pages of The Listener, making important rustling sounds. Flora glanced nervously at him from time to time. Poor Flora, barred by her mother from the kitchen. (“We’re paying, darling. There are people to do that.”) Ci Ci had made it clear that Flora had one job and one job only at Wickam Farm. Earlier, I’d seen her, lipsticked and overdressed, with her mother in the hall, and overheard Ci Ci, who was as subtle as a megaphone, saying, “Oh, for God’s sake, Flora, don’t make a meal of it, go in there and talk. To. Him.”

  Over lunch, Ci Ci kept giving Flora prodding looks, because Flora, apart from a few timid observations about the thaw, and how nice it was to see green again, and the prettiness of raindrops against the window, hadn’t exactly set the table aroar. My mother was in a foul mood: the Rayburn was playing up again—something to do with poor-quality coke—and the turnip and carrot soup was well below her usual standard. Ci Ci had pushed hers aside after a few spoonfuls.

  Daisy came late, her pink face and bouncy walk bringing energy into the room. Melting snow, she said, had flooded one of the stables, and William, the cart horse, was absolutely soaked. She’d been drying him. “Our towels, I expect,” Ci Ci complained.

  The phone rang.

  “Get that, would you?” Tudor’s goldfishy eyes swam up from behind the paper. “Bound to be for you.”

  “Ramsden fifty-eight.” Daisy’s fluting tones came from the hallway. “How nice. Oh, my goodness me, yes! Of course, of course, of course, splendid!” and then after a pause, “Lovely. Lovely! No, no, no, not at all. That’s absolutely perfect.”

  “Sounds like we’ve won the pools,” Tudor said to me, “but probably just another guest.” He gave a ghastly mock-happy grimace.

  “Let me get a pen. You can spell it out. No, no, no, no, no. It’s gone straight into the book.”

  My mother sighed and sagged, walked wearily to the kitchen for the shepherd’s pie. Tudor threw aside his paper and left the room. He stomped upstairs; a far door slammed.

  “I don’t blame him for being cross,” Ci Ci broke the silence that followed. “Not one little bit. She never says no.” She took a nip of the crème de menthe she drank after every meal for her indigestion and carried on eavesdropping.

  “And you’re from Travancore?” Daisy’s delighted voice drifted back from the hall. “Yes, yes, I know it of course, a wonderful part of the world. How many nights can you manage?”

  Ci Ci was listening avidly, an oily green mark on her lipstick.

  “Oh Lord in heaven,” she said. “She’s asking Indians to stay now.” She stroked her dog, breathing deeply. “Your aunt Ruth’s in Eastbourne,” she said to Flora. “We can always join her there.” A look of pure panic crossed the girl’s face.

  “Tudor’s promised the house will be quieter soon, Mummy. Can’t we wait?” Flora turned her pleading eyes to me. “And Kit’s going back to London soon, aren’t you?”

  “Soon,” I said, with no clear idea of when.

  “Splendid news.” Daisy had returned with the dish of shepherd’s pie in her hand.

  “My Indian friend Neeta Chacko has found a doctor for us. He trained at Barts, postgrad work at Exeter College, sounds absolutely charming. Speaks good English and Malayalam and is happy to stay with us for a few weeks, work on his thesis, and help with the translations. Isn’t that marvelous?” She couldn’t stop smiling.

  “Whoopee.” Ci Ci’s voice was slurred. “More cold baths.”

  “Mummy,” murmured Flora.

  “Thekkeden.” Daisy spooned a bit of shepherd’s pie onto Ci Ci’s plate. “That’s his surname. Neeta says they’re a Nasrani family, well educated, possibly communists. A lot of people from South India are.”

  Ci Ci’s lip furled. “Indians. Communists. Better and better.”

  “Mummy!”

  “It will be nice for Tudor to have some male company in the house,” Daisy said, “and critical for us.” She had her scheming face on. “Right, Kit?”

  “Right, Daisy.” I smiled back at her, hoping that my mother could cope.

  “He’ll be here next week,” she said, “if the snow has cleared.”

  - CHAPTER 3 -

  Daisy decided we should welcome the young doctor with a curry. She had the wheels put back on the Austin and went to Oxford in search of mango chutney. I offered to help my mother in the kitchen because Maud on the previous day had, on doctor’s orders, given in her notice.

  Growing up, I’d seen my mother make the usual ration stodge—rissoles, boiled cabbage, suet puddings—but making curry had a whiff of something secret and special about it, because it only ever happened when we were on our own. Then my mother would get out a battered green tin, uncork the small bottles inside it, and with a finicky, witchy kind of precision that thrilled me, measure out the five or six spices she used. I was under strict instructions never to touch the tin, which she kept in one of the side pockets of her suitcase, or the spices inside them, or to talk about them. When the curry was cooked, she would eat it in a kind of trance, her eyes half-closed, very quiet.

  But this morning, the old magic wasn’t working. Her spine looked rigid as she lashed herself into her apron, a frown line like a sharpened blade between her eyebrows.

  “I’ll do that, Mummy,” I said, seeing a pile of onions and muddy carrots on the draining board. I took an onion and started to chop it, but she snatched the knife from my hand.

  “Not like that, like this.” Her hand flew down the onion in a blur. “There.” She scooped up the tiny pieces, hurled them into the large frying pan, made them sizzle, the air turned blue and for a second, there she was again: my sorceress, my magician.

  Daisy had brought her own spice box home from India, a carved wooden box with rows of tiny cupboards inside, each one filled with a different spice. My mother opened it now and sniffed.

  “Musty,” she said with an exasperated sigh.

  “Tell me what they are,” I said, still hoping for a bit of fun with her.

  “This is chili powder, very hot. Fennel seeds, chili, dried coriander. I won’t put that in, Ci Ci will complain of indigestion. I’ll use Daisy’s for the chicken curry, and mine for the vegetable. So . . .” She was lost for a moment, her voice lilting, leaning over the onions that had started to turn brown at the edges. “I put spices first, warm them nicely, now lentils.”

  “Get out! Go away!” Her sudden shout made me jump. It was Sid, Daisy’s old black Labrador; he was circling and about to flop in his usual place in front of the Rayburn when she kicked him.

  “No dogs in the kitchen!” she shouted.

  “Keep your hair on, Mummy.” I was softhearted about animals. “He’s not the Loch Ness monster.”

  “Dogs are full of germs and fleas,” she told me after I’d shut him in the freezing hall.

  “Now here, come close.” She added a teaspoon of coriander to the lentils. “These first,” she whispered, “now the other vegetables.”

  And soon it was all lovely in there, with the kitchen filled with smells piquant and strange, the fat hissing, windows steaming, and us absorbed and getting on again. I was accustomed to watching my mother as anxiously as a farmer observes the sky for signs of storms approaching, but now, almost in spite of herself, I saw her whole body soften and relax.

  “Stir it clockwise,” she told me, stroking my hand. “Counterclockwise is bad luck.”

  My mother had a number of strange beliefs like this: don’t wash your hair on a Thursday, never shave your armpits on a Monday—things that when she was in a good mood, I could tease her about.

  “Um.” I closed my eyes, glad to feel the touch of her hand. “I love these smells.”

  “Does Tudor like curry?” she asked out of the blue and with a sly look I recoiled from.

  “How
should I know?”

  “You should make it your business to know.” She dropped my hand. “Because men appreciate these things, and you should wear a dress at night and stop wearing those awful gloves, like some farm laborer, and have you told him about your job?” I had the sense these reproaches had been dangerously backing up, and now they burst out like steam from a geyser.

  “My job!” I put down the spoon and sat down. “Why would I talk to him about it?”

  “Well, Daisy has, because he’s mentioned it to me, and by the way, he thinks her charity is madness when the farm is so run-down, but anyway . . .” She’d said what she’d been building up to and now she continued in her wheedly voice, “Let’s not have a row about it.” She lifted a scrawny chicken from the saucepan. “Let it cool, take the flesh off it, chop it small.”

  But my blood was up. “Why are you so ashamed of it?” Meaning the midwifery training. “Why do you hate it so much?”

  “Because . . .” Her hand was on the steaming carcass, water streaming from its bottom. “Most men hate that sort of thing, they find it squelchy.” In another, better mood, I might have laughed. However infuriating she could be, I loved my mother’s odd turns of phrase: “she’s gone all bendy,” for a friend who was trying to be feminine and seductive; “I’m forky today,” for when she was cross. Today, I wanted to crown her.

  “And I’m just so happy,” my mother went on in her crooning-mummy voice, stirring and sniffing, “to see my lovely daughter looking healthier. That’s all. I was terribly worried about you before. God knows what would have happened if the matron hadn’t phoned.”

  I chopped the chicken and tried to smile. My night sweats, the insomnia, the bouts of weeping I’d tried to pass off as the after­effects of the flu that had swept through our dormitory, but Matron Smythe, my no-nonsense superior at Saint Andrew’s, had described my inability to get out of bed one morning as “a perfectly ordinary case of nervous exhaustion brought on by overwork and the war.” Fourteen-hour shifts and sleepless nights had clobbered quite a few of her girls, she said.

  A dash of rain fell against the window. Ma’s dark eyes filled with tears. “Please, darling,” she said, “let’s not talk about this anymore, it only makes us both unhappy. Soak the rice, and we’ll sit down with a cup of tea, and I’ll try and think what on earth we’re going to do next. We can’t stay here indefinitely, and honestly,” in a fresh spurt of indignation, “is it really such a crime to want to see you settled and happy?”

  We drank the tea, and when she was breathing normally again she pulled a copy of Horse and Hound from her knitting bag and began the obsessive routine I remembered from childhood. The varnished nail skidded over the results for jumping competitions and advertisements for country homes, which, she observed with relish, no one could afford to heat now, stopping at the classified sections at the back that were her employment exchange.

  “Hampshire landowner needs housekeeper to run home and do errands, walk dogs, et cetera,” she read aloud.

  “No good,” I said. “Woofers.” She had a deep conviction that dogs were filthy and full of disease. She was frightened of them too, even ones she knew.

  “Elderly widower, Derbyshire, desperately seeks all-round factotum to help run house and do accounts for small farm, and help with entertaining. No pets, small self-contained flat. Time wasters need not apply.”

  She made a small mark with her pencil. In her glory days, she’d worked as the assistant to some big cheese in Indian royalty, the nabob of somewhere or other. And oh! the balls, the polo, the fun.

  Poor Mummy. My bad mood collapsed at the sight of her hunched over her magazine, her expression both hopeful and cynical. She was circling a couple of advertisements when Ci Ci’s face appeared around the door, her expression stagily dramatic.

  “Oh, the bliss of curry.” She closed her eyes. “It does takes one back.”

  “Keep the dog out,” my mother said curtly. “Nosy bloody woman,” she added when the door closed. My spirits sank. Nothing seemed to work anymore, not cooking curry, not being with me, and it felt in that bleak moment that we were trapped in a duet that had once been sweet but now played nothing but duff notes. The spice tin went back in her handbag; I cleaned the countertops. So, no magic wand and maybe she was thinking the same thing. When I looked up, her mouth was struggling.

  “Don’t say anything,” she said fiercely.

  “Is it the onions?”

  “Yes, it’s the onions.”

  She wiped her eyes on her apron and went to the sink.

  “You hate this, don’t you?” I said at last.

  “Don’t talk for a bit.” She kept her head down. “And don’t feel sorry for me.”

  I watched her dabbing her eyes and patches of white forming on her cheeks, a sure sign of her strongest emotions, and I disliked myself intensely.

  “Would you want this?” She was splashing her eyes with water. “Doing this?”

  “I like watching you cook,” I said, but only to soothe her, because I knew in a moment of absolute certainty that I must not end up like this: angry and unsatisfied, dependent on the kindness of strangers.

  “Oh, fruit pie” (one of her swear words), “the flipping Rayburn is low again.” My mother sank to her knees. “It will take ages to boil the rice when he comes, and take those awful gloves off.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Mummy. It’s cold in here.”

  “Then don’t hang around in the kitchen if you’re cold.”

  “I thought it would be fun to cook with you.” I was more upset than the occasion warranted but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Well, it’s not fun,” she said, a wild look in her eye. “And for your information I hate making it.” She was back at the sink, washing her hands like Lady Macbeth. “I hate the smell of it, the fiddle of it, and now, with the nig-nog coming, I’m going to have to make it all the time.”

  * * *

  The ugly phrase echoed in my mind all afternoon. It mingled with the smell of spices that spread so tantalizingly throughout the house and over tea, taken as usual in the threadbare sitting room.

  Ci Ci, hunched on a sagging sofa near the fire, sneered at the Indian doctor’s qualifications. “Some of them make it up, you know.”

  Through a mouthful of jam sandwich, she told Tudor and Flora that she, personally, would rather die than set foot in an Indian hospital. Her beady eyes, glaring at us over the rim of her “special teacup,” were those of a disheveled old parrot forced to share its perch. “Does anyone even know which lavatory he’ll use?” Ci Ci said, as if there were dozens of WCs throughout the house. There were actually two, one on her floor, one on ours. “Some of them don’t even know how to use the lav, you know. They squat over the bowl like campers.”

  Flora closed her eyes. “Mummy.”

  “Flora, you haven’t lived there. I have. Twenty-two years.”

  “Twenty-two years what?” Daisy appeared, showing no sign of having overheard this unpleasant exchange. “Any more tea in that pot?”

  “In India. Some of our servants were quite wonderful,” Ci Ci improvised quickly. Daisy had reminded us firmly at breakfast that Anto Thekkeden was a clever young man from a distinguished family. He would be a huge asset to the charity and she would appreciate it if we would all make him very welcome.

  “Pandit ran our house like clockwork,” Ci Ci continued with a sneaky smile to Flora.

  “Tell them about the Daimler, Mummy,” said Flora, who was a useful prompt when the occasion demanded it.

  “Oh yes, our lovely, lovely car,” Ci Ci told Tudor, who was looking blankly at her. “Pandit worshipped the thing. Couldn’t stop polishing it, put lovely fresh mints in the glove box. I—” A knock at the door interrupted her.

  Maud’s husband, Dave, stood there, breathless and important.

  “Miss Barker, sorry to trouble you, bu
t a young colored gentleman has fallen in the ditch. He come on a motorbike, skidded, and fell there. Do you want him at the house? He’s approaching it now.”

  “Did you leave him in the ditch?” Daisy sprang from her seat.

  “No, ma’am, I—”

  “In the snow!” Daisy was appalled.

  “No, I just didn’t know if you’d want him up at the house like.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, of course we want him in the house,” Daisy snapped. “Get a torch, and I’ll come with you.”

  “Glory,” she said, “go upstairs quickly and check the bathroom is presentable. He’ll be sopping wet and need a bath before supper. Honestly.”

  She sent me to the barn to finish sending invitations to a talk she was giving the following week titled “Infant Mortality in India.” I was licking envelopes when I heard the throaty roar of a motorbike coming up the drive, the skid of brakes, and then the front door open and close as the new arrival walked in.

  It was dark by the time I’d finished up the letters. I took a hay net down to Bert the demob horse, then walked back up the drive. When I got back to my room, I saw that my mother had put a blue dress on the bed for me, a pair of pearl earrings beside it. I was struggling with their clips when the lights went out. Melting snow down in the valley, Daisy had warned us; happened every year. As I felt my way downstairs, step by step, I could hear the splash of the Indian doctor having his bath upstairs. Daisy was on her hands and knees downstairs, getting oil lamps from the cupboard in the hall.

  We lit about ten of them and placed them at strategic points around the house. Golden light pooled around the portraits of the frock-coated ancestors in the hall and gave them a startling intimacy. It bounced off the glass eyes of the stuffed foxes, the eagle bagged near Pondicherry. Glory was frightened of the dark, so I went into the kitchen to help her. She was standing motionless beside the battery of small dishes she’d prepared to go with the curry.

  “Oh, Mater,” I said, “this smells nose-toddlingly good.”