Monsoon Summer Read online

  It had been our joke once to speak like this when the lights failed and pretend we were toffs in a Georgette Heyer novel, not tweenies (between-stairs people). Tonight she wouldn’t play.

  “It’s all gone wrong.” The whites of her eyes showed through the gloom. “No grated coconut, no fresh mango, no fresh tomatoes: I’m fed up with rationing.”

  She plonked a dish of dried-up raisins on the plate, and the WI green apple chutney, which Daisy had found in a cupboard under the sink, having drawn a blank in Oxford.

  “Is he here?” she said. “Have you seen him?”

  “He’s having a bath,” I said.

  “In Ci Ci’s bathroom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my God.” She closed her eyes. “This is going to be awful.”

  * * *

  We’d set the table with white linen napkins, the good plates, and what was left of the Waterford crystal. Did I say that Daisy had bought a beautiful cedar table in India and shipped it home? Terribly impractical, but it looked lovely that night polished to a high conker-colored shine. I think it was Daisy who told me once that you never regret your extravagancies, and this had been one of hers, and it always raised my spirits to see it.

  When we walked in with the trays, Ci Ci, Flora, Daisy, and Tudor were blurred figures in the candlelight. My first sighting of him was as a vague silhouette against a dark door, and when I got closer, a slim man in a too-large jacket that looked peculiar on him, like a boy wearing his father’s clothes. His face was in shadow. Daisy leapt towards him.

  “Everybody.” She looked down the table towards us. “I have the greatest pleasure in introducing you all.” She pointed to us each in turn and said our names. “And this,” she concluded with a drumroll inflection to her voice, “is Dr. Anto Thekkeden, from South India.”

  “And more recently, from a ditch near Whitney,” he said. His voice was cultivated, Home Counties clipped, with just a faintly buttery undertone, a purring of the rs that sounded foreign. I was surprised by it, expecting the Indian singsong that Tudor had done as a turn before he arrived.

  We laughed politely.

  “That corner is a brute,” said Daisy. “What kind of motorbike do you drive?”

  “It’s a Norton, twin cylinder. Very old, and the tires are bald.”

  “But frightfully economical on petrol, I expect.” Flora was determined to be kind, or maybe to head off Ci Ci, who’d been muttering about hotels again.

  Anto sat between Tudor and Flora. I was opposite him. The fuzzy light from the candles meant I couldn’t see him clearly at first, but when the light suddenly bloomed, oh Lord, he was handsome: high, dignified cheekbones, a wide and tender-looking mouth, and pale cinnamon-colored skin that made him look more like a Spanish grandee than an Indian. The other striking thing was his eyes: wide-set and almond-shaped and green, and at this moment, expressing a polite, faintly quizzical, watchful interest in the proceedings.

  Daisy had asked me earlier to get the conversational ball rolling.

  “I’m Kit,” I said, flustered enough to forget we’d been introduced.

  “I’m Anto,” he said, as if we hadn’t. He stretched his hand across the table and I shook it.

  “And you know Mrs. Mallinson,” I said to show I wasn’t a complete idiot.

  “Delighted to meet you,” Ci Ci drawled at her most patrician. She’d put on lots of eye makeup, and her silk jacket had a small cigarette burn on the lapel.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you all,” he said softly.

  Yes, a Spanish grandee, I thought, without the faintest idea really of what a grandee looked like, except from the pages of The Spanish Bride. And off-puttingly good-looking, my thoughts ran on: unfair and unnecessary for a man to have cheekbones like that and those eyes. Josie and I had a theory about all good-looking men, based on one or two God’s-gift-to-women doctors we’d met at the hospital: they were shallow and unreliable, and vain, and usually not very bright. To be handsome was like earning interest on money you hadn’t earned in the first place.

  “Glory has made this in your honor.” Daisy put a steaming plate of chicken and vegetable curry in front of him. “No luck, sadly, with the mango chutney, but this is rather good.”

  “Thank you.” He took the plate, closed his eyes, and breathed in deeply. “I haven’t had this for years.” For a moment he looked so troubled I wondered if we’d got it wrong and he was a strict vegetarian like some of the other Indians I’d read about.

  My mother appeared, dressed for defiance in a green satin shift with jade earrings. Family friend, her outfit signaled, not servant. She spooned rice and the lentil dish onto her plate with her usual slightly finicky delicacy and then looked around the table, where there was a sudden uneasy pause.

  “So, Dr. Thekkeden,” Ci Ci said at last, her head at an ironical angle. “What brings you to our shores?”

  He put down his knife and fork and looked at her. “I’ve been here for ages,” he said in his soft, posh voice. “I was educated here.”

  “Ah! So that’s why you speak good English.” Ci Ci was quite the Bombay hostess again. “Do have some more of this rather peculiar chutney.”

  “What school?” Tudor looked up.

  “Downside.” His reply was clipped. “My parents are Catholic.”

  “Oh.” Tudor sounded surprised. “Is that unusual?”

  “The school or the religion?”

  “Well, both.” Tudor was sounding prickly.

  “It is most unusual,” the young doctor confirmed. “But my father loves all things English.” There was a dry note in his voice as he said this, something a little mocking and public schooly. “He would wear plus fours if it wasn’t so hot in South India.”

  “And what profession does he follow?” asked Ci Ci.

  “He is a lawyer. He was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn.”

  “Am I correct in thinking Gandhi practiced law in England too?” Tudor asked. “Before he took up spinning and good works?”

  Stop peppering the poor man with questions, I thought.

  “Gandhi was called to the bar at Grey’s Inn,” Daisy jumped in. “But he never practiced here. I met him once, you know, in Bombay, where we ran a children’s home. He was a great man.”

  “A great man,” the Indian doctor confirmed quietly. “I’ve been reading about him in the papers.” I noticed the cuffs on his jacket were frayed.

  “Would you like some more rice?” I asked.

  “I would.” He looked at me across the table. “Thank you.”

  I walked to the sideboard, where the food was kept warm on a small steel tray with three candles underneath it.

  “Sit down.” My mother spoke for the first time. “I’ll do it. Our maid has the flu,” she explained briefly to Anto. “It’s a real bore.”

  “The food is very good,” he told her. “Thank you.”

  I saw her considering whether to tell him about her job in India now or later. The governor, the picnics, the polo games.

  But Flora said, “So did you get stuck here during the war?”

  “Sort of,” he replied.

  “Stuck here!” Ci Ci’s voice held a note of muted outrage. It was all right for her to hate England, but it was cheek for an Indian.

  “My father was keen for me to do my medical training at Bart’s Hospital, and then the war came. I haven’t been home for nine years.”

  “So you’re practically one of us,” said Daisy.

  He didn’t answer, just a little smile.

  “Did you mind?” Flora asked. She was wide-eyed like a child.

  He put down his fork and stopped eating. “That’s a big question,” he said. “None of us expected the war.”

  “Will you go home soon?” Daisy asked.

  “That is the plan.” He looked at her directly with his l
ong-lashed green eyes and gave an almost smile. “I’m worried they won’t recognize me. And may I ask about you?” He addressed the table generally.

  “Oh, us.” Ci Ci’s lip furled backwards, showing her sharp little teeth. “Oh, we’re Empire flotsam and jetsam.” She laughed to show this was a charming and self-deprecating joke. “We’re renting here while we catch our breath.” After a sip of Daisy’s surprisingly potent elderflower wine, she rambled on at length about the Daimler and Godfrey’s factory. How India had taken years off Godfrey’s life, and how Gandhi had spoiled things by stirring people up.

  “Sorry about this,”—she flung a defiant look around the table—“but I personally thought he was a ghastly little man, sitting there spinning in his nappy.”

  Daisy was shaking her head as if to say, Stop stop, stop! but said nothing, not wanting, I imagine, to stir up any storm clouds on his first day.

  “Just a tiny bit more, dear.” When Ci Ci held her glass towards Tudor, I stood up.

  “Would you like me to show you your room?” I said to the doctor. “It’s on the first floor.”

  My mother shot me a look of pure venom.

  “What a splendid idea.” Daisy looked relieved. “There was only time for a bath before dinner.”

  “Thank you,” he said, “I’d like that.” And to Daisy, and my mother: “A delicious meal. I can’t thank you enough. I look forward to seeing you all tomorrow.”

  As we left the room, the door releasing an icy draft, Ci Ci Mallinson said quite audibly, “Well, he’s got quite good table manners: that’s something, I suppose.”

  - CHAPTER 4 -

  The girl, whose name was Kit, stood up with a forwardness that startled him. She must have thought he needed rescue. He didn’t. He filed all such conversations in his mind under Indya: press button one and you got reams of stuff from the ex-colonials about the railways and the ungratefulness; or the rhapsodies about the sunsets! the spirituality! the smells! and not forgetting, ah! the cow dust and the fires, the spices! Add in the rifle dust and you had Parfum de Partition.

  In the hallway, she picked up his briefcase. “I can take this,” she said, leaving the heavier ones for him. He almost blushed, conscious of the packet of French letters scattered amongst the few shirts, his cigarettes, the Catholic missal his mother had packed with the note inside saying, “Don’t forget your prayers.”

  The condoms were standard issue for red-blooded medical students, but for him an invitation to a dance full of complications.

  Walking upstairs in the glow of the lamplight, he did his best to ignore the slim ankles, the straight line of her stocking, the silk sway of her dark hair: women were off limits now that he was going home. To make this absolutely clear to himself, he’d gone back to Downside the week before and spoken in great confusion to his moral tutor, Father Damian: a dear, fat old man with a great sense of humor, who had made his life so much better during his four years there.

  Over a glass of port in the book-lined study, he’d started with the smaller sin first: he was too addicted to going to the cinema, and it was time spent away from his PhD. “Well.” Father Damian had taken a sip, bunched his eyebrows judiciously. “Exactly how many hours a week do you donate to this pastime?”

  “Sometimes a whole afternoon.”

  “And what proportion of the week do you devote to your studies?”

  Anto thought about this. “It depends if I have lectures or tutorials.”

  “Include both in the sum.”

  “Maybe sixty hours. I have to get my doctorate before I go home.”

  “I think God may forgive you for a little time off.” Father ­Damian’s smile was dry and fond. “And working too hard is another sin, you know. But I hope,” the monk added with a sly look, “you have the intellectual rigor to watch Eisenstein, and not a lot of old tosh. I do worry about your cultural bearings; remember our night at the opera?”

  Anto had never been allowed to forget it: the excruciating performance of Madame Butterfly during his first term at the school. His eardrums so punctured by the foreign screeching, he’d sat, hands over his ears, wanting to howl like a dog.

  But films were different. A drug, a way of forgetting and finding yourself inside the big faces on the screen. He’d sat in the dark avidly noticing the details: the manners of the handsome men up there, their ways of smoking, of greeting women, of leaving rooms, and later, this close attention had led to him becoming a clever mimic who could make other boys laugh.

  Towards the end of this pleasant meeting, Father Damian wondered if there was something else troubling him, and if there was, he might take advantage of his time here and go to confession. Half an hour later, he’d knelt in the old school chapel and, breathing in the smells of incense and old velvet, blurted out his confusion and pain.

  During the past two years, he’d slept with two women, out of lust, not love. One of them, a student nurse at Barts, a nice girl, fair-haired, ethereal-looking, had fallen in love with him and been badly hurt when he couldn’t return the feeling.

  The other, a worldly WAAF, boyfriend in France, had hurt him by saying afterwards, “I’ve always wanted to sleep with a foreign man,” making him feel like an exotic pet allowed for one moment into the sitting room.

  With his lips close to the grille, he gave an abridged version of these events and, in the silence that followed, felt the familiar cold breath of the chapel floor.

  The priest coughed behind the curtain. He said that while God understood war made many men lustful in ways they didn’t understand, Anto must now, given the particular circumstances of his life, make an extra effort to control himself.

  Was he mistaken, the priest asked, in thinking there was a bride waiting for him in South India? Not a bride, he’d replied, a young girl, the daughter of a family friend. He’d never met her, he said, or if he had, he couldn’t remember her: he’d come to England when he was sixteen. Well, God would forgive him, the priest had said more robustly, but only if he now made a solemn commitment to change. The war had bent everyone out of shape, he said; it was time now to return to the old certainties.

  The old certainties, he thought later, back in his Oxford digs, eating the cold macaroni and cheese his landlady had left on a tray, what a luxury it would be to know what they were. For years, the idea of a God, loving or otherwise, had been slipping away from him, like a small boat unmoored and disappearing in a dark sea.

  * * *

  “So, this is it.” She opened a carved door at the end of the corridor and lifted her candle. “Your room.”

  When the lights pulsed and flickered into life, both of them jumped.

  “Thank God for that,” she said. Her smile was very pretty. “We have a dreadful time with the electrics here. If you like I could give you a torch?”

  “Thank you,” he said. He’d smashed his own when he’d fallen off the Norton.

  He looked around him. He liked his new room. With its tilted floor and cracked ceiling it was shabby for sure, but far more homely-looking than his digs in Woodstock Road. Its walls were covered in a lovely old blue Chinese wallpaper, its vines and birds a little watermarked here and there but giving it a kind of faded grandeur. The brass bed with its comfortable-looking blue eiderdown faced the window, from which he could see the dark shapes of the valley beyond.

  “Is it all right?” She was watching him.

  “It’s lovely.”

  “Bedside light.” When she leaned and switched it on, the room became a cozy cave.

  “Washstand.” She pointed at a large jug. “Basin, towel. You must be tired.”

  “No,” he said, “I’m not.” He hesitated. “Actually, I spent the afternoon in the Odeon in Oxford.” He didn’t tell her about the five a.m. start to study the pediatrics bible. One of the many disguises learned by his second term at Downside was to saunter into exams saying he didn’t know a b
loody thing but what the hell?

  “What did you see?”

  He handed her his ticket. When she peered at it under the lamp, he saw she’d rolled her hair around a scarf.

  “Celia Johnson. Brief Encounter.”

  “Damn it! I missed it! We’ve been snowed in.” She handed the ticket back. “Never mind, I’ve seen it twice.”

  “‘I shall never, ever tell anyone else about us,’” he said, with Trevor Howard’s look of crushed nobility.

  “‘Because all I want is to know that you are safe,’” she said.

  Her laughter was velvety and deep. It showed her white teeth. “What a lot of tosh,” she said.

  “Complete pap,” he agreed, although he’d sat there, heart worn, entranced. “But it passed a pleasant few hours, and I didn’t want to arrive too early.”

  “The last picture I saw,” she said, “was a real stinker: The Steam Railways of Mid-Wales. I thought I would die of boredom. Do you go to the cinema a lot?”

  She was standing with her hand on the door, looking at him with her direct gaze, and part of him was shocked. Why did her mother allow her to go unescorted to a man’s room? Where was everyone?

  “When work allows it,” he said in a discouraging way. “You see I’m—”

  “Kit!” A sharp voice interrupted him. “Kit, come down here at once!” The screeching voice rose. “Where on earth are you?”

  “I am twenty-eight years old,” she said, with a conspirator’s grin. “My mother thinks I’m two.”

  “You must go at once.” His face was stern in the lamplight, his expression sincere. “Your mother is calling you.”

  - CHAPTER 5 -

  “Ma, stop it!” I said, as she practically arm-wrestled me downstairs. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Taking you outside, so I can talk to you,” she replied grimly.

  “Fine with me,” I said, and meant it. She was a shouter when riled, and I had no intention of being a floor show for the other guests. She marched me across the yard and into the barn.

  “How could you?” she shouted when the door closed behind us, her face witchy and mean in the storm light.