Monsoon Summer Page 6

  But anyway, it was I who started making him cups of tea, at first because I felt sorry for him missing breakfast, and later because it gave me a queer happy feeling putting on the kettle for him, pouring water in the teapot, adding his spoonful of sugar from the jam jar, and carrying it to him.

  When I handed him the mug, he would look up and smile at me—the sweetest most sudden smile lit up his face—before going back to his books again. Working together like this felt domestic, contented, even though I was sometimes aware of a deep reserve about him, not exactly shyness but something deliberate, and I could never be sure which version of him I would be presented with.

  One day, as I was measuring out two spoonfuls of tea, he told me his uncle grew tea in the hills above Travancore. He had vague memories of his first visit there as a child, and of how grown up he had felt when an aunt had found him a special cup and poured him his first taste of tea. When he mimed a child’s solemn face, I saw what a dear little boy he must have been with those long-lashed green eyes. But when I looked at him again, I found him intimidating with his high, jutting cheekbones, that serious, remote, Spanish Grandee look.

  Shadow and sunshine, I thought when, on the following day, he put the tea cozy on his head and said in the plummy tones of an elderly vicar, “Thank you, my dear good woman, six lumps will suffice,” and I laughed too much and felt light-headed.

  He was a very good mimic—one of the reasons, I suspect, that he never complained of any bullying or name calling at Downside, where, he said, apart from a few twits, he’d made good friends. Daisy told me he had been in the first eleven cricket team too, which must have helped.

  Our laughter felt shockingly indiscreet, like the piercing of something formal, and afterwards I found I was shaking and was relieved when Daisy appeared.

  I’d started to eavesdrop when he was working with Daisy; I liked hearing him speak in his own tongue. It turned his voice into something buttery and strange which I felt as a pulse in my own stomach. I felt it hurt him too: when he stumbled on simple words, he winced like a man setting out on a familiar walk and finding glass strewn under his feet.

  Daisy agreed it must be peculiar to speak your own language again after so many years, and particularly to be discussing childbirth, sexual intercourse, ovulation, periods.

  She said she’d let him off translating words like vagina and nipples. “The poor boy left home so young, I doubt he even knows them.” These omissions could easily be filled in by Neeta, she said, who would add her own additions to the notes when they arrived in South India.

  So far, so purposeful. After a few weeks of this, we started to feel like a good team at the barn. We had something separate from the house, something new to rescue us from the dreariness of rationing and February gales and the strange silence and even stranger memories the war had left.

  Thanks to Daisy’s talks, a jumble sale, and our begging letters, a slow trickle of money was coming in. The refurbishing of the Moonstone Home, scheduled for autumn that year, was beginning to look entirely possible.

  And then Tudor began to drop in to the barn at inconvenient intervals, in what I can only describe as a claiming way.

  He sprawled on the edge of my desk and monologued, in a self-conscious showing-off way, about his jazz collection or his socialist principles or some archaeological paper he was about to publish.

  If he spoke to Anto at all, it was antler-clashing stuff about old schools and cricket scores and university results, or he was noisily sympathetic to Anto at having to put up with “the girls.”

  As the days wore on, the sight of his bony tweed bottom on the corner of my desk made me want to scream or stick a pin in it, but I tried not to show it, both for Daisy’s sake and my mother’s.

  It was my mother, I was sure of it, who was encouraging these visits, her mind leaping ahead to weddings in Saint Peter’s Church, which was part of the farm, to food for the reception, the naming of our children, to manicures, hats, canapés. And why not? Or so she would reason. In the deliberately classless world of Wickam Farm, anything could happen.

  But another fly in the custard was Ci Ci, who, noticing Tudor’s visits to the barn, began to unsheathe her claws. Poor Flora, poor me: reluctant gladiators, for a prize neither wanted. Or maybe Flora did; she’d become so wary of her mother it was almost impossible to tell.

  The storm finally broke on a night when Ci Ci was in bed with a hot water bottle and a tray, because she had a bad cold. Anto was working in his room, Daisy in Cheltenham giving a speech.

  On that freezing wet day, Tudor had laid aside his socialist principles to swagger off in plus fours to shoot at the Blenheim estate, which was close to us. He’d come back garlanded with dead birds that he wore on a string around his neck. At dinner, when my mother brought in the partridge, nestled in bacon and with a sage and onion sauce on the side, he regarded them with the complacent pride of a man who has just slapped a bison on the cave floor.

  “I took them ’em down just behind the Shakenoak Wood,” he said, in his usual careless drawl. “Lord Clyde was there too, but his dog had a bad day, so they both retired. Here, have some of this. I found it in the cellar—it’s Pomerol ’thirty-five—very good.” He looked at me. “Part of your education.”

  The wine was a surprise. Usually if we drank it at all, it was Daisy’s carrot, damson wine, or elderflower, combustible and variable brews that might have a thin layer of green mold on the surface and occasionally went off like bomb blasts in the larder.

  Tudor got out the dwindling set of Waterford glasses, poured a full one for himself, one for me, a thimbleful for Flora, who was profuse in her thanks.

  I had no idea what the significance of Pomerol ’35 was, but the taste was good and I liked the warm burr it gave to my bones.

  “When you drink a good wine,” Tudor instructed me, “you should hold your glass like this.” He put one hand daintily around the stem of the glass. “Never by the bulb, then hold it in your mouth for a moment.” His eyes were moistly intently on mine. “Now roll it around.” His thin lips rotated. “And swallow.” His Adam’s apple bobbed.

  “Don’t you love learning new things?” a suitably entranced Flora was saying when Daisy appeared in a wet mackintosh.

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “Birds,” Tudor said shortly. “Partridge. Got ’em today.”

  “Golly, I’m famished.” She unbuttoned her mac. “This smells wonderful.” She lifted the silver salver on the sideboard. There was a small amount of partridge left, a few tablespoonfuls of bread sauce, bacon, three shriveled carrots.

  “Has Anto been fed?” She stopped helping herself. “He’s still in the barn. I saw the lights on.”

  “I thought he went with you,” I said.

  “No, too busy. The poor boy must be ravenous. I’ll take him some food.”

  “I’ll go, Daisy,” I said. “You stay and eat.”

  We put a few morsels of meat and some potatoes on a plate, and what remained of the vegetables. I put a steel cover over the plate to keep it warm. When Daisy left the room to hang up her coat, I saw there was about half an inch of Pomerol left.

  “May I take some for Anto?” I asked.

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “It’ll be against Inky’s religion.”

  He’d taken to calling him Inky behind his back. When I heard Flora chortling dutifully, I felt a surge of pure rage.

  “Don’t call him that,” I said.

  “It’s a joke,” he explained patiently. Some of the wine had stained his chin like a birthmark. “It’s what Billy Bunter called our tinted brethren.”

  “It’s not funny,” I said, “and he does drink wine, you know that.”

  “Well, let him bring his own—or take him the other.” He gestured towards a carafe of damson at the end of the sideboard. “I don’t give a damn.”

  The glass tremb
led in my hand. I wanted to see wine drip down that smug, taunting face.

  “You’re pretty when you’re angry,” he said.

  Daisy walked in, which was lucky.

  “Oh, you angel,” she said. I had the tray in my hand. “Would you mind terribly taking it to him?”

  * * *

  It was misty outside and very cold, with the moon hanging behind a skein of clouds. I had the keys to the barn in my pocket. We’d had a minor break-in recently: nothing serious, an old typewriter and eight pounds in petty cash. When I unlocked the door, I saw Anto asleep at his desk in a pool of yellow lamplight, his head resting on his hands like a child’s, dark hair flopping over his hands. Under his right hand was a sheet of paper on which he’d written in his small, neat handwriting: “Oxygen Exchange System.” A tiny sandstone elephant sat cross-legged on top of a pile of textbooks.

  The fire had gone out; it was cold enough to see your breath. In the stable next door, I could hear Bert munching hay.

  As quietly as I could, I crept across the room and relit the stove, and when it was crackling and glowing, I put the tray on the side of the desk, trying to decide whether or not to wake him, he was so deeply asleep. Lord, he was beautiful. I’d never thought of a man being so before. The sharp curve of his cheekbones, the softness of his mouth.

  The collar of the tweed overcoat he was wearing was up. I turned it down, and then I touched his hair. A puff of air came from his mouth like smoke.

  “Thank you,” he said, quietly.

  I leapt back, managing to catch the plate of food in my hands, but the tray fell with a noisy clatter onto the floor, scattering knives and forks, and wine which spilled like blood over the hearth.

  “Blast.” I was furious and embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  I set the plate back on his desk and we got down on our hands and knees to pick up the fallen cutlery and mop up the wine. And it was then he put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me.

  “I know,” he said. He kissed me again.

  We were kneeling, staring at each other like two people about to be executed, when we both heard the clatter of boots outside the door, the horse stamping in his stable.

  “Let me in.” A slurred angry voice.

  “Hang on,” I called through the door.

  It was Tudor, red-faced, half plastered, proprietorial.

  “Why did you lock it?”

  “There was a break-in recently.”

  “Silly me. I thought the purpose of a key was to keep robbers out.” He smiled at Anto unpleasantly, showing his yellow teeth.

  “Boom boom boom boom!” he suddenly shouted, making his umbrella into a gun and pointing it at the sky. “Did you enjoy my birds?”

  He stood close to Anto, less than a foot away.

  “I haven’t tasted them yet,” Anto said. His voice was very quiet; I could see a muscle twitching in his jaw.

  “Well, I can tell you, they’re damned good,” Tudor said, and then to me, “It’s raining, Kit. You can share my umbrella back to the house. Your mother told me to get you.”

  “Thank you,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster; I felt weak-kneed and uncomfortably aware that my hair was mussed.

  I looked at the now cold plate of partridge and potatoes on the desk. And then I turned to Tudor and gave him the tray.

  “Could you hold this for me?” I loaded the tray with the dirty cups and cutlery Anto had used earlier in the day.

  Bull’s-eye, I thought. You wait on him, you horrible man—he’s worth two of you.

  A small, sweet victory, which I feared could not last.

  - CHAPTER 8 -

  One day he would struggle to even remember the name of the pretty girl at Wickam Farm, or the Bird Room, or the barn. He would shut down this part of his life just as he had shut down India on the ship coming here, or at least managed to cram it into some back room in his mind.

  But right now: the crunch of loose floorboards above him, Kit’s faint tread on the stairs, the clink of her bottles in the bathroom, the rustle of her dress coming off. To corral his mind, he got out the box from under his bed and laid out letters and photographs of his family on the eiderdown and switched on the lamp.

  His long-ago family: Appan, his father; Amma, his mother; Mariamma, his sister; and his grandmother, Ponnamma. The women who pinched his cheeks, fed him delicious meals, tucked him in bed at night, loved him up until they suddenly sent him away. He tried never to be melodramatic about this, tried to believe Father Damian’s suggestion that it might have been the making of him.

  And underneath, more photographs, splayed like a deck of cards, the extended family groups: hundreds of vaguely remembered ghosts from Christmases, christenings, Onam festivals, weddings. He studied them with the expression of a man studying for an exam he was bound to fail. He picked up a faded snapshot of his father. Studious, bespectacled, grave, Appan stood a few feet away to the right of a group of young Englishmen. A photo taken, as his father had told him many times, on the greatest day of his life: his graduation from Lincoln’s Inn, where he was called to the bar. Appan, wearing the dark Savile Row he still wears, stood skinny, scared-looking on some grand-looking steps, holding a piece of rolled-up cardboard.

  Anto’s face clouded as he remembered his father: the handsome, authoritative face at the end of the table. The family ringmaster who could change the emotional temperature of a room simply by walking in. His father’s car, a Bullnose Morris, one of the few in the district. Appan leaving for an important court case in Pondicherry, conker-colored briefcase bulging with grown-up mysteries, shaking his hand in the hall as he went to an overseas conference. “Look after your mother.”

  His hungry desire to keep his father’s love with good results, good cricket innings, good behavior felt like a source of weakness now. When he fell below Appan’s high standards, he saw disgust on his father’s face. “You’re on the seventh stair, my friend,” before the cane came out of the top drawer of his desk.

  When Anto first arrived in England, it was a freezing September. No sun for days on end, gray skies, gray streets, and he’d wondered if this was the eighth stair: a place where you could die from unhappiness. This abandonment from home felt so unexpected, so complete that it almost destroyed the balance of his mind. Being happy, being loved, he now saw, had been the worst preparation possible for a life in which nobody knew him. Not a single soul in England.

  His mother sent letters to Downside. Ordinary things: Pathrose cooking prawns and okra in the kitchen, the cricket match with the whole of the Thekkeden family on the lawn with, she’d written, “an Anto-sized hole in the fieldings.”

  The letters, in her impeccable handwriting, faint tang of jasmine oil on the envelopes, had in his first term almost destroyed him.

  Before the other boys came, he’d snatched them from the basket in the refectory, where milk and biscuits were served, taken them to his room braced for the exquisite misery of remembering. It was only later that their lurid envelopes had become an embarrassment.

  Now, in the lamplight, he squinted at a picture of her when young. Both of them were in the garden at Mangalath, near the small wooden summerhouse, where she tended her orchids. She was dressed simply in the plain white cotton chatta and mundu she wore at home. Her dark eyes were staring at the camera with a look that was both distant and scrutinizing. He was sitting on a tricycle at her feet, his expression pure and trusting as he looked up at her. She was his entire world.

  Any moment now she would give up her camera face (she’d always loathed having her picture taken), she’d scoop him up murmuring, “My little pot of gold.” Her only son, after years of trying. He can hear her in the kitchen now, barking orders to the servants, clinking the battered saucepans. The spices prickling his nostrils.

  Did she truly love Appan? He wondered now. It wasn’t the kind of
question the sixteen-year-old he left behind would ask. He turned the photo over. Mangalath. Anto. Three years old.

  Now, with a sigh, he picked up his mother’s latest letter. It was dated February, 1948, postmarked Fort Cochin.

  My dearest boy,

  I’m sending the pictures taken with my new box Brownie. Sorry to have sliced the head off your father several times. He was the one who gave me the camera for Christmas—not too grateful of me. We had fifty-four family at Mangalath on Christmas Eve but, as usual, missed you badly. I don’t know what I did in a previous life to have suffered without you for so many years, but now I hope it will make sense to me.

  Appan is so proud of you, says the new India needs people like you to show people we can strive and thrive without the British. So I’m proud of you too and the sacrifices you’ve made. One day, I hope you will be a great man in our community.

  I wish I could send you the fresh pineapple we had for breakfast; I know there is still very severe rationing there for you. All I can send is a mother’s love and prayers. Your father, up to his neck in a new case, will write separately and send money for your fare. My love to you,

  Amma

  P.S. Today, Vidya came with her mother; she asked to see a photo of you, sends hers to you. She says you are handsome!

  The sly aside saying the big thing was typical of his mother. The girl in the carefully tinted photograph is slender and shy in what looks like a new sari. She is the daughter of his mother’s best friend, beautiful, as his mother has not failed to point out in three of her previous letters. Did Anto remember meeting her when he was a little boy? Answer—not really, or if he did, only vaguely as a shy pair of big brown eyes behind her mother’s skirts. It was Anu, her mother, he remembered: the head patter, and bringer of homemade sweets enticingly wrapped in tissue papers, and once a new cricket bat.

  This letter, that he’d read anxiously several times, gave Anto a tightness in his scalp, as if parts of his brain were shutting down. He was being netted and hauled in, and yet, during the long lonely years of exile, he’d ached for them, wept for them, looked forward to the security of being married to a nice girl, back safely in the bosom of his family again.