Monsoon Summer Read online

  This, I realized later, was a brilliant move, handing back to her authority and humiliation in one swoop. It worked in a way that apologies never did with my mother.

  My mother pulled her satin dressing gown tightly around her.

  “I feel quite sick. I will go to bed and think about it. And you, miss,” she said, “I’ll see in the morning.”

  * * *

  “Say it quickly,” I said to him before he left, “I won’t blame you. Say it quickly if you don’t mean it.” Meaning marriage, meaning me for the rest of his life.

  “I mean it,” he said, very quietly. “I love you.”

  But he looked exhausted and pale, as if there were other things he should say but couldn’t find right now. In the end, we kissed like two sleepwalkers, and during the sleepless night that followed, I seemed to run through the full catalog of human emotions: confusion, and a kind of crazed delight at Anto’s unexpected proposal, embarrassment that my mother had caught us red-handed, fury at her for exhuming my father so unexpectedly and then pretending it didn’t matter.

  Out of this tangle I could only pluck one clear idea: that in the morning, I must tell Daisy before my mother did. Daisy loved Anto; she would understand.

  * * *

  Daisy was in the office the next morning, when I, foolishly happy, dropped the news at her feet, like a cat bringing a dead mouse into the house. She was in her overalls, gloves on because her chilblains were bad, wrapping up kidney dishes in brown paper. She straightened up, the expression in her eyes moving from their usual look of quiet pleasure at seeing me, to bewilderment, then horror.

  “Oh, Kit, oh Lord,” she said, when I had finished. She clapped her hand over her mouth and stared at me. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You can still get out of it. Have you spoken to him this morning?”

  “He meant it,” I repeated. “I know he did.”

  I was still feeling a kind of victorious expansion and babbled on for a bit about how we loved each other and how, in India, I could work at the Home, which was what Daisy had suggested all along.

  “It won’t happen.” Her head was shaking even before I’d finished. She looked ashy white. “It can’t. His family won’t allow it.”

  “But Daisy, they’re not Indian Indians.” I tried to explain to her. “They’re educated. They’re Anglophiles. His father lived in En­gland. He trained to be a lawyer here.”

  She sat down and put her head in her hands and groaned. “I know that. Oh, my dear girl,” she said, looking up, “you’re stepping into a bear pit.”

  “I thought you’d be pleased.” I sounded like a child even to myself.

  “It’s true I’d hoped you might consider being a worker there, on a very temporary basis of course, you know, a month or two months, part of a team, with a small salary, not as a wife, not as an Indian wife. And of course Tudor will be desperately disappointed too. He’s such a dear.” She put on her glasses and stared at me, looking very sad. No, he’s not, I thought. Tudor was definitely Daisy’s blind spot. Not in a million years, my mind clanged, only I loved her too much to say it.

  “And it will kill your mother,” she added. Unusual for Daisy to try emotional blackmail; it made me realize how desperately she minded.

  “She’ll come round, Daisy.”

  “No, she won’t.” Daisy was shaking her head, looking sadder than ever.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do.”

  “How?”

  There was an extra intensity in her gaze, which linked with other things I felt I didn’t understand: my mother’s half-truths, the occasional sly dig from Tudor and Ci Ci.

  And I was sick of it suddenly: this unspoken thing that seemed to follow me round like a whiff from a drain.

  “Daisy,” I said, “what are you talking about? If you know something about my mother that I don’t, why won’t you just say it?”

  “You must ask her yourself.” She got very busy rustling papers and putting her pens away in the old Stilton jar she kept on her desk. “It’s nothing to do with me.”

  “So there is something?”

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t know.”

  I’d never seen Daisy look more furtive or trapped.

  * * *

  I ran to the kitchen, where my mother was chopping spinach with her usual economy of movement. Two dead pheasants lay on the table, their necks flopped over, their little eyes all blank now. From the door I surveyed her quickly: the neat waist, the trim ankles, the beautiful black hair, caught this morning with a marquisette comb. The apron was the jarring note: an actress cast in the wrong play.

  “Mother, I need to speak to you.”

  “Well, I don’t want to speak to you.”

  She may as well have added “you revolting slut,” her look was so shuddery and thoroughly disgusted. She carried on chopping.

  “Mother,” I announced grandly, “I’m terribly sorry about last night, but we are in love and I’m leaving soon. I really am, you know.” Did I really believe it then, the grandiose words, the concrete travel plans? I don’t think so, but it felt important to make a stand. She stopped chopping and laid the knife down.

  “Shut up, Kit,” she said. “I refuse to talk about it here with all those blasted nosy parkers listening in.”

  She was almost levitating with rage as she took off her apron, put on her coat and a head scarf, and we walked out together into a raw autumn morning to have it out with each other.

  “Oh, don’t you bloody well come,” she said when the poor old Labrador tried to squeeze through the door with us. There was a yelp as she slammed the door shut and caught his front paw.

  * * *

  We took the track that led through the avenue of elms and into Shakenoak Wood. Autumn leaves lay in brilliant soggy piles under our feet, and when two fallow deer did grand jetés across our path and disappeared into the woods, neither of us remarked on them.

  At the end of the track, I undid the hunter’s gate, and when we stepped into the wood, I was close enough to hear her breathing, which was hoarse and labored.

  “I am going to marry him,” I said. “Try not to mind too much.”

  “Well, I do mind,” she said. Her eyes were very black, her skin very pale. “Because if you marry him, you will be dead to me.” Those were her exact words.

  “Are you serious? Is it so bad to marry the man you love?” I said.

  “Oh, love,” she said, as if it were some dog mess she’d stepped in. “It will be an absolute disaster. You know nothing about it.”

  My mother always refused to wear galoshes or Wellingtons, saying they made her feel “elephanty,” and now, walking blindly ahead of me, she stepped into a puddle, splashing her good shoes and stockings with mud.

  “Don’t touch me.” She flinched as I tried to lead her to drier land. “I’m so ashamed of what you’ve done.” A tear rolled down her face.

  “Mummy,” I said, as she dashed it away with the corner of her head scarf. I felt cold and determined to keep myself separate from her in a way I’d never felt before. “There’s something else I must ask you because I keep thinking people know something about me that I don’t know.”

  “People will say what they want to say.” She spat; her complexion had gone the sort of khaki-green color it went when she was really upset. “They’re spiteful.”

  “But what is it they’re not saying?” I was the tearful one now.

  She shook her head violently. “About what?”

  “You? My father? Why is it always so bloody mysterious?”

  “Why do you go on like this, on and on and on at me.” She made a stabbing gesture with her hand as if I were eviscerating her.

  “Because I’m leaving and I have to know.”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

 
“Because it’s not nice.”

  A mizzling rain started to fall as we stepped into a deeper part of the wood. I stared at the silk head scarf my mother had retied under her chin. It was a hideous but posh thing, patterned with brown and gold horseshoes and very distinctive. I was almost certain it had once belonged to Laura McCrum, the wife of a businessman she’d worked for near Bromley. These items had a worrying way of turning up in her wardrobe after we’d left, a small gesture of revenge maybe, but it shamed me on her behalf.

  “Let me tell you one or two things about India,” she said. “It’s the most complicated, class-bound country on earth. Any European putting one toe in the country and thinking they can understand it is a complete clot.”

  “I know that,” I said. “I’ve talked to Daisy about it.”

  She poufed at this nonsense, and when I protested I was one-quarter Indian myself anyway, she snapped, “Why do you bang on about that? Your skin is so pale you could pass for English anywhere.” Her face was all squeezed under the head scarf, her teeth bared, and then another thought brought dismay. “Do you go on about it to Tudor? Because if you—”

  “I can’t remember,” I interrupted her furiously, “and I couldn’t give a damn. He’s got nothing to do with what we’re talking about.” She groaned as if I were the thickest person on earth.

  “Tell me about my father.” It came out louder than I intended, and a pheasant scuttled out of the tangled undergrowth, clucking and complaining.

  She started sighing and pacing around. I looked through the wet autumn leaves at a darkening sky with huge clouds roiling in the west.

  “Kit.” She closed her eyes like someone locking herself into a cell, and when she came out her eyes were very black. “I’m only ever going to tell you this story once, because it makes me feel like the worst bloody twit in the world, and if you are rude to me, I will stop.”

  “I’m sorry, Mummy, please don’t.”

  I waited in terrible suspense. The rain was coming down more heavily and any moment now I expected her to run for the house.

  “God, I hate this climate.” She tied the knot on her scarf again.

  “When Tudor marries,” she said, “he’ll own all this wood, plus almost one hundred acres of prime Oxfordshire land. Daisy told me that, she spoke to me this morning before you got up. She’s as upset as I am.”

  “Really.” I could not resist the sarcasm. “Well, always nice to have company in your opinions. And just to make things perfectly clear, I wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man on earth. I don’t even like him.”

  “She knows Indian men as well as I do,” she went on, as if I hadn’t said a word. After a breath, she spoke again. “First, I was not born in Wrexham.” This hardly came as a great shock to me. I’d forgotten, or discarded, the Wrexham version of her story.

  “I was born in Pondicherry on the southeast coast of India,” she said, taking on the queenly drawl I thought of as her telephone voice. “My father, your grandfather, was an Englishman, a high-up engineer on the railways there. I don’t have any pictures of him, so don’t ask.” A flash of anger there. “My mother was an Indian woman.”

  I knew that already but didn’t want to stop her.

  “My mother died giving birth to what would have been my sister. I don’t remember ever meeting my father. I was sent to an orphanage in Orissa, an English convent. I don’t know who by, I was just sent. Is this the kind of information you’re after?”

  She gave me a look of muted fury, as if I were an impertinent journalist, not her child.

  “Mummy, I’m sorry.”

  “It was a home for half-caste children.”

  Half-caste. I’d certainly never heard her say that before, and the word fell in an ugly way—like a dead bird or a turd between us in the woods, and for the first time I wanted her to stop because I hated hearing it applied to her, and in a way, it interfered with my dream of her because when I’d thought of my mother in India, I’d thought of cocktail parties, and tiger shoots, and pink and peach skies. Now I thought of a girl I hadn’t thought about for years: Dymphna Parry, a miserable little thing who’d arrived midterm at my Derbyshire school. She’d been adopted by the vicar and his wife from somewhere in Africa.

  I saw Dymphna’s face again: gray-green with cold, the terrible tweeds she’d been togged out in, the woolly hair pulled into plaits that looked like unshorn sheep.

  She wasn’t exactly bullied, but she was one of the never chosen: not for rounders, not for special seats on the school bus. I’d discussed her frequently in pitying, condescending tones with my mother.

  “Why didn’t you say this before?” I felt sick because my mother’s eyes looked wild now and somehow unhinged, as if I’d cut the rope that kept her safe.

  “It was nobody’s business but my own.”

  Yes, it was, I shouted inwardly.

  “Our school was a convent.” My mother’s tone was frigid; she had not forgiven me. “The English nuns encouraged the English side of me, just as I have with you.” She flung me a look of great bitterness. “Or tried to. We learned grammar and Shakespeare and manners. We ate shepherd’s pie, toad in the hole. They were right to do so. The Indian towns around us were filthy places.” My mother shuddered. “The people so poor and full of disease. There was a smallpox epidemic there.”

  “How did you meet my father?”

  “I was clever, ambitious. I had good punctuation, so I secured a job with the British government. I was personal assistant to a resident, a delightful man.” My mother’s voice took on a certain swagger here. “I’ve forgotten his name. He was cultivated, kind, good to me. My pale skin, my English name meant my background was never discussed. I went to their parties as the spare girl, the decorative girl. I was pretty.”

  “And my father?”

  “We met at an elephant hunt. Look at me, Kit, I’m soaked, I’m cold. Do you want me to get pneumonia telling you this?”

  “Five more minutes, please.”

  “All right, an elephant hunt. A horrible affair. They built a cage for this beautiful creature and they smoked him out and then they stabbed him to death.” She looked at me as if I had personally driven a stake through the elephant’s heart. “That’s your Indian. He is two steps away from being a savage.”

  “Your father was an army officer, good regiment.” Again, the showy drawl. “Good job—aide de camp to General Smythe. I thought he was the bee’s knees. Why should I talk about him? He behaved so appallingly.”

  “Please, Ma, I hate feeling other people know and I don’t.”

  “Only Daisy knows,” my mother said. “And Daisy won’t say either, so don’t bother asking her.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m freezing. I’m not going on.” She was like a horse scampering on the spot in agitation.

  We had come to a bench in the woods, its seat shiny with rain and old bits of moss. There was a clear view of the hills beyond: the heap of stones that had once been a Roman fort, a peaceful farmhouse in the arm of a placid field, a farmer on his tractor followed by a sheepdog.

  When my mother almost collapsed on the bench, I wanted to put my arm around her and make her better. She was so upset, and I’d always had this haunting sense of her: of something fragile that I, her only child, could break. The idea of her as an orphan explained so much: her defensive hauteur, her longing for nice clothes and the outward trappings of respectability, her angry admiration for En­glishness, even her mild case of kleptomania.

  I’d planned to ask more about my father: specifically, Is he dead dead? Or dead to you? But instead I said, “You’re cold, Mummy,” because she was shaking. I wished she could have a bath when she got in but knew she couldn’t. We’d been having trouble with the thirty-year-old boiler again, but Daisy hadn’t wanted to call out a workman in case of a huge bill.

 
As we limped back to the house together, I hated suddenly this feeling of female powerlessness. I wanted action, change, the competence, the money to fix things, a new life, even if it was risky.

  “Look at my shoes,” my mother said, taking my arm at last. “Completely ruined, raking all this up.” We’d stopped on the grass verge near the drive. Daisy drove past us in the Austin. I saw the dim outline of Anto—hat, dark overcoat—sitting in the front with her. We looked at each other, but none of us waved.

  “Where do you think they’re going?” I watched the car disappear.

  “To the railway station, I hope,” said my mother. She tightened her grip on my arm. “It will hurt for a while but not for long. I’ve been through it myself.”

  “They’re probably only going to the post office,” I said. I was frozen to the bone with cold by now and not sure what I felt myself as the glint of the rear mudguard disappeared around the corner. “They’ll be back for lunch.”

  She turned on me.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” she said. “You’ll be dead to me if you do this. It’s everything I didn’t want.”

  I made myself look at her.

  “You don’t know the first thing about him,” I said, feeling removed from myself and heroic and not a million miles away from Olivia de Havilland in They Died with Their Boots On. “He’s clever, he’s kind . . .” I might have added “and besides, I love him,” when she interrupted me with a jabbing gesture of her hand.

  “Mixed blood is like oil and water,” she said, her face very pale. “Everything bad that has happened to me in my life comes from it. It’s a taint.” Her eyes were wild.

  “Mother,” I said, “how many dead people can you afford to have in your life?”

  “As many as I need to get by,”she said.

  - CHAPTER 11 -

  “I know about my father,” I lied to Daisy that afternoon. We were sorting clothes for the jumble sale. “My mother told me pretty much everything this morning.” Daisy’s head shot up like a startled horse. She was sitting in a sea of moldy riding clothes, tennis racquets, pith helmets, and several rotting canvases: her father had been a successful artist before the war, and we often joked about the undiscovered Matisse we’d find in the attic that would change all our fortunes.