Belonging (22 page)

Now that she is well, it is as though she has forgotten the event ever occurred. I would like to discuss it calmly but I am afraid of upsetting her again. The whole episode has left me with a feeling of unease.

Aunt Mina died a fortnight ago, just as the weather was getting warm. She caught the influenza in early February. It has carried off thousands, including many who survived the trenches. Some of our patients died of it just as they were getting back on their feet. In the end it was decided to discharge those who could be cared for at home in order to avoid it spreading to them.

In late February the convalescent home in High Elms was finally closed altogether, but by then I had already moved to the Beauchamps’ to nurse Aunt Mina. I welcomed the opportunity to take care of her and, over the three months that I nursed her through influenza, pleurisy and finally pneumonia, we did grow to understand each other better.

She died just before dawn as I sat beside her. Mrs. Beauchamp and I had taken it in turns to stay with her as she began to slip away. For two days she had been in a coma but just as the dawn chorus was starting she opened her eyes and smiled – the open smile of a young girl – and then she looked past me and said in a joyful tone, as though a long-awaited visitor had just entered the room, ‘Cecily!’ I turned my head
but of course there was no one there, and when I turned back she had stopped breathing.

I sat beside her in silence, holding her almost weightless hand in mine, and – as often happens after a peaceful death – I felt a lightness in the room, a feeling of release. I got up and opened the window, as we used to do in the hospital; it’s an old custom, meant to let the soul out. I don’t know if I believe in a soul but it seemed the right thing to do. I pushed the sash right up and put my head out into the cool morning and listened to the birdsong, and when I pulled it back in the room felt empty.

Last Saturday, on a beautiful spring morning, with the larks singing and the blackthorn and gorse blooming in patches of white and yellow on the Downs, we walked to the little Norman village church for the funeral. Mr. Beauchamp and Simon had come down from London for the weekend.

I stood beside Simon as we sang Aunt Mina’s favourite hymn, ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’, and it seems as though nothing much has changed in the world, for it could have been written about the last four years.

I thought of all the men who were still living in a waking nightmare and glanced at Simon. Tears were rolling down his face. I slipped my hand into his.

All over the church people were weeping now, not for Aunt Mina, but for the sons and brothers and husbands and lovers they would never see again.

The following day, after morning service, Mr. and Mrs. Beauchamp met me in his study to go through the details of my inheritance. Looking at them, I realised they have aged. I have been so absorbed with Aunt Mina that I have noticed nothing else for months. Mrs. Beauchamp is as elegant as ever, though her hair has faded; she was wearing a narrow damask overdress in pale grey over a plain charcoal-coloured skirt. Mr. Beauchamp’s dark hair is streaked with silver, and I noticed a web of lines around his bright squirrelly eyes.

‘Your aunt made me her executor and left me with some information that she wanted passed to you after her death,’ he said, as he unlocked his desk drawer and took out a package of papers. He hesitated before adding, ‘Information about your mother.’ My eyes must have widened because he said quickly, ‘I understand your aunt told you that your parents had died of the cholera. I’m afraid that wasn’t true. I always felt you should have been told the truth, but your aunt wanted to protect you. When you reached twenty-one I urged her to tell you, but she felt it would not be fair when you were so occupied with your war work.’

I shivered and, looking down, saw the hairs on my arms were standing up. ‘You’re chilly,’ Mrs. Beauchamp said, concerned. ‘Shall I fetch you a shawl?’

I shook my head. ‘What about my mother?’ How was it that I had never wondered where she was, had shut her out of my mind so completely?

Mr. Beauchamp went on, ‘I’m sorry to say that after your father’s death…’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know how much you know, Lila…’

‘I know about Father,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

He looked relieved. ‘Well… it appears your mother never really recovered from the shock. Immediately afterwards she was taken…’ He paused.

‘She’s dead?’

He looked shocked. ‘No, no. She was taken to an Army hospital at Deolali… not far from Bombay. It’s a place where they hold people who have, er… nervous complaints… until they can be shipped back to England.’

They say her mother’s doolally
. I remembered overhearing Cook – or was it Ellen? – saying those words.

‘Mother’s in England?’

He must have mistaken my shock for eagerness because he said, ‘No, I’m sorry, Lila. She was never brought here. For some reason she was discharged into the care of a native woman – I have her name here somewhere…’ He shuffled through his papers. ‘Ah, here it is – Zainab Khan – who undertook to look after her.’

‘Zainab? She was my ayah, and Mother’s too. But Mother always disliked her.’

‘That does seem strange. Possibly it was arranged by your aunt? They live at a hill station called Nasik and their rent and living expenses are paid out of your Father’s estate. The medical reports mention catatonia. I understand people with the condition do not suffer, but you probably know more than I about that from your time in hospitals.’

I thought of the catatonic patients I had seen: suspended, as though a wicked fairy had cast a spell on them. But in my mind Mother
was
the wicked fairy.

Mrs. Beauchamp put a hand on my arm. ‘We’re sorry to give you this news, Lila. It must be a terrible shock.’

‘As I said before,’ Mr. Beauchamp added, ‘I feel you should have been told all this years ago, and certainly when you came of age, but your aunt was of a generation who believed that the less said the better.’

‘Did she tell you? What happened… I mean, to Father?’

He hesitated. ‘She wasn’t sure whether you remembered. If you had forgotten, she didn’t want to remind you.’

‘How could I forget? He shot himself on his birthday. I saw him… just afterwards, I mean.’

They looked shocked. ‘My dear, how dreadful for you,’ Mrs. Beauchamp said.

Mr. Beauchamp cleared his throat. ‘Lila, are sure you want to go on now? Perhaps this is enough news to absorb for one day.’

‘No, I’d rather know it all.’

‘Well, I assume you will want to continue with the arrangements made for your mother’s care?’

‘Yes, it seems best, don’t you think?’

‘Unless you want to bring her here? Your aunt’s house – your house now – would be large enough to – ’

‘No.’

There was a silence. He said carefully, ‘Then might you want to visit her?’

‘I think not. Anyway, there wouldn’t be much point if she’s catatonic, would there?’

They exchanged a glance. ‘No, I suppose not. Well, erm… maybe we should discuss the Will,’ Mr. Beauchamp said briskly.
‘Your aunt has left you everything, as you probably surmised. I have copies of her Will, her bank accounts and investments here. And this for you.’ He handed me a thick yellow envelope.

I thought of the notebooks and letters that I had seen on her bureau all those years ago. ‘And the other family papers?’

He frowned. ‘She didn’t mention any other papers. Perhaps she refers to them in that envelope? All she gave me were the papers connected with your inheritance. Any family letters, photographs and so on must still be in the house. I believe most of the furniture was stored away when the house was requisitioned?’

‘Yes, it’s up in the attic.’

He nodded. ‘The house will, of course, require extensive renovation after its usage for the past three years, but, even taking into account the cost of restoring it, there should be enough left to give you an annuity that will meet your needs adequately. And then of course there is your father’s capital, although most of the income from that is taken up with provision for your mother as long as she lives.’

‘I understand.’

‘Of course, if you decided to sell the house and buy something smaller, that would increase your capital and give you a better income. I would not say you are wealthy, but you will certainly be comfortable even if you choose never to work again. In that respect you are more fortunate than many young women.’

He meant of course that, unlike many women, I shall not be forced to earn my own living. Since the war ended there have been repeated reminders in the press that most of us are doomed to remain spinsters and will have to support ourselves. And, perhaps to make up for it, in February 1918 certain women over thirty had finally been given the vote,
ostensibly as a reward for our help with the war effort. I thought Mrs. Beauchamp would be triumphant but, as she said sadly, it is hard to rejoice when the cost has been so high.

‘But of course Lila will want to work,’ she said now. ‘You’re much too intelligent to sit at home doing nothing. And now you’re a woman of means you’re free to do as you wish. I know you had hoped to return to India, but might you be better off here? We need doctors too, and Simon is really very fond of you…’

I looked at her, astonished. Could she mean what I thought she did? I thought of the advertisements placed in the paper by women whose husbands or lovers had been killed, offering to make themselves useful by marrying and caring for incapacitated soldiers.

‘There’s no hurry to decide,’ Mr. Beauchamp said when I remained silent. ‘You’ve hardly had time to get your bearings, what with your war work and then nursing your aunt, and High Elms is in no condition to be occupied, even if you had the staff. What Amelia means is that we would be delighted, and so would Simon, if you continued to live with us.’

I was grateful for the offer. Even if it were possible for me to live at High Elms, I could not bear the thought of living there without Aunt Mina. I am surprised by how much I miss her, and regret all the years we wasted when we could have been a comfort to each other.

Mr. Beauchamp waved my thanks aside. ‘We’ve regarded you as part of the family since you were a child. You and Simon and, of course – ’ he paused and said in a sombre voice ‘ – Jagjit.’

‘Have you had… is there any news?’

He looked down at his hands, then back at me. ‘No, nothing. I’m sorry, Lila, but it’s been almost six months since
the war ended. All the officers’ camps and most of the others have long been emptied and I think we have to accept…’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mrs. Beauchamp shake her head.

That afternoon, after Simon departed for London, I went up to my room and opened Aunt Mina’s envelope. It contained a letter and a small packet tied with string. The letter was undated but written, I presume, around the same time as her Will.

After twelve years of marriage to Rebecca I should have thought nothing would surprise me, but I arrived back last Tuesday to discover that she had broken into the drawer of my desk and made a bonfire of my diaries – all except the one covering my first three years back in India, which, ironically, was in an unlocked drawer with my childhood notebooks. I kept them locked up because, about a year after we married, she read one of the entries I had written about her and became hysterical. It was the first time I had seen her like that, and it showed me just how unstable she was. It had never occurred to me that she would read my private papers.

Zainab broke the news to me and when I asked if nothing had been salvaged – in my experience books do not burn easily – she said she had come on the scene too late to save them and the mali had poured water over them to put out the fire, which naturally would have made the ink run.

I am surprised to discover how much their loss has affected me. They have, after all, served their purpose of helping me to find expression for my thoughts. I had never intended that anyone else should read them – and yet I am angry – so
angry that I have been unable to speak to Rebecca about it for fear of what I might say. I wonder if she knew how much they meant to me. I don’t imagine it even occurred to her to think about it, because the one thing I have learnt about Rebecca is that she is completely wrapped up in herself. I do not condemn her for it: it is a feature of many people who have suffered greatly that, far from being ennobled by it, they become completely absorbed by their own suffering and are incapable of imagining anyone else’s.

And there is no doubt that Rebecca has suffered. Five miscarriages would be enough to overstrain any woman’s nerves, even one without her disposition. And that loss, together with her dependence on laudanum, which no effort on my part or that of the various doctors we have had over the years can wean her off, has made her a creature completely ensnared in her own fears. She sees enemies everywhere. For example, she complains that the servants do not like or respect her, but she is so impatient and critical that it is scarcely surprising. I know that she is inexperienced in running a household; Zainab seems to have fulfilled that role in her father’s house, presumably having assumed it after Rebecca’s mother’s death. But the male servants resent being told what to do by a female one, and Hindus by one who is not only a woman but a Muslim.

Rebecca’s distrust of me started when she read the diary, burnt now, in which I had expressed concern about her mental stability and wondered whether, on my next long leave, to take her to England to consult one of the new mind doctors. Once she got that idea in her head, no amount of reassurance would convince her I was not taking her there with the intention of confining her in an asylum.

I have gradually come to realise that most of her feelings of persecution exist only in her own mind. It is true that
other women do not take to her, but the rumours about our marriage are long behind us and it sometimes seems to me that it is her own secretive behaviour that creates the impression that she is concealing something. Then there is her irrational dislike of Indians, whom she accuses of cunning and dishonesty and all kinds of venality. In fact there is no one she trusts, even the woman who has brought her up from infancy and who is clearly devoted to her; nor I, who have done my best to protect her, mostly from herself.

Over the last dozen years, her conviction that everyone is gossiping about her has grown into a mania, with the result that we have been unable to remain in any place, or I in any post, for more than two or three years. Initially, in a new place, all is well. She takes on a new lease of life and with it her old bloom – at thirty she is more beautiful than ever and still possesses that magnetism that attracts men and alienates their wives. For a few months she basks in the attention and interest; and then she becomes convinced, usually with good reason where the women are concerned, that she is disliked and talked about. Then the fantasies begin: they are persecuting her, asking her impertinent questions designed to expose some disgraceful secret which they imagine she is concealing; the servants are plotting against her and spreading rumours about her. And so it goes on. Eventually there comes a time when she will not leave the house, then her room, finally her bed. The I.C.S. is a small world, and as people are transferred from place to place they carry stories with them – stories that have not done her reputation, or my career, any good.

The pregnancies have always occurred in the period soon after our arrival in a new place, when she is blooming and seductive. I still find her hard to resist, even though I am familiar with her little tricks: the slight upturn of the lips,
accompanied by a sudden widening of the eyes and the small undulation of her hips. But it is no longer her power but her weakness that controls me. When I take her in my arms now, it is because I want to prove not my own worthiness but hers – to convince her that she is worth loving. Sometimes I find myself filled more with pity than desire, but I know it would crush what little self-respect she has left if she saw that she had lost her power over me. Her ayah and I have been the two fixed planets orbiting her sun, marking her place in the heavens and keeping her from sinking into the outer darkness.

Re-reading the one surviving diary from our marriage, I am saddened by the difference between what she was then and what she has become, though even then there were signs that all was not well. I once saw a crow with a broken wing dragging itself along the ground while being eaten alive by ants; I put the poor creature out of its misery, and sometimes I almost feel it would be kinder to do the same for her. I have come home five times to news of another miscarriage – strangely they have always happened in my absence – to find her shut away in her room, half-mad and sedated with laudanum. We wean her off it and the cycle starts again. The doctors all say there is no apparent reason for her inability to carry a child to its term, and suspect it may be something to do with her nerves.

These days I feel nothing so much as weariness at the thought of what I will find when I come home.

Rebecca is pregnant again. I am sick at the thought of another tragedy, another lost baby, another breakdown. I cannot believe I was weak enough to allow myself to be seduced.

It happened about a fortnight after I got back. I was keeping my distance from her, still angry about my diaries, and when she realised I was not going to go to her, as I usually do, she came to me in the night, pale and sad, and wept like a child, until I pitied her and took her in my arms. And then I did not have the heart to reject her advances. Afterwards I was angry with myself and prayed that she would not conceive, but God – if He exists – did not see fit to hear my prayers.

I am so shaken that I do not know if I can write this. After all these years I would have thought nothing could surprise me, but since seeing the doctor yesterday I feel as though I have woken into a nightmare. He apologised for not informing me before but he has been away in England on a family matter and did not feel it was something he could reveal in a letter. He confessed he was in two minds about telling me at all but did not feel he could let the situation continue and did not want to go to the authorities.

I notice I am delaying writing the words, as though putting them down in ink will make them real.
Rebecca’s miscarriages were not an accident
– that is what he told me. My wife has been aborting her babies… has killed five of our children with cold-blooded deliberation.

I did not believe him at first and accused him of maliciously spreading rumours; I even threatened to sue him for defamation of character. I almost began to think Rebecca was right about people persecuting her. I know that he, like most people, has never liked her, but I could tell that he was sorry for me. He told me he had suspected it with the previous miscarriage but this time he found evidence of it. When he
showed me the piece of twig that local women apparently use to procure an abortion I was nearly sick. I knew at once who was behind it, for there is only one person close enough to her to have helped her, and without whose knowledge she could not have done it.

I don’t know what to do. In her present condition I dare not upset her, and yet I cannot allow her to destroy this child like all the others. Why did I not reject her advances? And yet part of me is angry, angry enough to be glad she is pregnant, and vindictive enough to take pleasure in the fact that I will force her to carry this child to term whether she wants it or not.

Last night I dreamt that I was in one of those strange gardens she embroiders so exquisitely. It was like the Garden of Eden, except that baby hands and feet were growing from the tree branches in place of fruit, opening and closing their fat little fingers like sea anemones. The plants at my feet had plump pink lips growing in place of flowers, all opening wide and quivering, as though they were screaming. The air was filled with the sound of it: short bursts of high-pitched screaming, stopping and starting like a chorus of crickets. Things were scuttling along the ground by my feet, and when I looked closer I saw that they were eyeballs moving along on their spider-leg lashes. I came to an apple tree. There was the stench of over-ripe fruit in the air and as I approached it the tree came to life and a twiglike arm reached out to me, holding an apple streaked purple, yellow and sickly green. My fingers sank into it and I realised it was rotten. I turned it in my hand and realised it was the back part of a baby’s
decaying foot and threw it from me in horror. The screaming got louder and louder and the ground began to move under me. I woke to find Rebecca shaking me by the shoulder and calling my name.

I shrank back, then got up and went out on to the verandah to get away from her. The skin on my neck and back was crawling. She followed me and began to stroke my shoulders and I flinched away.

‘Go to bed.’ I could not even bring myself to say her name.

‘You’re angry with me,’ she said, in that hurt child voice that usually awakens my compassion, but all I felt was rage and disgust. She put her hand out to me and I stepped away.

‘Don’t touch me!’

She turned away, miserable. I will have to tell her I know, but I feared that if I spoke to her then I would become violent. If I am honest, I intended to punish her, to make her suffer. I know that her greatest fear is of being ostracised, and it is a result she always provokes in the end – a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the terrible things I have discovered is that there is pleasure in tormenting someone who seems to invite it.

This morning her ayah – that bitch of a woman, Zainab – came to see me. She said in an accusing voice, ‘How can you be so cruel to her when she is carrying your child?’

I was so suffused with rage that my teeth were chattering. I got her by the wrist and dragged her into the front garden away from the house and the servants.

‘How dare you say that to me? Do you think I don’t know what you’ve been doing, you and your… your… precious girl?’

Her face went white.

‘Yes, I know it all. The doctor told me yesterday. Why did you do it? All those babies… my children… murdered!’

She put her hands to her cheeks in pretend shock. ‘What are you saying, sahib?’

Her playacting turned my rage to ice. I said coldly, ‘The doctor told me what he found. How many times? Were they all done deliberately?’

She did not reply.

I told her she was dismissed, that she must leave my house today and that she would get no pension from me. Nor would she ever see Rebecca again. ‘Think yourself lucky that I’m not handing you over to the police. If you were tried for this you would be hanged.’

This afternoon she came to me and broke down. She fell to her knees and clutched my feet and begged me not to send her away. ‘She’s all I’ve got. She is my life,’ she kept saying.

‘And my children were mine,’ I retorted, trying to back away, but she followed me on her knees.

‘She did not mean to hurt you, sahib. She was afraid…’

‘Afraid of what? Tell me why she wanted to murder our children… and why you helped her.’

And then she said something that astonished me. ‘They say that you can tell when a baby is born if it has Indian blood. She was afraid the baby would look Indian.’

I stared at her. ‘But why on earth should she think…? Do you mean she thinks that I…?’

‘No, sahib. Not that.’ And then she said something I found almost as hard to credit as the doctor’s story – she told me that she is not Rebecca’s ayah at all, but her mother!

This is her story. According to her, Ramsay had a preference for little girls and bought her virginity and exclusive rights to her when she was twelve. She was then being trained as a courtesan in Lucknow by a woman to whom her brother had
sold her after their parents died. Ramsay fell in love with her and bought her out. He took her as his bibi, but when she became pregnant she insisted on marriage and he agreed, to keep her happy. They lied about her age; she was just fourteen.

‘He still loved me then,’ she said bitterly.

They lived together as man and wife in Calcutta, where he worked as a manager for a tea company. It was the comment of an Englishwoman that the baby was so fair she could pass for a European that gave him the idea. When he was appointed manager of a new tea plantation in Assam, where no one knew him, he took the opportunity to change his story. He told Zainab that Rebecca, who was then two, would have a better chance in life if she was thought to be white, and that from now on she must pretend to be Rebecca’s ayah and say that her mother was dead.

It was a preposterous story. Did she really think I was such an imbecile as to believe it? ‘But why should he do such a thing? And why would you accept it?’ I demanded.

She shrugged. ‘He was tired of me. He always liked young girls. And what choice did I have? He told me that unless I agreed he would send me away and I would never see my daughter again.’ Her voice shook as she said it, and suddenly I remembered her panic that night when we had stood in the temple above the tank as Roland and Rebecca walked below. And something else: an image of a pair of sandalled feet near the base of a white pillar illuminated by moonlight. I looked down. Her feet were high-arched, with four long slim toes and one short one, like the feet on a Greek statue. I revisited that feeling of
déjà vu
I had when I first saw Rebecca’s feet on the day I proposed to her. How could I not have seen it sooner?