Secret for a Nightingale (2 page)

Then came the day when I did not see her and they would not let me go to her because she was suffering from some sort of fever which was infectious. I remembered how my father took me on his knee and told me that we had only each other now.

I was perhaps too young to understand the tragedy in our household, but I was vaguely aware of loss and sadness, though the magnitude of the disaster did not strike me immediately. Well-meaning ladies officers’ wives mainly invaded the nursery; they made much of me and told me my mother had gone to Heaven. I thought it was a trip to a land where there would be green fields and gentle rain, like going to the hills, only more exotic, and perhaps taking tea with God and the angels instead of officers’ wives. I presumed that she would come back after a while and tell me all about it.

It was then that Mrs. Fearnley came. The same fever which had killed my mother attacked her husband who had been one of the officers. He died during the same week as my mother. Mrs. Fearnley, who had been a governess before her marriage, was very uncertain about her future and my father suggested that while she made up her mind what she wanted to do, she might act as governess to his motherless daughter.

It seemed a Heavensent opportunity both to my father and Mrs. Fearnley and that was how she came to me.

She must have been thirty-five years old; she was well-meaning, conscientious and determined to do right by me. I was fond of her in a negative way. It was my ayah who was a source of excitement to me, alien, exotic, with soulful eyes and long dark hair which I liked to brush. I would lay aside the brush and rub my fingers through it. She would say: “That soothes me, little Su-Su. There is goodness in your hands.” Then she would tell me about her childhood in the Punjab and how she had come to Bombay to be with a rich family, and how her good friend the Khansamah had brought her into the Colonel’s household and that the great happiness of her life was to be with me.

When my mother died my father would be with me almost every day just for an hour or more, and I grew to know him better. He always seemed sad. There were tea-parties with a number of people and they talked to me and asked me how I was getting on with my lessons. There were one or two children with the regiment and I would go to parties arranged by the parents and then Mrs. Fearnley would arrange for me to return this hospitality.

The ayah used to come and watch us while we played games. Poor Jenny is a-weeping and The Farmer’s in His Den and musical chairs with Mrs. Fearnley or one of the other ladies playing the piano. My ayah used to sing some of the songs afterwards. Her rendering of Poor Jenny was really quite pathetic and she made The Farmer’s in His Den sound like martial music.

The officers’ wives were sorry for me because I had no mother. I understood this as I grew older and realized that her journey to Heaven was not the temporary absence I had at first imagined it to be.

Death was something irrevocable. It happened all around. One of the houseboys told me that many of the beggars I saw in the streets would be dead the next morning.

“They come with a cart to collect them,” he said. It was like the plague of London, I thought, when I heard that.

“Bring out your dead!” But the beggars on the streets of Bombay did not have to be brought out, for they had no homes to come out of.

It was a strange world of splendour and squalor, of bustling life and silent death; and memories of it would be with me forever. Flashes of it would come back to me throughout my life. I would see the Khansamah in the market-place, a smile of triumph on his face, and I knew later that meant he was making a profit on all his purchases. I had heard the wives talking about it and telling each other the sad tale of Emma Alderston who had thought she would outwit her dishonest Khansamah by doing the shopping herself, and how the market salesmen had conspired to charge her so much that she was paying far more than the Khansamah’s ‘commission’. “It is a way of life,” said Grace Girling, a captain’s wife.

“Better accept it.”

I liked to sit in the kitchen, watching our Khansamah at work. He was big and important; he sensed my admiration and he found it irresistible. He gave me little tasters and folding his hands across his large stomach watched me intently while I sampled them. I wanted to please him and forced my features into an expression of ecstasy.

“Nobody make Tandoori chicken like Colonel Sahib’s Khansamah. Best Khansamah in India.

Here, Missee Su-Su, look! Ghostaba! ” He would thrust a meat ball made of finely ground lamb at me.

“You find good, eh? Now drink. Ah good?

Nimboo pani. “

I would drink the chilled juice of limes flavoured with rose syrup and listen to his chatter about his dishes and above all himself.

For ten years that was my life the first impressionable years so it was small wonder that these memories remained with me. There was one which was more vivid than any other.

I can recall it in detail. The sun was already hot although it was morning and the real heat of the day was to come. With my ayah I had passed through the narrow streets of the market, pausing at the trinket stall to admire its contents while my ayah had a word with the owner, past the rows of saris which were hanging on a rail, past the cavern-like interior in which strange-looking tarts were being cooked, avoiding the goats which blundered past, skirting the occasional cow, looking out for the quick brown bodies of young boys who insinuated themselves between the people, and being even more watchful for their quicker brown fingers. So we came through the market-place to the wider street, and there it happened.

There was a great deal of traffic on that morning. Here and there a loaded camel made its ponderous and disdainful way towards the bazaar;

the bullock carts came lumbering in. Just as my ayah was remarking that it was time we made our way home, a boy of about four or five ran out in front of one of the bullock carts. I stared in horror as he was kicked aside just before the cart would have run over him.

We rushed out to pick him up. He was white and very shaken. We laid him on the side of the road. A crowd gathered and there was a great deal of talk but it was in a dialect I did not understand. Someone went off to get help.

Meanwhile the boy lay on the ground. I knelt beside him and some impulse made me lay my hand on his brow. It was strange but I felt something I am not sure what but a feeling of exultation, I think.

Simultaneously the boy’s face changed. It was almost as though for a moment he had ceased to feel pain. My ayah was watching me.

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I said to him in English: “It will be all right. They will come soon.

They will make you better. “

But it was not my words which soothed him. It was the touch of my hands.

It was all over very quickly. They came to take him away. They lifted him gently and put him in a cart which was soon moving off. When I had taken my hand from his brow, the last I saw of the boy was his dark eyes looking at me and the lines of pain beginning to re-form on his face.

It was a strange feeling, for when I had touched him it was as though some power had passed from me.

My ayah and I continued our walk in silence. We did not refer to the incident, but I knew it was uppermost in both our minds.

That night when she tucked me into my bed she took my hands and kissed them reverently.

She said: “There is power in these hands, little Su-Su. It may be that you have the healing touch.”

I was excited.

“Do you mean that boy … this morning?” I asked.

“I saw,” she said.

“What did it mean?”

“It means that you have a gift. It is there in these beautiful little hands.”

“A gift? Do you mean to make people well?”

“To ease pain,” she said.

“I do not know. It is in higher hands than ours.”

Some evenings I went riding with my father. I had my own pony who was one of the delights of my life; and it was a very proud moment when, in my white shirt and riding skirt, I rode out by his side. The older I grew the closer we became. He was a little shy with very young children. I loved him dearly the more because he was a little remote. I was at an age when familiarity could breed contempt. I wanted a father to look up to and that was what I had.

He used to talk to me about the regiment and India and the task of the British. I would glow with pride in the regiment and the Empire and

mostly in him. He talked to me about my mother and said she had never really liked India. She was constantly homesick, but bravely she had tried not to show it. He worried about me a motherless child whose father could not give her the attention he wished.

I told him I was well and happy, that Mrs. Fearnley was a good companion, that I was fond of her and loved my ayah.

He said: “You’re a good girl, Susanna.”

I told him about the incident with the boy in the road.

“It was so strange. Father. When I touched him I felt something pass from me, and he felt it too because when I laid my hand on his forehead he ceased to feel the pain. It was obvious that he did.”

My father smiled.

“Your good deed for the day,” he said.

“You don’t really believe there was something, do you?” I said.

“You were the good Samaritan. I hope he received proper attention. The hospitals here are less than adequate. If he has broken bones. God help him. It’s a matter of luck whether they will be reset as they should be.”

“You don’t think then that I have … a special touch … or something. Ayah does.”

“Ayah!” His smile was kindly but faintly contemptuous.

“What would a native know about such things?”

“Well, she said something about a healing touch. Really, Father, it was miraculous.”

“I dare say the boy thought it was pleasant to have an English lady kneeling beside him.”

I was silent. I could see it was no use talking to him, any more than it would have been to Mrs. Fearnley, of mystic matters. They were too practical, too civilized, they would say. But I could not dismiss the matter so lightly. I felt it was one of the most important things that had happened to me.

After my tenth birthday my father said to me during one of our rides:

“Susanna, you can’t go on like this. You have to be educated, you know.”

“Mrs. Fearnley says I am doing very well.”

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“But, my dear, there must come a time when you will outgrow Mrs. Fearnley. She tells me you are already outclassing her and, moreover, she has decided to go home.”

“Oh! Does that mean you will have to find someone else to take her place?”

“Not exactly. There is only one place where English young ladies should be educated and that is England.”

I was silent, contemplating the enormity of what he was suggesting.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I must stay here, of course.”

“You mean I must go to England … alone?”

“My dear Susanna, it is what happens to all young people here. You have seen that. The time will soon come when it will be your turn. In fact, some would say you should have gone before.”

He then started to outline his plans. Mrs. Fearnley was being most accommodating. She had been a very good friend to us. She was making plans to return to England and when she went I should go with her. She would take me to my mother’s brother James and his wife Grace at the Humberston rectory, and that would be my home until I could rejoin him in India when I was seventeen or eighteen.

“But that is seven years away! A lifetime!”

“Hardly that, my dear. I hate the thought of parting as much as you do perhaps even more … but it is necessary. We cannot have you growing up without education.”

“But I am educated. I read a great deal. I have learned such a lot.”

“It is not only book learning, my dear child. It is the social graces how to mix in society … real society, not what we have here.

No, my dear, there is no way out. If there were I should have found it, for the last thing I want to do is lose ,| you. You will write to me. We will be together through our | letters. I shall want to know everything that happens to you. I may come to England for a long leave eventually. Then we shall be together. In the meantime you will go to school and the rectory will be your home during holidays. Time will

soon pass. I shall miss you so much. As you know, since your mother died, you have been everything to me. “

He was looking straight ahead, afraid to look at me, afraid to show the emotion he felt. I was less restrained. One of the things I had to learn in England was to control my feelings.

I saw the sea, the hills, the white building through a haze of tears.

Life was changing. Everything was going to change . not slowly as life usually did, but drastically.

There had been more than a month to get used to the idea, and after the first shock I began to experience a glimmer of excitement. I had often watched the big ships coming into the harbour and seen them sail away. I had seen boys and girls take farewells of their parents and depart. It was a way of life and now it was my turn.

Mrs. Fearnley was busy with her arrangements and lessons were not so regular.

“There is little more I can teach you,” she said.

“You should be well up to others of your age. Read as much as you can. That is the best thing you can do.”

She was cheerful, looking forward to going home. She was to stay with a cousin until, as she said, she ‘found her feet’.

It was different with my ayah. This was a sad parting for her and for me. We had been so close closer than I had been to Mrs. Fearnley.

Ayah had known me from the time I was a baby. She had known my mother, and the bond between us had grown very strong since my mother’s death.

She looked at me with the patient acceptance of her race and said: “It is always so with the ayah. She must lose her little ones. They are not hers. They are only lent.”

I told her she would find another little one. My father would see that she did.

“To start again?” she said.