Sheltering Rain (33 page)

There were some welcome developments: the Dairy Farm food shops meant that while it was easiest to get one's amahs to do the shopping for fresh food, it was now possible to buy special treats for entertaining, like oysters, which were flown up from Sydney. There were more shops, selling a greater variety of things; it was easier to get hold of magazines, and books; and the influx of young nurses and teachers meant that it was an awful lot easier to make up the numbers at dinner. They were rather jolly, most of the nurses, Joy discovered, toughened, but humorous about their experiences with the troops, and tended to be terribly popular with the young officers (more so than the teachers, who tended to be less lively and, more important, significantly older). They were also often bold enough to accompany the men to the burgeoning neon nightlife of Wan Chai, where clubs like Smokey Joe's and the Pink Pussycat were springing up, capitalizing on the desperate need among both visiting troops and lonely traders for after-hours entertainment. Joy was rather curious about these clubs, and would have quite liked to have discovered what it was that was quite so scandalous about some of them, but Edward didn't seem interested, and it wasn't the kind of place where a reputable woman went alone, especially after dark.

Joy's mother, meanwhile, complained bitterly about the never-ending racket from the construction work, and the fact that all the good views were disappearing, obscured by the upstart blocks from farther down toward the waterfront. She could no longer see the sea from her west-facing windows, she remarked, due to the office blocks springing up around Central and Des Voeux Road, while getting on a tram had become a most unpleasant business. Which meant she was quite impressed by Joy's car, a white Morris 10, which Joy would drive cautiously down to the harbor every day, in order to meet her husband from work.

“I'll drive you to Stanley Market, if you like,” said Joy, observing her mother's astonished face as she backed the car out of the garage. Alice found her daughter's independence astonishing.
Unusual
, was the word she used to Joy. “A bit mannish for my tastes,” was what she said to Stella's mother. She could afford to admit this to Mrs. Hanniford, as everyone knew that Stella had walked out on her pilot husband, and her family was therefore in no position to judge.

“I wouldn't want to put you to any trouble,” said Alice, clutching her clasp bag tightly to her stomach with both hands, as if holding in her innards.

“Look, Mummy, it's really no trouble. I need to get a new table linen and you can help me choose it. Come on, it'll be a nice day out.”

Alice paused. “I'll think about it.”

While Joy's predictions of social awkwardness, and of her own regression to a teenage state, had failed to materialize with their return, those regarding her difficulties with her mother had proven wearingly accurate. While she suffered little maternal interference (if anything, she found she had to push Alice into accompanying her anywhere), there was still this purse-mouthed sense of disapproval, this crushing air of disappointment, but now potently teamed with a new air of martyrdom, and a sharp tinge of jealousy. If, when Edward arrived home from the dockyard, he attempted anything more affectionate than the most distant peck on the cheek, Alice's head would swivel, as if on castors, to pointedly look away from them both. If he invited Alice to supper (he was amazingly patient, thought Joy, gratefully, but that was because both knew Alice could have little impact on his life), she would reluctantly accept, but only after repeated claims that she “didn't want to intrude.” If he suggested he and Joy go riding in the New Territories, just the two of them, Alice's eyebrows would shoot up like he had suggested they indulge in some public sexual deviance before the hors d'oeuvres.

Joy tried to understand, but, as she told Edward privately, it was rather galling to have to play down one's personal happiness in order to keep one's mother in a good humor.

“I know,” she said to Alice shortly after her unaccompanied visit to Stanley, as her mother fingered the newly purchased table linen with a barely concealed look of disapproval. “Perhaps you could help me find an amah.”

“What kind of amah?”

“I don't know,” said Joy, who was frankly exhausted. “Just someone to help out a bit. Do some washing. I hadn't realized how many shirts Edward would get through in the humidity.”

“But who does your cooking?”

“I have been,” said Joy, almost apologetically. “When we're not entertaining, that is. I quite like cooking for him.”

“You'll need a wash-amah and a number-one amah for cooking,” said Alice, firmly, her confidence boosted by Joy's apparent deficiencies on the domestic front. “And then number-one amah can look after the children when they come.”

She didn't seem to notice Joy's sharp glance in her direction.

“Now,” she said, leafing through her little leather-bound address book, “there's a wash-amah called Mary in Causeway Bay who is looking for work. I took the liberty of taking her number last week, because Bei-Lin was being absolutely impossible, and I thought she should know that she's not irreplaceable, no matter how long she's been with me. She's not been the same since your father passed on, you know. Definitely more sullen, she is. And I'm sure Judy Beresford said she knew of a number-one amah whose family was heading overseas. I'll ring her and find out if she's still available. She'll be very good for you.” She paused, glancing at Joy, her brows briefly lowering suspiciously. “That's if I'm not interfering,” she said.

G
ood news about the shirts,” said Edward, as they ate supper. “You have many strengths, my darling, but laundry is not one of them. I was beginning to think I was going to have to do them myself. But what on earth do we need another hired help for? It's not as if we have children.”

Joy looked up from her food.

Edward met her gaze. Then stared, for a long time, at the table in front of her.

“How come you're not drinking?” he said.

K
ate stood just behind the door, watching from the hallway as her mother and daughter sat, heads almost touching, discussing one of the sepia-tinted photographs in Joy's calloused hands. Sabine, bent over, was exclaiming that the old white car was “
so
cool,” while Joy laughed about how fearful she was of driving it on Hong Kong's already crowded roads. “I had only just learned to drive,” she was saying. “Your grandfather taught me, as the instructors were so expensive, but he did have to grit his teeth rather. And we always had to stop afterward for a brandy dry.”

She had come up to try to find Sabine, who seemed to be permanently closeted with either one of her grandparents, reading to her grandfather, riding her horse, or bombarding her grandmother with questions about life “in the olden days,” as she put it, even now that the threat of Christopher and Julia had receded as far as Dublin. It meant that for the past few days of her stay, Kate, at something of a loose end, had found herself trailing sadly around the house and its grounds, asking somewhat pathetically if anyone had seen her daughter, grateful for any time Sabine chose to spend in her company.

But then Sabine seemed to be choosing to spend as little time as possible in her company. And Kate told herself she did not feel so much rejected (Sabine hadn't wanted to spend much time with her since she turned thirteen) as completely bemused by this apparent passion for all things Irish. She seemed to have embraced her grandparents with an unself-conscious affection, discovered an unlikely love for the little gray horse in the back field, and, most surprising of all, relinquished her urban need to be “cool” in all circumstances. She didn't even care that her trainers were covered in mud. But she also failed to disguise her evident irritation at Kate's attempts to help, whether it be an offer to carry up her father's lunch tray, or to give Sabine a break by reading to him. “She's quite proprietorial about him these days,” said Mrs. H, with some affection. “You'd never have guessed it from the way she was when she came.”

Mrs. H had been the one voice of sanity in the house, providing the warmest of the various welcomes (they were welcomes, Kate thought bitterly, only in the loosest sense of the word), and reassuring her that her daughter's evident happiness at Kilcarrion had been a relatively recent development. But then Kate saw the way Sabine spoke to Mrs. H, and that made her feel excluded and inadequate, too.

There had been one brief thawing in their relationship, when Kate had visited Sabine's room one night and volunteered the information that she and Justin were no longer together. She thought she had a responsibility to let Sabine know, and had told her gently, fearful of the possibility that this would be interpreted as further upheaval in her daughter's life (and also of making herself cry if she allowed herself to describe it as anything less than briefly and clinically). But Sabine had merely gone very still, as if listening for something that she had long expected to hear, and then satisfied, told her that it was “hardly a surprise.”

“So you don't mind?”

“Why should I mind? He was a prat.”

Kate tried not to flinch at Sabine's blunt assessment. She had forgotten her daughter's delicate way with words.

“So you think I've done the right thing?”

“Why should I care what you've done? It's your life.” Sabine had turned away, as if keen to read her book, signifying the conversation was closed. She paused. “I was half expecting it anyway,” she muttered, staring unseeing at the page in front of her.

Kate sat, her eyes fixed on her daughter's face.

“Well, you've never stuck at anything, have you? None of your relationships lasts. Not like Grandmother and Grandfather.”

The words were quietly said, but held the powerful kickback of a firearm, and Kate, wounded, had backed out of the room. Since then Sabine had been slightly warmer to her, as if aware that she had perhaps been too harsh, but she still seemed more comfortable around almost anyone else at the house.

And now, this morning, she hadn't been able to find her at all, and the study had provided the answer.

Yet seeing them sit there, close, relaxed, more comfortable with each other's company than either of them ever was in hers, Kate felt a huge lump rise to her throat, and a childish sensation of being left out. She turned, and closing the door softly behind her, made her way back down the stairs.

H
ad Sabine been aware of the tears that her mother shed in her absence, she might have felt some measure of guilt, or a desire to comfort her—she was not, after all, a malicious girl. But she was sixteen, and as such, had more important things to think about—like whether or not to go out with Bobby McAndrew. He had rung two days after the hunt (keen, but not toe-clenchingly keen, she had noted approvingly) and suggested they go out—to the pub, or the pictures, or whatever she fancied. Joy, who had initially answered the telephone, had seemed too distracted to take very much notice, merely handing the receiver over to the paling Sabine with the remark that “one of her little friends” was calling. Bobby, who had overheard, had laughed, stating: “It's your little friend Bobby here,” and that had sort of broken the ice, so that Sabine didn't feel quite so weirded out by the idea of going on a date with an Irish boy.

But now, with Saturday a matter of days away, she found herself wavering in her determination to go. It would be easy to get out of the house (no one seemed to take too much notice of what she was doing at the moment) but she wasn't entirely sure that she wanted to spend an evening with Bobby after all. She couldn't remember if she fancied him, for a start; his face had sort of become blurry and indistinct, and all she really remembered was that he didn't have dark brown hair or olive skin, which was, she had recently decided with the aid of one of Mrs. H's women's magazines, “her type.” And he would probably want to jump her bones at the end of the evening, especially if they went to the cinema, and even if she liked him, she hadn't worked out whether that would be a bit like being unfaithful. Because even if Thom had not yet shown any proper signs of wanting to jump her bones, she didn't want to close off that particular avenue just yet. He might be being shy.

Annie was no help, either. True, she had listened to Sabine's predicament, but it was in that Annie-esque way that seemed to involve looking out of the window, rubbing lengthily at her hands, flicking on the television once or twice, and then walking around the room aimlessly, as if looking for something she had lost (if she could only remember what it was).

“You should go,” she said, vaguely. “It's good for you to make friends.”

“I don't need any more friends.”

“Well, then it will be good for you to get out of that house. That's an awful lot of time you've been spending with your grandfather.”

“But what if he wants to be more than friends?”

“Well, then you've got yourself a boyfriend.”

“But what if I don't know if I want a boyfriend?”

Annie had looked rather exhausted at this point, and told Sabine She Really Didn't Know, and She Was Terribly Tired, and then, eventually, Would She Mind Coming Back Later, Because She Thought She Might Take A Little Nap. Which, frustratingly, was roughly what most conversations with Annie seemed to consist of these days. Sabine would have liked to ask her mother, and maybe even ask her if she would buy her something new to wear. But her mother would either flap embarrassingly about Sabine's “date” as she would call it, and insist on driving her there so that she could say hello, or get all hurt and silent about the fact that she was making a life for herself in Ireland. She knew it bugged her mother, the fact that she liked it here. But that's not my fault, she wanted to yell at her, when she saw her slinking around the house with a face like a wet weekend, as Mrs. H would have put it.
You were the one who turned our lives upside down. You made me come here
.