Where Earth Meets Sky (19 page)

‘Oh – yes, I hope so,’ Lily said, not at all sure what this meant and feeling terribly sorry for the woman. What on earth had brought the poor thing to this terrible plight? She felt as if she had joined a very odd household.

Once they had left the room, Dr McBride commanded her, ‘Come with me a moment.’

Lily followed him to the hall.

‘Look, I need to tell you about your duties. After all, there isn’t really anyone else to do it. Perhaps you’d care to dine with me this evening?’

To her surprise they dined in Dr McBride’s study. It seemed that other than sleeping, he did almost everything else in this room. At the other end of the room from the desk were chairs and a card table which had been laid for the meal.

Seven-thirty found Lily sitting, after a wash and change of clothes, at table with Dr McBride, Cameron the hound under the table, being waited on by Prithvi, the young girl, who fetched and carried with great efficiency from the kitchen. Lily realized that she was older than she seemed, as old as eighteen, perhaps.

The food, consisting of a thin soup and some kind of meat rissoles with barely cooked boiled potatoes, was rather poor, certainly nothing like as impressive as the food she had been used to at the Fairfords’ residence, but she was very hungry by now and downed everything that was offered.

For a time they ate in silence. Even Mimi the mynah had gone quiet. Dr McBride sat hunched at the end of the table, eating with some intensity. At last he rested his knife and fork down and said, ‘I know we don’t run the household like many Europeans, with servants for every jot and tittle. It’s not a money problem, you understand, it’s just that Muriel feels safer without too many folk around in the house. You’ll have to be a bit of a jack of all trades, sorting out the servants we do have, making sure they knuckle down, a bit of cleaning, bit of cooking, giving Nurse Brown a day off now and then. She won’t like it, of course, letting someone else nurse Muriel. But there’s nothing to nursing Muriel really – it’s more a question of company, and making sure she eats a little.’ Again he spoke of his wife very solicitously.

‘How long has Mrs McBride been ill?’ Lily ventured to ask.

‘Ah, well now . . .’ Dr McBride put his elbows on the table, clasping his hands, and stared at the little silver candelabra in the middle of the table. ‘I’d say . . . It wasn’t always anything like this bad, not until recently. Muriel is almost ten years my junior. She’s forty-four . . .’ Lily realized her guess of the doctor’s age had been just about right. ‘It’s been coming on for quite a while. We never had children, you see. Couldn’t seem to. And I suppose . . . Well, the beginning of it dates right back to then . . .’

Lily was disconcerted to be given such intimate detail, but the doctor seemed to want to speak.

‘There’s nothing wrong, you see – not medically.’ He sat back, abandoning his watery dish of milk pudding, and lit his pipe. ‘It’s something that stems from the mind. Hard to understand.’ He blew out a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke. ‘In the past year she seems to have reached the point of no return. Nothing I seem to be able to do.’ A tone of self-pity had crept into his voice. ‘She has become like a child, utterly dependent. It does limit my life rather, I must say . . .’ He looked appealingly at her then. ‘It wasn’t what I hoped for in marriage, I must admit . . .’ There was a silence, then the dog stirred, making a small sound and the doctor seemed to recover himself.

‘Sorry. My problems. Don’t want to bore you with all that.’

‘No, it’s quite all right,’ she said, feeling sorry. ‘It must be very worrying.’

‘Oh yes . . .’ He sighed, wearily. ‘Worrying – well, you get beyond worry as such. A doctor who can’t heal his own wife. It’s . . . Well, humiliating wouldn’t be a strong enough word.’

‘Heartbreaking?’ Lily suggested.

Startled, he looked sharply at her. ‘It’s certainly that, Miss Waters. Oh yes. It’s heartbreaking all right.’

Lily spent her first weeks in Mussoorie getting to know the place and people, and establishing her role in the McBride bungalow.

Her first task was to understand the working of the household and to get to meet the servants. She soon got to know Prithvi, who was seventeen and had had a life of hardship, her mother dying when she was young, leaving her to care for her sick father and two younger sisters. When her father died as well she lost hope of having any sort of dowry to marry and came to live with the McBrides. She was not educated as Srimala had been, by the Sisters in Ambala, and she seldom had much to say, but she was sweet and obliging and ready to accept instructions from Lily.

The cook, Stephen Owen, also presented little in the way of difficulty. Stephen was a very thin, anxious-looking man in his late thirties, whose hair was receding rapidly and who lived his life in a condition of spaniel-eyed anxiety. He invested everything, from his wife’s evidently petulant demands to the over-boiling of an egg, with an air of tragic melodrama.

‘I am not successful with junkets or blancmanges,’ he told Lily woefully, the first morning they met. ‘They are forever getting the better of me.’ This was followed by a sigh which suggested that this was one of his life’s deepest regrets.

He arrived late for work almost every day, always sprucely dressed in European clothes. Stephen’s father had been an English engineer, he confided to Lily after a few days. Hubert Owen had fallen in love with a Punjabi girl who had been very pretty but not, Stephen said wistfully, of a very high caste. Nor had he been a man of honour: he abandoned the girl and Stephen grew up in Delhi in an orphanage for the illegitimate children of Anglo-Indian liaisons. He had done a series of jobs in service and had been working in the McBrides’ long, thin kitchen for three years, during which, it seemed, his cooking had improved scarcely at all.

‘The doctor is a man of great kindness and tolerance,’ Stephen told Lily, stretching his eyes wide in his long, sensitive face. She could see that this was a plea for her to be the same.

‘We’ll get along very well, I’m sure,’ she told him. ‘But I expect there may have to be a bit of reorganization.’

That, in fact, was an understatement and she found herself surprised that the McBride house was functioning at all when she saw the chaotic state of the kitchen, the lack of any sort of order in Stephen’s work, including a sheer lack of basic supplies. She knew she could get stuck in straight away and make things better, as well as helping to improve his cooking.

‘The trouble is also Mrs Das,’ Stephen admitted. ‘She is coming and stealing things and I have never been able to stop her.’

Mrs Das was a very stout, dyspeptic widow who came in to clean for the McBrides and moved round the house muttering bad-temperedly, terrorizing Prithvi and letting out ragged-sounding belches so that it was almost impossible to be unaware of where she was at any time. Her cleaning skills were also questionable and Lily wondered why they didn’t find someone else, but realized that Dr McBride was probably easily satisfied in these areas and did not notice much so long as some sort of meal was placed before him at the right times of day.

‘Are you sure she’s stealing supplies?’ Lily quizzed Stephen.

‘Sure as eggs is eggs, Miss Lily,’ he said earnestly. ‘I have seen her with my very eyes.’

‘Well, why didn’t you stop her?’

Stephen’s face dropped into a study of dismay. ‘I did try. But she is a very bullying sort of lady.’

‘I’ll speak to her,’ Lily said. And we’ll get some locks put on the cupboards.’

Confronting Mrs Das produced nothing but sly smiles and slippery excuses, but the locks, to which Lily kept the keys, rendered Mrs Das daily more grumpy. Lily wondered whether Dr McBride was neglecting to pay his servants sufficiently, but when she checked, tactfully, with some other households in the area, the rupees they were taking home each week seemed generous in comparison with some.

She set to work cleaning and reorganizing the kitchen and took Stephen out to the bazaar to buy supplies, something she enjoyed so much that she said she would do it with him regularly.

‘Oh yes, please, Miss Lily!’ he said. She felt sorry for his hopeless air.

‘And we’ll learn to cook some new dishes, shall we?’ she suggested.

By the time she had been there a month, the household was running much more smoothly and the meals had improved no end. The one member of the staff whom she took longer to get to know was Jane Brown, Muriel McBride’s nurse. This was partly because at first she saw very little of her. Jane Brown’s hours were spent mostly in the sickroom or in her own little room opposite, which faced out to the back and so did not share the spectacular view. So far as Lily could see, she had no other life apart from looking after her charge and going out to Christchurch for the Holy Communion service on Sunday mornings. Lily, on the other hand, was off out during any spare time she had, getting to know this beautiful hill town to which she had already given her heart.

When she did encounter Jane Brown, she seemed at first a very reserved person. It began when she came into the kitchen to heat up milk for Mrs McBride.

‘I’ll do it if you like,’ Lily offered. The first time she had been scouring pans and her hands were covered in grimy soap, but she was truly willing to help.

‘Oh no!’ Miss Brown said. ‘No need for that.
I
attend to Mrs McBride’s needs.’

All right then, Lily thought, offended by her tone. I was only trying to be helpful.

She bent her head over the big pan she was scouring out. Miss Brown stood waiting for the milk and Lily could sense her watching.

‘Well, you’re not afraid of hard work, it seems,’ Nurse Brown observed.

Lily looked up at her. In the brighter light of the kitchen the nurse seemed a little younger than Lily had guessed. She wore a long black skirt and white blouse with a high, plain collar, with a starched apron over the top. Her figure was sturdy and well proportioned and her face was kindly, but so far she was not very forthcoming.

‘No – hard work has never put me off,’ Lily agreed carefully.

‘A good scrubbing’s well overdue in this house.’ Miss Brown nodded at the blackened pan Lily was working on, then said wryly, ‘I’m surprised
he
hasn’t finished us all off by now. Calling himself a cook – he can scarcely boil an egg without some mishap!’

‘Yes,’ Lily smiled. ‘He is a bit accident prone.’

This seemed to break the ice a little and gradually Miss Brown came into the kitchen more and more when Lily was there.

‘How is Mrs McBride today?’ Lily would ask.

At first Jane Brown gave non-committal replies: ‘Much the same,’ or, ‘One can’t expect much, I’m afraid.’

One morning, however, when Lily had been there about three weeks, Jane Brown came in when Lily was just despatching Stephen to buy the daily supplies. The nurse was obviously agitated and once Stephen had left, the room seemed to be filled with her mood. Lily’s thoughts were on the next job, sorting laundry for the
dhobi
man, but she took courage and said, ‘Is something wrong? Mrs McBride – is she not progressing today?’

Miss Brown whisked round from staring at the pan of milk, a furious look on her face. ‘Progressing?’ Her voice was full of pent-up emotion. ‘Do you seriously imagine that that poor woman is ever going to be well again, you silly?’

Lily was bewildered. She had not considered that Mrs McBride would not get better even after hearing the little she knew.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I don’t really understand what is the matter with her. Dr McBride said there was nothing wrong with her, not medically wrong. I’m sure that’s what he said.’

‘The woman’s dying!’ Miss Brown cried. ‘Slowly, day by day, she’s slipping away, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. And what’s worse is, she can’t do anything about it either!’

Lily stared at her. ‘But why?’

‘Because she won’t
eat
.’ A tear escaped and ran down Miss Brown’s cheek. There was more life in her face, suddenly, than Lily had ever seen before, a kind of terrible passion. She poured out the ordeal of her daily work. ‘This milk – she’ll barely manage a sip or two, though I try and try. Have you any idea what it’s like to watch over someone closely when they will
not live
? To watch them lose their hold on life and yet still be alive, day after agonizing day? She started starving herself years ago, a gradual thing at first, I think, and it became a habit, a state she couldn’t get out of. And now her body knows nothing else. They’ve tried everything – mental doctors, all sorts of cures, but nothing works. And she’s in decline much faster now, day by day, and I don’t think she could take food even if she wanted to.’ Miss Brown brushed her hands over her apron in a gesture of nervous distress and wiped her wet cheek. ‘She was a nurse herself, you know, trained in Edinburgh.’ Her tears flowed again and Lily sensed they had been stored up for a long time. ‘Nothing works properly . . . Her body . . . It’s like walking to Calvary with her every single day.’ She put her face in her hands and for a moment gave way to her grief.

Lily felt deeply affected by what she was hearing. She had seen the starving poor in India, the scrawny beggars in Ambala, but she had never heard of anyone starving themselves to death deliberately. She was also moved by the sight of this reserved woman breaking down in front of her.