Zemindar (46 page)

I tried to read in his face an explanation for his delay, and slowly I understood. Moti. I had already met her. Then she could only be the woman in the old tower.

Somewhere in the recesses of my muddled mind I felt I should be shocked. No gentleman would ever have considered introducing his native mistress into the presence of ladies, whatever the reason. But, though I saw the necessity for outrage, I felt none.

‘You mean …?’

‘Yes.’ His tone was deliberate and unapologetic. ‘Moti, Yasmina’s mother.’

‘She doesn’t like me,’ I said confusedly, remembering the venomous outburst that had met me in the tower.

‘It won’t matter. She has no reason for disliking Emily. And in any case she would do what I asked of her.’

‘Then, please, get her quickly!’

‘Very well.’ And with a final searching look into my face, he went.

I walked into Emily’s room. Charles stood at a window looking out into the darkness, clasping and unclasping his hands behind his back. His wife lay still and quiet for the moment, all colour gone from her face, her golden hair, black now with perspiration, stuck to her forehead and cheeks. I touched him on the arm and motioned him out of the room, following him. ‘Oliver has gone to get someone who … who can help Emily,’ I said, closing the door behind me.

‘A doctor?’

‘No, a woman. A … a sort of midwife. It’s the best he can do.’

He nodded, but did not seem to be listening; I knew he was waiting for the next moan or cry. When none came, he turned to me, and I saw his eyes were full of tears.

‘Laura, don’t let her die! For God’s sake, don’t let her die!’

‘Oh, Charles, there’s no likelihood of her dying,’ I lied. ‘She is only having a baby, and we’ll soon have skilled help. Come now!’

‘You don’t understand, Laura. You can’t! Emily never wanted this baby. Any baby. I forced … it on her. If she dies, I’ll have murdered her!’

He spoke with such intensity that for a moment I could say nothing. I remembered instead, that night in Calcutta and the sound of Emily’s sobs in the darkness; and later her unhidden terror at the knowledge that she was pregnant. Both were memories I should not have been in a position to recall, and the knowledge that I was party, however unwillingly, to his shame and her degradation brought hot colour to my cheeks. I disguised my own feeling of inadequacy with anger.

‘Don’t be so melodramatic!’ I said sharply after a moment. ‘This is no time to speak of such things!’

‘There is never a time to speak of such things,’ he admitted with bitterness. ‘But one cannot escape living with them.’

‘Now look, Charles, you are anxious and over-emotional on account of it, but listen to me. Many women feel as Emily does about a first baby, particularly when they are as young as she is. They see motherhood as a threat to their independence, a curtailment of their enjoyment. Oh, I know you and Emily have not been getting along too well, but that’s to be expected, too. It … it’s the sort of growing pains of marriage; but when the baby comes, things will all be different … for you both.’

‘No, they won’t. They can’t be, Laura. I … I have been such a clumsy, selfish fool! She was only a child, but I couldn’t have patience. I wouldn’t wait. I know she will never really forgive me. She has said more than once that she hates me, and she means it. I know she means it.’

‘But she will grow up. In time she’ll see things as you saw them.’

‘No. And it will do no good if she does, because I have grown up too. That’s the hell of it!’ He walked a few reflective paces down the corridor and then came back to me, head bowed, hands in his pockets. When he spoke, he kept his eyes on the floor.

‘I swear that when I married her, I loved Emily, Laura—not you!’ I drew in my breath ready to protest, but he went on: ‘I could never have married her without loving her. Or at least thinking I did. She was so pretty, so gay and … bright! I couldn’t keep my eyes off her face—and she’s so graceful and light in all her movements, so deft with her pretty hands. I loved her voice and her laughter; all her ways. I’d never seen a girl like her. I was her slave, Laura. I gave her everything I could; everything she wanted. But I wanted … I wanted something in return as well. She never gave it to me. Not willingly. I tried to be patient, but once we were married she continued to treat me as her … her cavalier. Not even her favourite one. Just the most constant! And then I … well, then I lost patience. I took what I wanted. And that was really the end—for us both. When I realized that, I turned to you. You know I did, don’t you, Laura? You always had time to listen to me, the kindness to … to sympathize, to understand, so that gradually I came to believe I never had loved Emily. God knows, perhaps I never did. But when I married her, I thought I did!’

‘Please, Charles,’ I said gently, ‘you don’t need to tell me all this, indeed you don’t. You are overwrought. In the morning you will be ashamed of ever having mentioned these things. Please don’t go on. In fairness to Emily, if not to myself.’

‘Yes, I must do the right thing, must I not? But tell me, where can “fairness” be found in an unhappy, unfulfilled marriage like ours? Oh, I know; between us, Emily and I are producing a new human being, but believe me we have no chance of any real marriage for all that. And it’s my fault. That is what I have to live with. Can you understand, Laura?’

I understood too well. Once, and not so long ago, I would have known a degree of guilty joy at his admitting that he loved me. But now—well, I suppose I too had ‘grown up’. I felt compassion for him, but also found in my mind a marked distaste that he should have spoken as he had at such a time.

‘Perhaps I can understand, Charles,’ I admitted, ‘but none of this is my business, least of all now. You shouldn’t be telling me your inner recriminations and hidden guilts. We all have them, after all, and you made your own choice. It’s only right—only manly, Charles—that you should stand by it now. And in silence. Emily has had her share of suffering too.’

‘God, do you think I don’t know that? That’s why, Laura, you must not let her die. If only she will live, I swear, I swear on everything that’s most holy to me, that I will make it up to her. Don’t you see … if she dies … I could not live with myself?’

‘She will not die,’ I answered brusquely. ‘And we all, sometime or other, have to learn that we are less than we think ourselves.’

He looked at me for a moment almost with wonder, almost as if he had never seen me before.

‘How hard you can be,’ he said slowly. ‘How hard you have become!’

He moved away from me up the dark corridor lit by little pools of yellow light where the lamps hung. I think he intended to come back to me, looking for more sympathy or understanding, support perhaps most of all. But I was unwilling to give it. I watched him for a moment, his comely head bowed, his hands clenched by his side, then turned and went in to Emily again.

Sitting in the hot, dim room by Emily’s bed, I wondered what my Aunt Hewitt would have said to the way in which her first grandchild was entering the world, unwanted by its mother and with only the help of a native woman to usher it into life. But Mount Bellew was too far away, too unreal; and, hard as I tried to conjure up a memory of my aunt’s face and tone of voice, to remember her views on propriety and expediency, I could confront myself with nothing more than a vague recollection of warmth and kindness. Perhaps, after all, she would have understood; would have done the same as I was doing on behalf of her daughter. I had to hope so. Here, in this foreign room that smelt of limewash and the coconut oil the
ayahs
used on their hair and the betel-nut they were fond of chewing, it was easy to believe that I had no alternative.

Somewhere, far away, a pariah dog yelped shrilly, and within the room a captive cicada iterated its maddening click from a cranny in the woodwork.

Oliver was so long returning with Moti that I began to wonder whether he had been unable to persuade her to come. When I realized we might still be left without help, I prayed for her presence, forgetting, not caring for her position in his household; all I prayed was that the woman forget her dislike of me sufficiently to be of assistance to my cousin. Why had she disliked me in the first place, I who had never set eyes on her before? And what was it that Oliver had said when I had told him of her dislike? Something like ‘She has no reason to dislike Emily,’ which implied that she did have a reason to dislike me, despite the fact that our first encounter, on that afternoon when Yasmina had led me to the old tower, had also been our last.

Of course, I suppose I understood him immediately, but women being as they are, I had decided to withhold recognition of my own understanding until I was able to analyse it, and, as it were, throw up a guard. Oliver had implied, though now I was inclined to think it too delicate a term, that his mistress was jealous of me. There could be no other interpretation, knowing what I knew. So then, having dragged the matter into the light and dissected it as I sponged poor Emily’s head, I became angry. I raged at Oliver Erskine, at his mistress, at his unwarrantable conceit; but chiefly at his unpardonable breach of all decency in bracketing the two of us (however nebulously) together.

But below the sound and fury and all the stinging eloquence of my dumb anger, I was conscious of a strange small singing in my heart whose meaning I could not decipher and whose origin I would not trace. Perhaps, left to myself then, I might have reached the source of that secret, uninvited joy but, even as I first felt it, the door opened and Moti entered quickly in a swirl of satin and a scent of musk, so inappropriate in that dark and pain-filled room.

The
ayahs
greeted her with twitters of relief. She threw me one brief look, discarded her veil of gauze, and set to work.

It was a strange night we spent, a night that seemed at times to have no ending. I soon realized that there was nothing I could do of practical assistance but, being reluctant to leave Emily alone among strangers, I withdrew only as far as a chair in the corner of the room where she could see me plainly, and I could watch the three dark women at their work: the
ayahs
attentive and obedient to every gesture of Moti’s, and Moti authoritative and decided, working and waiting with a calm assurance which did much to make the hours endurable for me at least. But sometimes I cringed with my eyes closed and my hands clapped over my ears, and prayed and half cried for an end that would not come.

And then at last, and quite abruptly, it was over. Emily lay at last quiet on the wreckage of her bed in a stupor of exhaustion, and at her feet Moti crouched, drenched in perspiration, with a small pink fragment of humanity in her lap and a look of purest triumph on her face.

An hour later, unable to believe that I had ever been tired, ever been frightened and sickened by the sights and sounds of childbirth, I carried my little cousin downstairs to make the acquaintance of her father.

The brothers were in the library, Charles hunched on a chair and Oliver spread out comfortably on the long sofa that had held Ungud. The sun had been up some time, but lamps still burned, lending the room an air of desolation, augmented by the remains of a meal and empty glasses and decanters on a table, and many cigar butts scattered on the hearth. Charles, I saw at a glance, was very drunk indeed and fast asleep.

Oliver got to his feet leisurely as I entered and politely wished me ‘Good morning.’ For answer I held the baby out to him. He advanced cautiously and poked her with his forefinger. ‘Hmph! Devil of a lot of trouble you’ve caused, sir,’ was his greeting to his niece.

‘Miss,’ I corrected.

‘Oh, girl, is it? No way of telling when you see ’em like this. Is Emily all right?’

‘I think she will be. She’s very tired now. Exhausted.’

‘And—this—is quite strong?’

‘A very bonny child indeed,’ I assured him—that being a useful phrase I had heard on similar occasions.

‘Nothing wrong with it, then?’

‘Well, of course, she is rather small—please don’t call her “it”—but small babies are often more healthy than large ones, so we must hope for the best.’

‘Good! Well, young woman, your father’s no credit to you at the moment. Doubt whether he’d even know what you were. I think we had better let him sleep it off before making the introduction, Laura.’ And he looked aside at Charles’s heavily recumbent form.

I had not seen Charles drunk before. He was an unlovely sight, lying in a shaft of all-revealing morning sunlight, with his shirt unbuttoned, his boots off, his mouth hanging open and his moustache stained with claret and tobacco. My disgust must have shown on my face, and Oliver, calmly getting into his alpaca jacket, laughed.

‘Don’t look so damning,’ he said. ‘He’s only drunk. He has every reason for becoming so, and I encouraged him.’

‘I’m sure you did!’ I retorted, and was immediately sorry for the censorious note in my voice.

He buttoned his jacket and passed a hand over his hair.

‘Come now, Laura, let’s swear a truce. You have discovered all my iniquities and I have admitted all your excellences. Is that not enough to form the basis of a more—cordial—relationship?’

‘Oh, I’m too worn out to quarrel with you this morning.’ And, with the realization that the first exhilaration of holding the baby in my arms had worn off, I was glad to seat myself in Old Adam’s great leather-covered chair. ‘You are the most exasperating man. I never know where I am with you.’

‘Hmph! Because your ideas, regarding me anyway, are preconceived ones,’ he announced blandly. ‘And you are a trifle too fond of making judgements.’ He looked again at Charles, who was snoring horribly. ‘He’s your hero, I’m your villain. And regardless of any indications to the contrary, so we must remain. You want us both to stay neatly labelled, as you have labelled us, and either of us deviating an iota throws you into a panic or a temper. Poor Charles has slipped badly in your eyes this morning by looking so like a … a besotted tramp. Not your idea at all of what an English gentleman should look like, is he? So I suppose it will, take you days to work him back into his favoured niche in your affections. You’ll have to think up a fine set of apologies, explanations and excuses, instead of just admitting that your Beau Ideal is capable of becoming blind, stinking drunk. Like any other man.’