Writing on Skin Read online

  Writing on Skin

  Sara Banerji

  For Hazel, Patricia, Hilda and Jill.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter One

  To Hermione the call of pigeons sometimes sounded like the stomach rumblings of a hungry god.

  ‘Such fanciful thinking gets one nowhere,’ Hermione’s husband, Hugh, had said. ‘There are enough problems in the world without having to contend with celestial gluttony.’ But still the idea had persisted.

  Fifty years ago, while a pigeon cooed at the window, a yogi had told Hermione that the gods were nourished by the thoughts of men. In Hermione’s mind pigeons and gods had been connected ever since and half a century later the cooings of pigeons still sounded to her ears like holy murmurings.

  Now pigeons moaned, unconcerned, and the cedar tree gasped out the turpentiny smell of summer as Hermione strode across the lawn of her English garden and sank into the wicker chair next to Hugh. The chair creaked as she allowed it to take the weight of her body, making her say, in the middle of her other complaint, ‘We will have to buy new ones. These will be dangerous soon.’

  Probably, if she had been searchingly questioned, she would have had to admit that the groan of the chair had hidden the slight sound of her bones settling, for she did not like to admit even to herself that she had grown old without getting the one thing she wanted in life.

  She rose after a while, talking, shaking her skirt flat with the palms of her hands, and walked up and down in front of Hugh, pressing her feet down hard so that scuffs of dust puffed out from under her shoes. Her knuckles crackled as she bent her fingers backwards with agitation, and this time no grumble of weighted wicker masked the sound.

  ‘I hate the smell of Tagetes,’ mourned Hermione. ‘Gerald’s planted all the borders with it.’ She swung her body like a wounded cobra, seeking with the whole of her system to display her aggravation at the tawdry yellow of the French marigolds.

  On Gerald’s first day, four years earlier, Hermione had not at first realized he was the new gardener, but thought he had come to sell an insurance policy, or persuade Hugh of the virtues of Jesus, for he had been wearing a pin-striped suit. Hermione had expected him to put on something more suitable when he began gardening but he had not even removed his jacket, and his only preparation had been to draw a pair of orange rubber gloves on to hands that were as soft and white as a woman’s. Several times a day Gerald would take a comb and mirror from his breast pocket and, pursing up plump red lips, comb his hair. He had a small turned-up nose that for some reason, perhaps because he held his head slightly tilted backwards, made him look arrogant rather than cute, and his hair was so pale Hermione wondered if he dyed it.

  On that first day Hermione had offered to lend him more suitable clothes, and looking doubtfully at Gerald’s small frame had said, ‘Though I’m afraid even those of Edward, my eldest son, would be too big for you, and he’s the shortest of the three.’

  Gerald had refused the offer with a dismissive wave of the hand. ‘I can see no reason to lower my standards just because I am performing my horticultural duties. I cannot tolerate dishevelment.’

  Hermione winced. She became dishevelled very easily, and could not even snip a bunch of roses without ripping her skirt or dirtying her blouse. Gerald, however, turned out to be one of those people who, whatever they did, remained neat. His fair hair did not get tousled by the wind, his shoes still shone at five o’clock, and in spite of his unworkmanlike appearance he was undeniably a successful gardener. It might have been Gerald’s ties, tastefully moderate, as much as his horticultural skill, though, that had persuaded Hugh to employ him.

  ‘Can’t stand the modern gaudy rubbish young men have dangling from their throats these days,’ Hugh said. ‘Gerald wears clothes that earn him respect instead of ridicule, a sign that he is on his way up. Heading for great things, great gardens, great vistas. He can move on once we’ve shed some land and then we can make do with some silly fellow to keep the weeding under control.’

  Hugh’s gardening knowledge came from a book entitled, Gardening in India, by an English lady resident, 1924. ‘Alternating red salvia, blue lobelia, and white alyssum is not only tasteful but patriotic as well, and jolly orange Tagetes enhance any garden,’ gushed the lady resident. She added, ‘All plantings must be absolutely straight for curvy lines are quite out of place in a garden,’ so that anyone who had not visited India must have imagined the entire subcontinent to be striped with red, white, blue and orange like a pair of gaudy pyjamas.

  Gerald, who had had to suppress most of his artistic inclinations while working for Hugh, had asked him once, ‘Are there many moles in India?’

  ‘Moles! None that I know of!’ Hugh had snorted.

  Well of course not, for hideous Tagetes’ only virtue is moles’ distaste for them.

  ‘In the gardens where I come from,’ Hermione moaned now, squeezing her eyes to blot out the orange, ‘gardeners did as they were told.’

  ‘Come on, old girl,’ sighed Hugh. ‘You know the Indian ones didn’t always please you. They drove you dotty sometimes.’ Talking dislodged the brim of his sun hat and his chin emerged, red and glossy.

  ‘You’ll get burnt. You’re sure to because that hat’s too small,’ said Hermione.

  ‘Everything’s too small for you in this country,’ murmured Hugh.

  Hermione paused, silent for a few moments, considering this. Then she laughed, realizing truth. ‘How extraordinary, Hugh, to reach the age of seventy and still discover new things about oneself. I think I like largeness for largeness’ sake.’

  ‘That’s what you liked about me,’ he said. Everything about Hugh was huge.

  Hermione stood looking down on him, still able to be amazed, remembering the first time they had made love in India: the shock of his vastness; the sudden immersion in Hugh’s orange hair; the darkness blotted out by white body; the huge smells that came from him, aftershave, whisky sodas and John Players cigarettes. Under the uneven paddle and clatter of the overhead fan, Hugh’s belly that had not yet become lined with the sedentary luxury of directorship had come down on to Hermione almost conversationally, whoompsh, whoomsh, a singing and sometimes hopeful sound as air was thrust audibly from the pocket formed between their two stomachs. Afterwards, drenched in heats that even the most swift of punkas could not have alleviated, Hugh had asked, ‘Was it as wonderful for you as it was for me, my dear?’ Not even looking at her, he had been unaware that she had not answered. Burying her in his beard, he had shouted, the words vibrating into her neck, ‘We’re going to be the most wonderful couple in the world. You’ll see!’

  His words had come true. Perhaps not the whole world but the people of India at any rate had, after a year or two, heard of the beautiful couple: Hugh so huge, so broad and blazing, and Hermione so slender and dark. Because of their mutual social acceptability and Hugh’s swift rise up the career ladder, Hermione was forgiven her bouts of eccentricity.

  There had for instance been the episode at the Calcutta Club. Hermione had arrived for a dance wearing a dress she had designed herself, bare-shouldered sari silk held with elastic above the breasts. A drunken tea-planter had pulled out the elastic and poured his drink in.

  She went home, changed in
to one of Hugh’s suits, and returned to the party. The bearers had prevented her re-entering, telling her that she was improperly dressed. She had looked down at her black suit, shining shoes, black tie, and expressed surprise, ‘But I am not. It says dinner jackets and that’s what I’m wearing.’

  ‘That is for men. Ladies are not admitted in trousers,’ said the club secretary, starting to feel anguished.

  ‘How do you know which I am?’ asked Hermione. ‘Have you ever seen me naked?’ She was already fingering the buttons of Hugh’s jacket.

  ‘Oh dear, oh well, all right,’ muttered the secretary, red-faced, nervous.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ Hugh had asked.

  ‘No one puts whisky sodas into men’s clothes,’ she said.

  ‘None of the other wives behaves like you,’ mourned Hugh.

  There were many ways in which Hermione differed from the other wives. For instance, she did not burn in the sun. When she’d first married Hugh, they and their friends had lain basting, cultivating the health of brown eggs, sugar and bread. Rough red patches had appeared on the faces of the British ladies after ten years or so of this, a soreness which cracked under the slightest strain as though pale-faced Aryans might be about to emerge, snake-like. Tans betrayed the British ladies and, instead of health flushed cancer tumours through their bloodstreams. Hermione’s skin had been unaffected.

  ‘It is because I am part Indian that I am spared this delicate balancing act between getting brown and getting cancer,’ she explained to Hugh. It had been a complaint of her mother’s that somewhere in her father’s family was an Indian ancestor.

  ‘Your great-grandfather ran off with an Indian lady. They said she was a Brahmin, but they always do, don’t they?’ Hermione’s mother had whispered, sixty years ago, as she’d secured Hermione’s plait with satin ribbon. ‘You have Indian blood in you. A touch of the tar brush. People of our sort just didn’t do it, you see.’

  After Hermione had grown up and married Hugh, she began to exaggerate her Indian ancestry. On being introduced to some Indian officials or local raja she would say, ‘I wonder if we share a common great-grandfather.’

  Hugh felt that Hermione never quite got it right, that she aimed either too high or too low. ‘If your paternal grandmother was a Brahmin then it is unlikely that her family would be either rajas or Harijans.’ The latter was a reference to the motor-vehicles licensing officer who had been on the verge of impounding Hermione’s brand new imported Mercedes as she’d driven back from a bazaar, on the grounds that it was not roadworthy.

  ‘More dignified to pay the bribe than claim you were his cousin, surely,’ Hugh had observed. The officer had been obese and pock-marked, with paan-stained teeth and a surly manner. ‘But more expensive!’ Hermione had triumphed, doing her big laugh so that Hugh knew she had not even found the idea of kinship with the motor-vehicles licensing officer offensive. She was, he thought, like an adopted child who searches for its true parents in every adult.

  ‘It’s not the grandmother you want to claim as your relation, but the whole of India,’ he grumbled.

  The strength of his own position came, to some extent, from the fact that he was not Indian, had no connections, was not prone to Indian prides or weaknesses. ‘I wish you wouldn’t tell people all the time. It’s not even as though it was proved.’

  ‘My mother was certain,’ protested Hermione.

  ‘Your mother,’ sighed Hugh. That was the only thing he did not like about Hermione. His mother-in-law used to come and stay with them in Delhi in the early days, complaining about everything, and comparing the life style unfavourably to the one she was used to.

  ‘You should all wear solar topees,’ she would demand. ‘British people go mad under such a sun without one. Look at Larry.’ The uncle who had neglected his pith helmet had eventually taken to sprinkling Angostura Bitters on his airmail copy of The Times, then eating it, and in the end he’d had to be ‘flown home’, the local euphemism for going round the bend. Hermione’s father’s family had been in India for four generations. Her grandfather and great-grandfather had been quite high officials in the Indian government, and her father had been a Collector.

  Hermione supposed she must be the only person alive now who knew of her dark ancestry, for her father had died long ago and her mother had died recently at ninety-five, though her memory had died long before and for her last twenty years she had been unable to remember anything apart from the fact that Hermione’s other uncle, killed in a car accident in 1923, still owed her two shillings for petrol. Senility had turned the old lady malevolent, incontinent and maddeningly healthy. She had had rosy cheeks, fresh white hair, a pretty mouth, a wrinkled skin that was like crumpled velvet, and enough sense left to make the worst of everything: stomach wind was always the result of malicious poisoning, mislaid objects had been stolen by grandchildren, and bad news on the TV proved the absence of God.

  In the India years she had been constantly subject to headaches and body pains, fluttering heart and collapsing ankles. Once she put her mind behind her, she became strong and sturdy like one of the Indian carting oxen. It was as if thinking had been responsible for her many unwellnesses. Later she had no mind at all and had had to be guarded from such things as eating her dinner three times over.

  Hermione, in chilly moments of being unable to prevent the matter pervading her consciousness, felt a stab of fear when she herself forgot the name of some close friend or confused the parents of one of her grandchildren. She understood that senility was hereditary and she had panicked badly over the unfortunate episode of the muddled letters.

  Lalia, her son Edward’s second wife, had got the one asking the bank manager, pathetically, for an overdraft. ‘My husband and I are both pensioners, used to the warm climate of India, and finding it hard to keep our health here …’ While the bank manager got the one to Lalia in which Hermione outlined her idea for thwarting Hugh’s plan for selling two-thirds of the garden and of planting a profitable woodland instead.

  ‘I can’t ask Hugh for the money for the 200 mature trees I require, dear,’ read the bank manager, ‘because at the moment he is determined to sell the land for a housing estate. Copying his friend, Bunty. (You know, that silly old chap Lord Lewis, who lives in the other big house in the village, and who has been in competition with Hugh ever since they were at school together.) So I’ve written to the bank giving the usual pathetic excuse of which you will not approve because you hate whining. I am not really telling a lie because once the trees are grown we can use them for firewood. When they come I rely on you for inspiration, darling …’

  Senility genes may, or may not, be hereditary. At first it seemed as though Hermione’s Indian ones were not. Her sons, now grown up, had been fair children, so that she would say to friends who came to look, ‘I can hardly think of them as mine.’

  ‘You shouldn’t talk like that. People will hear and think you don’t love them,’ her mother had said before the days of her senility.

  Hugh had been relieved his children were blonds, imagining whispered insinuations which might be damaging to his position in the light of his wife’s constant claims of kinship with India. There had been a little scandal in Hermione’s early years, which had taken a long time to live down. To this day there were some very elderly Indian officials who, in the back of their confused minds, remembered something of it.

  Hugh snored under the hat, heavy buttocks thrust back into his seat, legs pushed out on to the bit of lawn where once he had put up cricket stumps for his grandsons. Their lawn in India had been of a different texture, thin with the sandy red soil showing through like skin through the sparse hair of a buffalo. The malis used to scoop handfuls of water from a bucket and sprinkle it on with their fingers every evening, and then go over it again with bamboo canes, whipping the beads of moisture to the ground so that the sahib would not wet the cuffs of his trousers when he walked in the evening cool.

  But Hugh had chosen to give up such service
s for the rich green turf of England that he himself might have to mow. When his career had ended he had written to Bunty in England and Bunty had found a property for him. ‘A large Victorian house (rather battered) with extensive land and a lake. Bargain price, the market is down …’ Bunty’s letter had declared. ‘You can make a killing, old boy. I’ll get you on to the council to ensure no trouble with planning. I have just sold my fourth dead end and am celebrating by buying a four-hundred-year-old Adonis. Starkers, old boy. You’ll see it when you come. Only got a small chip off the balls.’

  ‘He must have been a disgusting little boy,’ Hermione had said, bitter because of the pain of leaving India that had started smouldering in her.

  ‘He was very pretty,’ murmured Hugh ambiguously. ‘Very very pretty.’

  ‘I can’t see why we need to go. Why don’t we just buy a nice house in Delhi? Or Kulu valley?’ Beautiful high pure-aired orchards of red apples and soft yellow pears.

  ‘Everybody goes back,’ Hugh had said firmly. ‘Who ever heard of expats settling here?’

  ‘Often!’

  She recognized this sharp pain, for sometimes it used to stab her when she hugged her pale children, when she pressed her face against their fair heads, when she looked into their blue eyes and failed to see that which she longed for.

  ‘Who?’ demanded Hugh.

  ‘Mavis Brookes.’ A pretty blonde who, shortly after the rather mysterious death of her husband, married her driver and now lived in an odd ‘no-class’ land, poised between the clubbable who could not meet her because of her new husband, and the servants with whom she was unable to socialize because she was a memsahib.

  ‘Dear Mavis,’ was all Hugh had said, in that sort of voice. Then after a compassionate pause, ‘I wonder how she fills her time.’

  ‘Fucking!’ said Hermione cheerfully. ‘I mean isn’t that what she married him for?’

  ‘Oh, Hermione!’ It was this outrageous side of his wife’s nature that used to worry Hugh in India. She was reckless, and you had to be especially careful in India where men lowered their eyes and felt shame when they mentioned their pregnant wives because people then knew they had done ‘it’. During the India years he often felt afraid that Hermione would do something to make him look ludicrous or show him up for something that even he did not yet know he was, for he realized he had never really understood Hermione. He had felt from the start that there were things about her he did not know, aspects of her nature that were hidden from him. There had always been something apart about her so that sometimes during their long marriage he had wondered if it was someone else, and not him, on whom she kept her true attention. When they made love Hugh had to stifle a fanciful notion that Hermione was pretending pleasure, and when, as he often did, keeping his voice optimistic and confident, he asked her if she loved him he would only briefly feel reassured by her enthusiastic, ‘Oh my darling, adore you!’ Quite soon after a pain of doubt would scald and he would find himself longing to ask her again, so that he could reanalyse every nuance of her tone. He had arrived in Britain like one reaching sanctuary because the dark shadow whose existence he only suspected would not, he thought, be able to reach her here.