Writing on Skin Read online

  Hermione was used to the burden of adulation. As daughter of a Collector she had been surrounded by it all her life. She had been bombarded, at her Calcutta college, by people longing to pay for her, and in her adult years in India people had competed to be allowed to entertain her and her husband, to have them to stay, to open their garden parties, dog shows, new departmental stores. She had expected this to end after the British left India, and had even welcomed the idea of being cut down to size, treated like an ordinary person, one whose marital status was of no great importance, whose behaviour cast no ripples, who could mix with whomever she pleased without causing offence. She had imagined that because the country had at last managed to shake off its shackles, she would as well. She had felt optimistic, expecting in the new India to find the obstacles to happiness fall away. This had not happened, and the Indians who stepped into the positions left vacant by the departed British had scowled and scandalized, or held the same imprisoning expectations of her. She had still had to wear gloves and a hat to present prizes or snip ribbons.

  Hugh had been the general manager of a large tea company and even though, over the years, most of the other British retreated or retired as they found the new Indian circumstances treating them less favourably, Hugh had hung on because Hermione begged him to.

  She did not know Britain apart from a few hectic and emotional home leaves during which time she seemed to be either cooking food for large numbers of Hugh’s relations, or consoling homesick sons and stitching name tapes into their clothes. To her India was home, and she had never thought otherwise.

  Although her married life had appeared smooth and unchallenged to all who knew her, in her early thirties something had happened which should have been the catalyst for changing the whole of her life and Hugh’s. But a moment of cowardice, a failure to act, to speak out, had destroyed that chance.

  After Hermione had borne Hugh three blond sons, he had said, ‘Your mother was talking rot. If you had had Indian blood in you, would you have had all these blond children?’

  Then when her family was complete, and she was thirty-nine years old, she became pregnant again. Hugh was astonished. Hermione was alarmed. And Unity was born.

  Hermione remembered the way Hugh had leant over the cot to look, then reeled back a bit, as though shocked.

  ‘A darling little girl, just like you wanted,’ she had said, but her voice had shaken a little and she had felt sure he would guess.

  Hugh had stared at the dark-faced child in silence for quite a long time and when he straightened, his face was red.

  ‘Your little daughter,’ Hermione had offered tremblingly. And had trembled even more when, after a pause, he asked, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure?’ Her tone had been too high. She said, pretending to joke, pretending not to understand, ‘Yes, she’s definitely female! Doctors are expert at knowing that sort of thing.’

  But Hugh had not laughed. ‘That it’s the right baby?’ He had glanced in the direction of the Indian doctor then added, ‘She’s quite different to the others,’ not stating in which way in case the doctor was offended.

  Hermione had been filled with a combination of luscious relief and sharp despair, as if that had been the crucial moment, and it had passed them both by. Hugh had seen no reason to set her free, and she had not found the courage to free herself. Sometimes, even now, she would feel angry with Hugh, because he had been too arrogant for suspicion. She had lain awake all night after he had left the hospital, looking into the dark face of the new-born child and wondering why she, Hermione, who had so often been accused of seeking danger, had not dared risk losing everything she didn’t want – wealth, position, society’s respect, even the three big sons succeeding at their public school in England – for the sake of the single thing she did.

  She was snatched back into the present by the sudden loud call of a pigeon, its tone turned harsh, rook-like, as though it made an announcement.

  Hermione had known for ages really.

  She rose and went over to the still figure of her husband.

  Bending, she gently touched his cheek and was not surprised to find it cold.

  Slug became hysterical when he understood what it was Hermione was trying to tell him.

  He backed off trembling, eyes wide, knees visibly shaking.

  ‘But I thought you would be good with death,’ said Hermione through numb lips.

  She was hardly able to make out the shivering youth’s muttered words at first. ‘It’s different if you do it yourself.’

  After Slug had scooted off so fast that one might have thought Hugh’s newly released ghost was at his heels, Hermione sank down on to the grass, began to shiver in earnest, and tried to determine at which moment exactly the hat brim had ceased to quiver and Hugh had stopped growing old.

  Chapter Three

  On the day of Hugh’s funeral, Unity phoned from India saying she would not after all be able to come. She and her African husband were both doctors, and had to go rushing off to Bengal, with their two daughters, because there had been a cyclone there and medical help was desperately needed.

  Unity was thirty-one, too old for such wild and feckless do-gooding thought Hermione, bitter because she was feeling disappointed and wishing her daughter was there. But Unity and her husband Eshak had always been like this. They never had any money, they never settled anywhere, they seemed to have offered themselves as curers of the world’s problems. But Ruth and Tammy, their children, had turned out, in spite of the irregularity of their lives and the lack of conventional education, to be sensible.

  Hermione’s three sons did come to the funeral. Edward, the eldest, was a thin, nervous man with a slight twitch in his right eye. That he was the shortest of the three sons was a source of pain, even bitterness, to Edward and made it hard for him to relate comfortably with his younger larger brothers.

  As he got ready for his father’s funeral his daughter, Dinah, seven years old, asked, ‘Why did Granpa die, Daddy?’

  Edward reached out to touch the child, but at the last minute flinched away. With something clawing him inside he sank down on to the bed and, shirt half buttoned, told her cautiously, ‘Everybody dies when they get old.’

  As though unable to bear the weight of this, like something lazy getting out from under a burden, the child asked, ‘What’s that on your arms, Daddy?’

  Panic fumbled Edward’s fingers as he tried to close cuff buttons and hide the marks the needles had made on him.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said sharply, wanting to keep her from further questions.

  ‘I did see something. Like writing. You’ve got writing there!’ Dinah persisted.

  ‘People don’t have writing on them. Only books do,’ said Edward trying to subdue the shivering that rose inside him.

  ‘There’s lots written on Granma’s face,’ said Dinah triumphantly. ‘And Granma said on the phone that she’s got a new gardener who’s got “Never grow old” written on his head. So you see everybody’s got something written on them. Mummy wrote on me for instance.’ She stuck out grubby knees on which were printed in felt tip the words, ‘Mummy loves Dinah’.

  She begged, ‘Please show me what’s written on your arms, Daddy.’

  Trying to make a joke of it, unable to meet her gaze in case he saw himself reflected there, he said, ‘I’ve got “Old already” written on me.’

  She looked shocked. The colour faded from her face. ‘But you said old people die.’

  ‘Perhaps it says, “Dinah’s daddy is old, but not old enough to be dead,”’ Edward tried to calm.

  She reached to pluck his sleeve. ‘Perhaps it says “Daddy loves Dinah”,’ but he snatched his arm away violently and Dinah, suddenly afraid, cringed from him.

  ‘Oh, God, why does it always have to be like this?’ Edward asked his aching soul and said to the child, ‘I’m sorry, darling. Forgive crosspatch Daddy.’

  But Dinah knew her father’s sudden splintery fury and hung back, her cheeks pale.


  When Hugh’s hearse arrived at the grounds of the house, Slug shrank away from the sight of the coffin as though he was Hugh’s murderer, making Edward whisper anxiously to Lalia, his wife, ‘That skinhead seems dreadfully guilty.’

  ‘Your mother says he’s a nice man. Good with plants. She hired him the day Hugh died,’ Lalia reassured him.

  ‘That’s all very well,’ protested Edward, ‘but he might have mates with scars on their faces, safety pins in their ear lobes, and clothes smelling of old goatskins, waiting to pounce on Mother now she’s alone.’ He had felt sure he’d seen suspicious glints of sun on metal from the bottom of the garden the day before, when he had gone to make arrangements for the funeral.

  But Lalia just laughed and said, ‘Trust you to find something new to worry about, darling.’

  After the funeral service a tea was served in the house that had once belonged to Hugh and Hermione, and that now, so oddly, was Hermione’s alone.

  As Edward drove along the drive with Lalia and Dinah the old hedge-cutter burst out of the bushes and waved them down. Edward stopped and opened the car window.

  The old man gestured with a battered thumb to where Slug was tremblingly directing the car-parking arrangements, and whispered hoarsely to Edward, ‘It was him that killed your pa. And he’ll do your ma in too if you don’t watch out. Him just needs a sniff of Uhu and she’s a gonner for certain. I warned ’er but she won’t listen.’

  Edward shuddered and whispered to Lalia, ‘You see. He thinks so too.’

  Lalia gave her husband’s arm a reassuring squeeze, and said softly, ‘He’s jealous, probably.’

  Edward gave Slug a doubtful glance before proceeding to the house, then he hugged his bruised arms together to protect his pessimistic needled messages, and tried to shake this additional worry from his mind. He had problems of his own, and could not face any more. Perhaps his brothers, Daniel and Rupert, could do something.

  Slug looked up as they passed and bestowed on Dinah a quick and nervous smile as though sensing an ally, then winced away from Edward’s scowl.

  ‘Slug’s nice,’ announced Dinah as they went into the house. ‘He wouldn’t do naughty things like glue up Granpa.’

  ‘Of course Slug didn’t kill your father! How absurd. I’ll have to sack that old dotard,’ snapped Hermione to Edward, when she heard what the hedge-cutter had said. ‘Come on in, it’s cold.’

  As Hermione went ahead she thought how seldom Edward had come to this house and the idea flashed through her mind with a stab of pain that it was Hugh that had made Edward afraid, and that now his father was gone Edward might find the courage. But when she looked back she saw, with sinking heart, the little nerve hopping like a twitch in the corner of her son’s eyes, and knew that his father’s death had not freed Edward after all.

  Rupert, long limbed, athletic, a year younger than Edward, had flown in from the Gulf state of Waswar. He had lived here for the past three years with his wife Anne and his daughter Mary. David, his son, had gone out to Waswar only reluctantly, for holidays.

  ‘You must come and stay with us while you make up your mind where you are going to live from now on,’ Rupert said. When Hermione shook her head he asked, ‘But what’ll you do, Mother?’

  Hermione, irritated, snapped, ‘Do? What more do you want? I’ve fed a hundred and fifty people. Salmon vols-au-vent, anchovy bridge rolls, devils on horseback …’

  Daniel, the youngest son, laughed and gave his mother a hug. ‘It’s OK, darling. We know. We’ve all put on at least half a stone …’

  Edward winced and put his hand against his hollow stomach in a gesture that his family knew. Something always ached inside Edward, begging for satisfaction.

  Lalia caught Hermione’s eye and tried to smile and reassure her, knowing she already had enough problems.

  ‘They’re humming your songs in Saudi Arabia,’ Rupert told Daniel.

  Daniel wrote musicals. His latest, Lonely Man, was in the process of becoming a hit.

  ‘The Saudis don’t like it. You’ll probably be banned which’ll be good for your reputation.’

  ‘Why don’t they?’ asked Daniel, who didn’t really care about his Saudi sales but knew Rupert would expect him to.

  ‘They say they find the scene where the girl tries to tempt the yogi offensive, but I think it is because of the Hindu theme myself.’

  Hermione, lean, shimmering in tawny chiffon, flowered and shapely, looked the way Hugh had liked to see her. Her waist circled by the heavy silver Mopla belt he had bought for her in Kerala, as usual she was not dressed the way other people expected, and she paced the rooms packed with people come to mourn her husband, ‘Smoked salmon, darling? Oh, you don’t take fish? Hugh would have known of course.’

  ‘You would have thought she could have worn something quieter,’ complained the elderly relations.

  ‘She should have refrained from jewellery,’ said the friends from India.

  ‘Have an asparagus pasty instead. Hugh always said you couldn’t go wrong with asparagus. Even Muslims eat asparagus. Even Hindus,’ urged Hermione.

  ‘What will you do, dear?’ asked the tenth sympathetic enquirer.

  ‘Buy myself a toyboy, perhaps,’ smiled Hermione.

  Hugh’s respectable cousin backed off, alarmed, twitching at her glasses as though they might shield her. ‘She always was outspoken but you would think she’d hold herself in check at such an occasion.’

  Hermione, hearing, felt satisfied.

  Slug and Gerald had both been persuaded to move among the guests pouring wine and offering food. The sight of the ancient aunts, ex-diplomats, geriatric tea planters and decrepit foresters backing off the clanking skinhead delighted Hermione and she felt relieved that circumstances had conspired to prevent her from sending him away. Anne, Hermione’s daughter-in-law from Waswar, tightly encased in figure-enhancing black, let out an audible shriek as Slug offered her a sandwich. But Lalia, taking a smoked-salmon roll, asked him ‘What made you like gardening?’

  Slug became shy like a three year old, hid his face against his shoulder and grunted out, ‘I grew a banana tree in my mum’s bathroom. After three years it got little bananas. They were bitter though.’

  Later Lalia told Hermione. ‘If he can get bananas to ripen in an English bathroom then he will be able to grow anything.’

  Hermione, brought up among bananas, preferring them to most of the dark and dripping bushes at present in her garden, felt calmed.

  ‘Shall I stay so that you won’t be alone tonight,’ asked Lalia. ‘Dinah would like that, wouldn’t you?’

  The child asked, ‘What’s the name of that big boy?’

  ‘David?’ Rupert and Anne’s sixteen-year-old son.

  ‘I love David,’ said Dinah.

  ‘I must get used to it, dear,’ Hermione told Lalia. She was silent for a while then said, ‘The priest, during his service, described a man I did not recognize. Even the friends and relations seemed to be talking about someone else who was not Hugh.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lalia.

  Hermione, perhaps because of so many years of deceit and treachery, was used to hiding her most important feelings, but Lalia always seemed to understand her.

  ‘I got the feeling,’ Hermione went on, ‘that Hugh had become a fictional character in whose creation I was expected to partake. I mean, he wasn’t “patient, gentle, forbearing” like they said. He was witty, fun, kind, strong, just, but not those other things. In fact he had a foul temper if he was kept waiting for a moment.’

  The episode, Hugh’s last, ended. Relations departed awkwardly, fearing that they had not seemed sufficiently bereft, embarrassed because they had not dared ask if Hugh had left them something in his will.

  Hermione stood at the front door seeing the mourners off, Slug at her side, telling her concerned family, ‘We will be all right! Quite all right!’

  Edward shivered. Next day he would remember the use of the word ‘We’ and worry. Today he h
ad grown cold and pale and was in a hurry to get home.

  Daniel, big, now red haired like his father, hugged Hermione and said, ‘I’ll come on Saturday and take you out in the sports car. It does a hundred and fifty.’ Then punching Slug playfully on the arm, ‘Now be sure you look after my mother!’

  ‘Oh my goodness, I won’t be able to sleep a wink for worrying unless you get rid of that awful yobbo,’ gushed Anne as she climbed into the vast limousine Rupert had hired for his week in England. And as the car swished off down the drive, she commented, ‘Hermione’s kept her figure which is more than you can say for Lalia. She looks like a saucepan of porridge boiling over. And her hair!’

  ‘I expect life without servants is not the same,’ said Rupert abstractedly, already anticipating the squash tournament he was due to compete in the following day.

  Hermione had gone in before they were out of sight.

  ‘You’d think she’d have waited. You can stop waving, children. Granma’s gone,’ sniffed Anne.

  Hermione helped Gerald and Slug gather up the last of the plates, while the sound of the mourners’ cars retreated into the distance.

  A lot of food had been wasted. How dare people nibble and sip then cast away, thought Hermione, scraping aside the toothpicks of cheese and olives, the little choux buns so laboriously stuffed with lobster, the button mushrooms filled with mozzarella. Surely they had had upbringings in which they were told to eat it all up, clean your plate, remember the starving children of India. She had winced when her daughter, Unity had once said to her, ‘They only starved because of the British. People were dying of hunger during the famine and the British stepped over them to go and dine in the Grand Hotel.’

  ‘Throw it all on the compost heap,’ she told Slug.

  ‘Oh, but Hermione!’ protested Gerald.

  ‘Yes?’ Hermione gazed at him, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Rats,’ Gerald said. ‘It will bring the rats.’

  ‘What?’ teased Hermione. ‘Are you afraid of rats?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ Gerald said hastily. ‘But rats are rats as we all know.’