The Tea-Planter's Daughter Page 9

  Kuts raised his eyebrows. “But I’vejust explained, Ben, that there is nothing wrong with your wife.”

  “Ah,” said Ben, looking down at the doctor’s desk, and turning a pencil that lay on it as though it had been some kind of propeller; all his concentration on this twiddling object, as if he performed some urgent task with it. When he spoke it was in a brisk casual way, as though he merely made a suggestion in passing, “Well, you know, some kind of potion …”

  “Potion? I’m sorry. I don’t quite understand you.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Ben burst out, his face red. “Isn’t there such a thing as a medicine to make a woman more sexy? Don’t you docs deal in aphrodisiacs?”

  Kuts was so taken by surprise that he burst out laughing before he could stop himself.

  “Dear old chap, you are thinking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is no such medicine in real life you know.” His laughter was louder than normal, because of relief. Senior Managers, as he knew to his cost, could be unpredictable and violent people.

  “What shall I do?” asked Ben humbly.

  “Ben, I have been treating this girl for—” he glanced at Julia’s records — “twelve years. During this period members of her family have brought her to me with all sorts of extraordinary complaints. I do not remember, in all these twelve years, having to examine her for any ordinary complaint at all apart from one go of pinkeye. For instance once I was asked to look into her pupils because they thought she had gone colour blind.” Julia had begun to carry the ability to see purples and greens in the barks of trees to excessive limits. “I held up a black book,” Kuts told Ben. “I asked her what colour it was, and she told me that on the cover of this book danced thousands of nameless colours. I said that surely she must know what is black, and she said, ‘But there are such a lot of blacks!’ Once they brought her in because her hair made a noise,” said Kuts. “Have you ever heard of such a thing? You do not get advice on how to treat noisy hair in the medical textbooks!”

  But Ben moved restlessly in his chair, not listening, not interested in talking hair and such things. What he wanted to ask was difficult enough anyway, but his position as Senior Manager made it much worse. Kuts had relaxed, apparently feeling that he had done his duty as a doctor, that he had reassured the husband that his wife was well, and so there was nothing more for Ben to worry about. Kuts smiled, nodded to Ben to indicate tactfully that there was no more to be said, and that the Senior Manager was free to leave, when Ben, his face red, suddenly burst out, “I suppose you know I married her at her father’s request?”

  Kuts stirred uneasily. This was the unspoken knowledge of the district, but not something that was ever said aloud. Kuts did not know how to respond. He looked uneasily at Ben, but Ben was staring out of the window. He said, “I mean, I did not have any great expectations about the marriage, as you may imagine. I had formed an impression, from the parents as much as anyone, that Julia was slightly, well, you know, mentally retarded. I mean, no one’s fault, some ayah dropped her …”

  Kuts nodded, feeling on safer ground. “Yes! A nasty fall, so I hear. Of course it was before my days as CMO.”

  “Of course!” said Ben. “She is not, you know.”

  “Not?” Kuts shook his head, feeling he had suddenly lost track of the conversation.

  “She is of normal intelligence. But different …” Ben’s voice tailed away.

  “Ah, yes, different!” laughed Kuts. Feeling that a joke would bring the conversation down to a manageable level he repeated, “Oh, no one could call Julia Buxton the same! Julia Clockhouse, I mean!”

  “The thing is, Kuts,” said Ben, turning and looking at the doctor with a sort of desperate hope in his eyes, “that after we got married I was most pleasantly surprised. I mean, I had expected it to be, you know, just like uncle and niece, but for the sake of the career that sort of thing is worth enduring, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you say?”

  Kuts shrugged, could not imagine what was coming, and thought to himself that he had never been invited to marry a woman to advance his career. Certainly his parents had arranged for him to marry Bobo, and he had not met her before their wedding day, though he had seen her photo. But no one had expected anything more of the union than a happy marriage and acceptable children. But all the same this chap was the SM. A suitable response was required. “Oh, yes,” he said at last, “though I suppose it would depend on the career, and also on the woman being offered …”

  Ben sighed. “We had some marvellous times together, Kuts. I had never expected it! She was very young, yet she was most utterly a woman. We weren’t like uncle and niece at all.” He paused, and seemed lost in some reverie. Then he repeated, “Not at all.”

  “No,” said Kuts. The whole district had talked about it, about the change in Julia; about the way, in the first years of her marriage, a light that had gone out at about the time she was seven had seemed to shine again in her.

  “Bright little thing till she was seven,” the old bachelors would say in the club. “Then something went out! After that she was like a zombie for a lot of the time!” Marrying Ben Clockhouse seemed to switch the light on again.

  On Julia’s wedding day she wore a white veil. Her cheeks that had always been very pale suddenly became rosy, and her eyes became full of sparkle. For four years after her wedding day she had come into the club with Ben, and laughed at the jokes though no one actually remembered her telling one. Managers inspecting their estates had passed her riding her husband’s horse and gone home to tell their wives, “Julia Clockhouse was singing while she was riding!”

  People in the club noticed a change in Ben as well. The worried, slightly sullen manager became relaxed and friendly. He had had a reputation for being stingy and stiff until he married Julia. But after the wedding he had gone into the club and shouted, “Drinks for everyone on me! Bearer! Give all the Masters and Madams whatever they like and put it on my account!” And he had told Babuchi to bake gingerbread men for all the managers’ children in the club nursery. During the first four years the managers began to say, “Ben Clockhouse is a really nice fellow! I wonder why we thought so little of him before!” The wives would murmur, “Isn’t it amazing what marriage will do for a man!” and the husbands would say, “I could be as happy as that if I had been made Senior Manager!”

  The ladies watching from the club window had seen, during those first four years, Julia and Ben holding hands and running up the hill together. And had seen them coming down later, their arms full of wild flowers, and grass in their hair as though they had been rolling about on the ground.

  “Not very dignified behaviour for the first couple of the district!” Lorraine had snorted, but Doris had said, “Oh, I think it’s lovely. They’re in love! That’s all! It’s a young couple in love!”

  “The first four years of marriage to Julia were the most lovely thing of my life,” said Ben, echoing something of what Kuts was thinking. “And then she suddenly refused to allow me to make love to her!”

  Kuts let a small silence elapse and then he said, “You mean that until this time you were having sex in a perfectly normal manner?”

  “Of course that’s what I am saying!” Ben shouted rather rudely. “What the hell do you think I am saying? My God! This is so bloody embarrassing. Then two years ago she just closed her legs tight, and wouldn’t allow me to make love to her.”

  “Not at all?” asked Kuts. Two years, he thought! My God!

  “Not at all!” said Ben, and sat staring down at the floor, his shoulders hunched, obviously waiting for the doctor to do some magic or other.

  “Hm,” said Kuts. “This is very interesting.” He felt nervous. Out of his depth. “Was she having enjoyment with the lovemaking until this time?”

  “Oh! Yes … !” Ben shook his head, and sighed, obviously finding it hard to express himself. “Both of us, you understand, we were …” He shrugged as though not wishing to seem boastful and said, “Well, we were wonderful!”<
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  “And did something occur to suddenly give her a distaste?” Kuts asked boldly.

  “That is the crazy part,” said Ben. “It is because she loved me that she stopped. That’s what she said. She would make love with another man because it would not have the effect on her. But me …” He shrugged again.

  “Ah!” said Kuts, hoping that he seemed to appear to be getting somewhere. Then when Ben did not seem to be going to say any more he said, “Perhaps you would like to expand on that a little, old man … I mean Mr Clockhouse!”

  Ben shook his head. “I can’t because I don’t understand. She said that after making love her soul comes out. And that this is a bad thing to happen to any one. And that there is a risk that it might not go back in again. She says her soul comes out and mixes with the whole universe, so that she becomes a part of everything. And that she is evil because of this so I shouldn’t touch her!”

  “Ah,” said Kuts. He pressed his index finger to the side of his nose, while he tried to decide what to say next.

  “You see, in our Hindu way of thinking,” he told Ben at last, “it is considered by some that sudden release of stress may cause the mind to experience its oneness with the cosmos. Tantra religion, for instance, relies on certain sexual deviations for this end—”

  “For Heaven’s sake, Kuts! I’ve come to you for medical advice. Not for a lecture on Hinduism. That’s what I wanted you to examine her for. To see if there’s any medical reason why she won’t make love with me! We aren’t happy any more, Kuts! In fact I’m not certain how much more I can stand of this. Even for the sake of my career. Can you imagine what it’s like lying in bed beside a woman night after night? Yearning for her. Feeling pretty sure she’s yearning for you as well, and not being allowed to touch her?”

  Kuts, who sometimes had to abstain from Bobo for a night or two because Bobo had eaten too much and had got indigestion, sighed with sympathy.

  “I am reaching a stage,” Ben went on, “where her presence tortures me! I never thought that I would feel about anyone like I felt about Julia. Now I am beginning to hate her!” He got up. “I can see you are quite unable to do anything,” he said. “But anyway thanks for listening to me. It’s not a thing one can talk about to just anyone.”

  “No,” said Kuts, wishing that Ben Clockhouse had not talked to him about it either. Later Ben would be sure to regret his indiscretions. One could get the sack for knowing as much about the SM as Kuts did now.

  Ben went out of the office, his shoulders hunched, like a man who had tried everything, and now knows there is no hope at all.

  ★

  Either the pounding of the storm on the roof or Julia’s wildness had sent lime powderings trickling over the picture frames and furniture. Kali carefully wiped away the dust from the portrait of Ben Clockhouse and Babuchi the cook, that Gwen had painted, and was touched with nostalgia for those days when the responsibility for the wild Missie had not rested on the shoulders of the servants.

  Gwen Buxton had been painting a picture of her son-in-law to be, probing with hog hair and turpentine to discover what it was her daughter saw in this irritable, rather sad young man, when Babuchi emerged from his black kitchen to take the dinner order, wiping the sweat from his face with a dirty tea towel, smelling of raw onions and cooking sherry. Gwen, waving an imperious paintbrush, had cried, “Stay there!” to the cook. To Ben she had said, “Do you by any chance possess a solar topee? If so, I would like you to wear it for the portrait.”

  Ben, imagining her to be joking, did not answer.

  Gwen painted strongly and told him, “In my day Europeans thought that the Indian sun would stew their brains. No European would have sat under the sun for a moment without his topee on.” Turning to Babuchi she said, “We will have cape gooseberry pie,” and she gave a light touch of vandyke brown to a sensitive shadow.

  “No butter for pastry,” said Babuchi proudly, thrusting a twig into his ear cavity. He wiggled this around for a while, then said, “Cow somewhat dry, Madam.” Ear operation complete he tossed the waxed twig rather near Ben’s foot, making Ben shudder a little.

  “It has always been Babuchi’s pride to find impossibilities in my order,” Gwen said to Ben, and to Babuchi, “Use margarine then.” She brushed a magenta wash over the foreground, and told Babuchi, “Please try to keep still.”

  “But there is no—”

  “Get some!” said Gwen sharply. Babuchi gave a little jump and said, “Yes Madam,” knowing when to capitulate.

  “The problem with Babuchi is”, Gwen told Ben, painting rapidly as she spoke, “he hates cooking! He hasn’t always been a cook you know. He used to be my painter’s matey in the old days. Do you remember the good times we had together, Babuchi?”

  Babuchi grinned, and said, “I have mixed a good rose madder many time, for Madam!”

  It seemed to Ben then that Babuchi’s food did indeed always taste a little of oil paint, and had the heavy lacquered look of an old master.

  The finished picture hung in the dining room now. Gwen had handed it to her son-in-law with such a proud flourish that he had not had the heart to tell her he did not want it. The truth was he had been deeply upset by the picture in which he and the servant had been given equal prominence. In fact if anything Babuchi was slightly more to the foreground, and more attention seemed to have been paid to the gravy splashes and scorch marks on the cook’s apron than to the immaculate creases on Ben’s planter’s shorts, and the starched crispness of his shirt.

  Ben had accepted the picture courteously, but Gwen had heard him tell Julia that he planned to cut it in half and hang the two parts separately. He had thought to himself that he would put Babuchi’s half in the downstairs loo. Gwen had been horrified, and said, “The whole point is the marvellous contrast between my orderly well-groomed son-in-law to be, and my dishevelled servant.” Then she had tapped Ben on the back of his hand with her paintbrush handle and said, “It is a token of my esteem, this picture.”

  In later years when she came to stay she would gaze and gaze at the painting in the dining room, her eyes screwed up to make them a little out of focus, and say, “You know, I think I’ve caught something there that had been evading me for years.” And to Julia, “This feeling of achievement in art gives great joy. I do wish your father could have been here to share it. It feels odd having all my joys on my own.” Edward had died before seeing the completed picture of Ben Clockhouse and Babuchi the cook. Gwen pressed her hands gently to her eyes in a gesture of regret, and said, “I wonder if he is now having joys I can’t share. Perhaps at this very moment he is experiencing an unshared joy!”

  “Did Father have joy?” asked Julia, surprised.

  Chapter 11

  It was after three, but Ben had still not come. Kali approached Julia where she sat in the dark sitting room, sinking under a tide of gin and bitters, her hair dulled and her tongue stiffened with drink.

  “What do you want? Leave me alone. I didn’t say ‘come in’ when you knocked.” But gins had tired her. She had no strength for anger.

  Little crazed cracks had appeared in the ceilings, and lime filtered on to the floors. This often happened when Julia drank, as though things fidgeted, and she could no longer control them. The brass elephants that Kali had, that very morning, polished brightly and arranged in a line across the mantelpiece, lay in a tumbled heap at one end now, as though they had walked so far but had not had the courage to jump right off. There were feathers on the floors and sofa from the cushion Julia had ripped and thrown, and they quivered softly as though someone had done goose-plucking in the room that day.

  Kali stood before her and she stared back at him with dull and hostile eyes.

  “Missie darling,” said Kali, spreading out his arms a little as though offering himself to her, “look what an old man I am! I am too tired now to keep doing these cleanings all the time, yet if I do not do it Master will punish me …”

  Julia stared at him.

  “Se
e, Missie.” He pointed to the breaks in the walls, the tumbling ornaments, the torn fabrics, the fallen curtains.

  Julia gazed around the room, and on her face came an expression of surprise. Then she said, frowning, “I didn’t do that. It was the thing inside me.”

  Kali shook his head and said, “If the horse Markandaya went galloping through Master’s house breaking the things you would pull on the reins. You can also control this other creature. I know that you can because I have known and loved you since you were a small baby. I know many things about you, Missie Baba, like that the thing inside you is not a bad thing, although the people say it is.”

  Suddenly tears began to flow down Julia’s face, and Kali was reminded of when she was four, cut her knee, and cried, “Oh Kali, take the hurt away.”

  “There, there, Missie,” Kali had murmured, dabbing Dettol, “Kali will give you sugar stick to take the hurt away.”

  Now she said those words again.

  “Oh Kali, take the hurt away,” she whispered into the gin-and-bitter-smelling dark.

  Quietly Kali took away the bottle and the glass. “She has stopped drinking. She is sorry,” said Kali.

  “Ah,” sighed the kitchen servants, and Babuchi gave Kali a glass of cooking sherry from which Babuchi normally permitted no one but himself to drink.

  Kali took a deep draught from the life-giving bottle, screwed its top back on again and wiped his moustache on the tea towel.

  The cook’s young matey had, perhaps, been the most relieved of all to understand that the problem of the mistress had been solved. Although he was a tribal, and accustomed to devils and such matters, they nonetheless frightened him, and he had heard some strange tales of the goings on in this very bungalow the time the Missie had got very upset.

  Babuchi told him, “These Europeans are most keen on birthdays, as you will discover after working for them for some time, and get most upset on these birthday occasions.”