Sheltering Rain (32 page)

“I'm thirty-bloody-five years old,” she said out loud, to the spiders, and the old cartons of weed killer. “How can they make me feel like this? How do they bloody do it? How do they make me feel like a child?” She paused, aware of how daft she sounded, and this made her more furious. “How come—how come I'm here two hours and I end up swearing my head off at a bloody wall?”

“Glad to be back, then?”

Kate spun around, blanching at the unheralded visitor. And then stood very still, her mouth hanging slightly open, like a half-hearted imbecile.

“T-Thom?” she said, haltingly.

“How are you doing?”

He took a step farther into the summerhouse, so that his face was visible under the bald, electric light. He was clutching two fertilizer bags under one arm, and held an old crate in the other hand.

“I didn't mean to give you a fright,” he said, his eyes not leaving her. “I was in the stores shed and saw the light. Thought I might have left it on.”

His face had broadened. Back when she had lived here, it had always been narrow, gaunt almost. But then he had been in training for his jockey's license, and preoccupied with keeping his weight down. Now, his shoulders were wide, and under his thick jumper his body looked sturdy, solid. It was a man's body. But then when they had last met, he had really been a boy.

“You—you look well,” she said.

“You look grand yourself.” He smiled, a slow, amused smile. “You don't
sound
quite as sweet as you used to.”

Kate flushed, her hand lifting unconsciously to her unflattering glasses. “Oh, God. I'm sorry. It's—well, you know what my family is like. They don't exactly bring out the best in me.”

He nodded. He was still gazing at her. Kate felt the pink of her cheeks slowly spreading to her neck.

“God,” she said. Then, “I—I really didn't expect to see you.”

He just stood there.

“I didn't think you worked here anymore.”

“I didn't. Came back a few years ago.”

“Where were you?” She paused. “I mean, I know you went to England after I did. I just wasn't sure what you did.”

“Went to Lambourn. Worked at a racing yard for a while. Moved to another one in Newmarket. Screwed up, and decided to come home.”

“Did you become a jockey? I'm sorry, I never read the racing papers, so I never knew.”

“I did for a while. Not a great one, to be honest. Had an accident, so I ended up working in the yard.”

It was then, as he slightly lifted his arm, that she saw his hand. She flinched, as she suddenly realized that its lack of animation had nothing to do with Thom's own stillness. He watched her eyes meet it, and looked down, the faintest hint of discomfort making him shift on his feet. Kate realized she had prompted this, and felt ashamed.

There was a long silence.

“What happened?”

He looked up at her, more comfortable with her directness.

“Got tangled up with a horse in a starting gate. By the time they got me out it wasn't worth saving.” He lifted it, as if examining it himself. “It's all right. Doesn't bother me anymore. I get along okay.”

Kate didn't know what to say. She felt suddenly overwhelmed by grief that Thom, Thom of all people, with his energy and easy grace, his joyous physical ability, should be crippled.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Don't be.” His voice had hardened. He evidently didn't want her sympathy.

They stood in silence for a few moments, Kate glancing down at her feet, Thom still gazing at her. When she finally looked back at him again, he looked embarrassed, as if caught doing something he shouldn't have been.

“I'd better be off,” he said, eventually. “Got to finish the horses.”

“Yes.” She found she had removed her glasses, and was fiddling with them, in one hand.

“I'll see you around.”

“Yes. I—I'll probably be here a few days at least.”

“If the family don't drive you nuts, eh?”

She laughed, a short, humorless laugh.

He turned to leave, ducking slightly as he walked through the door frame. “Your daughter, Sabine,” he said, turning suddenly to face her. “She's great. Really. You did a grand job.”

Kate felt her face break into a wide smile, probably the first since she had arrived there.

“Thanks,” she said. “Thanks a lot.”

And then he was gone, a pale figure disappearing into the darkness.

I
t is never easy to return to the place where one grew up. Especially when one's mother is apparently uncomfortable with the mere fact that one had grown up. But then Joy, who expected little in life to be straightforward, had never anticipated a reunion between her and her mother to be either warm or easy.

For one thing, it had been six years since Joy had last been in Hong Kong; six years in which she had followed Edward around the world on his various postings, six years during which she had become, she was sure, if not a different person, then surely one whose confidence and expectations would have eclipsed those of the old Joy by far; six years during which her father had died, and her mother had steadily become more closed off and bitter about her life still remaining.

Joy had heard about her father's heart attack by telegram, while they had been staying in naval quarters in Portsmouth. She had grieved silently, from under a weight of guilt that she had not been there when he died, and a suspicion, that had she allowed herself, she might have wished her mother to have been the one to go first. “Oh, well, I suppose she's got what she wants,” she had said, to Edward, so that he raised his eyebrows at her sharp tone. “She can go off and marry someone else now. Someone who meets requirements.”

But far from being released by his death, Alice had made the late Graham Leonard the renewed focus of her life, becoming, if it were possible, even crosser with him than she had while he was alive. “It's too late for me now,” she would write, in her increasingly scrawled dispatches, the unspoken lines of which suggested quietly that she wouldn't have been left in this mess had he had the decency to go earlier, before her waist had thickened, her skin had sagged, and gray had become the dominant color of her hair, rather than an apologetic hint of things to come. Before Duncan Alleyne, frightened off by her suddenly available state, turned his attention to the more youthful Penelope Standish, whose husband, while frequently absent, was very much alive. In those letters, she had also managed to suggest in a somewhat martyred tone that she both resented Joy's absence and chafed at any suggestion that Joy should come back to be with her. “You have your own life now,” was a particularly recurrent phrase, when Joy reluctantly offered the spare room in wherever she was posted at the time. It fell off the page in Alice's sarcastic tones. “You do not want to be burdened with an old woman.” (If Joy had used the words “old woman” five years previously, she mused, Alice's tongue would have whipped so sharply it could have torn paper.)

“Dear Mother,” she would write blandly in reply. “As I have told you, Edward and I would be delighted to have you stay with us at any time.” It was quite safe, she knew; Alice would never substitute her house in Robinson Road, with its parquet floors and good views (her husband's death may have been untimely, but it had been well insured) for what she believed were the cramped and “immoral” conditions where naval couples lived so close together. But in every letter, Joy made sure she dropped in at least one reference to either infestation, bad behavior among the servants, or screaming children next door, just as a kind of insurance.

Because Joy did not want to return to Hong Kong. In her six years as a naval wife, she felt she had left the old Joy, with her lack of freedom, her awkwardnesses, and her unhappinesses behind, and instead of feeling the pressure to be like someone else, had increasingly enjoyed the freedom to just be. Her desperate urge to discover a world outside had been sated by their frequent moves around the globe, from Hong Kong to Tilbury, on to Singapore, briefly to Bermuda, and finally to Portsmouth; Edward once remarked that his was the only naval wife he knew who greeted the reappearance of the packing cases with an eager smile, rather than a resigned sigh. But Joy, unencumbered by children (they had agreed that they would probably rather wait) or a desire to settle down, had relished every new place she had been sent; whether the gray, salty skies of southern England, or the baking sands of the tropics. It was all somewhere new; it all helped widen her view, like a camera lens offering suddenly panoramic vision, and it all lessened her fears of being hemmed in, restricted, tied to a more formal, rigid life.

Most important, it had all meant being with Edward, who, while becoming a less God-like figure in her presence, had been, in his affection and attention, so much more than she had ever expected that it had taken her more than three years to stop uttering her daily silent prayer of thanks. She was happy; she had tested out these words on herself numerous times, as if saying them could provide some kind of superstitious barrier to their disappearing. She liked the feeling that they were a team, two people working in tandem, unlike her parents' or many of the other marriages she had watched while growing up, bent and bowed under the weights of disappointment, obligation, and vanished dreams. Joy had not had to relinquish her dreams; she had only just begun to allow herself to have them.

However, she had to learn certain accommodations: how to run a household (and here, Joy had found a certain unforeseen sympathy with her mother when faced with the problems of “difficult” staff, cranky boiler systems, and the relentless, mind-numbing question of what to provide at mealtimes). Having always been a rather solitary person, someone who was perhaps happiest in her own company—and thus well able to cope with his lengthy absences—she had also had to get used to the fact that Edward was a man who needed a lot of attention; so much so that in the first years of their marriage she would have to fight feelings of claustrophobia when, on his return, he would frequently follow her around from room to room, like a dog begging for scraps. She also had to learn to be more sociable. Edward's position required him to entertain a lot; his new colleagues, his business associates, his opposite numbers on visiting ships. And it was Joy's job to organize the dinner parties, devise the menu, instruct the help, and ensure that he always had enough uniforms (whites for the days, “bumfreezer” short jackets and mess dress for the evenings) to look as he should.

She didn't mind; parties were somehow different as Edward's wife, free of the endless introductions to potential partners, the simmering undercurrent of matchmakers' wishes ill-met. She rarely embarrassed him these days, even when she ran out of things to say; he always said he'd rather have her company than theirs anyway. Sometimes the other men, with slightly fixed smiles, told him off for being too attentive to his own wife. It wasn't really the done thing, apparently, to show that much interest.

So she and Edward had developed a code. A rub of the nose if someone was being particularly boring, a repeated smoothing of the hair to denote pomposity, a pulling of the left ear if one was desperate to be rescued. And Edward always rescued her; arriving at her side with a drink, a joke, ready to steer off the offending party. There was another code; one to suggest a certain impatience to be on their own. That always made Joy blush. Edward was very keen for them to be on their own.

But it would be different in Hong Kong. She was sure of it. She would become Awkward Joy again, badgered by her mother, renowned as someone a little “difficult” in company, no great beauty. Good old Graham's daughter. (Wasn't it a shame? And him so young and all.) Lucky to have married at all. But an awful long time married with no children. (What would people think?)

They had arrived back in the colony on one of the wettest weeks on record, when the new, high-rise naval quarters on the Peak were permanently shrouded in gray mist, and the high humidity levels left Joy's hair springy and unmanageable and meant that she had to change her clothes at least three times a day, just to stay presentable. But the block was newly built, and Joy, overseeing the Chinese help as they brought her furniture into the spacious, third-floor apartment, had been thrilled to note that not only did it have a huge, light living room overlooking Aberdeen harbor, and a separate dining room, and no less than three bedrooms, but that it held one of the ultramodern dehumidifiers, which, although noisy, helped combat the ever-present threat of mold that existed through the rainy season.

Because fighting mold was a never-ceasing battle among the women of the colony, and they set about it with the same joyless determination with which their husbands had faced the Japanese. It wasn't out of choice; if one didn't install little electric heaters in one's wardrobe, or relentlessly wipe one's leather shoes, the closed, warm, dank confines of the apartments would ensure that two weeks later one's best alligator shoes were likely to have become green felt, and one's best clothes been newly lined with little filigree patterns of green. One's box of cigarettes (even if you didn't smoke, Joy had discovered, it was important to have a box to offer) had to be especially well looked after—there was nothing more embarrassing than watching a guest try to light a damp cigarette. And all the while, the smell hung in the air, musty and unpleasant, warning of invisible spores all around. Joy had set the dehumidifier going even before her belongings were all in, and she and the three Chinese boys stood, and nodded in approval, as with a low rumble, the machine visibly began to draw the moisture from the air.

They had been lucky to get the apartment, one of the other wives told her, as she advised Joy on the best way to lower a basket on a rope when the postman whistled, in order to pick up one's post (it was such a bore to walk all the way down); since the communists took over in China, there had been a huge influx of Chinese escaping into Hong Kong, causing the most frightful accommodation problems. And it all looked somehow more chaotic, and crowded, with the shanty towns springing up on the hills, and every inch of the harbor filled with boat people on their little sampans. Plus, the colony had become an even more important commercial center, and there were all sorts moving in, grabbing the best houses, and pushing up rents.