Zemindar (14 page)

‘What did you say? Me? I’m going to have a baby?’

‘That’s my guess anyway. The symptoms are all there. And why not? Fine young girl like you, I’m surprised you haven’t started before this.’

Emily let this sink in, her face stiff with anguish, as her mind recalled all the giggling, half-shamed gossip of the servant girls at Mount Bellew, and possibly of her own young friends.

‘It’s not true,’ she said at last in a whisper. ‘It can’t be! I won’t! I don’t want any baby. Not now and not ever! Oh, Mrs Barry, you are joking, aren’t you? Wha … how can I have a baby … here? It’s nonsense. It must be nonsense.’

There was no mistaking the complete unbelief in that wide, shocked gaze.

Mrs Barry stopped smiling and stroked Emily’s hand soothingly. ‘Well now, there’s no sense in taking on about it, m’dear. If it’s to be, it’s to be, and you will have to make the best of it. Maybe I am wrong after all, and the doctor will soon put us right. Anyway, you’ll feel much better shortly, and then you won’t mind so much if it is a baby.’

She left the room to ask Connie to send in some tea, and I sat down on the bed and tried to find something to say. Emily was now in tears.

‘Oh, Laura! Please say it’s not true. Say it can’t be a baby. I don’t want a baby, Laura. I tell you I don’t want it—I won’t have it!’ she wailed, hiding her face in the pillow.

‘Well, maybe it isn’t,’ I tried to comfort her. ‘We can’t be sure. But it will be all right if it is, Emmie, almost all women have babies—even out here—and this sickness of yours will pass quite soon just as Mrs Barry says.’

‘But it’s not that, Laura. You just don’t understand. I don’t know how it …’ But the rest of the sentence was drowned in sobs. I patted her shoulder and tried not to realize that the baby would be Charles’s child too.

‘I won’t, I won’t! Oh, it’s all too horrible! Laura, pray that it’s something else. I think I would sooner have the cholera!’ She was pounding the pillow with her clenched fist, and the sobs gave place to a paroxysm of weeping. I feared hysteria, so I took her by the shoulders and shook her.

‘Emmie! Emmie, control yourself!’ I said harshly. ‘This is no way for you to behave.’

‘Oh, yes, it is!’ she answered shrilly. ‘If … if you knew what I know now, and what I have … the horrid things I’ve had to do … Oh, Laura, I hate him for it! It’s all Charles’s fault, isn’t it? If he hadn’t made me behave so … so disgustingly—if he had just left me alone! But he never would, even though he said once he’d never touch me again and I thought he meant it. But it’s horrid and I hate night time because of it. And now it’s made me have a baby and I hate the thought of that too, and of Charles and of everything. Laura, Laura, how could he? He knew I … I wasn’t like that … that I never wanted to … to, you know? Oh, Laura!’

She heaved herself up and threw herself into my arms, burying her face in my neck as she had been used to when she was a little girl and her brothers’ teasing had been too much for her.

‘Oh Emmie, Emmie!’ was all I could say as she sobbed, her face damp against my neck.

‘But Emmie, you love Charles,’ I ventured after a time. ‘You married him. You must not think like that.’

‘No, it isn’t true. Not any more. I thought I loved him, Laura, but then I didn’t know about … about what he would want to do to me. Nobody ever told me about that! I’ve tried to be brave and bear my trouble on my own, but he knows I don’t love him—not as he wants me to. And then you see, he doesn’t love me either. Not really! He never seems to notice me really, you know. He doesn’t care about what I think, or what I want, or what I am inside—you know what I mean? It’s not me that is important to him, only that I
am
his. That’s what makes it all so … so disgusting. That’s what makes me hate him, that he can go on with … it, and all the time it might just as well be someone else. If he would only make me feel, well—special!’

She detached herself from me and buried her face again in the pillows.

She would be just nineteen when she became a mother, but my mother and hers had both been younger. Had they, I wondered, felt as she did? Had they, too, rebelled at the responsibilities consequent upon marriage, the duties of that state? Or was it true that Emily no longer loved her husband, had perhaps never loved him? Was it not only too probable that she had mistaken a girlish infatuation, the flattery of being sought by a personable young man, for love?

I turned my mind away from such dangerous channels, knowing in my inmost heart that I found some twisted satisfaction in realizing that she had never been capable of giving Charles what I would so willingly have given him myself. To assuage my guilt, I stroked the tangled masses of her golden hair, murmuring endearments, trying to encourage her to pull herself together.

I did not hear Connie enter the room and was startled when she spoke.

‘Poor Emily,’ she sighed. ‘Poor Emily, I guessed it was a baby, but nothing I say signifies, you know, so I kept it to myself. Only I was always ill too, so I know, and just like you, just in the mornings. Poor Emily.’

She stood at the foot of the bed, a tall wraith-like figure, her ginger locks straggling round her face, and the hem of her dress dipping unevenly where the hoops beneath the skirt were broken or bent.

‘I hope it won’t die, poor little thing. Mine would die so, you know, though I tried so hard to keep them.’ She dabbed her eyes with a ball of grey handkerchief, and hiccoughed politely behind her hand.

‘Tell you what, though,’ she went on. ‘You should get Charles to take you home right away. You’ve money enough, you see; you don’t have to go on and on waiting until you have saved up the passage money. And then perhaps it won’t die. If I had been in England, I would have had six children—not only Johnny—four boys and two girls.’

She hiccoughed again, while Emily and I watched in silence as she swayed gently on her feet, twisting her handkerchief in her fingers. Seeing us watching her, she put out a hand to the footboard of the bed to steady herself, then continued unperturbed: ‘It’s the climate, y’know, that kills them. That and the dysentery. And they put them in such tiny little coffins, white ones, with silk inside—but they cost almost as much as the big ones, Wally says. Wally says it’s more economical for them to die grown up, but I expect he was joking. He has to think about money such a lot, poor fellow, and still we never have any. My medicine too, I suppose, but I can’t do without it, though Wally says when I get to England I will have to learn to do without it because there’ll be no one to buy it for me, and it’s not delicate for ladies to buy it for themselves.’ She frowned to herself, looking suspiciously from my face to Emily’s.

‘Do you never buy it?’ she asked peremptorily.

Belatedly, I was beginning to understand why our hostess had to spend so much of her time in her own room, but Emily, who had never seen an inebriated woman before (neither had I if it came to that), was watching her aghast. ‘What does she mean?’ she whispered to me, her recent trouble for the moment forgotten.

‘Hush,’ I whispered back, for Mrs Avery was waiting for a reply.

‘Have you really never bought it then?’ she asked again angrily.

‘Bought what, Connie?’ I asked, standing up.

‘Why, gin, of course. That’s my medicine, you know. Gin with quinine in it. The doctor made me take it years ago—for the ague—and it’s done wonders for me. I … I sometimes think I would really die if I didn’t have it, only not with the quinine of course. I don’t need that any more because I don’t often get the ague now, but the gin is very strengthening. And when you’ve been out here as long as I have, you need something to strengthen you and make you forget the bad things. Of course sometimes … sometimes it makes me confused, and then Wally is apt to get angry and shout at me in front of the
ayah.
And that makes me cry always, so when he goes away I have to take a little glass to get my strength back. But he says I won’t be able to have it in England because he won’t be there to buy it for me.’

Suddenly she slumped down on the bed, her feet planted wide apart on the frayed drugget, and regarded her broken and unpolished slippers with great concentration. I believe she had quite forgotten us.

‘You won’t need it in England,’ I suggested hesitantly. ‘You’ll be happy in England, and Johnny will grow strong and well and so will you.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed politely. ‘Perhaps. And then, you see, I’ll have servants in England, proper ones in aprons and caps, and I haven’t told Wally this—oh! You mustn’t tell him either, promise?’ I promised hurriedly, wanting to induce her to leave the room, ‘But, you see, if I have proper servants, I can always make them buy it. That would be quite unex … unex … all right, and no one could object. If I have any money, of course,’ she added in sudden dejection.

‘Of course you’ll have some money,’ I said mendaciously. ‘Wally will make sure of that when he sees how much you need your medicine.’

‘I don’t know.’ She sighed deeply. ‘There are so many other things that Wally has to buy. And then soon there will be Johnny’s schooling and Wally says he doesn’t know how he is going to manage that along with everything else. It’s very hard, isn’t it? I wish I were like Emily and didn’t have to think so much of money; it must be nice to …’ Her mind wandered away and she lapsed into silence, again examining her slippers.

This then was the explanation of many things that had puzzled me in the Avery household: from the carelessness in domestic arrangements, the impudence of the servants, to the aura of peppermint that accompanied all Connie’s movements. It explained, too, the relief and frequency with which Wallace left his home, and the shabbiness not only of the furnishings but of Connie’s attire as well.

I went to her, and put my hand on her shoulder. ‘Connie, I think Emily would like to sleep a little now. Shall we leave her?’

She looked up, blinking her pale eyes in puzzlement, then got to her feet and stalked out of the room without a word.

Emily pulled the coverlet up to her and turned her face away from me. Then she put out her hand and reached for mine, without looking at me.

‘I’m sorry, Laura.’ Her voice was muffled and I could tell that she was still close to tears. ‘I meant what I said, you know. It’s not only because I’m sick. I suppose I am very wicked to feel as I do, but it’s no use pretending. Please help me, Laura, even if you don’t understand. Please help me!’

‘Of course I will.’ I pressed the small hand in mine. ‘Of course I will, Emmie. That’s what I’m here for after all, aren’t I? We’ll see it through together, Emmie, and in the end everything will work out more happily. You’ll see.’

She shook her head but said nothing, and after a moment I went out and left her alone.

During the next few days I became aware of a gradual shifting in the bias of my personal relationships, first with Emily and Charles, and then, to a lesser extent, with Wallace and Connie Avery. In recognizing the change that was taking place, and endeavouring to appreciate the reasons, I felt a development in my own struggle towards maturity.

Regarding Emily, I felt guilt as well as a renewal of the old affection and indulgence; guilt not on account of my own feelings for her husband, but because I had failed her in not guessing something of what her distress had been during her first months of marriage. Remembering the resentment I had felt at her seeming condescension and arrogant little airs, the irritation induced in me by her silly affectations, I could not altogether blame myself for my blindness, but all the same I should have realized there was more behind these annoyances than a childish desire to exert her new-found importance. It was, in fact, her feeling of helplessness, her lack of proper self-esteem, that had found a vent in her attitude towards me—not unjustifiable pride. Somehow Charles had bereft her of importance in her own mind, and in treating me as she had done she was only trying to redress the balance of her shaken self-confidence. Poor Emily—and indeed, poor Charles, for he too must have suffered from her unwillingness and lack of affection. Honesty prevailing, I had to admit that, so far, I had been aligned sympathetically with Charles and against Emily, though I had taken great care that neither should be aware of this. Now I too had a balance to redress, in justice to Emily. I found myself relieved to realize that Charles no longer had the power to upset my judgements—either of him, of his wife, or of anything else. That, at least, was a step in the right direction.

Where Wallace and Connie were concerned, my mind was easier, since I had not presumed to judge either on so short an acquaintance. Having got to the root of the trouble in the house, however, I went out of my way to be helpful to Connie, and, seeing this, Wallace was embarrassingly grateful and was soon discussing his wife’s trouble with a frankness that could only be considered complimentary. His devotion to the poor creature was real and deep, and he taught me to see her through his eyes—as an unhappy woman once capable of love, still worthy of love, but whom now no love could really reach. Left to myself, I might have condemned her as a drunkard and left her to her own devices, but Wallace’s confidence in my concern for her made that concern real, and I was soon enmeshed in the toils of the Averys’ domestic problems as I was in those of the Floods, but in a more practical fashion.

Disorder and slovenliness were ever my chiefest hates, and the Avery bungalow was notable for both. My Aunt Hewitt often remarked that I had a ‘managing temperament’, and because of this ingrained and perhaps meddling habit of setting things to rights around me, I began to give Connie some assistance in her household affairs. As she was more than willing to relinquish the reins of her household, I soon found myself ordering meals, supervising the laying of the table, doing the flowers, suggesting new dishes to the cook and generally superintending the housework. I was glad to have something to do, and found the necessity to communicate with the servants excellent for my study of their language. Wallace was openly grateful for the improved condition of his home, Connie happily, if vaguely, acquiescent, and Emily and Charles relieved to sit down to meals that were both wholesome and edible. For a time I had occasion to be complacent about the order I had brought into other people’s lives.