Fifty-Three

Hannah knocks at the front door of her house. She and Lucy wait on the step until Suria receives them and ushers them inside. “Oh, mem,” Suria cries, squeezing Hannah by the hands, ignoring Lucy’s icy stare. “Good now, mem?”

“Yes, thank you, Suria.” She is good. Though her ankle still requires her to limp a little. Being considered an invalid of sorts, a damaged person, has turned the ladies’ hostility to pity, or at least, pity has been the only appropriate social response. Pity sent from a distance. Which has suited Hannah fine. Mostly, she’s had space and time to herself.

She humps in after Lucy, who has noticed the colonel in the front parlor. What is he doing there, just sitting by himself? Waiting for them, she supposes.

“Hannah’s been seen by Dr. Peterborough,” Lucy reports, making the words seem cozy. As if she’s said, “Hannah’s been given a mug of warm cocoa.”

George is frowning at a patch of air near their heads.

“Hello, George,” Hannah says.

“Hello,” he mumbles, eyes shifting.

Lucy delivers him the written report from the doctor. Two pages, folded into quarters. Hannah has not read it. The colonel immediately unfolds the paper, fishing his spectacles from a pocket, and they watch him reading. After a moment or two, Lucy pats Hannah’s back. “Well, I’ll leave you now, dear. Do take care.” They embrace lightly. “I’m just next door,” Lucy reminds her. She gives a last glance at George, who hasn’t looked up from the page. “I’ll see myself out.”

When the colonel is finished reading, he removes his spectacles and comes over to where Hannah remains standing. She clutches the straps of her satchel. She’s kept it on her back.

“How are you?” he asks. “You look well.”

“I’d like to read the doctor’s report, please.”

“Of course,” he mumbles, fetching it and handing it over.

Hannah takes the pages with her upstairs to the guest bedroom.

At breakfast the next morning, the Colonel enters the dining room with the biggin and two beakers and pours them each a cup. Hannah has been leafing through a catalogue and has a cup of coffee already. When Suria brings in the tinned milk, George adds a dash to his coffee, catching her eye.

“Perhaps an old dog can change its spots,” he says.

“It’s a leopard,” she replies, “that doesn’t change its spots. An old dog can’t change its tricks.”

George chuckles happily. “What are you going to do today?”

She shrugs. The last thing she wants to do is chat to him. To have to talk blandly to the colonel is to risk being consumed again. She is already much at risk, walking in the old places, drinking from the old beakers, as if nothing has changed. Just above her sternum, where her heart should be, is a muscular knot of enmity and frustration and bitterness. She imagines it churning, in place, like a little engine. The anxiety is about how she will manage with this new installation, this new technology. If she were strong enough to pry open her own rib cage she might rip the whole thing out and fling it at him.

Instead they drink coffee in silence, eating two fried eggs each. She can tell he is pleased with her appetite. He feels compelled, it seems, to tell her about how terribly he’s gotten on in her absence. Then describes, once again, the entire horrendous scene at Finch’s retirement party: George’s nauseated boredom, the dressing down by Swettenham, the surprise of James’ announcement, his stomach coming up and onto his shoes as all of the guests looked on. Perhaps, she thinks, the colonel means for them to go on by recommencing their life from that night forward. And she would tell him about her feverish aches and her walk to the lower town. Of wading through the ditch to knock on Darshan’s door, drinking his Indian tea, and instead of falling asleep on his chesterfield, interrogating the poor man about an imaginary flower.

On the second night after her return, the colonel pads to the guest bedroom in the evening. She is reading a cookbook in bed, and this, too, he seems pleased to discover. He asks if she will consent to return to the marital bed. “The marital bed.” She wants to laugh at this ancient formulation and his formal, nervous choice of phrases. His face looks ruddier than ever.

He adds hastily, “I won’t…touch you. You have my word.”

On the third night, she does return to their bedroom. It is an effort of forgetting. As promised, the colonel does not touch her. In the sleepy haze of the early morning, though, he forgets himself and nestles into her like a boy with his teddy. She does not move away. Later, when she is stirring, he wakes and whispers an apology for being a jealous fool, for overreacting, for calling her a horrible name. It is a secret, sleep-drunk apology, delivered in fragments. He does not seem to care about a reply, and she gives none.

Later, when he comes downstairs for breakfast, it is as if this confession never happened. Except for something lingering in the colonel’s air—humility, perhaps? Good sportsmanship?

She is wondering at all this, when he says, “I’ve booked us berths on the November steamer to London.”

“Why?”

“You need to get well, don’t you? You cannot be well in a place like this.” He glowers at a spider which has frozen in its tracks on the ceiling. The spider sets off again. “You read the doctor’s letter.”

They look at each other across the table. You no more think me mad, than I think you mad, her eyes tell him.

The colonel’s announcement is not unexpected, given the doctor’s prescription. Given what passed for conversation at the Residency, as she convalesced. Her own reflections on the incompatible positioning of the colonel and the brigadier have led her in the same direction.

She says, “I can understand why you don’t want to work for E.W.”

He taps his teeth. “Nnnh, quite.”

“But what about—”

“As I’ve said, there’s your condition to think about.”

“I don’t have a ‘condition’ worth thinking about, George. What Charles has written it’s…it’s not what happened, is it? I’m fine.”

London? They’d tried to sell her on the wrong things, of course, for what did she care about frocks or George’s family? The promise of London is its position in the tides of art flowing to and from Europe. The Thames had come to seem to her, in daydreams, like it was made of paint rather than water. From London, Monsieur Godot or Madame l’Espagne would be close enough to visit; they might offer suggestions or put her name forward to collectors and galleries. And there must be others she’d not met yet, people who cared just as genuinely about what could be done with art, with life.

But she had nothing to show those people.

London, without making art? With the colonel pattering around their house, placing his perfectly reasonable demands upon her? No, with each exhalation. No, said the soft chime of her pulse. Not that. The clanging of a warning grows louder inside her each time she tries to imagine that London.

“I can’t go,” she says.

He flounders, apparently unsure what strategy to pursue. Insist that she leave? Agree to stay on? “When can you go? How much time do you need?” The colonel’s freckled forearms push against the table, his eyes are down. When she doesn’t answer, he adds, “You are still feeling fragile?”

“No.”

“So you simply discount everything Dr. Peterborough has recommended?” His color is rising; he twists in his chair, throwing one leg over the other. “I mean, hell, let’s just say it doesn’t matter what Peterborough recommends, does it? Let’s just say that. We need to go home. We need this, Hannah.”

“My art,” she says, faltering.

“It’s gone.” He crosses his arms. As if this is all he can say about it.

“My paintings are gone, yes. My art is not the same as my paintings.”

This is the lesson of their destruction, and it was Darshan who helped her to see it. You must not stop. It’s not about what she creates, but that she is creating. And didn’t Suria save her paints and brushes for that very purpose? Suria understood before Hannah herself could appreciate it. She needn’t, and couldn’t, recreate any single moment, any one subject or vantage point. Yet if she lets go, there will be more. Always. The world is full of future paintings.

“What are you on about?” he demands.

Before she can consider how to reply, the front door bursts open. Lucy Finch is standing in front of them, panting and apologetic. “I’ve only just heard! Oh my, had you heard, George?” She seems to seize up, looking from one of them to the other, unsure whom to address, or how.

The colonel’s face is white.

“What’s wrong?” Hannah prompts her.

“Sergeant Singh.”

“What?”

“He’s been killed. He’s been killed! He’s been killed.” Lucy clamps a hand over her mouth.

“I don’t understand,” Hannah says.

“God help us,” Lucy says softly. “Murdered in the street.”

Hannah lies in bed with her satchel. After a few nights, she dares to put the bag on the floor between the bed and the wall. (She has dragged the bed from the center of the room toward the far wall.) Not once, however, does the colonel seek to step inside her room. He appears to be quite productive, whether at the Residency or at the government office, helping Finch to hand the reins over to Effingdon-Watts. She hears his voice, his footsteps, his wardrobe doors opening and closing.

During the days, when he is safely out, she packs their belongings and cleans. Scrubbing floors and wiping walls and laundering all the drapes. Making it nice for the next family. Periodically, she walks out to the stable or sits on the veranda. But the cleaning is the most satisfying. The only time she and the colonel attempt to be in the same room together is for supper on the Friday he officially leaves his position. It is a special occasion that he has organized in advance. All day, Suria thumps in and out of the dining room and upstairs to Hannah, asking again and again about how to prepare Yorkshire puddings.

Hannah comes into the dining room as the colonel is opening a bottle of Whyte & MacKay. A glass waits empty on the sideboard. “Going away present, from the lads,” he says sheepishly. “Nice of them, isn’t it?”

“By the smell of you, I would have thought you’d already drank it.”

“Women,” he retorts. “Little police officers, all of you.”

Looking at his face Hannah feels suddenly queasy. Gripping the back of her dining chair, she leans over to tug her serviette from under her knife and drops it on her empty plate. “I’m not hungry.”

“You’ll sit down and you’ll eat with me tonight.”

She glares at him, which he seems to expect and even enjoy. The colonel points at her chair, taking his own seat. He begins carving the roast chicken, piling slabs of the meat onto his plate, then exchanges his plate for hers. Leaning forward over the table, he scoops a fat dollop of potatoes and two of the puck-shaped Yorkshire puddings onto the plate in front of her. Suria stands frozen by the sideboard, holding a boat of gravy. George walks over and grabs it from her, then pours it over everything.

“You’ll sit and you’ll eat,” he says again, jerking her chair out from the table. For she is still standing. “Pour memsahib a glass of port,” he tells Suria.

Hannah looks over at the ayah, who has already turned for the bottle. She closes her eyes and lowers herself into the chair.

“All of it,” he says.

The steamship to London is due to depart on November 10. For every supper prior, Hannah supplies Suria with an excuse for her absence. On several occasions, she is “out at a neighbor’s.” Fridays: attending the evening church service. Illness—which is in any case not far from the truth—covers several days at a stretch. There are also “women’s troubles” and the fact that she is asleep, sound asleep. Eva and Lucy, who call on Hannah during this period, receive one of the same excuses.

When Hannah runs out of excuses, she leaves Suria to come up with her own account of mem’s reclusive behavior. The colonel accepts it all, apparently, until the day that he doesn’t.

There is a note in his voice so unnatural that it draws Hannah from the guestroom to the top of the stairs.

“Don’t know, sahib.”

“You do know.”

“Mem not hungry. She say, you eat, please.”

“I am asking her to eat with me. And who am I?”

“Sahib, sir. Tuan, sir.”

“Who am I to her? Eh? What do you reckon?”

She hears Suria stumbling over a response. Then the unmistakable squelch of bone against bone, flesh against flesh. A heavy footfall. A loud grunt.

Hannah strains to hear what else may be happening below, though she cannot budge, as if the whole thing has unfolded within a bad dream and she is actually asleep.

That evening she goes to find Suria in her quarters with Anjuh. The ayah’s jaw has some stiffness and bruising that will probably worsen before mending. Unfortunately, two of the fingers of her left hand are in worse shape. Anjuh unwraps the bandage gently for Hannah to see. They look badly sprained. The little one, perhaps broken.

“How did this happen?” she asks.

Suria shakes her head.

“Tuan has done this to you,” says Hannah. He must have twisted them, hard, perhaps even stomped on her hand. Had she fallen from the initial blow? Hannah tries to remember the sequence of sounds. A coward, she was nothing but a coward, hiding out of sight and leaving Suria to face the colonel’s rage.

“I’m so sorry, Suria. So very sorry.” Hannah looks at the couple. “You won’t have to put up with us much longer.”

Suria says nothing, still shaking her head, as if she refuses to believe anything. Anjuh hovers anxiously beside her, holding the unspooled bandage in one hand and a bowl of noodles under the other arm. It must be excruciating for him to see his wife in this state.

“Do you have a doctor in town?” she asks. “Someone who can help you heal? I think you should be using a splint, Suria. You know, so the fingers can heal as straight as possible.” She tries to demonstrate on her own hand.

They look at each other and mumble a few words in Malay. Perhaps they don’t understand.

Hannah says, “I want you to go home. Back to the lower town. There’s no point in you hanging on here for the last week or two, not when he’s being…so unkind. Anjuh, please, help her get to a doctor. Medicine. Don’t worry, I will make sure that you’re paid for the last weeks of your service.”

Anjuh and Suria look at each other again, exchanging a few more words in Malay. “No, mem,” Anjuh tells her. “We not make you alone.”

Wiping the tears away, more come in their place. And now she is embarrassing these poor people! “I’m so sorry,” Hannah repeats. “I’m sorry for everything that has happened. Sorry for what we have made you do.”

“Hush, mem.” Anjuh puts the bowl of noodles down and takes her by the arm.

Suria joins in, moving around the table to ladle a new bowl of soup. “Please, eat.”

She accepts a place at their table. Anjuh rewraps Suria’s hand with the old bandage and pulls a crate up for an extra chair. Then they all begin slurping broth and spooling noodles onto their spoons. The table is so small their heads almost touch when they lean over the bowls.

“Noodles is good for sadness,” Suria remarks.

She will need a lot of noodles, then. A river full. As Hannah eats, her insides warming, she considers her next steps. Just like Suria and Anjuh, she cannot stay on Ridge Road.