Even the conversation over the tea table was marvellously sophisticated. They spoke of Venice and Florence, which they had just visited, and the El Grecos they had seen in Madrid. They had visited Paris, and Angus teased Amita because she had bought so many new clothes, and she only laughed and said to my mother, “How can a man be expected to understand that everything, the hats and the shoes, and all the shops are irresistible?” Only she made it sound like “irreseeestible,” and then we all laughed too.
Angus told us that they were leaving India and going to live in Burma because Angus had been made manager of a new office that was opening in Rangoon. They were going to find a house there, and Angus was going to have a little boat and was threatening to teach Amita how to sail. And this provoked more mirth because Amita swore that she only had to look at a boat and she was seasick, and the most energetic thing she had ever done in the whole of her life was to turn the pages of a book.
* * *
After tea, we went out into the garden. Lady Tolliver, Daisy, and my mother talked together, and Jassy, who had apparently forgiven Angus and was now restored to her usual good spirits, sat by him and begged him for tales of tiger shoots and houseboats in Kashmir. Amita asked me to show her the garden, so I led her down to the rose bed and tried to remember the names of all the various roses. “Elizabeth of Glamis, and Ena Harkness, and that little rambler is called Albertine. It smells very like sweet apples.”
She was smiling down at me. She said, “Do you like flowers?”
“Yes. Almost better than anything.”
She said, “In Rangoon, I am going to have the most beautiful garden that anybody has ever dreamed about. It will have bougainvillia and temple flowers and jacaranda trees and hollyhocks taller than a man. And there will be green lawns with peacocks and white cranes, and round pools of water, ringed with roses and blue with the reflection of the sky. And when you are grown up, maybe seventeen or so, you must come out and stay with Angus and me, and I will show it all to you. We will have dinner parties for you, and dances, and moonlit picnics down by the shore. And there will be young men around you, falling in love with you, droves of them, like moths around a candle flame.”
I gazed at Amita, dazzled, hypnotised by the visions of myself at seventeen, beautiful and slender as Amita, with a proper bosom and a tiny waist. I saw all those admirers, tall and straight and wearing glittering uniforms. I heard music and smelt the heavy fragrance of the temple flowers and saw moonlight on water …
She said, “Will you come?”
Her voice broke the dream. It had lost its laughter. And now her dark eyes were lustrous with unshed tears. And I knew that it was all a fantasy. She would never have that great, beautiful garden in Rangoon, because the life that she and Angus had chosen for themselves could not encompass such riches. And I would never go and stay with her. She would never ask my mother, and even if she did, I should never be allowed to go. It was all make-believe. She knew it and so did I; but still, I could not bear to see her look so sad, so I smiled up into her face and said, “Of course I’ll come. I’d love to come. More than anything in the world.”
She smiled then, and blinked the tears away. She put a hand on either side of my head and turned my face up to hers. She said, “One day I will have a little girl of my own. And I would like her to be just as sweet as you are.”
We were all at once very close. I felt, almost, that I had known her all my life and was going to know her forever. And in that instant, I knew, with piercing certainty, that they had all been wrong. My mother and my father, and the Tollivers, and their parents and their parents before them. The preconceived prejudices, the snobbery, the traditions, tumbled like a pack of cards and have stayed that way ever since.
By stripping the truth from a confused morass of childish impressions, Amita changed my whole life. What was all the fuss about? I had asked myself, and the answer was Nothing. People are people. Some good, some bad, some black, some white, but whatever the colour of our skin, or the difference in creeds and traditions, we all have something to give each other, and we all have something to share, even if it is only life itself.
* * *
Before she left, Amita went out to the car and came back with two parcels, one for Jassy and one for me. When the Tollivers had gone, we opened them, and found the dolls. We had never seen dolls like them, so neat and grown-up and beautifully fashioned, even down to the lacquered toenails on the tiny papier-mâché feet and the little glittering earrings. Our other dolls had names like Rosemary and Dimples, but the dolls Amita gave us were never given names. We did not play with them. We looked at them, and kept them in a glass-fronted cupboard in our bedroom along with my grandmother’s dolls’ tea set and the set of carved wooden animals that had come to us from an aged aunt.
* * *
I could not bear to discuss Amita with anybody. “Did you like her?” my mother asked one day when Jassy was out for tea with a friend and we were alone.
But I could not tell her how I felt or what I had learned, because now, she and I were on opposite sides of the fence. We were by no means enemies, but we held different opinions, and for the rest of our lives were going to have to learn to live with this.
So I only said, “Yes,” and went on eating my bread and butter.
* * *
I never saw Angus and Amita again. The war broke out and they were unable to come home. Amita was pregnant when the Japanese invaded Burma, but she escaped from Rangoon by marching north into Assam, along with some Forestry Department officials, a number of valuable elephants and their mahouts, and a whole horde of British women and children. Angus stayed behind, ostensibly to close up his office and destroy all the important papers. He promised to follow her, but he left it too late, was captured by the Japanese, and died a year later in a prison camp.
As for Amita, the long march, for a girl who had done nothing more energetic than turn the pages of a book, proved too much. A day after the exhausted band of refugees struggled into Assam, Amita went into premature labour. They found a bed for her in a military hospital, but little could be done for her. Her child was stillborn, and a few hours later, Amita died too.
* * *
I still have the doll she gave me. The painted hair lies dark on the dusky head, the tip-tilted eyes are ringed with kohl, the little sari glitters with its sequins and its gold thread. One day, when my fat granddaughter is old enough, I shall give her the doll to play with and tell her about Amita.
I could tell her, as well, the truth that Amita, on that summer afternoon, made so blindingly clear to me. But I hope, and believe, that by that time she is old enough to be given the doll, she will have found it out for herself.
The Blue Bedroom
As the sun slipped down out of the sky and long shadows grew and stretched out over the sandy dunes, the beach slowly emptied. Mothers called to reluctant children, coaxing them out of the warm shallows of a summer flood tide. Sleepy sunburned toddlers were strapped into pushchairs, picnic baskets were repacked, missing sandals and towels finally run to earth. By seven o’clock the beach was almost deserted. Only the lifeguard, sitting in his camp chair by the beach hut; a couple of determined surfers; a woman with a rambunctious dog.
And Emily and Portia.
Emily was fourteen and Portia a year older. Emily lived in the village—had been born here and spent all her life in the rambling old house that lay just beyond the church. But Portia came from London. Ever since Emily could remember, Portia’s parents had rented the Luscombes’ house for the month of August, while the Luscombes took themselves off to stay with their daughter who lived in some remote corner of Scotland that had a name like a sneeze.
As small children, Emily and Portia had played together every summer. In the normal course of events they would probably have taken little notice of each other, for they had, in fact, little in common. But Portia’s brothers and sisters were all older than she, and Emily was an only child. Thus, thrown together with the e
ncouragement of their parents, they had formed a companionship that was quite satisfactory in its own practical fashion. They exchanged Christmas cards each year, but had never found it necessary to exchange confidences.
It was Portia who had suggested this afternoon’s excursion to the beach. She had telephoned Emily after lunch.
“… I’m all on my own. Giles and his friends have gone to watch stock car racing…” Giles was her brother, an undergraduate at Cambridge and terrifyingly witty and erudite. “… and I don’t want to go. It’s too hot and smelly.” Emily hesitated, and Portia caught the hesitation. “You haven’t got anything else you want to do, have you?”
Emily, grasping the receiver of the telephone, listened to the silence of the house, drowsing in the heat of the early afternoon. Mrs. Wattis, having cleared the lunch, had departed for Fourbourne, where she was to spend the night with her sister. Emily’s father was in Bristol. He had gone this morning on a business trip and would not return for another two days. Stephanie was upstairs in her bedroom, resting.
“No. Nothing, really,” said Emily. “I’d like to come.”
“Bring a biscuit or a sandwich or something. I’ve got a bottle of lemonade. I’ll meet you at the church.”
Emily had not seen Portia for a year, and as soon as she set eyes on her, her heart sank. It had happened again. At school, all her friends seemed to be growing up and outstripping Emily, moving on to higher forms, more advanced examinations, added privileges, while Emily stumbled along behind, clinging to the security of childhood, the known, the familiar. Longing to advance with the others, but lacking the courage to take the first, deliberate step.
And now Portia.
Portia was growing up. She had a proper figure. In a mere twelve months, she had turned from a child to a young woman. Her skimpy shorts and T-shirt revealed a proper waist, slender hips, long, brown legs. She had grown her dark curls down to her shoulders, she had had her ears pierced and wore shining gold earrings. They glinted when she tossed back her hair, tangled in the glossy dark locks. She had pink varnish on her toenails and she had shaved her legs.
Walking down over the golf links towards the sea, they passed a couple of young men, golfers, making their way to the next tee. Last year the young men would not even have glanced at Portia and Emily, but now she saw their eyes on Portia, and she observed Portia’s reaction. The pantomime of not being aware of admiring stares. The sudden self-consciousness of her walk, the toss of her head as a gust of wind blew her hair across her eyes. The young men did not look at Emily and Emily did not expect them to. For who would want to look at a stringy fourteen-year-old, with no shape and no curves, hair the colour of straw, and horrible spectacles?
“You’ve still got specs,” Portia remarked. “Why don’t you get contact lenses?”
“Perhaps I will, but I can’t till I’m older.”
“A girl at school’s got them, but she said they were agony to begin with.”
Emily felt sick. She couldn’t bear to think about putting contact lenses into her eyes any more than she could bear to have her fingernails cut (Mother had taught her how to use a little emery board) or to eat sandwiches that the sand had got into.
She said, not wanting to talk about contact lenses, “Did you do O Levels this summer?”
Portia made a bored face. “Yes, but I haven’t had the results yet. I think I’m all right, but now my parents say I have to do A Levels. That’s another two years at school and I simply don’t think I can bear it. I’m trying to get them to say I can leave next summer and go to an A Level crammer or something. School’s so stifling.” Emily made no comment on this. “How about you? O Levels, I mean.”
Emily looked away from Portia because sometimes her eyes filled with tears, and this felt as though it was going to be one of them.
“I’m taking them next year.” Across the bay, a car was crawling down the road towards the distant beach. Sunlight flashed signals from its windows. She watched it minutely, concentrating, and after a little the tears receded, unshed. She said, “I was meant to take them. But Miss Myles, she’s my headmistress, said it would be better to wait another year.”
The interview had been a nightmare. Miss Myles had been so kind, so sympathetic, and all Emily had been able to do was sit and stare at her, numb with misery, scarcely able to listen to what she was saying, scarcely able to hear the sensible words. Nobody would expect you to pass, Emily, not just at this time. And after all, what rush is there? Why not give yourself another twelve months? Time is a great healer. In twelve months you won’t have forgotten, because you’ll never forget your mother, but I think you’ll find that things will be better.
They came to the railway bridge, the wooden footbridge that separated the golf links from the dunes. Halfway across they stopped, as they had always stopped, to lean over the wooden barrier and gaze down at the curving rails, glittering today in the brazen sunshine.
Portia said, “My mother told me that your father had married again.”
“Yes.”
“Is she nice?”
“Yes.” The silence that followed this single word seemed an indictment against Stephanie, so she added, “She’s very young. She’s only twenty-nine.”
“I know. My mother told me. She told me about the baby coming, too.”
“Do you mind?”
“No,” lied Emily.
“It must be funny, having a baby coming. Now, I mean. At our age.”
“It’s all right.”
They had bought a new cot for the new baby, but Emily’s father had brought Emily’s old pram down from the attic, and Stephanie had cleaned and oiled and polished it, and made a little patchwork quilt for it, and now it waited, in a corner of the wash-house, for the new occupant.
“I mean,” pursued Portia, “you’ve never had brothers and sisters. It’ll be strange for you.”
“It’ll be all right.” The wooden parapet of the bridge felt warm to her hand, splintery and smelling of creosote. “It’ll be all right.” She threw a splinter of wood down onto the railway lines. “Come on. I’m hot and I want to swim,” and they went on over the bridge, their footsteps sounding hollow on the planks, and started out across the sandy footpath that led to the dunes.
* * *
They swam and sunbathed, lying face down on the sand with their heads turned towards each other. Portia chattered endlessly, about next holidays when she might be going skiing; about the boy she had met who had promised to take her roller-discoing; about the suede jacket her father had said that he would give her for her birthday. She did not talk about Stephanie and the baby again, and for this Emily was silently grateful.
And now, at the end of the day, at the start of the evening, it was time to make tracks for home. The tide was at the turn, a rim of dark sand lay wetly just beyond the reach of the breakers. The sea was a welter of dazzling light, the sky still cloudless and a deepening blue.
Portia looked at her watch. She said, “It’s nearly seven. I’ve got to go.” She began to brush damp sand from her bikini. “We’ve got a supper party. Giles is bringing his friends home and I promised my mother I’d give her a hand.” Emily imagined the house, filled with young people all knowing each other very well, eating enormous quantities of food, drinking beer, playing the latest discs on their stereo. The image was both enviable and frightening. She began to pull her T-shirt over her bathing suit. She said, “I ought to go too.”
Portia said, with unaccustomed politeness, “Are you having a party?”
“No, but my father’s away, and Stephanie’s on her own.”
“So it’ll just be you and the wicked stepmother.”
Emily said, quickly, “She’s not wicked.”
“Just a manner of speech,” said Portia, and started to gather up towels and sun oil, stuffing them into a canvas bag that had ST. TROPEZ printed in huge red letters upon its side.
* * *
They parted at the church.
“It’s bee
n fun,” said Portia. “We’ll do it again,” and she gave a casual wave, and sauntered off. The saunter speeded up, turned into a run. Portia was hurrying home, to wash her hair and get ready for the evening’s fun.
She had not invited Emily to the party and Emily had not expected to be asked. She did not want to go to any party. She didn’t much want, either, to return home and face an evening spent in the company of Stephanie.
Stephanie and Emily’s father had been married now for nearly a year, but this was the first time that she and Emily had been left on their own. Without her father to act as buffer and keep the conversation going, Emily was in an agony of apprehension. What would they talk about?
She began to walk in the direction of home. Across the green, under the deep shade of the oaks, down the rutted lane, with a glimpse of sea at the end of it. In through the open white gates, the house revealing itself beyond the curve of the drive.
Reluctant, filled with a strange foreboding, Emily stopped, and stood looking at it. Home. But it had not been home since her mother died. Worse, since her father married Stephanie, it had become another person’s home.
What had changed? Small and subtle things. The rooms were tidier. Knitting and bits of sewing, books and old magazines no longer lay about the place. Cushions were plumped up, rugs lay flat and straight.
The flowers indoors had changed. Emily’s mother had loved flowers, but had no great refinements as to their disposal. Great bunches were crammed into jugs, just the way they had been picked. But Stephanie was a magician with flowers. Formal arrangements stood on pedestals in huge cream-coloured urns. Spikes of delphinium and gladiola, massed with roses and sweet peas and strangely shaped leaves that no person but Stephanie would even think of picking.