The Fisherman's Girl

by Maggie Ford

  ‘I’ve not changed, Annie. You have. You used to be so lively, happy, Now you’re just morose and silent and sulking all the time.’

  ‘It’s because you’re away from me so much. You seem only interested in your work, your silly exporting of gems, meeting clients, eating away from home.’

  ‘It takes up a lot of my time, darling.’ He was sitting stiffly in his chair now. ‘It’s part of my job. I don’t want to be away from you any more than you do from me. If you started socialising a little more you wouldn’t feel it so much. You’re beginning to behave like a hermit. Soon people will start gossiping, wondering what I’m doing with you.’

  ‘There seems too much gossiping goes on. None of them have nothing better to do than talk about someone else. I suppose I do as good as anyone. Trouble is, they won’t show it, but they’re all as bored as me with this place, this country.’

  He was getting a little irritated, his voice a little snappy. ‘Then you’re in good company, aren’t you? So learn to mix with it better, can’t you?’

  ‘Company.’ she shot back. ‘I feel as if I’m in a glass case, everybody noticing everything we do, everything I do whenever I set foot at the club. They go out of their way to make me feel I’m an outsider, an intruder, not their sort. Whatever I say, do, wherever I go, I feel it’s being scrutinised, chewed over, judged. Sometimes I feel as if I’m expected to behave as servilely as the Indians themselves.’

  ‘You mean the servants? Not the Indians. They’re not servile. They are proud of what they are. I think they even laugh at us.’

  He was trying to be humorous but she didn’t want to see it that way. All she heard was sarcasm, him having a dig at her.

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was sharp. ‘The servants, if you like.’

  His light smile faded. ‘Then it’s time you snapped out of this feeling. And please do not mistake the Indian’s pride in doing what he does to the best of his ability as servility or inferiority. He’s not your English worker who often begrudges whatever he does for his employer. I’d ask you to remember Annie, the Indian is totally different from us. I’d ask you to respect that.’

  Annie realised they were having a row. Voices unraised, very civilised, but a row nevertheless. The first. And all because of India.

  ‘I don’t care!’ Now her voice did raise itself. ‘I hate it here. I hate the people, the Anglo-Indians. And the Indians. I hate the way they do all they’re told without complaint. I feel ashamed ordering them about, seeing them complying. I say please but it still feels I’m just giving orders and they’re doing anything I tell them even if it’s against their better judgment.’

  Alex put his drink on the side table as though he had lost his enjoyment of it. His voice also sharpened though remaining controlled. ‘They’re our servants. We pay them for what they’re employed to do. What else?’

  ‘We! Them!’ She moved, jerkily, a short way along the veranda and back. ‘We, us, all cast in the same mould, behaving as if we see ourselves better than them … they. I’m beginning to hate myself for it. Hate it all.’

  He watched her pacing. ‘So you keep saying, Annie,’ he said, his voice low and even.

  ‘But it’s … it’s all wrong, us treating them as inferiors.’

  ‘I don’t think I do that. Annie, enough of this. It’s getting silly. You’ve been fed up all day and you’re taking it out on me. I’m afraid you will have to adjust to this place and the people who, like us, have to live here or continue being miserable. We’re going to be here for a long time.’

  ‘What?’ Annie stopped pacing, her pique forgotten.

  He probably saw the look on her face before she was even aware of it herself at the thought of years here instead of the one or two she had expected. He got up and came towards her, his arms held out to her, and she could do nothing other than come willingly, wanting only for this argument to be over.

  ‘Annie, I love you, my darling,’ he murmured into her hair. ‘I’m sorry you’re unhappy, but it won’t last and together we’ll make it work. We will, I promise. Seeing you sad makes me feel sad too.’

  He bent his face to hers and she let herself be kissed, feeling the smooth warmth of his lips on hers, comforting, desirable. He leaned back to look at her. ‘Now, let’s see you smile, my love.’

  Complying, she smiled, saw the satisfaction on his face. Alex was content again and assumed she was too. Well, she was, now that he was here to kiss her. When they kissed, embraced, made love, she felt she could conquer this place, could conquer the whole world. Only when he was away did she fear this new life, India and the people who ruled it, who had ruled it for two centuries until they had come to believe it theirs and any gauche newcomer a threat to their supremacy unless she fell into their ways unreservedly. Their territory. It belonged to them, not to the Indians, and people fresh from England were expected to be integrated into that narrow insular niche they had carved for themselves in a foreign land.

  Alex had already achieved that. He enjoyed his work, felt free and unfettered by the England he’d left behind. For her was still the trauma of facing that old brigade barricaded behind the boundaries of its English Club, enjoying life with that peculiar social snobbery typical to the English abroad which Annie was fast coming to recognise and shy away from. She saw herself, the newly arrived, as the lowest on the social rung, expected not to say too much, to be respectful, subservient, not as the Indian was expected to be, but with an awareness that she must bide her time in order to be accepted fully into their circles.

  The men were nice enough; it was their formidable wives she feared, with their studied silences, as she saw it, should she speak out of turn or say too much at once. She hated their patronising, their questions, veiled a little, as to her upbringing. At home she’d been at the top of the tree in her job, respected as head receptionist of a high-class hotel. Here she was considered nothing. Her only defence was to think of the lives of these people as a charade, slightly unreal, as though beneath their laughter and camaraderie, their pomposity and their social rules they too longed for home, the soft lines of the English countryside, the orderly cities. Perhaps Alex was right, there was nothing for them but unite against India and Indians with their so-different approach to life lest it rub off on them, and against the brash newcomer who might upset their order of things that seemed not to have moved on from the turn of the century. Even their homes reflected a life at the turn of the century. Victorian mirrors and drapes, colonial furniture, elegant but outmoded, bolstered the impression of a past regime.

  But Alex was right. If the two of them were going to be here for years she’d have to become one of them or remain isolated and miserable, ostracised as odd. But oh, to enter the Jalapur English Club, was, as she’d told Alex, like being an exhibit in a glass case.

  As they both dressed for dinner, even though there were only the two of them, (the done thing she had come to learn; standards must never be lowered before the eyes of the Indians, certainly not the servants) she put her woes firmly out of her mind. This was the hour she looked forward to, and it must not be upset by her going on about her miserable day.

  Coming indoors, shutters closed against biting insects (though the higher region of Jalapur was so far free of the malarial mosquito) allowing in only night breezes, they ate a light meal of salad, chicken in a mild anglicised sauce, vegetables and fruit. Annie’s palate had still not adjusted to hot curries. The brief Indian twilight had gone, leaving the night outside black. This evening’s short burst of rain with its distant lightning and faint rolls of thunder had ceased and night insects were singing in full flow as she and Alex sat on the Edwardian sofa after dinner. He had put a record on the gramophone and now the air filled with quiet dance music ‘With a song in my heart … I behold your adorable face … with a song in my heart …’

  It was still warm. The sofa’s cushions seemed to heat her legs under the soft clinging silk of the pale blue dress she wore. With Alex close beside her reading the Indian
edition of The Times, Annie fanned her face with a small delicate fan and thought about India and her journey to this place.

  Nothing of India inspired her. Of course, the temples were beautiful, the people quick to smile, the pink buildings of the city lovely, the scenery breathtaking. Beyond both sparse and full-leafed trees through which green parakeets skimmed, the distant hills were blue and misty under a cloudless sky – though not today. But one could take in just so much of temples and smiling people and scenery. The land, still dry as dust an hour after a downpour had passed, would become waterlogged and miserable with the arrival of the monsoon and the clammy heat made life unbearable.

  She’d had such high hopes coming here. Had been so excited, for all the tearful goodbyes to the family at Tilbury Docks. But the pang of emptiness mingling with the anticipation of all that lay ahead of her had soon been swept away by her longing to see Alex as she had waved to them from the upper deck, leaning over the handrail the better to glimpse her family among all the others crying their farewells.

  The P & O liner had been huge. The Viceroy of India, built just the previous year, had dominated Tilbury Docks, a glistening black-painted leviathan, her two funnels issuing the faintest trace of lazy smoke swiftly swept away on the stiff March breeze.

  From the deck where she’d stood she’d been able to look down upon the street lamps of Tilbury. (Later in that awful storm in the Indian Ocean that had laid her low, waves had towered above that same deck.) And when the liner had manoeuvred out of the dock it seemed its length might never turn round in such small space. Heaved round by tugs, the engines had shaken the whole ship and herself almost to bits, roaring and shuddering enough to frighten the life out of her though the seasoned passengers had taken not a bit of notice as they went off to their cabins to sort themselves out or to the dining rooms for their dinner. The juddering and roaring dying away, the ship at last eased out of the narrow docks. She too, calming, had gone first to her cabin to sort herself out, thrilled by the splendour of a first-class cabin for which Alex had paid, then down to dinner, suddenly hungry.

  In the equally opulent first-class dining room – there had been a different one for second-class passengers – surrounded by the low babble of conversation coming at her from all sides like gentle sighs, the light clinking of cutlery against fine crockery, everything bright and lively, she had felt utterly pampered. She’d found herself sharing a table with a middle-aged American woman, a Miss Rita Tessland from New England, and her paid companion, a quiet little mouse of a person named Nancy Green. They had been such nice people, with Rita Tessland proving to be quite a talkative woman, who instantly befriended Annie. They had become her companions all through the voyage.

  Gliding majestically out into the Thames, a few street lamps starting to glow from the Gravesend side in the gathering dusk of late March, the land slipped by, the river widening. The banks had soon merged with the darkening countryside of Essex and Kent, finally disappearing until they seemed to sail on in a black void but for tiny far-off pools of light denoting small towns. One pool of light she was sure she recognised.

  ‘That’s where I live,’ she told a couple standing by the rail where she had gone after dinner, speaking in the present tense but suddenly realising that that part of her life would never come again. But she wasn’t dismayed.

  ‘I’m going to India. Delhi,’ she chattered on. ‘A town not far from there called Jalapur. They say the buildings are all pink. I imagine it’s quite wonderful to see. My husband’s there waiting for me. He’s in the precious gems trade. He went out there for his father. He has an agency there.’

  The couple listened, smiled, but said nothing apart from a remark from the man that she would like Northern India, and after a while drifted away.

  The Bay of Biscay had been choppy and she had experienced her first bout of seasickness. Miss Tessland’s high but cultured New England voice ordered her not to stay in her cabin but to go up on deck, take deep breaths of sea air and keep her eyes on the horizon. It had worked. By the time the liner called at Gibraltar to take on more passengers, called at Marseilles to take on mail, then Malta and on through the spectacular Suez Canal that took Annie’s breath away, she had begun to feel very much a sailor born. But later during that storm in the Indian Ocean nothing had worked and she had lain prostrate on her bed, her head reeling, her stomach churning, heaving up what little food remained inside her.

  It had been a relief to finally reach Bombay, saying farewell to Miss Tessland, who was going on to Calcutta. Her first impression of India had been one of shock and bewilderment that to this day hadn’t diminished. And if her family had seemed far out of reach during her voyage, they had felt even more so as she’d made for the train to take her on to her final destination.

  Wrinkling her nose against the strange smell that had immediately surrounded her, a mixture of spicy food, bodily odours, unsubtle wafts of perfume, engine oil and stale steam from the trains, all hanging on the heat of midday, she’d followed the porter taking her luggage to her compartment. Victoria terminus, an amazing edifice at once cavernous and suffocating, a jumbled mix of Victorian gothic and Indian sculpture, had echoed with a constant deafening babble of voices. It teemed with humanity. Smart businessmen virtually rubbed shoulders with humble native travellers in colourful saris or white dhotis squatting beside their linen bundles, unaffected by the modern world about them.

  The train had been another shock, one she would never forget, the journey in it long, tedious, hot and so uncomfortable that it far outweighed her awe at the unaccustomed scenery of arid plains with sparsely leafed trees, low blue mountains, towns and villages with their squalid huts and grubby inhabitants, and dusty streets where skinny cattle wandered freely. Camels, asses, even men pulled laden carts, and the children looked in need of a good wash; all were seen fleetingly as the train rattled by. Stopping at stations en route to Delhi where Alex had arranged to meet her, she’d been dismayed at the apparent thousands of people scrambling on. The train was unable to accommodate them all inside, so they clambered on its roof and clung to its sides. She had offered up a prayer of gratitude for a first-class English compartment and cultured English fellow travellers.

  As with her voyage across the Indian Ocean, so she had been heartily glad to have the journey over. On her arrival, when Alex caught her to him in an overwhelming show of loving welcome, she’d once again fostered high hopes of her future, but her life here had proved no more inspiring than the sea voyage or the train journey. And here he and she were together, at least some of the time.

  Beside her, Alex put down his Times of India with a sudden rustle that made her nerve endings jump briefly.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open your letter from home?’ he reminded her, getting up to change the record on the gramophone. ‘I noticed it sitting on the sideboard when I came in, unopened.’

  She had forgotten all about it. Laughing at the oversight, surprised at herself for having overlooked it all this while, she got up almost guiltily and retrieved it from the sideboard. It was perhaps the first time ever she hadn’t opened a letter from home straight away. She should at least have had some curiosity as to how Connie’s wedding had gone.

  It was as she slit the flap that she noticed for the first time that it was quite a thin envelope. Slightly intrigued, she drew out a single sheet. Usually there was a whole wad, full of the goings on in Leigh, sometimes with an added note from Josie. Nothing came from Pam any longer. Mum had written telling her about Pam, a short, sad and bitter letter.

  Annie had written back saying how upset she’d felt. It had been an awkward letter to write, because she hadn’t wanted to take sides, knowing how her parents felt and also how Pam must feel. Distance had made the ongoing feud nonsensical and the casting out of Pam petty. But she hadn’t dared say so.

  She looked at this other single sheet, a premonition of bad news already assailing her. Seconds after reading it she was lying with her face against Alex’s shoulder
, weeping for Connie while he scanned the terrible news, his arm tightening in the sad knowledge that his wife could not be in England to comfort her sister.

  But they both knew the true reason for this unconstrained weeping was not for her sister’s loss – after all, Ben hadn’t yet become one of the family on the day of his tragic death – but for her own, a culmination of her disillusionment with life here, a sense of isolation and a deep longing to be home. He could have sent her home; could have afforded it, but as he held her close, Alex had a frightening feeling that were he to let her go away from here she might never return, her obvious unhappiness with this place overriding even her love for him, and that he could not have borne.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Danny lounged on the well-worn settee after tea, his eyes narrowed against the shaft of late August sunlight coming in through the window from the west. The tide was well out, the day’s haul done, the boiler lit with half an hour yet to go before a build-up of steam could allow the cooking to begin. He had time to relax.

  Young Tibb Barnard would come and tell them when all was ready. Then Dad would get up out of his armchair to stomp heavily and awkwardly along to the cockle sheds – his ankle had never been the same since he’d injured it in May, the day before Connie had lost her Ben. These days he suffered from a nagging ache in it and a need to rest it where once he’d have been active about the shed. These days he’d growl to Danny: ‘Well while we’re waitin’, might as well pop on ’ome, see how your mum is,’ indicating Danny go with him, that way avoiding the embarrassment of appearing to have difficulty leaving on his own. Nothing was said but his brothers Reg and Pete would often say they might as well pop off too for half an hour, which made him feel a bit better about it.