The Tea-Planter's Daughter

by Sara Banerji

  But it was not only the fear of the devil that worried the young matey. He had been disconcerted at the sight of Julia on one occasion, emerging from her bedroom dressed only in a short towel.

  “You don’t look at the Madam’s face,” Babuchi had instructed the boy sternly, when he had first arrived to work at the Clockhouse bungalow. And after Julia drank the gin, and walked round in a towel the cook added, “Don’t you look at her body either, or I see you get thrown out ofjob.” So the boy who was the sole wage earner in a family of eleven kept his eyes to the ground whenever he happened to encounter the mistress.

  Ayah arrived grunting with exhaustion and exasperation. She had grown very fat with the years and threw herself into the kitchen basket chair, the one with the broken legs that had been thrown out from Madam’s verandah, fanned herself with Babuchi’s newpaper, and said, “What sort of thing is this then? To call a sick old woman all the way out of her home and up this steep hill for nothing, and Julia Missie sitting happy as the Holy Father.” Ayah’s eyes were on the sherry bottle as she spoke. Babuchi put his hand protectively round its neck, and told her, “It’s because you took so long to come here. How can we sit here waiting while you take your time walking slowly along? It is only by the grace of God that the Master is not home already. He might be here at any moment. And put down that paper. It is getting torn and I have not yet read it.”

  “Slowly along!” cried the ayah with indignation, and she rattled the precious paper vigorously. “I have run nearly all the way with this fellow your grandson pushing me along as if I was a buffalo. ‘I will probably drop down from heart attack at any moment if I cannot have a rest,’ I told him. And he says, ‘We will all be killed by the Master anyway, if he comes back and the Missie is still behaving in such a way. So what does it matter if you get the heart attack.’ Now I get here and find there was no need for this hurrying at all. I could have stayed in my bed. All is perfectly well!”

  All the time she talked she kept her eyes on the sherry bottle. There was only about two inches left in it, Kali having drunk a great deal more deeply than Babuchi intended him to. There was just enough left for Babuchi’s after dinner swig.

  Ben Clockhouse kept the drinks cupboard locked, and always had the keys with him so only the cooking sherry was available for Babuchi’s consumption. Ben liked sherry in his clear soup. This soup was made from bones and carrots and onions, boiled for hours, then cleared with broken eggshells, and finally dabbed with sheets of lavatory paper to take away the grease.

  During dinners at which clear soup was served Babuchi would put his eye to the hole in the dining-room hatch and watch helplessly as Ben shook large amounts of sherry into the soup. The sight always nearly broke Babuchi’s heart, and he began to hate his wonderful soup and look upon it as a greedy gobbler of the precious sherry.

  “Master no like nice mushroom soup?” Babuchi would say hopefully when taking the dinner order. And his heart always missed a beat when Ben said, “I think we’ll have the clear this evening,” as though having clear was quite usual, not of any great importance, as though sherry splashed so cheerfully on was of no great account. One good thing about Julia Missie was that she never put sherry in her soup.

  Babuchi clung to his last two fingers and glared at Ayah. Ayah stared hard at the bottle and said, “I think there was no wildness at all. I think you just called me here, me an old woman, to make mockery of me. I think I will take the stick to this young boy, your grandson who has so cruelly tricked me—”

  “Oh, she has been running round breaking things with almost no clothes on, Ayah, and going into the rain in this way also,” the boy burst out, looking with alarm at the old woman. He remembered her whacks when he had been a little boy. He forgot for a moment that he was now a muscular young man and she a fat old lady. “I swear on the head of the holy yogi who sits at the gate that the memsahib was running round this house wearing almost no clothing.”

  Ayah’s eyes narrowed with cunning. “I think I shall have to tell the Master the things that are happening in his absence. I think I shall have to tell him that the servants here have not looked after my Missie.” She stared at the gripped bottle with such intensity that the sherry should have burst into flames. Babuchi shifted uneasily. His grip loosened.

  “Yes. That is what I will tell the Master,” said Ayah.

  “Would you like a little glass of sherry, Ayah?” said Babuchi in a small voice.

  Chapter 12

  Julia leant back in the planter’s chair that had been her father’s and pressed her face into the worn fabric of the cushion. It still smelled of Edward Buxton, after all these years. Julia smiled into the ancient cloth and considered how she had turned her father into something safe. It had taken a long time but in the end she had succeeded in turning him into aromatherapy in a threadbare cushion.

  Once, years ago, when she had been seven, he had fired mental arithmetic questions at her from this chair and she had answered with confident accuracy, unseeing eyes looking out of the window. She leant against her father’s knee and sometimes his hand gently stroked her head. She drifted deeper against her father, and his arm began to enclose her, to draw her against his body. She became filled with a gigantic joy that seemed to stream from the light coming into the room, and from her great dark strong father pressing her against him, smelling of whisky, tobacco, and manufactured tea. His body felt as tough and vibrant to her as the trunk of a tree.

  She leant across his knees, and, lifting her face, kissed him on the mouth. Her father stirred hugely like a mountain moving, so that darkness flooded over the child blotting out the light in a cacophony of love.

  Then he threw her from him.

  He thrust her with such force that her head struck the wall and she let out a little scream from shock and pain.

  She scrambled to her feet not understanding. He was looking at her and there was an expression in his face she recognised. A sort of longing. A pleading in his eyes. His mouth was slightly open so that she could see his teeth behind his beard. She stared at him, and probably her own mouth was open too. There was a white streak on her shoulder where it had rubbed the lime-washed wall, and on her forehead a bruise began to swell, but she did not notice it.

  Edward stretched out his hands making a gesture she did not understand, but she thought she heard him breathe the word “come”. She stepped towards him hesitantly, but before she reached him he suddenly seized his pen and began to write, saying without looking up, “Get out!”

  “But Father —” Julia began.

  “Get out at once!” Edward shouted, and still did not look at her. As the child scuttled from the room Edward was scribbling frenziedly.

  It had been several days before he called Julia for another lesson, and then his face was wooden and expressionless. Julia did not approach him. She stood in the middle of the room, her hands at her sides, her lips pressed tight.

  “Here. Read this.” He had thrust a reader towards her without looking up.

  Julia stood quite still. She did not pick it up.

  “Read!” ordered Edward.

  Julia did not move.

  Edward grabbed his ruler, and struck her sharply across her wrist. He had never hit her in her life before, and she felt the blood drain away from her face. But she did not withdraw her hands.

  “Begin reading at once!” Edward ordered. He held the ruler ready to strike again. Julia neither flinched nor read.

  Even today, breathing in all that was left of her father, she did not understand.

  Julia became marooned in the chair that had been her father’s and smelled of monsoon fungi and of long departed Planter Buxton.

  She had been taken to see him in the Arnaivarlai hospital, where they put him after the stroke had paralysed his arm.

  He had muttered through a dribbling corner of his mouth, “It was not my fault.”

  “I know,” she had said. “It was mine.”

  It was not fear of her father, but the s
ight of her mother’s face, grey and grieving, that stopped her saying, “But if you had not clipped the goose’s wings your arm would still be moving …”

  “You didn’t sound as though you cared at all,” Gwen wept, as they drove home.

  Julia had thought that marrying Ben Clockhouse would solve everything. On the day she had had tea with him in the assistant’s bungalow, and he had said to her that she might darn his socks she had thought that he would love her at least for a little time. As the months had passed after their wedding and he had learnt more about her, and had gone on loving, she had begun to feel secure, and to think that there would never come a day when he would push her away, like her father had done. She had begun to think that even if she made the little ornaments canter he would continue to love her.

  In the first year of their marriage Julia had said she wanted to meet Ben’s mother.

  Ben had not seen his mother for years. Although he was a grown-up man, and she had no power over him any more, he had felt his mouth dry with fear as they waited for her to answer the door bell. She had arrived wearing dark glasses because she had some mysterious eye disease, and her skin was as white as dough because, due to the disease, she never went out in the sun. Julia, Ben, and his mother had sat in the darkened sitting room, and she had poured cups of coffee for them.

  “Beware of your husband,” she had said to Julia. “He has ruined my life.”

  They had all sat silent for quite a long time after that, and the only sound had been Julia turning and turning her spoon in her coffee cup and the ticking of the slate clock on the mantelpiece. Then Julia said softly, “He has beautifulled mine.”

  During those first years Julia would wait for Ben to come home in the evenings with her heart racing in expectation, and sometimes, in the dry weather, after he got back, she would take him up the hill behind the house and show him the wild orchids growing there.

  “Their perfume makes me quite dizzy!” Ben would say, and laugh and stagger about a bit so that Julia had to catch him in her arms so steady him. Then he would press his face against her neck and say, “But you make me dizzier.”

  Once they made love up there, in spite of the fact that they might have been discovered by tribals searching for wild honey swarms. Wild elephants might have come upon them, but they did not even think of it.

  “Now that Missie has the Master to love and care for her she will not have any more troubles,” Kali had told Julia, and he had salaamed her in a very deep sort of way, so that Julia knew that even to Kali she had become a more important person by marrying Ben.

  But her greatest reason for supposing that her troubles would be over once she became the senior lady of Arnaivarlai and was married to Ben was because her mother had told her that happiness did not come from inside. Until her mother had said that Julia had been aware that inside her she had a well of happiness that needed very little, the flying of a goose perhaps, or the embrace of a father, to draw it up. From her earliest days she could remember the feel of this joy only just underlying everything she did, everything she was, so that she just had to dip her mind down a little way to become suffused in it. Even in the worst moments like when her father had thrown her from him Julia had been able to feel inside herself and find it ready to come out if she would allow it to.

  But then she had discovered that the happiness must not be allowed to rise to the surface for she understood now that goodness only comes from suffering. And Julia wanted very much to be good. Her father had said that Julia’s kind of happiness was the joy of Satan so there had followed years during which she had had to stifle it. At first it had been quite hard for Julia to squash the joy back in and she had had to use gin to numb it. But as time passed the happiness seemed to become disheartened, as a weed that is forever being hoed gives up trying to grow. So that by the time she met Ben she hardly ever felt happy.

  When Ben offered her all the things that her mother said would bring joy: a home, a husband, prestige, money, and one day perhaps children, Julia had realised with relief that she would once again be able to enjoy, and this time it would be a good worldly sort of happiness like everyone else’s.

  She had been a bit surprised at first to discover, once she became a madam, and joined the aunties in the club, that, in spite of the fact that they too had homes and husbands, money and children, they drank pink gin.

  “Surely they are as happy as possible, and no one can tell them they mustn’t be,” she had said to Ben.

  He had called her an innocent, and said jokingly, “It’s because you are Big Madam, and not them! It is because they mayn’t leave parties till after you have gone; because they have to walk behind you when we go on official inspections; because it is you who hand out the school prizes, while they sit on lower chairs on either side, that they drink gin. It is because they are jealous of you!”

  Julia had looked so shocked and alarmed at this that Ben had said quickly, “Of course I didn’t mean that! If they had husbands as nice as yours they wouldn’t need gins either!”

  Because during the first two years of marriage Julia had felt very happy all the time, and because she had felt sure it was due to her marriage so was therefore the right sort of happiness, she had not needed to drink a pinkie once.

  When Ben had assured her, “It’s because you’ve got such a nice husband that you don’t need gins and they do!” Julia had laughed and nodded for it was quite clear that Ben was nicer than any of the other husbands. During their first two years of marriage she had looked at the other husbands sometimes, remembering how some of them, when she had been single, had pinched her bottom, and even tried to kiss her. Dick Sallinger had tried to kiss her after she had become Ben’s wife too, though that was before Ben became SM. Julia thought to herself that Ben would never do things like that with other girls, because he loved her, Julia.

  As these thoughts passed through her mind she felt a stab of fear, and thought that perhaps because Ben no longer loved her he was even now kissing some girl in Madras. Perhaps that was why he had not come home for her birthday.

  She could not understand why the rackshasa that lived in her did not want anyone to love her. She decided it might be because if you are loved you become quite all right all the way through you so that your insides are like Heaven, and for a demon that would be as uncomfortable to live in as Hell would be for an angel.

  She felt such a great sorrow fill her as she thought about it that she did not even need a gin to keep the joy in. For it was because she had pushed Ben away that he no longer loved her. Making love with him had caused her soul to become scattered all over the universe and she had not dared let him do it, even though he had told her that if she didn’t she would not have any babies.

  Soon after she stopped letting Ben love her he stopped going up the hill to see the orchids with her, saying that his day on the estate had made him tired.

  “I will do anything for you,” said Julia. “Just tell me what you want and I will do it. I wish you got holes in your socks so I could darn them.”

  But Ben was busy, abstracted. He began to get depressions. He said things to her like, “Only make yourself respectable when you go out on these official functions. That’s all I want of you,” and, “At the school prize-giving you had your lipstick all over the place,” or “Get the ayah to come from the village to iron your frocks if you can’t get one of the house servants to do it properly.”

  “Yes,” Julia would say in a dull voice.

  “Julia,” he had whispered two nights ago, “I long for you so.”

  But she had kept her legs tight though she had longed for him as well. She did not dare after the experience. Ben Clockhouse had poured himself into her two years ago, and had become all the men of the world, all the male things of the universe. This had ended with Julia’s soul not simply rising and floating near the ceiling as it had done when she was a child, but wrapping itself around the whole world. In fact it might have been more accurate to have said that the worl
d had reproduced itself on Julia’s soul. “It will be the universe next,” Julia had murmured aloud against the cheek of her husband. And Ben whispered, “Oh I love you so,” into her damp hair.

  Valleys and ploughed fields, populations and the evolution of animals printed themselves on to the thighs and earlobes of Julia Clockhouse, until she whispered out in fright and tried to put the light on. But she could not lift her hands for the weight of earth on them.

  “I will never let that happen again,” said Julia Clockhouse.

  Because that had happened two years ago Ben had gone to Madras with his eyes cold, saying, “You don’t love me at all.”

  Other troubles had come to Julia out of marrying Ben. On official inspections of local colleges and newly built tea factories, when the aunties all had to walk behind Julia because Julia was the Big Madam, Julia had to wear a hat. This pressed down her hair and hurt it.

  “How can your hair hurt?” her mother had said once. “Hair is dead stuff and has no feeling in it.”

  “Mine has,” said Julia.

  But it was not only Julia’s hair that hurt today. She ached all over from the effort of keeping body and soul together, of the throbbing from the gins, and because Ben had not come back from Madras although it was her birthday.

  Julia shook her head blinking at the knock on the door.

  “Big Madam has come,” said Kali.

  Julia gazed at him confused, thinking at first, in her pink-gin-muddled mind, that Big Madam must be her mother.

  “She is a very Big Madam. A Rani. She sent the roses for your birthday,” said Kali who seemed flustered.

  On the mantelpiece was a great flopping bunch of yellow roses, much battered with the rain. Julia stared at them amazed. She had not noticed them before, although their petals were everywhere, fluttering on the hearthrug, tumbled over the backs of the brass line of elephants. Julia saw some earwigs coming out of the roses, and go sneaking to where Kali had lit a fire to keep the monsoon damp out. “Well, how sensible,” thought Julia. “If I was a chilly earwig I would not be able to think of anywhere nicer.”