Annie's Promise

by Margaret Graham

  The darkness was pushed aside at the sound of his voice and the words came back, harsh and dry. ‘You don’t understand. I cling. Fred said I did, Carl said I did. I used him, Ravi, I nearly destroyed him.’

  She told him about the drugs, about covering it up with Tom and Annie that day, about Cornwall. ‘I used him.’

  Ravi was silent and now he reached for her hand. She felt his warmth on her skin, but it didn’t reach inside her.

  ‘Yes, you did use him, but it wasn’t you, it was the drugs, it was the madness of the times – for you both. It was Carl. You couldn’t think when your mind was blurred, when someone was pulling in another direction, dripping poison as he was doing.’

  Sarah dragged her hand from his. ‘No, it wasn’t the drugs. I’m like my mother, you see. People aren’t important, it’s only our own needs that are, our own ambitions.’ She lay back and turned her face to the wall and wouldn’t speak any more.

  That night she ran a fever and for the next three days the hate raged in her, for herself, and for her mother who had always put her business before her da, before her. She hadn’t come. She hadn’t come.

  Annie took Don’s phone call at the end of April. He asked her to meet him that evening. She walked to the allotment, past the bar, to the shed. He stood there, his face pale, his eyes uncertain.

  She felt nothing as she looked at him. ‘Well Don, what do you want?’ He reached for her and she moved back. ‘Please don’t touch me, Don.’

  His hand dropped.

  ‘I want to say I’m sorry. Teresa is home in Gosforn. She’s going to the local secretarial college. She didn’t get into heroin, or cocaine, or LSD.’ His voice broke. ‘I don’t deserve that luck. I don’t deserve your forgiveness but I’m asking for it. You see, I know now a little of what you must be feeling. I thought for a moment Teresa was in danger, and my world crashed. It just stopped. I didn’t even know I loved her until then. All I knew before was rage and envy for you. I was mad. You took back the Gosforn house you see. I went crazy inside. I just wanted to say I’m so sorry and that I’ve told Maud and she can hardly believe what I did, and now neither can I.’

  Annie looked across the allotment. She had come on Good Friday and planted potatoes as she and Bet had always done. Sarah liked them fresh from the ground – translucent, tasting of the earth.

  ‘Thank you, Don,’ she said, turning from him, walking back towards the bar because what did it matter how sorry anyone was when her child wasn’t here and what did forgiveness have to do with anything?

  Sarah was weak when the fever ebbed and Ravi brought her a boiled egg, because he had remembered that she liked them. He brought her tea too and talked quietly as she ate and drank.

  ‘You must rest for a few days, you know. You have worked too hard. You need time to think, my Sarah. To come to terms with all that has happened.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to think. I want to work.’

  He shook his head. ‘You are too weak and I repeat, you need to come to terms with your life. However, I am going to another village today and I cannot leave you here because you will not promise me to stay on your charpoy will you?’

  Sarah didn’t answer.

  ‘Then you must come with me.’

  Her legs were weak as she moved towards the Morris and the heat drenched her. They drove silently as the plain unfolded before them and there were no thoughts in her head, there was nothing. How could he think she wanted to come to terms with anything? She knew all there was to know about the past, about hate.

  They entered the village, driving past buffaloes which grazed on parched grass and wallowed in the pool. She stepped out of the Morris, following Ravi to the mud house, where people were already queueing. She stood with him, handing him forms, whilst Bhim, who had travelled with them, swabbed, bathed, comforted. They sat with the villagers as the midday heat rose and worked again in the afternoon.

  At the end of the day, Ravi walked her round the village as the heat eased. They passed black-trunked acacia trees.

  ‘The villagers make furniture and doors, tools and charcoal from these,’ Ravi said. He broke two twigs, handing one to her. ‘They make good toothsticks too. Chew it until it makes a brush, Sarah.’

  She did, tasting the bitterness of the twig, stopping as Ravi did, turning round to look at the village.

  ‘Everything on this land is used by the villagers. The mud is for building and plastering, the wood for rafters, hemp fibre for charpoys, and so on and so on. But the young men are leaving, going to the towns, to England. The villages are changing. Their parents are so brave to allow them to leave. It takes courage to let your children go. Come with me, over here, Sarah.’

  Ravi took her hand and they walked over to one of the houses. He spoke to the woman who smiled and showed him into the grainstore. ‘Look at this, Sarah.’

  She peered past him into the darkness and saw a loom. Ravi was close to her. She could feel his heat and that of the mud walls.

  ‘The village women still weave daris for the family from the cotton they grow. People need clothes, and families need to be clothed, to be fed, to be provided for, my Sarah. Had you never thought of that?’

  She pushed herself away from the building, walking back to the Morris. ‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait for you in the car.’ She stumbled and his arm was there.

  ‘Yes, you are tired and we will go home. Perhaps when you have thought more, we shall talk again?’ Ravi said, nodding to Bhim who was loading the boot.

  But there were no thoughts in her head as she travelled back, just an anger that was growing.

  The next day she rolled bandages, and then followed Pitaji into the children’s ward, smiling at the children, telling them stories they could not understand, giving lunch to those whose parents brought them nothing, because they had nothing. She gave Polo mints to one child, though Pitaji said she must not.

  ‘One won’t harm her,’ she replied.

  Pitaji fetched Ravi who took her outside, his lips thin with anger. ‘That child was to have an operation this afternoon. Now she cannot, not until tomorrow. There is no goodness in spoiling, there is only stupidity, Sarah.’ His voice was firm, hard. ‘Now go and roll bandages and do not again enter the wards.’

  She rolled bandages, feeling the panic inside her, hearing his anger again and again. She cooked chapattis when the sun went down and sat alone, because she had been stupid, foolish, and Ravi stayed in his office.

  There was no sleep that night, and as she lay on her charpoy her head wasn’t empty, it was full of shame, and Ravi’s voice, firm and angry as it had been this afternoon. It swamped the night sounds, and then it was joined by another voice and it was her mother, shouting at her father because he wouldn’t eat.

  She sat up, shaking her head, feeling the sweat running down her face and neck, but the image and the sound would not go away and now she heard the nurse who had taken her to one side and told her that there was no goodness in spoiling a patient, it was too easy. Her mother was quite right.

  She thought of the loom in the grainstore, the women who wove to clothe their families, and now she pushed back the mosquito net and stood in the doorway, hearing the chatter from the courtyard, seeing the lights from the clinic. She gripped the doorway, making herself think, making herself face up to her past, opening her mind to things she had forgotten because the anger was dying, the hate was gone, replaced by doubt as she remembered her mother sewing outfits for her auditions well into the night, when her hands were already shaking with tiredness.

  Sarah looked at her hands which were trembling at the memories which were seeping back. She walked across, stood at Ravi’s door, knocked, opened it. He was working, his head bent over the desk.

  ‘Please, can I talk? I have been so very wrong.’

  Davy’s letter reached Ravi after Sarah had left but Ravi had already written to say that Sarah was safe, and loved them, and would one day be home.

  Davy took the next flight to
India. Annie and Georgie let the birds out for their evening toss, watched them dip and rise and return, and as the spring night closed in they held one another as though they would never let go.

  CHAPTER 24

  The plains were hot and dry, the train rattled and clicked, Indians hung from the sides and lay on the roof. The smell of curry and India was with her day and night but the heat was made bearable by a fan which stirred the air. She shared her compartment with a middle-aged woman who smoked cigarettes in a holder and put her lipstick-covered stubs into a brown paper bag. She seldom spoke except to curse this godforsaken land.

  ‘I love it. My parents were here after the war,’ Sarah said, looking out of the window at the landscape which was no different to Georgie’s and Annie’s descriptions. She wanted to talk of them, to draw them nearer, to somehow make them know she loved them, because she did, so very much – she knew that now.

  ‘To love a land like this is very strange,’ the woman said, turning from Sarah. ‘You must have had very little of beauty in your life.’

  Sarah looked at the sweat which streaked down the woman’s neck. A week ago she would have agreed but now she knew she had grown up amongst great beauty. It was there in the beck, the sea and even in the mines and the narrow streets. It was there in her home, in her parents, her aunt and uncle, in Davy, but she mustn’t think of him, because that love was closed to her. She didn’t speak to the woman again.

  The next day it was the dust which bothered her, cloaking her skin, hair and throat, especially when a sand storm blew up and turned day into night. But none of this really mattered because she was impatient now, all doubt had gone. She had been wrong about her mother, she was sure of that and now there was so much to do, so much to discover, so many bridges to mend.

  She left the train as dawn of the third day broke, pale through the cloudy sky. Would it rain? Of course not, the cloud cleared and the heat baked the ground again. She shouldered her rucksack and pushed through the throng of hawkers, beggars, stallholders, weaving through the tongas to the bus station, waiting as bicycles were heaved on to the roof, and the driver shouted and waved his arms.

  She listened, watched and longed for the bus to start because she had much to do, and more to discover about her mother. She looked into the distance where the Himalayas soared. Would her mother’s friend Prue Sanders still be there? Would she talk to her? She must, Sarah wouldn’t go until she had.

  The bus left at last and they journeyed towards the foothills. The air was clear, cooler and sweet smelling and at seven-thirty in the morning they stopped near a dhak bungalow and drank tea. Soon the driver was shouting again and they boarded the bus, driving on in increasing heat until they reached the level of the pines. They stopped and Sarah ate cold vindaloo from the rest house and then lay on pine needles as the others did, resting until four, before continuing. The Hindu girl sitting next to Sarah left the bus as they entered the next village. ‘This is my home. You may stay with me,’ she told Sarah. Sarah smiled but shook her head. ‘No, I shall stay at the rest house, but thank you.’ She didn’t want to stay with anyone, she didn’t want to have to talk, to smile. She just wanted to train her thoughts on Prue, on the truth.

  The next day they left early again and Sarah watched the Himalayas unfolding before her, their white peaks, their shadowed foothills, the terraced and irrigated slopes. Where was Prue’s village? Was she looking at it?

  The road was winding endlessly through rolling heights of grassland. They crossed a long precarious bridge of logs. Sarah looked down and it was as though she was looking at her life over the past few months, a bottomless drop. Then they were climbing to the pass. Above them Sarah could see five tiers of road winding away into the distance, at times it seemed to end in space and was so narrow she wondered how the party of Indians approaching with ponies could pass but they did. Were they much bigger than her mother’s pony had been? One day perhaps she could ask, if she felt she could ever go home after the grief she had caused them.

  The bus stopped at the top of the pass. Sarah climbed out with everyone else, and looked at the river which formed a semicircle at the base of the mountain thousands of feet below her. Had her father seen this? Had her mother?

  She sat on a boulder and breathed in the clear cool air and looked at the wild flowers and the rose bushes which were not yet in bud. Yes, Ravi was right. There must have been reasons why her mother hadn’t nursed. There must have been reasons why her mother hadn’t come with them to race the pigeons. There must have been reasons why she hadn’t come that last night.

  She lifted her face to the sun. How could she have been so stupid, how could she have remembered Carl’s words above all others, when Carl had always lied?

  ‘Have I been mad,’ she had asked Ravi, ‘to have been so cruel?’

  He had shaken his head. ‘Just young, just confused, just muddled by life, and by drugs. Go home.’

  But she couldn’t go home yet. How could they still love her?

  ‘Love in a family doesn’t die,’ Ravi had said. ‘But grief tortures. Let me tell them you are safe, but that your journey isn’t finished.’

  No, it wasn’t finished, not nearly because, after Prue, there was still something more she had to do.

  The driver hooted his horn and everyone clambered back on board. Sarah smiled at them, talked to those who had English, marvelling at the river valley as they wound slowly downwards, then up again through silent pine forests, gazing at the massive snow-covered peaks which came into view and then were hidden by the trees again.

  The bus set her down in the late afternoon near old shacks on the outskirts of Prue’s hill station. She took a tonga which plodded past brambles and heather, seeing butterflies the size of sparrows, remembering the nettles by the allotment shed, the tortoise-shells. There was a church on their left and now they were coming into the town.

  The tonga lurched as the wheel mounted a rock, then straightened. Sarah hung on, settled again, then looked down to the valley and over at the bazaar. Further away to the left were old buildings set amongst trees.

  That must have been where Dick Sanders had worked after the war. She craned her neck round, knowing that behind the trees she would just see the clinic and there it was, as Prue’s letters had described. She sat back. It was almost like coming home.

  The hotel was old with a sagging verandah; so they hadn’t replaced it as Prue said they had hoped. Sarah was glad. She paid the tonga wallah and heard him hawk and spit betel as she walked towards the steps. Crows were rising from the trees, there was a slight breeze. The verandah creaked and then she was into the darkness, ringing the bell at reception, booking a room for just two nights.

  The dining room was on one side, the lounge on the other. She sat on a red cretonne sofa which was worn and old. Palms stood in brass pots that were smeared with finger prints. New brass spittoons gleamed. The tables were draped with dark red cotton. She drank the tea that was brought and heard sitar music as the office door opened, then silence as it was shut. Fans hung motionless above her.

  ‘Your room is ready, Miss Armstrong,’ the manager said, bowing over the key.

  She smiled as a boy carried her rucksack up the stairs. She bathed in the old mahogany bath. The water was cold, fresh. She changed her skirt for another, and her blouse also. She walked to Prue’s, following the directions with which she had grown up. Past bungalows with compounds, keeping the valley to her right, the sounds of the bazaar to her left. Not yet, not yet because she hadn’t reached the clump of pine trees which stood between the Sanders plot and all the others. Here they were.

  She walked towards the verandah where crimson canna lilies grew. Oh Mum.

  She climbed the steps and stood there, not knowing what to do now and frightened. What would she do if Prue wouldn’t speak to her of the past? The door opened and a plump, pale-skinned, blue-eyed woman with long lashes and blonde hair stood there, dressed in pastel shades.

  ‘Prue? It’s Sarah Armst
rong.’ Sarah could think of nothing more to say. She just waited, wanting to grasp this woman and shout, Help me to know my mother.

  The woman said nothing, her eyes widening and Sarah’s hopes plummeted because this must not be Prue. Where could she now look? She must search until she found her. Sarah half turned, then turned again as the woman put up her hand.

  ‘I’m Annie’s daughter,’ Sarah said, feeling the hand on her arm.

  Now the woman smiled. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t recognise you? You are her image. I was just too moved to speak.’

  Prue’s arms were round her now, holding her gently and Prue’s kisses were on her cheek, her hand stroked her hair as her mother used to do. Sarah put her head on the older woman’s shoulder and felt tiredness sweep over her as she cried for the first time for a long while.

  Prue held the thin body and knew if she spoke she would cry too because she had shared each day of Annie’s pain.

  She led Sarah to a chair set back against the verandah wall and called, ‘Ibrahim, tea please.’

  She sat opposite and Sarah heard the creak of the cane chair under Prue’s weight. Sarah took the handkerchief that was offered and smiled. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know if you’d be here and I had to talk to you.’

  Prue thanked Ibrahim and poured the tea. ‘Yes, I’m usually here, but Dick’s in Delhi I’m afraid, on business. Never mind, you’ll see him on his return.’ Prue put the cup in front of Sarah, her bracelets jangling as Annie had said they always used to. ‘Now look, my dear. Your mother is sick with worry. Please, may I telegraph or telephone her to say you are here?’

  Prue looked across and now Sarah saw the deep lines to the corners of her mouth – they were the same as her mother’s.

  ‘She knows I’m safe, she knows I’m sorry and that I love her.’ Sarah broke off because it was as though the tears would come again. She drank her tea, it was strong, good – now she could speak. ‘Please don’t tell her yet – tomorrow will do.’