Andrew sat up straight. “Homosexuality a crime in Ireland? Yes it is, and because I loved Martin Moran then I am guilty as charged.”
“Stupid law.”
“Stupid, yes, but still the law, so we had to be careful. Only a few close friends were entirely sure of the situation. Angie knew. She used to keep an eye on the house here when Martin came to live with me.”
“Are you saying the judge didn’t even live here?”
Andrew laughed. “You know Martin, he had it all organised. My driver used to drop him back here at 6 a.m. and his driver would pick him up at 7.45 a.m. sharp, to bring him to his chambers at the Four Courts. The same in the evening: he came back to the square first and my driver picked him up and ferried him to Rathgar later.”
“But he died here, didn’t he?”
“That is the only lie I told you. He died in Rathgar.”
“And the library of law books?”
Andrew guffawed. “He was quite tired of his life here. You must come to Rathgar and see his room. He was a very different man on that side of the city.”
Emma stood at the fireplace, leaning against the mantelpiece for support. It was so much to take in. All the time she had been in Australia, she had imagined him sitting at his desk, poring over his law books. Instead he was living a life, building a home, with Andrew. Stabs of jealousy mixed with anger flashed through her, yet she was almost relieved he had not spent the time waiting for her to come back. She turned to Andrew.
“You were with him when he died?”
Andrew nodded.
“I am glad he had somebody who loved him so much by his side. Thank you.”
Andrew stood up and made to put his arm around Emma, but thought better of it. “Emma, you have to know he felt very guilty that he had not been a good father to you. He loved you but in his own way. He only ever wanted you to be happy.”
“Let’s not have that conversation now, Andrew.”
“I was thinking you might like to come to Rathgar when all this has sunk in, maybe see his room. He loved painting, oil paintings mostly. He did a lovely study of you sitting waiting to talk to him in his study here.”
“My father didn’t paint, he never had time . . .” She stopped herself saying more, for fear of sounding silly or confrontational. “So the marriage with my mother was a sham.”
Andrew shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know much about that part of Martin’s life. He never talked about it, but he said once he felt bad, because it was for all intents and purpose an arranged marriage. He went along with it and so did she. We know what happened after that.”
Emma looked out the window to watch the clouds curl over the mountains, bringing rain to the city. She felt cheated: cheated of a father, cheated of the knowledge that would have freed her of guilt all these years. And she was angry: angry for Grace, the collateral damage in an arranged marriage.
Andrew clapped his hands together, the noise slicing through the tension in the room, bounding off the walls. “I might leave you to it. You have a lot to think about.”
Emma swung around. “You knew him well. He does not seem to me a man who would enter into a loveless arranged marriage. What do you think?”
Andrew looked uncomfortable. “I think there is a lot we don’t know about even those closest to us. Honestly, I never quizzed him on it. That was a closed book for Martin. In some ways I wish I had, but I am satisfied that he loved me as much as I loved him, and for that I am thankful.” He moved towards the door.
She wanted him to leave, and yet she didn’t. “I might call over during the week.”
His face lit up in a broad smile. “Let me know beforehand, I will send my driver. Come early and we can spend the day together.” He stopped, worried he had been too familiar. With a little bow, he said, “I’ll let myself out.”
She heard the front door click shut. She watched him walking down the steps and the side of the square to the city, a lonely figure, this big man who was grieving silently inside.
27
Bangalore, India, May 1984
Rhya was lying down when the post arrived. The caretaker crept into the apartment and left the letter addressed to Vikram Fernandes on the table. He made sure, when he pushed the door open, to be silent, lest he disturbed Rhya. He might suffer for his consideration later, because no doubt she would have something to say about not alerting her immediately to such an important airmail letter.
When Rosa came in a rickshaw, the caretaker pulled her away from within earshot of the gaggle of servants squatting gossiping.
“From Ireland, you say?”
“A white envelope, beautiful stamps, ones to keep. Addressed to Mr Vikram.”
“We don’t know anybody that side.” Rosa hurried upstairs.
Rhya was expecting her but had not even bothered to tidy her hair. She was sitting at the table in the same spot where she had flopped when she picked up the letter, taking in the postmark. She had spied it as she walked through to the kitchen and could go no further. She should have been making tea after her afternoon rest. Never had a letter come into this house from Ireland that carried good news.
Rosa, when she pushed open the door, saw her mother sitting stiffly, holding the envelope. Rhya did not look up.
“Is there something the matter?”
Rhya, sobbing, shoved the letter across the table. “It is for Vikram. Why didn’t the man wake me?”
“Don’t blame him, Mama.”
“What can it be? Vikram won’t be home until late. He said he had to tie up a lot of loose ends at the city office and he would get something to eat at a stall downtown.”
“Leave it, Mama. Maybe it is something to do with the trip. Quite harmless.”
Rhya rose from her chair, her clothes crumpled, her hair untidy and dishevelled, a wild look in her eyes. “Isn’t that what always brought bad luck to this family? A seemingly harmless letter from a small place. We need to know what is in it.”
“It is for Uncle to decide whether to tell us, Mama.”
“Vikram Fernandes won’t tell us and we will spend the next decades wondering what it contained and blaming every bit of bad luck on it.” Rhya tucked the letter inside the waist of her sari.
“Mama, what are you doing?”
“Rosa, if you don’t want to know, you should go home now.” Rhya called out to the servant in the kitchen and told her to go to the gate and wait for the dhobi or the stupid fellow would start shouting to be paid.
“Way too early, not for another twenty minutes.”
“Don’t answer back, just go and wait by the gate.”
The servant shrugged her shoulders, leaving the apartment, lingering for a moment in the hallway in case she could find out why she had been sent away.
Rhya whipped into the kitchen and plonked a dekshi of water on the gas flame.
“Mama, Uncle will know if you have steamed it open. Please don’t do it.”
“Rosa, maybe you should go home.”
“I can’t let you do this.” She moved to take the letter from Rhya, but her mother raised her hand.
“Rosa, do you think I want to do this? I am trying to protect a man who has been hurt too much in life already.”
“If you do it, I will never speak to you again.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Rosa. I am only steaming open a letter.”
“Mother, I will walk out the door and not come back again.”
Rhya, who had used steel tongs to grip the letter and hold it over the boiling water, stopped, the envelope still aloft. “You don’t mean that. What way is that to talk to your mother?”
“What way is this to behave towards your own brother?”
“I am trying to protect him.”
“Go ahead, Mama, if you think it is worth it.” Rosa marched to the door.
Rhya slumped against the marble worktop. “I have not done it. Take the letter,” she called out, a pain shooting up her neck and along the back of her head.
&
nbsp; Rosa returned to the kitchen. “You have to remember, there is nothing that country can do to Uncle now, Mama.” She walked into Vikram’s bedroom and propped the letter beside his newspaper on his desk.
Rhya pushed her head into her hands and shook her head. “Does the pain ever stop coming? I can’t bear this.” Her voice was low and shaky, tears puddling into the creases at her neck.
“We won’t worry, Mama, until we have to.”
“Easy for you to say, Rosa,” Rhya snapped as she paced up and down, catching up the pallu of her sari, pulling it tightly through her hands, twisting it around her fingers. “That country tried to ruin Vikram.” Rhya flopped down on the armchair she usually reserved for watching television. “If I can’t open it, maybe we should throw it away.”
“Mama, why don’t you go and lie down.”
“And hear the ghosts whispering in my ear, Rosa? I don’t know what to do.” Rhya picked up the Deccan Herald, flinging it across the room. “All that small country has done is cause trouble for this family. Do you know my mother went to an early grave because of it? You did not have to lie awake listening to her crying because of what they did to her son. You did not see the haunted look on grandfather’s face after Vikram came home and accepted an inferior post in the hospital here.”
Rhya, unable to speak further, turned on her heel back into her brother’s room. There was an awful loss in her heart, so she did what she always did these days when she was feeling down: she sat at Vikram’s desk. Here, among the documents and scraps of paper, she could conjure up the brother who threw himself into modernising the coffee estate and putting the Fernandes family back on the coffee map of India.
This had been her father’s writing desk. Rudolph Fernandes liked to sit and work in the mid-afternoons, when the house went quiet as everybody rested. He forbade his children to go near his desk, but once a year, on their birthdays, they were invited to open the small drawer at the top left-hand side where Rudolph kept his mints. Beside the mints were several small boxes, each with a child’s name on it. On a birthday, one box was taken down, placed on the desk and the birthday child was told to sit and write a wish for the future. It had to be written in neat handwriting before being put back in the box on top of the wishes from previous celebrations.
Rudolph told each of his children that when they married and had their first child, he would give them the box. “Only when you have a precious child will you know the importance of such keepsakes. When you are old, you will look through these notes and some will make you laugh, others will make you cry and there will be some which will leave you with a sense of satisfaction, maybe of a dream achieved,” he solemnly told each of them.
Rhya opened the drawer. There was only one remaining out of the five: a small sandalwood box with the name “Vikram Fernandes” inscribed on top. She had never opened this box.
Vikram avoided this drawer, she knew that. He had endured too much pain already to be reminded of the dreams of youth. He had returned to India, his face bloated and darker, the stress in his eyes so haunting she could barely look at him.
She took the last little box out. All these years, she had never opened the trinket box. Vikram said he already knew what was in it, so why would he open it? Delicately, she pulled off the top, which was stiff and swollen with age. There were several pieces of paper, some written in a very childish hand. She smiled at those early wishes for the future: “I want a motor car”, “I want lots of money”, “Please can I have a maharaja’s palace”, ‘I want to fly an aeroplane”, “That Rhya will stop following me all the time”.
“That I will be as good as father.” “That I can be a fine man.” She looked now at the last one placed in the box by Vikram before he went to Ireland.
“That I make my family proud.”
And she wept a final deep weeping for a life so torn apart and left so lonely.
Rhya lay on Vikram’s horsehair mattress and closed her eyes. Vikram was never going to be free of that country which had left him a broken man. As their mother slowly but surely fell apart over what had been done to her son, it was Rhya who had to step in and run the family. Her father lost himself in his work; it was Rhya who bore the burden. She had to get up every night to try and persuade her mother back to bed. It was she who had to sit by her bedside until she fell asleep, often waking soon afterwards, afraid for her son, who had come back from Ireland a shadow of his former self.
Vikram, so caught up in his own loss, did not immediately see the devastation in his family. Within months, he too had cut his hours at the hospital to two days a week and spent the rest of the time working on behalf of the coffee estate.
“Mama, I brought some cardamom tea.” Rosa was standing at the door, a small china cup of tea in her hand, her face soft with concern.
Rhya sat up and allowed her daughter to fuss about her, placing pillows behind her head.
“Why not rest in your own room? There must be too many memories here.”
“Sometimes memories are kinder than the present goings-on,” Rhya answered, reaching out to take her daughter’s hand. “Let go of this foolishness. You must stay at home and look after your own husband. Anil will feel neglected, you have been spending so much time here.”
Rosa pulled her hand away. “Anil feels neglected even when I am right beside him.”
“You need to look after your husband, girl, not be chasing across the world to a country where there will be no welcome for you.” Rhya took a few small sips from her cup before placing it on the bedside table. “Rosa, I have a headache, I can’t talk about this now. Pull over the curtains. I will rest here in the quiet of the room.”
Rosa did as she was bid. She could hear the stress in Rhya’s voice, an indicator her mother was trying to stop a big argument blowing up, in which they both might say too much.
“Do you want me to wait while you rest, Mama?”
“No need, Vik will be home by nine. I will be up and about by then.” Rhya made an effort to smile so that her daughter would willingly leave her alone. She heard the doors swing back and the lift trundle downstairs, relief flowing over her that she could finally weep uninterrupted.
28
Parnell Square, Dublin, May 1984
Emma waited a few days before making contact with Andrew. He was happy to hear her voice and sent around a car immediately. When she got to the house he was on the phone but indicated to her to sit in his untidy sitting room. He pushed a glass of champagne in her hand as he finished advising a solicitor about an urgent injunction application.
“It pays the bills, but that solicitor wants me to hold his hand even though he is only preparing the simplest of documents. Enough of that nonsense,” he said afterwards as he fussed about, clearing a small mahogany side table for her glass. “Martin liked to sit in that chair, said it meant his back was to the substantial part of the room and the greater untidy mess.”
He made her laugh and she relaxed, enjoying his banter and chat. They had quaffed a second glass of champagne each and she was feeling slightly tipsy when he suddenly left the room and brought in a large framed canvas.
“Martin had this hanging in his study. I wanted you to see it.”
When he swung it around, she gasped in surprise.
The young girl was sitting on the chaise longue, her face sad, her eyes downcast, her brow furrowed in concentration as she tried to work up the courage to talk to her father. The dress was the blue flowery one with the zigzag braid around the outline of the pockets, her hair wavy, tied up in a bow-like clasp. She was wearing her summer sandals with her favourite pair of ankle socks, a small lace frill at the top. At the table, the judge was bent over his files piled on top of each other on either side of him. The window was throwing in light at the back, the law books standing sentry on the scene, a stack of files spilled untidily on the floor.
Andrew placed the painting across the couch and tiptoed away, leaving her to sit and stare and wonder how her father could have remembe
red the scene so vividly when, at the time, it was as if he barely noticed her. An oil painting, the canvas was rough to the touch, the colours of the library sombre, the little girl like a primrose in a dark wood, the father busy and preoccupied. She never knew he had remembered it; she never knew he had cared enough to paint it as it was.
“It is yours. I would like you to have it.” Andrew, who had stolen back into the room, was leaning against the wall, watching her examining the painting.
“I don’t know that my father would have wanted that.”
Andrew came to her and put his arm around her shoulder. “This is exactly what he would have wanted. So do I.”
He beckoned her across the hall to another sitting room-cum-office. It was almost the same as the first sitting room, but it was tidy. The person who sat here liked everything neat. The colour scheme was muted greys and blacks. There was a wide mahogany desk across the window span. At the fire, two high-backed armchairs, small footrests for the feet, mahogany side tables glinting in the sunlight. Over the fireplace a painting, a young woman in a shimmering gold dress, her hands fingering the tiny pleats and folds of the fabric, a faraway look in her eyes. The woman was standing as if examining the dress in a fitting, unaware that she was being observed or recorded. Around her neck was a delicate gold and pearl necklace.
Emma felt her throat tighten, her knees grinding. There was a dry taste in her mouth, so when she tried to speak she could not until she cleared her throat loudly. She sat down on the couch spanning the width of the fireplace, so that she could continue to look in the eyes of this woman she was sure was her mother.
“Why did he paint my mother?”
Andrew did not need to answer: she was so lost in the picture, she would not have heard him anyway.
The dress in the wardrobe, gold pleated linen by Sybil Connolly. Emma felt as if the ghost of Grace was on her shoulder, whispering to her. Her head was pounding, her heart racing. The artist showed a compassion for the subject; even the small curls around the front of her face were executed with precision, detail and care. Emma felt angry and confused. She wanted to run away from this double life and back to Parnell Square, where her father lived in the library and travelled between his law books in Parnell Square and his judge’s bench at the Four Courts.
The Judge's Wife Page 17
