Writing on Skin

by Sara Banerji

  When Hugh had said they were going to leave India, Hermione, accustomed to having her desires fulfilled, had waited confidently, almost excitedly, like a child expecting birthday presents, for the thing to happen that would prevent her from being sent into exile. Consequently she had been quite shocked with disappointment when she and Hugh had been smoothly transferred to a big Oxfordshire house and garden with lake, and all their ties with India cut.

  At first she had roamed the gardens, walking in galoshed feet for half a day at a time, as though hunting for the dark goddess who might be crouching round any corner ready to rise and tell her who she was. Hugh would surreptitiously watch her from the window and sometimes press his hand to his chest as though pushing a pain back in. He would tell himself, ‘It is only India she is missing. Nothing more.’ He never dared question her for he knew she was a liar. He offered to buy her a dog. She chose a Great Dane puppy and for a while Percy’s energetic requirements took Hermione’s mind off her many losses. Percy seized skirts, tugged tablecloths, nipped cats’ tails, and was astonished to be smacked for torn tweed, showered with broken crockery or scribbled on by furious felines. Percy’s urgent greed rushed food into vast dribbling face flaps that quivered inwards after the vanishing nourishment as though there was a vacuum between the slurping tongue and chomping teeth.

  Hermione had expected Hugh to become quickly dissatisfied with England, and wish to return to India, a longing she would have taken instant advantage of. But he had settled happily into village life, exhibiting at their flower shows, a gaffer among gaffers, talking turnips and of how to keep pigeons off the runner beans.

  ‘How could you wish for anything better than this life, so clean, so quiet, no flies?’ Hugh had asked her, though he hankered a little at first, too, missing the salaams from the poor men, and the brotherhood of the rich.

  ‘I miss dirt. Dust. Flies. Noise. Car horns blaring,’ Hermione had tried to explain. But it was not true really. It was her own blood that was missing, a part of her own body, an aspect of her soul.

  Indian friends came to stay, heavy women, bellies bulging out of too tight trousers, suffering from migraines from excessive shopping. Their sons bought cheap lager and wore the silken clothes of maharajas, got mildly drunk then left empty tins and cigarette stubs for Hermione to clear away.

  ‘I never even knew them,’ Hermione protested. ‘They’re just coming to sponge on us.’

  The pigeons sounded as though they were growing tired from their day-long protest in the heat and a strange sort of silence seemed to be pervading their coos. ‘I wish you could have been happy,’ mumbled Hugh back under his hat again, his voice sharing, it seemed to Hermione, the strained weariness of the doves. ‘I wish I could have satisfied you.’

  Hermione had found a youth to help Gerald in the garden and was trying to find a way to introduce him to Hugh. The youth was someone who would never say things like, ‘Well, Hermione, if you really want it there …’ with the end of the sentence left unsaid, so that Hermione knew her suggestion was infantile and its execution doomed to failure. Or, ‘We don’t put horse manure on roses, Hermione’, the horse stressed as though she had asked for it on apple pie. ‘I don’t know how it was done in India,’ Gerald would say, ‘but here we roll out turves …’ The Indian malis had made her a blue grass lawn, plucking individual rootlets from a neighbour’s and planting them at four-inch intervals until the large area of tilled ground resembled an advert for a hair transplant.

  Hermione’s prospective new gardener wore metal-studded leather, had a naked tattooed head, and might be sufficiently ignorant to lay her a rootlet lawn that took three years to thicken. ‘Can you get blue grass in Britain?’ she had asked Gerald.

  ‘Blue grass, Hermione?’

  As she paced in front of Hugh, sometimes flopping into her chair to rise a moment later as though the urgency of what she was saying would not allow her to relax, she caught sight of the skinhead waiting, as she had instructed him, at the side of the tool shed. He was bending forwards, as though hoping to get some hint from Hugh’s posture or her voice as to whether he had got the job or not. His large teeth showed in a timid grimace that contrasted strangely with his big dangerous body, baggy with pins and tatters.

  Hermione had encountered him out shopping. He had been drawing, with dry child’s chalks, portraits of plants upon the pavement.

  ‘Honesty,’ he told her, straightening, brushing chalk dust from his fingers when she stopped to look. Keeping his eyes on his art he murmured shyly, ‘I can’t get it quite right. It’s supposed to be a streaked one. You know, when there’s white splashed into the magenta.’ She had the feeling he was surprised to be talking to her like this, that it was something that had seldom, if ever, happened before. The people passing seemed puzzled, too, at the sight of the elderly lady and the dishevelled skinhead bending together over an inept drawing of a pink flower, and Hermione heard one woman murmur as she moved away, ‘She ought to be careful. He’ll mug her for sure …’

  Hermione had been attracted to the skinhead because he seemed to love flowers whereas Gerald appeared to despise them. Gerald marshalled them in orderly groups like a colonel mustering his troops, ruthlessly wrenched out disease, shaved uneven growth, ripped out errors as though dealing with mutinous soldiers. It was court martial for a white petunia in a bed of purple. Stinging round bushes with his strimmer that made a noise like an angry wasp, Gerald reduced plant matter to pulp in a moment; he lashed young trees to posts and climbers to walls with nails, wire and netting as though they would otherwise escape.

  ‘Hugh likes it tidy,’ said Gerald. ‘It’s the way Hugh wants it.’ He had his eye on a future of large vistas and gigantic scope and after all he was Hugh’s man, Hugh had found him, Hugh paid him. Hugh had told him, ‘My friend, Lord Lewis, will put you on to the next rung of the ladder.’

  Since he’d retired Hugh no longer enjoyed any power and he felt flattered that Gerald was accepting his advice and career assistance in a way that his own sons and grandsons had never done. With them it had been, ‘It’s all right Pa, I don’t need a letter from your old friend. I can get a job on my own.’ Or, ‘I’m going to be a poet, Granpa. I don’t have any desire to become a tea-planter in India.’ Tammy, Hermione’s half-African granddaughter, had rejected Hugh’s career advice on the grounds that Granpa’s career in tea did not qualify him to help her in her chosen ambition to become the pilot of a space craft. ‘I don’t expect you know a thing about weightlessness, for instance,’ she had observed kindly.

  Although Gerald had been with them for four years, they had not been able to find any reliable labour to work under his instruction. During the holidays, lethargic money-hungry teenagers, some Hermione’s own grandchildren, would agree to work, and after a while have to lie down dizzily, unused to the bending. Local gardening firms had yielded young men who, innocent of any knowledge of horticulture, had pounded over the land in enormous machines that threw up froths of weed, grass and earth, and left in their wake a till that, like grazed skin, took weeks to heal. By the time Hermione met the skinhead they’d had no assistant gardener for several months although, because of the dry summer and the ban on hosepipes, the garden had survived.

  ‘It’s fortunate I put in plenty of geraniums,’ said Gerald. ‘They are so tolerant to drought.’

  ‘I hope to manage without an assistant gardener altogether in due course,’ said Hugh. ‘After I’ve sold the surplus land, Gerald can cope. Geraniums and lobelia in the interim. Just like our bungalow in Calcutta.’

  Luckily the prices had been tardier and the developers more reluctant than Hugh had expected, and Hermione had walked the grounds with only minor nips being sold off now and then to be turned into estates of Roversrests.

  She had imagined the skinhead, otherwise known as Slug, ousting Gerald and creating for her an eccentric garden of the soul, for she saw in him a Gauguin of garden design, untutored and therefore concept free. Lalia, Hermione’s daughter-in-law
, was persuading her of the joy of full packed beds gushing over like cornucopias with catmint and alchemilla lamium. Thyme would go frothing over on to the lawn, old-fashioned roses would burst through in great perfumed blousy mountains, trees tangled with clematis would crack under the weight of rosa Kiftsgate, while silver- and gold-speckled ivies would go twining and tormenting among the hedges. The skinhead would produce this for her.

  ‘Who’s that fellow?’ grunted Hugh, noticing Slug for the first time, raising his head a little, glaring with one eye from under his hat.

  Hermione felt annoyed with Slug, whom she had ordered to keep out of sight until summoned, and who had now probably spoiled everything.

  Hugh said, ‘He’s just waiting for me to fall asleep to steal my watch.’ This sort of thing had often happened to him in his early years in India, until he had become vigilant and powerful and the risk of offending him had not been worth taking.

  ‘He’s got a watch already,’ soothed Hermione. It was a child’s Goofy watch with a yellow plastic strap. ‘He only wants a chance. You’re always saying young people should be given a chance.’

  ‘That,’ Hugh pointed a wavering finger in the direction of the tool shed, ‘may be young but it is not a person.’

  At the gesture the skinhead did a little shoulder-shrugging and grinning in response, as though the finger waved in his direction had given him hope.

  ‘My goodness, someone’s been doodling on his nut,’ said Hugh, and this time made a sound that was almost a chuckle. The shaved head shone where the sun caught it and Hermione tried to picture it with hair. If Slug got the job of assistant gardener, she wondered if she should suggest he wore a hat next summer even though this would hide the tattooed words ‘Never grow old’ etched into his skin in purple, green and yellow.

  Chapter Two

  Hermione had hoped, on producing her skinhead, for some strong response from Hugh, as one accustomed to spicy food longs for chillies.

  Hugh had accused her once of seeking danger here in England, because she had grown accustomed to it in India.

  ‘Danger?’ she had repeated, thinking back, trying India out with her tongue to test the truth of this assertion.

  There had been dangers she had always known, like cobras in the garden, wild elephants looting the runner beans; the need to push her watch and Hugh’s wallet up her knickers when they travelled, to hide them if they were stopped by bandits. She supposed she must have felt afraid sometimes but now could only remember the tingle of excitement like pepper at the back of her palate.

  In her secret heart, she knew that the thought of the skinhead doing Hugh’s garden excited her because he looked like England’s version of danger.

  The old man who cut the hedges had also seen Slug lurking behind the tool shed, and had sidled up to Hermione to say ominously, ‘He’s one of a gang. I know his mates.’ Allowing the blades to crunch, he had added, ‘My advice to you is don’t touch him,’ and then repeated, ‘I know his mates,’ in the same dark tones as before.

  ‘That fellow looks like a gardener about as much as you look like a weight-lifter,’ Hugh observed now, his tone almost indifferent as though his next phrase might be, ‘But I don’t mind. Have him if you want’. The brim of his sun hat vibrated with unaltered rhythm.

  Hermione glanced at him and thought that his body looked different. He was a big man, large limbed, headed, boned, and bellied but now he jutted like wet land.

  Irritated by such uncharacteristic inertia she said, like a picador pricking a bull, ‘I like a messy garden!’

  The brim wobbled smoothly.

  Hermione sighed and plucked a teasel from her skirt.

  Slug had ducked away out of sight now, but she still felt cross with him. Pausing in front of Hugh, she was again struck by the impression of heaviness, like earth piled. He had been red haired, bearded and impressive when she’d first met him. Even now, she thought, trying to look past the canvas hat and bulging clothes to see him critically, to see him as other people must, the first impression was of a powerful not an ancient man. Her scrutiny filled her with a sudden warm fondness so that she felt an impulse to hug him but was prevented by his too complete stillness which she felt it would be almost irreverent to disturb.

  They had been married for nearly fifty years. Daniel, their youngest son, was organizing a golden anniversary party for them in some London hotel. Must get a dress. The family always accused her of eccentric dressing.

  ‘My goodness you are lucky,’ Hermione’s mother had said, and sighed with admiration when she had first heard Hugh had proposed marriage to her daughter. Perhaps even then the tongue of senility had licked her, or why did she not see, why did she not know?

  Hermione had been a tall girl but Hugh had still towered over her.

  ‘What a couple you will make!’ enthused her mother, ‘One so dark and one so fair. You’ll have lovely children. I was afraid for a while that you were going to do something silly but all’s turned out well in the end, wonderfully well!’ she had cried. She had been searching for wedding-dress broderie anglaise among the bolts of perfumed cloth in the bazaar. As she had stood waiting while the squatting merchant flipped out yardages, Hermione had become suddenly overwhelmed with the dizziness of doubt.

  Her mother, rushing her out into the soup-warm air had blamed the fainting attack on the bazaarman’s joss sticks, crying over her shoulder as she shoved her shambling daughter into the taxi, ‘We will have to shop elsewhere!’ Then saying, ‘He should have known that we Europeans can’t bear the stuff.’

  The bazaarman had patted his bare belly and belched before rolling up the cloth again, making Hermione’s mother say as they rattled away down Park Street, ‘I’m sure he minded what I said, in spite of appearances. Nervousness gave him wind as it always does me.’

  Back home that day Hermione had examined herself in the looking glass, searching through her features, trying to put them together to make a face that she could then judge. For a fleeting moment she had been reminded of a woman in a Rajput miniature, poised nervously among lightning flashes, darting snakes, and the angles of branches, sharpnesses that symbolized the expectation of passion. But the impression vanished when she turned her head.

  She thought that at least when she had children and stirred her genes up with those of another person she would be able to look into their faces and discover herself. But in the event the fair children had seemed oddly alien, as though they had initially belonged to someone else.

  She and Hugh had had four children.

  Sitting next to her husband in the basket chair under the summer evening sky in which swallows swooped she whispered this fact softly but aloud. ‘We, you and I have four children.’

  She was lying, but sought to console him, to reassure him though she did not know if he heard for he did not stir but without moving seemed, in some subtle way, to sink more heavily against the cane.

  ‘I would not wish for a gardener you do not like,’ she tried again. The phrase came out jerkily as though slapped from her by a guilt-threatening nanny. She was forever trying to avoid feeling guilty about Hugh, to prevent the burden of her single enormous guilt from growing any heavier.

  But Hugh did not respond.

  Hermione’s thoughts went drifting back across the years, to the fourth child, what might have been, until she seemed to doze among the rememberings of someone old.

  She was brought back to the present by catching sight, out of the corner of her eye, of the reappearance of the clown with ‘Never grow old’ tattooed on his scalp.

  Immersed in the memory of a sublime moment Hermione had forgotten Slug and now suddenly wished she had not risked upsetting Hugh for his sake. She would tell him her husband had said ‘No’. Perhaps she could compensate him for his raised hopes by buying a drawing from him and if it was too awful she could always hang it in the downstairs loo.

  The pigeons were moaning most enormously as though in anguish over some mighty loss. Perhaps magpies had
invaded their nests, devoured their fledglings. But was it nesting time? She realized she had no idea, had never bothered much about insipid British wildlife and its seasons. She was like someone who has lost a beloved dog and is not willing, out of loyalty, to give their heart to the new puppy.

  Hugh had accused her of prejudice. ‘If you will only try to like things here you will find much to enjoy,’ he had urged her when they had first come to settle in England ten years ago. And because she was fond of Hugh and owed him much, she had made an effort.

  Hermione and Hugh had had a good marriage. They had been smiled upon by society from the start, first of all in India then later in England, where, because of their looks, natures, wealth, and position, they were eagerly included in every social event.