The Sunlight on the Garden (24 page)

Chicken it was, when we sat down for lunch on that Saturday. ‘Joseph's bread sauce is better than mine,' our mother said, admiringly but not wholly pleased.

‘You've made him into a first-rate cook,' my father said.

‘He has a natural talent. That Ahmed was beyond any teaching.'

‘Oh, don't talk of Ahmed. I often thought he'd poison me with that filthy kitchen and the flies and the ice-box dripping water.'

At the end of the meal our mother announced: ‘Now we have Joseph's surprise.' She got up and went out to the kitchen.

We knew from previous birthdays what we would hear next. From far down the corridor between the kitchen and dining room we heard her strong, not always accurate contralto:

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday, dear children,

Happy birthday to you …

Then Joseph was singing, in a nasal, no less loud tenor. Maria and I giggled, not in mockery, but in surprise and pleasure. He entered the room first, carrying the large, murderous knife that we so often watched him sharpening, sparks whirling away from the whetstone, when we were to have a Sunday joint. Behind came my mother, bearing a huge cake, the flames of its eighteen candles, nine for Maria, nine for me, juddering in the dry, dust-laden wind that had been blowing in through the open window.

She set down the cake with a sigh. Her forehead was damp, straying hairs sticking to it. ‘ There you are, children! Look what Joseph has prepared for you!'

Maria pointed: ‘Us!
Us
! They're us.'

Joseph had carved two figures, standing close to each other, their arms intertwined. One was a boy, dressed in white shorts and a blue, short-sleeved shirt, just like ones that I often wore. The other was a girl in a gym-tunic with black strap shoes fashioned not out of leather but some sort of black cloth. The two figures were inseparable, we later discovered, carved from a singe piece of wood.

Maria's eyes glittered in the light of the candles. Her mouth was open, as though she were about to cry out. I, too, stared transfixed.

‘Isn't that lovely?' our mother said. ‘Oh, Joseph, you've been to so much trouble. You shouldn't have! You
shouldn't
have!'

Later, we quarrelled about who was to keep the conjoined figures. I think that we both felt, though we would never say it, that they were symbolic of the lives that we had shared so closely. We did then not realise how soon and abruptly those lives would be separated, as though someone had taken an axe to the figures, splitting the single piece of wood into two. We were doomed to become remittance children, like thousands and thousands of others packed off ‘home', to be looked after by relatives, friends or even total strangers. I would go to an uncle and aunt, who already had a brood of six brats and certainly did not welcome another. Maria would go to our German grandmother in Switzerland, where she would be cosseted and indulged. We would rarely see each other again until the war was over and we were past twenty.

‘I'm older than he is. So I should have them,' Maria said.

‘But I'm the
boy
!' I shouted. ‘Anyway she's only twenty minutes older.'

‘He likes me better. Joseph likes me better.'

‘Liar!'

‘If I were Solomon I'd cut that piece of wood in two,' our father said.

‘Why don't you toss for it?' my mother proposed.

Reluctantly we agreed.

Maria won, as she usually did when we tossed for anything. She looked at me, worried and sad. ‘I'm sorry' she said. Suddenly

she held out the figures. ‘You have them if you want. I don't mind.' I shook my head. It was not the first time that it was brought

home to me that she had a far more generous nature than I had.

It was two or three weeks later that the unbelievable thing happened. With its abruptness and horror it might have been a car crash or train crash or an attack of the cholera that had been reported to be spreading in the native quarter.

It was yet another unbearably hot day. On the one following it, after repeated changes of mind, my mother had resolved at last to take Maria and me up into the hills of Naini Tal. Two electric fans were whirring at either end of the dining-room. The windows were closed, as they now always were until the scorching air outside had begun to cool with the sinking of the sun. Our bearer was on holiday and so it was Joseph's assistant, the
kitmatgar
, little more than a boy with the vestige of a moustache above his long, thin upper lip, who staggered in with an overloaded tray bearing our lunch. From time to time, either my mother or father would say ‘We really must get a trolley' but neither did anything about it.

My mother leaned across the table and picked up the cut-glass jug containing filtered water. A lace doily, fringed with beads, covered it. She jerked off the doiley. ‘Who's for water?' She and my father never drank alcohol, even though they always provided it for their guests. My father held out his glass. Meantime, the boy began to unload his tray. My father loved curry, as he also loved the sticky Indian sweets that most westerners abhorred. He also liked his curry to be extremely hot, which my mother, my sister and I certainly did not. As a result whenever we had curry, as on this Sunday, Joseph prepared two different dishes, one mild for us and one hot for him. The boy set down before my mother the silver entrée dish, with the crest of her family on it, containing the one curry. He set down the other curry, also in a similar entrée dish, before my father. My father, who, even on that Sunday, had from the early hours been visiting patients too ill to come to his surgery, was ravenous, as always. He grabbed a serving spoon and, plate in hand, dug out some rice from another dish, placed equidistant from all of us in the centre of the table. Then he piled two spoonfuls of his curry on top of it.

‘Mango chutney?' my mother asked, herself taking up a spoon.

Reluctant to open his mouth for any purpose other than eating, my father merely shook his head. He never took chutney, as the rest of us did, but my mother nonetheless always offered it to him.

He piled a fork high with rice and curry, raised it to his mouth and swallowed greedily. Then he again began to pile the fork high. Suddenly he gageed, put a hand to his throat and began to gasp and snort, his eyelids fluttering. My mother leaped to her feet, knocking back her chair, and raced round the table. Later, she was to say that she thought that he was having a stroke. It was from a stroke that she had seen her father die when she was still a child. ‘What is it? What's the matter?'

Stupefied, Maria and I remained seated, staring in amazement and terror.

Suddenly my father began to vomit, with an astonishing, projectile force. A particularly violent spasm caused him to topple from his chair, with a resounding crash.

As always in an emergency, my mother was wonderfully decisive. She turned to the boy, cowering in a corner of the room, his head lowered and his hands clutched together in front of him, and shouted in Hindi: ‘Get Dr Penrose – get him, now, now, hurry,
hurry
!' If he were not at home, then the boy should summon the young Geordie couple, the Roches, she added. She turned to us: ‘Go to your room! At once! Both of you! And stay there – stay there till I tell you.'

Reluctantly we obeyed.

From our bedroom window – on the ground floor since this was a bungalow – we watched as Dr Penrose, usually leisurely and dignified in his pace, now dashed across the dusty space between his bungalow and ours. Soon the Roches also appeared. They must have already been having their siesta, since he was in only pyjamas and she in a dressing-gown.

Later young Dr Cameron, from the nearby military cantonment, drove up in his high, open-top Austin, from which, a notable athlete at both Fettes and Edinburgh University, he leapt down, to race towards the bungalow. After that we waited and waited, still standing at the window.

‘Do you think he's dying?' Maria asked.

‘Perhaps he's already dead.'

She shook her head violently, in a refusal to accept such an outcome.

‘It must have been something he ate,' I said.

‘Perhaps he has this – this cholera. He and mummy were talking about it yesterday. He went to see a patient in the bazaar. He thought that man had it. Remember?'

I nodded but it was the first that I had heard of this.

‘People die of cholera,' she added. ‘Very quickly I remember nanny once told me that. She lived through a cholera epidemic in Bombay.'

‘We don't get cholera. Only the Indians do.'

Eventually we saw Dr Cameron, Dr Penrose and Roche carrying our semi-conscious father out to the car, as though he were a bag of rubbish for the dump at the far end of the compound. Roche was supporting the shoulders, his teeth gritted with the effort. The other two were supporting the legs. At a distance, as though they dreaded that the calamity were somehow infectious, there cowered a small, huddled group of servants, among them the orderly, the boy
kitmatgar
and Dr Penrose's erect and white-bearded Muslim bearer, once an Indian Army sergeant. I remember briefly thinking it odd that there was no sign of Joseph. As the three Englishmen laid the body out in the back of the vehicle, I suddenly saw one of my father's legs first twitch convulsively and then kick out.

‘He's alive! He's still alive!' I cried out.

Maria, hands to mouth, shook her head violently from side to side.

‘Yes, he is! He is!'

My mother clambered into the back of the car, at the same time shifting my father's head and shoulders on to her lap. Dr Penrose carefully put a large foot on the running board and then heaved himself into the front passenger-seat. After some hesitation Roche squeezed himself in beside him, a hairy arm trailing outside the window.

For a moment I had a feeling of total abandonment. Then I heard Mrs Roche calling: ‘Children! Children! Where are you? Are you all right?'

As we joined her, Maria asked: ‘Where's Joseph? I didn't see Joseph.'

‘Joseph?' Mrs Roche was puzzled.

‘Our cook.'

‘Oh, he's probably made himself scarce. Indians often do in an emergency.' She put an arm round Maria's shoulder and then stretched out her other arm to draw me close. ‘ You'd better come over to our bungalow until your mother gets back.'

I thought it ominous that she did not talk of our father also getting back.

He almost died; but, with his remarkable constitution, he somehow, against all the odds, survived. At first it was thought that, in that intense heat in a period without refrigerators, the chicken in his curry must have gone off. That would explain the mysterious disappearance of Joseph, who would no doubt have feared that he would be held responsible for the horror of what had occurred. None of the other servants, not even his boy assistant, would confess to having witnessed his departure. It was puzzling that Joseph had removed every one of his possessions, with the odd exception of the white shoes, perhaps considered by him to be too bulky to carry away along with everything else. My mother, with her usual brisk efficiency, was in search of a replacement cook as soon as she was no longer sleeping at the hospital and spending most of the hours of her days there.

Then came the devastating news. An analysis of my father's vomit and of the remaining curry in the dish from which only he had eaten, had revealed traces of poison. Who could possibly have wanted to kill my father? His was such a placid, benign nature and, though he could have easily become a successful physician in England, his religious convictions had instead sent him out to India to work largely among its most impoverished inhabitants in a climate that he hated. He was an innocent, almost a saint. Eventually it was generally agreed that, for some still mysterious reason, Joseph must have been responsible. It was he who had prepared the curry; and his immediate disappearance made his guilt all the more plausible.

Why, why, why? As he slowly recuperated, his face grey and oddly shiny and his voice reduced to a hoarse whisper, my father continually reverted to the question.

‘
Pas devant les enfants
,' my mother would hiss. But she could not deter him.

‘What did he have against me? What got into his head? I never did him any harm.'

On one occasion Roche, to whom these questions had been put when, unseen by the adults, I was reading an ancient copy of the
Illustrated London News
behind a bookcase in one corner of the sitting-room, replied ‘He's probably a psychopath. No one can account for how such people behave.'

‘But he always seemed so normal. And so decent. I never doubted the sincerity of his beliefs, never for one moment.'

Then, when my father was once more able to resume his work and my mother was about to take my sister and myself at long last up to Naina Tal, the answer came. A CID officer, a small man with a sharp profile and slightly protuberant teeth, visited us with some news. What it was, Maria and I, banished to our bedroom, did not hear in person. But we learned of it later Investigations had revealed that Joseph had never worked for a mission in Lucknow. His references must have been forged. He had been identified, by means of some photographs taken by our mother of him and us two children together in the garden, in the kitchen and outside his hut He was a well-known agitator and member of a secret society, recently infliltrated by the Intelligence Bureau, called The Red Arrow. The group had been responsible for four attempted assassinations and one successful one. Apparently – I learned this many years later from my father – the CID officer had expressed contempt that Joseph's efforts to ‘bump off' (his phrase) my father, had been so inefficient. The idiot, the officer said, had not realised that the poison would have been so much diluted by the curry with which it was mixed that it could not be relied on to be lethal. ‘They rarely get it right. Hopeless.'