Authors: Indira Ganesan
29
T
hose first weeks were filled with a kind of wonderment, as Meterling and Simon settled down together. They did not have much to unpack beyond clothes and books. Simon left for work around eight, and on her first solo trip outside, Meterling with Oscar in a Snugli walked to a flower market to purchase some blooms for the flat. A day at her disposal. The air was fresh with autumn, as people hurried by. She listened to the noise of the traffic, looked at the red buses
go past, and bought a newspaper. She compulsively consulted the map Simon had drawn for her, but she got lost anyway. She had wandered off the perimeter, toward the arrow on the paper marked Chelsea, or was it Millbank? There was a pub on the opposite side of the road she was on, with doors spilling open onto the sidewalk. Looking both ways, crossing carefully, she walked toward it. A man sitting just inside the door looked asleep as she went toward the bar to ask for directions.
“C’mon, let’s go,” said the man at the door. Heaving himself off the chair, he walked outside. The bartender indicated she should follow him, so Meterling did. He looked like an old sailor with his grizzled chin and cropped gray hair, and he was silent. After depositing her on her street, he lumbered back for his pint. Krishna, Meterling thought, watching him go back—she had been rescued by Krishna.
Mrs. Vickers, a woman of few words, came on Wednesdays. Simon hired her to clean, because, he said, “we can afford it, and you’re not used to this,” which was true enough; when had she had to do anything out of need in terms of housework? In Madhupur, she cooked only because she wanted to, mended only when she felt the inclination. At home, there was a servant for each task; Grandmother looked harried only because she needed to organize, or maybe because there were so many underfoot. Plus there was Oscar to look after, also on her own; but Meterling felt a twinge of guilt. Still, it seemed to make Simon happier, and she would be kidding herself if she protested too much.
“I’ve lots of Indian and Pakistani clients I do business with,” Mrs. Vickers said curtly that first day, hanging up her coat and bag. Immediately, Meterling felt rebuked. Mrs. Vickers had a fat zippered Filofax full of clients. Although used to women cleaning around her, to lifting her feet for the broom, Meterling
found that in London, she needed to leave the flat on Mrs. Vickers’s days. She found herself feeling embarrassed, wondering if Mrs. Vickers in her white skin resented working for “the Indians and Pakistanis,” whereas, she reflected, outside with Oscar, they had far more to resent. She tried to tidy up before Mrs. Vickers came: piling the laundry into baskets she had bought from an open-air market, tidying up the toys, washing the dishes. It was not enough, but Mrs. Vickers never said a word, and was brisk, nearly scientific in her cleaning, and what Meterling came to appreciate most was how the flat looked and smelled after Mrs. Vickers left: clean, smoothed out, renewed.
Simon gave her a Barclay card, but Meterling insisted that she get her own to draw from the interest on Archer’s estate. This was easier than both had anticipated, since the transfer of money had occurred months before, and what was required was a new account created under her own name. The bank issued her a credit card, a set of checks, and a safe-deposit box. Together, she and Simon stored her wedding jewelry in the bank’s vault, under the kind of quiet courtesy exhibited by the bank employees for the wealthy. For she
was
wealthy, my aunt Meterling, an heiress who had married money, twice.
Simon had introduced her to the neighborhood, taking straight routes she could memorize. They walked to Waitrose, which was larger than any shop she’d ever imagined. How did the British make choices: single cream; double cream; full fat; less fat; goat milk; soybean milk; kefir? In Madhupur, the milkman brought fresh milk on his bicycle, warm from the cow, and she received it in a vessel from his jug to take inside to boil. There were so many lights in the store too, so that everything gleamed. It was such a
white
country.
But pockets of green were scattered everywhere. No matter what part of town they were in, it seemed, there were neat squares of garden full of fall growth. When the pace got to be too much, or she became overwhelmed by all the buildings and street signs and roads, she studied the tulips, which were putting on their final show before winter. Purplish-red shocks of leaves as well as dark-orange berries clung to the tree branches, which held a certain enchantment; Meterling had never witnessed an autumn before. She snapped pictures, which she sent to us. (“All she does is send pictures of trees and flowers,” complained Sanjay.)
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees
,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core
.
Simon took her on the Underground, which thrilled her, because she had studied the station map back in Madhupur. So now she actually stopped at Oxford Circus and Paddington, Tottenham Court Road, minded the gap, held tight to husband and child. They sampled chum chums and other milk sweets somewhere near Fitzroy Street. She bought jars of mango pickle to accompany the ones Grandmother had made and packed for her. Meterling’s excitement was tremendous those first weeks—to see what she had read about, to experience what was in Dickens, in the
Spectator
, all the readings at school. Simon took them to his work, where he introduced his colleagues. They smiled, shook hands, fussed over the baby, and went back to work. She had not expected an editorial office to be messy, but it was, with lots of people moving in and out of cubicles and doors, holding bits of paper, while bookshelves bulged with manuscripts and books. Simon’s own office held a
half-dozen coffee cups, stained and forgotten, breeding mold, as well as a neglected plant of some species—a palm? A jasmine? Giving the baby to Simon to hold, she cleaned up his office, threw out the plant, tidied his desk somewhat.
Had he wanted to talk of Archer, or did he hope that she would bring the topic up? To think they had made it to England so easily, so conveniently. Archer was buried in the countryside, but Meterling hadn’t asked to see his grave. Perhaps she still smarted from being so cruelly left out of the funeral plans. Simon winced, thinking back to how quickly he and Susan had acted, how thoughtlessly, how selfishly.
He showed her the food court at Harrods, the Koh-i-Noor diamond at the Tower of London, and the Sword of Mercy, with its tip cut off. They toured the British Museum, walked through Bloomsbury, and looked at Dickens’s house and the Old Curiosity Shop on Portsmouth Street. One day they took the ferry to Greenwich, and the tour guide on the trip pointed out the places around the docks where the pirates, the rogues, the rebels were hanged. Snippets she remembered that she hardly knew were stuck in her mind kept coming to her: “Shakespeare answered very badly because he hadn’t read his Bradley”; “Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”; “Once more into the fray”—so much history, too much history.
“How will I learn it all?” she said later, on their return home.
“Learn what, Meti?”
“All this English.”
30
A
t night, she woke up, her heart racing. Once again, out of nowhere, she had dreamed of Archer. Always in the dreams, she failed to save his life. How could she have saved it at the wedding? By refusing to dance? Avoiding a splashy wedding, so his aneurysm could explode in a quiet setting?
She didn’t know whether to tell Simon. She resolved to go to the library and learn about dreams. But she put it off, and decided if she had another nightmare, she would both tell Simon and go find an Indian doctor. Simon’s arm draped heavily across her body, and she welcomed its anchor. Sometimes she felt like she wanted to be pressed with his sleepy weight on top of her, so that he became a shield, a force field, warding off memory, warding off the flickering thought that somehow perhaps she had willed Archer’s death, that however unlikely, a part of her subconsciously protested their marriage. Surely, though, that was afterthought, after Simon, after all that happened.
How much could they bear to speak about Archer? How large was their guilt. How it crept, if left unchecked, into their lives almost constantly. What they had done was not unusual, after all. Cousins, brothers, even uncles married widowed relatives to keep the bloodlines, the inheritances, the name, and though the church for years decried unions of affinity, a 1921 act allowed the marriage of a deceased brother’s widow with her brother-in-law. Perhaps in feudal times such a marriage
prevented the younger son from marrying well on his own, or going into the clergy; then there was also the pervasive idea that if a man and woman wed, they were united in blood, and all relatives became blood by default.
It was the scandal, the gossip that people loved. How merciless was she to wed so quickly, how tactless of him! How practical of her to want a father for a child, how foolish of him to squander his life! How deceitful of both to marry outside their own color and culture, to hurt both families in the bargain! How complicated, how unnecessary and undignified and selfish! It was the sheer selfishness of love that people minded, that refusal to think of the feelings of others for what—sex? This was what Grandmother feared, the censure of the neighbors and distant relatives, the outright stares of strangers. This was why she did not protest as heavily as she might have to keep them on Pi. In England, they could start a new life, she thought, finally coming to peace with the parting.
Yet she must have known the difficulties that were within Simon’s family. The gin company had a reputation, but in the end, maybe the tribulations of family had little effect on the business. Gin making had long been associated with notoriety, Simon told her, despite its beginnings as a medicinal tonic in Holland, condemned by Henry Fielding as poisonous and pernicious to the soul of England, causing the country to succumb to a perpetual state of drunkenness. They looked at the Hogarth prints of Gin Lane, where the drunken figures lolled about, mothers ready to kill their babies as a result of the spirit.
“No wonder you didn’t want to work for the company.”
“It’s lurid. Gin was responsible for thousands of deaths, abandonment, the ruination of families. People paid wages in gin. Saved the extra step, my grandfather said. People used to line up just to nurse themselves from the spigot, and when they
built the palaces, it became fashionable and aboveground to sip their drinks with their pinkies up.”
“Where’s the family palace now?”
“The family palace—that was the joke. Forster Gin Palace. It burned down during the Blitz. It was supposed to have been beautiful—it had a bas-relief of Greek maidens chased by satyrs and gods, and these ridiculously ornate mirrors, eight feet tall. My great-grandfather was shellshocked, and wouldn’t rebuild. So the company relied on its northern distilleries and the one on Pi.”
“Who’s running the company now?”
“An uncle of ours. Ruth-Sidney. Archer was to run it himself, but he refused. I didn’t want it, and neither did Susan. My father was never in the running. He likes the production part, not the sales meetings and negotiating with lawyers, the flying about. But they make a good team, Uncle Ruth-Sidney and Dad. It’s complicated—the whole damn company is riddled with complications.”
Simon looked so troubled that Meterling did not press for details.
Simon took Meterling to the site of the original factory in a town on the outskirts of London. The main factory was up north. The original factory had been torn down after a fire, replaced by a microdistillery responsible for artisanal blends sold mostly in private auctions.
“Where’ve you been, Simon boy?” asked a man whose ruddy complexion was accentuated by a squint and a grin.
“Larry—thought you’d be retired.”
“Nah, there’d be nothing for me to do, then.”
This was Larry McGuire, who had run the place for the past forty years, before, as he put it, “it went designer.”
Simon quickly made introductions, which led to more appraising looks at Meterling and the baby, and the foreman led them through the rooms containing copper stills, the purification processor, and, finally, the room of botanicals. Here, they were experimenting with bearberry, bayberry, and coriander for a Christmassy blend. The scents were strong when oak cask lids were lifted.
“Take a whiff of this, lass,” said Larry, offering a handful of coarse brown seeds, which he crushed in his palms. His hands were nearly as brown as the seeds, Meterling noted as she inhaled the fragrance. They reminded Meterling of something on the edge of her memory—not merely the coriander, but the scent of wood and fire. Was this smell familiar to her even in childhood?
They were offered gin mixed with bitters in the sampling room, and Meterling and Simon, with Oscar, took their drinks to a patio that overlooked the Tittleton River.
“When I was pregnant, I craved to taste a martini.”
“Hmm. You’re sure you can drink while feeding?”
“In moderation, and I’m only tasting.” She took a second sip. “This is delicious, Simon. I had no idea. I see now why people want to drink.”
“It’s good stuff.”
“I could live here,” said Meterling. She took another sip and pushed away her glass a few inches. “Oh, I know I can’t really, but this is so lovely, Simon, the beauty here.”
She looked at the river rushing past, the meadows beyond.
“You do have three fields.”
“And a manor house somewhere.”
“And a manor house somewhere,” repeated Simon, “that you haven’t yet seen.”
“Not yet, darling.” She sighed. “Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“I’d feel I was trespassing. Let’s wait a while longer.”
31
N
early every fine day, Meterling packed a small lunch and took Oscar out in his pushchair to the Serpentine, where they watched the exotic ducks. She ate her cheese sandwich with chutney on white bread neatly, while Oscar gurgled with delight, his belly full. There were other women with children, and at first Meterling was enchanted, thinking how multicultural England was, with so many black and brown women birthing white children. It dawned on her pretty quickly that they were nannies, working like ayahs to feed their own children left home with a grandmother. She supposed she was taken for a nanny, too.