Read The Tea Planter’s Wife Online
Authors: Dinah Jefferies
‘Why didn’t Naveena tell me?’
‘I had begged her never to speak of it.’
‘But she was the one who came up with the idea of sending Liyoni to live at the village.’
‘She’d seen what had happened to Caroline. She must have wanted to ensure you wouldn’t go the same way.’ He paused and closed his eyes for a moment, before speaking. ‘There’s more, I’m afraid. You see, I’m to blame.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
He shook his head. ‘It was. When I first saw Thomas I felt betrayed and I accused Caroline of having an affair with Savi Ravasinghe when he painted her portrait. Even though she absolutely denied it, I didn’t believe her.’
Gwen pressed her lips together hard and squeezed her eyes shut in shock.
‘I promise you I still loved her and tried so hard to help her.’
She opened her eyes and scrutinized his face. ‘Good God, Laurence, there must have been something more you could have done?’
‘I tried, really tried. But she’d lost all interest in her appearance. I helped her wash, I helped her dress, I even helped her feed the baby. I did everything I could think of to pull her out of the blackness, and I thought I had succeeded, Gwen, because just before the end she seemed to recover enough for me to leave her for the day …’
There was silence as he swallowed rapidly.
‘But I was wrong … that was the day she took her own life. The awful thing is that even after she died I still didn’t believe her denial of the affair. That might have been the one thing that could have made a difference.’
Gwen suddenly understood what he was saying. ‘You think she killed herself because of you?’
He nodded. His face crumpled and his eyes filled with tears but he brushed them away. ‘She had been telling the truth all along, though I only knew that after I sent for my mother’s records and found out about Sukeena. I wanted to talk to you then, tell you everything about Caroline and Thomas … but I felt as if I had taken them to the pool under the falls and pushed them into the water myself. I couldn’t bear to tell you.’
Hardly able to believe what she was hearing, Gwen was in absolute turmoil. She watched him shudder as he tried to control his emotions. The moment seemed to last for ever.
When he spoke again, his voice was shaking. ‘How do I live with this, Gwen? How can you forgive me?’
She shook her head.
‘It’s not only Caroline’s death. She felt she had to take our baby with her, that she couldn’t trust me to care for him. A tiny, defenceless baby.’
As Gwen listened to the wind blowing the water about at the edge of the lake, she felt crushed.
Laurence took her hand. ‘I know I should have told you at the start, but I was certain I would lose you too.’
She removed her hand from his and held her breath for a moment before speaking. When she did it was with sorrow in her voice. ‘Yes, Laurence, you should have.’
There was a pause during which she didn’t trust herself to speak again. If he had told her about Thomas at the beginning, would she still have married him? She had been so young, far too young really.
‘I’m desperately sorry you’ve had to go through all this alone. And sorrier than I will ever be able to say for what I drove Caroline to do. I loved her so much.’
Gwen closed her eyes. ‘Poor, poor woman.’
‘Can you forgive me for not telling you everything?’
While she tried to take it in, she opened her eyes and for a moment watched Laurence staring at the floor with his head in his hands and his shoulders hunched. What could she say? Outside the birds had silenced and even the wind had dropped. She had to make a decision that could mean the end of everything. She understood so much more now, but images from the past were crowding her mind and she felt such utter loss that she couldn’t respond.
The silence dragged on, but when she glanced at Laurence
again and saw the depth of his grief, that made her decision easier. It was not up to her to forgive him.
‘You should have told me,’ she said.
He looked up and swallowed rapidly.
‘But it was a mistake.’
His brow creased as he nodded.
‘There’s nothing I can say to change what happened to Caroline. You have to find a way to live with that. But, Laurence, you’re a good man and to keep on blaming yourself won’t bring her back.’
He reached out a hand but she didn’t take it at first.
‘You’re not the only one. I made a terrible mistake too … I gave my own daughter away.’ Her eyes burned and she choked on her words. ‘And now she’s dead.’
She looked deep into his eyes and then took his hand. She knew what living with guilt and fear could do. It hurt. It hurt so much. She thought of all he had been through, and all she had been through too. The day of her own arrival in Ceylon came back to her, and she remembered that girl who had stood on the deck of the ship and met Savi Ravasinghe. Everything had been in front of her, with no hint of the terrifying fragility of happiness.
She recalled the moment of utter peacefulness when she had stared at the bruised and wrinkled red face of her newborn son, his baby hands trembling and juddering as he screamed. Then, as if it was only yesterday, she remembered unwrapping the warm blanket covering Liyoni. She experienced again the shock at seeing those little fingers, the rounded belly, the dark, dark eyes.
She thought of the years of guilt and shame, but also of everything that had been beautiful and glorious about Ceylon: the precious moments when the smell of cinnamon combined with blossom; the mornings when the sparkling dews of the chilly season sent her spirit soaring; the monsoons with their endless curtains of rain, and the sheen of the tea bushes when the rain
had gone. And then tears spilt down her cheeks again, and with them a memory she handled with infinite tenderness: Liyoni, swimming like a fish across to the island, whirling in the water and singing. Free.
For such a small girl, Liyoni had left a long shadow; her ghost would not simply vanish, and Gwen wouldn’t let it.
As Laurence stroked her hair soothingly, as you would a child, she thought of Caroline, and felt such an affinity with her it took her breath away. And, finally, she remembered the moment when she no longer noticed the colour of her daughter’s skin. She felt her husband’s warm hand on her hair, and knew she would carry Liyoni’s last words in her heart for the rest of her life.
I love you, Mama.
That was what the little girl had said, the night before she died.
Gwen wiped her tears away and smiled as she watched a flight of birds take off from the lake. Life goes on, she thought. God knows how, but it does, somehow. And she hoped that one day, maybe, if she was very lucky, she might find a way to forgive herself.
The idea for this novel came as my mother-in-law, Joan Jefferies, reminisced about a childhood spent in India and Burma during the 1920s and early 1930s. As she told stories passed down by her family, which included tea planters in both Ceylon and India, I began thinking about attitudes to race, in particular the typical prejudices of that time.
My next stop was the audio collection at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, where I found wonderful recorded voices which brought the period to life. Once I’d written the first draft of the book, I went to Sri Lanka. Although Hatton, Dickoya and Nuwara Eliya are real places, Hooper’s Plantation is an amalgamation of several locations and is placed at a higher altitude than Hatton or Dickoya really are. And while I stayed in a Ceylon Tea Trails planter’s bungalow beside a reservoir, it is, of course, not the lake of the novel.
In the hills of a romantic tea plantation, swathed in mist, my ‘Tea Planter’s Wife’ would have lived an extraordinarily privileged life, but I created a predicament for her that would test all her assumptions about racial differences, and that would explore colonial attitudes and how they spelt such tragedy for her.
It is medically possible for two different men to father non-identical twins, but regarding the birth of a distinctly dark baby to an apparently fully white couple, the best documented case is of Sandra Laing – born to white Afrikaaner parents in 1950s South Africa but who looked typically black in skin colour, with tight curly hair and other distinctive features. To read more about Sandra, see Judith Stone’s
When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race
or pages 70–73 in
Who Are We – and Should It Matter in the 21st Century?
by Gary Younge.
In the early days it was quite usual for British men going out to work in India and Ceylon to take a ‘native’ bride, as it was felt the men would settle and be better able to deal with the local population. This situation changed, however, especially with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. As more unmarried white women began to travel out to ‘fish’ for a wealthy husband, those born of mixed race were less well tolerated; it was also thought that they might not be as loyal to the Crown.
Those familiar with the history of Sri Lanka will notice I have shifted the timing of a couple of events to better suit the purposes of the narrative. One was the riot over the language to be taught in schools and one was the battle of the flowers.
The detail you provide of life on a 1920s tea plantation is extraordinary – everything from local wildlife to the bedtime and cleaning rituals of the day. The research must have taken months!
I loved entering into a vanished world and learning about the intricacies of lives marked by contradictions: part jaw-dropping affluence, part intense isolation. The initial research took a couple of months of total immersion, but the thrilling part was listening to the crackly recordings of men and women who lived in Ceylon and India in the early twentieth century. Their voices melded together as they spoke of certainties, yet their world was on the brink of change; and while many still clung to the old power-structure, I made my main characters, Gwen and Laurence, more enlightened. I read, watched films, and finally I created the atmosphere of the setting by staying on an enchanting tea plantation in Sri Lanka, complete with flashing fireflies and singing cicadas.
You were born in Malaysia and lived there until you were nine. How much of your personal memory of life there is woven into your story?
The colour and the heat maybe, though more of my memories of life in Malaysia found their way into my first novel,
The Separation
, which Penguin published last year. This time I based Gwen’s struggle to understand her new unfamiliar world on my mother’s experience of going out to live in the East, at the age of nineteen. My mother couldn’t even phone home and missed her family terribly. I think you either fitted in to the colonial world or you did not, and my impression is that although my mother tried hard, she did not.
Is Gwen ‘of a type’ – did you base her on anyone specific, or on a more generalized idea of the kind of young woman who would have had the determination and guts to make a life (and a marriage) halfway around the world?
Gwen wasn’t consciously based on anyone specific. She is a naive young woman who falls head over heels in love and, like many women, yearns for adventure. She popped into my head fully formed, but I didn’t think of her as being of a type either, other than that she ‘lived’ when opportunities for women were much more limited than they are now. But her new life certainly calls for determination, and she needs guts to face the emotional fall-out of the story. I set her in the 1920s and 1930s because I’m fascinated by the lives of women then, and by how they handled the period of rapid change and unease between the two world wars.
Your writing of this period is so vivid … does that betray a secret wish to have lived in such times and such circumstances?
Now there’s a thought! I did love writing the book and would have happily lived in such a paradise, and at a time when life was less frantic. I’d have relished the adventure too, but I’d have made a terrible colonial wife. I’m not very domesticated and would probably have been off riding elephants rather than taking care of my poor husband. What it really betrays is my longing for the East. For the smells, sights and sounds of it. For the feel of it on my skin. And I wanted to seduce my readers with the sense and texture of the place, the same way it seduces me.
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These are the days of my life. Not when I was younger and had everything before me. They are now. Because writing means everything to me, sitting just a notch below how much my family matter. And to find myself published by Penguin is a gift. Writing gives me purpose. Drive. Writing means I wake up each day excited, raring to go. It puts me in touch with the most potent source of energy in life: creativity. It’s spellbinding and, as I write fiction, I feel like a wizard playing with dreams. Every day I can’t wait to get on with the next chapter, or the next batch of edits, or that bit of research I still need to do.
I live in an ordinary Victorian terraced side street in the middle of a town. There’s traffic and dust, but once you pass into the hall and make your way through to the back of the house and out into the garden, a magical world unfolds. You could be in a Cotswold village. It’s peaceful, not overlooked and, most importantly, I always have my early morning cup of tea there. We have a large awning outside the kitchen, so even in winter I pull on an extra jumper over my pyjamas, throw on a very thick dressing gown and slip my feet into some furry boots.
But the best time for me is the tail end of summer when the scent of jasmine drifts across to where I sit on my favourite bench, and the climbing roses are blowsy and fat. Swifts, swallows and martins pluck insects from the air as they pass, and gangs of pigeons wheel and somersault from roof ridge to chimney pot.
I watch every movement in the garden: the shiver of leaves as a breeze intrudes, my terrier making a dash for the birds as he defends his territory. I feel almost feral, watching and listening. It’s the most brilliant way to start my writing day. It transports me into a quieter world – a meditative state where my imagination can take flight.
When I make my way up to my writing room, I lean out of the window to smell the fragrance of rosemary, oregano and lemon balm from the herbs in pots on the patio below, then I close the windows, draw the curtains and turn off the phone. Sometimes, if I’m really itching to get going, I won’t even have a shower and opt instead for a bath before lunch. I don’t read my emails, I don’t do any social media, I just write. I’m not easily distracted and I never avoid writing, even when the going gets tough. That’s when I dig deeper. Writing isn’t always a breeze. It can be tricky, upsetting, demanding. Writing, like any love, can trigger all manner of tensions within you. After all, you’re plumbing your own psyche, your own heart, your own soul. I write about deeply emotional subjects: missing children, lost love, betrayal, guilt, and I explore what it means to love during difficult periods of history, though I aim to infuse my books with the beauty of life too. That’s why I need the garden to inspire me. It’s the contrast between the pain and the joy.
I have to be wrenched from my chair at lunchtime. I’m fortunate that my husband takes care of all the cooking and that, as the morning progresses, cups of tea or coffee will appear at my elbow, all too often left to go cold. I’ve been told by my physiotherapist that I have to get up and move around every half-hour. That’s almost impossible when a scene is unfolding in front of my eyes and I need to get it down before it fades. I write very quickly, albeit with only two fingers, but the images come and go so rapidly I just do it and, in the early stages, I don’t worry about how well it’s written. The first draft is terrifying. Weeks and weeks of it. I fly by the seat of my pants in a state of suspense and I don’t even know what I’ve got until it’s done.
So why do I say writing is so wonderful? Because I love the stage that comes after the first draft. I love the editing. I love the part when my ideas are down in black and white – maybe in places there are just skeleton scenes – and I love it because gradually, during the course of getting that first draft down, my characters have become real people to me. I care about them and hope my readers will too. My writing day is limited only by how many hours my eyes can cope with staring at a screen. After lunch, I may write until about three and then take the dog for a walk, before catching up with any emails, my social media and my husband, whom I’ve ignored all day.
If I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing, and my writing day continues while I sleep too. I’ll wake at three in the morning with an idea, or the final solution to a problem I’ve been struggling with. I dream in dialogue. Dialogue that I actually edit during the dream. Though when I try to remember it the next day, it’s usually gone or was utter nonsense. I’m terribly antisocial and might solve a tricky storyline while in mid-conversation with a friend, and then have to rush off to write it down before I forget.
My writing room isn’t tidy and probably reflects my mental state. There are piles of novels I keep intending to read, dozens of notebooks, a huge assortment of pens with or without ink, scraps of paper, research books and wall charts crammed with detail and possible scenes. It looks chaotic, but I like to be able to see everything. I don’t want to keep my notes on the computer where I can’t spot them as I pass by. And, even as I’m writing my current book, I’ll have an idea brewing at the back of my mind for the next one, so there will be jottings about that Blu-tacked to the wall lest I forget.
The icing on the cake of my day is when an email pops up from a reader who has written to me via my website. There’s nothing nicer than hearing from someone who has taken the time to write and tell you how much they’ve enjoyed your book. And although I write because I love to do it, without readers to enter into my story world it would all be for nothing. A book only really takes off when it lives in another person’s heart and head. Then it stops being my book and becomes yours. So thank you for reading. You’ve made my writing day.