The Mission House, page 7
‘Well you should give him a try. He’s very good. I’m sure they’d have something at Higginbotham’s. Maybe a translation into Hindi.’
Jamshed did not say that the language he spoke when he was not speaking English – or the smattering of French and German and Japanese he’d picked up over the years from all the tourists and volunteers he’d driven around – was not Hindi, but Tamil. He thought about saying so, but it seemed rude to point out Mr Byrd’s mistake.
Suddenly Jamshed swerved to avoid a scooter turning left across their path and Byrd cried out.
‘Sorry, sir!’ said Jamshed. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry!’ but Byrd only flapped his hand. He was used, by now, to the traffic. ‘That’s all right, Jamshed,’ he said. ‘I have every confidence you won’t kill me.’
After that they rode in silence and Byrd didn’t speak again as they made their way up the long hill from the centre of town.
Slowly the old man’s tiny vehicle bumped in through the presbytery’s gateless entrance, past the plastic sign that said dog is on duty, and along the cratered red driveway.
Through the lighted window of the shabby drawing room Byrd could see the Padre, writing at his desk. Somewhere in the back, he supposed, Priscilla would be chopping vegetables.
Butterflies stirred again in the pit of his stomach. He had almost managed to forget about her. Part of him wanted to stay in the old man’s auto and not have to get out and for a moment he hesitated.
‘Well – goodnight, Jamshed. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow. Yes, sir. Goodnight, sir.’
Byrd walked briskly across the garden to the steps next to the boiler house that led up to his bungalow, keeping his head down. If the old clergyman spotted him and came out and issued an invitation for dinner, he would plead an upset stomach.
He put the key in the lock of the bungalow door; paused. There was a presence just behind him, softly breathing and expectant. He turned the key in the lock and extracted it, bracing himself for the Padre’s smiling snowman’s face, but when he turned it was only the dog, looking up at him with dark, pleading eyes.
Byrd shook his head.
‘No,’ he said sternly.
When she didn’t move he opened the door only enough so that he could squeeze through the gap without her following.
‘Now go,’ he ordered, poking his head out through the narrow opening and pointing the way back to her sink. ‘And don’t come back. I don’t want you.’
Inside he sat down heavily in the Carter’s Nest For Rest. Through the windows of the verandah room he could see out across the garden, the roses and the asters and the rhubarb, the banana tree and the strange plastic-looking shrub whose name he didn’t know, and a great wave of emotion washed over him – a feeling that seemed to contain both happiness and anxiety, a feeling that he was at home here, and also that he wasn’t; a feeling that he belonged, somehow, here in these foreign hills, and also that he didn’t; a feeling that he was supposed to be here and that he wasn’t; that there was a point to everything, and that there was no point at all.
25
They met on the platform at Mettupalayam, the Padre will tell the superintendent of police.
They shared a train compartment, he will say. Mr Byrd looked like someone who was very tired, perhaps not entirely well. ‘I was worried about him. He seemed like someone who was in need.’
He was very struck by the Englishman’s appearance, he’ll say – by the flimsy, flyaway softness of what remained of his hair, and by his long, sad face; by his unsuitable clothes as he headed into the mountains – the combination of his straw hat and his knee-shorts, the large boat-like sandals. By his unwieldy hard-sided suitcase which he manoeuvred as if it contained a pile of rocks. By the aura he gave off of having brought all the wrong things, of being poorly equipped for whatever adventure he was embarked upon; of being, somehow, unmoored.
‘He seemed,’ the Padre will say, pausing, as if searching how to describe exactly the impression Hilary Byrd had made on him that day, ‘lost.’
26
Something is wrong with Mr Byrd, wrote Jamshed.
He is not so bright and cheery as in the beginning, after his fall.
All the way back to the presbytery from the library, Mr Byrd had sat leaning forward with his arms on the rail in front of his seat. In a rapid, rushing voice he’d spoken over the noisy clatter of the auto and the rumble of the traffic, and after that, for a long time, all the way up the steep hill to the presbytery, he’d sat on the back seat without talking. What was the matter with him?
In the beginning, in the weeks after his fall, there’d been some days, it was true, when Mr Byrd had been gloomy and said very little, or spoken unhappily about his life. But on the whole, it seemed to Jamshed, he’d been in good spirits most of the time. Almost every day he said how much he was liking it here in these foreign hills – how much he was enjoying being away from home, from the depressing brown fence and familiar carpets of his house and the noisy unhelpful new librarian called Margaret and his useless doctor called Richard Kerrigan. He said that he was missing his sister but he was liking the drizzling weather and the chocolate shop and the Assembly Rooms and the gardens full of trees and plants and all the old buildings, especially the library. He said he was enjoying the friendly Padre and the comfortable little mission house and the good cooking of the Padre’s young housekeeper called Priscilla.
And now Mr Byrd seemed agitated and unhappy. Jamshed didn’t know what to make of it. Overnight Mr Byrd had become nervous and distressed and there was a small vibrating twitch under the corner of his left eye which had not been there before.
They were rattling along, now, in the middle of the Mysore Road, below the Savoy Hotel. Hilary Byrd sat with his eyes closed. ‘I never wanted to go to school, Jamshed,’ he announced suddenly. ‘All I wanted to do was to stay at home and read and watch television and play in the garden and go for walks and bake cakes and sew.’
Jamshed nodded. He could see Mr Byrd in the rear-view mirror. They passed in front of Modern Stores and the Assembly Rooms, and the old man watched his English passenger looking mournfully out at the fast-moving traffic and the busy town through the gap in the tarpaulin. Mr Byrd looked as if he was thinking about all the reading and playing and walking and watching television and sewing and baking he could have done instead of being made to go to school.
‘My Aunt Peggy used to say it made a difference if you were born in the summer or the winter – into the sunshine or into the dark. Do you think there might be something in that, Jamshed? She and I were both November.’
When Jamshed said he didn’t know, that he himself had been born in July, which was both sunny and overcast, Byrd continued: ‘When Wyn and I were small, our Aunt Peggy was always disappearing for what our mother called “a rest”. We didn’t know what it meant at the time though of course I do now.’
He fell into one his brooding silences then, with that look of his which suggested to Jamshed that he might be replaying the whole of his life in his head. They trundled past the chocolate shop, and for a long time Hilary Byrd sat without speaking.
At the market he climbed out and came back with a bag of plums which he started eating quickly, one after another, catching the stones in his palm.
‘I should have been more like Coriolanus!’ he burst out suddenly.
‘Sir?’
‘In Shakespeare, Jamshed. The emperor, Coriolanus. His people tell him they’ve decided to banish him, but he says, “No! I banish you!”’
Hilary Byrd let go of a short, wistful laugh.
Yes, he said. He wished now that he’d expressed his feelings when people had started coming to the library to hold jewellery-making demonstrations and musical concerts or to receive help with their job applications. He wished, when they’d come wanting to sit in the new armchairs and chat to each other in what had once been the local history archive, that he’d stood at the door and barred their way and told them they were banished – that he felt about them the way Coriolanus felt about his people – ‘that I hated their breath like the reek of rotted fens, Jamshed! Like the dead carcasses of unburied men that did corrupt my air! That I despised them!’
Banishing them, yes! He would have enjoyed that. It would have been dignified and satisfying.
‘But I didn’t, Jamshed,’ he said quietly.
In the car park his sister had held him for a long time. She hadn’t told him it didn’t matter, because Wyn always knew that it did. He had phoned her in tears. The mothers and toddlers had begun to sing again, and he’d been looking for the poetry shelves but they’d been moved for the third time in a week, and he didn’t know where to find them. ‘She drove me home, Jamshed, and after that she didn’t leave me again for a long time. She went up to her flat in Shepherd’s Bush to get her things and moved into our Aunt Peggy’s old bedroom and stayed with me in the old house.’
‘Petts Wood, sir?’
‘That’s right, Jamshed. Where we grew up. I’ve never left it. When I was well enough to be by myself, she went back to work, but she came home in the evenings, and she was there at the weekends too, always.
‘What frightened me, Jamshed, was how exhausted she seemed. She’d always had her own way of helping me, but this time she seemed, oh I don’t know’ – Byrd shrugged and blinked and the old driver heard his voice click and break – ‘at a loss.’
Byrd had finished his plums.
‘I didn’t tell her till the day before. I made all the arrangements while she was at work. It felt like a life-time since I’d done anything for myself. It was the only thing I could think of – to take myself away. To try being elsewhere. I convinced myself that being anywhere but here – there, I mean, where I was – would be easier. I thought maybe I’d try one of the old Eastern bloc countries, Romania or Slovakia. Then I thought somewhere further away might be better, New Zealand, or South America. I really didn’t know where to choose. In the end I came here because – oh I’m not really sure, Jamshed. I suppose I thought there might be more to see, and that, well, I don’t know, I thought it might be cheaper, too, than all those other places.’
Mr Byrd was speaking very quietly now, in a kind of murmur Jamshed struggled to hear, ‘Wyn was very against it of course. She didn’t say so, but she was. Even though she was exhausted and at a loss, I know she thought it was a bad idea – that I wasn’t well enough to go anywhere by myself. She said why didn’t I wait until September when she could take some time off and we could travel together? But I said I didn’t think I could wait for September. I told her I’d write, and email, so she’d know I was OK.’
27
‘Mr Byrd!’
The Padre seemed to have materialised out of nowhere. One minute Byrd was walking across the empty garden towards the driveway on his way into town, the next moment the Padre, wrapped up in his scarf and his too-large fleece hat, was moving towards him, his arm raised like a flag.
‘Mr Byrd,’ he said, a little breathlessly, ‘there is something I wish to ask you. A favour. A boon.’
The old clergyman’s face was lit with a hopeful-looking smile. His dark eyes were moist, and there was a pleading depth to them that reminded Byrd of the dog’s.
Byrd swallowed. He felt himself shrinking and wanting to run away.
‘Priscilla –’ began the Padre. He glanced furtively at the back door of the presbytery as if he was afraid Priscilla herself might suddenly appear and start beating a rug against the wall or picking up sticks to feed the boiler.
He lowered his voice and took a step towards Hilary Byrd. ‘I was hoping, Mr Byrd –’
Byrd took a step backwards. He couldn’t help it. Keep everything light, he told himself. Be courteous and polite and it will be quickly over and then forgotten.
‘I was hoping you might be willing to help Priscilla a little with her English. With her reading and her writing? I would do it myself only I am snowed under with my ministry and my accounts.’
Byrd opened his mouth to speak but no words came out. It was not what he’d been expecting. Even so, he was fairly sure this was something he didn’t want to do, and he wished for the courage, now, to say no, he was very sorry but he was too busy to help Priscilla with her English.
‘I would be very grateful to you, Mr Byrd.’
The dog, Byrd noticed, had joined them and was also, now, looking up at him beseechingly.
‘Half an hour in the evenings perhaps, Mr Byrd, sir? If you could spare it?’
28
It had been so quiet at the presbytery, said the Padre to his dead wife. So uneventful with Mr Page gone back to Canada to see about his visa, instead of being busy about the place with his good works. No Mr Page helping him and Priscilla to see to the beggars who came to the entrance asking for rice or eggs or dal or anything else that could be spared; no Mr Page hopping onto the back of the church two-wheeler and going with him into town at night to distribute blankets and buns to the hungry and the homeless, no Mr Page jogging back across the garden after a day at the leper colony.
Yes, said the Padre, popping a pink fryum into his mouth and crunching on it, life had been a little dull without the young missionary, but then, with the rains, Mr Hilary Byrd had come, all the way from Petts Wood UK, and everything now was lively and jolly.
Even Ooly seemed better – more alert and interested in the world, and so amusingly attached to the tall Englishman. ‘Even though Mr Byrd,’ chuckled the Padre, ‘wants nothing to do with her!’
As for Priscilla, he told his wife, she seemed happier too. Priscilla seemed in fine spirits these days.
‘With any luck, Vallie, it will only, now, be a matter of time.’
29
At Higginbotham’s bookshop, Byrd bought pencils and pens and a soft, maroon cardboard exercise book with graph-paper pages so Priscilla could practise her handwriting. From the library he borrowed a collection of Anderson’s fairy tales with pictures and a few lines of simple text on each page, and hoped Priscilla would not be embarrassed, at her age, whatever that was exactly, to be reading to him in her slow halting way f rom books that were made for children.
At the first lesson he tried her with a few simple sentences he’d prepared himself, in his own handwriting, to see how much she did and didn’t know. He picked out a couple of paragraphs of easy text and asked her to read them to him aloud, and it came to him almost immediately, in the first few minutes, that everything was, in fact, all right.
When they sat down together at the Padre’s desk with the handwritten pages between them, he glimpsed the two of them, Priscilla and himself, in the wide, speckled mirror of the presbytery drawing room, and he saw a picture of a young woman and a fifty-year-old man; a teacher and his pupil; the Padre working silently in the corner on the church accounts, a yellow legal pad on his knees. The old clergyman wasn’t looking at them. There was an ordinary calm to everything, and in the mirror’s cloudy silvering, he saw that it was all exactly as it seemed, no more and no less: the Padre had asked him for his help in this small and unexceptional way, and now he was giving it. He’d been foolish to whip himself up into such a state of anxiety about the hope chest and the Padre’s wistful remarks and all that they’d appeared, at two-thirty in the morning, to suggest.
The relief!
He almost laughed out loud – no longer worried that the dinners the Padre invited him to at the presbytery three or four times a week were part of some crazy, cunning plot.
He stopped fretting that he would have to leave.
And the teaching, when he got down to it, was fun. There’d been a time, in his twenties, when he’d thought he might have it in him, to become a teacher, of French or German perhaps, or English literature, and he’d wondered over the years if it might have moulded him differently – if it would have made him more resilient and flexible, more accustomed to opposition, braver. But at the time it had terrified him, the idea of twenty or thirty faces tilted up to his, waiting for him to speak; the prospect of them breaking into uproar. Children, the young, had such a keen nose for fear and f railty in others; he remembered that f rom his own schooldays.
At the library in town he was delighted to find, along with the fairy tales, an assortment of Ladybird books like the ones they’d had at home.
Do we still have them? he wrote to Wyn, tapping excitedly on a grimy keyboard in the Global Internet Cafe. Up in the attic somewhere? I’d forgotten how good they were – simple but full of useful information and quite entertaining too.
30
She’d had another name once but could no longer remember it.
Priscilla, Aunty told her, was a joyful name which swept away all the sorrows of her life when she was hidden in the undergrowth before she was found. It was a fine Christian name, she said. ‘It means you will live a long life.’
At Aunty’s place there’d been a flat upstairs where Aunty lived; a concrete balcony where the girls hung their wet clothes to dry after they’d washed them in the big tub in the yard on Saturdays; a dormitory with six beds for the big girls; a dormitory with six beds for the little girls; an apartment with two beds and a cooking ring for the volunteers who came from the UK and Australia and France and many other countries, who stayed for a few months and then vanished and were never heard from again. There was also a kitchen, and a big room where the girls did their homework and where Aunty gathered them together before they went to bed to sing hymns and say prayers – prayers for things they needed, such as money for school fees and a washing machine and a summer outing; prayers for patience with the government officials who kept coming with new regulations about how Aunty should run her house; prayers for Priscilla to grow some teeth.
For a while, Priscilla had been one of the little girls. She held their hands (except for Smitha’s because Smitha did not want to hold a hand without a thumb), and walked with them to school and to St Peter’s church. It was always Aunty’s hope that money would be found to send them all to St Cecilia’s English medium school; in the meantime she had them come to her in the evenings for ten minutes each. There had once been a gift f rom one of the volunteers of a supply of Ladybird books, and Aunty used these to teach them the precious English language which would be such an advantage to them when the time came to make their way in the world. Thus they were instructed in What to look for in Summer and the life of Julius Caesar; in the adventures of Puss in Boots and Sir Walter Raleigh; in The Weather and The Frog Prince, and many other things, and some of the girls got on quite well but Priscilla was not one of them. The prospect of her ten minutes with Aunty made Priscilla sick with anxiety, and she invented every excuse she could to miss it. Sometimes she told Aunty she had a pain in her left eye and she couldn’t see properly; sometimes that she had been chosen (not true) to recite a poem tomorrow in class and must spend all evening learning it.
