Sheltering Rain, Page 36

  It was the night of the moon festival, when Chinese families across the colony took to the streets in slow-strolling groups, to mark the lunar celebrations with glowing lanterns and offerings and exchange sweet biscuits and cakes baked in its auspicious circular shape. Joy had watched from her balcony, captivated, as she was, every year, by the sight of thousands of tiny moving lights edging down to the inky harbor for the firework displays. In the clear sky, they stood reflected in the stars, two separate sets of constellations winking at each other from earth and heaven. Even Alice, who hadn't previously shown any inclination toward the various Chinese festivals (it was apparently another indication of Chinese "perversity" that they couldn't celebrate the new year at the same time as everyone else), had nonetheless given Christopher a little paper moon lantern, and he had run from room to room, demanding that the lights be turned off so that it glowed, a fragile little beacon in the dark.

  Edward was uncommonly cheerful when he came home, not just kissing Joy, but swinging her around in the hallway, so that Christopher laughed and begged to join in, and Alice announced, purse-lipped, that it was high time she was off. He had brought back an elaborately decorated red tin of moon biscuits, given to him by one of the Chinese engineers, and was eager to tell Joy about plans for the dockyards, which, if they came off, looked likely to mean a promotion.

  "Will you still be posted here?" said Joy, trying to keep the anxiety from her voice as they sat down at the table.

  "Of course. It doesn't involve going anywhere. But it might well mean better quarters for us--a nice house, perhaps, instead of apartments. Wouldn't you like that, darling? A house? With a little garden, perhaps? It would be nice for the children."

  "I suppose it would," said Joy, who had actually begun to rather enjoy living in the apartments.

  "We don't have to go, you know. I just thought you might enjoy the extra space. Now that we have two little ones."

  She supposed it made sense. Her mother was always saying how much easier it would be if one could wheel Katherine's pram to the end of the garden and forget about it for a while.

  Joy smiled. "I think your promotion sounds wonderful. Clever old you."

  Edward reached a hand across the table and took ahold of hers, squeezing it fondly.

  "Things are going to get better for us, darling. You'll see."

  She had gazed at him, at his sleek, reddish hair, dipped toward her as he ate, wolfing his food in a way that was so irrevocably male, and felt an overwhelming tenderness, not dissimilar to the one she felt for her children. He was so attentive, so considerate. She knew she was lucky, especially when one considered what some of the wives put up with. And now that he had agreed to what the doctor had suggested, they need never have another baby again. They could just carry on as they were, getting closer, and closer, and happier. . . .

  Joy was aware that she was daydreaming, and pulled herself a little more upright, in order to attack her food. It was chicken casserole; not up to Wai-Yip's usual standards, she thought, chewing meditatively. Then, perhaps that was no surprise.

  "You'll never guess what we found out today," said Joy, raising her fork to her mouth. "Wai-Yip is having a baby. Completely took me by surprise, I must say. I didn't even know she had a boyfriend."

  Edward's head shot up. His blue eyes looked temporarily startled, before conducting a microcosmic search of her own. In a nearby apartment, someone dropped something metallic on a wooden floor, sending a cymballic crash reverberating along the corridor. He didn't seem to notice.

  Joy's fork stilled as he moved. She leaned forward and stared at him, studying this new expression. There was the faintest bleaching of the normally high color in his cheeks.

  "You knew?"

  Edward looked back at her, blinking hard for a couple of seconds, and then, unusually, he looked away from her. He seemed to consider whether to say something, and then, eventually, took another forkful of his chicken instead, lifting it carefully to his mouth.

  There was a brief silence.

  Joy kept staring at him.

  "Edward," she said, and her voice held a sudden chime of fear. "Edward. Please . . ."

  Edward seemed to recover slightly. He swallowed his mouthful without any visible effort, and then lifted his napkin to his lips, wiping them slowly and methodically.

  "Your mother was quite right about her. She's become unreliable. She'll have to go."

  He paused. "I'll give her her notice after the weekend." He didn't look at Joy as he spoke, but kept his eyes fixed on his plate.

  Across the table, still transfixed by her husband, Joy began to shake, at first with a delicate tremor, and then more violently. She was still shaking when Edward stood up, and, his voice suddenly strangled as he attempted not to look at her, announced that he was going to his study.

  Joy spent that night in the guest room, unchallenged by her husband. She shook until she pulled the embroidered white sheet over her head, and then, laying curled up under the big fan, half-illuminated through the shutters by the blue glow of the full moon, she had begun to howl, great racking sobs of grief cascading through her body like seismic tremors. Edward, sleepless in the room next door, had, at around three o'clock, quietly come in, whispering fervent apologies under his breath, and trying to place his arms around her. But she had grown ferocious, and batted him away with her fists, taking great swings at his head, his shoulders, any part of him she could reach, until, himself weeping, he had backed out of the door.

  Then, until dawn, Joy had lain very still on the bed.

  Thinking back.

  Thinking.

  Her mother guessed, of course. She guessed as soon as Wai-Yip brought the baby back to the apartment. It wasn't hard; while sharing the usual squashed features of the newborn, Tung-Li had an unusually aquiline nose, and a distinct reddish tint to his hair. To her credit, Alice never spoke about it to her daughter, perhaps gleaning from Joy's curt announcement that the number one amah would be accompanying them to the new house, that any valedictory announcements about all men being the same, or how those Chinese girls would get their hooks into anybody, would be ill-received. Mindful of Joy's dangerously rigid demeanor, she also kept quiet about the certainty that the neighbors would talk, despite her own terrible reservations. What would people think? Joy didn't seem to care.

  Joy had informed Edward of her plans three long nights after the moon festival dinner. She had joined him at breakfast, her hair neatly set, and wearing a crisp blue short-sleeved shirt and white slacks, and had poured the tea without once looking him in the eye.

  "I've told Wai-Yip she's not returning to China," she said, her voice low and measured. It was the first time she had spoken to him.

  Edward looked up, a piece of toast halfway to his lips.

  "What?"

  "I've spoken to a couple of people. If she goes to China, she'll be disowned. She and the baby. She will find it impossible to get work, and the baby will be ostracized because . . . because of its appearance. With things as they are, with the communists and all, well, they might well starve."

  Edward had not moved.

  "I've decided--she's our responsibility. Your responsibility. And I won't have that child's welfare on my conscience. You will have to make sure the new house is big enough . . . that we don't have to see it. You should be able to manage that."

  There was a lengthy pause. Edward had risen from the table then, and walked round to her chair. There, he kneeled, and pressed his face into her hand, lifting it from her lap.

  "I thought--I thought you were going to leave," he said, his voice suddenly breaking.

  Joy said nothing, her jaw trembling slightly as she kept her face fixed toward the window. She could feel his hot tears on her skin.

  "Oh, God, Joy. I love you so much. I'm so, so sorry. I just got so terribly lonely. I--"

  Joy's head snapped back around. She pulled her hand away from him.

  "I don't want to talk about it," she said. "Ever."

>   CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sabine sat on the upturned crate in the summerhouse, a moth-eaten blanket across her shoulders, and her shirt pulled tightly across her chest, shivering in the cold. She had been in there almost half an hour. She had listened, through the sound of her own crying, to Thom's urgent calls for her down at the stable yard, had watched as the dusk became night, smothering everything in its blackness, and had sat, sobbing quietly in her musty haven, so paralyzed by her own shock and grief that she couldn't make her quaking fingers rejoin the buttons and holes on her now crumpled shirt.

  She hadn't known where to go; had just followed her own overriding urge to run away from Thom, to escape the bitter taste of her own humiliation. So she had headed first down to the bottom fields, then walked, lost in her own misery, up the back road to the village, finally settling on the summerhouse as a place of shelter. And now she was stuck; if she returned to the house, she would have to explain it all to her mother. If she stayed here, having left her jumper over the gray's stable door, she was likely to freeze. One thing was certain; she would have to leave Kilcarrion; there was no way she could stay after what she'd done.

  Sabine wiped her nose with the back of her hand, dissolving into snotty tears again as she remembered what she'd done: her placing of his hand on her breast; his look of horror as she had done so. What must he have thought of her? She was as bad as her mother; nothing but a whore. What had made her do it? She had ruined everything now. But another thought fought for space: Was she really so hideous? Would it have hurt him so much just to kiss her back a little?

  Sabine had not turned on the electric light, fearful of drawing attention to her whereabouts, but she could just make out the hands of her watch, which showed it was almost five-thirty. Down in the yard, she could hear the clanging of doors and buckets as the horses were given their evening feeds. Her grandmother would be busying herself somewhere, brushing off the dogs or consulting Mrs. H about the best way to reorganize the freezer. In the house, Lynda would be counting the last half an hour until she could load herself into her glossy little red car and go home. She would probably be watching one of her soaps. Her day was so punctuated by them, even Grandfather received his various pills according to their schedules.

  Thinking about her grandfather made Sabine wipe more fervently at her eyes. He was probably wondering where she was; she had hardly seen him at all today. He probably thought she had become like her mother: thoughtless, uncaring. Selfish. But she couldn't go back into the house. There was nowhere she could go. Nowhere she could rely on anyone, anyway. She sat, kicking at a pile of old flowerpots, not caring as they cracked and fragmented, hardly able to see them through eyes swollen through crying. Then she lifted her head, like a hound scenting the air.

  Annie's. She could go to Annie's. She would understand. And if Annie was having an "off" day, she could just ask to use her telephone, and get Bobby to come and pick her up. She had to tell him only half the story, after all.

  Sabine shook off the blanket, and, after checking cautiously that there was no one around to see her, slipped through the deserted gardens toward the back gate, trying not to let the hiccup and shudder that inevitably followed her tears slow her pace.

  For some reason the three street lamps that lined the main thoroughfare of Ballymalnaugh were all unlit that night, and Sabine found herself grateful for the clear skies as she half-ran, clutching her sides, up the road, hearing only the sound of her own footfall echoing on the tarmac. The only other light came from the windows of those houses she passed that had open curtains, revealing little tableaux of family life: the young couple prostrate on a sofa in front of the television, their small child playing on the floor; the solitary old lady reading the paper; the table, set for tea, while an unwatched television cast an aurora borealis of moving shadows in the corner. Sabine saw them all, running past, and felt lonelier than ever. I shall never have a proper family, she thought, making herself cry again. I shall always be on the outside, looking in.

  She slowed as she reached Annie's house, trying to catch her breath and wiping at her eyes, so as not to look too alarming. She didn't want Annie to think anyone had died, after all. She had done enough damage for one day.

  The downstairs lights were on, but the curtains were closed, just as they had been the last few times Sabine had ridden past. She paused before she walked up the path, finally doing up her shirt buttons and wondering briefly whether, after what Mrs. H had said about Annie's needing to go for counseling, she should really go in at all.

  But as Sabine stood uncertainly on the steps, the door was thrust open from the inside, throwing a bright shaft of orange light out into the garden. A tall, thin man with dark hair and shiny cycling shorts, silhouetted against it, moved as if to run past her down the steps, and then, spying Sabine, stopped and clutched at her shoulders.

  "Thank God," he gasped. "Oh, thank God. We need an ambulance."

  Sabine froze.

  "An ambulance. Have you got a mobile phone?"

  She gaped at him.

  He shook his head, irritatedly. "Look, I'm just a guest. Anthony Fleming. I just came back this evening, against my better judgment, I might add, and I found Mrs. Connolly--and--well--she needs an ambulance. Urgently. Do you have a phone? This one seems to have been cut off."

  Sabine's heart stopped, and she looked past him into the brightly lit house. She knew Annie had been depressed, but she hadn't thought about the possibility . . . Sabine shuddered. She had a sudden vision of a girl at school who had slit her wrists in the toilets two years ago after she was bullied. The blood had spurted as high as the ceiling, one of the fifth formers had told her.

  "Is she--is she--?" Her voice faltered.

  "Well, I'm no expert, but it looks like she's not got long left," said the man. "We can't waste any time. Where is there a phone?"

  Ignoring his protestations, Sabine pushed her way in through the door, hardly aware of the chaos of the front room, the smell of dust and stale food that confronted her. She had to see Annie. She kept walking determinedly, her chest tightening with fear as she tried to ignore the unearthly sounds coming from the kitchen. No one had told her about noise; when people killed themselves in films, they were always silent about it.

  But there was no blood, not on the ceiling, anyway, just a sort of discolored water all over the pale-blue lino of the kitchen floor, and Annie sitting in the middle of it, clutching onto a cupboard door with both arms, as if trying to haul herself over it.

  "Annie?" she said.

  "Oh, Gooooodddddddd. . . ." Annie, seemingly oblivious, let out a long, low moan. She looked like she was concentrating on something Sabine could not see. She looked puce with effort. She did not appear to be dying.

  "She's not dying," Sabine announced to the man, who had reappeared behind her.

  "Of course she's not dying," he said impatiently, his hands flapping as if he were shaking water from them. "She's having a bloody baby. But I'm a loans clerk, not a doctor. And I told you--we need to get an ambulance."

  Sabine stared at Annie, reeling slightly as she attempted to take in the significance of what the man had just said. Then "stay with her," she said, lurching for the door. "I'll get help." And her blood pumping in her ears, she began sprinting back up the road toward Kilcarrion.

  Kate leaned heavily against the desk, staring at the sepiatinted photograph she still held in her hand, at her own broad toothy smile, open, unknowing. At Tung-Li's moon face staring back at her, his apparent awkwardness before the camera now infused with a greater symbolism; his unusual features--because they were unusual, now Kate looked carefully at them--now explained.

  "Why didn't you tell me?" she said, eventually. Her voice, when it came, sounded frail, tremulous.

  Joy, who sat beside her on the chair, her head bowed, lifted her face wearily.

  "There was nothing to say. What would I have told you?"

  "I don't know. Something. Something that perhaps would have explained--oh,
I don't know." She shook her head. "Oh, God, Mummy . . . all this time . . ."

  It was dark outside, and the two wall-mounted lights cast gloomy, chiaroscuro shadows on the walls, highlighting the lengths of now-near-empty shelves, the few remaining boxes still to be sorted. An old framed map of Southeast Asia had come off the wall and stood, its glass fractured within its frame, against the wall.

  "What happened to him?" said Kate, still staring at the photograph. "To both of them?"

  "They didn't go back to China. When we came back to Ireland I found Wai-Yip a good position with a Black Watch family up in the New Territories. I think she was much happier there, really. She was nearer to her family. And things were . . ."--Joy took a deep breath--"simpler."

  Kate stared at the photograph again, and then placed it carefully on top of the box, leaving her fingertips lightly upon its surface. She paused, as if deciding whether to turn it over, but left it face upward.

  "I can't believe this . . . ," she said, almost to herself. "I can't believe Daddy . . . I thought you were perfect," she said. "I really thought the two of you had this perfect love."

  "No one's perfect, Kate."

  The two women sat in silence at right angles to each other, listening to the distant sounds of activity in the stable yard. For once, Kate noted, it didn't seem to stir Joy into some kind of action.

  "Why did you stay?" she said, eventually. "It was practically the sixties by then, wasn't it? People would have understood. We would have understood."

  Joy frowned, a hand raised to her hair.

  "I did think about it. But there was still quite a stigma about it, back then. And despite everything, I decided I was doing the right thing. I thought this way you children would grow up with a proper family. Without having to cope with people whispering, and pointing, and talking. . . . And we had built a life together. I suppose we liked the same things."

  She turned to look at Kate, and her expression softened. "Both of us loved you so much, you know. Your happiness was everything to us. And although your father hurt me terribly . . ."--here she winced slightly, and Kate realized with a sense of shock how close to the surface that betrayal still sat--"I decided that my own feelings were actually not the most important thing, in the end."