But her mother insisted on more-direct exchanges. “Encourage him a little, darling. These first months are always difficult. Tell him he’ll soon make friends.”
Mum thinks you’ll make friends soon, Marian wrote. But it embarrassed her to make such bold reference to his distress, as though she had caught him in a private sorrow and hadn’t the decency to look away.
Francis occasionally scratched a note of his own, a single stern page with news of the university or local politics. But it was Essie who kept in constant contact, Essie who wrote to Father Ivo for news of Simon’s health and demeanor, Essie who reminded Father Ignatius that Simon must drink only goats’ milk. “A little cows’ milk in cooking is not always harmful,” she explained, “but too much upsets his system.”
She had always liked the hours after eleven, when the house seemed to belong only to her. Francis kept to a strict sleeping schedule, and the baby seldom woke before morning. For a brief time nothing was required of her, and she was free to follow the course of her own thoughts without interruption. But Simon’s letters introduced an element of disturbance, and she spent her nights writing to him until her fingers cramped. We think of you every day, my son. When you’re feeling lonely, trust in God’s strength; He is always with you. She tried to ignore Simon’s pleas to come home; she knew she must not encourage such lines of thinking. But alone with his letters, she could not help herself. God knows your pain, my son. He has given you this opportunity. Think of this time as a sacrifice for your future happiness, and offer up all your hardships to the Lord. He will hear you.
When she had finished, Essie folded her son’s latest letter to keep in the back of her wardrobe with other papers she had saved, some since her own childhood. She had covered small boxes with pretty paper to hold Simon’s letters and already, after only half a term, the first was nearly full. She imagined boxes stacked from floor to ceiling by the time he had finished his tenure at St. Stanny’s: a tower of his faith and hers.
When Simon had been at school two months, his letters took on a new shrillness. It seemed to Essie that she could hear her son’s voice, a thin, high spire rising from the pages he had written. He begged to come home.
Essie read these letters in silence, lips pressed tightly together to prevent the voice in Simon’s letters from finding breath in her own person. It was for Simon’s own good, she decided, that she must shield Francis and Marian from such raw appeals. Marian was too attached to Simon to view this period of adjustment in its proper context. And Francis, she knew, would not have the stomach for it; he did his utmost to avoid tension of any kind.
“He’s working hard,” she told them brightly. “Exams are coming, so of course he’s feeling anxious. He’s given up sweets for Lent.”
In fact, Simon had not responded to his mother’s queries about his preparations for Easter, or even to Marian’s halting questions about the cricket team. But Essie persisted, writing every day with some new prayer or inspiration. During Lent her letters increased. Meditations on Christ’s agony, the fear that surely must have sickened Him, the temptations He endured while fasting in the desert, were set against a record of her own self-denial. She had foregone all meat and poultry and sometimes experienced dizzy spells, when the earth stopped revolving but her blood still whirled with echoed motion. At such times her pen against paper seemed to anchor her, and she wrote to Simon as if he were already the priest she dreamt he would become. It was for his sake, she told him, for the sake of his future, that she endured the pain of their separation. But the truth was that she felt a new and glorious intimacy with this son. Before he left home he had begun to seem remote to her—already on his way to being a man she would not understand. Now only the deepest expressions of her faith could sustain him. Words flooded through her, a stream of such ceaseless power that she believed her discourse with her son had been in some way sanctified.
One night, she went to sit with Marian. It was long past the hour when Marian should have been sleeping, but she stirred when Essie sat on the edge of her bed. “Awake, my girl?” She stroked her daughter’s hair. “You know my brother John went away to boarding school when he was even younger than Simon. Such stories he used to tell us!” It would be that way for Simon too, she promised Marian. He would make friends to last a lifetime. He would be invited all over the country by other boys’ families, lavish trips to Delhi or Madras—places he could never go on what their father earned. As she spoke she began to see the world her son would inhabit: the kind, learned priests, the laughing young boys, the pillow fights and tuck-box feasts.
When Marian fell back to sleep, Essie remained beside her. Already her girl was twelve. In another twelve years, Essie might be sifting through proposals. She lay down next to her daughter and tried instead to think of the stories she had told about Simon, stories certain to come true.
In April the days swelled with heat. The sky stretched overhead, tight as a blister, and the baby’s fever spiked. Essie thought he had heatstroke until his face erupted in a rash. The next day it had spread over his body; he pulled at his clothes and cried when anyone tried to pick him up.
Essie dashed off a quick note to Simon. I may not be able to write for the next few days. Your brother has a bad case of measles — his temperature is running very high. Keep him in your prayers.
On Good Friday, when Jude’s fever had dropped nearly to normal, Essie decided she could get away long enough to attend the Passion. She had sent Marian to an early service, so the baby would not be left with only Lila. “I’ll sit on the right side, near the aisle.” She took up the crocheted bag that held her rosary and looped it around her wrist. “If anything happens, let Lila stay with the baby and you run and find me, you understand?”
She read her book for a few minutes, but in the dim light her eyes began to ache. It was a relief to hear the bell at the gate jangling; she ran downstairs, where the afternoon postman was reaching into his sack.
“Coming down to meet me!” He smiled. “Handsome boys are already writing?”
Marian shook her head no — of course, no — and he laughed at her vehemence.
“Soon, soon,” he said, in the same tone her grandfather used when he was pretending to search his pockets for a five-rupee note he intended to give her: half a joke, half a promise. Marian took the mail and said nothing, though he tapped her chin with the back of his finger and laughed again before going.
A letter had come from Simon, addressed to her mother. It did not occur to Marian not to read it. “It’s a family letter,” Essie said lightly whenever anything was addressed to Marian. “Of course it’s meant for us all.”
After the brightness of the afternoon sun, the bedroom was dark and close. Jude had fallen into a deeper sleep, still and sweaty. Marian listened to the woolly sound of his breathing as she read. The letter was short, not much longer than the telegrams their grandfather sent on birthdays. Simon mentioned none of the progress her mother had described, none of the boys who had become his friends. He could not keep up in Latin. He could not sleep at night. An older boy woke him up again; he did not know what to do. Please, could he come home?
Marian put the letter down in confusion. She understood at once that her mother had deliberately hidden Simon’s misery, but the revelation jolted her—a sudden stop on a carnival ride, leaving her swinging in midair. She had been with Simon at Juhu the day she rode a Ferris wheel; she had clutched Simon’s hand until the nausea passed and she could look down to where their mother smiled and waved below. She looked different, small, from such a height. They had spot
ted camels, a juggler, a family of five boys, all dressed alike. The sound of voices drifted up to where she and Simon hung suspended in the sky. Then the car had lurched, tipping forward, and they trundled back down to earth, everything its proper size again.
In the bedroom, faced with Simon’s letter, Marian suddenly saw her mother from an alarming new angle. She had heard Essie lie before, of course: small white lies, the sort of lies routinely forgiven in confessionals. False appointments to avoid unwanted meetings, overblown courtesies, a quick twist away from one topic or another when she wished to deflect Francis’s attention. But the idea that her mother was keeping such a secret as this bewildered Marian so much that her own course of action was not quite clear. Even Simon’s unhappiness was distorting. Dimly she imagined cruel older boys shaking her brother awake to tease him, and she felt convulsed with a pity too powerful to express.
Jude put a fist to his eye, frowning in his sleep. He would soon wake, her mother would soon be home. Marian realized she must speak to her father, but she could not admit to having seen the letter — her mother would be furious. She stuffed it back in its envelope and then into her pocket. Later she would put it at the bottom of the rubbish pile, where it would not be found.
“What’s this I hear? Simon wants to come home?”
Essie looked up in shock. “What’s this nonsense?” she asked sharply. “What makes you say such a thing?”
For several days Francis had not acted on the news that his son was unhappy at boarding school. His initial dismay had curdled; he could not think of Simon without reflecting with irritation that Essie had landed them in this mess and now he had been dragged right to the center of it.
They had just finished dinner. Marian had excused herself to study and Jude had fallen asleep, still weak though the worst of the fever had passed. Francis saw with some satisfaction that his wife had gone absolutely still, clearly taken aback.
He shook his head sagely. “You’re not the only one who can read and write. People other than you receive letters.”
“But what has he said to you?” She stared at him, her face drawn and tight. Francis did not answer right away, enjoying the rare knowledge that his wife was anxious to hear what he had to say.
“He doesn’t like the school—that is the point.” He could hear for himself how negligible such a complaint would sound to his wife and struggled to recall some sharper detail, something to reveal his unexpected acquaintance with Simon’s predicament. “And there’s this trouble with Latin.”
Essie shook her head briskly and began to spoon the last of the raita into a glass, as if the matter had already been settled. “Don’t be ridiculous, Frank. He’s only been there one term. He needs time to adjust.”
“There’s no need for all this adjusting difficulty if we bring him home. I’ve been thinking he’s better off here.”
“Oh, you’ve been thinking! Suddenly you’ve been thinking!”
This was less a question than an opportunity to broadcast her derision. She pushed plates into one another, an angry clattering, and Francis raised his voice over the din.
“He’s a young boy still. Time enough later to send him to school.” He thought of Simon the day they took him to the station. They had handed him over to the teacher who would oversee the journey to the school and said good-bye on the platform. Francis found it painful to remember how small his son looked in the uniform jacket, like a child in a man’s coat. Essie had cut it far too large in the shoulders, hoping it would last two years at least. “The point is, we can wait a year or two.” He tried to speak with decision, as though to his subordinates at the university. He was a man of authority, of judgment, he often wished to remind his wife. All day long students and their parents flocked to his office, seeking his opinion.
“Listen to him! One of the best schools in the country— and the child has won a scholarship! All that is lost if we bring him home now. What happens in a year or two, Frank? Suddenly you can pay for his fees?”
Francis flicked his hand through the air, brushing away the familiar issue of his own earnings. She had begun to speak loudly, as though to an audience in other rooms, and Francis wondered if Marian could hear them. “Leave it for now,” he said. “We can discuss it another time.”
But Essie would not be stopped. She had begun to talk past Francis, as if he had already left her presence. “Suddenly he comes pushing his nose in. Where is he when I need his help? And I should say nothing, is that it?”
She did not give him time to answer; her stream of grievances rolled on. Francis did not indulge her with even the appearance of listening but poured himself a glass of water and drank deeply. He had the feeling, as often happened when it came to the management of the children, that he was standing by the side of the tracks with one hand feebly in the air as a train barreled past. Usually he did not permit this state of affairs to worry him. He enjoyed various offices he performed — counting out money for new shoes each year, examining papers with good marks before kissing one or another on the forehead. He enjoyed the pleasant sensation, as he cycled home each evening from the station, that his household was in full swing. A meal would presently be served, his children gathered around the table. He was not inclined to view his wife with any particular satisfaction; such hopes had not survived the raw silences of their first months together. But they had produced a house full of noise and purpose.
And it was not as if the children themselves were rushing away, helter-skelter, to some distant station. To Francis, despite the evidence of churning change, they remained constant. They filled his house, they cycled through illnesses, they replaced toys with books. He knew Essie lamented the loss of baby fat, the outgrown garments; she had cried over the christening dress all three had worn as infants, now packed away in camphor. But Francis preferred to take a longer view. They would always be his children. Better, perhaps, to wait until they were older, when Essie’s iron hold on them had weakened, before he staked his claim.
“My son could go to one of the top schools in the country or he could go down the road and waste his best chance, but I should keep quiet …”
Essie’s grievances billowed between them, black as smoke until it was difficult to breathe. Francis thought of the cool relief of the street, his wife’s voice dissipating to nothing, the promise of a hand of cards at his club. It occurred to him that in a few years he could take Simon with him.
She stacked the dishes — usually a task she left to the girl, but one she had now taken on with alarming fierceness. Francis expected something to shatter. “Lila, come and take these!” Suddenly she turned on Francis once more. “He’s a young boy—naturally he’s homesick. How many boys go to boarding school? You think it’s different for any of them? You think it’s easy for me to send my son away? But I am thinking of his future.”
The suggestion that he was soft was Francis’s undoing. “Enough,” he said, a grumbling surrender, and got up from the table, leaving Essie to bang the pots and pans and carry on muttering long after he had gone.
A week after Simon came home for the summer break, he told his father he did not want to go back to school.
“Still unhappy? Why?”
Simon did not answer. He seemed well enough — not too thin, though Essie had made a fuss. A bit more quiet, perhaps, and shy at first with his sister, but Francis supposed they had reached an awkward age. Simon’s marks were good enough and would surely improve.
“What’s the matter? It’s this Latin course? We can hire a tutor.”
Simon’s eyes swam with tears, which embarrassed them both. His twelfth birthday was only a few months off, and it seemed to his father that he had grown taller after only five months away. But his face was still a young boy’s, soft and hopeful. “Come, what is it?”
“I want to stay home.” Simon rubbed his eyes with his fists. He promised to study every day, to be at the top of his class in his neighborhood school. He would work in the house and the garden, he would help
take care of Jude. He would not ask to play cricket if Mummy said no. His voice rose, pleading, as he tried to bargain, and then his eyes filled again so that he could not speak. He did not cry out loud when Francis told him the fees had been paid, the scholarship granted, he must go back. But his tears came more swiftly, running down his cheeks and along the sides of his nose, trembling on his upper lip.
“Take.” Francis gave him a handkerchief. “You may grow fond of school,” he said while the boy blew his nose — and though Francis believed it, he knew he did not sound as if anything could be true but the sight of his son crying. He turned away, as though to give the boy a moment’s privacy, when in fact he could not bear to look at him.
But Simon stared at him, a taut and ravaged look, and Francis felt a surge of anger. Essie should have let well enough alone; he did not see the point of all this commotion. The child would have been fine in the local school, which had sufficed for Francis and his brother and most of their friends. But she was always pushing one thing or another, and he knew his house would be turned upside down if he brought it up again. Besides, they had made a beginning. They had scrimped to find money for the fees, the uniform, the tuck-box and trunks. Francis himself had applied to colleagues for their backing. What would they say if he pulled the boy from school so soon? It wasn’t only a matter of his own reputation, but of Simon’s as well. The boy would be considered too soft, too weak. And look at him, Francis thought with sudden pride. He had grown nearly to his father’s shoulder. His arms and legs were strong. Francis imagined other days his son would come home from school, clear-eyed and brave, a boy fit for anything. Francis would tell him then that he needn’t go on to seminary, he could study whatever he chose. Not to worry, he imagined saying. I will see to your education. But what was the point of such conversation now? It would only prevent the boy from settling down. He wanted to tell his son not to worry, not to be ashamed; such changes were always disruptive. You are stronger than you know, he wanted to say.