Page 16 of The Girl from the Tea Garden
He lurched at her, his face crumpling into tears. He could hardly get out his words.
Adela flung her arms about him. ‘Is it Mother?’ she cried. ‘Tell me!’
He gripped her tight and almost roared, ‘Yes, she’s all right and you have a baby brother!’
By the time DrHemmings arrived from Shillong at daybreak, the newborn had already been swaddled and fed. Adela dozed in a long cane chair on the veranda, wrapped in Sam’s car blanket, with Scout curled at her feet, while her father and Sam attempted to finish the bottle of whisky they had begun two hours ago in celebration. Her father’s animosity towards Sam had evaporated in the euphoria of the birth.
‘I have a son!’ Wesley greeted the doctor, climbing unsteadily to his feet. ‘Have a whisky with me, Hemmings.’
‘Don’t feel I deserve it,’ the balding doctor said. ‘Ayah has done all the hard work. I’ll just look in on MrsRobson first.’
The doctor checked on mother and baby, retreating when he found them both sleeping.
Adela was roused by Mohammed Din, fetching tea and puris for their visitor.
‘Umm, my favourite,’ Adela said, grinning at the servant, reaching for one of the deep-fried puffed-up breads.
‘Guests first,’ Ayah Mimi said, appearing out of the shadows wagging a finger. She touched Adela gently. The nanny was like a tiny bird, thin and darting in her movements, yet strong and wise. She had once been the ayah to Auntie Tilly’s cousin Sophie in this very house, so when the Robsons had returned to Belgooree from England, Ayah Mimi had become Adela’s beloved nanny too.
Adela handed round the plate, while Mohammed Din poured tea. ‘Proper tea too,’ she announced, breathing in the peachy smell of Belgooree tea. ‘Not like at sch—’
Abruptly she stopped, not wanting the conversation to revert to her absconding from school. She felt suddenly leaden inside, her appetite vanishing as the memory of her unhappy flight, and last night’s wrangling flooded back. She slid Sam a wary look. What trouble she had caused him, pitching him headlong into a family row and making things difficult for him with the Blacks at StNinian’s for forcing him to aid her escape. He looked exhausted, his eyes glazed with lack of sleep and whisky. His hat had fallen off the back of his head and his hair stuck up at untidy angles. Nelson, tired out from all the excitement, napped in his lap. How Sam must wish he had never set eyes on her.
Wanting suddenly to be with her mother, Adela left the men talking and slipped into her parents’ bedroom. The smell of cloves could not mask the stench of blood and afterbirth. She recoiled from the odour, struck anew with shock that her mother could have given birth. She was in her late forties, wasn’t she? The thought of her parents having sex at their age, let alone producing a baby, made her feel queasy. But there was the proof, her new brother lying peacefully in an ancient swinging cot by the bedside. Adela peered at him. He was tightly swaddled in a white sheet, his face crinkled like a withered plum, and with a shock of dark hair sprouting from his crown. She didn’t know what to make of him.
Once Auntie Tilly had said, ‘You and my Jamie get on so well together. It’s such a shame you don’t have a brother or sister to play with at Belgooree. Don’t you wish you had one?’
‘No,’ Adela had said, laughing. ‘Why would I want to share Mother and Daddy with anyone else?’
She turned away quickly from the cradle.
‘Mother?’ Adela whispered. ‘Are you awake?’
Clarrie’s face on the pillow looked flushed, dark hair stuck to her glistening brow, and there were purple smudges under her closed eyes. How Adela adored that face.
She burned with shame at the hurtful things she had shouted at her parents– repeating Nina’s poisonous words– when all she had wanted was for them to deny it all and for things to be the same between them as before. But they had not been able to calm her fears; instead her father had admitted to being engaged to the hateful MrsDavidge, and then her mother had admitted to having some Assamese grandmother, whom Adela had never heard of. It couldn’t be true! How could they have kept such secrets from her?
Adela sat on the bed trying to hold back the tide of panic rising in her chest. She wasn’t who she thought she was. She wasn’t one of them– the girls at school, who were proud of being British through and through. They knew where they came from; their allegiance was undivided. Home was Britain, even if half of them had never even been there. Until last night, despite the malicious gossip of Nina, Adela had believed she was every inch a British girl too. But not now. Her great-grandmother was Assamese. Had she been a farmer’s daughter or a peasant? Perhaps a tea picker. Adela cringed to think what Nina and the others would have to say about that: ‘Two annas has the blood of a chai-wallah in her veins.’
It made her all the more determined that she was never going back to StNinian’s. Adela got up and tiptoed back to the cot. She bent down and stroked the cheek of the baby. It was soft as an apricot. He snuffled like a puppy at her touch. She felt the first stirring of emotion, a stab of pity, towards him.
‘Poor baby,’ she whispered. ‘You’re a two annas just like me.’
CHAPTER 4
Christmas, 1933
Adela heard her parents arguing over her again. She was pulling off her riding boots at the bottom of the veranda steps when she became aware of raised voices from within the bungalow.
‘Well, I’ve invited them to stay. Tilly and Sophie want to see Adela as much as baby Harry,’ Clarrie insisted. ‘They’re concerned about her.’
‘There’s no need to be,’ Wesley snapped. ‘We’re managing perfectly well teaching her at home.’
‘Horse riding and tea tasting do not add up to an education.’
‘They do if she’s going to go into the family business.’
‘She’s too young to know what she wants,’ Clarrie retorted. ‘We can’t keep her here indefinitely. She needs to be with girls her own age doing interesting things and passing examinations; only then will she be equipped for the modern world. Things were different when Olive and I were young girls here and—’
