Page 69 of The Girl from the Tea Garden
‘Adela!’ Deborah remonstrated. ‘Don’t be so unkind.’
‘Okay, ladies,’ Tommy intervened, ‘time to clear off and let me lock up. See you at rehearsal tomorrow.’
They scattered off with calls of goodbye and disappeared, leaving Adela and Tommy alone.
‘It’s been just three weeks since the last show, yet somehow I’ve gone from everyone’s best friend to the girl no one wants around.’ Adela fixed Tommy with troubled eyes. ‘What’s happened in three weeks?’
Tommy met her look. ‘For starters, you and Prince Sanjay are what’s happened. They were jealous– I was jealous– you chose to go with him rather than with us to the after-show party. Should never turn your back on the pack, my girl.’
‘I regret that now ...’
‘But they would have got over that,’ Tommy went on. ‘You were providing some juicy gossip going off to his country retreat– we love all that stuff, don’t we?’
‘It’s Nina, isn’t it?’ Adela guessed. ‘She’s changed people towards me.’
Tommy sighed. ‘Yes, she’s been busy with her wagging tongue. Nothing too bitchy, just little titbits dropped now and again with that sorrowful look in her blue eyes that she’s so good at. She’s a pro that one.’
Adela gulped. ‘So you know ... you know things ... about my family.’
Tommy nodded. ‘She’s made sure they all know about you being Eurasian– says your granny was a tea picker or some such.’
Adela felt bile in her throat. She swallowed it down and said with emotion, ‘My great-grandmother was an Assamese silk worker– a skilled woman– and my grandmother was a teacher. My mother is a successful businesswoman who has run her own tea rooms in England and tea gardens in India. Why should the likes of Nina Davidge look down her long nose at me? Tell me that, Tommy!’
Tommy gave her a look of pity. ‘You know why, Adela.’
She gave a bitter smile. ‘’Cause my family have let the side down? ’Cause I’m not a pure-blooded English girl?’
‘It’s cruel, but that’s the way a lot of British still think. They like to feel superior– it’s been fed to them with their mother’s milk.’
‘Is that the way you feel, Tommy?’ Adela challenged. ‘Is that why you don’t want me in your play either?’
‘I would have let you audition if you’d bothered to turn up.’
‘Would you really?’
Tommy dropped his gaze. ‘Sit down a minute, will you?’ Adela stood where she was, defiant. ‘Please.’ He tugged her gently into a seat and sat beside her.
For a moment or two he said nothing. He looked around, making sure there was no one else there listening in.
‘Villiers isn’t my real surname,’ he said, his voice so low she had to lean in to hear him. ‘I don’t know what it is.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was adopted as a baby. My parents– my adoptive parents– had lost three babies, and my mother couldn’t bear the thought of another pregnancy, so they went to an orphanage and chose me.’ Tommy gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I must have been the palest skinned and the fairest haired they could find among the half-castes, ’cause that was what the orphanage was for: the babies the Brits disowned or the Indians were too ashamed to keep.’
Adela struggled to take in his startling revelation. All this time they had been friends yet never known that they shared the same secret. She covered his hand with her own. ‘Sorry, Tommy. I had no idea.’
‘Of course you didn’t. We all keep it locked up inside like something shameful, scared witless in case people find out.’
‘That’s the worst thing,’ Adela agreed, ‘the shame you’re made to feel. Why should it matter so much?’
Tommy shrugged and let out a long sigh. Adela squeezed his hand.
‘But you don’t know that you’re Anglo-Indian, do you? Your parents might have been British and died or something.’
‘Highly unlikely,’ Tommy grunted.
‘But possible. Have you ever gone back and tried to find out?’
