Monsoon Summer by Julia Gregson Page B

can’t remember,” I interrupted her furiously, “and I couldn’t give a damn. He’s got nothing to do with what we’re talking about.” She groaned as if I were the thickest person on earth.
    â€œTell me about my father.” It came out louder than I intended, and a pheasant scuttled out of the tangled undergrowth, clucking and complaining.
    She started sighing and pacing around. I looked through the wet autumn leaves at a darkening sky with huge clouds roiling in the west.
    â€œKit.” She closed her eyes like someone locking herself into a cell, and when she came out her eyes were very black. “I’m only ever going to tell you this story once, because it makes me feel like the worst bloody twit in the world, and if you are rude to me, I will stop.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Mummy, please don’t.”
    I waited in terrible suspense. The rain was coming down more heavily and any moment now I expected her to run for the house.
    â€œGod, I hate this climate.” She tied the knot on her scarf again.
    â€œWhen Tudor marries,” she said, “he’ll own all this wood, plus almost one hundred acres of prime Oxfordshire land. Daisy told me that, she spoke to me this morning before you got up. She’s as upset as I am.”
    â€œReally.” I could not resist the sarcasm. “Well, always nice to have company in your opinions. And just to make things perfectly clear, I wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man on earth. I don’t even like him.”
    â€œShe knows Indian men as well as I do,” she went on, as if I hadn’t said a word. After a breath, she spoke again. “First, I was not born in Wrexham.” This hardly came as a great shock to me. I’d forgotten, or discarded, the Wrexham version of her story.
    â€œI was born in Pondicherry on the southeast coast of India,” shesaid, taking on the queenly drawl I thought of as her telephone voice. “My father, your grandfather, was an Englishman, a high-up engineer on the railways there. I don’t have any pictures of him, so don’t ask.” A flash of anger there. “My mother was an Indian woman.”
    I knew that already but didn’t want to stop her.
    â€œMy mother died giving birth to what would have been my sister. I don’t remember ever meeting my father. I was sent to an orphanage in Orissa, an English convent. I don’t know who by, I was just sent. Is this the kind of information you’re after?”
    She gave me a look of muted fury, as if I were an impertinent journalist, not her child.
    â€œMummy, I’m sorry.”
    â€œIt was a home for half-caste children.”
    Half-caste. I’d certainly never heard her say that before, and the word fell in an ugly way—like a dead bird or a turd between us in the woods, and for the first time I wanted her to stop because I hated hearing it applied to her, and in a way, it interfered with my dream of her because when I’d thought of my mother in India, I’d thought of cocktail parties, and tiger shoots, and pink and peach skies. Now I thought of a girl I hadn’t thought about for years: Dymphna Parry, a miserable little thing who’d arrived midterm at my Derbyshire school. She’d been adopted by the vicar and his wife from somewhere in Africa.
    I saw Dymphna’s face again: gray-green with cold, the terrible tweeds she’d been togged out in, the woolly hair pulled into plaits that looked like unshorn sheep.
    She wasn’t exactly bullied, but she was one of the never chosen: not for rounders, not for special seats on the school bus. I’d discussed her frequently in pitying, condescending tones with my mother.
    â€œWhy didn’t you say this before?” I felt sick because my mother’s eyes looked wild now and somehow unhinged, as if I’d cut the rope that kept her safe.
    â€œIt was nobody’s business but my own.”
    Yes,