Читать книгу The Secret Legacy: The perfect summer read for fans of Santa Montefiore, Victoria Hislop and Dinah Jeffries - Sara Alexander, Sara Alexander - Страница 14

CHAPTER 5

I awoke the next morning with a start. Adeline was screaming. I heard the Major’s heavy footsteps above, thudding staccato feet across my ceiling. I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and ran upstairs.

The stench hit me before I turned the corner at the top of the stairs. An acrid smell snubbed the air. I knocked on Adeline’s door before opening.

‘Santina, I would welcome some assistance, yes!’ the Major called from within.

The tiles were splattered with vomit. Adeline was crunched into a ball at the corner of her bed. She rocked. The Major’s pyjama sleeves were rolled up past his elbows. He was on his hands and knees using towels to clean up the mess.

‘Please, Major, let me, you see to Adeline.’

It was the proper thing to do, but my stomach twisted at the sight of it all. He left to wash his hands in the attached bathroom. I swabbed the pools. No sooner had I started than Elizabeth cried out. The Major stepped back inside the bedroom.

‘All the women in my life have the devil in them this morning. That will be all, Santina, go to the child.’

I left, no doubt with too much eagerness.

The Major always to referred to Elizabeth as The Child. With each day that passed, that small bundle of life was becoming more a part of me. Each time he flicked this title at her, it was as if he pressed a fresh bruise of mine. I could count the times I had seen him hold her. He looked without seeing. A perfunctory glance now and then, someone cross-checking an inventory. It wasn’t hard to understand why, but it smarted nonetheless. This child had broken his wife. The devotion he bored into Adeline consumed all his passion. How could there be anything left for this needy babe? That was what I was there for. He paid me to love her for him. And I did.

Elizabeth’s lament was soon lost to milky nourishment. We sat in the corner of my room, on the chair I had prepared for night feeds. I always opened the shutters for her first feed of the morning, letting the light stream in through the tall glass double doors. The October sun was reluctant to acquiesce to autumn. How different from my first October in London, where the damp air already furled the decaying tips of bronzed leaves. Here, grapes swelled to picking, the mountain air was sweet with chestnuts. I watched the shadows of a passing cloud dance across the tiles. This morning’s sun was proud, radiating with the pretense of summer, mocking the promise of autumn. Perhaps Adeline’s recovery would stay a hope lost to the past too?

When Elizabeth had finished I sat her up on my lap, noticing how her back strengthened each day. I could lose myself in this small human. She absorbed my restlessness, distracted me from the gnawing sadness for having been dragged back to Positano, away from the life I’d planned. It was impossible for me to sink into those thoughts whilst I rubbed my palm in circles around her middle till she let out several belches and looked pleased with herself. The pull of this girl was both a balm and unsettling. This time the following year I would have to leave her; allowing myself to become attached would cause me nothing but more unnecessary heartache. I lay her down in her cot to stretch out for a little so I could return to the Major.

The door was open. I stepped in.

I found him curled around his wife. His hand locked into hers. Her hair was matted with nightmares and sweat. Their breaths rose and fell together. I stood, trespassing. My eye caught sight of the dirty towels. I decided to finish the job at hand, regardless of the imposition. I heaved the pungent pile and caught a bitter whiff.

‘Santina?’ I heard him call.

I turned, feeling even more the intruder.

‘Thank you.’

I always hesitated after he thanked me. It would be rude to say that he was welcome because that would insinuate we were equals, which of course we weren’t. It was rude to say nothing too, of course. Awkwardness puffed through me like a snake of smoke despite, or maybe because of, my best efforts to smother it.

‘I’ll take breakfast at my usual time, then we will begin your first lesson,’ said the Major.

I swallowed a stammer. ‘Will you not rest, sir?’

‘I will take breakfast at the usual hour. You will not shirk your commitments.’ I turned and left. If I had been nervous about my first lesson before, now I was on the precipice of panic.

He ate on the terrace just beyond the kitchen: two eggs, cooked for three and a half minutes once the water reached a rolling boil, two slices of toast, light brown on one side, one spoon of marmalade, two cups of tea from a pot. I added a fig on a small saucer as well. It needed to be eaten that morning; it would be jam by the afternoon otherwise. He peeled the papery purple skin, sliced it into four wedges, chewed each piece several times and wiped his mouth clean afterwards. I cleared the table and wished Elizabeth would call out for me, but the warm breeze seemed to lull her into a nap in the Moses basket upon the kitchen table. I liked her close to me. It helped me intuit every nuance and, with enough concentration, nip hysteria before fear of famine took hold and that round face of hers creased into the kind of fury you’d expect from a spurned woman intent on everyone knowing so.

‘Let us begin,’ he said.

I placed the last of the dishes into the ceramic sink.

‘You may finish your house duties afterwards,’ he announced.

I think he expected me to do something other than stand mute in the doorway.

‘Good heavens, Santina, am I really all that terrifying?’

It was one of those lingering questions that pierce the air, leaving a small, unanswered tear.

‘Sit here.’

He gestured at the chair beside him where Adeline had managed to eat a light supper yesterday evening. That had filled us both with a tentative hope – nothing that this morning wouldn’t have dashed, no doubt. He was a fixer. I suspected that what he couldn’t immediately fix with Adeline, or Elizabeth for that matter, he’d make up for with me and my tentative English.

I sat down, trying to unclasp my hands and failing.

‘You speak fairly well,’ he began.

My lips rose into an unsure smile.

‘Enough to understand instructions, yes. But if I allowed you to sail to America as promised, without a true grasp of English, I would be failing on my word. That is to say, what is English to you, Santina?’

‘What is it, sir?’

‘That’s what I asked.’

‘A language. To talk.’

He took a deep breath now, and as he let it out again, his gaze drifted toward the sea. It was a deeper blue than yesterday at this time, but still clear enough to see the watercolor patches of algae swirling toward Capri. His eyes snapped back to me. I noticed the tiny licks of darker blue that cut across the aqua, framed by thick blond-copper eyelashes.

‘It is not only to talk, Santina. We do that already. I will educate you in a cohesive manner. I will not ask how to buy cheese and bread. Any donkey can do that. I will teach you English – in all its startling, crisp beauty.’

He had lost me several sentences ago.

I watched him open a small book, marked by a slim leather bookmark that looked well loved. He straightened. ‘Oh ye! Who have your eye-balls vexed and tired, feast them upon the wideness of the Sea.’

He stopped and looked at me.

‘Keats, a poet, wrote that, in 1817.’

‘Is that all of it?’

‘You want to know the rest?’

I nodded. I hadn’t understood everything, but I liked the way his voice changed when he recited it. He twisted the book to face me.

‘There.’ He pointed toward the bottom of the page.

I looked at the jumble of letters. I couldn’t bear to raise my eyes to meet his.

‘You see? You carry on where I left off.’

I swallowed.

‘Don’t worry about mistakes, Santina, there’s no one here to laugh at you.’

My ears became attuned to the minutiae of sounds around me, a twitch of a leaf as a grasshopper skimmed its surface, the breeze lifting the sprinkle of crumbs he hadn’t allowed me to sweep away yet. I realized he was calling my name.

‘Santina,’ he said, his voice softer now; it was his Adeline voice, the one he used when her speech began to corkscrew toward ramblings, ‘you can’t read, can you?’

I felt furious that he had cornered me like this. What needed I for poetry? How on earth was that going to help me survive America? Here I was, dragged back to the tiny town that had smothered my childhood, following a man and his sick wife, caring for his daughter night and day, a responsibility I had never sought, and his repayment was a promise and a poem!

He wasn’t afraid of the bristling silence. He let it hang, unhurried, like a dank February morning in London where the clouds merge into one purgatorial white canopy.

His hand smoothed his beard.

‘Would you like me to help you, Santina?’

A sigh escaped before I could stop it, then a solitary tear, which I hated myself for. I brushed it off my cheek, but we both knew it had been there.

‘Please say you’ll consider my offer?’ he asked.

I hadn’t invited these blurred lines; he was my employer, not a teacher. I didn’t want to be helped. I wanted to work, survive a year here in exchange for my escape from this town, this place that had never taught me to read, or think about poetry, or hope to live off course from the mountain girl. I was prepared to commit to this time with his daughter and do the job as best I could but my eyes were set on a horizon far from here. Now I sat, within one of my town’s palaces, feeling more imprisoned than when I first left. His face relaxed into something close to a smile.

‘I think I can offer you more than just money, Santina.’ His voice lowered to a syrupy murmur, his expression softened. ‘In return for everything you are doing for my family and me.’

I lifted my eyes. His offer came from a genuine place. He was no more trying to imprison me than I was. I took a breath to answer, but a metallic clatter cut through my pause, followed by a bucket cascading down from the terrace above, crashing into the lemon trees below, tumbling down the brush toward the wall at the end of the garden. We ran upstairs. Adeline was stood before the balustrade that ran the length of her terrace. She was closer to it than made me feel safe. I stopped by the doorway. The Major walked through the bedroom toward the terrace, his feet soundless, as if he were wading through water.

I watched him coax her back inside. When she returned to bed, he crushed a pill into a spoon. He leaned in to give it to her. She spat in his face.

‘I’ll hold her and you give it to her, Santina.’

I took the spoon. She jerked in his grip.

‘Now, Santina!’

I placed it in her mouth. He closed her lips around it. After a few seconds he released his grip. She crawled to the top of her bed, grabbed the sheet and cocooned herself inside.

Her breathing began to even. The crease of bed linen eased down onto the mattress.

‘I will take lunch at the usual time, Santina. That will be all for now.’

I left. My footsteps echoed down the stone stairwell.

It was clear then, that the more unpredictable Adeline became, the more rigid his own routine would be. My lessons would be inescapable after all.

After breakfast the next day, the Major strode into the kitchen and laid a notebook and a wooden box inlaid with geometric patterns of mother-of-pearl upon the kitchen table. His height made the kitchen feel all the smaller. Unlike me, his head reached a foot or so from the ceiling, which arched over us, like a cellar. The walls were painted a brushed pink, and behind the marble counter that stretched the length of one wall there were a dozen lines of decorated tiles of geometric designs in yellow, emerald and turquoise, hopeful swirls of pomp. A wider squat arch graced the space where the hearth stood. A wooden table, dipping in the center with age, stretched halfway across the room.

‘I have decided, Santina, that I was quite in the wrong yesterday.’

I looked at him.

‘I will be grateful if you’d forget my clumsy start, yes?’

It was my turn to let a question evaporate, answerless.

‘Today,’ he resumed, ‘I am going to teach you how to cook one of the dishes I brought home with me to England after my years in India.’

‘Cook?’

His face brightened. I knew he had spent several years in India working for the British army, Adeline had told me that much. She’d intimated that his role was shrouded in secrecy, but I’d never paid it too much mind because Adeline had a wonderful way of painting stories with a brush of mystery, whatever the subject. For the first time I allowed myself to miss her. The eccentric little talks she might indulge me in after breakfast before she began her day in the studio. The way she’d shown off her heath in Hampstead to me; her paintings, bright with freedom and questions and passion. Now I understood. He needed the lessons more than I. It was impossible to shirk the sense that they were as much about the Major having another to converse with as opening my mind up to the poetry he loved best.

‘Cook, yes, Santina, and afterward you will write the recipe into this little book here.’ He picked it up and gave it an optimistic waggle. The cover was black leather, and the center of the front panel featured a tiny painted rose.

We spent the next hour trawling through the details of the dish. First, he asked me to dice an onion. He stood beside me whilst directing me on how to soften it in a pan with olive oil. It was something I did almost every day, but that didn’t stop him inspecting my timing. As the pieces began to sweat, he placed the box next to the stove and opened it. Inside were five jars filled with different colored powders; a palette of deep browns, golden yellow and fiery red.

‘This box goes with me whenever I travel. I knew we wouldn’t be able to source these spices here so I arranged for them to be sent to me in London before we came.’

He lifted one of the jars, unscrewed its lid and handed it to me: ‘Smell.’

I dipped my nose close to the opening, trying not to worry about the onions that were starting to caramelize. A pungent flowery scent powdered up into the back of my cheeks. I couldn’t place it.

‘This is ground coriander, Santina. Next growing season I shall be planting it in my garden and you will help me.’

He handed me each of the jars in turn: aromatic cumin with its sweet and smoky herbal scent that brought church incense to mind, the barky smell of golden turmeric and the provocative punch of ground chilli – my eyes watered in an instant. The final jar contained a fine deep brown powder. This was the most complex smell of all of them. There was smoke, fire, citrus and a muddy tang to it. My eyebrows creased.

‘This is curry powder. Ground in the hills of Jaipur, Santina, by an elderly lady I came to know well. I watched her large wooden pestle and mortar create this pot of wonder. She taught me everything I know about how to use it too.’

His eyes twinkled with the pleasurable memory. I wondered how long it had been since he had been able to talk to someone about this. I knew him as a solitary man, but it was clear that the loneliness stirred by the incessant care of Adeline needed remedy. These five little jars contained just that. He held each of them as if it was a precious jewel, presenting me in turn with reverence and a bottled excitement I’d never noticed before.

Next he gave me specific measurements for each of them. As I sprinkled a spoonful of turmeric, coriander and curry powder over the translucent onions, the small stone kitchen filled with a potent earthy steam. Next we stirred in two fistfuls of rice until each grain was coated with the sticky yellow mixture. The Major poured over almost half a litre of water, put the lid on, simmered it for ten minutes, then took it off the heat, but left the lid on to let the steam finish the job. Meanwhile he instructed me to boil six eggs, this time for four and a half minutes. I rinsed them under cold water, peeled them and cut them into wedges, as directed. Finally, we brought a little milk in a frying pan to a gentle simmer and placed two bay leaves inside. He opened up a paper package with two fillets of fish and slipped them into the warm milk.

‘This ought to be haddock of course, Santina, but I’m using what I could find yesterday afternoon at the fishmonger’s, which was very little I might add, because I made the mistake of waiting till the afternoon to get it. Foolish.’

He removed the fish pan from the heat and let it continue to poach whilst he instructed me to lift the lid on the rice. It was fluffy and golden; the fragrant ribbons of steam that lifted up from it made my mouth water. I watched him stir in the egg wedges, then flake the fish and fold it into the rice. He lifted the pan and put it on top of an iron potholder in the center of the table. He handed me a fork and gestured for me to taste. The caramel of the onion gave way to a woody perfume, a musky taste balanced by the creamy yolk and the tender aromatic fish flesh. My eyes gave away my delight.

‘First poetry lesson complete.’

My head tilted.

‘Now I help you write it. Title: Kedgeree.’

The rest of the morning he sat next to me, a fastidious but patient teacher, as I wrote the list of the ingredients. My scrawl was tentative and messy. He wouldn’t let me leave the table until I had finished. In between hesitations, whirring doubts ricocheted about my mind as I tried to understand how any of this would serve me in my new life.

‘Tomorrow, we will write the method. That is all for now. I will take lunch at midday. You may take an hour to take a stroll with Elizabeth perhaps? I will rest a while.’

He turned and left, leaving the scent of another world suffusing the air.