44 Scotland Street - Alexander McCall Smith [34]
She looked at Domenica. “I’m sure he would have loved you,”
she said. “I’m sure that he would have loved you a great deal.”
“Yes. I think he would.”
They said nothing for a moment. Then Domenica looked at her watch. “We must go through to the kitchen,” she said. “And then while I’m getting dinner ready, we can talk a little more. I don’t want to bore you, though. Sixty-one can be very boring for twenty whatever it is you are.”
“Twenty. Just twenty.”
“A good age to be,” said Domenica. “As is every age, I imagine, except for the years between fourteen and seventeen and a half. An awful time for everybody. Were you a dreadful teenager? I was, I think. In fact, I was exactly the sort of person I would not have liked to be. Does that make sense? Let’s think about it.”
27. The Electricity Factory
Domenica chopped the onions with a large-bladed knife, while her guest sat at the scrubbed-pine table and watched her.
“When did you live in India?” Pat asked.
Domenica tipped the onions into a saucepan. “I shall explain,”
she said. “It will be simpler if you get the whole story. Reduced, of course, to five minutes. Time marched on, and it continued to do so until I was eighteen, when my mother suddenly decided that she wanted to go off to India. She had been offered the job of principal at a school for girls in south India. It was run by a Scottish charity, some people in Glasgow. I stayed behind – I was about to go to university – and she went off. When I had finished my degree, I went out to see her. You travelled by ship in those days – a tremendous thrill for me.
“Her school was in the hills above Cochin, in Kerala. It’s a lovely state, Kerala – all that greenery and those waterways and those cool towns up in the Western Ghats. I fell in love with the place immediately, and begged her to let me stay with her, which I did. I had no idea what I was going to do at home, and Scotland was pretty dull, remember, in the early Sixties. I suppose we were still in the Fifties while everybody else had moved on.
“So I stayed with my mother in the principal’s lodge at the school. It seemed very grand to be living in a lodge, but it was quite a modest house, really. There was a verandah which ran round two sides of the house and a garden with fire coral trees. There were pepper vines growing up these trees and we used to harvest our own pepper and let it dry on banana leaves on the ground.
“I loved living there, as you can imagine, although I didn’t have all that much to do. I was taken on as a teacher, but I was not paid for this, and the duties were pretty light. But it was easy work, because the girls at the school were all very well-behaved and wouldn’t dream of being rude to the staff. Nobody was rude then. Rudeness was invented much later.
“And that’s where I stayed for three years. Then, at a lunch party held by the manager of a tea company, I met the man who became my husband. He came from Cochin, where his father The Electricity Factory
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had owned a business – more of that in a moment. He was called Thomas, as many people are in that part of the world because, as you know, it’s a largely Christian state – Thomist Christians. Very ancient communities. In fact, you get all sorts of churches, including the Syrian Orthodox Church, which goes in for fireworks in a big way on important saints’ days. Quite wonderful.
“Thomas asked me to marry him, and I said that I would. I had fallen for India, you see, and the idea of marrying into the country was a very exciting one. And Thomas was a good man
– very quiet and thoughtful, and very kind. Of course, I hadn’t realised that I would have to put up with his mother too, who would live with us in our house in Cochin. But that’s what happens when you marry into an Indian family. You get the whole lot.
“Thomas