Old Filth - Jane Gardam [13]
“She will follow to the Port when you have to go Home.”
Edward gave a shuddering, hopeless sob. He had just left Home. What would Ada do without him at Home? He was placed in Auntie May’s lap and looked at her with eyes nearly mad and shouted “Ada! Ada!” He tried to hit Auntie May, and swim for it, but she grabbed him in her muscular arms and tried to rock him. He became limp again. The sobs that shook his body began to become farther apart. He hiccupped and tried to speak, but it came out jerky and odd: “Ek, ek, ek—” like the baboon on the roof. A cupfull of drink appeared from a bottle in Auntie May’s bag. (Auntie May had negotiated these hateful kidnappings before.) The drink was dark and sweet and he gulped it in the middle of a last shuddering sob. She passed the empty cup to the boatman and rocked the child, allowing herself the pleasure of a child in her arms, knowing that this stringy, red-headed boy would never tempt her into lullabies or spoiling comforts. But he was warm against her broad chest, and now he slept. She seethed against the father, the system, the Empire which she had begun to think was not God’s ordinance after all, and how had she ever thought it could be? Duty to these people was what mattered now. Well, to all people. Love and duty.
Six months later the two of them took ship to England alone.
There was no sign of the District Officer, no sign of Ada, and they travelled steerage—Alistair had been vague to Auntie May about how much more money he had to spare, and she was nervous lest the child became over-excited by uniforms and orchestras. There was also the question of table manners for someone who had not sat at tables until six months ago at the Port. At first Edward had tried to eat beneath the table. The Mission had done better with his English than with his social graces. All that Auntie May had heard from Captain Feathers since they parted was a letter saying that all financial arrangements had been made for the boy and that he would come into his own money in time. His father’s sisters had been written to and had the address of the Public school where he would go when he was fourteen. Money had been sent to the foster parents in Wales.
Auntie May wrote back, making sure the father had the boy’s Welsh address correctly, and told him that a letter would be written by Edward every week as soon as he could write. She made clear that Edward was not himself at present. That, at the Port, while he had absorbed English easily—he would be a linguist she was sure—he had become passive and listless and glum and when he talked now it seemed to be with some difficulty, as if he had a constriction in the throat like an old clock trying to gear itself up to strike. “A-a-a-a-a-ack.” You longed to say the word for him. You sometimes almost wanted to shake him for he seemed to be doing it on purpose. When the words were eventually freed from the clockwork in the gullet, or the mind, out they poured far too fast, and when he paused for breath it was “ack-ack-ack, ek-ek-ek” again. At the Mission, other children had called him “the monkey” and he had in fact become rather like one of the bony, pale-orange baboons with their hot red eyes.
He never asked for Ada again.
At Colombo the ship took on more passengers and Auntie May suspected that two of the many white children with their ayahs and mothers might be Edward’s cousins travelling (of course) first-class. There had been rumours of this but she had made no enquiries. The two cousins were girls, one a little older than Edward, the other even younger. They would be spending the next four years together, all three, in Wales, with the Didds family. Edward might be taunted for his father’s apparent poverty if these cousins knew he was on the lower deck. There might be jealousy.
In this Auntie May was wrong. Whatever web the children were to make between themselves, it would always be too tight-knit for jealousy or taunts. But Auntie May kept her counsel, did her best with the stammering Edward as they crossed the molten-silver disc of the