So Much Life Left Over by Louis de Bernières

Author:Louis de Bernières
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

25

Rosie (2)

I BROUGHT US home because in the end I couldn’t bear to be apart from my father when I knew he had hardly any time left to live. I did love it in Ceylon, but somehow it wasn’t really me. Nuwara Eliya was like England, in fact they called it ‘Little England’, but it was terribly exaggerated beyond Englishness, like when an artist uses too strong a shade of blue for the sea, when the sea is actually green. And I hated having to go to the Hill Club. They didn’t allow lady members, and to get to the ladies’ entrance we had to step over an open gulley, go through a nasty little alley, and then we were confined to one end of the clubhouse. And despite being treated like that we were expected to go there! It was almost compulsory. Compulsory humiliation!

The races were fun, but you didn’t go to watch the racing, you went to see who was wearing what kind of hat. I went to support Hugh, really. The best thing was going to that beautiful post office that was rather like a cake, to see if anyone had written or sent a parcel. And try as I might, I never learned to love playing golf, as Daddy did. Daniel thought it was a lovely course.

I adored the servants, but it was like having three grown-up children, always squabbling and coming to me for adjudication, and doing strange things like buying a pot of orange paint with their own money, and painting the stuffed monkey in the hallway because they thought it would make it prettier, and leaving orange splashes on the parquet.

And it was entirely annoying trying to be helpful to the natives, and them just putting up with it, as if I were some tedious old lady who had to be mollified. I think they were pleased about the improvements to their accommodation, but they didn’t come near the clinic unless they were at the point of death. It was so frustrating waiting for someone to appear, with all your medicines lined up and instruments carefully sterilised, knowing that they were out there somewhere suffering away for nothing, and depending on numerology and astrology and strange concoctions.

Every day was the same. Daniel was out at dawn, and often not home until long after dark. He’d taken to the native food and his breath was not at all pleasant. He was always bad-tempered with me because I didn’t want to have any more children and he wouldn’t accept what the obvious way not to have them was. He said there were alternative ways of ‘having fun’ as he put it, but it’s a sin if it’s only done for fun, everyone knows that, and it’s not as if I am a lady of the night who exists for just one purpose. In any case, we had had several years of ‘fun’, and it had begun to pall on me, as most pleasures eventually do. I couldn’t see why he didn’t want to settle for being good companions.

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