The Woman Who Knew Gandhi: a Novel by Keith Heller

The Woman Who Knew Gandhi: a Novel by Keith Heller

Author:Keith Heller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt


One day soon after, just at the beginning of a spell of blackthorn winter, Rita Venden, the BBC Garden Paths expert, appeared unannounced at the Houghtons’ door. She stood quaking from the cold in a smart fur toque that was hardly at home in Hedge End and a beige woolen coat that should have been longer. Her legs gleamed in silk, and Martha remembered, as she greeted her, that Rita had been one of the few in the area to sport fine stockings, even during the worst of the war’s shortages.

The two women knew each other from the Darby and Joan Club, though they had seldom spoken. To Martha, there was something not quite village enough about Rita in the way she would elevate her head, even while walking alongside someone else, as if she were always peering for grander things over the horizon. Her age was a source of continuing debate as well. Easily the youngest of those neighbors who considered themselves elderly, Rita couldn’t have been more than fifty-five or fifty-six, and a trim, unwrinkled specimen at that. She was currently single, but she let it be known that, like Rebecca, there had been more than one husband in her past, and more than one child, too. Yet, again like the bookseller, Rita Venden refused to be held to specifics and was instead content to be whatever her neighbors thought she was at any given moment.

At first, Martha was taken aback at the sight of her, but then she ushered the woman inside and scolded her for walking out in such a short coat on such a blustery day.

“It is a mite fresh out, isn’t it, especially for this time of year?” Rita gasped as she let her wrap be taken and herself be steered nearer to the fire. “What’s to become of our growing season simply doesn’t bear thinking of.”

“You’ll have some tea?”

“With a drop of port or sherry on the side?”

Martha squinted at the clock on the mantel shelf that read half past eleven in the morning.

“Against the flu,” Rita informed her in all seriousness. “The doctors in London swear it’s better than any poultice.”

Rebecca being at her shop, and Samuel still brooding for a while longer up at Oliver’s, the house was Martha’s to do with what she would. So after brewing a pot of the bookseller’s Assam and arranging a plate of lemon cakes, she poured out two glasses of the amber Jerez that was normally reserved for Sunday evenings and sat down across from her guest with an expectant look.

“Mr. Houghton is still away?” Rita began with a sharp ear lifted toward the stairwell. “It must be so lonely for you to be here without him.”

“I’m comforted,” Martha assured her, “by the thought that he can be at the side of his brother, who needs him so much more than I.”

“That is a blessing.” Miss Venden smiled at her.

“Isn’t it just?”

As decorous as all this sounded, it was also partly true. By now,



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