Deborah Crombie - All Shall Be Well

The Major was already shaking his head. "Canna abide the beasts in the house. Make me sneeze. And wouldn't have it digging in my flower beds." His mustache bristled in distaste. "But somethin' should be done."

Kincaid sighed. "I know. I'll see to it. Goodnight, Major."

"Mr. Kincaid." The words stopped Kincaid as he mounted the steps to the front door. "I think you'll do more harm than good digging into this business. Some things are best left alone."

Kincaid paced restlessly around the sitting room of his flat. It was still early, not yet nine o'clock, and he felt tired but edgy, unable to settle to anything. He flipped through the channels on the telly, then switched it off in disgust. None of his usual tapes or CD's appealed to him, nor any of the books he hadn't found time to read.

When he found himself studying the photographs on his walls, he turned and faced the brown cardboard box on his coffee table squarely. Classic avoidance, refusal to face a disagreeable task. Or to be more honest, he thought, he was afraid that Jasmine would jump out of the pages of her journals, fresh and painfully real.

Kincaid allowed himself one more small delay-time enough to make a cup of coffee. Carrying the mug back to the sitting room, he settled himself on the sofa in the pool of light cast by the reading lamp. He pulled the cardboard box a little nearer and ran his fingers across the neat blue spines of the composition books. They came away streaked with a fine, dry dust.

If he must do it, then he would start chronologically- in the earlier books the Jasmine he knew would be less immediate, and he'd already glanced briefly through the last book and found nothing immediately useful. He pulled the most faded book from the back of the box and opened it. The pages were yellow and crackly and smelled a bit musty. Kincaid stifled a sneeze.

The entries began in 1951. Jasmine's ten-year-old handwriting was small and carefully looped, the entries trite and equally self-conscious: Theo's accomplishments (the proprietary interest already evident), prizes won at school, a tennis lesson, a ride on a neighbor's horse.

Kincaid flipped easily through the pages of one book, a second, a third. As the years flowed by the writing changed, developing into Jasmine's recognizable idiosyncratic script. Sometimes entries skipped weeks, sometimes months, and although they became more natural, they remained emotionally unrevealing. He'd started the fourth book when an entry dated in March, 1956, brought him up short. He went back to the beginning and began to read more carefully.

March 9

Theo's tenth birthday. The usual celebration. Same as last year and all the years before. The three of us round the dining table in our best clothes, stifling with the shutters closed, no one speaking at all. Cook made his idea of an English birthday cake. Awful (it's always awful), but Father just sat there looking like doom and Theo didn't even snicker. I could've screamed.

Father gave Theo a model airplane kit which, of course, Theo doesn't care about at all. I'll end up helping him put it together, can't hurt Father's feelings. Exercised Mrs. bloody Savarkar's horse for a month to earn enough to buy Theo a new tennis racket. Not that I minded the horse, but Mrs. S. is a bitch, always lording it over us just because we're "poor English".

Do I really remember the night Theo was born, or have I just heard the ayah's stories so many times I can't tell where her stories leave off and my memories begin. I remember shouting and smoke and the smell of burning, but I think that this all happened later and is somehow confused in my mind with the doctor pounding on the door and my mother's screams.

May 22

Mr. Patel pinched my arm again in class. He walks up and down the rows, making a dry-leaf rustly noise, looking over our shoulders while we're working. I can feel him coming up behind me, the back of my neck gets hot.

Today he grabbed my arm just below the shoulder and dug his fingers in, squeezing until I bit my lip to keep from crying out. He said I hadn't done my assignment properly, but it's just an excuse to keep me after and everyone knows it. I could hear the other girls sniggering behind my back.

"Jasssmine," he said when he'd let everyone else go, hissing the "s" in my name until my skin crawls. "Do you remember your English mother, Jasmine? You need someone to teach you things, Jasmine." He moved around his desk and I backed up against the doorframe, holding my books against my chest so he couldn't look there. "You know you shouldn't go out in the sun, don't you? It makes you look like a native girl." He smiled at me then. He looked like a bald tortoise, with his stringy neck quivering and his eyes blinking. I ran before he could touch me again, ran all the way home and threw up. I wish I could kill him.

The finger marks on my arm turned purple by the time I got home. I changed into a long-sleeved blouse before Theo or Father could see. No point in telling Father. I tried once before. He just got that vague look of his like he wishes he were somewhere else, and said my imagination was running away with me.

I know why Mr. Patel asked me about Mummy. They think I'm half-caste, because of my coloring, and that Mummy wasn't English at all.

I remember my mother. I remember the slippery feel of her dresses and the way she smelled of roses. I remember the dolls she had sent to me from England and the stories we made up about them. "Grow up to be a proper English girl, Jasmine," she'd say, "so you'll know how things are done when we go home." That was all she talked about, going home. She must have hated it here. Is it possible for someone to die of homesickness?

June 5

Theo, the little toad, told Father I stayed out of school while he was away. Father put on his miserable face and said I was just trying to make life difficult for him, and now he'll have to speak to the head.

June 30

Father died yesterday. The doctor said it was his heart, something to do with the fevers he had when he first came out.

He was just reading the newspaper at dinner. Said he didn't feel well, in a surprised sort of way, then slumped over the table.

I can't believe it. What will become of Theo and me?

Gemma sat at the kitchen table, huddled in Rob's old terry-cloth dressing gown. It was his color, not hers-the deep wine shade turned her hair ginger. She knew she should throw it out, or give it to Oxfam, along with all the other odds and ends of her married life that cluttered the house. But sometimes, if she pressed the dressing gown's nubby fabric to her face, she imagined it still smelled of Rob.

"Silly cow," she said aloud. What had Rob left her that she should want any reminders of him? It surprised her that she still missed his physical presence. Not just sex (although that had been scarce enough since that day two years ago when she'd come home to find Rob's things gone and a note on the kitchen table), but the quick touch, the hand on her hair, having something other than a hot-water bottle to warm her feet against at night. Work and looking after Toby left not much time for becoming reacquainted with dating.

The thought of Toby brought her attention back to the untidy pile of bills before her on the kitchen table. Gemma got up and poured herself more coffee, wrapping her hands around the chipped Thistle mug (a souvenir of her honeymoon in Inverness). Nearly nine o'clock on Sunday morning and Toby not up yet-last night's visit to her mum and dad's had exhausted him. Her sister's three wild ones had wound him to a fever pitch and Gemma had carried him kicking and screaming to the car, only to have him fall asleep in mid-shriek a few minutes later.