The Mission House Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Fleeing the dark undercurrents of contemporary Britain, Hilary Byrd takes refuge in a hill station in South India. There he finds solace in life’s simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery, where the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla have taken him under their wing.

  As his friendship with the young woman grows, Hilary begins to wonder whether his purpose lies in this new relationship. But religious tensions are brewing and the mission house may not be the safe haven it seems.

  The Mission House boldly and imaginatively interrogates the fractures between faith and non-belief, young and old, imperial past and nationalistic present. Tenderly subversive and meticulously crafted, it is a deeply human story of the wonders and terrors of connection in a modern world.

  For Michael

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  1

  As they climbed, the air cooled; by the time they were halfway up, it was chilly and fresh. ‘Thank God!’ said Byrd, gulping the breeze from the open window, and when the Padre asked him, what brought him here, up into the hills? Byrd said – and it felt like the truth – ‘The weather.’

  At Modern Stores he bought milk and Nescafé and a packet of Highfield Premium Tea, a very expensive jar of Hartley’s raspberry jam, two eggs in a paper bag, and what looked and smelled like a banana muffin, which he planned to eat in the morning for his breakfast.

  The Padre had told him about a short cut which would bring him up out of the hectic town to the presbytery on the hill above the church, and from the high pavement outside Modern Stores he could see the church’s white spire, pointing like a compass needle into the misty sky above the messy pattern of tiled and corrugated roofs and the floaty, lightly moving tops of the trees.

  ‘There it is,’ he said aloud, because it was reassuring to be able to see exactly where he was going. Carrying his shopping and his straw hat and pulling his suitcase over the broken surface of the road, he moved towards it until he came to the broad concrete steps the Padre had described. Up he went. On his left a group of women in bright clothes hacked at the ground with small sharp tools that flashed in the weak sunlight. Then, just as the Padre had told him they would, the steps delivered him out onto a steep road above the town at a gateless opening surrounded by thick vegetation; a crooked sign on the right-hand side said: dog is on duty.

  Byrd walked in under a canopy of dripping trees along a red earth driveway puddled with water.

  There was no sign of any dog, or the Padre. The bungalow was there though, in the garden next to the presbytery, as the Padre had promised, the door open invitingly.

  How tired he was!

  How exhausted after his weeks wandering about down on the plains: the temples and the dusty museums, the endless hotel rooms, the uncomfortable nights spent on buses and trains, the awful clamour of the auto rickshaw drivers, the intolerable heat.

  At the beginning of his travels, it had all gone well enough. At his hotel next to the Danish fort in Tranquebar, a pleasant breeze had blown in off the Bay of Bengal. In the middle of the night he’d looked out of his window to see the lights of fishing boats strung out across the water, like fallen stars. In the morning, waiters had arrived at his table in crisp white jackets and scarlet headdresses and his tea had come in a silver pot. His bedroom had overflowed with sequined bolsters and gorgeous rugs, and when he’d strolled along the shore past the fishermen mending their fine white nets, they’d seemed to be sitting cross-legged in a bank of cloud.

  But the hotel was more expensive than he could afford (more expensive than he thought a hotel in this country should reasonably be) and he’d moved up the coast to Pondicherry, but the Pondicherry hotels had been expensive too, and he’d been obliged to move on. For a month he’d shuttled between the cities of the interior, and everywhere he went, he found them alive with unbearable numbers of people and cars and scooters, bright lights and noise, horns and clatter and an endless beeping, the roar of engines, steam and smoke and diesel, with street vendors thronging the pavements in front of phone shops and newspaper kiosks, calling out to him about their vegetables and their fruit; he’d fought his way past men in flowing robes and men in white-collared shirts and dark trousers carrying briefcases, women in blue jeans and women in glittering saris, children in polished shoes and no shoes at all. It was overwhelming. The crippled beggars repulsed and terrified him, and he’d hurried past them with his suitcase, praying they would not reach out and catch hold of his ankle or the hem of his shorts. On top of everything, there’d been the heat.

  But he was here now, and though there’d been clamour and hustle as he’d made his way through the town, it seemed to him like a gentler version of everything he’d encountered down on the plains, and best of all, he was no longer sweating.

  In the cool of the evening he walked through the small, square rooms of the little bungalow: a sitting room with a fireplace and an etching of a Scottish loch and a neat, round table, in the corner a green f ridge; a verandah-like room closed-in with windows, containing a desk and a huge extraordinary chair like a dentist’s; a bedroom with a three-quarter bed, an embroidered placard on the wall above it which said, I will be your Shield, your High Tower, the Horn of your Salvation; a bathroom with a toilet and a sink and a big pink plastic bucket like a dustbin; a kitchen with a blue propane bottle and a two-burner stove, another sink, and shelves lined with clean newspaper. Ideal Pigeon, it said in black script on the front of the stove’s white enamel.

  ‘Well isn’t this nice,’ he said aloud.

  He boiled the eggs and made himself a cup of tea. He unpacked his things and stowed his suitcase under the bed. He walked through all the rooms again, closing the open windows and drawing all the curtains. It was hard to imagine anything more cosy and snug.

  In the kitchen he put a pan of water on to boil, then two more, until there was enough hot water in the pink bucket in his bathroom for him to stand in it and wash himself. There was still a crust of salt around his middle f rom the sweat which had collected there, in the heat of the morning, and dried when the train reached the cool air of the mounta
ins. It gave him such pleasure to see it dissolve and disappear beneath his wet sponge. And then there was the novelty of putting on his pyjamas, which he hadn’t worn since leaving home.

  It was late when he noticed the other man’s clothes, hanging limply f rom a forked hook on the back of the bedroom door. The door was open against the wall, and when he closed it, there they were: a red and blue plaid shirt and a pair of dark, many-pocketed trousers; a hat with ear flaps and a pom-pom.

  It amazed him, what he felt when he saw them – how much he would have preferred it if they weren’t there; how much, in the few short hours since he’d arrived, he’d come to think of the place as his own.

  He pushed the door back against the wall so that the clothes of the absent missionary were, as they’d been before, out of sight.

  On his pillow, a hot water bottle lay in a woollen cover, and he thought about boiling another pan to fill it, but he was so very tired now, and instead he climbed into the three-quarter bed and let his head sink into the cool pillow. For a little while, he read, but soon his eyes began to close, and his last thought before he slept was how lucky it was, that he and the Padre had boarded the same carriage at Mettupalayam; how lucky that they’d fallen into conversation after his joyous Thank God! when, half-way up, the air had cooled; what a stroke of good fortune it was, that this little bungalow was lying here in this pretty, if slightly neglected and overgrown garden, empty and available.

  2

  At the railway terminus the Padre had parted with Mr Hilary Byrd and they had gone their separate ways, Mr Byrd to Modern Stores to buy his supplies, the Padre to the presbytery to prepare the bungalow for his arrival.

  When he had beaten the rugs and put a quilt and a hot water bottle on the bed and pegs on the wire washing line outside, when he had put fresh newspaper on the kitchen shelves and dry sticks in the grate and a bag of milk in the small green fridge in the sitting room, the Padre sat down on the stone steps outside and told the dog, Ooly, that they were expecting a visitor.

  The dog’s ears twitched. At the edge of the garden the leaves of the eucalyptus trees waved about in the breeze and a light rain began to fall. It fell on the Padre’s head and on the dog lying in the old kitchen sink. A shallow rust-coloured lake began to form around her but she didn’t seem to mind. She stayed where she was, her long throat resting on the sink’s lip, her dark liquid eyes looking out across the garden, past the hydrangea bush and the banana tree and the Dorothy Perkins rose towards the cratered driveway and the gateless entrance and the road, as if this was the first piece of news that had interested her in a very long time.

  3

  In the days that followed, Byrd toured the town.

  He visited the Botanical Gardens and the lake. He called at the King Star Chocolate Shop and bought six ounces of Fruit & Nut in a vacuum-sealed foil bag. He replenished his supplies in the market and at Modern Stores. He ate lunch at the Nazri Hotel. He walked through the jewellery district. He visited the library and Higginbotham’s bookshop. At the bank opposite the Collector’s Office, he changed his money, and at the CTR barber shop he had his hair trimmed and watched the cricket which was playing on a small television high up on the wall, and everywhere he went things were, as they had been down on the plains, both strange and familiar, predictable and wholly unexpected; easy to understand and indecipherable. A lot of people spoke English but a lot didn’t. Some of the newspapers were in English but most weren’t. Some of the buildings reminded him of home but many didn’t.

  In the Global Internet Cafe he composed an email to his sister, Wyn, full of details and description, and the little saga of his lucky meeting with the Padre and how it had brought him to his bungalow, and when it was finished he sent it to her, like a peace offering.

  Nothing could have prepared him for the claggy, oppressive heat of the plains. He’d felt as if he were being slowly cooked, basted in the sweat with which his pale body was permanently awash, and eventually he could no longer face doing battle with it. For a whole week he didn’t go outside; he stayed in his hotel room with the ceiling fan going and the air conditioning on, and then one evening he’d gone down to the bar and heard a group of German tourists talking about a slow blue train with decorated glass windows that would bring him up out of the roasting cauldron of the plains into the cool air of the mountains. In the morning he’d packed his suitcase and taken a taxi to Mettupalayam and by 7 o’clock he’d been in his seat, high up on the winding track, looking down upon a brown river sliding between big boulders and small, broken rocks.

  He liked his bungalow more and more.

  He’d been shopping again, at Modern Stores and in the market, and all his jars and packets were arranged on the newspaper-covered shelves in his kitchen; his fruit and his vegetables stowed away on the tiered orange plastic stand next to the Ideal Pigeon stove; his books in a pile on his desk, his pyjamas under his pillow. Through the windows of the verandah-like room at the front, he could see out across the valley to the other side, beyond the town, to the mist-shrouded forests and bright, tea-covered slopes.

  He also liked the presbytery garden – its combination of the exotic and the familiar: the rhubarb and the multi-coloured asters, the penstemons and the snapdragons, the elderflower and the Sweet Williams, all mixed in with the banana tree and the eucalyptus and some kind of huge, almost plastic-looking green shrub with giant red flowers which Wyn might have known the name of but which he couldn’t identify.

  The only irritating thing was the black dog. He hadn’t noticed it the day he arrived, but it lay, almost all the time, in a white sink on the ground next to the boiler house behind the presbytery. The only time he’d seen it move was when it climbed out of the sink and followed him to the door of his bungalow, as if it expected to be allowed inside.

  The Padre himself came and went quietly and unobtrusively. Byrd saw him most mornings, setting off on an ancient motorbike with a spare tyre on the back, inside a beige vinyl cover that said Padre Andrew.

  He and his brothers had all been named for the apostles, said the Padre cheerfully when he saw Hilary Byrd looking at the tyre. They’d been baptised at the Immanuel Church in Coimbatore – their father had worked at the post office there. ‘My older brother is Thaddeus. The others are James and Philip. Thaddeus is dead now. The other two are in Chennai. I am the only one of us who went into the church.’

  He was short and round and very dark, bald and old, and most of the time he was dressed as he’d been on the day of their first meeting, in a too-large fleece hat and a green jacket; long trousers and a scarf wound around his neck like a snowman’s. He looked a little, thought Byrd, like Paddington Bear.

  ‘Settling in, Mr Byrd, sir?’ he said at the end of a few days from the seat of his motorbike at the presbytery’s gateless opening when he was coming in and Byrd was going out, and Byrd said, ‘Yes!’ He liked his bungalow very much, he liked the town. There was a lot he didn’t understand but even so, he was feeling very much at home.

  The Padre tilted his head to one side. He looked pleased – no, he looked more than pleased. He looked delighted, as if nothing in the world could make him happier than Mr Hilary Byrd settling in and liking the town and feeling very much at home. Perhaps, he said, Mr Byrd would have dinner with him one evening, in the presbytery? Tomorrow, perhaps? If he would like that?

  Byrd said he would like that very much.

  The Padre beamed and clapped his hands. He seemed ready to explode with delight.

  ‘Good. I will tell Priscilla.’

  And then he was moving off, bouncing away along the puddled red driveway towards the front door of the presbytery.

  Byrd watched him kick out the stand on his motorbike and disappear into the house.

  Priscilla?

  He had not known there was anyone else here. He had thought he was alone with the Padre and the dog.

  4

  At the terminus, the day Byrd arrived, the auto rickshaw drivers had called out to him, Sir! Sir
! They had folded back the dripping blue tarpaulins of their tiny black and yellow vehicles and gestured for him to enter their damp and ramshackle interiors.

  One of them – a short, old, desperate-looking man in tracksuit bottoms and a flapping shirt – had moved towards him, advancing at a steady forward-tilting trundle and already speaking to him. Sir! Byrd had taken a step back. His hand moved lightly, instinctively, to the nylon money belt around his middle. He hated the way these people made him feel both guilty and afraid. He wished he’d gone with the Padre – wished he had not said that he would do his shopping first, and then make his own way up to the presbytery by himself. He’d raised his chin and fastened his gaze on the white spire of the church in the middle distance which the Padre had promised would lead him in the right direction. Even so, he could still feel, and smell, the old man – close to him now, just a little to his left. Please, sir. Dark creased hands with stubby prayer-laced fingers, separated to fan a wallet of cracked and faded photographs, had appeared at the edge of Byrd’s vision. Glancing down he saw a pair of dirty feet, one wearing a black flip-flop and the other a red plastic clog. Close to Byrd’s face, a lilting obsequious voice spoke. ‘Botanical Gardens, sir. Lake. Tea Plantation. Savoy Hotel. King Star Chocolate Shop. Racecourse. 500 rupees. Whole day. Please, sir.’

  If Wyn had been with him she would have gone striding off into the throng by now, plied her way through the press of bodies saying, Excuse me, excuse me, and found someone reliable to take them shopping and on up to the presbytery. She would have come back smiling and certain and taken him by the arm and said, ‘This way, Hilary, this way.’ She would have fought off anyone who had the impression that Hilary Byrd was adrift, somehow, here in the hills; that his longwristed hand was there for the taking, to be led away through the teeming streets or off into the tree-choked forests of wattle and eucalyptus. But Wyn was not with him, and Byrd had been quite alone and very anxious about being drawn into anything unwanted; about being taken to some place he didn’t want to go. It had happened to him everywhere, time and again: in Chennai and Trichy and Thanjavur, when he was making his aimless and uncomfortable way across the roasting plains, he’d found himself enticed into taxis and auto rickshaws by their eager and insistent drivers – taken to countless shops and temples and palaces he didn’t want to visit and then asked for more money than he wanted to pay.