Monsoon Summer Read Free

with its sloped ceiling, the washstand, the small, soft bed that had once belonged to Daisy’s parents. But what I most liked was the expanse of open country outside, the silver flash of the river that ran through it. The quiet of the space (so quiet you could hear an apple drop from a tree at night) was a blissful luxury after fouryears in nurses’ dorms in London. My last dorm—spluttering gas fire, clotheshorses crammed with other people’s dripping underwear—was claustrophobically small. Nowhere quiet to cry there, with about two feet between each bed and the next.
    And I was crying, uncontrollably at times, and I needed to think. It wasn’t, I told myself irritably and often, as if I were going through some special kind of interesting crisis. It was the war. It was life, and nobody’s fault that my year at Saint Thomas’ had been catapulted straight from the classroom into the Blitz. In my first year on the wards, when London was bombed for fifty-seven continuous nights of horror and bedlam, the hospital, plum opposite the Houses of Parliament, was a sitting duck. One night we’d seen what looked like the whole of the Thames—houseboats, warehouses, park benches, trees—on fire.
    And now the war was over, and this great quiet blank had opened up. I wasn’t the only nurse to still feel in the deep muscles of my legs, in my brain, and my spirits, extraordinarily tired, as if I’d gone from twenty to seventy in a few short years, or to wake suddenly in the night to the nerve-shredding sound of screaming ambulances, or to find there were times when it took all my mental strength not to give in to the series of gruesome snapshots pooled at the bottom of my mind: burns with a rotting meat smell, the young fireman injured by shrapnel in the gullet, who gargled blood before he died, and of course the girl.
    Everyone tells you, if you are a nurse or a doctor, that mistakes happen, that we’re only human, but the girl was the one who took me to the edge, and I can’t write about it, can’t think about it now. All I can say is I found it hard to forgive myself and probably never will.
    * * *
    Daisy beamed at me as she unlocked the door to the barn.
    â€œI’ve been dying to show you this,” she said. There was an immediate smell of dust and hay and I remembered feeding lambs here during bad weather—the muscular suck of their tongues, the waytheir eyes rolled when the milk entered their mouths. “It’s been our greatest challenge so far.”
    The barn was freezing inside, almost colder than outside. She switched on a naked bulb festooned with cobwebs and the first thing I saw was a large blackboard with the words The Mother Moonstone Maternity Home Fort Cochinchalked on it in ­Daisy’s slashing hand, with a column of figures beside it. Next to the blackboard were two battered school desks piled high with files, three boxes labeled Medical Supplies and Not Wanted on Voyage. Tacked to one of the walls behind was a large chart, one I recognized from R. W. Johnstone’s textbook on the internal workings of the pregnant woman at term.
    â€œI do prefer the office to be separate from the house, don’t you?” said Daisy, seeing my dubious gaze. This office was arranged like a small stage set in the middle of a few bales of hay and stacks of old gates.
    â€œIt’s essential to get the house out of your head, at least for part of the day.” Daisy, I knew for a fact, was often up at five, feeding animals or cooking stews, in order to clear this time for herself. She knelt to light the stove in the corner, brushed a dozing farm cat off her desk.
    â€œThat’s yours.” She pointed to the chair opposite hers and handed me a rug to wrap myself in. “But Kit,” she said, looking at me steadily and kindly, “before I bamboozle you, how are you, honestly?”
    There was a time when this kind of invitation