‘It is not only to talk, Santina. We do that already. I will educate you in a cohesive manner. I will not ask how to buy cheese and bread. Any donkey can do that. I will teach you English – in all its startling, crisp beauty.’
He had lost me several sentences ago.
I watched him open a small book, marked by a slim leather bookmark that looked well loved. He straightened. ‘Oh ye! Who have your eye-balls vexed and tired, feast them upon the wideness of the Sea.’
He stopped and looked at me.
‘Keats, a poet, wrote that, in 1817.’
‘Is that all of it?’
‘You want to know the rest?’
I nodded. I hadn’t understood everything, but I liked the way his voice changed when he recited it. He twisted the book to face me.
‘There.’ He pointed toward the bottom of the page.
I looked at the jumble of letters. I couldn’t bear to raise my eyes to meet his.
‘You see? You carry on where I left off.’
I swallowed.
‘Don’t worry about mistakes, Santina, there’s no one here to laugh at you.’
My ears became attuned to the minutiae of sounds around me, a twitch of a leaf as a grasshopper skimmed its surface, the breeze lifting the sprinkle of crumbs he hadn’t allowed me to sweep away yet. I realized he was calling my name.
‘Santina,’ he said, his voice softer now; it was his Adeline voice, the one he used when her speech began to corkscrew toward ramblings, ‘you can’t read, can you?’
I felt furious that he had cornered me like this. What needed I for poetry? How on earth was that going to help me survive America? Here I was, dragged back to the tiny town that had smothered my childhood, following a man and his sick wife, caring for his daughter night and day, a responsibility I had never sought, and his repayment was a promise and a poem!
He wasn’t afraid of the bristling silence. He let it hang, unhurried, like a dank February morning in London where the clouds merge into one purgatorial white canopy.
His hand smoothed his beard.
‘Would you like me to help you, Santina?’
A sigh escaped before I could stop it, then a solitary tear, which I hated myself for. I brushed it off my cheek, but we both knew it had been there.
‘Please say you’ll consider my offer?’ he asked.
I hadn’t invited these blurred lines; he was my employer, not a teacher. I didn’t want to be helped. I wanted to work, survive a year here in exchange for my escape from this town, this place that had never taught me to read, or think about poetry, or hope to live off course from the mountain girl. I was prepared to commit to this time with his daughter and do the job as best I could but my eyes were set on a horizon far from here. Now I sat, within one of my town’s palaces, feeling more imprisoned than when I first left. His face relaxed into something close to a smile.
‘I think I can offer you more than just money, Santina.’ His voice lowered to a syrupy murmur, his expression softened. ‘In return for everything you are doing for my family and me.’
I lifted my eyes. His offer came from a genuine place. He was no more trying to imprison me than I was. I took a breath to answer, but a metallic clatter cut through my pause, followed by a bucket cascading down from the terrace above, crashing into the lemon trees below, tumbling down the brush toward the wall at the end of the garden. We ran upstairs. Adeline was stood before the balustrade that ran the length of her terrace. She was closer to it than made me feel safe. I stopped by the doorway. The Major walked through the bedroom toward the terrace, his feet soundless, as if he were wading through water.
I watched him coax her back inside. When she returned to bed, he crushed a pill into a spoon. He leaned in to give it to her. She spat in his face.
‘I’ll hold her and you give it to her, Santina.’
I took the spoon. She jerked in his grip.
‘Now, Santina!’
I placed it in her mouth. He closed her lips around it. After a few seconds he released his grip. She crawled to the top of her bed, grabbed the sheet and cocooned herself inside.
Her breathing began to even. The crease of bed linen eased down onto the mattress.
‘I will take lunch at the usual time, Santina. That will be all for now.’
I left. My footsteps echoed down the stone stairwell.
It was clear then, that the more unpredictable Adeline became, the more rigid his own routine would be. My lessons would be inescapable after all.
After breakfast the next day, the Major strode into the kitchen and laid a notebook and a wooden box inlaid with geometric patterns of mother-of-pearl upon the kitchen table. His height made the kitchen feel all the smaller. Unlike me, his head reached a foot or so from the ceiling, which arched over us, like a cellar. The walls were painted a brushed pink, and behind the marble counter that stretched the length of one wall there were a dozen lines of decorated tiles of geometric designs in yellow, emerald and turquoise, hopeful swirls of pomp. A wider squat arch graced the space where the hearth stood. A wooden table, dipping in the center with age, stretched halfway across the room.
‘I have decided, Santina, that I was quite in the wrong yesterday.’
I looked at him.
‘I will be grateful if you’d forget my clumsy start, yes?’
It was my turn to let a question evaporate, answerless.
‘Today,’ he resumed, ‘I am going to teach you how to cook one of the dishes I brought home with me to England after my years in India.’
‘Cook?’
His face brightened. I knew he had spent several years in India working for the British army, Adeline had told me that much. She’d intimated that his role was shrouded in secrecy, but I’d never paid it too much mind because Adeline had a wonderful way of painting stories with a brush of mystery, whatever the subject. For the first time I allowed myself to miss her. The eccentric little talks she might indulge me in after breakfast before she began her day in the studio. The way she’d shown off her heath in Hampstead to me; her paintings, bright with freedom and questions and passion. Now I understood. He needed the lessons more than I. It was impossible to shirk the sense that they were as much about the Major having another to converse with as opening my mind up to the poetry he loved best.
‘Cook, yes, Santina, and afterward you will write the recipe into this little book here.’ He picked it up and gave it an optimistic waggle. The cover was black leather, and the center of the front panel featured a tiny painted rose.
We spent the next hour trawling through the details of the dish. First, he asked me to dice an onion. He stood beside me whilst directing me on how to soften it in a pan with olive oil. It was something I did almost every day, but that didn’t stop him inspecting my timing. As the pieces began to sweat, he placed the box next to the stove and opened it. Inside were five jars filled with different colored powders; a palette of deep browns, golden yellow and fiery red.
‘This box goes with me whenever I travel. I knew we wouldn’t be able to source these spices here so I arranged for them to be sent to me in London before we came.’
He lifted one of the jars, unscrewed its lid and handed it to me: ‘Smell.’
I dipped my nose close to the opening, trying not to worry about the onions that were starting to caramelize. A pungent flowery scent powdered up into the back of my cheeks. I couldn’t place it.
‘This is ground coriander, Santina. Next growing