Page 15 of The Secrets of the Tea Garden

CHAPTER 3

Lying on the camp bed in the chilly attic room under a pile of blankets and coats, Libby could hear the murmur of Adela’s and Sam’s voices in the room below. Their indistinct conversation was punctuated with Sam’s deep chuckle and Adela’s suppressed giggles.

Libby felt bad about causing the argument earlier that evening. Why had she allowed her mother and Josey to upset her? Normally she shrugged off Tilly’s chiding remarks and teased Josey back. Their household functioned well enough with Libby largely out at work, Josey at the theatre and Tilly busy with voluntary work for the Women’s Voluntary Service and the church. They had a part-time cook and a maid who came in daily to do the cleaning, washing and ironing. When Mungo was back from university in Durham, Tilly was at her happiest. The days after he went away, Josey would try and cheer Tilly up with trips to the theatre or reading aloud from one of Tilly’s favourite novels, while Libby kept out of the way by staying late at Herbert’s Café doing the bookkeeping.

But this evening, something inside Libby had snapped. Seeing Adela again after more than three years’ absence had reignited all her longing for India and her father. It had shaken her with the force and suddenness of a monsoon storm. Just one whiff and sip of the scentedtea had made her realise that she still yearned as strongly to return to Assam as she had when she was a child. Torn from her family home at Cheviot View on the Oxford Estates and packed off to a spartan boarding school in Northumberland, eight-year-old Libby had cauterised her emotions – and lashed out at her mother for being the one who had abandoned her there.

Libby had never quite got over the shock of finding herself in the austere red-brick institution with its rigid rules and freezing dormitories. She had been constantly in trouble for exploring beyond the school bounds and answering back in class. She had written plaintive letters home asking for her father to come and fetch her and when he hadn’t she had taken comfort in eating as much of the stodgy school food as she was allowed and spending all her pocket money on sweets and fizzy drinks at the tuck shop.

Her mother, on receiving Libby’s first school photo, had worried that her daughter was growing fat and asked the school to ban her from the tuck shop. Libby had found other ways to satisfy her sweet tooth, by finishing other girls’ schoolwork and letting them copy her sums in exchange for toffees and sticks of liquorice.

Luckily for Libby, a young enthusiastic teacher had joined the school and had seen the potential in the unhappy, rebellious girl. Miss MacGregor had been in the suffrage movement as a schoolgirl and enthralled Libby and her friends with tales of protest marches and run-ins with police. She had taught them history – with a liberal dose of anti-imperialist politics – and Libby had grown to adore her.

It was Miss MacGregor who had persuaded Libby to stay on at school until she was seventeen and gain certificates that would equip her for employment. She had instilled in Libby a righteous anger at injustice and an ambition to make the world a better place. Tilly had complained Miss MacGregor had made Libby impossible to live with, and her brothers had teased her mercilessly about her having a ‘crush’ on the charismatic teacher.

Libby wriggled under the bedcovers, trying to warm up. The talking in the room below had stopped. Then she heard it: the tell-tale squeaking of the iron-framed bed and its old springs. Adela and Sam were making love. Libby felt a hot wave of embarrassment and envy. She had lost her virginity on that very bed to a Polish refugee who had been billeted with them during the War. She’d been seventeen and Stefan hadn’t been much older. They had both been inexperienced but enthusiastic, and took the opportunity to experiment while Tilly was out volunteering at the WVS rest centre.

Blue-eyed Stefan had left to train as an army mechanic and had sent her occasional postcards from North Africa. By the time she had joined the Land Army at eighteen their sporadic correspondence had petered out.

Libby burrowed down under the blankets trying not to hear the sounds of love-making coming from below. Lucky Adela and Sam! Libby had never been in love with Stefan but he had left her with an appetite for sex. Her mother would have been aghast at Libby’s brief fiery affair with a handsome, dark-eyed Italian POW who had come to help with the harvest at the Northumbrian farm where nineteen-year-old Libby was working in 1944. Tilly would have called it fraternising with the enemy, but Libby had made sure that Lorenzo was no fascist sympathiser. At the end of the harvest party, they had toasted the communists and the Socialist International before sneaking off to the hay barn where she had allowed him to seduce her.

She had been briefly, passionately in love with Lorenzo but he had hurried home to Italy – and, she discovered, to a waiting wife – at the end of the War.

Libby was now fully awake. She rubbed her cold toes and pondered her new determination to go back to India. Be brutally honest, she told herself. It wasn’t just eagerness at seeing her father again and revisiting the tea plantations; Calcutta drew her too. Or more specifically: handsome, fair-haired, fun-loving George Brewis. She had relived their doorstep kiss a thousand times.

Lying sleepless in the attic, Libby wondered who George Brewis had kissed since. She hadn’t heard from him again. Ridiculous to hold out hope of a romance with George; he was a man of the world and she must have seemed immature and provincial to his eyes. He could have had no idea how passionately she had adored him from afar as a girl in her early teens – or how much his recent kiss had meant to her.

Restlessly, Libby turned over. The noises from below had stopped. No doubt the loving couple were now falling asleep contentedly in each other’s arms. Libby let go a sigh. She sat up, turned on the bedside light and reached for her sketching pad. Whenever she was agitated about something, she found that doodling in a sketch book and creating funny figures calmed her anxious thoughts. It was a strategy she had discovered at boarding school.

Despite her numb fingers, Libby did a quick cartoon of her and George dancing, exaggerating his shoulders and flop of fair hair, and giving herself large feet and lips that were more like a duck’s beak. She chuckled, discarded the pad and turned out the light.