Monsoon Summer by Julia Gregson

interrupted him. “Kit, come down here at once!”The screeching voice rose. “ Where on earth are you? ”
    â€œI am twenty-eight years old,” she said, with a conspirator’s grin. “My mother thinks I’m two.”
    â€œYou must go at once.” His face was stern in the lamplight, his expression sincere. “Your mother is calling you.”

- CHAPTER 5 -
    â€œM a, stop it!” I said, as she practically arm-wrestled me downstairs. “What on earth are you doing?”
    â€œTaking you outside, so I can talk to you,” she replied grimly.
    â€œFine with me,” I said, and meant it. She was a shouter when riled, and I had no intention of being a floor show for the other guests. She marched me across the yard and into the barn.
    â€œHow could you?” she shouted when the door closed behind us, her face witchy and mean in the storm light.
    â€œHow could I what, Glory?” I used her name to remind her I was a grown-up.
    â€œTake that man up to his room and stay with him so long. Everybody was waiting for you to come down.”
    Everyone of course meant Tudor.
    â€œYou were in the kitchen. Daisy was busy, I did it to help.”
    â€œTo help .By being with a man alone.”
    I would have laughed had I not been so angry myself.
    â€œGlory,” I said, as patiently as I could. “I was a nurse during the war.” I could have told her then about wiping the lips of wounded men, holding their legs in my hands, emptying their chamber pots, feeding them, changing their pajamas, and yes, seeing, sometimes, their most secret parts—what my mother would have called their nooks and crannies—but even in the heat of battle, I needed to protect her.
    â€œAnd look where nursing got you.” Her eyes glittered with spite.“Right back here again.” She looked around at the barn’s cobwebby bridles and molding hayricks, and shuddered theatrically as her eyes settled on a two-foot-high technical drawing, “The Anatomy of the Genital Tract.”
    â€œLook at that revolting thing. Have you any explanation for your behavior?” she said when she had recovered.
    â€œThat foul old bag was attacking him,” I said. “You know how nasty she gets.”
    â€œOh, so a world savior now, like Daisy,” my mother said sarcastically. “And look where it got her.”
    I disliked it when my mother sneered at Daisy, showing a deep mistrust of intellectual “bluestockings” that came from her own insecurities.
    â€œGet this into your head, Kit.” She held up a finger. “Number one: you are not a skivvy here, your job is in the office. You’re a volunteer, you’re Daisy’s friend.”
    â€œCan’t you see any good in this?” I asked her. I’d tried, at least once, to tell her about the charity but she’d turned a deaf ear.
    She looked down for a second. “Oh, blast it!” Our walk across the yard had rimmed her suede shoes with mud. She set about scrubbing them frantically with a sheet of discarded writing paper from the wastepaper basket.
    â€œSecond.” With a dainty gesture she dropped the dirty paper back in the bin. “Never, ever go unattended into the bedroom of an Indian man. You don’t know them. I do. They are absolute predators, and they see all European women as sluts. Don’t look so shocked. I’m only telling you what is true.”
    I rubbed my arm where she had pinched it hard, and pulled away from her. She’d once thrown a lamp at my head in a fury when I wouldn’t wear the dress she’d laid out, and now she had the same wild look in her eyes. She’d bathed the cut later and given me a doll as “a sorry present” and had said she loved her little girl more than anything else in the world, but it was just so hard sometimes beingall on our own together. And I’d hugged her back, flooded with sweet relief at our