Monsoon Summer by Julia Gregson Page A

now was Kit, sleeping above him in what felt like almost indecent proximity. Up there now, sleeping, breathing, so close it felt like agony, for more than anything else, he wanted to kiss her again.
    A rattle from upstairs—her curtains being pulled. Earlier she’d worn her hair up in a messy bun, stuck a pencil through it while she was working, but now he imagined it tumbling down.
    He tried to joke himself out of it. “My God, Miss Smith, you’re beautiful,” because nothing about her had escaped his attention: the curve of her jawline, her dark eyes, her long neck bent over her work, the dark waterfall of her hair, her flashing smile when he made her laugh.
    She was brushing her hair now. She was cleaning her teeth.
    â€œOh, for God’s sake.” He looked up frozen and afraid. “Stop it, you stupid bastard. Go to sleep.”

- CHAPTER 9 -
    C learly alarmed at what had passed between us, Anto went back to working in the Bird Room in the early mornings. When we met in the dining room, I saw that he looked exhausted, and he would not meet my eye. I kept on working, talking, pretending not to care, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him: the satin feel of his cheek, the softness of his lips on mine.
    The memory kept me awake, and sometimes, when I crept out of the house at night to see if he was awake too, the light was still on in his window, and hearing my own breath, I felt myself in the position of a suicide trying to talk myself down from the edge.
    I wanted him. My body was racing ahead of my brain like a naughty child, frightening me because everything about it was wrong. He was due to return to India in a matter of months. He would marry a girl there, or so Daisy had said, chosen by his parents, and it went without saying that my mother would be horrified.
    But when in early April I got a letter from Saint Andrew’s saying my course had to be further postponed until the next academic year—more problems with the roof—I was not disappointed.
    My mother hugged me when she read the letter. “It’s just like old times,” she said, and from long habit I returned her fond look, but my feelings were far more complicated and secretive than I let on. What I wanted most was to speak properly to Anto again and not get caught.
    Was it odd to have fallen for him so quickly? Not to me, itwasn’t. Not really. I was dangerously ready for love after the war, and he was terribly handsome and impressively clever and he already made me laugh, and he called up a maternal feeling in me because he seemed both brave and lost. There was something else too: I wanted to be properly loved, in the high old way, by a man, a young man who would exorcise a nasty memory, because there was a time, before I was eighteen years old, when I was so wet behind the ears that I honestly thought you could get pregnant if you kissed a man.
    One of my mother’s employers, Mr. Frank Jolly, a Yorkshire optician, a widower, had put an end to that by gently sliding a hand down my school uniform in the car one day. I know it’s usual for young girls to say they are appalled by such advances. I wasn’t.
    What I felt, at least initially with Frank Jolly, was experimental. He was not bad-looking, and fairly young. He started to pick me up from school, and at first his advances were mild enough to be called caresses. But then, one afternoon when my mother was at the pictures, I was shocked when a thing like a landed fish leapt out of his trousers.
    We were in the sitting room, the curtains drawn, when he touched me, his face all jumbled and mottled, like a jigsaw gone wrong. He said I’d led him on to this and, as he laid me down on a towel on the sofa, said I must now go through with it else my mother would lose her job and there would be a scandal. And I believed him and went through with it and afterwards shouted and cried in the bath trying to wash him away.
    When I tried to tell my