Shining Agnes

By Sara Banerji

In a once great, now falling, mansion live an aristocratic family: Alice, huge, sad and longing for love; her paralysed mother who is subject to wild and eccentric enthusiasms; and the foster child Agnes, whose desire to be an actress sets in motion a train of bizarre and horrifying events.
Then love comes to Alice in the form of beautiful but furtive Vincent who has moved in next door. But does he want Alice for herself or for the treasures that she digs from the rubble of her tumbled home? And how does he view Alice's obsession with compost, the making of which she compares to the growth of spiri­tuality and the purging away of sin?

Black comedy lurks beneath the surface of this gloriously imaginative new novel from the author of Cobweb Walking, The Wedding of Jayanthi Mandel and The Tea-Planter's Daughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781448208401

Sara Banerji

Sara Banerji was born in England but lived for much of her adult life in India. She now lives in Oxford where she teaches creative writing.

Book preview

SHINING AGNES

Sara Banerji

For

Ranjit,

Bijoya, Shobita

and Juthika

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

A Note on the Author

Chapter 1

Some people say it takes a year to make compost but I nearly always find it is ready after nine months.

Nine months of warm wet cuddling under the covers turns things like old bones, dog turds, dead mice, and potato peelings into one dark pure crumble with all the stench gone. It takes longer for leaves, though they can be speeded up with a feed of horse dung and treacle.

It takes nine months to make a human baby, too.

I have never had a baby but I have always loved making compost, so it seems appropriate that I should be spending the last hours of my life surrounded by my black sheeted heaps.

Wisps of steam leak whitely out of rips in the plastic and rise towards the trees, and I am touched with regret that I will never now spread the dark and hard-won crumble. I shiver in the cold autumn evening and feel regret, too, because in the hearts of the ripening heaps is heat that is not available to me at all.

I have cut no logs this autumn so we have been without fires all week and chill has got into my bones. Or perhaps it was the terrible thing that had happened a week ago that makes me so cold.

Father Manion says, You must take Mother in at once because old people are very susceptible and she is not dressed for it.

But I pay no attention to him for it doesn’t matter if Mother is cold as she is going to die soon. Father Manion does not know this or he would not be wasting time trying to get hold of the handles of Mother’s wheelchair. He couldn’t hope to wrest the chair from me, though, because although I am a woman I am much stronger than him.

It is brave of him to fight me because he knows I am a murderess. He can do nothing about this, though, except pray that I will repent, because I have confessed my sin to him and he is a priest.

Chapter 2

Mother lost the use of her legs long ago, when Father died. And the shock of what she saw last week made all the rest of her body stop working as well, so that now she can’t even talk. Which is good, for I could not bear to hear the things she says.

After Father died, Mother might have become paralysed all over if it had not been for Sophie.

Sophie is my cousin. She is ten years younger than me, and Mother disapproved of her because her ambition was to be an actress.

And you tell me how you can be that without committing mortal sin, Mother would murmur darkly.

Anyway, Mother’s forebodings were fulfilled. Sophie committed mortal sin, and the result of it was that Mother got given a baby to look after, and her body stopped freezing. The bits that had gone stayed gone, but no more went.

In the ten years before baby Agnes, Mother never talked about Father at all although I always longed to talk about my father. In fact the longing never left me.

Just a few weeks ago I made the mistake of trying to lure the busy and irritable old lady from the corner shop into discussing him.

You remember him as a little boy, don’t you?

I would never have expected him to grow so dissolute, the old woman said whisking a handled wire through a gigantic cheddar. Out of the whole family he was the thoroughly naughty one. But we never expected it would lead to … she paused, lowered her voice, and said ominously … to what it did.

What Father’s infantile naughtiness had led to was dying without paying the corner-shop bill.

Ridiculous things he bought here, said the old lady. Champagne, liqueur chocolates, globe artichokes … We don’t never eat such things in our house.

Oh! For Heaven’s sake! I interrupted her.

La-di-da! cried the corner-shop lady, making me wish vehemently that we had some other shop to go to. First you ask me to tell you about ’sir’, she emphasised this word with heavy sarcasm, and then you don’t like what I’ve got to tell you! Well I can’t manufacture facts just because you don’t like them! She whammed eggs into their cavities with almost shell-cracking force. I mean if he hadn’t got the money he ought to have eaten potatoes and lard like we had to when we were children. She was about ninety and very small and stunted from an impoverished childhood.

He always used to say his father was kind to you, I murmured weakly. Her family had originally worked as servants in my father’s family’s household.

Kind! cried the woman, roused to fury. It’s not kind a person wants. It’s their rights! She added spitefully, Anyway we all come down to the same in the end. So many bits have fallen off your big house by now that it’s almost the same size as my little cottage.

A tall figure suddenly emerged out of the dark at the back of the shop. It was Michael, her grandson. He started to say something but then he saw me, flinched slightly, and stopped. On the few occasions that we met over the years he had always reacted like this at the sight of me, though when we were children we had been great friends.

In those days he had been small and thin and often had a cold, but although I was so much taller and stronger than him it was usually he who invented the games we played. We made a raft out of empty beer bottles once, screwing their tops on tight to keep the air in, then lashing them to a plank with string from the corner shop. Michael was always much handier than me although it was me who had the strength to pull the string tight and haul the heavy raft to the river.

It sank the moment we stepped on it.

It’s because you are so heavy! Michael had shouted, angry that all his hard work had been lost.

I remember being sorry for being so heavy but not knowing what I could do about it.

But the day he rode the cow it had been my weight that saved him. We had spent weeks taming the Ayrshire, bribing her with crisps, old apples, and biscuits until at last she would come cantering towards us when we called her.

When we thought she was tame enough, Michael got on to her back and dug his heels into her sides letting out a yell as he had seen cowboys do on the films. The Ayrshire went berserk and began to rush round the field bucking and letting out squirts of bright green manure while Michael clung to her neck and screamed with terror.

When the cow reached the far fence it seemed as though she was about to jump it and Michael’s shrieks reached a crescendo. At the last moment she had second thoughts, and swung round to come shitting, roaring, galloping back towards me.

I stood in her path and braced myself. As she approached, so wild with fear that she did not even notice me, I reached out and seized her by the ears. Her hard hairy forehead thundered against my chest. I staggered and reeled and all the breath was knocked out of me for a moment, but I managed to cling on. I leant over her head, pinning her down and screamed, Jump off! to Michael.

He leapt, and fell sobbing into the grass.

You could not imagine this tall, stern policeman sobbing now.

He gave me a brief nod, and said quickly to his grandmother, Mother says your tea’s ready, Gran. She’s coming to take over. Then he vanished into the back of the shop again. Nowadays, Michael’s manner towards me was always cold and formal.

His mother Jenny appeared a moment later. My face must have been red. Jenny assumed this was because of something the old lady had said.

Pay no attention to Mum, she told me. She’s just a jealous old lady who would like to live in a palace herself, aren’t you dear? Jenny patted her mother gently on the shoulder.

The old lady sniffed. Jealous! she cried shrilly. I’d never want to live in such a pigsty. Can’t imagine anyone who would!

She longed to live in your house when she was a little girl, Jenny told me, winking.

Jealous, mumbled the old woman, wiping her hands on her apron. I’ll give you jealous. My kids behaved properly, so they did. Those kids up at the big house, and that’s your father too, Alice my girl. They were up to all sorts of things. My old man would have walloped his boys to an inch of their lives if they had behaved like those little sirs.

What sort of things? I asked, curiosity overcoming anger.

Jokes, said the old lady. Hiding behind the grave stones, and making moaning noises. Village people nearly had heart attacks. Once your father sprayed green dye on Sam Pritchard’s hens and the poor man got a terrible shock. He never drank a drop from that day on, even after the rain washed the green off.

I had heard these stories dozens of times in my life, but always loved to hear them again.

Father was one of those people who enjoyed things too much. He would tell Mother, bubbling with excitement, that he had landed a job in the Middle East. Mother would fuss over him, pack socks and ties and hankies, as though he was a little boy going to boarding school.

A week later he would phone us from Oman or Jordan enthusiastically describing the marvellous people he was working for, the beauty of the desert, the wonderful parties he was being invited to.

A week after that a telegram would arrive. Decided leave job because of opportunity of fascinating Sahara trip stop Maud please inform London directors stop.

Later Mother would cry as the directors told her they would probably be suing Father for breach of contract.

But when he eventually arrived back in England, tanned and sandstained, and unable to talk about anything but sunrise in the desert and the beauty of the Bedouin women, Mother would hug and kiss him and never say a word about the phone call.

When I was eight he forgot to come home in time for my birthday.

Oh, naughty, naughty Father, he said, hunching his shoulders to his ears in remorse. He rushed me off on a compensatory outing.

Father’s compensatory outings were always unusual.

On one occasion he took me to the sailing club and, as we had no boat, punted me round the lake in an antique wooden bathtub. It eventually sank, but not before we had been shouted at quite a lot by the yachtsmen. The manager’s face was terrifically red, and he shouted as well, as he pulled us ashore with a boat hook. He said Father ought to be prosecuted for endangering the lives of the other yachtsmen who had had a hard job dodging our unmanageable craft.

Father emerged from the water dripping and with his shoulders already hunched so that I wondered for a moment if he was going to offer the manager of the sailing club a compensatory outing.

Father nearly went to prison once, making up to me for forgetting to take me for my riding lesson.

I will get you a better steed, he laughed, and took me to the zoo. We waited by the cage of the Galapagos tortoise, and when no keepers were looking, Father slipped me over the fence, and dropped me onto the back of one of the mighty reptiles as it lumbered past.

I lay on my stomach, clinging to the cool knobbly shell, until the usual furious official appeared, retrieving me, and bawling threats at Father.

Mother was often in need of compensatory outings as well as me, but being a grown-up she was able to anticipate trouble.

No, Rowland, she said firmly, I don’t think breakfast in the grounds of Buckingham Palace would be a good idea at all, and they ate strawberries and drank champagne in Kensington Gardens instead. It was a great success.

I am going to take your Mother to Kensington Gardens for breakfast every morning from now on, said Father.

No, you are not, Rowland darling! cried my mother. There are more things in life than breakfast, you know.

I wish I could have come, I said.

So Father took the housekeeping money from the tin on the kitchen dresser and bought four bottles of champagne from the shop at the corner.

Father, Mother, and I were a bit tiddly for the rest of the morning, letting out burps, and giggling wildly at the slightest witticism, and all three of us eventually tumbled into bed and dropped sound asleep while it was still daylight.

Mother and I went into the fields that evening and searched for potatoes left from last year’s crop, but there weren’t any. In the end Father managed to wheedle a loaf of bread and some cheese from the lady at the corner shop, who said to the next customer, loud enough for us to hear, They say rags to riches in three generations, but them at the big house has done it faster. My mother was a servant in the big house in his father’s day, and to think they are begging me for bread one generation later.

Father told me, laughing, as we walked home, My father was very kind to all his servants, so it’s only fair that their descendants should be kind to us.

Mother and I went to Mass every Sunday.

Mother always made a special emphasis on Mass when Father was home, shouting several times, and loudly to make sure Father heard, Alice! Don’t forget it’s Sunday! and, Have you got your hat? although when Father was away we managed to set off without any fuss at all.

Once Father scrambled out of bed at the last minute, and came, wrapped in a towel, to the top of the stairs, to laughingly see us off.

God’s sure to be there, he teased my Mother. No chance of his oversleeping when you make such a racket getting ready.

Did I wake you? Mother asked all innocence. And then added, Won’t you come too?Just this once? She accompanied the request with a little tempting tilt of her head and flutter of her eyelashes, causing Father to rush down, two stairs at a time, to hug her.

Mother was always trying to convert Father. Once I remember her persuading him to dip his finger into the holy water stoup she kept in the hall. Perhaps she thought that contact with the sacred water might cause some sort of spiritual awakening inside him. Father plunged his hand in and began to flick the blest water all over my mother, who was forced to duck and dodge while maintaining the sort of dignified composure required of one being deluged with holiness.

I, too, longed for Father to come to church with us, though not because I wanted him to become a Catholic. I never wanted anything about Father to change, but thought how much fun it would be if he was there. I would imagine him whispering a joke during the most boring part of the sermon. And at the most sacred part of the Mass, when the little bell rang, the congregation lowered their heads, and the priest held up the host, now miraculously transformed to the body of Christ, I would dream that Father was beside me, sharing the thrill of such an awesome moment.

Mother always prayed vigorously during Mass, clenching her knuckles until they were white, her shoulders terribly tense because of the urgency of her requirements. During my childhood I knew she was praying that Father would become a Catholic but later on, me getting married came to head the list.

When the time came to take Communion,