Saint Menu of Rajputana! gulped Dilip, his heart withering, that is a preachment all its own, leaping irrewocably beyond my poor ability to reply or even grasp. Have I then bungled so hopelessly in this good relationship that these words of attack have found deliverance in such angers? The words cut him. Violence crushed man like pestles spice. Hate caused violence, and he almost hated himself for recognizing the violence in himself—which simply proved it all.
Dilip well knew the history of antagonisms under the British raj in India. It was part of the folklore. The English might seemed always the legacy of the twin tyrannies of The Will and The Wish: bedfellows both, salt as hyenas, bucking under polluted sheets in a calendar of nights that knew no end. The Will imposed, the Wish conceived—and out burst the ugly runt of Colonialism, an infant Mars swaddled in chain-mail, blowing fire, and screeching for dominion. Even as a boy, Dilip himself had been exposed to that formula of oral tradition which records, collates, and channels once again the news of long ago and weaves anew, in repertorial bric-a-brac, legends that never die: the Sepoy Mutiny; General Dyer and the Amritsar Tragedy; Curzon’s “Convocation Speech” at Calcutta; Bentinck hunting down the Kali thugs; and, of course, the illustrious Clive, in red tailcoat and white breeches, leading his little columns of sepoys through the green jungles, crying defiance from the ramparts of Arcot, and waving his sword triumphantly ’mid the cannon smoke at Plassey.
All his life, he had heard the caveat against those graft-ridden little boffins, the I.C.S. officials; the carpet-bagging traders from the East India Company; and the interminable regiments of gin-soaked, mutton-chopped drubbers, many educated at Elphinstone or St. Stephens, who marched through the villages in puttees, white helmets, and uniforms imperialist red and gold, all chewing from thick rolls of compressed Cavendish tobacco and swinging swagger sticks at the poverty-hounded illiterate rustics in Kottachairy or Kerala who stood by on the roadside in a queer sort of silence, filled with dark sad stares and reproachful echoes. “If every Indian were to spit once,” the radical-conservatives of the Jan Sangh party often cried, “we could drown the British for good!” This was a collusion in which Dilip could never participate, for, turnabout, this was also the indulgence of The Will and The Wish: a Scylla and Charybdis through which the spirit of love could only sail in peril! Touching on this, he had often consulted the Menu: “What receives blacking from one age should be polished in the next.”
Dilip looked pleadingly at Roland, like a mouse might crawling over the horny, yellowing toenail, wide as a cornfield, of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Was there forgiveness in his heart, he wondered, for his own unforgivable rudeness? He felt small as a penny. The hysterica passio in this recent intercourse, thought Dilip, perhaps only showed a man weary of his many toils. There was nothing personal, surely.
“Say, do you mind if I put a question to you?”
“Surely,” smiled Dilip, glad with a chance of contrition.
“Surely, you, ah, mind?”
“I do not mind, even a tweet.”
“Well,” Roland jiggled some wax from his ear, “I was just wondering if, ah, I was wondering if you’re making it down the line, to Brighton that is, to, well, just for holiday, is it?”
“For weekend, yes. A short wac.”
“Wac?”
“Wacation.”
“You mean holiday.”
“Yes.”
“I thought you meant whack. A quick shag, bit of a jig. You mean holiday.” Roland smiled. His teeth looked like the cromlech of Stonehenge.
“Yes.”
“Thought so.”
Roland picked up the newspaper, which now looked like a shred of ancient papyrus. He paused: “You, ah, you going down”—he looked behind him surreptitiously, then back again—“with anyone else?”
“I go by myself, yes.”
“On your tod, is it?” Roland nodded. He chuckled. “No, um, no bird going with you, or anything? No girl, like?”
Dilip suddenly caught the gist of the conversation. He laughed brightly. “No, indeed. I shall ride down alone.”
“Oh.”
The ball was Roland’s on a hold. It was a wall-pass, now for the dribble through the pivot, past the sweeper, and then a nice banana-shot into the money.
“You, ah, got a girl.”
“Sorry?”
“I say, you got a girl. Haven’t you? Someone to”—again Roland looked behind his shoulder, then back toward Dilip and breathing in confidence—“someone to keep your back warm, eh?”
“I know English ladies from time to time, yes, and have both rambled and interdined with my chairman several times. I find them most unselfish and never devoid of self-respect.”
“They are, that.”
Chairman! thought Roland. Chase me around the wash-house! Not enough he’s on the razzle with half the crumpet in the British Isles, he’s a bit of a Nancy to boot! He had heard that before. They did it for candy. It was part of their religion.
“But what I mean is, you don’t have a girl down in Brighton. That’s what I had in mind,” Roland clarified, “when I put the question to you.” Dilip now entertained a peculiar feeling and picked up his book to read. He tried to smile.
“Yes, sir. A woman is waiting for me down in Brighton.”
Roland pointed beyond the waiting room. “That’s, ah, who you rung up then, that it?” There was not a noise. “That it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“On the telephone?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so.”
Roland went back to the newspaper, Dilip to his book.
The intervallic questions, quiet, created intervallic silences, loud—and filled with terrible implications. Dare I suspect connivance?, Dilip asked himself. The consulted Menu had once stated: “Look for the insomniac in every sleeper, the drudge in every queen; then, look no more.” Surely, Dilip felt, the treachery is all mine. Dilip read firmly into a paragraph, to lose himself in the business of a diversion that would save himself from the form of murder called rash judgement. They were still both reading. Roland never looked up.
“English?”
Dilip lowered his book, slowly.
“Sorry?”
“I say, an English girl?”
“A lady.”
“Ah yes, forgive me. A lady, I meant.” Roland bowed.
“Yes.”
Roland bit the inside of his cheek. “Oh.”
A cruel shape suddenly seemed to stand astride them, over them, casting a shadow that lengthened along in eerie, almost nocturnal distortion—an eclipse disquieting and monstrous. Then, Roland spoke one word from behind the raised paper.
“White?”
Light flooded in: a failsoof, clearly, has asked that question, Dilip knew. I am in the presence of an aborigine Bheel, he thought, and quickly consulted the Menu: “Deception is only Perception spelled incorrectly.” Oh yes, thought Dilip, it was a matter of perception, and he wanted, there and then, to recount for his suffering friend the ancient Jain tale he had once heard on Mt. Abu: Mrs. Elephant and the Yowls. Four blind men (it began), whereby to know it, hastened to describe the creature elephant. Their similar affliction caused dissimilar interpretation. So, was the elephant described: he who touched the ear saw her as a fan; he who touched the leg saw her as a pillar; he who touched the tail saw her as a whip; he who touched the trunk saw her as a dong-pull. Thus (it ended), were the men truly blind and left to wander forever in their umbrages, all the poorer. That was the story. It was a good story.
“I said, white?”
Roland stood up. Dilip blinked once.
“Yes, sir.”
There it was: a long-range drive into the pitch, a boot-and-run on an overlap, a punch through the clogging and—chop!—gametime! Gametime!
The bell for the train rang.
A strange incident then followed as Dilip fixed his necktie and stood up. It was a pavane: Roland circled the bench. Dilip circled the bench. Roland circled the bench. Toge
ther, they halted.
“Into the sweetcake, aren’t we? Bit of a spiv, aren’t we? Over here having a right old knees-up, aren’t we?” The voice was cast iron. “Huh?” Dilip jumped into himself in fright.
“I am hearing the train go ‘ding,’ ” Dilip croaked.
“Huh?” screeched Roland, choking on the word, his eyes flashing fire, like the little boy, pop-eyed, who screams mercilessly when his vegetables suddenly touch each other in the plate. “Huuuuh??”
Wiolence, thought Dilip.
The little Indian lowered his eyes and picked up his valise. “I must embark now.”
“One thing, en it, to give them a box of sweets, like a bloody ponce, maybe even a Dundee cake. Quite another to be giving one of our own the free ride and turn us into a ruddy jungle over here, a zoo, a goddam zoo, a zoo full of them secondhand mongrels and golliwogs, black as pitch, kids walking around all with a touch of the tarbrush and pointed heads, what?”
Meep! Dilip inhaled a deep, horrified breath and jumped fumbling at his valise. “Oh me, had you to poke through my personal goods, sir?”
“Awww, ease off it, guv’nor. The bloody thing flipped open because you forgot to put the yank on the lock. In a public utility, what’d you expect? This ain’t the Ritz. No more than you’d do.”
Wengeance, thought Dilip.
“I could not do such a thing, my friend,” asked Dilip, almost inaudibly, “could I?”
“No, no,” Roland growled, his jaw distorted, “you’d only be having your own peek-a-boo session down in the Brighton sands is more like it, en it?” He breathed fury into Dilip’s face. “En it?”
“I do not understand.”
The bell rang again. Roland, his head cocked at a pathological angle, now drew toe-to-toe with the little Indian, drawing a curlicue around one of his soft buttons, staring like a hawk into his eyes, and speaking thickly: “You can get crapped for that where I come from, ducky. You know that? You don’t know that, do you?” he wailed. Then he spit out in disgust. “Course you know it, you sneaky bugger! You bloody sharker!”
Wiciousness, thought Dilip.
It was, however, like throwing stones at the rising sun. Dilip, with his unending versatility of intake, merely stood in the midst of the horrible echoes bathed in the bright radiance of his queer and uncommon faith, which the military and secular call bravery. Then he quietly, patiently, picked up his racquet and valise and tottered just to the doorway, wondering, all the while, only why his friend had thrown his character away, almost like a pure electrical flow sputtering out in a frayed plugless knot of snipped copper wires—and all for nothing. Dilip felt himself a failure and, furthermore, terribly, terribly concerned, for in this matter—not uncommon for him—he had often consulted the Menu: “Nullity is nothing to worry about—and we all must!”
Roland then sprung out of a sudden, like a birch-broom in a fit: “Keep your black, bloody paws off the missies, Jack! I’ve got a good mind to come out there and give you the treat.” He paused, gone white, twitching. “A damn good mind!”
The final bell rang—just as Dilip turned to Roland, with a face shining like white samite in what looked like an almost unearthly and serene resignation, his eyes twinkling like gems. His heart was like a rubbed ciborium: year after year, beaten upon, battered, and buffered into a smooth rich gold, it now shone out in a pure silver-white lustre, in blazes, very like a flame; and from that ciborium, filled with hosts of gold, Dilip then lifted out one incredibly lovely wafer and held it out to his friend in a very, very quiet gesture of communion:
The Buddha, being abused, was silent, pitying the folly of the man who abused him. When the man had finished his abuse, the Buddha asked him, saying: ‘Son, if a man declined to accept a present made to him, to whom would it belong?’ The man answered: ‘In that case, it would belong to the man who offered it.’
‘My son,’ said the Buddha, ‘thou hast railed at me, but I decline to accept thy abuse and request thee to keep it thyself. Will it not be a source of misery to thee? As the echo belongs to the sound, and the shadow to the substance, thus.’
And Dilip was gone.
Roland’s eye darted: a quick peck, like the eye of a corncrake, through his sharp squint. His heart dripped with fury—then it drenched itself dry, grew hard, and finally it shut. The train whistle blew before he moved, his fists closed at his sides, his sharp defeated face long and gooselike. He lurched forward, then, in rapid actions: he was out of the waiting room like a whippet, down the dark stairs, and once again within the station cellar, flea-pits gunpowder grey and hollow as a cenotaph. The sound of water was still pouring from somewhere in cold splashes. Roland heard his own whickering footsteps echo to the end of a long tunnel where, in these catacombs, one bus sat alone in a kind of Scotch mist, the glassed-in sign, top front, having been rolled to show its destination: Houndsditch. Roland boarded it and sat down in the shadows, a sort of violet deathlight round his jaw.
The bus was empty. Roland, in a slump, knee on the bar, stared at the biscuit adverts, job notices, a sign from the chamber of commerce of Wiss. For some reason, then, he began experiencing a vague sense of agitation, even worse than the recent battle he fought. It was instinct, what then happened, for now suddenly unnerved—perhaps as an occupational irritation—he began levitating slowly as he caught, just beside his ear, on a wide panel that ran like a ghat to the rubber floor, a very small, inch-wide blot. It was dark, almost perfectly round. He look away, but the blot seemed waving in the cornea of his eye.
Roland flicked at it with a finger. He hitched his cuff into his hand and drew three swipes across it. Then he felt his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. It was his souvenir: the vernicle of the Hyde Park orator. With it, he rubbed the spot again: swish, swish, swish. The blot remained. Roland turned and faced the panel; grinding his teeth, he gripped the cloth into a wretched ball and drove it furiously over the spot in sequential rubs and fast, violent tugs. He spat into the panel, spat into the handkerchief, and went at it again: nothing. He bashed it. He scratched at it. He bonked at it with the edge of his hand. Then he looked, bewildered by what seemed, but could not possibly be, a simultaneous result: the panel coming up like new, the blot remaining as it was. Roland looked again; he could not see his reflection. He lowered his head, jerked it to the left, the right, but from the polished panel came no reflection, no reflection whatsoever. There was only the shine. There was only the dot.
Suddenly an idea, slim but cogent, sprung quickly into his mind, that apparat of sweet craft, closet skills, and arithmetic trickeries, which revolved so fast it almost seemed to swallow itself up, very like a barber pole. Roland sat up in his seat, on the edge of a resolution instant in its appeasement: why not simply pretend the blot was part of the bus? Hel-lo and bloody goodbye! All was borne in on him in the swift nose-thumbing logic Roland called his own, and inner suasion that almost formed in a bitter smile on his lips: but not yet a smile, only the slight trace of cunning flickering in the eyes, like the child who marches into the kitchen, looks about, and swiftly pockets a cookie. Why should he give a damn? Why should he give one damn? On such premises did the experienced wiper act—that is, if he was to get on into the next wash and not send the night dickering into the day. It almost made him laugh, out loud.
Roland, however, did not laugh. Out loud. Or within. What was curious, in fact, was that he did not laugh at all. The whistle of a laugh, if any formed at all, had been for some time now strangely snuffed out at the base of his windpipe, oddly stuck fast and dry like a hollow reed pinched tight by the terrible force of some inexplicable press of gravity, almost as if—through some ghastly misplaced pressure, increasingly more manifest—he saw that his entire life now rested within the grip of that single frail resolve; as if, in point of fact, it was only that single frail resolve, made there in the shadows, that alone could make the busride back to Houndsditch less painful, and, if to speak of perpetuity, the only possible way one might ever possibly believe he could
live happily ever after.
THE WIFE OF GOD
Reverend is not a title. It is an adjective set before a proper name—and perhaps not even one all that proper.
—Alexander Theroux
3
I
The Reverend Which Therefore sucked, then swallowed a black jujube, one on which he could just as easily have bitten down, he was that agitated. The ormolu clock beneath a portrait of Lord Eldon bonged eight. He discomposed himself on the sofa, with the relish of tragic collapse, facing the shut door of his mother’s bedroom with a frantic concern he was momentarily unequipped to assess but which was traceable, in fact, to an exasperation stalled only by two inner oppositions: the duty to be civil to her who bore him, and the need to point out that they would be late for the ballet. He thought of St. Theodylus, patron saint of those who suffer from cruel apprehension.
“Mo-ther, really,” Which complained, using syllabic distinction for emphasis in a question he felt a justified simplism, “is this like you?” But he merely heard a high silvery laugh form into a coo, the coo into a growl, all from behind the door that wrecked any attempt at direct confrontation.
It was getting dark. The pulled windowshades of Lady Therefore’s commodious flat on Great Cumberland Place (W.I.) filtered out the world of trade and swop, any glimpse of smoky sky, and any intimation of the reality of the non-propertied classes, and yet always somehow kept intact within the brushed and curried elegance of the lyric past. In no way could the furnishings and general décor of a room be more studiously focused on that invisible point of coincidence between the doggedly alive and the much-lamented-for predeceased. Here, the nostalgia, the sting of implication, in a room through which the swagger of a vanished age lighted up those temperaments sympathetic to it—a mid-eighteenth century tallboy in winestain mahogany rubbed to a manic shine; a glass boscage with a stuffed touraco and monarch butterflies on milkweed pods and panicle; and an S-shaped Louis XVI tête-à-tête of soft blue velvet, upon which sat a pack of cards spread out in an unfinished game of solo and a magazine opened to an essay, the title of which was emotionally circled in red ink: “The Osprey: World Endangered Citizen?”
Three Wogs Page 14
