Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  Dark Angel

  Sally Beauman

  Contents

  One

  I The Fortune Teller and my Godmother

  Two

  I A Comet and a Copulation

  II An Assignation and an Accident

  Three

  I A Declaration of War

  II A Declaration of Love

  III Engagements

  IV Marriages

  V In Transit

  VI Unknown Soldiers

  VII Lazarus

  Four

  I Cui Bono?

  II Frank

  The Final Entry

  After Words

  About the Author

  For Ronald and Gabrielle Kinsey-Miles,

  my father and mother,

  with my love

  The human heart is the starting point

  in all matters pertaining to war …

  —MAURICE, COMTE DE SAXE

  Reveries on the Art of War, 1732

  ONE

  AT MY CRISIS, THE child cried out from the next room—her gulfs cry, high and yelping.

  She has contrived such ill-timing before, but when I investigated, she slept.

  To Winterscombe for the comet (and other incendiary delights) at nine this morning.

  I

  THE FORTUNETELLER AND MY GODMOTHER

  From the journals

  Winterscombe,

  April 2, 1910

  WHEN MEN ARE GATHERED together alone, they discuss Sex. When women are similarly gathered, they discuss Love. What may we deduce from this paradox? Why, that women are hypocrites.

  With Jarvis last evening, and two others at the club. With the second bottle of port, I posed them a question: Had any of them, ever, been so fortunate as to encounter a woman they could respect? (They might discount their mothers, I allowed. We could all grant mothers were a special case.)

  No advocates for the female mind, I noted—though that scarcely surprised me. Jarvis became eloquent on the advantages of their apertures: for these, he claimed, he had the most profound respect. Hitchings, made bilious from the port, grew unduly passionate. Climbing upon a chair, he declared that—as God was his Judge—he respected all women. Were their instincts not more finely attuned than were ours? Did they not enjoy a delicacy of mind, a scrupulous sensitivity of heart denied our sterner sex? Women were undone (this was his thesis) by their dependency upon our favours—an unconvincing essay, this, in advocacy. Much fuddled Darwinism was to follow, in which men were brutes, first cousins to the Apes, while women (mysteriously exempt from the monkey chain) were their Guardian Angels. Since he fell off his chair at this point, it was agreed among us that his arguments might be discounted.

  Returned home late. Had the child’s nurse, against my desk, by gaslight. The light made her skin blue, like a cadaver.

  I went to a fortuneteller once. His name was Mr. Chatterjee; his premises were a small shop between a pastry maker and a silk dealer, in the middle of the bazaar in Delhi.

  It was not my idea to consult Mr. Chatterjee; I did not believe in fortunetellers, horoscopes, Tarot cards, the I Ching—none of that tempting mumbo-jumbo. Neither, I think, did my friend Wexton, although it was he who made the suggestion to go.

  Mr. Chatterjee had been recommended to Wexton. One of the Indians we had met on this visit gave him a glowing testimonial—it might have been Mr. Gopal from the university, or maybe the Maharani. The next day, on a visit to the bazaar, Wexton located his premises; the day after, he suggested I visit him.

  Traveling with Wexton was always full of surprises. I thought, Why not?

  “Won’t you come too, Wexton?” I said. “He could read both our fortunes.”

  Wexton smiled his benevolent smile.

  “At my age,” he replied, “you don’t need a fortuneteller to predict your future, Victoria.”

  A nod toward the graveyard. Wexton gave no sign of melancholy. I set off for my future the next afternoon.

  On the way, pushing through the crowded alleyways of the bazaar, I considered the question of age. In a Victorian novel—the kind my father liked—a woman is old at twenty-five, over the hill by thirty. Now, in the 1980s, due partly to the influence of sudsy television, a woman is still judged young at fifty. But when I went to see Mr. Chatterjee it was 1968. People had begun to wear buttons that said DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY.

  Wexton, well into his seventies, found that very amusing. I was not so sure I did.

  When I went to visit my fortuneteller I was single, childless, a success—I suppose—at my chosen career. I was also almost thirty-eight years old.

  The visit to India had been Wexton’s idea. For the three months before we left I had been in England, at Winterscombe, helping my uncle Steenie to die—or at least trying to ensure that when he did, he did so easily, without physical pain.

  Morphine cocktails work—indeed Steenie claimed they were nearly as good as champagne—but there were, inevitably, other pangs for which medicine was less effective. When Steenie finally died, I lost an uncle I loved, one of the last members of my family. Wexton lost his oldest friend, an iconoclast who had once, I suspected, been more than a friend—though neither Steenie nor Wexton ever spoke of this.

  “Look at us,” Wexton said, when we were alone at Winterscombe. “As gloomy as two bookends. We should go away, Victoria. How about India?”

  It was a surprising suggestion. Claiming pressures of work (in fact fearing introspection), I had not taken a vacation in eight years. Wexton, whose poetry had made him internationally famous, never took holidays at all. American by birth, but an expatriate for some fifty years, Wexton had made his den in an untidy, book-filled house in Church Row, Hampstead; he disliked being coaxed out of it. It was entirely unlike him to accept an invitation to be lionized in Delhi, of all places. However, he did. He would go, he said; what was more, I would go with him. I was anxious to escape grief and the responsibility of Winterscombe (a great white elephant of a house—I would probably have to sell it), so I agreed. I rearranged my work schedule. Three days later we landed in Delhi.

  Once there, Wexton gave his lecture at the university, read some of his famous poems to a distinguished audience of Indians, Europeans, and Americans, and then, gracefully but firmly, decamped.

  Wexton has written lines that have stained my mind (as perhaps they have yours); as great poetry does, they have become an indissoluble part of my thinking. Many of his poems are about love, time, and change. As I listened to him read I thought of lost opportunities, a broken love affair eight years before, and my own age; I felt unspeakably sad.

  Wexton, whose attitude to poetry was pragmatic, did not. He gave his lecture; he hunched himself into a human question mark over the unreliable microphone. He pummeled, as was his habit, the great folds and crevasses of his face. He tugged at his hair, so it stood up in wild tufts. He looked like a huge and benevolent bear, bemused that these words of his should produce on his audience the effect they did.

  Once the lecture was over, he strolled down from the platform, attended the formal reception in his honor, and annoyed his Embassy hosts by avoiding all the most celebrated guests. He talked for a great deal of time to Mr. Gopal, an earnest and excitable man whose position at the university was a minor one. He talked even longer to the Maharani, a woman of great good nature, mountainously fat, whose days of social eminence were over. The next day, to the consternation of his hosts, he left. Wexton loved trains; we went to the station and, for no very good or planned reason, took a steam train to Simla.

  From Simla to Kashmir and a houseboat on the lakes, with curry-scented curtains and a wind-up gramophone. From Kashmir to the Taj Mahal, from the Taj Mahal to a baboon sanctuary where Wexton became beguiled by baboons, and Mr. Gopal, by then
a disciple, caught up with us.

  “Very brave man, your distinguished godfather,” he remarked to me as Wexton fixed the baboons with a benign gaze. “These creatures give a very nasty bite.” From the baboon sanctuary to the beaches of Goa, from Goa to Udaipur; from there, with numerous side visits to temples, fortresses, and railway stations, we returned to Delhi.

  The pace was frenetic, which cheered Wexton enormously.

  “Just what we need,” he would say, settling back in another compartment in yet another train. “New places. New faces. Something’s bound to happen eventually.”

  Something did, of course, once I’d been to see Mr. Chatterjee—but neither of us knew that then. I would embark on a very different kind of journey. I had been preparing for it, I think, for some time, without being aware of it. My uncle Steenie, and certain things he had said to me when he was dying—things that alarmed me—had pushed me closer to the journey. But it was Mr. Chatterjee who provided the final impetus.

  Wexton, when he discovered my intentions, resisted. It was a mistake, he said, to explore the past—that was dangerous territory. He was being evasive, and we both knew why. My past involved Winterscombe (that was fine, Wexton said, though he was wrong). It also involved New York, where I grew up (that was all right, too, provided I did not dwell on the question of a certain man, still living there). Finally, it involved another godparent, in this case a woman. In this case, Constance.

  Constance’s name was one Wexton now refused to pronounce. She was his antithesis, of course, and I think he had never liked her. Wexton disliked very few people, and if he did dislike them, he preferred not to discuss them, since he was devoid of malice.

  I had once heard him, in discussion with Steenie (who adored Constance) describe her as a she-devil. Such intemperate language from Wexton was exceptional—and it was never repeated. When I was to tell him of my visit to Mr. Chatterjee and the decision I had reached, Wexton never once used her name, although I knew she was uppermost in his thoughts. He became, for him, very gloomy.

  “I wish I’d never listened to Gopal,” he said. (Or was it the Maharani?) “I might have known it would be a mistake.” He fixed me with a pleading gaze. “Think a little, Victoria. One hundred rupees on it, any bet you like: Chatterjee’s a charlatan.”

  I knew then how keen Wexton was to convince me. He was not a betting man.

  Mr. Chatterjee did not look like a charlatan. It had to be said, he did not look like a fortuneteller either. He was a small man of about forty, wearing a clean nylon shirt and freshly pressed tan pants. His shoes gleamed; his hair oil gleamed. He had confiding brown eyes of great gentleness; he spoke English with an accent inherited from the days of the Raj, the kind of accent that, in England itself, had been out-of-date in 1940.

  His shop, compared to that of some of his rivals in the bazaar, was difficult to find and self-effacing. Over its entrance was a painting on cardboard of a crescent moon and seven stars. A small hand-lettered sign said: THE PAST AND THE FUTURE—RUPEES 12.50. This was followed by an exclamation mark, perhaps to emphasize Mr. Chatterjee’s bargain rates; his rivals were charging upward of rupees 15.

  Inside, Mr. Chatterjee’s premises were austere. There was no attempt to evoke the mysterious Orient. There was one elderly desk, two clerk’s chairs, a metal filing cabinet, and, on the wall, two poster portraits. One was of the present Queen of England, the other of Mahatma Gandhi; they were fixed to the wall with tacks.

  The room smelled of the pastry shop next door and, slightly, of sandalwood. There was a multicolored plastic fly-curtain across a doorway, and from beyond that came the sound of sitar music played on a gramophone. The room resembled the bolt-hole of some minor civil servant, perhaps a railway official—and I had seen many of those the past weeks. Mr. Chatterjee sat down behind his desk and assembled charts. He gave me an encouraging nod and a smile. I was not encouraged. Mr. Chatterjee looked amiable, but as a fortuneteller he did not inspire confidence.

  Not at first. Mr. Chatterjee took his task very seriously; it was lengthy, and at some point—I am still not quite sure when—he began to win me over. It was when he touched my hands, I think. Yes, probably then. Mr. Chatterjee’s touch, cool, dispassionate, like that of a doctor, had an odd quality. It made me a little giddy—a tipsy feeling, the kind you get when you drink a glass of wine on an empty stomach and finish it too quickly.

  I cannot now remember all the details of his routine, but it was both fluent and curiously moving. Herbs were involved—I remember that, for my palms were rubbed with a pungent substance, during which there was much discussion of birthplaces (Winterscombe) and birth dates (1930).

  The stars were involved, too—that was where the charts came in. Mr. Chatterjee examined the charts closely; he put on a pair of spectacles. He drew linking patterns of lucid beauty, joining destinies and planets with a lead pencil that kept breaking. These patterns seemed to displease Mr. Chatterjee; more than that—they seemed to perturb him.

  “I am seeing a date. It is 1910,” he said, and shook his head. He prodded one particular area of that chart, an area that was beginning to resemble a freeway intersection.

  As he prodded, Mr. Chatterjee paled. He seemed unwilling to proceed.

  “What else do you see?” I prompted.

  Mr. Chatterjee did not answer.

  “Bad things?”

  “Not too nice. Oh dear, no. Most definitely not.” He resharpened his pencil. The sitar music stopped, then, after a pause, continued. Mr. Chatterjee seemed to have dozed off—his eyes were closed—or possibly he was transfixed by his 1910 intersection.

  “Mr. Chatterjee,” I said gently, “that’s twenty years before I was born.”

  “A blink.” Mr. Chatterjee opened his eyes. “Twenty years is a blink. A century is a second. However … I think we will be moving on. Try a new tack.”

  He bundled up the charts with an air of relief. He replaced them in the metal filing cabinet and locked it. Once the chart was out of sight he seemed cheered. For the second stage of his routine, gold dust would be employed—at least he said it was gold dust.

  “If you would be so good. Please to close your eyes and consider most seriously those who are dear to you.”

  I closed my eyes and I tried. The sitar music scratched. A powdery substance was sprinkled against my eyelids and my cheeks. A lilting incantation began, in Hindi.

  I felt hot. The dizziness increased. My mind began to track off in directions I would never have predicted. When the incantation came to an end and I opened my eyes, the gold dust was being carefully brushed back into its container, an ancient tin for Navy Cut tobacco. Mr. Chatterjee gave me a sad look.

  “I am seeing two women,” he said. “One is close, the other very far away. I am telling myself that you will have to choose between them.”

  He then told my fortune in some detail. His account of my past was unnervingly accurate. His account of my future was too roseate to be likely. He ended by telling me I was about to make a journey.

  I was disappointed by that. I had begun to like Mr. Chatterjee. I had almost begun to believe in him. I became afraid he would move on to speak of tall dark strangers, voyages across water. I would have hated that; I did not want him to be tawdry.

  A journey? I made journeys all the time. My work as an interior decorator meant I was always on the move, to the next house, the next commission, the next country. One week from now I would return to England. The next job was in France, the one after it in Italy. Was that the kind of journey Mr. Chatterjee meant? Then I hesitated. There were other kinds of journeys.

  Mr. Chatterjee sensed that momentary skepticism, I think. He gave me an apologetic and gentle smile, as if my disbelief were his fault and not mine. He took my hands between his. He lifted them to my face.

  “Sniff,” he said, as if this would explain everything. “Smell.”

  I sniffed. The pungent substance rubbed on my palms was volatile. It contained oils, but also alcohol. The warmth of
the room and of my skin released scents even more pungent than before. I sniffed, and I smelled India. I smelled crescent moons, honey and sandalwood, henna and sweat, affluence and poverty.

  “Concentrate. To see, you must first close the eyes.”

  I inhaled again, eyes tight shut. I smelled … Winterscombe. Damp and woodsmoke, leather chairs and long corridors, linen and lavender, happiness and cordite. I smelled childhood; my father and my mother.

  “Concentrate. Again.”

  Mr. Chatterjee’s grip on my palms tightened; a tremor passed through them. The scent in my nostrils was now unmistakable. I smelled the fresh greenness of ferns, then a ranker, more assertive undertone, musk and civet. Only one person I had ever known used that particular scent, and to me it was as individual as a fingerprint. I dropped my hands. I smelled Constance.

  I think Mr. Chatterjee knew my distress, for he was then very kind to me. He talked me down. Then, with the air of a priest in the confessional—or, indeed, a railway official untangling a complex timetable—he gave me one final piece of advice. He told me to go back.

  “Go back where? Go back when?” Wexton said mournfully over dinner that night.

  “I’m not sure yet,” I said. “But I know the route, and so do you.”

  The next day I wrote to her. When I received no reply—that did not surprise me; she had not replied when Steenie asked for her and I cabled—I changed my flight plan.

  A week later Wexton flew back to England alone. I flew halfway around the globe to New York, and to that other godparent of mine, Constance.

  Constance made me. I could say she brought me up, for that was true, since I went to her as a child and remained in her care for more than twenty years, but Constance’s influence upon me was deeper than that. I regarded her as a mother, a mentor, an inspiration, a challenge, and a friend. A dangerous combination, perhaps—but then, Constance herself radiated danger, as the many men who suffered at her hands could have told you. Danger was the essence of her charm.