by Anita Desai
That, sadly, was what happened. By the time the cool evenings and the early dark of November came around, Diamond was clearly champing at the bit: his howls echoed through sleepy Bharti Nagar, and neighbours pulled their quilts over their heads and huddled into their pillows, trying to block out the abominable noise. Mrs Das complained of the way he rattled his chain as he paced up and down the enclosed courtyard, and once again the garbage collectors, the postmen, the electric and telephone linesmen were menaced and threatened. Only Mr Das worried, ‘He’s gone off his food. Look, he’s left his dinner uneaten again.’
Inevitably the day came when he returned from work and was faced by an angrily triumphant Mrs Das bursting to tell him the news. ‘Didn’t I tell you that dog was planning badmashi again? When the gate was opened to let the gas man bring in the cylinder, your beloved pet knocked him down, jumped over his head and vanished!’
The nights were chilly. With a woollen cap pulled down over his ears, and his tight short jacket buttoned up, Mr Das did his rounds in the dark, calling hoarsely till his throat rasped. He felt he was coming down with the flu, but he would not give up, he would not leave Diamond to the dire fate Mrs Das daily prophesied for him. A kind of mist enveloped the city streets – whether it was due to the dust, the exhaust of tired, snarled traffic or the cold, one could not tell, but the trees and hedges loomed like phantoms, the street-lamps were hazy, he imagined he saw Diamond when there was no dog there, and he was filled with a foreboding he would not confess to Mrs Das who waited for him at home with cough mixture, hot water and another muffler. ‘Give him up,’ she counselled grimly. ‘Give him up before this search kills you.’
But when tragedy struck, it did so in broad daylight, in the bright sunshine of a winter Sunday, and so there were many witnesses, many who saw the horrific event clearly, so clearly it could not be brushed aside as a nightmare. Mr Das was on the road back from Khan Market where he had gone to buy vegetables for Mrs Das, when the dog-catcher’s van passed down the road with its howling, yelping catch of hounds peering out through the barred window. Of course Mr Das’s head jerked back, his chin trembled with alertness, with apprehension, his eyes snapped with rage when he saw his pet enclosed there, wailing as he was being carried to his doom.
‘Diamond! They will kill my Diamond!’ passersby heard him shriek in a voice unrecognizably high and sharp, and they saw the small man in his tight brown coat, his woollen cap and muffler, dash down his market bag into the dust, and chase the van with a speed no one would have thought possible. He sprang at its retreating back, hanging there from the bars for a horrid moment, and, as the van first braked, then jerked forward again, fell, fell backwards, onto his back, so that his head struck the stones in the street, and he lay there, entirely still, making no sound or movement at all.
Behind the bars of the window receding into the distance, Diamond glittered like a dead coal, or a black star, in daylight’s blaze.
Underground
In that small town, clustered around and above the bay, every third house was a boarding house, while hotels were strung out along the promenade, stolidly gloomy all through the year except in summer when wet bathing suits hung out over every windowsill and sunburnt children raced screaming across the strip of melting asphalt and onto the shining sands, magnetized by the glittering, slithering metal of summer seas. Sand dunes, dune grass, shells, streams trickling across the beach, creating gulleys, valleys and estuaries in exquisite miniature and shades of purple, sienna and puce. Boat sails, surf boards, waves, foam, debris and light. Fish and chips, ice-cream cones, bouncy castles, spades, striped windbreakers. ‘Where can I pee-pee? I have to pee-pee!’ ‘Spot, come away! Come away, Spot!’ ‘I’ve cut my foot! Ooh, look, boo-ooh!’ And a hinterland of blackberry bushes, rabbit warrens, golf links, hedged meadows, whitewashed, slate-roofed farmhouses – and the motorway flowing all summer with a droning, steady stream of holidaymakers baking in their beetle-backed cars.
The White House Hotel alone appeared to take no part in this summer bacchanal. Summer and winter, spring and autumn, it remained the same: an immaculate whitewashed cottage built of Cornish stone, with a slate roof, red geraniums in green windowboxes, and wrought-iron gates shut to the road. Not exactly the kind of place you hoped to find when you came to the seaside – it was not far from the sea, true, but had no view of it. Instead, it looked out onto the long, low hills, their green downs speckled with the white fluffballs of grazing sheep, in their hollows the kind of woods that sheltered streams, bluebells, yellow flags and dragonflies. Pretty enough, but not providing that sense of being at the seaside which was what you came to this little town for, a hellish drive in August.
Jack Higgins turned to his wife who had fallen silent and begun to take on a somewhat overbaked look. They had been imprisoned for far too long in that small, overheated car. ‘What d’you think, Meg? Will it do?’
She shrugged her roasted shoulders under the thin straps of her yellow checked sun dress (it had looked very much crisper that morning when he had slipped his hands under those straps, heard them snap against her skin). ‘It’ll have to, won’t it. There’s no room anywhere else.’
That was true: they had already tried the hotels along the promenade, the houses clustered around the bay with their B & B signs. Every one had turned them away with the message: No Vacancy. It had taken them an hour to explore the possibilities and accept the inevitable.
‘Can’t we stop for a drink?’ she had asked at regular intervals, like a querulous child, and as time wound on, it had turned to ‘What about supper then? If we stopped for a bite, we could go further—’
But he had had enough of driving for the day. They had come a long way: it had been the hottest day of summer so far, and he would not tolerate another hour in that roasting oven of a car if he could help it. What he wanted was not a drink or a bite but a cool, shadowed room, a wash, a change and a rest. He knew that was what she needed too, even if she would not admit it.
So he compromised. He had pulled up outside a shop in town, hung about with rubber balls, flip-flops, spades and pails, and went in to enquire: in a town as small as this, surely everyone would know where there might still be a vacancy.
He was right: the woman selling fudge and postcards at the counter, once she had finished with the family demanding her attention and sent them off happily licking their lollies (four different flavours for four different children), asked, ‘And what can I do for you, sir?’ then launched into a description of every boarding house, bed-and-breakfast establishment and hotel in the vicinity. Jack could not see the point of so much information since every one, she assured him, was full. ‘On a Sunday in August as hot as this, you get trippers by the millions,’ she boasted, and watched him wilt and mop his neck with smiling satisfaction.
‘So there’s nothing? D’you think we might do better down the coast?’ he queried bleakly, and found himself eyeing, with envy, a ginger-haired boy who materialized at his side, licking a lime-green ice.
Quite unexpectedly, and also eyeing the ginger-haired child and his dripping ice, though not with envy, she said, ‘You might try the White House up the road that way. That’s usually empty.’
‘How far—?’
‘Just round the corner, up from here, five minutes,’ she said, and wiped her counter clean, defying the boy to touch it. He turned away but his place was taken by a group of young girls in tight, revealing jeans and doll-sized T-shirts. She gave them a testy look, her head waggling.
He wanted to ask her why she had not told him earlier of the one place that might be vacant, and how it was that a hotel so close to the coast could have a vacancy, but after opening his mouth he closed it again – two young girls with painted mouths and eyes were combing through a case containing lipsticks, and the woman loomed across to guard it.
He went out into the sizzling blaze of light reflected off the sea and sand to his car and wife, twisting the key chain around his finger.
Much as
he yearned for the quiet and shade of exactly such a place in exactly such a green glade, he hesitated before turning into the driveway lined with neatly clipped conifers and evergreens. Slipping into the car park where the only other vehicle was a green Land-Rover, he turned off the engine rather thoughtfully before slipping out. ‘Coming?’ he asked his wife, bending in. ‘Go and ask,’ she told him sulkily, and it was clear this was not the kind of place she had had in mind.
Something made Jack run his hand over his hair, almost nervously smoothing it down, then glance down at his midriff to make sure his shirt was tucked in, before he crossed the car park and climbed the white stone steps between pots full of fuchsias to the front door. As he put his hand out to press the shining brass doorbell, he glanced upwards: something had caught his eye – the slight movement of a white muslin curtain upstairs. Someone had been holding it aside, watching him, and now let it drop.
Bob McTaggart turned away from the window, knowing he had been seen. He would have to go downstairs and open the door. He padded softly down the corridor, his footfall silenced by the grey carpeting. On either side of the corridor, doors stood shut. He glanced at each, at the number painted in blue on the central white panel, between the frosted glass ones: 4, 5, 6, 7. At the end of the corridor, on the landing, there was a small table with a bowl of dried flowers on it, and above it a mirror. He stood and stared at the reflection of the flowers in the mirror which had a blue frame decorated with sea shells. On its slippery surface, behind the solid form of the vase and the splayed stars of the papery flowers, there was a grey shape – his. He could only stare at the middle of it for so long, then he had to glance up, meet his own eye. Almost at once he glanced away, and went quickly down the stairs, to the corridor below. This was carpeted in blue, and its doors stood shut, too: 1, 2, 3. He passed them as if he were swimming by, with slow strokes of his legs, up to the front door. He felt the familiar response to the doorbell rising up his chest which was constricted, making air passage hard. He wanted to shout – and he was afraid he might – ‘No! Go away! Go!’ when he opened the door.
He stood with his hand on the doorknob – wooden, smooth, sensible – fighting back those words as he had done the first time they had had guests come looking for a room. He had just brought Helen back from the clinic that day, where she had had her check-up. He had been putting her to bed, filling a hot-water bottle, fetching her an extra blanket – warm as the night was, she was shivering – when a car turned in at the gate: it was a family of holidaymakers, the first ones of their first season as managers of the White House Hotel. Exactly what they had prepared for and waited for, and now there they were: the children hugging their bedtime dolls and blankets, the parents large and hopeful on the doorstep, impossible to turn away. He had been obliged to get a key from the office, open one of the shut doors into a pristine room for which Helen had chosen the curtains, the counterpane, the ruffles. The children bounded onto the bed, trying out its springs. The father wondered if anyone would give him a hand with the luggage, and the mother asked for a meal. He was flustered, he needed Helen, and she was lying in their room, on the other side of the living room, waiting for the hot-water bottle and the blanket he had promised her. But he needed to calm these people first, stop their invading the house any further. He thought that if he fed them, they would go away, retreat into their room, shut the door and leave him alone.
In the kitchen he bumped into tables and counters while opening cupboards, taking out bread, eggs, ham, cans of baked beans. He cut his finger on the can, blood ran into the tomato sauce as in a manic comedy show. He wiped both onto the clean teatowels. He and Helen had meant to take cooking lessons together: they had seen an advertisement, and enrolled – but there hadn’t been time, and now all he could do was toast some bread, put baked beans on the toast, eggs in hot water, and he was failing.
While the toast burnt, the baked beans bubbled, sizzled and then subsided into a black crust in the pot, eggs split and oozed their gelid whites into the boiling water, he was reminded of the night when he had been the invader, the stranger, in another scene of confusion, chaos – strangely attractive – the night he had arrived in some desert outpost in Iraq where he was to spend three months, installing pipelines.
His firm had only just won the contract and he was the first to be sent out. They had told him there was an hotel near the airport where he was to stay till they built accommodation for all the engineers who were to follow. The airport had turned out to be a strip of tarmac laid across the sand which was quickly reclaiming it even as the small plane taxied down towards the long low barracks – he looked out to see it scurrying in busy wisps to overlay it. A windsock flapped in the hot white wind like a domestic flag. A man in orange overalls stood waving his two small flags at the pilot, a chequered scarf draped around his head and mouth. With a marvellous dramatic note, the sun, as orange as his clothing, but spherical and not oblong, was setting in a haze that surrounded him forebodingly.
In the barracks the Iraqi liaison officer met him with gold-toothed enthusiasm and insisted on carrying his bag, expressing surprise at its lightness and singleness, he could not tell with what sincerity. Tossing it into the jeep that waited outside, he had taken Bob McTaggart across what seemed an immense parking lot, already overlaid by the blowing sand, to another barracks, half-buried under the grains that had whirled through the air.
That was the hotel – hostel – whatever one might call it. It was clear it had few guests, if any. In fact, the doors stood open and its lobby was deserted as though, newly constructed as it might be, it was already abandoned. The manager, who was eventually summoned from some region beyond, led him down a corridor to his room. On either side there were metal doors, shut, numbers painted on them: 1, 2, 3 and so on. McTaggart pleaded travel fatigue as an excuse to decline the liaison officer’s invitation to an evening’s entertainment, then looked through the door opened for him and saw that although there was a wooden bedstead in the room allotted him, it was hardly prepared to receive a guest: the mattress had no sheets to cover it, only a blanket that looked like army surplus. A single unshaded light bulb hung from a cord to which flies had adhered themselves as though it were a candystick. On the discoloured wall a gecko clucked its displeasure at this intrusion. In the bathroom there was a plastic bucket and a tap but no drop of water. Yet the cistern above the toilet was stained with rust. At least it stank of hygiene – lysol, or phenyle, in quantities.
As darkness closed in, mosquitoes sailed in through the windows unimpeded because, although they were covered with wire gauze, the frames had wide cracks. He spent the evening lying on the mattress, trying to read the thriller he had bought at the airport for the trip. Then suddenly the generator stopped grinding – he had not even been aware that there was a generator till it did so – and the light went out, darkness whipped across like a blindfold. He wondered how he would get through that night: it promised to be very, very long.
Then, in no time at all – or so it seemed – the dark thinned into grey and the uncurtained window framed a new day, pale with sand. He was cold. He sat up and lifted the blanket about his shoulders. His mouth was dry, his throat scratched, and he felt he could not do without some hot water. He must get some hot water. None came from the tap so he went out into the corridor, huddled in his blanket, searching for the manager to help. The barracks – hotel, hostel – was as empty as the night before. McTaggart blundered into what was clearly meant to be a dining room – it had tables covered with tablecloths on which flies clustered and crowded, and chairs with red Rexine seats. The only sign that meals had ever been served here were the plastic salt cellars, the bottles of ketchup, and the stains on the once-white cloths to which the flies adhered.
Seeing a swing door at the far end, he went out through it and found himself on a veranda looking across at a cluster of outhouses. They had to be inhabited: he saw a curl of smoke rise from a small fire. Standing there in the half-light, wrapped in his blanket,
he could make out figures huddled around it. Eventually the fire flared up – it was just made of a few sticks in a tin bucket – and he saw by its light a woman who had slipped off her bodice from one shoulder and was nursing an infant at her breast. Beside her a man squatted with his head thrown back and his teeth bared in laughter as he clapped his hands: a small girl was dancing before them, in a red dress too long for her so that its waist hugged her knees and its hem swung at her feet, while her curls tumbled about her face and she struck her bare feet on the earth, swaying her small hips to the rhythm of her father’s clapping.
He stared at them: the woman with her bosom bared for the infant wrapped in her shawl, the man’s teeth and moustache and lips and eyes that glittered with laughter and love, and the small girl, her legs, feet and curls swinging to inaudible music. Shrouded in the dust and dimness of day before dawn, intermittently and sporadically illuminated by the small flames shooting up from the bucket, they had about them a quality so fragile, so immaterial and implausible that it could have been a mirage, a dream – a dream he might have had, in fact, of how life should be, how it might be, if it were different, and closer to what he so passionately, in such a rush of overheated blood, wished it were.
‘Hello!’ he shouted.
The child ceased to dance, the woman hastily lowered her blouse, the man rose from his haunches in a flurry. Even the fire seemed to waver and go out. McTaggart, shocked at the dramatic effect his voice had had, wondered why he had shouted, why he had broken the fine glass pane of the mirage, and he wished he could withdraw, but the man was hurrying through the whirling dust towards him while the others in the tableau were receding into it. It was the manager, also huddled in a blanket, his face enquiring, and bewildered by the appearance of this intruder.
