A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  ‘We’ll pick something up on the way home,’ Rita said. ‘That chicken barbecue place is open till after midnight.’

  She went out to get both their coats, leaving the two men alone. She took a moment to fix her hair in the mirror on the hallstand – standing there listening for what they might be saying to each other. But she heard nothing. When she returned, Kris was putting on his shoes, ready for departure, and trying to prevent Nathan from kneeling down to help him.

  Next day Rita didn’t leave for her job. She spent the day alone in their apartment – that ugly little place, with a hole of a kitchen in which she often had to kill cockroaches (Kris couldn’t kill anything) and occasionally mice, well fed from the restaurant downstairs. Although she wished they could have afforded better accommodation, she didn’t really mind and neither did Kris; they were used to shabby places and never contrasted them unfavourably with the way people like Nathan lived.

  But now Kris said he wanted them to move. This was while they were eating the little meal she had cooked for the two of them. ‘Is that your idea?’ she asked, putting down her knife and fork. She ate in a very nice way, the English way, and she had taught him to do the same.

  ‘Well, it’s Nathan’s actually, but I think so too. I mean, look what happened last night, it’s ridiculous and I feel stupid, falling asleep like that, on the sofa . . . ’

  ‘You want us to move in with Nathan?’ When he was silent, she said: ‘Did he come to see you at the store today?’

  ‘He came to take me out to lunch. He sends you his love and hopes your cold is better – I had to tell him that, you know, to explain why you stayed home.’ He blushed, ashamed to have resorted to a lie on her behalf. It made him the more determined to be absolutely candid with her: ‘I think Nathan’s right, and it’d be much more convenient for everyone—’

  ‘For him?’

  ‘Yes, and for you and me. You and I?’ he queried, for she was careful of his grammar, also of his accent which she had carefully pruned of any influence from the immigrant and other poor London children he had gone to school with.

  ‘You and me is all right. But aren’t you and I – see, here it’s the subject, see the difference? – aren’t we leaving, going back home?’

  ‘Rita, Rita,’ he reproached her.

  Both got up though they hadn’t quite finished eating. He began to clear the dishes, and when she tried to help him, he said, ‘No, don’t – you must be tired.’

  ‘From what? From my cold? . . . I don’t see why you had to tell him a lie. Why couldn’t you say straight out that we’re leaving? That’s no secret. I told him long ago; he should have got used to the idea by now.’

  They had been there before: whenever she had to get him away from someone who was laying too large a claim on him. Each time he had resisted – always because he couldn’t understand what it was she had against that person. ‘But he’s so kind,’ he would argue. ‘Such a good friend.’ She invented every kind of calumny against this friend, and though he made no pretence of believing her, he gave in to her – for her sake, because he saw how unhappy she was. But this time, with Nathan, he didn’t argue; he said nothing.

  Rita no longer went to work for Nathan and he made no attempt to call her back. She rarely went out but stayed alone all day, pounded by street and kitchen noises from below. The telephone stood dumb. No one called her, and she refrained from calling the only person she wanted to talk to because she knew Kris was embarrassed to be called at work. But he came home to her every night and was as frank as ever about his activities. So she learned that Nathan, though frantically busy, came punctually every day to take Kris out during his lunch break. She was also fully informed what they talked about – the film of course, and how Nathan was still trying to persuade them to give up their apartment and move into his. Kris continued to think this a good idea. ‘He says you can have his mother’s room – it’s so pretty and gets the morning sun.’ The third time he said this, Rita put her hands over her ears. Then he quietly dropped the subject, and next day he told Nathan to drop it too.

  ‘He was so nice about it,’ Kris told Rita. ‘He said if that’s the way Rita feels, it’s all right, we’ll do exactly what she wants.’

  ‘We? Who’s we?’

  ‘Oh gosh, Rita,’ he said but smiling. ‘You and I of course.’

  ‘That’s right: you and I,’ she said, determined, grim.

  It was easy for Nathan to let go of that plan because now he and Kris were discussing their location scout. This too Kris reported to Rita: how they would go to all the places where the film was to be shot. Lebanon, Jordan, the Holy Land – ‘Rita, imagine!’ She realised that this situation was not like the others from which she had had to disengage him, because this time she had come up not only against a person – not only Nathan, or even his film, or all the exotic ancient countries of their itinerary – but against Kris himself: that place in him to which neither she nor anyone had access.

  She said, ‘What about me?’ in a voice she made small and weak, though ashamed of using this tactic.

  His reaction was instantaneous. ‘You? But you’re coming with us!’

  She said she was going back to London. She wanted to sound positive, unyielding, but knew she didn’t because she wasn’t. She was pliant with supplication, needing all his love for her. He knelt to put his arms around her waist, his head in her lap. He begged her not to go – but he did not say that he would go with her nor, if she didn’t change her plan, that he would change one iota of his.

  Next day just before his lunch break, she went to see Kris at the men’s store. The place was hushed and sacred with good taste; beautiful young salesmen stood discreetly at the sides, waiting to be selected by one of the customers who entered with the air of hunters on the scent of new attire. Rita felt like an intruder – she was one, but although Kris was engaged in selling a cravat, bestowing his grace and courtesy on his client, he took a second off to reassure her with a flick of his smiling eyes.

  He did the same to Nathan when he came in; and Nathan greeted Rita warmly and consulted her on the potential purchase of an Italian robe. She gave her advice, not reminding him how he had quite recently bought one from Kris; and when they left for lunch, it was taken for granted that she would be of their party.

  Obviously they were expected – their table was ready, and a third place was quickly added. It was a famous restaurant, overburdened with decorations as luxurious as the gateaux and soufflés being wheeled around on carts. It was the favourite lunch resort for ranking people in the film industry: top agents and studio executives just flown in from the Coast. The seating hierarchy was as strictly observed as at a court, or in their offices; the upholstered booths along the sides belonged to the top echelons, that is, those with ultimate decision over the cash flow. As an independent producer, Nathan rated a table within shouting distance of the royal booths. A lot of shouting did go on, from table to table, not for actual communication but as proof that one knew and was known. It also mattered how many and who stopped to chat at whose table, and how loudly everyone laughed; for the conversation consisted of joshing and joking, as in a locker room. They were mostly men – the older ones short and stocky like Nathan, the younger ones smooth, tall and blond, hand-fed on vitamins. There were a few women who told scatological jokes and knocked back Bloody Marys. There was the occasional famous face – an actor being entertained by his agent – and once a very famous actress wafted her way along a row of tables, tall under an immensely tall hairdo, as effulgent as the sun and wearing the self-effacing smile of someone who could never be effaced.

  Nathan greeted, shouted, played the game along with the rest; but what was going on at their table for three was of a different order. Although it was an actual journey he was proposing to Rita and Kris, in using the antique names – Aleppo, Smyrna, Adrianople – he conjured up their past with ships in their harbours and the sultan at his court; and from there he penetrated into the heart of their ghetto
s, which was also the heart of his film, where devout shopkeepers felt a stirring of the soul that told them the Messiah was coming.

  ‘He was coming,’ Nathan said, pointing at Kris, who lowered his eyes and smiled in a charmingly deprecating way.

  ‘He’s not an actor,’ Rita repeated stubbornly.

  ‘Nobody would believe an actor,’ Nathan said.

  ‘But they’d believe him?’

  ‘They’d believe in him,’ Nathan answered her. He leaned forward and spoke in the intimate, passionate way he used whenever he wanted to fire financiers up about his project. Now it was to Rita that he described the lives of the believers, humble, despised, persecuted, forced to practise their faith in secret – and then, in their darkest hour, that promise, whispered from shop to shop and alley to alley, that the Redeemer was on his way.

  ‘People want to see him. They need to see him,’ Nathan said.

  ‘Who do you mean? Kris? Or the character in your film?’

  Just then someone beckoned to Nathan, who, excusing himself, got up to join him. It was an actors’ agent, in the process of negotiating a contract with Nathan for a client; but now he had called him to tell him the latest joke that was making the rounds of the studios about a recently fired executive. When they had finished laughing, Nathan directed the other’s attention towards Kris.

  The agent looked, appreciated. He said, ‘Who’s his agent?’

  Nathan said, ‘You are.’

  Left alone for a moment of privacy, Kris and Rita exchanged – not words, not even glances, they didn’t have to do that. Kris was fully alive to her doubts and fears and wanted only to still them. ‘It’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘It’ll be fun, Rita. A fun trip.’

  But what she surmised in him had nothing to do with a fun trip. She realised that whatever Nathan believed, or pretended to, Kris truly believed.

  ‘I can’t do this without you. It’s a big job, Rita. A terrific responsibility – I mean, all these people.’ He waved his slender hand around the restaurant, indicating to her all that gross luxury and the sinners in it making deals. ‘I’ve got to help them because, you see, really in their hearts they want something different; like they’re waiting for it; like they’ve been promised.’

  She had never seen him so worked up. He was fervent, inspired – not from outside, but as from that inner source that had, up till now, remained secret and hidden. He was pleading with her: ‘I can’t let them down, Rita.’

  She kissed his cheek (it was burning). She didn’t understand or believe in his mission, but she knew that she had to be by his side for whatever it was he felt called upon to do. She persuaded herself that she was necessary to him, that he needed her. But really she knew it was the other way around, and that it was she who needed him, just as much as did all the others who so passionately desired him. She already surmised that soon these would no longer be counted as individuals but in their tens of thousands. This was confirmed for her when Nathan and the agent joined them, each of them laying a hand on Kris’s shoulders, each of them smiling – as delicately reverent as though touching a golden idol capable of fulfilling every promise, every wish.

  Pagans

  Brigitte: calm, large-limbed and golden as a pagan goddess, she loved to lie spreadeagled on the beach or by her swimming pool, in communication with the sun. Los Angeles had been good to her. When she was young, at the time of her marriage, she had been a successful model. Her husband, Louis Morgenstern, was a small wizened shrewd little man, thirty years older than herself but a studio head, a powerful producer, a very rich man. It had been a relief for her to give up her career. She preferred to swim, to sunbathe, to give dinner parties for Louis (studded with stars but as dull, in their different way, as those her sister Frances gave in New York for her banker husband); also to travel in Europe and occasionally take lovers – wry intellectuals who taught her what to read and confirmed her contempt for the sorts of films made by the studios, including her husband’s.

  Her sister Frances had been very sceptical about the marriage to Louis. She was wrong. In spite of the lovers – kept secret, discreet – it lasted almost thirty years and so did Brigitte’s respect and liking for her husband. While Frances had married conventionally within their own circle settled in the US for several generations, Louis was the first in his family to be born here and still had a grandmother who spoke no English. Frances and her husband Marshall were ashamed of what they considered their sister’s misalliance. They felt themselves to tower over Louis and his family – socially of course, culturally, and physically too, as was clear at the wedding when tiny Morgensterns scurried among the lofty trees of bankers and real estate developers. Afterwards Marshall joked about the ill-matched couple and how Brigitte would be crushing Louis on their wedding night between her mighty thighs.

  Brigitte was in her fifties when Louis died, and Frances, for whom Los Angeles was a wasteland, said, ‘Now perhaps you’ll come back to civilisation.’ Brigitte sold her house – the Hollywood mansion of indoor and outdoor pools, patios and screening rooms – while Frances searched for a suitable apartment in New York for her. Meanwhile Brigitte moved into a suite in a hotel, and although Frances found one Upper East Side apartment and then another, all close to herself and Marshall, Brigitte kept making excuses not to move into them. She liked Los Angeles; unlike New York, it was lightweight and undemanding. From one hotel window, she could see pretty houses frail as plywood scattered over the wooded hillside. From another, she had a view over the city of Los Angeles spread flat as far as the horizon; at night it was transformed into a field of shimmering flickering glow-worms fenced by the cut-out silhouettes of high-rise buildings. And the trees – the tall straight palm trees with their sparse foliage brushing a sky that was sometimes Renaissance blue and sometimes silver with pollution but all day held the sun to pour down on the ocean, the golden beach and Brigitte herself, past menopause but still golden and firm in her designer swimsuit, and pads on her large smooth lids luxuriantly shut.

  Frances was getting impatient. I suppose she has a new lover out there, she thought to herself; and she said it to Brigitte over the phone: ‘Who is it now, another of those foreigners filling your head with clever rubbish.’

  Brigitte laughed; she had always laughed at Frances’s disapproval, whether it was of Louis, of her lovers or of her indolence. Brigitte still had male friends – she needed them to tell her what to read – but she had long since reached a stage where she could admit that sex was boring for her. With Louis, she had enjoyed sitting beside him while he explained their stocks and shares and other holdings to her. By the time he died, he had been ill for some years but was only semi-retired, for his successors at the studio continued to need his experience and his financial clout. Twice a year he and Brigitte still gave their dinner parties where the agents and the money men mixed with the stars. Louis had little respect for most of the stars; he mocked their pretensions and perversions, their physical beauty which he said was the work of plastic surgeons and monkey glands. After each dinner party and the departure of the famous guests, he kissed Brigitte in gratitude for what she was: full-figured and naturally tanned, almost Nordic, God knew how and it was not only the hairdresser and the beautician. Louis had grown-up children from a previous marriage, and when it turned out that Brigitte couldn’t have any, he was glad, wanting to keep her perfect, unmarred. Actually, Brigitte was not sorry either; she didn’t think she had time for children. Frances said anyway she was too slothful and untidy ever to be able to bring them up. Frances had untold trouble with her own now grown-up son and daughter, who had gone the unstable way of the young and too rich.

  Two years after selling her house, Brigitte was still in Los Angeles. By this time she had met Shoki, a young Indian, and an interesting relationship had developed. It may have appeared a classic case of older woman with impoverished young immigrant, but that was not the way it was at all. It was true that he was young, very young; it was also true that he was poor, insofar as
he had no money, but the word impoverished was inapplicable. He had the refinement of someone born rich – not so much in money as in inherited culture. This expressed itself in him physically in fine features and limbs; culturally in his manners, his almost feminine courtesy; and spiritually – so Brigitte liked to think – in his eyes, as of a soul that yearned for higher being. These eyes were often downcast, the lashes brushing his cheeks, for he was shy – out of modesty not lack of confidence. As far as confidence was concerned, he reposed as on a rock of ancestral privilege, so that it never mattered to him that he had to take all kinds of lowly jobs to keep himself going. Brigitte had met him while he was doing valet parking at her hotel; he had been filling in for another boy and left after a few weeks to work in a restaurant, again filling in for someone else. There were always these jobs available in a shifting population of unemployed or temporarily unemployed actors and other aspirants to film and television careers.

  He himself wanted to become a writer-director, which was why he was here so far from home. He informed Brigitte that film was the medium of expression for his generation – he said it as though it were an idea completely original to himself. He carried a very bulky manuscript from agent to agent, or rather to their secretaries, and was always ready to read from it. Encouraged by Brigitte, he sat in her suite and read to her, while she watched rather than listened to him. Maybe it was all nonsense; but maybe it wasn’t, or no more than the films on which Louis had grown so immensely rich; and she wanted him to be successful, so that he wouldn’t go away, or wouldn’t sink along with the other young people for whom he filled in on an endless round of temporary jobs.

  She introduced him to Ralph, who had started off as a producer and now had his own talent agency. He had often been among her and Louis’s guests, the powerful locals who had been their friends or had considered themselves so. Actually, some of them had made a pass at her – as who did not, even when she had been beyond the age when any woman could have expected it. Usually she laughed at them, and the one she had laughed at the most had been Ralph: ‘Come on, you don’t mean it.’ Finally he had to admit that he did not. His excuse was that she was irresistible. ‘At fifty-five?’ she asked. He was the only person ever to explain to her in what way, and of course it was easier for him, with his lack of taste for women, to be impersonal. He said that her attraction was her indifference – the fact that she just was, the way a pagan goddess is, Pallas Athene or someone, ready to accept worship but unconcerned whether it is given or not.