A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  He laughed. ‘Are you sure that’s what it is?’

  ‘It may be Disprin. For my headache. It’s so terribly noisy. How can anyone enjoy being in such a noisy place?’

  ‘At least one doesn’t have to hear what’s going on in one’s own head. They’re over there. No, you’re looking in the wrong direction.’

  The reason it took her so long to find Brigitte’s table was that all the eighty-four tables crammed into that space appeared very much the same. Everyone there sat as in a burnished cast of wealth, of costly ornament. It was she, Frances, who was out of place. Although her hair too was professionally dyed, it had a discreet touch of silver; and her jewellery was not like that of others, women and some men, who displayed diamonds and rubies and pearls of a size and quantity that, if this had been any other place, would have been taken for paste. And maybe it was paste, she thought; it couldn’t be safe to walk around loaded with such immeasurable riches.

  ‘They’re waiting for me,’ she told Ralph.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get through myself, but there’s such a crush. Maybe after they’ve served the dessert. Why didn’t you come with them?’

  ‘I was on the phone with my husband. He wants me to come back to New York.’ Again looking around the room, she thought of Marshall at his fundraiser. He too would be with the powerful and rich, but his would be not only physically less brilliant but much more glum than these surrounding her, who were laughing, chatting, shouting and outshouting one another as though placed on a stage to impersonate characters having a festive time.

  ‘Brigitte doesn’t want to leave. But he wants both of us. They’ve been having sex together.’ She found it difficult to say – the words, that is; to herself she still thought of it as ‘sleeping together’. ‘It’s been going on for years. I don’t blame her for not wanting to come live with us. She doesn’t even like Marshall.’

  ‘No. Not the way she likes Shoki. As a friend, that is. They’re friends.’

  ‘Yes, he’s my friend too. But I really think I must go home. Of course Marshall will be angry if I come without her. But he’s angry at me anyway. It’s just that he needs someone with him where he can be any mood he wants. That’s the only way he feels comfortable.’

  Dessert had been served. A master of ceremonies tapped a microphone. Speeches were about to start. Ralph suggested they should try and squeeze through the crowd to the other table. He led the way, and when Shoki looked up, he saw them cleaving a path towards them. Shoki told Brigitte that it was very hot inside and maybe they should try to catch some fresh air? She got up at once and he took her elbow to guide her. Their host rose in his chair, but they did not appear to see him, or to hear him when he called after them.

  Unimaginably, outside the noisy room there was an empty terrace hovering over an expanse of ocean and moonless sky. Although a crowd of brilliant figures could be seen agitating inside, no sound reached through the double glazing of the windows. Two faces were pressed against the glass, trying to peer out into the darkness. Shoki said, ‘There’s Ralph.’

  ‘Yes, and Frankie.’

  They sighed as though something was difficult for them. But it wasn’t. Nothing was difficult for them. Shoki knew a way down from the terrace to the beach and soon he and Brigitte were walking there, their hands lightly linked. He told her about Bombay, where he had also walked on the beach, but it was not the same. For one thing, the sun was too hot, and then, always, there was Bombay – right there on the beach with the coconut sellers, the boy acrobats, and others seeking money for food; and beyond, the whole city of Bombay with its traffic, its slums, its huge heavy Victorian buildings pressing down on the earth and the human spirit. He didn’t have to explain much to Brigitte, because somehow it was how she felt about New York, where everything was just as oppressive. But here, now, the ocean was very calm and very dark and all that could be seen of it were the white fringes of its waves gliding into the sand. There was absolutely nothing, no world at all between water and sky, and it was inconceivable that, with such fullness available, anyone could be troubled about anything – apartments, desires, attachments, anything.

  THE LAST DECADES

  Death of an English Hero

  This happened in 1970. His name was Paul Lord, but various people knew him by various other names. Fortunately, when he was found, he had his British passport on him, otherwise it might have been difficult to identify a body found in a broken-down guesthouse in the bazaar of an insignificant Indian border town. It was during a sweltering summer, and in that part of the world bodies have to be disposed of on the same day; so that by the time his next of kin had been informed, Paul had already been cremated.

  The reports on the manner of his death were unclear. Some said he had been shot in the head, others that he was stabbed in the chest. There were no witnesses; nothing could be proved or revised since the body was long since cremated. There were also conflicting reports whether he had been killed where he was found lying on the bed, or whether his body had been carried there afterwards. Everyone agreed there were no signs of struggle in the room. The proprietor of the derelict little guest house swore he had seen and heard nothing; the only other occupant (a long-distance truck driver) had been dead drunk and remained in a stupor even after the police arrived and tried to slap him awake.

  The dead man’s next of kin appeared to be his mother, Catherine Lord; the address found on him was not hers but that of a flat in London. She was aware that he had rented this place more than twenty years ago, but she had not seen it until now when she was asked to clear out his possessions. It was off the Marylebone Road in an Edwardian house subdivided into four rental units, all of them except Paul’s small businesses. His flat was at the rear of the second floor and it was dark, bleak and almost empty. The only personal items included some books, in a script that may have been Arabic or Urdu. There were also a few books of poetry. The most personal items were the certificate of his marriage to a woman called Phoebe, spinster, aged thirty-five, of Stockbridge, Mass., USA, and a bundle of love letters from a woman in India called Leela. His mother felt it to be her duty to inform both of them, and both arrived within a very short time.

  Mrs Lord travelled up to London to meet them at the Marylebone flat, and while she and Phoebe were exactly on time, Leela was three-quarters of an hour late, which Paul could have told them was typical of her. She at once broke down in a very dramatic way. She appeared beyond consolation, which anyway the other two, unaccustomed to so much emotion, were unable to offer. But Leela recovered on being shown her own letters. She even laughed with amazement and some pride: ‘He kept them, can you imagine!’ It was hard to imagine, for Paul was known to destroy every scrap of paper, along with all else that might have given anything away.

  His mother was less surprised by the revelation of a mistress than of a wife. Like any mother of a middle-aged bachelor son – Paul died at forty-five – she had sometimes asked him about marriage; he had usually answered her flippantly, saying who would have a penniless, homeless fellow like himself? She knew that he had always had many girlfriends, she had even met some of them – all of them English, young, dashing and self-confident. Neither Phoebe nor Leela was anything like that. Phoebe was American, with a long Yankee face that had in middle age taken on an archetypal quality. But Leela had even now in her forties retained her bounce and vitality, her rich black hair touched up only a little bit, her radiant eyes, and her full figure, still splendid though by now over-full. Paul had kept both these women secret, one for twenty years, the other for ten.

  His mother was used to being uninformed about him. Even as a boy he had always had his own agenda, which he didn’t share with her. There had been only the two of them – Paul had never known his father, a naval officer who had died in a submarine accident. At that time Mrs Lord held an important post in the civil service, and she and Paul had lived together in a flat in central London. His school was in London too, but when he was thirteen he insisted on being
admitted as a boarder, and from that time on she knew less and less about him. He began to spend his holidays either with friends or by himself, only vaguely informing her where he was and with whom. He became even more vague when he went up to Oxford, but at least she knew he was there, taking a degree; and afterwards, when he joined the foreign office and was sent on postings to various countries, she still had at least some idea of his where-abouts. It was later, when he left the diplomatic service, that she no longer had any notion of his activities. All she knew was that he was constantly somewhere else, and his visits to her were short and irregular.

  After her retirement from the civil service, Mrs Lord had moved to a town famous for an ancient battle, about two hours from London. Here she lived in a semi-detached Victorian brick house by the river; probably it had once housed fishermen and barge captains employed on what had been a thriving river traffic. The house was very narrow with a downstairs living room and, at the top of a ladderlike staircase, two very small bedrooms. She slept in one of them and kept the other always ready for Paul, for the visits she lived for. His was as bare as every room he ever had. Even when he was young there had never been any clutter: no boy’s paraphernalia, no pictures of film or rock stars on the wall. Not even a bed – on his visits, Paul slept on a mat on the floor, because of a back injury he had sustained, he said, while playing some sport (though he had not been known to play any sport).

  She was aware that every embassy had some less important attaché whose official role was a front for other activities. This may have been why Paul was never promoted but kept in a position where he could operate more freely. Maybe these operations had been discovered, and he was asked to leave the country to which he was accredited. But such cases were usually reported and the expelled diplomat might even be shown boarding a plane home. No such report was ever seen about Paul. But he was not a person who would ever be caught – he just would not be!

  She had long ago tried to put it out of her mind, but occasionally she couldn’t help recalling something that had happened when he was fifteen. She was still living in London then and he was a weekly boarder at his school. There was a scandal. Some of his classmates were caught at night robbing the house of a parent known to be away for the weekend. A servant had caught them in the act – he had switched on the light in the master bedroom and found the boys crouched over jewel boxes that had been prised open, spilling their contents. Only one boy was quick enough to make his escape; the rest were locked into the room while the parent was summoned home. Two pieces were found to be missing; the school was quietly alerted, the boys questioned and some of them expelled. Although they were all Paul’s friends, he himself was not implicated.

  A few days later she was putting away his laundry when she discovered two pieces of jewellery tucked among his undervests. She replaced them and sat on his bed, deciding what to do. As usual she was expecting him over the weekend and would confront him then; but that Saturday, when she again opened the drawer, the two pieces had gone. Arriving just as she was standing by the open drawer, he asked her if she had seen his blue and grey jersey. He had forgotten to pack it and had intended to come home a day earlier to get it. But he had been held up –

  ‘So you haven’t been here?’ she asked.

  ‘I told you, I didn’t have the time. Did you find it? My jersey? Great. You saved the day.’

  Until the end of her life, and years beyond his, Mrs Lord continued to be active. In the summer she gardened till the last hours of daylight. All the seeds she put into the earth grew into an abundance of flowers and vegetables. But at night, alone in her house, she had doubts she couldn’t suppress. She sat by her empty fireplace, gazing into imaginary flames as into thoughts that at first flickered and then leaped into fears. It was not only her doubts about his reasons for leaving the diplomatic service; maybe he never had left but was working secretly for his government on what was known as special duties. Or if not his own, some other country in need of his services; or not even a country but an insurgency working within it. He was away for months and years in places he had never identified. She always heard from him, he regularly wrote for Christmas or her birthday; but his letters arrived weeks late and with a postmark that failed to show who had posted it or from where. She knew that some of the countries were those he knew well from his foreign postings; probably he spoke the local language and would have been useful for someone wishing to employ him for purposes of their own. But if his business was illegal, he would surely have been a rich man. No bank accounts were found after his death, only the post office savings book she had started for him when he was a schoolboy, and this had remained at almost the original amount. She must have imagined the two pieces of jewellery hidden between his undervests, for no trace of them, or any profit derived from them, ever showed up.

  Phoebe had met Paul in London, on her first visit there after the death of her mother. In earlier years, she and her mother had travelled together, staying in the grand hotels that her mother loved. Now on her own, Phoebe took a room in a bed-and-breakfast place, which was dingy and cheap. Not that she needed to economise any more than when her mother was alive, but it was in Phoebe’s nature not to want to spend money. At home she had moved out of their family house, and her lawyer had arranged to rent it out. Phoebe now lived in a cabin on the estate, which had formerly housed the handyman. She no longer needed a handyman, nor any of the other employees who had been necessary to run the house and care for her mother.

  On previous visits to London, there had been an active social life, with dinner parties in town and weekends in the country. The mother had known everybody but Phoebe knew nobody. She wandered by herself around the streets and bought theatre tickets for plays she couldn’t wait to end. She often went to the National Gallery to see medieval angels, and that was where she met Paul, who had a taste for the same angels. Though after a while he stopped looking at them and became interested in Phoebe instead. He knew she was American before he even spoke to her – a sort of early American, austere, thin-lipped, her ancestors emigrated from Scotland in the seventeenth century. This turned out to be exactly what she was. Although he was not at all a person to act impulsively, he asked her to marry him after knowing her for only a week. She was surprised but she didn’t question his motive. Even then she was aware that everything with him had its purpose, and she guessed that maybe he needed to be married to an American for a type of visa he couldn’t obtain on his own.

  He had proposed to her at her boarding house in Earls Court, where she had invited him to breakfast. While her breakfast was included in the price of the room, she had to pay extra for him, and he saw her signing a chit, after checking the total. When he asked her to marry him, her nose reddened, which was a sign with her – the only sign – of volcanic interior heavings. But she spoke calmly. ‘We can’t, can we. To get married, you need an address in London where you’ve lived for at least six months.’

  Her knowledge of this practical difficulty was unexpected, but he solved it immediately. ‘I have an address. It’s in Marylebone, so we can go to the register office there perfectly legitimately.’ He never took her to his flat, and she saw it only after his death when it was opened up and she met his mother there and Leela.

  For their wedding night she and Paul had taken a double room in the Earls Court boarding house. Now his breakfast was also free, but that was not the only satisfaction she had. She was a thirty-five-year-old virgin and sex was entirely new and astonishing to her. Her ardour too was astonishing, the sexual feelings she harboured unknown to herself and undiscovered till he discovered them. He was away for almost a year and the only address she had for him was a poste restante in Brussels. She never asked why he was there – or if not there, then where, and what he was doing. She totally accepted the fact that his work was secret; also that they would not meet very often.

  Although Phoebe knew that all his expeditions were hazardous, she suffered no fears during his absences. His cause was unknown
to her, but hers was absolutely clear. Her ordeal was simply to wait, and she did so back home in America, in her cabin in the woods of the old estate. She had got used to being alone and she loved it – the cabin itself, and she only had to step over its threshold to be among huge trees, maple and locust and copper beech, all of them ancient. Even those that were dying still had some green boughs and birds living inside them and squirrels hiding nuts in the hollowed trunks. Everything around her was stirring and murmuring, shot through with the trickling of the little brook that was choked in some places and in others so clear that stones could be seen shining inside it.

  There were no friends or suitors for her and never had been. When she was young and living with her mother in the main house, the house itself had been her companion. She loved its walls and its ancient furniture and hangings as much as she loved the trees surrounding it. She spent her days up in the attic, while her mother paced restlessly downstairs. Phoebe engrossed herself in the books she found among the lumber in the attic; they were old and tattered and crumbled away bit by bit in her hands. A Union soldier from the Civil War haunted an upstairs bedroom. She had always known he existed and she spoke about him to Paul. Although himself swept clean of such beliefs, he liked them in Phoebe. He told her that, behind her mild appearance, there lived a fearful and fearing New World; her sexual ardour was part of it, it was a dead witch still smouldering inside her. When she asked if she had been burned at the stake, he said no, her New England ancestors had been more merciful and had merely hanged their witches.

  She knew he moved about in many parts of the world, all of them ones she had only read about. But she did read about them – he merely had to mention a place name and, as soon as she was alone again, she went to the public library to study everything she could about it. She became fascinated by certain desolate areas – deserts or inaccessible mountain passes in Central Asia, not in their present but in their nineteenth-century past when British adventurers had criss-crossed one another’s paths and lives, and often deaths. Poring over their photographs, she saw Paul in all of them – lean, tanned, with light eyes – although they were mostly disguised as horse-traders or holy men. Paul had shown her a photograph of himself in such disguise; he said it was for a fancy dress ball. She believed him, she knew he was very social and attended all sorts of smart parties. She watched him dress up in his dinner jacket (it was the only article of clothing they found when they had to clear out his Marylebone flat) and she kept awake in bed in one of those London boarding houses they always stayed in whenever they met. He was never too tired after his long social evening to amuse Phoebe with accounts of it, especially of the party games that had been played. There was one game where you had to tell something very personal about yourself, the deepest secret of your heart. She wondered what he might have told – might it have been about her? Was she his deepest secret? She doubted it; and even if she were, she was sure that he would never have revealed her, any more than anything else he wanted to keep hidden.