A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Only Lily was a throwback to earlier, simpler, simply American girls. She came in, as so often barefoot, her white-blonde hair wind-blown; she was holding a branch with a few leaves on it. She said at once: ‘Where’s Gavin?’

  ‘Doesn’t he tell you anything?’ Fay said, and Celia, eyebrows raised: ‘The Polish critic?’

  ‘I’m really stupid,’ Lily said. ‘I forget everything. Look, there’s Elizabeth. She’s pruning a rosebush. She’s always busy; she does a million things. Can’t you see her? I wish you’d wear your glasses, Mummy.’

  ‘I don’t need them. I don’t need to see anything more. I did a house tour; I sat through an entire lunch. I’m starting a headache and I want to go back to New York.’

  Lily didn’t look at her but trailed the branch she was holding across the faded flower pattern of the carpet. She said, ‘It wouldn’t be fair to Elizabeth. If we left. It wouldn’t even be polite. It would really be very rude. I mean, if it were me, I’d think these were really very rude people.’ Still intent on her branch, she missed the look of wry resignation that passed between her mother and her sister.

  Lily became pregnant. At first she said her stomach was upset, and as for her periods, they were always irregular. When Celia wanted to take her to a doctor, she didn’t want to go because doctors always discovered something horrible. ‘But supposing it’s not horrible,’ Celia said. ‘Supposing it’s something you’d like, you and Gavin?’

  ‘Oh, you think it might be a baby? Well, why not. I am married.’ She looked at her sister out of those very candid fairy-tale eyes that made people love and trust her.

  On being informed: ‘Is it possible?’ Fay asked Celia.

  ‘Of course it is,’ Celia said. ‘You hear about it all the time. I have friends you’d never think – and then suddenly they spring a grown-up son or daughter on you, visiting them over Christmas.’

  Fay also had such friends with unsuspected offspring. But still she said, ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘Can’t imagine what,’ Celia said, the more irritably because she also couldn’t imagine: not about Gavin and, if it came to that, not about Lily herself. But there she was, pregnant, an indubitable fact.

  Gavin’s mother Elizabeth had no doubts at all. She came travelling up to the city and took Lily to her own gynaecologist, who confirmed that everything was fine, and also that the scan showed a boy. Elizabeth was delighted – another grandchild, and this time the son of her only son. She advised plenty of exercise for Lily, plenty of walking, plenty of good food and fresh air.

  Lily did plenty of walking but the air she was taking in was not altogether fresh. It was what she liked best in the world – street smells, petrol fumes, leaking gas pipes, newly poured tar, pretzels, mangoes from Mexico, Chinese noodles, overblown flowers – the exhalations of the city, the densely populated streets that she traversed from one end to the other, walking lightly on sandals so flimsy her feet might have been bare and treading on grass. On warm days she wore a very light summer frock – no more than a shift – that blew with any breeze wafting up from the subway or from leaky steam pipes. She avoided parks and other open spaces unless they were from a building recently demolished; and if she sat for a moment to rest, it was on the steps of a Masonic temple or a store front, from which she was sometimes chased away. When it rained, she sheltered under an overbridge, though she liked to get wet – very wet, with the drops trickling from her hair down her face so that she flicked out her tongue to taste them and refresh herself. She stopped occasionally to sniff the flowers arranged in the front of a grocery store. On raising her eyes to the sky, she was perfectly satisfied that all she could see of it was a bright patch inserted among tall towers. If it was night – for she wandered around for many hours – there was sometimes a slice of moon and helicopters flitting and glittering around like fireflies.

  Celia summoned Gavin to her office. ‘I hate it,’ she told him. ‘The way she walks around everywhere by herself and at all hours. It’s not safe. She’s not safe.’

  ‘Lily?’ He was gentle and smiling, patient as no patient of hers ever was. ‘But Lily is always safe. Don’t you feel that about her – that nothing could happen to her?’

  ‘Maybe it’s happened already.’ She was trembling a bit – at what she was saying, the danger to Lily, but also at his calm, the way he sat there, crosslegged and slightly swinging one foot in its narrow shoe. She said, ‘You know how innocent she is, how trusting.’

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled in recognition of these qualities in his wife, and he assured Celia, ‘I love and adore her as you do.’

  ‘I’m her sister. I love and adore her in a different way. All I’m asking is that you should stop her from wandering around the streets. Or help me stop her. Please be home tonight so that we can talk to her together.’

  ‘Yes, we should – but unfortunately, tonight, what a pity.’

  ‘Tomorrow then?’

  ‘Oh absolutely,’ he promised. ‘Definitely tomorrow.’

  But it was on that same day that he met Lily to report on his talk with her sister. They met where they usually did, in a church in midtown. It was the place where they had first seen each other, amid a sea of empty pews with here and there a few bowed figures, some come to pray, others only to fall asleep for want of food or a home to go to. Everyone was alone, maybe lonely and certainly in deep need. If Gavin and Lily were in such need, it was at least partly satisfied that time when they first met each other.

  On the day of Gavin’s talk with Celia, they did not go in but sat on the steps of the church. He ran down for a moment to buy them two pretzels from a cart, and a drink to share. They picnicked there on the bank of a river of traffic, rushing and foaming in the street below. They sat close together at the side, undisturbed by people walking past them. Gavin informed her of everything that Celia had said to him and the way she had said it; he concluded, ‘She thinks you may have been . . . attacked? By someone. In the street?’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘Then what happened? If you want to tell me, that is.’

  She did – and it was relatively easy sitting so close and he listening with the sympathy and selfless love that he always showed her. ‘It was raining,’ she said. He nodded; he understood that she was sheltering somewhere. ‘Yes, under the 59th Street bridge. The rain was coming down really hard and I only had this – ’ she indicated her diaphanous dress – ‘I didn’t want to stay there because you know what it’s like under a bridge that people who don’t have anywhere else use for their, you know, their toilet, and also to store whatever they have, from the trash or whatever. No one spoke to anyone, like they don’t in church, because of having so much else to think about? Different things. Except there was one person, maybe he didn’t have too many worries to consider, I mean he was maybe too young to have them.’

  ‘How young?’

  ‘Seventeen. He told me he’d come from – I’ve forgotten – some African country. He’d come here to start a restaurant. That was his dream. He was looking for a job to be a waiter where he could save enough money to open his own restaurant with the special food from his African country. He was very very hopeful that it would happen. I was the first girl he met to talk to since he’d come here. He did what you always do – touched my hair and then let it sort of run through his fingers. He was very sweet, gentle also, till he got excited. He got like . . . frantic? No, I wasn’t scared; I understood he got that way because he hadn’t met any girl here, so it was my fault really, in a way. And afterward he was very nice again and said he wished he had something to give me to keep for myself. I didn’t have anything either, so I told him I’d come back next day and bring him something.’

  ‘And did you?’ Gavin asked, playing with her hair the way she said the boy under the bridge had done.

  After a moment she admitted it. And after another moment: ‘I thought: maybe he’ll never have the restaurant, maybe not even a job in one, nothing that he expects will happen, ever happen, such a
lot of disappointment . . . I gave him a silver chain Fay had brought me from Peru. I’d never liked wearing it, it was so heavy, like being put in irons. But he was glad to have it and to see me again. I think he thought I wouldn’t come back.’

  ‘But you did.’

  She hung her head but raised it again before answering frankly: ‘That time we didn’t stay under the bridge. We walked to the Park; it wasn’t raining that day but the ground was wet. It was chilly but much nicer than under the bridge. This was the day before you and I drove to the country with Fay and Celia, and all the time we were there, I kept thinking how he didn’t have a sweater or anything, and what if he caught a cold and had nowhere to sleep except under the 59th Street bridge? So when we got back to New York, I went there with a blanket and a sweater, but he’d gone. And I keep hoping he went off to a job as a waiter in a restaurant but also I think – what if he got ill being out in the open? And it turned into pneumonia and he was taken to a hospital where they take poor people?’

  ‘Boys of seventeen don’t catch pneumonia,’ Gavin affirmed clearly. ‘He’s working as a waiter and saving money for a restaurant. You have to believe me. I don’t want you to worry in any way or have disturbing thoughts, because that’s bad for our baby. OK? Promise. Only nice thoughts.’

  ‘About you.’

  ‘About me, if that’s what you want.’ He took her hand and kissed it.

  Next day he took her to the country to stay with his mother. Lily liked to sleep late, and in the mornings, when Elizabeth herself had already been up for many hours and completed many tasks, she sat beside her frail daughter-in-law and the precious unborn child where they lay in a deceased great-aunt’s great bed. Elizabeth was nearing seventy, strong and stocky, with apple cheeks and bright blue eyes. Although her connection with the family was only through marriage, she was an expert on each degree of their convoluted relationships and of their convoluted stories. These stories, which she was passing on to her pregnant daughter-in-law, were mostly of domestic or social interest. No one had held high office or distinguished themselves in any wars. But they had involved themselves in local politics, built additions to the house, engaged in lawsuits with neighbours about boundary lines. There had been some scandals: divorces as long ago as the beginning of the century, also the stigma of gambling debts, and more than one case of temporary confinement in a mental institution. But mostly they had led long and uneventful lives, with several of them celebrating their hundredth birthday. They had done some travelling – honeymoons and study tours in Italy, safari in Africa – but they had all spent their last years at home and with each other. In the end family loyalties triumphed over everything, even property disputes between brothers and sisters.

  Elizabeth encouraged Lily to walk around the grounds. It was the end of what had been a very wet summer, and the estate had become a wilderness of tall grass with trees sweeping down into it. The trees themselves had survived their centuries with hollowed trunks; some of them had split apart and had been kept from falling by iron chains that had grown rusty and appeared to be part of the trunks they were meant to hold. Besides age, storms had ransacked the land, and every winter one of the great trees – copper beech or red maple – had given way and crashed to the ground, to be cut up into firewood to feed the giant fireplaces inside the house and warm the chill bones of its inhabitants.

  Although Lily traversed city streets in complete confidence, here she tramped through the grass with misgiving of what might be lurking there – poison ivy, or a snake she knew would not be harmless to herself. Passing two blighted apple trees – the remains of what had once been an orchard cultivated for profit – she picked up one of the apples that lay half hidden in the grass; soft and rotten, it split apart in her hand and maggots crawled out of it. She miserably counted the minutes until she could say she had had enough fresh air and return to the house to be near the telephone on which Gavin called her regularly, at the same time every day.

  Celia, also calling every day, asked her, ‘When are you coming home?’ Lily was evasive – for Celia, this was something completely new in her. Lily said she needed the home-cooked meals Gavin’s mother provided instead of the gourmet take-out Celia usually sent for. ‘I thought you liked it,’ Celia said, and Lily replied yes she did, when she had only herself to think of.

  Celia told Fay: ‘She’s lying to us. They’re both lying to us.’

  ‘What if they’re not?’

  ‘I’ll find out. We’ll go there this weekend. She’ll tell me the truth. She always does. Don’t you want to know the truth?’

  ‘Not always,’ Fay said. ‘Will Gavin be there with her, do you think?’

  ‘Is Gavin ever with her,’ Celia said in exasperation.

  Suddenly Fay said with more energy than she usually produced, ‘Whatever’s happened has happened. So let it rest, Celia.’

  But ‘No,’ Celia said. ‘No.’

  On the weekend, challenged about her husband’s absence, Lily remained calm. ‘He’s trying to get away, but there’s always something.’ Her shy-violet eyes were large and solemn with truthfulness. ‘Gavin knows a lot of interesting people. Everyone wants to meet him.’ She sounded as proud and pleased as Gavin did when he spoke of her. ‘He’s so wonderful – different from everyone in the world. More wonderful,’ she explained.

  Celia said, ‘That’s what I’m saying: he is different; all right, more wonderful, if that’s how you want it . . . You don’t have to go through with this,’ she continued. ‘It’s a very easy thing to do nowadays, almost legal, certainly with someone as small as you . . . ’ She tried to span her hands round Lily’s waist not only to demonstrate its smallness but to touch her in affection.

  Lily disengaged herself. She said, ‘If you don’t believe me, you don’t love me. People don’t love people they think are liars.’

  She went out and took the only action she knew – she called Gavin, and from her voice he realised he could not delay any longer. He told her he would be there on Sunday morning and, confident that he would, she got up early and accompanied her mother-in-law to church.

  So when Gavin drove up to the house, he met only Fay, unsuccessfully trying to make coffee for herself in the stone-age kitchen. He did it for her, and she thanked him, and then she said she was glad he had come, to help intervene in the situation that had arisen between her two daughters. The difficulty was, she told him frankly, that Celia couldn’t stand the competition, always having had Lily completely to herself.

  ‘And now you’re here,’ he said.

  ‘Not for long. I’m going away. But you’re not. And the baby is not, I presume.’

  ‘Yes, he and I are here to stay.’

  ‘Isn’t it exciting? I’m excited.’ She stroked his arm, lingering over the sleeve of his summer jacket; she had always appreciated good-looking men. She said, ‘It was so kind of you to have married my little Lily.’

  ‘No no, not at all; quite the contrary. It’s Lily who is kind. Mother adores her. For her sweet temperament,’ he explained, ‘and for being so much part of the family. I hope when they’ve finished praying together, Mother will show her around the churchyard. It’s full of us, going back two hundred years. Of course there’ve been ups and downs – two hundred years is no joke! – but that’s how it goes. Kingdoms like the orchard flit russetly away, and all the rest of it.’

  ‘But the name is still there,’ Fay said. ‘And you’re carrying it on. You and my Lily. That’s so mysterious and lovely.’ She pressed his shoulder, massaging it a bit in affection.

  The Sunday lunch Elizabeth served on her return was the same Fay and Celia remembered from their previous visit. So were the family anecdotes told around the table, and they seemed endless to Celia, leaving her tense with frustration. But afterwards she managed to manoeuvre herself and Fay to be alone with their hostess in the parlour. Elizabeth was embroidering a little muslin shirt, and she explained that the pattern – of birds, daisies, violets – was copied from a framed s
ampler with a faded signature and the date 1871. Beside it hung some watercolours of local scenes – a waterfall, a horse and cart in a field – painted years ago but still there, Elizabeth said, to be rendered by anyone with artistic talent. She herself had no such talent – which made her all the more thankful to have Lily in the family. Fay confirmed that Lily had always loved sketching and had gone to art school.

  ‘She lasted a week,’ Celia said. ‘Lily is really too frail – physically and otherwise – to see anything through. That’s why we’re worried about her present condition: if she’s strong enough to carry it full term.’

  ‘Our Dr Williams said everything was perfectly normal,’ Elizabeth said with satisfaction.

  ‘Perfectly normal,’ Celia repeated. She threw a swift glance at her mother, but despairing of help from there, rushed in on her own to tell Gavin’s mother: ‘We hardly see him. We have no idea where he is, with whom. All we know is he’s not where he should be. At home, Lily never knew if her husband was on the sofa where he had chosen to sleep, or if he’d been out all night.’

  Snipping off a thread, Elizabeth smiled in reply. ‘Gavin has always been a nightbird. I suppose poets usually are, that’s when they get their inspiration. Luckily dear Lily is an artist herself, she understands him perfectly. A perfectly matched couple.’ She smiled again.

  ‘A poet and his muse.’ Fay smiled back.

  Two slender figures in light clothes, Gavin and Lily wandered among trees and bushes in the grounds. When he lifted a branch to let her slip through, they appeared to vanish – tenuous as shadows, insubstantial. But for each other they were substantially there. They hardly touched; only sometimes he held her hand, or guided her by her elbow. The grounds were different for Lily when he was there. Now she saw that here and there the ancient and broken trees had sprouted new branches with leaves on them. He led her to where there was a fishpond with water lilies unfolded and goldfish swimming beneath them. They sat on a pile of stones forming a bank, and he lightly laid his arm across her shoulders while she traced his features with her finger, in silence and contentment.