It did not last very long; he looked at his watch. He had to go back to the city, an appointment.
She said, ‘Let me come with you.’
He smiled and kissed her hair. ‘Mother so loves having you here and she can look after you better and cook you all those dishes. I know you don’t like them, neither do I, but you need them. The baby needs them.’
‘And afterward? Do we have to live with Celia? Can’t I come live with you?’
From his sad smile she realised how impossible this was. She knew he had a place where he needed to do things of his own, write his poetry and meet poets and other friends.
‘Celia lives near the Park. You can take the baby there.’
‘I don’t like the Park.’
‘Then walk in the street with the pram – I’ll meet you every day and I’ll push the pram. I’ll love to do that.’
‘Really?’ She laughed out loud with pleasure.
‘Oh yes. Yes. It’ll be fun. Our own baby . . . I’m so much looking forward to it. We all are. Mother can hardly wait.’
They were silent. After a while he said, ‘Mother will stay with you while he’s being born. She did it for all my sisters. She’ll be the first to see him.’
A leaf dropped from an overhanging tree; a frog croaked. Gavin said, ‘Tell me about him again.’
She waved her hand before her face as though waving away something she did not want to see; but on the contrary, it was a gesture of conjuring up a vision that was imprinted on her mind. ‘He was small, very small and skinny. Like those pictures you see of children starving in Africa? Only it was the way he was built, he wasn’t exactly starving, though he was hungry. I could tell from the way he ate my pretzel and then asked for another and two hot dogs. It may be because teenagers can never get enough to eat. His hair was very curly and it sat on him like a cap, and his ears stuck out from his head like two handles. His eyes were the biggest thing about him, they were huge, huge, and they shone in the rest of his face – I mean his face being so dark and it was also dark under the bridge.’
‘Yes,’ Gavin said. ‘I think I can see him. In fact, quite clearly.’
‘I see him all the time and I’m scared.’
‘Why should you be? I’m here. It’s my son.’
‘Scared that he may have gotten sick from being in the rain and having nowhere to dry his shirt. I don’t think he had another one, and it was very thin cloth so you could see his shoulder blades sticking out.’
‘I thought you trusted me,’ Gavin said, sounding so sad that she gave a little cry of reassurance and for a brief moment laid her hand on the shoulder of his jacket.
‘If you trust me, you have to believe me.’
‘I do believe you, and last week I went around to all the Ethiopian restaurants I could find in New York, but he wasn’t there. But maybe he wasn’t Ethiopian.’
‘No, maybe he was Nigerian, but you wouldn’t want to go around to all the Nigerian restaurants. He’s working and saving his tips for the restaurant. You have to believe me without proof. That’s what faith is – believing without proof.’
They got up from the bank of stones. It was getting late, the shadows lay cool and lengthened on the grass and the tops of the trees had the stillness around them that means the end of the day and its liquidation in the setting sun. They retraced their steps back to the house where his car was parked, and when they passed through the blighted orchard, he picked up an apple for her and she ate it. She didn’t even have to look; she knew it would be whole, without worms or decay.
Nevertheless, some of the things he had promised her did not happen. The baby was born and, as Gavin had predicted, Elizabeth was the first to see him emerge with his little cap of black hair. Gavin chose the name Scipio for him (after the Roman general Scipio Africanus, he explained to Lily). But Lily did not often push Scipio in his pram. Instead she pushed Gavin in his wheelchair through the streets they both loved. Poets traditionally die young – in the past often from consumption, but Gavin was an early victim of a new disease. He had been moved to Celia’s apartment and stayed in the bedroom that he now shared with Lily, he alone in the bed and she on a folding cot placed at the foot of it. She cared for him entirely by herself, refusing to engage a nurse and only sometimes grudgingly accepting Celia’s help. It was easy for her to carry him, he had become as light as a child, and he looked up at her with perfect trust in her ability to hold him.
A week after he died, she climbed up to the roof of an office building that Gavin had pointed out to her as a typical example of post-war commercial architecture. He had told her it was architecturally very boring, but it suited her purpose after she discovered that the fire-escape stairway leading to the roof was kept open during office hours. So it was by day that she took the long climb to arrive at the top. From here she gazed down over the city: the churches and the bridges and the ribbons of river, and the streets with their shoals of cars and glittering towers of museums and stores and theatres and restaurants and dreams of restaurants – dreams of glory and gold pouring down from the sky that, now she was so close to it, turned out to be much larger and brighter than she had anticipated.
While he was growing up, the orphaned Scipio mostly lived in the country in the family house permeated by the family history that his paternal grandmother transmitted to him day by day. He didn’t listen to her stories very carefully; at this time his principal interest was in horses and he often accompanied his two great-uncles to the races at Saratoga. His ambition was to become a jockey, for which he was small and wiry enough, and even slightly bow-legged. But after spending a vacation with his grandmother Fay in Monte Carlo, where she had settled for tax reasons, he grew enthusiastic about motorcar racing. This led to his subsequent career as a racing-car driver. He became famous and was photographed for magazines, leaning against his car with his crash helmet under his arm, his radiant smile stretching up to his ears where they stuck out like two handles.
This photograph, and many others of him, stood in Celia’s living room. She looked at him with pleasure, but as the years passed she began to be puzzled by these pictures of Scipio. She wondered what he was doing there among all the others, especially next to the photograph of Gavin and Lily on their wedding day. But after some more time she also couldn’t remember who this couple was – she wiped the dust off the glass, but failed to make them or her memory any clearer. No one heard her mutter to herself; if she muttered some names, she had no faces to put to them, even though they were smiling all around her. There was a film over her eyes, and a film over her mind. Only sometimes there was a glimmer – a shimmer of two figures in light-coloured clothes on the verge of disappearing from sight, between trees or around a street corner, or simply fading into the ether. The ether! Even that – a poetic idea but a false hypothesis – has ceased to exist.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Germany of Polish parents and came to England in 1939 at the age of twelve. She graduated from Queen Mary College, London University, and married the Indian architect C. S. H. Jhabvala. They lived in Delhi from 1951 to 1975. Since then they have divided their time between Delhi, New York and London.
As well as her numerous novels and short stories, in collaboration with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written scripts for film and television, including A Room with a View and Howards End, both of which are Academy Award winners. She won the Booker Prize for Heat and Dust in 1975, the Neil Gunn International Fellowship in 1978, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1984 and was made a CBE in the 1998 New Year’s Honours List.
Copyright © 2012 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Innocence” and “The Teacher” first appeared in
the New Yorker
“Talent” first appeared in Sisters: An Anthology (Paris Press, 2009)
Illustrations © C. S. H. Jhabvala
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 1927-
A lovesong for India : tales from the East and West / Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-619-02035-1
I. Title.
PR9499.3.J5L68 2012
823’.914—dc23
2011039135
COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
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A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West Page 26
