Weekends would have been empty and boring if she had not got into the habit of walking near his house. He lived on the outskirts of town in a Victorian house with a derelict garden. There had been several rows of these old houses, but most of them had been pulled down and replaced by new semi-detached villas which were sold on easy instalments to newly-weds. Dr Greaves was not newly wed; he had many children who ran all round the house and down the quiet lanes and out into the fields. These children were never very clean and their clothes were obviously handed down from one to the other. The babies of the young couples in the villas wore pink and blue nylon and were decorated with frills. All the young couples had shiny little cars, but Dr Greaves only had a bicycle.
One Saturday Nalini met him coming out of his house wheeling this bicycle. He was surprised to see her and wondered what she was doing there; and although she did not quite have the courage to tell him that she had been lingering around for him, neither did she stoop to tell him a lie. They walked together, he wheeling his bicycle. He called ‘Mervyn!’ to a little boy who came dashing round a corner and was, to judge by his unkempt appearance, a son of his, but the boy took no notice and Dr Greaves walked on patiently and as if he did not expect to have any notice taken.
It was a sunny day. Dr Greaves was going into town on a shopping tour and Nalini accompanied him. They went into a supermarket and Dr Greaves took a little wire basket and piled it up with a supply of washing soap and vinegar and sliced loaf and many other things which he read out from a list his wife had prepared for him. Nalini helped him find and take down everything from the shelves; sometimes she brought the wrong thing – a packet of dog biscuits instead of baby rusks – and that made them laugh quite a bit. Altogether it was fun; they were both slow and inexpert and got into other people’s way and were grumbled at. Dr Greaves was always very apologetic to the people who grumbled, but Nalini began to giggle. She giggled again at the cash desk where he dropped some money and they had to scrabble for it, while everybody waited and the cashier clicked her tongue. Dr Greaves went very pink and kept saying, to the cashier and to the people whom he kept waiting, ‘I’m most awfully sorry, do forgive me, I am so sorry.’ Finally they got out of the shop and he stood smiling at her, blinking his eyes against the sun which was still shining, and thanked her for her help. Then he rode away, rather slowly because of the heavy load of shopping he had to carry from the handlebars.
The next Saturday it was raining, but nevertheless Nalini stood and waited for him outside his house. At first he did not seem to be very pleased to see her, and it was only when they had walked away from the house for some distance, that he made her sit on the crossbar of his bicycle. They rode like that together through the rain. It was like a dream, she in his arms and feeling his breath on her face, and everything around them, the trees and the sky and the tops of the houses, melting away into mist and soft rain. They went to the same shop and bought almost the same things, but this time, when they came out and she already saw the smile of farewell forming on his lips, she quickly said, ‘Can’t we have coffee somewhere?’ They went to a shop which served home-made rock cakes and had copper urns for decoration. It was full of housewives having their coffee break, so the only table available was one by the coat rack, which was rather uncomfortable because of all the dripping coats and umbrellas. Nalini didn’t mind, but Dr Greaves sat hunched together and looking miserable. His thin hair was all wet and stuck to his head and sometimes a drop came dripping down his face. Nalini looked at him: ‘Cold?’ she asked, with tender concern.
‘How can you bear it here,’ he said. ‘In this dreadful climate.’ There was an edge to his voice, and his hand fidgeted irritably with the china ashtray.
‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ said Nalini. ‘I’ve had so much sun all my life, it makes a change really.’ She smiled at him, and indeed as she did so, she radiated such warmth, such a sun all of her own, that he, who had looked up briefly, had at once to look down again as if it were too strong for him.
‘And besides,’ she added after a short silence, ‘it’s not what the weather is like outside that matters, but what you feel here, inside you.’ Her hand was pressed between her charming little breasts. Her eyes sought his.
‘I hope,’ he said foolishly clearing his throat, ‘that you’re happy in your work.’
‘Of course I am.’
‘Good. I thought your last essay showed some improvement, actually. Of course there’s still a long way to go.’
‘I’ll work hard, I promise!’ she cried. ‘Only you see, I’m such a funny thing, oh dear, I simply can’t learn anything, I’m stupid, my mind is like a stone – till I find someone who can inspire me. Now thank goodness,’ and she dropped her eyes and fidgeted with the other side of the ashtray, and then she raised her eyes again and she smiled, ‘I’ve found such a person.’ She continued to smile.
‘You mean me,’ he said brusquely.
This put her off. She ceased to smile. She had expected more delicacy.
‘My dear girl, I’m really not a fit person to inspire anyone. I’m just a hack, a workhorse. Don’t expect anything from me. Oh my God, please,’ he said and held his head between his hands as if in pain, ‘don’t look at me with those eyes.’
‘Are they so awfully ugly?’
‘Leave me alone,’ he begged. ‘Let me be. I’m all right. I haven’t complained, have I? I’m happy.’
‘No, you’re not.’ She sagely shook her head. ‘I’ve read it in your face long ago. Why are these lines here,’ and she put out her finger and traced them, those lines of suffering running along the side of his mouth which she had studied over many lectures.
‘Because I’m getting old. I’ll be forty in May. Forty, mind you.’
‘Sometimes you look like a little boy. A little boy lost and I want to comfort him.’
‘Please let me go home now. I’ve got to buy fish and chips for Saturday lunch. They’ll all be waiting.’
‘If you promise to meet me tomorrow. Promise? Norman?’ She lightly touched his hand, and the look with which she met his was a teasing, victorious one as if she were challenging him to say no, if he could.
At home her landlady, Mrs Crompton, was feeling unwell. She hadn’t cooked anything and lay in bed in the dark, suffering. Nalini turned on the lights and the fires and went down in the kitchen and made scrambled eggs on toast. Then she carried a tray up to Mrs Crompton’s bedroom and sat on the side of Mrs Crompton’s bed and said, ‘Oh you poor thing you,’ and stroked the red satin eiderdown. Mrs Crompton sat up in bed in her bedjacket and ate the scrambled eggs. She was a woman in early middle age and had a rather heavy, English face, with a strong nose and thin lips and a lowish forehead: it looked even heavier than usual because of the lines of disappointment and grief that seemed to pull it downwards. From time to time, as she ate, she sighed. Her bedroom was very attractively furnished, with ruffled curtains and bedcovers and a white rug, but it was sad on account of the empty twin bed which had been Mr Crompton’s and now just stood there parallel with Mrs Crompton’s, heavily eloquent under the bedcover which would never again be removed.
Nalini felt sorry for her and tried to cheer her up. She held one of Mrs Crompton’s large, cold hands in between her own small, brown, very warm ones and fondled it, and told her everything amusing that she could think of, like how she forgot her sari out on the washing line and it got soaking wet again in the rain, all six yards of it. Mrs Crompton did not get cheered up much, her face remained long and gloomy, and at one point a tear could be seen slowly coursing its way along the side of her nose. Nalini watched its progress and suddenly, overcome with pity for the other’s pain, she brought her face close to Mrs Crompton’s and kissed that dry, large-pored skin (how strange it felt! Nalini at once thought of Mummy’s skin, velvet-smooth and smelling of almond oil) and as she did so, she murmured, ‘Don’t be sad,’ she kept her face down on the pillow with Mrs Crompton’s and hidden against it, which was just
as well, for although she really was so full of sympathy, none of this showed on her face which was blooming with joy.
‘Dearest Mummy, Sorry sorry sorry! Yes you’re right I’ve been awful about letters lately but if you knew how much work they pile on us! I’ve been working like a slave but it’s fun. My favourites now are the Augustans. Yes darling, I know you’re surprised and at first sight they do look cold like we’ve always said but they are very passionate underneath. I go out quite often into the country, it is so peaceful and beautiful. Sometimes it is windy and cold but it’s funny, you know I always feel hot, everyone is surprised at it.’
Norman usually wore a polo-neck sweater under his sports jacket, but Nalini never more than an embroidered shawl thrown lightly over her silk sari. Whenever they met, they went out into the country. They had found a place for themselves. It was a bus ride away from town, and when they got off the bus, they had to walk for about half a mile through some fields and finally through a lane which wound down into a small valley. Here there were four cottages, hidden away among trees and quite separate from each other. At the rear their gardens ran out into a little wood. The owners of the fourth and last cottage – a devoted old couple whom Norman had known and sometimes visited – had both died the year before and their cottage was for sale. At the bottom of its garden, just where the wood began, there was a little hut built, plank by loving plank, by the old dead owners themselves as a playroom for visiting grandchildren. Now it served as a secret, hidden shelter for Norman and Nalini. No one ever came there – at most a cat or a squirrel scratching among the fallen leaves; and the loudest sounds were those of woodpeckers and, very occasionally, an aeroplane flying peacefully overhead. Nalini, who was really in these matters quite a practical girl, always brought all necessary things with her: light rugs and air cushions, packets of biscuits and sausage rolls. If it was cold and wet, they carpeted the hut with the rugs and stayed inside; on fine days, they sat in the wood with their backs leaning against the trunk of a tree and watched the squirrels.
Nalini loved picnics. She told Norman about the marvellous picnics they had at home, how the servants got the hampers ready and packed them in the back of the car, and then they drove off to some lovely spot – it might be a deserted palace, or an amphitheatre, or a summer tank, always some romantic ruin overgrown with creepers and flowers – and there rugs were spread for them and they lay on them and looked at the sky and talked of this and that, recited poetry and played jokes on each other; when the hampers were unpacked, they contained roast chickens, grapes and chocolate cake.
‘Yes,’ said Nalini, ‘it was lovely but this,’ she said and ate a dry Marie biscuit, ‘this is a million billion times better.’
She meant it. He lay beside her on the rug they had spread; it was a fine day, so they were under a tree. Dead leaves crunched under the rug every time they moved; there weren’t many left up on the branches, and some of them were bright red and hung in precarious isolation on their stalks.
Norman too sighed with contentment. ‘Tell me more,’ he said. He never tired of hearing about her family life in their house in Delhi or, in the summer, up in Simla.
‘But you’ve heard it all hundreds of times! Tell me about you now. You never tell me anything.’
‘Oh me,’ said Norman. ‘My life’s tended to be rather dowdy up till now.’
‘And now?’
He groaned with excess of feeling and gathered her into his arms. He kissed her shoulder, her neck, one temple; he murmured from out of her hair, ‘You smell of honey.’
‘Do you think of me when I’m not there?’
‘Constantly.’
‘When you’re lecturing?’
‘Yes.’
‘When you’re with your wife?’
He released her and lay down again, and shut his eyes. She bent close over him; her coil of hair had come half-undone and she made it brush against his cheek. ‘Tell me how you think of me,’ she said.
‘As a vision and a glory,’ he said without opening his eyes. She drank in his face: how fine it looked, the skin thin and pale as paper with a multitude of delicate lines traced along the forehead, and the two deeply engraved lines that ran from his nose to his lips. It was a face, she felt, designed to register only the highest emotions known to mankind.
‘What sort of a vision?’ she asked. And when he didn’t answer, she begged him, ‘I want to hear it from you, tell me in beautiful words.’
He smiled at that and sat up and kissed her again; he said ‘There aren’t any words beautiful enough.’
‘Oh, yes, yes! Think of Chaucer and Pope! Do you ever write poetry, Norman? You don’t have to tell me – I know you do. You’re a poet really, aren’t you? At heart you are.’
‘I haven’t written anything in years.’
‘But now you’ll start again, I know it.’
He smiled and said, ‘It’s too late to start anything again.’
But she would never let him talk like that. If he referred to his forty years, his family, the moderateness of his fortunes, she would brush him aside and say that from now on everything would be different. She did not say how it would be different, nor did she think about it much; but she saw grand vistas opening before them both. Certainly it was inconceivable that, after the grand feelings that had caught them up, anything could ever be the same for either of them again. For the time being, however, she was content to let things go on as they were. She would be here for another two years, finishing her course; and although of course it would have been marvellous if they could have lived together in the same house, since that could not be, she would carry on with Mrs Crompton and he with his family. When the two years were up, they would see. Meanwhile, they had their hut and one another’s hearts – what else mattered? She was perfectly happy and wanted, for the moment, nothing more.
It was he who was restless and worried. She noticed during lectures that his hands played even more nervously with the edges of his gown than before; his face looked drawn, and quite often nowadays he seemed to have cut himself shaving so that the pallor of his cheeks was enhanced by a little blob of dried blood. Once in her anxiety she even approached him after lectures and, under cover of asking some academic question, whispered, ‘Is something wrong? Are you ill?’ A frightened expression came into his eyes.
Afterwards, when they were alone together in their own place, he begged her never again to talk to him like that in class. She laughed: ‘What’s it matter? No one noticed.’
‘I don’t care if they noticed or not. I don’t want it. It simply frightens me to death.’
‘You’re so timid,’ she teased him, ‘like a little mouse.’
‘That’s true. I always have been. All my life I’ve been terrified of being found out.’
At that she tossed her head. She certainly had no such fears and did not ever expect to have them.
Then he said, ‘I rather think I have been found out,’ and added, ‘It’s Estelle.’
‘Have you told her?’
‘When you’ve been married to someone as long as that, they don’t need to be told anything.’
After a short pause, she said, ‘I’m glad. Now everything is in the open.’
She knew certain steps would have to be taken, but was not sure what they were. It was no use consulting with Norman, he was in no state to plan anything; and besides, she wanted to spare him all the anxiety she could. In previous dilemmas of her life, she had always had Mummy by her side, and how they would discuss and talk and weigh the pros and cons, sitting up in Mummy’s large, cool bedroom with the air conditioner on. Now Mummy was not there, and even if she had been, this was a matter on which she would not be able to give advice. Poor Mummy, Nalini thought affectionately, how restricted her life had always been, how set in its pattern of being married and having children and growing older, and tasting life only through books and dreams.
Her English friends at college were also not fit t
o be let into an affair of such magnitude. Nalini was fond of them, of Maeve and the rest, but she could no longer take them quite seriously. This was because they were not serious people. Their concerns were of a superficial order, and even when they had connections with the men students, these too remained on a superficial level; never, at any point, did their lives seem to touch those depths of human involvement where Nalini now had her being. Once she had a long heart-to-heart talk with Maeve. Actually, it was Maeve who did most of the talking. They were in her room, which was very cosy, with a studio couch and an orange-shaded lamp and an open fire in the grate. They sat on the floor by the fire and drank coffee out of pottery mugs. Maeve talked of the future, how she hoped to get a research studentship and write a thesis on the political pamphlets of the early eighteenth century; for this she would have to go to London and spend a lot of time in the British Museum Reading Room. She spoke about all this very slowly and seriously, sitting on the floor with her long legs in brown knitted stockings stretched out in front of her and her head leaned back to rest against a chair; she blew smoke from her cigarette with a thoughtful air. Nalini had her legs tucked under her, which came easily to her, and her sari billowed around her in pale blue silk; sometimes she put up her hand to arrange something – her hair, a fold of her sari – and then the gold bangles jingled on her arms. There was something almost frivolous in her presence in that room with all the books and the desk full of notes and Maeve’s favourite Henry Moore study on the wall. Yet it wasn’t Nalini who was frivolous, it was large, solid Maeve. How could anyone, thought Nalini, endeavouring to listen with a sympathetic expression to what her friend was saying, talk with so serious an air of so unserious a future – indeed, how could a future spent in the British Museum Reading Room be considered as a future at all? She pitied Maeve, who looked healthy and human enough with her bright red cheeks and her long brown hair, but who did not appear to have as much as an inkling of what riches, what potentialities, lay waiting within a woman’s span of life.
At the End of the Century Page 11
