At the End of the Century

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Mrs Crompton seemed to know more about it. She carried, at any rate, a sense of loss, the obverse side of which postulated a sense of possibilities: she knew a woman’s sorrow and so must have, Nalini inferred, some notion of a woman’s joy. Mrs Crompton was not an easy person to get along with. She was hard and autocratic, and ran her household with an iron discipline. Every single little thing had its place, every action of the day its time: no kettle to be put on between ten in the morning and five in the afternoon, no radio to be switched on before noon. She did not encourage telephone calls. Nalini, who at home was used to a luxuriantly relaxed way of life, did not, after the initial shock, find it too difficult to fall in with Mrs Crompton’s rigid regime and always did her best to humour her. As a result, Mrs Crompton trusted her, even perhaps liked her as far as she was capable of liking (which was not, on the whole, very far – she was not by nature an affectionate person). They spent quite a lot of their evenings together, which suited both of them for, strangely enough, Nalini discovered that she was beginning to prefer Mrs Crompton’s company to that of the girls at college.

  Indeed, in the evenings Mrs Crompton became a somewhat different person. When the day was done and its duties fulfilled, when the curtains were drawn and chairs arranged closer to the fire, at this cosy domestic hour her normally stern daytime manner began if not to crumble then at any rate to soften. Memories surged up in her, memories of Mr Crompton – though not so much of their life together as of their final parting. This seemed to have been the event in her life which stirred her deeper than anything that had ever gone before or come after. It had played, and was still playing, all her chords and made her reverberate with feelings of tremendous strength. Nalini admired these feelings: it was living, it was passion, it was the way a woman should be. She never tired of listening to Mrs Crompton’s story, she was the unfailing attendant and sympathizer of the tears that were wrung from this strong person. Nalini heard not only about Mr Crompton but also, a lot, about the other woman who had taken him away. There was one incident especially that Mrs Crompton often rehearsed and that Nalini listened to with special interest. It was when the other woman had come to visit Mrs Crompton (quite unexpectedly, one morning while she was hoovering in the back bedroom) and had asked her to give Mr Crompton up. Mrs Crompton had been at a disadvantage because she was only in her housedress and a turban tied round her head, while the other woman had had her hair newly done and was in a smart red suit with matching bag and shoes; nevertheless Mrs Crompton had managed to carry off the occasion with such dignity – without showing anger, without even once raising her voice, doing nothing more in fact than in a firm voice enunciating right principles – that it was the other woman who had wept and, before leaving, had had to go to the bathroom to repair her make-up.

  Nalini was careful to wear her plainest sari when she went to call on Estelle Greaves. She had no desire to show Norman’s wife up to an even greater disadvantage than she guessed she already would be. She had not, however, expected to find quite so unattractive a person. She was shocked, and afterwards kept asking Norman: ‘But how did you ever get married to her?’

  Norman didn’t answer. There were dark patches of shadow under his eyes, and he kept running his hand through his hair.

  ‘She can’t ever have been pretty. It’s not possible, how can she? Of course, probably she wasn’t so fat before but even so – and she’s older than you.’

  ‘She’s the same age.’

  ‘She looks years older.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Norman said suddenly, ‘shut up.’

  Nalini was surprised, but she saw it was best to humour him. And it was such a beautiful day, they ought really to be doing nothing but enjoying it. There was a winter stillness in the air, and a hint of ice in its sharp crystal clearness against which the touches of autumn that still lingered in fields, trees and hedges looked flushed and exotic. ‘Let’s walk a bit,’ she said, tucking her hand under his arm.

  He disengaged himself from her: ‘Why did you do it?’ he said in a puzzled, tortured way. ‘Whatever possessed you?’

  ‘I wanted to clear the air,’ she said grandly; and added, even more grandly, ‘I can’t live with a lie.’

  He gave a shout of exasperation; then he asked, ‘Is that the sort of language you used with her?’

  ‘Oh, with her.’ Nalini shrugged and pouted. ‘She’s just impossible to talk to. Whenever you try and start on anything serious with her, she jumps up and says the shepherd’s pie is burning. Oh Norman, Norman, how do you stand it? How can you live with her and in such an atmosphere? Your house is so – I don’t know, uncared for. Everything needs cleaning and repairing. I can’t bear to think of you in such a place, you with your love for literature and everything that’s lovely—’

  He winced and walked away from her. He did not walk through the wood but along the edge of it, in the direction of the next house. This was a way they usually avoided, for they wanted to steer clear of the old people living around. But today he seemed too distraught to care.

  ‘Why are you annoyed with me?’ she asked, following him. ‘I did right, Norman.’

  ‘No,’ he said; he stopped still and looked at her, earnestly, in pain: ‘You did very, very wrong.’

  She touched his pale cheek, pleadingly. Her hand was frail and so was her wrist round which she wore three gold bangles. Suddenly he seized her hand and kissed its palm many times over. They went back to their hut where they bolted the door, and at once he was making love to her with the same desperate feverishness with which he had kissed her hand.

  She was well pleased, but he more guilty and downcast than before. As he fastened his clothes, he said, ‘You know, I really mustn’t see you any more.’

  She laughed: ‘Silly billy,’ she said, tenderly, gaily, in her soft Indian accent.

  But from this time on, he often declared that it was time they parted. He blamed himself for coming to meet her at all and said that, if he had any resolution in him, he would not show up again. She was not disturbed by these threats – which she knew perfectly well he could never carry out – but sometimes they irritated her.

  She told him, ‘It’s your wife who’s putting you up to this.’ He looked at her for a moment as if she were mad. ‘She hates me,’ Nalini said.

  ‘She hasn’t said so. But of course you can’t expect—’

  ‘Well I hate her too,’ Nalini said. ‘She is stupid.’

  ‘No one could call Estelle stupid.’

  ‘I’ve met her, so you can’t tell me. She has nothing to say and she doesn’t even understand what’s said to her. It’s impossible to talk to her intelligently.’

  ‘What did you expect her to talk to you intelligently about?’

  ‘About you. Us. Everything.’

  He was silent, so she assumed she had won her point. She began to do her hair. She took out all her pins and gave them to him to hold. But it turned out that he had more to say.

  ‘It was so wrong of you to come to our house like that. And what did you want? Some great seething scene of passion and renunciation, such as Indians like to indulge in?’

  ‘Don’t dare say anything bad against my country!’

  ‘I’m not, for God’s sake, saying anything bad against your country!’

  ‘Yes, you are. And it’s your wife who has taught you. I could see at one glance that she was anti-Indian.’

  ‘Please don’t let’s talk about my wife any more.’

  ‘Yes, we will talk about her. I’ll talk about her as much as I like. What do you think, I’m some fallen woman that I’m not allowed to speak your wife’s name? Give me my pins.’ She plucked them from out of his hand and stabbed them angrily into her coil of hair. ‘And I’ll tell you something more. From now on everything is going to change. I’m tired of this hole-and-corner business. You must get a divorce.’

  ‘A splendid idea. You’re not forgetting that I have four children?’

 
‘You can have ten for all I care. You must leave that woman! It is she or I. Choose.’

  Norman got up and let himself out of the hut. At the door he turned and said in a quiet voice, ‘You know I’m no good at these grand scenes.’

  He walked away through the garden up on to the path which would lead him to the bus stop. He had a small, lithe figure and walked with his head erect, showing some dignity; he did not look back nor lose that dignity even when she shouted after him: ‘You’re afraid! You’re a coward! You want to have your cake and eat it!’

  They made it up after a day or two. But their separate ideas remained, his that they must part, hers that he must get a divorce. They began to quarrel quite frequently. She enjoyed these fights, both for themselves and for the lovely sensations involved in making them up afterwards. He found them exasperating, and called her a harridan and a fishwife: a preposterous appellation, for what could be further from the image of a harridan and a fishwife than this delicate little creature in silk and gold, with the soft voice and the soft, tender ways. Once he asked her: ‘All right – supposing I get a divorce, what next? What do you suggest? Do we stay here, do I go on teaching at the university and support two families on my princely salary? You tell me.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said at once, ‘I’ll take you with me to India.’

  This idea amused him immensely. He saw himself taken away as a white slave boy, cozened and coddled and taught to play the flute. He asked her to describe how they would live in India, and she said that she would dress him up in a silk pyjama and she would oil his hair and curl it round her finger and twice a day, morning and evening, she would bathe him in milk. It became one of their pastimes to play at being in India, a game in which he would loll on the rug spread on the floor of their hut and she would hold his head in her lap and comb him and pet him and massage his cheeks: this was fun, but it did not, Nalini reflected, get them any further.

  ‘Dearest Mummy, How I long for one of our cosy chats up in the bedroom. I have so much to tell you. Darling Mummy, I have found someone with whom I want to share my life and I know you too will love him. He is exactly the sort of person we have always dreamed of, so sensitive and intelligent like an English poet.’ But she never sent that letter. Mummy was so far away, it might be difficult for her to understand. Besides, she could not really do anything yet to solve their practical problems. One of these was particularly pressing just now. Winter had come on, and it was beginning to get too cold to use their hut. Icy blasts penetrated through the wooden boards, and Norman’s teeth never stopped chattering. But where else could they go? Norman said nowhere, it just meant that they must not see each other any more, that the cycle of seasons was dictating what moral right had already insisted on long ago. Nalini had learned to ignore such defeatist talk.

  It was around this time that she first confided in Mrs Crompton. This came about quite naturally, one evening when they were both sitting by the fire, Mrs Crompton with her large hands in her lap, Nalini crocheting a little rose bedjacket for herself. Sometimes Nalini lowered her work and stared before her with tragic eyes. It was silent in the room, with a low hum from the electric fire. Nalini sighed, and Mrs Crompton sighed, and then Nalini sighed again. Words were waiting to be spoken, and before long they were. Nalini told her everything: about Norman, and Estelle, and the children, and the hut, and the cold weather. Also how Norman was going to get a divorce and go away with her to India. Mrs Crompton listened without comment but with, it seemed, sympathy. Later, when they had already said goodnight and Nalini had gone up to her room and changed into her brushed nylon nightie, Mrs Crompton came in to tell her that it would be all right if she brought Norman to the house. Nalini gave a big whoop and flung her arms round Mrs Crompton’s neck, just as she used to do to Mummy when Mummy had done something lovely and nice, crying in a voice chock-full of gratitude, ‘Oh you darling, you darling you!’

  Norman hated coming to the house. He kept saying he was sure Mrs Crompton was listening outside the door. Once Nalini abruptly opened the door of her room, to convince him that no one was there, but he only shook his head and said that she was listening through the ceiling from downstairs. Certainly, they were both of them – even Nalini – very much aware of Mrs Crompton’s presence in the house. Sometimes they heard her moving about and that put them out, and sometimes they didn’t hear any sound from her at all and that put them out even more. When it was time for Norman to leave and they came down the stairs, she was invariably there, waiting for them in the hall. ‘Do have a cup of tea before you go,’ she would say, but he always made some excuse and left hurriedly. Then she would be disappointed, even a little surly, and Nalini would have to work hard to soothe her.

  Nalini had made her room so attractive with lots of photographs of the family and embroidered cushions and an Indian wall-hanging, but Norman was always uncomfortable, all the time he was there. Sometimes even he would make an excuse not to come, he would send a note to say he had a lecture to deliver at an evening class, or that he was suffering from toothache and had to visit the dentist. Then Mrs Crompton and Nalini would both be disappointed and turn off the lights and the fires and go to bed early.

  She boldly went up to him after classes and said, ‘You haven’t been for a week.’ He raised his eyes – which were a very pale, almost translucent blue, and remarkably clear among the dark shadows left around them by anxiety and sleepless nights – and he looked with them not at her but directly over her head. But he came that evening. He said, ‘I told you you mustn’t ever do that.’

  ‘I had to – you didn’t come so long.’

  He sighed and passed his hand over his eyes and down his face.

  ‘You’re tired,’ she said. ‘My poor darling, you’ve been working too hard.’ With swift, graceful movements, which set her bangles jingling, she settled pillows on her bed and smoothed the counterpane invitingly. But he didn’t lie down. He hadn’t even taken his coat off.

  ‘Please let me go, Nalini,’ he said in a quiet, grave voice.

  ‘Go where, my own darling?’

  ‘I want us not to see each other any more.’

  ‘Again!’

  ‘No, this time really – please.’ He sank into an armchair, as if in utter exhaustion.

  ‘You’ve been talking to your wife,’ she said accusingly.

  ‘Who would I talk to if not to my wife. She is my wife, you know, Nalini. We’ve been together for a long time and through all sorts of things. That does mean a lot. I’m a wretchedly weak person and you must forgive me.’

  ‘You’re not weak. You’re sensitive. Like an artist.’

  He made a helpless, hopeless gesture with his hand. Then he got up and quickly went downstairs. Mrs Crompton was waiting at the foot of the stairs. She said, ‘Do have a cup of tea before you go.’ Norman didn’t answer but hurried away. He had his coat collar up and there was something guilty and suspicious about him which made Mrs Crompton look after him with narrowed eyes.

  Mrs Crompton told Nalini about men: that they were selfish and grasping and took what they wanted and then they left. She illustrated all this with reference to Mr Crompton. But Nalini did not believe that Norman was like Mr Crompton. Norman was suffering. She could hardly bear to look at him during lectures because she saw how he suffered. These were terrible days. It was the end of winter, and whatever snow there had been, was now melting and the same slush colour as the sky that drooped spiritlessly over the town. Nalini felt the cold at last, and wore heavy sweaters and coats over her sari, and boots on her small feet. She hated being muffled up like that and sometimes she felt she was choking. She didn’t know what to do with herself nowadays – she did not care to be much with the girls at college and she had lost the taste for Mrs Crompton’s company. She hardly worked at all and got very low marks in all her subjects. Once the professor called her and told her that she would either have to do better or leave the course. She burst into tears and he thought it was because of w
hat he was saying, but it wasn’t that at all: she often cried nowadays, tears spurting out of her eyes at unexpected moments. She spent a lot of time in bed, crying. She tossed from side to side, thinking, wondering. She could not understand how it could all have ended like that, so abruptly and for nothing. They had been happy, and it had been radiant and wonderful, and after that how could he go back to that house with the leaking taps and the ungainly woman in it and all those children?

  The weather was warmer. It was a good spring that year, and crocuses appeared even in Mrs Crompton’s garden. Nalini began to feel better – not happy, but better. She went out for walks again with one or two friends, and sometimes they had tea together, or went to the music society. It was all very much like before. One fine Sunday she and Maeve took a walk outside the town. There were cows in the fields, and newly shorn sheep, and the hedges were brimming with tiny buds. Nalini remembered how she had walked with Maeve the year before, and how dissatisfied she had felt while Maeve, in her brown knitted stockings, talked of Anglo-Saxon vowel changes. Today Maeve wore patterned stockings, and she talked of her chances of a research studentship; there were several other strong candidates in the field – for instance, Dorothy Horne whose forte was the metaphysicals. Nalini listened to her with kindly interest. The air was full of balmy scents and the sky of little white clouds like lambs. Nalini felt sorry for Maeve and, after that, she felt sorry for all of them – Dorothy Horne and the other girls, and Mrs Crompton and Norman.

  ‘Dearest Mummy, What a clever clever little thing you are! Yes you are right, I have not been happy lately . . . You know me so well, our hearts are open to each other even with such a distance between us. Here people are not like that. I don’t believe that Shakespeare or Keats or Shelley or any of them can have been English! I think they were Indians, at least in their previous birth!!! Darling, please talk to Daddy and ask him to let me come home for the long vac. I miss you and long for you and want to be with you all soon. I don’t think the teaching here is all that good, there is no one like Miss Subramaniam at the dear old Queen Alex with such genuine love for literature and able to inspire their pupils. A thousand million billion kisses, my angel Mummy.’