Three Continents

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  When Manton came back, she got all nervous because of not being ready. But with me there, he took no notice of her; instead he went into his father-daughter act he liked to think we had. And I suppose we did have it—we were certainly fond of each other, but it was not in a parent-and-child way. Or if it was, it was the other way around and he was the child, though I can’t say I ever really saw myself as his parent—I guess his girlfriends like Barbara filled that role, even if they didn’t know it but thought they were looking up to him. That was what Manton needed from women, to be mothered and to be admired, the way he had got used to from his own mother and, even more, from Sonya, his stepmother.

  “Harriet, let me look at you!” He always said that and always went into the traditional Daddy-looking-over-daughter routine, holding me at arm’s length to beam at me with pride and pleasure. At the same time he was looking me over quite sharply. Of course he was desperate about the way I dressed—or rather, didn’t dress—and the most he could hope for was that my skin hadn’t broken out, or some other thing that might not do him credit. For a daughter was not exempt from the function of his other women of doing him credit: Manton would not have kept company with a frump. He sighed as usually on letting me go and said “Why don’t you let Barbara take you to some of her places, it’s the one thing she knows about.” When he turned his attention toward her, she at once began to babble the way she did when she was nervous—how she was just getting ready, wouldn’t be a second, that she and I got talking and she absolutely forgot the time, which was unforgivably stupid of her. The more she went on the more irritated he got, of course, and then she got more nervous, positively jumpy and crazy, and they were back in their vicious circle.

  I felt sorry for her and mad at him. I knew how he could be: If you showed the least weakness or nervousness he would take advantage of it (I guess that made him a natural bully, though there was another side to him). But I hadn’t come there to listen in on their difficult relationship. I wanted to tell him about Lindsay and Propinquity—to ask his advice maybe, or just to have someone close with whom to talk about it. And as soon as Barbara had gone to squeeze herself back in her outfit, I did tell him. He was outraged. He couldn’t believe his ears. He knew Lindsay was crazy but this beat everything. Not that he cared a damn about the house—in fact, he hated it, for being ugly-—but the idea of giving it away, giving away his children’s heritage, and on such a whim and for such a cause: He was speechless, he said. I must say, his reaction seemed to me very sane and natural; I felt justified, confirmed in my own common sense while everyone else appeared to have taken leave of theirs. When Manton was angry, his color rose high and his eyes glittered cold and blue. He looked what he was perhaps meant to be: a soldier, colonizer, man of action—quite magnificent really, and formidable. At that moment poor Barbara came in, in her ridiculous little short frock, and all his manly anger turned on her: “Do you really seriously believe,” he said, very slowly and drawling like an Englishman, “that I would be seen out dead with you in that ludicrous getup?” I could see her plump knees knocking together as she hastened to agree with him that she looked terrible. “Go and take it off,” he interrupted her. “We’re not going.” She pleaded for a bit, then burst into tears—not for herself but for him, for spoiling his evening. And in fact this would have been considered unforgivable, if he hadn’t already changed his own plans; but he had—my news had stirred him up, and he decided that he would drive me back to the country to see what was going on. Barbara was allowed to come and sat in the back, talking away happily.

  Here was a further complication in the house, and to explain it, I should say something of Manton’s relation to the rest of us. There is no need to talk about Manton and Lindsay: the less said there the better. And Manton and Michael—there was not much to be said there either, except that Manton was not cut out to be anyone’s father and especially not Michael’s. Over the years they had learned to tolerate each other, which they did mainly by never seeing each other. Then there was Manton and Mrs. Schwamm—he was simply delighted to hear she was back, not only because she was such a terrific cook but because they had this thing about adoring one another. Manton was the type to make himself tremendously popular with any domestic staff, and they were always eager to do something extra for him; and that was how it was with him and Mrs. Schwamm—whom he alone was allowed to call Else, or even Elsie. Finally, Manton and Jean—well, that was better than one would have thought possible, considering how he was this very sexy man whose women had to be women, and she was what she was. But I think they were useful to each other. Jean kept Lindsay completely out of his hair, while he had put Lindsay off men forever—so Lindsay herself said, and in fact, on the very rare occasions when he was around, Lindsay simply clung to Jean, as for protection against him.

  So Manton entered this arena—only to be thrown at once because everything had changed beyond his recognition. I had tried to tell him something about the Rawul and his party, but it wasn’t possible to get across the fact of their influence: of how they had taken complete possession of the house and everyone in it. And Manton himself was at once drawn into the new dispensation. It happened just as soon as he saw the Rani and was bowled over by her. She was used to that—people being bowled over by her—and knew exactly how to handle him. She wasn’t flirtatious as much as friendly; that is, she held him at a distance by giving him her respectful attention; but she was this phenomenally beautiful woman, so that while she puffed him up with her respect, she brought him down with her aloofness. I wasn’t sure why she took even that much trouble with him; she didn’t with anybody else. Maybe she thought he could be useful in getting me to donate the house; and of course Manton was a very handsome and attractive man, always had been—I mean, it was what he was, it was the essence of his personality.

  Barbara’s reaction to the scene was unexpected. She was upset about Manton and the Rani, but that wasn’t all of it: She hated everything else too—I would never have thought that sweet, soft Barbara could hate anything or anyone, but my God she did. It was awful for her when Manton decided he had to stay; he told her to go back to New York and pack some of his clothes and bring them up, and when she began to fuss, he said “Well you can bring yours too”; but that was the only concession he would make. When she tried to argue, he said “I’ve never heard such selfish nonsense”—pointing out that he had been called to help decide whether his son and daughter should give up their house, and how generous it was of him to allow her to be in on this family affair. She found she had no choice—if she wanted to stay with him, that is, and she did; but she was horribly upset, both before driving to the city to get their clothes and after she came back. I found her in tears in her bedroom—she had to sleep separately from Manton because he got onto this high horse of how it wasn’t proper for her to share his bed in his wife’s house and with his children present. I felt sorry for her, and also that it was mostly my fault that they were here—they had been all right in New York, living in their hotel and going to costume balls.

  Michael came in on me while I was with Barbara in her room. This was constantly happening all over the house, people looking for each other in each other’s rooms, everyone with something important, and usually intimate, to say. Barbara was lying on the bed crying, and I was sitting beside her. This room suited her well—it was as fluffy and fair as she was, with ruffled curtains and flouncy chair covers and an ivory carpet with pink roses on it. Barbara was never very articulate, and besides crying couldn’t really explain herself. When Michael and I tried to comfort her, she said “It’s not only Manton and her.” Here she burst into a new flood of tears; she cried like a child and her face went puffy like a child’s. “It’s all of it,” she said, when she could speak again. “All of them. You don’t know,” she said. Michael and I looked at each other across her. If Barbara implied she knew something that he and I didn’t, it must be true because usually she was very self-deprecating. Barbara’s background and experience
were quite different from what one might have expected: Looking at her, knowing her, one would think she came from some nice family in Connecticut, but in fact her mother was a movie star and Barbara had spent her early years in Hollywood and on film sets in places like Morocco or Rome. And now what she tried to explain to Michael and me was that the atmosphere in the house—I suppose she meant the way everyone was so intensely involved with everyone else—was like it used to be around her mother and her associates when they were all locked up with each other on location. And just as she had got this out, there was a brief and very authoritarian knock on the door, which opened immediately afterward—I didn’t have to turn around; I could tell by the shock passing through Michael that it was Crishi. “Oh there you are,” said Crishi, enfolding the three of us in his smile.

  An instant change came over Barbara. She had been lying there in a heap, making no attempt to hide her tears, but now she shot up on her bed and sat very upright, arranging her dress to cover her thighs and knees. She held her head high, and though her cheeks were still wet and swollen, she put a prim, distant, disapproving look on her face, like a matron with an uninvited, undesired guest. I was amazed—I didn’t think she could be like that; I had never seen her with anyone she disliked. Crishi felt it immediately, and he moderated his smile and said he hoped he wasn’t in the way, or anything? He looked from one to the other and especially warmly at Barbara, who became more prim. Then Crishi raised one slender finger at Michael, meaning one moment, very politely, but also meaning come here, now. And Michael went at once; without one glance at me or Barbara, he obeyed as he would a master’s call. When they had gone, Barbara said “He’s the worst, Harriet. No,” she said as though I had contradicted her, “he’s a bad person.” I didn’t think he was a bad person, on the contrary; but I guess I still didn’t feel strongly enough one way or the other to stick up for him with Barbara.

  I must have wiped out the incident with Paul; or allowed myself to put a different interpretation on it—at any rate, I no longer held it against Crishi. I hadn’t seen Paul around for some time, and assumed he was gone wherever it was Crishi wanted to send him. I didn’t ask about him; it wasn’t important enough. And they were always coming and going, all the followers—there were so many of them and so many different missions they had to fulfill and different centers to liaison with. I was used to seeing them tramping up and down the stairs, but it was a shock to Manton. In his day, if there was a crowd in the house, it was one that had come for a dance or a party. “What are they—hippies?” he asked me, hippies being the latest thing he had heard of. But Manton was adaptable, and it took him no time to get used to them—or rather, fail to notice them, the way he never had difficulty ignoring people he didn’t need. As in a restaurant, he would make a point of being terribly friendly with the waiter who served him and the maître d’ who gave him a good table, but everyone else might as well be plants and stones. It would be untrue to say he was a snob because it had nothing to do with class, only with whether a person impinged on his life or not. So he would brush past the “hippies” on the stairs, genuinely not seeing them; and would sit for hours with Else Schwamm in the kitchen, telling her how he was falling in love with the Rani, and what should he do about it; and she, without for one second interrupting the kneading and rolling of her pastry, face red, arms pumping, would give him the benefit of her life’s experience, the two of them convinced that it was the most important topic in the world.

  The rest of us knew better. I say “us,” including myself, for I was now in a position where I wanted to believe—that is, believe with Michael that it was all for some high purpose, and not with Barbara that it was a fraud. I knew Michael wouldn’t have been taken in by a fraud. He had spent too much time—all his life practically, and mine—examining truth and faith and every other fundamental principle. He wouldn’t compromise any of that on account of his own feelings—for Crishi, that is. He had been in love before, and whereas it may have made him suspend his quest for a while, it had never led him away from it. And it couldn’t be so now, when he felt more strongly than I had ever seen him do before. I believed in him, which was how I was ready to believe in everything else.

  It was being made clear to me that we were very fortunate to have been chosen as one of the spearheads of the movement. The Rawul’s followers felt it strongly—that they were pioneers, leaders of a mission, apostles or whatever; and this was brought home to me one day in a quarrel I had with one of the girls over the use of a bathroom. The bathroom was mine—anyway, the one adjoining my room—and while I had accepted the fact that the Rawul and his party had more or less taken over everywhere else, I continued to think of this one room and bathroom as exclusively my own. But once when I tried to go in, I found the door locked. I wasn’t pleased but I had lived enough in dorms to take it philosophically and just wait. Whoever was inside didn’t come out and didn’t come out, till finally I banged on the door and yelled a bit. A yell came back—it was one of the girls and she was very rude, so I banged some more and was very rude to her, and we had this shouting match through the door. When she came out at last, she was livid; she was holding a book, which she must have been reading in there. She waved it in my face—it was the Dhammapada, and I understood that it was very bad to disturb anyone in the reading of that. I calmed down and said that there were plenty of bathrooms in the house without her having to come in here to use mine. As soon as I uttered the word mine, I realized I had made a mistake. I had played into her hands and she could take off from there, about possessiveness and ego and all the rest of it. It so happened I agreed with her, though under the circumstances I couldn’t say so; and anyway, she didn’t give me a chance to—she just went on and on. She was a very thin, pale girl, who looked as if she were suffering from amoebic dysentery; but if she was physically debilitated, mentally she was very fierce—that is, in her convictions. She asked me did I have any idea what it meant that this house had been chosen, and we with it? In case I didn’t, she explained that, whatever we might have been before, we now had to live up to the responsibility of our position. By the time she finished, she seemed to have mellowed toward me and to be really on my side; she even pressed my arm to show me she knew how difficult it was to live up to something greater than oneself.

  WE all continued to attend the Rawul’s evening talks, which were getting to be like a family get-together with the same internal strains and the same sense of cohesion, of not being able to get out even if one wanted to. But now the Rawul said the time had come to reach outward—after all, we were not a private group, a personal club, but were there to reform the world. The Rawul could make these sort of statements absolutely without blinking, because they were so utterly serious to him; he really felt himself to be on this mission. Up till now, he had what he called “reached outward” only through the mail—that was what most of the activity in the house was about, getting publicity material together to send to government agencies in Washington, the U.N., the press, to schools, sponsors, donors, foundations, and generally responsible citizens. The Rawul now called for more direct contact with the outside world. It was the way they had operated previous campaigns—in England, Holland, and India so far—and had no doubt that it would work here too. The first step was to be a big party on the grounds of Propinquity for people from the town and from the adjacent houses—a sort of open house, like Lindsay’s family traditionally had on July Fourth. And in fact it was the July Fourth weekend that was chosen for this opening campaign.

  I had doubts about it from the first, which I told Michael. He disagreed with me—we disagreed often nowadays; it made me sad, but he didn’t seem to notice. He said everybody used to love Grandmother’s parties and was eager to come—all sorts of different people, the bank manager and the real estate agent, the families from the big houses, the plumber, Grandmother’s favorite butcher, the package-store people, the garage owner—it was the event of the season for the neighborhood. Yes, I said, but hadn’t he no
ticed the neighborhood had changed: For one thing, it was much poorer; the rail service to the nearest town had been discontinued, the yellow-frame houses with white porches and hanging plants had been taken over by families on welfare, and the big houses had either been torn down or bought up and restored as weekend homes by lawyers and decorators from the city. And quite apart from the neighborhood changing, what about us? Didn’t he think, I asked Michael, that we—he and I, Lindsay and Jean, Manton and Barbara—were quite a change from our grandparents? Michael brushed me aside. He said I was proving his point—of course the neighborhood had changed; We had changed, two generations had passed, and didn’t I see that it was the moment for a real, a conscious change? In fact, for a new world movement to cohere this changed society in a new way? Michael was getting to be as persuasive as the Rawul.

  In the years when Lindsay and Jean were alone in the house, living mostly in the kitchen, it seemed to rain almost all summer. But I never remember a wet July Fourth weekend when Grandmother had her open house, and this time too, for the Rawul, the weather held. Yes, the weather, the grounds, the house, these were all unchanged from our grandparents’ time, all glorious. And, just as in their time, the preparations for the party started days ahead and involved the whole household. The Rani and Crishi were in charge. Both were very good at giving orders and getting things done; they might have sounded a bit ruthless when it came to the followers, but they could be very tactful, as with the local tradesmen, who would later be guests at the party, and with Mrs. Schwamm. It was an achievement to get her to hand over her kitchen to the general maneuver and to participate in it. She outdid herself in the creation of Viennese tidbits, while the Rani supervised the preparations of various kinds of kebabs and fritters with exotic fillings—not quite Indian but a sort of mixture, like the Rani herself. It was very different from Grandmother’s hot dogs, spare ribs, and potato salad; but so were the Oriental rugs and bolsters spread on the lawns from her garden furniture; and most different of all were the principal hosts.