At the far end of the room, in the space between two windows where a cabinet full of porcelain usually stood, was the same group of musical followers who had played at the July Fourth flag-hoisting ceremony. On that occasion, Crishi had given them the signal when to strike up—that is, at the exact moment when the two flags, the Stars and Stripes and the Rawul’s, began their ascent. Now again it was he who gave them the signal, and the moment was when he and I were supposed to be sealing the ceremony by our kiss; but even as our lips met, his eyes swiveled around and his hand rose to make the musicians strike up. They did so, on the same note of jubilation as on the previous occasion. Crishi sprang away from me—maybe to see that everything was functioning as he wanted—and it was the last I saw of him for several hours. Probably it is that way at a wedding—I mean, your own wedding—that you are parted from those you want to be with by a crowd of well-wishers surrounding you and saying things you’re too overwrought to hear. I didn’t see Michael either but guessed he had gone to read somewhere upstairs. The first person to come up to me was the Rani—not to wish me well; she didn’t say anything, only rearranged the wedding dress she had fitted on me. I had no time to think of her because I was soon claimed by Sonya and her friends. They led me up to the Princess in her wheelchair and appeared to regard it as a solemn moment, though neither the Princess nor I knew what it meant. “Lay your head in Highness’s lap,” Sonya whispered to me. I didn’t want to, but realizing it was important, got down on my knees before the wheelchair; there I hesitated, and Sonya had to press my head into the royal lap. There appeared to be nothing human within the cotton smock, no lap or legs on which to lay my bridal head, just this little heap of skeletal remains. Someone took the Princess’s hand to guide it—she didn’t like the situation any more than I did and had to be rebuked by her nurse not to be a silly; her hand was pressed on my head to bless me, and we stayed like that, with me holding my breath and the Princess making whimpering sounds, till they released us.
There was a lot of noise from the followers playing their instruments, and on the landing the string quartet had struck up a medley of old Broadway show tunes. I was surrounded by Sonya’s friends, all of them terribly excited, for they loved a wedding; they loved parties in general, and these were not as plentiful for them as they had been—some of the grand dresses had a musty smell to them under the layers of heady old-fashioned perfumes. There was a babble of languages around me, Russian, French, and German, but mostly it was various exotic accents of English, all outshouted by Dorothy in pure American. They held glasses and plates of delirious food, and some of them were so wrought-up, their hands shook so much that they spilled champagne and crumbs down my paneled dress; they brushed me down and Sonya helped them, everyone laughing and crying, and before long I was too. They didn’t give me time to look around for Crishi, but I knew that when they had gone, there would be he and I together and married; and it was this thought that was the cause of my laughter and tears, whatever might be theirs.
There had been no talk about where we would spend our first married night together—we could stay here in Sonya’s house, or go to some hotel, or drive back to Propinquity. I looked forward to it, whatever it was. The last guests had gone, including the family—Manton and Barbara returned to their hotel, and Lindsay and Jean drove to Propinquity, as did the Rawul and followers. The caterer’s men were carrying out their paraphernalia, with Sonya tripping after them, tucking tips into their pockets. I went to the front bedroom next to hers, where I had changed into my wedding dress. Crishi was in the room; he had already taken off his bridegroom’s brocade coat and was back in his usual clothes, buttoning up his shirt. The Rani was there too; I was surprised, for I thought she had gone back to Propinquity with the others. But there she was, folding up his bridegroom’s coat very carefully, as though it were some prop she was putting away for the next time.
“Oh there you are,” Crishi greeted me in the distraught way he had when there were other things on his mind. “You must be dead with all that going on.”
“I’m okay.”
“Well you’re lucky, you can get to sleep straight off. . . . Stop messing with that, Rani, put it away and we’ll pick it up in the morning when we get back.”
“Get back from where?” I asked.
“It’s always like that. Always the same. It’s what you have to expect from that bunch of psychos. Now Harriet I have to go. You know that.”
“No. No I don’t. I don’t know that.”
I stood at the foot of the bed, straight and stiff so as to keep myself together. They were on either side of the big double bed that Sonya had got ready for us in case we decided to stay. It had a bedspread with a scattering of bowknots on it, and above it—a new fantasy of hers—matching drapery suspended from a Victorian crown of gilt. The Rani was concentrating on the suitcase into which she was packing his coat; she kept her eyes lowered with a modest air, not wishing to interfere between husband and wife. Crishi was so amazed at my tone that he stopped buttoning his shirt and stared at me for a moment before bursting out: “And who do you think is going to go up there and get it all straightened out—if not me?” As usual when he was or pretended to be worked up, his London accent became more pronounced. “You don’t think I’ve had a hard day, you don’t think I’m about ready to drop, you don’t think all I want is to crash here on this nice soft bed the way you can. But no such luck for me,” he ended up bitterly. The Rani felt very sorry for him and looked up from his suitcase and suggested in a gentle voice, “Perhaps I could try to manage by myself.”
“Yes you could try,” he said with the same bitterness. “But I don’t think you’re going to get very far. That’s the way it is in this outfit—if I don’t look after every single dumb stupid thing myself, someone else is sure to get it all balled up. I’m sick of it, I can tell you. But what to do—I’m in it up to here, and fed up with it up to here too. And then to have people pulling at you—no don’t go, stay with me, hold my hand—I don’t understand you, Harriet. I really don’t.”
“Oh no no,” the Rani intervened between us. “She didn’t mean it like that. She knows you have to go.”
“Do you know?” Crishi said, looking at me like he dared me to say no. I didn’t say no, but I didn’t say yes either. I kept my eyes fixed on the beautiful bedspread Sonya had newly bought for us; probably she had put it on the bed herself, with many lovely loving thoughts as she smoothed and patted it all around.
The Rani became very busy. She shut Crishi’s suitcase and put it by the door, she looked in the mirror and touched up her hair—“Goodness! What a mess”—she came up to me and kissed me, for the first time that day: “Just go to bed and have a lovely sleep.” Her face was no longer unhappy but blooming as usual, as she preceded Crishi out the door. He was following her but turned and came up to me again: “I’ll be back; you’re not going to get rid of me that easy.” He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and whispered into that ear: “Too bad it’s tonight, but it’s not exactly like it’s the first night, is it. Is it?” he repeated and blew into my ear, tickling it so that I had to smile. Then he was gone, leaving me with that smile on my lips and his breath on my ear, as if these were enough for me on that wedding night.
I sat on the bed and tried to have sensible thoughts. He was right—it wasn’t our first night; we had had many before and would have many, many more after. And it was true too that the organization depended largely on him, that nothing went right without him. I also tried to have sensible thoughts about the Rani, who was so closely bound up with him in the work. The Rawul was the apex of the movement, but Crishi and the Rani were the base on which it rested. They were collaborators; they worked together. The Rani was married to the Rawul, Crishi to me, but within the organization, in the work itself, the two of them were closest to each other. This was how it was and might always be. I took off the wedding dress she had given me—or had she only lent it?—and wore one of my new nightgowns. Barbara had selected
the one I was to wear tonight, and I put it on though I didn’t really feel right in it, with all that lace and frilly stuff.
I couldn’t stay alone any longer. I left the room and went into the front bedroom, where Sonya was. I opened the door and found her kneeling by the bed. She had her back to me and could have been a little girl saying her prayers. She too was wearing a nightgown—an even more elaborate one than mine, full of old lace; she had bought it from a friend of hers who ran a very exclusive lingerie business. She didn’t hear me come in—my feet were bare, her carpet deep—and wasn’t aware of me till I stood beside her. When she raised her face, it was not a little girl’s but an old old woman’s. Yet the expression on it was a child’s, glowing with pure feeling—and the feeling was all for me; she had been praying for me. She pulled me down beside her. I buried my face in the counterpane of the big double bed—a heavy dark austere bed, which Grandfather had first shared with Grandmother and where as a child I had seen them lying side by side like two carved effigies; and afterward I had seen him with Sonya in it, only she had been snuggled up close to him and he held her in his arms like a doll. Now she knelt beside me, praying—fervently, the way she did everything. When she had finished, she got up, and she thanked me for coming in to her—tonight, of all nights: “Only now you must go back to him,” she said and kissed me, as was her way, full on the lips.
I left her but couldn’t return to the room she had got ready for us. I went up the stairs to the next floor. This was where Michael and I had our rooms when we stayed in the house. Michael! I hadn’t seen him all day. He must have been sitting behind me during the ceremony, but when it was over and I turned around, he was gone. I hadn’t thought of him since, but that wasn’t unusual; I didn’t have to think of Michael, he was just there. And when I opened the door of his room, he was there—lying on the bed with a book, as always. I was so relieved, so relieved, I had to hold on to the door handle for a moment. He looked up and said “What’s that?” He meant my unusual nightgown. I took it off and put on his old robe hanging behind the door. I lay on the opposite end of his bed, looking at him in the lamplight. He moved his feet so I could lie properly. He didn’t ask me anything—where Crishi was, or anything. He just lay there reading his usual kind of book. My eyes, fixed on his face, began slowly to close; the Rani was right—I was exhausted and needed to sleep. I woke up once and found Michael asleep too, with the light still on and the book on his chest. I meant to turn it off but was too tired and went back to sleep, my feet touching his shoulder, and his mine.
II
THE FAMILY
MY married life really started in London, and it wasn’t what I had expected. Crishi didn’t live with me but with the Rawul and Rani in the apartment—or flat, as they said in England—below the one where Michael and I were. The building was one of those gloomy old five-story English houses with high ceilings and tall narrow windows that had been one-family houses with many children in them and servants in the basement and the attic; now they had been converted into flats and let out to rich foreigners. The houses overlooked a garden in the center to which everyone living in the square had a key, but all the time we were there it was never warm enough to sit out; anyway, it was usually raining. I spent a lot of time looking out the window at the trees in the rain. I was usually waiting—waiting for Crishi, that is. He would call sometime during the day to tell me when to meet him and where, and this always varied. It was not at all the way it had been at Propinquity, where everything had been so structured, with the followers running the house and the Rawul’s visiting hours and his evening lectures that everyone attended. Here there was no regular program, and most of the time I didn’t even know where everyone was. Sometimes I found that, when I thought they were in the flat downstairs, they had gone out somewhere. It might be ten o’clock at night before Crishi called and said to come to some restaurant where they were having dinner. We would stay sitting around there till long after midnight, which was all right for me because, having nothing to do except wait, I had slept through a good part of the day. When we all went home, Crishi sometimes came upstairs with me but by no means always, and I never knew if he would yawn at his landing and say “Goodnight, sweetheart,” and go into their flat with the Rawul and Rani, or if he would make the extra flight up to mine and Michael’s.
I got the impression that they were all—that is, the Rawul, Rani, and Crishi—more relaxed and at home in London than they had been in the U.S. That had been literally a new world for them, but here they were in their own old world. They seemed to have many connections here, unlike in the States, where they had only us and the followers and the rather weird people who were beginning to hear about the movement. In England many more people knew of it, and the Rawul sometimes lunched in the House of Commons with a member of an independent party, or at the Savoy with the leader of a new parliamentary group. Most of the followers I had known were left behind in the U.S. to carry on the work there and to look after Propinquity and the house on the Island. There was a different group of followers in London, and they didn’t live with us but in another house, which had been taken for them in Earl’s Court. I saw only isolated members when they came to clean our flats. There was also an office, so the movement was really separated from our domestic lives; and that may have been why the Rawul, Rani, and Crishi seemed more like a private family here, living in a big family flat where everything was comfortable and familiar to them.
It was in London that I discovered the Rawul had another wife. No one had mentioned her before but it was not as if she were being kept secret—at least not privately, though officially, as the leader of the movement, he had only one consort, and that was the Rani. But actually, legally, the Bari Rani, as she was called, was his wife; and so as not to get them mixed up, the Rani was actually called by her real name in England, and it was as Renée that I too began to think of her. The Rawul may have gone through some sort of ceremony with her—maybe the same as mine—but he had never divorced the Bari Rani. She too was living in London, not in the same house as ours but one that was almost identical and in an identical square a few streets away. She had three teenage daughters called Priti, Daisy, and Baby, and the four of them came to visit us shortly after our arrival. Crishi had told me that they were very excited about our marriage and couldn’t wait to see me. He advised me to wear some of my new clothes; he said they would be very disappointed if I didn’t come up to their standard, which was high. As soon as I entered the room, there were these four pairs of eager eyes on me, but next moment they were tactfully lowered, for I had failed to take Crishi’s advice. I didn’t feel right in those clothes Barbara had bought for me. The visitors themselves were dressed and made up exquisitely—Crishi had told me they spent all their time shopping, and it showed. All four of them were bright and quick, with quick darting eyes and movements and voices. They had brought a lot of highly colored pastries for us, as well as the Rawul’s favorite walnut cake. The mother, in her pastel diaphanous sari, was sipping tea out of a porcelain cup, and the girls in their pastel diaphanous dresses were sucking Cokes through straws. At first the four of them looked the same age—but of course with the mother the effect had been achieved artificially, or rather, so well was it done, artistically. She was older than Renée, but it seemed the other way around—maybe because of her chirping manner, the same as her girls’. Renée, placid and full-bosomed, appeared very mature beside her, almost indulgent, with a little smile playing around her lips as she listened to their chatter. The Rawul had added the dignity of a paterfamilias to that of statesman and English gentleman. He wore what is known as a smoking jacket, in midnight-blue velvet, and his girls called him Papa. There he sat relaxing in the bosom of his family—and I guess we were a family: The Rawul and Renée were the royal couple, with Crishi as their crown prince; which made me the crown princess, even if it was difficult for me to feel like one; and to complete our Oriental dynasty, there was another royal consort with another set of princesses; a
nd around us, acting as household staff, were the various followers who had come up from the house in Earl’s Court to serve our tea. Through the French windows we could see the flag of the Fourth World, which had been hoisted from the little wrought-iron balcony—not an unusual sight around here, for other national standards proclaiming foreign embassies drooped over the wet and leafy square where English nannies had once wheeled their tow-headed charges in stately prams.
The flag was the cause of the first disagreement I witnessed within our extended family circle, which up till then had appeared to be, considering the circumstances, quite harmonious. From time to time the Rawul went to visit the other household—that is, his wife and children—and whenever he did, he wanted them to fly his flag from their balcony. He even sent over a follower to hoist it. The Bari Rani kept quiet about it for a while, but one day she refused to let the follower on her balcony, so when the Rawul arrived, there was no flag. They must have had a big fight about it because soon the Rawul came back home, looking flushed and uptight. The phone rang and it was the Bari Rani wanting to speak to him, but he wouldn’t and sent Renée instead. She tried to be calm and diplomatic, but the Bari Rani slammed the phone down on her, and after a while she rang again, and again the Rawul sent Renée. This went on two or three times and ended in the Bari Rani arriving on our doorstep, in a state. Although so tiny, she looked commanding, and if the Rawul had wanted to evade her, he didn’t have a chance. She ignored everyone else, including Renée, and continued her row with him. She told him that he could do what he liked in this house but not in the other one, where she lived with her children. Here the Rawul interrupted her to say that, wherever he happened to be, whether it was in this house or in that, for the duration of his stay it was his territory where his flag had to be displayed. That much respect was owed, he said, to him and his movement. “Oh respect,” said the Bari Rani, and she made her eyes glide over Renée, and from there back to him, and then she repeated “Respect,” and seemed for the moment to have got off the subject of the flag.
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