Three Continents

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  But I did mention it to Crishi and Michael—and they both dismissed it, in their different ways. Crishi said “Oh isn’t that terrible,” clicking his tongue in pity before adding “but then why the hell don’t they get out and leave the house to us.” “They can’t, Crishi,” I said. “You know they can’t—not till you get the money to pay them.” “Oh yes the money,” he said. “We’re all waiting for the money. Your fault: Why can’t you have your birthday now instead of June?” It was useless talking to him.

  And for once talking with Michael was useless too. It turned out he hated Babaji—“All that stuff: the incense and the nonviolent shoes and the sublimated sex. It’s rotten,” he said. “Soft and rotten.” His face took on a contorted, harsh expression that I didn’t like to see, and he knew I didn’t. He defended himself: “They’re so fanatical, you have no idea.” “But don’t you have to be?” I asked. “If you truly believe in something?” “Of course,” he said; “but what you believe in has to be the truth, not made-up lies like theirs.” There was no point in arguing with him; he was so proud and sure. Maybe that’s why we had begun to look different from each other, for there was nothing I was sure about. If he resembled anyone now, it was the other followers—and not only because he wore the same clothes and had his hair cropped close to his head: It was something in his bearing too, something rigid and trained. This was probably due to the martial exercises they practiced; but how to account for the change in his eyes—no longer the far-seeing seafarer’s eyes he had inherited from Grandfather and Manton, but more like the other followers’, unblinking and almost blank in deadly certainty.

  CRISHI still often called me to meet him in Rupert’s gallery, and I dropped in on my own too, to see Rupert. Since discovering he had been married to Renée, I regarded him as a member of our very extended family. The way I felt about this family was that some members of it I liked better than others, but in any case there we all were. I certainly liked Rupert, and even felt a sort of bond with him, maybe because he was the only one besides me who didn’t seem to be confident about anything. Even in his gallery he looked as if he didn’t know why he was there. I often wondered why he was—he wasn’t the type to run any kind of business; and in fact he didn’t—he left everything to his partner, Nicholas. There were frequent parties at the gallery, and while everyone was shouting darling at each other, Rupert sort of hovered about, looking apologetic when he took anything off the trays the waiters were carrying around. The gallery was on two floors, one of them a basement with the tiniest little cubbyhole tucked away in it, and this served as Rupert’s office. It was a hiding place as much as an office—that was what I used it for during these parties, and sooner or later Rupert would join me. It was there that he told me about Renée and himself and other things he didn’t usually talk about. He kept interrupting himself—“Is this boring you?” Sometimes other people would come in to ask about some picture on display, and when he went out with them to look at it, he stood there swaying on his heels, not knowing what to say but too polite not to show interest, till Nicholas came bustling up to rescue both him and the potential buyer.

  Rupert had met Renée in India. It had been his first visit, though his family had an association with the country going back to the eighteenth century. He had gone to visit his brother Tom, who had joined a kind of mission there—he was a priest but he didn’t work to relieve people’s religious needs so much as their physical ones. There were a lot of physical needs in India, Rupert said and fell silent and looked down into his glass reflectively. At this point someone came to ask him about a picture, and I saw him go through his usual routine in front of it, till Nicholas took charge. Rupert certainly knew about the picture, but he was too reticent to air his views. When he came back and it was only me, he talked about it knowledgeably and made me go and see it with him. I had seen hundreds like it—in the gallery and with Indian dealers who brought them to the flat. This one showed a prince in pearls, turban, and silk tunic entertaining his beloved at a picnic, both of them sitting on a carpet with maidens at hand playing musical instruments; in the foreground were tiny delicate dishes and flasks, along with the flowers in the meadow, and in the background a palace that had open doors and windows and all sorts of goings-on inside, and behind that there was a stream and you could see the fish in it and above it blue rain clouds and cranes flying through them. I don’t know what it was that made these pictures so erotic, so charged with something exciting and delicious about to happen. Rupert felt it too; and talking about the picture, he told me that it was in just this sort of place and atmosphere—very different from his brother Tom’s mission in Meerut—that he had met Renée. He had been invited to a palace in Saurashtra by one of the princes, who had gone to school with him; Renée was there too—she traveled from palace to palace in her search for treasures to buy and sell.

  From the moment he met her, Rupert kept on following her around, and she let him. She involved him in her business too, and he helped her get things out of India, either by carrying them himself or through people he knew in various embassies. Although she had many contacts herself, high and not so high, she made him follow up every one of his, and when they returned to England, he introduced her to his friends and acquaintances, even those he hadn’t seen in years. She was at that stage of her career when anyone at all might be useful to her. Although they went in and out of India constantly, he did not see as much of his brother Tom as he would have liked because Renée’s business kept them so occupied. She was having visa trouble in India as well as residency difficulties in the U.K.—she held the wrong sort of passport from her first marriage—but that was taken care of after she married Rupert. At that time Rupert still had the house in Yorkshire, which had been in his family since the seventeenth century. He could afford to live in only a part of one wing, but had struggled to keep the place, especially as Tom had liked to come there on his leave from India every three years. But Renée could not bear it—it was impossibly cold, lonely, and dreary for her, and far from everywhere she had to be. Not long after their marriage she put it on the market and got a very good price from a Lebanese businessman in need of an English country place. With the proceeds, she bought the gallery and brought Nicholas in to manage it. She had known Nicholas for some time; he too was connected with the art world and he and Renée had sometimes been able to help each other out over some deal. He was energetic, and shrewd, and perfectly able to run the gallery on his own; but after Renée had got together with the Rawul and Crishi and had divorced Rupert, Rupert had involved himself more in the gallery—not because he was its nominal owner but to remain in constant touch with Renée.

  Some time after Rupert had told me this at one of the gallery parties, the trouble with the police started—in fact, it started at another party there. Someone who did not look like a guest came to speak with Nicholas. He was not obtrusive, and I don’t think anyone else noticed; probably I wouldn’t have noticed either if Nicholas had not come into the cubbyhole where Rupert and I had taken refuge. Nicholas, who looked pale and tense, told me to go out—he was very brusque, but Rupert said “Would you mind awfully, Harriet? For a minute?” The man smiled at me and said “If you’ll excuse us, miss.” They shut the door behind me. I was trapped in the middle of the party, among these strangers who had such a lot to say to one another; but as I stood there wedged between several lively groups shouting across me to each other, Crishi came up, and looking toward the closed door of Rupert’s office, asked me what was going on in there. When I told him about the man talking to Rupert and Nicholas, Crishi signaled to Renée—it had struck me before how easily, wherever they were and however many people there were between them, these two managed to communicate with each other. She made her way across to us and he said something to her I couldn’t hear. There were too many people clamoring for their attention for any discussion between them, but when they were swept apart, they kept up their secret communication, both of them electrically aware of the door openi
ng and the man emerging.

  He left quietly, raising his hat to me and apologizing for having taken me away from my friends. Crishi and Renée came over to me immediately to ask what he had said to me; then they went into the room with Rupert and Nicholas. I stayed outside waiting. The party had drawn to its close, only a few stragglers were left looking around for hosts to say good-bye to. Crishi and Renée came to the door occasionally and so did Rupert, though Nicholas, who was usually the most affable and visible host, stayed inside the office. Soon the gallery was empty except for me and the caterer’s men packing and cleaning up. There were loud arguments inside Rupert’s office; I could hear Nicholas sounding very shrill and almost hysterical, but Rupert’s voice was as calm as Crishi’s. And when at last they came out, they looked as they had sounded—Rupert and Crishi as they always were, but Nicholas seemed to have shrunk in size and authority. His smooth confidence had gone and he was shouting: “I’m not responsible! You can’t say I am! It’s not my responsibility.” Renée and Crishi ignored him—“Ready, Harriet?” Crishi said to me, as usual, as if it were I who had kept him waiting—but Rupert was concerned about Nicholas and reassured him: “Of course not, of course you’re not; I am.”

  And that was how it was arranged: Rupert was responsible. The case built up very slowly, and it was never clear to me what it was about, and I doubt whether Rupert understood either. Some years ago there had been a series of major thefts from an Indian museum, and the Indian police, working through Interpol, had traced some of the missing items to Rupert’s gallery. Well, it was his gallery and he was responsible for what was in it, however it may have got there. And since there was a lot of unpleasant publicity including headlines in the evening papers—like PEER’S SON IN MAJOR INDIAN ART THEFT—it was better that Rupert’s name should come up rather than Renée’s or Crishi’s, which would have been embarrassing for the movement. Crishi was more upset than he wanted anyone to know. Actually, he never did show it when he was upset—only if you knew him well, you would notice him becoming even more cheerful and energetic than usual, with the tiniest frown between his eyebrows and that habit he had of setting his teeth on edge so you couldn’t tell if he was smiling or what.

  At this time he got in a fight with one of the Indian dealers, whom I guess he held responsible for getting everyone in this trouble. I had seen the man before—at least, I think it was he, although there were several of them looking more or less alike, all plump and brown and middle-aged in tight-fitting suits, with shiny shirts, neckties, and rings. They brought pictures and, with a tender smile, unwrapped them like babies out of linen covers. That was what this man was doing—smiling, delicately unwrapping—when suddenly, without warning, in a tiger’s leap, Crishi jumped him. It was a horrible scene, but at the same time a bit comic—the way the expression on the man’s face changed, and he cried out the Hindu names of God, several of them, while Crishi was crying out these vile Hindu abuses. Crishi couldn’t speak any Indian language well, but he was fluent in the curses, some of which he had taught me for a joke and maybe for excitement, because they all involved female genitals and so on. The man lay on his back on the carpet, his stomach rising like a dome; he begged for mercy, but Crishi didn’t have any. There was nothing comic now; I was reminded of the time when I had seen him kicking Paul in the orchard at Propinquity. The Rawul, who couldn’t stand violence, had left the room, but Renée watched with her arms folded. I went out too because I didn’t want to see what was being done to the man, nor Crishi doing it. Besides, I had Robi with me, hiding his face against me.

  Robi was Renée and Rupert’s son, who usually stayed with Rupert. After Rupert was in trouble and kept having to make court appearances and even had to spend some time in prison before bail was granted, Robi was brought to live with us. That was all right, except that he and Renée made each other terribly nervous. She was forever finding fault with him for making too much noise or not eating his food, and when as a result he became very timid in her presence, she accused him of being a dull, dispirited child. She was watching him all the time, couldn’t take her eyes off his face; and if she wasn’t scolding him, she might suddenly seize him and hold him close to her and kiss him as though devouring him, and that frightened him more than anything. He preferred to be with me, and he slept upstairs too, and I took him to school and brought him home. I enjoyed waiting outside with the mothers to be claimed by him when he came running out in his striped cap and socks. To get away from Renée, we often went to the other house, to the Bari Rani and the girls. He was completely accepted there, like a little brother, and everyone fussed over him, combing his hair, kissing him, making him open his mouth to count his teeth. He ran in and out of the rooms, even when the girls were dressing; and when their friends came, he wouldn’t go to bed but fell asleep in a chair in the middle of the party. He was like a little Indian boy—even in appearance, he didn’t seem to have got anything from his English father. This hadn’t struck me till Bari Rani pointed it out—more than once. She was always returning to the subject, asking whom did I think he looked like. Well actually, though he had Renée’s coloring, he didn’t look like her either, but it could hardly be expected that a timid frail little boy should resemble such a tigress. “How old is he now?” Bari Rani would ask me—she knew he was six better than I did, for she had been around when he was born. They had already been a sort of family at the time, including Crishi, who had appeared among them some two years before that. Sometimes Bari Rani suggested that he resembled Crishi—although of course, she added, it might be just the coloring, the faintly olive skin of someone partly Oriental. “Don’t you think he’s small for his age?” she said. “And with such a tall father—Rupert must be over six feet. Poor Rupert,” she ended up. “What have they got him into?”

  Robi often fell asleep in my bed, and I would study and study his face—you couldn’t say he looked like Crishi and you couldn’t say he didn’t. But I liked to pretend that he was Crishi’s—that is, Crishi’s and mine. When I told Crishi that, he laughed and said “I hope you’re not getting any ideas.” But he was very passionate with me during these days. I was beginning to notice that whenever he was particularly worried about anything, he would want to make a tremendous amount of love at night. It was as though he wanted to forget everything and just become this body pouring himself into sex. He came up every night; he never failed me. Robi was asleep by that time, and Crishi would pick him up and take him into another room. He never bothered to do this gently and often Robi woke up and began to cry, the way children do when suddenly awakened. But when he opened his eyes and saw it was Crishi carrying him, he became quiet at once. The truth was, he was afraid of Crishi, even more than of Renée; and I also have to say that I have seen Crishi strike Robi—for almost nothing really. If Robi asked a question during some grown-up conversation, Crishi without hesitation would slap his face, very hard and not at all the way one would slap a child. Robi dared not even cry out and Crishi didn’t glance at him, but continued talking as though no interruption had taken place.

  Whenever Crishi came upstairs and especially after he began appearing so regularly, Anna made her usual fuss. First she tried to keep him talking with her, using all the delaying tactics she could: and when he left her at last and was with me, she began to play her tapes very loudly, or turned the TV up and laughed ostentatiously at what she saw there. She also woke up Robi and made him sit and watch TV with her and engaged him in long loud conversations—only they weren’t conversations—they were monologues to be overheard by us, for she couldn’t stand children, had no time for them at all. “How much longer is he going to be here?” she asked me about Robi. It was exactly the same question I asked Crishi about her, while the two of us lay in the dark and she made all the noise she could in the next room. He said not much longer, then he said she had to be there because of her work with the Rawul, then he said, “What difference does it make to you?” Well, I guess it didn’t make all that much—after all, he was h
ere with me, in my bed, it was he and I making love while she watched TV.

  Renée began to do something she hadn’t done before—she came up during the day, when Crishi was not there. Although she had a reason—that is, Robi—she came mostly when Robi was at school, and if he wasn’t, she sent him away to another room so that she and I could be alone together. If Anna was there, she ignored her completely; she wanted to be only with me. She came into my room and sat on the bed and sighed and stroked the pillow and turned it around and stroked the other side. She was very gentle with me, and friendly and open. She confided in me—but in a sort of general way: about being a woman, and getting older, and losing so much of what was dearest to you. It was as if she wanted me to pity her. But how could I: someone so strong and beautiful. She said “I don’t expect you to understand, Harriet—I wouldn’t have understood at your age when I still thought I could have everything I wanted, anytime I wanted it.”