Anna told me that the reason everyone was so worried was that a huge amount of bail had had to be found for Rupert; and it was an especially bad time because there had been some arrests among the followers and what they were carrying had been confiscated and lost. “Naturally she’s in a bad mood,” Anna said, referring to Renée; she added “Never mind, it’s only a little while longer and their troubles will be over.” I knew she was referring to when Michael and I would come of age; I had got used to it being generally assumed that everyone was waiting for that time, and I guess Michael had too. He and I never spoke about it to each other.
Then Lindsay and Jean appeared on the scene. I can’t say I was really pleased to see them, but Crishi seemed to be. He made quite a fuss of them. They went through the same routine as Manton and Barbara had—that is, they were ceremonially received by the Rawul in the downstairs flat and met both households at the Indian restaurant. They were as stiff and out of place as Manton and Barbara had been; I decided there and then it was hopeless to bring everyone together. Michael cared neither one way nor the other; he sat there with his head bent over his plate, eating. But Crishi and Renée really put themselves out; and when Lindsay and Jean asked me to accompany them on a tour of England, Crishi insisted I go, though I didn’t want to.
That was a strange trip. Lindsay and Jean were very, very loving with each other, with their differences apparently resolved: It was the same as with Manton and Barbara, who had also, since my marriage, drawn closer together. And like Manton and Barbara, they loved being in England. Lindsay often said she felt more at home here than anywhere else, or rather, she didn’t say, she asked—“Why do I feel so at home here?” The answer you were supposed to give her, and if you didn’t she supplied it herself, was that it was where her roots were. Technically this was true, for both sets of her great-great-grandparents had emigrated from here in the 1850s; but all the same, she appeared exotic and transplanted—more so than, for instance, the Rawul, Renée, and Crishi, who somehow belonged. While in London, Lindsay and Jean stayed at the Ritz, but once in the country, they booked themselves into what they liked to think of as inns. They had been inns, often dating back as far as the fifteenth century, although converted into hotels with modern baths and central heating that was never on high enough. After English breakfasts in hotel dining rooms with wooden beams and Tudor fireplaces, Lindsay and Jean went out to visit churches, abbeys, and manor houses. With me in the backseat, they drove from one old village and market town to another, content with everything they saw, soothed and lulled by the green fields, the riverbanks, the low clouds spilling alternately soft rain and watery sunshine. Looking very American in the Scottish country clothes they had bought in London, they walked sturdily in brogues, while I trailed behind them. Mostly I was on the lookout for pay phones from which to call Crishi. I tried every place he might be—in the upstairs flat, the downstairs one, the gallery, the office, the Earl’s Court house, at Babaji’s—but he either had just left or was expected any minute. When I did get him, he was loving and happy to hear me but there was someone waiting for him in a car outside or on hold on another line. I would say “I think I’ll come home,” and he’d say “Oh I miss you ever so—I have to go, they’re waiting—” “Crishi, I want to come home!” He had hung up. Sometimes I got Michael, who was more sympathetic. “It must be a drag for you,” he said when I told him I was tired of touring with Lindsay and Jean. But when I said I wanted to come home, he too became evasive—not as evasive as Crishi, but more embarrassed as he advised me to stick it out a bit longer.
The high point of the trip was our visit to what Lindsay liked to think of as her ancestral village. Actually, the Macrorys had come from Ireland, and Lindsay had visited there. But she hadn’t liked it—it depressed her, she said, it was too primitive—and much preferred this English place where one of the Macrorys had come to be the vicar and where the great-great-grandfather who had emigrated to America was born. We went into the church, which was very old, the oldest part dating from Norman times. Between the stone buttresses, the walls were plainly whitewashed; the pews were no more than wooden benches; the stone floor was scrubbed to the bone; but the outside light, refracted through stained-glass windows, made this simple interior glimmer like a semiprecious stone. There was a register of the vicars in an unbroken line from 1176 to the present day. They included Lindsay’s ancestor, the Reverend James Macrory, with the dates of his vicarage, 1837–1850. He lay buried in the graveyard adjoining the church with his wife, Margaret Jane, beside him. Lindsay, who had been here before, led us to these graves, wending her way between ancient tombstones, some of them half sunk into the ground. Oh, Lindsay was so proud here, queenly; she strode with her head held high, her golden hair and designer scarf blowing in the wind. When we reached the Macrory graves, she and Jean held hands and read the inscriptions out loud to each other. Neither of them seemed to feel the rain-cold wind that swept through the grass and the yew trees and through me, making me shiver. Their imperviousness may have been partly due to the warm, woven new clothes they wore; but mostly to the reverence they felt as they stood hand in hand by the ancestral grave, like two pilgrims at the culmination of their destined journey. I was not only cold but impatient—because I knew that when at last we could turn from this sacred place, we would have to retrace our steps through the graveyard, past the church, along a brook, over a stile, around a haystack, and not a telephone in sight till we got back to the hotel.
When Jean asked me that night at dinner in the hotel dining room, “Aren’t you proud?” I knew she meant proud of my ancestry. What could I say? It didn’t seem such a big deal to me to belong to any one place, even if it was old. But Lindsay said it gave her a very special feeling to think of the Reverend James Macrory and Margaret Jane his wife mingled in this earth. There was an old, old waiter serving us, a shuffling and surly old man who couldn’t manage all the tables; everyone had to wait a long time and sometimes got the wrong orders. Lindsay, who at home tended to be short with waiters and salespeople so that it got embarrassing to be with her, was very patient with him. Lindsay was in a mellow mood; mellow and thoughtful. “Jean and I’ve been thinking,” she said, during one of the long waits between courses. “About Propinquity.”
They outlined their plan to me. They said they wanted to turn it into a historic house—“Historic,” I said, “it was only built in 1906.” “We want to show how people lived. How it was in Grandfather’s time. We’ll restore everything the way it was—we’ll lay the table in the dining room with all the things so it’ll look as if the family was just sitting down to eat. And we’ll hang the pictures back—you wouldn’t remember but we used to have Father’s Uncle Gerald on the stairs till someone wrote that book implicating him in some awful murder on St. Kitts, which Father said was all lies, though he did take the picture down. But every family has something in it; I mean, that’s what history is.”
I said “What about the Rawul and the movement?”
“Oh Jesus,” Lindsay said, hiding her face in her hands. I had spoiled her mood.
Jean said gently, “Lindsay thinks it’s wrong.”
“What is?” I asked; and when they didn’t answer, I said to Lindsay, “You used to think it was all right. You wanted to give the place; you yourself wanted it.”
“I’ve been thinking lately,” Lindsay said. “We both have—haven’t we, Jean?”
“What about?” I asked.
“Oh well, many things.” She glanced up suspiciously: “I suppose only you and Michael are allowed to think. You two are the great intellectuals and I’m the dumbbell.”
“Now dear,” Jean said warningly, “we’re here to have a sensible talk and not to pick on Harriet.”
“I’m not.” She made a visible effort to be sensible and continued: “It’s been helpful having those people at Propinquity-—the Rawul’s people—they work hard and they’ve done a good job on the grounds and they’re not bad in the kitchen either, though nothing v
ery special, not like when Else was there.”
“What, Else’s gone?”
“Didn’t I tell you? It was getting too difficult, Harriet. She had too many personal problems. And just when Jean and I were trying to work out our relationship, which is what we’ve been doing, haven’t we, Jean, so that we know a little better where we’re going.”
It was clear where they were going with each other. Jean’s sad-dog air had given way to one of happy fulfillment. They appeared to have reached a plateau of accord that was not unlike Manton and Barbara’s; and judging by what they went on to say, they had also reached the same conclusions as my other set of parents.
This was that I had made an unfortunate marriage. They had had time to think about it, and to discuss it with each other, and they knew a mistake had been made. Lindsay even blamed herself, which was unprecedented for her, saying that she should have warned me—“Against what?” I asked.
She stared at me, with her beautiful though rather blank blue-gray eyes: “Don’t you know? Isn’t it perfectly obvious? What he married you for? But of course he did,” she said when Jean tried to hold her back. “They might dress it up under all sorts of fancy names, but that’s what it comes down to: your money. Our money. Our properties. Propinquity.”
“It isn’t true,” I lied.
“No? Then why has he been pestering me to mortgage the property? He’s in such a hurry to get his hands on everything, he can’t even decently wait till you’re twenty-one. But I’ve disappointed him, I’m afraid, and I’m going to disappoint him even more—him and Michael both. Oh yes, we’ve been hearing from Michael too, didn’t you know?”
“Yes I did know. Of course I know,” I lied some more.
“And you think it’s quite all right? That I should mortgage Father’s house, the Macrory house, our property—throw away our property—” At that moment the waiter came with our dessert, and she felt compelled to be charming and grateful to him the way she was with people in England. We ate in silence, even taking care, as did the other guests in that well-bred dining room, not to make too much clatter with our cutlery. I took the opportunity to think out what to say, now that I knew why Crishi and Michael had sent me on this trip; what it was they wanted me to say.
“It’s only a mortgage. We’ll be able to repay it when we get the house on the Island and all the rest. . . . And it’s just temporary: I mean, we’re just in temporary difficulties.”
“Who’s we?” Lindsay said. That was too obvious for me to answer. She and Jean might think I had made an unfortunate marriage, but that wasn’t my opinion.
For the rest of our trip, they said more or less what Manton had said: about family, tradition, holding together. It must have been maddening for them, the way I was so impervious to everything they said—as well as to the sights we saw, the well-kept castles, mansions, gardens. Wherever we were, all I thought about was getting home.
WHEN at last I did, Crishi wasn’t there, so I went to look for him. First I went to the gallery, where Nicholas was now in sole charge. Ever since the trouble with the stolen paintings had started, Rupert didn’t come there any more; it was thought that, with all the bad publicity attached to him, his presence might undermine the prestige of the place. As usual, the haughty girl assistants tried to discourage me from staying, and not finding Crishi, I was ready to leave when I heard Michael’s voice from the little office downstairs—and that was how I came in on the scene between him and Nicholas. Nicholas, who was quite short, had drawn himself up to his full height and was being very cocky with Michael. He said in his sneering, drawly accent—“You surely don’t imagine that I run this place in order to act as your fence.” Michael said “You’re here to do what you’re told.” Nicholas twitched his nose in an uppity little sniff: “I might have my own ideas about that”—but had hardly got it out when Michael caught hold of his elegant lapels and drew him up close: “You do what you’re told.” Nicholas maintained his dignity awhile longer: “Would you mind taking your hands off me?” he said, trying to keep his voice steady but sounding fussy and frightened. “You do what you’re told,” Michael repeated, more threatening, and tightening his grip. Nicholas looked down at his own lapels—he seemed as nervous about any damage to his very smart suit as to himself, or perhaps made no distinction between the two. His eyes roved around for rescue, but he saw only me. Michael, too, glanced at me for a moment but had no time for me. His fury was rising, fueled perhaps by Nicholas’s fright, or the sensation of having caught hold of him. Nicholas tried to be defiant. “I have no business with you,” he said. “But I have with you,” Michael replied; Nicholas’s voice rose to a rabbit’s shriek: “Get out of my gallery, you and that sister of yours, before I call the police!”
“Yes why don’t you,” said Michael, and at the same time he struck the other’s face so hard that blood gushed out of his nose. Nicholas cried out, “My glasses!” for these had fallen to the floor. Michael said “Pick them up,” and struck him again; Nicholas fell to the ground, where he began to crawl around in search of them. Blood came from his nose, tears from his eyes; he groped for his glasses, but they had fallen some way off and I went and picked them up for him. This seemed to infuriate Nicholas and he screeched “Get out of my gallery, both of you!” By this time the haughty girls had arrived and Nicholas cried out to them, “Call the police!” Then Michael did something really horrible: He kicked Nicholas where he was on the floor, not once but several times, and Nicholas crawled away to get out of his reach. “Go on, call the police, why don’t you,” Michael told the girls. “And let me give you something more to call them for—assault and battery,” he said. “Isn’t that what you call it?” and he followed Nicholas and kicked him again, and again, just the way I had seen Crishi kick Paul, and with the same expression on his face.
But there was this difference between Michael and Crishi, or used to be: Whereas Crishi accepted everything he himself did as right and never thought about it again, Michael had to go through a long course of self-justification. As we walked away from the gallery, Michael reflected on what he had done. But, unlike in the past, he didn’t have to justify himself to himself—he was absolutely certain that he was right. “What’s the matter with him?” he said angrily. “Does he think we go through all that so he can play it big in his crappy little gallery?” “Go through all what?” I asked, though I knew perfectly well. Naturally, he didn’t answer my unnecessary question, and I asked another: “Where’s Crishi?” “Risking his neck so that creep in there can wag his ass at duchesses.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“When he is back. . . . Don’t fuss, H.”
“I only want to know when. I miss him.” Yes that was true, but it wasn’t that I was worried about the hour of his return: I was worried about him, as I was each time he or Michael went on a trip, each time fearing what would happen, what I might expect to hear.
And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. When we got back home and were walking up the marble stairs, the door of the downstairs flat opened and Renée came out. She said “I thought you were Crishi.” Then: “Is he back?” When Michael said no, she tried to sound casual: “Oh well, I’m sure he will be, any moment.” Michael and I went on upstairs. The flat was empty, Anna wasn’t home; Michael and I were alone. This happened so rarely nowadays that I felt I had to take advantage of it. I faced him and asked straight out: “Why do you have to do it? Why do you have to go, you and Crishi?”
“What a question,” he brushed me aside, but I insisted: “Why you and he, when there are all the others?” I meant all the followers—I meant, quite frankly, Let them take the risk, not you.
“Oh they panic,” Michael said. “They get scared. That’s how they’re caught.”
“And you?”
“Shall I tell you something? I like it.” His eyes, cold and clear as water, narrowed with pleasure. “If you’re not scared—if you make yourself not be—you just walk through; no one can touch you. It’
s almost they’re scared, if you’re not. You should see Crishi—it’s like he’s daring them to stop him, always hanging around to ask some damn fool question about where’s the men’s room or what’s the local time. Well I can’t do that, not being naturally gabby like him, but I can be not scared—you know? Keep my head up, walk through any place I want, at any pace I want, in a hurry or with plenty of time to spare. God, it makes me feel good. Better than anything I’ve ever done.” And really, there was a sort of glow about him I hadn’t seen before, as if he had truly found, fulfilled himself the way he had always wanted to.
I said “Lindsay says you want a mortgage on Propinquity?”
“We need it, only she’s being her usual dumb stupid bitch self. . . . I tell you, I’m counting the days till we’re twenty-one and can do what we want and get rid of everything.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Well don’t you?” he said and continued at once. “Of course you do. You don’t want to be tied up with all that junk.”
“Lindsay and Manton have gone into a big thing about the family. Families: the Wishwells and the Macrorys. They’ve both developed strong feelings on the subject.”
“Too bad we’ve got different plans.”
Three Continents Page 26
