So Much Life Left Over

by Louis de Bernières

  It was on the day Father came home that I realised dorasani Rosie was pregnant again. Everybody was happy for her, because she had lost the last child and perhaps this would be a healthy one, but neither she nor the master seemed happy. At least, they were both very happy when they were with their daughter, but not when they were alone together. Dorai Pitt said to me after we became lovers that he did not want to talk to me about his wife, because it was a painful subject and he did not want to dishonour her in my eyes, that she was a good woman, and he knew how bad the gossip was amongst the tea pickers, so it was better for him to be silent. But I knew perfectly well what the problem was, which was why it was so easy for me to seduce him.

  I did not do it for the advantages. I did it because that is what my heart moved me to do. I took the advantages and I passed them on to my family, like a good daughter, but I never pretended to feelings I did not have or did anything that I was not moved to do. I loved him and prized him, and I gave him back some happiness that he had lost, and he brought me comfort and a great deal of pleasure such as I had not imagined, and he treated me with kindness and often asked me if I was contented and if there was anything I might need.

  He moved me to a little house on the road to Nuwara Eliya, near a waterfall, quite close to the plantation. This small house had everything I needed, and for one week I was happy there, but then I said to him, ‘Beloved, I miss the women and my family and the tea-picking,’ and he said, ‘What? You want to go back to work?’ and I said, ‘Beloved, I can’t have nothing to do. It makes every day into a year, and it will force me to live longer than I intended. Until I have children, I will go back and pick tea, as before. When I have children, I will be busier, and I will pick tea less often.’

  He was amused. He said, ‘What? You will hang our children up in a tree in little hammocks, to rock in the wind, as the other women do?’ and when I said ‘Yes’ he laughed and said, ‘Well, why not? I have spent much of my life in the air.’

  I knew that my beloved was trying to avoid our having children. We had a great many other ways of taking pleasure that would make it less likely. But sometimes one gets so oblivious that it is impossible to be sensible at that moment, and one is carried away. It was these moments that I loved the best and most looked forward to, and, as for me, I was not trying to avoid having children.

  Those were the best years of my life, even though my beloved had a little son who was born to dorasani Rosie, and who turned out not to be a monster like the last one. This child was called Bertie, and my beloved would sometimes say, ‘She tries to keep him from me. Why is she trying to keep him from me? When he cries and I pick him up, she takes him away. When I try to play with him she finds reasons to take him away.’ And I said, ‘It is not always easy even for a woman to understand another woman, so how is a man to understand her?’ He said, ‘I don’t find you difficult to understand,’ and I said, ‘I am not dorasani Rosie,’ and he said, ‘She even tries to keep me away from Esther, but Esther’s old enough not to let her get away with it.’ I said, ‘Beloved, does she still take you in her arms?’ and he shook his head and said, ‘I have only you for that,’ and I said, ‘Is it enough?’ and he said, ‘If not for you and the children I would be very lonely and miserable.’ I said, ‘I am glad I bring you happiness,’ and he replied, ‘I just hope I am not setting you up for disaster.’

  But he did not understand that we are not like his people. Our disasters are bigger than theirs, and the ones that are so big for them are very much smaller for us.

  I tried to learn to cook to the master’s taste, but it was useless. I made mashed potato and it didn’t seem right so I put curry leaf and mustard seeds in it, and my beloved said, ‘I want to eat the same things as you. I like the coconut and the fruit and spices. You know, I am half French, so I have higher expectations than most, and I’m sick of mutton chops,’ and I said, ‘I will make you a mutton curry,’ and he liked that very much and he told me that dorasani Rosie did not like the smell of the spices on him and said he was ‘going native’, and he said, ‘If you don’t want to go a little bit native, there wouldn’t be any point in being here.’ I made him congee many times, and he brought me trout from the special white man’s lake in Nuwara Eliya.

  My beloved came to me once or twice a week and he would have come more often, but he had to have good excuses to give to dorasani Rosie. Sometimes he arrived on horseback, and sometimes on his motorcycle, and one day I said, ‘I would like to go in the motorcycle,’ and he said, ‘We can’t be seen together,’ and I said, ‘Let’s go at night,’ so one night when there was a moon we went out, and I got into the sidecar, and he gave me goggles and told me to wear all my clothes, and we went out in the dark with the lights on, and it was like magic to me. The throb of the engine was nice, it was strange to see the black silhouettes of all the houses and think that everybody inside them was asleep, and the smell of the petrol was pleasant, and the smell of the flowers that blossom at night, and we saw many animals in the headlight, I didn’t know we had so many, and I had never seen a waterfall by moonlight before, and then we stopped at the waterfall and watched it in the silver light, all glittering. He took my hand and then we embraced and I said, ‘I will remember this all of my life,’ and it wasn’t cold, so he fetched a rug from the box on the back of the sidecar and we lay on it behind some trees, and we were there for some time.

  Further down the road we stopped at Christ Church, and he took a torch and showed me where he had buried his first boy, and we looked down at the little circle of light and the headstone, and he was so quiet that I wanted to say something, but when I looked I knew he wanted no speaking, so I took his arm and stood with him, and that is all we did. Then we collected jackfruit from the enormous tree nearby, and we put them on the floor of the sidecar and I had to bury my feet under them so as to fit in when we set off again.

  Of all the times we spent together, this was my favourite, when we rode in the darkness, and lay on the rug, and came home at dawn, with the jackfruit rolling about at my feet.

  11

  Fairhead’s Good Idea

  One Saturday morning Sophie went downstairs to feed Crusty and put him out in the garden. The dog had largely recovered from his terrible mange, but would assuredly never be handsome. He had turned out to be an expensive addition to the household, what with all the sulphur ointments and the olive oil, and even a course of violet-ray treatment, but Sophie and Fairhead loved him nonetheless, and to a small extent, as so often happens with the childless, he had taken the place of a child. Fortunately he had turned out to be a dog with reasonably good manners and clean habits. Whilst Fairhead was at the hospital Sophie amused herself by training it in French.

  This she did partly to provoke her mother, who was often heard to comment that the most extraordinary thing about France was that the dogs understood French, and must therefore be uncommonly intelligent. When challenged, she liked to say that English was the natural language of dogs, and when asked why she thought this, she would say, ‘Because, clearly, my dear, all other languages are foreign.’

  So Crusty already knew ‘assieds-toi’, ‘couche-toi’, and ‘viens’ and ‘dis bonjour’, and now Sophie was working on ‘vas chercher’ with the aid of a tennis ball thrown into the rhododendrons.

  Sophie pulled the newspaper through the letter flap, and glimpsed at it as she made tea, then she tucked it under her arm and carried the cups upstairs, with a langue de chat biscuit in each saucer.

  Fairhead sat up in bed and drank his tea. He read an item about how, if you were earning more than £400 per annum, you could definitely afford a car, and then he began one about the first ever talking picture, but halfway through he gave up, because Sophie was lying alongside him, running her hand up and down his chest, inside his pyjamas. He tossed the paper onto the floor, and slid down to face her.

  ‘My darling,’ she said, ‘as you’re a priest and fully quali
fied holy sage, will you answer me a question theological?’

  ‘You elevate me somewhat, my dear. Fire away.’

  ‘What if God is really the Devil? What if the Devil rules this world, and, after we die, we go to hell for being good? I mean, what if Good is Evil, and vice versa, and we’ve got God and the Devil the wrong way round?’

  ‘Oh my goodness. You’re too far ahead of me. Going to hell for being good? What do you think? You asked the question.’

  ‘I think we should do good, even if it’s wrong and we go to hell for it.’

  Fairhead thought about this, and said, ‘I think you might just have proved that God and the Good are logically distinct. You should send your idea to Bertrand Russell and see if he can make use of it. I expect he’s in Cambridge, or something.’

  ‘You want me to give succour to sceptics?’

  ‘I like sceptics. They keep me on my toes. I think I might even be one. Just as there’s a conservative inside every socialist, and vice versa.’ He kissed the tip of her nose and said, ‘Today you only have one eye, from so close up.’

  ‘And you have only one wife, from so close up.’

  ‘That’s what you think. I may have a wife in every suburb of the mighty metropolis of Blackheath.’

  ‘I think I’d better take this opportunity to tire you out.’

  ‘Better not miss the chance,’ he said.

  Afterwards, Sophie said, ‘I think we’ve just got to face up to it.’

  ‘I’m afraid we might have to,’ agreed Fairhead. ‘It’s been ten years now, hasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s not as if we haven’t tried,’ said Sophie. ‘We’ve scaled many an alp, broken many records, established unprecedented precedents, both in frequency and in ecstasy.’

  ‘We have never tired of making attempts. Our feats have been heroic.’

  Sophie propped herself up on her elbow and kissed him softly on the mouth. She said, ‘My darling, I’m frightened that if we get too desperate, it’ll just spoil everything. It’s already spoiling things. Let’s give up trying.’

  ‘Give up trying?’

  She saw the look of horror on his face, and laughed. ‘I don’t mean give up the frolics. I mean give up doing it because we’re getting desperate. Please can we just frolic for fun? For its own sake? It’s spoiling things, isn’t it? Then if something happens, it’s just an unexpected stroke of luck, like finding a half-crown on the pavement.’

  ‘Well,’ said Fairhead, ‘what about adopting? The world is full of orphans. We could start going to orphanages to see what they’ve got.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sophie. ‘It wouldn’t feel right, somehow. What would we do if we adopted, and it turned out to be a fiend? Are you allowed to give them back?’

  ‘We’ve got Crusty.’

  ‘Crusty is a regal treasure, a jewel in the crown of our contentment, but he’s hardly as good as a child. And dogs only last about ten years.’

  ‘I think you should go straight for being a grandmother.’

  ‘How so, beloved?’

  ‘Well, grandparents universally agree that the nicest thing about having grandchildren is that one can hand them back at the end of the day. All the pleasure, none of the toil.’

  ‘I perceive the luminous intelligence of your idea, but it has one tiny teeny-weeny bijou flawlet.’

  ‘It has no flaws,’ said Fairhead.

  ‘How will I skip motherhood, O sage of Blackheath?’

  ‘You can open a dame school.’

  ‘A dame school?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the drawing room. A dame school can be as small as you like.’

  ‘I’ll need some tiny chairs.’

  ‘You’ll need a blackboard, a yardstick for pointing to the blackboard, chalk, slates, crayons, pads of paper, exercise books…’

  ‘And lots of lavatory paper and cotton handkerchiefs.’

  ‘And a slipper for biffing the naughty ones.’

  ‘There’ll be no biffing in my dame school. Children will be hugged into submission in my vice-like embrace.’

  ‘Your cruelty knows no bounds. You could call the school “Mrs Sophie Fairhead’s Biffless Academy for the Children of Busy Mothers”.’

  ‘I prefer “apathetic mothers”,’ said Sophie. ‘Do you think we could get an old wreck of a car, and teach them to be mechanics?’

  ‘I thought you’d had enough of that in the war. Too many broken fingernails.’

  ‘ ’Tis true, but every five-year-old should know how to mend a magneto and crank an obstinate engine into life. How else will they cope in adulthood when their horseless carriages break down halfway across Dartmoor?’

  ‘I think you should acquire a patron. King Zog of Albania springs to mind.’

  ‘He’ll be busy. He’s only been king for a month. ’Tis sad but true. Where shall I find my pupils?’

  ‘Advertise in the Lady. And the Blackheath Gazette. Put notices up in shops and the porches of churches. Pin papers to trees.’

  ‘And the British Journal of Engineering, and the Tablet, and Lepidopterists’ Monthly, and the Taxidermists’ Hebdomadal.’ She sat up in bed and clasped her hands around her knees. ‘I’ve been getting dreadfully fed up with being a lady of leisure. It’s all very well taking orphans out on ponies, and going out and about doing charitable things, and calling in on the sick, and it’s fun for a while, but then you start to get bored with yourself, and simply desperate for something to get your teeth into. As we all did in the war. How much should I charge?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Let’s find out what everybody else charges, and charge exactly the same. Or a farthing less.’

  ‘I’m going to get started on Monday,’ said Sophie. ‘The weekend is for gardening and eating roast beef, and frolicking of course.’

  ‘My darling, you’ve got to give me time to recoup my resources.’

  ‘I’ll give you until tomorrow. Let’s get up and eat eggs with soldiers. Your turn! I did it yesterday.’

  ‘Other men lounge motionless whilst their wives bustle about them.’

  ‘Silly man, you chose the wrong woman.’

  ‘I like boiling eggs and making toast, fortunately.’

  ‘I hope you’re grateful that I allow it.’

  ‘Forever grateful. Do you remember our first night, in that hotel in Dover?’

  ‘How could I forget? The Dover sole was delicious.’

  ‘Well, our tenth anniversary is coming up.’

  ‘You remembered! So?’

  ‘Let’s book into that hotel, and demand the same room. If it’s sunny in the morning, we might see more dust that falls from dreams.’

  12

  Hugh

  One morning at dawn I arrived at Taprobane Bungalow on horseback, leading another pony on a rein. Daniel was waiting for me, as arranged, and we set off to hack around the estate as we usually did at least once a month, to check that all was in order.

  We enjoyed these rides. We had a pair of bay horses who knew the estate like the back of their, well, not hands exactly. Hooves? Like the front of their forelegs, shall we say? They became quite disconcerted if one didn’t follow the usual route, and you could just feel them thinking, ‘What, doesn’t he know what he’s doing? Silly man.’

  I’ve always loved horses, especially a good gallop, and I’ve won a few cups at Nuwara Eliya in my time. I feel about a horse the same way as Daniel felt about his motorcycle. That is how you fly without an aircraft. Horses have a toasty smell, and a kind of warmth of spirit as well as of body. Some are intelligent, and some are dense, some are frolicsome and some are staid.

  Daniel and I usually talked about the war, and developments in modern aircraft. We were both interested in the idea of setting up some kind of air service in Ceylon. We tho
ught that there was immense potential in seaplanes, and so, of course, we were in exactly the wrong place, up in the highlands. There should have been a service between Colombo and Trincomalee, for example, and Jaffna always seems cut off from the rest, arbitrarily stuck onto the tip, so to speak. The big frustration was that there were the tanks, huge reservoirs, the most marvellous and obvious places to land floatplanes, but they were constructed in the first place by a civilisation that had been entirely destroyed by malaria. Until we got on top of the malaria there would be no future in setting anything up on the tanks.

  We talked quite a lot about the Empire. Daniel was preoccupied with the notion that it was bound to fall away, and I had thought a great deal about that myself. I told him that Ceylon had not been anything like a democracy when we arrived, so the natives didn’t see any difference over who dominated them, and there was still some residual gratitude for the abolition of compulsory unpaid labour, but even so, it’s obvious from history that all empires are exhausted after a couple of hundred years. I remember saying this to him when he and Rosie first arrived, and I’d gone to meet them in Colombo. Daniel and I both had pangs of conscience about whether we were really entitled to be there. In my opinion we were a hell of a lot better than what we replaced, but that’s just about all the justification I could come up with, and my pious hope is that perhaps we’ll leave something worthwhile behind us when we go. It was only last year that Canada and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa and Newfoundland got independence, and the Empire began to turn into a Commonwealth. Sooner or later the brown peoples are going to notice. In fact they already have. If you raise a native elite to play cricket and golf and recite ‘Daffodils’ and drink sundowners and be just like yourselves, and then don’t let them into your club, you can expect trouble. It turns them into Bolshies. Who’s next? India, no doubt. We’ve created the same stroppy elite there.