Ryman, Rebecca

by Olivia

  Holding in her hand the letter that Jai Raventhorne had written, the letter whose existence she had never believed, Olivia sat through the night at her window, gazing out and beyond into nothingness. She was engulfed in the swirling flood of memories, but by the sheer force of her will-power she fought them and made the tides recede. When the first lavender light of dawn touched the eastern horizon, her mind was again static, her thoughts again in her control. Calmly, she carried the black diary and the letter into her bath-room and, on a corner of the cemented floor, set a light to both. With no perceptible feeling, she sat and watched as they burned down into a tidy pile of ashes. Then she gathered them up and scattered them out of the window into the morning light.

  A time to remember, a time to forget. A time to leave behind what one could never return to.

  But it was the following night that Olivia's nightmares returned to again desecrate the hours of her sleep.

  Astonishingly, the spider was still there. And the cobweb.

  At least a spider and a cobweb. Not having the requisite talent to distinguish one spider from another, Olivia could not say with certitude that this fat, furry little fellow was the same or a remarkably similar descendant. The giant cobweb, however, still barricaded the wooded path near the Maratha Ditch, still looking like a jewelled screen of black lace with the early morning dew. The banyan tree, of course, was the same. Its gnarled roots still made as comfortable a perch as they had more than two years ago. Idly, Olivia sat to observe the single-minded endeavours of the busy little spider who seemed so contemptuous of her presence. His beady head swung from side to side like a pendulum clocking time as he spun out, inch by painstaking inch, silken filaments of exquisite fineness. He occasionally threw her darting, sidelong glances but without pausing in his labours. Olivia was shot through with wistful envy; how idyllic to have but one function in life, one thread of existence in which only the here and now mattered!

  Everything in the forest was the same as she had left it on that distant morning. Only Jasmine was missing, now given away to a charitable orphanage, the other Templewood horses and coaches taken over by Hal Lubbock. Also missing, of course, was the barking of the dogs. Instead of Jasmine, Olivia now rode another mare, a blue roan, from Freddie's stables. As for the dogs' barking, if she closed her eyes she could hear even that.

  Why was she here this morning? Olivia could think of no reason that logic would accept. To her great joy, Dr. Humphries had at last declared her fit enough to ride again. "But no steeple-chasing, my friend," he had warned. "Choose a horse that is a lady, and then ride her like one." She had not been in a saddle for an age and her sense of liberation compounded into rapture. But then, why here, why to this forest? Olivia did not know the answer to the curious question. It seemed that she had been driven here by some intangible and sadistic force lying buried in her unconscious mind.

  And by those hideous, recurring nightmares.

  During the day, generally, her mind obeyed her entirely. It was during the nights, when she had abdicated conscious control of it that it had got into the habit of playing tricks on her. Suddenly invoked like rabbits out of a conjurer's hat were tiny disjointed fragments that turned into frescos of the past without her permission or participation. There seemed not a word, not the whisper of a thought, not a gesture or a sensation that her secretive mind had not stored and preserved to perfection without her knowledge. In her nightmares, echoes and sounds reverberated with frightening and forgotten fidelity. In her sleep Olivia saw sights, touched surfaces, tasted flavours and inhaled fragrances that no longer should have held any meaning. It was an insanity that had dragged her here this morning, but she could not expel her hallucinations any more than she could break away from the spells that this sorcerer of a forest was casting upon her now.

  There was, Olivia recognised with a calmness that amazed her, an inevitability about her recession into the past. It was, perhaps, in its meticulous re-enactment that her salvation lay, her final liberation. She could no longer keep buried those memories that she despised. For her own exorcism, she had to exhume them one by one, examine them from a distance and then inter them to lay them to rest forever. The answer was not concealment; it was bold confrontation.

  The pool where the dragon-flies looped and swooped over water-lilies still lay turgid and unmoving and covered with emerald green slime. The bel tree was not yet in fruit, but it would be in the spring. I can tolerate anything you choose to be; it was here that she had said it. Perched on that boulder, he had said, I always know where you are. You make it impossible for me to stay away. Wonderingly, he had asked what was the stubbornness that drove her. It is a stubbornness called love. Standing apart from herself, Olivia heard her own voice as she made that commitment as clearly as she heard the yelping of the dogs prancing around her feet. And it was here that he had repeatedly bemoaned his madness. But now, it seemed, that madness was not only his.

  In the tedious task of compiling the few remaining inventories at the mansion, Olivia gratefully accepted Arthur Ransome's offer to help. Also, the matter of the Birkhurst jewellery given to her at the time of her marriage could no longer be postponed. With her sailing date approaching rapidly, some decision had to be arrived at and Olivia badly wanted advice. After completing the copious compilations in the kitchen, the provision store-rooms, the stables and the gardeners' sheds, over breakfast Olivia asked Ransome, "Since I do not intend to take the jewellery with me, would it be wise to leave it in the bank vault in Mr. Pennworthy's care? If I do so Donaldson will want to know why I do not take it with me."

  Ransome reacted more sharply than Olivia had expected. "Those jewels are yours," he said with categorical conviction. "They are yours to take with you legitimately wherever you go. Whatever your differences might be with Freddie, you are still his wife and the baroness. To say nothing of being mother to his two sons."

  Perhaps because she was out of kilter, or because of her prevailing emotional imbalances, or maybe because she was suddenly tired of all her deceptions, Olivia decided to now tell Arthur Ransome the entire truth. There had been no end to her lies; she was beginning to be disgusted with them, especially with the tawdry half truths she had been dispensing to this fine man who had given her his sorely needed friendship and love and thus deserved much better. The breakfast completed, Olivia folded her serviette and asked composedly, "Have you ever wondered, Uncle Arthur, why you have never seen Amos closely since the christening even though he is your godchild?"

  He frowned, not knowing what to make of the sudden question. "Amos? Well, no. That is to say," he shifted uneasily in his seat and coloured, "yes. As a matter of fact, I have wondered sometimes ..."

  Olivia rose from the table. "You will see him now. Then I will not have to explain the reason." She went out of the room to summon Sheba.

  Ransome had not added that the wonderment was, in fact, universal. But then, he was certain that in her perspicacity she was already aware of that. There had been much unkind gossip concerning the reclusivity in which she was bringing up her child. Ransome had never mentioned any of it to Olivia, but he had been hurt by much of what he had heard at burra khanas and had, on occasion, defended her stoutly. Not being dense, he had calculated that Amos had enacted in this shadow play—all the nuances of which he could not understand—a quite considerable part far in excess of what was apparent.

  A few minutes later, Olivia returned with the child. Now all of fifteen months old, Amos was just starting to find his feet and insisted on making full use of his discovery. He toddled in unsteadily, hanging on to his mother's finger, stumbled once or twice, then sat down heavily with a thud in the middle of the carpet. Leaving him where he was, Olivia walked back to the table and resumed her seat opposite Ransome. Left to his own devices, Amos looked around for a plaything and happily grabbed a cushion to investigate with consuming interest.

  Olivia watched Ransome's face carefully, not removing her eyes from it as he sat staring at the child. "Well?" />
  His stare deepened and his frown intensified. Initially puzzled, his expression slowly changed into something else. Realisation came in stages, then all at once everything clicked into place in his mind and he gasped. "God's blood!" he whispered, aghast. "Am I seeing things, Olivia? Do my eyes deceive me . . .?"

  "No. Your eyes do not deceive you. The person Amos reminds you of so unmistakably is indeed his father. Are any further explanations necessary?"

  He shook his head, his face bleached white. For a moment he could not speak.

  A corner of the cushion was now in Amos's mouth and imminent destruction was threatened with his teeth. Olivia got up to give the bell rope a tug and then gently removed the object from the child's hands. Incensed at the deprivation, Amos opened his mouth and screamed. But before he could exert his lung power to its full capacity, which was considerable, Sheba had quietly come in, whisked him up in her arms and removed him quickly from the room. The child's lusty bawls continued until the door of the nursery upstairs slammed shut behind them.

  "You see?" Olivia commented drily. "The resemblance isn't only skin deep."

  The little interlude had allowed Ransome to recollect his scattered wits and contain his reactions, but shock was still writ large across his face. "All these months, all these years, how dreadfully you must have suffered!" Disoriented and dazed, he dabbed his forehead with quick, clumsy gestures. "And how severe must have been the strain of sustaining your necessary subterfuges! I ... I scarcely know what to say . . ."

  No moral judgements, no pious censure; Olivia was moved to tears by his unqualified acceptance and simple, spontaneous sympathy. "I married Freddie because I had to marry someone," she said huskily, "and only Freddie was decent—and foolish!— enough to have taken me. Freddie too has suffered, also strained sometimes beyond endurance to sustain my subterfuges. Now you see why I had to part with Alistair? And why I consider I have no right to keep the jewellery?"

  Enormously saddened, he hung down his head and shook it. "I have had some intuitions about your inner disturbances, my dear. And of course I sensed that you were better . . . acquainted with Jai than you would have had me believe. But this was not a prospect I had ever imagined. What agonies you must have been through!" Even baffled and unhappy, he had no difficulty making further deductions. "I presume Jai was not aware of his child's existence when he indulged in that inexcusable act of abduction?"

  "No. But he is aware of it now."

  Ransome pondered. "Do you think that is why he returned him, having vowed not to in that note?"

  "I have no idea," she said coldly. "The workings of his mind are as much a mystery to me as they are to everyone else."

  He almost smiled; the workings of Jai Raventhorne's mind she knew as she did her own, but he did not venture to pursue the thought. "But surely he has made contact with you since then? Come forward with offers of, well, help . . .?"

  At that Olivia stiffened. "His help is not required! Amos is my responsibility. And he will remain a Birkhurst."

  "Yes, yes, of course. I only meant ..." Embarrassed, he lapsed into silence and did not complete his sentence. When he spoke again it was with a tangential switch of subject. "Wild rumours still thrive. One is that Moitra is about to make a bid for Templewood and Ransome, whatever little remains of it."

  "I see." Her fractional smile was sarcastic. "Since he has not been able to put you on the streets, for his efforts he buys the pleasure of at least removing your name plate—is that it?"

  Ransome spread his hands to show his indifference. "Perhaps. I am inclined to let him have that pleasure." Shaking two pills out of the bottle he always carried, he washed them down with a draught of water, suddenly seeming as detached as she. "I feel I too have had enough of India, you know, my dear," he said unexpectedly. "There comes a time when she wants to devour you for all that she has given. She breaks you in body and in spirit. She cannibalises and destroys—as she did Josh and Bridget and, perhaps, even you. All at once I find myself hungering for the placid green pastures of England, where I can graze my last few years away in peace without fear of predators. All at once, Olivia, I too want to go home ..."

  Olivia searched his worn face in surprise and sadness. She had never before heard him talk of England as his home. "Where will you go in England? Do you have in mind any special place for retirement?"

  "Home!" He laughed sourly. "The tragedy is that it is of a foreign country that I speak of as 'home.' I have a sister in Exeter, but I have not seen her since she was ten. Now she is a grandmother. I doubt if we would even recognise each other anymore. And all my friends are here. My only identity with England is that on the streets I will look no different from anyone else." He heaved a mighty sigh, then clucked, as if in impatience with himself. "Oh . . . balderdash! It is old age that is making me nostalgic. My home, such as it is, is here. I have no other. When I die, I would want to be buried in Indian soil next to Josh."

  Salim came in bearing a tray of hot tea and Olivia silently set about refreshing their cups. She could think of nothing to say that would not sound false and shallow, but within herself she shared his loneliness. In his own way, he too was a man of two worlds and yet of neither, as were so many other Englishmen estranged from the mother country.

  "You must not take my ramblings seriously," Ransome said, shedding his air of dejection and forcing a laugh. "I could never live in England any more than Josh could have done. For one, we both hated those damned umbrellas one is forced to carry everywhere, to say nothing of the diabolical winters and stewed slop they call food. Besides, whatever would I do without my bearer? Good God, I don't even know how to find a pair of socks for myself!" They laughed a little, sipped their cups of steaming tea and lapsed again into trivia to shake off their absurd melancholy. And then, as he rose to go, Ransome suddenly said, "Oh, the wildest rumour of all I have not mentioned to you. Perhaps it will help to cheer you up and dispel the involuntary gloom I have introduced into the morning. Although some say that Jai has gone to earth in Assam in his self-imposed banishment from station, others disagree. It is being bandied about with gathering conviction that Kala Kanta is, perhaps, dead. Now, is that not something to warm the cockles of many hearts, perhaps even yours?"

  CHAPTER 23

  Was he?

  The question remained trapped between the layers of Olivia's mind, scavenging its tissue, interfering with all her thoughts. She could not understand its persistence; she was becoming a stranger to herself. To correct the tilt of her world and to retrieve a fine edge of her sanity, she rode fiercely every morning. Her sorties took her far out into the countryside, along the river, to the forests on the other bank of the Hooghly, but despite its exploding seas of humanity, Calcutta to her was a city peopled with ghosts. Everywhere she saw phantoms: in the mango groves, amidst scraggy scrub lands, around the bazaars and the temples and the embankments, most of all along the river embankments. The Ganga was again in port, moored at the Trident wharf, which was shrouded in silence. Olivia started to shrink from those re-enactments she had so blithely believed to be the means of her eventual liberation, her salvation from the past. Instead of exorcising her, they were beginning to draw blood again. Ironically, this time her adversary was invincible because it was herself. And yes, her life was unfinished, like a stitched garment with the hems left undone. All other parts of her life had now been neatened; she could not leave those hems unattended.

  "Is he dead?"

  It was during her final visit to Kirtinagar that Olivia asked Kinjal the question that would not lie dormant. She had brought Amos and Sheba with her for farewells to a family that was now her own. If Kinjal was at all surprised by her question, she took care to conceal it. Instead, she countered with one of her own. "Would it matter to you if he were?"

  "No. It is merely a loose end. It needs to be tied."

  "And if Jai is dead, will you consider it then tied?"

  "Yes. Instantly."

  "And if he is not?"

 
"Then it will take longer."

  "Very well then," Kinjal retorted, matching her obstinacy, "since it is of no consequence one way or the other, we will talk about it later."

  If there was joy in the reunion, inevitably there were also ripples of consuming sorrow. To soothe the melancholy aches of the long, perhaps permanent, parting ahead, they exchanged wild promises, made enthusiastic plans, shared impossible dreams.

  "It has always been my ambition to visit the New World," Arvind Singh said. "Now there is even more incentive to do so. We will bring the children, of course. They would never forgive us if we left them behind."

  "Neither would we! But you are used to living in palaces," Olivia teased. "Would you be able to live with us in a grass hut when you come to Hawaii?"

  "Certainly. My villagers live in huts made of mud and grass. I have often spent nights with some hospitable family or other."

  "Do you still intend to start your little school?" Kinjal asked Olivia.

  "Oh yes. I will teach all our children together. And when they are not having lessons we will swim and surf and teach them how to catch fish. Sally will keep our appetites satisfied with taro doughnuts, which are now her specialty, she writes. We will have luaus and sing Hawaiian songs and gather seashells to make necklaces . . ."

  They laughed but with forced gaiety, knowing that all this would perhaps never be, but it made the parting more bearable. Relentless in her silence, Kinjal had still not answered Olivia's question until the eve of her return to Calcutta. But then it was Kinjal herself who revived the subject, insisting that her own question be answered with honesty.

  "No, it does not matter one way or the other," Olivia reiterated evenly. "I ask only because he has become a habit to my mind. And however pernicious, habits die hard. If these past few chapters of my life are to be closed, as they must be, then I do have a right to know."