Will write you more news very soon.
Ever lovingly,
Paddy
Penelope my darling,
I know that the first question you’ll want answered will be, has Oliver changed? Yes, he has, but not in the way I should have expected. I mean, he doesn’t seem to have got noticeably older—but then after all, one must remember that he’s only thirty-four, even now. As a young man, there was an assurance about him, or shall we say a determination, or even a ruthlessness—no, I’ve gone too far, I can hear you protesting!—well, anyway, he carried himself very erect and was apt to stick his jaw out, and his movements were purposeful. Now he gives the impression of being far less sure of himself. He stoops towards you when he talks and hunches his shoulders in a funny awkward way, as if he’s apologizing for being taller and bigger than you are.
Does he look healthy? No, I’m afraid he doesn’t. He is lean and bony-faced and tough, tough enough obviously to take an enormous lot of strain without breaking down. But he’s under great strain, of that I’m sure, and I doubt if he’s getting nearly enough sleep. You can see the fatigue in his eyes. They are bluer than ever and shockingly brilliant and searching, quite desperate. One avoids them, or rather one consciously makes oneself look into them, so as to pretend one hasn’t noticed anything wrong.
All these characteristics became much more evident this morning, when I saw him in his monastic outfit, this crumpled shoddy cotton sheeting he has to wear. He is too big and physical for it. It makes him seem rather pathetic, like a hospital patient in a nightgown, deprived of his trousers.
As yet I can’t detect any hostility towards me, although Goodness knows I came prepared for it. That may appear later. When he met me at the airport his behavior was nervous to the point of hysteria. But of course he had been waiting for me a long time, my plane was late, he was probably very tired and had no doubt been rehearsing our meeting and winding himself up for it, as I certainly had, so he wasn’t his normal self. As he ran towards me he was laughing quite wildly, as I never remember him laughing before, and then he stopped in front of me and stood just looking at me, without even shaking hands. I didn’t know how to react to this, so I started walking and he fell into step beside me. Meanwhile he was still laughing or rather simmering with laughter, and his face kept flushing deep red, and he made jokes which all alluded in one way or another to his status as a monk. It was as though he was trying to forestall any possible criticism. Also he was unnaturally polite. He speaks more softly and diffidently than he used to, several times I had to ask him to repeat what he’d said.
There’s something almost indecently vulnerable about him. You feel he’s utterly exposed. Even the thinnest mask, the one nearly all of us wear for decency, has been stripped off. Do I mean by this that I think he has turned into a saint already? No—but then I don’t know what a saint is, so how can I tell? Isn’t it just a word we use for anyone who makes us feel acutely uncomfortable?
What I’m wondering is, what on earth do the people in this Monastery think of him? That’s one of the many things I’m hoping to find out while I’m here.
You know, Penny, this really is a most formidable country! If you regard it in the aspect of an adversary, it has a kind of passive cunning, something like a judo wrestler who throws you by means of your own weight and strength. Am I making any sense? Probably not, as these are just first incoherent impressions.
I began to get them last night, while Oliver and I were driving back from the airport. We drove through miles and miles and miles of tumble-down suburbs—no, suburbs is too materialistic a word—this was a no-place, dark, featureless, an endless straggling bumpy lane with low unlighted buildings on one side of it and trees on the other, trailing their leaves in a ditch of muddy water. The weirdest thing about this midnight limbo was that it wasn’t at all deserted. Dim figures were flitting silently about in wispy smoke-coloured garments; it was as if they’d formed themselves out of the smoke from the glowing charcoal braziers we kept passing. The air was full of acrid charcoal smoke and richly perfumed dust; it’s the very breath of this place, so soft and yet so powerful. I felt a kind of nauseating enchantment. How easy it would be to breathe it in and become part of it like its inhabitants, these emanations of dust and smoke! Surely that must happen to anyone who stays here long. That’s why I fear for Olly. I suppose that’s what I was trying to express when I mentioned judo—Olly’s very strength, his terrific energy and manic determination, may actually hasten his defeat. And isn’t this exactly what he wants?
It was before you and I met, but I know I must have told you how Uncle Fred got a banker friend of his to give Oliver a job in his bank, it was somewhere in the City. Olly actually worked there a whole year, or nearly, and he was so efficient that everyone marvelled. They predicted that he had a brilliant future ahead of him, he was the stuff of which first-rate executives are made, he’d be on the board before he was thirty, and so forth. So what does our Olly do—walks out one day and joins the Quakers! Of course, at the time we all told each other it was merely a phase, he was still very young, only just down from the Varsity. I listened indulgently to his not very tactful declarations that all business is immoral and that banking is the worst, because it’s usury, and that those who practise it are the scum of the earth. Bless him, he didn’t mean anything personal! Uncle Fred’s friend was the calmest and most optimistic of us all—he treated Olly’s defection as a sort of mild nervous breakdown, had known lots of similar cases, he said, it was usually the best boys who went through it, in fact it was a mark of real character, and in due course they returned to sanity with an improved sense of proportion, all the better for their little escapade. Indeed, he announced that he was holding Olly’s job open for him, being so certain he’d recover. Well, he was mistaken. We all were. Olly had meant what he said, and furthermore, ever since that day, he has proceeded to follow his principles to their logical conclusion. First, business is rejected as evil, then all activity including social service is found to be meaningless, and so you end up with the integrity of doing nothing but contemplate your navel and the fascinatingly frustrating game of trying to know the Unknowable! Believe me, darling, I’m not merely sneering—if I sound bitter it’s because this concerns me passionately. I hadn’t fully realized, until I actually arrived here and saw Olly again, just what a sorry tragedy this is and how near he is to the final curtain of it. Am I going to stand by and watch it fall, without even a protest? No, of course not. I have got to speak out, even if it means losing his trust and affection forever. I must wait for the right opportunity, though.
The Monastery guest-house is bare in the usual cheerless tropical way, but perfectly clean. Oliver warned me not to hang my clothes on some wall-pegs near the window, because thieves have been known to angle with long canes from the alley outside and lift things off the pegs and the nearby table. He told me this with the almost unavoidable pride which the old hand feels in warning a newcomer. Living in a place like this makes you possessive of the discomforts, they’re all you’ve got. I remember how, in Africa, Olly had an air of practically owning the mosquitoes!
(Which reminds me, I had rather dreaded them here, but there don’t seem to be many. I have a net over the bed, of course. One slightly spooky thing did happen this morning, though. When I opened my suitcase three or four of them flew out—they’d been inside it all night!)
My food is prepared by a special cook, and it is British to the extreme of caricature. It must have taken generations of memsahibs to train the Bengalis to produce this brassy black tea, this wooden toast, these chalk-white scrambled eggs as dry as leather. I am to eat my meals in a vast bare dining-room at a table which would seat twenty at least. Oliver says that some of the senior swamis will be joining me for lunch and supper soon, but this morning at breakfast I was alone with him. He watched me eat but would take only a cup of tea. I sat in state at the head of the table under a huge propeller fan, like an incarnation of Western capitalism, with O
liver across from me in his Hindu wrapper, representing poverty, chastity and non-attachment. What a pair! How much cruder can symbolism get? I had to fight against laughing, not because I felt happily amused but because I was afraid of hysteria. I know this sounds affected, but it’s the truth. The situation seemed funny to me but also ugly, because it was so false, and that’s a combination which provokes hysterics. It isn’t this new-found religion of Oliver’s that I can’t take seriously, I know it means something to you and I can at least respect it intellectually. What I can’t and will not take seriously is Oliver himself as a synthetic Hindu, dressed up in these robes. I’m sorry. Perhaps you’ll think I’m being hatefully provincial. Perhaps I am. But I won’t apologize for that. It wouldn’t be sincere.
During breakfast, I asked Olly a few beginner’s questions about the manners and customs here, just so as not to offend him by a lack of curiosity. I longed to probe deeper, into his personal life, but I couldn’t trust the tone of my voice, he might have guessed from it what my attitude is. If he realizes this prematurely, I shall have lost whatever tiny chance I may have of bringing him to his senses.
After breakfast, when he said he had to leave me, I went out to explore. There’s a lane outside this guesthouse, one end of it leads to a gateway which opens into the grounds of the Monastery; in the opposite direction it winds along behind the houses which line the bank of the Ganges. I am to see the Monastery this afternoon with Oliver, and anyhow I wouldn’t have dared face it without a chaperone, so I walked the other way. This river-suburb must have been fashionably grand, once—ancient crumbling dark-crimson mansions, the homes of the English and other Europeans no doubt, with nineteenth-century French statues in their gardens, nymphs and classical goddesses, and creepers with great blossoms climbing over everything. Pools full of waterflowers, cows cropping at weeds amidst garbage, walled alleys that wander in and out and stop abruptly, choked with rubble where the walls have collapsed. Mother will absolutely adore the romantic colour-photographs I’m going to take of all this; luckily she won’t be able to smell the stink from the open drains and assorted droppings! (Incidentally, I’ve just finished writing to her—I foresee I’m going to have to use up my normal quota of white lies for years to come, reassuring her about the health and happiness of her precious ewe-lamb!)
This morning I was in the wrong mood, I suppose. Under other circumstances I could have discounted the stinks and appreciated the romance, but I can’t look at this place except in relation to Oliver, so it fills me with depression and a certain horror, even. Down at the ghats by the river I was watching the men and boys bathing—it’s they and their families who are now crammed into the tumble-down mansions, turning them into slum-tenements. They were ducking their heads in the cloudy brown mud-water, then swilling it round in their mouths and spitting it out again. I wanted to yell ‘Stop!’ It’s as shocking as seeing someone take poison. But of course it doesn’t poison them, and that in its own way is even more shocking, that such filth should be their daily drink. And they seem so unsubstantial, so humble, so dreadfully patient. It’s no good, Penny—no doubt we are rooted in the flesh, no doubt we’re the most arrogant of spiritual morons, no doubt their traditions did have much to teach us, once—but not any longer; tradition is dead when it no longer produces a way of life in the present, and their way of life has failed. When unfortunate innocents like Olly expose themselves to it, it can only corrupt and destroy them.
But I’m getting altogether too worked up! Had better stop here, lie down on my exceedingly hard bed and try to lower my blood-pressure before lunch by reading a good trashy novel. (Luckily I have one here with me.)
My warmest occidental hugs and kisses for you and the Two Ds. Wish me well on my crusade against the Hindus!
Faithfully,
Paddy
P.S. On rereading this letter, it suddenly strikes me that there’s one other thing about my meeting with Oliver you’ll undoubtedly like to hear. The very first question he asked me when we met was about you (not Mother!); he wanted to know how you were and what you were doing, and he listened eagerly to everything I told him and then questioned me some more. I also took the liberty of inventing a cable you’d sent me just before I left the States, in which you particularly asked me to give him your love. I could see that this pleased him immensely—more than he wanted me to know!
He hasn’t really changed. I was right about that. I knew it before we’d even left the airport. But he is more everything. He has more assurance. He’s slyer. He’s more on his guard. Also, he’s much more tired. At moments, he looks really dead tired. Perhaps it’s slowly wearing him out, this need he feels to be eternally on the alert. But that doesn’t mean that he’ll ever relax. I doubt if he could, now. It must have become part of his nature.
I’d forgotten how powerfully charming he is. Even when you know all his tricks, he can still charm you. And anyone would have to admit that he looks marvellously young for his age. That black floppy hair with hardly any grey in it, those bright clear eyes with only the tiniest wrinkles showing white against his tan, those firm brown cheeks only slightly too heavy, and those beautiful teeth—they must certainly have had something done to them since I saw them last, they’re unnaturally regular. Perhaps one of the dentists in Los Angeles put crowns on them. That’s what they do to movie stars, and Patrick is a kind of star, he’s fighting middle-age just as they do.
When we met, he seemed almost scared. I think he really is afraid of offending me. That ought to melt my heart, I know, but it doesn’t. It only irritates me, I’m sorry to say, because Patrick’s way of being scared is in itself a kind of maliciousness. Oh, he treads so softly lest he should step on one of my prejudices, and he jolly well takes care that I shall feel him doing it!
Yesterday morning, I came round early to the guesthouse and talked to the cook about Patrick’s breakfast, and then I went to Patrick’s door to ask him if he was ready to eat. I heard him moving about inside the room, so I knew he was awake. I knocked and called ‘Patrick?’ and he called back, ‘Come in,’ so he must have been quite prepared for my entrance, and yet when I walked into the room I found him stark naked. Well, that in itself wasn’t surprising. Patrick has never been shy about nakedness; he used to make fun of me because I was. But then he said, ‘This won’t take a moment, I just want to finish—’ and he proceeded to do a lot of pushups, forty at least, and then about a dozen jumps, raising his arms and landing with his feet apart, then jumping to bring them together again. He did these jumps very deliberately, facing me and grinning at me, with his teeth looking whiter than ever in his flushed brown face. And I couldn’t help being aware of his rather big penis slapping against his bare thigh as he jumped. Patrick always had a beautiful body and it is still in perfect shape, he must exercise all the time. You can tell that he’s been lying in the sun completely nude. He’s dark brown all over, with only the faintest trace to show the part the swimming-trunks have covered.
I was embarrassed and wanted to look away. But Patrick was grinning at me as if he was challenging me to admit that I felt awkward about looking at him, so I had to go on doing it. And I knew that he was sort of testing me—to see if I’d risen above the flesh, I suppose, and was so pure I wouldn’t even notice if he was naked or not! It would have been ridiculous if it hadn’t been rather obscene. God, he is just like a woman, sometimes! It was like some corny scene in an old Russian novel, where the woman tempts the young monk. I wanted to laugh out loud but I couldn’t, because I did notice and I was embarrassed, and that made me angry with him. So I walked away and stood looking out of the window, and needless to say as soon as I did that he stopped exercising at once and put a towel round his waist and went into the bathroom. I told him I’d wait for him in the dining-room. As I shut the door I thought I heard him laugh, but that was probably just my imagination.
In the afternoon, when I went to fetch him to show him around the Monastery, I found him sitting at the table in the dining-room, readi
ng through a letter he’d just written. I offered to arrange for him to have a table in his room to write on, but he said, ‘I’d rather work at a big table like this one, where you can spread your papers out—it makes me feel I’ve got everything under control.’ Then he excused himself and went into his bedroom.
Before I’d even had time to resolve not to do it, I’d glanced down at the table. There was one letter already sealed in an envelope, addressed to Mother, and there was the letter Patrick had been reading. All I could see was the bottom of the last page, just a postscript. The rest of it was covered by a sheet of blank paper, which he’d casually slipped over it as I walked in.
Patrick had written a lie to Penelope, saying that, as soon as he and I met, I’d asked for news of her and listened to it ‘eagerly.’ Also he admitted lying to me, about a cable she was supposed to have sent and actually hadn’t, giving me her love. Patrick claimed that this lie had pleased me ‘immensely’—‘more than I wanted him to know.’
This was so flatly untrue, I could hardly believe my own eyes. Actually, while I was still waiting for Patrick’s plane, I’d already made up my mind not on any account to be the first to mention Penny, and not to show any undue enthusiasm when he mentioned her. Patrick could claim he noticed some unnatural reserve in my manner, perhaps, when he talked about her. That’s all he could possibly have noticed.
Why did Patrick lie? Was it for Penny? That would mean he believed Penny seriously cared if I’d asked about her or not, which I’m afraid I doubt. Or was it for me? Patrick is anything but a careless person, his very indiscretions are calculated, he doesn’t leave things lying about that he wants hidden. I’m nearly sure he meant me to read that postscript—just to tease me, disturb me, keep me puzzled and guessing. So now I must try to forget all about it.
A Meeting by the River Page 5