by Paul Scott
I wonder just how much, once he’d made the move of showing friendly to me, wanting to head me off for my own good, he was genuinely and quite unexpectedly attracted to me as a person? Certainly from then on he began to pay attention. And although I didn’t appreciate it at the time I see now that he became my new contact with the sort of world the club represented, the flag-wagging little world – but through him it wore a subtler mark – the Henry Moores, the Debussy. The one constant in my life was Lili and the MacGregor House, the variants were Hari on his side and Ronald on his. Those two seemed so far apart I don’t think I ever referred to one in front of the other. But they weren’t far apart at all. Which was why I was so angry, felt such a fool, when I discovered the truth, that they’d been – what? enemies – since that day in the Sanctuary, when Hari was struck and dragged away, and Sister Ludmila had watched it all happening.
*
She dressed like one of those sisters of mercy with huge white flyaway linen caps. I’d seen her once or twice in the cantonment bazaar, walking in front of a boy who was armed with a stick, holding a leather bag that she kept chained to the belt round her waist. I was with a girl from the hospital and I said, ‘Whoever’s that?’ She said, ‘That’s the mad Russian woman who collects dead bodies and isn’t a nun at all, but just dresses like one.’ I was only passingly interested, not only because India has its fair share of eccentrics of both colours but also because it was during that period of unhappiness, of dislike for everything around me. A few weeks later I saw her again and mentioned her to Lili who said, ‘She doesn’t do any harm, and Anna Klaus helps her sometimes, and likes her, but she makes me shiver, bashing off collecting people she finds dying.’
Aunt Lili hates anything grisly or sordid, doesn’t she? She told me that once as a young girl, the first time she went to Bombay and saw the slums, she cried. I think well-off privileged Indians like Lili have a sort of deep-rooted guilt that they bury under layers of what looks like indifference, because there’s so little they can individually do to lessen the horror and the poverty. They subscribe to charities and do voluntary work but must feel it’s like trying to dam up a river with a handful of twigs. And with Lili I think there’s also a horror of death. She told me about going to the morgue in Paris with a medical student and how afterwards she had nightmares of all the corpses rising up and falling back and rising up again, which is why she hated Nello to show off his cuckoo clocks in the museum room at the MacGregor House! The room where he put Uncle Henry’s old briar pipe in a glass case – the one Uncle Henry gave him to improve his imitations.
I took Hari into the museum room once, round about the beginning of the time when we knew that we both liked being together and so had to face the fact that there was almost no place we could be, except at his house or at Lili’s. The Bibighar came a bit later. The time I took him in to the museum room we were joking about everything, but there was this sense already of cheating, of having to cheat and hide, buy time, buy privacy – paying for them with blows to our joint pride. I thought as I looked round the room, ‘Well, Hari and I are exhibits too. We could stand here on a little plinth, with a card saying Types of Opposites. Indo-British, circa 1942. Do not Touch.’ Then all the people who stared at us in the cantonment, but looked away directly we looked at them, could come and stare to their hearts.’ content. I think it was in Hari’s mind too. We never went into the museum room again. I said, ‘Come on, Hari – it’s mouldy and dead,’ and held my hand out without thinking, then realised that except for dancing, casual contact like getting in and out of a tonga, we had never touched each other, even as friends, let alone as man and woman. I nearly withdrew my hand, because the longer I held it out and he hesitated to take it, the more loaded with significance the gesture became. It hadn’t been meant as significant – just natural, warm and companionable. He took it finally. And then I wanted him to kiss me. To kiss me would have been the only way of making the hand-holding right. Holding hands and not kissing seemed wrong because it was incomplete. It wouldn’t have been incomplete if he’d taken my hand the moment I’d held it out. When we got out of the room he let go. I felt deserted, caught out, left alone to face something, like once at school when I admitted to some silly trivial thing several of us had done and found I was the only girl to own up, which made me look a fool, not a heroine. It was this sort of thing with Hari – these repeated experiences of finding myself emotionally out on a limb – that added up and made me feel sometimes – as I suppose I did climbing the staircase that night after Ronald Merrick’s proposal – ‘It’s probably all wrong my association with Hari Kumar’ I mean made me feel it before Ronald put it into so many words. And added up in that other unfinished sum that posed the question, ‘Well, what does he really feel for me? A big-boned white girl with not much to be said in her favour.’
*
And then there were the rains. They came fresh and clean, wild, indiscriminate. And changed the garden, Mayapore, the whole landscape. That awful foreboding colourlessness was washed out of the sky. I’d wake at night, shivering because the temperature had fallen, and listen to the lashing on the trees, the wonderful rumbling and banging of the thunder, and watch the way the whole room was lit as if from an explosion, with the furniture throwing sudden flamboyant shadows, black dancing shapes petrified in the middle of a complicated movement – a bit of secret night-time devilry that they returned to the moment the unexpected light went out, only to be caught and held still in it again a few moments later.
I was at the Chillianwallah Bagh on the last night of the dry. For two nights there had been sheet lightning and distant thunder. It was towards the end of June, about a week, perhaps less, after my dinner with Ronald Merrick when he had said, on the steps of the MacGregor House, ‘Some ideas take some getting used to.’ Sitting with Hari and Aunt Shalini this time I saw how unreal my life had become because there didn’t seem to be any kind of future in front of me that I wanted and could have. Why? Holding one hand out, groping, and the other out backwards, linked to the security of what was known and expected. Straining like that. Pretending the ground between was occupied, when all the time it wasn’t.
The tonga came at eleven and on the way home we suddenly saw her, lit by the sheet lightning – the wide white wings of the cap, a man ahead of her, and one behind carrying what looked like a pole, but was a rolled-up stretcher. I’d said – not wanting the evening to end – ‘Let’s drive back through the bazaar and past the temple,’ and he’d agreed, and then I suffered pangs of conscience at the thought of the extra rupees the boy would want; because now I’d fitted Hari into place, and knew he hadn’t any spare rupees to throw away. On the other hand I wouldn’t have dared offer him even an anna. That time we went to the Chinese Restaurant I said quite without thinking, ‘Let’s go Dutch on a chop suey,’ and his face closed down, the way Ronald Merrick’s did when I rejected his proposal. The Chinese Restaurant was a far from happy experience, what with the insult it seemed I’d offered Hari suggesting Dutch and then the insult to us both when the proprietor stopped him from following me upstairs.
I said, ‘That’s the mad Russian woman who collects dead bodies, isn’t it?’ She was going away from us, turning up a side street. Hari said she wasn’t mad and he didn’t think she was Russian. He said, ‘We call her Sister Ludmila.’ He’d once written a piece for the Gazette about the Sanctuary, but his editor had refused to publish it because of the implication that the British were responsible for letting people die in the streets. So he’d altered the article, because that wasn’t what he’d meant. He’d altered it to show that nobody cared, not even the people who were dying, nobody except Sister Ludmila. But the editor still wouldn’t publish it. He said Sister Ludmila was a joke. I asked Hari if I could visit the Sanctuary. He said he’d take me there if I really wanted to see it, but that I mustn’t be upset if she treated me like some kind of inquisitive snooper. She kept herself very much to herself and was only really interested in people who were
dying and had no bed to die in, although she also ran an evening clinic that people could go to who couldn’t afford to take time off from work to go to the day-time clinics, and she doled out free rice on certain days of the week, to children and mothers mostly. I asked him how he had got to know her and he simply said, ‘By chance.’
*
She had an image of the Siva dancing in a circle of cosmic fire, carved in wood, and a framed biblical text: ‘He that soweth little shall reap little, and he that soweth plenteously shall reap plenteously. Let every man do according as he is disposed in his heart, not grudging, or of necessity,. for God loveth a cheerful giver.’ There seemed to be a connection between the Christian text and the Hindu image, because this Siva was smiling. And the way the god’s limbs are thrust out and jaunty-looking gives the image a feeling of happiness, doesn’t it? The only immobile thing is the right foot (even the right leg is bent at the knee and springy-looking). The right foot is the one that presses down on the crouching figure of the little demon, which is why that foot has to be firm and unmoving. The left leg is kicking up, the first pair of arms are gesturing cautiously but invitingly, and the second pair are holding the circle of flame, holding it away but also keeping it burning. And of course the god is winged, which gives the whole image an airy flying feeling that makes you think you could leap into the dark with him and come to no harm.
These were the only bits of decoration in her whitewashed ‘cell’ – the Siva and the text. At our last meeting she gave the text to me, because she said she knew it by heart anyway. But I’ve always been too embarrassed to show it to you and I don’t think I deserved to be given it anyway. It’s in my big suitcase, the one with the straps round it.
What an extraordinary woman she was. When evening comes I think of her preparing to set out on that nightly expedition into the alleys and dark cul-de-sacs, and into the waste land between the temple and the Bibighar bridge. I got into the habit of going there about once a week straight from the hospital – to help with the evening clinic, not just because it was another place Hari and I could meet. I once asked her whether I could go with her at night on her missions. She laughed and said, ‘No, that is only for people who have nothing else to offer.’ I thought she meant I could offer money, but she said she had enough, more than enough, although promised that if ever she didn’t and I still wanted to help I could.
We took to each other. Perhaps I liked her originally because she was fond of Hari and saw nothing wrong in our being there together. She used to let us sit in the office, or in her room. When it was dark he and I would cycle back to the MacGregor House, but he didn’t often come in on those occasions. The days I knew I’d be going to the Sanctuary I went to the hospital on my bicycle and left early to avoid the car or van that Mr Merrick was always sending round for me. The same in the evenings, after work. I’d leave a message for the driver that I’d either gone or was working late. Sometimes, though, I’d let myself be driven back to the MacGregor, and then go on to the Sanctuary by cycle. I didn’t want the hospital to know I helped at Sister Ludmila’s clinic. It wasn’t often that I did, but I guessed it was against the hospital rules or something. I saw Anna Klaus there one evening and said, ‘Don’t split on me!’ She laughed and said people probably knew anyway because in a town like Mayapore it was almost impossible to keep anything a secret.
But not all the people who would have liked to know did. I mean people on our side of the river, people like Ronald Merrick. I kept it from Ronald because this was the part of my life I shared willingly with no one. Ronald was part of another life. Lili yet another. I didn’t know I’d divided my life up into these watertight compartments, I mean I didn’t consciously know. Subconsciously, yes, and I was aware of the subterfuge involved, but not aware of it in a way that ever allowed me in those days to use the word subterfuge – at least not until the evening when I went to the temple with Hari, and found out about Ronald’s part in his arrest, and felt everyone had cheated, and then realised I’d been cheating just as badly myself, and became afraid, recognised that I’d really been afraid all along, afraid like everybody else of going out on a limb in case somebody sawed it off – which was ironic, wasn’t it, because I used to kid myself that’s what we all ought to do, kid myself it was what I was doing. But if I was out on a limb I had one arm securely round the tree-trunk.
I suppose I thought that everything I did was an adventure of some sort. An evening at the MacGregor House with Lili and a few ‘mixed’ friends, an evening at the club with Ronald or the girls and boys, an hour or two at Sister Ludmila’s clinic, a walk with Hari on a Sunday morning to the Bibighar. Well, they were adventures, weren’t they? because each of these things was done – unintentionally but for all practical purposes – in defiance of the others. I was breaking every rule there was. The funny thing is that people couldn’t be absolutely certain which rule I was breaking in what way at what time because they were so hedged about with their own particular rule they could only follow me far enough to see that I’d broken it and gone away, and become temporarily invisible, so that when I came back, when I returned to their own fold they didn’t know enough about what I’d been doing and where I’d been to make real charges against me, other than the general one of being – what? Unstable? Asking for trouble? Unaligned? Bad enough of course, but people do like to be able to define other people’s instability and non-alignment, and if they can’t their own fear of what you might come to represent forces them to make another bid for your allegiance.
To be rejected – which I suppose is one of the easiest ways of making your mark, you have to come right out with something they see as directly and forcefully opposed to what they think they believe in. To be accepted you have to be seen and heard to appear to stand for what they think they believe in. To be neither one thing nor the other is probably unforgivable.
But, Auntie, it was awfully difficult for me. I did genuinely like several of the girls and boys I mixed with at the club. I genuinely liked Ronald, when he was the closest he could ever get to being easy and natural with me. I even liked him when he was difficult and ‘official’ because I thought I knew why he acted like that. And I loved Lili, even at her most standoffish, when that old Rajput princess blood showed through and she sort of gathered up the hem of her cloak. Saree, I mean! I liked the fun of the English before it became self-conscious and vulgar and violent, and I liked the simple almost childish fun of the Indians, and their seriousness, before it became prissy and prickly and imitative of European sulks. With Hari I can’t connect a word such as ‘like’, because my liking was hopelessly encumbered with the physical effect he had on me, which turned liking into love but didn’t leave me insensitive to his pigheadedness and prickliness. All of which makes me sound on paper like a paragon of virtuous broad-mindedness, until you remember the horrible mess I made of everything.
*
I hate the impression we automatically get of things and places and people that make us say, for instance, ‘This is Indian. This is British.’ When I first saw the Bibighar I thought: How Indian! Not Indian as I’d have thought of a place as Indian before I came out, but Indian as it struck me then. But when you say something like that, in circumstances like that, I think you’re responding to the attraction of a place which you see as alien on the surface but underneath as proof of something general and universal. I wish I could get hold of the right words to say just what I mean. The Taj Mahal is ‘typically Indian’, isn’t it? Picture-book Moghul stuff. But what makes you give out to it emotionally is the feeling of a man’s worship of his wife, which is neither Indian nor un-Indian, but a general human emotion, expressed in this case in an ‘Indian’ way. This is what I got from the Bibighar. It was a place in which you sensed something having gone badly wrong at one time that hadn’t yet been put right but could be if only you knew how. That’s the sort of thing you could imagine about any place, but imagining it there, feeling that it was still alive, I said, ‘How Indian,’ because it was
the first place in Mayapore that hit me in this way, and the surprise of being hit made me think I’d come across something typical when all the time it was typical of no place, but only of human acts and desires that leave their mark in the most unexpected and sometimes chilling way.
Usually it was a Sunday morning place, but one day Hari and I sheltered there from the rain, dashing in from the road in the late afternoon, on our bikes, and running up the steps that divided one level of old lawn from another, to the ‘pavilion’, the roofed-over mosaic. We stood under it and I had a cigarette. We’d been on our way to tea at Aunt Shalini’s. It was a Saturday. I had a half-day off from the hospital and after lunch I’d cycled to the cantonment bazaar to see if those awful photographs I’d had taken for your birthday were ready at Gulab Singh’s where that little man Subhas Chand had a booth. I saw Hari coming out of the Gazette offices and called out to him. I said, ‘Come and help me choose my picture for Auntie Ethel, then if they’re any good you can have one.’ So we went to Subhas Chand and looked at the proofs. I said, ‘Oh, Lord,’ but Hari said they were all pretty good and helped me choose the one to make up cabinet size for you. Afterwards I made him come to Darwaza Chand’s with me while I chose that dress length. There were hardly any people shopping at that time. Those who were stared at us in the usual unpleasant manner. When I looked at my watch and saw it was already four o’clock I invited him back to the MacGregor House for tea, but he said, ‘No, come to see Aunt Shalini.’ I’d not been to his house since the night before the rains set in. I told him I’d like to but I’d better change first. He said, ‘Why? Unless you want to tell Lady Chatterjee where you’re going.’ But it was her purdah hospital committee afternoon, and there wasn’t any need to tell Raju, so we set off. We went the Bibighar bridge side. He hated taking me over by the Mandir Gate bridge because that way we had to go through the bazaar. And that’s how we were caught, cycling past the Bibighar. Down it came, as it does, and we dashed in there, expecting it to dry up in twenty minutes or so. But it went on and on, and blew up a storm.