The Complete Stories

by Anita Desai

  It was when she was in such a state that a letter arrived from her mother. She opened it listlessly, knowing in advance what it would contain – advice on how to run her household, how to cook a specially strengthening stew, an offer of monetary help, pleas to return home, her father’s message that she should consider studying for a higher degree before embarking on a career – and she glanced at it cursorily: her mother did not understand even now the attraction of living, alone, in Delhi, and could think of it only as a poor substitute for living at home.

  But at the bottom of this letter, her mother had added, craftily:

  Our neighbours have invited us to a welcome party next week; their son Arun is returning from the United States. He has taken a degree in geology and is expected to find a suitable job in the field. I am sure he would be pleased to meet you again. If you are planning a visit soon, we shall ask him over for a meal. I know his family is very keen …

  Mao gave a leap off the bed as Moyna flung herself backwards, at the same time throwing the letter into the air with a shout of laughter. She rolled her head about on the pillow, spluttering, ‘Oh, Mama – re-a-ll-y, Mama!’ Mao had not seen such behaviour in a long time. He sat by the door and watched her, his paws primly together, his tail wrapped around him, disapproving. It was clear he thought she had gone crazy. Even he, with his fine senses, could not know that the letter made up Moyna’s mind for her. She was free, she was determined, she had made her decision, and she sat up, laughing.

  In the kitchen below, the Bhallas’ servant boy turned up the music and sang along with it.

  The Landing

  The moving company’s truck, emptied of its load, now turned around in the driveway, using the single immense hemlock tree as the pole on which to turn, and went lumbering down the dirt road on to the highway below, and slowly withdrew.

  Then the silence began to ring in her ears. Louder and louder till it practically shrieked.

  So she thought it best to turn too, and go into the house to see what distraction it could provide from that insistent ring.

  It was, after all, very new to her even though it was very old: 1743 was the date carved into the beam over the entrance. But she had entered it newly and now had to learn every plank and brick and beam in it, one by one, till all became familiar and she could move about without hesitation.

  She paced the length of it and then the breadth, going from room to room. In one, the floor sloped, in others the boards creaked, and the height of the ceiling changed from high to low. Some were well lit, others shadowy. They all belonged to her now, and she had to show them she was mistress. She said to herself, ‘Hmm, I will put my desk here’ and ‘I will need some shelves there’ but there was something hollow, not quite convinced about these intentions. That was because she was growing increasingly aware that there was an opposition to these intentions that was also growing, and that she was not in command of the house so much as it was of her. By entering it, she had subjected herself to it.

  When she recognized that, she shook a little, a small shiver running down her neck and through her shoulders.

  She had bought the house and established herself in it – but now it was projecting a powerful suggestion that it was not so amenable to her purchase as she had imagined. She had not asked for its consent, after all, and it struck her that the house was withholding it.

  Of course this was absurd. How could the house, an inanimate object, possibly contain feelings or make them apparent?

  Reason would not support such an intuition, however strong.

  The house was inanimate, surely; a thing of stone, brick, board and beam. Mortar and lath. Sheetrock and slate.

  But there was also the air entering it through the windows. She had gone around opening them while the men from the moving company unloaded their boxes and brought them in.

  And it was these windows that let the air in – let it in, let it out, in, then out. It was not the house breathing, she told herself. That was an illusion, she said, and continued to prowl through the house she now owned.

  Having learnt the dimensions of one floor, she grasped the banisters and went up the stairs. They were wide and hollowed out at the centre, as one might expect: through the years, many had climbed them and climbed down. Generations. The banisters provided safety and reassurance: these stairs could take more.

  It was the landing that invited pause. It was somehow, inexplicably, more than simply a place to stop and catch one’s breath before proceeding. Evidently bare and empty, yet strongly suggestive of more. She stopped to study the whitewashed walls and wondered if there weren’t traces of openings that no longer existed and were covered over with plaster. Some heavy timber beams entered those walls, then vanished. They suggested that once they had led to, and supported, another space, perhaps a room that had once led off the landing.

  If so, it no longer existed – all was bricked up, plastered over and painted.

  What was it concealing?

  She was certain that the landing, comfortably large as it was, was reduced from a formerly large space. She could not have said why but had the clear impression of another, yet undetected chamber that had for some reason been closed off. Why?

  Baffled, she continued up the stairs to the upper floor. This too she carefully paced, measuring it with her stride. Here the ceiling was lower, the windows smaller, as were the rooms. All in all, they gave an impression of greater intimacy and friendliness than the rooms downstairs. What linked them to those places was of course the staircase – and the landing.

  When she thought of how the landing separated and demarcated them, the image that came to her was of a landing stage on a river, or lake, where such a structure marked a point of transition between earth and water, one element and what was distinctly another.

  Then there was the other landing, the long strip of tarmac trembling in an excess of light and heat, on which planes landed and from which they took off: she thought of such a strip in the middle of a forest, or plantation, or grassland – a kind of scar or scab marking the point of departure and arrival.

  This had never before been suggested to her by a house.

  Perplexed, she went back downstairs – and found all the windows shut. She had not heard them bang in the wind, and they were securely fastened.

  Perhaps she had not opened them, after all, only thought she did. Surely that was the explanation. It was not a good idea, she knew, to start imagining ghosts in the house, or intruders.

  Still, she went upstairs to check and found the windows that she was sure she had not touched, now all open. Breathing the air in, breathing it out. Perhaps they had been open all along.

  It was both irritating and intimidating to find that her memory had begun to play tricks on her. Entering the old house – 1743, was it not carved in the beam over the door? – she herself had suddenly aged, with a failing memory, she told herself, and shook her head at the absurdity of it all.

  But perhaps it was just being entirely alone, in that ringing silence, that made her imagine things. Hallucinate. She would have to take care.

  As she might have foreseen, it was all even harder at night. Once darkness fell, she could not look around and reassure herself of what was there and what was not. She could have switched on lights and done so of course, for in place of the lanterns that must once have hung from the hooks in the ceiling there were now electric lights. But she never turned on more than one light at a time, and if she went from one room to the next, she turned off one light as soon as she turned on another. To have all the lights on at once and have every room blazing would have been a sign, a blatant show of panic. To light just one at a time was like taking a candle from room to room. As she might have, would have, done in 1743.

  In that way, she lit the way up the stairs to bed. On the landing she paused again, to see if the beams still gave that effect of going through the walls to another space, and if a bricked-up opening could still be deciphered under the pale layer of plaster a
nd whitewash. But there was no light on the landing itself, only one at the bottom of the stairs and another at the top, and it was too dimly lit for her to see such traces. The walls and the stairs were mute, giving away nothing.

  She had a bed upstairs – she had bought a few pieces of furniture along with the house: this four-poster bed and a chest of drawers upstairs, a kitchen table downstairs, all too large and heavy, obviously, for the previous owners to have removed and taken with them. Now she made up the bed for the night, and changed into a nightgown she had brought up in a valise. She put out the light and climbed into the bed, actually glad for the darkness so that she could not make out any details – whether the closet doors were open or shut, the ceiling low or high – and perhaps they would no longer trouble her but allow the erasure of sleep.

  She fell deeply into oblivion as if falling into a pit that had opened suddenly under her: she was tired. But soon, suddenly, awoke. In that pitch darkness she had a strong, throbbing sense – like a pulse beating in her temple – that someone was standing at the foot of her bed, watching her. She could distinctly hear it breathing, heavily and unevenly. It made no motion at all and she herself felt paralysed, incapable of any. It took a sudden lightning flash of will – Off! On! – to leap up and switch on a light.

  The space revealed around her bed was empty of course. There was no one there. What she had taken for somebody was one post of the four-poster bed, at the foot. That was what had stood there, watching her. And it was her own breath, struggling to heave itself out of her sleep, that she had heard and taken for another’s.

  So she sat back on the edge of the bed, weak with foolishness. Then lay back and waited for day.

  When it appeared, almost imperceptibly, as a silent dissolving of darkness, she went barefoot down the stairs to the landing. Here the presence – or intimation – of what had existed before and no longer did had become strongest. It no longer was, but had left a grey and insubstantial after-image.

  It could not be verified because there was no evidence of a door or window that might once have opened on to an additional space. Yet here, at what was arguably the heart, or centre, of the house, was the most powerful sense of what had once been the heart and centre and still marked a transition that had been made – from earth to water, land to space, night to day, life to death. That was what left behind an after-image, as a boat leaves a wake in water, a plane a trail of vapour in the sky.

  She passed her hands over the surface of the walls to see if she could detect what her eyes could not: traces. Apart from her certainty that there was a chamber to which the presence that had watched her sleep had withdrawn, there was no other clue.

  Perplexed and frustrated, she went back up the stairs with nothing but a sense of absence and bereavement.

  When she went in to work, colleagues asked her, carelessly, as if not really interested in her replies, if she was ‘settling in’. She kept her replies suitably brief and cryptic. Yes. She was. Settling in.

  Once she went to the water cooler for a drink because she had had such an urge to shout: ‘No! I’m not! Settling in!’ and to ask some of them – some of the nicer ones in the department – to come and see for themselves. And an aged man who was something of a ghost of the department – he had been there for so long that he had almost been forgotten – came out of the hall to collect his hat and coat, looked at her briefly from under ashy eyebrows, and asked, ‘Well, and how are you liking the house on the hill?’ She wondered if he had ever lived there himself but she had never spoken to him before and could hardly start questioning him or inviting him to tea so that he could see for himself. That was what she might have done but he was already shuffling off down the hall, head sunk between his shoulders like an aged turtle. The house might have suited him, she thought as she collected her own coat from the stand; perhaps he would have been more attuned to its message and vibrations and been able to decipher them.

  On returning to the house, she took a few moments to pace the grounds, looking at the walls, eaves and roofs from outside, studying them to see if there were traces of an extension that might have existed. That could have provided an explanation of sorts of her suspicion that there had been one and that, like an amputated limb, it lived on, making itself apparent in her discomfort, her distress at its absence.

  But all she saw was a tile coming loose, a ring of mossy green damp rising along the foundation and a spattering of bird droppings across a windowpane, but no clue that might give her direction for further search.

  She turned to go in and suddenly a scattering of black rooks fell out of the hemlock tree with an astonishing volume of sound – flapping of wings, ruffling of feathers, indignant caws – and sat on the ground beneath the tree, trying to get back their balance, then stalked off across the drive into the shrubs, complaining of her intrusion.

  She watched them till they were gone and only the rustling in the shrubs betrayed their passage. Gradually her own alarm subsided, and she went in and unpacked the groceries she had bought on to the kitchen table and made herself a meal, determined to keep herself occupied. It was the empty stretch of time and the empty space that night and darkness hollowed out of the visible world that let out the presence that came to watch her, audibly breathing, when she lay on the four-poster bed. She knew that, but it manifested what was otherwise invisible.

  She was not afraid. Oh no. It was only that, while she had imagined the house she had bought and moved into to be vacant, it proved not to be so. There was this presence occupying it – and eluding her.

  It became a nightly ritual to get up and pad on bare feet down the stairs to the landing, both to escape it and to confront it there. It was the landing, she knew, that the presence inhabited and that it slipped through its walls as if they were porous, curtains rather than walls – in and out, in and out, like breath.

  There was another chamber, she knew it, but when she touched the walls, they were just that – solid, not porous, cool and smooth to her touch like a blank face turning upon her, saying, ‘Did you want something?’

  Because she so much wanted that meeting, that confrontation, she began to try to entice it into the open – by setting a place for it at the table, by leaving a light on in a room she had left, or by placing a chair across from the one she occupied.

  She did not talk to it, not yet. She held back that final communication. Not because it was too difficult, but because it would have been too easy. To talk to it would have been to acknowledge it out loud – and she would not do that, it would too closely resemble defeat.

  But when the voices of the rooks startled her out of sleep at daybreak, she wondered if it was actually trying to talk to her in those harsh, jagged syllables. Perhaps it was making the attempt to break through that final barrier that she could not bring herself to make.

  She started staying at work later and later, pretending she had paperwork to deal with after everyone else had gone. But the sense that it was waiting for her would grow steadily more powerful and more irresistible. Besides, she would be tired and want her tea and want to be home, by herself. Eventually she would give in, drive back and stride to the front door in a rush – to find it shut but unlocked, making her question herself: surely she had locked it on leaving? Or else find it double locked when she was certain she had not done that: why should she? Always the door yielded reluctantly to her push as if the air, the emptiness behind it, were pushing back to keep her out.

  This was too much – it was her house, after all. So she set down her bag and spoke to it, finally. ‘I’m leaving.’

  She did, at great expense and in great discomfort and, worst of all, a sense of acting foolishly. It made her angry to have bought and moved into that house and angry at now moving out. Her colleagues at work expressed surprise but also sympathy. The old man who, she now felt, had something malevolent in his lidded eyes, twinkled darkly at her, ‘Too lonely up there, eh?’ and she very nearly snapped back, ‘On the contrary, not lonely enough,’
but caught herself in time.

  The wretchedness of the transition was increased by the fact that the alternative accommodation she found was a set of small rooms above a row of shops in town. She chose it because there was simply no room here for any presence other than hers. She filled it completely with her furnishings and belongings. She could barely turn around among them. When the heat of summer drammed down on the low roof over her head and beat at the vinyl panel on the outside, it became suffocating.

  Lying awake on the narrow couch – actually just a metal fold-up contraption – she thought of the big house on the hill, and the presence in it prowling from room to room, looking for her, waiting for her. If she returned, would it emerge from its secret chamber and ask her into it at last, in welcome?

  She turned on to her side and closed her eyes, imagining that welcome. She felt neither triumphant nor relieved at having escaped its embrace; she only felt bereft at having abandoned all possibility of it.

  Just under her window, on the street, a lamp glowed with ferocious zeal; some insects revolved around it in a rumbling drone while others hurled themselves at it with piercing detonations. If she drew her curtains to shut out the demon light, the room became so oppressive that she could not breathe.

  She stood leaning out of the window, her palms pressed upon the sill, and waited for someone, some presence to appear, even if only a cat prowling by night. But there was no one there at all. Till a car appeared, raucous with music and drunken voices. It slowed and someone flung a bottle that smashed against the wall just under her window. The shards burst outwards into the light, then showered down. There was laughter, a shouted expletive. That was the message, for her. It left her trembling.