A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Kris had a piece of news. ‘I’ll make your drink first; you must be so tired, poor Rita.’ After she had drunk it, and they were eating the meal he had prepared: ‘I’ve got a job.’ She said, ‘Oh no. Oh why?’ He laughed. ‘Think of the money! Five hundred a week. Fabulous, what? A fortune.’ He kept this up all evening, trying to laugh and tease her out of her distress. He was used to having to do this whenever he took up some new employment. This one was in a very smart men’s outfitter where she knew he would be exposed to the eyes of every customer walking in off the street; and they would be exposed to his charm, which he could not help exuding.

  Although usually she went to sleep long before him, that night she lay awake. Their walk-up apartment was noisy, there was a diner downstairs and the kitchen workers clattered and shouted till after midnight, and Kris was watching a late show in the other room, which was partitioned from the bedroom by a cardboard-thin wall. When his programme was finished, he turned it off and came into the bedroom. They had always slept together in twin beds side by side, since he was eight years old; before that, he had shared her bed and couldn’t sleep except curled up against her. She watched him now changing into his pyjamas. After some time, when they were both lying very still in their two beds, he stretched out his hand for her to take; and that was how she finally managed to fall asleep, not comforted but at least with his hand lying lightly in hers.

  The next evening, Rita, having accepted Nathan’s invitation for herself and Kris, turned up alone. Nathan seemed to crumple up in his evening clothes. ‘Oh no!’ he cried, stamping his patent-leather pump, completely forgetting his usual courtesy and Rita’s feelings. She made an excuse – Kris had a headache. ‘He could have taken an aspirin or something,’ Nathan said. The two of them went alone and it was a depressing evening for Nathan; he didn’t notice it was for Rita too, that in fact she had arrived in such a mood, with her eyes red-rimmed. And soon there was another evening that Nathan had arranged for the three of them when again she came alone, again claiming a headache for Kris. But when it happened a third time, she had to tell him the truth – that Kris had an engagement with someone else. Nathan questioned her more closely than he might have done if he had been interested in keeping up the least pretence of indifference. And Rita too showed more of her feelings than she usually did when she told Nathan that Kris now had a job, which had inevitably widened his social contacts.

  Nathan hardly ever got up in time to make lunch appointments, so when Rita saw him at eleven o’clock in the morning dressing up in a pearl pinstripe suit with a pale pink shirt and a tie with gold crowns on it, she could easily guess where he was going. She had gone there herself, on the second day that Kris had started work. Nathan arrived home carrying a package containing a cashmere sweater. The next time he came back with an Italian robe. He proudly showed off his purchases to Rita, but otherwise he was secretive about his morning’s activity – in so far as he could be secretive, for as usual his plump, white face expressed his inner feelings as though they had been plastered on in greasepaint.

  Kris, on the other hand, could be secretive, if he wanted to. On this occasion he didn’t want to. Although he said nothing about Nathan’s first visit, when she asked him on the second day, ‘Did Nathan come to see you at the store?’ he replied: ‘Yes, wasn’t that kind of him? He bought a silk robe, Italian, very expensive, and he’s asked me for lunch tomorrow. I told him I only get forty-five minutes so he said we’d go somewhere nearby. He’s awfully nice.’

  They went out to lunch three days in succession, and three times Nathan told Rita nothing and Kris described exactly, without her having to ask, where they had gone, what they had eaten and what Nathan had said.

  On the third day Kris reported that Nathan wanted him to leave his job. ‘And do what?’ Rita asked.

  ‘You’ll never guess.’ Kris laughed.

  She guessed at once. ‘You’re not an actor.’

  ‘That’s why: he says he doesn’t want an actor.’

  ‘Then what does he want?’

  Kris laughed again. ‘He wants me.’

  When she arrived for work, she told Nathan, before even taking off her coat, that she was going back to England. Nathan was still half asleep in his enormous bed, amid fleur-de-lys sheets. ‘Kris and I both, of course,’ she added.

  Without waiting for his reaction, she went straight out to sort the papers he had left lying about for her in his study, which was also their workroom. This was no more worklike than the bedroom; Nathan had surrounded himself with exquisite and valuable objects, scattered about and so numerous that one was apt to stumble over them. Fortunately, not much could break because there were soft surfaces everywhere, cushions and carpets and upholstered chaises longues.

  He had followed her, tying the robe he had bought from Kris. He tried to sound reasonable, even paternal. ‘What will you go to London and do?’

  ‘Why, you think I’m not good enough to get another job?’

  ‘My dear, I know better than anyone how good, how very good you are.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said tightly. She was aware of the way Nathan was looking at her. Rita had a good figure – she was tall and slim – and pretty dark brown hair; but she was used to people thinking, and even hinting, what a pity it was that the brother should have all the beauty. Even their mother had said it, when drunk and angry.

  Nathan said, ‘No one understands the project better than you, and you know how close we are now to getting it off the ground.’

  ‘You don’t have a star.’

  ‘I don’t need a star. I’ve explained that to you and I thought you understood.’

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve understood.’ She began to tremble and then to accuse him: ‘Who are you to tell him what to do? He was so proud to have found work all by himself and to help me with our expenses. He’s always done that. I wanted him to have more education, but he left school at sixteen to go out and find work.’

  ‘And do you like him going out to work?’

  ‘Yes. Because he likes it.’

  She had been through this before: men like Nathan, and women too, wanting Kris to leave whatever job he had and come to work for them in something they had concocted for him. Sometimes Kris did and sometimes he didn’t – but whatever his decision, it was always his own, reached for reasons of his own that he shared with no one.

  ‘Can we talk?’ Nathan said. ‘The three of us?’

  ‘Kris and I have talked. It’s all settled.’

  This was far from the truth, but that was not for Nathan to know – any more than he needed to know that she was as much in the dark as he was. Kris’s nature was as clear as his countenance. Yet there was one area in him, one secret unknown place where even she could not penetrate. It wasn’t that it was deliberately shut off from her but that he seemed unable to reveal it: as if it were as much a secret place to him as to her, where his intentions formed themselves almost without his knowledge.

  Kris liked working in the store, and everyone, colleagues and customers, liked him. Some of them loved him, which always happened, and though he preferred it when they only liked him, he did his best to deal gently with the others. He was very sensitive to people’s feelings, probably because of always being careful with his sister, who was easily hurt. He himself was immune in that respect: his attachments were light enough never to chafe him – including that to his sister, though he wouldn’t have admitted it. What he liked best was to be alone; one might have said alone with his thoughts except that he didn’t have that many, or as far as he knew any very deep ones. He was also fortunate in that he could be alone while – for instance – joking around with the other young salesmen and dealing with customers (or clients, as they were called in his high-class establishment). It was rare for anyone on whom he attended to leave the store without the purchase he had recommended. This was because he genuinely felt the client’s need for a particular item, and also because he himself admired it so much, stroking the luxurious silk of a s
carf or necktie and making it irresistible by modelling it himself. All the time, though, he remained inside himself, detached and alone. The same when he was walking in the streets, which he enjoyed doing (but actually, he enjoyed everything). Often he would walk home instead of taking the subway, not to save money but to have an hour or so to himself. It didn’t matter to him whether he was in New York or in London, or in Rome or Paris, where he was sometimes taken to stay in villas and grand hotels. The streets, the buildings were everywhere beautiful to him, so were the parks and monuments, though everything he passed or passed through was no more than a scrim covering something else even better. The sky in all its times and seasons was the best of all to him, and he experienced it so intensely that it seemed to remain inside him, transformed into a flowering garden. At night, lying in the bed next to Rita’s and holding her hand, he lingered in that garden, staying awake much longer than she suspected – tranquil but also expectant not for anything in particular, not for a person, but for a call, a mission that might come to him provided he remained patient enough to wait for it.

  Whenever the three of them attended some gala dinner, Rita would be placed at the same table with Nathan, as a pair, while Kris was accommodated wherever a single man might be required between two ladies. But on one occasion it happened that Kris too was seated at their table, exactly opposite Nathan. It was in one of the grandest clubs in New York and was to honour the scion of one of the oldest families of New York State for his work in preserving a well-known city landmark.

  The dinner for two hundred and fifty guests was held in the main hall, which reached five storeys up to the glassed-in roof supported by cast-iron trusses. Granite staircases swept in two wings to the second floor where a small orchestra was seated under oil paintings of former donors and committee members. These were the ancestors of many of the guests assembled there, who were wry among themselves about the ways their money had been made – not in the railways and coal mines on which earlier family fortunes had been founded but in humbler products of domestic use. However, it was these families who were now the oldest aristocracy, and one already on the point of extinction. Everyone there was old, very very old; if they had children and grandchildren, these did not frequent the club but had taken a different direction – some to become carpenters, or to join spiritual groups, or make documentary films, fleeing every vestige of family tradition as though it were a curse. Sometimes it was a curse, and one that, if it hadn’t been generally known, would have been a dark secret – alcoholism, suicides, even a suspected murder: declines that it had taken European aristocracies centuries to reach had here been achieved within a couple of generations.

  Nathan’s mother had come from a similar background, but his own blood had been refreshed by its exotic infusion. Also, he was an artist, adding to the sense of superiority he felt towards this company. When the speeches carried on too long – and they all did – he didn’t disguise his boredom. He leaned back in his chair, rolled breadcrumbs on the table, and smiled across at Kris. Both Kris and Rita were listening with the zealous attention of outsiders. Along with everyone else, they applauded each reference lauding the dedication of the guest of honour. They smiled at humorous recollections of past events – if the guests hadn’t been at school together, they had been at the same debutante dances, polo matches and university football games. But there was general relief when the last speaker – the guest of honour himself, an erect old gentleman whom everyone called Freddy – sat down and the steward signalled to his team of waiters to begin circling with the desserts.

  The entire room was laden with billionaires, most of them in their seventies or eighties. Nathan had arranged for his party to be seated with the president of an international investment company, the heir to a supermarket chain and the descendant of a cosmetics empire. It may have been the presence of so much money that inspired Nathan, or it may have been the presence of Kris. Cutting across the pleasant interchange between old acquaintances about their diets and surgical procedures, he spoke as usual about his film; he had been doing that for years – everyone had heard him – but now in such a way that he induced these mighty men and women to silent introspection. The granite of their faces unexpectedly softened while Nathan offered a hope they had not thought to hope for. He seemed to be making them all extras in his film, metamorphosing these excessively endowed New Yorkers into seventeenth-century Middle-Eastern Jews – rabbis and moneylenders, small traders and thieves – who, after centuries of oppression and suffering, were suddenly told that the Messiah was on his way to them. He admitted freely that at first he had supported a false Messiah, one who had expounded a doctrine of redemption through being steeped in sin. But far from being steeped in it, the true Messiah had no conception of sin. Have you done insidious deeds such as manipulating the stock exchange, falsifying tax returns, fornicating with teenage girls? The new Messiah would come and redeem you with his purity. Because he is innocent, he will make you innocent. The heiress seated next to Kris put her hand on his. Nathan nodded at him in smiling encouragement, and shy though he was, reticent, self-effacing, Kris took that old hand and pressed it as in promise to a humble child. It wasn’t going to be an expensive film, Nathan said; ten million, fifteen, twenty at the most – what was that in these days of inflated budgets? There weren’t enough ladies to go around at that table, so on his other side Kris was seated next to the hereditary cosmetics king, heavy and hardened with his own money. This man too put his hand on Kris’s; and now it was as though the entire table were holding hands, all of them united, like a circle of disciples or dervishes, in a promise and a pledge.

  Shortly after that evening, and largely as a result of it, Nathan got his finance together. A period of tremendous activity followed. He went from meeting to meeting all over town – always running late, constantly telephoning Rita with new instructions, urging her not to go home before he returned. He told her to ask the housekeeper to prepare supper for her as well as for himself – ‘And for Kris, if he’s around,’ he added, casually, before hanging up.

  She was never entirely sure whether Kris would be around. They usually left their apartment together in the mornings – he to take the subway to his place of work, she the bus to hers; from the moment she got up, she plotted how to ask him what he was doing in the evening, but often she couldn’t manage it until the last moment before he descended into the subway. She knew he wouldn’t tell her a lie, and sometimes he did say he had a date with someone from work, but mostly he said he wasn’t sure – and it was the truth, she knew, and also knew he was keeping his options open, whatever these might be. So like Nathan she too was in suspense; and when, at the end of the day, Kris did show up at Nathan’s, she couldn’t hide her relief and joy, not even from Nathan – she met him at the door when he came in and said, ‘He’s here.’

  Once Nathan came home so late that Kris had fallen asleep on the living-room sofa. Rita had covered him with a blanket. She tried to wake him, but Nathan said, ‘No, don’t.’ He went into his bedroom and came out with an Indian shawl; this he substituted for the blanket – so gently that Kris never stirred. Nathan stood gazing down at him. Then he said, ‘Why is he so tired?’

  ‘Well, naturally, he’s been working all day at his store.’

  ‘And last night – where did he go last night?’ Rita hesitated, and Nathan stopped looking at the brother to look at the sister: ‘Did he get home very late?’

  Now Rita replied promptly: ‘Oh no. He was home by the time I got there.’

  Unlike Kris, she didn’t mind telling a lie when necessary. But it was she herself who was very tired, having waited up for Kris till three o’clock in the morning. And when he came, he kept her up longer while he undressed and lay down next to her, telling her about his evening – he told her in detail, leaving out, she presumed, nothing.

  Again she made to wake him and again Nathan restrained her. ‘Why don’t you leave him here for the night?’ he said. ‘You stay too. You could be in Mot
her’s old room – why don’t you? You’ll like it. It’s so pretty and it gets the morning sun.’

  ‘We’re going home.’ She called Kris’s name and put out her hand to shake him; Nathan caught it, and when she struggled to free herself, he gripped it tighter. For a moment they stood glaring at each other.

  Nathan let go; he said, ‘No. Let’s do this in a nice way.’ Then he said, ‘This thing has gotten very big, you know that.’

  ‘Big for you, not for us.’

  Although they were no longer trying to keep their voices down, Kris went on sleeping under the soft Indian shawl.

  Nathan said, ‘I’m taking him away. No no, not from you, of course not, I would never try that. I mean take him away with me on the location scout. He has to see all these places – all his former haunts.’ Nathan smiled.

  ‘If you think he cares for travel or luxury hotels or your first-class plane seats, if you think you can seduce him with any of that—’

  ‘Seduce?’ Nathan said, and repeated it as if he didn’t believe his ears.

  And she repeated it too, so loudly that Kris woke and sat up and rubbed his eyes. He looked from one to the other. He said, ‘I’m hungry.’

  Nathan shouted: ‘Of course you are! We all are! Starving! Ravenous! We’re on the point of devouring each other!’