A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  On my way back, I drove past the girls’ house. It was thrown wide open, windows and doors flowing out into the front yard, which was full of toys, and playing with them were the usual children the girls gathered up from the town – orphans, or fugitives from bad homes. The girls had set up a swing and Maeve was sitting on it, shouting ‘Higher!’ while two laughing children pushed her. Betty saw me in my car outside; she waved and called, ‘Isn’t this fun!’

  But when she came out to talk to me through the car window, the first thing she said was, ‘Is he still in the cottage?’

  ‘He’s working on my bookshelves.’

  ‘If he’s working for you, why don’t you let him stay in the house? There’s plenty of room for just the two of you. He hardly needs a whole cottage to himself.’

  ‘Then who else would stay there?’

  ‘You’ve seen our kids, how happy they are just in that inch of space we have for them. And on your place, in that air, those trees – and then the seasons! Rain and wind and snow! Beautiful.’

  I started the car, and when I revved the engine, she had to talk louder: ‘It’s not good for people to stay alone. I know what I was before I met Maeve, and I know what she was, but together – ’ here she shouted after the moving car – ‘the two of us together, that’s a life!’

  The cabinet took longer than the other jobs he had done for me. He became so involved in the work that he continued after our supper and after I had gone to bed. I listened to him hammering downstairs, and one night I got up to see how he was getting on. He was concentrating on fitting in the shelves but was dissatisfied and took them out again to plane them. I stood silently watching him. When he turned around, he looked at me in the doorway in my long nightdress, which was of delicate silk, fit for a bride. I remembered the thoughts Betty had tried to put in my head – had actually put there; and the idea that he could read them, as he so often could, both embarrassed and excited me. I went back upstairs and continued to lie in bed listening to his hammering. When it stopped, I heard him moving around downstairs and, wondering what he was doing, wanted to go see for myself. But the same embarrassment overcame me, and I continued lying in bed listening; that too was nice, to hear him moving inside my house.

  When I woke in the morning, the sun was pouring a sea of sparkling autumn light into the room. I wore a robe and tied it as I hurried down the stairs, thinking I might still find him there. But he had gone; he had completed his work, and swept up the wood shavings, and altogether left everything completely neat. The cabinet was finished; it sat in its niche. The lock was on, so I knew he had moved the silver inside and locked it up for security, taking the key to give me in the morning. One of the books was lying on the dining table with a note on it that said, ‘See page 420.’ I opened it to that page and found the key inside. I scanned the page to see if there was a secret underlined message for me, but there was not. I read it again, but still detected no message. I tried the adjoining page and the following one, with the same result. But the key was definitely there. I unlocked the new cabinet and found I had been mistaken, and he had not yet moved the silver inside. But the breakfront was empty, and so were the drawers in my sideboard, in which I had kept my silverware.

  The cottage too was empty and swept with a broom, which he had left leaning against the wall. The only thing missing here was the table fan. The first thing I wondered about was how he had managed to transport everything on that rickety mount of his. I imagined how he might have fastened the fan to the bike and then, like a real burglar, slung the silver in a sack over his shoulder; and so he would have stood at dawn on the highway to thumb a ride from long-distance trucks on their way to far-off, unknown, undiscoverable destinations.

  The girls soon transformed the cottage into a playroom. The children painted fantastic murals of jungle animals and spaceships; Betty baked cookies while Maeve wove a rug on her loom, which had stood unused in the attic of their old house. As for me, I’ve been studying his book. I start at the beginning and read right through to the end; then, in the hope of getting to understand more, I go back and repeat the process. Maybe this is what he had in mind for me, in return for what he took. So the loss of my silver may not be a loss at all but the fee charged for my education. Sometimes, though not always, I think it was worth it. Meanwhile, as Betty had anticipated, each season here brings us its own joys: ghosts in bedsheets at Halloween, stars and angels on the Christmas tree, and in the depths of winter, when the snow has fallen thick and fast, tobogganing down the slope behind the cottage into the hollow that in the spring will be covered in new grass and sprinkled with small flowers, bluebells and forget-me-nots.

  At the End of the Century

  Celia and Lily were half-sisters, but since both their fathers had long ago withdrawn, they were united by their one parent in common, their mother, Fay. Fay took them along with her – to France, South America – wherever she had a new marriage or liaison. Celia, who was ten years older than Lily, returned to New York as soon as she could. Educating herself through a series of semi-professional courses, she set up as a psychotherapist and became quite successful, while waiting for Lily to be old enough to join her.

  Lily was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where she was miserable. Celia advised patience; she knew Lily would be miserable anywhere except with herself. As soon as she had failed her last exam, Celia made arrangements for her to take art classes in New York, though she wasn’t really surprised when Lily dropped out within a month. After that, Lily spent her days wandering around the streets carrying her sketching pad. This remained blank, but perhaps for the first time in her life Lily appeared to be entirely happy, living with her sister in their apartment in an Art Deco building on the East Side.

  Celia was still there – immensely old, the only one left. Even Scipio was gone (killed when his racing car overturned at São Paulo), although his name remained as sole heir in Celia’s will. Nowadays, all Celia could do was keep herself slightly mobile. When she managed to get up, she somehow dressed herself, usually askew, and shuffled off to the soup and salad place at the corner. Here she was served the same bowl of soup every day, which was all she seemed to need for nourishment. What was there left to nourish? The present was extinct for her, the past had vanished with all the people in it, even the dearest of them.

  When Lily, at nineteen, had decided to get married, it had been unexpected: a shock. She simply produced Gavin, didn’t even introduce him, murmured his name so softly that Celia failed to hear it and he had to say it himself, louder. Celia couldn’t find out where and how they had met. ‘I picked her up on the street,’ Gavin said. He warned Celia: ‘I’ve been telling her she really ought to be more careful about strangers.’ He said it tongue-in-cheek, a joke, but afterwards, when she and Lily were alone, Celia was serious about the dangers of the street. Lily said mildly, ‘I don’t talk to many people and hardly anyone talks to me.’ Celia believed her; there was something remote about Lily that would discourage strangers from addressing her.

  Gavin’s family liked and accepted her immediately. Gavin was a poet, and it seemed right for him to unite himself with his muse. Lily was fair to the point of evanescence, delicate, almost diaphanous – it was easy to think of her as a muse. She loved Gavin, everything about him. ‘Why?’ he would ask, amused, but she couldn’t answer, she had no gift for words. She was an artist by temperament more than practice. She liked to trace Gavin’s features – not with a pencil or brush but with her finger, lightly feeling him. This also made him laugh, but he kept still for her.

  He came from a large old American family, and the wedding was quite grand. It was held in the Hudson Valley mansion where Gavin’s mother Elizabeth still lived with two old uncles. China Trade dinner services were taken out of cabinets where they had been shut up so long that they had to be soaked in tubs of water to wash the dust off. Faded tapestries were hung over wallpaper that was even more faded. But it was summer and the grounds were lush, the ancient trees load
ed with foliage that looked too heavy for their broken limbs to carry. A fountain spouted rusty water out of the mouths of crumbling lions. There was a band and some of the guests danced, even some very old ones in very old long dresses that got wet in the grass.

  The original idea had been for the newly wed couple to live in the house with the groom’s mother. Gavin was the youngest of Elizabeth’s five children and the only son; his sisters were all married with children, but he was over thirty and had not been expected to marry. Elizabeth prepared one of the bedrooms for him and Lily – it had been unoccupied for years, but all that was needed was to renew the curtains and the canopy over the four-poster. Elizabeth picked flowers and filled several vases so that youth and freshness permeated the ancient room, which held a harp and watercolours of mountain streams and a broken-down castle in the Catskills. It was enchanting, and at first Lily and Gavin were enchanted. It seemed so perfect for them, for him who wrote poetry and her who painted.

  It turned out that both of them preferred the city. Lily saw plenty of sky from the terrace of Celia’s apartment, and birds, and buildings as fantastic as trees and more ornate; this was as much landscape as she needed. Gavin had spent his childhood in the country, but after he went to boarding school, he didn’t look forward to going home; school was far more exciting to him (he made deep friendships) and even during vacations he preferred to take up invitations from friends whose parents lived on Park Avenue and had season tickets to the opera.

  Six months into their marriage, Gavin and Lily were mostly with Celia in the city. At least Lily was – Gavin spent much of his time elsewhere, with friends in their studios and their weekend houses on Fire Island or the Cape. It didn’t occur to him to take his wife with him on these visits; she too appeared to think it natural that she should be mostly alone or with her sister. Marriage for her meant waiting for Gavin and being very happy when he was there. And because Lily was happy, Celia too complied with the situation, at least to the extent of not commenting on it.

  Then their mother Fay showed up. She did this every now and again, whenever a liaison broke down, or she had to see her lawyer about increasing her remittances. She was bored easily, loved to travel, loved to meet new people. She was very skinny and very lively and dressed with tasteful flamboyance, wound around with Parisian scarves and Italian costume jewellery; her hair was a metallic red, cut like a boy’s.

  It was the first time she had visited her daughters since Lily’s marriage. She had been living in Paris just then and was unable to attend the wedding because of undergoing an unspecified procedure. All she told them about it now was: ‘You don’t want to know all that . . . But guess what: I’m a widow.’ They didn’t understand which husband she had lost, till she revealed that it was Celia’s father. They hadn’t heard her refer to him as anything but ‘that loser’, but now she became sentimental, remembered early days – ‘Fay and Harry! Crazy kids!’ – and then felt sorry for Celia, for being fatherless, orphaned. ‘You’re still here,’ Celia pointed out, which irritated her mother; those two never could be together for long without irritation.

  Now they had to live together, for although Fay felt most at home in hotels, she couldn’t for the moment afford to move into one. Celia’s apartment was large – the same one in which she remained for the rest of her life – but, with Fay there, it was no longer large enough. Fay suggested that the front part, Celia’s office where she saw patients, could be made into a charming bed-sitting room for herself. ‘You don’t see your crazies all day,’ she argued, promising to make herself scarce during office hours. Failing that, she felt it to be appropriate to move into the bedroom now given over to Gavin and Lily. ‘They should have a place of their own,’ she said. ‘It’s working class for a young married couple to be living with their families.’

  ‘They’re looking,’ Celia lied. But they weren’t, and she even suspected that Gavin had kept his old apartment and continued to live there the way he had done before his marriage.

  Lily agreed that it was a waste for the married couple to have the larger bedroom when she herself was mostly alone in it. One morning, while Celia was busy with her patients, Lily helped Fay carry her load of possessions into the room she willingly vacated. Even Gavin, arriving from one of his excursions, didn’t seem to mind that his clothes were now scattered over various closets. Also, since their new room was too small for two of them, he made himself comfortable on the living-room sofa. He kept the light on all night to read, while playing records very softly, so as not to disturb anyone. He was always considerate, more like a house-guest than a husband.

  The second Sunday after Fay’s arrival was the day they drove her to meet Gavin’s family in the country. A traditional Anglo-Saxon lunch of roast lamb had been cooked by Elizabeth, Gavin’s mother. Her kitchen still had its old appliances, which had become antiques, but Elizabeth coped very efficiently, even providing a special dish for Lily, who was vegetarian. The cavernous dining room had been opened up, and as far as possible the dust wiped out of the convoluted furniture. Only its smell remained pervading the air. There was no smell of food, since the family usually ate in the kitchen.

  In outward appearance and manner, this family now seated around the table was also more or less traditional. Besides Elizabeth, who sat at the head, there were two uncles, her brothers-in-law who lived in the house with her; both wore three-piece suits, their waistcoats and bow-ties slightly spotted with food. The visiting guests were three of Gavin’s sisters, two of them with husbands and some children, and a few relatives introduced as cousins. All spoke in the same loud voices, guttural with good breeding and unchallenged opinions. The conversation consisted mostly of amusing family anecdotes recounted by the two uncles. At the punchline, each uncle rapped the table and coughed with laughter, which made tears rise to their sorrowful, faded eyes. Elizabeth too laughed as at something she had never heard before; and she looked around at her guests to make sure they absorbed this family history, which it would one day be their turn to pass on.

  At the end of the meal, when the sisters and cousins had driven off to visit other relatives embedded in the neighbourhood, Elizabeth invited Fay on a house tour. Several rooms had to be kept shut up because of the cost of heating and the lack of domestic staff, and here the furniture – New York State and valuable – was shrouded to protect it against bat droppings. The paintings and the statuary testified mostly to the taste of the ancestors whose portraits hung all around the house they had built and rebuilt. They featured the same type of men and women through the generations, the original tall bony merchants and farmers – they operated gravel pits and flour mills – still visible in the later portraits of New York clubmen living on trust funds.

  These portraits were the only part of the house tour of any interest to Fay. While hardly listening to Elizabeth’s detailed biographies, she stepped close to examine them; but none of them in the least resembled fair slender Gavin. At last she asked Elizabeth, ‘I suppose he takes after your family?’ But no – Elizabeth’s family, professional people from an adjoining county, were mostly, like herself, short and sturdy. Gavin was the first to look like – well, what he was: a poet.

  As they crossed an upper landing, they saw him on the stairs; he was arguing with Celia, who called to them, ‘Gavin says he’s going back to New York!’ They walked up together to join their two mothers on the landing. Celia was angry; she said, ‘He has to meet some writer from Poland.’

  ‘Fixed up weeks ago,’ he regretted. ‘Just the sort of stupid thing I do. It’s not even a writer, it’s a critic. But I’m not going to spoil your fun. I know Mother has a whole programme for you this afternoon. The Shaker Museum; the old almshouses. It’s just my bad luck . . . Don’t look at me like that, Celia, as if you’re seeing right through me. You scare me.’

  ‘I wish I did. Maybe then you’d be nicer to Lily.’

  ‘Oh my Lord! Ask Lily who, who could be nicer to her than I?’ He pecked her cheek as though grateful to
her for her compliance, and she watched him, lithe in his linen suit, run lightly down the stairs.

  Later, Fay and Celia were standing by the window in the bedroom allotted to them. It was a bright gold afternoon, but they looked only at the figure sitting on an ornamental bench under the largest maple, which was still magnificent though half destroyed by storms.

  ‘She’s sketching,’ Celia said.

  ‘Have you ever actually seen . . . ?’

  ‘Gavin says she has talent.’

  Lily was sitting very still. Perhaps she was taking in the scene to interpret it later. She could often be observed sitting this way, gazing in front of her, her hands folded on the sketchbook in her lap: maybe watching, maybe waiting, definitely patient.

  Fay turned away impatiently. ‘I couldn’t bear to stay the night in this creepy room. No doubt they all died in that bed. Let’s go: I don’t need to be entertained any more. And surely the Shaker Museum is a joke.’

  ‘No. And neither are the almshouses.’

  ‘You just love to torment me, Celia, you’ve always loved to do that.’

  But she wasn’t serious – she was relieved to have Celia with her. Although so different in every way, she and her daughter were both out of their element here. Unlike Gavin’s ancestors, theirs hadn’t tilled this land nor built their houses on it. Their great-grandmothers and grandmothers had long since looked to Europe for their sustenance; this was evident in both Fay and Celia, in the cast of their thoughts as well as their chic appearance.