Runaways

by Carolyn McCrae

  It hit him on his arm. He made no effort to catch it and it clattered against the wall, falling to the ground without shattering.

  “You are very, very stupid.” He spoke slowly and deliberately as if what he said was a matter of fact.

  I charged across the room and tried to hit him with clenched fists. I really wanted to hurt him for having made such a fool of me.

  My fist connected with the side of his face just as his hand slapped out at me. I obviously hadn’t hurt him as much as he had hurt me and it was in no way a fair contest.

  Nothing that had ever happened in my life prepared me for what followed. None of the dreadful times with Joe, nor the experimental affairs I had while in Sussex, prepared me for what Jonathan did to me in the next few minutes. It was obvious that he felt nothing for me. He couldn’t have inflicted the pain in such a cold-blooded and methodical way if he had cared at all. When he had finished humiliating me he dressed slowly and left, not even bothering to close the door behind him.

  I ran a bath and lay in it, watching the colours of my skin change as the bruises began to show. Was there anything that he had said or done in the past six months that would have warned me? I could think of nothing. He had been charming and generous, polite and attentive. He had made love carefully and considerately. He was right. I was a naïve fool.

  Eventually I pulled myself out of the bath and walked, rather shakily, to the mirror. I stood with my head bowed, staring at the black and white floor before plucking up the courage to look up and into the mirror.

  Now I knew I would be spending my honeymoon in this suite, venturing outside only with a scarf to cover my face.

  I soaked the thick white cotton flannel in cold water and winced as I gingerly pressed it onto my face. What had I done to deserve this? This should have been the happiest day, the first day of my married life. Instead I felt as I had so many times before in my life; defeated, a failure, lost and lonely.

  I thought of picking up the phone and calling … who? I had failed with Joe, I had failed with Carl. I couldn’t fail again. I had to put up with it. I just had to.

  Somehow.

  That evening Jonathan and I were served room service. I stayed in the bathroom as the meal was delivered and Jonathan requested the bearers leave us alone. I’m sure he made some ribald comment as I heard the tone of his voice and the bearers’ stifled laughter.

  We ate in silence.

  What was there for either of us to say?

  As we were finishing the meal the room bell rang.

  I got up, preparing to go into the bathroom, assuming it was the bearers come to clear away our meal.

  “Oh no Susie, you must stay and meet my guest. He has come specially to see you. I am sure you will be delighted to see him. He is an old friend of yours.”

  The last time I had seen Ramesh he had been sitting with Linda on the sea wall of Sandhey in September 1976.

  “Good evening Susannah. Welcome to my country.”

  He must have noticed the bruising on my face and neck, and on my arms but he said nothing. “I am so pleased to see you again after what, almost exactly seven years? So much time, so much ‘water under the bridge’. I hate that saying, It is so very English with its implication that the water is moving, that it is fresh and new, that every moment brings something different. In my country water under the bridge would be stagnant, foul and stinking.”

  “Hello Ramesh.” I didn’t want to say any more.

  “Jonathan, my good friend, your memsahib isn’t very impressed is she?” Did you appreciate my wedding gift to you?”

  “I did, but my wife didn’t. She disapproves.”

  Very deliberately he took something out of his pocket and went over to the table by the window.

  “Something you may not have had before, Jonny. Very good. Very special.”

  Soon the air was filled with a sweet sickly smoke and they were talking quickly in a language I did not understand.

  “Why?” I asked a simple question. They both turned towards me. They seemed to have forgotten I was there.

  While I had been watching them I had been thinking.

  That I had not put two and two together annoyed me almost as much as everything else that had happened to me in the past few weeks.

  Why had Jonathan called Linda’s firm to do his work? Certainly she was in the phone directory, but nowhere near the top of the list. He must have known who he was calling.

  I began to think of some of the things I had told Jonathan in those early weeks. I had not been discreet. Why would I be? I could not possibly have known he knew the people I had talked about and was passing all the secrets I shared with him straight back to Ramesh. How he must have loved hearing of the pain he was causing.

  I was looking at Ramesh. I was looking into the clear brown eyes that Linda had once loved. There was so much cold dislike in them.

  “Why have you gone to so much trouble?” I repeated my question.

  “Shall I tell her now?” He asked Jonathan.

  “Why not? I suspect any hopes of a long and happy union have already been dashed.” They laughed together, as if recognising a shared joke.

  Ramesh sat down, crossing his legs precisely and dusting an imaginary speck of dust from his neatly pressed chinos.

  “My father was dead before I was born and my mother lived with his family as is our custom. We do not abandon family members as you do. She was lucky we were not so traditional a family as to require her to go sati. My uncle returned with tales of how he had been cheated, how he had been rich but had been cheated by the man he called voh aadmee ‘that man’. ‘Voh aadmee’ was responsible for so much. My family deserved a prosperity that ‘that man’ had stolen from us.”

  “But he didn’t earn anything! He stole it.!” I couldn’t believe Ramesh had such a simplistic view of his family.

  But he continued, ignoring me. “My uncle’s wealth had been taken from him, he returned with nothing. We had all expected better. My aunts told me it was my job to go to England and find voh aadmee and repay him for what he had done to our family. So that is what I have done. I found David McKennah and I found the people he cared for. One by one I have done my best to ruin your lives. I think I have done quite well. Your cousin Graham as a very willing tool, he and that fascist friend of his. Your friend Linda was gullible and forward. You were easy to flatter, so easy to fool, so trusting and malleable. Carl’s work hasn’t been going so well has it? Such a shame. Your beautiful homosexual brother and his wife no longer have any trust or love between them. Your children … Yes I think I have done quite well and I will go on as long as your family gains from what it stole from my uncle.”

  “You are being ridiculous, none of us gained from your family.”

  He again ignored my interruption and I realised that he had other motives as he spoke animatedly and with such arrogance.

  “When I first met Linda she was demure and yet ambitious, she wanted to make a success of business, she did not seem interested in anything else. The women I had been introduced to with a view to marriage had all been simpering and shy. Linda had a mind of her own and I found that attractive. But you argued with the men as if you were our equals, you talked loudly and you swore. I watched you all that summer and I learned to hate you. I don’t mean dislike. I mean hate. I was determined that you would all learn what it was like to have to work for people’s good opinion. You showed your bodies to anyone. Only whores, the girls of the cages, do that to catch the attention of a man. You were no better. You were older and had been married, you were a mother, yet you ignored your children, you threw yourself at a man who was as close as a brother. You should have had more respect for yourself. And the beautiful Holly. She had been abused, she was unhappy, she should have known to keep herself to herself, but she didn’t. She had sex with your brother while she was still married to another man. And then she married him but continued to have sex with me, many times, even in her own bed, sometimes minutes before
her husband would take her too. She would still be moist from me and he flattered himself that he thought he was arousing her!”

  He paused, provocatively uncrossing his legs and sitting with them splayed apart, his erection clear for anyone who cared to look. I didn’t rise to his bait, waiting silently for him to continue.

  “You all need to be taught a lesson. All through that summer I listened to you and your friends. I was acceptable because I knew about cricket! Have you any idea how humiliating that is? You never had to apologise for your whiteness, for the colour of your skin. You never had to try to be something that you weren’t because you were already what other people aspired to. You were all confident in your ability to do exactly as you chose. You were all shameless, decadent, disgusting. You had so much confidence in your god-given right to be where you were in society. You were all so smug and self-satisfied. None of you realised what it was like for others to fight for the right to be considered equal. You did not know what it was like to have to be perfect in order to be average. I had to be so clever, so polite, so perfect in every way just to be accepted. You would never have to do that.”

  Ramesh sat back in his chair, silent, pleased with himself, still aroused. Jonathan was not listening, he had lost interest some time before and sat smoking in a world of his own.

  Since some response seemed necessary and I was not going to rise to this invective I spoke quietly and simply. “Why did you want to hurt us so much?”

  “Because my family has had to start from nothing when we should have had wealth and it was your grandfather’s fault. He stole my birthright. He, and his family, must be made to pay.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “Haven’t I just told you? Don’t you understand?”

  “What you have said is all a load of sanctimonious bullshit.”

  “I think I’ve been very successful.” Ramesh’s voice had changed. It was charming, ingratiating, almost apologetic. “Not one of you is happy.”

  I must have given him the impression I was defeated, that he had shocked and distressed me into silent acceptance because Ramesh then went too far. Whether it was the drugs and his feeling of superiority that made him feel invincible, or his belief that I knew far less than I did, he began to give away more information than he should have done.

  “I went to see Graham Tyler before he died.” That was how he had got hold of the drugs in prison. It seemed so very long ago that Carl had read me the report from his Sunday newspaper but it was only 18 months. “He gave me this.”

  When I looked at the contents of the envelope I knew Graham would not have given that to anyone willingly. Perhaps it had been the price he paid for the drugs that would kill him.

  There were several sheets of paper, closely written with names David McKennah, Elizabeth Moreton, Maximilian Fischer. I recognised most of them. There were dates and a number of addresses. I was surprised to see the address of our flat in London, but the writing was older and obviously written years before I had moved in with Jonathan.

  I looked across at my husband. He was asleep. I looked back at the papers in my hand. I knew Ramesh would take it back from me, he was taunting me with knowledge he suspected I would want, so I tried to memorise as much as I could whilst unconvincingly feigning a lack of interest.

  “Why did you go to see Graham?”

  “I was curious. You were all too interested in your love affairs to see what was in front of you. Holly had been married to Graham. She was divorcing him. He was an inconvenience and he was removed. I wondered at the power of someone who could do that. I asked questions and got answers, perhaps no one thought I was important enough to have the truth hidden from me. Graham had been blackmailing the great Max Fischer and I knew why. The other person in the plot was Holly’s fascist father, another man who was conveniently disposed of.”

  “He died in a car crash. He was drunk!”

  “Convenient wasn’t it? Graham was on to something. He knew much, much more than he told me at the time.”

  “You met him?”

  “Oh yes. We spent quite a lot of time together. But you wouldn’t have known, you were all so involved in your own little romances and Graham and I were invisible, unimportant because of our class and colour.”

  I knew that wasn’t fair but couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound like self-justification and I didn’t see why I should explain myself to this man.

  “I wouldn’t have thought you were obvious friends.”

  As we talked I was trying to commit as much of the contents of those tantalising sheets of paper as I could to my, thankfully good, memory. Did Ramesh think I knew nothing of his uncle or was he testing me?

  “We had a lot in common.”

  I suspected that was a hatred of Max. Graham must have felt himself very lucky to meet up with Ramesh to help him with his plans. He wouldn’t have known he was out of his depth and that Ramesh was a great deal more clever and his desire for revenge went a great deal deeper.

  “Mine I think.” Ramesh held his hand out for the papers I was still holding. “Don’t be silly and think you can keep them.”

  Every day of the two weeks that was supposed to have been my honeymoon was spent with Ramesh. He showed us round the city, he took us on drives into the mountains and kept us company on the yachts he arranged to sail us across the harbour to the islands with the caves. We never mentioned the documents he had briefly shown me, he never mentioned Max or his uncle, he didn’t offer to introduce us to his family or take us to his home or beach hut. It seemed that he didn’t want to let me out of his sight. It was almost that he didn’t trust what I might get up to if left alone for an hour.

  I framed questions in my mind as he drove with us to the Juhu Airport for our flight home ‘You never mention your uncle’ or ‘What a shame we haven’t had the opportunity to meet your uncle?’.

  I never did ask him and wondered what he would have done if I had.

  In the few hours on the plane returning to England Jonathan and I reached an agreement. I wouldn’t leave him, I would act the dutiful wife and support him in his career as he, and his colleagues, expected me to. We would live together in his flat but I would have my own room. He wouldn’t bother me and I would ask no questions about his life. In return he would allow me to live my life as I wanted.

  The previous January I had needed a job that allowed me time to do my research, I had had no knowledge of where to start finding Vijay and no means of paying for anything. Now, in late September, I had a man to pay the bills and knew who and where Vijay was. I just didn’t know how to approach him, and what to approach him with. I sat back in the comfort of the first class seat thinking that, whatever it had cost, I had achieved some of the things David has asked of me.

  It was as I looked out over the seemingly endless mountainous deserts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran that I thought of my situation in another way. We were vulnerable now in a way we never had been when David had been alive. David had ensured that Max had some reason to protect Charles and I and our families. Whatever Vijay or Ramesh had planned in the past we had had an umbrella of security around us. Since David had died Max had no reason, nor perhaps any inclination, to honour his commitment. Since David had died the bad luck in our family had accelerated.

  Why hadn’t Ramesh done anything about his marriage in the three years since he had left Linda? Why had he chosen this year to ruin her? Why had Ramesh involved Jonathan this year to wreck any chances I may have had of happiness. Maureen had certainly changed in her attitude towards me.

  Ramesh had succeeded in disrupting Linda’s life, and mine, but was disruption going to be enough for him? He would wreak his revenge through our humiliation, he would ensure we ended with nothing, neither money, nor social standing, nor self-respect. One by one he would pick us off. For so many years I had thought that there was no threat to our family.

  I had thought David was over-dramatic and had not realised that the world had
moved on.

  I had been wrong.

  My interest in David and Max’s past was no longer academic. I had to find more about them and about Vijay. I had, somehow, to find a way to get him off our family’s back. And I had to do it all without Jonathan having an idea because everything I did, everywhere I went, would be reported back.

  Linda had done this journey in despair at the knowledge that her marriage had been annulled. I would have given anything to have been in the same position. I believed I had grounds for divorce already, if not annulment.

  But, again, I had nowhere to go.

  If only I hadn’t forfeited my friendship with Maureen and with Ted.

  But I had.

  I had run away from them once too often.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Are you ready for this?” Ted asked Linda as he helped her into the car and she took one last look at the house that had been her home in one of the better roads of Sevenoaks.

  Linda nodded. She couldn’t bring herself to speak without showing how upset she really was; her marriage, her work, the life as she knew it, were all ending. “Somehow I feel like someone in a Victorian novel, you know the poor family member heading off for life as a governess.”

  “Anyone less like a governess would be difficult to imagine.” Ted joked, but added more seriously when he realised she meant it “You are helping Charles far more than he is helping you. You could go anywhere, do anything. With your skills and experience you could move to London, get a job, enjoy yourself.”

  “Still, I’ll be looking after Susannah’s children, the ‘surrogate mother’.”

  “Charles is desperate, Linda. He’s had them for over six months and he’s at his wits end. He is so grateful to you. Don’t think it is an unequal relationship at all. He won’t be your boss, he won’t be employing you.”

  “But he’ll pay for all my living expenses, he’ll probably give me pocket money, I’ll be living in his house. I’ve got nothing.”