I could hardly see for tears trying to focus my mind on what I could do now.
I would find Vijay and ask him why he wanted to hurt our family so much. For years now not one of us had been happy.
I had to go to India.
And at least in India I wouldn’t have to think about Ted.
“Are you all right dear? Is everything OK?” The taxi driver looked concerned, my bags and tears seemed to indicate tragedy.
“I’m fine. Can you take me to London?” I couldn’t face seeing if any trains were running. “The Savoy.”
“It’s going to be a lot of money.”
“That’s OK. Can we just get on our way?” I had been too long in the house and I didn’t want anyone to come back, I didn’t want Josie to look accusingly at me, or Ted to look disappointed.
As we drove down the lane I prayed we wouldn’t meet Ted’s MG coming up the hill. I couldn’t face that.
We drove the hour it took to get to London in silence apart from the familiar tunes playing on the car radio. Every one had a meaning. I will always love you brought tears to my eyes and I tried not to listen to the lyrics but some of the songs were so familiar that the words just came into my head anyway. All of them seemed to be about leaving, loving, losing. We had hardly reached Bromley before I asked the taxi drive to turn the radio off.
I was really not sure I was doing the right thing.
But then what else was there I could do?
As the car drove me towards Heathrow two days later it would have been very easy to dwell on the four years since I had flown to India under such different circumstances but I was determined to be positive. I was not going to stay at the Taj so, since the Kambli family had a house in Juhu, a beach resort to the north of the city, American Express booked me a room in a hotel there. They were surprised there was a room at such short notice.
But every time I thought of something positive Ted came back into my mind.
Only when I was checking in my luggage did I realise something significant was missing. Maureen’s diaries. They had been in the taxi as I had been driven up to London.
I had eight hours on the plane to do nothing but worry about the diaries.
I tried to think of other things, questioning everything I had always believed.
It was Ted who had told me I was not Arnold Donaldson’s child, it was Ted who had told me I was free to love Carl as we did not share a father, it was Ted who had told me I was conceived when my mother was raped. I had never wondered who my real father was.
It had never seemed to matter.
I had never had any reason to disbelieve what Ted had told me that summer’s evening in 1976 and I had never known anyone else well enough to ask them if what Ted had said was true. Everyone who might have known was dead. Except Max. And Ted.
I tried not to believe Ted could have harmed my mother. They had been friends, she wouldn’t have been gone to live with him in her dying months if he had done that to her.
But maybe they had had an affair, maybe it hadn’t been rape at all, maybe my mother had wanted to be made love to by Ted.
Just as I did.
I didn’t know what to think.
I only knew that I loved Ted and really did not want him to be my father.
And Maureen’s diaries would have told me more. But I had left them behind on the seat of a taxi that I would never be able to trace.
I had left them on the seat.
I couldn’t believe I could have been so stupid.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Twenty hours after leaving the Savoy I was sitting in the garden of my luxurious room watching the waves crash onto the beach. The sun was setting, the red band leading straight across the Arabian Sea from it to me. The perfect red circle, so much larger than ever it was in England, dropped gradually under the horizon. Sunset here, where would it be sunrise? I tried to remember the time zones and not think about the black sack on a taxi’s back seat, or now in a dustbin or on a tip.
I was woken by the phone ringing.
“Mrs Smith?” The voice was Indian but the accent was perfect middle class English. He didn’t talk like a member of the hotel’s staff, there was too much authority in his voice. “Or should I say Mrs Parry? Miss Donaldson?”
“Who are you? Ramesh? Is that you?”
“My name is not Ramesh.”
“Then how do you know my names, my history?”
“We knew you were coming. We have contacts at the High Commission, we have been waiting for you.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My family.”
“Are you a Kambli or a Thakersey? Are you related to Ramesh? Vijay? I want to meet Vijay I have so much I need to tell him.”
“There are many questions to ask and to answer. You have been very busy since you were in our city last. We want to know what you know, then we can tell you what you don’t.”
“You mean you want to help me?”
“You’ve got this far. You deserve to reach your goal.”
“Do you know what that is?”
“Better than you do yourself.” He waited for that to sink in before asking, very politely whether I would like to join him for a drink in the hotel bar at noon the following day. I accepted his invitation knowing that I had no alternative but to do so.
I opened the drawer in the bedside table and picked out the telephone directory. I hadn’t really expected to find a Vijay Thakersey or even Ramesh Kambli. And I didn’t.
I turned on the television and watched the amazing ham acting and stylised singing of an old film Love in Tokyo. The colours, the music and the story all seemed completely over the top and for the hour I was watching it I forgot about England, the storm, the children and Ted.
But then there was a news programme. It was in English but not in an English that was easy to follow or understand. There was film of an old man getting into a large white limousine, the caption read Vijay Thakersey. I couldn’t understand what the news story was about but it had something to do with films and a new deal that had been signed. I looked at the three younger men with him and wondered if I would be meeting one of them the next day.
I picked up the phone. “Is it possible to call England?”
“I’m afraid not, Memsahib, if you give me the number I will phone you when we have got through. Sometimes it is easier than others, but with the World Cup there are no lines available.”
“The World Cup?”
“The cricket Memsahib. You mean you did not know? You were lucky to get the room here. It was only because of the High Commission in London, they said it was very important that you have a room in this hotel.”
“Should I call you Annie or Susannah?” The good looking, well dressed man sat next to me in the bar. I recognised him from the news bulletin the previous evening.
“Susannah.” I replied, Annie reminded me too much of Ted and Maureen, then added “Thanks” hurriedly in case he thought I was being short with him.
“And I am Sandeep.”
“How do you do Sandeep? Do I assume your family name is Thakersey?”
He nodded in assent.
“I feel like we should get to know each other well, Susannah, my grandfather knew your grandfather very well.”
“So I understand.” I didn’t want Sandeep to feel he had the upper hand in this conversation. “Do I have to thank you for ensuring I had a room in this lovely hotel despite the World Cup?”
He dipped his head in acknowledgement. “We felt it was time to talk to you and since you seemed to want to talk to us, well, we were not going to make it difficult for you.”
“I suppose you want me to tell you what I know.”
“No. It is not like that at all. You must understand that my grandfather and I never approved of what Ramesh did. We never wished harm to you or your family. It was Ramesh who felt the need for vengeance and who tried to bring ruin to my grandfather’s friends.”
“You don’t like Ramesh?” I as
ked tentatively.
“He is a cousin. I would not say we had to like each other. I have no respect for him nor he for me. He breaks the law as if law doesn’t apply to him. He is neither a nice nor a respectable man.”
“And you are? Respectable? Nice?”
“I hope you will find me so.”
“Can you tell me about your grandfather? I know something about him but, obviously, not enough.”
“Of course. I am here to make you welcome and to do as you wish.”
It was not the first contact with the Thakersey family I had expected.
“You must understand that my grandfather had a difficult time in England. He did not fit in with society, there was a lot of civil unrest at the time and Englishmen were not willing to welcome foreigners in their midst. He was an educated man who did not appreciate being treated as if he were of a lower caste. But he was a determined man, he would not return to his family with his tail between his legs. So he did what he was best able to do. He read the quality newspapers of the day and he wrote letters. Every day he would write a letter to The Times about some issue of the day, many were published. One day he received a note requesting his attendance at an office in a small street situated off Whitehall, of course he went. There he met Mr David Redhead who told him perhaps he could be of assistance to the mother country.
“My grandfather, however, was disappointed and shocked by the tone of the meeting. Instead of a request for service, which he would have been happy to comply with, Mr Redhead showed no respect, insisting that my grandfather was in his debt since, if he did not do as Mr Redhead instructed he would be deported. It was obvious that Mr Redhead knew a great deal about my grandfather’s life as he threatened him with exposure as a fraud.
“My grandfather was a qualified lawyer but he had exaggerated his experience and qualifications to obtain work in London, a situation which Mr Redhead made very plain he was aware of. My grandfather understood he had little choice but to do as Mr Redhead instructed. He had gone to the meeting full of hope and enthusiasm for his mother country, he left disillusioned because what he had been told he must do to stay in the country was to lie, to cheat and to steal.”
I had listened intrigued as Sandeep filled in some of the jigsaw pieces for me. What I resented, and I had had to keep myself from interrupting, was his view of David as a blackmailer. I tried to redress the imbalance of his view.
“But David, Mr Redhead, had to recruit the best people for the job.”
I was surprised by his reaction.
“Your grandfather was not a ‘nice’ man. The operation he ran was not ‘nice’.”
“He was only doing what he had to do.”
“You still don’t understand do you? In that first year Mr Redhead recruited 15 men and women. If they didn’t want to do what they were asked to do, or they tried and failed, the result was still the same.” He paused seemingly reluctant to spell everything out. It was as if he felt I should have understood. I wasn’t deliberately trying not to understand, it was just that where Sandeep was leading me was to a view of David I could not recognise. “My grandfather’s test was to kidnap a brilliant young scientist from the University in Göttingen. They wanted him in England, or if not that then at least not working for Germany. My grandfather was to bring him to England and if he couldn’t he was to kill him. He managed to drug the scientist and transport him into France but there were difficulties, I don’t know exactly what happened but he tried to escape, my grandfather killed him. If he hadn’t my grandfather was in no doubt he himself would have been killed.
“David couldn’t…”
But Sandeep ignored my interruption.
“There was a lady my grandfather knew of, she was an aristocrat, she flew an aeroplane which was unheard of for a woman at the time. She failed in the task your grandfather had set her and her aeroplane crashed.”
“You can’t know that that was my grandfather’s fault!”
“He admitted it. He told the others that it would happen the day before it did.”
I couldn’t believe this was the David I had known.
“There was another man, a man from the east of London, his name was Ian. He failed in his task and his body was found many weeks after he disappeared, tied in chains and dumped in the River Thames. There was a girl, a working class girl from the north of England who had been recruited because her father was German and she spoke the language perfectly. She failed and she was found burned to death in her flat which had apparently caught fire when she had failed to turn off a gas fire. There was…”
“You’ve made your point.” I wondered for a few moments how much of this could be true. I had found out none of these things, focussed as I was on the merchandise the fishermen had imported. Sandeep was telling me I had been looking in entirely the wrong direction.
But then I had been doing what David had wanted me to do.
“This is all irrelevant, my grandfather and the successful candidates worked through the 1930s doing as they were told.”
“But they didn’t did they? They did what they were told but they also kept stuff for themselves. They all siphoned off quite a lot for themselves.”
“Ah yes. The inventory.”
“You know about that?”
“Of course. We have followed your investigations. My grandfather and I have wanted you to succeed When we knew you were researching Max’s inventory we knew you would discover that artefacts were traceable to my grandfather.”
“But I never found any proof of that. I looked, I was looking for anything that could link anything to Vijay. I never found anything.”
“We were hoping you would be able to prove that he had not been exiled with nothing. We needed the proof to persuade Ramesh.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There is no reason why you should. Ramesh believes that your family owes us a great debt. He believes your family stole our wealth and left his uncle to start with nothing. We have told him he is wrong and in the old days he would have done what his elders told him but he is a hothead. He decided upon a vendetta against your family and for many years now he has done what he could to cause you pain and distress. I believe he has been involved with far more than that, with burglary, murder, drugs. Our family has important business here in India, we are influential and powerful. Ramesh’s exploits are putting our business at risk. Quite simply, our word is not good enough, we need proof that Ramesh is wrong and then perhaps he will stop his illegal activities. That Ramesh will not believe his uncle’s word is a cause of great distress to him. If you hadn’t come here of your own accord we would have brought you here because you must have found the proof we need to stop Ramesh doing what he has been doing. There must be something in your work.”
All this time I had thought Vijay was the cause of Ramesh’s actions. Perhaps, after all we were on the same side.
“Can you give a message to your grandfather?”
“Of course.”
“Please tell him that Maureen is dead.”
“That is sad. He has spoken of her. She was a good friend to him.”
“She died in a car crash a few weeks ago. She was talking of him just before it happened.”
“They were different times. My grandfather could love a woman of a different culture but he could never marry her. Marriage was in the hands of the fates and the family. He may have loved this woman but he could never marry her if he ever wished to return to his family.”
He took the drinks from the silver tray proffered by the bearer and handed one to me.
“In 1947 my grandfather had a choice to make. He could stay in England and marry or he could return to India. He could not do both and he knew what was happening as our country faced Independence. Your government rushed through the arrangements, it all happened too quickly and my grandfather had to make a difficult decision under great pressure. He chose his family and his country over the love of a woman. He always believed he was right to do so even though
he knew how much he had hurt her. He will be sorry to hear of her death.”
“He did well though, didn’t he? When he came back to India.”
“The process of Independence was difficult. But he saw that there would be many opportunities for a family with wealth and power. The old order would be destroyed, it would take some time for the British to leave but then there would be immense opportunities. The Americans came in for some years, through the 1960s, but eventually they, too, left us to run our own country. My grandfather spent a decade building up resources and capital, working out what would be the best way to make his families fortune in this new world. He started producing films in 1963. He hired the most beautiful young women, the best looking young men and it didn’t matter whether they could sing or act because their voices were always dubbed by the man and women with the best voices. He had seen a film Singing in the Rain and his idea came from that. He added a great deal of colour and excitement, making sure the simplest language was used so the largest number of people could understand the simple, melodramatic plots. He had success after success. He bought cinemas then cinema chains, he became very powerful and very rich.”
“Bollywood.”
“As you say, Bollywood. It would not have existed in the way it does if it hadn’t been for my grandfather. And Ramesh is risking all this for his misguided anger against your family. We know he has been involved in drugs and burglaries and even, we suspect, murder. He has put the good name of our family at considerable risk, simply because he will not believe what is the truth. The truth, we know, is that your family helped our grandfather, they did not cheat him. We must prove this to Ramesh, then and only then will he leave your family in peace and our family can get on with our business.”
“And you think I have the proof.”
“Somewhere in all the work you have done you must have the proof, items you cannot trace but which we know of, anything that can prove that Ramesh is wrong. We need him to be wrong. We both need him to be wrong.”
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