So Much Life Left Over

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘Ah, like Cunegonde.’

  ‘Cunegonde?’

  ‘You know, the woman in Candide who has her buttocks eaten when her companions get hungry. Or was it just one of them?’

  Ottilie laughed. ‘I’ve never read Voltaire. I know I should. You’re a very silly man. Your humour is most indelicate, quite unsuitable for a simpering little thing like me. Did you know that it was here at the Tarn that Rosie decided to marry Daniel? He went into the water to rescue a drowning dog, and that was what made her mind up.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to meeting them. Are they really coming back?’

  ‘That’s what Rosie says in her letter. Daddy’s furious. It’s obvious that Daniel doesn’t want to, and she’s bullied him into it.’

  ‘What fearsome sisters you are.’

  Ottilie smacked him gently on the back of his hand. ‘Watch out, you! But isn’t it funny how things turn out? I mean, Christabel used to be a typical English rose, but since she’s been Gaskell’s companion she’s turned into a sort of tropical orchid. A bromeliad or something.’

  ‘A frangipani blossom? Bougainvillea perhaps?’

  ‘Oh, do be quiet, silly man. And Sophie, well, Sophie’s just Sophie, isn’t she? Her tremendous depth lies in her apparent silliness.’

  ‘I adore Sophie,’ said Frederick. ‘When you’re with Sophie you can’t help having a smile on your face.’

  ‘Everyone loves her. She doesn’t have a single enemy. She was a driver on the Western Front, you know. Changing tyres under fire and that sort of thing? I think she knows as much about engines as Daniel does. Who would have believed it? She seems so terribly feminine, doesn’t she?’

  ‘And Rosie?’

  ‘Poor Rosie’s too complicated for her own good. She doesn’t even understand herself. She’s got a heart of gold, and she’d do anything for anyone, but you know, I think she’s still got shell shock.’

  ‘Shell shock? Was she at the front?’

  ‘Well, as I told you, her childhood sweetheart was killed in 1915. They were engaged to be married. And then she worked herself to the bone at Netley just to try and forget, but every wounded soldier must have reminded her of Ash, and every death must have reminded her that Ash was dead. And then she married Daniel on a sort of gamble that it might be the right thing to do and she might really learn to love him.’

  ‘Oh dear. It doesn’t sound very encouraging.’

  ‘I’m expecting fireworks when they come back. I’m really rather dreading it.’

  Frederick put his hand on top of hers. She was not quite sure how to react, so she left her hand where it was, and just looked down at it.

  He said, ‘I’ve never been in love. Until now.’

  He turned and looked at her, and their eyes met. Suddenly her face crumpled, and she burst into tears. Frederick was confounded, and could think of nothing to do but put his arm around her shoulder, and say, ‘Ottilie, my dear, my dear…’

  She fumbled in her handbag and brought out a small handkerchief, dabbing her eyes.

  ‘Is there any hope?’ asked Frederick. ‘Is there any hope?’

  Ottilie said nothing, but nodded vigorously. Suddenly she looked up and said, ‘I thought I’d be an old maid. I am an old maid.’

  ‘What terrible nonsense, and even if you were, I’d feel the same.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘I would. Cross my heart and hope to die. What about you?’

  ‘Me? What about me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to be a gamble.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be.’

  ‘You know I’m asking you to marry me, don’t you?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Well, don’t be so surprised. There’s no woman sweeter in the whole world.’

  ‘There are millions sweeter than me.’

  ‘I don’t know any of them.’

  ‘You haven’t done enough research.’

  ‘I’ve done exactly the right amount. Will you marry me and come to India?’

  ‘There’ve been riots in Lahore. Sikhs and Muslims at each other’s throats. Fourteen dead. It doesn’t sound very peaceful.’

  ‘Lahore is nowhere near Madras. The tea pickers are Tamils and they’re Hindu if they’re not Roman Catholic, and the educated Indians in town are a delight. I’ve got photographs. You’ll see how beautiful it all is. I know you’ll just love it. I’ve got a nice little residence in the suburbs, and a beautiful big bungalow on a hillside.’

  ‘You don’t have to bribe me.’

  ‘I fear I may not be enough on my own. I’m nothing special after all.’

  ‘You fought at the Battle of Jutland.’

  ‘So did thousands of others. I’m not special, there are lots of old seadogs like me, and lots of people with nice bungalows. All I’ve got is my certainty. About you.’

  Ottilie began to cry again. She had recently had her hair trimmed in fashionable shingles, and the spring sun was sparkling in the tips.

  ‘Have you loved before?’ asked Frederick. ‘I probably shouldn’t ask, but I need to know who to be jealous of.’

  ‘Of whom I should be jealous,’ said Ottilie.

  ‘Of whom I should be jealous,’ repeated Frederick.

  ‘I loved someone for years and years and years,’ said Ottilie, ‘ever since I was tiny. But it was completely hopeless. He only ever had eyes for Rosie, and now he’s on the North-West Frontier, still trying to get over her. I decided to give up quite recently, and just settle for being an old maid. So I did give up. And after a while I began to feel like a liberated city. Like Ypres, perhaps. Somewhat ruined, but calm, and hopeful. In case you’re wondering, it was Archie, Daniel’s brother. There, now you know. And you don’t have to be jealous. The poor man is a tormented soul, and he’s foolishly brave, and he’s pretty much a dipsomaniac, and you’ll probably never meet him, and he’s in the Frontier Scouts. I’ll always be fond of him, but I really have given up. And you’re here now. Is there a clinic on your estate? I’d quite like to get back to nursing. There must be an awful lot one can do for the natives.’

  Frederick laughed resignedly. ‘Well, yes, there is a clinic, but you’d mostly be tending to whites, except that we’re all terribly brown from playing tennis in the sun, and you’d hardly tell us apart from the natives were it not for the clothes and the tennis rackets.’

  ‘I’m absolutely not going if there’s nothing to do. I really can’t abide idleness. Perhaps I could teach the natives reading and writing. Sophie’s little dame school is doing terribly well.’

  ‘Do I take it that you’ve agreed to marry me?’

  ‘I’m not racy enough to live in sin.’

  ‘So, is it yes?’

  ‘You haven’t asked me properly.’

  ‘You want me to kneel in a park? In front of all these ducks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  16

  Farewell to Samadara

  Daniel and Samadara were on the terrace behind the little bungalow that he had bought for her. She had been putting out curry leaves to dry, and they lay in a patch of sunlight on a small sheet.

  They sat opposite each other, leaning forward with their hands joined. ‘What are the choices, then?’ she asked.

  ‘There seem to be a great many,’ said Daniel. ‘I could bring you over to England.’

  ‘To be a wife or a concubine?’

  ‘I don’t know. The question is, would you want to come to England?’

  Samadara bit her lip and said, ‘I have no family there. I would be a dark woman amongst the white ones. Who would I go to? Who would befriend me? Who would be with me on the ship? Am I to be a servant?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be a servant. I’d look after you.’

  ‘Who would talk to you if you had a dark woman?’

  ‘I really don�
��t care.’

  ‘I think you will care in the end. One day you would send me back.’

  ‘I fear that one day you would demand to come back.’

  ‘Only the future knows the future. What else can we do?’

  ‘I can stay here, and dorasani Rosie would go home with the children.’

  ‘Why must they go with her? You are their father. You are the commander of your family. You tell her to go home and leave the children. Tell her she can come back, perhaps for three months a year. Tell her she must do as you say.’

  ‘That’s not how it works with us,’ said Daniel. ‘I can’t order her to abandon the children.’

  ‘Of course you can. You are the man.’

  Daniel sighed. ‘I can’t think of any white man who would order his wife to abandon her children. It’s not our custom any more. You would only take them from her if she was vicious in some way. And there’s something else.’

  ‘And what is that?’ asked Samadara impatiently.

  ‘I have to think of the children. My duty is not to you or Rosie but to the children.’

  ‘And who gave you this duty? Why is it your duty? Did God give you this duty?’

  ‘Please don’t be angry with me. It’s a duty I choose for myself. What matters is that the children must be as happy as I can make them.’

  ‘Children are like dogs. They accept whatever happens to them,’ said Samadara. ‘Children live in a little world where they don’t understand anything until they are grown up and look back on it.’

  ‘You’re right, I’m sure. But when my children look back, I don’t want them to think that I destroyed their family so that I could be with a woman who was not their mother. I don’t want to be remembered like that.’

  ‘You are thinking of honour and dishonour, then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You will treat me with dishonour because it’s more important to be honourable to others?’

  Daniel said, ‘There’s something else you must understand.’

  ‘And this is?’

  ‘Both the children love their mother. Esther might be able to live with me without her, but I know that Bertie couldn’t. Dorasani Rosie is his whole world, and I hardly feature at all. I can’t take him from his mother.’

  ‘Then do what King Solomon would do.’

  ‘King Solomon?’

  ‘Yes. Obviously. You keep Esther, and you send her home and let her take Bertie.’

  ‘I said that Bertie doesn’t care for me. I didn’t say that I didn’t care for him. And she loves Esther even if Esther prefers me. Sometimes you love someone and they don’t love you in return. It’s probably very common with parents and children.’

  ‘You are saying that you prefer your son to me.’

  Daniel sighed. ‘My darling, if you have a child, you always love it more than anyone else.’

  ‘Perhaps now I won’t have children. Perhaps now I won’t be married. Perhaps now nobody will want the discarded concubine of a white man.’

  Daniel wanted to say that the fact that he would leave her an allowance would be sufficient attraction, but realised that it would enrage her, even if it were true. ‘I want you to come to England. Please.’

  ‘You’re talking like a dreamer. Like a drunkard. How am I to come? On the same ship as you and your frozen wife? Where are my papers that say that I can come? Am I to become British, just like this?’ she said, clicking her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘I’m sure it can be arranged. There must be a way of doing it. I can find out in Colombo.’

  ‘What about my family?’

  ‘You want me to bring your family? How big is it?’

  ‘It’s as big as our families always are.’

  ‘How many would I have to bring?’

  ‘I would have to discuss it with my family. How can I be in England with no family?’

  ‘We would have children.’

  ‘You have always tried to avoid having children with me.’

  ‘I would stop avoiding it.’

  ‘They would be neither white nor dark. What world would they belong in?’

  ‘To the future. All this rubbish about races is going to come to an end one day.’

  ‘I see no sign of it. The half-castes here are like birds in a cage with invisible bars.’

  ‘Please come with me. We’ll sort it all out somehow.’

  Samadara waved her arm round at the trees and mountains. ‘This is my home. Here is my family. Here is the red earth I will lie in when I am dead.’

  ‘Your grandfathers moved. They came from India.’

  ‘For us, India was hell. This place is not hell. Here we are on our knees thanking God for the fruit and the rain and the work and the safety. If you loved me you would stay here.’

  ‘I do love you, and I do want to stay, but most of all I want to do what is most right for the children.’

  ‘The children would be happiest here.’

  ‘I know that. But Bertie doesn’t. Please come to England.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then we’ll lose each other, probably forever.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘No.’

  Daniel clasped his hands together and hung his head. ‘Then we have to say goodbye.’

  ‘We don’t have to. You chose it.’

  ‘I never chose it. It’s been imposed on us.’

  ‘You cannot be imposed upon unless you choose it,’ said Samadara gently, her anger having suddenly died away. ‘You’ve chosen your wife and children over me. It’s simple. And I will tell you something.’

  ‘Yes?’

  She stood up, walked away, and turned round to face him, her hands on her hips. Then she raised a finger, narrowed her eyes, and pointed at him.

  ‘You will always love me. You will always wish you had stayed with me. You will always regret giving me up. If you lie with other women, a time will always come when you begin to wish she was me, and it will be me moving beneath you. You will wonder if you did what was right, and then one day you will realise that you didn’t. You will begin to miss the handsome children we would have had, and their children’s children. When you are at the moment of death, you will remember me, and you will see that you laid my heart to waste and poisoned your own life.’

  Daniel stood up, trembling. ‘Is this a prophecy, or a curse, or a blessing?’

  She held up three fingers, tightly together, and clasped them with her other hand, saying, ‘All these things.’

  17

  Rosie (1)

  Before Daniel and I left Ceylon, we went to visit the grave of our stillborn son.

  Things had become very bad between us, because I had grown desperate to go home, and he was equally keen on staying. He loved the very active life, with all that time on horseback, the getting up at dawn, the expeditions down to the tanks to shoot duck, and the tennis parties on Sundays. He played golf at Nuwara Eliya just for fun, without bothering to compete for any of the cups and medals. In the evenings he liked to sit out on the terrace and read to Esther, who was always on his lap with her thumb in her mouth, and French Bear clamped to her side under one arm. I confess I often felt jealous of their affection for each other, and it was as if she had come between us. Of course, I adored Bertie, and he would be on my lap because Esther kept him off her father’s.

  Daniel also loved the machinery in the factory, which was beautifully maintained and had a kind of grandeur on account of its sheer size and pristine cleanliness. He would drink gallons of his own tea with the Singhalese engineers as they arranged schedules for servicing, and so on, and would come home and talk away merrily about cranks and grease nipples. I don’t know why he thought I might be interested.

  I did have some friends, such as Hugh’s wife, Gloria, but in
general we all just drank sherry, talked about each other, and about home, and about what we had done in the war. It was as though we were already eighty years old in our thirties. There was no one there who was very interested in literature or art, and somehow it wasn’t enough to get batches of books from Cave’s, read them, and then have no one to talk to about them. Gloria only read romances and old editions of the Lady. Daniel actually did understand poetry, because it had been beaten into him at Westminster, but for that very reason he was not an enthusiast, and his comments about a picture might be just ‘Oh that’s nice, I like that one’. He read books about machinery, and old editions of Punch.

  I was fond of the servants and they were fond of me, but their whole lives were rooted in practicalities, and I found their kind of Catholicism annoyingly superstitious. I suspected that they thought of it as a kind of powerful magic. No doubt they would have found mine very dry. It wasn’t their fault, because they’d had only a minimal education, and so the fault was ours, of course. There was a fear that if you gave them too much education, they wouldn’t stay on the plantations. Hugh used to say that the educated ones would be the ones to force us out in the end.

  I had a lot of reasons for wanting to go home, but I was mainly concerned about what would happen to my parents after Ottilie left to get married, and my principal worry was what it had always been, which was my father’s health. It seemed to me that I was the only one who would be able to care for him properly.

  The fact is, I couldn’t bear the anxiety, and I had become terribly bored and listless in paradise. Looking back, I think that perhaps I should have taken more interest in the wildlife, and gone on more expeditions.

  Daniel actually wept the night before we left. He sat on the steps of the terrace, his head in his hands and his shoulders shaking, with Esther standing next to him saying, ‘Daddy, don’t cry. Daddy, don’t cry.’

  On the morning of our departure all the servants lined up to shake our hands, and they were all weeping, particularly Preethi, who didn’t want to have to say goodbye to the children. Her wailing followed us down the road. I was the only one not in tears when our little convoy set off on the long journey to Colombo. I was the guilty one, and I felt ashamed and excluded, but obstinate.