So Much Life Left Over

by Louis de Bernières

  On the way to Nuwara Eliya I saw a small and very pretty young Tamil woman standing by the side of the road, stock-still, decked out beautifully in scarlet wedding finery, with gold bangles. She cut a very striking figure, as she was on the left side, silhouetted against the sky. She had a rosary in her left hand. As we passed she stared at me so intently that I felt as if her eyes were boring into my soul. I looked back, and she had gone down on her knees, sitting back on her heels with her arms crossed against her breast, as if she were dead, and her head bowed.

  We had to pass Christ Church on the long winding descent, and I tapped Daniel on the shoulder and indicated that I’d like to stop. Hugh had the children and all our luggage in his car, and he stopped behind us and waited whilst we visited the grave.

  Daniel was trembling. He and I stood side by side and looked down at that tiny little plot on the mountainside, with its equally tiny headstone, and ‘The Stillborn Son of Daniel and Rosemary Pitt’ inscribed on it. Gloria had suggested that we put ‘God Wanted Him for an Angel’ but Daniel and I both hated the idea. He thought it was sentimental rubbish, and I thought it was presumptuous.

  I don’t know what God could have been thinking. After that, I still depended on Him completely, but I loved Him a lot less.

  I said, ‘Who will look after the grave?’ and Daniel said, ‘I’ve left some money with the gardener. He said the job’s pretty much hereditary, so the grave should be tidy forever.’

  ‘Poor little thing,’ I said, but Daniel said nothing. When you look down at a grave it is impossible not to think about what state the body might be in. You wonder if it’s mummified, or if it’s a skeleton, or whether the bones have turned brown and yellow and crumbled to nothing. I had only a vague memory by then of what the baby had looked like. I just remembered his rainbow-coloured entrails packed under that membrane.

  I felt completely empty, and reached out sideways and took Daniel’s hand. It was strong and warm, and he squeezed mine gently. We stood in silence for about twenty minutes in that perfectly beautiful place, utterly stricken with regret, hand in hand for the first time in months, for the last time.

  18

  Returning

  Daniel and Rosie returned in the spring of 1928 and in some ways it was the mirror image of their outward journey. They were back on the SS Derbyshire, which had recently been refitted and smelled of fresh paint. As before, Rosie was seasick until she had been at sea for several days and, as before, the smell of turmeric and perspiration drifted across the sea as they passed Bombay. They suffered the appalling heat of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Bertie was miserable and grizzled continuously. At Port Said Rosie and Esther once again fell ill with gippy tummy, leaving Daniel to walk the sordid streets alone, fending off the little boys with ‘feelthy pictures’ of their ‘sisters’, and others with their blobs of shoe polish, who at all times seemed ready to pounce on his feet, so that his progress resembled a dance.

  They had travelled out to Ceylon with optimism in their breasts. Rosie and Daniel had come to know each other very much better and to find that they had a great deal in common. Daniel had finally had the opportunity to bond closely with his little daughter, and they had made friends with a distinguished Egyptian gentleman, Ali Bey, from whom they had occasionally received an elaborately eloquent letter in a beautiful hand that had clearly benefitted from having learned to write Arabic first.

  This time, however, Rosie was feeling guilty, but obstinate and helpless, and Esther was in a constant rage about having had to leave behind her beloved Singhalese ayah, Preethi, and the sweet-natured Tamil servants, the beautiful garden, and the pet mongoose that belonged to the Bassetts. She was still not at all delighted by her new baby brother, now a year old, oblivious to anything except his own sensations and appetites. She was still inclined to ask: ‘Why can’t we just put it back?’ On this melancholy and ill-tempered voyage, Daniel was having to look after the infant as well as Esther, as long as his wife remained too seasick to move.

  Daniel was angry and resentful, but not because of having to take care of the children. He had loved Ceylon, and had prevised a wonderful future for himself and his family, thinking that one day he would be master of an entire estate, and dreaming of setting up an aerial postal and passenger service with a small flotilla of floatplanes and a fleet of motorcycle combinations. Just as a golfer cannot help looking at the landscape and thinking of how it might become a golf course, Daniel was incapable of noticing any morsel of flat land without thinking of how it might make an airstrip.

  He was also galled to the bone about having to leave Samadara. He had grown tired of being virtuous when there was no reward for it, and tired of having virtue thrust upon him by force of circumstance. He had, in a fit of pique coloured by a kind of loneliness, finally dropped his principles, and understood that sometimes a married person needs to take a lover if they are going to have any kind of romance or intimacy. He had vivid memories of his old friend Fluke advising him to find a ‘dusky maiden’, or at least to find a wife in France, and Samadara had lived up to all the sumptuous reveries that white men have about native girls. She had indeed been sweet-natured and sensual, and, above all, lovable. Daniel had given in to an impulsive desire, had quickly grown to love her, and it was all too bitter to have to leave her behind. He would remember his own guilt and her grief all his life, as she sat on the floor of the little house that he had arranged for her, hugging her knees, tears streaming silently down her face, biting her lip, looking up at him pleadingly with her huge brown eyes. He had turned out to be just another damned Pinkerton, and he hated himself for it.

  He frequently wished that he had been able to send Rosie home without it being automatically assumed that Esther and Bertie would be sent with her. Other men sent their wives and children home. He could not have borne to be apart from Esther and Bertie, however, and being with Rosie was the price he had to pay. They had enjoyed a few months of blissful marriage in Ceylon, but now it all seemed like the kind of rose-tinted dream that comes upon you just before you wake up. He often found himself leaning on the ship’s rail, looking out to sea, muttering ‘damn, damn, damn’ to himself. He felt that he wanted to get in a fight so that he could burn off some of this anger and disappointment, and he could hardly help but treat Rosie coldly.

  In place of Ali Bey, Daniel made friends with a young Greek gentleman in a tight black suit with shiny patches at the elbow and knee, who had been employed to serve as ship’s doctor. Just like Ali Bey, this man had become enchanted by Esther, and always took the opportunity to chuck her under the chin and pat her on the head whenever they met on deck. ‘Pretty koritsi!’ he would exclaim, and ‘Filakimou!’

  The doctor was then twenty-four years old and had had no medical training whatsoever, but had taught himself English in order to read and memorise in its entirety The Concise Home Doctor, a massive two-volume encyclopedia of diseases and treatments of humans and animals that he had picked up in Monastiraki market on his first trip to Athens as an eighteen-year-old. He had gazed at the strange Roman letters, the pictures and diagrams, and known in that instant what his vocation must be. This was confirmed when, in the same market, on the same day, he found a large and equally dilapidated Greek/English dictionary. From his point of view, it was triply confirmed when, having painfully mastered the foreign alphabet, he was blessed with a revelation that struck him almost like a bolt of lightning. He would never forget the moment when, in the kafeneion back in his village, he had suddenly realised that the entire technical vocabulary of medicine was Greek. It was as if he had been born with all the knowledge, and would hardly have to learn anything. He had gone out into the blinding sunshine, overwhelmed with happiness, and kissed the young Father Arsenios on both cheeks, saying, ‘Patir, for just this once, I am a believer.’

  Fortunately he had a good doctor’s natural healing touch, and learned very quickly from experience what he had not learned
from his books. Such was his obvious skill and knowledge that, to the very day when he perished in an earthquake, not a single person ever challenged him to produce evidence of qualification.

  Having encountered Esther for the first time, and made a fuss of her, the doctor straightened up and held out his hand to Daniel, saying, ‘Dr John.’

  Daniel took his hand, saying, ‘Daniel Pitt.’

  ‘Greek,’ said the doctor, tapping his chest. ‘You?’

  ‘Half English, half French. Moitié français, moitié anglais.’

  ‘Vous parlez français?’

  ‘Mais oui, bien sûr.’

  ‘Moi aussi, je l’ai appris tout seul, sans école.’

  ‘Alors, nous pouvons parler français. Ou anglais. Ou un mélange.’

  ‘Ou un mélange! Ha! Oui, but it is English I am wanting to practise. I learn from English book. I am ship doctor.’

  ‘Are you really called John? It doesn’t seem very Greek.’

  ‘Only for English. Real name Iannis.’

  ‘May I call you Iannis? John doesn’t seem right. You don’t look like a John.’

  ‘OK, but when you call me you say “Ianni”, no Iannis.’

  Daniel puzzled for a moment, and said, ‘Ah, that’s the vocative?’

  ‘Vocative, yes. Klitiki. Or you call me Iatre. Iatre is “Oh doctor”.’

  ‘Oh doctor. I like that. I shall call you, what was it? Iatre? Come and sit with us, Iatre. We’re ready for the deckchairs, I feel.’

  They sat side by side looking out over the seemingly infinite ocean, and Iannis said, ‘You know Greek?’

  ‘They made me do ancient Greek at Westminster. It’s one of our venerable public schools, for duffers. I really was a duffer, I’m afraid. I didn’t pay much attention. My brother Archie was terribly good at it.’

  ‘Is very funny, English ancient Greek. I laugh very much. Sometimes English come to Greece and go to ruins. Is talk in strange funny voice and many dead words. Is all wrong.’ He paused, and then said wistfully, ‘This my last voyage. I enjoy. Then finish.’

  ‘Oh? Why is that?’

  ‘Wife tuberculosis. She very ill. I doctor can do nothing, nothing. She not live too long. She cough blood, she turn white and she get too thin. Very sad. I very sad. Have to go home. I work in village now. I get donkey perhaps. One day car perhaps. I love your daughter. She very sweet. Poli glyka. She called Esther. Esther from Bible. No? She about seven? I have little daughter. She three only, and soon, no more mama. Is terrible. So I go home. I look after daughter. I not give her to aunties or nothing. I make her doctor like me. Only lady doctor in Greece one day! I love your daughter because she sweet and pretty like mine. Soon I go home and I take her on knee and I never go out in ship again.’

  ‘I’m so sorry about your wife.’

  ‘Yes, she very good wife. I am loving her too much, too much.’

  ‘And what is your daughter called?’

  ‘She called Pelagia. Is nice name. It mean ocean. Is possible Esther sit on my knee? I miss my Pelagia. You know she smell so nice. She only three. Very pretty, very sweet, very intelligent. Also very strong. She get angry, she stamp foot, like this, she shout, and she throw kouklaki. She very Greek. I more like Italian.’

  ‘Would you like to sit on the doctor’s knee?’ asked Daniel.

  Esther looked up at the pleasant, handsome face with its eloquent brown eyes and beautifully groomed black moustache, and, with her thumb still firmly in her mouth, she nodded solemnly. She slid off her father’s lap and into the arms of Dr Iannis, who cradled her in his left arm and kissed her on the forehead, bouncing her a little, and saying, ‘Ah, Estherakimou.’

  Afterwards the doctor had a go at holding Bertie, saying, ‘I try little baby boy. I not have boy. Boy different?’

  ‘Not really,’ replied Daniel. ‘Boys smell just as nice.’

  ‘Is not different,’ said Dr Iannis after a few minutes.

  Dr Iannis dealt efficiently with Rosie’s seasickness. He talked a great deal about the vagus and vestibular nerves, the semicircular canals and acidosis. He was quite keen on the idea of bromide or chloral suppositories, but Rosie firmly vetoed the idea. He mused aloud about atropine, belladonna and strychnine, but there was none on the ship anyway. Instead he carefully packed her ears with sterile gauze, right against the eardrums, and made her drink glucose every two hours. He bound her stomach in a kind of tight cummerbund, and told her to lie on her right side with her knees drawn up.

  It worked, but it made Rosie feel very strange to be almost completely deaf, and confined to her cabin. She wondered if this was what it was like in the womb. She found herself revolving the same memories, having the same obsessive thoughts, and fighting against the strange, simmering, implacable anger that she felt towards her husband, and which she knew was steadily destroying her marriage. She asked herself over and over again whether she really loved him, and answered herself as many times that she truly did.

  It was all very well telling herself that her heart had become overcomplicated because of Ash, and her natural impulses thwarted by her faith, but now she began to wonder if the truth was that she did not want to have to live with a man at all. What she dreamed of was a peaceful life alone with the children. She had the terrible thought that she might even have reached this stage with Ash, if he had lived and they had married. The idea seemed utterly preposterous and horrifying, but it nagged at her nonetheless, and she lay for hours on her side, her eyes wide open, and her heart pounding.

  Daniel found that he required very little conversational skill in Dr Iannis’s company. The doctor was a tireless talker, obsessed with the history of everything and anything. ‘I from Cephallonia. Is Ionian Island, not in Ionian Sea, is between Greece and Italy. Was Venetian. You know Veneto?’

  ‘No, but I do very much hope to go there one day.’

  ‘Is very good, very nice. They give music, understand. They bring kantades. Is man with accordion, man with guitar, man with mandolin. They sing in plaka and kafeneion. Is polyphon, yes? Most Greek music monophon, but Cephallonia music from Veneto. Is very pretty songs. I sing you song about ant. I sing it to Estheraki.’

  Esther sat solemnly on his knee whilst he sang to her, a simple tune in march time, ideal for bouncing her on his knee. When he had finished she said, ‘Can you sing “This is the Way the Gentleman Rides”?’

  ‘I not know that one. Is English?’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Daniel.

  He handed Bertie to the doctor, sat Esther on his knee and bounced her up and down to the different rhythms of the gentleman, the lady, the soldier and a great many other improvised characters, until at last he came to the farmer, and exclaimed, ‘Down in the ditch!’ as she fell to the deck, laughing and kicking.

  ‘Is good!’ said Dr Iannis. ‘I try to remember, for Pelagia. She like very much.’

  During the stop in Malta, strolling about in Valletta with nothing to do and nothing to say to each other, Daniel and Rosie felt as gloomy as they had been cheerful on the way out. The spring weather somehow made it all much worse, as if the rest of the world were going ahead without them. Daniel was holding Esther’s hand, and Rosie was pushing Bertie in a large cream-coloured perambulator that they had acquired in Colombo on the eve of their departure. It was only the presence of the children that prevented them from lapsing into a continuous acrimonious argument.

  ‘Just think, we’ll be home for April,’ said Rosie, trying to make conversation, and Daniel said morosely, ‘O to be in England now that April’s there. Have you any idea what I’m supposed to do when we get back? I have precisely one hundred guineas left. Have I got to go to Henley and beg for my job back?’

  ‘Well, I’m certain they would give it to you, if you asked.’

  ‘I’d have to go back to Birmingham. Are you coming with me this time?’

/>   ‘Oh well, I’d have to think about that. You could open a branch in London, perhaps.’

  ‘I’ve a good mind to rejoin the RAF.’

  ‘Would you?’ she asked, a little too enthusiastically.

  He detected this, and said, ‘Looking forward to some long absences, then? Hoping I’ll be posted abroad?’

  ‘I just want you to be happy,’ improvised Rosie, and Daniel gave her a sour sideways glance, and said, ‘I believe you.’ A few moments later he added, ‘I want to live with the children. I don’t see any point in having children if you’re not there whilst they’re growing up. It’d be different if there was a war on. Anyway, peacetime in the services is a damned dry run. It’s just polishing and saluting and stamping and following procedures.’

  ‘You probably won’t rejoin, then?’

  ‘Probably not. Even though it’s obviously where I belong. Though I did love it in Ceylon.’

  The conversation was interrupted by Dr Iannis, who had spotted them from a distance, and came hurrying towards them waving his panama hat, crying out, ‘Ah, my friends, my friends! I show you round. I know history. I tell you history of everything. We go eat rabbit. Rabbit very good Malta…’

  It was the persistent but congenial company of this Greek doctor that prevented Rosie and Daniel from quarrelling violently and falling out with each other, and they were grateful to him. Neither of them was ready to face the inevitable storm that would be the aftermath of their return, and they thought of this period as the ominous prelude to a crisis, like the condemned man who spends the night of his execution playing cards with his jailers.

  As they approached the docks in Gibraltar, Dr Iannis leaned on the rail with his pipe in his mouth, and told his friends, ‘Is last time here. After, I go home Cephallonia. Here one big bordel for English sailor, like Malta, but I like anyway. I like big warships. I go see monkeys for last time. You seen monkeys?’