To The Coral Strand

by John Masters

  March: the heat gradually increasing in a double progression, each morning a little hotter, a little closer, than the day before, each afternoon a little hotter, a little closer, than the morning, a blanket-like drugging sea heat, far different from the sword thrusts of the northern sun.

  At the hospital she made the mistake Janaki had warned her she would. In consequence a sick Parsee woman spent a night in the oxygen tent, and Dr Merchant spoke in sad warning to her. The hospital could not afford such mistakes, let alone the patients. She grew distraught, snappish, and distant. For a time her job teetered on the brink. But too much depended on it: decent food for Rodney, decent clothes, good sheets, gay curtains, all that could remind him of another world outside the rat-ridden tenement and the overcrowded train to the factory. After a bitter night, knowing that it needed only a touch of his hand, the graze of his cheek on hers, in love, to cure her, and knowing he had no desire to make the gestures, and no love to charge them with meaning, she mastered herself. After that she wiped Rodney out of her mind at the moment she entered the hospital grounds, by a deliberate act of will, like cleaning a slate with a wet cloth; and took him back the moment she walked into the street again in the morning.

  In Rodney - no change. He slept in the steamy heat as well, or as badly, as in the Mediterranean beauty of February. Watching him narrowly, trying to learn more about him, she noticed how un-Indian he was. There was nothing strange about his face or his clothes, but people always looked at him with surprise as he passed, even those living in the same block, who saw him every day. It was his manner, she decided. He was a dead-beat, a down- and-out. But those were Western words carrying the notion that he had once been something else, and, but for his own character, might be again. There was no resignation in him, only despair, for he was not in the grip of an all-powerful fate, like the Indian poor around him, but in the grip of his own nature.

  She noticed also his absolute lack of possessions. Where were his medals, his uniforms? Most of his civilian clothes he had lost in Chambal, and the rest when he was wounded. When he arrived that dawn in Bhowani after his flight he carried nothing of the past but a wrist-watch, and somewhere even that had gone. She believed it was a presentation watch, perhaps with his name engraved on the back, and he had thrown it away before leaving Bhowani as their chauffeur. In becoming the chauffeur he had lost the clothes she had given him. Now, apart from the suitcase and the minimum of necessary clothes, he owned nothing at all.

  April: heavy clouds beginning to move up in dense formations from the Arabian Sea, so that at noon the city lay dark in the stifling embrace of heat, and the sun’s rays, grey and hardly visible, poured out from the stone walls, up from the oiled streets, down from the trees. The fecundity of India, which she had once scorned and feared, now twisted her bowels every time she went out. There were always two or three pregnant women squatting outside the houses, always a dozen naked brown babies playing in the gutter. In the afternoon she heard wailing and cooing from every window and doorway. Wherever she turned, women squatted with choli loosened, sari negligently half covering one breast, a baby ecstatically kneading and sucking at the other.

  Rodney had not changed, not a degree.

  May: a sudden increase in heat and humidity, though she had thought both were impossible. A short violent dust storm, followed by heavy rain, struck on the first of the month, when the Communists marched through the streets waving the clenched fist, banners flying until the wind shredded them and the rain drove marchers and spectators alike off the streets, and ten palm trees blew down in the park. The Alfonso mangoes came in season now, yellow, juicy, firm-fleshed, and sweet as nuts. She bought four, carefully wrapped in ice, gave him two for breakfast, and waited expectantly for comment. In vain: he said nothing.

  She almost lost her temper with him then, but controlled herself, and when he had gone, wondered whether in fact he ever tasted anything. His taste buds could not have been physically destroyed, but perhaps the nerves that transmitted the sense to the brain were out of action, like those others that instigated interest, pity, hate. Later, she decided it must be so, for in the middle of the month they were walking together to the end of the block, where he would turn left and she right, when a careening truck swung round the corner and ran over a two-year-old child in front of its mother. The child was half squashed, like a beetle, no longer a human being but an animal dying in pain, gobbling and writhing in blood and crushed flesh. The mother ran out, shrieking. Rodney glanced at it, and walked on, saying nothing. Later that day, punctually on schedule, May 15, the monsoon broke. She discovered a leak in the wall of Rodney’s room, the plaster began to flake off her own ceiling, the rats came into the house for shelter from the flooded sewers, and a few nights later she killed two of them in her room with the frying pan.

  June: the rains falling in their cyclic pattern, rain every night, clearing a little by dawn; mid-morning rain, clear in the afternoon; rain starting in the evening when she set out for the hospital. Mould forming in the shoes she ranked against the wall, in a single day. The temperature hovering around 90 every day, 88 every night. No change in Rodney ... A subtle, growing change in herself. She saw a cockroach, and made no attempt to kill it. Half-way to the hospital she would remember she had left the dishes unwashed on the table. Or she would look in the mirror in the nurses’ common room, and see that she had forgotten to put on lipstick.

  July: July 1, the monsoon broke out into one of its sudden spells of violence. Lightning sizzled across the roofs of tenement and factory, and outlined the ships in harbour with violet fire. Thunder rattled the bedside tables in the wards and the lights flickered off, once for a few seconds in the middle of an important operation and later for ten minutes. The patients grew more nervous and jittery. Lightning struck a tall, old building opposite. The building cracked with a sound like a dynamite explosion, and then caught fire internally. In two of the wards the patients’ collective nerve cracked, and hysteria exploded. In the morning she walked back to the tenement through a battered, shell-torn city in the rain, fell into bed, and asleep.

  She awoke early, her nerves on edge ... As soon as she had dressed she opened the cupboard and took out the bottle of whisky she kept there. She poured herself a stiff dram, drank it in a couple of gulps, and began to prepare the tea, bread, vegetables, and lamb chops for their ‘breakfast’.

  Rodney came in and she indicated the bottle. ‘Have some. Have a lot ... Look at it!’ She waved a free hand at the small window. The rain streamed down the panes, and seeped in over the sill with the driving wind. Thunder growled in the distance, clouds hung low over the rooftops, and there was no sign of the sun.

  Rodney poured himself a drink. Nowadays he did not drink anything like as much as he used to. As with pain, and with taste, there was nothing there. If she offered him the bottle, he drank. If she didn’t, he didn’t. Once, trying to stir him to show some kind of emotion, she had given him half a dozen pegs in quick succession. Nothing changed, neither in his manner, nor in his speech, nor in his silence.

  When they had eaten she pushed the plates aside - to wash them she had to take them down to the drain in the tiny back yard - and poured herself another whisky. Rodney rose, but she said, ‘Sit down. Have another whisky. There’s nothing else to do today. Pheew, it’s close.’

  The whisky burned like a small coal fire in the pit of her stomach. How long, how long? The memory of the night crowded in upon her and she felt a hysterical desire to be held tight against fear, fear of loneliness, fear of the dark, fear of the vast and heedless universe. The muscles of her wrists trembled and the tic returned to her eye. In all these weeks she had held herself back from a physical contact she needed as a flower needs water. She had thought, once, that his sheer maleness must sooner or later break out at the provocative glimpses he had of her: half dressed; bending to put on a shoe; standing with one leg on a chair to fasten garters; brushing her hair in front of the mirror - situations which she had not deliberatel
y created because she had not needed to. Living so close, they happened. She had hoped, at first almost subconsciously, later with acknowledged hunger, that animal rut would bring him upon her. Once in her arms he must feel the melting totality of her love. From lust she could lead him to tenderness, to hope of a future, to ...

  He never made a move, and she never caught in his eye any glint of interest, nor heard any tremor of invitation in his voice. These, and the gradually deepening loss of confidence, had held her from a more direct approach, so that, although their hands occasionally brushed, and, in those confined spaces, more often, their bodies, that had been all. Besides, she was a woman and knew without having to remind herself that if her permanent availability and her obvious love did not move him, certainly no assault would.

  But there come moments of desperation when one must do the thing that is bound to fail, because it is there in one’s nature and cannot be for ever suppressed. As she stood up, her eyelid quivering, she thought of Rodney himself, rushing out in the dawn from Chambalpur to the hopeless battle ...

  She went to him, carefully lifted the whisky out of harm’s way, and sat on his lap. She muttered, ‘Rodney,’ and snuggled close against him, her arms round him and her mouth pressed to his cheek. The long-withheld fact of physical pressure went off like a bomb in her, but not specifically in her sexual desires or in their seat. She clung and whispered, kissed and caressed in an agony of love, willing the cold body to come to life, trying to squeeze out her own life into him, so that she could lie at last dead at his feet, if only he could live, to look down on her with the love she was giving him. ‘Oh, my darling, my darling,’ she mumbled, ‘oh, my darling, my darling, I love you, I love you.’

  Thus for a long time, which she could not measure, just a long time, until he took her by the shoulders and pushed her away.

  The intensity of her emotion again exploded, this time in quick- burning fuses of anger leading from all parts of her body to her head and pouring in fire from her smarting eyes. She stooped and tugged and kicked out of her underpants, jerked up her skirt until she held it above her waist, and thrust her loins into his face. ‘There!’ she screamed. ‘There! Don’t you even want that! Forget about me. Think of that! You’re a man, aren’t you?’

  He said coldly, ‘We had a louse inspection the day before yesterday. Pull your skirt down ... The purpose of making love is to have children.’

  She pushed down her skirt, her heart pounding. She said, ‘There’s nothing ...’

  ‘When you can have children, you can forget that they’re the object. You can take sex as lust, as affection, as anything you like. When you can’t - you can’t.’

  She cried, ‘Rodney, I would die with happiness if you would ...’ He said, ‘No one can have my child, or will.’

  ‘I will,’ she said.

  He said, ‘No, you won’t.’ He met her eyes coldly. She knew that nothing of her passion, her desire, her love had communicated itself to him. He was, at least in regard to her, impotent.

  She sat down and poured herself a whisky. ‘What would you do if you had a child?’ she asked.

  He said, ‘I’d take her away with me.’ His hands came forward, not outspread and empty now, but slightly curled, carefully holding the invisible shape of a small baby. ‘I’d raise her and love her and think my life had been worthwhile. I could go then, and begin again, because I’d have something to begin with. But, as you see - I shall not have a child.’

  ‘I could have your baby,’ she said carefully. ‘There are modern ways. One’s called artificial insemination. You wouldn’t have to make love to me.’

  He said, ‘A child that came out of love, of its own accord, not planned for any purpose.’

  She sat, with head bowed over the table. After a while she said, ‘It’s time we both had a holiday. I need one badly, and so do you.’

  ‘I don’t want a holiday,’ he said.

  ‘We could go up to Mahabaleshwar,’ she said, ‘we could go to Ajanta ... a rest house in the jungle somewhere. We’ve got to get out of this.’

  Rodney said, ‘There’s nothing to stop you going.’

  ‘Without you? I’d be miserable,’ she said.

  As soon as she said it she knew she was lying. At this moment, her head aching from the thunder, her nerves jangling from the night’s hysteria and the screaming patients, the lightning flashing through the darkened wards, her body quivering with frustrated love, she knew that she would give anything to be away from this silent, dead corpse to which she had tied herself.

  She said, ‘Then, if we aren’t going to have a holiday, we must live better. There’s no need for you to work as a chowkidar any more. Last month young Khussroo Milkwallah came to the hospital, and asked after you. I told him what you were doing and he said, “That’s a bit of a bind, isn’t it? What’s the point?” He’s right. Yesterday he was in again, and told me they’d be happy to appoint you assistant administrative officer there. The administrative officer is no more than a glorified babu, and they want a different type of man, anyway, someone who can deal with the doctors as an equal, but take the administrative load - the actual buying of supplies, the laundry, the catering - off their hands. The babu’s going to retire in six months, and by then you’ll be ready to take over, at a much better salary, too ... There was no chance to tell you about it yesterday.’

  Rodney had given no appearance of listening, and again, for a moment, the furious outburst against him hovered in her throat and in the aching tips of her fingers. Just as she leaned forward to shout at him, he said, ‘There’s no place for me in that world.’

  ‘There is, if you’d just take it,’ she said; ‘whatever purgatory you’ve sentenced yourself to, you’ve had enough. And it’s not only yourself you’re punishing.’

  He said, ‘I didn’t ask you to share my life. I told you that perhaps trying it would be the only thing to convince you. Why don’t you go away?’

  She jumped to her feet. ‘I will! I can’t stand any more.’ She ran the door, sobbing in pain and anger. He sat at the table, his head bent over the dirty plates.

  She ran back and threw herself to her knees beside him. She put her arms round him and laid her head on his lap. ‘I’m just going out, darling. I had an awful night and can’t sleep ... I’ll be back, always.’

  He said nothing. She rose to her feet, kissed the top of his head, and slipped out of the room. For an hour she walked in the thinning rain, picking her way over the wreckage of the storm, water gurgling all the while in her ears. She walked aimlessly, seeking a way of escape from a situation which would soon destroy her. Then she would be no use to him. Or perhaps, she thought, only then will I be of use to him, two derelicts together - but the idea repelled her, and she could not think of it as union - the slow sinking through turbid water of two corpses, tied together, even though one was male and one female.

  She found herself outside Janaki’s house and walked in. Janaki hurried to her, arms outstretched. ‘My dear! Why haven’t you come before? Why haven’t you brought Rodney? ... I’ve heard something from Khussroo Milkwallah ... You look awful, Margaret, really awful.’

  ‘Give me a whisky,’ Margaret said sullenly, ‘please.’

  ‘At this time? Three o’clock? ... Sit down ... There ... There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have come to see me, though I understand about Rodney. Surely you need a rest sometimes?’

  ‘Not if he doesn’t take one with me,’ she said. She gulped the whisky. ‘Why didn’t you marry him, if you loved him?’

  ‘I was married already,’ Janaki said.

  ‘Then why did you lead him on? You’re the only person he’s ever loved. You were the one he dreamed about. It was only when you threw him over that he went to all those other women. You could have given him everything ... but you just wanted him for a thrill.’

  Janaki got up and closed the door. Agitatedly she kneaded her small, soft hands. She said, ‘You must understand, Margaret. He overwhelmed me, the same way
his people overwhelmed my country. I was mesmerised by his confidence, by his power. I remember the night ... we became lovers. I’d been out in his car, and we had to come back through Pabbi. There was rioting all over the province then and Pabbi’s the worst town in the country. A big crowd of Pathan roughs stopped us, surrounded the car, waving knives, yelling. I was so terrified I almost fainted - I, a Hindu woman among those raving fanatical Muslims. Rodney raised his hand and said in Pushtu, “Gentlemen, you may not have my balls until I’ve used them properly. Go away, and send your women to me. All of them.” For a moment there was an awful silence, then the whole mob burst into shrieking laughter. We had to stay till midnight, eating an enormous pilao with them. When we got back to Peshawar - Max was out on manoeuvres - he looked at me, and ... I couldn’t help it, any more than the Pathans at Pabbi ... I just keeled over. I tried to tell myself it was a reward for saving my life, but really I was helpless. He could do anything he liked with me ... I fawned on him. I hated him. I loved him. I despised myself - never him. I had been taught never to speak to an Englishman until India was free. You have met my mother and grandmother. Of course I had to meet them when I married Max, but I never had one into our house. At that time I might have gone away with Rodney - he didn’t ask me. We were both very young. He had his career. Later, when I knew that he really loved me, Max had got the same confidence. I saw that all the things which had once annoyed me in Max - his slowness, his acceptance of the British, of insults, his ox-like good temper - were really the signs of a man who had as much strength as Rodney... and he was my husband. I fell in love with him ... What could I do?’

  Margaret’s head sank. ‘What am I going to do? I can’t get him to live, to think, anything. He won’t move ... Is one of your children his?’