The day following my arrival I walked through the garboil of West End streets to a clerk-infested antechamber on Whitehall. A certain Mr Ricketts came to fetch me before luncheon. As his head peeped around the door, one of his eyes was cast ceilingwards in a manner that might have signified a reflective mood in its owner, were the other not beadily roving up and down my person.
‘Bad news for you, I’m afraid, young man,’ he said, when I had taken my seat in his office.
‘Bad news?’
‘We had you down for a politico in the Rajputana, but rather a rum state of affairs have come to light in the district where you was to have been sent. Smoked out a circle of aspiring mutineers. Seems one of them broke cover about a week before it was supposed to happen. We stamped down hard on it, of course. Hanged some, spared others, blew the ringleaders out of cannons. But all in all, matters stand somewhat ticklish. It’s not the place to break in new blood. We’re of a mind that it would be best for you to hang fire. Cool your heels in London for a couple of months, while we sort out another posting. A young chap like yourself can’t have any objections to that.’
All through this little peroration, his left eye was busily absorbed in the pattern on the ceiling while the right remained fixed upon me. It gave the impression that Mr Ricketts’ mental processes were so valuable, he could only expend 50 per cent of them on anything in his immediate vicinity; the remaining capacity being reserved, presumably, for calculations on behalf of Her Majesty’s government.
I told him that notwithstanding my eagerness to commence my service, I would bow to the wiser counsel of my superiors.
‘Very good,’ he murmured, and as a signal that the interview was at an end, his right eye snapped downwards onto the paper in front of him, while the left continued staring upwards, as though the reserved part of his cerebellum was devising further torments for the contumacious Hindoo regiments.
His counsel had provoked in me an opposite response to the one intended: it inflamed my enthusiasm to embark immediately. But since there was nothing to be done, I took rooms in Dover Street and passed four pleasant months in the capital.
It was during this time that I made the acquaintance of a young woman called Serena Eden. [Patrick had tried and rejected several equally unlikely alternatives including Ethel Younghusband, Cissy Spanks and Dara Nightshade, but his final choice obviously pleased him – DM.] O was ever human beauty so aptly named! In her name and in the deep, hurt ebony of her lustrous eyes she carried the very echo of lost paradise. Her name was beautiful, but less beautiful than she: she was a fawn, a nymph, an amaranth, a sacred flower.
She was an American from Louisiana and so dark-skinned that unkind speculation murmured of African forebears and a bend sinister in her family crest. It was envy. Her skin was the gold of the Scythians; gold that put gold to shame. And what shall I write of her eyes? Her black eyes, romany black, black of the rarest jade, the slow, inevitable black of death itself before which every man stands powerless.
Her father had sent her to London to complete her education – though it seems unlikely he had in mind the scandalous liaisons with older men, or the appetite for gambling, or the dozen other qualities uncharacteristic of her sex that made her the object of rumour in the circles in which we moved.
It was with some little apprehensiveness that I introduced myself to her during the interval of a comic operetta. I had been relieved of my virginity in a perfunctory encounter with a prostitute in a doorway off Air Street during one of the long vacations, but my experience of women my own age and class was narrow.
Miss Eden’s sloe-eyed glance initially reduced me to a nervous mumbling, but gradually my confidence asserted itself in sallies of wit. At the commencement of the second act, I pressed her hand and invited her to an exhibition of paintings by my unfortunate friend Doriment, who was then enjoying growing celebrity and showed no signs of the madness that was to unhinge him in his later years.
On the appointed day, I arrived early and spent twenty minutes pacing up and down on the pavement and adjusting my tie in the window of a wine merchant’s facing the gallery. She alighted from her carriage without a chaperone and greeted me with a quip and a kiss.
I escorted her into the exhibition and followed her as though hovering on winged feet. Something fast and urgent swept me along with an exquisite motion.
I cannot remember one word that she and I said to each other, though we were never silent. A deeper communication was conducted with looks, the inclination of a head, the light pressure of her hand, and the air between us seemed to hum with invisible signification like the wires of a telegraph.
Or so I hoped. The counterpart to my elation was a profound doubt that she held my feelings in any but the lightest regard. She loves me; she loves me not: nothing was ever still, it was either budding or dying: the systole and diastole of some distant heart, filling with hope and then being emptied of it. It was divine; it was infernal.
I courted her for weeks. I knew she enjoyed my company, but all the time we sparred with and teased one another, I could not guess if her true feelings went any deeper. I was one of a number of young and not-so-young men, hopefully besieging her with their attentions. They would be camped in the drawing room of the family she lived with, which included a less well-favoured daughter of about Serena’s age called Alice, and compete for the meagre privileges of opening a door for her, carrying her needlework, or reading to her from the newspaper.
Having made some initial progress with her at Doriment’s exhibition, I became embroiled in this interminable siege along with her other suitors, each of whom seemed less concerned with advancing his own cause than ensuring that no one else had the opportunity to advance his.
It was while things stood at this impasse that I finally received a communication from Mr Ricketts. He gave me to understand that my eventual posting would not now be to the north of the country, but to one of the districts in the south. I forbore from pointing out the irony of this decision. Alongside two hundred other aspiring administrators, I had sat two weeks of examinations in a hall in Burlington House. (One of the invigilators later informed me, in confidence, that my marks were among the highest ever attained.) [Patrick appears to have gone back to this section at a later date and deleted the word ‘among’ – DM.] Alone of all the candidates, I had offered papers in Punjabi and Urdu. Now, by the wayward logic that I would find characteristic of my employment in the dominions, I was being despatched to the south of the subcontinent, where my painstakingly acquired languages would be as useful to me as Croat, or the secret tongue of Euskaadi.
Undaunted, I booked my passage, reacquainted myself with Sanskrit grammar and bought primers in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. I also amassed a small library for the crossing, comprising histories of the region, several volumes on native custom, and a general work on hydrology.
Accordingly, I spent less time in my futile courtship of Miss Eden and was more often to be found at home, studying (or rather, trying to study) my primers. Even then I found myself abstracted, unable to concentrate on anything but learning the endearments in my new languages that I lacked the courage to say in English. In my Telugu grammar, the use of the optative was explained by means of an idiomatic expression that compared a woman’s breath to the scent of persimmons. I copied this out in the original and sent it to Serena with my kindest regards. At least it was a declaration of sorts, if not one she would be able to understand.
The next time I visited her for tea, there were two suitors and myself. I felt disinclined for the witty small talk that passed among that circle for conversation and directed most of my attentions towards Alice, who was a kindly young bluestocking with whom I was to conduct a correspondence two decades later while researching a – needless to say – unfinished monograph on the life cycle of the sand fly.
At the end of the afternoon, I rose to leave. Serena was playing cards with her two besiegers, who were undoubtedly glad to have seen me off. She had made no allus
ion to the note I had sent her, but as I said goodbye, she shot me a look so full of something that I can see her dark eyes now, as though they were imprinted upon my brain as on a daguerreotype. What she meant by that look, however, was as incomprehensible to me as my Telugu note must have been to her.
I had left the house and was walking down the glass-covered portico that led away from its front door when her low voice halted me. She called out my name.
I turned round: the vestigial wings on my ankles gave a flutter and raised me two inches above the pavement.
‘Stop bothering me,’ she said, dark fire flashing from her eyes.
‘Bothering you?’ My voice was the merest whisper. The wings on my heels had become a pair of rusty dumb-bells.
‘I’m very impressionable,’ she said, adding a reprise of the look she had offered me over the playing cards. ‘Please don’t trifle with me.’ My feet had wings once more.
‘I believe that if you had any inkling of my true feelings for you, you would not make that accusation,’ I said.
‘I hardly know you,’ she murmured.
‘That is little to be wondered at. The company here is not congenial to our deeper acquaintance. If you might be persuaded to meet me on more intimate terms … At my rooms, perhaps, for tea?’
‘Yes,’ she said, with a look that has no verbal equivalent in any language known to me, but which contained admixtures of love and longing, and was sharpened by a sense that she was struggling to overbear the reluctant voice of her conscience.
She came to tea with me on the hottest afternoon of the hottest summer of any I have known in a city I have since come to know well. I had opened every window to its fullest extent and placed vases of iced water around my rooms in a vain attempt to reduce the temperature.
The stiff fabric of my collar and cuffs restricted the flow of blood through my body, causing my suppressed pulse to throb in my neck and wrists. I felt the discomfort of the scold in the pillory, of the innkeeper condemned to the stocks for watering his beer. My tongue clave to the roof of my mouth. The china cup chattered in its saucer as I passed it to her with a trembling hand. She steadied mine with hers, placed the cup on an open dictionary, then led me to my bedroom. I was her first lover.
In all its technical aspects, the act was the same as my initiation in that doorway in Air Street, but then two people may both be said to have spent time in France when one has had rats for company in the donjon of the Chateau d’Yf, while the other has been drinking Sauternes with his feet in a stream at the edge of a field of lavender.
These were not the jejune ecstasies of pimpled youth. We led one another to the winding heart of the eternal rose itself. O Mnemosyne, paint for me once more the fine bone china of her skin that afternoon with its film of perspiration; the wetness of her parted lips; the pungent shag tobacco of her nether hair.
And then?
The time until my departure for India was ebbing like the tide that would float my ship out of its harbour. I surrendered to this larger current. Out of fear? Perhaps. It was impossible for me to stay. I lacked the passionate courage, I lacked the determination to please myself, I lacked the knowledge of my own heart that would have made me a different man and might have granted me a different fate.
In age, I have come to share the fatalism of the Mussulmans, to believe, as they do, that the tortuous paths of each man’s destiny have been inscribed since Creation in the infinite Book of the Almighty. On its secret pages are written the place of each man’s birth, the travails of his life, the names of his enemies, the number of his children, the manner and the hour appointed for his death. Each year I pass in ignorance the future anniversary of my final day. I offer prayers to the infinite mercy of this Creator, who spares us the knowledge of our destinies, who, in denying us choice, takes upon Himself the authorship of our sins. Inshallah
That I would be the best scholar of my generation; that I would be distracted by indolence, that I would be parted from my lover, that I would never marry, never raise children – these were preordained, shards of a future that lay in wait for me, to be lifted from the dust year by year and fitted together like an Etruscan jar.
Serena and I made no plans; we did not discuss our future. We lived each moment together as though nothing could impinge on our happiness. And then on my last night in London, she met me at the dock. The yellow moon was snagged in the rigging of a tea-clipper.
‘I would stay if you asked me,’ I told her.
Her stiff bonnet shaded her face. ‘I think you and I both know’, she said coldly, ‘that I’m not the kind of girl who asks for anything.’
When I said farewell, she showed no emotion, but promised to write to me.
The torturers of the Ottoman Caliphate pride themselves on prolonging a man’s suffering by impaling him on a sword in such a way as to cause no mortal injury. I felt this pain then: as though a rapier had been run expertly through my innards. I stayed in my cabin and wept for two days.
I have to be truthful, some part of me was glad to be separated from her: the same part that exults in solitude and the smoky light of a solitary winter evening. It has always been easier to follow this unilateral instinct, and I can see now that the pattern of my life (I am writing this alone, in an empty house, in silence) owes everything to it.
I arrived in Bombay after a journey of six weeks to find letters from Serena that had preceded me on the outward voyage of a faster ship. Her tone was warm but there was no mention of the intimacies we had enjoyed. She offered me her cordial regards.
I was poised on the edge of a strange continent, wondering inwardly whether to go on or go back. But as the weeks and miles had passed between us, the draw of my beloved had grown correspondingly weaker. At the very least, I reasoned, I must fulfil the minimum requirements of my contracted service.
I travelled by train to the eastern city of Madras to take up my post. It was a diagonal journey across the width of the subcontinent. I could see from the outset two Indias. The India I saw by day was full of the familiar reassurances of a life I knew well, but the India of dusk, of orange light settling across the flat plains behind the western ghats, the silhouettes of the spiky palmyras, was like another continent, vast and indifferent to our presence.
Those of my countrymen with whom I was stationed were uncongenial company. Belonging for the most part to the middle-ranking classes, they were willing to undergo the rigours of life in the tropics because the recompense was a pantomime of social advancement. They held dismal dinner parties where we sweltered in formal attire and ate approximations of our national dishes. Pig-sticking, whist and sleeping with prostitutes constituted the whole of their interest in their new surroundings. Sedulous in prosecuting the smallest details of their offices, they lacked the perspicacity to see the comedy of British rule in India. Ours was the folly of the cockerel who takes credit for sunrise; the vanity of the swimmer in the Thames who claims he controls the tides because they rise and fall as he does.
A map of India hung above my commode. I fell ill with malaria and in my fevered dreams confounded the shape of the country with the musky triangle of my forsworn lover.
FOUR
THE PASSAGE ENDED more suddenly than it had begun: a full stop after the last sentence and then nothing. I read it twice more on the flight, wondering who the unnamed ‘I’ was supposed to be. The character reminded me of a redoubtable Victorian explorer – a Burton, or a Livingstone – but he also resembled Patrick in various ways: the compulsive need for solitude, the self-advertising eggheadedness. He was an emotional retard too, which made me think of my father.
As prose, it wasn’t my cup of tea. The high style leaves me cold – invocations to the muses and all that stagey dialogue. Was ‘pungent shag tobacco of her nether hair’ supposed to be a turn-on? It sounded like a description of the fur on a chimpanzee.
One small detail pleased me especially, though: that unfinished monograph. When I was at school I did a project on the life cycle of
the house fly. I was flattered to think that this fact had somehow stuck in Patrick’s brain. House fly, sand fly – it came to the same thing.
What struck me most about the story was Miss Eden. It seemed possible that she was a real person, a fancy-dress version of a woman Patrick had once been in love with. Her reply on the dock when the narrator makes his mealymouthed offer to stay and marry her – that sounded like something someone might have really said.
Compared with the little that was revealed about her – that she’s beautiful, passionate, and brave enough to defy convention – the hero came off pretty badly. It’s not clear why he’s so wedded to the idea of leaving for India. Doesn’t he see the risks Serena’s taken for his sake? He won’t stay unless she demands it, which is almost as odd and anachronistic as her making the first move in the seduction. There was something disingenuous about the narrator: this old chap who is haunted by a memory of a woman he says he wanted, but whom he gave up in favour of his job; a man who makes a foolish decision and can’t admit it, who passes the buck on to the Almighty. There was something pathetic and very human, too, about his making a mistake and then disclaiming all responsibility for it.
Of course, it’s possible that the narrator was going to come to his senses, jack in his job in India, and go back to the woman who loved him. But Patrick’s narrator seemed to be one of those people who are in love with the idea of love. I wondered if he would have written about Miss Eden in the same way if they had been living together for ten years and the pungent shag tobacco of her nether hair was turning up on his face soap.
Overall, I didn’t know what to make of it. Notes for a novel? A short story? A meaningless five-finger exercise? Or something else entirely?
Once when I was eight Patrick and I fell out over a game of Frisbee. My grandfather had given him a tin for cigarette butts that hung from a stake on the lawn. It was an ugly thing Grandpa had salvaged from the dump. My cousins had the idea of seeing who could knock it off with a Frisbee. No one could hit it and the game was losing its momentum when Patrick arrived, put fifty dollars in the tin and squatted behind the target like a catcher at home plate.
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