by Sara Banerji
‘He can’t,’ said Eshak morosely. ‘We’ve been sacked. And we’ve no spare sheets, remember.’
‘He will have to,’ Unity said strongly. ‘We owe him so much. And anyway, Rosie likes him, so she’s sure to let us stay a bit longer if he’s here.’
It was Dr Das who had lent them the house in the village to use as a clinic. Unity had been terribly excited the first day they had gone there. ‘This is the village where I found out about my mother’s friend, Yudhishthira,’ she told Dr Das.
‘Ah, yes,’ said the doctor. ‘This house I offer you is in fact the very one where this foolish cousin of mine once lived. He gave it to his servant in the old fellow’s lifetime; but now both Baba and his wife have passed on, the property has come to me.’
‘Why should Dr Das want to see so much of us?’ enquired Eshak, bringing her back to the present.
‘He adores the children,’ laughed Unity. And Eshak, remembering, burst out laughing too.
The last time he had come to stay, the doctor, a normally dignified and rather awe-inspiring person, had let Ruth and Tammy ride on his back while he galloped round the room on all fours. He had made such a noise that Rosie Ramsay, inspecting the books in the club below, had come up to reprimand the children.
She had rushed in shouting, ‘What kind of a reputation do you think you are giving this outfit with all this filthy din.’ And to Unity and Eshak, ‘Did you not know there are important clients under? Calling yourselves doctors and not even knowing that we have to keep a reputation of quiet in the pursuit of health.’ She had been most taken aback to see that it was Dr Das who was responsible for the racket.
Rosie admired the old doctor, whom she thought of as a truly cultured person, unlike any of the men she had married. Sometimes in her more optimistic daydreams she would think that Dr Das admired her too. She had managed in a moment to modulate her tone, but all the same it was hard to banish the signs of outrage and fury in a single instant. The doctor had risen slowly, shaking off his burden of children, and faced her, until he towered over the fat lady.
‘It is you, Dr Das, who is making all this noise and spoiling the calm of my establishment?’ she’d said, her tone having become a little quavering. Almost simpering. Her English had gone to pieces in her agitation. ‘I had thought it must be one of these young people causing the disturbance as they have done on many previous occasions.’ She had glared accusingly at Ruth and Tammy who edged nervously away from her.
The doctor had looked Rosie up and down for a moment then said at last, ‘Madam, exercise is even more essential to the health than quiet.’ He had paused, while Rosie waited, her face flushed, though whether from such close proximity to the object of her admiration or because she had come upstairs so fast, it was impossible to say.
Then he had added, ‘As a doctor also, Mrs Ramsay, I recommend to you to seek out these two darling children. To take exercise in their company will be especially beneficial to you.’
‘We love him!’ Tammy and Ruth cried now. ‘He can have our sheets.’
Chapter Fourteen
Edward got the letter from the hospital on the morning that Hermione decided to leave her Delhi hotel. While she was experiencing despair because India was not what she had expected and while Unity and Eshak were panicking because Rosie Ramsay had sacked them, Edward was reading the letter which gave him back his first hope for years.
It was spring in England, the sky was blue, the cherry blossom so white it was like parchment against the dark trunks. As white as the paper from the hospital which told Edward he was not HIV positive.
It is an extraordinary feeling when fear falls off.
Edward stared at the releasing letter like a person reprieved from execution. He felt as sensitive as a skinned rabbit, wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.
‘What? What?’ asked Lalia, her lips gone dry because from her husband’s pallor and his silence she feared the worst.
Then, too full of emotion for words, he grabbed her, hugged her, kissed her in a wild wet boyish way.
He seized Dinah who, half curious, half afraid, had come trundling in on her tricycle.
Silently he pressed his beloved people to him as though he had returned from some long and dangerous journey. Because of this glorious grace that had been bestowed on him, he knew he could now find the strength to go ahead and solve the final problem.
Dinah, after a tense moment, relaxed and leant against him, giggling because she understood her daddy had come back.
‘I think I love you as much as I love David,’ she muttered into his throat. Then added, ‘Nearly anyway.’
In England Slug was still stung with remorse. Still blubbing. So many curtains in a rambling Victorian house, and so little significance attending their drawing. Until Slug had used Hermione’s as a signal to the gang.
‘The gang would be free if I hadn’t twitched,’ he moaned elaborately.
His mates were in the nick when they should still be supping up glue fumes.
Lacking any sense of timing, lacking sense itself, Slug had twitched the curtain then gone on to loving Gerald.
Gerald had needed three days in hospital and seven stitches. Afterwards, on his return, he’d removed his knitted cap to reveal the stitches on his head and Slug had gasped with excitement.
‘What’s written there?’ he asked and for a fleeting moment considered getting some such work done in coloured tapestry silk on his own head.
He had never read anything till he’d met Gerald, but during their months of intimacy Gerald had read Wuthering Heights to him.
Slug had been terribly moved by Cathy and Heath-cliff. ‘Just like us,’ he said. Now he thought the words inscribed on Gerald’s pate could be something like, ‘Gerald Loves Slug’.
Gerald, bemused, raised his hands to his head exploringly, then understanding said, ‘Oh. They don’t mean anything. It’s where the cuts were.’ The gang had hit Gerald with a wrought-iron foot scraper which had imprinted a complicated pattern on his skull.
Once a week Slug, murmuring, ‘Off to see me gran, then,’ would slither on to the bus guiltily, glue tubes optimistically fragranting the fag-filled atmosphere, on his way to visit his friends in prison.
Gerald felt no resentment, understanding just what the frog who’d received the scorpion’s sting had died discovering: it was Slug’s nature. In fact Gerald respected Slug for his fluid loyalty and expected to benefit from it one day himself.
Slug’s remorse even extended to Hermione, who would have been able to watch her garden develop if it had not been for him.
‘We should wait till she comes back and says where she wants the statues.’ Slug had never felt loyalty before and was enjoying the sensation.
He had never feared standing up to anyone before either, used to a sudden quailing on the part of the opposed, and he enjoyed the unafraid annoyance that leapt into Gerald’s expression, enjoyed the little tickle under his ribs of Gerald’s aggravated, ‘She doesn’t know a thing about gardens.’
‘She’s got books,’ murmured Slug hopefully, moving his leather- and chain-crackling bulk in aggressive mode.
‘Oh, don’t fidget, Slug! You’re wobbling the base.’ They were installing two statues: male, nude, gloriously explicit. Gerald, in a fit of showy competitiveness, had approached Lord Lewis.
‘Take a casting of Adonis, dear chap?’
‘It’s to raise money for the homeless of our town,’ said Gerald. This had been Slug’s idea.
‘I know what not having a home is like, see,’ Slug had said, wondering if his friends would qualify. After all, there were frequent occasions when their families refused to let them indoors and then they would sleep wherever they happened to fall. Gerald had been charmed by Slug’s unexpected and admirable social conscience.
‘Homeless?’ snorted Lord Lewis. ‘Didn’t know we had any, except for those dreadful skinheads whom I saw heaped up in a drunken stupor at the foot of the war memorial last night. But if you s
ay so … For God’s sake be careful with that statue. His balls have been stuck on once already.’
‘She might not like them at all, anyway,’ said Slug when the deed was done and two new Adonises had been cast in fibreglass by Daniel’s set designer.
‘Sometimes I think you’re fonder of her than you are of me,’ scowled Gerald.
‘Are you going to be cross with me?’ asked Slug hopefully. He had never been in love before and was interested in the see-saw emotions his new passion provoked in him.
‘Don’t fidget, Slug! These are beautifully crafted and we don’t want to break them.’
Daniel had agreed to the casting because he felt guilty over the suicide drama when Slug had tried to drown himself in the lake.
At the time it had been merely an amusing almost-joke to lead on the eager Gerald with whose affections he had tinkered, because in the theatre that was the best way of getting things done. Daniel had been inspired by Gerald’s enthusiastic description of what could be done in a small London garden with trellis, trees, a fountain and spotlights.
‘It would give you a chance to express yourself properly, darling,’ he had told Gerald. ‘It will be a relief for you, I have no doubt, after the awful rigidity of my father’s place.’
‘I had great admiration for your father, as a man,’ betrayed Gerald, ‘but as far as garden design went he hadn’t a clue.’ He smiled crookedly.
He had always adored big men and secretly had cried more than anyone when Hugh died, while maintaining his crisp official face in public.
‘It’s light as a feather,’ said Slug aggrieved, feeling his big muscles and heavy in-breathing wasted, made mock of almost.
‘The public will be deceived,’ said Gerald standing back to look and crashing into the approaching Daniel who had come to see his work in situ, and had arrived late because of a nervous reluctance to become once more entangled in the complicated web of men’s love.
Hastily moving his body out of contact in case he should once again be misunderstood, Daniel said, ‘Mother is fairly eccentric so she may even like them.’
The fibreglass Adonises, tastefully aged with polypropylene and wiped with yoghurt for speedy mossing, stood balls to balls.
‘The studio’s done a good job, I must say,’ Daniel added.
‘In my opinion,’ said Slug, who was becoming more daring as he became more secure, ‘It would have looked better if the statues had been different. Even,’ he announced adventurously, ‘if they had been a male and a female.’
‘It was difficult enough getting the stingy old blighter to lend me this one,’ said Gerald, who was pleased with the juxtaposition. ‘I can’t imagine him finding me a second.’
Although Hermione had decided to leave Delhi, she had not yet made up her mind where to go instead; so for a few days she sat restlessly at her window looking on to streets that seemed to her quite dingy. Occasionally, just when she was starting to despair, something of real India would come into view: a gaudy wedding procession with beaten drums and dancing trans vestites; a funeral trotting swiftly by, the visible face of the corpse dotted with sandalwood; a squad of naked yogis staring with unseeing eyes and with iron rods through their cheeks.
She did not look at yogis with hope any more, but all the same the sight of them comforted her.
The hotel servants began to fret at the small amount she was eating. ‘You don’t like our food, Madam? You are ill? You did not come for lunch again.’
They began to bring trays bearing Indian milk sweetmeats to her room, or strips of fresh mango cut like flowers and decorated with toothpicked marigolds.
To bribe the wild elephants not to wreck their garden in the early years of their marriage when they had lived on the tea estates, Hermione and Hugh had laid out similar trays of coconut and banana by their front gate.
Still without appetite, laughing to herself at feeling like a propitiated elephant, but with tears in her eyes as well because the gesture moved her, she ate the little offerings.
The servants, instantly encouraged, feeling they were making headway, responded with yet more goodies: crisped banana slices, puce-fleshed guavas, white candy sugar so carefully arranged that Hermione began to feel like the god Ganesh behind whose statue the rat had hidden all those years ago when she had gone to a café with Yudhishthira.
After five days the manager came to see her, rapping on the door of her room with white gloved knuckles.
‘The food is not to your taste, Madam?’
‘Delicious, delicious,’ she lied. It was true Indian food, the sort she and Yudhishthira would have eaten together all those years ago, but somehow it was as though she had grown too old for it.
‘I can cook anything,’ said the manager, longing to please her. ‘We can make English food if ours is not to your preferred taste. Roast chicken,’ he added hopefully. ‘Baked caramel custard?’
Hermione shuddered.
Each day she sent one of the hotel servants to the post office to see if she had any letters.
Gerald’s arrived.
‘Dear Hermione … Just to keep you fully informed … Took the liberty… acquired maximum cooperation from both town and family… charge of only one pound fifty due to the fact of garden’s comparative immaturity … Obviously, considering large attendance, appeared good value … Lalia was barely able to cope with buttering the large number of sandwiches.’
Hermione tried to imagine the one-pound-fifty visitors ripping the crusts off their sandwiches and throwing them to the Piranha and his lesser brethren. Hermione knew Lalia’s sandwiches. They were not dainty.
She visualized the citizens of her home town entering the shrubbery to be amazed or disgusted, according to their taste, by the illuminated male genitals which Slug had drawn a picture of in Gerald’s letter.
‘We had considered concealing with ivy strands the male paraphernalia since we expect children, but eventually decided against, this offering a likelihood of prurient curiosity.’
Hermione felt amazed at such excitement generated by the afternoon opening of her garden, an event contrasting so greatly in vigour to the cooped existence she was now leading. She tested herself to see if she felt regret. And longing. And decided she did.
In some far corner of the city there was a riot going on and as she read, distant smoke bangs could be heard.
When Anne and her daughter, Mary, came back to England after the coup in Waswar, they had nowhere to live so it was decided that they should temporarily move into Hermione’s house.
Anne emerged from her plane with black tears sliding through the canals in her Max Factor because everything she owned might be lost. Mary’s tears were crystal clear, sparkling this way and that because she could see new English freedoms through them.
Heathrow carpets must definitely be made of waterproof material to have invisibly absorbed so much crying and still not be stained.
Gerald and Slug had done their best to clean up Hermione’s house, but all the same there were some deficiencies.
Anne discovered the wet detritus of the gang’s bliss trip from three weeks earlier on the Turkoman and Mirzapur rugs.
‘What is it?’ she screamed.
‘The gang’s puke,’ Slug kindly explained to her. It was all he had left of them and he felt nostalgic about it.
Anne’s horror was almost as great when she discovered the two Adonises by the pond.
‘Great rubber willies sticking out through the trees,’ she yelled.
‘Polypropylene,’ corrected Gerald.
For some reason this increased Anne’s sobbing fury.
Gerald said to Slug that evening, ‘Let’s make the move to Bunty Lewis now. He said he would take us on.’ He was unimpressed by mobile make-up and overflowing bronze breasts.
‘Me too?’ said Slug, and tears came into his eyes. But they were ones of joy.
Anne lived peevishly in Hermione’s gutted mansion and waited for some fellow to appear to escort, save and enjoy her. Eve
n at forty-five she was a man’s woman, and would sink, soft as a melting marshmallow, the moment a male embrace made itself available. It was her great need for masculinity that caused the gay aspects of the otherwise enthusiastic gardeners to infuriate her. She wrote to Rupert on one occasion saying, ‘A great sexy lout of a fellow, and he goes to bed with another man. What a waste.’ Rupert read her words with alarm, but decided to find comfort in the fact that Slug did not like women.
A wodge of more letters came to Hermione from England. She read Gerald’s descriptions of his and Slug’s grand schemes, of layouts and bedding plans, accompanied by Slug’s sketches and, tucked in among the garden plans, she found some news.
‘Saplings all in place now, and staked against the strong winter winds. Anne doesn’t like it here … Tried rhododendrons in the shrubbery, but the soil too alkaline.
‘Your granddaughter has been going out and not coming home till two or three in the morning. Anne is distraught, threatens a lot, but can do nothing.
‘The President is growing well in spite of the dry summer, and as was to be expected Golden King is thriving.
‘We raised four hundred pounds on open day but unfortunately the gang, who had been released on bail, got stoned again, ripped up a whole bed of winter pansies that had just come into flower, and stuck them all over the statues with Uhu, apparently offended by the unconcealed male organs. It led to a violent episode in which people ran terrified to escape from the roaring bikes, and during the attack several of our flowerbeds and best bushes were flattened. We are still clearing up. On their way out the gang overwhelmed Slug who was in charge of collecting entrance fees. He, out of friendship apparently, was reluctant to put up any sort of violent defence so the gang seized all the takings.
‘Anne is extra upset because Mary was seen on the back of one of the bikes, so presumably she has been going out with these disreputable fellows. Slug, to whom I have just read the last, confirms this and says he knows who the fellow is.