Breakfast with the Nikolides

by Rumer Godden

  It was probable that he had not even bought the picture, it had probably been given to him by one of his Indian friends.

  (‘Graft,’ said Louise scornfully.)

  (‘Gifts,’ corrected Charles.)

  They quarrelled over Charles’s Indian friends. Louise could not understand how an Indian could be a real friend. ‘Naturally,’ said Louise, ‘we must be prepared to meet them in society now, and in the cities and larger places there are cultured Westernized people, like Sir Monmatha Ghose—’

  ‘Monmatha isn’t Westernized, thank God,’ said Charles. ‘He adopts certain customs and manners that are now more universal than Western, but he keeps himself quite integrate.’

  Louise did not understand what he meant. She hardly saw Sir Monmatha, though she had met and dined with him often. The students who worked and played and lived next door to her were quite unnoticeable unless they made too much noise; when, if Charles were out, she would send Shah to stop them as if they were street boys. If one of them had spoken to her she would have called it impertinence and she would not leave the children alone even with the venerable Professor Dutt. She hated it that Charles refused to have an ayah for them but sent them out attended by Mahomed Shah. She had a peculiar, distorted, almost diseased idea of the Indian, of his life and his religion, particularly if he were a Hindu. Nothing Charles could say would shake her.

  They quarrelled over many things. They seemed to make a point of quarrelling; in Amorra that was easy; they were like two people on a stage – as they had been from that first moment on the deck of the steamer – held there in the limelight as husband and wife, with all that the audience did not know between them; and the situation was complicated by two of the audience being there on the stage with them, Emily and Binnie. They would not keep an armistice for long … We have not quarrelled for two whole days, they said. I was forgetting. I am being far too amiable. I must start a quarrel at once … If it was not Louise it was Charles. If it was not Charles it was Louise.

  (‘Why don’t you ride, Louise?’)

  (‘Isn’t there only one horse?’)

  (‘I can use the Bhutia more. You can have Delilah in the mornings.’)

  (‘Thank you. I prefer not to share your horse.’)

  She regretted that. The days were still long and empty and though they were empty they were oppressive; she felt herself crushed under them, shut away from a world that was up and vitally alive. When I go back, said Louise, I shall now be a stranger. I shall be foreign for ever and ever. I have lived out of time … She could only read and listen and ponder and wonder; but the wireless news reports had the unreality that they might have had for a child, a little voice speaking out of a box, and the daily paper by the time it reached Amorra was thirty hours old; papers from Europe came far apart in a deluge of deliveries held up together, sometimes three months old; books and letters were rare and precious; and from Paris, from Bellevue, was silence … I have no mother or father, said Louise, no one nearer than my old governess, though she is very dear. Grief for a people is sharp, grief for a place is sharper and has a peculiar bitterness that can never be wiped away. It is the place I mourn most – and that at this time, I should be shut away, a prisoner. That is what I am – a prisoner. (‘Nothing of the sort,’ the voice answered clearly and precisely. ‘You chose to come – you came. What did you expect?’)

  Louise did not listen. She asked aloud, ‘But what can I do? How can I keep with them at home – what can I do?’

  ‘What everyone else is doing,’ said Charles, ‘go on.’

  But Louise only felt herself crushed, a prisoner dulled and tormented by loneliness and fear. She was afraid; she was in danger of dying, of losing herself – Louise. (‘And it has taken you such a long time to build yourself up, hasn’t it? No wonder you can’t bear to knock it all down.’) And two lines of newsprint that she had seen in some paper came inexplicably into her mind: There are some preposterous edifices, said the paper, that the war has brought to light … At least these will be better cleared away. Louise checked herself sharply. Where was she drifting? And she tried to break free in paroxysms of temper that were not temper, but fear.

  It was worst in the evenings, after the children were in bed; Emily went to bed with Binnie. Even in her loneliness and need Louise would not allow her to stay up; Emily because of her health must be sent to bed early.

  ‘But I’m nearly twelve,’ Emily protested.

  ‘You are still only a little girl.’

  ‘Indian girls can be mothers at my age.’

  ‘You are not an Indian girl.’

  ‘I’m not a little girl either,’ muttered Emily rebelliously; but she was still young enough to be sent to bed and she was sent to bed! Louise was left alone.

  And as she sat alone Charles was working, she could see him, imperturbable and cheerfully busy … There are two worlds, said Louise. There is one – reasonable, positive; some people are lucky, they live only in that. There is another, the limitless height of the first, like a mirage, a mad distorted mirage, and sometimes it blots out the other and the sky. You don’t know what it is like, Charles. You have never seen it. You think I invent it, to bend the first world to my will, but it is there – it is there. I try to be reasonable – but it is there. You think I invent it, but I don’t …

  Charles had very little time to think, to reason or to talk; he had to act, and arrange and settle; he had to create. The lights fell till late from the office windows across the lawn below, and there was a continual coming and going on the drive; white figures disappeared into the dusk, there were continuous bright stars of light from bicycles coming, and red stars of light from bicycles going away. Did everyone in Amorra have a bicycle? Did everyone in Amorra come and see Charles on business in the evening? It looked, she had to admit from the loneliness of the drawing-room, strangely attractive – friendly – busy and important.

  Once she went as far as to say, ‘You work from five in the morning, Charles, till nine or ten at night.’

  ‘There is all that work to do,’ he said defensively.

  ‘I – I know. Would it help you – Charles – if someone took part of – the correspondence for instance – from you? There must be a great many letters to write – someone with English at least that you need not supervise …’

  ‘Meaning you?’ asked Charles. For a moment she thought he was pleased, eager to accept; then he said, ‘No, thank you. My work belongs to me. That is one thing you won’t get your hands on.’

  Now, this morning, they were violently opposed; Louise refused to leave Don, Charles sat and watched her, miserable and angry.

  Don lay on the floor and all the exhibits were there: the bed with the gnawed wooden sides, the leash bitten through; and he had had a sudden choking fit like a convulsion, and he lay panting quietly on the floor.

  ‘You did send for the vet?’

  ‘I told you so.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he come? Oh, why doesn’t he come?’

  ‘Because he can’t fly,’ said Charles irritably. ‘He has to bicycle.’

  The Pekingese pressed their faces against the netting that had been nailed across the door and uneasily moved their tails; their tails were their barometers, they went down as they watched Don, up as Louise spoke or stirred; they made questioning marmoset noises in their throats, while the same question was going round and round in Louise’s mind … What am I going to do? What else is there to be done? This is hydrophobia. Hydrophobia. The whispered word is like a spark, a tongue of fear licks up from it and runs and flames and flares into a conflagration. That is no exaggeration, Charles … In her mind Louise perpetually defended herself against Charles … Hydrophobia is like that; it starts, no one knows where, it spreads and spreads away from its spark – anyone can get it – you, Charles, Emily, Binnie, the Pekingese, the servants; any of them, anyone outside them. We don’t know if Don has been out of the grounds, we don’t know where he has been. Did he go out? Where would he be likely to go
if he had? Anywhere. Nowhere. Everywhere. He has shown no sign of biting but he is affectionate – to be more than usually affectionate is a symptom – he jumps up and fawns like all spaniels, he might lick, he might scratch. Affection can become a horror – I, who worship dogs, have to steel myself not to recoil from him. The virus runs from the spark of the bite, along the nerves, to the brain – sometimes it is quick, sometimes it can smoulder and smoulder along – and it is madness that kills in agony, for which there is no cure. Madness …

  ‘If it is hydrophobia—’ said Charles suddenly.

  ‘You think it is. You think so yourself.’

  ‘I think it is – but it might be hysteria.’

  ‘Hysteria! Do you think I would not recognize hysteria?’

  ‘I don’t see why you should,’ said Charles, and he added quietly, ‘I have mistaken it for truth myself.’

  She turned her back on him … It is like a plague, her thought raced on, we don’t know where it will break out next. Don has been brought up with children, he may have jumped up and licked a child’s face, a hand that had a scratch on it; I can examine Emily and Binnie for scratches – I am powerless to find and save those children … And at the thought of the children, a sob rose in her throat.

  (‘Why is it worse for children to die than grown-ups, Mother?’)

  (‘They are at the very beginning of things – they are little – unprotected.’)

  (‘Yes, but it’s easy to make them again. It takes ages to make a grown-up.’)

  Louise moved impatiently. Why must she think of Emily’s arguments now? Emily was a perpetual annoyance. They had questioned the servants that morning – ‘Who has been near to Don in the last few days? Who has been to the house?’

  ‘No one but the men who come to the office.’

  ‘The Babu shall warn them. Anyone else?’

  ‘The man with the cows—’

  ‘The peon with the letters—’

  ‘And—’ Kokil the sweeper shifted his feet – ‘yesterday, the monkey man was here.’

  ‘The monkey man? You know I have given orders never to let him in!’

  The monkey man had a drum, a miniature tom-tom with weighted strings, that beat as he twirled it in a little rattling rhythm; it sounded like the chattering of a monkey. He had a large male monkey and a little female dressed in patchwork clothes, and they all sat down together in the hot shade of a tree and the monkeys did their acts and dances, which towards the end of the performance grew candidly obscene.

  ‘Why did you let him in?’

  ‘Emily baba said—’

  ‘Whose orders do you take, Emily baba’s or mine?’

  They were silent; they took Emily baba’s. It was easier. Louise cried, ‘You must go into the bazaar and tell everyone. Everyone! Do you understand? Charles, you must see – you must insist—’

  But there was no answering certainty on Charles’s face.

  ‘You must. You must.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  Charles was not at all helpful. Now he said, looking down at Don, ‘Louise, you must wait.’

  ‘We dare not risk it. He might escape – suppose he did? We shouldn’t know where he had been or what he had done. Think of the havoc he might cause.’

  ‘He couldn’t cause havoc, he wouldn’t have a chance.’

  ‘He might. He might easily.’

  ‘The moon might turn to cheese,’ said Charles rudely.

  ‘I don’t understand you. How can you hesitate? No one else would wait a minute.’

  ‘Oh, I know. There are plenty of good fellows who will let down their dogs,’ said Charles with venom. ‘Deserters. Judases.’

  ‘Charles! Don’t. Please don’t.’

  ‘Why worry? You’ll have your bloody way,’ said Charles and then he said more quietly, ‘Louise, at least don’t do it while Emily’s away.’

  ‘But that’s why I sent her out. What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t do it. Wait for her. Tell her and then do it.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because I ask it. Please, Louise.’

  ‘She’s only a child. Charles, how could I let her go through this?’ Charles’s voice was usually light and faintly mocking when he spoke to her, unless he was angry; now its earnestness intrigued her. ‘But why?’ she asked again.

  ‘It would be better, Louise.’

  ‘You know nothing whatever about children.’

  ‘I know about Emily,’ said Charles … I like my daughter Emily, said Charles, but he did not say it aloud. If only Louise would not get in the way I should like her very much. Binnie reassures me too, she is the answer to a question that has troubled me for years, but I have a peculiar faith in Emily. There is something vagabond about her, especially the way she moves her elbows and her head, that shows me she is tough and gay and sufficiently hard, while her eyes and her hands and her stomach, poor brat, show that she is duly sensitive. She is capable of taking proper treatment, she deserves it; but Louise will keep a hand across her eyes, and for Emily that means a struggle and fear – a misunderstanding, needless fear. Emily would rather suffer and understand, not at the time perhaps, but afterwards. Presently she would understand; however tragic and deep the suffering, presently she would digest it; digest is the perfect word, Emily could absorb and take what she needs from it, mix it with her own philosophy and discard the rest. It could become an integral part of her. I am acquainted with death, she could say, and death is the other side of life – together they are complete, the two sides of a coin, light and darkness, good and evil, death and life. Necessarily I must know both, or I cannot know either. Emily would presently understand. I, Charles her father, am certain of that; but I am not allowed to help you, Emily. I cannot reach you while you are beyond Louise. How could I help you if I reached you? I would remind you of the little words I could not teach Louise; you know them already but I should continually remind you of them: – I am – It is – I see – I am. And those, said Charles, are the best and the only things you can ever learn of life – learn them in a minute – go on learning them always. That is truth … He did not say any of this aloud to Louise, he stared at the bricks on the floor silently, until he said, ‘Let me fetch her when Das has been. Let me fetch her and you can tell her yourself what you think it best to do.’

  ‘No,’ said Louise.

  ‘Very well,’ said Charles, standing up, and she could see that he was passionately angry and moved. ‘Very well. Take the power of the angels if you must but, by God, you can do it alone.’ He flung over the netting, scattering the Pekingese, and shouted for the groom to bring Delilah.

  Louise stayed, smitten into silence with a chill of superstitious shock.

  Don lay on the ground at her feet, pressed down on the bricks that were cooler than the air, pressing his throat down on them and then getting up, stretching his head out as if something were in his throat, moving his head, hanging it down so that the shadow of his ears hid his face; when he looked down his face fell into its customary soft peaceful puppy folds, but when he stretched out his neck there was a staring panic look in his eyes and his body seemed wild and strained. He stood up stretching out again, his feet slipped on the floor and he staggered and fell, and choked, his claws scrabbling wildly on the bricks, and Louise stepped quickly out of his way, waiting till he lay still again. The Pekingese stirred and whined.

  She picked up the thermometer that Charles had not let her use; in the hot air the mercury had gone up. She shook it down and at once, in her hand, it ran up to 105° … No wonder in this country we cannot be reasonable; even the weather is unbalanced, a parabola outside normality. The hot sun beats sense and resistance out of us, there is another virus in it that attacks us all, nothing is normal … There was nothing friendly and nothing normal to her, the country was a hyperbole of heat and terror and disease, she found only perpetual enmity, abnormality, perpetual strain … But if we have to be inoculated for this, we shall surely have to go away and we must. I
must. I can’t bear it any longer, cried Louise. I hate it, it hates me. It is destroying me. It hates me …

  The back of the stable had brick holes for ventilators, and a pigeon came through one and looked at her. Its neck was a deep glistening green, its eyes bright and gentle; it bobbed its head two or three times in surprise to find her there and murmured ‘Coo.’

  Louise had to laugh and immediately began to cry.

  At the sight of her tears Narayan stopped aghast.

  Tears. Nothing but tears. What was the meaning of so many tears? Anil had been in tears last night, Narayan had left Shila weeping; now, here was Mrs Pool with tears running down her cheeks and they seemed a continuation, a culmination of the tears of Shila and Anil. He stood, not knowing whether he had better go away or stay, and superstitions chased one another through his mind … Three times tears! Oh, what is going to happen?… Tears, very very painful tears – what did they mean? A warning? An omen? He was sure that something had happened and from that happening rings of other happenings would spread out and out from it. He was ominously certain of it.

  Mrs Pool was graceful in her crying. Her face was not reddened or made ugly by her tears, it remained pale and her hair and her skin in the shadowless light of the stable reminded him of pictures he had seen of the Mother of Christ; perhaps it was the stable that put that into his head, but he found himself thinking it was a pity she was crying over a dog, not a baby. Still she disturbed him; with her eyes drenched in tears she seemed to him too much like Shila, and Shila herself was not unlike Anil; they were each a sad echo of the other. He wished they would not cry; but for him, if not for them, there was, he began to think, good in those tears; they seemed to be washing a throng of previous conceptions, old carelessness, and impossible illusions from his mind; Anil, perhaps, could not be perfect as Narayan would have him, his bright, other, wished-for self; perhaps he was simply Anil, an exasperating, intensely human and delightful friend. And Shila? Perhaps he had never seen Shila properly, she was his wife whom presently he might discover, with all the loves and frailties of a wife. And Mrs Pool was not a species apart from him, with an insurmountable impossible difference; she was Shila’s sister crying her eyes out as Shila had cried. His life had a promise as if it would soon be washed clean, and though he was a little uneasy because he had up to then preferred it coated in mystery, he was immensely cheered.