by Rumer Godden
‘I don’t understand. First you are angry with me. Then you are not. What do you want? What do you want me to say?’
‘You are deliberately trying to provoke me, Emily.’ Louise sprang up from the bed. ‘I don’t want to lose my temper with you but you make me do it.’ She came close to Emily, who shrank back until the edge of the bed was pressing into her legs. Louise seemed to tower over her with the power of a giant, but again she stopped herself. ‘Emily—’ Her voice altered, it was coaxing and cajoling. ‘Try to tell me what happened tonight. What did he say? What did he do? How did he come? Can’t you tell me anything he said to you tonight? Anything you talked about at all?’
Emily felt a touch of understanding and pity that was not childlike but completely mature … How old I am now, she thought, and then she lost it … Her eyes looked this way and that, searching for inspiration.
‘Emily?’
She shut her eyes. Her mind went backwards and forwards trying to remember. She felt a wave of sickness coming over her.
‘What did you talk about?’
(You are not going to be sick, are you? Emily asked herself. The words rang in her head and they brought back the breakfast with the Nikolides and joined it to this trouble tonight; it began then – with the Nikolides; it has been getting bigger ever since … ‘What did you talk about?’)
‘Soup,’ said Emily suddenly.
Louise gave a sharp breath like a hiss and slapped her cheek.
Emily jumped and all the colour went away from her face except from that one mark. She did not cry. She looked at Louise quite silently, her eyes brimming with dignity and hurt.
‘You are impossible. Impossible!’ cried Louise. ‘I try. I do try, but you are impossible. What am I to do? What am I to do?’ She walked up and down, as if the pain were too bad to keep still, and she said, as if a repellent little snake had crept into her room, ‘Get away. Go away to bed.’
Still with those baleful eyes on Louise, Emily crept out and away along the verandah. She was cold. Cold. Charles did not come. The coldness numbed her. Her pyjamas were wet, but she was burning, and in spite of the burning she was cold and she lay shivering, sick and dry with a brittle cold dryness. How can you be wet and dry, burning and cold? There was no warmth or live feeling left in her, only her head felt hot and her eyes burnt with shock, and her cheek where Louise had hit her.
She heard Charles come up. She waited, trying not to cry. She waited. Charles went into Louise’s room and after a while he closed the door.
She put out her hand and rubbed the edges of Don’s bed; the wooden edge was still rough with his biting, the rug was there that he had scraped up into a nest before he lay down on it, and the lead that he had broken. The lead dangled limply in her fingers, nothing at the end of it. Before, there was a pull, warmth, sturdiness. Now only limpness, emptiness. There was no one. No one. In a rush of despair she thought, This is what it feels like to be dead.
Charles came upstairs to go to Emily but Louise’s door was open and he saw Louise. She was walking up and down the room, up and down, until she turned and faced him; her hair was on her shoulders and with heat and anger she had a flush of colour in her cheeks and the heavy white folds of her dressing-gown swung in round her feet as she turned, showing the shape of her hips and thighs and legs in folded slender lines. ‘You are always right,’ she cried. ‘Always! You are hateful. Hateful.’
‘And you, even when you have been as poisonous as you were tonight, still remain so beautiful,’ said Charles, and he leaned against the door surveying her. ‘Why is it? More than beautiful. You have an angelic face, Louise, the face of an angel; you ought to be so kind. I wonder why you are not. By the way,’ he asked, ‘what have you done to Emily?’
‘Can’t you hear her? She is crying in her bed,’ and she said defiantly, ‘I slapped her face.’
‘Charming,’ said Charles, but he made no move to go to Emily.
‘Well – what are you going to do now?’
‘What can I do – except what I have always done? Take the consequences. I expect there will be consequences,’ said Charles. ‘I don’t think that boy will hold his tongue. I told him you would apologize.’
‘I won’t apologize.’
‘You will have to. God knows what you have smashed this time—’ and he said softly, his eyes on her, ‘Last time it was a house—’
‘You smashed that …’
‘No, you,’ he corrected. ‘You had made a mistake. You see, you married a man, when all you wanted was a money-box.’
‘That isn’t fair.’
‘Of course it isn’t. I find it hard to be fair to you, Louise. You call me hateful. For years you have made me feel hateful, and I shall never forgive you for that.’
‘You were hateful,’ said Louise hotly, ‘you didn’t trust me.’
‘Were you to be trusted?’ asked Charles. Louise did not answer. ‘That was it,’ said Charles, ‘you were not reasonable. You did not want something – you wanted everything. You wanted to spend all your money and be rich, you wanted to have a child and have no worry and pain, you wanted to marry and not be married; and when it naturally didn’t fall out like that you made an outcry and a moan. You wanted to be trusted and have the fun of being untrustworthy – you did have fun, didn’t you, Louise? And you wanted me to be jealous – without being inconvenient.’
‘You forced yourself on me.’
‘What a villain. Go on.’
‘You behaved abominably.’
‘I behaved like a fool. Look at the statistics,’ said Charles. ‘You stayed with me for nearly three years – say a thousand nights, Louise; on one night out of a thousand I lost my temper with you. Why was it only one?’
‘It isn’t a joke,’ said Louise icily.
‘No. Nor was it then,’ said Charles, and his eyes grew hard. ‘Can a man assault his own wife? Apparently he can – if she chooses to make a scandal of it … and, incidentally, make it impossible for herself to see him again – for eight years, Louise?’
‘I had no wish to see you again. You were bestial.’
‘And the result of that was Binnie,’ said Charles thoughtfully; ‘and Binnie, the child of violence, is very nearly perfect. That doesn’t make sense, does it?’ His voice was not steady, he had forgotten his bantering. ‘I tortured myself over Binnie. You knew that, didn’t you, Louise? That is why you never wrote and were so careful not to let them tell me anything. Dear Sir,’ he mocked bitterly: ‘Mrs Pool has instructed us to inform you that a daughter was born on the 4th April. I thought she might be abnormal. I thought I might have made her blind or ill. I believed all the old wives’ stories. When I walked up on that steamer I was shaking – and then she came across the deck and put out her hand and made me look …’ He did not go on.
‘Why didn’t you ask?’ said Louise.
‘Because you wouldn’t have told me. You were very angry, Louise. You did everything you could. You separated me from Emily – finally. I shall never have Emily again. You refused to see me.’
‘I couldn’t bear to see you.’
‘You didn’t dare. There was one thing you could not forgive me about that night, Louise,’ said Charles, ‘and that was that you liked it.’
‘That isn’t true.’
‘Isn’t it? Why didn’t you ask me for a divorce? Why wouldn’t you take it when I offered it to you? Why didn’t I divorce you?’ – He came closer – ‘Why, when you were frightened to death, did you come back, Louise—’
‘You didn’t want me. You don’t want me now.’
‘Who in their senses could want you?’ shouted Charles. ‘You make nothing but trouble wherever you go. I can’t escape it, and neither can you.’ He looked at the bruises on her arms. ‘I hurt you tonight, the first time I have touched you for eight years. It seems I’m beginning where I left off – because I touched you tonight I can’t go away,’ and he said, ‘You are eight years older, Louise. This time are you going to run away?’
He fell asleep again and dreamed that Mrs Pool was suffocating him.
This time he woke by sitting violently up on his bed, literally tearing himself out of the dream. Sitting up, presently he began to breathe properly … I cannot lie down, my throat is too uneasy … and he leaned against the wall and went to sleep in that position; but every few minutes he woke.
XI
Charles called early at the Principal’s house. It was outside the town and remarkable because it was three storeys high and looked all the higher for the flat land round it. He left Delilah by the steps and was asked to come up, past the first floor, past the second and on to the roof, where he saw a small marquee built into the sky with a top that was lined inside with a quilting of patchwork flowers. Sir Monmatha Ghose sat under it, his legs folded neatly into each other, on a bed with a mattress tied down with a cotton sheet and two of the enormous bolsters called ‘Dutch wives’. Sitting as he was, on a cloud, between two clouds, with the real clouds rolling slowly past him, he was like a god being carried in his palanquin of flowers through the air; he could see his domain, all the College, Charles’s house, the Farm, the new houses, the road to the river, and the river; and in the very distance, the Nikolides’ chimney smoking against the sky.
‘Welcome to my seat in heaven,’ he said. ‘Now you see how I spy on my students. It is truly heavenly. From up here I can see just how big they are – so small that they are not important at all. Down there they are sometimes so important that they blot out everything else. Then I come up here to readjust my eyes.’
‘And I have come to drag you down again,’ said Charles. ‘Monmatha, something very unpleasant has happened—’
‘Not on Examination Day,’ pleaded Sir Monmatha as he sat up and unfolded his legs. ‘What is it?’
Charles told him.
‘Anil Krishna Banerjee?’ said Sir Monmatha Ghose. ‘Yes, I know him. Yes, he might do it and he might just as easily not. It is impossible to predict. You are quite satisfied, of course, that he did not; but I do not think he can keep it to himself. He will make a fuss, undoubtedly, and they are ripe for trouble today. They will probably go on strike. Well, it has happened before.’ He sighed. ‘Troubles in College are not usually sexual ones, though the authorities make arrangements for all foods of mind and body except that.’ He looked at Charles and it struck him that Charles had singularly the look of a man who has been fed; he had lost a haggardness that he used to have, most noticeably for instance on that night when he had come to listen to the news. ‘You have heard the news?’ said Sir Monmatha. ‘I think Greece will be next. The Nikolides were going home to Athens for the winter. Now they are not going.’ He sighed again. ‘Yes, I am afraid it will make a stir. I am sorry, Charles.’
‘I am sorry too.’ Charles did not go on.
‘Does the little girl know?’
‘Not so far. I shall tell my wife to keep her in. I left them asleep.’
‘Das may be able to help. He can influence the boy. I shall be going down to the College, could you have a word with him?’
‘I will go now. If we can stop it at the beginning …’
‘The beginning.’ Sir Monmatha pointed down. ‘My dear Charles, it has begun.’
When Anil woke for the last time he was sitting in his chair with his arms on the table and his head on his arms. This time he woke completely; he had a dry electric wakefulness and his throat refused to swallow. He took off his shirt and took his drinking cup and went outside; after a drink it was better and he washed out his throat and cleared it with noisy spittings.
‘Who is it who makes such filthy noise?’ He did not answer. The water had eased him and he splashed his face and chest and arms. It was beginning to be light; the darkness was raftered by light, but in between were mammoth wedges of blackness, and Anil had a sense of heaviness as if the darkness would never lift; but the birds knew that it was morning, they were beginning their earliest sounds in the trees and then, far over their heads, dropped from the minaret into the College grounds, came the first call of the muezzin from the mosque in the bazaar. The lights were on in the Moslem Students’ Hostel.
Anil splashed himself as if he would never finish in the cool water; he could feel his body burning through his soaked waist-cloth … I think I have some fever, he said.
As he went back along the verandah the daylight was growing; voices spoke to him, on the beds a white mosquito-net was lifted, a bolster thrown out, arms stretched; there were yawns, hawkings, spits over the verandah rail, laughter, the opening noises of the day. Anil was revived by the cold water, and as he passed among his friends, he began to smart with remembrance.
There was the tank, turning green in the growing light, the cool glimmer of water, the shadows, still liquid, of the trees. That was where he had sat with Emily and there was the slumbering outline of the house, and one after the other, smarting bitterly, came those moments, there in the porch, when Mrs Pool had lacerated him. Mrs Pool. Mrs Pool. Mrs Pool. Her name was repeated, hammering in his brain, throbbing with bitterness and injustice and wounded pride. Mrs Pool – and soon it was running in a whisper down the colonnaded verandah of the Hostel.
The students gathered. They leaped from their beds, they came up from the privy, they left their washing. The whisper passed from tongue to tongue – Mrs Pool. Mrs Pool … Mrs Pool … Mrs Pool.
They all knew Emily and none of them admired her; they all admired Louise; that did not prevent them conveniently overlaying both with their own inventions: Louise was a hag, a siren, a malefactor; Anil could not see anything but Mrs Pool, Charles was blotted quite out of his mind and Emily was a figment who altered as he wished.
She grew and waned also according to the rumours that were now rushing about the College and changing in the same surprising manner … Anil Krishna Banerjee had rescued the child Pool and Mrs Pool had accused him … Anil had accused Mrs Pool of cruelty and Mrs Pool said she would flog him … Mrs Pool had flogged him … Anil, who had rescued a little child from assault, was to be flogged and sent to prison and forbidden to sit for his Examination … Mrs Pool had hit Anil with a horsewhip … Mrs Pool had made improper advances to Anil … Anil had made improper advances to Mrs Pool … Anil had made improper advances to Mrs Pool and Charlie Chang had flogged them both with a horsewhip … Anil (but no one really believed this) had flogged Charlie Chang … That monster, the girl Pool, had assaulted Anil … Anil was to be expelled …
They flew from mouth to mouth, and the quadrangles filled with students; groups of them gathered and surged round corners of the buildings, where on ledges or pediments other students harangued them; where one came down, another sprang up; Moslems joined with Hindus. The Superintendent of Anil’s Hostel, attempting to telephone the Principal’s house, had been bodily placed on his bed and advised to stay there; and one young Hindu, with cheers, climbed out along the first-floor balcony and cut the wires; only he cut the wires of the electric extension instead, and all the fans went off and it was necessary to cut the telephone cable on the inside, which might more prudently have been done in the first place.
The morning meal at the Hostel was carried round the square, and a procession started with it to the Principal’s
house. We shall not eat injustice – a banner was scrawled; there were other banners – banners of the League, the Onward Movement – and someone had made a straw figure and dressed it in a frock and given it long dangling legs and a head of straight jute hair. It was really not at all unlike Emily. They had garlanded Anil and put a white cap on his head and painted his forehead and he was in the middle of them, but before the procession could start a car was reported to be coming from the Principal’s house.
The procession shrieked and swayed ‘They are coming to arrest him!’ And the shriek passed down its length: ‘Hide him. Hide him. Hide him.’
Anil was passed from one set of hands to another, he was hustled and bundled and pushed, his cap was knocked off and the garlands pulled off his neck, until at last he reached the fringes of the crowd, where nobody knew who he was or why they were passing him along or what they were to do with him and they left him to pass himself; they were all pressing in the other direction, watching a party of students who were daringly preparing to surround and halt the car.
Anil found himself in Charles’s mango grove at the back of the College; through it a path led to the river road. Anil stood there panting, leaning against a tree, his face against the bank. He felt very ill … I have much fever. What is it? Perhaps it is tonsillitis. Perhaps it is diphtheria … But he had no pain in his throat, only the sensation of blockage, of swelling; it made him swallow nervously and continually, but he was frightened by a strange feeling in his head. He had had it all morning; for moments together he had no head at all, he had only a gap … I suppose where my neck is left … in which was a noise and a hot light … as if the sun had sat down in my eyes; but how could the sun sit in my eyes if my head is not there?… I am quite sensible, you see.
It was very quiet in among the young trees. The hubbub seemed to be moving away from him, there was no one now near the grove but one old woman picking dung off the road and putting it in her basket. The bark of the tree scratched Anil’s forehead and he had one thing that seemed to him to need most urgent attention; his toe where he had knocked it on the stone last night was sore and swollen … It is most dangerous, a swollen toe, thought Anil; I must have it seen to … And then he remembered that this path led out towards the river … Indro’s house is by the river. Indro will put it right for me. I shall go and see Indro …