Don’t worry yourself too greatly with these matters, the Bengalee Babu is wont to see tigers behind settees when there are none, and accordingly create comparable frenzy and frantic politicking. As with all these things, the division, if and when it happens, will pass peacefully: Bengal will make a noise for a few weeks and then acquiesce.
How is our very own Bengalee Babu responding to all this? Does he not have any views that he might have communicated to you? I shall have to leave the story of the persistent Daisy Ampthill for another occasion for it is too long to relate now; she grows a menace apace and I fear for my peace of mind and sanity sometimes with her around, always hiding in some piece of shrubbery or behind a tree, waiting to pounce as a tiger on its prey. I shall leave you on tenterhooks. I promise to write with more news from Velloor.
Your loving brother always,
James
SEVEN
The November morning briefly toys with the idea of frost but settles for bruised sunshine instead. If it holds, the afternoon is going to be one of those autumn ones, glassy air blazing with burned gold till the dark comes down like a swooping cat, sudden and swift. In their separate rooms, both Anne Cameron and Ritwik, sleepless and still, think of cats.
It wouldn’t do for Ugo to get that fat sparrow, no, it wouldn’t, but she knows of no way to prevent cats from stalking birds. He would probably come and offer the half-dead bird to her one of these days, purring and wrapping himself around her ankles. No, she couldn’t have that. Ugo himself was one of those offerings, although an unintended one. The Pakistani family five doors down, with three children, one of the kids, what was his name now, Saleem or Osman, one of the boys, certainly, but beyond that she cannot be any more definite, one of the boys had come in with seven kittens one day, spilling out of his arms and shoulders and hands, and dropped them one by one in her front room.
‘You like? Amma says we can’t have them all. You want one? Please.’ The boy, hardly more than six, was pleading.
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘No. Who would look after it?’ Best not to get attached to creatures, and at such a very late hour in life too.
‘You,’ the boy said, with perfect, unassailable innocence.
‘I’m not very good at looking after things.’ The words hurtled out, as if her faculty of speech itself had become incontinent. What was she doing? Very soon, she’d actually start telling this little boy, with such lovely dark eyes, like a forest lake, about how she could never look after things. People. Richard. Clare. Christopher.
‘Please.’ That word again.
In the end she didn’t know how one had come to be left in her house. But she had got the nice and ingratiating Mr Haq, the boy’s father, to install a cat-flap in the back door leading to the garden. That way, Ugo could go in and out as he wished; that was more than half the problem taken care of. But the boy, was it Osman or Saleem, she doesn’t see any more.
She lies. She saw him once, huddling in a corner of the road with half a dozen other boys, when she made an extremely rare sortie from her front door to the end of the road one day, just to see if she could make it unattended, just to see. The boys had fallen silent when she had emerged from the house. A few foreign words, opaque and derisive, tinged with cruel laughter somewhere, had leaked out from their close cluster. And then, ‘Bag lady.’ More laughter. Of course, they thought she wouldn’t be able to hear.
Maybe it wasn’t Saleem or Osman at all among those boys.
Ritwik is obsessed with Ugo. Never having shared a living space with an animal before, his first instinct was to feel slightly repelled by the whole idea. The cat hair everywhere didn’t help. And he was convinced he would catch some disease off the fat marmalade animal, diphtheria or something equally terrifying. He doesn’t know when that gave way to this rapt adoration, watching Ugo and thinking how he was perfect, pure form. Nothing that he did – the way he moved, yawned, curled himself, stretched out in the slowly moving quadrilaterals of sunshine on the carpet, head-butted Ritwik’s outstretched hand, ran his jawline along the human knuckles – nothing was less than infinite grace.
And then there was the disdain, the utter unimportance of taking anything else except his own wants into account. Pure form, yes, but pure selfishness as well. And why not? Why should animals conform to human ideals or indeed be made to behave in human ways? That is why Ritwik hates dogs, their slavering, adoring excess, tailoring their lives to human expectations and emotions. No such rubbish with cats. They do things on their own terms; you like it, fine, you don’t, you can fuck off. There was a letter in the Guardian a few weeks ago that reminded readers: ‘Dogs have owners, cats have staff.’
He is becoming a staff to Anne. No sooner does he think that than he cringes at the bad pun. Oh, well, anyway, he is a support, there is no denying that. In the beginning, while Gavin had explained his duties to him, it had all seemed neat, contained, a job more than anything else: making sure that Mrs Cameron used her stairlift all the time; keeping the bath dry at all times; locking and securing all doors and windows because who knows what miscreants might be targeting the house, knowing a brittle, eighty-six-year-old lady lived there with only a part-time help; feeding the cat; changing Mrs Cameron’s sheets; giving her a warm sponge three times a week; chamber-pot duties; cleaning her after she had messed herself; heating her soup; collecting her winter fuel allowance; trips to the Post Office for monthly collection of state pension . . . The list grew, like something organic, with a breathing, spreading life of its own, but it was manageable. It could be boxed under the broad title of ‘duty’ and that itself limited it.
What he hadn’t been prepared for was the little ambushes tucked away cunningly between the spaces of these boxes. Like the time Anne walked into his room, without knocking, her powder blue nightdress clinging to her bony form like a helpless sail trying to clutch on to something before it was blown away by the lawless winds. In the kind, low light of his bedside lamp, which he always kept on, he noticed there was a conspiratorial look in her hollow eyes, a gleam that could only have been called naughty. And mingling with her normal doughy odour was something else, something floral and sick . . . juniper berries, yes, that was it.
It took him another few seconds to nail down the smell to gin and that too after he had noticed her teetering on the soles of her feet while saying, ‘Boy priest, story time. Story time.’
Almost without thinking, Ritwik looked at the watch on his bedside table. Twenty past two. Did the old bat never sleep? Over the last few months, he had gradually trained himself to be woken up like this, with as little gap as possible between the meshy drag of sleep and awareness, sharp like an instant shard of glass. You couldn’t have the submerging luxury of drowsiness when there could be an eighty-six-year-old lying in a crooked and impossible heap at the bottom of the stairs. But to be woken up by the drunken old bat demanding to be read a story? There were limits. Besides, where the fuck did she get her hands on a bottle of gin?
He swallowed his annoyance. ‘It’s very late. Do you know what time it is?’ It was pointless asking her anything, or having the to and fro of ordinary human interaction through small talk with her. She never answered. In most cases, she probably never even heard the questions from the other side. In the radical innocence of old age, the horizons of her world had become that of an infant’s: very close and devoid of everyone in it except her own self.
‘Priest boy will read a story now. You can choose the book.’
‘How generous of you. Thank you.’ The acid crept up his throat. If Anne heard it, she didn’t say anything. There was always the danger that she registered far more things than she ever let on. Ritwik had found out that Anne clocked things with the beady-eyed sharpness of a bird, bringing them out later, at unexpected and sudden moments, seemingly without motive, but they never failed to unsettle Ritwik deeply. It was like having your bookshelf suddenly break into speech one morning, ‘You don’t really have time for a wank now, why don’t you go down and make
Anne her tea?’
So he did exactly what he was told: he chose the book. He got out of bed, went over to the bookshelf and picked out his Arden edition of Hamlet. Teach her a lesson, this one; let’s see if she ever asks me to read again.
‘Shall we go to my room? Richard shot himself in here. It was his study, you see,’ she said.
Just like that. No warning, no advance preparation, nothing. As if it were as trivial as saying, ‘This room is too dusty, let’s go sit somewhere else.’ Ritwik knew that the questions which swarmed into his mind, like humming locusts, a huge drove of them, would receive no answers, not even the basic one, ‘Who is Richard?’ He filed the comment away, heavy, dangerous, like a bullet, in his head. Like Anne, he would bring it up when least expected, see if surprise led to a chink in this wilful wall.
‘I removed all the pictures and drawings of birds from the house after that. The bloody lot. Gave them away, drove out to a landfill and got rid of the rest,’ she keeps talking to herself.
‘OK, let’s go to your room,’ he said, his voice perfectly modulated, normal. Overnormal. ‘Do you want me to take your arm?’
When they were settled in Anne’s room, with its musty smell of dust, sourish yeast and the new liquid detergent Ritwik had bought last week, he opened the book at random and started reading, his delivery flat, expressionless, as deliberately droning and undramatic as he could make it.
O Hamlet, speak no more.
Thou turn’st my eyes into my very soul,
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.
To this, Hamlet then says,
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty!
Something in the words, some feathery whisper behind this son chiding his mother, his disgust oozing out from the fascinated, sick lump of words he had so lovingly chosen to pin her down, lulled Ritwik into stressing the right syllables, even doing different vocal modulations for Gertrude and Hamlet. He left out his tags, ‘This is the Queen’, ‘Now Hamlet says’, and let the drama tug him away.
O speak to me no more.
These words like daggers enter in my ears.
No more, sweet Hamlet.
Anne’s head was lolling. There were bubbles forming and breaking, accompanied by the rhythmic drone of slight susurration, on her lips. Ritwik stopped, reached for the edge of her counterpane and tried to wipe her mouth. At that very instant, she opened her eyes, pin-sharp, unreadable, and said, ‘Christopher died in India. Malaria. A severe type, they said. That’s why I came back. Richard was in school here. I could hardly live there on my own.’
What on earth was she saying? She was in India? When? Why wait for four months and then mention it? Why not in the very beginning when an Indian person was moving in? Who was Christopher? Which bit of India? When? Why? Was Richard her son? Was Christopher her husband? Would Gavin know? Why hadn’t he said anything?
He continued his reading, leaping over lines because Anne’s words had made him miss pages and he didn’t want to waste time finding the line where she had lobbed her explosive: he didn’t want to give her an excuse to think he was unduly curious about her life.
Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass but my madness speaks . . .
‘We lived first in Delhi and then in Almora. Christopher was with the Forest Commission. You’re not from there, are you? You look different.’
‘No, I’m from Calcutta.’
‘Never went there. I went out there when I was your age. Came back ten years later. Changed something in me. Didn’t like it there, not to begin with. Not even while I was there. But after I came home, for years I went around missing something, not sure quite what. Felt a bit empty. Pale. Make no mistake, I was relieved to be back here. But then, over time, I got bored, I suppose.’
Ritwik kept very quiet. It was like watching a very rare animal come out to drink; if you so much as exhaled, it would immediately bound off, never to be spied again.
‘One of Christopher’s officials was eaten by a tiger. Fancy that. Hoo hoo hoo hoo.’ The laugh was like a high moan of a malicious wind in the pliable top branches. ‘Shouldn’t laugh. But it seems so unbelievable now. Tigers carrying off people. They were doing track repairs to the railway lines, I think.’ Pause. ‘No, I think I’m confusing it with something else. Heavy rains and the whole rail track got flooded. They had to take a boat from Ranikhet. A boat on the railway lines.’ Her voice was becoming faint, she seemed to be losing the thread of her story. She looked distracted.
‘Christopher was born there. Son of an army bigwig, Lieutenant-General or something. His mother was a very unconventional woman. Must have had a lot of steel in her to have broken all the rules in that society. Ran a school for Indian girls. Unimaginable at that time, really. Loved India. Passed it on to her son. You know what they say, India rages like a hectic in your blood’ – the way he started and looked up sharply, the allusion could have been a jet of ice-cold water between his eyes– ‘you have to go back. It does something to you, to your senses, your blood, Christopher used to say. So he went back. Joined the civil service and went back to his first love.’
Ritwik was speechless. He let this torrent of information seep in slowly, then asked, ‘What happened then? Did you meet him in England? And his mother?’
Long pause.
‘Could you keep an eye on the fat sparrow and see Ugo doesn’t go near it?’ There, the curtains had come down again.
‘It will be difficult to do that.’
And then, like the curl of a whip lashing out, ‘You don’t have a mother, do you?’
Nothing will wrongfoot him, nothing will make him pause. ‘No.’ Brief, like the truth.
‘So he’s going mad and making all sorts of wild accusations about his mother. Go on then, why did you stop?’
O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.
He says,
O throw away the worser part of it
And live the purer with the other half.
Good night . . .
His voice was a straight, grey road, monotonous and vistaless. He read the words without managing to get to the meanings behind them. When he lifted up his burning face next, at the sound of a gentle purr, Anne’s head was twitching on the pillow, gently pumelled by unknown dreams. He sat there for a while, waiting for the rhythm of her snoring to calm him down, and then turned the light off. Ugo had come in unheard and was rubbing himself against him, purring so loudly that Ritwik was half-convinced he had some pulmonary illness. He picked the cat up and gently left the room. Ugo could come and curl up on his duvet while his fingers gently kneaded the creature’s thick orange pelt.
He turns off his bedside lamp: the sky outside has lightened enough. Another twenty minutes of snoozing, then he will have to go about his morning duties – tea and biscuits for Anne, cleaning out the chamber pot, washing her. As he is about to drift off, there is a shuffling outside his door. Seconds later, Anne walks in – she never knocks – and asks, ‘What does “enseamed” mean?’ She gives the word three syllables.
Ritwik flails about in his head for a bit, then remembers exactly what she is referring to. He says, ‘Greasy. Drenched in animal fat and, by extension, disgusting things exuded from the body.’ He toys with the idea of saying something more about Hamlet’s obsession with his mother having sex but decides there is no need.
She appears not to take notice of what he has said. ‘Come into my room, I want to show you something. Come. Don’t make any noise.’ She beckons with her right hand, like a witch trying to lure a child into her cottage.
Anne leads him to the window looking out into the garden. ‘Look at the horse chestnut tree. Somewhere in the middle. Do you see what I see?’
Ritwik has spent a lot of hours in t
he summer disciplining the garden – weeding, uprooting, cutting down and even burning the more recalcitrant unwanteds, mowing the grass down to a stubble with the lawnmower borrowed from Mr Haq. It doesn’t look good – it is still not a garden – but it isn’t a contained bit of jungle any more. The three trees – the ceanothus, the lime tree and the horse chestnut – look grand and imposing in the bare space. Right now, the tops of the two big trees are beginning to get tipped with the morning.
In the wet, pewtery light, it takes Ritwik a few seconds to find the exact area that has drawn her interest but when he does, he wonders how he could have missed it. Sitting on the middle branches are a pair of improbable birds, each no bigger than a small pigeon but with red breast and stomach and a regally curving swoop of lustrous green fantail, long, elegant and utterly out of this world, Ritwik thinks. They couldn’t be real. And then he notices the small sparrowy head of one of them move jerkily. As if in response, its companion shifts clunkily sideways on the branch.
Anne is speaking and when he manages to listen to her equally improbable words, he doesn’t know which amazes him more, what she is saying or the presence of these magical birds. ‘Quetzals, I think. Though I may be wrong, my eyesight isn’t exactly perfect. Trogonidae. The genus name is Pharomachrus. Found only in the mountain forests of southern Mexico and Panama.’
Ritwik is rooted to the ground, unblinking in his gaze. He wants to let the images of the birds sink into the deeper lairs of his head and hold them there forever because he knows they are going to disappear soon, very soon, but this sudden discovery of the ornithologist in Anne distracts him. He is ashamed to discover his unquestioned assumption that an eighty-six-year-old should have no interests, should remember nothing from the heydays of her life, but should be content only to count the last hours off in infirmity, dependence and mindlessness.
Anne breaks the rapt silence. ‘They are never found in these parts of the world. What are they doing here?’
A Life Apart Page 21