by Olivia
"Well, of course it is, but Estelle doesn't see it that way." Olivia further pressed home her advantage. "And in her pique, she's taking it out on poor Aunt Bridget, who's at her wit's end. I think you should find some time to have a talk with her, Uncle Josh."
"Who, Bridget?"
"No, Estelle. She's set her heart on this pantomime, Uncle Josh. I know Aunt Bridget objects strenuously, but it's really quite innocuous. Maybe you could persuade Aunt Bridget to let Estelle have her way. You see," she hauled in a breath and plunged into a detailed description of the problem on both sides, noting that through her recital her uncle listened with undivided attention. She finished and then sat back to wait for his comments, since he appeared to be giving the matter some thought.
After a long while he looked up. "He's turned us down, you know," was all he said.
"What. . .?" It took a moment for Olivia to understand the drift of his remark and realise that it had nothing to do with what she had said. She breathed in deeply and sighed. "Your proposal?"
"Yes. We got his formal refusal this morning."
So, Arvind Singh had not gone against his friend's wishes after all! "Does the consortium plan to better the offer?"
"The consortium!" He gave a snort of disgust. "A bunch of liver-faced goons scared of their own behinds! No, the consortium is not prepared to better the offer, but it no longer matters." He suddenly smiled. "There is more than one way of catching a monkey, my dear, more than one."
There was no point now in reviving the matter of Estelle and her pantomime. Sir Joshua's attention was no longer available, if it ever had been. She would have to wait for another opportune moment to broach the topic again. It was doubtful if in his present mood of rabid disappointment and anger he would consider favourably the idea of indulging his daughter's dramatic aspirations.
Without her knowledge, her deferment of the paltry matter was the second worst decision Olivia was to make in her life. The worst would come tomorrow.
At last, at last, it was the day of the immersions!
Estelle had returned scandalously late last night and a flaming row had ensued between mother and daughter at the breakfast table after Sir Joshua had left for work. Since, with deliberate disobedience, Estelle had stalked out of the house again today, no doubt another fireworks display would follow to enliven the dinner table tonight. Weighted down by her own anxieties and her almost intolerable feeling of suspense, Olivia no longer cared one way or the other. The morning had passed in completing Wuthering Heights, and in the afternoon she had somehow forced herself to sleep, but once the nap was over and she had had tea with her aunt, after which Lady Bridget went visiting, the hours dragged by as if anchored down with millstones. For a while Olivia played with Clementine, a sadly neglected little pup these days, then she did some weeding in the garden and mentally plotted her escape route from the house for the hundredth time. Then, for no reason other than that her nerves screamed for relief and her mind for diversion, she wandered idly into the servants' compound. What she saw this time horrified her.
Under the cloak of darkness and the camouflage of the hectic gaiety and lights and colour last night, she had not noticed the squalor. What she observed now in daylight was the appalling deprivation and degradation that had lain beneath the veneer. Garbage heaps, scattered and putrefying, stank to high heaven. On either side of the court-yard there were open drains clogged with filthy slime and attracting a million flies and cockroaches. The quarters themselves were like ruins after a battle, with doors hanging loose and, in the walls, gaping holes that had been carelessly stuffed with gunny sacking and rags to keep out the rains. There were patches of green dampness everywhere and the stench was foul. The litter from last night had been swept aside but with enough apathy to leave plenty of residue. But what shocked Olivia most were the children, hordes of them, rummaging enthusiastically within the rot, their skinny limbs like sticks, their ribs showing in relief above their unhealthy pot-bellies, and their skin in some cases covered with open sores. How was it that she had never seen them, not one, out in the open before? Did they live hidden in the brickwork like the cockroaches . . .?
Olivia felt sickened. And angry. Why were these people satisfied to live in such cesspools? If the Templewoods didn't give a jot for those who served them with diligence, could the servants not bestir themselves to improve their lot with their own hands? At home Olivia had seen plenty of squalor in the tenements of New York and Chicago, but it was understood that everyone worked hard to get out of that situation, to move on in the world, to do better and ever better for themselves and their families. Why, even the cattle at home had more decent accommodations! With the grim intention of collaring one of the sweepers, Olivia marched boldly into the quarter nearest to her, watched all around by silent, wondering eyes. The room into which she stepped was dark and reeked of dampness, for it was without even a window. Eventually her eyes discerned a huddled form lying on the bare brick floor riddled with rat burrows. Sitting beside the huddled form was a boy of about ten. As Olivia entered, the form stirred and tried to rise; she saw that it was an old woman.
"What is wrong with her?" Olivia asked in improvised Hindustani.
"She is sick."
"I can see that! Is she taking any medicines? Do you know what it is that ails her?"
The boy shrugged. "There is no point. She will be dead soon."
Shaking with frustration, Olivia was about to argue when she felt a presence behind her and, lightly, a hand touched her arm. It was Babulal. "Come, missy mem," he said solemnly, "this no place for you. Lady mem very angry, she no like you come here."
Olivia felt another surge of anger but couldn't find the words for it. In any case, Babulal had spoken in his pidgin English and, suddenly, it was like a snub, a slap in her face. What he was trying to tell her was that this was their world, not hers; and in it she was not welcome any more than they were in hers. Or, at least, that is how Olivia interpreted it in her silent rage. Without another word she turned and allowed him to lead her back to the garden. She felt suffocated and helpless—rage against whom? Against the Templewoods for being so uncaring? Against these wretched people for accepting these inequities without lifting either a voice or a finger? Against herself for never having even spared them a thought at all? It was all so hopeless anyway. For a while Olivia's depression persisted. Haunted by what she had seen in that miserable quarter, she brooded and tried to think of a solution. But only for a while. Then, as the clock ticked away the remainder of the evening, she remembered something her father had once told her: "The world is full of cruelty, injustice, tragedy. If you can do something about it, do it; if not, don't add insult to injury with armchair sympathy."
Pragmatism, or convenient amnesia? There was no time now for Olivia to philosophise. The clock that had been such a sluggard all day seemed now to positively race ahead as dinner came and went. Sir Joshua's meal, as had become the custom, was dispatched to his office in a tiffin box. Estelle did not appear at the dinner table, being not yet home, and Lady Bridget toyed with her food in grim silence as she ripened for another fight. As soon as she could excuse herself with decency, Olivia ran up to her room to prepare for her nocturnal adventure.
The hands of the clock finally showed half past eleven. Heart thundering against her ribs with sledge-hammer force, Olivia sat on her bed and waited. Dressed in practical outdoor clothes and boots, she tapped her foot impatiently on the floor, watching the clock face almost without blinking. Lady Bridget was by now hopefully fast asleep, having long given up waiting for either her daughter or her husband and having perforce to defer the battle royal till the morning. Suddenly on the staircase outside, a floor board creaked and then there was silence. Olivia exhaled with a relieved whoosh; evidently her cousin had finally decided to come home. Another fifteen minutes, she said to herself, to give Estelle time to settle in. Holding her breath, Olivia waited. Ten minutes to go, five . . .
The door of her room opened abruptly and
Estelle walked in. "I'm glad you're still awake, Olivia. I must talk to you about something important." She walked to a chair by the window and sat down.
Olivia's thundering heart crashed into her sturdy outdoor boots as she tried desperately to fold her feet under the bed. Oh sweet heavens, not now, not now . . .! Couldn't the selfish, thoughtless, irresponsible girl have returned earlier? All at once she was seized by a blind, unreasoning fury. "I'm sorry, Estelle," she ground out, not troubling to conceal her anger, "but I was just about to go to bed, and I'm extremely sleepy. Can't it wait until the morning?"
Estelle hesitated.
"Look, Estelle, if it's about the pantomime, I've already stirred the subject with Uncle Josh. He's . . . he's thinking about it, but tomorrow ..."
"It's not about the pantomime."
Something in Estelle's tone silenced Olivia as she took note of the faded pallor, the swollen eyes and the rigid stance that made her back as stiff as a ramrod. Olivia felt another flash of irritation: Oh, damn! The silly girl had gone and done something really unmentionable with that Smithers boy . . .
But then the clock on the landing chimed. Midnight! Did the immersions continue after midnight? What if Bahadur decided that she wasn't coming after all and left? What if Jai tired of the wait and decided likewise and she missed seeing him altogether? She panicked and, grabbing her cousin by the shoulders, urged her up from the chair.
"To tell you the truth, Estelle, my head is bursting with one of those wretched migraines or a cold or ... or something. I can hardly keep my eyes open, see? If I don't go to sleep at once I fear I shall faint, collapse . . . and I won't be able to concentrate on what you're saying . . ." Incoherently, she babbled a string of excuses, the words tumbling out of her mouth in a jumble as she almost pushed Estelle towards the door. "Tomorrow, Estelle, tomorrow I promise. We'll talk all day if you like and all night too, I promise ..."
For a moment Estelle stared at her in surprise and hurt, then she shrugged. "Very well. Tomorrow then. Do forgive me for having intruded on your time, my understanding Coz. Good night."
Estelle's sarcasm Olivia didn't even notice in her immense relief at her departure. She saw nothing else but the clock as she waited ten more interminable minutes; then she could wait no longer. She removed her shoes to hold them in a hand, locked the door of her room behind her as quietly as she could, tiptoed down the stairs praying that her uncle didn't choose that very moment to return home, and ran into the formal dining-room. Five minutes later—through the downstairs parlour, the billiards room and that back window she knew never did latch properly—she was flying down the vegetable garden path at the rear of the house, over the low wall and down the main road to the corner. Concealed by the dappled shadows of a giant peepul tree stood Jai Raventhorne's carriage. Next to it, patiently, waited Bahadur. With a small cry of relief, Olivia flung herself inside through the door Bahadur quickly opened for her and collapsed against the upholstery. She had already forgotten everything, everything else in the world that existed, save Jai Raventhorne.
Olivia did not think of Estelle again that night.
There was no way Olivia could have known then as the carriage sped away through the dark to meet the man who was her destiny that her summary dismissal of Estelle was the worst mistake she was ever to make in her life. And the price she was to pay for it was exorbitant, more exorbitant than she could ever have imagined.
CHAPTER 9
Olivia could barely recognise him.
At the jetty to which the carriage bore her, the Dassera moon seemed to douse the world in its cold white light, making it eerily phosphorescent. Dancing silver shards slashed the black of the river; small breezes gusted like spurts from invisible bellows. Chained to a post of the wooden planked wharf awaited a longboat from the Ganga, identified by a winking metal trident on her prow. Beside it stood a strangely unfamiliar figure in cream silken dhoti and kurta, both edged finely with gold. A woollen shawl, embroidered and tasselled, was draped over one shoulder. Under a luminous moon his ebony hair glistened, smoothed back from his forehead with rare meekness to follow the curve of his arrogant head and curl upended at the nape. He was barefooted.
Tangled within her throat, Olivia's breath knotted further. In the delusion that she could recall every line and crease of his face, each contour of his sinewed body, she sometimes forgot just how compelling Jai Raventhorne's appearance could be. Tonight he looked patrician, a zamindar, scion of some aristocratic dynasty. Smiling a little, she told him so as, unspeaking, he helped her into the longboat. "A man of two worlds," she breathed, settling comfortably in a cushioned seat.
"Or of neither!"
Opposite her, his face was shadowed but she sensed that he did not smile. She was disappointed that they were not to be on their own. Somehow she had assumed it would be as always. But as the oarsmen started their smooth rhythms in the water and the longboat started to move to midstream, she discarded the small disappointment as ungracious. Jai Raventhorne sat no more than a foot or two away from her. She could taste him with her eyes, hear the muted undulations of his breath and the crisp rustle of his silk. Even untouching, she could feel his pulse as if it were her own beneath the warmth of a skin she almost shared with him. It was enough.
"Where are we going?"
"To Shiriti Ghat. The immersions are best seen from the river." He noticed the slight shiver she gave and frowned. "Why didn't you think to bring a shawl?"
Snugly clad in a thick tweed skirt and a long-sleeved woollen blouse, she had considered that she would be sufficiently warm, but the damp gusts decreed otherwise. "I did but I forgot when . . ." She stopped. Domestic problems would be of no interest to him and, in any case, they were not to be discussed with others. "When I left the house. I think I'd make a terrible burglar. I almost fainted with nervousness."
He made no return nor did he smile. He merely removed his shawl to arrange it carefully about her shoulders. In the shadows she searched for his eyes in a face that gleamed like bleached wood, but they told her nothing. She was touched suddenly by a vague unease; tonight she could not fathom his mood, for it seemed altogether unreadable. He was tense, this much she could discern, although his taciturnity was not motivated by indifference, she assessed. His invisible eyes, darting like fish, Olivia was certain, were missing nothing, not a single nuance of her own thoughts. Even so she felt warm in his vision, physically cosy in the embrace of a shawl that was of the softest pashmina. Against her cheek it was like a caress. Discarding her unease Olivia smiled.
"Do you perform the Durga rituals in your home?" However well read he might be in philosophy he had never struck her as a man of religion.
"Yes."
"Because of piety?" she asked, surprised.
"Because it is expected." By Sujata, she wondered? But then she remembered that Sujata no longer lived in his house. He sensed her question. "By my staff, those who crew the ships and work in my office, people of the neighbourhood too poor to raise their own altars." He shrugged. "Anyone else who wishes to worship." There was no mention of friends or family, but then he had none.
"The worship itself—does it mean anything to you?"
"No. I have neither a vote of thanks to offer the gods nor a shopping list for future favours. My destiny is my own."
As it always did, his cynicism wounded her. The isolation he cultivated so savagely made her heart ache, and once more she yearned to storm the citadels of his merciless privacy. In America she had sometimes met men who were also alone—drifters, lone riders, solitary homesteaders, ranchers in the remote wilderness who called no one family and no place truly home. Jai's isolation, however, was excessively cruel, for he lacked nothing that money could buy and everything that it could not. Who was the father who had abandoned him without leaving even a name? Had Jai ever sought him out, missed him, thirsted for that paternal affection that was every son's due? And his mother, that unfortunately ravished woman—had she never resented the child thrust into her womb by a
fate that was callous? Was she really dead? That unknown father—was he dead? Or, perhaps, was he still living unconcerned in some distant land unaware that across the oceans existed a son who might bear his face even if he did not his name? And from which parent had he inherited his astonishing eyes?
"Don't dwell on irrelevancies, Olivia!" He burrowed inside her huddled thoughts as infallibly as ever. "Think of nothing except what you are about to see. There is a reason."
A reason! Unease, this time needle pointed, threaded through her veins. Her initial instinct had not been wrong; she knew now she had cause for that unease but could not decipher what, and she was frightened. Her ache, her acute need now to be held against that inaudible heart that seemed to beat so calmly within reach of her fingers, intensified into a torrent of longing, but she swallowed it. Even a foot away he was so far removed, so inexorably padlocked within the cavernous vaults of his unattainable mind, that she did not dare to intrude. Yet, Olivia knew that he felt everything she felt, breathed with the same breath as she, sensed accurately every one of her longings but deliberately without reaction.
"Observe," he said gently. That was all.
Like a wayward pup commanded to heel, she obeyed. And observed.
They had entered a stretch of the river where the bank to their right pulsated with life. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, thronged the shore, now so close to the longboat that Olivia could see their features clearly illuminated by the torches that flamed everywhere. Rumbling rolls of drums, regular and rhythmic, floated across the waters. Within their primitive cadences they seemed to carry esoteric messages decipherable only by the aware. The air around them reverberated with chants and wails, disembodied voices rising and falling like the tides of the sea under the baton of the winds. The longboat inched closer towards the undulating river bank, the sinuous movements of the oarsmen now as smooth as those of a serpent.
In rhythm with the drums, Olivia's heartbeats syncopated. She watched in awe-struck silence, prickles of fear playing her spine like a keyboard. They were now near enough to the river bank to be able to pick out details of the images being readied for immersion and extinction. The images were carried on platforms borne on men's shoulders, bare and black against the shining white of their long dhotis and short loin-cloths, an army of unearthly-looking creatures engaged in vital communal enterprise. Carefully, lovingly, the images were balanced between two boats waiting side by side in the water. Wading in waist deep, the men pushed the boats farther out into the mainstream with eager arms. A boatman with a long pole gently separated the boats from each other. For an instant, just an instant, the images teetered and seesawed, and then, as the boats sailed apart, they fell clumsily into the water. The ritual was repeated with the remaining images, and each time, a hushed wail of triumph stirred among the crowd and then died again. Having completed their duties, the waders returned to the bank.