The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  The rising of Mull Standish to the occasion of tragedy, though unsurprising to those who know him, is nonetheless an example to all. Emerging dry-eyed from his cottage-hospital grief, he dedicates himself to the welfare of the living. In the weeks that follow, the fevered energy with which he locates and hires the finest available treatment for Waldo is a marvel to behold. Waldo will recover from his physical injuries. For several years after that he will benefit from the attention of a team of specialists thanks to whose efforts he will be able to resume a limited, but surprisingly contented, existence in the world.

  Yul Singh’s men follow Standish’s orders. Ormus Cama is taken to a white house on a hill overlooking the Thames, a house at whose open French windows white curtains blow in the breeze, to be cared for by his mother. Thus one rift in the world at least is on the way to being healed. Spenta receives her broken child with loud cries of self-reproach, spends a rapid fortune to set up a state-of-the-art sanatorium in the sunny and spacious old orangery, and resolves to nurse Ormus back to health with her own hands, positioning herself constantly by his bedside, although exhaustion obliges her, from time to time, to snatch a few hours’ sleep. Lord Methwold is recently dead, peacefully, in his sleep, deceased without issue, and his wife is the sole—and uncontested—beneficiary of his impressive will. This country mansion is now hers; also the town house at Campden Hill Square, the healthy bank accounts, the substantial holdings in gilts and blue-chip equities. A real stash, in sum. The former Lady Spenta Cama has received the news of her good fortune as an admonition from god. To be suddenly rich in worldly goods is to understand the nature of her deeper impoverishment. Of her three sons, one is in jail for murder, a second has been despatched (oh, callous mother!) to a nursing home, so as not to trouble her aged spouse. The youngest has long been estranged from her, thinking himself unloved; now he’s badly hurt. She, who believes herself devout, has failed in her souls duty.

  Secretly, away from the failing Methwold, she has been tuning in to Radio Freddie, keeping in touch with her son through his work. The station’s closure has been hard to bear: it is a second parting, a second rupture. Her letter to Ormus, maudlin and full of apologies, addressed to him in care of the pirate station, arrives in Standish’s hand on the day of the singer’s ill-fated car journey. So it is Standish whose intervention returns Ormus to the bosom of his family. (Virus Cama is home too, liberated from his captivity by his stepfather’s demise.)

  This service nobly performed, Mull Standish returns to London, to Wandsworth Crematorium, for it is time to burn his son.

  At the crematorium, he leans on his cane, closes his eyes, at once sees the great fire-jets billow around the young man’s body, cleansing him of himself. Though he is an American and has lived an intensely American life, Mull does not weep. Opens his eyes. Antoinette Corinth and She, their arms around each other, are dabbing at kohl-blurred faces under their black lace veils. More than dialogue is dead now. Standish closes his eyes again and sees Waldo Crossley’s future. Waldo, made foolish by the accident, smiles sweetly at autumn leaves as he spears them upon a blustery parterre. Above which, looking down at him from the windows of a large white house, is Ormus’s mother. Who wishes nothing more than to make eternal reparation for a lifetime of poor mothering. Who will care for Waldo as if he too were her beloved child.

  It’s over. No more weeping. Standish moves across the aisle to speak quietly to his ex-wife. It’s my belief that this is your work, he says, mildly. I didn’t think you could do it, but now I’m sure you did. I can’t imagine how great the burden of your hatred must be. I can’t conceive of carrying so much poison in your heart for so very long. The killing of your children to spite their father. It’s like something out of a book.

  You loved them and they came to love you. Her voice is ice. Her teeth glitter maliciously. That is what gives me the greatest comfort, and pleasure.

  Murderess, he says. Infanticide. May the gods blast your life, he says.

  She turns on him. They were disturbed boys ever since you abandoned them. For years now they’ve been doing whatever it takes to escape the truth. Namely, that their faggot father fucked off fast. When they were kids they’d eat a can of boot polish if they thought it would bring them an hour’s escape. They’d drink cough medicine by the quart. Glue, pills, bloody plastic-bag erections, that’s what was happening, so Mull, don’t you fucking start with me. Then you showed up like god almighty, gave them a job, finally decided to love the little bastards. That really drove them to drink and everything else. Needle time. Or hadn’t you noticed. But then you close down the station, you take it away from them, and you even let the poor runts see that you love some other shitbag more than them. You just don’t get it. You never did get it. They were terrified of you, terrified that you were about to fuck off again. Out of their heads with fear. That just after they started loving you, you’d hightail it with your Indian prince.

  He will not let her see him tremble; controls himself; accuses her again.

  You prepared the picnic, he says. You planned to kill them all.

  Or, she counters, they put the stuff in there themselves. To die and take your lover boy with them. Poor darlings. They couldn’t even get that right.

  Mull Standish waits alone for the ashes. Hawthorne’s ashes are his own life. Decisions must be made: to be or not to be. You face up to life, you give it your best shot, you approach it with all the openness and humanity you have, and you get this. One boy in a fake Greek urn, the other a shell without a self. This isn’t what was supposed to happen.

  He enfolds the urn in his arms and kisses and kisses it. This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.

  The small galaxy that is passing through the larger galaxy of my story is being torn apart, destroyed. Antoinette Corinth and She close down The Witch and leave for the Pacific coast of Mexico, dressed in fiery tropical colours, exchanging dark silence for brilliant light and noise. No charges are contemplated against them. It is for each of us to decide which truth we choose to follow: the truth of tragedy, of story, Standish’s Medean truth, or Antoinette’s accusatory version, or the more sober truth of the Law. Innocent till proved guilty, and so on.

  Either way, it’s not much good to Hawthorne and Waldo.

  Soon after the women’s departure there is a fire in Unfold Road and the store burns down. Arson is suspected but not proven, and after a delay the insurance companies pay up. Mr. Tommy Gin, as the principal backer, receives the lion’s share of the payout, but a cheque of appreciable size is sent to the beautiful seaside resort of Zopilote in the Mexican province of Oaxaca, on the Golfo de Tehuantepec. The cheque is cashed, but no further news of Antoinette Corinth and her companion, She, is received. They have, for the moment, vanished into an impenetrable elsewhere, into which this story cannot go.

  Certain patterns recur, seem inescapable. Fire, death, uncertainty. The carpet whipped out from under us to reveal a chasm where the floor should have been.

  Disorientation. Loss of the East.

  During the later stages of the so-called lost years, after his emergence from the long coma, Ormus Cama will for a time keep an occasional journal, a haphazard thing littered with automatic writing, crazytalk, “poetry,” visions, conversations with the dead, and many ideas for songs.

  In one of the earliest entries, he will describe a hallucination experienced in the back seat of the fateful Mini Cooper, in all probability just before the encounter with the fertiliser truck:

  The top of my head was open, just blown apart as if by an explosion, and he climbed out and ran away. Now he doesn’t come to see me any more, because why would he, he’s free, he’s not running through the corridors and staircases of the casino looking for a way out, he’s escaped, he’s out there somewhere. If you meet him, remember he’s not me. He just looks that way. He’s not me.

  And this is another early entry:

  Vina I know you better now. My darling I have met your lethal mother. I have faced her
other, and survived.

  11

  HIGHER LOVE

  In the early days, before the orangery sanatorium is ready, Ormus is placed in Spenta’s own bed, attached to drips and monitors. This part of the house is old and flaky, like the England out of which it was born. A fine rain of plaster dust settles slowly on Ormus’s cheeks. Spenta at his bedside brushes the pale flecks away with a paisley-patterned silk cloth. Virus Cama, back home again, sits with his hands resting softly on his knees in a corner of the master bedroom, on a carved folding chair in black teak, a chair that was once used by a travelling Collector in what is now Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, on his journeys along the Wainganga and into the Seeonee hills. Spenta regards her broken sons, Sleep and Silence, bows her head, and resolves for the one hundred and first time to make it up to these lost boys, to heal them with belated love. It is not, must not be, too late for redemption: theirs and her own. She prays to her angels but they no longer answer. Her sons are her only angels now.

  But Cyrus, she mourns dumbly. For Cyrus, it is too late.

  Memorabilia of British India are all around. A mirrorwork chhatri hangs over a long-armed recliner chair. Company school pictures, hand-coloured Daniell engravings. A silver tea service, a stone godhead, photographs of great days spent shooting birds and beasts, a tiger rug, stone boxes with silver bidri inlay work, an itr-seller’s perfume chest, a harmonium, carpets, cloths. A framed letter from Morgan Forster describing oddly echoing caves in the side of a scrubby hill.

  The Indian nurse arrives.

  It is only some while later, after Spenta has remembered who she is and where she has seen her before, that they realize nobody can recall letting her in. She seems to materialize from nowhere, hovering solicitously behind Spenta and Standish, wearing a pristine starchy uniform in pale blue and white, with a small watch pinned at her breast. The agency sent me, she says vaguely, busying herself with sheets and towels and reading the chart hooked over the foot of the comatose singers bed. Spenta and Standish are at a low ebb. Exhaustion and shock have taken their toll, so that even when Virus Cama gets up from his Collector’s chair to tug worriedly at his mother’s sleeve Spenta just shrugs him off and slumps down with her head in her hands. Standish, too, is on the point of collapse, having barely slept since the catastrophe. The Indian nurse turns down the lights in the master bedroom and takes charge with a competence that brooks no argument. She is a good-looking girl, well spoken, knowledgeable about the leading families of Bombay society. She tells Spenta about her time with the Sisters of Maria Gratiaplena, though, she hastens to add, she herself is no nun. It is perhaps because of this reference that Spenta, whose thoughts are much abstracted, begins to call the newcomer Maria, a name to which she readily answers. Rest, Maria says, and Standish and Spenta troop meekly out, followed by Virus Cama, who keeps looking over his shoulder at the nurse and shaking his greying head.

  When she is alone with sleeping Ormus, the nurse begins to talk to him in a voice full of smoke and longing. At last, my love. Though it is not our beautiful little nook in Worli, still it will do, for wherever you lie, that place is my palace and so on, whatever bed contains your body is my only desired resting place et cetera, and even when you die my love I will follow you into your grave, into it and beyond, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

  Then she goes on to remind the unconscious man of their past lovemaking, the many wonderful things they have done together, those supreme proofs of their passion, athleticism and flexibility, to say nothing of the sensual powers of certain natural oils. Her long oration is an erotic masterwork that would be lost to posterity were it not for the Grundig tape deck which Mull Standish has installed beneath Ormus’s bed just in case he should return briefly to consciousness and say something, anything, during his manager’s and his mother’s simultaneous absence from the room. Ormus stays silent, but the thin brown tape phlegmatically absorbs everything Maria has to say, eavesdropping on her intimacies just as those other, fictitious tapes listened in on the imaginary “President Nixon” in the novel The Watergate Affair. And at a certain point she moves on from reminiscence to action, she describes to the unknowing Ormus in explicit detail how she plans to rouse him from his slumbers by arousing his carnal desires, there is a clink of glass containers, then the slippery sounds of oil-slathered hands moving across one another and applying themselves to the sleeping figure.

  The sound quality on the tape is good. Anyone listening to it can easily picture Maria as she climbs on to the bed (mattress noises), and because the human imagination all too easily runs away with its suppositions, I must move on quickly to the clearly recorded sound of a door flying open, and the horrified voices of Spenta and Standish as they burst in, Spenta having finally summoned up the memory of the nympho on the plane to London.

  They order the Indian nurse to get off, get dressed and get out, because how dare she, is she so wholly lacking in the faintest scrap of decency, they will see her disbarred from nursing duties, she should cover her breasts at once, yes, and her pudenda too, and above all she should stop laughing, stop it this minute, this is no laughing matter, in five seconds’ time they are going to send for the police.

  Her laughter fills the tape as she leaves the room.

  Ormus remains asleep; dormant and, in spite of all Maria’s ministrations—so the story goes—still soft.

  She keeps showing up. Ormus is moved to the new facility in the orangery and the next night she’s there. Spenta goes to the toilet for a minute and returns to find Maria, naked except for a black veil, bending over Ormus’s exposed sex, the movements of her ample mouth half concealed by gauze. She really is very beautiful, very wanton and very mad, Spenta thinks, but that doesn’t explain how the girl got inside. Spenta gives orders for a constant vigil to be maintained, a guard is posted, dogs are unleashed in the nocturnal grounds. Still Maria finds a way in. One night Standish is on duty, reading the latest Yossarian to help him through the night, and in spite of the writer’s comic genius he nods off for, he thinks, no more than a couple of minutes. When he awakes he is startled to find her there, fully materialized, oiled, veiled and naked, in spite of the hounds and the locked grilles and the beam-operated alarm system: and this time she is actually straddling Ormus, bouncing vigorously up and down, riding his soft cock horse. You’ll never keep me away from him, she crows. I am his destiny, his private need and so on. That woman (she means Vina) can never give him what he wants, but I know what he desires better than he, I give it to him before he knows he’s going to ask for it et cetera. I come from his secret world.

  Who are you, Standish demands, blinking. He is heavy with sleep, and he’s also wearing his reading glasses, so that everything more than nine inches away looks blurry and unreal.

  As he tries to focus on her, she disappears. A crack seems to open in the air itself, and she steps through it and is gone.

  The human capacity for rationalization is a thing of wonder. It enables us to disbelieve the evidence of our own eyes. Since what Standish has fuzzily seen is impossible, he concludes that he has not seen it. She must have slipped out the door while he was still dozy, he concludes. He gets up and looks, but she’s gone. Standish notes the further failure of the security system and suspects an inside job. The crazy girl is probably buying the favours of some staff member, a gardener, a handyman. Someone is smuggling her in and being rewarded, no doubt, with some of that sexual action with which she makes so free. It must be looked into. Meanwhile, no real harm done. Standish returns to his book.

  Peacefully, Ormus sleeps on.

  Mull Standish, a contemporary man, looks for answers in the everyday. Spenta just as naturally turns towards the paranormal, fears a haunting and summons Parsi priests from London and the local Anglican vicar. Fire ceremonies and exorcisms are sonorously performed. After these rites there are periods, often very extended, when the Indian woman fails to manifest herself. For these absences, as for her presences, no explanation is given; Spenta, however, gives the
credit to the servants of Ahura Mazda and the Christian God.

  Then Maria appears again, and the whole cleansing ritual is renewed.

  There are days when Spenta feels mortally afraid. Deserted by angels, she fears she and her family may now have fallen prey to demons. At such moments she looks to Mull Standish for comfort. Always immaculately groomed, expensively tricked out in silk-collared camel coat or raffishly cigar-chewing in mink, Standish in these agonizing times still stands foursquare on the unsteady earth, a well-planted man, a tree that has no plans to fall any time soon. His calm tones, his gravitas, his sleek hair: these things reassure Spenta, and a gleam comes into her eye, though she is seven years his senior and can have no realistic expectations. Still, she pays greater attention to her appearance, she lowers her eyelashes, she flirts. Standish, noting the advent of an unrequitable love, has grown fond enough of Spenta to let her dream.

  For all his apparent solidity these are years of misfortune for Mull Standish. The sudden collapse of a Newark office block for which one of his U.S. subsidiaries supplied cooling systems has been followed by a more general erosion of confidence in his construction business. Due to the end of his liaison with “Sam Tropicana,” his erstwhile lover’s family is determinedly putting the poor mouth on him, and New York’s City Hall has started frowning on his projects and tenders. The IRS irregularities have been squared, but only after the payment of arrears plus a punitive fine. In Britain the end of the pirate phase has done more than financial harm; it has removed some essential excitement from his life. He has wound up his record label and makes his bread and butter, nowadays, from investments in rental property shrewdly acquired during the pirates’ boom years.

  Naturally, like any dynamic entrepreneur, and there can be no doubt of the Tightness of that description, he continues to have his schemes and dreams. Hippies in Sloane Square sell yo-yos that light up as they rise and fall. He has a piece of this action, also in much else that is gimcrack and union-jacked and over-priced and sold in Carnaby Street. His gift for what marketing men call gap analysis has led him to launch a listings service, Where It’s At, which begins as a poor folded sheet guiding the young to pleasures both mainstream and “alternative” and quickly grows into a money-spinning weekly magazine. For ordinary mortals, this slate of activities would be proof of robust health, and robustness is the quality Standish—still, in his early fifties, an indefatigable powerhouse of a fellow—works hardest to project. However, he is a man with a broken heart. If he is to be compared to a great tree, then there is something decaying at its core. One day, without warning, it may suddenly fall. Only then will passers-by be able to see the sickness, and understand.