The Death of Mr Love, page 16
‘See you there!’ she said gaily and was gone, leaving me still uttering expressions of disbelief, watching the cling and swing of her skirt as she walked away.
Now there was a little drama. The Srinujis, who had come by bus, were proposing to walk the couple of miles to Chelsea, and had to be asked, pressed and finally begged, before they would agree to what they had wanted all along, which was to ride with us. So, ushered into the limousine by its egg-stained chauffeur we set off through the vast cemetery, its starfish avenues of lachrymose statuary spinning around us, the living at the hub of a giant wheel of death. ‘Our lives are governed by patterns which resurface time and time again.’ Ashes to ashes. It was in a graveyard that I had last seen her.
‘Bhalu, you’re trembling,’ said Katy.
I said, ‘I got chilled standing out there.’
But I was, truthfully, in a state of bad shock. Initial joy had given way to contradictory and baffling feelings. An analogy (the effort of a bookseller with eight hours of each day to bury his nose in his stock) might be those curious verses from the Rig Veda where the poet is one moment uplifted, exalted, raving in delight, but the next confesses that, ‘in deep distress I cooked a dog’s intestines.’ By the time we had re-entered the Fulham Road and the real world of London under drizzle, I realised that what I was actually feeling was panic.
From time to time, in London, I would run into someone with whom I’d been at school in India. There were plenty of them in England and I was always amazed at how badly they had aged, a smooth-skinned boy transformed into a corpulent banker, the champion batsman now a labourworn executive with a briefcase perpetually open on his knee. Usually, after the ritual of how-dos, and what-have-yous, there was a period of silent assessment; how well or otherwise have we done vis-à-vis the other? I would explain that I had failed at film production, no, actually walked away from it in disgust after too many boozy years, and was now a happily penniless bookseller. They would smile and say that fulfilment, enjoying one’s work, was the main thing, but one could see them silently giving thanks that they had ended up as somebodies who wore somebody-suits and drove somebody-cars. Suppose Phoebe, once her own euphoria had worn off, saw me as they did, a thin, greying man, in no way remarkable, nothing like the boy who’d climbed waterfalls and shot mangoes out of trees with catapults.
Maya’s flat was full of people. It was the first time I had been there since the night of her death. Apart from the missing bulbuls, everything was as it had been when she was alive. The golden angel still perched on its carved pedestal. Great-grandfather’s butterflies glimmered on the wall. Familiar scent of cobra-jasmine. I peeped into the bedroom, but the bed was neatly made, counterpane smoothed and tucked in at the corners. Someone had put the books back in their shelves and tidied away the photograph albums. It felt as if Maya was out shopping and would be back shortly to welcome all these old friends. I saw Panaghiotis going up to Srinuji with hand outstretched. Beyond them, Piglet, on scrubbed-and-Sunday-best behaviour, was pouring himself a hefty whisky: the first time, and probably the last, that all three would find themselves in the same room. An old lady, a neighbour in the building, came up to offer quavering condolences, but I was only half-listening, looking around the room. Srinuji and Panaghiotis were already deep in conversation. I caught a few incense-scented phrases of Christian consolation. Srinuji was nodding, ever the sage. How stiff and composed Pan looked. What his loss was I could only imagine. He and Maya had been close.
‘Arthritis,’ the old lady said, peering up at me. Why she hadn’t been able to come to the funeral. I must steer her towards Katy and my sisters, who had their heads together, no doubt discussing the mysterious reappearance of Phoebe.
Where was Phoebe? Had she decided not to come? But no, there she was, in the doorway. Smiling. Being greeted by my sister Nina. Exclamations. Mutual surprise, pleasure.
‘It’s been a terrible day,’ the old lady confided. ‘I’ve had to take an extra pill for my knees.’
Phoebe was looking about, she had not yet seen me. Nina was leading her towards Suki and Katy. I had just managed to extricate myself and was making my way across the room when my arm was grasped from behind.
‘A word,’ said a voice in my ear. ‘My kingdom for a word.’
Piglet, wagging his whisky at me.
‘Not now, Piglet.’
‘You’re up to something, friend Bhalu.’
Never in all the years I’d known him had I felt such irritation. I tried to move on, but he was still holding onto my arm.
‘Not so fast, laddie. Who’s your blonde lady chum?’
‘Just someone I knew years ago.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you the dark horse?’
‘An old friend. Haven’t seen her in years.’
I followed his eyes to where Phoebe was standing with my sisters and Katy. They were talking rapidly, in that eager way that women have when they go into conclave. Phoebe had her back to me. She was laughing, shifting her weight from one leg to the other.
‘Seemed rather keen on you.’
‘For heaven’s sake, I haven’t seen her in four decades!’
‘And say,’ declaimed Piglet, ‘what store of parting tears were shed? Thou art an old love-monger!’
‘I had given up hope,’ Phoebe was saying, as we joined them. ‘It was as if you’d vanished off the planet.’ She gave me a bright smile. ‘Mummy was in India just before she died and she tried to find your mother. Then she discovered you’d been in England all along. She was amazed. All those years. Afterwards I tried to trace your mum, but there was no sign of her in the directory.’
‘No, she’s ex-directory,’ said Nina, as if Maya were still alive.
‘They usually tell you that the number exists, before they refuse to give it to you . . .’
‘She’s listed under her maiden name,’ Nina said, still clinging to the present tense.
‘Her maiden name? Why was that?’
‘She would never tell us,’ said my other sister, Suki.
Phoebe said, ‘But we couldn’t find any of you.’
This was not surprising. By 1993 my sisters were both married, and Katy and I were listed as Shaw’s Bookshop. ‘As a matter of fact,’ I interjected, ‘we tried to find you too. Soon after we came to England. Back in the seventies. No sign anywhere.’
‘I was abroad for a long time,’ said Phoebe. ‘Mummy, bless her, never had a phone.’
‘So how did you find us?’ asked Suki.
Katy said, ‘Phoebe read Maya’s name in the Telegraph.’
‘Not the Telegraph,’ said Nina. ‘It must have been The Times, or the Guardian.’
‘Maybe it was The Times,’ said Phoebe.
‘We would have put it in the Telegraph,’ Nina persisted, ‘but we thought no one of Maya’s would see it.’
‘She was kind. I remember her very well,’ said Phoebe. ‘She cared about people. Mummy loved her.’ She raised her wine glass, as if to toast our absent mothers. ‘It’s such a shame they never met again. But I suppose they have by now. Up there having a good gossip about all of us.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Nina. ‘Once we’re dead that’s it.’
In which case, I thought, why can’t you bring yourself to use the past tense?
‘Khattam. Finished,’ said my sister. ‘Maya was right. It’s no good being sentimental. I don’t believe in ghosts.’
‘I believe in ghosts,’ said Phoebe. ‘And in my experience they’re anything but sentimental.’
This caused a short silence. I said, ‘Maya thought people live on through their actions.’
‘Maya was full of nonsense,’ said Nina.
‘It’s hard to believe unless it’s happened to you,’ Phoebe said. ‘Mummy still talks to me, and I wish she wouldn’t.’
The much longer silence that followed was broken by my eleven o’clock chum, who bounded forward, trotter outstretched. ‘Call me Piglet. Everyone does.’
‘Piglet,’ I said. ‘This is Phoebe Killigrew. We last saw her, what, I should think it must be more than thirty-five years ago. Ninu here would have been—’
‘Poor Bhalu, he’s drivelling,’ said Nina quickly. She turned to Phoebe. ‘I don’t remember you very well. I suppose because I was so much younger and you were one of Bhalu’s friends.’
‘More than friends,’ said Phoebe. ‘Bhalu was my hero.’
‘Really?’ said Katy, amazed as only one could be who had lived with me for two decades.
‘Last time I saw him he was a little boy, yet I recognised him at once. The moment I saw him I thought, Yup, that’s my Bhalu.’
Something in the way she said my Bhalu.
‘He used to teach me how to do things. Even nowadays, if there’s something I need a man to do, I often think, I wish I had a Bhalu.’
‘I wish I had that sort of Bhalu,’ Katy said. She looked around the room. ‘Did you say you were married? Is your husband here?’
After a small, uncomfortable pause Phoebe said, ‘Peter couldn’t come. He’s at home. In Yorkshire.’
‘With your children?’
Again the tiny flicker. ‘We have no children.’
Another angel passed overhead.
‘Yorkshire, did you say?’ cried Piglet, once more unto the breach. ‘Whereabouts?’
‘Sorry?’
‘In Yorkshire. Where do you live?’
‘You wouldn’t know it,’ said Phoebe. ‘It’s a tiny place.’
‘I’m sure I shall,’ said Piglet. ‘Our lot’s often on manoeuvres up there. What’s it called?’
‘It’s a tiny place,’ she repeated. ‘Not far from Richmond.’
‘ “Ay, ay, thou wouldst be gone to Richmond. I’ve had pastimes there and pleasant game,” as the Bard never said. Well, did say, but not quite like that. I know Richmond. We did a Bosworth there, outside the castle. About three years ago. Perhaps you saw it?’
‘Are you in the army?’
‘Bodyguard of King Richard, at your service,’ said Piglet. ‘Man-at-arms. Halberdier, to be precise. I carry a sort of axe-on-a-pole.’ He began to enumerate the troops and arms needed to re-fight various skirmishes of the Yorkist wars.
‘God, how is he getting home?’ Suki whispered to me.
Phoebe was listening to Piglet’s lengthy descriptions of cannon, polearms and arrow storms.
‘So there you have it,’ he said at last. ‘Now then, what’s it called, your village? “Hard by York’s gate let us lie, there to conquer or to die.” Odds on I’ve bivouacked there.’
‘My village?’ Piglet’s sottish Shakespearean bonhomie seemed to have thrown her. She was gazing at the titles in Maya’s rosewood bookcase, probably terrified that if she told him, a troop of medieval drunkards would turn up unannounced on her doorstep. ‘I wouldn’t call it a village really. Just our house and a couple of farms. Sleeman. You won’t find it on a map.’
Rescue being necessary, and spotting the tall, turbanned figure of Joan Barboushjian, I took Phoebe’s elbow and said, ‘Excuse us, there’s someone who knew Phoebe’s mother.’
‘Congratulations, Bhalu,’ said Pope Joan. ‘A very moving service.’ Politeness or sarcasm? I couldn’t tell. ‘I hadn’t seen a great deal of Maya lately. Pity. We’re all due for the chop. Me next, I suppose.’
I introduced Phoebe and said, ‘You must have known Phoebe’s mother in Bombay. Sybil Killigrew?’
Pope Joan turned her pterodactyl gaze to Phoebe and said, ‘Well, well. So you’re Sybil’s girl. You look nothing like her.’
Phoebe gave me a sly wink and we were children again, on parade before our mothers’ friends.
‘Do I remember Sybil? Well, of course I do! I met her several times, at Maya’s, but I never knew her very well. She just vanished. One heard all sorts of stories, but . . .’ She paused as if thinking better of whatever she had been going to say. ‘What became of her? Did she marry again?’
‘Unfortunately no,’ said Phoebe. ‘She never did.’
‘Bhalu, my little rascally Bhalu,’ said Phoebe. ‘My oldest friend. I’ve waited years for this moment.’
At last we were on our own. There was so much I had been chafing to say to her, but now that I had my chance, I was tongue-tied.
‘You haven’t changed,’ she said. ‘I look at you and I can see the little boy inside, standing up on tiptoe to peep out of your eyes.’
‘Here’s to you!’
‘To us!’ she said. ‘Old friends.’ She touched glasses and took a long sip. She needed it as much as me. ‘Yes,’ she said, turning her inspection onto me. ‘You’re a bit gruffer, and your fingernails are cleaner than I’ve ever seen them, but really, you’re just the same.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘I don’t know, I just can.’ She had a trick of letting her head fall a little to one side. ‘In what way have I changed?’
‘What a question!’
‘Well, what’s the answer?’
‘Not to state the obvious but . . .’
‘But . . . ?’ Again that little coquettish tilt. I remembered it now. She had always done it.
‘You’ve got rid of your glasses.’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t suppose anyone pulls your hair any more.’
‘No.’
‘You smoke.’
‘Oh hell, is that so obvious? I was being good too, thinking I wouldn’t have one while I was here.’
‘It’s really not important.’
‘What else then?’
You’ve grown up, I wanted to say. What happened to you? Do you remember Ambona? Do you still climb trees? How the hell did you become such a gorgeous bloody woman?
I said, ‘You’re no longer a little girl.’
With rather a wan smile she said, ‘Perhaps I never was.’
‘Do you go back?’ she asked. ‘To India, I mean? There was that little boy we used to play with. Jula? I remember him very clearly. I wonder where he is now.’
I had hardly been back and had not seen Jula for the best part of thirty years, but began to tell her what I knew, how he had grown up and become Mitra, who was apprenticed to a printer and how I used to hobnob with him in the Dongri bazaar.
‘Dongri? Where’s that?’
‘It’s a Muslim bazaar in the heart of Bombay.’
She said, ‘I want to hear about you first. Tell me about your daughters. About the bookshop.’
I had been dreading the moment when I would have to confess what a khichdi (kedgeree) I had made of my life. In the event it was surprisingly painless. Every parent finds it easy to talk about their offspring, so I described events from the twins’ childhood, how Katy had taught them to ride, how proud we were of their cups and medals and school reports, and how lost we had felt when they first went off to university. Phoebe was a good listener and soon I was telling the sorry tale of my lost years – my foray into the Soho film industry, at first cheap B-features, later commercials, the boozing, late nights in The French Pub and drinking clubs – until the bookshop saved my marriage and probably my life. Nice pat phrase, that. Properly self-deprecating.
‘It’s a wonder the girls did so well,’ I added. ‘Considering that at one point I seriously thought I was an alcoholic.’
‘Same silly Bhalu,’ said Phoebe. ‘You always did yourself down, even as a child.’
But all she’d had was the oft-told, expurgated version. Perfected in the telling. Not my shames – dark hair, cheap wine, and Pushkin – though Katy knew and had forgiven me. Nor another thing I had never told anyone. Getting home early, unexpected, one day during that same awful era, and witnessing something I shouldn’t have. Something Katy never knew I’d seen. I knew how close I had come to losing her.
‘You don’t realise how important you are,’ Phoebe was saying.
‘Important?’ It wasn’t a word I’d have chosen.
‘Yes, important. It doesn’t mean being a boss or a big shot. It means being special to other people. Being kind. Like you were to me, when we were children . . . You don’t mind, do you, if I smoke?’
Normally I can’t bear people smoking near me, but I shook my head. ‘No, of course not. Go ahead.’
She lit a cigarette, exhaled. ‘I was thinking of that when I was listening to you in the chapel, talking about your mother. What she believed. That it’s important to do small kindnesses, good things, because they carry on, they have their effects. It’s quite true. People remember things for years. They don’t forget.’
It wasn’t quite what Maya had meant, but I was touched.
Phoebe stood swirling her wine, watching it climb in the glass, then glanced briefly across the room at Katy, who was talking to Piglet and Panaghiotis. ‘I wish I’d been there,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have let you get in that state.’
For a moment I didn’t follow what she was talking about, but then I was horrified. ‘I’ve given you the wrong idea,’ I said. ‘Katy’s the gentlest soul. Not many women would have been as patient. And she supported me in giving up the London job, though it left us almost penniless. I’ll always be grateful for that.’
Phoebe said quickly, ‘Sorry, that was clumsy. I didn’t mean to imply . . . I’m sure Katy did everything she could.’
The wake was almost over. Srinuji and Piglet were collecting glasses. Sounds of washing up emanated from the kitchen. Katy came over and lifted a plate from the mantelpiece.
‘You two all right?’ she asked.
‘Katy’s lovely,’ said Phoebe. ‘You’re lucky. How did you meet her?’
It was soon after I finished my Sussex course, the one I’d come from India to do. Post-graduate diploma in film studies. I had a flat in Brighton and was travelling to London for interviews with film companies. To support myself I got a job in a bookshop and was put in charge of the horse, dog and cat shelves. A girl with a rather nice bottom, often jodhpur-cased (I didn’t mention this bit to Phoebe) used to come in and browse the horse books. So I made a point of ordering every horsey title in every publisher’s catalogue. We soon had the biggest equine section in town and I used to skim through them so I could make conversation. That’s how we got to know one another. We went out for coffee, the odd meal at some cheap café in the Lanes, a walk on the beach. It was a tremendously hot summer. She took me home to meet her parents, who had a small farm on the Downs.
