The Death of Mr Love, page 21
‘A karahi,’ I said. We were sitting round the table having supper – had done nothing but eat all day – and Phoebe had agreed, after all, to spend the night. So much for affairs.
‘Yes, I loved curries,’ said Phoebe. ‘I mean real Indian ones, not those ghastly English curries you used to get, full of sultanas and bits of apple. I missed good hot Indian curries. It was one of the things I got teased about, at boarding school in England. The other girls said I had an Indian accent . . . I hated England. I still do, I think.’
‘Phoebe. That nursery rhyme you used to know, in Hindi. Can you still remember it?’
‘Of course.’
She recited, ‘Muffety Mai, dahi malai, ghaas pe baith ke khayi.’
I could still hear the child in her voice.
‘I always thought you sounded so English when you said that.’
‘Can you guess what it means?’ Phoebe asked Katy.
‘It’s Little Miss Muffet,’ replied my wife. ‘You’re forgetting I’ve lived with Bhalu for nearly a quarter of a century.’
‘I left school when I was eighteen,’ Phoebe said. ‘Went to art school. I was at the Slade, studying painting. Left before my finals. I often wish now I’d finished, but I wanted to get away. I was very keen to travel. In the holidays I used to stay with Mummy. She was on her own then. She’d just moved to Lincolnshire. It was a crumbly old place, but all she could afford. We didn’t have much left by then. The money from my father had stopped coming. Mummy never had a job, she used to do sewing, things like patchwork. There wasn’t much money. Anyway, after I left art school I went and stayed with her for a bit, then got a job in London.’
‘Is that where you met your husband?’ asked Katy.
‘No,’ said Phoebe. ‘That wasn’t till much later.’
‘Did you have someone?’ I asked. ‘Boyfriend? You must have had boyfriends.’
‘Oh, lots. It was the sixties, don’t forget. Swinging London, the Beatles, then Flower Power. I went a bit mad, I was a dippy hippy chick. Pop festivals, pot and painting. Doesn’t seem possible now, does it? You must have done all that, Katy.’
‘I was too wrapped up with ponies,’ said Katy, smiling. ‘I tried pot a couple of times but it just sent me to sleep.’
‘Don’t call it “pot,” call it hashish or charas,’ I said, thinking that Phoebe would enjoy reading about Dongri.
‘Bhalu’s always ticking me off about Indian words,’ said Katy. ‘Don’t say “jodhpurs” say “Joe’dpoors”. Don’t say “Himmerlayer” say “Him-ah-liar”.’
‘He used to do that when we were children,’ said Phoebe. ‘Don’t say “Jula”, say . . . I still can’t pronounce it.’
‘Juldla,’ I said and they both laughed.
‘I really just wanted to paint,’ said Phoebe. ‘Even had my own garret. But I couldn’t sell much. So I did something else I’d always fancied. Got a job on a cruise ship, as a trainee purser. We sailed round the Caribbean. I ended up spending several years there.’
‘Is that where you met Peter?’ This was me.
‘No. I had a few boyfriends, but only one I was serious about. His name was Ronnie. We lived together for a while. He was American. It was tremendously romantic. He had a beach shack . . . well, it was a little bit nicer than that, but not much . . . on Grand Cayman. Cocktails on a beach like talcum powder. I used to wear red shoes. My trademark.’
‘It sounds fun,’ said Katy. ‘Why didn’t you marry him?’
‘I got home one day and there was a strange woman sitting there. She said she was Ronnie’s wife . . . I was utterly shocked. I looked at Ronnie, but he sat and said nothing. He’d lied to me. Can you imagine? The woman started yelling at me. I said, “Look, this is my home, you can’t just barge in here like this. I didn’t know about you.” She told me to get the hell out. She just threw me out.’
‘Well, you can see her point,’ said Katy.
After supper we did the washing-up together. Phoebe soaped and rinsed, and made me do the drying and putting away because, as she said, ‘I don’t know where things go in your house.’
‘That in itself feels odd,’ she added. ‘Because when we knew each other before, your house was mine too.’
Frotting the wretched plates till they squeaked, I said, ‘I think it’s time you told me about Peter.’
‘Do we have to talk about him? I’d rather not.’
‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but it sounds as if you aren’t very happy.’
‘Oh, but I will be,’ said Phoebe. ‘I promise you.’
The spare room was made up. Katy announced that she was going up to bed. Phoebe and I sat by the fire and talked. We compared dates. Where was I when she was at school? What had she been doing while I was in Dongri with Jula and Dost? I thought of my memoir, which was still lying on my desk in the shop. I was about to say I’d post it, but remembered just in time. ‘We’ll go there tomorrow and collect it.’
Phoebe’s life sounded so much more adventurous than mine. She’d gone off to the Caribbean around the time I met Katy, and was dancing red-heeled fandangos on her sugar-white beach when I was going back and forth to Wardour Street, editing and finally producing cruddy low-budget travelogues.
‘You must have done some travelling together,’ Phoebe said.
‘Well, we went to India once.’
Just after we were married, I had taken Katy to meet my father and my grandparents in Kumharawa. Maya’s parents were already dead, killed in a car crash on the Delhi–Lucknow road, Kipling’s Grand Trunk Road. A drunken truck driver overtaking on a bend at night. One of the hundreds of accidents that make Indian roads so dangerous. Maya, true to form, had tried to persuade us not to go. She said she had consulted an astrologer who told her that she and her family should avoid India.
‘Was it Mr Srinuji?’ asked Phoebe. ‘And did Katy like India?’
Tempting though it was to blame Srinuji for every bit of Maya’s nonsense, he hadn’t then come on the scene. Kumharawa must have been a difficult experience for Katy. For all the old man’s pride in his healthy village life, there was no drainage. One had to crouch in all weathers over a latrine in the corner of the garden. Turds and whey slid through a gap in the wall into a filthy ditch in the lane beyond. Water for bathing had to be drawn from the well. Katy said she liked India but could not imagine living there.
‘We never travelled much after that,’ I said. ‘A few holidays in Greece.’
‘But I thought your job was making travel films.’
Yes. Having failed to get one job after another, I finally found one at a small film company whose credit I had noticed on the end of a bad documentary about Singapore. I could do better, I thought. So I walked in off the street and offered to write them a film about Bombay. I talked with passion about the city tourists never see – Dongri, naturally – and hinted that I could get their cameras into a hashish den that no foreign hippy had ever visited.
They were interested, but for a different reason.
‘Can you get Air India to sponsor travel for our crew?’
I said I could always try. It meant writing a letter.
‘Could you get the Indian Tourist Board to put us up?’
Another letter. It was a scam, of course. The idea was to con foreign tourist ministries into funding a holiday for the ‘crew’, in effect, the owner of the company and his wife. This elderly couple would wave an old 16mm Bolex out of taxi-windows, shooting on ‘ends of rolls’ picked up cheap (guaranteeing a film whose colour leapt and jounced). Whatever appeared on the processed film was passed to me to cut. I worked on an old-fashioned movieola – nobody does it like that any more – strips of film hanging like eels from racks. The last part of the scam was getting the ‘travel documentary’ released as a B-feature alongside some big Hollywood movie and collecting the EDEY money, a handout supposed to be for the encouragement of British film-making, from the government.
‘Shame about your Bombay film,’ said Phoebe. ‘You could have done such a good one too.’
‘Oh, I still think of it sometimes. I love the bookshop, but it would be nice to do other things now and again.’
‘Have you ever thought of going back?’ she asked. ‘To Bombay, I mean?’ She was staring at me in a rather myopic way. Belladonna eyes. We were both tired. It was past three.
‘I did think of proposing a documentary about Ambona. I thought the BBC might be interested. We’d have the cameras out before the rains start. Show what it’s like. Barren-looking. Parched. The people, all waiting for rain. Cows on the hills, paddy fields crazed with drought. The first storms. Lightning, thunder. Downpour. Water, water, everywhere. Overnight, everything green.’
‘Fishing,’ she said. ‘Those funny rainhat things. You should do it, Bhalu. You should still do it. No one will have seen anything like it before.’
But the BBC turned down my idea, and me. Someone I knew said a commercials company was looking for an editor. So began my ten-year career in the twilight zone between film and advertising. I found, rather to my surprise, that the Indian film industry was regarded with derision. No one had heard of Guru Dutt, or Majrooh. The requirement of a dozen songs per film seemed absurd. Our most famous soprano, one man told me, had a voice of peculiarly agonising quality, like a drill piercing zinc sheet.
I already hated what my life had become (aaaaiiieeee, what a phrase) and it was to get worse. Yes, here comes the unwholesome truth at last. Yaaro mujhko maaf karna, main nashe men hoon. That lyric of Shailendra’s, which was a hit when I was with Mitra and Dost in Dongri, acquired new significance for me. I pursued the nasha of alcohol. With overworked voice-overs and out-of-work actors, dubartists and piss-artists, I drank in the George, the Ship, The French Pub (I could never remember its real name) and became something of a bon-viveur. A man I met over several bottles of wine at Macready’s offered me a job producing – commercials again, of course. I had an expense account and my real work was to entertain ‘creative people’ from advertising agencies to lavish lunches. We practically lived in the Tate Restaurant (Château Lafite at £145 a bottle). My boss, the splendidly named Titus Golinkin used to scold me for not spending enough. ‘Only four hundred quid? What’s the matter, lost your appetite? Never underestimate lunch.’ Here also began the late-night taxi-rides, the drunken soliloquies. This is the truth, and I still don’t care to remember it.
‘And girls?’ said Phoebe. ‘Must have been women. Isn’t the film industry full of gorgeous girls? Wasn’t Katy worried? I would have been.’
‘Yes, it is. But . . .’
Katy was miserable, but stubbornly loyal. She threw herself into her interior design business and work with the horses. Her lovely bottom grew anvil-shaped from the hammering of saddles.
‘But . . . ?’
But there was only one, I had been going to say. A secretary in an ad agency, a tall, intense girl with a fondness for Pushkin. It was the readings from Eugene Onegin that – at least with hindsight – had appealed to me more than her undeniably good figure or the long black hair she would sit and brush after each supper and hurried coupling in her bedsitter off the Fulham Palace Road.
‘“Evening, darkening sky, and waters in quiet flood. A beetle whirred . . .”’ She’d look up from the page, sigh with pleasure. The affair lasted a few weeks. Then, in a fit of 70 proof honesty, I told Katy. After which . . .
‘I was never tempted,’ I lied to Phoebe.
‘You’re a man. You must have been tempted.’
‘Perhaps I’m not a very typical man.’
That other thing happened about the same time. One day I came home early. Walked into the cottage to find it filled with strange music. Exotic birdsong. Can never hear that music now without remembering. The music must have masked my footsteps. After that I decided to quit London.
‘I’ve never been much good with women,’ I said.
‘Don’t do yourself down. I wish people wouldn’t do that.’There was a strange vehemence about the way she said this, but then she smiled. ‘Bhalu, you’re a very attractive man.’
I was far too tired to be flattered. But to complete the tellable part of the story (Phoebe by now so tired her eyes were closing), what saved me, it is clear now, was my grandfather’s death. He left some money, and Maya found a way to get it out of India. My share of his legacy came to a tidy amount, even in sterling. It was Katy who found me the bookshop.
‘My God,’ I said. ‘Look at the time!’
It was just after five in the morning.
We crept upstairs to the spare bedroom. Phoebe whispered, ‘It’s almost too late to sleep now.’
She sat on the bed and slipped off her shoes.
‘Shall I get you a cup of tea?’ I asked.
She said, ‘What a sweet, thoughtful man you are. But no thanks. I’m too tired to sleep. What I’d really like is a shower.’
The shower was in a sort of tiled cupboard. The door was in our bedroom. ‘You’ll have to creep through.’
‘I’ll be very quiet.’ She stood up and began to undo her jeans. ‘Could I borrow a towel?’
‘Of course,’ I said. I came back with a bath towel and poked it at arm’s length through the door. Phoebe came quickly out of the room, took it from me and wrapped it around herself. ‘God, it’s cold,’ she said.
I was tired, perhaps I was hallucinating. I had a distinct sense of bare limbs. It was only after she vanished into our bedroom and I heard the shower, that I realised she’d had nothing on.
At six, we went for a walk through still dark woods down to a stream from which mist was rising and sat on a tree stump while the sun rose. We threw sticks into the water, and got home to find a puzzled Katy making early-morning tea.
CHANG (BRIGHTON, JANUARY 1999)
The sea, glimpsed through a gap at the bottom of the street, looked like rows of grey knitting. It was raining, blowing spiteful cold drops down our necks. She was wearing her jacket with the collar turned up. It puffed her hair upwards and outwards around the ears, an effect I particularly like. She stopped outside a small, unremarkable house, and rang the bell.
‘Bhalu, thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘You may think this is a lot of nonsense, but I have to ask Mummy’s permission.’
The door was opened by a woman with Brasso-bright hair and a mouth like a smudged hibiscus. She introduced herself to me as Madame Stella. We were shown into a room overwhelming in its clutter. Too many pictures: dogs, Sacred Hearts, horned gods, a goddess crowned with stars, Red Indians, Hindu sages.
In the middle of the floor stood a small cloth-draped altar on which were two lighted candles, a joss-stick and a faded black and white photograph of two women: one, who looked like a young Ava Gardner, pointing at the camera; the other, in a sari, caught with her head thrown back in a cloud of laughter. Behind them was a bougainvillaea whose grey flowers, I knew, had actually been pink. The woman in the sari was my mother.
‘It’s a warm spring day on the inner planes,’ said Madame Stella. ‘Your mother is expecting you, Phoebe darling. The gentleman’s mother too. Indian lady, isn’t it? Chang talked to them both this morning. They said to tell you they’re keeping well. It’s a good time to seek guidance. There’s a big spirit council going on at the moment, you see, on the Inner. Have you got my little something, dear?’
Phoebe reached in her jacket and brought out some notes.
‘Yes, well I won’t be a minute,’ said Madame. ‘You sit yourselves down. You know what to do, Phoebe dear. Show the gentleman how to get comfortable. That’s it.’
She bustled out of the room with the money.
‘Phoebe,’ I said, ‘what on earth—?’
‘Shhh! I know what you’re thinking,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all right to be sceptical, you don’t have to believe. It’s just that a lot of what she says comes true.’
‘You see her regularly?’ I was reminded of Maya’s requests, that she would never admit were prayers, to Ganesh.
‘Not very often. Once every three or four months.’
Madame Stella re-entered the room. ‘Your mother,’ she said to me, ‘wants you to listen very carefully today. She has an important message for you. Something she could not tell you when she was alive.’ She settled herself into a large armchair close to where Phoebe and I sat, squeezed together on a sofa covered with a cloth that might have come from a souk in Tunis.
The medium pointed at a picture of what looked like a Sioux chief. ‘This is Chang, my Chinese guide. When he comes through, you may ask questions, but I warn you, he used to be a mandarin. He was governor of a province in China. He is used to respect. He won’t like it if you interrupt. And now we will hold hands.’
I glanced over at Phoebe to see how she was taking this, but she had her eyes closed; her brow wore a little frown of concentration. The medium let her own, heavily-greened lids droop, licked her lips. She smiled, then grew stern again. Unidentifiable emotions chased one another across her face. She drew several deep shuddering breaths, and exhaled a slow chain of hiccoughs. It was fascinating, like a performance from one of Dost’s masala movies. Her head sagged, lolled towards us and a number of sighs and grunts shook her ample body. Her tongue extruded itself from the crimson mouth and she began to snore.
Suddenly the eyes flicked wide open, staring at the carpet, then – this was surely a sequence lifted from a horror movie – the head with its protruding tongue twisted slowly and fixed us with a sly regard. The tongue slid back, emerged briefly to lick the lips, and a deep voice with an accent more Berlin than Beijing, in fact not unlike Peter Seller’s Dr Strangelove, said, ‘Welcome Phoebe, welcome my Indian friend.’ Velcome Veebee, velcome my Indian vriend.
‘Hello Chang,’ said Phoebe, in a tiny voice. Chang rolled his eyes and fastened them on me. Phoebe’s elbow dug into my ribs.
