The Death of Mr Love, page 22
‘Hello, Chang,’ I said.
‘The spirit council is aware of your presence.’ Zee zbirit gounzil is avare of your brezzence. ‘Your mothers are there.’ Mozzers.
Chang rolled his eyes and said, ‘Oh, they are looking so lovely. Two beautiful ladies. Oh my soul!’ Luffly. Vyootiful. Zoul. The part obviously called for a certain roguish gallantry.
‘Phoebe, your mozzer is nearby. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, she is on her vay. She is connecting viz us qvite strongly on ze vibration. She may not appear in ze room viz us, but she is zbeaking to me . . .’
Phoebe’s body, pressed tight to mine, began to quiver. I too was trying very hard to suppress a giggle. I gave her hand a squeeze.
‘Yes, Zybil, I hear you . . . vait, zere is another zbyrit here . . . come closer, Zybil.’ The other spirit must turn out to be Maya. But apparently not, for Chang, in an imperious gubernatorial manner shouted, ‘You! Yes, you! Ze ozzer zpirit! Kindly vait your turn . . . vat’s zat you say? . . . you are called Ming, and you are ze spirit guide of ze gentleman? Vell zat is excellent, Ming, qvite excellent . . . I feel sure ve shall have a uzeful talk togezzer . . . after I have zboken to Zybil . . . No, no, Ming, please! . . . please vait your turn to zbeak, I am zbeaking viz Zybil. Zybil is here now. She is in ze room viz us.’
Phoebe’s body was still shaking. I pressed against her and gripped her hand tight, supposing that, like me, she was fighting not to laugh. But when I stole a glance at her, I saw that her eyes were screwed tight shut, like a child’s, and her mouth was twisted in real misery.
We went to a café near the sea. One of those where Katy and I used to go, when we first met. Strange how things go in circles. We sat at a table by the window and ordered coffee. The cafés on the sea front all have big glass windows, for the view. But it was not a day for a view, a grey sea, slabs of rain hitting the window, running down in drips and drabs. Not far away was the West Pier, with the gap where the ship had gone through it. They had fixed some sort of a footbridge across. Starlings were circling above it, never still, always working the wind.
‘Phoebe, what is all this about?’
She was staring at the birds as they wheeled about the pier. There must have been thousands of them, in a huge cloud that kept changing shape as it turned, lifted, dipped. One moment it was a vast ellipse, the next a galaxy with trailing starfish arms.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’d already decided to tell you. That’s why I came. Brought the box. But what’s in it is so very personal . . .’
‘You surely don’t believe Sybil was really there, just now.’
‘I know she was there.’ She lit a cigarette, still watching the pier starlings as they demonstrated the only real lesson of history. Then she sighed, and began her story.
‘Bhalu, you probably don’t remember how my mother used to be. She was miserable, in Ambona. I mean how she was before. She was a lovely, cheerful person. She loved going to parties, having fun. I think she found my father a bit of a stick, but they had got it worked out. Then something happened. Mummy went to pieces. That’s when she kept running away to Ambona. Your mother, Maya, was hugely supportive. She would take us in, look after Sybil. And then, back we’d go to Bombay and she’d be all right for a while. I thought, that last year, that she was getting better. I don’t know how things would have turned out, if we hadn’t . . . Well, if I hadn’t . . .’
‘You’re thinking of poor Rosie. It wasn’t your fault. Or mine.’
She said, ‘I wish I could believe that. But if I hadn’t insisted on going up there . . . It has haunted me ever since. And then we were sent away. We came here.’
‘And vanished,’ I said.
‘After India, Mummy couldn’t seem to face anything. She and Daddy were separated and after a couple of years she asked for a divorce. Said she didn’t want anything from Daddy for herself, but needed money for me. She’d never had any of her own. But there was a problem, because in those days as you know it was very hard to get money out of India. All our money was there.’
‘I remember,’ I said. ‘When I flew to England all I was allowed to bring was three pounds sterling.’
‘But you got your grandfather’s money,’ she said, with a little unreadable smile. ‘Dear Daddy, despite all his family’s centuries in India, or probably because of it, never understood that after 1947, the Indians really were in charge. He used to order officials about. Get on the wrong side of them. So we never got any money . . .’
I remembered the tall, grim figure in Ambona cemetery.
‘Daddy wanted me to go back to India, to live with him, but Mummy said she would die. She said she might as well kill herself.’ Phoebe did an imitation of her mother’s clipped, post-war accent: ‘“Darling, it’s better if I die, it’ll make everything simpler for everyone. Then you can go to your father.”’
‘What happened?’ I asked, remembering how charming, how gay, her mother could be, and how unhappy she’d been in Ambona.
‘Daddy had a friend,’ said Phoebe, ‘a sort of business partner. I think they’d been together in the Army, during the war. He lived down near Cheltenham. I reckon they did some sort of deal. The money for Mummy came from him. He used to pay my school fees too. I assumed that Daddy repaid him in India. He called himself my guardian. He was tall, like Daddy. Had to stoop to enter doorways, with the sort of bright blue eyes that seem to stare through you, if you know what I mean. He thought the world of Daddy but seemed to regard Mummy as a sort of common slut. He could never manage to be polite about her. He thought she wasn’t cut out to be a Killigrew. Just like the nanny, really . . . Anyway, this man didn’t provide enough money for her to live on. He said she’d have to get a job. She had a bit of money from her parents, enough to buy a tiny run-down cottage in the middle of nowhere. It was up in Lincolnshire, the only thing she could afford. I used to go there during the holidays.’
‘I had always imagined you living in a big house with a butler, tennis, boating on the Thames.’
‘Hah! You must be joking.’ She stared out of the window.
I said, ‘You’re watching the birds.’
‘Yes. It’s like flames, or water flowing. You can sit and watch it for ever. And they’ve been there for ever. Look at the pictures.’
I hadn’t noticed the photographs around the walls of the café. Faded pictures, taken years ago, when the place was in its heyday. Above the pier a dark, an always-and-never-changing blur of birds.
‘When I left art school I went home to my mother for a while. She was so pathetic by then. Just flashes left of her old self. With other people she could still be the life and soul, larger than life. But it was all a sham. Inside she was all eaten up. I was looking after her. I was twenty-one. I got tired of it. I wrote to my father and told him he had to do something. That even if he could abandon her, he couldn’t just abandon me. That’s when I went back to London. Couldn’t make it as a painter so I got the job with the cruise line. Ever since the ship, when we came back to England, I fancied working on a cruise liner. I’d be a purser and look after the passengers . . .’
She broke off to light another cigarette.
‘A few months went by. We were at sea when I got a telegram from Daddy saying he was coming to England. He wanted me to be there. So I replied telling him when I’d be back. And he came. He came to England.
‘Mummy didn’t want to let him inside the cottage. He stood on the doorstep, holding his hat in his hand. He looked so sad. He had come all the way from India. But I hugged him and brought him in. He couldn’t take his eyes off me. “Is this my little girl?” he kept saying over and over. I was eleven, the last time he’d seen me. Mummy wouldn’t talk to him. She shut herself in her bedroom and wouldn’t come out. I think she must already have been a bit crazy, by then . . .’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Before Daddy left, he made me promise that I would look after Sybil. He said I should stay with her until he could sort something out. I don’t know what he thought he could do. Then he left. I walked with him to the bus stop and watched until I could no longer see him waving. Until it went out of sight. I can see it now, a green bus, getting smaller and smaller. Then I just crumpled. I cried. My God, how I cried. I cried for days. And then . . . Oh God, I’m sorry, I hate to be so depressing. I need a hanky . . .
‘. . . Bhalu, I disobeyed him. I ran away. I left her. I abandoned her. That’s the truth. When I went back to the ship I vowed never to set foot again in England. The long and short is that I ended up in the West Indies with Ronnie. I stayed, off and on, for nearly thirteen years. That time when she turned him away, when he was so sweet and gentle – that was the last time I saw him. My dad died when I was out there.’
Rain was still pattering against the café’s big sea-facing window. One sensed rather than saw the drops. The glass was a grey sheet of mist, where the warmth inside the café had steamed it up. I was experiencing the strangest sense of dislocation. Listening to her story, I felt powerfully the nearness of the past, other rain on other windows, as if one could walk out of the café and find the road to Ambona around the next corner. Phoebe leaned over and wiped a big wet circle on the glass. In a flat grey sky the starlings were still wheeling above the West Pier.
‘When I came back, Mummy was still in the cottage, but the money had stopped. After Daddy died, the guardian said that there never had been any money, that he’d been doing it for Daddy. Now that Daddy was gone, and I was working, he saw no reason to continue it. We wrote letters to Daddy’s bank, and his old lawyers, but for ages we didn’t get a reply. Then a letter came saying that Daddy had been nearly broke and he’d sold out his share of the family business. But there wasn’t much left by then, after the debts. Just his furniture and paintings, but he’d always had those. They could not understand where the money had gone. There were no other effects that could have accounted for it. Mummy had no money and she was too proud to ask me for any. Nor would she lower herself to take the government’s hand-outs. It would have meant queuing at the Social Security and God forbid she should do that. She told me she was living on dandelion leaves. I said, “For God’s sake, let me give you some money,” but she was stubborn as anything. So I lost my temper and shouted at her. I accused her of behaving like this just to drive me crazy with worry. She picked up a knife and said, “Don’t ever talk to me like that again. I hate people who shout and threaten me. And I kill people I hate”.’
Phoebe looked into my eyes. ‘Bhalu, something happened in India. Something terrible, that ruined things for all of us.’
IV SYBIL
THE BOX
The box was of wood, stuccoed and painted with climbing roses in oranges and pinks, the shocking colours of Rajasthan. Its hinges, like the key, were corroded to rust. It stood foursquare on painted feet in a corner of my study. Inside were twenty-two diaries and notebooks, some of them leather-bound, others with coiled spines. All were filled, cover to cover, with Sybil’s neat, but hard-to-fathom handwriting. A carrier bag from an English grocer contained sheaves of yellowing paper smudgily imprinted by the uneven keys of an old typewriter. Some of these, double-spaced, and bearing rusty traces of paper-clips, were manuscripts. Pressed into one notebook were a number of letters addressed to Sybil, crisp as flower petals. On top of all lay an envelope containing a handwritten note.
Moon Cottage, September 1993
My dear Maya,
If you read this, it means clever Phoebe has found you. I so regret that we lost touch after I left India. While Killy was alive India still seemed close, but that was a long time ago. I did go back once to look for you. It was earlier this year. Everything had changed. The Bombay I knew had gone and you were not there. The Navy Office told me Captain Sahib was ‘out of station’. At last I made contact with Homi, who took me to lunch at Gourdon’s – that at least goes on. Of course he didn’t recognise the old biddy who turned up, but after his initial consternation made a gallant recovery. He is bald and his moustache has gone grey. After a while he began to hold my hand and call me ‘darling’, which I very much resented. He told me of your divorce and I learned that you had followed your children to England, but that no one had heard from you in years. On my return I tried to trace you, but you have vanished. Where are you? Oh Maya, what regrets! Imagine, these last years, we might have been neighbours – sitting in the long light of English evenings, remembering how suddenly the darkness came in India. By the time this reaches you, if it ever does, I will have gone to where, as you know, I dread what awaits. You are probably the only person who can imagine. I could never talk to Phoebe about it, though I have told her some things. So many years ago, but the memories are still too awful to entertain. Maya, what I wanted to do in India, I wasn’t able to do. I am leaving you my notebooks. They are all there, apart from the latest one, which I must burn, and that one other which you remember . . . I was hoping you still had it, and that, if I found you . . . Such foolishness! Ah well, now it does not matter . . .
KILLY AND BILLY (SYBIL’S JOURNALS 1948–56)
Journals are not necessarily autobiographical and Sybil’s day-today jottings were more often about other people than herself, but from bits and pieces in the notebooks and interleaved letters (she often kept copies of letters she wrote) I could piece together her story.
She had grown up in an unremarkable street in Croydon and was evacuated during the first years of the war. By the time it ended she was old enough to have acquired a Canadian boyfriend with whom she got roaring drunk among the crowds celebrating VE Day. The euphoria didn’t last and neither did the soldier. Like many people, she found life after the war curiously flat. She’d been to a grammar school where, enthused by a fiery English teacher, she dreamed of becoming an author, but instead she found herself working in a London typing pool. Then she met Killy. In 1946 he was a dozen years older than her, in his mid-thirties, burnt brown by three years of adventuring in Burma with Orde Wingate’s Chindits, for which he’d been picked because he could speak Hindustani. The Killigrews had been in India for generations. It was rumoured (Killy told her this) that they had once been in the opium trade, but nowadays dealt in cotton and machine tools. Killy was tall – two inches over six feet – with bushy up-winged eyebrows. For a big man he was a light-footed dancer. Sybil, or Billy, as he called her, felt like a waif in his arms, and was duly carried away by his tales of elephants, palm-fringed sunsets and turbanned servants. He told her stories of tiger shoots, silver Rolls-Royces and droll maharajas. Greedy for adventure and trusting blindly in romance and fate, she agreed to accompany him back to Bombay as his wife.
Killy and Billy steamed into Bombay in a monsoon squall in the autumn of 1948. ‘It won’t be as you imagine,’ he warned her. She was duly unprepared for the smells, smoke, noise, dirt, crowds, chaos, above all the heat, which clamped a hot, damp flannel across her mouth and nose. October is the muggiest month in Bombay. She wasn’t prepared for the moisture that dribbled down her temples and made salty marshes under her arms. She knew Killy was well off, but was thrown by the sheer size of the house to which he brought her. She hadn’t expected it to be so dark: endless rooms filled with heavily carved Indian furniture. The marital bed was a daunting four-poster in which, Killy said, both he and his father had been born. The walls were hung with the heads of slaughtered animals. Sybil didn’t quite know how to address the servants, who greeted her with solemn deference, one immediately running to draw a bath, another to make tea. In the first months, she felt the servants’ eyes following her about. One morning she discovered a room which contained an enormous billiard table. She set up the balls and chalked a cue, then looked up to meet the reproachful gaze of the head bearer.
Sybil was caught off guard by the household’s strange rituals, by the fact that each morning, Killy’s cook brought her the account for market, the hisaab, showing purchases of vegetables, groceries and tea. She was embarrassed weekly by the dhobi who spread the dirty washing out across the drawing-room floor, counting off items one by one before tying them up in a huge bundle which he went away balancing on his head. Tucked into her diary was a bill on smudgy yellowing paper:
On it she had written, ‘What the hell are Gootlies? Ask cook.’
But stranger than all of this was Killy – she hadn’t expected his warning to extend to himself. She realised, after the shock of the first few months had worn off, that above all, she was lonely. Bombay was an unlovely city, its buildings peeling, stained by the rains, left unrepaired. And turbanned servants lose their charm when you catch the head bearer, or kitmutgar as Killy insisted on calling him, sitting carefully picking lice out of the folds of his turban.
Killy was frequently away visiting family businesses all over the country. When he was at home, it was off to the club with stuffy buggers who liked to play billiards after dinner and abandon the women to small talk, as if the war hadn’t happened, the world hadn’t changed. In England, Killy had seemed dashing. In India he seemed merely old and she felt not just younger, but inferior. Not up to the mark.
To James Killigrew and his circle, India was independent in name only. Vestiges of the Raj were everywhere. The city’s streets were still known by their British names, Apollo Bunder, Ridge Road, Hornby Vellard, Marine Drive, Nepean Sea Road, Flora Fountain. Dogs and Indians not allowed read the sign outside the gates of the European swimming club at Breach Candy. Killy was on the club committee. When Sybil complained that the notice was outrageous – it was embarrassing enough not to be able to invite Indian friends – Killy said it had always been there. ‘Relic of the old days. Just left up for tradition, really. No one takes it seriously.’
‘But you don’t allow Indians in,’ she said.
‘Do try to understand,’ said Killy. ‘It’s not that we don’t want Indians, or don’t like Indians. It’s just that it’s one of the few places left for our sort of people.’
