The Death of Mr Love, page 25
But when Mister Love takes Sybil to lunch, there is no soup, no polished silver spoon. It’s – this food is traditional Indian, you eat with your fingers, so – here, may I show you? – reaches over and presses her fingers to form a sloppy ball of rice and sauce – and now to your mouth – oh dear, chin – here, let me wash your fingers – dabs them with a napkin wetted in the rosewater bowl – does it taste nice? is it good? – brings one of her fingers to his lips, rolls them wetly over it, flicks her finger with his tongue, gently sucks – mmm, this is delicious, just like my granny used to make. Sybil experiences a sensation akin to falling. She realises that this oddly plummeting feeling is love and that she has never felt it before.
I have a lovely secret, a special feeling, like a gift that has come to me and woken me from sleep. There’s not a minute when I don’t think of him, and I marvel at my own foolishness. My wild imaginings. Running off together, a whole new life. I know it would be absolute bliss and also know I am being unrealistic. I sit trying to picture his face, going over and over the same few things: every smile that showed he likes me, ditto his smallest gestures, most inconsequential remarks. This morning Phoebe was talking to me and after a while I realised I hadn’t heard a word. I keep having to drag myself back to my mundane world, when really I am on a different plane. At times I feel despairing, and want to bang my head on the table. At other times, I know that this is the height of happiness. When I put a record on the gramophone, every song I hear speaks directly to me, is sung for me only, carries a special message just for me. That record ‘When I fall in love’, L plays it twenty times running. I’ll sing the words to myself even when Killy is in the room and feel oddly liberated, for my life is no longer anything to do with him. He will speak, and I look up in surprise. So much is going on in my head that I’m not aware I haven’t spoken a word for hours. I no longer eat. I push away my plate, nourished by superior knowledge, armoured and invincible. I am aware constantly of my body. It is keenly alive, longing to be touched. Killy has noticed. He makes remarks. He said today that I was looking radiant. It makes him amorous. Last night he came to my room. I was expecting him and he found me ready for love, like an open flower. As I held him in my arms, I had no sense of wrongdoing, of being unfaithful to either of them. He does not know, but it was the last time. I can’t make love with someone I no longer love. Last night, the lovemaking was not him and me, nor me and anyone else. It was intense, but the passion was blind, all-encompassing. He could have been anyone, everyone and everything, and I felt wholly woman.
What she had felt for Killy had not been love, could not have been, because love was this delirium. What she had felt for Killy was admiration, respect – she had mistaken it for love. In those days she was so young, so inexperienced. This was unmistakable. The excitement, the tremulous and guilty awareness of her feelings as his fingers pressed into the small of her back when they danced together, sometimes under the eye of her husband. The yearning to melt together, to become one – she poured these feelings into her journals. She was sure that Killy would never stoop to prying, and Rosie could not pick locks. But just to be safe, she soon began attributing her emotions to a character in her novel, and for the first time, some passages were in Pitman’s squiggle-script. She must have felt secure, because tucked in between the pages of the diary was a faded, brown photograph of a man. He had a gentle face, with thick eyebrows, gentle eyes, and a full, curved mouth. On the back was written, in a typical Indian hand, ‘With all my love, L.’
Looking for the first time at Mister Love, I felt sure I knew him from somewhere. His face seemed familiar. But I could not say from where I recognised him, or why.
For a long time Sybil resisted her own feelings and L’s advances. To begin with she refused invitations to meet him alone, but her resolve gradually weakened. Mister Love had a flat near the sea at Malabar Hill. He lived with his sister, who quickly became a friend. This gave Sybil an excuse to visit him. Killy, who was spending more time at home these days, did not suspect anything; he was glad to see Sybil happy. Not that there was anything to suspect. Apart from feelings, which couldn’t be helped, she had done nothing wrong. L pressed her, of course, to go to bed with him, but she constantly refused. Sybil adored L, but to her own surprise had discovered an old-fashioned respect for her wedding vows. She no longer loved Killy but she was not going to have a cheap affair. L was so desperate, she wrote, so unhappy. All eaten up, poor boy. He thought of her every minute, begged her to see him. Spending time with her was the only thing that made his life bearable. She began to feel it was her duty to ease his suffering. There could be no harm in their meetings, so long as she never revealed her feelings. Poor romantic boy, he read her poems by Indian authors, so full of hyperbole they made her giggle. She enjoyed his company, she told him truthfully, and lied by saying she wanted him simply as a friend.
She was in love, but clung to her marriage. What changed her mind? Was it that a possibility which had already been dismissed as frivolous daydreaming, became real one day? L mentioned marriage. Killy was away again. Mister Love proposed a picnic. Somewhere special. They travelled in his new car through the northern suburbs to the dusty township of Borivili. He negotiated the car at walking pace through lanes bustling with people and animals until they came to a creek. A wooden fishing boat crammed with country folk took them the half mile to the far shore. Waiting for them, its bullocks patiently eating hay, was a wooden cart of the sort used by villagers. It was the first time Sybil had ever ridden in one. They creaked a mile through coconut groves and emerged into a blue-and-white dazzle of sea and sky. The beach ran from a fishing village, deserted during the heat of day, to a red sandstone hill on which crouched the remains of a Portuguese fort. Corroded cannon still pointed out to sea through tangles of lantana. The foot of the hill was whorled by the sea into caves, in which the tide left pools full of interesting creatures, ‘sea urchins and starfish, little wispy shrimps and tiny pieces of coral, intricate as crystallised spittle’.
In one of these pools, lying a few inches below the surface, Sybil saw a rock imprinted with a perfect fossil leaf. Mister Love duly rolled up his sleeves, but she made him put it back again, because there were tiny animals clinging to it. They ate the picnic in a shack which, he said, belonged to one of his friends.
The cottage was sweet-smelling and dark, the dried cowdung floor was cool and fresh and the only light in the evening, L said, would come from hurricane lamps . . . The island lay stupefied in the sun. I was aware of myriad small sounds. Gurgle and plop of mud-hoppers, incessant whine of cicadas, rustling of wind in the palms. We went swimming. I floated in my bathing costume. L said I looked like an elegant starfish.
There was no electricity, no water, just four walls and a coconut thatch roof. In this carefully chosen and well-prepared spot, he asked her to marry him, and they became lovers.
Later, they met at his flat overlooking the Arabian Sea. Her journal describes the waves teasing the rocks under his window as a joyous mating of water and earth.
His caresses are like soft avalanches of sea. A rising tide that will submerge me. I want to open more and more for him. I am an anemone, opening out to capture, to draw into myself his fingers, tongue, all of him. Yes I want all of him and all else too, the exterior whole world. I want to take into myself the universe of outside and refashion it within my body, heal its ills, correct its faults, mend its flaws, make it perfect within me, and then return this perfected world to the outside, the world born back into itself, but better than before – this is the woman’s gift.
RIVALS (SYBIL’S JOURNALS, 1958)
May. Hottest month of the year. The city lay suffocating under a gunmetal sky, the rains still weeks away. But Sybil was happy. She was in brightest love and her lover, love’s avatar, Mister Love, was in love with her. He kept pestering her to marry him and Sybil knew that next time he asked she would say yes. She also realised that she must tell Killy, but the thought made her afraid. God knows what he might do. Besides, for all his neglect of her, Sybil did not want to hurt Killy. He was upset enough by the fact that she would no longer sleep with him. He did not know why. Things had changed between them, was all she would say. She no longer felt the same about him. Now that she knew their marriage was over, she sometimes looked at him, his greying head, glasses on nose, bent over a book, and felt fondness. Guilt pulled her this way and that. She did not know what to do. No one, not even her best friend, my mother Maya, knew that her relationship with L had crossed from friendship into the salt marshes of adultery.
We meet in his flat, at times when his sister is out. No longer do we waste time talking. There is little enough time, and all of it needed. It’s straight to the bedroom, eager fumblings with each other’s, or our own clothes. No sooner are we naked than we fall onto the bed, lips and fingers and tongues touching, probing, sliding and slithering: it thrills me and leaves me weak with shame.
Mister Love’s professions of love, each time he undressed her and she, bending down, removed his shoes as she imagined an Indian wife would, grew more ardent, but guilt-ridden Sybil would no longer give herself completely. Gently, she began turning aside his advances. Mister Love fretted. He complained that she did not love him. Didn’t she want them to be married? She said he must understand. She could not make love to him again until things were out in the open. Which meant telling Killy. And this she still could not bring herself to do. L was behaving like a petulant child, but men are such babies, they have tantrums if they don’t get what they want, especially sex. Her mind was elsewhere. Let me think and plan first, she told herself. She was worried about Phoebe. What would Killy do? She wanted the three of them, she, Phoebe and Mister Love, to be together. Of one thing she had no doubt, she had never been happier.
If this should prove to be a chimera, a false dawn, then so be it. I will count myself blessed to have enjoyed this much, to have known what love can be. One can get through life only to a point cherishing an ideal. As disillusionment sets in, the ideal sickens, infected by disappointment, frustration, agnosticism, bitterness, desperation and despair. And suddenly – when one is resigned to eking out one’s lifetime in a second-rate, lonely, unfulfilled, dead, mistaken but respectable way – suddenly, with only a slight shiver of warning, one is face to face with that ideal personified, perfected more in fact than in fancy. And at that moment, and in those that follow, one says: ‘This is all I have ever needed. Life didn’t let me down, after all.’
Later she would copy these words into a letter she sent to her ‘ideal, personified and perfected’ Mister Love. She kept copies of these letters, pressed in her diary. Sometimes she wrote three a day.
Poor Sybil. It was painful for me to read her trusting words, knowing, with the hindsight of Retribution, what moments would actually follow. So sure was she of Mister Love’s sincerity, of the genuineness of his love, that she did not quite take him seriously when he let fall, lightly, one evening, after she had again refused to sleep with him, that she had a rival.
‘If you won’t marry me, there are others, you know. There are others who will.’
‘Which others?’ she cried playfully, thinking he was teasing.
‘It doesn’t matter who. But I can tell you there is at least one other woman. She is not just willing, but desperate.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Sybil.
‘Do I have to prove it?’
He looked so serious, maybe he wasn’t teasing. It wasn’t surely that Anglo-Indian girl, Sybil told herself. He had assured her that was nothing but gossip. Half a dozen other names came to mind, but flim-flam, the lot of them. Then a thought struck her.
‘Oh, poor love,’ she said. ‘I’ve just realised. No wonder you’re in such a hurry. Don’t worry, I’ll save you. Just be patient a little longer.’
‘What are you talking about?’ demanded her paramour.
‘Well, isn’t it obvious? Your parents have found you another girl.’
‘What rubbish.’
‘And you’re upset because probably she’s no more prepossessing than the last one.’ Laughing. Thinking of the dull woman whose photographs he had shown her. Laughing. ‘No, don’t deny it. Looking sulky doesn’t suit you. I know how you detest arranged marriages, but don’t worry, darling. I won’t let her have you.’
‘It’s not a question of arranged marriage,’ he said, by now rather irritable. Her determined good humour must have puzzled him. ‘If you really must know, this other girl has more in common with you.’
‘Meaning what, exactly? How is she like me?’
‘I mean that she is an Englishwoman.’
This, Sybil had not expected.
‘Who is she? Where did you meet her? When did you meet her?’ But he would not say.
‘Do you love her?’
‘Of course not, darling. She writes to me, but her letters are not so amusing as yours. Listen, if you like I’ll read you one of them.’
They were lying side by side on the bed, he naked, unsated but still hopeful, she dishevelled but still more or less clothed. Their encounters, to judge from her diary, had turned into adolescent tussles which usually ended in wrangling. As a compromise – she did not want to be cruel – she would allow him to undo her bra and play with her nipples till they were hard, to moisten his fingers between her thighs. He was hoping to arouse her. She, in no need of arousal, found other ways to ease his need.
Mister Love rolled off the bed and she heard him scrabbling underneath. He came up with a sheet of writing paper.
‘Got it. Just a moment, I need my reading glasses.’
‘Wait,’ said Sybil. ‘You shouldn’t read me someone else’s letter.’
He looked at her, over the rim of his glasses, as if to say, well this is what you drive me to, and read: ‘ “Last night, when you spoke about your need to marry and the various girls you may marry, something inside me snapped and I knew that I couldn’t bear the thought of you loving and being close to someone else . . .” ’
It did not take long to worm out the identity of her rival. Mister Love seemed almost anxious to tell her, but the name he spoke was the last she expected to hear.
The rival was the woman she had referred to as S, her ‘twin’, with whom she had swapped identities at the Willingdon. Sybil’s description was so close to Maya’s in Retribution, that Maya must have based her story on Sybil’s letters.
Shock subsided into anger. She had been betrayed. ‘How could she?’ Still she did not put the blame on him. ‘She was my friend. She introduced us.’ Then, as the full implications dawned, ‘And she knows about me? About us?’
‘I don’t believe in secrets,’ he said.
‘What does she mean, “close to someone else”? The bitch! She knows it’s me!’
‘Sybil, please calm down,’ said Mister Love, who must have been delighted by all this. ‘You’re getting it out of proportion.’
‘But why didn’t you tell her you’ve already proposed to me? Did you tell her?’
‘Of course I did,’ he said, with a bland smile.
‘Then I don’t understand how she could—’
‘Look,’ he said. ‘You have nothing to worry about. I didn’t encourage her. Poor girl, she is infatuated, but she means nothing to me. Not like you.’
‘Do you say the same things to her?’
‘Of course not!’
Ha! Liar! she thought (as her notebook records, and I, reading, silently cheered, a foolish celebration, given that I already knew the outcome), but she was ready to be mollified.
‘In fact,’ said Mister Love, ‘S says herself that she has no chance against you.’
‘Does she think we’re having a contest?’
‘I can’t say what she thinks. Here! here!’ he said. ‘Listen to this. “My darling, I wish I were brilliant and witty and could write a letter to make you laugh.” You see? Why does she say that? Who is she comparing herself to?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Sybil.
‘She’s talking about you! Who else sends me such entertaining letters?’
He dived off the bed again and in a moment his voice came from somewhere underneath it. ‘Listen, this is what you wrote.’ He began to skim the invisible letter. ‘ “. . . couldn’t make love . . . someone I didn’t love . . . I’m that truthful, anyway . . .” Yes, here it is, it was when you stopped sleeping with him. “So he said I was unnatural, impossible, abnormal, prudish – an iceberg! And he was surprised because he said that when he first saw me he thought I was a nymphomaniac! Actually he was kind enough to spell it, for fear of hurting my feelings, and rather than enunciate a word like that, he started: N-I-M-F- when I stopped him . . .” See what I mean? You are so funny!’
But Sybil did not laugh.
I had been thinking about betrayal, how I had been let down so badly by someone I thought of as a friend. My mind was full of outrage. When he read my letter back to me, a needle of pain went through my heart. Only it wasn’t pain, it was shame. Killy may not have been the kindest, most considerate husband, but he does not deserve to have his unhappiness mocked by the man who is cuckolding him.
The cuckolder’s head popped up beside the bed and smiled, displaying a set of white teeth. ‘There, my darling. No comparison. She knows that.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Sybil said. ‘How does she know? How does she know about my letters? Don’t tell me you’ve been reading my letters to her.’
