The Death of Mr Love, page 26
‘Well, of course I have,’ said Mister Love.
‘You read her that? About Killy?’
‘Of course I didn’t read that actual bit,’ said her lover, quickly back-pedalling once he saw he’d upset her. ‘What sort of person do you think I am? I read her harmless things, just pretty jokes, the funny way you put things. And why did I do it?’ His voice rising in righteous self-defence. ‘To show her how much I treasure you. To warn her not to build up dreams and raise false hopes. To make her realise that nothing could come between me and you.’
He stopped, smiled and began dancing, naked as he was, beside the bed, crooning, ‘O O O you are the One the One and only, the only One for me.’
He looked so ridiculous, capering like that, with his balls and penis flopping about.
‘Stop it!’ I shouted. ‘You sound like one of those awful songs on the Binaca Hit Parade.’
‘You, darling, are the One, the One woman I have thought of marrying. To begin with it was a terrifying feeling, like falling into a trap. But how did I know it was the right thing to do? Because I missed you when you were not with me. Other girlfriends are not as much fun in bed as you are. Their conversation seems insipid. You were funny. You made me laugh. I looked forward to your letters. I found excuses to telephone you. To my disgust, I was upset when you flirted with other men. You mocked me for what you called my “mirror-worship”. You called me “Mister Love”.’
‘You are a devil!’ I exclaimed, half-horrified, half-amused. ‘I don’t know whether to believe you. You’re playing with both of us.’
His game worked. When he climbed back onto the bed, my clothes were already coming off.
Mister Love did not deny that he had been sleeping with S. On the contrary, he made a point of telling Sybil. She was hurt, but decided that her best policy was to make light of it. ‘Probably the silly boy has done it to make me jealous.’ She wrote to him that he could do as he pleased. ‘Your idea of marriage is getting a girl into bed. Every so often, you ‘marry me’. Then, the moment my back is turned, you marry someone else! How could you? (Yes, I know I told you you could.) Please don’t get married again before I can see you again . . .’
Soon she would find the courage to speak to Killy. She would reveal everything, endure his anger and there would be a final end to lies. Pressed between the pages of the notebook were several heavily worked drafts of the letter she sent a few days later to her lover, describing how he fulfilled her noblest ideal.
My dear L, I started to write to you yesterday but got ill and had to go to bed. Nothing serious. I’m so glad I got sick because when it happened I was writing a very long letter to you and I’m sure you’d have hated every word of it. It was so full of affection. It probably helped to give me a fever because bits of it kept going round in my head all night between pains. If our love 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 . . .
There followed the rest of the passage from her journal, culminating in that awful moment of irony: ‘Life didn’t let me down, after all.’
She added, in a postscript:
S and I are so alike, we both lose weight and interest in life when we’re alone. Don’t be angry with me for saying this. I wish to God I were with you – Sybil.
Did Mister Love appreciate the generous spirit that made Sybil write so sympathetically of the woman who had tried to steal him away from her? I doubted it. Next time Sybil met her rival, she was sure that the other woman felt no generosity towards her.
‘I saw S yesterday afternoon,’ Sybil wrote to Mister Love. ‘She must hate me. Her face was so hard set, her lips so tight, her hands shook when she lit a cigarette. She was coldly polite.’
Some weeks of sultry weather passed. The rains came. Sybil, yearning to believe in Mister Love’s sincerity, must have had her doubts because she was still hesitating. Should she? Shouldn’t she? Then she discovered something that made up her mind.
BEYOND CHURCHGATE (SYBIL’S JOURNALS, 1958)
July. It was raining. She was so happy that day, the day of her good news. She bought flowers and took them round to L’s flat. She let herself in with the key he had given her. (S did not have a key, she had quizzed him thoroughly about that.) Mister Love was asleep on his bed, his afternoon siesta. Before he woke up she had already pulled off her clothes and, laughing, climbed up into his arms.
Afterwards, lying with her head on his shoulder, she murmured that she had good news. ‘It’s something wonderful,’ she said. ‘Something I know you want as much as I do.’
‘Let me guess,’ he said, leaning up on an elbow and tracing her lips with his finger. ‘Your husband is off on one of his trips. Shall we go away together, somewhere nice? The beach place in Gorai? Khandala to see the waterfalls? Wouldn’t that be nice?’
‘My news is much better than that,’ she said, anticipating his joy when he heard it.
‘Better than that? What could be better than that? Tell me.’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, and waited for his smile.
He remained silent.
‘We’re going to have a child,’ she said, almost as if he had not understood her the first time. ‘It’s what you said you so much wanted.’
Still, no smile appeared on the face of Mister Love. His finger was playing around her mouth. ‘A child?’ he said. ‘But darling, that’s impossible. I thought you were taking precautions.’
‘I stopped,’ she said. ‘When I no longer . . . with Killy. And we weren’t either. I stopped.’ Now she was uncertain. She did not know what to make of his muted response. ‘Aren’t you pleased?’ she tried again. ‘We’re going to have a child of our own.’
L’s finger was abruptly withdrawn. ‘It isn’t the best time,’ he said, rolling away. He got up and began to dress.
‘Suddenly,’ Sybil wrote afterwards in her diary, ‘I felt naked. I was naked, but not until that instant had nakedness felt improper. I thought I knew him but, suddenly, there was this feeling of being a naked strumpet in a strange man’s bed.’
‘Of course I want to marry you,’ Mister Love was saying as he stepped into his trousers. ‘But this is the wrong moment.’
He began doing up the fly, one button at a time, twisting the fabric to pinch each little disc through. She must be patient. Button. Meanwhile she was not to worry. Button. He would take care of things. Button. There would be time in future for other children. She could not believe that she had heard this. Then of course it came to her. Relief. What a devil he was.
‘You’re teasing!’ she said, sitting up and smiling. ‘You horrible man. You’ve been teasing me!’
At this he gave a small smile. ‘Teasing, am I? Who is teasing who around here?’
‘Whom’, her writer’s inner voice wanted to correct, but she said nothing. ‘If I am teasing, kindly tell me why did you do this? It will just cause problems.’
‘What problems?’ she protested, still sure that he was testing her. ‘We love one another. We’re not ashamed of that. Let my husband and the rest of the world say what they like.’
‘You’ll have to tell your husband it’s his.’
‘Oh, stop teasing,’ she said, laughing, but no longer sure of him. ‘I haven’t slept with Killy since – well, several curses ago. It must have happened . . .’ She stopped, recollecting that it had been the afternoon he told her she had a rival. ‘Anyway it’s yours,’ she said. ‘You know that.’
‘You must tell him it is his.’
‘Please my darling, don’t say these things. How can I, even if I wanted to? The child is yours. It is half-Indian.’
‘Then get rid of it,’ said Mister Love.
She looked at him with stunned eyes. ‘Darling, you can be so cruel. Don’t say things you don’t mean. I know you like teasing, but I beg you, don’t joke about this.’
‘I am not joking,’ replied her Soul of Love. ‘You must be crazy if you think this is a joke. You come here and announce you are pregnant. You say your baby is not your husband’s. You tell me it is half-Indian. All right, I’ll accept that. Half-Indian it may be, but how can I be sure it is mine?’
‘My God, you are cruel. That is beneath contempt.’
She got up and began awkwardly to dress, but her fingers were shaking too much to do up the buttons.
She said, ‘I don’t know why you’re doing this. I can’t believe you mean these things. Perhaps I shouldn’t have sprung the news on you, but I thought you’d be happy! This is our baby, for God’s sake.’ By now she was crying. ‘After all, we’re going to be married.’
His next words tore her heart out. ‘Do you expect me to marry every woman I sleep with?’
‘Do you really expect me to marry every woman I sleep with?’ He turned and walked away. When she heard Mister Love speak those words, Sybil was stunned. Then, for a few blind instants, her tears turned to rage. She shouted, ‘I can’t believe you said that! I really can’t!’
There was a bottle of water that he kept by his bed. Sybil picked it up, holding it by the neck. His back was towards her. He was standing at the window, looking out at the sea. Sybil lifted the bottle. For a moment she intended to slam it down on his head. Then she put it back and left, brushing past a tear-blurred shape that was the servant who, having heard raised voices, was hovering outside the bedroom door.
I left L’s flat on Nepean Sea Road and began walking. It was raining, but it did not matter. Where I went did not matter. Anywhere would do. All places were the same. I walked up to the top of Malabar Hill, to the Hanging Gardens, where the Old Woman’s Shoe stands. The tears would not stop. People were staring, so I left and walked along Ridge Road to Walkeshwar, to the temple of Hanuman. For the first time in my adult life I stood and prayed, oblivious to the fact that my prayer was to a Hindu deity. I prayed as if my heart would burst, asking for guidance, for clarity, and, I am afraid, asking that it all prove to be a mistake, that L would ring me to say that he had, after all, been teasing. I don’t remember making the decision to go down the hill, but at one point on the long descent I found myself passing the Governor’s House. How often had we dined there with Killy’s grand friends? And what would they make of her now, this woman who never was cut out to be a memsahib, this soaked, defeated figure wandering without purpose among the common people on Chowpatty beach?
On Marine Drive she came to herself, sitting on the sea wall somewhere beyond Churchgate. The rain had stopped and the sky had cleared. The sun was setting over the sea. White-clad families out for evening strolls regarded her with curious eyes. A peanut hawker passed, his little pot of coals glowing in the deepening blue of dusk. Streaks of orange and violet over the sea, a sharp whiff of charcoal, roasting nuts: all these things she would remember for the rest of her life.
Sybil did not want to go home and had nowhere else to go. At last she stopped a taxi and went back to the house. Everything was quite normal. The ayah was trying to get Phoebe to bed, Phoebe was protesting that she wanted to wait up to see her father. Sybil said, yes of course she would read her a story. Thank God, thank God, thank God, a part of her mind kept repeating, that she had not been honourable enough to tell Killy. Thank God.
Her situation nonetheless was precarious. A pregnancy could not be hidden for long. She longed to keep the baby, but realised that Killy would never agree. What was she to do? Would he throw her out? Divorce her? Force her to have the child adopted? Unless . . . but no, that was impossible. For a woman like Noor, perhaps, with an Indian husband and an Indian lover. Or any number of women back home. But in her case, the fact of adultery could not be hidden. It came home to her that she was alone in a strange country, with no one to whom she could turn for help. She had never before needed access to large sums of money, but a large sum was needed now. The idea of abortion terrified her. Abortions were dangerous, illegal and very expensive. How could she get the money? Whom could she ask? How could she repay them?
May turned to June. Killy saw his pretty wife wandering the house, ‘all distrait’, as he put it, and thought that perhaps she was suffering a nervous breakdown. It would explain why her feelings for him had changed, why she would no longer perform her conjugal duty. Nervous collapses were a common feature of British life in India. They had happened a good deal in the old days. Soldiers who could no longer bear the heat, flies and dust went ‘all distrait’ so frequently that a special military psychiatric hospital was opened in the small cantonment town of Deolali, in Bombay State. The condition was known as ‘going doolally’.
Sybil was going doolally. Symptoms. Endless rain in the world outside. Rain inside. A feeling like the ocean welling up within, constantly jittery, on the edge of tears, unable to concentrate. The feeling that all her friends somehow knew about her secret shame and were avoiding her. The telephone in the house had stopped ringing. Sometimes it just would not stop, but the calls were all for Killy. Desperation. Looking out across the sea, glittering between squalls, and wanting to die, Sybil thought of suicide. Unable. Guilt. Thought of those left behind. The need, above all, to protect her innocent daughter. All these things she wrote in her journal, locked her box and hid the key away between her breasts.
A woman friend, whom she did not name in her journal, gave Sybil the money she needed. The same unnamed friend helped, by discreet enquiry, to find a doctor prepared to end the pregnancy. The abortionist was a European. Sybil told him she wanted to die, and he obliged by cutting her with such savage ineptitude that she bled for a week. The operation was performed in the morning. Sybil kissed Phoebe before she left for school, and took a taxi through the city’s flooded streets. She had to pick her way, the last few yards, between puddles of stinking brown water. Bombay’s sewers had a habit of upgushing after heavy rain. The ‘clinic’ turned out to be a single, insanitary room above a busy road. The doctor worked without a nurse, in fact without any assistance. Just him and Sybil in the room with damp walls which contained a table covered with a towel on which she was to lie. In a corner, on the floor, was a primus stove on which a pan of water balanced, simmering. Knives and syringes were laid out on a towel nearby. Also jars of tea and sugar and a packet of biscuits.
‘I am always well prepared,’ said the doctor, when, terrified but trying to be brave, she commented on this. ‘We are going to be here quite some time.’
He was fair-haired, fortyish, and spoke with a strong German accent. He told Sybil that she should not worry, he had studied medicine in Berlin, before the war. Was chased out by the Nazis. He told her to remove her underwear and lie on the table.
‘Don’t I need to change? Properly I mean?’ She had imagined green gowns, the doctor scrubbed, masked and gloved.
‘No need for the top half. Just the panties.’
There was nowhere to change.
‘So I won’t ask what you have been doing,’ he said, as she reached under her skirt to take them off. ‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Now please, on the table.’
There was nowhere to put them, so she wadded them up and put them in her handbag. She climbed onto the table and lay stiff as a corpse. The tears began when she felt his hands on her, pulling her dress up around her waist, lifting her knees, pushing them apart. Her body shook with waves of shame and humiliation. ‘Oh God,’ she sobbed, ‘I want to die. Please let me die.’
‘Well now, that would cause me some problems,’ he said in a jovial tone. ‘Please try to relax. Later, you will be fine. I have seen many ladies in your situation. Always the pretty ones, always the regret, always too late. And usually, if they are European, it is because the father was not. I am right, eh?’
He bent over her. ‘It will hurt a bit,’ she heard him say. ‘Not for long. A few minutes. Not so bad. You must not make a noise. What we are doing is illegal.’
Where last she had been caressed by L’s warm fingers, she felt the cold touch of metal.
Hours passed. She did not know how many. She lay on her back and got to know every crack in a ceiling crazed with pain. ‘No risks,’ he had said. ‘I would like to give you an anaesthetic, but I can’t. They can go wrong, and I am not equipped to deal with that.’
At some point he injected her. A long needle, directly into the womb. He hardly spoke, but Sybil could hear him humming. A tune from Lohengrin. He didn’t tell her what might happen, so, without warning, the pain smouldering inside blazed into flame and engulfed her whole body. She began screaming and he clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Quiet! Do you want the police up here?’ After a moment’s panic he said, ‘We need a bit of cloth. What did you do with your panties?’
She felt the fabric dragged between her teeth. ‘Bite this,’ he said. ‘And for God’s sake keep quiet.’
She felt him fumbling with his instruments between her legs and then the agony flared up again and she was gone.
In her dream Sybil was far away, on the island with L. She was lying on her back on the beach. It was hot and the sea was singing arias from Wagner. Mister Love was smiling, assuring her that everything was all right. He leaned over her and said he was just popping out for something to eat, he would be back soon.
Sybil rode back to consciousness on waves of pain. Her body was cramping, heaving like the sea, she thought, trying to cast up something on shore. From a great distance she heard the doctor’s voice. ‘Nearly there, nearly there now.’
She sat upright. The doctor, holding a mug of tea, was staring at something between her legs. She looked down and saw a huge clot of gore. ‘Oh please, please,’ she cried, ‘take it away! But he said he couldn’t, until the placenta came. She lay on the table waiting for eternity to pass, trying not to touch the baby.
‘What happens now?’ It was dark outside the room’s one dingy window. Night had come, bringing more rain. Her pain had ebbed away, exposing a soul that stank like mudflats.
