The Death of Mr Love, page 28
‘Was it about? I haven’t touched it in years.’
It was the tale of a man much like me, who, in his mid-forties, finds himself longing for a bit of adventure (being a bookseller I made him a book-keeper). One day he sees an advertisement for a correspondence course on how to become a private detective and on a whim sends off for it. As the lessons arrive, each teaching a different skill – how to shadow a mark without being spotted, how to eavesdrop on conversations, how to grub for evidence in people’s garbage, how to steam open envelopes and carry out dead letter drops – he practises on his neighbours and friends, with ludicrous and, finally, devastating results.
‘It sounds fun,’ she said. ‘Why did you give it up?’
‘It’s still in a drawer somewhere.’
The waiter reappeared, flourishing magnificent platters, black porcelain with gold chinoiserie, each bearing the artistically arrayed minimum that could be called a meal: hers was fish of some sort, halibut perhaps, steamed in little lettuce parcels, mine a tagine of lamb with lemon and olives.
‘Well,’ she said, when we had replenished our glasses and were addressing the tiny portions. ‘What drives your man? Fundamentally.’
I was forced to ponder this. I had the character, a few incidents and even a notion for an ending, but most of the story was still a bright mist. I planned to have my hero narrate his story in that downbeat first-person style which is de rigueur for serious private dicks, but what drove him? I had never been quite sure. ‘Love,’ I said, taking a stab at it. ‘Love, I suppose, fundamentally.’
She said, ‘Everyone writes about love. Maybe you should try something more interesting.’
‘Like what?’
‘Revenge,’ she said. ‘Maybe he wants to take revenge.’
‘He’s not that sort of character.’ I couldn’t imagine my manqué detective wanting revenge on anyone. ‘There’s not much humour in revenge.’
‘That isn’t what I meant.’ She leaned over and speared an olive from my plate. Licked it, then held it for a moment between her teeth before sucking it in and crunching.
‘Bhalu, what I mean is a story not about revenge, but written to avenge.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘All right. Let’s take your bookseller. Book-keeper. One day he finds out that, many years ago, something very evil was done to a person he loved. Something unforgivable. A cruel, heartless crime, that destroyed her life. But the crime never came to light, and the criminal was never punished. So you go back to investigate.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘How many years ago? Goes back where? And who goes back?’ Here it came at last, her mother’s diaries. But what a tortuous way to bring the subject up.
‘Doesn’t matter how long,’ she said. ‘What happened was so evil that it can never be forgotten, or forgiven. It must be punished.’
She means Mr Love’s cruelty, I was thinking. But her mother’s diaries stopped before the end of the story. Phoebe obviously doesn’t know that Mister Love was killed for his sins.
‘But Phoebe, what if the man – or woman, of course – who did this vile thing is dead?’
She said sharply, ‘What makes you think it was a woman?’
Only then did it occur to me that I had never given any thought to the question of who had murdered Mister Love.
The exquisite but ephemeral meal was over. We resisted the ninja-like waiter’s attempts to tempt us with chocolate comma, blueberry coulis, blackberry mousse and a melting cheese which, he said, was a species of vegetarian Brie. Our coffee was spiced with cardamom and cost more than an entire meal at the sort of cafés I frequented in Lewes. Phoebe sat twisting her napkin. She was not wearing her wedding ring, I noticed. The awkwardness of earlier once more interposed itself.
‘Thank you for the excellent meal,’ I said. ‘I don’t often eat like this. In fact I’ve never eaten like this.’
Phoebe seemed to come to a decision. She leaned forward and said, ‘Bhalu, I’ve got to tell you. I’ve been desperate to see you. I mean, on our own.’
‘Really?’
I cursed myself for sounding so gauche. The impossible thought occurred that she might be going to kiss me again.
‘Yes, really. You see, there’s something I want to tell you. I don’t know whether I should. I’ve been struggling.’
‘If you want to, you should,’ I said.
‘Can I?’
‘Of course.’
‘Anything?’
‘Anything at all.’
She sighed. ‘That’s what I thought. You know, Bhalu, we are twin souls. We’re joined by fate. Don’t you feel it too?’
She reached out and took my hands. ‘I’m sure it’s not by chance that we met again. What happened to us, when we were children – it binds us. Do you see that? Our lives are wound round one another’s.’
As a child she’d had hay-coloured plaits, incapable of retaining a ribbon, no matter how tightly, intricately knotted. Poor luckless Rosie used to get annoyed when she came home without them. The Ambona hills must have been littered with her scraps of satin. Today her hair fell softly to the neck and was cut in that style still favoured by women who grew up in the sixties, a fringe that gets in the eyes. What was she like as a young woman? We had missed the best years of each other’s lives.
‘Bhalu, other people don’t understand. Katy thinks I’m a threat to her.’ She brushed her fingers over my forehead. ‘Don’t frown. Grey at the temples suits you, by the way.’
‘Nonsense!’
‘No, you’re sitting there with your mouth open, ready to tell me I’m wrong, but I’m not. Women have instincts and mine is that Katy doesn’t like me. Not one little bit. Maybe she thinks I’ll try to take you away from her. But she’s wrong. I already have you. We already have each other. We’ve belonged to each other since we were eight years old. You’re the truest, deepest friend I ever had. But we’ve become strangers. I’m so afraid you won’t feel the same about me.’
I held her hands. Here was the cause of our awkwardness. We both so badly wanted to prove that our childhood friendship could and would effortlessly translate to the present that we daren’t open up, reveal our new grown-up selves, in case we discovered after all that we had nothing in common. And I’d thought it was just me who worried about this, who feared that the adult I had become betrayed the promise of the child I had been. She was right. We were bound, and we were strangers. Certainly I very much wanted to know her. Despite the long hiatus, she was precious to me in the way that people are who have loved each other with the absolute commitment of small children.
‘I had this feeling,’ said Phoebe, ‘that I could tell you anything. Anything at all and you wouldn’t be judgmental. I feel that you wouldn’t think the worse of me . . .’
‘I can’t imagine . . .’
‘Bhalu, suppose I proved to be the sort of person you wouldn’t want to associate with?’
‘I associate with Piglet, so I don’t think you’ve much to worry about,’ I said, not sure where this was going. ‘Are you trying to tell me you’ve done something bad?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘At least, not yet.’
She gave a deliciously wry smile, one that began with lips pursed like a rosebud and widened slowly into a grin.
Searching her face for a clue, and finding nothing except the now fading smile, I realised again how much I had missed. I had not known her during the years that formed her face and could only guess at what might have incised the laughter lines at the corners of her eyes and the creases that ran either side of her mouth – but her eyes, grey flecked with green, were the eyes I had known as a child.
‘Have you ever had an affair?’
This took me completely by surprise.
‘No,’ I lied. ‘Have you?’
Whatever she might have said next was stifled by the approach of our waiter, all in black to match the crypt-like dining room.
Afterwards, she took me to her suite, a sumptuous white-on-white apartment done out in what purported to be Corfiot style with a four-poster bed engulfed in clouds of muslin. There was nowhere to sit, except a sort of step where the floor dropped into a bay window, so we sat on the bed.
She said, ‘Bhalu, you must have guessed I didn’t bring you here just to have lunch.’
‘No? What, then?’
I hoped she had missed the tiny catch in my voice. Stupid to imagine, wrong to think . . . but I’d been aware of her all through the meal – her perfume, the graceful lacuna between her breasts as she leaned to lift that olive, the curl of her tongue taking a lick at it – and she’d asked if I’d ever . . .
She took my hand. ‘It’s so hard to believe. All these years apart, but the feelings are all still there.’
‘My God,’ I said, ‘you are trembling.’
‘Bhalu, I’m very afraid about . . . what I’m doing here with you. It’s probably a bad idea. Whatever happens, I don’t want it to spoil things.’
She stared at me with those strange eyes from my childhood. I could feel my doubts dissolving, animal stirrings. I was ready to betray.
‘Oh, I don’t think it will,’ I said.
‘I told you, I feel as if I can trust you with anything. Can I?’
‘Of course you can.’
She released my hand, dipped into her bag and pulled out a thick notebook with a green and yellow cover. ‘I brought this. I want you to read it. It’s Mummy’s last journal. From 1993.’
The notebook lay on the bed between us. I was floundering in a swamp of what I informed myself was relief, but which felt a great deal like regret.
Phoebe took a breath. ‘Oh God, Bhalu, I feel so terrified about this. What will you think? This journal begins in England, and there’s lots of things in it. But it ends during a trip she made to India, about six years ago. She wouldn’t tell me why she was going. And when she came back she wouldn’t say why she’d been. A couple of months later she died, and I found this by her bed.’
Desire ebbs so painfully slowly.
‘Shall I take it with me?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I want you to read it now. Just the last few pages. I daren’t risk anyone else seeing them. I should have burnt it.’
‘Why, what’s in it?’
‘You’ve read the diaries?’
‘Yes.’ I had still not told her about Retribution.
‘You know my mother had an affair . . . it ended badly. She had an abortion.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry.’
‘I’ve never had anything like that – an adulterous affair, I mean – so I don’t know, forgive me . . . I wondered if you . . . ? The man was murdered.’
An electric panic surged up my spine. At a stroke, the whole enormity of what Retribution meant was made clear. It had been true. In which case, everything connected with it was true . . . and Maya had taken the blame for his death on herself.
‘How do you know this?’ I asked at last.
‘Mummy told me. And it’s in here.’ Tapping the notebook with a long fingernail.
‘Bhalu, I’m very afraid that I know who murdered him.’
SYBIL’S ‘LAST JOURNAL’ (BOMBAY, 1993)
The Arabs are sitting on the sea wall laughing in the rain. They are mostly from Dubai, dusty sons of the desert, and come here every year at this time to marvel at the monsoon. Shankar, the room waiter, told me this. He says the staff don’t like them because they are dirty and let their children urinate on the floor and shit in cupboards, but the hotel puts up with it because they tip well, hundreds of rupees a time and pay over the odds for everything. For a moment just now I thought I saw L sitting on the wall among them. In an instant it all came back, the ammoniacal taint that clung to me in those months after his murder, the constant terror that I would be uncovered. I thought I should never get over it, but in time it became less terrible and, I suppose, though I did not count how many years it took, there came a day when I woke up and it was not the first thing on my mind.
I came back to India for three weeks and find three days hard to stand. The days waste away as they did when I first arrived in 1948. The smells, the mustiness, the damp heat, the unfresh beds, the sourness in the bread, all the parts of the whole taintedness are still here. I feel the same frustration as evening arrives; the fan churns up hot air, and one is cramped uncomfortably on a screwed-up bed pretending to read, while another day whiles into night with nothing achieved.
Perhaps L has returned to haunt me. After all, isn’t that why I’m here, to lay the ghost, as once the man? Shankar, the room boy, has just brought me a bottle of whisky. Also two bottles of soda. There is rust under the rim where he flipped the cap off. He placed his hand on his heart, bowed and backed from the room. He has a caste mark right in the middle of his forehead. A large red dot. A bullet hole, like the one that killed L.
They are drumming now, down below. This is the first time I’ve watched the moon rise in India since I was with Maya in Ambona. God, Indian whisky is disgusting. Why did I come back? My joke in London was that I would bring presents for such as may still remember me, and stay just long enough to buy presents to take back. Phoebe said, ‘You’re not a pedlar, carrying gifts and goods backwards and forwards for other people.’ No, I had another mission. My 69th birthday present will be to free myself from the nightmare people, from the last of them. I said to myself, ‘I will go to India and find Maya. We will go back to Ambona together. Maya will know how to do what must be done.’ Thirty-nine years ago, I left this place. Now I want to go to The Times of India and read the old papers to relive what I felt then. Pain, dread of exposure. I could almost hear S, my rival in love, gloating: ‘You really thought you’d got away with it, didn’t you, Sybil, dear?’ L was dead but they would not let the story die. They poked and foraged and pried and came very close, but never did learn the truth, and when there was nothing left to report, his ghost started appearing all over the city.
Even now, at this solemn remove of time, it comes back, the flickery hysteria I felt when I read that L’s ghost had been seen walking near the flat in Nepean Sea Road. Two nights after this debut it appeared again, this time at Flora Fountain. The sightings multiplied. In Memonwada Street, near Chor Bazaar, it accosted a man on his way to the Chicken-moholla Mosque. It mounted the statue of the black horse at Kalaghoda and sat smirking behind Edward VII. It alighted from a train at VT station and dissolved into a flight of pigeons. A professor from the University spotted it smoking a cheroot on the steps of the Asiatic Library. It was seen making obscene gestures on the forecastle of a naval destroyer and simultaneously begging from passing cars at Kemp’s Corner. On its first outing L’s spectre wore a sober business suit, but by the end its costume was invariably a blood-stained bathtowel. It was at about this time that street hawkers all over the city began selling copies of the towel L was wearing when he died, printed with his name in big blood-dripping letters. His real name, of course, not ‘Mister Love’ which was my pet name for him, which only Maya and I knew. What a bitter misnomer. He never missed a chance to tell me, as I assume he told all the other pretty married women who were his accustomed prey, that in Hindi his name meant ‘love’.
Maya, how ironic that I should come here to look for you – sent by Zul in guise of an angel – only to learn that you have been living in England for years. How did we lose touch? We were close as sisters, ‘les inséparables’ – isn’t that what Sub used to call us? But afterwards I hated all and everything to do with India, yes even you, Maya. Impossibly far away it seems – Ambona, hills crouched under flights of rain that summer, when I told you about my botched love affair, my fear of Killy finding out; to be unfaithful was bad enough, but with an Indian? And that was before L’s death. I told you how, when I found I was expecting L’s child I went to him imagining his joy, and said, ‘Here is our child, that you wanted.’ His face, upon which no smile appeared. His cold-hearted reply, my disbelieving tears, then the contemptuous, unforgivable suggestion that I pass it off as my husband’s. God, how he must have despised me. Even then, he had another insult to hurl. ‘Get rid of it. Do you expect me to marry every woman I sleep with?’
Well, now there is nothing left. We shall not meet again in this life. My hope lay in being released. My dear Maya, you will surely be astonished to get this letter from me – it must be thirty years since my last. Oh Maya, what regrets. And what irony that I should come all the way here to find you. My dearest Maya, I can just imagine your amazement to get this letter from your old friend Sybil Killigrew, much less a letter written from Bombay even though it must go back to find you in England and O God the thought of going back appals me, the work I came for undone, and if you are wondering what am I doing here, I came looking for you, sent by angelic Zul in disguise because there was something that I decided I must do and only you could help me. But Christ, you are not here. Dearest Maya, well, here am I, good old Sybil K, scouring the stinking midden that is Bombay looking for you and it turns out all along that you are in England, and separated too, so Homi Mehra tells me. Old age alas has not improved him. Maya is in England, he said, but no one knows where, no one has heard from her in years. So be it. Tomorrow I will go alone to Ambona to look for it . . .
Well I went and the directions I have carried locked in my brain for nearly forty years were no use. No use at all. I need you Maya, but what directions will find you? Look, here’s an empty bottle. If I go out on the balcony and throw it hard enough – put a message in it first, it would have about as much chance of finding you – will it reach the sea?
Didn’t. Bottle made foul racket, banged off car, smashed in gutter. I ducked back and turned off my light. They will blame it on the Arabs. Sybil K performs familiar Houdini act. Writing in darkness. The moon is still up, but hard-faced, mean, and very high. Can’t see, can hear. Waves bursting on the sea wall, drunken words racing across the page. In the dark, their voices can come back to me. L and his child murdered within a year, skull of the father passed around in court, to see the path of bullets, corpse of the fledgling tipped in refuse bin.
