The Death of Mr Love, page 29
What mangled mind survived that loved you both?
Child, speak. I have come back – a wave or two of sea from where you were conceived. Make contact with me tonight; the touch of mind at most is all I need to be released. By your sea, in sound of surf and with your father who is with you, release you me so that I can end this play. Child unborn, by your consent alone, I can be sent to sleep. Blot out the rest. I never found love in this world that measured mine . . . I am the cavern and the roaring seas; history and the span of time. I kill my young when occasion suits.
Garbage, speak! You, who ended in the Churchgate trash thrown out by the refugee from Hitler – no mercy – he escaped Hitler but he did not spare you. By our joint consent you perished by knife, passed to the waiting garbage heap.
Deal as you will. The devil does not beg. God deals in love, but I in death. Should you be lenient, I’ll kill you both again. L didn’t love me. He told me so. And other people too. When you use someone in the name of love, you deserve to be murdered.
By surf & stinking sea six bullets and a knife, remember me. Nepean Sea, Prem Ahuja and his child, remember me. Because I was not loved I killed.
I AM YOUR RETRIBUTION!
V SHAITAN
THE DEEP WELL
Phoebe’s eyes never once left my face as I read her mother’s last journal. When I looked up I would catch her gazing at me, almost in terror. She fumbled once for a cigarette, but put it away again, unlit. When I reached the black waves of self-hatred in which Sybil was drowning, her writing growing erratic, the letters larger and crazier, the pen slashing, making jagged loops, stabbing at the paper, I grew more and more fascinated and horrified; until, when the words had swollen, so monstrous and misshapen that it took barely three of them, sprawling across the paper, to fill up a line, there came an earth-heaving shock, dumbfound astoundment and the world’s walls collapsed.
‘Oh God!’ she cried. ‘Look at your face! Well, now you know!’
Yes, now I knew.
Phoebe was terrified that her mother had been a murderess. This struck me as so ludicrous that I burst out laughing.
‘Phoebe. Phoebe, darling, your mother didn’t kill him.’
Here I am after all, hugging her, cuddling her, pressing kisses onto her rainy cheek.
‘Darling Phoebe, listen to me,’ I said. ‘I know that Sybil says she killed him. I know you think she did. But she didn’t! She can’t have.’
The truth was so much stranger. So bizarre, so overwhelming, that I didn’t know how to tell her.
Phoebe was crying, making small snivelling sounds. Her nose was starting to run, but she didn’t seem to be aware of it. Déjà vu. Thus I had found her once, crouching among the chickens. I kissed her cheek again, and let her go.
‘Don’t cry, my dear, darling Phoebe,’ I said. ‘Look, I’m going to show you. I’m going to prove that your mother was completely innocent.’ I picked up the notebook, and opened it to where the writing ended, in huge stark capital letters. She shook her head from side to side, like a child.
‘Just here. You see? She finally names Mister Love. She gives us his real name . . .’
I stopped. The sight of that name again stopped my breath. Surely, surely, I was thinking, this is impossible. It could not have been. Phoebe leant against the white, upholstered bedhead, staring at me with wet eyes, saying nothing at all.
‘Phoebe, if that name meant anything to you, you’d know that Sybil didn’t kill him. Not a chance. Couldn’t in a million years have killed him. Phoebe, I know who Mister Love was. I know who killed him. Everybody knows. It happened when I was away at boarding school. A huge scandal. In all the papers. Listen . . .’
I told the story, as far as I could remember it. The rich Sindhi seducer, the English wife of an Indian naval officer. The jealous husband going to the playboy’s flat. Shooting him. The scandal and sensation of the trial. I could still hardly believe that the story told in Retribution referred to this shooting, because if it did, it meant that Phoebe’s mother and mine had been entangled (incredible thought) in the most notorious case ever to come before an Indian court: the trial of Commander Kawas Nanavati of the Indian Navy for the killing of Prem Bhagwandas Ahuja.
Phoebe heard me out in silence, her face expressionless, a strange response to my good news.
When I stopped talking, she said, ‘I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make sense. Because if that’s true, then tell me Bhalu, why was my mother being blackmailed?’
Blackmailed?
She began to cry again, and wouldn’t stop. The violence of her grief was appalling. What could I do? I hugged her to me and felt the great snorting sobs shaking her body, pumping her ribcage, flattening her breasts against me. Please, Fever, stop, shhh, shhh, shhh. I pressed my mouth to her cheek and then to her mouth but still she would not stop. I was quite helpless. Her cries sounded like those of a small, desperate animal, sobbing, crying, uttering little squeals and astonished screams of pain.
Footsteps came to the door of the room – stopped – went away again. It occurred to me that someone from the hotel thought I was injuring her. But no, in that case they would have knocked. Whoever came to the door had decided that the sobs and cries were pure pleasure, that I was royally fucking her in this palatial bed. And recalling how, only an hour earlier, I had been daydreaming about some such outcome, I realised how utterly sad it was that I knew nothing about the woman I was holding in my arms, nothing at all.
In the end she grew quiet, gave a sigh, then found a small smile and said, ‘You called me Fever.’
‘You didn’t really believe your mother murdered Mister Love?’
‘What else could I think? She says so, doesn’t she? She says she killed him. It’s unambiguous. For years, almost as long as I can remember, I’d known we had to leave India because her lover had been murdered and she was being blackmailed. But I never really understood why. Something to do with letters she’d written him. I found the notebook after she died. Six years ago. And then it all made obvious, horrible sense. She was blackmailed because she had murdered her lover.’
‘You’d known all this, about the murder and the blackmail, since . . . when? Since you were a child?’
She gave me a rather sad smile. ‘If it weren’t for you, my darling Bhalu, I would never have had the chance to be a child.’
‘Oh Bhalu, I nearly forgot your present.’
She reached into her handbag and brought out a tiny Indian lacquer box. Inside was a lump of a dark aromatic substance.
‘I thought we could try it together,’ she said. ‘Oh, of course, you need cigarettes. Here, use mine.’
She sat watching me as I performed with unsteady fingers. It was at least twenty years since I’d rolled a joint. I felt rather foolish doing it.
‘Prem,’ she said, rolling the word around her tongue, tasting it. She rhymed it with ‘hem’. It should have rhymed with ‘shame’.
‘So why did she call him Mister Love?’
‘Because “prem” in Hindi means “love”,’ I told her, tapping a mixture of tobacco and hashish, Dost-fashion, back into the tube of the cigarette. I still couldn’t believe it. The Nanavati murder.
It was tantalising. I remembered so little about it, apart from the bare outline, but knew it was huge and important.
I said, ‘Tell me about this blackmail.’
Phoebe flicked her gold lighter. Drew deeply on the joint and exhaled in a gush.
‘My mother used to tell me things. She couldn’t talk to my dad, so I was her confidante. It’s why I used to like coming to stay with you, because then she would tell your mother instead.’
‘What did she tell you?’
Another deep drag. Holding. Smoke flaring from her nostrils. ‘She’d say things like . . .’ She mimicked her mother’s dipped accent.
‘ “He’s got some letters I wrote. I shouldn’t have written them, it was so stupid of me, but how could I ever imagine . . . ? He’s got the letters, and that’s that. I tell you this, darling, you must keep it a secret. No one must know. I don’t know what will become of us. He wants a thousand rupees, another thousand, and I told him, ‘I haven’t got it. There’s no more. You’ve bled me dry.’ He said – this man said, ‘You can get it from your husband,’ and I said, ‘You know I can’t ask him.’ And he said, ‘Well, get it from one of your other friends.’ You should have heard the leer in his voice, the filthy beast. But there’s no one I can ask. I’ve spent the allowance that Daddy gives me, I can’t ask Maya again. And I can’t pay your school fees again, darling, and maybe this time they’ll kick you out. I can’t pay the cook because they’ve taken everything. I daren’t tell your father. How can I go on living like this? Tell me. How can I . . . ?” ’
Within days of Mister Love’s death the phone calls began. ‘A matter of procedure. A quick visit to my office should sort it out.’ At his office, ‘Madam, is this your handwriting? Can you confirm that you wrote these letters? Thank you, that is all.’
A month later, there was another call. ‘Madam, it seems we have something more to discuss. Unfortunately, copies of your letters were made. Official records. Such things can easily fall into the wrong hands. To make sure that certain people behave as we would all wish, it is necessary . . . you understand . . .’
‘ “No, darling, I daren’t let your father find out. I daren’t, I just daren’t. You don’t understand, you’re just a child. He would kill me. Yes, he would. He’d take you away from me. He’d send you to boarding school and you’d be miserable. You don’t want that, do you? If you tell your father, he’ll take you away from me and he’d never let me see you again. But I have to pay this man, or . . .” ’
Whose threats did Sybil whisper into her helpless daughter’s ear? Phoebe said she did not know. She thought he was an official. Her mother had never mentioned a name. He must have been close to the investigation, or the court case, to have got hold of Sybil’s letters to Ahuja. A policeman maybe. Or a court officer. He had copies of her letters and had started by threatening to show them to Killy if she did not co-operate. He wanted a lot of money. She could afford it, rich foreign bitch, rich foreign husband. Sybil knew she ought to tell Killy, but she could not. For the first time in years they had begun to find happiness together. She could not bear to hurt or humiliate him. She had to lie. And for the second time in two years Sybil found herself in desperate need of money. She sold possessions. She invented essential trips that she never made, and necessary items that she never bought. She stole from Killy. But the blackmailer was never satisfied.
‘Mrs Killigrew?’ The cold voice on the phone. ‘You have broken your word. The package is not here as agreed. Do I have to point out the conseqences?’
‘ “Money, Phoebe darling. That’s what this man wants. More and more money. And I said – I went to his office in tears, imagine how hateful to cry in front of that monster – I said, ‘I haven’t got any left, because you’ve taken it all.’ And this time he said, ‘The lawyers in the case know about your letters. They have no plans to use them, but how long can I keep this out of the papers? Someone will talk and that is why I am trying so hard to help you. But if you can’t pay, dear lady, we can maybe come to some other arrangement?’ I think you know what he meant, don’t you? I don’t have to spell it out. I just ran from his office in disgust, and that’s why I’m so desperate, you see, but I can’t go to your father and I can’t go back to Maya. She’s already helped me as much as she can. Oh darling, don’t cry, I don’t want you to be upset, you’re the only person I can talk to. You’re so calm, so wise, you fill me with strength. You’re my tower. You’re the only reason I can go on. I’m going to tell you a secret. You must never tell anyone. Will you? Promise? So let’s dry that face . . .”
‘Then,’ said Phoebe, ‘she’d tell me some other appalling thing. Like how horrible it was to lose her baby. Bhalu, she told me all about that, in the most awful detail. And what she’d felt like when her lover was murdered. She’d tell me these things and I had to listen, and try to be strong for her, and suggest things she could do. We sat and plotted together. She’d say, “You’re my best friend. You are like a deep well. I can drop my secrets into you and know that they will never come up again.” But I heard a voice inside me screaming, “No, no, don’t tell me these things! I can’t help you, Mummy, because I’m only a child”.’
I thought of the little girl who so desperately wanted to visit the temple on top of the mountain, to make her wish come true.
The afternoon was wearing on. We had smoked another two hashish-laced cigarettes, lying side by side on her bed as we talked. The mixture of wine at lunch and dope had made me drowsy. She murmured, ‘I feel so much lighter. Thank God. Thank you, Bhalu. Knowing it wasn’t her. I knew you’d help me!’
She got up on one elbow, leaned over me and pressed her mouth on mine. Don’t fool yourself, it’s the booze, I thought, melting under the heat of her breath. Anyway, she’s kissed me like this before. She is impulsive and affectionate, and it doesn’t mean a thing. But this time her eyes were closed and her tongue flickered at my clamped-tight lips. Surrender was inevitable. I too shut my eyes, and our tongues played naughty, joyous games. I could taste the wine in her mouth and one of her breasts was squashed against me, pressing a hard nub of nipple into my ribs.
She rolled away onto her back and reached for a cigarette.
‘I met him once,’ she said, directing a cloud of smoke into the bed’s fairytale canopy. ‘I mean the man who was blackmailing her.’
‘What!?’ The agony of thwarted lust.
‘It must have been him. He picked me up once from school. An Indian man, in a car. It was a very hot day. He said that he was a friend of Mummy’s and that she had asked him to take me to a place where we would go swimming. He said Mummy would be joining us later. So I went with him.’
She moved back onto her elbow.
‘At first I thought we were going to Breach Candy, but of course he was Indian. We drove up to the top of Malabar Hill. Do you remember Bombay, Bhalu? And there is the road that goes down towards Chowpatty beach? Well, the car took that road, but after a while, it turned off to the right, down a private drive that led down towards the sea. The man told me that this was the Governor’s House. But he had access to it. There was a small beach there. Did I know how to swim? I said not very well. So he said he would teach me. He had brought a swimming costume for me. It wasn’t mine. I was scared. He said I could change in the car. He himself stripped off behind a towel. He was wearing black trunks.’
‘Why do you think he was the blackmailer? Couldn’t he just have been a friend of Sybil’s?’
‘He wasn’t,’ she said. ‘I know because when I got home Mummy was having hysterics. Rosie had been left waiting at the school gate. She brought home a note for Mummy. It said, “I have taken your kitten off to drown”.’
‘Bastard.’
‘Yes, but that wasn’t the only reason.’
‘Why? What did he do to you? Did he touch you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He told me a story. We were swimming in the water and he was holding me, with one hand under my tummy. We were looking back to the shore. There were big gardens, sloping up to the road, quite a way up the hillside. The man started telling me about a murder that had happened in one of the bazaars. Like the place where Jula and you used to go. A woman was stabbed to death. The man who did it cut her head off. He took it in a bag and walked across Bombay. Then he threw the head over a wall. It got stuck in a hedge, and one of the gardeners found it. My man – that is, the man who had taken me swimming – pointed up the hill to a thick hedge. He said that was where the head had been found. He asked me to be sure and tell my mother the story.’
Something occurred to me. I said, ‘Was this just before you came to us, the third year? It would have been 1960.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember. After that she said I must never be out of Rosie’s sight.’
‘Yes. How worried they were that day we went with Jula, to look for the Kathodi. Do you remember?’
She said, ‘The best part of my childhood was being with you, away from it all.’
‘No wonder they were so worried. They said the ayah must never let us out of her sight. And then the night we went up to the temple we thought she followed us because she was nosy. But what if she’d been told we were in danger?’
She said, ‘I can’t think about that, Bhalu.’
But I could. And it came back to me, the darkness, excitement and terror of that night. The ghostly figure, lit up in the lightning glare. The falling scream.
‘Fever, suppose her death wasn’t an accident.’
‘I hate him,’ said Phoebe. ‘All my life I’ve hated him.’
At her behest I made another joint. I was holding it, staring up into the muslin clouds above when Phoebe scuffled her feet and I heard the clunk of shoes hitting the floor. Suddenly there was a foot pointing at the canopy. She lowered the leg, holding it stiff, like a dancer, then raised the other till it was vertical. Her legs were long and beautifully-shaped and when she lifted them up, her dress fell back to her hips.
‘I can understand that,’ I said, scarce able to breathe.
‘Mummy’s love affair went wrong. Her baby was scraped out of her alive. God, do you wonder why I never wanted one? Then her lover was murdered. Enough suffering, surely, for one woman. But no. Along comes this man, who knows most of this horrible story. Does he show sympathy? He does not. Does he try to protect her? He does not. Instead he gets out his thumbscrew. And he methodically begins to torture a woman who was already half mad with grief and guilt.’
Her leg was still in the air. I handed her the joint and the leg came slowly down.
‘But that wasn’t all of it, Bhalu. You know what was worse?’
‘Nothing could be worse.’
‘Actually, darling, it was what he did to my father. And me. Daddy wasn’t having affairs with people. Nor was I, till . . .’
