The Death of Mr Love, page 30
Phoebe jumped up and knelt beside me. ‘Put this thing out,’ she said. ‘I feel so strange.’
She looked up, laughed, then straddled me and bent so low that her hair touched my face. ‘God, how I love you.’
I thought she was about to kiss me again, but she frowned, and with her face still inches from mine, said, ‘Bhalu, that man. Don’t you understand? He’s still out there somewhere. He’s old and rich, from all the money he extorted from people during his vile career. I can never forgive him. Never. I used to dream of killing him. I wanted to cut his ears off, and slit his eyes. Now I just want to see him, meet him face to face. Bhalu, I want to find him. You must help me. I want you to come to Bombay with me and find him. Say you will, darling. Please?’
Her mouth was lowering to mine when she gave a little retch, straightened up and said, ‘I feel ill.’
She stood up. Swayed. I caught her, made her lie down and began folding back the cover on the far side of the bed.
‘Can’t sleep with clothes on,’ she said. ‘Undress me.’
‘But . . .’
‘Silly. Nothing you haven’t seen before.’
So I put my arms under her shoulders and lifted her up. The dress was wriggled off. Unfastened her bra. Warm breasts, heavy. Nipples not erect. Slim body. Appendicitis scar. Hadn’t had that when she was eight, or nine, or however old we’d been, under the waterfall, in Eden.
She lifted up her hips. I drew the damp scrap down her thighs. Katy was wrong. Phoebe had no need for hair dye.
She was already asleep. Breathing harshly through the nose. Since leaving the lunch table, eight hours had somehow passed. It was well past eleven. Too late to catch the last train? Not if I left immediately. After a moment’s thought, I took off my shoes and socks. Paused. Then I took off my trousers and shirt and climbed into the huge bed. Christ, what the hell was I doing? What would I say to Katy in the morning? Well, nothing had happened. Almost nothing. A yard at least, between me and Phoebe. Nothing would happen. I would just sleep. Lying awake in the darkness, listening to Phoebe’s little drunken snores, reliving the moment of that extraordinary revelation, everything that followed, I realised that she hadn’t once mentioned her husband. I knew almost nothing about her.
Why did I get into bed with her?
Get hold of a video of Basic Instinct and run the opening sequence. Just the titles. If you get to the woman in the blonde wig with the icepick, you have gone too far; you need only the title sequence, when the screen is all shifting light and shadow. Close your eyes, and listen to the music.
It’s an eerie, uneasy music, full of beauty and warning. It hints that you are getting into something beyond your ken, beyond your control. You struggle to free yourself, but the music is strong, its sweetness pulls you back; there is no way out, you are lost.
ZUL THE ANGEL (FROM SYBIL’S LAST JOURNAL)
She was still asleep when I woke. I washed as quietly as I could in the bathroom. Not wanting to disturb her, I told myself, but in truth I was anxious to escape. Had to rummage in her toilet bag for toothpaste. Facial scrub. Shower creme. A foil wrapper containing three condoms. I crept out, wrote a note to thank her for lunch (!) and tell her that I had borrowed Sybil’s journal. ‘Don’t go running off to India,’ I wrote. ‘I am going to find out as much about this whole business as I can.’
I didn’t see anyone on the way out of the hotel. Dawn was just breaking above South Kensington. Victoria deserted, the train to Lewes empty. I sat daydreaming. If she hadn’t drunk so much . . . hadn’t smoked that hash . . . where the hell had she got it, anyway? . . . what might have . . . ? As if I needed to ask. I knew exactly what would have bloody well happened. Okay, then answer the other question. Had she meant it to happen? What had she wanted? She’d certainly kissed me as if she meant it. Wait. Recollect the kiss. Warm, long, wet. In detail, please. Flowery bouquet, warm, rolled on the tongue. Full bodied, definitely. Fruit, melon topped with strawberry, saw them later, remember, hadn’t had those when she was nine. Smooth finish with hints of honey and tobacco. Yes, she’d meant it. Condoms. No doubt at all. And God, those legs . . . damn it, more questions. Innocent? How could it be? No longer a child, was she? The legs, I was yearning to stroke them. And then . . . ‘Undress me,’ she said. ‘Nothing you haven’t seen before . . .’ She could not have been unaware of the effect she was having on me. Gazed fascinated at that channel which, last time I saw it, had been innocent, like a cleft in smooth, bare rock. Now, a watercourse widened and deepened by many rainy seasons, it fell half-hidden through dense scrub. So much for metaphor. Strangely, during lunch when I looked into her décolletage I had thought of the ravine that separates Bicchauda from Dagala. Phoebe as embodiment of the Ambona hills.
Must put Phoebe out of my mind. Think of Katy and be glad nothing had happened. I loved Katy. She was a good soul. Kind. Loving. Supportive. Just as attractive, in her own way, as Phoebe. Think of something else.
Thank God the train was empty.
I forced myself to open Sybil’s journal. Mad words leapt out.
. . . Prem deserved it. The innocent suffered. The baby should not have been murdered. How much you love, so much shall be returned to you, in like measure. My measure is altogether more generous and less carping than yours, all those of you who thought you knew me, and put me on trial for thirty years or more. Answer for it . . . Answer.
Prem Ahuja. I had almost forgotten him. What Sybil and Maya had been mixed up in, all those years ago. Testament to Phoebe’s intoxicating power: a nasha so powerful that it had almost made me forget that sensational discovery.
Poor Sybil. Thirty years passed and brought her no peace. What was it that sent her so suddenly, so mysteriously, back? Then I noticed that inside the front cover was scrawled, in the same crazy handwriting as the final ravings, ‘This is Sybil Killigrew’s Last Journal.’ In my tumescent delirium, it did not occur to me until later to wonder how Sybil herself could have known.
Sybil’s Journal, June 28th, 1993
Yesterday I started scraping the paint off the planks in the kitchen. I thought I would strip them bare, down to the wood, then polish them to make them glow.
I scraped paint all morning. There were several layers. Lime green. Under that, brown. And beneath that a dark blue. My arm hurt and by lunchtime I was crying with the pain. I went into the drawing room and lay down. Smell of damp everywhere. I thought, I want to give up. Let me just die now. When a knock came at the door I thought it must be the postman.
Standing outside was a friend I had not seen for thirty years. Zul Lalvani. He used to be a documentary film producer. Zul must be my age, or older, but he looked more or less the same as he always did. His feet were clad in dapper little handmade shoes and the rest of him in a suit in which every stitch was put in by hand. He was, in a word, immaculate. Zul! How had he found me? I was so delighted.
He said, ‘Billy! My dear Billy! Do you realise your friends have been searching for you for thirty years?’
‘My goodness, Zul!’ I cried. ‘How can you not have changed?’
Zul said, ‘Don’t be fooled, Billy. It’s hair dye.’
Then I realised that I was standing in my dressing gown, which had flakes of paint all over it, like multicoloured dandruff. The scraper was sticking out of a pocket.
I said, ‘Zul, I can’t ask you in. I am so ashamed. The house is not fit for you to see.’
‘Oh come now, Billy,’ he said, stepping past me. ‘Isn’t that why I’m here?’ Then he walked, room by room, through my rotting house, but instead of seeing all the bad things – the patches of damp, and the place where the floorboard is missing – he saw all the beauties, the possibilities. He saw at once, without my having to tell him, that the absurd loft could be converted to a studio. I started to explain all the things I had started doing (the unfinished painting in the hall, patchwork walls, made by sticking on scraps cut from magazines and books of wallpaper samples) and he never once told me I was stupid, or misguided, as Phoebe does when she comes here (when she deigns to come here). He approved of all my ideas and said it would be beautiful when it was finished.
We went into the kitchen and there was the half-scraped wall. I said, ‘I did hope to finish it today, and I did try hard. But I’m so tired. I can’t do any more.’
He said, ‘Billy, I know exactly what to do. Now you sit down, right over there, and I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
When he brought the tea, he was wearing an apron. He looked so silly with it on over his smart suit, it made me laugh.
He said, ‘This won’t take a tick. Leave everything to me. Just sit here and drink your tea, and don’t you worry about a thing.’
He cleaned the house from top to bottom. He spent hours. He did everything. I even heard scraping from the kitchen and got up to see what he was doing. He had just finished scraping the wall, and was rubbing some oil into the planks to give them a shine.
When he had finished, the house looked immaculate.
Then he said, ‘Now Billy, you’ve got to look after yourself. We can’t have you going and getting ill. You must eat properly.’
There was nothing in the house but a tin of peaches, one with a dent in, that I found on the bargain shelf at the supermarket.
I said, ‘I’m sorry, Zul, I’ve nothing to give you. I was going to go to the shop tomorrow.’
He took the apron off and said, ‘Now you wait here and relax. I’ll be back in a jiffy.’
When he had gone I panicked. Suppose he was really disgusted and wouldn’t come back. But an hour later I heard his footstep and he was whistling a tune. He came through the door laden with shopping bags.
‘Just ran up the road,’ he said. ‘This should do us nicely.’
And while I sat in the kitchen he busied himself; the copper pans were shining, scoured till they shone. He made a risotto and whisked up a zabaglione, which was always my favourite. He’d even thought of wine. I hadn’t tasted wine in years.
Over dinner he said that he had a project that he wanted me to do. It was a documentary film, about loneliness, and he wanted me to write the script. I said I would be delighted, but I hadn’t done anything of that sort before. He said it didn’t matter. He said, ‘Some of us were sitting around, back in Bombay, talking about things. And when this idea came up, I thought of you.’
‘But how did you know where to find me?’ I asked.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘We Bombaywallahs know how to get things done.’
So then I became frightened. ‘If you can find me, anyone can,’ I said.
Zul said, ‘Billy, that old business was over and done with years ago. Nobody remembers it now. You should come back to Bombay and see for yourself. All your old friends are still there.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And he’s there too. The one who hounded me.’
‘Him?’ said Zul, with a contemptuous laugh. ‘These days that fellow is nothing. Nothing! You should confront him and ask for all your money back. He would have to give it. Otherwise we shall expose him.’
When we’d finished eating he insisted on doing the washing up. He wouldn’t let me lift a finger. Then he said, ‘My dear, I have to get back to London tonight, but I shall be back very soon. In the meanwhile, here is an advance on the project.’
He handed me a wad of notes. I remember he used to carry large sums of money around with him. We would go to listen to singers, and sometimes, if there was one whose singing pleased him, or whom he fancied, he would peel off notes and throw them at her feet. The roll of money was all fifty-pound notes. It must have been thousands of pounds.
‘I can’t accept this,’ I said.
‘Oh yes you can,’ he said. ‘You will soon be starting work on that project of mine, and this will hardly cover your costs.’
I was so grateful. I poured out my feelings. I said that I had not thought that anyone cared about me, or what had happened to me. They had forgotten. I had been part of their lives for a while, and had just vanished. He had changed everything. He was like an angel, sent from heaven to help me.
He said, ‘Billy darling, you need have no such worries. Your friends are here now. We are going to look after you.’
I saw him off. He waved and said he would be back soon. I watched him go off down the path, his city shoes crunching on the weedy gravel.
Next morning I woke with my heart light for the first time in years. I walked into the kitchen, saw the half-scraped wall and the congealed pan on the stove.
OISEAUX EXOTIQUES (SUSSEX, MAY 1999)
‘I won’t ask where you’ve been,’ said Katy.
I had walked home from the station through fields loud with birds. Katy wasn’t in the cottage. I found her pitching straw and dung out of the Moron’s stable into a barrow.
‘You know where I’ve been.’ I had told her that I was going to London to have lunch with Phoebe.
‘I didn’t expect you to be early,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t think you’d stay out all bloody night.’
‘I didn’t mean to. Honestly. It got late. When I realised what the time was, it was just too late to get to Victoria . . .’ How very feeble this sounded.
‘I thought they ran all night,’ said Katy, stabbing the pitchfork at a pile of droppings.
‘No. Last one’s just after midnight.’ Thank heaven I’d checked.
‘Midnight? It must have been quite a lunch.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said. ‘She was taken ill. Someone needed to be there. Then it just got late.’
‘Why didn’t you ring, in that case? I was worried.’
‘I thought you’d be in bed,’ I said. ‘The time just vanished.’
‘I bet,’ she said. ‘So she was ill. In the restaurant? That must have pleased them. Where did you take her? To a hospital?’
I shook my head. What credible answer could I have given?
‘Spend the night with her?’
A meteor shower of dung flew past me.
‘Not exactly.’
‘Not exactly? What does that mean?’
‘Not in the sense you mean,’ I said. ‘I took her back to her hotel. She went to bed. Out like a light. I slept on the sofa. I promise you nothing happened.’
‘Well, I believe you, Bhalu.’
I was curiously piqued. ‘Why? Do you think I’m past it? Not capable?’
‘What are you telling me now? That you did sleep with her?’
‘No, I just told you I didn’t.’
‘Well, what are you saying? Did you or didn’t you?’
Encore, the rain of dung.
‘I don’t think I’m exactly her type, do you?’
She paused, leaned on the fork and brushed a strand of hair away from her face. ‘Women like her don’t care about what a man’s like, just what they can get out of him.’
‘That’s ridiculous. What could she possibly get out of me?’
‘You’ve always talked about her, ever since I’ve known you, as a little angel. Well, can’t you see what your angel has grown up to become?’
‘I see a perfectly normal woman.’
‘Oh, do you? Open your eyes, Bhalu. All that make-up. Hair straight out of a bottle. Dresses ten years too young. Come on, this isn’t your angel.’
‘You make her sound irresistible.’
Katy turned away and resumed her work. Scoop, twist, chuck. Scoop, twist, chuck. She did this every day, in all weathers.
‘If you’re going to stand there watching, you may as well do something. You could do his water.’
So I fetched the hose and ran it into the Moron’s blue bucket. Tiny bits of straw pirouetted in the stream, were whirled round the sides in a watery waltz.
‘There’s something about her . . .’ said Katy, swinging her fork, ‘She’s damaged goods, Bhalu. Don’t get involved. Whatever may have happened to her, it isn’t your affair.’
The word hung in the air, crackling with sulphurous fire.
‘I’m already involved,’ I said. ‘I have been since I was eight.’
‘Damn it, you’re not children any more!’ said Katy.
I turned off the hose and watched the last few drops from its little green mouth plink into the bucket. ‘Am I supposed to stop caring about her just because she’s grown up? If she is damaged, as you put it, doesn’t she need her friends?’
‘But it’s not just friendship, is it?’
I didn’t want to let it go at that. I said, ‘When you have loved someone as a child, I think the feeling doesn’t ever go away. It’s there for ever. It doesn’t change. That’s the point, Katy. The feeling doesn’t change. It’s as if we were brother and sister . . .’
But even as this pious utterance left my lips I knew it was a fraud. It never had been quite true, not even when we were children.
‘Liar!’ said Katy. ‘She’s no more a sister to you than she is to the men she makes her money out of. You don’t have to tell me what she does for a living, it’s written all over her.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘She’s a woman who lives off men, Bhalu.’
‘We’re safe, then. What have I got that she could live off?’
‘She’s the sort of woman who sleeps around. And she doesn’t care if they’re married. She had an affair with a married man. She told us herself.’
Oh you hypocrite, I thought, remembering coming home once to find our cottage filled with exotic birdsong.
I said, ‘That’s unfair. She didn’t know.’
‘So she says. But she is the sort of woman who asks someone else’s husband to lunch in order to seduce them.’
Exotic birds clamouring in my mind.
‘Bhalu, I do trust you.’
We were sitting at the kitchen table.
‘She wants something from you. Okay, so it can’t be money.’ She gave a cynical little laugh. ‘Somehow I don’t think it’s romance. So what is it?’
I said nothing. I was trying to decide to which idea that laugh had attached. Money, haha? Or Haha, romance?
