The Death of Mr Love, page 31
I said, ‘She wants me to go to India with her.’
Instead of the outburst I would have predicted, Katy sipped her coffee and looked thoughtfully at me over the cup.
‘Phoebe does?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
So I told her the story. Everything from Retribution to Sybil’s Last Journal and the revelation that Mister Love was Prem Ahuja.
‘This isn’t just about Phoebe. My mother was involved too. In some way, she was mixed up in it. And it has affected all of us. Katy, I think this is the reason why Maya left India, something to do with threats and blackmail. I want to find out what.’
‘But Bhalu, this is nonsense. What good will it do going there? It’s forty years too late. Let it alone.’
She got up and went to the stove, stood stirring a saucepan with vigorous circular strokes that made her bottom wobble.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘You’re probably right.’ I stood behind her, placed my palms on the voluptuous trembling hemispheres.
She said, ‘Not now, Bhalu.’
‘Let’s go upstairs.’
‘No! I’m in the middle of making lunch.’
‘Afterwards then.’ I put my arms round her and pressed up against her back.
‘Goodness.’ She squeezed round to face me. ‘You are serious. Well, you’ll just have to wait till tonight.’
For a moment we stood, arms round each other, faces almost touching, then she pulled away and turned to the grill, under which two chicken breasts lay tanning, side by side.
‘This going to India . . . do you think she really means it?’
‘As far as I can tell, yes.’
‘In that case,’ said Katy, ‘I’m afraid there really is something wrong with her. I mean, why now? Why not years ago? Why didn’t she go with her mother? Wouldn’t that have made more sense?’
‘I don’t think they got on. Her mother seems to have gone a bit batty.’
‘It gives me the creeps,’ said Katy.
‘What does?’ I asked, setting out plates.
‘She said her mother still talks to her. Don’t you remember? And then she dragged you off to see that medium. If you ask me, she’s madder than her mother was.’
A spasm of disquiet fled through my body. I remembered the terror on Phoebe’s face when she thought Sybil was in the room with us.
‘And Bhalu, suppose she finds this man. What will she do?’
‘She says,’ – it was something I had been wondering myself – ‘that she just wants to see him. To let him know that she knows.’
‘And then what?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Suppose she looks him in the eye and says, “I know”. And he looks back at her and says, “So what?” What happens next?’
‘Nothing happens. She’s done it. She’s free. It’s a psychological thing. Completing unfinished business. Laying the ghost.’ I realised that I was quoting Sybil’s Last Journal.
‘You don’t honestly believe that?’ She was flitting round the kitchen, peering at the grill, stirring her saucepan. ‘You said that at this lunch of yours, she was talking about revenge.’
‘Only as a theme for a book.’
‘How do you know she wouldn’t pull out a gun and shoot him?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘How can you be sure? You hardly know her. No, let’s be precise. You don’t know her at all. She is a complete stranger.’
‘A stranger I’ve known for only forty years.’
‘A mixed-up, unhappy child you knew for a few weeks – that’s all it added up to – forty years ago. A grown woman in whose mysterious company you have spent the grand total of three days. And one night. Whereas you and I have shared a bed every night for twenty-two years.’
Katy took a dishcloth and lifted the pot to the table. ‘Voilà,’ she said. ‘Chests of chicken to the green pepper, à ma façon.’
A little while later, when we were eating, she said, ‘If you go to India with her you’re bound to have an affair.’
I said nothing. She let the silence lengthen, watching me. Her eyes were topaz blue. When she wore make-up, which wasn’t often, she could make them look huge. To me she grew lovelier as she grew older. ‘So,’ she said, after enough of a pause had elapsed. ‘I see you’re not disagreeing with me.’
‘Can’t a man and a woman just be friends?’
‘You tell me,’ she said. ‘You’ve had an affair. I never have.’
Again I said nothing. But this was not the same silence. This was part of a different silence. A silence thirteen years old.
One morning – it was during the worst of the bad times – I got to London to find our street closed, office inaccessible. Suspected gas leak, something like that. Golinkin was standing on the pavement thumbing through a Filofax. ‘Going to take hours,’ he said gloomily. ‘May as well have the day off.’ I caught a train back to Lewes and decided to walk home. A light summer day. I walked to the edge of town (riverside warehouses, warm brewery smells) and took a footpath by the river. The far bank was lined with poplars that stood on tall selves inverted in the quiet sliding green. Our cottage lay about two miles off, round the curve of the valley, hidden by a shoulder of downland. I struck out across fields in which the harvest was being gathered. The margins were crowded with poppies and cornflowers and in shaws and hedges, birds were calling. I recall thinking how good it felt to have a day unexpectedly to myself. I would surprise Katy, suggest we pack a picnic, some chicken, a cold bottle of wine, and take it up onto the Downs.
Came to the cottage. No one about. The twins, I & I, were at school. As I opened the back door I became aware of a strange music inside the cottage: a piano figure, glaring and dissonant, that took off into a run, a sort of stumbling arpeggio, and ended in chatter unmistakably like a bird call. Swooping clarinet notes, trills and calls. Piccolo piping. Groan of bassoon, oboe squawkissimo. A light intricate rhythm like a pencil rapidly clock-clocking in a wooden cup and a heavier regular soughing. I had never heard anything like it. This weird music was orchestrated – or was this not part of it? – with vocal sounds, odd low-voiced words, an exclamation, desperate mewing.
The living-room door was slightly ajar and from beyond it came the clamour of the musical birds. Katy must have the television on. She sometimes watched it while ironing. I was going to call out, but something, I don’t know what, stopped me. I crept to the door and applied my eye to the crack where it was hinged. A blurred vertical stripe of living room came into view and with it the most incongruous sight. Over the back of our worn blue sofa a woman’s naked legs were lifted in the air. Between them, a man’s equally bare rump and shoulders were moving doggedly back and forth, as though he were leaning in to drive a plane along a plank. Their actions seemed curiously choreographic, now in time, now at syncopated odds with the bird calls. He would shunt forward, pushing the legs back as far as they could go. The legs would give a little shudder and the feet stretch till the toes were pointed. Her hands were clasping her thighs, greedily pulling them up and apart. Now the sounds resolved into what I had all along known they must be. Little soft cries, grunts, a low spoken word.
I don’t know how long I stood, hidden by the door. Probably no more than a dozen heartbeats. I felt disconnected, unshocked. Far more surreal than anything I was seeing or hearing, was the fact that I found myself trying to remember terms from my daughters’ ballet lessons. The twins, at nine, planned to be ballerinas as well as champion show jumpers as well as vets. They always wanted to show us whatever they had just learned, and would quarrel about the name of each step, or position. ‘Iso, that isn’t supposed to be dessus, it’s dessous.’ ‘Oh, for God’s sake Imo,’ (they both had the habit of mimicking their parents’ expletives), ‘you did devant not derrière.’
What the woman’s foot is doing now – what is that called? The toes extending, instep arching, there’s a name for it. Allongé? Dégagé? He, en arrière, pulling back, and her leg slowly unfolding, en l’air, which is full of the invisible birds. His épaulement, quelques mouvements derrière, and here he comes again, en avance! Her hands, there’s no ballet term for what they are doing, clutching at her knees, which, bending, plié doesn’t do it, could now, no, now, at this instant, hardly be more fully pressed back. Again that little shudder, and a rapid fluttering of the foot (petit battement), all of this scored, for clarinet, or for the female dancer in this horizontal pas de deux, with throaty cries of surprise. On the thirteenth heartbeat everything stops. Silence. A word or two spoken in a low tone. She laughs. Her legs fasten round his waist. Then the resumption of their rhythm, his bass, her clarinet solo. By then I had no doubt what I was witnessing and, as quietly as I had come in, crept out again.
Stood in garden sunshine, wondering what to do. Old brick and flint walls soaking up the heat. Roses, planted by Katy, climbed upon them, raising creamy white and pink parasols against the sun. Zepherine Drouhan. Kiftsgate. Paul’s Himalayan Musk. Alberic Barbier. Wedding Day. Pouring down scent. Odd how Indian gardens, which have too much sun, love the rain, and English gardens, with too much rain, adore the sun. My father would have been proud of our roses. Katy tended them, pruning and dead-heading, always at the right times, to bring out the flowers. I followed the rose stems round the corner of the house, thinking that I must get far away. Headed for the back gate, a path to the fields. Nearby, low to the ground, was a wide open window and issuing from it came the extraordinary symphony of birds.
‘It isn’t Katy,’ a very calm voice in my mind informed me. ‘Katy has lent the cottage to someone – a friend – for the afternoon. Katy isn’t here. At this moment, she is probably in Brighton.’
Then – of course! – I remembered her telling me that she was going to a client’s house to supervise something. Something to do with walls! Some special paint effect! Scumbling?
There was a bush growing half across the window – in early summer it bore blue brush-like flowers, ‘Ceanothus’, I think it’s called, something like that – which Katy had talked of cutting back, because it blocked so much light from the room. I turned back, crept up behind it, parted its branches. Sunlight falling like long larrups of golden syrup on floorboards, lighting up the corner of a Persian rug and lifting the eye onto the sofa, which no longer has its back to me. Now I see who is on it and what they are doing. I was going to say, I know, instead of I see, but knowledge implies understanding. I see what they are apparently doing. She, naked, is on her back, her head at the end of the sofa nearest me, her knees pressed to her breasts by the weight of the nude man crouching over her. I recognise him now. One of her interior design clients. Something to do with the music department at the university. We have been to his house and had dinner with him and his wife. His house she was supposed to be at. Musician. Explains why I have never heard this bird thing before. Must have brought it with him. Clever idea, scumbling to musical birds. This man, anyway, is the craftsman who has been keeping up that tireless to-and-fro. Now, framed by fading blue puffs of Ceanothus he rears up, catches her calves behind the ankle, pushes them back, stumbles (scumbles?) forward until he is kneeling, his knees wide apart. Catch myself thinking, he’s going to come off that sofa. A rose-scented gust of wind, shoving rudely past the bush in which I am concealed, is ushered into the room by bowing curtains. It lifts the musical birds, sends them soaring, and sets the shaft of sunlight aswirl with dust motes, like the overhead beam in a cinema, projecting a scene which I could not accept as any more real than a film image, rhythm, music, to be experienced in detached incredulity.
How many times have I re-run this scene? Their heads are close together. Then comes that gust of wind, the dust motes spin, a branch sways, sunlight reaches out and touches their twin heads with gold. Now he rears up, adjusts his body and no longer is any detail hidden from my eyes. Her hips lift to meet his approaching body, they collide, draw apart and together again, moving in equal measure, a double-being whose two halves are joined by a fleshy umbilicum that lengthens and contracts, and sometimes vanishes altogether. Most men, confronted with this sight, of another man fucking their wife, might feel anger, pain, jealousy, grief. I felt none of these things, just a kind of astonishment lost in an immense calm. What I was seeing seemed at that moment to have nothing to do with me. And despite the pain that hit me later, I have never felt that there was anything sordid or even erotic about what they were doing, but something rather inevitable. There was a kind of tenderness in their mating, accentuated by the peculiar quality of the music, and her cries, lost in that abyss of birds.
I left the garden and went up the lane. A few hundred yards from the cottage, a car was parked. Shabby red Renault. I walked on the Downs, floating along cornflower and poppy planes. Sat on a hillside and watched light changing in the valley, sun and cloud chasing each other across the slopes, which came alive in dozens of pulsing greens and blues. I could see our cottage, a tiny toy, set among fields, the trickle of the lane, the red car.
When I went back it was evening and everything was normal. The twins were home from school. Katy greeted me with a kiss and said she’d tried to phone me at the office, but had had no reply. I said I’d been in meetings. Somehow, the evening passed.We sat on the blue sofa, watched television and talked about the twins. In bed that night I approached her, not knowing how she might respond, but she was willing enough. We made love with a passion that appalled me. Few times had been so intense. Katy seemed to open completely. There came a point where I pushed to the limit, felt her melt, and was admitted further, deeper than seems possible, and we lay breathlessly joined, as close to being one as two people can be. ‘That was amazing,’ I said afterwards. She replied, ‘Like the night we made the twins.’ I never mentioned what I had seen, never for a moment stopped loving her, but for that last remark neither could I ever quite forgive her.
It must have been two years later, when I was settled in the bookshop – the man having ceased by then to be a threat, he and his wife had moved to a university in Wales – that I turned on Radio Three and was startled to hear again the sounds of that afternoon. I listened until the end of the performance. It lasted less than a quarter of an hour. Then the announcer: ‘In that performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques . . .’
In bed, Katy renewed the attack. ‘You’ll be making a big mistake, if you get involved with her,’ she said out of the darkness.
Our two forms were humped, back to back, under the quilt. Outside in the field some animal was uttering staccato cries. Vixen, perhaps. I turned over and ran my hand along her hip. ‘I love this sexy curve. Just here, where it drops down and becomes your waist.’
‘Too sleepy,’ she murmured. Then, reaching behind, in a wide awake voice, ‘Oh I say, that bitch has got you all razzed up.’
She rolled to face me. Our mouths were so close, we inhaled each other’s breath. She put her arms round me and said, ‘You and I are strong together. You’re my rock.’
‘I love you.’
‘Bhalu, nobody could be closer than we are,’ sighed Katy. She kissed my cheek. ‘Now let’s go to sleep.’
Next morning at breakfast she said, ‘She’d get on your nerves, you know. You’d find her absolutely infuriating.’
I said, ‘I promise you. I am not going to run off with her.’
THE AHUJA MURDER (BOMBAY, 27 APRIL, 1959)
My man in Bombay was efficient. Hardly two weeks after the lunch with Phoebe, a courier came into the shop with a large, heavy parcel which he dumped on my desk.
‘Was wondering what you’d got in there,’ he said, looking around. ‘Now I know.’
But it wasn’t books. The package, duly disembowelled, proved to contain transcripts of court proceedings from the Nanavati trial, a few cuttings from various newspapers, photocopied sections from a book in Hindi about the case, and, most importantly, photocopies of every relevant page of Blitz. Upwards of two hundred pages of thick curling paper. My man apologised for having found nothing during his previous search. Blitz had not reported the murder when it occurred and only began covering the case once it came to court in October 1959.
With the strangest feeling of déjà vu I began reading the story of the Ahuja murder. The reports spoke of ‘the eternal triangle’, but I knew there had been two triangles, interlaced and inseparable. In Retribution (which by now I knew almost well enough to quote by heart) Mister Love trifled with Sybil and S, and was shot by an unknown hand. In the Blitz account, Mister Love, now known by his proper name, trifles with S alone and is killed by her husband.
The press reports of forty years earlier had for me the haunting quality of being like, yet simultaneously unlike Retribution, near-identical twins. Retribution was the hidden, distaff face of the legend. So far as I knew, Phoebe and I were the only people left alive who knew the whole story. The public had only ever been told half. How odd that, as stated in Retribution the women had also been alike as twins, resembling each other confusingly closely not only in appearance but in name. Sybil had always referred to her rival as S. I now knew why.
In the early afternoon of 27 April, 1959, Commander Kawas Nanavati of the Indian Navy, an officer who had been marked for high promotion, drove his English wife Sylvia and their young children to the Metro cinema to see Tom Thumb.
Other cinemas in the city were showing, variously: Regal – Vertigo; Strand – Escapade in Japan; Maratha Mandir – Amar Deep; Excelsior – This Happy Feeling (the previous week it had been Limelight); Opera House – Hira Moti.
Commander Nanavati did not stay for the film, but drove to the naval dockyard and boarded his ship, the cruiser Mysore, ex-HMS Nigeria and now Indian flagship. He went to the armoury, said he was driving to Aurangabad (some reports say Ahmednagar) and needed a weapon for protection. He signed out a revolver and six bullets.
At 4.10 p.m., Nanavati rang the bell of Prem Ahuja’s plush flat in the Jeevan Jyot building on Nepean Sea Road. Ahuja’s servant Anjani, who knew Nanavati, was setting out a tray of tea. He told Nanavati that his master was resting. Nanavati pushed past him into the bedroom and slammed the door. The servant heard angry shouting, then shots. He ran into the room to find Ahuja dying in a pool of blood.
Instead of the outburst I would have predicted, Katy sipped her coffee and looked thoughtfully at me over the cup.
‘Phoebe does?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
So I told her the story. Everything from Retribution to Sybil’s Last Journal and the revelation that Mister Love was Prem Ahuja.
‘This isn’t just about Phoebe. My mother was involved too. In some way, she was mixed up in it. And it has affected all of us. Katy, I think this is the reason why Maya left India, something to do with threats and blackmail. I want to find out what.’
‘But Bhalu, this is nonsense. What good will it do going there? It’s forty years too late. Let it alone.’
She got up and went to the stove, stood stirring a saucepan with vigorous circular strokes that made her bottom wobble.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘You’re probably right.’ I stood behind her, placed my palms on the voluptuous trembling hemispheres.
She said, ‘Not now, Bhalu.’
‘Let’s go upstairs.’
‘No! I’m in the middle of making lunch.’
‘Afterwards then.’ I put my arms round her and pressed up against her back.
‘Goodness.’ She squeezed round to face me. ‘You are serious. Well, you’ll just have to wait till tonight.’
For a moment we stood, arms round each other, faces almost touching, then she pulled away and turned to the grill, under which two chicken breasts lay tanning, side by side.
‘This going to India . . . do you think she really means it?’
‘As far as I can tell, yes.’
‘In that case,’ said Katy, ‘I’m afraid there really is something wrong with her. I mean, why now? Why not years ago? Why didn’t she go with her mother? Wouldn’t that have made more sense?’
‘I don’t think they got on. Her mother seems to have gone a bit batty.’
‘It gives me the creeps,’ said Katy.
‘What does?’ I asked, setting out plates.
‘She said her mother still talks to her. Don’t you remember? And then she dragged you off to see that medium. If you ask me, she’s madder than her mother was.’
A spasm of disquiet fled through my body. I remembered the terror on Phoebe’s face when she thought Sybil was in the room with us.
‘And Bhalu, suppose she finds this man. What will she do?’
‘She says,’ – it was something I had been wondering myself – ‘that she just wants to see him. To let him know that she knows.’
‘And then what?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Suppose she looks him in the eye and says, “I know”. And he looks back at her and says, “So what?” What happens next?’
‘Nothing happens. She’s done it. She’s free. It’s a psychological thing. Completing unfinished business. Laying the ghost.’ I realised that I was quoting Sybil’s Last Journal.
‘You don’t honestly believe that?’ She was flitting round the kitchen, peering at the grill, stirring her saucepan. ‘You said that at this lunch of yours, she was talking about revenge.’
‘Only as a theme for a book.’
‘How do you know she wouldn’t pull out a gun and shoot him?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘How can you be sure? You hardly know her. No, let’s be precise. You don’t know her at all. She is a complete stranger.’
‘A stranger I’ve known for only forty years.’
‘A mixed-up, unhappy child you knew for a few weeks – that’s all it added up to – forty years ago. A grown woman in whose mysterious company you have spent the grand total of three days. And one night. Whereas you and I have shared a bed every night for twenty-two years.’
Katy took a dishcloth and lifted the pot to the table. ‘Voilà,’ she said. ‘Chests of chicken to the green pepper, à ma façon.’
A little while later, when we were eating, she said, ‘If you go to India with her you’re bound to have an affair.’
I said nothing. She let the silence lengthen, watching me. Her eyes were topaz blue. When she wore make-up, which wasn’t often, she could make them look huge. To me she grew lovelier as she grew older. ‘So,’ she said, after enough of a pause had elapsed. ‘I see you’re not disagreeing with me.’
‘Can’t a man and a woman just be friends?’
‘You tell me,’ she said. ‘You’ve had an affair. I never have.’
Again I said nothing. But this was not the same silence. This was part of a different silence. A silence thirteen years old.
One morning – it was during the worst of the bad times – I got to London to find our street closed, office inaccessible. Suspected gas leak, something like that. Golinkin was standing on the pavement thumbing through a Filofax. ‘Going to take hours,’ he said gloomily. ‘May as well have the day off.’ I caught a train back to Lewes and decided to walk home. A light summer day. I walked to the edge of town (riverside warehouses, warm brewery smells) and took a footpath by the river. The far bank was lined with poplars that stood on tall selves inverted in the quiet sliding green. Our cottage lay about two miles off, round the curve of the valley, hidden by a shoulder of downland. I struck out across fields in which the harvest was being gathered. The margins were crowded with poppies and cornflowers and in shaws and hedges, birds were calling. I recall thinking how good it felt to have a day unexpectedly to myself. I would surprise Katy, suggest we pack a picnic, some chicken, a cold bottle of wine, and take it up onto the Downs.
Came to the cottage. No one about. The twins, I & I, were at school. As I opened the back door I became aware of a strange music inside the cottage: a piano figure, glaring and dissonant, that took off into a run, a sort of stumbling arpeggio, and ended in chatter unmistakably like a bird call. Swooping clarinet notes, trills and calls. Piccolo piping. Groan of bassoon, oboe squawkissimo. A light intricate rhythm like a pencil rapidly clock-clocking in a wooden cup and a heavier regular soughing. I had never heard anything like it. This weird music was orchestrated – or was this not part of it? – with vocal sounds, odd low-voiced words, an exclamation, desperate mewing.
The living-room door was slightly ajar and from beyond it came the clamour of the musical birds. Katy must have the television on. She sometimes watched it while ironing. I was going to call out, but something, I don’t know what, stopped me. I crept to the door and applied my eye to the crack where it was hinged. A blurred vertical stripe of living room came into view and with it the most incongruous sight. Over the back of our worn blue sofa a woman’s naked legs were lifted in the air. Between them, a man’s equally bare rump and shoulders were moving doggedly back and forth, as though he were leaning in to drive a plane along a plank. Their actions seemed curiously choreographic, now in time, now at syncopated odds with the bird calls. He would shunt forward, pushing the legs back as far as they could go. The legs would give a little shudder and the feet stretch till the toes were pointed. Her hands were clasping her thighs, greedily pulling them up and apart. Now the sounds resolved into what I had all along known they must be. Little soft cries, grunts, a low spoken word.
I don’t know how long I stood, hidden by the door. Probably no more than a dozen heartbeats. I felt disconnected, unshocked. Far more surreal than anything I was seeing or hearing, was the fact that I found myself trying to remember terms from my daughters’ ballet lessons. The twins, at nine, planned to be ballerinas as well as champion show jumpers as well as vets. They always wanted to show us whatever they had just learned, and would quarrel about the name of each step, or position. ‘Iso, that isn’t supposed to be dessus, it’s dessous.’ ‘Oh, for God’s sake Imo,’ (they both had the habit of mimicking their parents’ expletives), ‘you did devant not derrière.’
What the woman’s foot is doing now – what is that called? The toes extending, instep arching, there’s a name for it. Allongé? Dégagé? He, en arrière, pulling back, and her leg slowly unfolding, en l’air, which is full of the invisible birds. His épaulement, quelques mouvements derrière, and here he comes again, en avance! Her hands, there’s no ballet term for what they are doing, clutching at her knees, which, bending, plié doesn’t do it, could now, no, now, at this instant, hardly be more fully pressed back. Again that little shudder, and a rapid fluttering of the foot (petit battement), all of this scored, for clarinet, or for the female dancer in this horizontal pas de deux, with throaty cries of surprise. On the thirteenth heartbeat everything stops. Silence. A word or two spoken in a low tone. She laughs. Her legs fasten round his waist. Then the resumption of their rhythm, his bass, her clarinet solo. By then I had no doubt what I was witnessing and, as quietly as I had come in, crept out again.
Stood in garden sunshine, wondering what to do. Old brick and flint walls soaking up the heat. Roses, planted by Katy, climbed upon them, raising creamy white and pink parasols against the sun. Zepherine Drouhan. Kiftsgate. Paul’s Himalayan Musk. Alberic Barbier. Wedding Day. Pouring down scent. Odd how Indian gardens, which have too much sun, love the rain, and English gardens, with too much rain, adore the sun. My father would have been proud of our roses. Katy tended them, pruning and dead-heading, always at the right times, to bring out the flowers. I followed the rose stems round the corner of the house, thinking that I must get far away. Headed for the back gate, a path to the fields. Nearby, low to the ground, was a wide open window and issuing from it came the extraordinary symphony of birds.
‘It isn’t Katy,’ a very calm voice in my mind informed me. ‘Katy has lent the cottage to someone – a friend – for the afternoon. Katy isn’t here. At this moment, she is probably in Brighton.’
Then – of course! – I remembered her telling me that she was going to a client’s house to supervise something. Something to do with walls! Some special paint effect! Scumbling?
There was a bush growing half across the window – in early summer it bore blue brush-like flowers, ‘Ceanothus’, I think it’s called, something like that – which Katy had talked of cutting back, because it blocked so much light from the room. I turned back, crept up behind it, parted its branches. Sunlight falling like long larrups of golden syrup on floorboards, lighting up the corner of a Persian rug and lifting the eye onto the sofa, which no longer has its back to me. Now I see who is on it and what they are doing. I was going to say, I know, instead of I see, but knowledge implies understanding. I see what they are apparently doing. She, naked, is on her back, her head at the end of the sofa nearest me, her knees pressed to her breasts by the weight of the nude man crouching over her. I recognise him now. One of her interior design clients. Something to do with the music department at the university. We have been to his house and had dinner with him and his wife. His house she was supposed to be at. Musician. Explains why I have never heard this bird thing before. Must have brought it with him. Clever idea, scumbling to musical birds. This man, anyway, is the craftsman who has been keeping up that tireless to-and-fro. Now, framed by fading blue puffs of Ceanothus he rears up, catches her calves behind the ankle, pushes them back, stumbles (scumbles?) forward until he is kneeling, his knees wide apart. Catch myself thinking, he’s going to come off that sofa. A rose-scented gust of wind, shoving rudely past the bush in which I am concealed, is ushered into the room by bowing curtains. It lifts the musical birds, sends them soaring, and sets the shaft of sunlight aswirl with dust motes, like the overhead beam in a cinema, projecting a scene which I could not accept as any more real than a film image, rhythm, music, to be experienced in detached incredulity.
How many times have I re-run this scene? Their heads are close together. Then comes that gust of wind, the dust motes spin, a branch sways, sunlight reaches out and touches their twin heads with gold. Now he rears up, adjusts his body and no longer is any detail hidden from my eyes. Her hips lift to meet his approaching body, they collide, draw apart and together again, moving in equal measure, a double-being whose two halves are joined by a fleshy umbilicum that lengthens and contracts, and sometimes vanishes altogether. Most men, confronted with this sight, of another man fucking their wife, might feel anger, pain, jealousy, grief. I felt none of these things, just a kind of astonishment lost in an immense calm. What I was seeing seemed at that moment to have nothing to do with me. And despite the pain that hit me later, I have never felt that there was anything sordid or even erotic about what they were doing, but something rather inevitable. There was a kind of tenderness in their mating, accentuated by the peculiar quality of the music, and her cries, lost in that abyss of birds.
I left the garden and went up the lane. A few hundred yards from the cottage, a car was parked. Shabby red Renault. I walked on the Downs, floating along cornflower and poppy planes. Sat on a hillside and watched light changing in the valley, sun and cloud chasing each other across the slopes, which came alive in dozens of pulsing greens and blues. I could see our cottage, a tiny toy, set among fields, the trickle of the lane, the red car.
When I went back it was evening and everything was normal. The twins were home from school. Katy greeted me with a kiss and said she’d tried to phone me at the office, but had had no reply. I said I’d been in meetings. Somehow, the evening passed.We sat on the blue sofa, watched television and talked about the twins. In bed that night I approached her, not knowing how she might respond, but she was willing enough. We made love with a passion that appalled me. Few times had been so intense. Katy seemed to open completely. There came a point where I pushed to the limit, felt her melt, and was admitted further, deeper than seems possible, and we lay breathlessly joined, as close to being one as two people can be. ‘That was amazing,’ I said afterwards. She replied, ‘Like the night we made the twins.’ I never mentioned what I had seen, never for a moment stopped loving her, but for that last remark neither could I ever quite forgive her.
It must have been two years later, when I was settled in the bookshop – the man having ceased by then to be a threat, he and his wife had moved to a university in Wales – that I turned on Radio Three and was startled to hear again the sounds of that afternoon. I listened until the end of the performance. It lasted less than a quarter of an hour. Then the announcer: ‘In that performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques . . .’
In bed, Katy renewed the attack. ‘You’ll be making a big mistake, if you get involved with her,’ she said out of the darkness.
Our two forms were humped, back to back, under the quilt. Outside in the field some animal was uttering staccato cries. Vixen, perhaps. I turned over and ran my hand along her hip. ‘I love this sexy curve. Just here, where it drops down and becomes your waist.’
‘Too sleepy,’ she murmured. Then, reaching behind, in a wide awake voice, ‘Oh I say, that bitch has got you all razzed up.’
She rolled to face me. Our mouths were so close, we inhaled each other’s breath. She put her arms round me and said, ‘You and I are strong together. You’re my rock.’
‘I love you.’
‘Bhalu, nobody could be closer than we are,’ sighed Katy. She kissed my cheek. ‘Now let’s go to sleep.’
Next morning at breakfast she said, ‘She’d get on your nerves, you know. You’d find her absolutely infuriating.’
I said, ‘I promise you. I am not going to run off with her.’
THE AHUJA MURDER (BOMBAY, 27 APRIL, 1959)
My man in Bombay was efficient. Hardly two weeks after the lunch with Phoebe, a courier came into the shop with a large, heavy parcel which he dumped on my desk.
‘Was wondering what you’d got in there,’ he said, looking around. ‘Now I know.’
But it wasn’t books. The package, duly disembowelled, proved to contain transcripts of court proceedings from the Nanavati trial, a few cuttings from various newspapers, photocopied sections from a book in Hindi about the case, and, most importantly, photocopies of every relevant page of Blitz. Upwards of two hundred pages of thick curling paper. My man apologised for having found nothing during his previous search. Blitz had not reported the murder when it occurred and only began covering the case once it came to court in October 1959.
With the strangest feeling of déjà vu I began reading the story of the Ahuja murder. The reports spoke of ‘the eternal triangle’, but I knew there had been two triangles, interlaced and inseparable. In Retribution (which by now I knew almost well enough to quote by heart) Mister Love trifled with Sybil and S, and was shot by an unknown hand. In the Blitz account, Mister Love, now known by his proper name, trifles with S alone and is killed by her husband.
The press reports of forty years earlier had for me the haunting quality of being like, yet simultaneously unlike Retribution, near-identical twins. Retribution was the hidden, distaff face of the legend. So far as I knew, Phoebe and I were the only people left alive who knew the whole story. The public had only ever been told half. How odd that, as stated in Retribution the women had also been alike as twins, resembling each other confusingly closely not only in appearance but in name. Sybil had always referred to her rival as S. I now knew why.
In the early afternoon of 27 April, 1959, Commander Kawas Nanavati of the Indian Navy, an officer who had been marked for high promotion, drove his English wife Sylvia and their young children to the Metro cinema to see Tom Thumb.
Other cinemas in the city were showing, variously: Regal – Vertigo; Strand – Escapade in Japan; Maratha Mandir – Amar Deep; Excelsior – This Happy Feeling (the previous week it had been Limelight); Opera House – Hira Moti.
Commander Nanavati did not stay for the film, but drove to the naval dockyard and boarded his ship, the cruiser Mysore, ex-HMS Nigeria and now Indian flagship. He went to the armoury, said he was driving to Aurangabad (some reports say Ahmednagar) and needed a weapon for protection. He signed out a revolver and six bullets.
At 4.10 p.m., Nanavati rang the bell of Prem Ahuja’s plush flat in the Jeevan Jyot building on Nepean Sea Road. Ahuja’s servant Anjani, who knew Nanavati, was setting out a tray of tea. He told Nanavati that his master was resting. Nanavati pushed past him into the bedroom and slammed the door. The servant heard angry shouting, then shots. He ran into the room to find Ahuja dying in a pool of blood.
