The Death of Mr Love, page 34
Pause. A murmured conversation. Was it my imagination or did I hear a giggle?
‘Yes sir, I remember you now. And your address?’
‘We have two. My wife booked and I don’t know which one she gave. Was it . . .’ I cast about for an imaginary address. ‘17 Sleeman Road, Crediton, Devon?’
‘No sir, that is not the address we have here.’
‘Well, what address do you have?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t give guests’ details over the phone.’
‘Damn it, I’m her husband!’
A long pause. ‘In which case, sir, surely you don’t need to ask me for your own address.’
Wife, I had called her, and wife so many people had thought she would be. Ben, the stationmaster’s son. Jula’s mother, laughing till she choked, over her smoky hearth, asking to be invited to our wedding. Maya’s and Sybil’s faces, when Babu the driver told them they were destined to be joint-mothers-in-law. They had laughed too. Maya said, ‘Destiny is not what-will-be. Destiny is what I do now.’
Was our destiny what she had done? Or he, that man whose name I did not know, whom Maya had called Shaitan, devil? Suppose he had been honest, and done his duty to protect the innocent and vulnerable, instead of breaking the laws he had sworn, and was paid, to uphold, what might my life have been like? Well, I would not have lost Phoebe, first love, childhood sweetheart, jaan-e-janaan, life and soul, but neither would I have met Katy.
I love two women. Which of them is my soulmate? Can a soul have more than one mate? Must I choose? I recognise, with a sense more of dread than of irony, that I am caught in the same dilemma that had trapped Mister Love all those years ago. How strange that I have also found myself in that other situation, which Nanavati, the man of honour, found so intolerable that it drove him to kill. Was I dishonourable to have felt no murderous urgings? At the time I had blamed myself, rather than Katy or the other man. Now, looking back to that day through the gulf and abysm of time – ‘gulf and abysm’, where did that come from? I thought it was Shakespeare, but it isn’t, therefore probably Piglet – I understand why I was not angry, but moved and awestruck.
About five years ago I was looking at illustrations in one of the few genuinely valuable books that has passed through my hands, a seventeenth-century work on alchemy, whose splendid title began: Amphitheatrum Sapientiæ Æterna, Solius Veræ, Christiano-Cabalisticum, Mageicum, Physico-chymicum, Tertriunum, Catholicon: Instructore Henricus Kunrath Lips. Theosophiæ Amatore Fideli, et Medicinæ utriusque Doctore, and ended: Hallelæ-Iáh! Hallelæ-Iáh! Hallelæ-Iáh! Phy diaboló! The book contained a number of loose plates from some other text, handcoloured by a long-ago owner. One of these pictures, whose beauty took away my breath, depicted the universe as concentric rings containing a rainbow, the sun, clouds and flames, encircling a central sphere of luminous night filled with stars and the crescent moon. Under the stars stretched a peaceful landscape and in the middle of this lay, coupling, a reddish-brown man and a white woman, by whose feet appeared a golden sun and silver moon. Underneath were the lines:
The white woman, if she be married to the brown man,
presently they embrace, and embracing are coupled.
By themselves they are dissolved
and by themselves they are brought together,
that they which were two, may be made as it were one body.
I remembered that eerie, unearthly bird music, and it came to me: this is the music that accompanies the creation of life. Thus, thus, had it been when I & I were made. The honeyed movement, bodies pairing in equal consent, joined by that integument that seemed to belong to neither or both: it was all there in the picture. What I had witnessed in such pitiless detail was an arcanum being revealed: I had seen the alchemical marriage of souls. The meaning of that vision was at once clear and obscure: the man should have been me. But who was the woman?
I caught a train to London and hung about near the hotel. My patience, eventually, was rewarded by the approach of a familiar lugubrious face: the waiter who had served us three weeks earlier, on his way to work. I stopped him. We had a brief conversation. A note changed hands. He told me to wait in a café at the end of the street. I ordered a coffee and noticed, when I stirred it, that my hand was trembling.
There was a young couple huddled at a nearby table. The boy pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and opened it. What looked like a condom fell out. The girl gave him a shove. Burst out laughing. About half an hour later the waiter came in. I gave him another £20 and he slid a scrap of paper in front of me. It was a London address less than a mile away. Bright’s Lane, W8.
Kensington, just south of the High Street, is an area of smart town-houses. She, or at any rate her husband, must have pots of money. Well, that much was already clear from her smart clothes, the car, the expensive hotel. Bright’s Lane sounded very desirable. I was imagining one of those chic little mews where off-duty stockbrokers can be seen at weekends with their sleeves rolled up, tinkering with Aston Martins and old E-types. But Bright’s Lane was a surprise. I found an alley, lined with dustbins, that ran behind the back doors of the High Street shops. Number 12 was a black-painted door, half-ajar. There were a couple of bells, but none bore a name. Inside was a dark hall, bare floorboards and black plastic rubbish sacks stacked along the wall. Everything was filthy. I could not believe she lived here. I went up to the first floor. Two doors, the paint on them peeling. From behind one came the thudding of a bass, which stopped when I knocked. The door was opened by a young guy with stringy hair. Beyond him in the flat I could see a battered sofa against which leaned the guitar he had been playing.
‘Phoebe?’ he said, in answer to my enquiry. ‘Upstairs. Top floor. Don’t know if she’s about. She’s away mostly.’
‘Is her husband here?’
‘Husband? Sorry mate, no idea.’ He gave me a peculiar look and shut the door. As I climbed the stairs I heard the bass resume.
The second and third floors were like the first. Outside one door stood a rusting pram filled with empty cornflake packets. It didn’t feel like the sort of place she would live. What about her husband? The downstairs neighbour – neighbour? weird thought – didn’t seem to know about him. Was this some sort of pied à terre? Had she chosen a place so unlikely that no one, for instance her husband, would think of looking for her here? The stairs to the top floor were as bare and dingy as the rest of the building. They led up to a small landing and a single door painted in faded rainbow colours. A moment’s panic. I was no longer sure I wanted to find out what lay behind it. In my mind I heard Katy’s voice: ‘She’s damaged goods, Bhalu. Madder than her mother was. You don’t know her at all. She is a complete stranger.’
Summoning my courage, I knocked. No reply. I knocked again and the sound seemed to echo in the building. From downstairs came the faint thump of the bass.
Half an hour later found me, in a state of confusion and not a little funk, sitting in a wine bar that was doing its futile best to ooze continental charm. At least there was no young man spilling condoms from his cigarette packet. Without much enthusiasm, I scanned a long list of overpriced, indifferent wines and decided on a coffee. Would soon be awash with the stuff. What a bizarre day. I had decided to wait an hour and then go back. It was 5.45 p.m. If Phoebe worked – why not? I could no longer be certain of anything – there was a chance she might be home soon. So I got a table in the window and watched the street. Across the road was a salon called The Laser-E-Razor (for that carefree hair-free look). Three girls with near-identical tans and streaked-blonde hair came out and stood waiting while one of them locked the door. They crossed the street to the bar and took the table next to mine. I caught fragments of their conversation.
‘. . . this hairy back. So he asks if we can do his arse.’
‘No way!’
‘That’s what I said, but he drops his knickers . . .’
One of the girls, looking around for a waiter, caught my eye and realised I was listening. I gave her a sympathetic smile.
‘. . . bends over and parts the bloody cheeks. There was a bit of paper stuck to the hairs.’
‘God! Gross!’
The girl whispered to her colleagues. Three blonde heads turned and looked at me. I raised my coffee cup. ‘Dirty old man,’ I could almost hear them thinking.
Then I saw Phoebe. Surely it was her – fair as any of these three, T-shirt, faded jeans – on the other side of the road with a bag of shopping. She turned a corner towards the alley. I gave her a couple of minutes then paid my bill and left.
The building seemed darker and emptier than before. Silence, from behind the bass-player’s door. My footsteps seemed to crash up the stairs. I came to the rainbow door. A line of light now showing underneath. Faint music, a radio or television switched on. I took a breath and knocked.
‘Who is it?’ called Phoebe’s voice.
I dared not reply.
‘Mario, is that you?’
A lock was turned. The door opened.
She screamed and tried to shut it. I put my foot in the jamb, behaving like a character out of a cheap thriller. My own detective, in fact.
‘Wait! Phoebe, I must talk to you.’
‘Take your foot out of the door.’
‘No. Phoebe, please let me in.’
‘I can’t,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’ve got your foot in the door!’
‘Oh.’ I withdrew my foot. The door closed, there was the clink of a chain falling away, then it opened again. Phoebe stood in the doorway, with her hands on her hips.
‘Upon my life and soul, if it isn’t my little friend Bhalu.’
But she was smiling. ‘Well,’ she said, when we had stared at one another for what seemed like an eternity, ‘you’ve gone to all the trouble of finding me. Don’t you want to come in?’
The room was enormous, with large windows that overlooked the High Street. Its floors were of polished wood overlaid with Oriental rugs and it was filled with heavy furniture of a kind I had not seen for years. Indian furniture, from an era that is hardly remembered, even in India. In a corner stood a carved rosewood sideboard. There was a writing desk, also in rosewood, and a sofa upholstered in pale silk, its back carved into branching trees full of monkeys and birds. This was surely no pied à terre. The walls were crowded with photographs and paintings in heavy gilded frames: a portrait of an Englishman in Hussar’s uniform; a plump brocade-clad raja wearing strings of pearls and emeralds that would have bankrupted a small nation. Half-finished canvases were stacked against a wall.
‘Don’t look so alarmed,’ said Phoebe. No kiss this time. She was still standing, hands on hips, apparently amused by the gaping figure revolving slowly on its axis in the middle of her floor.
‘Forgive me, I am just a bit . . . flabbergasted.’
In a far corner of the room was a thing I had not seen since childhood, a tiger’s head, yellowed ivories opened in a snarl.
‘Better get you a drink then. Do sit.’ Then, following my eyes, ‘Don’t worry. I shan’t bite you.’
‘This is where you live?’
‘Yes.’
‘On your own?’
‘Yes. How did you find me?’
‘I bribed someone at the hotel.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Resourceful,’ she said. ‘But that’s you all over, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ I felt a stab of annoyance. How could she be so casual about having lied to me?
She sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I was going to tell you last time, but . . .’ She opened the sideboard, revealing a glass forest within. Bent to extract something, presenting to me a denim-clad rump and long dancer’s legs. Ouch! Those laser-blondes were right. Dirty old man. Appalling. I was unable to look at her without my feelings being muddied by lust. The green butt of a bottle appeared between her thighs. Cork’s small, rude noise. She straightened up, poured with her back to me. ‘Bhalu, I’m very embarrassed. About the hotel. What happened . . .’
I thought, which bit of what happened?
‘Did you manage to catch your train?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said at last.
‘I’m so glad,’ she said, returning with two glasses of red wine. ‘I was worried about Katy.’
It was a decent wine, earthy, dark as her rosewood.
‘Phoebe,’ I said. ‘Does your husband know about this place?’
She looked at me and did that little thing with her head. ‘No.’
‘But why?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you one guess, my dear.’
‘Look, I know about Sleeman,’ I said, a little desperately.
‘Sleeman?’
‘It isn’t a village in Yorkshire, near Richmond. Sleeman was a man who wrote a book called A Journey Through Oude. You saw it in my mother’s bookshelf when Piglet was pestering you to say where you lived.’
She settled herself on the sofa, crossed her legs and patted the cushion beside her. ‘Come and sit down, Bhalu.’
‘Well? Is that true or not?’
‘I had forgotten the name,’ she said. ‘Clever of you.’
Again I felt that stab of irritation. No, something hotter.
I said, ‘You must have had your reasons for . . . well, to be blunt, for lying. I won’t ask what they are, but . . .’
Her eyes held mine for a long moment. Then she said, ‘Oh shit, I was afraid you’d see it like that.’
‘Phoebe, what am I supposed to be seeing? All this.’ I gestured round the room. ‘I’m lost. What about Peter, your husband? If you live here, alone, where does he live?’
‘Bhalu, there is no Peter!’
‘You mean you’re no longer together?’
‘No, I mean there never was a Peter. I made him up. I’m not married. I never married.’
‘I’ve lived here since I was a student.’
‘Has anything you told me been true? I thought you went to the Caribbean. Or was that a fantasy too?’
‘No! Bhalu, you can’t understand. What it was like, when I went back to live with Mummy. She wanted me to give this place up, but I didn’t, because I had to have somewhere of my own, to get away. And then when I was living in the Caribbean, I hung onto it. I don’t know why, some sixth sense. Besides . . .’ she swept her arm around the room, ‘I had nowhere else for all this. It was just one room then, this one. But I’m the longest-serving tenant now and the landlord can’t get rid of me, so he gave me the whole of the top floor. Here. Come and look.’
She got up and opened double-doors in the far corner. Light poured in from a huge, raftered room with a ceiling that was at least half skylight. In the centre was another of those heavy relics from old India, a carved four-poster bed, hung with Tussore silks.
‘This place is a palace.’
‘A palace hidden in a slum,’ she said. ‘The landlord thinks that if it gets bad enough I’ll leave. But it suits me to have it the way it is. Who would want to burgle a place like this?’
‘What about the other tenants? I met a chap with a guitar.’
‘Mario. He’s at the Royal College. Studying Baroque violin. Most of the people who live here are friends of mine.’
Looking at the bed’s ancient cream and brown Tussores – wild silks, not spun by common mulberry-crunching silkworms, but unravelled from the hen’s-egg-sized cocoons of huge cinnabar and ochre moths with owl’s-eyes on their wings, and of long-tailed moonmoths whose phosphorus wings used to batter against our windows in Ambona – I was reminded of the marital four-poster Sybil had found so daunting as a young bride.
‘Phoebe. Your furniture. Where did you get it?’
‘My daddy,’ she said. ‘It’s all he left and all I have left of him.’
Now that I looked again, the apartment was full of pictures of the same man. I recognised him, tall, with bushy eyebrows. The stern man who had stood beside Phoebe at Rosie’s funeral. There were faded pictures of him as a young man in uniform fresh from Burma. On his wedding day, with the young Sybil, and a guard of honour of fellow officers. Smiling, standing with one foot on a supine tiger. Black and white pictures. Daddy photographed with Pandit Nehru. Looking rather grim, receiving an honour of some kind from a politician dressed in the Congress style, white cotton cap and kurta. Daddy in swimming trunks by a large pool which might have been Breach Candy. Daddy in a jeep, with Indian farm workers standing all round. These pictures hung on every wall, stood along every surface. How had I missed them before?
Apart from the wedding picture, there was not a single portrait of her mother. There were a few pictures of Phoebe as a young woman. Yes, she had been stunning. Phoebe in a bikini on a beach, probably the Caribbean. Phoebe and a man sitting on the steps of a house. One other photograph I recognised. A fair girl and a dark boy in a garden in Ambona, with the high cloud-cutting ridge of Bicchauda rising behind.
But the pictures of Killy were everywhere. The largest painting, an oil of him seated wearing tweeds, with a shotgun across his lap and spaniel at his feet, must have been done late in his life. It hung in a massive gilt frame in the centre of a wall. I saw that a garland of dried roses depended from it. On a table below stood a pair of small portraits and two silver candlesticks with half-consumed candles.
The place was a shrine to her dead father.
THE OPIUM CHEST
Phoebe’s father, garlanded with roses dead as he, studied my face from his pigment world. He was frowning slightly. I had never known him as a child, never met him bar that one time, in the exceptional, dripping circumstances of Ambona cemetery. Had he minded that his little daughter’s best friend was an Indian boy? Sybil’s diary noted the advice he gave her as they stood at the rail of their steamer and the smell of Bombay came out over the water to greet them: ‘We have a duty to be friendly to Indians, but we must never forget that our souls are different.’ Deeper relations were out of the question: ‘Fish cannot marry tomatoes’ (an idea today’s bioFrankensteins struggle to refute). Killy might not have disapproved of me as a boy, but his gun-toting portrait disliked the idea that I might be her boyfriend. Its eyes seemed unnaturally living. In horror movies one is used to seeing eyeballs glaring from behind holes cut in a canvas. The portrait’s eyes had something of this quality, but the holes were painted holes and the dimension beyond, from which her father so warily appraised me, was some brushstroked eternity.
