Then he dried up. I just didn’t know what to say, because I didn’t know if I’d understood or misunderstood what he was driving at. We sort of stared at each other for a while. Then he said, ‘I’m only asking whether after you’ve had time to think about it you’d consider the possibility of becoming engaged to me.’
Do you know, Auntie, that’s the only proposal I’ve ever had? I’m sure by the time you were my age you’d had dozens. Does every girl find the first one oddly moving? I suppose it depends on the man. But if he’s, you know, all right, decent enough, you can’t not be touched, can you, whatever you feel about him as a person? I don’t think my feelings for Ronald Merrick could ever be described as more than passingly affectionate. He’s fair-haired and youngish and has blue eyes and is really awfully good-looking but there was and still is (perhaps more so than ever) a distinct reservation (from my point of view) that must be something to do with what I feel as the lack of real candour between him and whoever he’s dealing with. I never feel quite natural when I’m with him, but can never be sure whether that is my fault or his. But when he came out with this request (you can hardly call it a proposal, can you?) I wanted very much to have been able to make things all right for him and say ‘Yes’. Do men know how vulnerable they look when they slough off that tough, not-caring skin they mostly seem to wear when there are more than two people in a room? Far more vulnerable than women, when they let their hair down.
What made it so extraordinary was that he never so much as touched my hand. At the time, this not touching added to my wish not to hurt him. Later, thinking about it, it added to the sense I had of the coldness surrounding the occasion. We were sitting at opposite ends of the sofa. Perhaps I ought to have taken my specs out and put them on! Looking back on it I can’t really recall whether I felt that what had been said was a shock or not. It seemed to be a shock, anyway a surprise, but in retrospect the whole evening was obviously leading up to it, so I can’t think why I should have been surprised, or even believe that I was. There must have been lots of things said before he came out with it that I inwardly took notice of. At some stage or other I decided that physically, in spite of his looks, he repelled me, but I think that came later, and was only momentary, when I’d established for both of us the fact that although I didn’t want to hurt him I had never thought and never would think of him in the way he seemed to want me to. The feeling of faint repulsion probably came through because of the sense I had of relief, of having got out of a difficult situation and retreated into myself‘in a way that left no room for others whoever they might be. I was now more concerned about the possible effect of my ‘refusal’. Honestly, I’m sure that all I said was ‘Thank you, Ronald – but –’ but that was enough. You know how people talk about faces ‘closing up’? I think ‘close-down’ is nearer to it, because close up suggests a sort of constriction, a change, whereas what actually happens is that the face remains exactly the same but all the lights go out. Like a house where the people have gone away. If you knock at the door now there won’t be any answer.
We had some more Sousa and presently he drove me home and we talked quite easily about nothing. When we got to the MacGregor House I asked him whether he’d like to come in for a nightcap. He said no, but escorted me up the steps to the verandah. When we shook hands he hung on to mine for a moment and said, ‘Some ideas take some getting used to,’ from which I gathered he hadn’t yet given up, but it was a different man who said it. The District Superintendent of Police, the Ronald Merrick I don’t care for. The same one who later – only a few days ago – annoyed me by warning me about my ‘association with young Kumar’.
One of the servants was waiting on the verandah. I thanked Ronald for the evening, and then said goodnight to them both. I heard the car drive away and the servant beginning to lock up as I went upstairs. I knew Aunt Lili had planned an early night for once, so I didn’t go to her room. The house was very quiet. It’s the first time I’ve ever been conscious of the fact that it’s supposed to be haunted. It didn’t feel haunted in the eerie sense. Just big and empty and somehow desolate and occupied in the wrong way. What am I trying to tell you? Not that I felt frightened. But that I suddenly wanted to be with you.
I never told you, but there was a time – my second month in India last year – when if someone had offered me a passage home I’d have accepted like a shot. Goodness knows I loved being with you. But during that second month, perhaps not the whole month but two or three weeks of it, I had what I can only describe now as a permanent sinking heart. I hated everything, hated it because I was afraid of it. It was all so alien. I could hardly bear to leave the bungalow. I started to have awful dreams, not about anything, just dreams of faces. They used to come up out of nowhere, normal looking at first but then distorting and exploding, leaving a blank space for others to come up and take their place. They weren’t the faces of people I knew. They were people I invented in alarming detail – alarming because it didn’t seem possible to imagine faces so exactly. I suppose I was obsessed by the idea of being surrounded by strangers and had to have them even in my dreams. I never told you but I think that day on the verandah with the durzi you guessed what I was going through. I remember the way you looked at me when I lost my temper and snatched away that blouse he was doing his best to copy. You know, if I’d been living with the Swinsons that would probably have been the point of no return for me. I’d have been assimilated from then on into that inbred little cultural circle of English women – men, too, but particularly women – abroad in a colony.
I suppose it’s only natural that wherever we go we should need the presence of someone known and dependable and proven. If there’s no someone there has to be something. In Pindi during those particular weeks I became ridiculously attached to my luggage, my clothes, as if they were the only things I could trust. Even you, you see, seemed to have failed me. You knew everybody, everything, and I felt cut off from you because I didn’t, however much you took me out and about. And you took the dirt and poverty and squalor in your stride, as if it didn’t exist, although I knew that’s not what you actually felt about it. But this is why I snatched the blouse from Hussein. I couldn’t bear to see him holding it up, examining it, touching it with his black fingers. I hated myself for feeling that, but couldn’t stop feeling it, so I shouted at him. When I went to my room I sat down and wanted to burst into tears and be rescued and taken home, home. I’ve never felt so badly the fact that I no longer have a home in England, with Mummy gone, and Daddy, and David.
Much the same thing happened to me the second week I was here at the MacGregor House, and my initial curiosity in my surroundings had been satisfied. But in Mayapore ‘home’ had become the bungalow in Pindi, and you. I hope none of this showed in my letters and worried you. I’m over it now. I love it all. But for a while I hated Mayapore. I asked myself what on earth had I done, coming to this awful place? I even suspected Aunt Lili of having me here only because I was English and it was a feather in her cap to have a white person staying in her house. (Isn’t that disgraceful?) And I even thought back on that train journey and found myself less critical of those two beastly women. After all, I thought, how were they to have known that Lili wouldn’t do something that revolted them? And in the hospital I realised how much easier it was to talk to another English woman, even if you disagreed with everything she said. People of the same nationality use a kind of shorthand in conversation, don’t they? You spend less effort to express more, and you’ve got so used to the effortlessness that anything that needs effort is physically and mentally tiring, and you get short-tempered, and then tireder and more short-tempered from trying not to let the temper show.
I think this is why I failed to keep my resolution never to go to the club. I made that resolution originally because it was impossible for Lili Chatterjee ever to go with me. I have never liked the club, but it amuses me – it is so self-conscious about its exclusiveness and yet so vulgar. Someone is always drunk, the talk
is mostly scurrilous, and yet its members somehow preserve, goodness knows how, an outward air of rectitude, almost as though there were inviolable rules for heartless gossip and insufferable behaviour. It was a week or two before I realised that because I lived at the MacGregor House most of the women I met at the club disliked me and a lot of the men were embarrassed by me. Not to have noticed the dislike straight away shows the extent of the relief I must have felt at first simply to be there among my own kind.
Mummy once said to me, ‘You seem to like everybody. It’s unnatural. It’s also unfortunate. You’re going to waste so much time before you’ve worked out who the people are it’s worth your while to know.’ I used to think she meant worth while in the ambitious sense. Now I wonder whether she meant worth my while in the sense of the interests of my privacy and peace of mind and sense of security. But either way she would be wrong, wouldn’t she? I’m sure this longing for security and peace is wrong and that we should extend our patience time and time again almost right up to its breaking point, put ourselves out on a limb, dare other people to saw the limb off, whoever they are, black or white.
But it isn’t easy, is it? The night I came home from my evening with Ronald Merrick I thought, as I was climbing the stairs, that at the top I was in for something unpleasant and I wanted to turn and run and get back to him of all people. I actually stood still, half-way up, and looked down into the hall and there was this servant, a boy called Raju, staring up at me. Oh heavens, he was only making sure he didn’t turn out the light before I got up on to the landing, only doing his job, but I said to myself: What are you staring at? I was in my long green dress, the one you like that shows my awful shoulders. I felt – well, you know what I felt. He was too far away for me to see his expression. He was just a brown blob in white shirt and trousers, and then in the place where his face was one of my imaginary faces came, that of someone I’d never seen before. I called out, ‘Goodnight, Raju,’ and heard him say, ‘Goodnight, madam’ (he’s a South Indian Christian so he says ‘madam’), and then I continued up the stairs and when I got on to the landing I think I expected to see our resident ghost, Janet MacGregor. But there wasn’t anything. I’ve not seen her yet I felt relieved, but also cheated.
One day I must tell you about Hari Kumar. So far in my letters to you he’s really just a name, isn’t he? And I must tell you about a curious woman called Sister Ludmila who wears nun’s clothing and collects dead bodies. I wish you were here so that I could talk to you any old time. The gong’s just gone for dinner. It’s raining frogs and the lizards are playing hide and seek on the wall and making that peculiar chopping noise. Tonight Lili and I are dining alone and afterwards I expect we’ll play mahjong. Tomorrow I hope to visit the local Hindu temple with Mr Kumar.
Love, Daphne.
*
I wish you could have been here in the rains (Lady Chatterjee says) and then you would have seen it how Daphne loved it best. But I understand. You have to travel about and the wet season wouldn’t have been the best time to do so. The garden is already beginning to look dry and tired and brown. I love every season, though. And I especially love it at night like this. I always sit on the front verandah because you don’t get the smell of the river – which I never notice, but know that English guests do – and anyway you can see down the drive, which is nice, remembering the people who used to come up it, and anticipating those who might come up it now, and you can just make out the beds of canna lilies when we have the verandah light on like this. When there’s a moon it’s best with the light off, but when I give my party for you we’ll have all the lights on, including those in the garden itself. I’d put them on for you now, for you to see the effect, but we’re asked to conserve things as much as possible because of the war with China, and I suppose that includes conserving electricity.
Let me go on, then, about Miss Crane. She was an old school English liberal in the sense I grew to understand the term, someone who as likely as not had no gift for broad friendships. In Miss Crane’s case I think it went further than this. I think she had no gift for friendship of any kind. She loved India and all Indians but no particular Indian. She hated British policies, and so she disliked all Britons unless they turned out to be adherents to the same rules she abided by. I suppose what I’m saying is that she made friendships in her head most of the time and seldom in her heart. To punish someone whose conduct didn’t coincide with her preconceived notions of what he stood for she took his picture down. How ineffectual a gesture that was. But how revealing, how symptomatic of her weakness. As a gesture it lacked even the pathetic absurdity of turning the portrait of the black sheep of the family to the wall. At least in that gesture there was – and would be still if anyone ever did it nowadays – a flesh and blood anger, something positive. But she had courage. The Miss Cranes of the world often do, and I think at the end the reason for her madness was that she also had the courage to see the truth if not to live with it, see how all her good works and noble thoughts had been going on in a vacuum. I have a theory that she saw clearly but too late how she had never dirtied her hands, never got grubby for the sake of the cause she’d always believed she held dear, and that this explains why Mr Poulson found her like that, sitting in the rain by the roadside, holding the hand of that dead schoolteacher, Mr Chaudhuri.
Daphne, though, Daphne was different. Wouldn’t you say? You’ve read those two letters now? Don’t bother to make copies. Take them with you. Let me have them back one day when you’ve finished with them. I know them almost by heart. I only wish I’d known about them at the time. Yes, I wish it, but ask myself, Well how would it have helped if I had known, what could I have done if I’d seen them? She had to make her own marvellous mistakes. I say marvellous. She didn’t ever shrink from getting grubby. She flung herself into everything with zest. The more afraid she was of something the more determined she was not to shrink from experiencing it. She had us all by the ears finally. We were all afraid for her, even of her, but more of what she seemed to have unlocked, like Pandora who bashed off to the attic and prised the lid of the box open.
Is this why I always sit here, on the front verandah? Those are the steps, you know. Well of course you do. You keep on looking at them, and looking down the drive, almost expecting to see someone who has run all the way in darkness from the Bibighar. On that night I was in the hall with Mr Merrick, just there by the entrance to the living-room. We couldn’t see the steps from there. His car was parked away from the steps, in shadow. Afterwards, thinking about that, I wondered if he had left it so that it wasn’t at once obvious to the outside world that he was here, actually at the MacGregor House when the whole of British Mayapore was seething with rumours about the riots in the sub-divisions, and rumours about Miss Crane who was already in hospital.
He said as soon as he came in, ‘Are you all right, Lady Chatterjee?’ which amused me really, because for the first time since we’d known each other he seemed to be treating me as one of you, as if I were Lady Green or Brown or Smith, living alone in a house only just on the fringe of safety. I gave him a drink, he said he hadn’t much time, but drank it willingly enough, which I thought unusual, because he was an abstemious sort of man. I remember thinking: When you are worried, when you are concerned, when your face is alive, you’re really quite good-looking. I said, ‘I expect you’ve come to see Daphne, but she’s at the club,’ and he said, ‘Yes, they said at the hospital she’d gone straight on to the club, but she isn’t there.’ ‘Oh, isn’t she?’ I said, and I got worried too, but tried not to show it, so I said, ‘But I’m sure she’s all right.’
And then he asked outright, ‘Is she with Hari Kumar?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I hadn’t thought she was with Kumar. I’d even had the impression the association Mr Merrick warned her against had ended. I didn’t know he’d warned her against it. I didn’t know Mr Merrick had proposed to her. She’d kept all that from me. But she hadn’t been able to keep from me the feelings she’d had for Kumar
, nor the fact that she hadn’t seen him for at least a week, in fact more like three weeks. So when Mr Merrick said, ‘Is she with Kumar?’ I replied, quite truthfully, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ And then I wondered. But I said nothing. One did not voluntarily mention Kumar’s name to Mr Merrick. He said, ‘Well, at this time of night where can she be?’ I said, ‘Oh probably with friends,’ and I went to the phone and rang several places where she might have been. It took ages. The telephone lines in Mayapore were blocked with official calls. Mr Merrick kept going to the verandah and coming back again each time I’d finished a call. ‘She’ll be in soon,’ I said, ‘come and have another drink,’ and again, to my surprise, he said he would. He was in uniform still. He looked awfully tired.
‘Is it serious?’ I asked him. ‘It seems to be,’ he said, and then blurted out, ‘What a damned mess,’ and looked as if he was about to beg my pardon for swearing. ‘Some of the people you know,’ he said, ‘are locked up.’ I nodded. I knew which ones. I didn’t want to talk about them. ‘But here I am,’ he said, ‘having a drink with you. Do you mind?’ I laughed and told him not a bit, unless when he’d finished his peg he was going to haul me off to jail in a black maria as a suspected secret revolutionary. He smiled but said nothing, and I thought: Oh, am I in for it? Then he came out with this special thing, ‘I asked her to marry me. Did she tell you?’ It was a shock. I told him, no, and realised for the first time how awfully danger-ous the whole situation was. ‘Is Miss Crane all right?’ I asked. I didn’t want to talk to him about Daphne, or Hari Kumar. Or about where they might be. Mr Merrick had always disliked young Kumar and I have to confess that my own feelings towards him were mixed. It always seemed to me that he had too big a chip on his shoulder. And he was in some trouble once. Mr Merrick had had him in for questioning. At that time I didn’t know the boy from Adam, but a friend – Anna Klaus of the Purdah Hospital – once rang me and said the police had arrested this boy for apparently no good reason. So, well, you know me. I asked Judge Menen about it. So far as I could see it all turned out to be a storm in a teacup and he hadn’t really been arrested at all but only taken in for questioning. It turned out that my old friend Vassi knew him. That’s Mr Srinivasan, who still lives here, and whom you must meet. Anyhow I asked young Kumar round one evening because my curiosity had been aroused and that’s how he came into my life, or rather into Daphne’s life. He was brought up in England. His father had had tremendous plans for him, but the plans collapsed when the father died a bankrupt and poor Hari was sent home here to Mayapore, only of course it wasn’t home to him. He was two years old when his father took him to England, and eighteen when he came back. He spoke like an English boy. Acted like one. Thought like one. They say that when he first reached India he was spelling his name the way his father had spelled it. Coomer. Harry Coomer. But probably his aunt stopped that. She was the closest relative he had and I think in her own rather orthodox Hindu way she was very good to him, but that meant not disciplining him enough, letting him waste his time which also meant letting him have time to brood about his bad luck. It worried me a bit, the way Daphne seemed to take to him, worried me because I couldn’t be sure whether he felt quite the same way about her. She knew I had these reservations. So did young Kumar. Perhaps I should have come right out with it. But I didn’t. And I think I must blame myself for any note of furtiveness that crept into what Mr Merrick called the association between Kumar and Daphne. And when Mr Merrick was here that night and said that he had asked Daphne to marry him and I realised how dangerous things could be, I remembered that in the morning she had seemed especially happy – not especially happy for the Daphne I knew, but especially happy for the Daphne who had been mooning about for days and hardly going out anywhere except to the club and pretending in her typical way that nothing was wrong, and there suddenly seemed to be no doubt at all that she was with Kumar, that she had been happy because they’d agreed to meet again. No doubt in my mind, nor I think in Mr Merrick’s. And believing I knew for sure that she was with Kumar I also believed I knew where and made the mistake of thinking that if i knew Mr Merrick might also guess, and go there and find them together, which I did not want. In fact it struck me that the less said the better, because the place where I guessed they were was also the place where Mr Merrick had first met young Kumar and taken him in for questioning, and so the whole situation had come full-circle and I felt that some kind of disaster was inevitable. So I made us both stop talking about Daphne and asked about poor old Miss Crane who had been taken to hospital. I said, ‘Is she all right?’ and he said yes, so far as he knew, and then looked at his watch and got up and asked if he might use the phone to talk to his headquarters. Before he got to it the phone rang. It was the Deputy Commissioner. Mr Merrick had told his people where he’d be. I remember Mr Merrick answering it and telling Robin White he’d personally checked all his patrols, that the town itself was quiet for the moment because nearly all the shops in the bazaar had closed and the people seemed to be staying indoors, almost as if there was an official curfew. Then he said, ‘No, I’m here because Miss Manners is missing.’ He made it sound as if I’d reported her missing, and it seemed to be such a ridiculous word to use, but at the same time true. He spoke a bit longer then handed the phone to me and said Robin would like a word with me and would I forgive him if he didn’t wait but got off straight away. Robin said, ‘Lili, what’s this about Daphne?’ I said I didn’t really know, that I thought she had gone straight to the club from the hospital, but Mr Merrick said she wasn’t there, so now I supposed I was worried too. I said, ‘Are things bad, Robin?’ and he said, ‘Well, Lili, we don’t know. Would you like to come and stay the night with us?’ I laughed and asked, ‘Why? Are people moving into the funk holes?’