‘I see things speeded up,’ I tell her. ‘Different things ageing really fast. Just now I was dreaming that I was walking towards two trees in a field. Green grass and blue sky and these two big trees. Then, suddenly, they started…It was as if I was watching them going through all their seasons one after another incredibly fast, leaves falling off and growing again, over and over. I saw them get old, ancient, wither, then die, all within a matter of seconds. Doesn’t sound like much, I know.’
She remains silent, very lightly stroking my wrist, where my pulse is throbbing.
‘Sometimes it’s animals,’ I say. ‘A family of dogs, all their flesh dropping off them and their skeletons crumbling. It’s the knowing it’s coming, in the dream, you know? Like I recognize it’s going to be one of those dreams and I can’t stop it.’
‘What sort of trees were they?’
‘I don’t know. Big, leafy. Why?’
‘I’ve got a dream dictionary at home.’
‘I don’t think the type of tree matters. Sometimes, like I say, it’s dogs or fish or foxes. It’s the speeding up that’s the thing.’
We lie in silence side by side. The house’s ether tells me Vince hasn’t returned. I hope he’s had sex with someone, that he’s safe, that it hasn’t left him feeling more alone. He fell out with his mother and father years ago and his brother, to whom in any case he was never close, emigrated to Australia a long time back. It occurs to me that apart from Vince I don’t have any friends. Melissa and Maude are out there like energy centres on which I can, no matter how distantly, draw. Even Carl and I have, this last decade or so, found a groove. (It began when we realized we were both readers; books licensed us to concede kinship in spite of having nothing else in common. Now it’s a joke between the girls that Carl and I stick up for each other against their criticism, that at this preposterously late stage in the game we’ve decided we’re brothers.) My mum and dad. I think of my family and then of Vince, effectively without one. And all of London and all of life to roll around alone in.
When, after perhaps ten minutes, Janet Marsh moves her hand slowly from my wrist across my hip and down–gentle insinuation then bald statement–to my cock I know it’s because we don’t have the resources for anything else. We’re existing now in that state of knowing there’s no future in this but putting the knowledge to one side to get through the present. There have been moments, the shared food, the more or less successful screwing, but they seem paltry now with the encroaching light and the faint sound of the first train. All that we don’t know about each other and all that doesn’t fit forces us back into sex, since the alternatives are lying here acknowledging it or getting up and dealing with whether she’s still too drunk to drive home. (I’ve felt her turning this over, these ten minutes, the business of getting home. If she takes a cab she’ll have to come back later to pick up her car.) We turn towards each other, kiss, achingly and stalely start up again, though, not being the man I used to be, I’m wondering what dirty twist she can add this time to get me going.
CHAPTER TEN
The Deal with God
(Bhusawal, 1945)
It did occur to Kate, cycling to her aunt’s one Monday morning three days before her eighteenth birthday, that she’d gone mad. If she stopped, made the shift to one side of herself and looked disinterestedly at her life, a version of her voice said, quite calmly: You’re living in a state of madness, a meandering fever, a dream. And she, quite calmly, replied: Yes, I know. Three years, after all, had passed since Lahore; and Cyril still lived. Not because her resolve had failed but because having decided to kill him she found she’d given herself, perversely, an increased tolerance of her own suffering. It was as if knowing she had this potential allowed her to take her own time realizing it. Murders, apparently, had their peculiar gestations. At some point–she couldn’t say when, exactly–the date of her eighteenth birthday had hardened into significance. You’ve got until then, she’d told God, in the no-nonsense idiom their communiqués demanded. After that, I’m doing it myself. She hadn’t been able to shake the feeling she was being tested, offered some sort of deal. Sometimes now in the loveless face of God (there were star-strewn nights she spent hours staring into the heavens as if in direct confrontation) she believed she saw a smile. No benevolence; just the faintest suggestion of amusement at her own writhing freedom. You can kill him, yes…
But?
She didn’t know. Only that she was the subject of divine experiment. This, she incrementally understood and accepted, was what God did, was why He’d given us the freedom to choose in the first place: not out of love; out of curiosity.
Fine. You’ve got until I’m eighteen. Then I’m doing it myself.
Since having been taken out of school after her grandfather’s stroke Kate had been forced into domestic slavery at her aunt’s, though she still lived at Cyril’s. Sellie, small in her upper body but going heavy in the hips, had a tiny-boned moist face and a thick mop of centre-parted hair. Some resemblance to Kate’s mother around the eyes, but very slight. The milky-coffee colouring was the same but the face had a hint of Cyril’s monkeyishness about the mouth. Kate imagined her in a tree, nibbling a pomegranate held in her small dexterous hands.
‘The dhobi’s been,’ Sellie said, putting her head round the bathroom door where Kate was flannel-washing Dalma and Lucy while Robbie, naked but for chuddies, hung by his hands from the corner of the water tank. The floor was stone-flagged and the walls were brick painted buttermilk yellow. One window with blind slats missing admitted stripes of light into and out of which two bluebottles chased each other. Hot water steamed from the washbasin. Dalma, who was a skinny little thing with a huge nest of tangled black hair, was still half asleep in her nightdress.
‘The clothes are on the chest in the hall so you’ll put them away when you get back, okay?’
‘Okay, Aunty,’ Kate said. All this could go on. The world didn’t stop just because murder was maturing in your blood. She let the thoughts–specifically the word murder–have their play to see if they detonated anything from God. Nothing. Only the steadily increasing weight of His presence. Kate held aloof; their terms were understood. He had three days to stop her, or to make the killing of Cyril unnecessary. There was no need for further dialogue.
‘Hi-ho, Silver,’ Robbie said.
‘He’s going to tip that over,’ Kate said.
‘Robbie get down from there,’ Sellie said.
He ignored them. ‘Hi-ho, Silver,’ he said. ‘Away!’
‘What to do with this child?’ Sellie said vaguely, and withdrew.
Kate dried Dalma and handed a separate towel to Lucy, who could dry herself. ‘Go on, Robbie,’ Kate said. ‘Clean your teeth quick or we’re going to be late.’
Robbie propelled himself backwards from the tank, landed on his heels, then stuck his palms in his armpits with a grimace of pain.
‘I told you you’d hurt yourself,’ Kate said. ‘It’s all rusty on the edge, you silly boy.’ He was, Kate thought, a bit mad. He kept up bizarre monologues, got fixated on things, laughed if he hurt himself doing something stupid.
‘I am a silly boy,’ he said, pulling a face of shuddering agony. ‘I am an absolute silly boy, dear God.’
‘Hurry up and wash,’ Kate told him. ‘Go on while I get these two dressed.’
‘I hope it’s kippers for beakfast,’ Robbie said, stretching the elastic of his chuddies and looking forlornly at his genitals. ‘Please, St Francis, make it kippers.’
‘There aren’t any kippers, stupid,’ Kate said. ‘There’ll be porridge and toast and tea–if you get a move on.’
‘It’s the end of the Empire!’ Robbie said, this being one of his father’s habitual utterances. ‘God save the King!’
The day went as usual. She took Robbie and Dalma to school on her bike, Robbie on the back, Dalma on the handlebars, then rode back to find that Sellie’s half an hour of looking after Lucy had exhausted her. ‘Kit, you’ll have to take her for
a while, honestly I slept so badly last night.’ Thereafter all chores performed with Lucy on her hip or clinging to her leg or screaming or breaking something or choking on something she’d swallowed. ‘Please keep her quiet, Kit, for heaven’s sake. It’s Uncle Will’s lie-in today and he’s not feeling too good, either.’ (Sellie’s husband, Will Lomax, was an Anglo fair-skinned enough to be taken for an Englishman, albeit of the pinkish boiled variety, with a bald, freckled head, bulldog jowls and a coin-slot mouth. He was one of those men, Kate thought, who enjoyed pretending to be irascible, barking at people, bellowing that there wasn’t enough oil in the curry, standing with hands on hips and slot-mouth open in amazement at your effrontery that in reality he not only didn’t mind but loved. He played this character full-time, enjoyed it, very occasionally stunned you by dropping out of it and saying something from his true self, quietly. If he thought about it at all, Kate knew, he was on her side: the hell of Cyril, the exploitation by Sellie, but he wasn’t a man to dwell on things that required his ethical action. He was more likely to lift his burra peg up to the evening sunlight as if inspecting the scotch for foreign bodies and say, ‘My God what a world,’ before closing his eyes and taking a soothing sip.)
Kate put the clean laundry away, washed the household’s yesterday socks and hung them out, polished the family’s shoes, refilled the water chattis when the taps came on, kept Lucy amused. She went home for lunch with her grandfather, then returned to Sellie’s for the afternoon’s babysitting. She picked Robbie and Dalma up at four, rode home with them, oversaw their tea, then took all three children out on foot to the Railway Institute, where before the evening’s adult socializing began youngsters gathered at the compound’s swings, roundabout, climbing frame and slide. (The other children were there in the care of servants. Kate had heard one of the boys ask Robbie, ‘How come your ayah doesn’t wear a sari?’) Then, with the sun lighting soft columns of evening gnats, back to Sellie’s to bath the children and get them ready for bed, at which point Sellie materialized to comb her offspring’s hair and coddle them for ten minutes before they went to sleep.
‘I’m off, Aunty,’ Kate said, hurrying to her bike.
‘Don’t be late tomorrow,’ Sellie called. It was what she always said.
All this goes on. Murder. All this can go on. The world doesn’t stop but turns up its dial, gets more itself. She had maybe an hour before the lamps were lit. Cyril’s curfew. The place was off the south side of the bazaar. She pedalled hard past a bullock cart, the animals’ pale golden haunches gleaming, the chorus of flies busy at their beshitted rears. The bike seemed twice its normal weight. Her calves and thighs burned. The market deserted depressed her, flecks of food and the bony dogs nosing. There’d been a downpour while she bathed the kids at Sellie’s, what felt like the monsoon’s last utterance, that shift up there, something leaving the sky.
The ground inclined and she stood up on the pedals. An Anglo woman carrying a wicker basket over her arm hurriedly crossed in front of her, gave her a glance from under the brim of her sun hat. Kate felt the stare on her back as she passed. As far as the town was concerned, she knew, the worst had all happened; it was all already as bad as it could be. That’s Cyril Starkey’s niece. Poor wretch. She’d caught the lowering of voices, seen the looks: pity; curiosity; disgust; satisfaction. Satisfaction that it was someone else, as if it validated them. The irony was it hadn’t all happened. It could, she knew, be worse. There were long periods, sometimes months long, when Cyril left her alone. She wondered if he was governed by an astrological cycle. At first it had surprised her every time he drew back from doing what he could, with force, have done. It had surprised her until she understood how much he lived in fear. Fear was at the centre of him. If he raped her he’d have to find in himself the resources to justify it. If he couldn’t, there would be no escape from his own self-disgust. Finding the justification would be one kind of madness. Failing to find it would be another. It was what her eyes confirmed for him when he could bear to meet them: This is what you are. She meant, at the eye of the storm of meanings, a coward. Therefore he beat her. The beating was the crescendo, the surrogate consummation. After the violence, new rules and proscriptions, their only purpose that they guaranteed her infringement. I’m still the roof over your head and I’m still entitled to a bit of bleddy respect. The mandatory kiss goodnight, this was. Facilitating all the vulgar touches. His hands leaving invisible filthy prints. Which over the weeks would build. Desire against fear. Fear won, but the margin of victory got smaller, smaller, smaller. She could see it. He was working himself up. Once or twice her grandfather had got between them. The furious raised male voices, but always in the end the old man beaten back, skulking, hot and rosy with his own dependence (for all his favouritism Sellie had made it clear she wouldn’t take him), ready for the raging retreat into drink. Now he hid behind his own feebleness. When he’s dead: every look of Cyril’s said it; all three of them thought it. It was in the bungalow with them like a fourth person.
She used to play a scene out in her head. A policeman, Cyril’s friend and billiards accomplice Sergeant Rhubotham, small-eyed and with a high forehead from which the hair went back in a dozen glossy ripples, saying, Now, Miss Lyle I realize this is difficult but I must ask you: Did your uncle…Are you saying your uncle raped you?
No, but he was going to.
How do you know? Are you seriously asking me to accept that your—
Accept what you like. I don’t care. Do whatever it is you’re going to do and get it over with.
Superficially the dialogue within herself was conducted as if the question was what she’d do immediately afterwards, how she would, as the phrase was, get away with murder. The fantasy of simple admission to Sergeant Rhubotham had some time ago been replaced by the business of concocting alibis, stories of thieves in the night, jumping a train, going in disguise, making her way back to Quetta where Edwin Hawes, who’d been working the Mail to Hyderabad when the earthquake struck, still lived in the city they were rebuilding. Whereas in the earlier phase the mere fact of Cyril’s death was her reward (she’d own up to Rhubotham, yes, but in the last days of her life enjoy sensuous cleanliness, the freedom to relish the world’s bits of beauty, even the play of sunlight on the bare brick of a prison wall), now she planned to survive, to navigate beyond the crime, to find a way into the future, whatever the world (or God) might do to her by way of retribution. This, superficially, was the inner dialogue. The other dialogue, the real dialogue–about how she would (how she could, practically) do it–wasn’t a dialogue at all, but a murmur of forces never allowed to come to the surface, to thought, to language. She’d given no thought to the machete since the day of Kalia’s dismissal, but one evening, months later, when she was chasing pariah dogs from the compound she’d come across it in the long grass near the fence, lobbed there, presumably, by Cyril. She’d picked it up and brought it like a sleepwalker into her room. Wrapped it in a rag and hidden it under her wardrobe. She hadn’t thought anything, simply done it. The forces moved her and she was content to let them. The less she had to think about it the better.
What she did have to think about was Kalia. Doing something, now, miss, he’d told her. This is my country. Poor people don’t realize how many of them there are. They are like the body, you know, but without head and brain what good? Disowned by Cyril, he’d jumped a goods train to Bombay. A year ago he’d got a message to her through the butcher that he was back in Bhusawal, secretly, since Cyril had reported the ‘assault’ to Rhubotham. Since then he’d come and gone a few times, stealthily. I will help you, miss. You can count on me. He still found it difficult to meet her eyes, but less so than formerly. Something had hatched in him but remained deformed, a profane inclination beyond the accepted boundaries. Somewhere in Kate’s meandering fever was the phrase He loves you and the adjunct like that. He wouldn’t think of it in that way, wouldn’t think of it at all, would experience it only as a piercing need to be of use to her.
/>
She turned left into a cramped street of poor houses and huts. Here the maze began. Washing hung like dismal bunting, a stink of shit and stagnant water, cut through here and there by spicy cooking whiffs and strands of woodsmoke. She’d been here before but had to run the directions through her head. Miss, there is one pale blue house on a corner and a place with a striped thisthing opposite. Awning, he’d meant. If you get lost ask for the house of Jagrilal the tailor. He dropped into English erratically. In the old days he’d been reluctant, said it was disrespectful of him to talk to her in her language, which wasn’t his. But how can I teach you if you won’t repeat? Eventually, he’d made himself do it, in an agony of embarrassment, not meeting her eyes.
Another left, three small huts with rotting roofs. Turn right. There was the awning, and the pale blue house opposite. Kalia was peeping out from behind the door’s curtain.
‘All right, miss?’
She nodded.
‘Best to bring your bike inside.’
The curtain opened on to a small, low-ceilinged room with a big bed in one corner and an open cooking fire in the other. A dark infant with a head of wild black curls lay asleep with its mouth open on the bed. A girl of four or five lay on her belly next to it, moving her shins back and forth and singing quietly to a filthy homemade cloth doll. An old woman in a shapeless shift squatted on her haunches watching a pan on the fire, while a sari’d woman in perhaps her late twenties sat in the back doorway, orangely lit by the dust-filtered sunlight, grinding spices on a curry stone. It had astonished Kate that Kalia had friends, an existence beyond Cyril’s.