1977 (28 page)

And what is Mujhib? Anyway I am tired of Bengal. It has never been anything but a trouble

to us. Like Ireland to the English, isn’t it, Lucy?”

But Lucy had no chance to reply because there was a crash and then a commotion on the

verandah. People looked round. Some stood up. Lucy stayed seated. She did not need to

stand up and peer in order to know what had happened. Tusker had upset something. The

final disgrace. There was a hush. She noticed now that the men were gathered looking down

at something or someone and the only thing they could be looking down at was Tusker, and

that meant that Tusker was no longer upright which in turn meant that he had had another

attack; perhaps the fatal one. She hardened her heart again, to withstand the immediate alarm

that must presently soften into grief and terror. And here was Coocoo flowing gracefully

across the lawn in her lovely saree, a gorgeous bearer of bad news.

“Tusker seems to have had a bit of a fall.”

“Oh, dear. Silly Tusker. I’d better come across and see.” She moved slowly, putting her

plate on the grass, gathering her things. At the end of one’s life all that was left was dignity

and one was damned lucky to have the chance to show it. She left her bag on the chair. It

had been a good bag. The treacherous sunlight showed how old it was. She went with

Coocoo towards the verandah. The men were gathered round the steps but made way for

them. One of them righted the wicker table Tusker must have fallen against or grabbed as he

fell. There had been things on the table. The verandah was spattered with broken glass. He

lay spread-eagled in his clown’s clothes. His eyes were shut. The eyelids were startlingly

white against the coloured powder that caked his face and head. The clown’s mouth was

open. Through it, unconscious or conscious, he was gulping in the pine-scented air. Dr Mitra

was kneeling beside him, fingers on the pulse of his left wrist. Tusker’s right hand was

bloody, still gripping the stem of a glass.

Mitra said, “I think he just missed his footing and knocked himself out.”

“Will he be all right?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Tusker muttered something.

“Can’t hear you old chap.”

“Home,” he said more clearly. “Not hospital. Bugger hospital.”

“Who said anything about hospital? You’ll be right as rain.”

Tusker opened his miner’s eyes. “Luce? You there, Luce?”

“Yes, Tusker.”

“Home. Not hospital.” He began to raise himself into a sitting position. Dr Mitra tried to

restrain him but in the end had to help him into the sitting position he was insisting on.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “One too many, that’s all. Slipped on some bloody thing. Bad

business. Damned bad form, eh? Ladies present. Get drummed out. Ha!”

The group round the verandah began to disperse. Presently only Tusker and Lucy, Mitra,

Tiny and Coocoo and some of the Menektara servants remained. Tusker shut his eyes and

bowed his head, concentrating on the business of recovering strength. Then he opened one

eye, now the other, as if aware for the first time of the state of his clothes. He rubbed his

trouser leg and inspected the palm of his hand.

“Well it’s what the card said. Tiny and Coocoo are playing Holi.” He glanced at them.

“Why haven’t you played then? It wasn’t us who invented it. From the look of me you’d

think it was. Keep away old man,” he said to Dr Mitra, shrugging Mitra’s hand off his

shoulder. “You’ll ruin that lovely suit.”

“You don’t believe in things like Holi, do you, old man?” he said an hour later when Dr

Mitra drove them both back to The Lodge. “Load of guff. Excuse for a piss up, like

Christmas for us. More like Easter though. Eh, Luce? Fertility rites. D’you know Mitra old

chap when I first came out six hundred million years ago or whatever it bloody well was I

was fool enough to ask the colonel’s lady what Holi was in aid of. She told me. Told me the

whole thing. No flies on her, Mitra old fruit. But when Luce here asked me, when
she
came

out, I was such a bloody gentleman I just hummed and hawed and said, Spring festival,

y’know, so the poor little thing piped up at a dinner table one night in one of those awful

sodding silences we used to have to endure because the memsahib at the head of the table

had got her knickers in a twist and anyone who knew a thing about what you said or didn’t

say in a situation like that just naturally kept quiet. I’ve lost the thread, Luce. What was I

saying?”

“You were telling Dr Mitra about the awful gaffe I made, Tusker, but perhaps he’s not

interested.”

“Of course he’s interested. He’ll dine out on it for weeks, won’t you Mitra old boy old man

old boy?”

“Perhaps. Who knows, Smalley old fellow?”

A pause.

“You taking the piss by any chance?” Tusker asked. “If you are, sod you. Sod you anyway.

Sod us one and all.” He leant back.

It was intolerable. In the driving mirror her glance slid off Dr Mitra’s. She felt as outraged

by his composure as by Tusker’s abominable behaviour and disgusting language. She felt

outraged too by this reminder of the gaffe, years and years ago, back there in horrid Mahwar,

‘piping’ up in that somehow transient silence which she arrested by saying—because Holi

was the last thing that had been mentioned—”Why do they use
those
colours? One had

always thought of Spring as green.” He could have saved her from that. He could. Yes he

could have saved her from that by telling her the truth when she’d asked him. The silence at

the table then was echoed in the silence in Dr Mitra’s car; her eventual realization of the

significance of the colours here exemplified by the sight of Tusker caked in reds and purples

(ruining Dr Mitra’s car seat covers)—the colours that symbolized both the menstrual flow

and the blood a groom drew from a virgin bride.

Intolerable too was the homecoming which was so early it caught Ibrahim unawares, taking

his ease on the front verandah with Minnie (who fled) and with Bloxsaw whose hackles rose

when Tusker in his harlequin disguise emerged from the car. The creature bared its teeth and

growled and would have fled too if Tusker had gone near it.

“You must tell me the truth, Dr Mitra,” she said half-an-hour later when she saw him back

to his motor. “Did he fall because he’d drunk too much or because he’s had another slight

attack?”

“If I were worried about him would I leave him here? Don’t worry. Keep him off the

booze, that’s all. Ring me any time. I’ll look in tomorrow.”

“You haven’t answered my question, Dr Mitra.”

“I thought I had. The hospital is only a stone’s throw, but I’ve left him with you. Isn’t that

an answer? It’s the best thing. He likes his own home.”

“Yes, I see.”

“I’ll give him a new prescription probably. Let’s see tomorrow.”

She wanted to ask, How long? A year? Less, more? Any time? But she had lived long

enough to know that you did not ask questions to which there were no answers and which

you didn’t want answered. When she went back into the bedroom Tusker was asleep. His

face and hands and arms although washed still bore traces of the Holi powders. The ruined

clothes were in the dhobi basket. She thought, her distress giving way to irritation, “And he

was quite right. It’s their festival not ours.
They
who should have looked like clowns.”

Between Holi and Easter he regained his resilience. On the Monday after Palm Sunday

(March 27) he announced that he and Billy-Boy would be convivial that evening. She and

Ibrahim went to the pictures. She went because any departure from the norm might have

alerted him to her concern although this was lessening day by day. He was drinking nothing

stronger than beer, and little of that. He had seen the writing on the wall. Nevertheless she

couldn’t afterwards remember what picture she had seen because for her the screen had

been filled with images of her arrival home to a house of death, the empty place at the end

of a journey, or the dark at the bend of the stairs in her father’s house.

So that, arriving home and finding the place locked she panicked. She gave Ibrahim the key

and made him go in first. The light was on in the living-room. There was a note on the

escritoire. From Mitra?

It was a note from Tusker. “Gone to the cabaret at the Shiraz with Billy-Boy. Back at

midnight.”

“It’s all right, Ibrahim. I shall go to bed. Perhaps you’d stay up until he gets back.”

Later, hearing the sound of singing she switched off her light. The singing was Tusker’s and

Billy-Boy’s. The dog in its basket in the garage began to bark. The singing stopped at once.

Billy-Boy must have scooted home. She heard Tusker locking up. She’d left his bedside lamp

on and when he came in she watched him from under lowered lids. “Luce?” he said. He

wasn’t drunk. “Luce, you awake?” She heaved over on to her other side and covered her

head.

“They rush you for the beer in that place,” he said next morning. “Beer, Luce, that’s all I

had. It was Billy-Boy who was on the booze. I bet he’s copping it this morning from

Madam.”

“What on earth made you decide to go to the Shiraz?”

“He was being a bore, that’s why. A proper misery. He perked up when we got there,

though.”

“How nice.”

“Good picture, was it?”

“I don’t remember the picture. It went out of my mind when I got home and found you

nowhere in sight, Tusker.”

He drank his orange juice and then banged the top of his egg.

“It’s Easter this coming weekend,” he said.

“I thought you’d given up noticing things like Easter.”

He cut his buttered bread into soldiers to dip into the yolk.

“There’s a new bloke. Black as your hat, according to Billy-Boy. Likes to be called Father.

He’s coming up at Easter.”

“You’re spilling egg on your shirt.”

“Thought we might go on Sunday. What about it old thing?”

She finished her own egg. An egg was symbolic too.

“You’re suggesting we should go to church together on Easter Sunday?”

“Good a time as any. Have a shufty.”

“You’ll find the churchyard much improved.”

“Wasn’t thinking of the churchyard. A shufty at his new reverence is what I meant. Who

knows, Luce, it might fall to him to ash us both to ash and dust us both to dust. We might as

well have a look at the bugger.”

“Really, Tusker.”

“You think that morbid?”

“I was saying really to the language. But I’ll say it to the idea, too.
Really
.”

“Ha!”

They went to morning service on Sunday April and. The church was fuller than she had

seen it for years. She stared in dismay and fascination at Father Sebastian. She was glad

Tusker hadn’t insisted on eight o’clock communion. But when the new priest began to

intone the sentences of the scriptures prescribed for opening the order of morning prayer in

a loud ringing voice she was struck first by their beauty and then by the recollection of her

father mumbling them and then by the resonance of Father Sebastian’s voice and the curious

appropriateness of the Indian lilt to the lilt and rhythm of the words. She opened her eyes

and saw that his were shut and that he was speaking words known by heart.

“I will arise and go to my Father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against

heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.”

“Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and

confess our manifold sins and wickednesses,” Father Sebastian continued, without a break,

and the service was away, flowing through the church and through Lucy’s mind and heart

and soul. Standing for the first hymn she glanced at Tusker whose presence comforted her.

His forehead was ridged in concentration. He had never been able to hit a note accurately

but she was less conscious this morning of that slightly painful effect than of the surprise

and pleasure of hearing him giving voice instead of droning.

During Father Sebastian’s sermon, the text for which he took from one of the anthems

prescribed to be said or sung on Easter Day instead of a psalm (“Christ, our passover is

sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast ; not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven

of malice and wickedness: but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth”) she thought

his attention was drawn to her rather frequently as if she were someone he felt he had seen

before, which of course he had done if he’d yet studied the photographs Mr Bhoolabhoy

must have sent him days ago. Mr Bhoolabhoy had kept his promise to let her have copies

and she had posted two or three, including the one showing herself and
mali
at Mabel’s

grave, to Sarah. She hadn’t shown them to Tusker, nor yet said anything to Tusker about