1977 (16 page)

stop Mildred burying Mabel at St John’s. She hadn’t believed Mabel was dead and had a bad

conscience about having left her alone to spend the afternoon repairing Mr Maybrick’s

Handel.”

“His what?”

“For his organ. It was coming apart. Perhaps it was his Bach.”

“Sometimes you kill me, Luce,” Tusker said, helpless it seemed with mirth and wiping his

eyes.

“I am glad that I have some kind of positive effect on you, Tusker. It is at least proof that I

am still alive and in possession of certain faculties. Among them for instance the faculty of

provoking a response if only a response to me as an absurd person. But naturally I could not

expect to be able to jog a memory so deeply buried in deliberate forgetfulness and wilful

obfuscation.”

“Obverse-what?”

“Obfuscation. It is a word currently popular among critics of government. This morning I

find it pertinent to you, Tusker. You obfuscate. You stupefy me. You bewilder me. I do not

know where or what I am when I talk to you.”

She clasped her hands under her chin the better to stop him interrupting. “And I do not

know
why
you obfuscate. Presumably it’s because nothing is clear to you any more and you

deplore the idea of things being clear to other people. You were born under the sign of

Aries, which reminds me we must discuss your birthday, and you do not want to be left out

because people born under this sign hate being left out of anything but are utterly selfish

always trying to control and order other people about to suit themselves and going on doing

it or trying to do it even when they seem to have lost their grip on reality but of course they

are probably only pretending half the time to have lost their grip in order to attract sympathy

and attention. It is typical of you to pretend to have found one error and at the same time

overlook a real error—the fact that it was on June six nineteen forty-four which was the day

of the landings in Normandy that Mabel Layton died on the verandah of Rose Cottage when

there was no one in the bungalow except Susan because Miss Batchelor was having tea with

Mr Maybrick and Susan went into premature labour as a result and after the baby was born

she went off her head too and Minnie had to save the baby from being burned to death,

which of course they tried to hush up but we all knew because you can never stop Indian

servants gossiping. And Mildred never never forgave poor old Miss Batchelor for not being

at Rose Cottage on the one day in years when there was some excuse for her being there at

all and she told her to vacate and didn’t care that Barbie had nowhere to go, all Mildred was

interested in was moving into Rose Cottage at last herself with Susan and Sarah, and you’re

not going to tell me you don’t remember, and don’t remember Susan being rude to us at the

Church and how you said later that her being rude was probably the first real sign that she

was off her rocker and hadn’t recovered, but of course you were always making excuses for

people like them and pretended not to notice what
I
had to put up with which I only did

because it was my duty to do so although it was a very different matter when they’d all gone

home, you were free with your criticisms then, Tusker, Take Rose Cottage. You knew I’d

longed and longed to live there but after we’d moved in and the Laytons and all the other

people had gone all you did was poke fun and complain about Mildred’s bad taste getting rid

of the roses and making a tennis court. You poked fun at the Laytons even in front of

Indians and were insensitive to the fact that very often the Indians were shocked and that I

was embarrassed and am still embarrassed by the way you belittle things and people that

belong to a part of your life you have decided is behind you. In Bombay you poked fun at

the Indian officers you’d been working with who’d taken over the reins, you poked fun at

them to all those box-wallahs. It is not an attractive trait Tusker, and it is too late for you to

do anything about it, it seems to be part of your nature to attack, to denigrate and now to

obfuscate, and I have lived with it too long to have the strength to do anything but regret it

and to observe it as the reason why
I
have no friends, because all our friends are your

friends, Tusker, not mine, and—yes, I
will
say it—
they are all black
and I want you to realize

that it has been much on my mind recently that if you had not recovered from your attack I

would have been alone here, alone, Tusker, and having to rely for human sympathy and

moral support upon people who frankly do not care for me, not deeply, and for whom I do

not deeply care either.”

A pause.

Tusker said, “You’re pissed, Luce.”

“Which is another thing. I have noticed that you do not use words like that in front of

Coocoo Menektara or Mrs Srinivasan, nor even in front of their husbands. You seem to

reserve them for me, for Dr Mitra, for Ibrahim and for your bosom-chum Mr Bhoolabhoy.

And I am not as you so crudely put it, pissed, but might be before the day is out. You call

me to ask who was the last person to be buried at St John’s knowing perfectly well that

Edgar Maybrick was entirely within his rights to say it was Mabel Layton, and that it would

have been highly macabre for him to have nominated himself, even though he
was
the last

person, and will ever remain so, because there is no more
room
.”

“Yes there is. There’s a nice little space in the southwest corner. Enough for two if they dig

deep enough.”

She crossed her arms over her long-unclaimed bosom. Suddenly there was a grunting

sound from the mower and then (was it?) a distant shriek of outrage from Mrs Bhoolabhoy.

The symbolism did not escape her: two aspects of the grim reaper.

“I am not concerned what you do with me, Tusker, if I predecease you. You can sell me to

Tata’s for soap, for all I care. But what I do with you if you predecease me is entirely my

business. I shall probably float you down the Ganges on a raft woven of the paper in which

you have all your life buried yourself, but not—you understand—so that you may drift out

into the Bay of Bengal to become a speck of water and merge with the Absolute, but so that

you may merge with the millions of tons of silt that are making the Hooghly river un-

navigable and giving concern to the Public Works Department of the city of Calcutta. Have

you decided what you want to do about your Birthday Buffet?”

“Yes,” Tusker said. His eyes looked filmed over. His skin was blotchy. Perhaps another

attack was imminent.

“Then give me instructions.”

“That’s soon done. Bugger the birthday buffet.”

“This is your message to your friends? This is the way in which you wish me to convey

letters of non-invitation to, say, Colonel and Mrs Menektara?”

“I’ll dictate it if your bloody shorthand’s still up to it.”

She nodded, gripped her beads. “Bugger is not a word Pitman’s taught me, but for subtlety

of sound and elegance of outline the Pitman method has never been surpassed and I suspect

your dictation would not find me at a loss. But it grieves me, Tusker, that in our old age you

too should sneer at me for having once had to acquire a skill which I was proud to have

acquired and of which I remained proud even when I realized that in India it marked me as a

girl who had once had to work for a living. And it came in handy enough, didn’t it? Without

it, the cost of discovering one had married a man without manly ambition might have

proved insupportable. Every hour you spent hiding yourself behind a desk, Tusker, was paid

for by me in little humiliations, dogsbodying for the wives of the men who profited from the

work that flowed from your desk, your desks, your hundreds of desks, none of which any

man who thought as much of his wife as he thought of his own peace of mind and comfort

of body would have sat at for a moment once he realized that other men were enjoying the

fruits of his work and their wives with them and his own wife suffering. It was you, Tusker,

who made
me
a dogsbody because a role of dogsbody for yourself was the one you had

chosen to play. But at least you might have gone on playing it and not begun to freak out the

moment you left the army. People do not understand when they find an apparently mature

man acting in an entirely different way from the one to which they are accustomed and what

people do not understand they dislike or fear and they do not easily forgive the person who

is the cause of these disagreeable emotions. I shall not raise the subject again and shall not

discuss it further. I think I have made my feelings plain and in all the circumstances I should

be grateful if you would be so kind as to make plain the position I should be in if you had

another attack and did not survive, and instead of making absurd notes about poor Mr

Maybrick’s inoffensive little book you made plain notes in plain terms about my financial

position as it would be were I to find myself alone here and weeping amid the alien corn.”

Tusker’s mouth hung open. Her heart was racing, but triumphantly. She had never
stunned

him into silence. His silence now was like the silence she had years ago imagined creating in

a darkened theatre, one which would hold until after her exit when it would be shattered by

prolonged applause, a deserved ovation: the kind she had dreamed of and might have got

back in ‘Pindi before the war when they did
The Wind and the Rain
, except that that hard

grasping little bitch Dulcie Thompson got the part, not that there’d ever been any doubt that

she would nor that she, Lucy, would end up in the prompt-corner as assistant stage manager

to the incompetent Captain Starling, and anyway the part had never been auditioned for.

Leading parts went automatically to Dulcie and you took your life in your hands if you

prompted her during one of her Pauses or alternatively got chewn to a rag if you couldn’t tell

the difference between a Pause and a Black-Out, which was virtually impossible because

Dulcie’s addiction to Pauses was matched only by her susceptibility to Black-Outs which she

covered by succumbing to her other addiction—business : business with a handkerchief or a

handbag, unrehearsed business that ruined other actors’ concentration, even moving props

that caused blackout for someone else a few minutes later when he found the prop not in its

place.

“I need a prop now,” Lucy thought. “Something to help me get off while Tusker’s mouth

is still open.” But there was no prop. She would have to ad lib. “I don’t suppose, Tusker,

that you even remember the time when Dulcie Thompson was ill on the fourth night of
The

Wind and the Rain
and the GOC was coming and everyone was in despair and Major

Grimshaw rang you and said as ASM I was also understudy and obviously knew the part

backwards so would I do it and you said, no?”

Tusker closed his mouth but still said nothing.

“If you remember the incident at all no doubt you only remember me saying Oh Tusker

thank you for getting me out of it I’d have been terrified but terrified — which I would have

been but not of me making a mess of it but of making us conspicuous and putting Dulcie

Thompson’s nose out of joint and so making things difficult at the
daftar
for you, with

Colonel Thompson, because after all you knew of my interest in amateur dramatics before

we were married and listened apparently so sympathetically to what I told you of my hopes,

then, of doing a part, so what you said to Major Grimshaw was a lie, but in my silly little way

I thought of it almost as a compliment because I thought you were worried that I’d act

Dulcie Thompson into the ground, but I’m afraid it was simply another example of the way

you have always deprived me, yes, deprived me, of the fullness of my life in order to support

and sustain the smallness of your own. And there is no need to remind me, Tusker, that at

the last moment Dulcie Thompson arrived anyway and without actually giving the

performance of her carefully modulated, calculated, controlled and disgusting life created a

sufficient enough impression to cause her husband to be elevated two months later to the

rank of brigadier and to be posted abroad, during which tune no doubt the GOC had it off

with her in Ootacumund.”

“Naini Thai,” Tusker said.

“Ootacumund, or Naini Thai, it is neither here nor there.”

“Don’t agree. It was definitely Naini Thai. And it wasn’t the GOC but that other general,

old Trumpers. Ootacumund was the place she had it off with young Bobbie Beamish. Old

Thompson divorced her and she became the Marchioness of Peacehaven and was last seen

in Cairo at a party given by Henry Kissinger for Golda Meir.”