A Lovesong for India (20 page)
Read A Lovesong for India Online
Authors: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Then there came the night when the waste basket was completely full. Instead of waking her sleeping son, Madame put down the glass and picked the discarded pages out of the basket. She carried them through the silent house until she came to her own room. Here she locked the door and spread the pages on her bed. There were twenty-four of them, and some were so crumpled they appeared to have been flung away in anger or despair. She smoothed them – most of them were revisions, repetitions and rewrites of the same text. She selected several different versions and began to read them, whispering to herself with expression, like an actress preparing for an audition.
It was not yet dawn when she wrapped the purloined pages in a beautiful old shawl she had brought with her from Budapest. She walked across the Park, oblivious of the dark, the snow, the howling wind. Patty’s building was ablaze with all its lights and mirrors, and up in her triplex she was giving a party. Guests lay on the stairs, they ate from over-full plates and drank from over-full glasses, they slumped in chairs and across beds, entwined in twos or more. Music played, someone sang, someone else had climbed halfway up a curtain and pretended to be an acrobat suspended in mid-air.
Madame found Patty in the penthouse. This was walled entirely in glass and shone like crystal mirrors. There were flowers in glazed pots all around, and Simon, like a watchful gardener, was watering them out of a can. Unlike the rest of the triplex, it was very quiet here. Patty was reclining alone on a gilded sofa. She was wearing a long dress of cream lace over cream velvet that sparkled with what were surely real diamonds; more diamonds were scattered over her hair.
She unwrapped the parcel Madame had brought, but before looking at the pages, she admired the shawl. Madame said, ‘It is for you.’ In her will, she had bequeathed it to Eileen, whom she truly loved for her goodness; but Patty’s position in her heart was of a different order. Anyway, Patty had already wrapped the gift around her shoulders and was regarding her reflection in the surrounding glass.
Patty couldn’t read the pages without her spectacles; her poor eyesight was the only flaw in her perfection. ‘You read it,’ she said. Madame intoned them the way she had rehearsed at home, and Patty and Simon listened attentively. Her voice was deep and trained in declamation, and it seemed to rise from a more profound, a more passionate past. None of them, including herself, noticed that after a while she was no longer reading the text but was declaiming from memory in a foreign language. Was it Racine in French? Patty, draped in her new shawl, said it was wonderful and that she could listen to Madame forever.
At the same time, on the other side of the Park, Eileen was checking up on Theo in his study. He was asleep; the full glass stood at his elbow and she sniffed it, suspicious of its contents. When she managed to wake him, he stretched out his hand for it. She wouldn’t give it to him. She said, ‘Come to bed, dear.’ He got up obedient as a child, and she took his hand as though he were one. When he saw the waste basket, he said, ‘Good. You emptied it.’
She helped him into his pyjamas and, lying in their twin beds, talking of this and that, she told him about the screening scheduled for the next day. He was pleased. It was the new film from a woman director he disliked, and he had been waiting to demonstrate how her work, while appearing to be pregnant with cultural significance, was finally as fecund as a hysterical pregnancy. Eileen looked across at him, at his face lit up by the night-light she kept on for him (he had never liked the dark). He was pale from his weeks of seclusion, but he looked relieved, released, and as glad to be in his bed next to hers as she was to have him there.
The New Messiah
Rita met Nathan Silveira at a time of low ebb: for her, and for him too. This was in London, three years ago. He had come there looking for finance for his new film – to London of all places, where everyone who had anything to do with film was mostly unemployed, including Rita herself. Her last job had been with a producer who couldn’t get his project going and had returned to advertising. It had been that way for the past several years – she had managed to get quite enviable jobs and then they collapsed and she had to keep herself going with freelance word-processing. There was also her brother Kris to look after. She was excited when she was sent to Nathan Silveira, who had asked for a temporary secretary in London. Although his last two films had been failures and he hadn’t made one for the last three years, his first film (about a Faustian painter) was considered an underground classic. While in London, he was living at the Savoy – in a state of chaotic disorder, which Rita managed to straighten out for him. When he returned to New York, his hopes in London disappointed, he invited her to join him. She considered it the break she had been waiting for; she was in her thirties by then and did not feel London had anything more to offer them – that is, herself and Kris.
When she arrived, Nathan arranged a room for her in the huge gilded Fifth Avenue apartment of his eighty-year-old aunt. It was convenient because it was only a few blocks from where he lived in the equally huge and gilded apartment that he had inherited from his mother. When Rita found that the aunt expected her to act as
her
secretary-companion as well as Nathan’s, she moved to a sublet where she was only asked to look after a canary and a bowl of goldfish. After that, she made a similar arrangement elsewhere; her one aim was to find a place of her own where Kris could come to live with her. Meanwhile, she spent money calling him in London; mostly she had to leave a message on the answering machine, asking him to call her back collect. He always did, though sometimes not till several days later, during which she worried about him. She knew she didn’t need to; without her, there were plenty of others prepared to look after him. But maybe it was about that she worried.
her
secretary-companion as well as Nathan’s, she moved to a sublet where she was only asked to look after a canary and a bowl of goldfish. After that, she made a similar arrangement elsewhere; her one aim was to find a place of her own where Kris could come to live with her. Meanwhile, she spent money calling him in London; mostly she had to leave a message on the answering machine, asking him to call her back collect. He always did, though sometimes not till several days later, during which she worried about him. She knew she didn’t need to; without her, there were plenty of others prepared to look after him. But maybe it was about that she worried.
At last she found something she could afford, and he was happy to come the moment she sent him the fare. He missed her, and he had never been to New York. The apartment she brought him to was shabby – a three-flight walk-up in an old brownstone waiting to be sold and torn down – but they were both used to that; also to having only one bedroom between them. Rita began to live a double life, physically between Nathan Silveira’s apartment and her own, and socially between Nathan and Kris. But not emotionally, for while she liked Nathan, she loved Kris. She kept them apart for as long as possible, for she knew how susceptible Nathan was. She didn’t even tell him about Kris; she didn’t need to, he hardly asked about her personal circumstances. It wasn’t that he was cold or indifferent – not at all – but that he had such a full life of his own.
He had to attend many social events: premieres, black-tie fundraisers, private dinner parties; it was necessary for him to be in the company of very rich people who were the potential financiers for his current film project. But anyway he loved parties – he became very excited as the evening wore on and two pink spots appeared on his white cheeks, so that people began to suspect him of using rouge. Altogether he appeared very feminine when he was enjoying himself, his big loose body shaking with laughter inside his evening jacket. He wore some jewellery, and his hair, which was balding on top but still thick around the sides, hung in long curly locks, almost like ringlets. Glamorous society women surrounded him; they adored him and he played at adoring them. Of course everyone knew that he was looking for finance, and next morning he would be making some very serious phone calls – not always taken and rarely returned – to the people he had met the night before. His social training had conditioned him always to have a lady to escort, and he had plenty to choose from. If one of them failed him, he would turn to Rita: ‘Could you wear something lovely and come with me tonight? A bore for you of course, but thanks.’
Kris was on her mind throughout the parties she attended. She thought of his wistful smile when she left; he was happy for her, though he longed to go with her. Instead he had to stay alone in their cramped little place, sitting on the sofa with the broken spring someone had handed down to them, looking at their hired television set.
Kris did not complain, except about himself: that he didn’t have a job, wasn’t helping Rita with the money. She said it didn’t matter, and that anyway he couldn’t work without a green card. But she knew that he would only have to show himself in the right places – or just go to a gallery or sit in a coffee bar – for interesting contacts to present themselves. Already once or twice, when she had to go with Nathan, she saw that Kris too was dressing up. When she asked, ‘Where are you going?’ he said, ‘Oh nothing much, just someone I met in the video place.’ It began to happen some evenings that he had somewhere to go and she didn’t; but if she said she had a headache, he cheerfully stayed home and massaged it for her. They cooked a little meal together, each producing a special gourmet dish, and then each insisting the other’s was better.
She knew this could not last for ever: that she could not much longer leave him to pursue a social life of his own. So one day, when Nathan invited her to one of his evening events, she said, ‘May I bring my brother?’ He said, ‘Your brother? I didn’t know you had one.’ Then he made one of his expansive gestures: ‘Of course. Of course.’ He loved pleasing people, doing them favours.
Kris of course was enchanted. He hadn’t once worn the evening suit he had brought from London and now he quickly pressed it up on the kitchen table. She tied his black tie for him – he insisted she did it much better than he could, better than anyone in the world. She looked at his face as he raised his chin for her; as so often, instead of pride, she was full of misgivings. He was too perfect. They were already on the staircase when he remembered something and had to go back; waiting for him outside the door, she could hear him on the telephone – he spoke in a low sweet voice, full of apologies, breaking a date with someone who was pleading not to have it broken.
The evening evolved as she had expected, and maybe feared. Nathan was struck dumb by Kris – and being struck dumb took the opposite effect with him, it made him babble incessantly all the way in the limousine, not to Kris but to Rita and the chauffeur. He hardly addressed a word to Kris, but from time to time passed his eyes swiftly over his face, shy even inside the dark car. And when they arrived at their destination – a cinema bright for a premiere – he extended his hand to help Kris out as tenderly as for a child or a woman. The photographers yelled, ‘Nat! Nat, this way!’ and he smiled and obligingly posed; and as he did so, he laid his hand on Kris’s sleeve, drawing him into the flashlight, the limelight with himself, as if he were his new star.
In the months before Kris’s arrival, when Rita had been with Nathan all day, he had found out very little about her. Now he wanted to know everything. ‘Tell me about you and Christopher,’ he said when she came to work in his apartment the morning after the premiere.
‘His name isn’t Christopher. It’s Krishna.’
‘Krishna!’ cried Nathan, in rapture and surprise.
Their Indian father had been a press officer at the Indian embassy in London; their English mother a typist in the same office. The father had been charming and good-looking – ‘Like Krishna?’ smiled Nathan.
‘No, not like Kris,’ Rita said. ‘He wasn’t a responsible person like Kris is. He drank and chased after girls and made our mother’s life hell for ten years. Then he went back to India, when Kris was three months old. Two children was too much for him. There’s a message here from that person at ICM – you want me to answer it?’
‘In a minute. And your mother? Was she responsible?’
‘She should have been – she was from one of those hardworking, completely teetotal, nonconformist families, but he made her drink with him and then she did it on her own because she couldn’t stand it without. She was killed in a car accident, run over. There was no insurance money because she was walking against the red light, dead drunk probably.’
‘So you and Krishna – Kris – are alone?’
‘No. Not alone. He’s always had me and I’ve always had him.’
She looked at Nathan, almost in hostility. She knew he wanted to say (others had said it), ‘And now you both have me,’ and it would be gratuitous. They didn’t need him, except as an employer.
But she allowed him to invite Kris along every time he invited her; at least this way she would always know where Kris was and with whom. They became a threesome. Kris was often photographed with Nathan, the two of them walking over a red carpet together. They participated in opening nights and auctions and charity events in crimson and gold ballrooms. They celebrated the birthday of a studio head and praised and toasted him with the colleagues who would be ousting him the next day. At a museum gala Kris and Nathan both danced in the Impressionist gallery with an ancient trustee, skeletal but barebacked, who was expected to donate her collection of Sisleys and Monets. Kris enjoyed everything and Nathan enjoyed watching him and Rita felt more or less safe. Nathan continued tender and respectful with Kris, almost holding his breath in his presence as if he didn’t believe his good luck. All this time – several months – he made no new young friends, brought home no attractive waiters. He worked hard on his project and made Rita work hard; their calls to financiers were endlessly persistent. The project itself, however, was in flux, with Nathan revising all the treatments he had been working on.
Nathan’s genealogy was as hybrid as that of Rita and Kris. His mother was American, from a family of Midwestern newspaper owners, very rich and very crazy. His mother herself had not been crazy. She had had a conventional upbringing, in refined boarding and finishing schools, and had worked hard at keeping up her transmitted conventions – in everything except her marriage to Nathan’s father. He too came from a prominent family, but a very different one from hers. Originally from the Middle East, they had partly settled in New York; some of them may have assimilated but these did not include Nathan’s father. Plump, dark, somewhat oily with curly black hair – Nathan took after him exactly – he had an exotic ancestry: a reputed descent from the family of a seventeenth-century mystic who had laid claim to being the Messiah.
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