A Lovesong for India (22 page)

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Authors: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

BOOK: A Lovesong for India
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Nathan’s mother had come from a similar background, but his own blood had been refreshed by its exotic infusion. Also, he was an artist, adding to the sense of superiority he felt towards this company. When the speeches carried on too long – and they all did – he didn’t disguise his boredom. He leaned back in his chair, rolled breadcrumbs on the table, and smiled across at Kris. Both Kris and Rita were listening with the zealous attention of outsiders. Along with everyone else, they applauded each reference lauding the dedication of the guest of honour. They smiled at humorous recollections of past events – if the guests hadn’t been at school together, they had been at the same debutante dances, polo matches and university football games. But there was general relief when the last speaker – the guest of honour himself, an erect old gentleman whom everyone called Freddy – sat down and the steward signalled to his team of waiters to begin circling with the desserts.
The entire room was laden with billionaires, most of them in their seventies or eighties. Nathan had arranged for his party to be seated with the president of an international investment company, the heir to a supermarket chain and the descendant of a cosmetics empire. It may have been the presence of so much money that inspired Nathan, or it may have been the presence of Kris. Cutting across the pleasant interchange between old acquaintances about their diets and surgical procedures, he spoke as usual about his film; he had been doing that for years – everyone had heard him – but now in such a way that he induced these mighty men and women to silent introspection. The granite of their faces unexpectedly softened while Nathan offered a hope they had not thought to hope for. He seemed to be making them all extras in his film, metamorphosing these excessively endowed New Yorkers into seventeenth-century Middle-Eastern Jews – rabbis and moneylenders, small traders and thieves – who, after centuries of oppression and suffering, were suddenly told that the Messiah was on his way to them. He admitted freely that at first he had supported a false Messiah, one who had expounded a doctrine of redemption through being steeped in sin. But far from being steeped in it, the true Messiah had no conception of sin. Have you done insidious deeds such as manipulating the stock exchange, falsifying tax returns, fornicating with teenage girls? The new Messiah would come and redeem you with his purity. Because he is innocent, he will make you innocent. The heiress seated next to Kris put her hand on his. Nathan nodded at him in smiling encouragement, and shy though he was, reticent, self-effacing, Kris took that old hand and pressed it as in promise to a humble child. It wasn’t going to be an expensive film, Nathan said; ten million, fifteen, twenty at the most – what was that in these days of inflated budgets? There weren’t enough ladies to go around at that table, so on his other side Kris was seated next to the hereditary cosmetics king, heavy and hardened with his own money. This man too put his hand on Kris’s; and now it was as though the entire table were holding hands, all of them united, like a circle of disciples or dervishes, in a promise and a pledge.
 
Shortly after that evening, and largely as a result of it, Nathan got his finance together. A period of tremendous activity followed. He went from meeting to meeting all over town – always running late, constantly telephoning Rita with new instructions, urging her not to go home before he returned. He told her to ask the housekeeper to prepare supper for her as well as for himself – ‘And for Kris, if he’s around,’ he added, casually, before hanging up.
She was never entirely sure whether Kris would be around. They usually left their apartment together in the mornings – he to take the subway to his place of work, she the bus to hers; from the moment she got up, she plotted how to ask him what he was doing in the evening, but often she couldn’t manage it until the last moment before he descended into the subway. She knew he wouldn’t tell her a lie, and sometimes he did say he had a date with someone from work, but mostly he said he wasn’t sure – and it was the truth, she knew, and also knew he was keeping his options open, whatever these might be. So like Nathan she too was in suspense; and when, at the end of the day, Kris did show up at Nathan’s, she couldn’t hide her relief and joy, not even from Nathan – she met him at the door when he came in and said, ‘He’s here.’
Once Nathan came home so late that Kris had fallen asleep on the living-room sofa. Rita had covered him with a blanket. She tried to wake him, but Nathan said, ‘No, don’t.’ He went into his bedroom and came out with an Indian shawl; this he substituted for the blanket – so gently that Kris never stirred. Nathan stood gazing down at him. Then he said, ‘Why is he so tired?’
‘Well, naturally, he’s been working all day at his store.’
‘And last night – where did he go last night?’ Rita hesitated, and Nathan stopped looking at the brother to look at the sister: ‘Did he get home very late?’
Now Rita replied promptly: ‘Oh no. He was home by the time I got there.’
Unlike Kris, she didn’t mind telling a lie when necessary. But it was she herself who was very tired, having waited up for Kris till three o’clock in the morning. And when he came, he kept her up longer while he undressed and lay down next to her, telling her about his evening – he told her in detail, leaving out, she presumed, nothing.
Again she made to wake him and again Nathan restrained her. ‘Why don’t you leave him here for the night?’ he said. ‘You stay too. You could be in Mother’s old room – why don’t you? You’ll like it. It’s so pretty and it gets the morning sun.’
‘We’re going home.’ She called Kris’s name and put out her hand to shake him; Nathan caught it, and when she struggled to free herself, he gripped it tighter. For a moment they stood glaring at each other.
Nathan let go; he said, ‘No. Let’s do this in a nice way.’ Then he said, ‘This thing has gotten very big, you know that.’
‘Big for you, not for us.’
Although they were no longer trying to keep their voices down, Kris went on sleeping under the soft Indian shawl.
Nathan said, ‘I’m taking him away. No no, not from you, of course not, I would never try that. I mean take him away with me on the location scout. He has to see all these places – all his former haunts.’ Nathan smiled.
‘If you think he cares for travel or luxury hotels or your first-class plane seats, if you think you can seduce him with any of that—’
‘Seduce?’ Nathan said, and repeated it as if he didn’t believe his ears.
And she repeated it too, so loudly that Kris woke and sat up and rubbed his eyes. He looked from one to the other. He said, ‘I’m hungry.’
Nathan shouted: ‘Of course you are! We all are! Starving! Ravenous! We’re on the point of devouring each other!’
‘We’ll pick something up on the way home,’ Rita said. ‘That chicken barbecue place is open till after midnight.’
She went out to get both their coats, leaving the two men alone. She took a moment to fix her hair in the mirror on the hallstand – standing there listening for what they might be saying to each other. But she heard nothing. When she returned, Kris was putting on his shoes, ready for departure, and trying to prevent Nathan from kneeling down to help him.
Next day Rita didn’t leave for her job. She spent the day alone in their apartment – that ugly little place, with a hole of a kitchen in which she often had to kill cockroaches (Kris couldn’t kill anything) and occasionally mice, well fed from the restaurant downstairs. Although she wished they could have afforded better accommodation, she didn’t really mind and neither did Kris; they were used to shabby places and never contrasted them unfavourably with the way people like Nathan lived.
But now Kris said he wanted them to move. This was while they were eating the little meal she had cooked for the two of them. ‘Is that your idea?’ she asked, putting down her knife and fork. She ate in a very nice way, the English way, and she had taught him to do the same.
‘Well, it’s Nathan’s actually, but I think so too. I mean, look what happened last night, it’s ridiculous and I feel stupid, falling asleep like that, on the sofa . . . ’
‘You want us to move in with Nathan?’ When he was silent, she said: ‘Did he come to see you at the store today?’
‘He came to take me out to lunch. He sends you his love and hopes your cold is better – I had to tell him that, you know, to explain why you stayed home.’ He blushed, ashamed to have resorted to a lie on her behalf. It made him the more determined to be absolutely candid with her: ‘I think Nathan’s right, and it’d be much more convenient for everyone—’
‘For him?’
‘Yes, and for you and me. You and I?’ he queried, for she was careful of his grammar, also of his accent which she had carefully pruned of any influence from the immigrant and other poor London children he had gone to school with.
‘You and me is all right. But aren’t you and I – see, here it’s the subject, see the difference? – aren’t we leaving, going back home?’
‘Rita, Rita,’ he reproached her.
Both got up though they hadn’t quite finished eating. He began to clear the dishes, and when she tried to help him, he said, ‘No, don’t – you must be tired.’
‘From what? From my cold? . . . I don’t see why you had to tell him a lie. Why couldn’t you say straight out that we’re leaving? That’s no secret. I told him long ago; he should have got used to the idea by now.’
They had been there before: whenever she had to get him away from someone who was laying too large a claim on him. Each time he had resisted – always because he couldn’t understand what it was she had against that person. ‘But he’s so kind,’ he would argue. ‘Such a good friend.’ She invented every kind of calumny against this friend, and though he made no pretence of believing her, he gave in to her – for her sake, because he saw how unhappy she was. But this time, with Nathan, he didn’t argue; he said nothing.
 
Rita no longer went to work for Nathan and he made no attempt to call her back. She rarely went out but stayed alone all day, pounded by street and kitchen noises from below. The telephone stood dumb. No one called her, and she refrained from calling the only person she wanted to talk to because she knew Kris was embarrassed to be called at work. But he came home to her every night and was as frank as ever about his activities. So she learned that Nathan, though frantically busy, came punctually every day to take Kris out during his lunch break. She was also fully informed what they talked about – the film of course, and how Nathan was still trying to persuade them to give up their apartment and move into his. Kris continued to think this a good idea. ‘He says you can have his mother’s room – it’s so pretty and gets the morning sun.’ The third time he said this, Rita put her hands over her ears. Then he quietly dropped the subject, and next day he told Nathan to drop it too.
‘He was so nice about it,’ Kris told Rita. ‘He said if that’s the way Rita feels, it’s all right, we’ll do exactly what she wants.’
‘We? Who’s we?’
‘Oh gosh, Rita,’ he said but smiling. ‘You and I of course.’
‘That’s right: you and I,’ she said, determined, grim.
It was easy for Nathan to let go of that plan because now he and Kris were discussing their location scout. This too Kris reported to Rita: how they would go to all the places where the film was to be shot. Lebanon, Jordan, the Holy Land – ‘Rita, imagine!’ She realised that this situation was not like the others from which she had had to disengage him, because this time she had come up not only against a person – not only Nathan, or even his film, or all the exotic ancient countries of their itinerary – but against Kris himself: that place in him to which neither she nor anyone had access.
She said, ‘What about me?’ in a voice she made small and weak, though ashamed of using this tactic.
His reaction was instantaneous. ‘You? But you’re coming with us!’
She said she was going back to London. She wanted to sound positive, unyielding, but knew she didn’t because she wasn’t. She was pliant with supplication, needing all his love for her. He knelt to put his arms around her waist, his head in her lap. He begged her not to go – but he did not say that he would go with her nor, if she didn’t change her plan, that he would change one iota of his.
Next day just before his lunch break, she went to see Kris at the men’s store. The place was hushed and sacred with good taste; beautiful young salesmen stood discreetly at the sides, waiting to be selected by one of the customers who entered with the air of hunters on the scent of new attire. Rita felt like an intruder – she
was
one, but although Kris was engaged in selling a cravat, bestowing his grace and courtesy on his client, he took a second off to reassure her with a flick of his smiling eyes.
He did the same to Nathan when he came in; and Nathan greeted Rita warmly and consulted her on the potential purchase of an Italian robe. She gave her advice, not reminding him how he had quite recently bought one from Kris; and when they left for lunch, it was taken for granted that she would be of their party.
Obviously they were expected – their table was ready, and a third place was quickly added. It was a famous restaurant, overburdened with decorations as luxurious as the gateaux and soufflés being wheeled around on carts. It was the favourite lunch resort for ranking people in the film industry: top agents and studio executives just flown in from the Coast. The seating hierarchy was as strictly observed as at a court, or in their offices; the upholstered booths along the sides belonged to the top echelons, that is, those with ultimate decision over the cash flow. As an independent producer, Nathan rated a table within shouting distance of the royal booths. A lot of shouting did go on, from table to table, not for actual communication but as proof that one knew and was known. It also mattered how many and who stopped to chat at whose table, and how loudly everyone laughed; for the conversation consisted of joshing and joking, as in a locker room. They were mostly men – the older ones short and stocky like Nathan, the younger ones smooth, tall and blond, hand-fed on vitamins. There were a few women who told scatological jokes and knocked back Bloody Marys. There was the occasional famous face – an actor being entertained by his agent – and once a very famous actress wafted her way along a row of tables, tall under an immensely tall hairdo, as effulgent as the sun and wearing the self-effacing smile of someone who could never be effaced.

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