A Lovesong for India (33 page)

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Authors: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

BOOK: A Lovesong for India
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‘I wish I did. Maybe then you’d be nicer to Lily.’
‘Oh my Lord! Ask Lily who,
who
could be nicer to her than I?’ He pecked her cheek as though grateful to her for her compliance, and she watched him, lithe in his linen suit, run lightly down the stairs.
Later, Fay and Celia were standing by the window in the bedroom allotted to them. It was a bright gold afternoon, but they looked only at the figure sitting on an ornamental bench under the largest maple, which was still magnificent though half destroyed by storms.
‘She’s sketching,’ Celia said.
‘Have you ever actually seen . . . ?’
‘Gavin says she has talent.’
Lily was sitting very still. Perhaps she was taking in the scene to interpret it later. She could often be observed sitting this way, gazing in front of her, her hands folded on the sketchbook in her lap: maybe watching, maybe waiting, definitely patient.
Fay turned away impatiently. ‘I couldn’t bear to stay the night in this creepy room. No doubt they all died in that
bed
. Let’s go: I don’t need to be entertained any more. And surely the Shaker Museum is a joke.’
‘No. And neither are the almshouses.’
‘You just love to torment me, Celia, you’ve always loved to do that.’
But she wasn’t serious – she was relieved to have Celia with her. Although so different in every way, she and her daughter were both out of their element here. Unlike Gavin’s ancestors, theirs hadn’t tilled this land nor built their houses on it. Their great-grandmothers and grandmothers had long since looked to Europe for their sustenance; this was evident in both Fay and Celia, in the cast of their thoughts as well as their chic appearance.
Only Lily was a throwback to earlier, simpler, simply American girls. She came in, as so often barefoot, her white-blonde hair wind-blown; she was holding a branch with a few leaves on it. She said at once: ‘Where’s Gavin?’
‘Doesn’t he tell you
any
thing?’ Fay said, and Celia, eyebrows raised: ‘The Polish critic?’
‘I’m really stupid,’ Lily said. ‘I forget everything. Look, there’s Elizabeth. She’s pruning a rosebush. She’s always busy; she does a million things. Can’t you see her? I wish you’d wear your glasses, Mummy.’
‘I don’t need them. I don’t need to see anything more. I did a house tour; I sat through an entire lunch. I’m starting a headache and I want to go back to New York.’
Lily didn’t look at her but trailed the branch she was holding across the faded flower pattern of the carpet. She said, ‘It wouldn’t be fair to Elizabeth. If we left. It wouldn’t even be polite. It would really be very rude. I mean, if it were me, I’d think these were really very rude people.’ Still intent on her branch, she missed the look of wry resignation that passed between her mother and her sister.
 
Lily became pregnant. At first she said her stomach was upset, and as for her periods, they were always irregular. When Celia wanted to take her to a doctor, she didn’t want to go because doctors always discovered something horrible. ‘But supposing it’s not horrible,’ Celia said. ‘Supposing it’s something you’d like, you and Gavin?’
‘Oh, you think it might be a baby? Well, why not. I
am
married.’ She looked at her sister out of those very candid fairy-tale eyes that made people love and trust her.
On being informed: ‘Is it possible?’ Fay asked Celia.
‘Of course it is,’ Celia said. ‘You hear about it all the time. I have friends you’d never think – and then suddenly they spring a grown-up son or daughter on you, visiting them over Christmas.’
Fay also had such friends with unsuspected offspring. But still she said, ‘I can’t imagine.’
‘Can’t imagine what,’ Celia said, the more irritably because she also couldn’t imagine: not about Gavin and, if it came to that, not about Lily herself. But there she was, pregnant, an indubitable fact.
Gavin’s mother Elizabeth had no doubts at all. She came travelling up to the city and took Lily to her own gynaecologist, who confirmed that everything was fine, and also that the scan showed a boy. Elizabeth was delighted – another grandchild, and this time the son of her only son. She advised plenty of exercise for Lily, plenty of walking, plenty of good food and fresh air.
Lily did plenty of walking but the air she was taking in was not altogether fresh. It was what she liked best in the world – street smells, petrol fumes, leaking gas pipes, newly poured tar, pretzels, mangoes from Mexico, Chinese noodles, overblown flowers – the exhalations of the city, the densely populated streets that she traversed from one end to the other, walking lightly on sandals so flimsy her feet might have been bare and treading on grass. On warm days she wore a very light summer frock – no more than a shift – that blew with any breeze wafting up from the subway or from leaky steam pipes. She avoided parks and other open spaces unless they were from a building recently demolished; and if she sat for a moment to rest, it was on the steps of a Masonic temple or a store front, from which she was sometimes chased away. When it rained, she sheltered under an overbridge, though she liked to get wet – very wet, with the drops trickling from her hair down her face so that she flicked out her tongue to taste them and refresh herself. She stopped occasionally to sniff the flowers arranged in the front of a grocery store. On raising her eyes to the sky, she was perfectly satisfied that all she could see of it was a bright patch inserted among tall towers. If it was night – for she wandered around for many hours – there was sometimes a slice of moon and helicopters flitting and glittering around like fireflies.
Celia summoned Gavin to her office. ‘I hate it,’ she told him. ‘The way she walks around everywhere by herself and at all hours. It’s not safe. She’s not safe.’
‘Lily?’ He was gentle and smiling, patient as no patient of hers ever was. ‘But Lily is always safe. Don’t you feel that about her – that nothing could happen to her?’
‘Maybe it’s happened already.’ She was trembling a bit – at what she was saying, the danger to Lily, but also at his
calm
, the way he sat there, crosslegged and slightly swinging one foot in its narrow shoe. She said, ‘You know how innocent she is, how trusting.’
‘Yes.’ He smiled in recognition of these qualities in his wife, and he assured Celia, ‘I love and adore her as you do.’
‘I’m her sister. I love and adore her in a different way. All I’m asking is that you should stop her from wandering around the streets. Or help me stop her. Please be home tonight so that we can talk to her together.’
‘Yes, we should – but unfortunately, tonight, what a pity.’
‘Tomorrow then?’
‘Oh absolutely,’ he promised. ‘Definitely tomorrow.’
But it was on that same day that he met Lily to report on his talk with her sister. They met where they usually did, in a church in midtown. It was the place where they had first seen each other, amid a sea of empty pews with here and there a few bowed figures, some come to pray, others only to fall asleep for want of food or a home to go to. Everyone was alone, maybe lonely and certainly in deep need. If Gavin and Lily were in such need, it was at least partly satisfied that time when they first met each other.
On the day of Gavin’s talk with Celia, they did not go in but sat on the steps of the church. He ran down for a moment to buy them two pretzels from a cart, and a drink to share. They picnicked there on the bank of a river of traffic, rushing and foaming in the street below. They sat close together at the side, undisturbed by people walking past them. Gavin informed her of everything that Celia had said to him and the way she had said it; he concluded, ‘She thinks you may have been . . . attacked? By someone. In the street?’
‘No. No.’
‘Then what happened? If you want to tell me, that is.’
She did – and it was relatively easy sitting so close and he listening with the sympathy and selfless love that he always showed her. ‘It was raining,’ she said. He nodded; he understood that she was sheltering somewhere. ‘Yes, under the 59th Street bridge. The rain was coming down really hard and I only had this – ’ she indicated her diaphanous dress – ‘I didn’t want to stay there because you know what it’s like under a bridge that people who don’t have anywhere else use for their, you know, their toilet, and also to store whatever they have, from the trash or whatever. No one spoke to anyone, like they don’t in church, because of having so much else to think about? Different things. Except there was one person, maybe he didn’t have too many worries to consider, I mean he was maybe too young to have them.’
‘How young?’
‘Seventeen. He told me he’d come from – I’ve forgotten – some African country. He’d come here to start a restaurant. That was his dream. He was looking for a job to be a waiter where he could save enough money to open his own restaurant with the special food from his African country. He was very very hopeful that it would happen. I was the first girl he met to talk to since he’d come here. He did what you always do – touched my hair and then let it sort of run through his fingers. He was very sweet, gentle also, till he got excited. He got like . . . frantic? No, I wasn’t scared; I understood he got that way because he hadn’t met any girl here, so it was my fault really, in a way. And afterward he was very nice again and said he wished he had something to give me to keep for myself. I didn’t have anything either, so I told him I’d come back next day and bring him something.’
‘And did you?’ Gavin asked, playing with her hair the way she said the boy under the bridge had done.
After a moment she admitted it. And after another moment: ‘I thought: maybe he’ll never have the restaurant, maybe not even a job in one, nothing that he expects will happen, ever happen, such a lot of disappointment . . . I gave him a silver chain Fay had brought me from Peru. I’d never liked wearing it, it was so heavy, like being put in irons. But he was glad to have it and to see me again. I think he thought I wouldn’t come back.’
‘But you did.’
She hung her head but raised it again before answering frankly: ‘That time we didn’t stay under the bridge. We walked to the Park; it wasn’t raining that day but the ground was wet. It was chilly but much nicer than under the bridge. This was the day before you and I drove to the country with Fay and Celia, and all the time we were there, I kept thinking how he didn’t have a sweater or anything, and what if he caught a cold and had nowhere to sleep except under the 59th Street bridge? So when we got back to New York, I went there with a blanket and a sweater, but he’d gone. And I keep hoping he went off to a job as a waiter in a restaurant but also I think – what if he got ill being out in the open? And it turned into pneumonia and he was taken to a hospital where they take poor people?’
‘Boys of seventeen don’t catch pneumonia,’ Gavin affirmed clearly. ‘He’s working as a waiter and saving money for a restaurant. You have to believe me. I don’t want you to worry in any way or have disturbing thoughts, because that’s bad for our baby. OK? Promise. Only nice thoughts.’
‘About you.’
‘About me, if that’s what you want.’ He took her hand and kissed it.
 
Next day he took her to the country to stay with his mother. Lily liked to sleep late, and in the mornings, when Elizabeth herself had already been up for many hours and completed many tasks, she sat beside her frail daughter-in-law and the precious unborn child where they lay in a deceased great-aunt’s great bed. Elizabeth was nearing seventy, strong and stocky, with apple cheeks and bright blue eyes. Although her connection with the family was only through marriage, she was an expert on each degree of their convoluted relationships and of their convoluted stories. These stories, which she was passing on to her pregnant daughter-in-law, were mostly of domestic or social interest. No one had held high office or distinguished themselves in any wars. But they had involved themselves in local politics, built additions to the house, engaged in lawsuits with neighbours about boundary lines. There had been some scandals: divorces as long ago as the beginning of the century, also the stigma of gambling debts, and more than one case of temporary confinement in a mental institution. But mostly they had led long and uneventful lives, with several of them celebrating their hundredth birthday. They had done some travelling – honeymoons and study tours in Italy, safari in Africa – but they had all spent their last years at home and with each other. In the end family loyalties triumphed over everything, even property disputes between brothers and sisters.
Elizabeth encouraged Lily to walk around the grounds. It was the end of what had been a very wet summer, and the estate had become a wilderness of tall grass with trees sweeping down into it. The trees themselves had survived their centuries with hollowed trunks; some of them had split apart and had been kept from falling by iron chains that had grown rusty and appeared to be part of the trunks they were meant to hold. Besides age, storms had ransacked the land, and every winter one of the great trees – copper beech or red maple – had given way and crashed to the ground, to be cut up into firewood to feed the giant fireplaces inside the house and warm the chill bones of its inhabitants.
Although Lily traversed city streets in complete confidence, here she tramped through the grass with misgiving of what might be lurking there – poison ivy, or a snake she knew would not be harmless to herself. Passing two blighted apple trees – the remains of what had once been an orchard cultivated for profit – she picked up one of the apples that lay half hidden in the grass; soft and rotten, it split apart in her hand and maggots crawled out of it. She miserably counted the minutes until she could say she had had enough fresh air and return to the house to be near the telephone on which Gavin called her regularly, at the same time every day.

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