No Country: A Novel (28 page)

I excused myself from Queenie and bounded up the stairs to him.

“My name is Robert Aherne, sir. I am the son of Brendan Aherne of Elliot Road. I’ll bring the money, and more, for the lady and me—tomorrow, first thing, I promise,” I said hurriedly, as quietly as my agitation would allow.

“Ah, Aherne,” said the manager, smiling broadly.

“Oh yes, please, Tid—I mean, Mr. Dorsey,” I said, relieved that I had saved the situation.

“You better pay it right now, mun,” Tiddly said, his sneer hanging askew on his face, his incisors out. “That there is for Europeans, ain’t it? Am I the Eurasian Bank?”

“But I promise . . .” I began, in absolute misery.

“Robert,” Queenie whispered, suddenly beside me. She took me by the elbow and turned me around. “Robert, come with me,” she said, and led me to the end of the lobby. A large flowering plant stood between us and the others. We were in a narrow corner which was not covered by the great blue carpet. She put a couple of small rupee notes in my palm and closed her fingers over them. I looked miserably at her, feeling my humiliation churn within my stomach.

She brought her face close to mine. Her eyebrows were perfect. Her breath was cool and fragrant. “Remember, I’m Queen Titania,” she whispered. “Go get our tickets, Bottom.”

I looked down at the crumpled rupee notes in my palm, barely enough for the cheapest tickets in the house. I bought them like a sleepwalker and returned. She was admiring the large posters in the lobby, serenely ignoring the speculative look on the manager’s narrow face. We walked in together, past the plush red velvet seats at the back, to the bare wooden chairs of the section closest to the screen. But it was as if all the things around us were simply stage sets, and the person for whom it was all arranged was Queenie, who sat beside a tall, awkward boy. Estelle Thompson was the radiant being who could not be smudged.

The lights dimmed and a piano thrummed. The world of the cinema took over, its pellucid grays, blues, and blacks merging with the piano music which pulsed around us. Some other universe unfolded before our eyes. Castles, turrets, prancing horses, sword-play. I looked at Queenie, and thought that she was lost, drawn into that flickering world, among the painted faces of a magical reality.

I was watching her in this velvet dimness when she turned her
face, eyes still on the screen. I bent my head to her, and she whispered, “Will you come and see me here, Robert?”

“Here, at the Elphinstone?” I asked, uncomprehending.

“Of course, silly Robert. Or at the Corinthian Theatre, or the Albion Cinema, or the Electric Theatre—or the Alfred, if you like,” she murmured.

“Oh?” I breathed, waiting for her to explain.

“I will go away, you know,” she said, as if reminding me of a story I already knew. “But I will always remember my Calcutta beau, sweet Robert Aherne of Elliot Road. My awkward, angry Robert.”

All I could think of, at that moment, was what she heard the manager remark to me. In my hurt pride, I did not comprehend that Queenie was telling me about her whole life, even as she was beginning to live it. I sensed a gulf between us, as if I were just a boy whose gawky innocence had drawn her to me. But the moment passed. I reached out and held her hand. As she put her head on my shoulder, I wondered if she even noticed when I kissed her hair.

Through the next weeks I began to take Queenie to bioscope shows and sometimes for afternoon walks to the Strand by the river, to the Eden Gardens. We would kiss behind the pagoda there. But she never wanted to go to Elliot Road, or to meet my father, nor did she once invite me to her home.

Instead, I took her to meet my mother and grandmother at the far end of Park Street among the marble and stone mausoleums and headstones of the cemetery. I felt the need to connect Queenie to the absent women of my life.

We walked past the grave of young Rose Aylmer, about whom Walter Savage Landor had written a lament, and beyond it, the
obelisk for Sir William Jones, the linguist. The trees were high and graceful above us, as we noted the place where Dickens’s son Walter lay buried. Queenie paused often among the headstones, reading the names.

Alice Agnes

Beloved daughter of Augustus and Joan Fairbrother

1847–1864

“She was only seventeen,” Queenie said, as if she had known her years ago.

Then I showed her my mother’s gravestone, a simple marker with her name and dates. Queenie held my hand. We stepped away to another tombstone near it:

Kalidasi Euphonia

Mourned by Her Loving Husband

“She Sings Among the Angels Now”

“Did you know her?” asked Queenie.

“She was my grandmother, my father’s mother. She died before I was born.”

“Did she sing?”

“My grandfather Padraig fell in love with my grandmother when he heard her.”

“She was Bengali?” Queenie traced her name with her fingers.

“She was. Beautiful and dark, with a voice my father says was deep and lovely.”

“Beautiful and dark,” she mused. “The English would not likely think that.” She was standing still, her light eyes thoughtful,
the last rays of the sun catching the brown glints in her hair, her complexion lit from within as if by a golden glow. Her eyelashes were long and made her eyes even more beautiful, and reminded me of someone whom I had known, or perhaps had dreamt of.

“Do you,” she said in a whisper, “do you know what you want, Robert?”

I looked at her, puzzled by her seriousness. She reached out and touched my cheek tenderly. “My beautiful boy,” she murmured, “I so love your innocence.” Her eyes were full of regret.

She held my face between her palms. “I cannot help what I want, Robert, all the things that I want to be, and where. Even if I must give up something precious.”

“What things, Queenie?” I asked, wondering what she could mean. I waited for her answer, but she had moved away.

“I have never seen my father’s grave. He was born in England,” she said, “near Durham.”

“Where is he buried?” I wanted to know more. “You came here from Bombay, didn’t you?”

“He died . . . a hero . . . yes, at the Somme in the Great War,” she said as if to herself, “my mother once said.”

“Your mother . . .” I began.

“It is late, Robert,” she interjected abruptly. “It is time for me to return.”

“Don’t you want to see the moonrise?” I asked, longing to have her stay longer.

“No,” she said, uncharacteristically sharp, “I am late as it is. My maid will worry.” I was certain she had been on the point of telling me something important, something that would change her life, and mine, but had drawn away from the brink.

“Queenie . . .” I pleaded, wanting to restore that moment, but
she had walked away, half a step ahead of me. Not wanting to discomfit her, I followed at my normal pace, but she stayed ahead, which discouraged talk. She turned and stopped on the threshold, her hand on the great teak door of the building.

“Goodbye, Robert,” she whispered. I smiled, expecting her to smile back.

But she looked gravely at me. “Goodbye,” she said again quietly, and turning, shut the door after herself.

The entire next week, Queenie kept out of sight and sent no messages. Determined to spend the whole day and evening—if that was what it took—waiting for Queenie, I paced up and down Lindsay Street. I ached to see her, just once, even from across the street. It occurred to me a million times that I might just walk into Lindsay Chambers and knock on every door in that building to find out where she lived. But, mindful of her dignity, as carefully as she had protected me in my moment of discomfiture at the Elphinstone, I refrained. I would wait, I told myself.

I leant wearily at the streetlamp by the corner curb. The
bhistis
came by, toting their swollen leather bags, sprinkling the roadways with water. Evening fell. At street corners, and all along Chowringhee Road, lamplighters with their ladders lit the amber gas-lamps one by one. Footsore, but feeling no hunger, I decided to saunter down to the corner of Chowringhee, near the stately Grand Hotel where I bought cigarettes, Woodbines, which I had seen English soldiers smoke. As I plodded up and down the length of the arcade under the Grand Hotel, all the way up to Firpo’s, I lit my first cigarette, holding it like a stage prop, getting used to its feel between my index and middle fingers. I puffed at it cautiously and headed back to the street corner across from her door.

My heart bounded when I finally caught sight of her from
under the awning of a closed shop. Her maid opened the door, but just inside the fold of the door—on the threshold—she hugged Queenie, who let herself be held, impatiently, and then stepped onto the street.
A hugging servant?
I thought, puzzled. Perhaps an old retainer, her childhood nursery maid.

Only then did I notice the sleek bulk of the car as it hove into view, its interior lit low, the seats soft leather.

Queenie stepped smartly into the car, as if on cue. Its door shut with quiet authority, and as the car pulled away from the curb, soundless as an ocean liner edging into deep water, I saw Queenie smiling up at the man beside her. His arm was wrapped around her shoulder, his palm draped over it. On one of the fingers was a signet ring that sent a diamond prickle as it swept by, and the tip of that finger lay casually on her right nipple.

I felt a sharp pain. The cigarette had burnt down to a stub, scorching my fingers. I flung it away. I had recognized the man in the car: Sir Victor Sassoon, the immensely rich, moustached, corpulent owner of ships, spender of money in matters of pleasure, the man of business from Bombay, Hong Kong, Macau, and beyond.

I glanced back at Queenie’s door.

The truth struck me then. This mud-coloured maidservant had clearly once been a beautiful woman, before the crow’s-feet, the greying hair, the slight stoop of age. This was no employee. She was Queenie’s mother.

I dragged myself home, but did not enter. The spreading bougainvillea and the looming deodar trees subjected the house to a deeper darkness. Only one light burned in the house where, through the ground-floor window, the top of my father’s grey head was visible, coils of tobacco smoke rising above it.

The women of our house were long gone, my mother, grandmother—all turned into stories—even my childhood ayah, Sonu-amma, pensioned off years ago. My father and I lived side by side, as if under separate laws of gravity on this common earth. Were I to reach out, I felt I would encounter, not him, but the worn leather of his chair. I was growing up, but nobody had told me what manners of heartache would beset me.

I did not know where she had gone. I never saw Estelle O’Brien Thompson again.

•  •  •

A
T HOME, THE
large familiar rooms felt constricting, and I knew each corner as a prisoner knows his cell. The portrait of my grandfather stared right back at me, a hard glint in his eye, a kindred unquiet spirit. When I went up to the terrace, I found it windless, full of washing hung out to dry in the gritty air.

I was not older, rich, or powerful, which impelled me to reject what I did possess. I gave up reading for I found it impossible to sit still. Music I renounced, for it touched places that bled. I considered asking some girl out, any girl, then felt an inarticulate hostility towards all of them.

One sleepless night, I switched on my bathroom light and stood holding my razor, unable to decide why I was doing it, then drew a line across my chest and watched the beads form, red drops on an electric wire.

My father began to notice the changes, but I found his concern irksome. Tony’s good humour grated on me; whenever he tried to include me in an outing with other friends and his new girlfriend, Cheryl Demeder, I brusquely turned them down. They began to
leave me to my incoherent anger and silences. I could barely tolerate myself and listlessly attended lectures, but as often as not, found myself turning away from the droning classes, sometimes from the very gate of the college. Taking up boxing at a local club, I pummeled my opponents. Although I had always played centre forward for my football team, I now relished being a full-back, making bruising tackles.

Whenever my father played his violin or turned on the phonograph, I would leave home irritably, wandering the hot pavements, pacing the flagstones of the indifferent city, returning home breathless. I took to lying on the cool stone floor of my room, curtains drawn, then doing push-ups until my body screamed with pain, and dropping on my bed to sleep fitfully.

I missed meals with my father, often skipping them altogether, sometimes bursting into the kitchen at odd hours to devour anything I could find, while our cook, Mathur, stared in disquiet. Shaving one morning, I could find in the mirror no trace of the boy who used to hang on his father’s words.

Loitering past the domed post office at Dalhousie Square one incandescent summer afternoon, I chanced to see notices announcing openings in the police service when the idea struck me. I remembered being excited to hear that Sir Charles Tegart had been named Commissioner of Police in Calcutta, and wondered if he would remember me.

Ready to reinvent myself, I thought with contempt of my attempts to do so onstage. Those had been futile, with pathetic consequences. I decided on the spot to apply for the police force.

Growing heady with the prospect of action and the exercise of authority, I spent the following weeks in fevered anticipation, refusing to consider the chance of another rejection. The day I
received the official letter of acceptance, I returned home with my hair cut very short. My father seemed surprised, but said nothing. I had not told him anything yet, savouring my secret for the time being.

Two months after my nineteenth birthday, on the morning I was to show up for work for the first time, I went to his study and declared that I had signed on.

“After Jallianwala Bagh, how could you think of joining British service!” My father was peering at me, incredulous, an angry flush spreading over his face.

“That was almost five years ago,” I said dismissively.

“Ah, so it is different in five years?” There was a ragged edge in his voice.