A Life Apart (43 page)

‘Where’s the money going to come from?’

Zafar doesn’t answer. Ritwik looks out of the window again and watches the fast glide of trees and houses and road signs. He is baffled by Zafar’s sudden outburst. He takes a left
turn at a sign and the roads become narrower. They drive past open country with sudden battalions of brooding Lombardy poplars and hedges huddled in the dark. Zafar seems to know where he is going:
he takes more turns, each taking them down a narrower road. Suddenly in front of them, skulking in the dark, is a huge house, a mansion made of darkness, hiding cunningly and willing itself to
remain undiscovered. There is a long crunching of gravel under the tyres as the massed shadow moves closer and closer until Ritwik can make out a façade broken up by unlit windows, scores of
them, and cornices, a doorway, chimneys, bussoirs. They get out of the car and Zafar leads the way to the front door. He takes out a giant bunch of keys and fumbles around, the keys clinking and
jingling, till he finds the right one. They enter and Zafar turns on a light switch.

The sudden light hurts Ritwik’s eyes. They are in a huge hallway. The floor is wooden, with exquisite Persian and Afghani rugs on them. There is a mirror, in its heavy and intricate golden
frame, reflecting them. There is wooden furniture everywhere – a slim table with curved and ornate legs, a heavy cabinet, two beautiful chairs with red silk upholstery; to Ritwik’s
untrained eyes, they all look very expensive and classy. These are the objects for which words such as nonsuch chest, davenport, card table with floral marquetry, veneered cabinet are used, Ritwik
thinks; if only he could unite name with thing.

‘What do you think? Come, come along, I’ll show you the rest. Are you interested in antique furniture at all? It’s something of an obsession with me,’ Zafar says, moving
ahead.

Ritwik is too struck by the sheer magnitude and opulence of the house and its heavy English furnishings and objects to respond. He follows Zafar to an enormous room that borders on the vulgar in
its excess – cabinets and a huge chest of drawers against the walls, tables and stands, a gateleg dining table so huge that the twelve identical chairs around it look distantly placed from
each other. The light from the two crystal chandeliers will not allow any dishonesty, any evasion. Zafar keeps up a running commentary, most of which doesn’t reach Ritwik, apart from words
and phrases here and there.

‘The chairs are all Louis Quatorze . . . I had the rugs shipped to England . . . the only bit of the house that’s fully furnished . . . Queen Anne, by the way . . . it’s almost
ready . . . Grace Carpenter in the village . . . you look a bit gobsmacked, if you don’t shut your mouth, you’ll soon start catching flies.’ It is the laugh on which this ends
that makes Ritwik pay attention to what he is saying. He shuts his mouth and says, ‘This . . . this is amazing. How many rooms does it have?’

‘Twelve bedrooms, on three floors. There are reception rooms, drawing rooms, morning rooms, smoking rooms, a billiard room. I think if you add the bathrooms, kitchens, breakfast rooms, and
all that sort of thing, maybe forty?’ Ritwik can hear the pride of ownership in his voice.

‘But what are you going to
do
with . . . with this palace?’ He cannot keep the incredulity out of his naive voice. ‘You’re not planning to live here, are you? It
looks like a stately home, something English Heritage looks after. Do you really own it?’

‘Yes, I do. As of last year. Do you want to have a quick tour around the other floors?’

‘Zafar, you must be joking, you cannot own this thing. It’s like saying you own Audley End or something. You cannot
buy
this sort of thing, can you?’

‘Of course, you can. You can buy anything you want.’

Ritwik thinks he catches a moment of truth, a brief flash of the inner, real Zafar, in this last statement and, for some intangible reason, it makes him feel both small and sad. He shakes it off
and asks again, ‘But will you live here? In all of it? You could . . . you could house ten, a dozen families here.’

‘Well, I wanted to buy something in this country, do it up, maybe have a place here when the family wants to travel.’ His voice becomes hooded again. ‘Besides, I work with
important clients. It would be nice to have a place to entertain them, you know, have meetings, that sort of thing.’

‘Does it have a garden?’

‘A huge one. And an orchard. But it’s too dark to see them now. There’s even a gardener.’

Ritwik feels dispersed in this new world; in a strange way, it makes
him
feel dishonest, besmirched.

‘What time is it?’ he asks, feeling leached of interest and energy, as if it had all flown out to create the unremitting shower of attention the house so imperiously demanded.

‘It’s about half one. Time to go?’

‘Oh my god, it’s very late,’ says Ritwik, a bit too promptly. ‘Zafar, I would love to see the rest of the house but I must leave now.’

‘All right then, let me turn the lights off.’

‘I’m a bit paranoid about leaving Anne on her own. I keep thinking I’ll go back home one day and find her lying in a heap at the foot of the stairs or in the bathroom.
She’s very, very old and frail. I’ve also recently discovered that she’s a little gin fiend.’ Ritwik keeps on this patter. ‘You’ll bring me here in the daytime
one day, won’t you? I’d love to see the garden and the orchard and the whole house in the daylight.’

‘Yes, some time.’

‘Come to think of it, I’ve never seen
you
in the daylight.’

‘I might be a vampire, beware,’ Zafar says, making a lunge for his neck with bared teeth. Ritwik starts laughing and holds him away. In an instant, Zafar envelops him in his arms,
lifts him off the ground, carries him to the room with the chandeliers and sets him down on the table on his back. He kicks out of his way a couple of chairs, unbuttons his fly, rubs himself
against the seat of Ritwik’s jeans while he lies, knees up, on the table, then lifts him up again and pushes him down to his knees on to the floor. It is over in an instant, before Ritwik has
even had a chance to tumesce. Saliva and semen drip off his chin on to the floor; he cannot banish the thought of the stain it will leave on the expensive wooden floor. He stands up, reaches into
his pocket, pulls out some crumpled and frayed tissues, bends down and rubs the bit of the floor where he thinks the drops might have fallen: his dark-adapted eyes cannot make out anything much in
this room.

They leave the house and begin the drive in total silence. There is no traffic and the redbrick houses behind their privet hedges and shielding trees all look abandoned. Even the streetlights
add to the spectral effect.

‘Do you want to live in that house?’

Ritwik isn’t expecting a question like that; he turns his head sideways, in a flash, to look at Zafar. Zafar’s eyes are steadily fixed on the road unrolling in front of him.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You could live there. If you wanted to, that is,’ he says in an utterly detached tone, as if he were reading regulation 4.2 of the Highway Code.

‘I can’t leave Anne on her own.’

A brief pause. Then, ‘It’s not as if she’s going to live for very long, is she?’

‘Zafar!’ Ritwik shouts. It’s a reflex action he immediately regrets and tries to turn into mock-admonishment, not with great success.

‘You had no compunction leaving her alone when you were working fields or factory warehouses.’

He starts disputing this – ‘That’s not true at all, I always returned home at night but . . .’ – when, halfway through, there is a brief, illuminating flicker of
light. It doesn’t come in a blinding flash; only a slow, unsurprising discovery of how much Saeed has told Zafar about him that makes him nod his head with a calm realization, yes, they know
this.

Zafar is too shrewd to miss the sudden, midway halt. He laughs and says, ‘I’m just suggesting you might want to stay there, say, when I’m around in the country. But, of course,
there’s your old lady to think of.’

He lets Zafar understand he has taken his words at face value by remaining quiet. But the game is too far advanced for him to let be. ‘Which bit of Africa were you in?’ he asks,
looking out of the window.

‘Sudan, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire,’ comes the answer, prompt and pat, throwing Ritwik completely: Zafar will certainly not give him the satisfaction of letting him hear
the clicks inside his head.

More silence and the slipstream of trees, hedges, houses in its silent flow. Then another move in the game: Zafar asks, with as much disinterest as his voice can muster, ‘Why do you
ask?’

‘Nothing, just wondering.’

They are now well inside suburban London. ‘Saeed’s given you money, I expect.’

‘Oh, yes, he has, thank you. He’s very eager to please.’

‘You mustn’t attach too much importance to him. I retain him out of old loyalties but he’s really very’ – a ticking pause, one two three four five six –
‘peripheral.’

Ritwik makes an effort to ignore the last word; he counts twenty backwards and then asks, ‘What old loyalties?’

Zafar doesn’t bother to respond. Instead, he says, ‘We’re in Streatham already. That was quick, wasn’t it?’

‘Thank you for dropping me off.’ The armour had parted, only a tiny bit, for a tiny fraction of time; it has become impenetrable again.

‘I’m off to Gloucestershire in a couple of days’ time. For a night, maybe two. I was going to ask you to come with me but I know you can’t.’

‘Oh. What’s happening in Gloucestershire?’

‘Business stuff, meetings, prospective clients. Work.’

Only after Ritwik has shut the passenger door and Zafar has made a three-point turn to leave Ganymede Road does Ritwik notice the open curtains and the lights blazing in the living room. He lets
himself in. Every single light in the house seems to be on.

‘Anne, Anne,’ he calls out.

There is no answer. That is not unusual but something about all these burning lights makes his blood pound hard in his heart, his ears. He runs into the kitchen and notices that the door to the
garden is wide open. He rushes out but his pupils take a few seconds to adjust to the dark outside. He sees a pale shape, not even a ghost but the residue of one, under the horse chestnut. He
advances with immense strides.

Anne is standing under the tree, her nightdress clinging to the bones of her frame. She has one hand cupped behind an ear, as if she is trying to focus on some very distant sound, and a finger
on her lip asking for total silence. Regardless of the fright he has had, that gesture overwhelms everything else: he doesn’t speak and listens out for what Anne might have heard.

After several moments of this silence, Anne whispers, ‘Listen.’

A minute of waiting then the silence of the cold spring night shatters with manic laughter from up high, an eked out cackle and bray that curdles his blood. It is followed by another, then
another, and Ritwik realizes with a flash that it is the call of an animal.

Anne hobbles closer to Ritwik and whispers in his ear, ‘Kookaburras. A pair of them.’

They stay rooted under the tree, Ritwik suspended in a miracle he neither comprehends nor welcomes. After an eternity, he touches Anne’s arm and steers her towards the house. He
doesn’t think they’ll hear the birds again.

Anne witters on, ‘
Dacelo gigas
. It’s one of the largest members of the Alcedinae, the kingfisher family. Alcedinae. The family name must be from the story of Alcyone,
don’t you think? Do you know the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, how one of them went to sea and was lost, and bereft of her love . . .’

O
n one of these nights of unrest outside and swelling anxiety inside, when she cannot sleep, Miss Gilby writes a short note to her brother,
asking him for any information he might be able to glean from his wide range of acquaintances on Ruth Fairweather, but avoids mentioning what is happening in Bengal; chances are, he has a far
greater, if removed, familiarity with these developments. She writes a longer letter to Violet apprising her of everything – Bimala’s infidelity, her own growing interest in Indian
birds, the tension caused by Mr Banerjea’s presence in ‘Dighi Bari’, the village poised on the knife edge of communal riots. By the time she finishes, the dawn chorus has begun.
She puts on her riding attire and decides to take Pakshiraj out without waking up the
saees
: a long ride, she thinks, will blow the cobwebs away from the increasingly dark and cluttered
corners of her mind.

She reaches the paddy fields and directs Pakshiraj towards the Tulsi river, now a thin, bright ribbon in the winter, with large stretches of sandflats and wet riverbed around it crisscrossed
by meandering, silvery threads of water. The morning breaks all pale gold and orange and before long settles into the white light of day. She has become a stranger in a family of strangers. The
only person with whom she can converse is so busy and harried that she hasn’t seen him for weeks, except that brief meeting in the verandah; even at a time like this, his natural courtesy
reminded him, first and foremost, to be solicitous of her welfare and safety. The very thought makes Miss Gilby’s eyes sting with tears. How noble and unselfish, how manly; such men are
forever doomed to bear the slings and arrows of fortune with silent patience and grace. The haggard look, those lacklustre eyes, which were wont to shine with gentleness and warmth – could
they be not only for the fires raging in his village? Could he have an inkling of what is going on between his wife and his closest friend, no, no friend, but a viper, right inside his very house?
Does he know the full story? Has he let Bimala know that he knows? Or does he know and suffer in silence, like King Arthur in the tale by Malory? Miss Gilby had been taken by surprise when she had
reached the end of the story to find out that the aged King had known of his wife Guinevere’s adulterous relationship with Sir Lancelot for long but had kept quiet in the interest of the
unity of the Round Table. A sudden memory gives this view the seal of certainty in Miss Gilby’s mind: she remembers the anguished whisper of Mr Roy Chowdhury –
I cannot send my
friend away, Miss Gilby, I cannot
– when she had asked him why he didn’t arrange for Mr Banerjea to leave Nawabgunj and go away to Rungpoor, something he had been meaning to do for
a long time.