The Indian Clerk (23 page)
Authors: David Leavitt
Littlewood stretches his arms. "Well, that was a thoroughly draining entertainment," he says, stripping off his waistcoat.
"I don't know about you chaps, but I'm knackered."
At which, with the insouciance for which he is famous, he yanks off his clothes, flings back the covers of one of the beds,
and lies down. No thought, apparently, of washing. "Goodnight," he says, and within seconds he is snoring.
Hardy and Ramanujan are left, for all intents and purposes, alone. They look at each other.
"I believe the bathroom is downstairs," Hardy says.
"Thank you," Ramanujan replies. He opens his little valise and removes from it a toiletry kit and a pair of pyjamas. Bearing
these with him, he opens the bedroom door and tiptoes out.
Hardy blows out breath. Now he has time to visit the water closet and change—quickly, surreptitiously—into his own pyjamas.
Having done so, he surveys the two beds, one tidy, the other thrown into disarray by Littlewood's splayed and naked form.
Littlewood has pushed the covers down to just below his navel. For a moment, Hardy watches the expansion and compression of
his diaphragm, notes the sparse hairs on his chest . . . Oh, which bed to climb into? If he gets into the bed with Littlewood,
he won't sleep a wink. But if he gets into the empty bed, he'll merely be passing the burden of choice on to Ramanujan. And
what will Ramanujan do?
Then he hears a door open somewhere—the bathroom door below, perhaps—followed by footsteps on the stairs.
Almost without thought, he makes his choice. He climbs into the empty bed.
Five minutes pass. He counts them. The door to the room opens and shuts again. He hears the floorboards creaking under bare
feet. Then there is a moment of stillness, before Ramanujan blows—hard—and Hardy both hears and smells the guttering of the
candle. Darkness smothers the room. He feels the heft of another body pressing down on the mattress, which tilts away from
him. Sheets and blankets tighten around his rib cage. He smells wool, the outdoors—and then he realizes what has happened.
Ramanujan has not actually got into the bed; he's only got onto it. He is sleeping atop the bedspread and sheets and blanket,
with his coat draped over his torso.
Well, how strange! Hardy hardly knows how to interpret
that.
And yet, he must confess, he likes the way that, thanks to Ramanujan's weight, the sheets pull away from him, and push down
on him, and envelop him. It's like being cocooned.
He falls asleep, and wakes what seems an instant later to see dawn light coming through the window.
"Harold," a voice says—Ramanujan's? But no. It's only Gaye.
He sits on the edge of the bed. "Well, look at you," he says. "Quite a night, wasn't it?"
"How do you mean?"
"Drama off the stage as well as on. I mean, it's the sort of thing Shakespeare should have written, and might have written,
though not for performance, of course. You know, soldier lovers divided by war. Like something out of Greek poetry."
"You're the classicist."
"I've always loved
The Tempest."
Gaye takes what appears to be a file out of his pocket. "And Bliss made a perfectly serviceable Caliban, don't you think?
Not brilliant but . . . serviceable."
"Are you filing your nails?"
"Do a dead man's nails grow? I'm sure you remember what I always used to say, you have to see Shakespeare performed to really
grasp him. And what poetry! Listen." He puts his hand to his diaphragm. " 'And then I lov'd thee, and show'd thee all the
qualities o' th' isle . . .' Much like you've shown your Indian friend the qualities of the isle, Harold. 'The fresh springs,
brine-pits, barren places, and fertile . . .' And then at the end, the brutal envoi: 'Cursed be I that did so!' It undoes
everything that comes before. Because what Caliban recognizes is that he has loved, which is noble, but because he's loved,
he's lost the thing that matters most to him. 'Cursed be I that did so!'"
Hardy almost sits up. He almost starts to argue. But he knows Gaye won't be there to hear him.
Just like him to leave him like that, the words hanging, and no opportunity, ever, to reply.
E
ND OF AUGUST. Across the street from the Nevilles' house, the Third Battalion of the Rifle Brigade (Irish) has encamped on
Midsummer Common. At seven Alice wakes to the sound of their training exercises, the officer in charge shouting out his orders
in a brogue. Eric is already gone, at his study in the college. She breakfasts with Ethel, who shows her a postcard that her
son has sent her from Woolwich Arsenal. He is in the Territorials. All morning long, Ethel bangs pots in the kitchen, while
Alice sits by the dining room window, looking out at the soldiers, waiting—for what? For the world to end? For Ramanujan to
visit?
He arrives just after eleven. Unannounced. When she hears the knock at the door, she composes herself on the piano bench and
waits for Ethel to bring him in. She doesn't want him to see how glad she is to see him, or how glad she is that Eric is away.
The jigsaw puzzle sits where he left it. Much to Ethel's annoyance (and Eric's amusement) she will not hear of it being dismantled.
She serves him coffee—she has taught Ethel to boil the milk in the Madrasi way—and then they sit together at the piano. She
teaches him songs. She is teaching him "Greensleeves."
Your vows you've broken, like my heart,
Oh, why do you so enrapture me?
There is a sudden report of rifle fire—the soldiers practicing in the Common. "Why must they always do that when I'm playing?"
Alice asks crossly. "All right, let's begin again."
Your vows you've broken, like my heart,
Oh, why do you so enrapture me?
Now I remain in a world apart
But my heart remains in captivity.
Who does he see when he sings these words? Janaki? Each time he visits, she asks if he has heard from his wife, and each time,
he says no. At first he claimed not to be troubled by this. "I'm sure," he'd said, "that I shall have a letter next week."
Then, when no letter came, he'd said, "No doubt the war is interfering with the delivery of the post." But letters keep arriving
from his mother.
More rifle fire. And no letter. "It's probably nothing," Alice says. "Perhaps she's gone to visit her family."
"She would have told me."
"Well, does your mother mention her in her letters?"
"No."
"Could you ask your mother?"
"It would not be . . . No, I could not."
He rests his elbow on the wooden lip of the piano—delicately, so that it doesn't touch the keys. Then he rests his head on
his hand. And how she longs to stroke his black hair! But she would no sooner touch him than admit to the surge of hope, even
joy, that she feels each time he tells her that he has still not heard from Janaki. For if Janaki has, in fact, left him,
or moved away, or died, then he will need her more than ever. And if he needs her, he will come more often; perhaps even move
back into the house.
After he has gone, she unpins her hair. She brushes it. She looks at herself in the mirror. "You are a terrible woman," she
says, and feels it as true. She has been thinking terrible thoughts. For example, she has been thinking: what a pity that
Eric has such weak eyesight! For if Eric had normal eyesight, he might enlist and go to France. Then strangers would treat
her with great kindness, knowing that she had a husband fighting in France. She would be alone in the house. She could be
alone with Ramanujan.
It is not exactly that she is in love with him. Or at least, she is not in love with him the way she was (or is) in love with
Eric. For Eric's appeal is his familiarity. From the start, he attracted her precisely
because
he was so simple to know. He was the proverbial open book, the sentences written out in the large, legible print of a child's
primer. In this regard he could not have differed more from her sister Jane, a creature of strata and stratagems, whose words
were often fishing lures or traps. Eric, by contrast, was incapable of subterfuge. Bespectacled and virginal and perennially
cheerful, he lived for his work—the prospect of returning to it in the morning was enough to keep him awake much of the night—and
for lovemaking, at which he is clumsy. Still, he tries. Now he is slower than he was. He waits for her. For all her exasperation,
she cannot help but be touched by his grunts of pleasure and the gratitude afterward. Oddly, it is those aspects of her husband's
character that she finds most irratating—his absentmindedness and his thickheadedness—that evoke in her the greatest tenderness.
And then there is Ramanujan. With Ramanujan, nothing, or next to nothing, is straightforward. Far from a child's primer, he
is a text written in a language she does not know how to read. Even when he is in her presence, even when he sits physically
by her side, she cannot guess his thoughts. Eric's thoughts she can guess easily, and she's almost always right. Ramanujan,
on the other hand, she sees as a closed door behind which lie untold treasures. Things she cannot guess at. Mysterious Eastern
lovemaking techniques, and occult lore, and a certain ancient wisdom. No specifics are available to her, only the vague sense
of an atmosphere very different from that of her living room: a tent draped in spice-colored fabrics from which bits of mirror
wink, scented by jasmine petals drying in a silver bowl.
Her life, she sometimes feels, has been reduced to alternating anticipation and anxiety. Mornings she frets as to whether
he will come. If he does not come, she lapses into despair. If he does, she begins to worry, almost from the instant of his
stepping through the door, about what she will do once he leaves. And once he does leave, the dread closes in like dusk in
winter.
The next morning she wakes, as always, to the voice of the battalion commander, and finds that she can bear it no longer.
Not the waiting, not the rifle reports. Without telling anyone, not even Ethel, she gathers her umbrella and hat, walks to
the station, and boards the first train to London. The platform is full of young men on their way to join regiments. Only
some are in uniform.
Every day Cambridge's
reservoir of youth empties a little more,
she thinks, as she sits down in a compartment the other occupants of which are three of these young men, one in dusky khaki,
the other two in Norfolk jackets. The ones in Norfolk jackets discuss the latest news from Belgium in animated voices, as
if war was a football match, while the one in khaki gazes listlessly out the window.
Not wanting to call attention to herself, Alice opens her handbag and takes out a copy of the
Times.
"Nearly all the persons I interrogated," she reads, "had stories to tell of German atrocities. Whole villages, they said,
had been put to fire and sword. One man whom I did not see told an official of the Catholic Society that he had seen with
his own eyes German soldiery chop off the arms of a baby which clung to its mother's skirts."
With a wheeze, the train moves out of the station. Alice puts her paper down; watches the tracks give way to another train
going the opposite direction, and then the backs of mean houses. In one of them a child is staring at an iris. The listless
young man takes a book from his satchel:
The War of the Worlds.
One of Eric's favorites. And what
will
happen if Germany invades England? Will this young man protect her? Will she be raped by the Huns? Will they bayonet poor
Ramanujan? She shouldn't be asking such questions, she knows. She is a pacifist, after all. And these boys—they could be Eric's
students, the ones he sometimes brings home for tea and differential geometry.
She resumes her reading:
All the men with whom I talked were agreed that, apart from their heavy guns and overwhelming numbers, there was nothing about
the German soldiers which need be feared. They describe the behaviour of the enemy as too brutal for any civilized nation,
and most of them had seen Belgian villagers drawn in front of the Germans to act as a screen for them. One man declared that
a favourite trick of the Germans is to terrify Belgian villagers by driving them along immediately in front of their heavy
guns, where, owing to the elevation of the guns, they are really quite safe. Their experience has been that the Germans have
no respect for the Red Cross, and that in fact they wait until the wounded have been picked up, and then fire.
At Liverpool Street, she throws the paper in the dustbin. She catches a cab and rides to St. George's Square, to an address
she looked up furtively in Eric's diary just before leaving. Not that she has any reason to assume that Gertrude will be there;
still, she hopes so. She needs to talk to someone, to a woman.
Having paid the driver, she approaches the building. It is narrow, upright, one of a sequence of houses pushed somehow too
close together, like books crammed onto a library shelf. The window trim needs new paint. One of the bells (bronze, needing
to be polished) is marked "Hardy." She rings it, and is relieved when, a minute or so later, the door opens and Gertrude is
standing before her, dressed in a rather dreary frock, blinking with surprise.
"Mrs. Neville," she says.
"Hello," Alice says. "I hope you don't mind my just showing up like this, I—I had to get out of Cambridge."
"But my brother's not here."
"I know. It's not your brother I want to see."
Gertrude does not appear especially happy to hear this. "Oh, well, come in," she says after a moment, making space in the
constricted corridor. "I'm afraid I haven't much to offer you," she adds as they climb a narrow staircase, the treads of which
creak under Alice's shoes.
"I wasn't expecting anything."
"Nor is the flat particularly tidy."
"Really, it doesn't matter."
They go in together. Gertrude shuts the door, then leads Alice through a sitting room that is musty and nearly empty of furniture
into a kitchen with a pebbled brown linoleum floor and a table over which newspapers are spread. "Do sit down. Would you like
some tea?"
"Thank you, yes." Alice takes off her hat. She cannot say why, but for some reason she feels immense in this room. It's not
that it's so small, or that she's so large—it's just that whenever she moves, she knocks into something. First her elbow upsets
the dish rack. Then her head hits the door frame. Then, as she's pulling the chair Gertrude has indicated out from under the
table, she shoves it accidentally into the wall.
"Oh dear," she says. "I hope it won't leave a mark."
"It doesn't matter. Do you take milk?"
She shouldn't have come.
"Yes, please." Gertrude's copy of the
Times
is, as it happens, open to the article about the Belgian atrocities. "Did you read this yet?" Alice asks.
"Yes, just now."
"I wonder if the stories are to be believed—if German soldiers really are chopping the hands off of babies."
"I can well believe it, coming from the nation that gave us
Struw-welpeter."
"Who?"
"Slovenly Peter. It's a book of German children's stories. And in one of them there's a little boy who sucks his thumbs, and
his mother warns him that if he keeps sucking them, the great tall tailor will come and cut them off with his great sharp
scissors, and he keeps sucking them, and lo and behold, the great tall tailor does come and he does cut off his thumbs."
"How gruesome."
"The illustrations are quite fabulous, with vivid red blood spurting from the points of amputation."
"And this is given to children?"
"Well, why do you think it is that German soldiers never suck their thumbs?"
Gertrude places the cup of tea before Alice, sits down opposite her, crosses her arms. She looks impatient, suddenly, as if
to say, all right, enough fun and games, why have you come to bother me? And why has Alice come to bother her?
"I suspect you're wondering what I'm doing here," she says. "The truth is, I'm not sure myself. Cambridge simply . . . feels
rather sad right now."
"So my brother tells me."
"The train today was full of young men. Students. Every day Cambridge's reservoir of youth empties a little more."
No response. And Alice was proud of that line.
"A battalion is encamped across the street from our house. From Ireland. Each morning they go through their exercises, starting
at dawn."
"And your husband?"
"He is getting on. At the college, the wounded are being bedded outdoors, in Nevile's Court. Officers dine in Hall."
"So my brother tells me."
"And will Mr. Hardy volunteer?"
"He says he hasn't decided, though it's hard to imagine him in uniform. What about Mr. Neville?"
"He has weak eyes." Alice sips her tea, then adds: "It's a pity, too, because he's very brave. He's a very strong swimmer.
Last winter he jumped into the Cam and saved a child from drowning."
Why did she say that? No doubt Gertrude is well aware that, even if Eric's eyesight were perfect, he'd never volunteer. He
makes no bones about his pacifism. And yet it seems suddenly urgent that Gertrude know he's not a coward. "The other night,
Eric overheard someone saying, 'The way things are going, soon Trinity's going to be emptied out save for Hardy and a bunch
of Indians.'"
"That seems rather an exaggeration."
"Perhaps . . . Still, wouldn't it be astonishing if in a few months time he and Mr. Ramanujan were all that was left of Trinity?"
"Your husband will be there too. And the Master."
"I know. I was exaggerating."
"And how is Mr. Ramanujan faring?"
"As well as can be expected, I suppose. Not that I see him very often these days."
"You mean, since he's no longer under your roof?"
"Of course he does come to visit a few times a week. I'm teaching him to sing."
"To sing?"
"He has a lovely voice. Yesterday I taught him 'Greensleeves.'"
"I should like to hear that."
"Of course, he's far too shy to sing in front of strangers—only me."
"It's good to know that he has found such a friend in you, Mrs. Neville."