The Indian Clerk (28 page)
Authors: David Leavitt
W
ATCHING RAMANUJAN with Chatterjee has the oddest effect on Hardy: he remembers trying, back before he met Ramanujan, to form
an image of what Ramanujan
might look like, and seeing Chatterjee. And now Ramanujan is
with
Chatterjee, and it's like watching two incarnations of the same person. Much as he tries, he can't recapture the image of
the Senior Combination Room that he formed after reading
A Fellow of Trinity-,
the real Senior Combination Room has obliterated it. Chatterjee, though, remains, and as long as he does, so will the image
of Ramanujan that Ramanujan, by virtue of his arrival, should have erased.
Is he jealous? It's not exactly that he misses the summer days when he and Ramanujan strolled alone along the riverbanks.
Nor does he begrudge him his new friends. And yet he can't help feeling . . . what? Left out? He tries to be logical with
himself. He asks himself: what do you want? For the Indians to invite you to join them on one of their London jaunts? To share
a room with Ramanujan at Mrs. Peterson's boardinghouse? To go with him to the zoo, and visit Winnie the black bear cub from
Canada, and take tea with Littlewood and Mrs. Chase?
Surely not. After all, he has his own flat. His own life.
Whenever they see each other in public, Ramanujan gestures to Hardy, Hardy nods, and they move on. One afternoon on Great
Court, though, Ramanujan actually waves. Hardy has no choice but to cross the lawn, where Ramanujan introduces him to his
friends. Chatterjee has a firm handshake, Mahalanobis bows, Ananda Rao will not meet his eye. They talk about the Gallipoli
campaign for a few minutes, and then Chatterjee says, "Well, I must be off. Goodbye, Dear Jam."
"Goodbye," Ramanujan says.
Dear Jam?
"What is this, a nickname?"
"It is what they call me."
Dear Jam.
So far as Hardy can surmise, Ramanujan doesn't even like jam. At least he's refused it every time Hardy's offered it. True,
in the words there's a faint echo of his name. Even a partial anagram. ARJAM is in RAMANUJAN. So is that where the name comes
from? And does having heard it give Hardy the right to use it?
"Dear Jam." He tries it out when he gets back to his rooms. "Dear Jam." He can barely get his mouth around the words.
"Why fret?" Gaye asks. "Indians are always giving each other silly nicknames. Pookie and Bonky and Oinky and Binky. It's a
boarding-school affectation."
Hardy turns. Gaye is kneeling by the fireplace, stroking Hermione.
"How did you become such an expert?"
"I listen."
"And what do you hear?"
"That you're jealous. Admit the truth."
"I'm not jealous!"
"Then you're envious. You
want
his friends. Especially that cricketer . . . And I can't blame you for that."
"You're utterly wrong. It was the same when you were alive, Russell, you always assumed I was in love with everyone. You were
ridiculous about it."
"So what's the truth?"
"Just that I'm curious as to the origins of this pet name. And the very fact that he
has
a pet name—it seems out of character for him."
"Or perhaps
he
isn't the man you assume—or should I say require him—to be?"
"I don't require him to be anything in particular."
"Yes you do, Harold. You need him to be shy and reclusive and obsessed with his work, because then you don't have to bother
taking him around. He doesn't interfere with your life. But if he keeps
you
in the dark, you don't like it, which, if you ask me, is rather hypocritical, given that you've done next to nothing to introduce
the poor man into your own, shall we say, social sphere."
"That's not true. Littlewood and I took him to dinner at Hall and he despised it. He hates the food. We tried. What can you
do when you offer someone something and he doesn't want it?"
"Well, I can't say I'm surprised." Gaye strokes Hermione's neck, so that she purrs. "After all, you did the same thing to
me."
"What did I do?"
"You know perfectly well what. The thing you can't speak of. The Saturday night thing."
"Oh, that."
"Yes, that."
"It was an entirely different situation."
"Was it? You shut me out. Just as you're shutting him out."
"But he doesn't want to be brought in."
"Fine." Gaye stands, releasing Hermione. "Well, clearly you know everything about the case, so I'll be off then, shall I?"
"Don't go."
"Why? What's the point of my staying when you obviously have no interest in hearing what I have to say? It was the same when
I was alive, Harold. You heard me out but you never listened."
He moves away. Hermione tests her claws on the carpet. Then Hardy says, "Wait."
"What?"
"You told me earlier there was something you wanted me to admit. Well, what is it?"
"That you want to keep him all to yourself. That you're afraid of losing him."
"All right, I want to keep him all to myself. I'm afraid of losing him. There. Are you satisfied?"
"And you'd like to have it off with the cricketer."
"And I'd like to talk cricket with the cricketer. Then we could see what develops."
Hermione tests her claws on the carpet. Gaye smiles. "I'm glad you said that. It's a relief to hear you speaking the truth
for once."
"Does it sound like the truth to you?" Hardy asks. "It doesn't to me. But then again, since the war started, nothing does."
T
HE POT, the same sort that his mother used all through his youth, is made of beaten brass with a layer of silvering on the
inside. The recipe is his mother's, too. First he soaks the tamarind pulp in boiling water. Then he mashes the pulp with his
fingers, to squeeze all the liquid out of it. Into the pot he puts lentils and turmeric and water and lets them cook until
the lentils have broken apart, until he has a sort of yellow gruel. He stirs the lentils to break up any lumps, then adds
more hot water, and lets the broth rest so that the solids sink to the bottom. Then he strains the broth, leaving aside the
solids, which he will use for
sambar
. To this broth he adds coriander and cumin powder, chili powder, sugar, salt, and the tamarind juice. He lets the broth cook for
a further fifteen minutes, and then the
rasam
is ready—to be finished off later with a garnish of mustard seeds fried in
ghee.
At home, his mother would make the
rasam
fresh every day. He does not have the time to do this. Nor could he eat all that
rasam
in one day. So he makes the
rasam
at the beginning of the week, and then, all week, he has it to hand and can reheat it every time he wants some. In this way
he need not be distracted for long from his work.
His friends notice the smell whenever they visit him. Sometimes he offers them a cup. They talk or work together and, in the
meantime, the tamarind in the
rasam
corrodes the silvering, exposing the brass and leaching out the lead. If he does not taste the lead, it is probably because
the spiciness of the chili powder and the sourness of the tamarind would be enough to cover flavors far more acrid.
So the months pass. He eats his
rasam
over rice, or drinks it from a cup. The pot sits placidly on the stove.
R
USSELL COMES TO Hardy's room to tell him that Rupert Brooke has died—something Hardy already knows from the
Times.
He comes in without knocking, interrupting a conversation Hardy is having with Sheppard. " 'Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply
instructed,'" Russell reads aloud, " 'with classic symmetry of mind and body . . .' And they say Winston Churchill wrote this!"
"I sense a distinctly
Edwardian
pen behind those words," Sheppard says.
"They reek of what our friend Mr. Lawrence might call
Marsh
-stagnancy," adds Hardy.
"Very funny. Fine time to joke, with a young man dead. And Marsh's paw prints all over his body."
Hardy looks at his lap. The truth is, he has never subscribed to what he's lately heard called "the cult of Rupert Brooke."
To him, Brooke was merely a handsome, rather pallid young man who radiated an aura of self-regard and anomie; inclined, out
of the blue, to make the most scabrous remarks: against Jews, against homosexuals—this, though at meetings of the Society
he often spoke of sleeping, in his youth, with boys; of having lost his virginity to another boy. Brooke liked James Strachey
and hated Lytton; seemed always to be having sexless affairs with women; wrote what Hardy thought to be banal and sentimental
verse. And now he is dead. Is Marsh to blame?
Sheppard says he doesn't think so. "Admit it, Bertie," he says, "you're being too hard on Eddie."
"He might as well have murdered him. He seduced him. Brought him into his posh circles, introduced him to Asquith, put it
in his mind to be the great hero. Wasn't Brooke living in Eddie's flat?"
"Still, it was Brooke himself who enlisted."
"Eddie got him the commission."
"Only because he insisted upon it. He would have gone regardless."
"Yes, but so quickly?"
"Eddie might have been trying to save him," Hardy says. "He might have been trying to get him the safest commission he could
find."
"Not that it did any good. Brooke was hell-bent on dying," Sheppard says.
"And now he has died—of sunstroke, the
Times
tells us," says Hardy.
"Apparently not, in fact," Russell says. "That was only what they thought at first. It was blood poisoning, from a mosquito
bite."
"A mosquito bite!"
"Sunstroke makes better propaganda, though."
"Brought down by glorious Phoebus' rays," Sheppard intones. "Buried, like Byron, where Hellenic light bathes his grave, far
from home."
"And to think that he never even saw battle."
"Didn't he? I thought he was in Antwerp."
"He was, but his battalion never fought."
"Felled by a mosquito en route to Gallipoli. A pity, when he hoped so badly to be shot, or blown up by a mine."
"He managed to get those war poems published quickly enough."
"Have you read them?"
"I have." He recites:
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
"I suppose we're the half-men," Hardy says. "Singing our dirty songs."
"Into Condy's Fluid leaping, more like it," Russell says, crumpling the obituary in his fist.
E
THEL, IN SORROW, as an act of silent, sorrowful protest, continues to make the coffee the Madrasi way, boiled with milk and
sugar. Even when Neville complains—"Can't we just have ordinary coffee?" he asks—she still makes it that way.
"There's nothing you can do about it," Alice tells him. "You know Ethel. Once she sets her mind to a thing—"
Ethel is stout, red-faced, about fifty, from the look of her, though she might be younger. She comes from Bletchley, and returns
there every Wednesday to visit her daughter, who works in a corset factory. No husband has been mentioned.
"Any news of the son?" Neville asks Alice.
"She doesn't say and I don't ask. I gather he's in France."
"Poor lad. Well, go on."
Because of her husband's poor eyesight, Alice makes it her habit, each morning, to read aloud to him from the newspapers.
" 'At Bow Street Police Court on Saturday,' " she reads, " 'Messrs. Methuen and Co., publishers, Essex Street, Strand, were
summoned before Sir John Dickinson to show cause why 1,011 copies of Mr. D. H. Lawrence's novel
The Rainbow
should not be destroyed.' We should hold on to our copy, Eric. It might be worth something. 'The defendants expressed regret
that the book should have been published, and the magistrate ordered that the copies should be destroyed and that the defendants
should pay ten pounds, ten shillings costs.'"
"So they just gave in?"
"I'm not surprised, given the mood these days. 'Mr. H. Muskett, for the Commissioner of Police, said that the defendants,
who were publishers of old standing and recognized repute, offered no opposition to the summons. The book in question was
a mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action throughout, wrapped up in language which he supposed would be regarded in
some quarters as an artistic and intellectual effort.'"
"Such as at 113 Chesterton Road."
"It must be the Sapphist scene. The two women."
"Alice, you're not supposed to know about such things."
"Ssh. Ethel."
"You're the one who said it!" Neville butters some toast. "Anyway, the obscenity business is just a cover. It's really because
the book is so overtly antiwar."
"Has it really become that dangerous to be antiwar?"
"I fear so." He winces at the sweetness of the coffee. "And his being married to a Hun-ness doesn't help. Any more news on
the Derby business?"
"Yes, there's a piece about that."
"Oh? What's up?"
Alice scans the article, then says, "It's nothing. Just more back and forth." She says this to spare her husband worry, for
in fact the article touches on a point of great concern to them both. According to the terms of the Derby Scheme, men under
forty-one may "attest" voluntarily their readiness to enlist without actually enlisting. What the article discusses is the
order in which the "Derby men," as they've been dubbed, will be called up. To quell the anxieties of married men—and to make
sure that they attest—Asquith has offered his assurances that no married man will be called up until every last single man,
including those who haven't yet attested, has been hunted down and sent to the front. The result has been a sudden upsurge
in the number of recorded marriages.
Neville has not attested. Neither has Moore. Others that they know have. You can recognize a Derby man by the armband he wears,
gray with a red crown. In Neville's case, of course, whether he attests or not is of no practical import; his eyesight is
so bad that he would be turned away at the medical exam. Still, his refusal to go through the formalities is enough to provoke
disapproval. For the whole purpose of the Derby scheme (or so the cynics say) is to put such an onus on those who don't attest
that they'll be shamed into attesting. It's a discreet form of conscription. Coercion is the rule of the day. Yesterday, for
instance, Neville heard that James Strachey had quit his job at the
Spectator
rather than attest, as his editor insisted. And his editor was his cousin! And though things haven't got that bad at Trinity,
still, Neville knows full well that every day he doesn't go to the recruitment office, he puts himself at greater risk. Butler
has made it clear how strongly he disapproves of pacifist activities within the college. He keeps a careful tally of which
fellows are members of the Union for Democratic Control and the No Conscription Fellowship. Neville, like Russell, belongs
to both. And unlike Russell, he doesn't have a reputation to protect him.
"We're reaching a point where if you're not wearing an armband, you look rather conspicuous," he says.
"What about Hardy? Has he attested?"
"I don't know. Why do you ask?"
"No reason. I'll just be curious to see if he has the courage of his convictions . . . the courage not to."
The truth, of course, is that Alice hopes that Hardy
will
attest, and that, as a single man, he'll be called up. Sooner rather than later.
"Well, from what I've heard," Neville says, "no matter what happens, he won't fight. He's got some medical condition."
"What kind?"
"How should I know, darling? I'm not his doctor. Ethel, more toast please."
"But if you know that he's got
some
sort of condition—"
"That's just the rumor. It's what I picked up in the Combination Room."
"Who told you?"
"I don't remember. Chapman, I think."
"Ask him. Find out what's wrong with him. He could be planning to buy a medical exemption certificate. I've heard you can
buy them on the black market for fifteen pounds—"
"Steady on!" Neville leans across the table; takes his wife's hand. "Alice, what's this about? Why are you so het up about
Hardy?"
She pulls her hand away. "I'm not het up. I just wish he'd make up his mind and take a position."
Neville removes his spectacles and cleans them. "This is about Ramanujan, isn't it?"
"In part. In part it's about him. I won't deny that. I've always had the sense that Hardy looks upon him as—I don't know—a
sort of mathematics machine, to be milked for everything he's worth before he breaks down. But he doesn't care at all about
the poor man's happiness, about what he might need, or how he's managing with the cold weather. He works him like a dray horse."
"Well, from what I saw of them the other day, Ramanujan seemed perfectly all right."
"What? What did you see?"
"They were walking together, and Ramanujan was smiling. Laughing. And besides, it's not as if he's doing maths twenty-four
hours a day. He went to London last week."
"Did he? Who with? Did Hardy take him?"
"No, he went with some other Indians."
"Oh, I see. Well, that's all right, then."
"And he's changed rooms. He's moved over to Bishop's Hostel."
"Why?"
"To be closer to Hardy, I suppose." Neville stands. "You've got to stop worrying about him, Alice. He's fine."
"I wish I could believe that."
He bends over her. "My dear little mother," he whispers into her hair. "What you need is a child. A little miniature Eric
Harold—"
"That's not entirely in our hands."
"More than you think, it is. You know what I mean." Neville pauses for effect. She looks away. Then he pats her head, as if
she's
the child. "Well, I must be off."
"Goodbye."
He kisses her on the cheek; hesitates a moment; kisses her on the mouth. His hand is on her neck.
Ethel comes in, and they part.
"Clear away these things, will you?" Alice says. Then she gets up from the table and walks into the sitting room. The puzzle,
after all this time, is still there. She looks at it. Trembling. And why? Damn all these men—Hardy, Eric, Ramanujan. Hardy
doesn't leave. Ramanujan does. Eric may be forced to. Damn them all.
She looks at the puzzle; at the Beau Brummell-y gentleman, and the innkeeper handing them their drinks. Three more men. And
how long have they been sitting there? A year? A year and a half? Guarded, protected by her? And why?
All at once she flings out her hand so that the puzzle falls to the ground. It's done before she thinks to stop herself. So
this is what it feels like—what Jane must have felt, those afternoons in the old nursery. Exultant with rage.
Alice's heart is racing. Fragments—a single piece or two pieces, clinging together—fly across the carpet, while big swaths
of picture, ten or twenty pieces stuck together, hang and then fall over the table's edge, like rubble in a landslide. And
as they fall, something falls inside her. The consequences. Always the consequences.
By the time Ethel comes in, she is on her knees, picking up the pieces.
"Mr. Ramanujan's puzzle," Ethel says.
"An accident," Alice says. "I knocked against the table."
"Let me do that, ma'am." Now Ethel, too, is on her knees.
"Thank you. Oh, look, this one is shaped like a teapot."
"I must say, I'm glad to see it gone. Now I can polish the mahogany."
"Really?" Alice stops, looks up at Ethel. "Are you really glad?"
"Dust catchers, that's all they are," Ethel says. Very efficiently she breaks up the big chunks and sweeps the remains into
a pile. By the time she and Alice are done, no sign will remain that any violence took place here. And if Eric asks, Ethel
will say nothing to contradict Alice when she tells him, "We decided it was finally time to take it apart."