The Lotus and the Wind (29 page)

She smiled uncertainly. ‘
Are?
They’re the same person.’ Colonel Savage said, ‘Are they? For your sake I had hoped not.’

She said, ‘Do you know what he’s been doing? I don’t want to know secret things, but I would like to find out what sort of life he’s been leading. It will make it easier these first few days if I know.’

‘I know a little, Anne. Hayling came down to the southern front specially to tell me. Robin’s work has taken him through some of the loneliest, wildest parts of Asia. He’s done the work brilliantly. What the work has done for him’--he gripped her hands tightly--’we’ll find out soon.’

She said slowly, ‘I wonder whether he felt the loneliness. Whether he thought of us sometimes.’

Her father-in-law hesitated, then said, ‘Not often, I’m afraid. We’d be deceiving ourselves if we imagined that he kept longing to be back with us, or even thinking much about us, any of us. A man in his position, on work like that, can think only of his circumstances from hour to hour, and of his task. We have to be content to be a sort of floor beneath his feet. Then at the end he may realize that the floor has been there all the time, supporting him. Then--he may wonder whether we’re a good floor or a poor one, wonder even whether he needs a floor at all.’

‘I see.’ She nodded her head vaguely. She was prepared to fight. She wished the enemy could be a concrete reality, preferably human--another woman, for instance. Edith Collett’s example had shown her exactly how to deal with that. Or slandering, doubting, so-called friends; them she could beat down or persuade.

Colonel Savage said quietly, ‘My son does not love me, Anne. You know that, of course. But I love him. It’s only that I do not understand him. I never will, and the fault is not in him. Robin extends beyond my limits. Don’t tell him I love him, that never does any good.’ He paused and looked meaningly at her before continuing. ‘Don’t tell him, but--if you can--let him know somehow. I’ll be happier. I think he will be too.’

She did not know what to say, so said nothing. He nodded brusquely, dropped her hands, and walked with quick steps to his tent.

Anne went to lie down beside her sleeping babies. Her breasts ached, but the twins were asleep in their cots under the single mosquito net, and she would not awaken them. Robin might have changed so much after what he had been through. And what was that? What lives had he lived, what had he seen, what done? Whatever they were, she could never share in them, however hard her love drove her to try, as he could never share in the actual experience of giving birth.

Her mother came in. ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were asleep. The darlings! Aren’t they hungry yet?’ The babies woke up and yelled together. Anne fed them and watched her mother’s quiet face. The babies were wonderful, but they were not her mother’s. How could they do this, then? How could they, just by existing, unstring the muscles controlling that face, so that it lost its familiar angularity and was possessed instead by a kind of voluptuous calm?

After that she went to sleep. Then she ate, fed the babies, ate, slept. She could not tell one day from another, or yesterday from to-morrow, they were so much the same, except that suddenly it was the day. After lunch she moved aimlessly about in her tent for a while, shifting a hanging there and a rug here. She fed the babies. Soon after, she had to lie down because she was so tired. Lying there, thinking of Robin a bit, then of Colonel Savage, then of the babies, her eyelids dropped more heavily down, and her thoughts revolved more slowly in that darkness, and she awoke in a sweat to see Robin standing in the doorway of the tent.

It must be Robin. He was dark, dark fierce brown, and in the dim light his face had the same angles as his father’s. He did not look like an eagle, though, but like some hungry, weaker bird. He came into the tent and stood beside her bed. ‘There’s no one about except your father’s bearer. He told me which was your tent.’

‘Darling, darling! I went to sleep. Shivsingh went in to Srinagar to meet you; he must have missed you on the road. Everyone’s in their tents, waiting. I went to sleep--oh, I fell asleep.’ She began to cry from mixed joy, tension, and exasperation.

He knelt on the mat beside her bed and kissed her face and brow and cheeks. She felt his lips, which were cracked and baked, absorbing her salt tears. She stopped crying and lay still, unable to find the strength to get up. He rose from his knees and walked over to the babies. After lifting the mosquito net, he stood beside the cots without speaking for five minutes, while she lay with her head turned on the pillow and watched his face for a sign.

He said, ‘They’re ugly. They’re mine?’

He spoke wonderingly, and she knew he meant no insult. ‘Pink and blue. A boy and a girl. Hayling told me in Simla.’

He lowered the mosquito net, sat down suddenly in a chair, and said again, ‘They’re mine,’ this time not as a question. It was worse, though, because his voice went flat and expressionless. She sprang out of bed and rummaged through the chest of drawers, throwing on her clothes. ‘Oh dear, what time is it? The sun’s down.’

‘A few minutes after six.’

‘I’ll never forgive myself for sleeping. I had so much to do and I never did it.’

He looked at her and said, ‘I prefer this to last time. That was too much arranged.’

She smiled, feeling happier. The old Robin and the old Anne could not have discussed the interlude at Edith Collett’s, because their communion with each other lay at a shallower level. They had now reached deeper waters together and could see each other more clearly. She said, ‘I was silly. But don’t blame Edith.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Up here in Kashmir somewhere. I don’t see much of her.’

‘You ought to. She’s a good woman.’

‘I think so, darling, but--’ She did not finish the sentence. She did not see much of Edith because in the months of pregnancy she had had time to discover that Edith’s solutions did not answer her own problems.

The evening passed. No one came to disturb them. The bearer brought dinner to them. She could not eat, but Robin ate well. When he had finished he sat back in an armchair, his face like a mahogany dummy’s, much darker than Shivsingh’s, against the cretonne cover. She said hesitantly, ‘Robin, wouldn’t you like to see your father for a minute? Just to say hullo.’

He looked down at his slippered feet, stretched his legs in a curious, tentative way, and stood up. ‘Yes.’ He kissed her suddenly as he went out. She joined her hands behind her head and waited quietly. He had changed all right. Every minute the waters ran deeper and faster. Where to?

By the time he came back she had undressed and got into bed. He sat on the stool by her dressing-table and began to take off his boots. ‘I’ve got a pair of corns from wearing these things,’ he said, and twisted his foot to look at the sole. After a while he said, ‘I had a talk with my father.’ He took off his shirt. ‘I went over because I thought it was my duty. I used to dislike him. On the road, whenever I thought about him, which wasn’t often, I still did. Now I don’t. He must have changed.’

‘Or you have.’

He stood in the middle of the rug, under the high ridgepole, and she saw that the skin of his torso was stained brown. His body was paler than his face. He saw the direction of her glances and said, ‘That won’t come off for months unless I have the special lotion brewed up.’

‘You must do that to-morrow, Robin. I’d rather have a white husband.’

‘Why?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but went on at once, almost as if evading some further query on her part. ‘I have changed. I used to try not to dislike anyone, but I did, really. Now I don’t. I can’t. The feeling doesn’t come.’ He kept his head turned away from her.

To his back she said, ‘Or love anyone?’

‘I don’t know. I thought I’d find out, but I haven’t. Jagbir. You. Them.’ He stared at the babies. ‘They’re very quiet, aren’t they?’

‘I fed them while you were out. They do nothing but eat and sleep. You’ll hear them in the morning, though.’

‘Yes. I did not think much about people unless they were connected with the work. Everything else I only felt. I was in mountains and deserts a long time. In some places I heard nothing but the wind--not the howl of a wolf or the sound of a bird or a tree branch creaking. Just the wind. I realize now it made a sort of backdrop, a curtain behind everything else.’

‘A curtain, or a floor?’

He stood in his trousers in the middle of the tent and turned to look at her. ‘A floor? Yes. Jagbir saved me from trouble more than once because his floor is so much more substantial--people and things he loves, food, memories, hopes. He’s here--or in a brothel in Srinagar. What happened to my painting kit? It was in that long canvas bag.’

‘It’s over there.’

‘I’m going to do some painting while I’m here.’ Then, without change of emphasis or tone, he went on. ‘We are all very small, and nothing about us is smaller than our fear.’ He pulled on his nightshirt, took off his trousers, and came over to her. He blew out the lamp and lay down beside her, and she felt the warmth of his body, and, inside it, the cold of empty space. He did not seek warmth, he did not seek cold. Only because he was shaped in the form of a man did she imagine these things. He should have been born deformed, to make it easier for him. Or God should have sent his spirit to inhabit winds and mountain-tops, instead of putting it into a sheltering, enclosing body so that it became Robin Savage.

This was ridiculous. He was not like other men, but she had known that when she married him. He was hers, and she his. She curled closer to him in the big bed and warily put her arm over his chest. She said, ‘What is the matter, darling? Can’t you tell me?’ It was on her tongue to say, I love you, but she remembered Rodney Savage’s warning look and did not say it.

His chest rose and fell slowly under her arm. He lay flat on his back, and she knew that his eyes were open and that he was staring at the tent roof. His attitude was stiff, but his muscles were relaxed. After a while he said, ‘I want something which I don’t seem to be able to find among people. I think I’ve only met one man who could help me, and he is an enemy. I don’t know why he’s so important to me, because I only spoke to him three or four times. But things happened that made me sure he is like me, only farther on, closer to finding what he’s looking for. His wife loves him, too.’

‘But he doesn’t love her?’ Anne asked quietly, her arm stiffening.

‘Yes, he does, as far as he can. How can I make you understand, when I hardly understand myself? What’s the good of talking about ships, ropes, birds--or coins?’ But he knew the purport of her question well enough and continued his answer in a more direct fashion. ‘You think it’s something lacking in you, I think it’s something lacking in me. I believe I do not have the capacity for love as you and Jagbir and Lenya Muralev have it. I may have been born this way, I may have grown into it. Whatever the cause, the effect is the same--that I’m afraid of people. Even of you.’

‘Oh, my darling, no!’

‘Yes, I’m afraid of your love. When I try to explain to myself why that is so I say that every good human quality is balanced--usually overbalanced--by an opposing evil. I say that there is no humility without pride, no love without hate, no courage without cowardice. Don’t you see that each word, each idea, has no meaning without its opposite? But in the end I think there is no explanation.’

In the dark, lying in a tent under the Kashmir stars, in that vale of plenty ringed about by silent lakes and mountains, he was slipping away from her, borne by the irresistible power of a glacier. He breathed quietly under her arm, and she must not let him go from her. In the early days she had struggled against the world for him, and she had fought a good fight and in the end won it, but it was the wrong fight. She and the world--the peopled world--should have fought side by side to rescue Robin from a power that was little known and much feared. She had learned that this strange power--let her call it the wind, as Robin did--moved in men but not in women. It was far more mysterious than the so-called ‘mystery’ of sexual love, which was no mystery. The wind set even the most humdrum of men to dreaming of escape and free movement, footloose athwart bare landscapes. Another power, the motionless calm of the lotus, existed in all women and bred in the most untamed, the most ethereal of them, longings for a place of her own, children, a hearth, human love.

She thought: It’s my tragedy that I’m nearly all lotus, and I had to give my love to the wind. Of course a man would not be a man without some trace of it--what woman could be stirred by a spirit as exactly feminine as her own? But in Robin there was nothing else.

There must be. And it was silly to talk grandly of tragedy. She did have to give her love to Robin--she couldn’t help that--but it wasn’t tragic. Not to have this, her own love, burning inside her, that would be tragedy. Tragedy! She was not a cabbage to sit rooted to the earth while her lover flew away. She was not a lotus, even, but a woman with legs to move and a brain to think and a spirit to search. She could fly up and find the wind, as much of it as God gave her power to find. Robin should be held by the love of the lotus, and step down a little from the bitter, inaccessible peaks he saw and tore his fingers to scale.

The babies cried, first one, then the other, an impotent, importunate wail. She smiled to herself and slipped out of bed, whispering to him, ‘I’ll just lift them and pat them.’ She had beautiful, wonderful children to help her.

Later, but she could not be sure whether it was a week or a day, she was alone with him in a shikara on the Dal Lake. It was after a picnic at Shalimar, and all the rest of them had gone on ahead. Thin streamers of mist lightened the dusk over the lotus. The water showed only in small and scattered patches. A temple stood on a jagged peak within her sight. Beyond, the mountains leaned back, lifting higher and higher to the snow. Arms of cloud caressed the peaks. She lay back on the cushions in the narrow boat, rested her head against Robin’s knees, and watched the lotus drift by. The bows cut like a slow knife through the floating carpet of them. Their mauve and white flowers and flat, green leaves spread as far as she could see. She trailed her fingers over the side, willing that he should not speak, for the water was calm, and silent mountains looked down on them.