Far Pavilions (133 page)

His confidence in his ability to make her forget the past and be happy again evaporated, and he found himself wondering if she still had any love for him at all, or if the events of the past few years had worn it away as the wind and water will wear away an apparently solid rock. All at once he did not know, and terrified by the doubt he turned from her and stumbled out of the cabin, to spend the remainder of the afternoon alone on the poop deck, watching the slow-moving shadows of the sails and dreading the coming night because of the possibility that Juli might reject him – or submit to him without love, which would be far worse.

Towards sundown the breeze had freshened a little, tempering the salty heat of the day. And as the sea darkened and the sky turned from green to amethyst and then to indigo, the foam under the cut-water began to glimmer with phosphorus, and the stretched canvas showed iron-grey against a brilliant expanse of stars. Gul Baz, wooden-faced, brought a tray of food to the poop deck and later spread a wide, padded
resai
on the planks below the awning, added a few pillows, and observed in a voice devoid of all expression that the Rani-Sahiba – the Memsahib, he should have said – had already eaten, and had the Sahib any further orders?

The Sahib had none; and Gul Baz, having served coffee in a brass cup, went away taking the almost untouched tray with him. The ship's bell sounded the watch, and from somewhere below and amidships Red, who had been celebrating with the Mate and old Ephraim, bellowed up a convivial good-night to which McNulty added something that Ash did not catch, but that appeared to amuse his companions. The sound of their laughter faded and not long afterwards the murmur of voices from the after-deck where the lascars gathered of an evening also ceased, and the night was silent except for the swish of the sea and the monotonous creak and croon of timber and hemp and taut canvas.

Ash sat listening to those sounds for a long time, reluctant to move because he still did not know how his wife would greet him, and he dreaded a rebuff. Today had seen the fulfilment of a dream, and this night should have been the crowning moment of his life. Yet here he sat, racked with doubts and tormented by indecision – and afraid as he had never been afraid before, because if Juli were to turn from him it meant the end of everything. The final and permanent triumph of Shushila.

As he hesitated, putting off the moment of decision, he suddenly remembered Wally declaiming lines written two centuries earlier by one of his many heroes, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose – ‘
He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That puts it not unto the touch, To win or lose it all
…’

Ash smiled wryly, and lifting a hand in a gesture of acknowledgement said aloud, as though his friend were actually present: ‘All right. I'll go down. But I'm afraid my deserts are minimal.’

The little cabin was brightly lit, and after the cool freshness of the night air unbearably hot and strongly tainted with the smell of lamp oil. Anjuli was standing by the open port-hole looking out across the shimmering beauty of the phosphorescent sea, and she had not heard the latch lift. Something in her pose – in the tilt of her head and the line of the long black plait of hair – reminded him so strongly of the child Kairi-Bai that almost without knowing it, he spoke to her by that name, whispering it very softly: ‘Kairi –’

Anjuli whipped round to face the door, and for the flash of a second there was a look in her eyes that could not be mistaken. It was gone immediately: but not before Ash had seen it and recognized it for what it was – stark terror. The same look that he had once seen in the eyes of Dilasah Khan, thief, traitor and sometime trooper of the Guides, when they had cornered him at last in a cleft of the hills above Spin Khab. And in Biju Ram's on a moonlight night three years ago, and more recently in the terrified gaze of five bound and gagged wretches in the
chattri
at Bhithor.

To see it now in Anjuli's was like receiving a sudden and savage attack from a totally unexpected quarter, and the impact of it made his heart miss a beat and drained the blood from his face.

Anjuli's own face was grey with shock and she said with stiff lips: ‘Why did you call me that! You have never…’ Her voice failed her and she put her hands to her throat as though there was a constriction there that prevented her breathing.

‘I suppose – because you reminded me of her,’ said Ash slowly. ‘I'm sorry. I should have remembered that you did not like me calling you by that name. I didn't think.’

Anjuli shook her head, and said disjointedly: ‘No. No, it was not that… I don't mind… It was only… You spoke so softly, and I thought… I thought it was…’

She faltered to a stop, and Ash said: ‘Who did you think it was?’

‘Shushila,’ whispered Anjuli.

The rustling, swishing water beyond the port-hole seemed to take up the lilting syllables of that name and repeat it over and over again,
Shushila, Shushila, Shushila
– And without warning, rage exploded in Ash, and he slammed the door shut behind him and crossing the cabin in two strides, gripped his wife's shoulders and shook her with a violence that forced the breath from her lungs.

‘You will not’, said Ash, speaking between clenched teeth, ‘say that name to me again. Now or ever! Do you understand? I'm sick and tired of it. While she was alive I had to stand aside and see you sacrifice yourself and our whole future for her sake, and now that she's dead it seems that you are just as determined to wreck the rest of our lives by brooding and moping and moaning over her memory. She's dead, but you still refuse to face that. You won't let her go, will you?’

He pushed Anjuli away with a savage thrust that sent her reeling against the wall for support, and said gratingly: ‘Well, from now on you're going to let the poor girl rest in peace, instead of encouraging her to haunt you. You're my wife now, and I'm damned if I'm going to share you with Shu-shu. I'm not having two women in my bed, even if one of them is a ghost, so you can make up your mind here and now; myself or Shushila. You can't have us both. And if Shu-shu is still so much more important to you than I am, or you blame me for killing her, then you had better go back to your brother Jhoti and forget that you ever knew me, let alone married me.’

Anjuli was staring at him as though she could not believe what she had heard, and when she could command her voice she said with a gasp: ‘So that is what you thought!’ – and began to laugh: high-pitched and hysterical laughter that shook her emaciated body as violently as Ash's hands had done, and that went on and on… until Ash became frightened by it and slapped her across the face with an open palm, and she stopped, shuddering and gasping for breath.

‘I'm sorry,’ said Ash curtly. ‘I shouldn't have done that. But I won't have you behaving in the way she did, as well as making her into a sainted idol.’

‘You fool,’ breathed Anjuli. ‘You
fool
!’

She leaned towards him and her eyes were no longer blank and frozen, but bright with scorn. ‘Did you speak to no one in Bhithor? You should have done so, and learned the truth; for I cannot believe that it was not common talk in the bazaars. Even if it were not, then the Hakim-Sahib should have known – or at least suspected. And yet
you
– you thought I was grieving for her!’

‘For whom, then?’ asked Ash harshly.

‘For myself, if anyone. For my blindness and folly in not seeing what I should have seen many years ago; and my conceit in thinking that I was indispensable to her. You do not know what it has been like… no one can know. When Geeta died there was no one left whom I could trust… no one. There were times when I thought that should go mad from fear, and others when I tried to kill myself and was prevented – because she did not want me to die – that would have been too easy. You warned me once that she was the
Nautch
-girl's daughter and that I must never forget it. But I would not listen to you. I would not believe…’

Her voice failed her and Ash took her hands and drew her towards the nearest chair and pushing her down in it, fetched a cup of water. He stood over her while she drank it, and then sat down opposite her on the edge of the bunk and said quietly: ‘I never thought of that. It looks as though we have been at cross-purposes. You had better tell me about it, Larla.’

47

It was a long and ugly story, and listening to it Ash was no longer surprised that the widow whom he had snatched from Bhithor bore so little resemblance to the bride he had escorted there barely two years previously.

For he had been right about Shushila. She had indeed proved herself to be a true daughter of Janoo-Rani – the one-time
Nautch
-girl who had never let anything stand in the way of her own desires, or had the least compunction in eliminating anyone she considered to be a stumbling block in her path.

Anjuli told it as though she had known Shushila's mind from the beginning, though that was not so. ‘You must understand,’ she said, ‘that I did not discover this until almost the end. And even then there were many things that only became clear to me after we had escaped from Bhithor and I was lying hidden in the hut behind your bungalow, where I had nothing to do but sit alone and think – and remember. I believe that I know it all now, so if I tell the tale as though I knew Shushila's thoughts and words as well as those of other people with whom I had little or no contact, I am not pretending to a knowledge that I cannot have had. And I did in some sort know them, for few things can be kept secret in the Women's Quarters where there are always a score of watching eyes and listening ears, and too many wagging tongues.

‘Geeta and my two serving-women, and a Bhithori servant-girl who also wished me well, told me all that they heard. And so also did that evil creature whom you left bound and gagged in the chattri, for she delighted in tale-bearing and would repeat to me anything that she hoped would hurt me. But I could not bring myself to think ill of Shushila… I could not. I believed that she was ignorant of the things that were done in her name, and was sure that they were done by order of the Rana, without her knowledge or consent. I believed that those who wished me well and tried to warn me were mistaken, and that those who wished me ill only told me these things in the hope of wounding me; so I closed my eyes and ears against both. But in the end… in the end I had to believe. Because it was Shushila herself – my own sister – who told me.

‘Concerning the Rana, there too I should have known what might happen, for I had seen it happen before: only then it had been our brother, Nandu. I told you about that, I think. Nandu treated her harshly, and everyone thought she would hate him for it. Instead she became devoted to him, so much so that sometimes I felt a little hurt by her devotion, and was ashamed of myself for feeling so. Yet it taught me nothing. When she fell in love with that evil, perverted and disease-ridden man who was her husband, I could not understand it, though for her sake I was more than happy that it should be so, and being blind to what might follow, I was truly grateful to the gods for permitting her to find happiness in a marriage that she had fought to avoid and dreaded so greatly.’

Ash said: ‘I can believe anything of your half-sister, but not that she loved the Rana. She was probably only play-acting.’

‘No. You do not understand. Shushila knew nothing of men and therefore was no judge of one. How could she be, when except for her father and her brothers Nandu and Jhoti, and her uncle, whom she saw only rarely, the only ones to frequent the Women's Quarters were the eunuchs, both of them old and fat? She knew only that it is the sacred duty of a woman to submit herself in all things to her husband, to worship him as a-god and to obey his commands, to bear him many children and, lest he should turn to light women, to please him in his bed. In this last, as I know, Janoo-Rani arranged for her to receive instruction by a famous courtesan, so that she should not disappoint her husband when the time came for her to marry. It may be that this aroused in her a hunger that I did not suspect, or else she had been born with that hunger, and kept it hidden from me. Whichever way, it was there…

‘I would not have believed that such a man as the Rana, who preferred young men and boys to women, could have satisfied it. Yet he must have done so, for from the night that he first lay with her she was his – heart and mind and body. And though I did not know it, from that same night she hated me, because I too was his wife, and the eunuchs who wished to make trouble between us had whispered to her that the Rana admired tall women because they were more like men, and had spoken favourably of me. There was no truth in this, but it aroused her jealousy; and even though he treated me like an outcaste whose touch is defilement, and would neither speak to me nor see me, she became afraid (as I too was afraid) that one day he might come to think differently and have me brought to his bed – if only to wound her, or because he had drunk too much, or was crazed with
bhang
(hashish).’

That first year had been the worst, for though Anjuli had expected little happiness for herself in her new life, it had never occurred to her that Shushila would turn against her. She tried to convince herself that this was only a passing phase that would end when Shu-shu's first passionate adoration of her husband waned and she discovered, as she must, that the god of her idolatry was a middle-aged libertine, rotted by vice and capable of behaviour that in a less exalted personage would be regarded as unacceptable even by criminals.