Ryman, Rebecca (116 page)

The
girl who appealed most to her as Amos's new governess was a young Anglo-Indian
called by the veritable mouthful of Bathsheba Smith Featherstonehaugh,
"pronounced," she proudly told Olivia,
"Fanshawe."
The
girl came with excellent references from Cornelia Donaldson's sister-in-law in
Bombay and was said to be well versed in both child care and household duties.
Besides, she was pert, placid and neat, and Olivia liked her infectious smile.
Her father, she said, had been an adjutant to a commanding officer in Poona. He
had died during the Afghan War. Her mother, whose nationality was obvious from
the girl's walnut complexion, had died of the pox soon after. "But I have
a grandmother in Newcastle," she said, thrilled at the prospect of a
voyage overseas. "She's
English,
you know. Just like my father
was."

"And
what do you consider yourself to be?" Olivia asked.

She
was surprised at the question. "Why, English, of course. Why else should I
be wanting to go home?"

That
what she thought to be "home" was half a globe away from Honolulu
Olivia did not have the heart to tell her yet. But the girl's comment depressed
her. Like Amos, she too was of two worlds. Or neither. And for twilight people
like them, rejects from both worlds, there were not many options open. For
them, however, a third world did exist—and that could only be America, already
a mixture of many, and less cruel than most. She
decided to hire the girl,
shortening her name instantly to Sheba.

It
was only after Olivia had finished assigning her new duties to Sheba and
writing down for her the child's routine through the day that she suddenly
noticed her diary still lying on the table. The breeze had riffled through its
pages to reveal one where she had written just two sentences:
Yesterday I
met a man. I think I would like to meet him again.
The few words, innocent
and unaware, were the same she had once also written in a letter to her father.
She had not known then that these innocuous words were destined to be the
starting point of an odyssey begun more than two years ago, an odyssey only now
being completed. Or, perhaps, being left uncompleted.
My life is finished
and yet unfinished.
It was what her aunt had once said to her about
herself. The analogy disturbed Olivia.

Unthinkingly,
before she was aware of what she was doing, she sat down to flick through the
pages of the diary. Her account started excitedly on the day she had
disembarked in Calcutta, with her awestruck admiration for the imposing man who
was her uncle, with her first meeting with her aunt, with Estelle. As if
hypnotised by her handwriting, Olivia re-read her initial impressions, her
confusions, her desperate homesickness, her sporadic enthusiasms and
irritations and excavations into a land so frightening in its strangeness.
Among the cramped notations there was even mention of the intrepid young
Englishman Courtenay (or Poultenay!) who had gone native and provoked her visit
to the bazaar of the Chitpur Road. In between the writings the diary had many
blank pages when she had been too tired or too restless to pen confidences. The
last date on which she had written anything—everything!—was the day before Jai
Raventhorne had sailed away on his
Ganga
with her cousin Estelle. And
with her own future.

The
diary was a microcosm of her life in Calcutta, down to today's hasty words of
celebration. In re-living that life vicariously through the pages, Olivia
realised that she had made a terrifying mistake. Like a jammed drain slowly
being unblocked, memories started to trickle through, then expand and gush.
With the free flow swept a cascade of debris, forgotten flotsam and jetsam from
a life that might never have been. Before she could stop the deluge, her mind
flooded. Airless, she felt she was drowning, but then she began to float. In
her state of somnambulance, she walked to her almirah to retrieve the sealed
brown envelope that had been delivered to her with the return of Amos.
Outraged, her mind screamed in protest, but the fingers that
cracked open
the seal were no longer hers, rebels against the frantic commands of her brain.

Within
the brown envelope was contained another, smaller and once white but now soiled
and crumpled as if having passed through many hands over many months.
Completing the process of her submersion, Olivia tore open the flap and
withdrew the single sheet that reposed within. She read the handwriting of
which she recognised every stroke, every curl.

I
once told you that I was weak, and you laughed. Reading this you will no longer
doubt me. Were I not a coward, you would not have to suffer the pain of having
to read these words in a letter. Instead, you would be circled within my arms,
encompassed by my tenderness; your ear would be pressed to my heart, listening
carefully to its language, to the sounds of love that are above speech, beyond
hollow words, eloquent in their silence. I would not be begging forgiveness for
the inadequacies of these pathetic sentences behind which I hide because I do
not have the courage to face you. And somewhere within your own heart, I know,
you would be assured that I love you in defiance of the dictates and limits of
all reason.

I
take Estelle to England. Why? For these answers, which I do not have the
strength to give you, you must go to Arthur Ransome, for he knows everything
and more. I do what I do because I must. It is a ritual of exorcism that I
perform. To deserve you, I must return to you undiseased. And return I will, my
much loved one—that much I beg of you to believe. The pain I inflict on you I
give to myself tenfold, but if, in your abundant generosity, you will continue
to trust me, to tolerate even this that I have chosen to be, you will have
fulfilled the hope that is the life force of this wretched man to whom you have
already entrusted everything.

Wherever
I go, my beautiful innocent, you go with me, unseen and unheard but always
there where I can reach out and touch you. Within six months I shall be back.
You must be prepared to receive a man depleted by his loss of you, a man even
less whole than he is now. In his supreme arrogance, he will
believe that he
is still loved. In his abject humbleness he will know it is not because he
deserves but because you disburse with charitable forgiveness.

I
wound you, I make gross demands, I explain nothing. I ask of you a sacrifice
you cannot understand. Shamelessly, I offer nothing in return except everything
that I am and have, and a love far beyond measurable dimensions. I marvel at
such pathetic recompense—can it ever be enough for you? Stark reason tells me
that what I expect is a madness; selfish instinct comforts me that it is not.
In my darkest hour I cling with awe to your reckless assurances, to your
promise to trust me, no matter what. I carry you with me, always. I sail away
but I also leave myself behind.

Holding
in her hand the letter that Jai Raventhorne had written, the letter whose
existence she had never believed, Olivia sat through the night at her window,
gazing out and beyond into nothingness. She was engulfed in the swirling flood
of memories, but by the sheer force of her will-power she fought them and made
the tides recede. When the first lavender light of dawn touched the eastern
horizon, her mind was again static, her thoughts again in her control. Calmly,
she carried the black diary and the letter into her bath-room and, on a corner
of the cemented floor, set a light to both. With no perceptible feeling, she
sat and watched as they burned down into a tidy pile of ashes. Then she
gathered them up and scattered them out of the window into the morning light.

A
time to remember, a time to forget. A time to leave behind what one could never
return to.

But
it was the following night that Olivia's nightmares returned to again desecrate
the hours of her sleep.

Astonishingly,
the spider was still there. And the cobweb.

At
least
a
spider and
a
cobweb. Not having the requisite talent to
distinguish one spider from another, Olivia could not say with certitude that
this fat, furry little fellow was the same or a remarkably similar descendant.
The giant cobweb, however, still barricaded the wooded path near the Maratha
Ditch, still
looking like a jewelled screen of black lace with the early morning dew. The
banyan tree, of course, was the same. Its gnarled roots still made as
comfortable a perch as they had more than two years ago. Idly, Olivia sat to
observe the single-minded endeavours of the busy little spider who seemed so
contemptuous of her presence. His beady head swung from side to side like a
pendulum clocking time as he spun out, inch by painstaking inch, silken
filaments of exquisite fineness. He occasionally threw her darting, sidelong
glances but without pausing in his labours. Olivia was shot through with
wistful envy; how idyllic to have but one function in life, one thread of
existence in which only the here and now mattered!

Everything
in the forest was the same as she had left it on that distant morning. Only
Jasmine was missing, now given away to a charitable orphanage, the other
Templewood horses and coaches taken over by Hal Lubbock. Also missing, of
course, was the barking of the dogs. Instead of Jasmine, Olivia now rode
another mare, a blue roan, from Freddie's stables. As for the dogs' barking, if
she closed her eyes she could hear even that.

Why
was she here this morning? Olivia could think of no reason that logic would
accept. To her great joy, Dr. Humphries had at last declared her fit enough to
ride again. "But no steeple-chasing, my friend," he had warned.
"Choose a horse that is a lady, and then ride her like one." She had
not been in a saddle for an age and her sense of liberation compounded into
rapture. But then, why here, why to this forest? Olivia did not know the answer
to the curious question. It seemed that she had been driven here by some
intangible and sadistic force lying buried in her unconscious mind.

And
by those hideous, recurring nightmares.

During
the day, generally, her mind obeyed her entirely. It was during the nights,
when she had abdicated conscious control of it that it had got into the habit
of playing tricks on her. Suddenly invoked like rabbits out of a conjurer's hat
were tiny disjointed fragments that turned into frescos of the past without her
permission or participation. There seemed not a word, not the whisper of a
thought, not a gesture or a sensation that her secretive mind had not stored
and preserved to perfection without her knowledge. In her nightmares, echoes
and sounds reverberated with frightening and forgotten fidelity. In her sleep
Olivia saw sights, touched surfaces, tasted flavours and inhaled fragrances
that no longer should have held any meaning. It was an insanity that had
dragged her here this morning, but she could not expel
her
hallucinations any more than she could break away from the spells that this
sorcerer of a forest was casting upon her now.

There
was, Olivia recognised with a calmness that amazed her, an inevitability about
her recession into the past. It was, perhaps, in its meticulous re-enactment
that her salvation lay, her final liberation. She could no longer keep buried
those memories that she despised. For her own exorcism, she had to exhume them
one by one, examine them from a distance and then inter them to lay them to
rest forever. The answer was not concealment; it was bold confrontation.

The
pool where the dragon-flies looped and swooped over water-lilies still lay
turgid and unmoving and covered with emerald green slime. The
bel
tree
was not yet in fruit, but it would be in the spring.
I
can tolerate
anything you choose to be;
it was here that she had said it. Perched on
that boulder, he had said,
I always know where you are. You make it
impossible for me to stay away.
Wonderingly, he had asked what was the
stubbornness that drove her.
It
is a stubbornness called love.
Standing
apart from herself, Olivia heard her own voice as she made that commitment as
clearly as she heard the yelping of the dogs prancing around her feet. And it
was here that he had repeatedly bemoaned his madness. But now, it seemed, that
madness was not only his.