Three Continents (32 page)

“Very pleased to meet you, I'm sure,” said Eric—and seemed intrigued, looking at us from under his brows, as shaggy and old as those of practically all the club members. He, as well as other waiters and the porter, had already scrutinized us on our arrival, to make sure we were with someone and not a couple of anarchists come to blow the place up. “I think I see the resemblance, sir,” he lied, lowering his eyes away from us—put out no doubt by Michael's fierce stare.

“Do you, Eric? Well then you see more and further than other folk do. No these two fine young people are an entirely different kettle of fish. They have their act together—only a saying, Eric, just the way we quaintly put it, it doesn't mean they're acrobats or some kind of performers, no no no ha ha ha, far from it, don't be misled by their unusual appearance.
Are you sure you won't have anything more?” he asked Michael. “A lemonade? Or how about a plain old club soda—we can do one of those, can't we Eric?”

“I'm about ready to leave,” Michael warned, and Eric went about his business.

“Sit down, Michael, I have many more things to say. Serious things, you'll be surprised to hear: not just any old Manton chatter. I'm sure everyone has heard enough of that; yes everyone has heard enough of the old Manton; we're all, including myself, fed up to the teeth with him. But I'll tell you something that'll make you sit up and it is this: The old Manton is dead, he is no longer with us.”

“Is he drunk or something?” Michael asked me.

“On only two of these?” Manton said. “You underestimate me, dear boy, but then you always have. You remind me, in the most unfortunate way, of my father; your grandfather. He had the same knack of making me feel a heel.” Eric returned with his drink and Manton started in on it at once. But when he put it down, his mood had changed. He was silent for a while; eyes downcast; and then hand over eyes: “I know you won't believe me, and you have every right not to, but I truly have turned over a new leaf. At last.”

“Harriet told me about your getting married and a baby and all of that.”

“Yes all of that; all of that.” Manton was still subdued. “I know what you want to tell me; what you have every right to tell me: that all this should have been done twenty years ago; when you two were born. That was the time to turn over a new leaf, to get myself together and be a proper father for you two.”

Michael said “Oh hell really.”

“Oh hell really indeed! And it is, I know, psychological hell for children not to have proper parents. There I sinned against you even before you were born—in choosing your mother. But that's a different story altogether. Only you must do me justice in this one thing—I didn't as it were pick her off the streets. Lindsay—whatever she is, and unfortunately we all know what—but there's a couple of generations o money there that's not going to do you any harm at all. No to speak of Propinquity. But let's for a moment do that: speal
of Propinquity. Yes yes yes I know,” he raised a hand to ward off the interruption we didn't make, “I have no right to say anything about Propinquity: any more than I have a right to say anything about the house on the Island or any other Wishwell property. No legal right whatsoever, though perhaps some other kind of right. Say shut up and get out right now, if you want to.”

Michael didn't tell him that, but he did say: “We've been over all that before, with Grandfather. He asked us the exact same thing you're working around to: if we're sure we want to do what we're going to do with all of it. And we'll tell you what we told him: Yes we are sure. Okay? Does that take care of it?”

It
was
what he had told Grandfather—but in such a different way. At that time, sitting on the floor of his cell-like room at Propinquity, Michael had been very, very slow and reflective, deep-thinking. Now he was as brisk as Crishi; even his way of speaking had changed, and he no longer had to think an hour before bringing out the thought it had taken him two hours to formulate. It was all there, all formulated. He was dead certain.

Manton too was trying to change, but he was only in the beginning stages, and Michael's certainty left him floundering; and a bit sad and defeated-looking. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose you have your ideas and principles. I've never had too many of those, and it's too late to start having them now. What a pity. What a pity, I mean, for Barbara and—well, the new generation of Wishwells. . . . Barbara wants to get married in church, in a white dress, with bridesmaids and all of it. We're going to look for a place to live. We're sick of hotels. Somewhere in the country, or by the ocean. With a lot of scenery; a lot of rooms too. Space. For the baby. And for you two, whenever you want to come there, which we hope will be very often. We'll have Thanksgiving, Christmas, the whole bit. We'll start again, as a family.”

I said “What about my family? Don't forget I've got married too.”

“No I'm not forgetting that,” Manton said, looking down into his empty glass. There was a silence in which I was afraid he was going to say something bad about Crishi.

He may have wanted to; but there was a tactfulness in Manton, a reticence—not unlike the atmosphere of this club we were in. Maybe that was why he fitted in so well here, looked so much in his natural element. It was Michael who was, and looked, out of it; and it was Michael who broke up the tactful atmosphere. “All this is completely pointless,” he said in a voice too harsh and loud for the place. “Whatever you're trying to say, you can't shake Harriet and me out of doing what is right.”

“Oh God yes,” Manton said hopelessly. “Doing what is right.”

He left it at that, said no more; and anyway, it was impossible to keep Michael any longer. The whole conversation—Manton's plea—left him tense and furious; and although he didn't talk about it with me, he may have done so with Crishi. The two of them were so often together, had so much business together, that they had a lot of opportunity to talk—more than Crishi and I had. He may even have told him the same day, as soon as we left the club. Crishi said nothing to me that night, but he did the next morning when, as usual, I took Robi to school. In good weather Robi and I liked to walk across the park; but today we had to take a cab because of the rain. As so often when it rained, there were no cabs to be had. We were standing at the corner, quite wet, looking up and down the street, with Robi shielding his head with his schoolbag, when Crishi arrived—maybe by accident, or more likely having watched for us to leave. He asked “Why are you standing in the rain?” When I said there were no cabs, he said “What nonsense,” and at that moment one came around the corner and stopped exactly where we stood. It was one of those things that happened around Crishi—a melting away of minor obstacles—so that when with him one almost expected and relied on it. He got in with us and rode with us to school; and after we dropped off Robi, I told the driver to go to Manton and Barbara's hotel. But when we drew up outside, Crishi said to the driver, “No, we've changed our mind,” and we drove on. I protested, I said that Manton and Barbara were waiting for me, but Crishi said “Let's go for a drive,” and he leaned forward to give a new direction. It was pleasant, driving enclosed in the high dark roomy upholstered London taxi. Drops of water slid down the glass,
blurring the people on the wet pavements as they struggled with their umbrellas and avoided being splashed from the road; the trees lining the mall and stretching farther into the parks had melted away into mist and so had Buckingham Palace and stone-white Queen Victoria. Crishi held my hand in his. He said “Manton and Barbara don't like me.”

“If they don't, it's too late, isn't it. Is that why you didn't want me to stop?”

“Do you believe it? What's on their mind?” Feeling me try to withdraw my hand from his, he held it tighter. I didn't struggle; I liked it. At the same time I didn't like what he was saying, and wouldn't answer him; and so we rode along.

“In a way it's true,” he said at last, slowly as out of deep thought. “I wouldn't have married you without it—without the money—I'd have wanted to but it wouldn't have worked out. You understand that?”

I said I did. I knew he needed to have it, that the movement depended on the funds he and Renée could raise; and as the movement grew, so did their need for money. He had spoken to me about this before—even quite bitterly—how the Rawul could afford to soar into the heights of his abstract philosophy while he and Renée had to stay down below and do whatever had to be done.

But today he said more; he said yes, he needed money for the movement-—but also for himself; because it was so unbearable not to have it. I said “That's what Renée says too.”

“Yes she too.” He continued to hold my hand securely. “It's a tie between us, between her and me. But between you and me, I love it that you
don't
know, and never have.”

“Is that why you never tell me anything?”

“I've told you a lot.” His teeth were on edge in what may have been snarl or smile. “Or you've found it out from Anna. She told you about my mother.”

“You never did.”

“I try to forget her.”

I could understand that because there had been times when I tried to forget Lindsay. But when I told him that, he laughed. He seemed to think it funny to hear any comparison between my mother and his.

We were driving through the park, which was absolutely
empty of people, with the trees dripping heavily and leaves dropping from them in wind and rain. I said “I must go back. I told Manton and Barbara I'd be there by ten.” I didn't want to go back, though.

“My mother was ever so pretty,” Crishi said. “That's why I like pretty women such a lot. No, you could be too—you could, in your Aunt Harriet way—if you'd just—” He picked up my hair, piled it on top of my head, ran his hand over the nape of my neck. “She was tiny—she'd come up to your shoulder maybe, no more. She had this beautiful skin, you can't believe it, how soft it was and nice. She loved dressing up in new outfits. Dressing up and going out. What she'd do is, there was this girlfriend she had who was an usherette at the local Odeon. She'd drop me off with her and I'd stay till they closed down after the last show. I saw a lot of movies and ate a lot of chocolate bars and stuff. It was perfect.”

“Where was this?”

“I'll take you there one day. We had this little house in London, in Woolwich—a council house—I don't know how she managed to get it but people did do things for her. I suppose being so pretty and poor with this little boy—me. Now she's old and fat and lives in Hong Kong with a Chinese wrestler. She looks quite Chinese herself. Well she's partly Assamese—do you think my eyes are slanting? They are, aren't they, a bit. When she was mad at me, she'd call me ‘Chinese devil.' I could drive her mad, I tell you.” He laughed—outright, with pleasure, not his usual snarl. “She'd chase me down the street with the bread knife, all the neighbors watching. I didn't mind it—I thought it was a lark—but afterward she'd feel so ashamed she'd cry her eyes out and then she'd be mad at me all over again. I was the man in her life,” he said, proud and amused. “Then she married that Portugese salesman and we moved to Goa. That's when I kept running away and at first she'd have me brought back by the police but then she didn't bother anymore. She was glad I was gone.”

I guessed that was when it had all started: the beach in Bombay; the traveling with strangers; the jails. I didn't ask him and he didn't tell me but it was all part of him, like the mysterious scars on his body that I sometimes asked him
about, only to be given a different answer each time. Also the fear and hatred of having no money, from which I wanted to protect him—that was the one thing I could do for him. I did feel very protective of him, sitting with him in the taxi; I put my arms around him and held him as though he were not Crishi but the little boy his mother had loved. And he murmured in my arms like a little boy dropping off to sleep, secure, loving, and grateful.

Later I told Barbara and Manton some lie about why I hadn't come to meet them; and after that, although I continued to join them on some of their outings, it was more out of duty than for pleasure. Secretly I wished they would go back to New York and leave me to my own life in London. There was no way I could draw them into that—how to explain about the upstairs and downstairs flats, or about Bari Rani's household, and what could I tell them about Anna, or the gallery, or our weekends at Babaji's house? More and more, as I accompanied them on their shopping tours, or to museums and matinees (I was never free, for them in the evenings because of waiting for Crishi to call and tell me where to come), I found that I was looking forward to the time when I could leave them and go back home. They noticed, and it made them sad but I couldn't help it. I mean, I loved them but not in that deep, and often deeply painful, way I had loved others.

Barbara and I spoke about it one day in a museum. She and I spent quite a bit of time in museums, for Barbara was in the process of educating herself. She admitted that she didn't have much education—she was sent to some fancy schools but pulled out of them quite soon because of her mother either quarreling with the teachers or wanting Barbara to be with her on location in Egypt or somewhere. Her mother had absolutely no respect for education, and how could she have, Barbara said, never having had any herself beyond ninth grade and afterward working in a laundromat and marrying at fifteen? Barbara was determined to stock up on the treasures of civilization as fast as possible, to have something to hand on to her family and not be just this dumb blonde, mashing baby food or whatever. Manton, who didn't feel in need of any further education, would leave us at the
portals and, kissing us both, hurry off to his own London pursuits. We tramped around till Barbara got tired, and with being pregnant, this happened quite soon. We would find a painting we both liked and sit there and talk. That day we were in front of a Veronese or someone from his school. We were on the round velvet-covered seats in the center of the gallery, under a lofty glass roof grimy with rain and among soaring marble pillars with gold capitals. The picture was a huge high one, with a huge bearded father and huge white-bosomed mother, both in pearls and velvet and making energetic lunging motions toward a very large naked baby. It was this latter that had attracted Barbara and was the reason why we sat there. It was a male baby, and Barbara said “Manton hopes it'll be a girl.”