Three Continents (45 page)

“We must get back,” she said with decision. “I told Manton we'll be there for the christening. We have to see him. Aren't you dying to see him?”

“Yes,” I said. “Have you told Michael?”

“I can't find him. I must find him! My goodness, a sweet little brother has come—”

I asked Robi to go with Sonya to help her find Michael. She was a bit reluctant to leave, having so much more to say, but I persuaded her that Michael must be found and told at once. When they left, I locked the door, and by the time I returned to the bed, Crishi had rolled over on his back and was lying there, looking up at me, wide awake. “So there's another Wishwell,” he said. I leaned over to kiss him; when I released him, he said “Another brother.”

“Stepbrother.” I tried to kiss him again, but he held me off.

“Are you going?” he asked.

“Going where?”

“With Sonya. To see him.”

“Are you crazy: leave you?” I fell on top of him and kissed his face and hair. He kept still; and when I left off at last, he said “What about your baby? We haven't heard about that for a while.”

I didn't bother to answer. Not only would a baby have been superfluous now that I had Crishi, but it would have been a hindrance between us and everything we did together and were going to do together—in the future, that is, when we had the money.

I was surprised at the way Michael got excited about Manton's baby. It was totally uncharacteristic of him. Then Lindsay called—that was strange too—I mean, why should
she
be
so happy about Manton's baby? She kept on and on over the phone from New York—she and Jean had driven there straightaway from Propinquity to visit the baby. Michael listened to her, and I heard him ask “Who's he look like?”—what a question, from Michael! I stared at him, and he thought I wanted the phone and offered it to me. I wasn't all that keen but I took it, and there was Lindsay echoing from outer space in her girlish girl-of-good-family voice: “. . . the cutest little nose, just like you two, and the same funny pointy ears Michael has. . . . Oh isn't it just too—to have a baby in the family again—I've absolutely decided that Thanksgiving every year has to be at Propinquity, and Christmas—well we'll think about it—Manton and Barbara have bought this place which might turn out all right, though personally I think they paid too much for it. . . . Who's that? Michael? Harriet? He's a very very blond baby like you were, Michael, with the tiniest bit of downy fluff on his head—”

“What's she saying?” Michael said. He went in the other room to get to Sonya's other phone; but in the meantime I wiggled the receiver a bit and Michael called “What happened?”

“She got cut off.”

“Well we were lucky to have her so long; Manton was only on for a few minutes,” Sonya said. “Get me the airline, Michael!” she called to him in the other room. “Ask when we can have three seats.”

I went into the bedroom where Michael was already dialing. I took the receiver from him and said “You're not really seriously thinking of going, are you?”

Michael thought this over, and having done so, having given the question respectful consideration, he said “Why not”; and after a while, “Going to New York isn't that big a deal.”

From an absolutely practical point of view, he was right. Airplanes flew between New Delhi and New York every day, constantly, and one sat on them and got off at the other end and did what one had to do and came back; not a big deal at all. Except that I wanted it to be: wanting to be as far as possible from everything that lay behind me, not in space as much as in orientation. Hadn't Michael felt the same during
the years he was traveling in all those different places—not for the sake of the places but for himself, his own fulfillment, his own happiness, rejecting everything that was a hindrance to that.

I said “And your work here?” But knowing this was no longer the ultimate question it had been, I went on, “It's only temporary, Michael, I mean being here in this hotel and all the political stuff of the Bari Rani's, it's only till we go—you know—up there, to Dhoka.”

“Oh are we going?”

“Why, Michael, what do you mean, what do you think it's all about? Haven't you heard the Rawul say a million times how it's the pure source we have to get back to? Without that, it just wouldn't be worth it, would it?”

He was still sitting by the telephone on Sonya's big hotel bed. I got up there too and into a cross-legged position, just behind him. We were as close as we could be without quite touching; we could feel each other intimately, physically and otherwise. My mouth was so close to his ear that my breath must have tickled it as I whispered to him: “I don't like it any more than you do here. But I know it's all right because we'll be leaving soon, going on—you know, up there.” All I could see was the back of his head, until he turned and I saw him in profile. His expression had lightened, waiting for me to say more: “Once we're there it'll be like the Rawul said—not neti but high and pure—oh you know it all much better than I do. . . . Only what I can't understand, Michael, how at this stage you would want to turn back—go
back
—when we've got this far, that's just completely incomprehensible to me. It's not like you; it's not like us.” I felt the good impact I was having on him—by what I said and, more, by being so close to him. It was as if at that moment he felt himself again.

Sonya came in to ask if he had got through to the airline—but when she saw us, she stopped short. She stood in the doorway and regarded us with her head on one side. She must have been happy to see us the way we were at that moment. “Did you get them?” she said again but absently—preferring to stand there and see us together on her bed. But this being Michael, she got an answer, and a bald and truthful one: “I didn't call them,” he said. She appeared
satisfied, pressing no further but retreating to leave us alone to decide whatever we wanted to.

And when we did decide—that is, to stay—she showed no disappointment but said she would ask them to postpone the christening till she could be there. I felt there had been a great misunderstanding and said at once, “Oh no, Sonya, you must go, of course you must, they're waiting for you.” She shook her head, she said no, she would stay with us, what else had she come for. I tried to catch Michael's eye to make him help me persuade her, but he avoided me; I realized he wanted her to stay. But I felt more like Crishi, who had said several times, “Shouldn't she be pushing off now?”

I was impatient to be alone with Michael so I could present this point of view to him; but when we were and I did, he wouldn't see it. He said “Why shouldn't she stay? She wants to be with us.” “It's bad for her here—cooped up in her room all day, doing all that stuff with cards. . . . And when we leave to go up there? She can't go with us then?” “Why can't she? Of course she can. She's always gone with us everywhere, wherever Grandfather went she came too. Wherever it was.” “Oh Michael.” But there was no point in arguing; he wouldn't listen. He wanted her there; He was clinging to her. He said “You don't want her here.” It was no use my saying that I was thinking of her, that for her own sake it was better she should leave. He knew that wasn't true—he knew it as clearly as if he had been listening to Crishi and me talking.

For only the night before Crishi had said to me, “You'd better get rid of her now. She's a bad influence.”

“On me?”

He laughed at that—and it was ridiculous, to suggest that anyone but he could have any influence over me now. “No but on Michael,” he said. He didn't elaborate—he didn't have to. It was funny, what was happening between him and me, the way I knew exactly what he meant, just as it used to be between Michael and me.

Crishi and I were also, without having to talk about it, in agreement about Tom: that he should leave, taking Robi with him. I hardly liked to admit it, but I wanted Robi to be gone, and not only because it was time he was sent to school. Although Robi had learned long ago to keep very quiet—especially
when Crishi was there—his presence in our dressing room did have an inhibiting effect on me, and I kept listening for any movement from him, in case he was awake. I never did hear any, but that wasn't necessarily because he was asleep; unfortunately he had learned to be canny and watchful. But more than Robi, it was Tom we wanted to be gone, for he made absolutely no bones about being a disturbing influence; in fact, he deliberately set out to be one. I knew he often talked to Michael, as well as to Sonya, and though it was never when I was there, I don't think he was interested in keeping what he said a secret from me. I had the strong impression that he was trying to talk to me on the same subject, and I took care to avoid him. But he was a difficult person to avoid for he had no inhibitions about stalking you down. He could be seen purposefully striding around the hotel, and it didn't bother him that he was such an incongruous figure there.

He caught up with me one morning in the hotel lobby, which was a very public place for the kind of conversation I knew he wanted to have with me. He more or less maneuvered me—I must say, for a man of God he was pretty forward—into one of the deep damask-covered sofas in which hotel visitors were encouraged to relax. The place was as busy as an airport, with guests checking in and out and mounds of luggage everywhere and boys in uniform carrying them. In the center of the lobby was a huge marble fountain with little jets of colored water playing.

Tom came out with an apology—for what he had said the other day, about not all marriages. . . . He didn't finish the sentence this time, but went straight on to explain it: “It's because I've been through this before, with Rupert; with my brother.”

“I know you didn't want him to be married to Renée.” I looked at him, defiantly; I felt I had to be defiant with him. “But it was what
he
wanted, so who was anyone else to say.” I went on: “If anything bad happens to me, I'm not going to be sorry—not at all! I'll still be glad that I did what I did: that all of it happened. And I think Rupert feels the same way.”

“But I,” said Tom grimly, “would give my right arm for it
not to have happened; that I had been strong and clever enough to prevent it. He's my younger brother,” he said, and saying this, softened. “I was quite a practical sort of chap always but Rupert's a dreamer; full of ideals—Beauty and Truth and all the rest. I admired him for it: for thinking all that was available here and now. . . . I know they're very different types, but
your
brother reminds me of him. Don't you think so? No? But surely you agree that Michael too has a purity that one could not bear to see besmirched.”

I don't know whether Tom had arranged it—for Michael to meet us here in the lobby—but at that moment I saw him come toward us. Among the tourists in pastel-colored summer playclothes, the Arabs in robes, the rich Indians in shiny brand-new suits and ties, the smartly uniformed hotel staff, Michael looked as out of place as Tom. He was, as usual, in white cotton clothes; but these were not very clean, and in all I have to admit Michael did not look clean—no longer the spare stern upright ascetic Michael but more like one of those sick kids who drag themselves around the bazaars and beaches of the poorest countries in the world. When he came closer, this impression was confirmed; he did look—not exactly sick, but unhealthy; his complexion, always very pale, was blotchy, and the sore on his mouth had not gone away. The word “besmirched,” which Tom had pronounced, was still in my ears, but I dismissed it as being entirely wrong, unacceptable when applied to Michael.

Tom said to him, “I've been telling Harriet how you want to go home.”

This was a lie; it was not what he had been telling me, and Michael too contradicted him—“You mean, how
you
want me to go home.”

Tom grinned in a good-natured way and shrugged as though it didn't much matter. Michael was looking at me: “You and I talked about it,” he said, as if defending himself against having done anything behind my back.

“Of course we did,” I answered Tom more than him. “And decided how stupid and weak it would be to turn back now.”

“Stupid and weak,” Tom repeated, weighing these two words as if he weren't quite sure how or to whom they were to be applied. He asked: “Do you mean turn back from the movement or from your marriage?”

“Both, of course,” I answered.

“And are you speaking for Michael or yourself?”

And again I answered without hesitation: “Both, of course.”

Michael didn't say anything; he stared straight ahead, absenting himself from the scene. But even when he did that—gazed into the far distance the way he used to—his eyes no longer had their seafarer's look but were blank, like those of people who don't want to, or are unable to think.

“Are you sure?” Tom asked me then.

I wasn't even sure what he meant—did he mean sure of myself, of Michael, of the movement, of my marriage? But on all counts I answered in the ringing way Michael had once answered Grandfather's same question: “Absolutely sure.” I glanced at Michael, expecting him to second me, but his eyes didn't unfocus from the distance, nor did any expression enter into them. Tom also waited for confirmation from Michael, and when there wasn't any, I felt it was up to me to repeat “Absolutely,” in the same absolutely unwavering way.

Tom had no alternative but to accept our answer and let us go; no alternative really except to take Robi and leave with him. But there was a new complication, for by this time Renée had decided that she didn't want to let Robi go. She must have come to this decision during a restless night, for it was early in the morning when she came to our room to announce it. Only Robi was awake and he let her in. It was the morning of the day he was supposed to leave, and he had got dressed and was waiting for us to wake up. But what woke us up was Renée standing over us and announcing in a loud voice, “
I
care if the child leaves or stays, even if no one else does.” We were forced to wake up, though Crishi made a great business of yawning and rubbing his eyes. When Renée said “Even his father doesn't care,” he was too engrossed in his own yawn to hear her.