Three Continents (53 page)

I slept very soundly—naturally, after such a journey—and when I woke up, Crishi was sitting on the side of my bed. I was so happy and relieved, I threw my arms around his neck, and it was some time before I asked him, “Is Michael all right?”

“All right? Why shouldn't he be?. . . Oh you mean that scrap he had with the Bhais? That was nothing.” He stroked my face and kissed it; he smelled so fresh and sweet, newly bathed and in a clean shirt of fine Egyptian cotton. But the bed next to mine hadn't been slept in, so maybe he had been up all night.

“I don't know who's been telling you what in Delhi, what sort of rumors they've scared you with. I had a job calming down Sonya too.” When I began to apologize for bringing her along in spite of his express orders to come alone, he kissed me again: “I can see how you couldn't get rid of her. But don't you think you ought to have a bath? Pfoo, sweetheart, you stink—well, anyone would after that journey. Rotten luck about the plane; but it's all right now—they've started flying again, so Sonya can go back nice and comfortable. It only takes three hours; that's why we got here so quick. Michael and I,” he said. “Come on, I'll run your bath.”

He went into the adjoining bathroom and continued talking to me from there. I got out of bed and opened the curtains, but all there was to see was what I had been seeing for the past two days from the train window. I drew the curtains shut again; it was so much nicer that way, the two of us in the room together, with the air-conditioner on. He called me into the bathroom; it had a big old-fashioned bathtub and all sorts of ancient fittings, which looked as if they belonged in a much bigger, older place. He confirmed this: He said they had been brought in from the palace. “Where
are we?” I asked him. “Oh it's where everyone stays when they come here.” “But don't they stay in the palace?” He laughed at that: “Wait till you see it.”

Well, I had a very nice bath—he made it a playful occasion—and when I went back in the room, someone had brought a lot of breakfast with juice and eggs, just like in a hotel. “What about Sonya?” I asked him. “She had her breakfast hours ago, sweetheart; now it's just you and me.” There was a table at which we could have eaten, but we preferred to sit on the bed, one on each side of the tray and feeding morsels to each other. After such a good night's sleep, clean and fed, in this pleasant air-conditioned room and with him beside me, I was absolutely contented and peaceful; so, it seemed was he. We were happy, as always when we were together.

Then he said “Now, Harriet,” and at once my heart lurched, and I said in fear, “Michael.”

He frowned: “Oh yes, do think the worst straightaway, go on, think that Michael's dead. . . . I told you, didn't I, he was all right? What's the matter with you, why do you have to have this morbid imagination? Just like an old woman; just like Sonya. By the way, she'll have to leave today, I've got a seat for her on the plane. Because I'm telling you straight—I'm not having two hysterical women on my hands; one is quite enough for me.”

“I'm not hysterical.”

“Oh no? Then what's that—‘oh Michael'?” He imitated the start I had given. “And if you're like that now, what are you going to say when I tell you Michael's not here? There, you see.”

I made every effort to be completely unhysterical because the most important thing was not to irritate Crishi any further. I said in a calm and steady voice: “Then where is he?”

But Crishi
was
irritated—not with me, but with Michael. “Packed up and gone, that's where he is. It's always the same story with you people—you play around with something and when you get tired, you quit. No consideration for anyone else of course—oh no, why should you? The rest of us are just there for your amusement.”

He sounded so bitter that I felt I had to defend myself. He did have to admit that it wasn't fair to include me in this
accusation because never once, not for a second, had I thought of leaving. “Well all right,” he conceded, qualifying with a frown: “so
far
. But who can tell with you people? I'd have thought—anyone would—that Michael was absolutely one hundred percent with us, but no, suddenly it turns out it wasn't the right thing after all—that it was your goddamn neti, neti, and all that crap—so next thing we know he's climbing on a bus to God knows where.”

“Michael left on a
bus
?”

Crishi couldn't help smiling a bit: “You should have seen him, wedged in with all the peasants and their chickens, making his tight-ass face like he was much too superior to notice any of those nasty smells creeping up his aristocratic nostrils.”

I had seen enough of the public transport system to get the picture of Michael accommodating himself to it in his aloof way; but what about the other picture, the one Paul had given me—of Michael being carried unconscious into the hotel room? Crishi must have guessed my thoughts, for he said at once, “I told you all he had was a scratch on his arm—you don't think anyone who's got anything more than that would let himself be rattled on one of those Indian buses across the Thar Desert?”

“Is that where's he gone?”

“Or wherever. . . . Gave me one of his lectures too before taking off—about how the Rawul was all bunk—”

“He said that?”

“Should I tell you something, Harriet: I think Michael's so selfish, such a complete egotist, that he doesn't care for anyone else in the world—not only not for the Rawul or me or any of us, but not for his own people either, for Sonya and the rest of you, and that, sweetheart, includes you. . . . All right!” he anticipated my protest. “If he did care, wouldn't he have stayed? I told him, Harriet's on her way, she's on a train this very minute, can't you at least wait till she gets here—oh no, he had to go, the bus was leaving, on no account was he going to miss it, so good-bye, nice knowing you.”

Crishi was silent, and so was I. In a way, I was relieved that Michael was well enough to set off on a journey by himself; and I was used to his going off like that, without warning, on some quest of his own. Crishi had opened the front of
my shirt and was burying his face into my very modest cleft; he murmured from out of there, “Anyway, I'm still here, if that's any good to you.” I pressed him closer to me, so close he could surely feel my heart beating for him.

We stayed like that for a while, very much satisfied with each other. After a last shower of kisses, he raised his head and said to me: “You'll have to tell Sonya. That Michael's gone,” he explained. I nodded; it wouldn't be difficult, for Sonya too was used to Michael setting off suddenly on strange journeys. “And get rid of her,” Crishi went on. “There's absolutely no point her hanging around here, getting in our way. She should never have come—no, I'm not blaming you, I can see how you couldn't shake her off—but she'll have to go. Because I want to be alone with you, and that's all there is to it.” I felt the same, needless to say.

I found Sonya downstairs with some ancient retainers hovering around to anticipate her wishes. She was peering into the rooms there—perfectly ordinary, comfortable family rooms with nothing sinister about them; yet she asked me in a whisper, “Where
are
we?” Before I had time to explain, she whispered again, “Have you seen Michael? I've looked for him everywhere.” I made her sit down on one of the fat settees in the living room (it had colored studio portraits of the Rawul, Bari Rani and the girls, and a Bechstein grand with a pile of beginners' piano pieces on it). She looked at me with scared eyes, anticipating the bad news I was about to give her; it must have been in this way that I had looked at Crishi, irritating him as Sonya did me now. I told her, as quickly as possible, “Michael's left. . . . He walked out, that's all; on all of us.”

“Darling, how could he? When he was—”

“He wasn't,” I said. “He was nothing of the sort. That just goes to show how you shouldn't listen to rumors from people who don't know what they're talking about. It's really ridiculous—the way you jumped on the train with me and came all this way because some idiot told you how he'd heard something had happened to Michael.”

My indignation made her hang her head; I began to feel sorry for her. And she looked so terrible—she must have slept in her little silk dress (if she slept at all); she had brought
nothing else to wear, and though she had put on her usual makeup, it was no more than a layer of color daubed on an ancient, ancient face.

I took her hands in mine; I said “It's my fault. I shouldn't have let you come. . . . But I couldn't have stopped you, could I?” She shook her head with a shy smile. “No, I know how you'd run from one end of the earth to the other for Michael and me.” I kissed her hands I was holding. When I felt her tears fall on me, I said “I told you—it's all right; Michael's all right. It was all a false alarm.”

“Did you see him?”

“How could I see him? He was off and gone away before we ever got here. And not so much as a note for us, not one single line. Isn't that just like him?” I said, laughing and encouraging her to laugh with me. But she didn't, and I went on: “Of course it is! He's done it hundreds of times—don't you remember when we were supposed to be on the Island for Grandfather's birthday, only Michael was in Iran? Don't you remember how worried we were because of what was going on there, and Grandfather had to call people in the State Department? And no one could find him till he turned up in some monastery in Ladakh. That was when he shaved his hair off—it never really grew after that,” I suddenly remembered. “He used to have nice soft floppy hair but after that it was always sort of stubbly.”

Sonya said “My baby, my sweet baby”; I guess she meant Michael, though she was hugging me. I laughed at her: “You see, that's the trouble with you—you think we're still babies who can't look after ourselves.”

She admitted it; she apologized for it. I said “It's lucky you've got a new baby to fuss over. Aren't you dying to see him? Manton's baby? Oh I am.”

“Let's go, darling,” she said.

“Yes, you must go,” I said. “They're waiting for you—they can't christen him without you, can they? Not without his godmother, they can't.” I was stroking her head with its ruined coiffure. When she reached up to kiss me on the lips, I let her: how familiar the taste of her lipstick, which, as a child, I had wiped off as soon as she wasn't looking. “You'll be so proud holding him, won't you, in his christening robe.
Do you think he'll be wearing Michael's? I'm sure he'll be blond like Michael, what with Barbara being so blond—oh they told you he was? There, you see, it'll be just like holding Michael.”

“The two of you, I can't tell you—you were two little angels come down from heaven, one fair, one dark. I couldn't see you during the christening—there were too many people in front of me—but I sneaked a look when you were being carried out of the chapel—oh, what sweetness, what sweetness, I could have died.” At that time, when we were born, Sonya was still “unofficial,” and the nearest she could get to a Wishwell christening was to lurk somewhere in the last row. But now she would be there right in front, holding the principal personage.

“Watch out you don't drop him—he's probably a huge big fellow, with those two parents how could he not be, and look at you, you tiny thing.” I kissed a tiny plump hand of hers: “And you must send me lots of photos—I want to see you in all your glory with the latest Wishwell in your arms.”

“But you'll be there, darling.”

I had been talking to her as to a child who had to be humored, but as with a child, it was time to be firm: “It can't be, Sonya.” I went on: “If Grandfather was here, wouldn't you want to be where he is, and nowhere else in the world? . . . There, you see; that's how I feel, with Crishi.”

She was silent. I knew she was struggling to respect my feelings and to accept the, for her, unacceptable comparison of Crishi with Grandfather. But that was her problem, not mine in the least.

“And your birthday,” she said at last, somewhat shifting her ground. “Your twenty-first, darling—don't you want to be at home for that?”

“I am at home. Yes I am—yes even in this weird place that we don't even know where it is except it's somewhere in the desert, and in this weird house with someone else's family photographs and piano music. Crishi's here, so it's okay; it's home for me. Don't say any more, Sonya. You ought to know how I feel—you of all people,” I said, ending up with the reminder that it was she who had taught us to live for love.

But from this point Crishi took over: “What are you doing?”
he came bustling in on us. “Do you realize you'll miss it if you don't get a move on?” There was no arguing with him, for he made out that a decision—to catch the plane—had already been fixed, and that it was up to him to hurry Sonya to the airport. He had a car outside, with the motor running and a Bhai at the wheel. It was impossible to talk inside the car, because whenever Sonya began to say something, Crishi would be shouting at the Bhai to ask him was this the fastest he could drive. We traversed the already familiar dust-enveloped desert landscape with a line of undulations, but these were closer and turned out to be jagged rocks. We drove through a very ramshackle little town huddled at the foot of one such rock; it had low buildings, some of which were very old and some very new, but all looked as if about to tumble down. There was a cinema and rows of tea stalls with long-distance trucks parked outside them, and some commercial activity like grain and planks of wood being transported on bullock carts. With Crishi shouting at him to hurry, the Bhai at the wheel maneuvered his way through a battalion of beat-up old bicycles, hand carts, rickshaws, children, goats, and dogs, keeping his finger pressed on the horn. Sonya gave up any attempt at conversation—one moment she was screaming “Look out!” as we skirted a naked child with a black thread around its extended stomach, and next moment leaning back against the car seat with her eyes shut and her hands over her ears.