Twenty hours after leaving the Savoy I was sitting in the garden of my luxurious room watching the waves crash onto the beach. The sun was setting, the red band leading straight across the Arabian Sea from it to me. The perfect red circle, so much larger than ever it was in England, dropped gradually under the horizon. Sunset here, where would it be sunrise? I tried to remember the time zones and not think about the black sack on a taxi’s back seat, or now in a dustbin or on a tip.
I was woken by the phone ringing.
“Mrs Smith?” The voice was Indian but the accent was perfect middle class English. He didn’t talk like a member of the hotel’s staff, there was too much authority in his voice. “Or should I say Mrs Parry? Miss Donaldson?”
“Who are you? Ramesh? Is that you?”
“My name is not Ramesh.”
“Then how do you know my names, my history?”
“We knew you were coming. We have contacts at the High Commission, we have been waiting for you.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My family.”
“Are you a Kambli or a Thakersey? Are you related to Ramesh? Vijay? I want to meet Vijay I have so much I need to tell him.”
“There are many questions to ask and to answer. You have been very busy since you were in our city last. We want to know what you know, then we can tell you what you don’t.”
“You mean you want to help me?”
“You’ve got this far. You deserve to reach your goal.”
“Do you know what that is?”
“Better than you do yourself.” He waited for that to sink in before asking, very politely whether I would like to join him for a drink in the hotel bar at noon the following day. I accepted his invitation knowing that I had no alternative but to do so.
I opened the drawer in the bedside table and picked out the telephone directory. I hadn’t really expected to find a Vijay Thakersey or even Ramesh Kambli. And I didn’t.
I turned on the television and watched the amazing ham acting and stylised singing of an old film Love in Tokyo. The colours, the music and the story all seemed completely over the top and for the hour I was watching it I forgot about England, the storm, the children and Ted.
But then there was a news programme. It was in English but not in an English that was easy to follow or understand. There was film of an old man getting into a large white limousine, the caption read Vijay Thakersey. I couldn’t understand what the news story was about but it had something to do with films and a new deal that had been signed. I looked at the three younger men with him and wondered if I would be meeting one of them the next day.
I picked up the phone. “Is it possible to call England?”
“I’m afraid not, Memsahib, if you give me the number I will phone you when we have got through. Sometimes it is easier than others, but with the World Cup there are no lines available.”
“The World Cup?”
“The cricket Memsahib. You mean you did not know? You were lucky to get the room here. It was only because of the High Commission in London, they said it was very important that you have a room in this hotel.”
“Should I call you Annie or Susannah?” The good looking, well dressed man sat next to me in the bar. I recognised him from the news bulletin the previous evening.
“Susannah.” I replied, Annie reminded me too much of Ted and Maureen, then added “Thanks” hurriedly in case he thought I was being short with him.
“And I am Sandeep.”
“How do you do Sandeep? Do I assume your family name is Thakersey?”
He nodded in assent.
“I feel like we should get to know each other well, Susannah, my grandfather knew your grandfather very well.”
“So I understand.” I didn’t want Sandeep to feel he had the upper hand in this conversation. “Do I have to thank you for ensuring I had a room in this lovely hotel despite the World Cup?”
He dipped his head in acknowledgement. “We felt it was time to talk to you and since you seemed to want to talk to us, well, we were not going to make it difficult for you.”
“I suppose you want me to tell you what I know.”
“No. It is not like that at all. You must understand that my grandfather and I never approved of what Ramesh did. We never wished harm to you or your family. It was Ramesh who felt the need for vengeance and who tried to bring ruin to my grandfather’s friends.”
“You don’t like Ramesh?” I asked tentatively.
“He is a cousin. I would not say we had to like each other. I have no respect for him nor he for me. He breaks the law as if law doesn’t apply to him. He is neither a nice nor a respectable man.”
“And you are? Respectable? Nice?”
“I hope you will find me so.”
“Can you tell me about your grandfather? I know something about him but, obviously, not enough.”
“Of course. I am here to make you welcome and to do as you wish.”
It was not the first contact with the Thakersey family I had expected.
“You must understand that my grandfather had a difficult time in England. He did not fit in with society, there was a lot of civil unrest at the time and Englishmen were not willing to welcome foreigners in their midst. He was an educated man who did not appreciate being treated as if he were of a lower caste. But he was a determined man, he would not return to his family with his tail between his legs. So he did what he was best able to do. He read the quality newspapers of the day and he wrote letters. Every day he would write a letter to The Times about some issue of the day, many were published. One day he received a note requesting his attendance at an office in a small street situated off Whitehall, of course he went. There he met Mr David Redhead who told him perhaps he could be of assistance to the mother country.
“My grandfather, however, was disappointed and shocked by the tone of the meeting. Instead of a request for service, which he would have been happy to comply with, Mr Redhead showed no respect, insisting that my grandfather was in his debt since, if he did not do as Mr Redhead instructed he would be deported. It was obvious that Mr Redhead knew a great deal about my grandfather’s life as he threatened him with exposure as a fraud.
“My grandfather was a qualified lawyer but he had exaggerated his experience and qualifications to obtain work in London, a situation which Mr Redhead made very plain he was aware of. My grandfather understood he had little choice but to do as Mr Redhead instructed. He had gone to the meeting full of hope and enthusiasm for his mother country, he left disillusioned because what he had been told he must do to stay in the country was to lie, to cheat and to steal.”
I had listened intrigued as Sandeep filled in some of the jigsaw pieces for me. What I resented, and I had had to keep myself from interrupting, was his view of David as a blackmailer. I tried to redress the imbalance of his view.
“But David, Mr Redhead, had to recruit the best people for the job.”
I was surprised by his reaction.
“Your grandfather was not a ‘nice’ man. The operation he ran was not ‘nice’.”
“He was only doing what he had to do.”
“You still don’t understand do you? In that first year Mr Redhead recruited 15 men and women. If they didn’t want to do what they were asked to do, or they tried and failed, the result was still the same.” He paused seemingly reluctant to spell everything out. It was as if he felt I should have understood. I wasn’t deliberately trying not to understand, it was just that where Sandeep was leading me was to a view of David I could not recognise. “My grandfather’s test was to kidnap a brilliant young scientist from the University in Göttingen. They wanted him in England, or if not that then at least not working for Germany. My grandfather was to bring him to England and if he couldn’t he was to kill him. He managed to drug the scientist and transport him into France but there were difficulties, I don’t know exactly what happened but he tried to escape, my grandfather killed him. If he hadn’t my grandfather was in no doubt he himself would have been killed.
“David couldn’t…”
But Sandeep ignored my interruption.
“There was a lady my grandfather knew of, she was an aristocrat, she flew an aeroplane which was unheard of for a woman at the time. She failed in the task your grandfather had set her and her aeroplane crashed.”
“You can’t know that that was my grandfather’s fault!”
“He admitted it. He told the others that it would happen the day before it did.”
I couldn’t believe this was the David I had known.
“There was another man, a man from the east of London, his name was Ian. He failed in his task and his body was found many weeks after he disappeared, tied in chains and dumped in the River Thames. There was a girl, a working class girl from the north of England who had been recruited because her father was German and she spoke the language perfectly. She failed and she was found burned to death in her flat which had apparently caught fire when she had failed to turn off a gas fire. There was…”
“You’ve made your point.” I wondered for a few moments how much of this could be true. I had found out none of these things, focussed as I was on the merchandise the fishermen had imported. Sandeep was telling me I had been looking in entirely the wrong direction.
But then I had been doing what David had wanted me to do.
“This is all irrelevant, my grandfather and the successful candidates worked through the 1930s doing as they were told.”
“But they didn’t did they? They did what they were told but they also kept stuff for themselves. They all siphoned off quite a lot for themselves.”
“Ah yes. The inventory.”
“You know about that?”
“Of course. We have followed your investigations. My grandfather and I have wanted you to succeed When we knew you were researching Max’s inventory we knew you would discover that artefacts were traceable to my grandfather.”
“But I never found any proof of that. I looked, I was looking for anything that could link anything to Vijay. I never found anything.”
“We were hoping you would be able to prove that he had not been exiled with nothing. We needed the proof to persuade Ramesh.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There is no reason why you should. Ramesh believes that your family owes us a great debt. He believes your family stole our wealth and left his uncle to start with nothing. We have told him he is wrong and in the old days he would have done what his elders told him but he is a hothead. He decided upon a vendetta against your family and for many years now he has done what he could to cause you pain and distress. I believe he has been involved with far more than that, with burglary, murder, drugs. Our family has important business here in India, we are influential and powerful. Ramesh’s exploits are putting our business at risk. Quite simply, our word is not good enough, we need proof that Ramesh is wrong and then perhaps he will stop his illegal activities. That Ramesh will not believe his uncle’s word is a cause of great distress to him. If you hadn’t come here of your own accord we would have brought you here because you must have found the proof we need to stop Ramesh doing what he has been doing. There must be something in your work.”
All this time I had thought Vijay was the cause of Ramesh’s actions. Perhaps, after all we were on the same side.
“Can you give a message to your grandfather?”
“Of course.”
“Please tell him that Maureen is dead.”
“That is sad. He has spoken of her. She was a good friend to him.”
“She died in a car crash a few weeks ago. She was talking of him just before it happened.”
“They were different times. My grandfather could love a woman of a different culture but he could never marry her. Marriage was in the hands of the fates and the family. He may have loved this woman but he could never marry her if he ever wished to return to his family.”
He took the drinks from the silver tray proffered by the bearer and handed one to me.
“In 1947 my grandfather had a choice to make. He could stay in England and marry or he could return to India. He could not do both and he knew what was happening as our country faced Independence. Your government rushed through the arrangements, it all happened too quickly and my grandfather had to make a difficult decision under great pressure. He chose his family and his country over the love of a woman. He always believed he was right to do so even though he knew how much he had hurt her. He will be sorry to hear of her death.”
“He did well though, didn’t he? When he came back to India.”
“The process of Independence was difficult. But he saw that there would be many opportunities for a family with wealth and power. The old order would be destroyed, it would take some time for the British to leave but then there would be immense opportunities. The Americans came in for some years, through the 1960s, but eventually they, too, left us to run our own country. My grandfather spent a decade building up resources and capital, working out what would be the best way to make his families fortune in this new world. He started producing films in 1963. He hired the most beautiful young women, the best looking young men and it didn’t matter whether they could sing or act because their voices were always dubbed by the man and women with the best voices. He had seen a film Singing in the Rain and his idea came from that. He added a great deal of colour and excitement, making sure the simplest language was used so the largest number of people could understand the simple, melodramatic plots. He had success after success. He bought cinemas then cinema chains, he became very powerful and very rich.”
“Bollywood.”
“As you say, Bollywood. It would not have existed in the way it does if it hadn’t been for my grandfather. And Ramesh is risking all this for his misguided anger against your family. We know he has been involved in drugs and burglaries and even, we suspect, murder. He has put the good name of our family at considerable risk, simply because he will not believe what is the truth. The truth, we know, is that your family helped our grandfather, they did not cheat him. We must prove this to Ramesh, then and only then will he leave your family in peace and our family can get on with our business.”
“And you think I have the proof.”
“Somewhere in all the work you have done you must have the proof, items you cannot trace but which we know of, anything that can prove that Ramesh is wrong. We need him to be wrong. We both need him to be wrong.”
“If I have what you’re looking for I haven’t recognised it.”
“You must look again, you must look through all your computer disks, your writings and notes and you must find proof.”
“Why is it so important now?”
“Cinema has had its best day, the world of television is opening up. Satellite communications will give us great power but if there is the slightest stain on our reputation we will lose these valuable contracts. We cannot take the risk.”
“And if I don’t find proof?”
“You are the only person who can.”
“Sandeep?”
“Susannah?”
“I will need a computer.”
I went back to my room wondering whether Sandeep had been entirely honest and half expecting to find my room ransacked and all my papers and notebooks gone, but the room was exactly as I had left it. I poured some soda water from the fridge and squeezed two sectors of lime into it, thinking all the time about how to find what Sandeep and Vijay Thakersey needed.
I didn’t want to think about David as a ruthless, almost evil, man. I didn’t want to be aware that some of the things I thought I knew, the lives I thought I had unravelled, were not complete pictures. All these years I had believed Ramesh was acting on Vijay’s orders. It had never occurred to me that he might be what David had said his uncle was, a loose cannon. Perhaps you never can learn everything about another person.
There was a knock on the door and a man in the white uniform of the hotel wheeled a trolley into my room with a computer that was more up to date than the one I had left back at Ted’s. He was followed by a man in a smart grey suit.
“I am to check that this is compatible with your requirements. You are to see if your disks can be used.”
I looked at the machine, oddly incongruous in this environment. “It looks absolutely fine. Thank you.”
“Mr Sandeep has asked me to wait while you check. Please memsahib, if you would be so kind.”
It was a very polite order.
The attendant had plugged in the machine and I looked around for the on-off switch, I was not familiar with this make or model but hopefully, once I could see what programs it had loaded onto it, I would be on more familiar ground. It seemed an age as we waited for the screen to light up. I sat down and was relieved to see displayed a neatly organised menu listing available programs. The machine had been well set up and it was obvious at one glance I would have everything I could possibly need but I put my disk in the drive and gave the instruction for the machine to access it. It worked.
I looked up at the man in the suit and smiled. “Perfect.”
They left, closing the door carefully behind themselves. I would not have been surprised if I had heard the sound of a key turning in the lock but there was none and I realised I was being paranoid. My room opened through a wide French window onto the open garden and the beach beyond, it was hardly the prison I had fleetingly imagined myself to be in.
An hour later there was another knock on the door and a different attendant entered with another trolley, this time laden with bowls of fruit, plates of sandwiches and bottles of water.
Frustrated and tired after several hours of concentration, I turned away from the computer and worked my way through Max’s notes and my hand written records of conversations with David. I could find nothing. How could I prove that Vijay had not been empty handed on his escape? How could I prove that Maureen, or Max or even David had helped him leave? At the end of a fruitless afternoon I took a break as the sun was setting and sat out on the veranda with a glass of water. I wondered how much time Sandeep would give me.
Sitting alone and feeling conspicuous in the dining room later that evening I was wondering what it was that I had missed when Sandeep appeared, politely excused himself and sat down opposite me.
“How are you progressing?” He asked without preamble.
“Progressing.” I answered trying not to give anything away.
“I have spoken with the manager and we have arranged for you to move to a much better room.”
“But I am quite comfortable, it’s a lovely room.” I didn’t like the feeling that I was being moved to an upper floor, away from the garden. Neither did I like the idea of all my personal things being moved without my being there to supervise.
“It is our best suite, my grandfather has arranged it especially. You will be much more comfortable. You are our honoured guest and as such you must have the best room in our hotel.”
As soon as I walked into the room I realised why I had been moved. It was truly luxurious, with a large balcony overlooking the sea. But it wasn’t the luxury that caught my eye. It was one of a group of pictures on the wall above the bed.
The last time I had seen it had been in the dark hall at Sandhey and I had been talking to David.
Max’s Schiele.
I sat on the bed and stared at the drawing I had first really looked at the day after my mother’s funeral. It had been stolen from Max in the burglary in which Ramesh was undoubtedly involved. It now graced the wall of this wonderful room. I noticed behind the drawings there was a lighter patch of wall, as if a larger picture had occupied the space until very recently. They had put them up specially for me.
I had had lists of all the artefacts that were known to have been run by the fishermen and I had identified where the vast majority had been within the past 20 years. But nothing I had found could be in any way attributable to Vijay.
Perhaps I had been working in the wrong direction.
I should have focussed on Maureen. She would have known what David did, she was in love with Vijay, she would have helped him. All I had to do was prove it. It was only a week before that I had sat at her desk and leafed through her diaries as Ted had tended the bonfire but it seemed like a lifetime. There had been so much to take in. My realisation that I loved Ted, that Maureen had tried to kill me and that Maureen had known so much that she had never told me as she tried to protect the man she loved. And that Ted was my father.
I sat on the enormous bed and cried.
I cried because it was not fair that I had realised I loved him minutes before he was taken away from me, because it was not fair that I was thousands of miles from home, that I had no home, that I was alone, that I had lost all those people who had been my family and friends.
I cried because I had made such a mess of everything.
I remembered something I had glimpsed in one of Maureen’s diaries. All the answers are there for her to find but neither her eyes nor her mind is open. I had assumed I had known what it was I was looking for but I had been focussing on the wrong thing.
As the image of Ted tending the bonfire came to my mind I realised that that was true of so many things in my life.
I had wasted years of my life fascinated by the wrong men, then so much of my time concentrated on the wrong research. Everything I had explored over the past years had been for nothing. All the hours I had spent researching and reading had been for nothing. I looked up at the Schiele thinking that the only item I had found that could be traced to India had been stolen from Max. The only use all that information could possibly have was if I could prove that some of it was here, in India, and had been brought here by Vijay in 1947 with David’s approval.
The proof for Sandeep wouldn’t be in the lists of merchandise, it would be in Maureen’s diaries. I had been so careless, so stupid, even when I had been reading those I had focussed on the unimportant trivia of my own life.
Vijay’s proof would be in Maureen’s diaries.
And I had lost them.
I looked at the picture that Ted must have passed a hundred times when it was on the wall in Sandhey. I thought of him from the Sandhey days. He had seemed like an old man in his grey flannel trousers, tweed jackets and paisley ties. He had seemed as old as Max though, even in 1976, he would have only been in his 50s. Now I was in my 40s that didn’t seem so old at all. He had seemed years younger when we had spent the time driving backwards and forwards to Sevenoaks to help Linda, dressed in blue jeans and a red sweater. When he’d come to pick me up from the flat in south London he had seemed even nearer me in age. Perhaps it was just me getting older.
Then in the light of the bonfire I knew I not only loved him but wanted him.
Less than an hour after that realisation I had heard what Maureen had written. Ted was my father. It was Ted who had raped my mother.
But he had denied it.
Who could I believe?
If Ted had raped her why had she let him take her to the nursing home to give birth to me, why were they such friends in those end days, why had they spent so much time enjoying each other’s company? The only answer was that he hadn’t raped her. He could be my father but they had loved each other. It hadn’t been rape, it had been an affair.
It was the only arrangement that made any sense.
But I loved him now.
And not as a daughter should love her father.
I looked at the phone. I could pick up the receiver and ask the operator to call him. I wanted more than anything to hear his voice. What he had said could have been true.
If Maureen had loved him and hated me that much she could have left that note as insurance that Ted and I would never be together. He had seemed genuinely devastated by the contents. Perhaps I should have given him more of a chance to explain.
Tears don’t solve anything, but they help to relieve tension and so I cried.
I wanted to run away. But where can the runaway run?
I had not truly faced up to anything in my life but now, with nowhere to go, I had to.
I had run away from everyone except myself.
I was the one person I could never leave behind.