Nalini came from a very refined family. They were all great readers, and Nalini grew up on the classics. They were particularly fond of the English romantics, and of the great Russians. Sometimes they joked and said they were themselves like Chekhov characters. They were well off and lived gracious lives in a big house in Delhi, but they were always longing for the great capitals of Europe – London, Paris, Rome – where culture flourished and people were advanced and sophisticated.
Mummy and Daddy had travelled extensively in Europe in easier times (their honeymoon had been in Rome), and the boys had, one by one, been abroad for higher studies. At last it was Nalini’s turn. She had finished her course in English literature at Delhi’s exclusive Queen Alexandra College and now she was going to the fountainhead of it all, to England itself. She tried for several universities, and finally got admission in a brand-new one in a Midland town. They were all happy about this, especially after someone told them that the new universities were better than the old ones because of the more modern, go-ahead spirit that prevailed in them.
‘Dearest Mummy, I’m sorry my last letters haven’t been very cheerful but please don’t get upset! Of course I love it here – who wouldn’t! – and it was only because I was missing you darlings all so much that I sounded a bit miserable. Now that I know her better I can see Mrs Crompton is a very nice lady, she is from a much better class than the usual type of landlady and I’m really lucky to be in her house. I have a reading list as long as my arm from classes! It’s a stiff course but terribly exciting and I can hardly wait to get started on it all. The lecturers are very nice and the professor is a darling! Social and cultural activities have begun to be very hectic, there are so many societies to choose from it is difficult to know where to start. There are two music societies, one for classical music and the other for pop. You won’t have to guess very hard which is the one I joined . . . ’
Yes, there was the classical music society, and more, a poetry society, and the town had symphony concerts and a very good repertory company playing in a brand-new theatre financed by the Arts Council. It was a good place, full of cultural amenities and intelligent people, and the university was, as Nalini and her family had been told, modern and go-ahead, with a dynamic youngish Vice-Chancellor in charge. Nalini’s letters home – she wrote three or four times a week – were full of everything that went on, and her mother lived it all with her. Sometimes, sitting in her drawing-room in Delhi on the yellow silk sofa, the mother, reading these letters, had tears in her eyes – tears of joy at the fullness and rapture of life and her own daughter a young girl at the very centre of it.
But Nalini was not as happy as she should have been. She did everything that she had always dreamed of doing, like going for walks in the English countryside and having long discussions over cups of coffee, but all the same something that she had expected, some flavour that had entered into her dreams, was not there. It was nothing to do with the weather. She had expected it to be bleak and raining, and she had spirits high enough to soar above that. She had also learned to adjust to her landlady, Mrs Crompton, who had ‘moods’ – as indeed it was her right to have for she had been the injured party in a divorce suit – and to be sympathetic when Mrs Crompton did not feel up to cooking a hot meal. Of course, she missed Mummy and Daddy and the boys and the house and everything and everyone at home – dreadfully! – but it was the price she had been, and still was, willing to pay for the privilege of being in England. Besides, there was always the satisfaction of writing to them and as often hearing from them, and not only from them but from all the others too, her cousins and her college friends, with all of whom she was in constant correspondence. Every time the postman came, it was always with at least one letter for Nalini, so that Mrs Crompton – who wasn’t really expecting anything but nevertheless felt disappointed to have nothing – sometimes became quite snappish.
Nalini was not lonely in England. She got to know the people at college quite quickly, and even had her own group of special friends. These were all girls: they were friendly with the men students, and of course saw a lot of them during classes and the many extracurricular activities, but special friendships were usually with members of one’s own sex. So it was with a number or just a single girl friend that Nalini roamed over the college grounds, or sat in the canteen, or went to a concert, or out for a walk; and very pleasant and companionable it always was. Yet something was missing. She never wrote home about anything being missing, so they all thought she was having as grand a time as her letters suggested. But she wasn’t. Really, in spite of everything, all England at her disposal, she was disappointed.
One day she was out walking with her friend Maeve. They had left the town behind them and were walking down the lanes of an adjoining village. Sometimes these lanes were narrow and hemmed in by blackberry bushes that were still wet with water drops from recent rains; sometimes they opened up to disclose pale yellow fields, and pale green ones, and little hills, and brindled cows, and a pebbled church. The air was clear and moist. It was the English countryside of which the English poets – Shakespeare himself – had sung, and of which Mummy had so often spoken and tried to describe to Nalini. Maeve was talking about Anglo-Saxon vowel changes and the impossibility of remembering them; she was worried about this because there was a test coming up and she didn’t know how she was ever going to get through it. Nalini also did not expect to get through, but quite other thoughts occupied her mind. Although she was fond of Maeve – who was a tall strong girl and looked like a big robin with her ruddy cheeks and brown coat and brown knitted stockings – Nalini could not help wishing that she was not there. She wanted to be alone, in order to give vent to the melancholy thoughts with which she felt oppressed. If she had been alone, perhaps she would have run through the fields, with the wind whipping her face; or she might have leaned her head against a tree, in which a thrush was singing, and sighed, and allowed the tears to flow down her cheeks.
The men students at the university were all very nice boys: eager and gentle and rather well mannered in spite of the long hair and beards and rough shirts that so many of them affected. One could imagine a charming brother-and-sister relationship with them, and indeed that seemed to be what they themselves favoured when they went as far as establishing anything more personal with any of the girls. It would not have done for Nalini. She had enough brothers at home, and what she had (even if she didn’t at the time know it) come to England for, what she expected from the place, what everything she had read had promised her, was love and a lover.
A girl in such a mood is rarely disappointed. One of the lecturers was Dr Norman Greaves. He took the classes on Chaucer and his Age as well as on the Augustans, and although neither of these periods had ever been among Nalini’s favourites, she began to attend the lectures on them with greater enthusiasm than any of the others. This was because Dr Greaves had become her favourite teacher. At first she had liked the professor best – he was handsome, elegant, and often went up to London to take part in television programmes – but, after she had written her first essay for Dr Greaves, she realized that it was he who was by far the finer person.
He had called her to his office and, tapping her essay with the back of his hand, said, ‘This won’t do, you know.’
Nalini was used to such reactions from the lecturers after they had read her first essays. She could not, like the other English students, order her thoughts categorically, point by point, with discussion and lively development, but had to dash everything down, not thoughts but emotions, and moreover she could only do so in her own words, in the same way in which she wrote her letters home. But all the lecturers said that it wouldn’t do, and when they said that, Nalini hung her head and didn’t know what to answer. The others had just sighed and handed her essay back to her, but Dr Greaves, after sighing, said, ‘What are we going to do about you?’ He was really worried.
‘I’ll work harder, sir,’ Nalini promised.
‘Yes, well, that’s nice of you,’ said Dr Greaves, but he still looked worried and as if he thought her working harder wouldn’t do all that much good. Nalini looked back at him, also worried; she bit her lip and her eyes were large. She feared he was going to say she wasn’t good enough for the course.
‘“In Troilus and Criseyde”,’ read Dr Greaves, ‘“Chaucer shows how well he knows the feelings in a woman’s heart”. That’s all right, but couldn’t you be a bit more specific? What passages in particular did you have in mind?’
Nalini continued to stare at him; she was still biting her lip.
‘Or didn’t you have any in mind?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said miserably; and added – not, as far as she was concerned, at all inconsequentially – ‘I think I’m a very emotional sort of person.’
He had given her essay back to her without any further comment; but there had been something in his manner as he did so which made her feel that a bad essay, though unfortunate, was not the end of the world. The others had not made her feel that way. Dr Greaves soared above them all. He was not handsome like the professor, but she found much charm in him. He was rather short – which suited Nalini who was small herself – and thin, and exceptionally pale; his hair was pale too, and very straight and fine, of an indeterminate colour which may have been blond shading into grey. He was no longer young – in his thirties, at the end of his thirties indeed, perhaps even touching forty.
Nalini’s life took on colour and excitement. She woke up early every morning and lay in bed wondering joyfully how many times she would see him that day. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays she was secure because those were days when he lectured; the other two days she was dependent on glimpses in corridors. These had the charm of sudden surprises, and there was always a sort of exquisite suspense as to what the next moment or the next corner turned might not reveal. But of course the best were lecture days. Then she could sit and look at him and watch and adore an hour at a time. He walked up and down the dais as he talked, and his pale hands fidgeted ceaselessly with the edges of his gown. His head was slightly to one side with the effort of concentration to get his thoughts across: he strove to be honest and clear on every point. His gown was old and full of chalk, and he always wore the same shabby tweed jacket and flannel trousers and striped college tie. He was not, unlike the professor and several others of the lecturers, a successful academic.
Weekends would have been empty and boring if she had not got into the habit of walking near his house. He lived on the outskirts of town in a Victorian house with a derelict garden. There had been several rows of these old houses, but most of them had been pulled down and replaced by new semi-detached villas which were sold on easy instalments to newly-weds. Dr Greaves was not newly wed; he had many children who ran all round the house and down the quiet lanes and out into the fields. These children were never very clean and their clothes were obviously handed down from one to the other. The babies of the young couples in the villas wore pink and blue nylon and were decorated with frills. All the young couples had shiny little cars, but Dr Greaves only had a bicycle.
One Saturday Nalini met him coming out of his house wheeling this bicycle. He was surprised to see her and wondered what she was doing there; and although she did not quite have the courage to tell him that she had been lingering around for him, neither did she stoop to tell him a lie. They walked together, he wheeling his bicycle. He called ‘Mervyn!’ to a little boy who came dashing round a corner and was, to judge by his unkempt appearance, a son of his, but the boy took no notice and Dr Greaves walked on patiently and as if he did not expect to have any notice taken.
It was a sunny day. Dr Greaves was going into town on a shopping tour and Nalini accompanied him. They went into a supermarket and Dr Greaves took a little wire basket and piled it up with a supply of washing soap and vinegar and sliced loaf and many other things which he read out from a list his wife had prepared for him. Nalini helped him find and take down everything from the shelves; sometimes she brought the wrong thing – a packet of dog biscuits instead of baby rusks – and that made them laugh quite a bit. Altogether it was fun; they were both slow and inexpert and got into other people’s way and were grumbled at. Dr Greaves was always very apologetic to the people who grumbled, but Nalini began to giggle. She giggled again at the cash desk where he dropped some money and they had to scrabble for it, while everybody waited and the cashier clicked her tongue. Dr Greaves went very pink and kept saying, to the cashier and to the people whom he kept waiting, ‘I’m most awfully sorry, do forgive me, I am so sorry.’ Finally they got out of the shop and he stood smiling at her, blinking his eyes against the sun which was still shining, and thanked her for her help. Then he rode away, rather slowly because of the heavy load of shopping he had to carry from the handlebars.
The next Saturday it was raining, but nevertheless Nalini stood and waited for him outside his house. At first he did not seem to be very pleased to see her, and it was only when they had walked away from the house for some distance, that he made her sit on the crossbar of his bicycle. They rode like that together through the rain. It was like a dream, she in his arms and feeling his breath on her face, and everything around them, the trees and the sky and the tops of the houses, melting away into mist and soft rain. They went to the same shop and bought almost the same things, but this time, when they came out and she already saw the smile of farewell forming on his lips, she quickly said, ‘Can’t we have coffee somewhere?’ They went to a shop which served home-made rock cakes and had copper urns for decoration. It was full of housewives having their coffee break, so the only table available was one by the coat rack, which was rather uncomfortable because of all the dripping coats and umbrellas. Nalini didn’t mind, but Dr Greaves sat hunched together and looking miserable. His thin hair was all wet and stuck to his head and sometimes a drop came dripping down his face. Nalini looked at him: ‘Cold?’ she asked, with tender concern.
‘How can you bear it here,’ he said. ‘In this dreadful climate.’ There was an edge to his voice, and his hand fidgeted irritably with the china ashtray.
‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ said Nalini. ‘I’ve had so much sun all my life, it makes a change really.’ She smiled at him, and indeed as she did so, she radiated such warmth, such a sun all of her own, that he, who had looked up briefly, had at once to look down again as if it were too strong for him.
‘And besides,’ she added after a short silence, ‘it’s not what the weather is like outside that matters, but what you feel here, inside you.’ Her hand was pressed between her charming little breasts. Her eyes sought his.
‘I hope,’ he said foolishly clearing his throat, ‘that you’re happy in your work.’
‘Of course I am.’
‘Good. I thought your last essay showed some improvement, actually. Of course there’s still a long way to go.’
‘I’ll work hard, I promise!’ she cried. ‘Only you see, I’m such a funny thing, oh dear, I simply can’t learn anything, I’m stupid, my mind is like a stone – till I find someone who can inspire me. Now thank goodness,’ and she dropped her eyes and fidgeted with the other side of the ashtray, and then she raised her eyes again and she smiled, ‘I’ve found such a person.’ She continued to smile.
‘You mean me,’ he said brusquely.
This put her off. She ceased to smile. She had expected more delicacy.
‘My dear girl, I’m really not a fit person to inspire anyone. I’m just a hack, a workhorse. Don’t expect anything from me. Oh my God, please,’ he said and held his head between his hands as if in pain, ‘don’t look at me with those eyes.’
‘Are they so awfully ugly?’
‘Leave me alone,’ he begged. ‘Let me be. I’m all right. I haven’t complained, have I? I’m happy.’
‘No, you’re not.’ She sagely shook her head. ‘I’ve read it in your face long ago. Why are these lines here,’ and she put out her finger and traced them, those lines of suffering running along the side of his mouth which she had studied over many lectures.
‘Because I’m getting old. I’ll be forty in May. Forty, mind you.’
‘Sometimes you look like a little boy. A little boy lost and I want to comfort him.’
‘Please let me go home now. I’ve got to buy fish and chips for Saturday lunch. They’ll all be waiting.’
‘If you promise to meet me tomorrow. Promise? Norman?’ She lightly touched his hand, and the look with which she met his was a teasing, victorious one as if she were challenging him to say no, if he could.
At home her landlady, Mrs Crompton, was feeling unwell. She hadn’t cooked anything and lay in bed in the dark, suffering. Nalini turned on the lights and the fires and went down in the kitchen and made scrambled eggs on toast. Then she carried a tray up to Mrs Crompton’s bedroom and sat on the side of Mrs Crompton’s bed and said, ‘Oh you poor thing you,’ and stroked the red satin eiderdown. Mrs Crompton sat up in bed in her bedjacket and ate the scrambled eggs. She was a woman in early middle age and had a rather heavy, English face, with a strong nose and thin lips and a lowish forehead: it looked even heavier than usual because of the lines of disappointment and grief that seemed to pull it downwards. From time to time, as she ate, she sighed. Her bedroom was very attractively furnished, with ruffled curtains and bedcovers and a white rug, but it was sad on account of the empty twin bed which had been Mr Crompton’s and now just stood there parallel with Mrs Crompton’s, heavily eloquent under the bedcover which would never again be removed.
Nalini felt sorry for her and tried to cheer her up. She held one of Mrs Crompton’s large, cold hands in between her own small, brown, very warm ones and fondled it, and told her everything amusing that she could think of, like how she forgot her sari out on the washing line and it got soaking wet again in the rain, all six yards of it. Mrs Crompton did not get cheered up much, her face remained long and gloomy, and at one point a tear could be seen slowly coursing its way along the side of her nose. Nalini watched its progress and suddenly, overcome with pity for the other’s pain, she brought her face close to Mrs Crompton’s and kissed that dry, large-pored skin (how strange it felt! Nalini at once thought of Mummy’s skin, velvet-smooth and smelling of almond oil) and as she did so, she murmured, ‘Don’t be sad,’ she kept her face down on the pillow with Mrs Crompton’s and hidden against it, which was just as well, for although she really was so full of sympathy, none of this showed on her face which was blooming with joy.
‘Dearest Mummy, Sorry sorry sorry! Yes you’re right I’ve been awful about letters lately but if you knew how much work they pile on us! I’ve been working like a slave but it’s fun. My favourites now are the Augustans. Yes darling, I know you’re surprised and at first sight they do look cold like we’ve always said but they are very passionate underneath. I go out quite often into the country, it is so peaceful and beautiful. Sometimes it is windy and cold but it’s funny, you know I always feel hot, everyone is surprised at it.’
Norman usually wore a polo-neck sweater under his sports jacket, but Nalini never more than an embroidered shawl thrown lightly over her silk sari. Whenever they met, they went out into the country. They had found a place for themselves. It was a bus ride away from town, and when they got off the bus, they had to walk for about half a mile through some fields and finally through a lane which wound down into a small valley. Here there were four cottages, hidden away among trees and quite separate from each other. At the rear their gardens ran out into a little wood. The owners of the fourth and last cottage – a devoted old couple whom Norman had known and sometimes visited – had both died the year before and their cottage was for sale. At the bottom of its garden, just where the wood began, there was a little hut built, plank by loving plank, by the old dead owners themselves as a playroom for visiting grandchildren. Now it served as a secret, hidden shelter for Norman and Nalini. No one ever came there – at most a cat or a squirrel scratching among the fallen leaves; and the loudest sounds were those of woodpeckers and, very occasionally, an aeroplane flying peacefully overhead. Nalini, who was really in these matters quite a practical girl, always brought all necessary things with her: light rugs and air cushions, packets of biscuits and sausage rolls. If it was cold and wet, they carpeted the hut with the rugs and stayed inside; on fine days, they sat in the wood with their backs leaning against the trunk of a tree and watched the squirrels.
Nalini loved picnics. She told Norman about the marvellous picnics they had at home, how the servants got the hampers ready and packed them in the back of the car, and then they drove off to some lovely spot – it might be a deserted palace, or an amphitheatre, or a summer tank, always some romantic ruin overgrown with creepers and flowers – and there rugs were spread for them and they lay on them and looked at the sky and talked of this and that, recited poetry and played jokes on each other; when the hampers were unpacked, they contained roast chickens, grapes and chocolate cake.
‘Yes,’ said Nalini, ‘it was lovely but this,’ she said and ate a dry Marie biscuit, ‘this is a million billion times better.’
She meant it. He lay beside her on the rug they had spread; it was a fine day, so they were under a tree. Dead leaves crunched under the rug every time they moved; there weren’t many left up on the branches, and some of them were bright red and hung in precarious isolation on their stalks.
Norman too sighed with contentment. ‘Tell me more,’ he said. He never tired of hearing about her family life in their house in Delhi or, in the summer, up in Simla.
‘But you’ve heard it all hundreds of times! Tell me about you now. You never tell me anything.’
‘Oh me,’ said Norman. ‘My life’s tended to be rather dowdy up till now.’
‘And now?’
He groaned with excess of feeling and gathered her into his arms. He kissed her shoulder, her neck, one temple; he murmured from out of her hair, ‘You smell of honey.’
‘Do you think of me when I’m not there?’
‘Constantly.’
‘When you’re lecturing?’
‘Yes.’
‘When you’re with your wife?’
He released her and lay down again, and shut his eyes. She bent close over him; her coil of hair had come half-undone and she made it brush against his cheek. ‘Tell me how you think of me,’ she said.
‘As a vision and a glory,’ he said without opening his eyes. She drank in his face: how fine it looked, the skin thin and pale as paper with a multitude of delicate lines traced along the forehead, and the two deeply engraved lines that ran from his nose to his lips. It was a face, she felt, designed to register only the highest emotions known to mankind.
‘What sort of a vision?’ she asked. And when he didn’t answer, she begged him, ‘I want to hear it from you, tell me in beautiful words.’
He smiled at that and sat up and kissed her again; he said ‘There aren’t any words beautiful enough.’
‘Oh, yes, yes! Think of Chaucer and Pope! Do you ever write poetry, Norman? You don’t have to tell me – I know you do. You’re a poet really, aren’t you? At heart you are.’
‘I haven’t written anything in years.’
‘But now you’ll start again, I know it.’
He smiled and said, ‘It’s too late to start anything again.’
But she would never let him talk like that. If he referred to his forty years, his family, the moderateness of his fortunes, she would brush him aside and say that from now on everything would be different. She did not say how it would be different, nor did she think about it much; but she saw grand vistas opening before them both. Certainly it was inconceivable that, after the grand feelings that had caught them up, anything could ever be the same for either of them again. For the time being, however, she was content to let things go on as they were. She would be here for another two years, finishing her course; and although of course it would have been marvellous if they could have lived together in the same house, since that could not be, she would carry on with Mrs Crompton and he with his family. When the two years were up, they would see. Meanwhile, they had their hut and one another’s hearts – what else mattered? She was perfectly happy and wanted, for the moment, nothing more.
It was he who was restless and worried. She noticed during lectures that his hands played even more nervously with the edges of his gown than before; his face looked drawn, and quite often nowadays he seemed to have cut himself shaving so that the pallor of his cheeks was enhanced by a little blob of dried blood. Once in her anxiety she even approached him after lectures and, under cover of asking some academic question, whispered, ‘Is something wrong? Are you ill?’ A frightened expression came into his eyes.
Afterwards, when they were alone together in their own place, he begged her never again to talk to him like that in class. She laughed: ‘What’s it matter? No one noticed.’
‘I don’t care if they noticed or not. I don’t want it. It simply frightens me to death.’
‘You’re so timid,’ she teased him, ‘like a little mouse.’
‘That’s true. I always have been. All my life I’ve been terrified of being found out.’
At that she tossed her head. She certainly had no such fears and did not ever expect to have them.
Then he said, ‘I rather think I have been found out,’ and added, ‘It’s Estelle.’
‘Have you told her?’
‘When you’ve been married to someone as long as that, they don’t need to be told anything.’
After a short pause, she said, ‘I’m glad. Now everything is in the open.’
She knew certain steps would have to be taken, but was not sure what they were. It was no use consulting with Norman, he was in no state to plan anything; and besides, she wanted to spare him all the anxiety she could. In previous dilemmas of her life, she had always had Mummy by her side, and how they would discuss and talk and weigh the pros and cons, sitting up in Mummy’s large, cool bedroom with the air conditioner on. Now Mummy was not there, and even if she had been, this was a matter on which she would not be able to give advice. Poor Mummy, Nalini thought affectionately, how restricted her life had always been, how set in its pattern of being married and having children and growing older, and tasting life only through books and dreams.
Her English friends at college were also not fit to be let into an affair of such magnitude. Nalini was fond of them, of Maeve and the rest, but she could no longer take them quite seriously. This was because they were not serious people. Their concerns were of a superficial order, and even when they had connections with the men students, these too remained on a superficial level; never, at any point, did their lives seem to touch those depths of human involvement where Nalini now had her being. Once she had a long heart-to-heart talk with Maeve. Actually, it was Maeve who did most of the talking. They were in her room, which was very cosy, with a studio couch and an orange-shaded lamp and an open fire in the grate. They sat on the floor by the fire and drank coffee out of pottery mugs. Maeve talked of the future, how she hoped to get a research studentship and write a thesis on the political pamphlets of the early eighteenth century; for this she would have to go to London and spend a lot of time in the British Museum Reading Room. She spoke about all this very slowly and seriously, sitting on the floor with her long legs in brown knitted stockings stretched out in front of her and her head leaned back to rest against a chair; she blew smoke from her cigarette with a thoughtful air. Nalini had her legs tucked under her, which came easily to her, and her sari billowed around her in pale blue silk; sometimes she put up her hand to arrange something – her hair, a fold of her sari – and then the gold bangles jingled on her arms. There was something almost frivolous in her presence in that room with all the books and the desk full of notes and Maeve’s favourite Henry Moore study on the wall. Yet it wasn’t Nalini who was frivolous, it was large, solid Maeve. How could anyone, thought Nalini, endeavouring to listen with a sympathetic expression to what her friend was saying, talk with so serious an air of so unserious a future – indeed, how could a future spent in the British Museum Reading Room be considered as a future at all? She pitied Maeve, who looked healthy and human enough with her bright red cheeks and her long brown hair, but who did not appear to have as much as an inkling of what riches, what potentialities, lay waiting within a woman’s span of life.
Mrs Crompton seemed to know more about it. She carried, at any rate, a sense of loss, the obverse side of which postulated a sense of possibilities: she knew a woman’s sorrow and so must have, Nalini inferred, some notion of a woman’s joy. Mrs Crompton was not an easy person to get along with. She was hard and autocratic, and ran her household with an iron discipline. Every single little thing had its place, every action of the day its time: no kettle to be put on between ten in the morning and five in the afternoon, no radio to be switched on before noon. She did not encourage telephone calls. Nalini, who at home was used to a luxuriantly relaxed way of life, did not, after the initial shock, find it too difficult to fall in with Mrs Crompton’s rigid regime and always did her best to humour her. As a result, Mrs Crompton trusted her, even perhaps liked her as far as she was capable of liking (which was not, on the whole, very far – she was not by nature an affectionate person). They spent quite a lot of their evenings together, which suited both of them for, strangely enough, Nalini discovered that she was beginning to prefer Mrs Crompton’s company to that of the girls at college.
Indeed, in the evenings Mrs Crompton became a somewhat different person. When the day was done and its duties fulfilled, when the curtains were drawn and chairs arranged closer to the fire, at this cosy domestic hour her normally stern daytime manner began if not to crumble then at any rate to soften. Memories surged up in her, memories of Mr Crompton – though not so much of their life together as of their final parting. This seemed to have been the event in her life which stirred her deeper than anything that had ever gone before or come after. It had played, and was still playing, all her chords and made her reverberate with feelings of tremendous strength. Nalini admired these feelings: it was living, it was passion, it was the way a woman should be. She never tired of listening to Mrs Crompton’s story, she was the unfailing attendant and sympathizer of the tears that were wrung from this strong person. Nalini heard not only about Mr Crompton but also, a lot, about the other woman who had taken him away. There was one incident especially that Mrs Crompton often rehearsed and that Nalini listened to with special interest. It was when the other woman had come to visit Mrs Crompton (quite unexpectedly, one morning while she was hoovering in the back bedroom) and had asked her to give Mr Crompton up. Mrs Crompton had been at a disadvantage because she was only in her housedress and a turban tied round her head, while the other woman had had her hair newly done and was in a smart red suit with matching bag and shoes; nevertheless Mrs Crompton had managed to carry off the occasion with such dignity – without showing anger, without even once raising her voice, doing nothing more in fact than in a firm voice enunciating right principles – that it was the other woman who had wept and, before leaving, had had to go to the bathroom to repair her make-up.
Nalini was careful to wear her plainest sari when she went to call on Estelle Greaves. She had no desire to show Norman’s wife up to an even greater disadvantage than she guessed she already would be. She had not, however, expected to find quite so unattractive a person. She was shocked, and afterwards kept asking Norman: ‘But how did you ever get married to her?’
Norman didn’t answer. There were dark patches of shadow under his eyes, and he kept running his hand through his hair.
‘She can’t ever have been pretty. It’s not possible, how can she? Of course, probably she wasn’t so fat before but even so – and she’s older than you.’
‘She’s the same age.’
‘She looks years older.’
‘For God’s sake,’ Norman said suddenly, ‘shut up.’
Nalini was surprised, but she saw it was best to humour him. And it was such a beautiful day, they ought really to be doing nothing but enjoying it. There was a winter stillness in the air, and a hint of ice in its sharp crystal clearness against which the touches of autumn that still lingered in fields, trees and hedges looked flushed and exotic. ‘Let’s walk a bit,’ she said, tucking her hand under his arm.
He disengaged himself from her: ‘Why did you do it?’ he said in a puzzled, tortured way. ‘Whatever possessed you?’
‘I wanted to clear the air,’ she said grandly; and added, even more grandly, ‘I can’t live with a lie.’
He gave a shout of exasperation; then he asked, ‘Is that the sort of language you used with her?’
‘Oh, with her.’ Nalini shrugged and pouted. ‘She’s just impossible to talk to. Whenever you try and start on anything serious with her, she jumps up and says the shepherd’s pie is burning. Oh Norman, Norman, how do you stand it? How can you live with her and in such an atmosphere? Your house is so – I don’t know, uncared for. Everything needs cleaning and repairing. I can’t bear to think of you in such a place, you with your love for literature and everything that’s lovely—’
He winced and walked away from her. He did not walk through the wood but along the edge of it, in the direction of the next house. This was a way they usually avoided, for they wanted to steer clear of the old people living around. But today he seemed too distraught to care.
‘Why are you annoyed with me?’ she asked, following him. ‘I did right, Norman.’
‘No,’ he said; he stopped still and looked at her, earnestly, in pain: ‘You did very, very wrong.’
She touched his pale cheek, pleadingly. Her hand was frail and so was her wrist round which she wore three gold bangles. Suddenly he seized her hand and kissed its palm many times over. They went back to their hut where they bolted the door, and at once he was making love to her with the same desperate feverishness with which he had kissed her hand.
She was well pleased, but he more guilty and downcast than before. As he fastened his clothes, he said, ‘You know, I really mustn’t see you any more.’
She laughed: ‘Silly billy,’ she said, tenderly, gaily, in her soft Indian accent.
But from this time on, he often declared that it was time they parted. He blamed himself for coming to meet her at all and said that, if he had any resolution in him, he would not show up again. She was not disturbed by these threats – which she knew perfectly well he could never carry out – but sometimes they irritated her.
She told him, ‘It’s your wife who’s putting you up to this.’ He looked at her for a moment as if she were mad. ‘She hates me,’ Nalini said.
‘She hasn’t said so. But of course you can’t expect—’
‘Well I hate her too,’ Nalini said. ‘She is stupid.’
‘No one could call Estelle stupid.’
‘I’ve met her, so you can’t tell me. She has nothing to say and she doesn’t even understand what’s said to her. It’s impossible to talk to her intelligently.’
‘What did you expect her to talk to you intelligently about?’
‘About you. Us. Everything.’
He was silent, so she assumed she had won her point. She began to do her hair. She took out all her pins and gave them to him to hold. But it turned out that he had more to say.
‘It was so wrong of you to come to our house like that. And what did you want? Some great seething scene of passion and renunciation, such as Indians like to indulge in?’
‘Don’t dare say anything bad against my country!’
‘I’m not, for God’s sake, saying anything bad against your country!’
‘Yes, you are. And it’s your wife who has taught you. I could see at one glance that she was anti-Indian.’
‘Please don’t let’s talk about my wife any more.’
‘Yes, we will talk about her. I’ll talk about her as much as I like. What do you think, I’m some fallen woman that I’m not allowed to speak your wife’s name? Give me my pins.’ She plucked them from out of his hand and stabbed them angrily into her coil of hair. ‘And I’ll tell you something more. From now on everything is going to change. I’m tired of this hole-and-corner business. You must get a divorce.’
‘A splendid idea. You’re not forgetting that I have four children?’
‘You can have ten for all I care. You must leave that woman! It is she or I. Choose.’
Norman got up and let himself out of the hut. At the door he turned and said in a quiet voice, ‘You know I’m no good at these grand scenes.’
He walked away through the garden up on to the path which would lead him to the bus stop. He had a small, lithe figure and walked with his head erect, showing some dignity; he did not look back nor lose that dignity even when she shouted after him: ‘You’re afraid! You’re a coward! You want to have your cake and eat it!’
They made it up after a day or two. But their separate ideas remained, his that they must part, hers that he must get a divorce. They began to quarrel quite frequently. She enjoyed these fights, both for themselves and for the lovely sensations involved in making them up afterwards. He found them exasperating, and called her a harridan and a fishwife: a preposterous appellation, for what could be further from the image of a harridan and a fishwife than this delicate little creature in silk and gold, with the soft voice and the soft, tender ways. Once he asked her: ‘All right – supposing I get a divorce, what next? What do you suggest? Do we stay here, do I go on teaching at the university and support two families on my princely salary? You tell me.’
‘Oh no,’ she said at once, ‘I’ll take you with me to India.’
This idea amused him immensely. He saw himself taken away as a white slave boy, cozened and coddled and taught to play the flute. He asked her to describe how they would live in India, and she said that she would dress him up in a silk pyjama and she would oil his hair and curl it round her finger and twice a day, morning and evening, she would bathe him in milk. It became one of their pastimes to play at being in India, a game in which he would loll on the rug spread on the floor of their hut and she would hold his head in her lap and comb him and pet him and massage his cheeks: this was fun, but it did not, Nalini reflected, get them any further.
‘Dearest Mummy, How I long for one of our cosy chats up in the bedroom. I have so much to tell you. Darling Mummy, I have found someone with whom I want to share my life and I know you too will love him. He is exactly the sort of person we have always dreamed of, so sensitive and intelligent like an English poet.’ But she never sent that letter. Mummy was so far away, it might be difficult for her to understand. Besides, she could not really do anything yet to solve their practical problems. One of these was particularly pressing just now. Winter had come on, and it was beginning to get too cold to use their hut. Icy blasts penetrated through the wooden boards, and Norman’s teeth never stopped chattering. But where else could they go? Norman said nowhere, it just meant that they must not see each other any more, that the cycle of seasons was dictating what moral right had already insisted on long ago. Nalini had learned to ignore such defeatist talk.
It was around this time that she first confided in Mrs Crompton. This came about quite naturally, one evening when they were both sitting by the fire, Mrs Crompton with her large hands in her lap, Nalini crocheting a little rose bedjacket for herself. Sometimes Nalini lowered her work and stared before her with tragic eyes. It was silent in the room, with a low hum from the electric fire. Nalini sighed, and Mrs Crompton sighed, and then Nalini sighed again. Words were waiting to be spoken, and before long they were. Nalini told her everything: about Norman, and Estelle, and the children, and the hut, and the cold weather. Also how Norman was going to get a divorce and go away with her to India. Mrs Crompton listened without comment but with, it seemed, sympathy. Later, when they had already said goodnight and Nalini had gone up to her room and changed into her brushed nylon nightie, Mrs Crompton came in to tell her that it would be all right if she brought Norman to the house. Nalini gave a big whoop and flung her arms round Mrs Crompton’s neck, just as she used to do to Mummy when Mummy had done something lovely and nice, crying in a voice chock-full of gratitude, ‘Oh you darling, you darling you!’
Norman hated coming to the house. He kept saying he was sure Mrs Crompton was listening outside the door. Once Nalini abruptly opened the door of her room, to convince him that no one was there, but he only shook his head and said that she was listening through the ceiling from downstairs. Certainly, they were both of them – even Nalini – very much aware of Mrs Crompton’s presence in the house. Sometimes they heard her moving about and that put them out, and sometimes they didn’t hear any sound from her at all and that put them out even more. When it was time for Norman to leave and they came down the stairs, she was invariably there, waiting for them in the hall. ‘Do have a cup of tea before you go,’ she would say, but he always made some excuse and left hurriedly. Then she would be disappointed, even a little surly, and Nalini would have to work hard to soothe her.
Nalini had made her room so attractive with lots of photographs of the family and embroidered cushions and an Indian wall-hanging, but Norman was always uncomfortable, all the time he was there. Sometimes even he would make an excuse not to come, he would send a note to say he had a lecture to deliver at an evening class, or that he was suffering from toothache and had to visit the dentist. Then Mrs Crompton and Nalini would both be disappointed and turn off the lights and the fires and go to bed early.
She boldly went up to him after classes and said, ‘You haven’t been for a week.’ He raised his eyes – which were a very pale, almost translucent blue, and remarkably clear among the dark shadows left around them by anxiety and sleepless nights – and he looked with them not at her but directly over her head. But he came that evening. He said, ‘I told you you mustn’t ever do that.’
‘I had to – you didn’t come so long.’
He sighed and passed his hand over his eyes and down his face.
‘You’re tired,’ she said. ‘My poor darling, you’ve been working too hard.’ With swift, graceful movements, which set her bangles jingling, she settled pillows on her bed and smoothed the counterpane invitingly. But he didn’t lie down. He hadn’t even taken his coat off.
‘Please let me go, Nalini,’ he said in a quiet, grave voice.
‘Go where, my own darling?’
‘I want us not to see each other any more.’
‘Again!’
‘No, this time really – please.’ He sank into an armchair, as if in utter exhaustion.
‘You’ve been talking to your wife,’ she said accusingly.
‘Who would I talk to if not to my wife. She is my wife, you know, Nalini. We’ve been together for a long time and through all sorts of things. That does mean a lot. I’m a wretchedly weak person and you must forgive me.’
‘You’re not weak. You’re sensitive. Like an artist.’
He made a helpless, hopeless gesture with his hand. Then he got up and quickly went downstairs. Mrs Crompton was waiting at the foot of the stairs. She said, ‘Do have a cup of tea before you go.’ Norman didn’t answer but hurried away. He had his coat collar up and there was something guilty and suspicious about him which made Mrs Crompton look after him with narrowed eyes.
Mrs Crompton told Nalini about men: that they were selfish and grasping and took what they wanted and then they left. She illustrated all this with reference to Mr Crompton. But Nalini did not believe that Norman was like Mr Crompton. Norman was suffering. She could hardly bear to look at him during lectures because she saw how he suffered. These were terrible days. It was the end of winter, and whatever snow there had been, was now melting and the same slush colour as the sky that drooped spiritlessly over the town. Nalini felt the cold at last, and wore heavy sweaters and coats over her sari, and boots on her small feet. She hated being muffled up like that and sometimes she felt she was choking. She didn’t know what to do with herself nowadays – she did not care to be much with the girls at college and she had lost the taste for Mrs Crompton’s company. She hardly worked at all and got very low marks in all her subjects. Once the professor called her and told her that she would either have to do better or leave the course. She burst into tears and he thought it was because of what he was saying, but it wasn’t that at all: she often cried nowadays, tears spurting out of her eyes at unexpected moments. She spent a lot of time in bed, crying. She tossed from side to side, thinking, wondering. She could not understand how it could all have ended like that, so abruptly and for nothing. They had been happy, and it had been radiant and wonderful, and after that how could he go back to that house with the leaking taps and the ungainly woman in it and all those children?
The weather was warmer. It was a good spring that year, and crocuses appeared even in Mrs Crompton’s garden. Nalini began to feel better – not happy, but better. She went out for walks again with one or two friends, and sometimes they had tea together, or went to the music society. It was all very much like before. One fine Sunday she and Maeve took a walk outside the town. There were cows in the fields, and newly shorn sheep, and the hedges were brimming with tiny buds. Nalini remembered how she had walked with Maeve the year before, and how dissatisfied she had felt while Maeve, in her brown knitted stockings, talked of Anglo-Saxon vowel changes. Today Maeve wore patterned stockings, and she talked of her chances of a research studentship; there were several other strong candidates in the field – for instance, Dorothy Horne whose forte was the metaphysicals. Nalini listened to her with kindly interest. The air was full of balmy scents and the sky of little white clouds like lambs. Nalini felt sorry for Maeve and, after that, she felt sorry for all of them – Dorothy Horne and the other girls, and Mrs Crompton and Norman.
‘Dearest Mummy, What a clever clever little thing you are! Yes you are right, I have not been happy lately . . . You know me so well, our hearts are open to each other even with such a distance between us. Here people are not like that. I don’t believe that Shakespeare or Keats or Shelley or any of them can have been English! I think they were Indians, at least in their previous birth!!! Darling, please talk to Daddy and ask him to let me come home for the long vac. I miss you and long for you and want to be with you all soon. I don’t think the teaching here is all that good, there is no one like Miss Subramaniam at the dear old Queen Alex with such genuine love for literature and able to inspire their pupils. A thousand million billion kisses, my angel Mummy.’