WHEN LEILA came home in the evening, exhausted and quiet, he told her first of his summons to the Residency.
‘That’s what it amounted to, a summons.’
They were having a drink before dinner. Leila took a small sherry. To that extent he had already corrupted her.
‘Did he say what it was about?’ she asked.
‘No. Important, he said. Urgent. Men only. I didn’t actually say I would go.’
‘But you must, Andrew.’
‘Why must I?’
‘You are a British subject.’
‘So are you now, as my wife.’
She smiled. She would always regard herself as a Savuan.
‘If I go,’ he said, ‘I’ll warn him before he says anything that you and I have no secrets from each other.’
‘Haven’t we, Andrew?’ How intelligent and how honest were her brown eyes; and also how humorous.
There had been that monstrous secret of his, that the more he loved and needed her the more he had wanted to hurt her. But that was safely past; no need therefore for her ever to know.
‘Another thing,’ he said, and told her about Mr Srinavasan’s having seen Albert Lo and Richard Chia in the College grounds talking to students. ‘Did you know they were coming to Savu Town?’
She shook her head. ‘They spoke about it but I advised them to stay where they were.’
‘Well, they don’t seem to have taken your advice. Very foolish of them.’
‘Yes, but they’re desperately keen to help us win the elections. It will be a terrible disappointment for them if we lose.’
Of the thirty-two seats being contested twenty of them were in Savu Town itself.
‘It must be hard for you to understand, Andrew, how these young men feel. You’ve lived in a democracy all your life. They’ve never known anything but dictatorship. They feel ashamed.’
Sandilands said nothing. He was thinking that the most terrible disappointment that could come to Chia and Lo and other young hopefuls like them wouldn’t be the loss of the elections, but what would follow if the elections were won. They would soon find that the Utopia they dreamed of was as far away as ever. Leila herself would be frustrated by timid, cautious, self-serving, corruptible colleagues.
She suddenly changed the subject. ‘I went to see Mrs Daya today, Andrew. She has a daughter the same age as Christina.’
‘Was the girl with her?’
‘Yes. They were both weeping. I’m afraid so was I. A good lawyer does not cry with her clients.’
‘I think I might have wept too.’
That scene in the prison cell was reality, the elections with their promise of democracy was illusion.
‘Will you come with me next time, Andrew?’
There would be too much self-revelation for him in that prison cell, but he said that he would go with her.
She gazed at him with unambiguous love – what he himself was so far incapable of – and said, softly, ‘Have you got over it, Andrew?’
He was startled. Over what? Had she guessed? Had she seen it in his shifty eyes? Better not to ask, better to leave it unspoken, not only now but for the rest of their lives.