‘Let me rub some sun cream on your back as well,’ she said to Clare. ‘You know, you do have a gorgeous body.’
‘Thank you,’ said Clare, blushing a little.
‘No wonder Tammy finds you irresistible…’ Maria’s voice trailed off as she squinted to see into the distance. ‘My God, look at him! I hope he doesn’t swim out too far. There’s a nasty undertow on this coast, so I’ve heard.’
Clare followed Maria’s narrow-eyed stare and saw Tammy striding into the sea, being pushed back by waves as they broke against him. Eventually, he flung himself forward and began to swim.
Clare could not stop thinking about the cripple’s note, and what its omission of any reference to Tammy might imply. On the radio that morning there’d been an announcement that the police were getting closer to tracking down the assassins, whatever that meant in actual reality. Clare thought that if they really were on the verge of making arrests, it would make the assassins all the more desperate to strike at Tammy so as to silence him as a damaging witness. On the drive to Sandeha, she’d seen a number of motorbikes, each one causing her anxiety in case it could’ve been the two young men. But as she realised the riders were nothing like those she feared, she would relax, dismissing her anxieties, even embarrassed about allowing them to haunt her.
‘You’re crazy about him, aren’t you?’ Maria said, interrupting Clare’s thoughts. ‘As mad for him as I am for Antonio.’
‘Who? Tammy?’ Clare asked defiantly. ‘No! I most certainly am not.’
Having seen Vijaya in tears, Maria had been filled with an avid curiosity ever since. Clare resisted many of her questions, either answering them obliquely or not at all. But she did tell Maria about Max and Narayan, which Maria unconvincingly claimed to have guessed at already. Hesitant at first, Clare also found herself revealing the brief encounter between herself and Tammy. She soon wished she hadn’t, because Maria then became determined to urge her on.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Max has Narayan after all.’
‘But I feel very badly about Vijaya.’
‘You’ve no reason to,’ said Maria. ‘You’re not at all to blame for what’s happened.’
Nonetheless, Clare couldn’t get the sound of Vijaya weeping upstairs out of her mind. She recalled her own brief argument with Tammy afterwards.
‘I said I’d never marry her,’ he’d told Clare with very evident distress. ‘I respected her greatly but we were not compatible.’
‘You shouldn’t have told her that,’ Clare had replied, appalled. ‘It was cruel.’
They could not discus it further then because they’d had to join the others, who’d been waiting by the two cars, Tammy’s and Narayan’s. Vijaya had come downstairs then, feeling compelled to say goodbye. She’d joked about the wretched aunts who seemed to tyrannise her, however much she laughed at them, bravely covering up her enormous hurt regarding Tammy.
It now seemed that Tammy had changed his mind about swimming in the sea and was making his way back to shore. Clare watched him anxiously, wondering what he might do next. Sam was climbing all over her, joyfully exploring this newly acquired territory, trying to probe her mouth with his sticky fingers.
‘Stop him doing that,’ said Maria.
‘Oh no,’ Clare said, shaking her head. ‘He’s so affectionate. He doesn’t seem to know what an inhibition is, does he?’
‘More’s the pity,’ said Maria as she put a pair of binoculars to her eyes and began to focus on something over towards the temple, or perhaps on the temple itself.
‘A few self-respecting inhibitions wouldn’t do it any harm at all,’ she went on. ‘My God, Clare darling! Look! Max and Narayan are climbing the temple.’
She handed the binoculars to Clare. She set Sam down at her side, and raised the binoculars to her eyes. She had to adjust them slightly before she could make out Max stretching up his arms to find a handhold. Above him, Narayan was moving his hands and feet gingerly across the stonework.
Tammy was back on the beach and heading towards the temple himself.
‘Max isn’t good at heights,’ Clare said. ‘Presumably Narayan is. I hope he is.’
‘He’s strange, that one,’ said Maria. ‘A bundle of contradictions. What a fantastic body, though! It’s all that pumping iron, I suppose. If I writhed and grunted in a gym, heaving weights around, do you think I’d ever be reduced to a shape more like that? Oh baby, sweetie baby, tell me that it’s possible! Go on.’
Maria lifted Sam into the air, where he cooed benignly at her, before gently putting him down again. She beamed at Clare.
‘Antonio’s such a brute,’ she confided. ‘What a dance macabre the monster led me! And then I lost him, even after I bore him a son! Now, though, it seems it may not be for good. He sent me a text to tell me the Innamorata is goading him past endurance.’
‘The Innamorata?’
‘That skeletal creature he ditched me for, lured by the reek of her abominable loot. Apparently, she’s flying into screaming tantrums whenever he glances at another woman by accident, which probably happens only every half a minute or so, I’d say.’
Clare laughed. Sam was trying to remove the bung from a thermos flask that he’d pulled from the basket Maria had brought with them.
‘My gin!’ she cried out in simulated panic. ‘My chilled gin and tonic!’
She uncurled the child’s stubborn fingers from the bung, then unscrewed it and poured a dash of the contents into a cup.
Clare watched, astonished, as she gave it to Sam to drink.
‘It makes it so much better tempered,’ Maria gaily told her, although Sam sipped at it with a screwed-up face, obviously not approving of the taste at all. ‘Little angel monkey,’ she added, kissing the child lightly on his lips. ‘Monstrous little putto. Can you imagine it, Clare, painted on a Renaissance ceiling, all plump and rosy? Imagine its cherubic fat wings, and sweet little leer, hovering over some large sexy lady who is trying to forget her horrible butch lover and longing for some delicate, sweet substitute.’
Clare picked up the binoculars again and looked towards the temple. Tammy was now standing at its base, apparently readying himself to begin the climb. Max was halfway up, and Narayan was still above him. Clare thought it was typical of Max to want to climb this derelict temple, the element of danger adding to the romance of it, no doubt. Would they not be damaging its surface, though, however lightly? Was it not a form of desecration?
Tammy started climbing.
‘I think it’s boozing time,’ Maria announced. ‘Come on, let’s have some gin and tonic to celebrate the downfall of the dread Innamorata, cast into the outer darkness by the maddened animal.
‘Here’s to The Animal!’
‘I toast to him,’ Maria cried, handing a cup to Clare and taking a swig or two from her own. She gazed at The Putto – her current favourite name for him – but he wasn’t hovering over her with a sweetie leer at all. Instead, he was stumbling around in a most unfriendly sulk, letting off cross little squeaks that Maria airily ignored.
Clare turned and noticed Subramaniam was approaching them, leaning on his stick, his shadow hobbling before him as if it lured him on across the windblown sand. She took a sip from her cup, and shifted her focus to the sea.
‘The tide’s coming in very fast,’ she said to Maria.
Narayan was nearing the crest of the temple. Max was directly below him, and Tammy was about halfway up now.
‘The temple’s much smaller than I’d imagined it over all these years,’ said Subramaniam as he reached the two women. ‘I pictured it covered with a hundred gods and heroes. Maybe the sea has worn them away.’ He sighed. ‘It’s more than fifty years since I last came here, you know, maybe even sixty. At my great age, time often seems so unreal; the distant past could have been in some other quite different life. Who knows what other lives I’ve led, or what other forms my wandering soul’s inhabited.’
He smiled gently at the two women, as if suspecting they were sceptical of such beliefs.
‘But reincarnation does pose problems,’ he conceded. ‘The idea of karma has its difficulties.’
‘Bad luck in this life being down to sins committed in a previous one?’ queried Clare.
‘Indeed, yes. I had a son who was born deformed. He died when he was only eight years old. I hated to think that was because of sins he’d committed in a past life. That’s so unjust. But no religion is perfect. All of them present us with their problems, in our search for transcendent meaning in this puzzling, often very painful, life of ours. So, so.’ Subramaniam paused reflectively before continuing. ‘I’m very happy to see the temple again,’ he said. ‘A reminder of my innocent youth. Why, though, are these young men climbing all over it? Is that entirely respectful of them?’
‘I was thinking the same,’ said Clare.
‘It is a religious building, even if it has been abandoned to the wind and waves. Maybe they think of themselves as the modern equivalents to those mythic heroes: Tammy with his economics, Narayan with his physics, a subject that tries to reduce the entire world to the whirling around of tiny atoms, lacking in both mystery and meaning. Oh but we’ve had such discussions, he and I.’
‘Surely Narayan sees the laws of physics as purely human hypotheses,’ Clare suggested.
‘Yes, they don’t exclude the possibility of divine purpose, of ultimate spiritual significance,’ agreed the Professor. ‘Nor do they exclude the possibility of human goodness, such as we need so much in these bad times of terror and fanaticism. That young how could he have been so cruel? Narayan has never lost his beloved Hindu faith, as Tammy seems to have, the poor dear fellow. And which of them is the happier, I ask you? Which is the more understanding and secure? Does Tammy think we can save this ancient country with all these soulless forms of modern knowledge?’
While Subramaniam was speaking, Clare looked from time to time through Maria’s binoculars. She saw Max lever himself up and stand on the summit with Narayan – and then she saw them put their arms around each other. She felt a sudden stab of exasperation, although she knew she was being jealous. Eager for distraction, she turned to catch Maria telling Subramaniam about Antonio, much to her surprise.
‘He is an animal?’ asked Subramaniam, determined to take Maria in his gentle stride. ‘Well, many of our gods take the forms of animals. We find it a very touching notion.’ He looked at the sea for a while. ‘Look at the tide coming in so fast; the sea so rough.’ He turned back to Maria. ‘So what kind of animal is your husband?’
‘A cross between a rabid tiger and a lecherous great ape.’
‘Well, you joke about him, but even a tiger has its gentleness, and even the ape possesses a kind of beauty that is not immediately apparent to our human eyes. If he’s your husband, though – animal or otherwise – why did he not come with you to these shores?’
‘Because he deserted me for another woman,’ said Maria flatly. ‘Actually, I’ve a new theory to account for his philandering. I suspect he’s a repressed gay. Not only repressed but very chauvinistic, and macho, hence his pathetic attempts to prove himself by being such a compulsive lady-killer.’
‘The human spirit has always been repressed,’ observed Subramaniam. ‘It is the very condition of the finite, earth-bound soul. As for being gay, that is very marvellous! Every bit of gaiety brings us ever closer to the soul divine – and that is of a boundless happiness.’
‘What I meant by gay is homosexual,’ Maria apparently felt required to say.
‘Oh,’ said the old man. ‘Homosexual? I didn’t know that was especially gay. We have little of it in India.’
‘You might think that,’ Clare said on impulse, immediately regretting it.
‘A great shame, in my opinion,’ said Maria. ‘It might solve some of your population problems. Far more fulfilling than vasectomy.’
‘Vasectomy’s no more the answer than being gay is. All this frantic desire, this pursuit of sheer physical sensation, when chastity is what is needed: more restraint and quiet contemplation.’
‘Chastity!’ exclaimed Maria. ‘That’s asking far too much. No, you ought to have loudspeaker vans touring the villages, advertising the joys of all non-reproductive sex.’ She carried on, although Clare rather hoped that she would stop.
‘Homosexuality should be positively encouraged,’ she said, ‘at least up to its natural limits. Seven per cent or so, I think it is. A most effective and natural means of birth control at a time when your population is over the billion mark.’
‘You mustn’t think I’m intolerant,’ the old man replied, blinking mildly, ‘but all forms of love are an aspect, however partial, of the divine love that is in us all. Abstinence, though, doesn’t mean misery. Chastity can be very gay. The triumph of the soul over the body is a very happy thing indeed. The power of chaste love is infinitely greater than that of mere carnality, which can be so frustrating and tormenting.’
Clare was still intermittently looking at the temple, around the base of which the tide was now swirling. She saw Tammy clinging to the stonework. The sun dazzled her eyes for a few moments. The scene seemed to tremble and was lost to her, but then she found it again. Tammy looked to be about six metres up. He suddenly moved his head sideways, as if intending to look up at Max and Narayan.
There was a violent burst upon the stonework, just where Tammy’s head had been. He lost his handhold. There was another explosion of stone dust. Tammy’s body swayed across and was left hanging from only one hand.
Another explosion. He lost his grip entirely, his arms flew backwards, and he began to fall. Horrified, she heard his sudden cry.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Clare ran. It took a minute for her to reach the water that now surrounded the temple (she later learnt it had been an abnormally high tide). As she ran, her thoughts were whirling. Were those bullets that had struck the temple? There’d been no noise, but a rifle could have been fitted with a silencer. Some fishermen and children were also racing towards the temple, stumbling in the loose, wind-driven sand.
Tammy had fallen into the water. He appeared to be unconscious, his head bobbing limply up and down as the water rose and fell. Had a bullet hit him? Max was climbing back down, fast; Narayan too. The fishermen had reached the temple, and Clare wondered if the marksman was among them. The waves surged on, and Max dived into them, ignoring any risk of danger to himself. Narayan followed. Both of them vanished, as if sucked down by a cascading wave. Seconds later, Clare saw them farther out, their arms beating hard in the driving surf. She watched as they desperately sought to save Tammy.
She scanned the fishermen. They were moving frantically about, pointing and shouting. There was a tall man noticeable among them, his back to her.
Twenty metres out, Max and Narayan converged. A wave seized hold of Tammy’s body, and his head disappeared below the water. Above the spray, the gulls shrieked and wheeled about in fierce excitement. Clare heard a voice calling from behind her; it was Subramaniam, who was holding his hands together in prayer.
The sea was running even higher. Clare saw Max emerge from one of the waves and then saw Tammy’s body slide down another before being thrown to the top of a splitting breaker. It was there that Max managed to get hold on him. With one arm around his chest, he began to tow him back to shore. Narayan joined them moments later and helped to keep Tammy’s head above the water.
Clare felt an enormous surge of gratitude to both men. It coursed through her body like electricity. She wanted to keep her eyes on them as they approached the shore but something, some instinct, compelled her to turn her head.
She saw the face of the tall man, lined, bearded and frowning intensely. Then she saw the crutches. She believed it was the cripple. Were the two youths with him? She looked around, searching frantically, but the group was breaking up. She couldn’t make them out among the excited, moving fishermen. She looked back, but the cripple had disappeared. The number of onlookers was growing. People were hurrying from all directions, gathering in little awed clusters, as they watched Max and Narayan bring Tammy back.
A terrifying thought seized hold of Clare. What if someone on shore was waiting for Tammy? What if they would try to kill him in some other way?
Max and Narayan reached the shore. Max took Tammy in his arms and carried him a little way up the beach before placing him gently down by a clump of seaweed. He put his mouth to Tammy’s and began to breathe into it. Clare and Narayan crouched down next to them. Subramaniam stood a short distance away, chanting his prayers, while the temple, silhouetted against the sky, threw its long, twilight shadow across the beach.
Maria had stayed behind with Sam, but now she advanced towards them, holding his squirming, protesting body tightly in her arms.
Clare concentrated on what Max was doing. She knew he’d been trained in First Aid resuscitation. She watched as he breathed hard into Tammy’s mouth, and then leant his hands on his sternum, pressing several times in measured sequence. There was no response. Fervently she wished for that inert body to revive, for even a flicker of breath to stir his chest. Tammy had a cut on his forehead and it was oozing blood. His hand, now stiff and pale, rested on the straggling seaweed.
‘Let me help,’ Clare said, involuntarily recalling Violet’s fight for air.
Max pulled back, allowing Clare the space to put her mouth to Tammy’s and breathe into his lungs. Max positioned himself so that he could continue the compressions on Tammy’s sternum. Between breaths, Clare put a hand to his forehead. It was a cut, not a bullet hole. It was bleeding profusely, though. She tried, ineffectually, to stem the flow with her hand, feeling his blood pulse beneath her fingers. She kept up the breathing, aware of Subramanian chanting his prayers, and the idea helped her. It served as an antidote to her bemused feelings about the cripple. She hadn’t seen him again. She wondered why he’d tried to kill Tammy in that extraordinary way. She supposed he’d been watching Tammy for some time and had seized his chance when he saw him climb the temple. He’d be separated from her, alone and totally exposed.
There was still no response, still no movement of Tammy’s chest. Lifting her head, Clare saw the fishermen and children in a circle around them, now watching silently. There were two or three youths among them, although she couldn’t make out their faces in the fading light. She couldn’t let herself think of the assassins, or the cripple. She couldn’t afford to be afraid of them, not there and then. She had to focus all her energy, everything she had to give, on reviving Tammy. His lips felt cold and hard, but she kept going. She felt her own heart thud as she thrust all her breath into Tammy’s saturated lungs till her head began to ache.
Tammy’s eyelids flickered.
‘Tammy!’ Clare exclaimed, feeling the tears welling in her eyes.
His eyes began to open, his head jerked back, and water spurted from his mouth. He coughed convulsively. His back arched, and his hands beat at the sand. Clare watched with awe and pity as he fought for air, for life; it was as if he was struggling to return to her. Eventually, the coughing slowed, and his breathing grew more regular and strong. His eyes seemed to focus in dim bemusement and he mumbled a few incoherent words. Max moved forward, and Clare moved away to allow him to turn Tammy onto his side.
Clare remembered something Narayan had said to her about falling in love against one’s own will.
She looked around and noticed that the two youths had now gone. They were probably innocent onlookers. If they were conceivably the assassins, they might still attempt to murder Tammy, although they were unlikely to try when so many people surrounded him. She realised they might make a move later on, when he was quite alone, and that must be prevented at all costs. The cripple still hadn’t reappeared and she began to wonder if, in her fear and confusion, she’d imagined him.
It was only then they noticed Tammy’s leg wound. His thigh was streaming blood. Narayan tore a strip from the towel he’d brought, and Max found a piece of driftwood with which they made a clumsy tourniquet. He tightened it around Tammy’s upper thigh and the bleeding stopped. He tore another strip from the towel, which he used to secure the folded remainder tightly against the leg wound. He then loosened the tourniquet a little. The cut on his forehead had stopped bleeding.
‘We can’t move him,’ Max said. ‘Not for quite some time.’
It was another half-hour before Tammy sat up. Vaguely he asked what had happened. They told him but, not surprisingly, he didn’t take it all in at first. As they walked slowly back to the hotel, a curious levity seemed to overcome them. This was partly helped by Maria’s jokes, especially about The Putto. Strangely, he did not seem to have been upset by all the drama. Indeed, he seemed to approve, as if assuming it had all been put on for his entertainment. He waved his chubby hands in cherubic blessing and, after some gurgles of satisfaction and an appreciative belch or two, fell fast asleep in his mother’s enfolding arms.
Subramaniam limped back, leaning heavily on Narayan’s shoulder. Tammy, now being carried with in Max’s strong arms, still appeared stunned, although he too laughed a little. It was only when they reached the hotel that Clare felt the full force of her shock, and she laughed and wept in relief. She knew now that she was in love with Tammy, but Narayan’s gaze of curiosity made her see the need to control her feelings.