THE SWIRLING RIVER that winds from Mundy’s birth to Sasha’s reincarnation at the Linderhof has its source not in the shires of England but in the accursed mountain ranges and ravines of the Hindu Kush that under three centuries of British colonial administration became the North-West Frontier Province.
“This young sahib of mine you see here,” the retired major of infantry who was Mundy’s father would announce in the private bar of the Golden Swan in Weybridge to anybody unfortunate enough not to have heard the story before, or who had heard it a dozen times but was too courteous to say, “is by way of being a bit of an historical rarity, aren’t you, boy, aren’t you?”
And, slipping an affectionate arm round the adolescent Mundy’s shoulder, would muss his hair before turning him to the light for ease of scrutiny. The Major is small, fiery and impassioned. His gestures, even in love, are never less than pugilistic. His son is a beanstalk, already taller than his father by a head.
“And I’ll tell you for why young Edward here is a rarity, if you’ll permit me, sir,” he would continue, gathering steam as he addresses all the sirs within range, and the ladies too, for they still have an eye for him, and he for them. “On the morning my bearer reported to me that the memsahib was about to do me the honor of presenting me with a child—this very child here, sir—a perfectly normal Indian sun was rising over the regimental infirmary.”
A stage pause, of the sort Mundy too will one day learn to make, as the Major’s glass also mystically rises and his head dips to greet it.
“However, sir,” he would resume. “However. By the time this same young man deigned to appear on parade”—swinging accusingly round to Mundy now, but the fierce blue gaze as doting as ever—“without your topee, sir, fourteen days confined to barracks, as we used to say!—that sun up there wasn’t Indian anymore. It belonged to the self-governing Dominion of Pakistan. Didn’t it, boy? Didn’t it?”
At which the boy will most likely blush, and stammer out something like, “Well, so you tell me, Father,” which would be enough to earn him a kindly laugh, and for the Major just possibly another drink on someone else’s tab, and an opportunity to point the moral of his tale.
“Madame History a very fickle lady, sir”—in the telegramese later inherited by his son. “You can march for her day and night. Sweat your guts out for her. Shit, shine, shave, shampoo for her. Doesn’t make a blind bit o’ difference. The day she doesn’t want you—out. Dismiss. Scrap heap. Enough said.” A fresh glass is by now making its ascent. “Your good health, sir. Generous man. To the Queen-Emperor. God bless her. Coupled with the name of the Punjabi fighting man. Finest soldier ever lived, bar none. Provided he is led, sir. There’s the rub.”
And a ginger beer for the young sahib if he’s lucky, while the Major in a fit of emotion whisks a khaki handkerchief from the sleeve of his frayed military sports jacket and, having first hammered his fussy little mustache with it, dabs his cheeks before returning it to base.
The Major had cause for his tears. The day of Pakistan’s birth, as the Golden Swan’s customers know all too well, robbed him not only of his career, but also of his wife who, having taken one exhausted look at her overdue and overlong son had, like the Empire, expired.
“That woman, sir —” It is the evening watering hour, and the Major is waxing sentimental. “Only one word to describe her: quality. First time I saw her, she was in her riding clothes, out for a dawn canter with a couple of bearers. Done five Hot Weathers in the plains and looked as though she’d come straight from eating strawberries and cream at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Knew her fauna and flora better than her bearers did. And she’d be with us here to this day, God bless her, if that arsehole of a regimental doctor had been halfway sober. To her memory, sir. The late Mrs. Mundy. Forward march.” His tearful eye settles on his son, whose presence he appears momentarily to have forgotten. “Young Edward,” he explains. “Opens the bowling for his school. How old are you, boy?”
And the boy, waiting to take his father home, admits to sixteen.
The Major, however, as he will assure you, did not buckle under the tragedy of his double loss. He stayed on, sir. He endured. Widowed, a baby son to look after, Raj collapsing round his ears, you might think he’d do what the other buggers did: lower the Union Jack, sound the Last Post and sail home to obscurity. Not the Major, sir. No, thank you. He would rather slop out his Punjabis’ shithouses than kiss the arse of some limp-wristed war profiteer in Civvy Street, thank you.
“I summoned my derzi. I said to my derzi, ‘Derzi, you will unstitch the major’s crowns on my khaki drills, and you will replace them with the crescent moon of Pakistan—juldi.’ And I pledged my services—for as long as they were appreciated—to the finest body of fighting men in the world bar none, provided”—his index finger stabs the air in dramatic warning—“provided, sir, that they are led. There’s the rub.”
And there also, mercifully, the bell will ring for last orders, and the boy will slip a trained hand beneath his father’s arm and march him home to Number Two, The Vale to finish up last night’s curry.
But Mundy’s provenance is not as easily defined as these barroom reminiscences suggest. The Major, so lavish with the larger brushstrokes, is reticent when it comes to detail, with the result that Mundy’s memories of his infancy are a succession of camps, barracks, depots and hill stations that accelerates as the Major’s fortunes dwindle. One day the proud son of Empire rules supreme over a whitewashed cantonment complete with red-ochred club, polo, swimming pool, children’s games and Christmas plays, including a historic production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in which he stars as Dopey. The next, he is running barefoot down the mud streets of a half-empty settlement miles from any town, with bullock carts instead of motor cars, a corrugated iron cinema for a club, and Christmas pudding served in a regimental institute green with mold.
Few possessions survive so many moves. The Major’s tiger skins, his military chests and treasured ivory carvings are all posted missing. Even his late wife’s memory has been stolen, her diaries, letters and a box of precious family jewelry: that thieving bastard of a stationmaster at Lahore, the Major will have him flogged, and every one of his rascally chaprassis with him! He makes the vow one night in his cups after Mundy has driven him over the edge with his persistent damn-fool questioning. “Her grave, boy? I’ll tell you where her bloody grave is! Gone! Smashed to bits by rampaging tribesmen! Not a stone left standing! All we’ve got of her is here!” And he drives his tiny fist against his breast, and pours himself another chota peg. “That woman had class you wouldn’t believe, boy. I can see her every time I look at you. Anglo-Irish nobility. Vast estates, razed to the ground in the Troubles. First the Irish, now the bloody Dervishes. Entire clan dead or scattered to the winds.”
They come to rest in the garrison hill town of Murree. While the Major vegetates in a mud-brick barrack hut smoking Craven A for his throat’s sake and growling over pay imprests, sick lists and leave rosters, the boy Mundy is consigned to the care of a very fat Madrasi ayah who came north with independence, and has no name but Ayah, and recites rhymes with him in English and Punjabi, and surreptitiously teaches him holy sayings from the Koran, and tells him of a god called Allah who loves justice and all the peoples of the world and their prophets, even Christians and Hindus, but most of all, she says, he loves children. It is only most unwillingly, after much pressing on Mundy’s part, that she admits to possessing no husband, children, parents, sisters or brothers left alive. “They are all dead now, Edward. They are with Allah, every one. It is all you need to know. Go to sleep.”
Murdered in the great massacres that came of the Partition, she admits under interrogation. Murdered by Hindus. Murdered at railway stations, in mosques and marketplaces.
“How did you stay alive, Ayah?”
“It was the will of God. You are my blessing. Go to sleep now.”
Come evening, to a chorus of goats, jackals, bugles and the insistent twanging of Punjabi drums, the Major will also contemplate mortality, under a neem tree at the river’s edge, puffing at cheroots that he calls Burmas and cuts into lengths with a tin penknife. Intermittently he refreshes himself from a pewter hip flask while his overgrown son splashes with his native peers and, acting out the never-ending tales of adult slaughter all around them, plays Hindus versus Muslims and takes turns at being dead. Forty years on, Mundy has only to close his eyes to feel the magic cooling of the air that comes with sundown, and smell the scents that leap out of the sudden dusk, or watch the dawn rise over foothills glistening green from the monsoon, or hear the catcalls of his playmates give way to the muezzin and the nocturnal bellows of his father berating that damned boy of mine who killed his mother—Well, didn’t you, boy, didn’t you? Come here juldi when I order you, boy! But the boy declines, juldi or otherwise, preferring to let Ayah clutch him to her flank until the drink has done its work.
Now and then, the boy must endure a birthday, and from the moment it appears on his horizon he succumbs to a variety of illnesses: stomach cramps, feverish headaches, Delhi belly, the onset of malaria, or fears that he has been bitten by a poisonous bat. But the day still comes round, the kitchen wallahs prepare a fearsome curry and make a great cake with Many Happy Returns to Edward on it, but no other children are invited, the shutters are closed, the dining table is laid for three, candles are lit and the servants stand silently round the wall while the Major in full mess kit and decorations plays the same Irish ballads on the gramophone again and again, and Mundy wonders how much of his curry he can get away with not eating. Solemnly he blows out his candles, cuts three slices of his birthday cake and lays one on his mother’s plate. If the Major is half sober, father and son will do silent combat with a red-and-white ivory chess set brought out for feast days. The games have no conclusion. They are put aside for tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes.
But there are the other, rarest nights—they never needed to be many—when the Major with a more than usually frightful scowl will stalk to a desk in a corner of the room, unlock it with a key from his chain, and ceremoniously extract from it an elderly red-bound volume called Selected Readings from the Works of Rudyard Kipling. Pulling a pair of reading spectacles from their battered metal case and setting his whiskey glass in a hole in the arm of his rattan chair, he will bark toneless phrases about Mowgli the jungle boy, and another boy called Kim who became a spy in the service of his Queen and Emperor, though what happened to him when he had become one, and whether he won or was caught, were matters not divulged by the extract. For hours on end the Major will sip and read and sip as solemnly as if he is conducting a one-handed service of Communion, until at length he falls asleep, and Ayah emerges silently from the shadows where she has been crouching all this while and, taking Mundy by the hand, leads him to bed. The Kipling anthology, the Major tells him, is the sole survivor of a vast eclectic library that was once his mother’s.
“That woman had more books in her than I’ve had hot dinners,” he marvels in his soldier’s way. Nevertheless, with time it becomes something of a puzzle to Mundy, and a frustration, that such an illustrious reader as his mother should have left him such a ragbag of half-told tales. He prefers Ayah’s bedtime stories of the heroic doings of the Prophet Mohammed.
For the remainder of his education the boy attends the dying remnants of a colonial school for the orphans and children of impecunious British officers, performs in pantomimes and pays weekly visits to a smooth-faced Anglican missionary who instructs him in divinity and piano, and likes best to guide boys’ fingers with his own. But these random spurts of Christianity are only tiresome interruptions in the sunlit passage of each pagan day. His best hours are spent playing ferocious cricket with Ahmed, Omar and Ali on the dust-patch behind the mosque, or gazing in glassy rock pools that flash mother-of-pearl, while he whispers child-love to Rani, a nine-year-old barefoot beauty of the village whom he intends to marry forever just as soon as arrangements can be made; or bawls patriotic hymns in Punjabi as the shiny new flag of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is hoisted over the regimental cricket pitch.
And Mundy would have passed the rest of his youth in this undemanding manner, and the rest of his life also, had not a night come when the servants and even Ayah are fled and the bungalow’s shutters are once more bolted fast, while father and son in silent haste load their last few life possessions into leather suitcases with brass corners. By first light they are bumping out of camp in the back of an ancient military police truck with two grim Punjabi soldiers riding shotgun. Hunched at Mundy’s side the unfrocked major of Pakistani infantry wears a civilian trilby hat and his old school tie, a regimental tie being no longer pukkah for an outcast found guilty of raising his hand to a brother officer. What he did with his hand when he’d raised it was not defined, but if Mundy’s experience was anything to go by, he didn’t just slip it back in his pocket unfired. At the garrison gates, the dewan who until now welcomed Mundy with a beaming salute is granite-faced, and Ayah stands as white as all the ghosts she fears in her grief, anger and disgust. Ahmed, Omar and Ali howl and wave and scamper after the truck, but Rani is not among them. Dressed in her Brownie tunic, her black hair freshly plaited down her back, she bends double at the roadside, bare feet pressed together as she chokes over her folded arms.
The boat leaves Karachi in darkness and stays dark all the way to England because the Major has become ashamed of his face after seeing it printed in the native press. To hide it from view he takes his whiskey in his cabin, and food only when the boy presses it on him. The boy becomes his father’s minder, keeping watch for him, making sorties, vetting the ship’s daily newspaper in advance for toxic matter, sneaking him on deck for furtive walks before daylight, and in the evenings while the ship changes for dinner. Lying on his back on the other bunk, secondary-smoking his father’s Burmas, counting the brass screw heads in the teak ribs that arch across the bulkhead and listening now to his father’s ramblings, now to the chug of the ship’s engines, or puzzling his unfulfilled way through Rudyard Kipling, he dreams of Rani, and swimming home to what his father still calls India.
And the Major in his anguish has much to say on the subject of his adored, abandoned India, some of it to the young Mundy’s ear surprising. With nothing more to be gained by pretending otherwise, the Major declares himself mortally disgusted by his country’s connivance in the disastrous Partition. He heaps curses on the rogues and idiots in Westminster. Everything is their fault, right down to what they did to Ayah’s family. It is as if the Major must unload his own guilt onto their shoulders. The bloodbaths and forced migrations, the collapse of law, order and a central administration are a consequence not of native intransigence but of British colonial disrespect, manipulation, greed, corruption, cowardice. Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, against whom the Major until now will hear no evil, becomes in the fume-soaked atmosphere of their tiny cabin the Jackass. “If the Jackass had moved slower on Partition and faster to stop the massacres, he’d have saved a million lives. Two million.” Attlee and Sir Stafford Cripps fare no better. They called themselves socialists, but they were class snobs like the rest of ’em.
“As for that Winston Churchill, if he’d been allowed to have his way, he’d have been worse than all the other buggers put together. Know why, boy? Know why?”
“No, sir.”
“He thought the Indians were a pack of fuzzy-wuzzies, that’s why. Flog ’em, hang ’em and teach ’em the Bible. Don’t you ever let me hear you say a good word for that man, d’you understand me, boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Give me a whiskey.”
The Major’s burst of heresy may have its intellectual limitations, but its effect on the impressionable Mundy at this crucial moment in his life is of lightning. In a single flash he sees Ayah standing with her hands clasped in horror, with all her murdered family lying at her feet. He remembers every filtered, unclear rumor of mass murder followed by mass revenge. So it was the British then—it wasn’t just the Hindus—who were the villains! He relives the jibes that as an English Christian boy he was obliged to suffer at the hands of Ahmed, Omar and Ali. Too late, he thanks them for their moderation. He sees Rani and marvels that she sufficiently overcame her disgust to love him. Ejected from the country he loves, caught in the twilight of puberty, dragged night and day towards a guilty country he has not seen but must now call home, Mundy undergoes his first exposure to the radical reappraisal of colonial history.
The England that awaits the young Mundy is a rain-swept cemetery for the living dead powered by a forty-watt bulb. A gray stone medieval boarding school reeks of disinfectant and is ruled by boy quislings and adult despots. Number Two, The Vale weeps and rots as his father cooks inedible curries and pursues his purposeful slide into degradation. There being no native red-light quarter in Weybridge, he retains the services of a flighty Scottish housekeeper named Mrs. McKechnie who, aged eternally twenty-nine, disdainfully shares his bed and polishes the last of his collection of Indian silver boxes until one by one they mysteriously disappear. But flighty Mrs. McKechnie never strokes Mundy’s cheek the way Ayah did, or tells him heroic stories of Mohammed or chafes his hand between both her own until he falls asleep, or replaces his lost talisman of tiger skin to ward off the terrors of the night.
Sent off to boarding school on the strength of a legacy from a distant aunt and a bursary for the sons of army officers, Mundy is bewildered, then horrified. The Major’s parting words, though well intended, have not prepared him for the impact of his new life. “Always remember your mother’s watching you, boy, and if a chap combs his hair in public, run like hell,” his father urges him huskily as they embrace. On the school train, trying desperately to remember that his mother is watching him, Mundy looks in vain for child beggars clinging to the windows, or station platforms packed with rows of shrouded but unmurdered bodies with their heads covered and their feet poking out, or chaps who comb their hair in public. In place of dung-brown landscapes and blue mountain ranges, he sees only sodden fields and mysterious billboards telling him he is Welcome to the Strong Country.
On arrival at the place of his incarceration, the former white godling and baba-log is summarily reduced to the rank of Untouchable. By the end of his first term he is voted a colonial freak, and thereafter affects a chee-chee accent in order to capitalize on the distinction. To the rage of his fellows he keeps a wary eye for snakes. When he hears the rumbling of the school’s ancient plumbing he dives under his desk, yelling, “Earthquake!” On bath days he equips himself with an old tennis racket for fending off any bats that should fall out of the ceiling, and when the bell tolls for chapel he muses aloud about whether the muezzin is calling him. Dispatched on early-morning runs to quell his libido, he is given to inquiring whether the Dorset crows circling overhead are kites.
The punishments he attracts do not deter him. During evening prep he burbles half-remembered passages of Koranic scripture taught to him by Ayah, and when the bell for lights-out sounds he can be discovered in his dressing gown bowed before a cracked mirror in the dormitory washroom, pulling his face about as he hunts for signs of darkening skin and shading round the eyes that will confirm him in his secret conviction that he is a twelve-annas-in-the-rupee half-caste rather than the inheritor of his aristocratic mother’s dignity. No such luck: he is a Despised One, sentenced to life imprisonment as a snow-white guilty British gentleman of tomorrow’s ruling class.
His one spiritual ally is an outcast like himself: a dignified, ageless, diffident, white-haired refugee in rimless spectacles and a shabby suit who teaches German Extra Studies and cello and lives alone in a redbrick bedsitter on the Bristol Road roundabout. His name is Mr. Mallory. Mundy discovers him reading in a tea shop in the High Street. A grand meeting of masters is currently in progress, so why is Mr. Mallory not attending it?
“Because I’m not completely a master, Mr. Mundy,” he explains, closing his book and sitting bolt upright. “Maybe one day, when I grow up, I become one. But until now, I am a temporary master. Permanently temporary. You wish a piece of cake? I invite you, Mr. Mundy.”
Within the week, Mundy has enrolled for twice-weekly cello lessons, German Extra Studies and German Oral. “I have taken this path because music is all I care about and German is a sort of literary version of music,” he writes recklessly to the Major, in a letter seeking his permission to add fifteen pounds to the annual tuition charges.
The Major’s reply is equally impulsive. It comes by telegram or, as the Major would say, signal. “Your application wholeheartedly approved. Your mother musical genius. If he’s related to the Mallory who took part in assault on Everest he’s prime human material. Ask him and report back. Mundy.”
Mr. Mallory is not, alas, prime human material, or not of the sort the Major has in mind. His real name, he regrets, is Dr. Hugo Mandelbaum, he comes from Leipzig and has no taste for heights. “But don’t tell this to the boys, please, Mr. Mundy. With such a name as Mandelbaum, they have too much fun.” And he laughs and nods his white head with the resignation of one who has been the object of quite a bit of fun already.
The cello is not a success. At first, Dr. Mandelbaum is concerned only with bow action. Unlike the Anglican missionary in Murree he treats Mundy’s fingers as if they were live electric wires, gingerly attaching them to their points before leaping back to safety at the other side of the room. But by the end of their fifth session, his expression has changed from one of technical concern to simple grief for a fellow human being. Perched on his piano stool, he clasps his hands together and leans over them.
“Mr. Mundy, music is not your refuge,” he pronounces at last, with great solemnity. “Maybe later, when you have experienced the emotions that music describes, it will become a refuge for you. But we cannot be sure. So maybe better for now you take refuge in language. To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. German is such a language. Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge. You allow me to read you a little poem by Goethe? Sometimes Goethe is very pure. When he was young like you, he was pure. When he was old like me, he became pure again. So I tell you once in German a most beautiful little poem, then I tell you what it means. And next time we meet, you will learn this little poem. So.”
So Dr. Mandelbaum recites the loveliest and shortest poem in the German language, then provides his translation: Over all the mountains is peace . . . but wait, soon you too will be at rest. And the cello goes back into Dr. Mandelbaum’s cupboard where he keeps his shabby suit. And Mundy, who has learned to hate the cello and is not used to tears, weeps and weeps at the shame of seeing it go, while Dr. Mandelbaum sits on the far side of the room at the lace-curtained window, staring into a book of spiky Gothic lettering.
Nonetheless the miracle happens. By the end of a couple of terms Dr. Mandelbaum has acquired a star pupil and Mundy has found his refuge. Goethe, Heine, Schiller, Eichendorff and Mörike are his secret familiars. He reads them furtively in scripture prep, and takes them to bed to read again by flashlight under the sheets.
“So, Mr. Mundy,” Dr. Mandelbaum declares proudly over a chocolate cake he has bought to celebrate Mundy’s success in a public examination. “Today we are both refugees. For as long as mankind is in chains, maybe all good people in the world are also refugees.” It is only when he speaks German, as now, that he allows himself to lament the enslavement of the world’s downtrodden classes. “We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: ‘Better to be a salamander, and live in the fire.’”
After which he will read him a passage from Lessing’s Nathan der Weise while Mundy listens respectfully, nodding to the cadence of the beautiful voice as if it were the dream-music that he will one day understand.
“Now tell me once about India,” Dr. Mandelbaum will say, and in turn closes his eyes to Ayah’s plain tales from the hills.
Periodically, seized with a desire to exercise his parental duty, the Major will descend unannounced on the school and, supported by a cherrywood walking stick, inspect the lines and roar. If Mundy is playing rugby, he will roar at him to break the blighters’ legs; if cricket, to swipe the buggers over the pavilion. His visits end abruptly when, angered by defeat, he accuses the sports master of being a bloody pansy and, not for the first time in his life, is escorted from the field. Outside the school’s walls the Swinging Sixties are in full cry, but inside them the band of Empire plays on. Twice-daily chapel services praise the school’s war dead to the detriment of its living, value the white man above lesser breeds, and preach chastity to boys who can find sexual stimulation in a Times editorial.
Yet while the oppression Mundy suffers at the hands of his jailers entrenches his loathing of them, he cannot dodge the curse of their acceptance. His real enemy is his own good-heartedness and his inextinguishable need to belong. Perhaps only those who have had no mother can understand the emptiness he has to fill. The change in the official attitude is subtle and insidious. One by one, his gestures of insubordination pass unnoticed. He smokes cigarettes in the most perilous places but nobody catches him at it or notices his breath. He reads the lesson in chapel while drunk on a pint of beer gulped down at the back door of a nearby pub, yet instead of the mandatory flogging he has the rank of prefect thrust on him with the assurance that the post of head boy is within his grasp. There is worse to come. Despite his ungainliness he is capped for rugby, promoted to the school cricket team as a fast bowler, and appointed the unlikely hero of the hour. Overnight his heathen practices and subversive tendencies are forgotten. In a dreary production of Everyman he is given the title role. He leaves school covered in unwanted glory and, thanks to Dr. Mandelbaum, with an Exhibition in Modern Languages to Oxford.
“Dear boy.”
“Father.”
Mundy allows time for the Major to muster his thoughts. They are seated in the conservatory of the Surrey villa and as usual it is raining. Rain shades the blue pines in the neglected garden, seeps down the rusted frames of the french windows and pings onto the cracked tile floor. Flighty Mrs. McKechnie is on home leave in Aberdeen. It is midafternoon and the Major is enjoying an interval of lucidity between the last of the lunch hour and the first of the evening. A scrofulous retriever farts and mutters in a basket at his feet. Panes of glass are missing from the conservatory, but this is all to the good since the Major has developed a horror of enclosure. In accordance with new regimental orders no doors or windows to the house may be locked. If the bastards want him, he likes to insist to his diminished audience at the Golden Swan, they know where they can find him; and he indicates the cherrywood walking stick which is now his constant companion.
“You’re set on it, are you, boy? This German thing you’re up to?”—drawing shrewdly on his Burma.
“I think so, thank you, sir.”
Major and retriever reflect on this. It’s the Major who speaks first.
“Still some decent regiments out there, you know. Not everything’s gone to the devil.”
“All the same, sir.”
Another prolonged delay.
“Reckon the Hun will come at us again, do you? Twenty years since the last show. Twenty years since the show before that. They’re about due for another, I grant you.”
A further period of rumination follows, until the Major suddenly brightens.
“Well, there we are then, boy. Blame your mother.”
Not for the first time in recent months, Mundy fears for his father’s sanity. My dead mother responsible for the next war with the Germans? How can this be, sir?
“That woman could pick up languages the way you and I pick up this glass. Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Telegu, Tamil, German.”
Mundy is astonished. “German?”
“And French. Wrote it, spoke it, sang it. Mynah bird ear. All the Stanhopes had it.”
Mundy is gratified to hear this. Thanks to Dr. Mandelbaum, he has for some while been privy to the classified information that the German language has beauty, poetry, music, logic and unlikely humor, as well as a romantic soul incomprehensible to anyone who can’t decode it. Short of a KEEP OUT sign on its door, it possesses everything a nineteen-year-old Steppenwolf in search of a cultural safe haven could decently ask. But now it has genealogy as well. Any further doubts he may have are quickly dispelled by fate. Without Dr. Mandelbaum he would never have plumped for German. Without German he would never have signed up for weekly tutorials on Bishop Wulfila’s translation of the Bible into Gothic. And if he hadn’t signed up for Wulfila, he would never have found himself, on the third day of his first term at university, sitting buttock-to-buttock on a chintz sofa in North Oxford with a diminutive polyglot Hungarian spitfire called Ilse who takes upon herself the task of leading a motherless six-foot-four virgin to the sexual light. Ilse’s interest in Wulfila, like Mundy’s, is an accident of life. After an academic safari through Europe, she has descended on Oxford to expand her understanding of the roots of contemporary anarchism. Wulfila wormed his way into her syllabus.
Summoned at darkest night to the Surrey villa, a bereft Mundy cradles his father’s sweated head and watches him spew out the remaining fragments of his wretched life while Mrs. McKechnie treats herself to a ciggy on the landing. Other mourners at the funeral include a fellow alcoholic who is also a solicitor, an unpaid bookmaker, the landlord of the Golden Swan and a handful of its regulars. Mrs. McKechnie, still firmly twenty-nine, stands to attention at the open graveside, every inch the courageous Scottish widow. It is summer and she is wearing a black chiffon dress. A languid breeze presses it against her, revealing a pair of fine breasts and a frank outline of her remaining assets. Masking her mouth with her Order of Service, she murmurs to Mundy from so close that he can feel her lips fluttering the little hairs inside his ear.
“Look at what you might have had if you’d asked nicely,” she says in her mocking Aberdonian brogue, and to his outrage brushes her hand across his crotch.
Safely back in his college rooms, a trembling Mundy takes stock of his humble patrimony: one red-and-white carved ivory chess set, much damaged; one army-issue khaki knapsack containing six handmade shirts by Ranken & Company Limited, Est. Calcutta 1770, By Appointment to HM King George V, with branches in Delhi, Madras, Lahore and Murree; one pewter hip flask, much dented, for sitting under neem trees at sundown; one tin penknife, Burmas for the use of; one truncated ceremonial Gurkha kukri engraved To a Gallant Friend; one multigenerational tweed jacket with no maker’s attribution; one copy of Selected Readings from the Works of Rudyard Kipling, foxed and much thumbed; and one heavy leather suitcase with brass corners, found hidden or forgotten beneath a sea of empty bottles in the Major’s bedroom wardrobe.
Padlocked.
No key.
For several days he keeps the suitcase under his bed. He is the sole possessor of its destiny, the only person in the entire world who knows of its existence. Will he be mountainously rich? Has he inherited British American Tobacco? Is he the sole owner of the secrets of the vanished Stanhopes? With a hacksaw borrowed from the college butler he spends an evening trying to cut his way through the padlock. In desperation he lays the suitcase on his bed, draws the ceremonial kukri from its scabbard and, in thrall to its power, makes a perfect circular incision in the lid. Drawing back the flap, he smells Murree at sunset and the sweat on Rani’s neck as she crouches at his side peering into the rock pool.
Official army files, British, Indian, Pakistani.
Faded parchments appointing Arthur Henry George Mundy to the rank and condition of second lieutenant, lieutenant, captain in this regiment, then a lesser regiment, then the one below it.
One yellowed, hand-printed playbill of the Peshawar Players’ production of Snow White, featuring E. A. Mundy in the role of Dopey.
Letters from unhappy bank managers concerning “mess bills and sundry other debts that can no longer be covered by this account.”
Beautifully handwritten protocol of a court-martial convened in Murree in September 1956, signed Warrant Officer J. R. Singh, Court Clerk. Statements of witnesses, statement of Prisoner’s Friend, Judgment of this Court. The prisoner confesses his crime, no defense offered. Statement by Prisoner’s Friend: Major Mundy was drunk. He went berserk. He is sincerely sorry for his actions and throws himself on the mercy of the court.
Not so fast. Sorry is not enough. What actions? Mercy for what?
Summary of evidence, submitted in writing to the court but not read out. It is alleged by the prosecution and agreed by the accused that Major Mundy while refreshing himself in the officers’ mess took exception to certain words spoken in flippant jest by one Captain Gray, an honorable British technical officer on temporary attachment from Lahore. Seizing said respected captain by the collars of his uniform in a manner totally contrary to good order and military discipline, he three times head-butted him with great accuracy causing extensive facial bleeding, kneed him purposefully in the groin and, resisting the efforts of his perturbed comrades to restrain him, dragged the captain onto the veranda and administered such a horrendous rain of blows with his fists and feet as might have gravely endangered the captain’s very life and being, let alone jeopardized his marital prospects and distinguished military career.
Of the words spoken by the captain in flippant jest, there is so far no clue. Since the prisoner does not offer them in mitigation, the court sees no purpose in repeating them. He was drunk. He is sincerely sorry for his actions. End of defense, end of career. End of everything. Except the mystery.
One fat buff folder with pockets, the word FILE inked in the Major’s hand. Why? Would you write BOOK on a book? Yes, you probably would. Mundy spills the contents of the folder onto his frayed eiderdown. One sepia photograph, quarto size, on presentation cardboard mount with gilt surround. An Anglo-Indian family and its many servants cluster in a rigid group on the steps of a multiturreted colonial mansion set in the foothills of upper India amid formal lawns and shrubberies. Union Jacks fly from every pinnacle. At the center of the group stands an arrogant white man in stiff collars, next to him his arrogant unsmiling white wife in twinset and pleated skirt. Their two small white boys stand either side of them, wearing Eton suits. Either side of the boys stand white children and adults of varying ages. They can be aunts, uncles and cousins. On the step below them stand the uniformed servants of the household, color-coded for precedence, the whitest at the center, darkest at the edges. The printed caption reads: The Stanhope Family at Home, Victory in Europe Day, 1945. GOD SAVE THE KING.
Conscious that he is in the presence of the Maternal Spirit, Mundy takes the photograph to his bedside light, tipping it this way and that while he scans the ranks of the female members of the family for the tall polyglot Anglo-Irish aristocrat who will turn out to be his mother. He is looking particularly for marks of dignity and erudition. He sees fierce-eyed matrons. He sees dowager ladies long past childbearing age. He sees scowling adolescents with puppy fat and plaits. But he sees no potential mother. About to set the photograph aside he turns it over to discover a single scrawl of brown handwriting, not the Major’s. It is the hand of a semiliterate girl—perhaps one of the scowling adolescents—blobbed and reckless in its excitement. Here’s me with me eyes shut, tippical!!
No signature, but the exuberance is infectious. Returning to the photograph, Mundy examines the group for a pair of shut eyes, English or Indian. But too many are shut on account of the sun. He lays the photograph faceup on the eiderdown and rummages among the other offerings in the folder and selects, at random but not quite, a wad of handwritten letters bound in string. He turns the photograph facedown again and makes the match. The writer of the letters is also the writer of the illiterate inscription on the back of the photograph. Dealing the letters onto the eiderdown, Mundy counts off six. The longest is eight unnumbered sides. All are scrawls, all are painfully, atrociously spelled. Marks of dignity and erudition are conspicuously absent. The earliest start My dearest or Oh Arthur, but the tone quickly deteriorates:
Arthur, bloody hell, for the love of God listen to me!
The bastad that done this to me is the same barstad that your Nell gave herself willing and week to, your Gods judgmint on me, Arthur, don’t bloody deny it. If I go home ruined my dad will kill me. I’ll be a scarlit whore with an illigitment to feed they’ll give me to the nuns and take me baby I’ve heard what they make you do for repintince. If I stay in India its me with the halfcarst prostutes in the market God help me I’d rather drown meself in the Ganges. Confessions not safe here, nothing is, that dirty bogger Father M’Graw would as soon tell Lady Stanhope as put his hand up your skirt and that Housekeeper stayring at me belly like I’ve stolen the lunch off her. Are you pregnant by any chance, Nurse Nellie? God help me Mrs. Ormrod whatever makes you think such a thing, it’s all the good food you’re feeding us in the servants hall. But how long will she believe that pray Arthur when I’m six months gone and still swelling? And me playing the Holy Virgin Mary in the staffside Christmas tablo for Christs sakes, Arthur! But it wasn’t the Holy Spirit done it to me, was it? It was you! THEYRE FOCKIN TWINS ARTHUR I CAN FEEL THEIR BLOODY HARTS GOING HEAR ME!
Mundy needs a magnifying glass. He borrows it from a first-year student on his staircase who collects postage stamps.
“Sorry, Sammy, something I need to look at a bit closer.”
“At fucking midnight?”
“At any fucking time,” says Mundy.
He has focused his attention on the lower step and is searching for a tall girl in nurse’s uniform with her eyes closed, and she isn’t hard to spot. She’s a sunny, overgrown child with a head of black curls and her Irish eyes clamped shut exactly the way she says they are, and if Mundy ever wore a nursemaid’s drag and a black wig and squeezed up his eyes against the Indian sun, this is what he’d look like, because she’s the same age as I am now, and the same height, he thinks. And she’s got the same damn-fool all-weather grin I’m wearing while I gawp at her through the magnifying glass, which is the closest I will ever be to her.
Or hang on, he thinks.
Maybe you’re smiling out of shyness because you’re too tall.
And there’s something of the wild spirit about you too, now I come to look at you more closely.
Something spontaneous and trusting and joyful, like a tall, white Rani full-grown.
Something that is actually a great deal more to my taste than the stuck-up, tight-arsed aristocrat of dignity and erudition that I’ve had shoved down my throat from the day I was old enough to be lied to.
* * *
Personal and Confidential to Yourself
Dear Captain Mundy,
I am directed by Lady Stanhope to draw your attention to your obligations to the person of Miss Nellie O’Connor, a nursemaid in Her Ladyship’s employ. Her Ladyship asks me to advise you that if Miss O’Connor’s position is not promptly regulated in a manner befitting an officer and gentleman, she will have no alternative but to apprise your Regimental Colonel Commanding.
Yours faithfully,
Private Secretary to Lady Stanhope
One marriage certificate, signed by the Anglican Vicar of Delhi in what looks like rather a rush.
One death certificate, signed three months later.
One birth certificate, signed the same day: Edward Arthur Mundy is hereby welcomed to the world. He was born, to his surprise, not in Murree but in Lahore, where both his mother and his baby sister were certified dead.
Mundy deftly completes the equation. The nature of Captain Gray’s words spoken in flippant jest is no longer in question. Mundy? Mundy? Aren’t you the fellow who put the Stanhope nursemaid in the family way? By providing no cause to have them repeated in court, the Major secured an embargo on them. But only in court. The secretary’s letter may have been personal and confidential to the Major—but so it was to the entire strength of the Stanhope household and its outstations. His head still buzzing with images of the berserk Major raining blows on luckless Captain Gray, Mundy searches his heart for the appropriate rage, anger and recrimination that he tells himself he should be mustering, but all he can feel is a helpless pity for two inarticulate souls trapped in the conventional cages of their time.
Why did he lie to me for all those years?
Because he knew he wasn’t enough.
Because he thought she wasn’t.
Because he was sorry and guilty.
Because he wanted me to have the dignity.
It’s called love.
The brass-cornered suitcase has one more trick up its sleeve: an ancient leather-bound box embossed with a gold crest containing a Pakistani War Office citation dated six months after the birth of the infant Mundy. By directing the operations of his platoon with reckless disregard for his own safety and firing his Bren gun from the hip, Major Arthur Henry George Mundy emptied twenty saddles and is hereby appointed an honorary bearer of the Pakistani Something-or-Other of Honor. The medal, if it was ever struck, is missing, presumed sold for drink.
Dawn has broken. With tears streaming down his cheeks at last, Mundy pins the citation to the wall above his bed and next to it the group photograph of the victorious Stanhopes and their minions, and hammers them both home with his shoe.
Ilse’s radical principles like her eager little body are unappeasable, and Mundy in the flush of his initiation can be forgiven for not spotting the difference. Why should he care that he knows even less about Mikhail Bakunin than he does about the parts of the female anatomy? Ilse is giving him the crash course in both, and it would be downright impolite to accept the one without the other. If she rails against the state as an instrument of tyranny, Mundy passionately agrees with her, though the state is about the last thing on his mind. If she lisps of individualization, extols the rehabilitation of the I and the supremacy of the individual, and promises to cut Mundy free of his submissive self, he implores her to do exactly that. That she talks in the same breath of radical collectivism disturbs him not at all. He will make the bridge. If she reads aloud from Laing and Cooper, while he dozes temporarily sated on her naked belly, a nod of appreciation can scarcely be accounted hardship. And if making love appeals to her more than making war—for in her spare moments away from anarchism and individualism Ilse is also an evangelizing pacifist—he will hang up his musket for her any day, just as long as her impatient little heels keep hammering his rump on the coconut matting of her anchorite’s horse trailer in St. Hugh’s—gentleman callers tolerated between the hours of 4 and 6 p.m. for Earl Grey tea and Marmite sandwiches with the door open. And what more soothing, in the afterglow of lust temporarily assuaged, than the shared vision of a social paradise ordered by the free agreement of all component groups?
Yet none of this should imply that Ted Mundy is not by predisposition committed to the New Jerusalem that Ilse has revealed to him. In her starry radicalism he has found not only echoes of the venerable Dr. Mandelbaum, but evidence of his own vague stirrings of revolt against most of the things that England means to him. Her just causes are his by adoption. He’s a hybrid, a nomad, a man without territory, parents, property or example. He’s a frozen child who is beginning to thaw out. Occasionally, trotting off to a lecture or library, he will brush up against a former schoolmate in sports jacket, cavalry twill trousers and polished brown toe caps. Awkward exchanges pass before each hurries on his way. Christ, that fellow Mundy, he imagines them thinking, gone completely off the rails. And they’re right. Pretty much, he has. He belongs neither to the Gridiron nor the Bullingdon, the Canning nor the Union. At raucous if dismally attended political meetings he relishes his tussles with the hated rightists. His height notwithstanding, his favored position away from Ilse’s arms is perching cross-legged with his knees up by his ears in the cramped rooms of left-leaning dons while he listens to the gospel according to Thoreau, Hegel, Marx and Lukács.
That he is not persuaded by intellectual argument, that he hears it as music he can’t play rather than the iron logic it professes to be, is neither here nor there. He is undaunted by belonging to a tiny band of gallant comrades. When Ilse marches, Mundy the great joiner puts his whole good self where her loyalties are, boarding the coach with her at Gloucester Green at daybreak equipped with the Mars bars she likes, and the carefully wrapped egg-and-cress sandwiches from the market, and a thermos of tinned tomato soup, all stowed for her in the Major’s army-issue knapsack. Shoulder to shoulder and often hand in hand, they march to protest against Harold Wilson’s support of the Vietnam War, and—since they are robbed of the chance to dissent through the parliamentary process—proclaim themselves members of the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition. They march to Trafalgar Square to protest against apartheid and issue passionate declarations of support for American students burning their draft cards. They cluster in Hyde Park, are politely dispersed by the police, and feel vindicated if a little hangdog. Yet hundreds of Vietnamese are dying every day, bombed, burned and thrown out of helicopters in the name of democracy, and Mundy’s heart is with them, and so is Ilse’s.
To protest the seizure of power in Athens by the CIA-backed Greek colonels and the torture and killing of unnumbered Greek leftists, they linger vainly outside London’s Claridge’s Hotel where the colonels are believed to be residing during a furtive visit to Britain. None emerges to receive their jeers. Undaunted, they repair to the Greek Embassy in London under banners reading Save Greece Now. Their most satisfying moment comes when an attaché leans out of a hotel window and shouts, “In Greece, we would shoot you!” Safely back in Oxford, they still feel the wind of that imaginary bullet.
In the winter term, it’s true, Mundy takes time out to stage a German-language production of Büchner’s Woyzeck, but its radical sentiments are impeccable. And in the summer, if a little sheepishly, he plays valiant cricket for his college and would have a high time drinking with the boys if he didn’t remind himself of his allegiances.
Ilse’s parents live in Hendon, in a semidetached villa with a green roof and plaster dwarfs fishing in the garden pond. Her father is a Marxist surgeon with a wide Slav brow and fuzzy hair, her mother a pacifist psychotherapist and disciple of Rudolf Steiner. Never in his life has Mundy met such an intelligent, broad-minded couple. Inspired by their example, he wakes up in his rooms one morning seized with a determination to propose marriage to their daughter. The case for doing so strikes him as overwhelming. Bored out of her wits by what she perceives as half-baked British protest, Ilse has for some while been hankering for a campus where students go the whole hog, such as Paris, Berkeley or Milan. Her choice, after much soul-searching, has fallen on the Free University of Berlin, crucible of the new world order, and Mundy has pledged himself to accompany her there for his year abroad.
And what more natural, he argues, than to go as man and wife?
The timing of his proposal is not perhaps as propitious as he imagines, but Mundy in the grip of a great plan is blind to tactic. He has turned in his weekly essay on the symbolic use of color by the early Minnesänger, and feels master of the moment. Ilse on the other hand is worn out by two days of ineffectual marching in Glasgow in the company of a Scottish working-class history student named Fergus, who she claims is irredeemably homosexual. Her response to Mundy’s declaration is muted, if not downright contemptuous. Marriage? This was not one of the options they considered when they were debating Laing and Cooper. Marriage? Like a real bourgeois marriage, he means? A civil ceremony conducted by the state? Or has Mundy so far regressed in his radical education that he covets the blessing of a religious institution? She stares at him, if not angrily, with profound gloom. She shrugs, and not with grace. She requires time to reflect on whether such an outlandish step can be reconciled with her principles.
A day later, Mundy has his answer. A squat Hungarian angel wearing nothing but her socks stands feet splayed in the only corner of her anchorite’s horse trailer where she can’t be spotted from across the quad. Her pacifist-anarchist-humanist-radical philanthropy has run out. Her fists are clenched, tears are streaming down her flushed cheeks.
“You have completely bourgeois heart, Teddy!” she bawls in her charmingly accented English. And as an afterthought: “You wish stupid marriage and you are complete infant for sex!”