‘I’m ssorry, Bimala,’ Miss Gilby stammers, ‘I–I just wanted to return these’ — she holds out Bimala’s books and writing materials lamely — ‘I thought how is she going to do her homework if they are left behind. .’
Bimala comes closer, looks at her with a puzzled expression; Miss Gilby is speaking too fast for her to follow anything. Her eyes alight on Miss Gilby’s outstretched hands and suddenly the quizzical expression clears. A smile floods her face.
‘Oh, my books. Thank you, Miss Gilby,’ she murmurs, taking them from her tutor’s hands.
Another woman, also dressed in stark white, but with her black hair tied severely back in plaits, appears behind Bimala. She stands staring, openmouthed, at this exchange between Bimala and an English lady right in the middle of the andarmahal. A Christian lady in the middle of the andarmahal. Bimala notices the momentary distraction in Miss Gilby’s eyes, focusing on something behind her, and wheels around.
She turns back to Miss Gilby and says, ‘My. . my. .’, searches for a word, ‘husband sister, husband sister,’ she says, at last, with triumphant relief.
‘Yes, your sister-in-law,’ Miss Gilby instinctively corrects, ‘your husband’s sister,’ stressing the possessive case. She turns and leaves with rude abruptness.
Once back in her room, she flops down on the nearest armchair and pants, as much with the knowledge of her great blunder as with the physical exertion of running up the stairs. After half an hour, she dares to go out to her verandah, eaten up with curiosity about what her presence in the andarmahal might have precipitated, although knowing well that she will not be able to see their verandah. Ten minutes of pacing up and down and straining to hear what’s going on rewards her with the sound of excited female voices and the brisk, energetic sound of broomstick against mosaic floor, the splash and swill of water, the sound of meticulous washing of the verandah into which she had mistakenly strayed.
FOUR
Everyone seems to be having money problems. Rachel rigorously limits herself to three pints of lager a week and that too in the college bar because it is heavily subsidized. She tells everyone with disarming frankness, ‘I can’t afford to go out to the pub, you know.’ Ritwik finds the ease with which she talks about financial constraints astonishing: he’d never be able to do it himself. He notices that most of them talk freely about not having very much money, or the need to take up part-time jobs such as waitressing at formal hall dinners, but Peter doesn’t ever join this sort of discussion. Declan tells him, sotto voce, ‘He gets money from his parents’, as soon as Peter goes to the bar to buy a round for everyone. It’s impolite to ask others about the details of their finances, so they don’t ask him about his, nevertheless he feels guilty that they assume about him what they know of Peter.
Ritwik has worked out that Declan’s Catholic — his only visit to the Continent was a bus trip to Lourdes with a bunch of pilgrims — so he tries to avoid mentioning his school past. Declan’s a practising believer in a pervasive way, not only in his world of Sunday morning services and prayers sent up to the BVM, but also in tutorials where he talks of Paradise Lost as Milton’s attempt to make his readers believe in God and the salvation in Christ who pays for the sins of the fallen with His blood. Milton as tub-thumping, silver-tongued evangelist. When he talks about all this, he casts his eyes downwards, a look of utmost reverence settles on his face and his voice goes down an octave or two. He ends by saying that they should all pray after they finish reading the epic. Dr Carter defuses this call to religious communality by agreeing with him but in more sophisticated terms revolving around the seventeenth-century connotations of the word ‘justify’. Sarah says, yes, indeed, they should all pray after closing the book but out of sheer bloody relief.
There is this refreshing down-to-earth quality about Sarah; she seems focused too, but not in a manically driven way. She wants ‘to do good’, as she puts it; to Ritwik, her lack of cynicism, her easy laughter, her feminism are all like a slant of light on the gloom of dusky church marble. She plans to go into education administration because she says Britain’s schools are in a parlous state. It is she who explains to him the difference between grammar, state and comprehensive schools, and the cruel misnomer ‘public’ school. They get on really well and, together with Declan, they form an unusual trio. In another life, he wants to have Sarah’s positive force, be her even, with her glorious head of ringlets, her candour and freckles and unshakeable faith in radical economic redistribution.
Declan talks of girls all the time, not in the way Gavin does, but with more soul and less hormone. He says things such as, ‘Her smile went straight through my heart, you know? I’d like to have her for keeps’ or ‘She lights up my inner world, like’. There is something so touching in his innocence that the kitsch factor can be easily ignored. But Declan believes in the soul, so within that universe all is perfectly acceptable. But all this talk of girls makes Ritwik anxious: he grips his Guinness a touch more strongly, expecting a casual question about his love life any moment. Of course, he’ll lie, but he’ll feel guilty about it, especially because he’ll be lying to these two guileless people. Beside them, his life is a dark labyrinth of shame and secrets.
Sarah always steers the conversation away from love and relationships when Declan gets into his romantic excesses. It is as though she somehow senses this might be a mined area for Ritwik. This evening she gets up and says, ‘Well, I have to be off for work now.’
‘What essay are you doing?’ Ritwik asks.
‘No, it’s not essay work, it’s work work.’
‘You mean work for money?’ Ritwik’s a bit thrown; he didn’t know Sarah had to supplement her grant as well. He feels a surprising, unexpected prick of envy, the envy of the excluded.
‘No, no, not that sort of work. I do voluntary work three nights a week for the south-eastern chapter of the NSPCC. Answering telephones, sending out information, stuffing envelopes, you know, all that kind of stuff. A glorified secretary, really. But for an organization with a heart, not for a cheroot-smoking fat cat.’