O Hamlet, speak no more.
Thou turn’st my eyes into my very soul,
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.
To this, Hamlet then says,
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty!
Something in the words, some feathery whisper behind this son chiding his mother, his disgust oozing out from the fascinated, sick lump of words he had so lovingly chosen to pin her down, lulled Ritwik into stressing the right syllables, even doing different vocal modulations for Gertrude and Hamlet. He left out his tags, ‘This is the Queen’, ‘Now Hamlet says’, and let the drama tug him away.
O speak to me no more.
These words like daggers enter in my ears.
No more, sweet Hamlet.
Anne’s head was lolling. There were bubbles forming and breaking, accompanied by the rhythmic drone of slight susurration, on her lips. Ritwik stopped, reached for the edge of her counterpane and tried to wipe her mouth. At that very instant, she opened her eyes, pin-sharp, unreadable, and said, ‘Christopher died in India. Malaria. A severe type, they said. That’s why I came back. Richard was in school here. I could hardly live there on my own.’
What on earth was she saying? She was in India? When? Why wait for four months and then mention it? Why not in the very beginning when an Indian person was moving in? Who was Christopher? Which bit of India? When? Why? Was Richard her son? Was Christopher her husband? Would Gavin know? Why hadn’t he said anything?
He continued his reading, leaping over lines because Anne’s words had made him miss pages and he didn’t want to waste time finding the line where she had lobbed her explosive: he didn’t want to give her an excuse to think he was unduly curious about her life.
Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass but my madness speaks. .
‘We lived first in Delhi and then in Almora. Christopher was with the Forest Commission. You’re not from there, are you? You look different.’
‘No, I’m from Calcutta.’
‘Never went there. I went out there when I was your age. Came back ten years later. Changed something in me. Didn’t like it there, not to begin with. Not even while I was there. But after I came home, for years I went around missing something, not sure quite what. Felt a bit empty. Pale. Make no mistake, I was relieved to be back here. But then, over time, I got bored, I suppose.’
Ritwik kept very quiet. It was like watching a very rare animal come out to drink; if you so much as exhaled, it would immediately bound off, never to be spied again.
‘One of Christopher’s officials was eaten by a tiger. Fancy that. Hoo hoo hoo hoo.’ The laugh was like a high moan of a malicious wind in the pliable top branches. ‘Shouldn’t laugh. But it seems so unbelievable now. Tigers carrying off people. They were doing track repairs to the railway lines, I think.’ Pause. ‘No, I think I’m confusing it with something else. Heavy rains and the whole rail track got flooded. They had to take a boat from Ranikhet. A boat on the railway lines.’ Her voice was becoming faint, she seemed to be losing the thread of her story. She looked distracted.
‘Christopher was born there. Son of an army bigwig, Lieutenant-General or something. His mother was a very unconventional woman. Must have had a lot of steel in her to have broken all the rules in that society. Ran a school for Indian girls. Unimaginable at that time, really. Loved India. Passed it on to her son. You know what they say, India rages like a hectic in your blood’ — the way he started and looked up sharply, the allusion could have been a jet of ice-cold water between his eyes— ‘you have to go back. It does something to you, to your senses, your blood, Christopher used to say. So he went back. Joined the civil service and went back to his first love.’
Ritwik was speechless. He let this torrent of information seep in slowly, then asked, ‘What happened then? Did you meet him in England? And his mother?’
Long pause.
‘Could you keep an eye on the fat sparrow and see Ugo doesn’t go near it?’ There, the curtains had come down again.
‘It will be difficult to do that.’
And then, like the curl of a whip lashing out, ‘You don’t have a mother, do you?’
Nothing will wrongfoot him, nothing will make him pause. ‘No.’ Brief, like the truth.
‘So he’s going mad and making all sorts of wild accusations about his mother. Go on then, why did you stop?’
O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.
He says,
O throw away the worser part of it
And live the purer with the other half.
Good night. .
His voice was a straight, grey road, monotonous and vistaless. He read the words without managing to get to the meanings behind them. When he lifted up his burning face next, at the sound of a gentle purr, Anne’s head was twitching on the pillow, gently pumelled by unknown dreams. He sat there for a while, waiting for the rhythm of her snoring to calm him down, and then turned the light off. Ugo had come in unheard and was rubbing himself against him, purring so loudly that Ritwik was half-convinced he had some pulmonary illness. He picked the cat up and gently left the room. Ugo could come and curl up on his duvet while his fingers gently kneaded the creature’s thick orange pelt.
He turns off his bedside lamp: the sky outside has lightened enough. Another twenty minutes of snoozing, then he will have to go about his morning duties — tea and biscuits for Anne, cleaning out the chamber pot, washing her. As he is about to drift off, there is a shuffling outside his door. Seconds later, Anne walks in — she never knocks — and asks, ‘What does “enseamed” mean?’ She gives the word three syllables.
Ritwik flails about in his head for a bit, then remembers exactly what she is referring to. He says, ‘Greasy. Drenched in animal fat and, by extension, disgusting things exuded from the body.’ He toys with the idea of saying something more about Hamlet’s obsession with his mother having sex but decides there is no need.
She appears not to take notice of what he has said. ‘Come into my room, I want to show you something. Come. Don’t make any noise.’ She beckons with her right hand, like a witch trying to lure a child into her cottage.
Anne leads him to the window looking out into the garden. ‘Look at the horse chestnut tree. Somewhere in the middle. Do you see what I see?’
Ritwik has spent a lot of hours in the summer disciplining the garden — weeding, uprooting, cutting down and even burning the more recalcitrant unwanteds, mowing the grass down to a stubble with the lawnmower borrowed from Mr Haq. It doesn’t look good — it is still not a garden — but it isn’t a contained bit of jungle any more. The three trees — the ceanothus, the lime tree and the horse chestnut — look grand and imposing in the bare space. Right now, the tops of the two big trees are beginning to get tipped with the morning.
In the wet, pewtery light, it takes Ritwik a few seconds to find the exact area that has drawn her interest but when he does, he wonders how he could have missed it. Sitting on the middle branches are a pair of improbable birds, each no bigger than a small pigeon but with red breast and stomach and a regally curving swoop of lustrous green fantail, long, elegant and utterly out of this world, Ritwik thinks. They couldn’t be real. And then he notices the small sparrowy head of one of them move jerkily. As if in response, its companion shifts clunkily sideways on the branch.