But she did give him something no not love not the obliterating love he had wanted oh yes she felt it love in pores and arteries and her leaking nipples and in the pit of her stomach but she could never show it to him never for love is a weakness too isn’t it an admission of helplessness so she didn’t not obviously but it was always there and if he was so all-comprehending why didn’t he see it and save his mother why didn’t he so she gave him birds instead those creatures of the air hollow insubstantial through which they communicated their love no she’s wrong again she never communicated anything otherwise he would still be here and she would comfort him in his isolation saying it didn’t matter what he was who he was he was in the end the child who had ripped her apart he was hers always and forever and nothing was going to change it but they had kestrels and oystercatchers and snow eagles and macaws and hoopoes instead. So much love such a lot of air air everywhere for these creatures to live and move and swim in the same air, lower, through which Richard, no more than five, glides through across the green lawn in Simla with a feather clutched in his baby fingers Mummy, mummy, is this a pigeon feather or a dove’s and what are these lovely things at the bottom pointing to the tuft of down feathers a couple of inches from the base of the quill, her bird-loving son a little blond ornithologist angel with who knew a Civil Service career stored up for him all history between then and now gone like a twinkle in the eye a breath a vapour that is the life of man all of it untying loosening free to scatter in the moment when her son’s brains her own innards slither down and crust over a wall and she not knowing what had happened for an uncalibrated moment in time thinking Richard has fallen asleep at his desk and is going to turn around at the sound of her entering the room and say Why don’t you shut the door. .
‘Why don’t you shut the door?’ she suddenly mumbles, startling Ritwik out of his reverie. He was certain she was taking one of her cat naps, mouth open, eyes pressed shut, head lolling on the air pillow, everything in the house still, very still, with only the sound of his hand moving occasionally in the water, accentuating the silence. That barely discernible liquid sound and Anne’s dream-soaked words — ‘brain’ and ‘feather’ were the only two he could make out and even those he is not sure about — escaping from her subterranean world out into this alien space.
‘Are you cold?’ Ritwik asks her.
No answer. No movement from Anne.
‘Look, you will have to sit up a bit if I get up to shut the door,’ he says softly.
She moves, an amphibious crab, graceless and pained. Ritwik stands up, shuts the door and sits down by the bath again.
‘What do you say to letting out some water and turning the hot tap on for a bit?’ he coaxes her gently back to life.
She remains resolutely contained in whatever demesne she has chosen to wander in now. Ritwik releases the plug for a minute, replaces it, turns on the hot tap, swirling his hand in the bath all the time to keep the temperature equable. When the water feels right, he turns the tap off, soaps the yellow cloth and lifts up Anne’s breasts and rubs it gently under them, under her armpits, on her shoulders, her thighs, the join of legs and torso, all remnants and residues of what they began life as. The ribcage feels like a very precarious cage, about to unconfigure and lose whatever tired bird it was imprisoning inside, letting it free at last. He is especially shaken, every time, by the craterous area where her breasts started life. He takes up her arms, one by one, puts them on his shoulders and soaps them. Anne wakes up. Her eyes are clouded with a distance that Ritwik can never traverse. When she is in one of these moods, she won’t talk, or interact; she will cocoon in on herself and walk away till she readmits him in her own time, the time dictated by the metronome marking the rhythm of the world she has suddenly slipped into.
‘That’s enough, don’t you think?’ she asks. ‘Give me your hands, so I can get up.’
This is an extremely delicate operation; one false interlocking of fingers on arms, one slippage in any of those myriad surfaces of contact, would spell immediate, even irreversible, disaster.
‘OK, take your hands out of the bath so I can dry them.’
She complies like an obedient child.
‘Now leave your hands out.’ She puts them up on her head. Ritwik dries his own hands and arms thoroughly so that there is not a trace of wetness on which Anne’s clutching hands can slither. He puts both hands under her armpits and lets her grip his upper arms: he is a vice, a ball of white-hot concentration. He almost lifts Anne out of the bath, positioning her on to the bath mat, still holding her close, in a near-embrace, till she finds her feet and feels secure enough to disengage herself partially so that Ritwik can towel her dry. He kneels, so that he can do her lower half more efficiently, with a slight quickening of his heart: he must not look, he must not be caught stealing furtive glances at that great unknown. He wonders what Anne feels at this indignity. Does she resent it passionately yet holds her tongue because she has no other option? Does she simply not care? Do you reach an age when things such as enforced nakedness, help with toilet paper and with sluicing the stubborn corners and crevices of the body, count for nothing anymore, the impulse to inhibition just a trivial expression of a long-gone vanity? Would he ever have the courage or the effrontery to ask her directly in one of her more readable moments, perhaps when he is sitting by her bed and reading out The Little Prince or The Owl Who Was Afraid of The Dark to her as the dark congeals outside the windows and a new bird shatters the silence?
They had peacocks last week, a flutter of cumbersome feathers and raucous shrieks, a sound that still shivers up and down Ritwik’s spine in the same way the scrape of fingernails against chalkboard set off shudders in him. The birds had strutted around on the grass, sending out into the innocent December air their abominable cries as if they had been done an injury, which nothing could reverse or recompense. And then they had flown off or disappeared, leaving Ritwik astounded and Anne, stoical and mysterious, with a vague unsmiled smile playing around her bunched mouth, as if she not only knew the answer to this phenomenon but had in fact brought it into being herself.
‘I want my kimono,’ she announces, breaking what seems to Ritwik an interminable silence, for they have each slipped into their unreachable worlds.
‘I need to put some powder on you first, don’t I?’ Ritwik slips back into duty.
‘All right then, but hurry, please, it’s cold in here.’