They leave the house and begin the drive in total silence. There is no traffic and the redbrick houses behind their privet hedges and shielding trees all look abandoned. Even the streetlights add to the spectral effect.
‘Do you want to live in that house?’
Ritwik isn’t expecting a question like that; he turns his head sideways, in a flash, to look at Zafar. Zafar’s eyes are steadily fixed on the road unrolling in front of him.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You could live there. If you wanted to, that is,’ he says in an utterly detached tone, as if he were reading regulation 4.2 of the Highway Code.
‘I can’t leave Anne on her own.’
A brief pause. Then, ‘It’s not as if she’s going to live for very long, is she?’
‘Zafar!’ Ritwik shouts. It’s a reflex action he immediately regrets and tries to turn into mock-admonishment, not with great success.
‘You had no compunction leaving her alone when you were working fields or factory warehouses.’
He starts disputing this — ‘That’s not true at all, I always returned home at night but. .’ — when, halfway through, there is a brief, illuminating flicker of light. It doesn’t come in a blinding flash; only a slow, unsurprising discovery of how much Saeed has told Zafar about him that makes him nod his head with a calm realization, yes, they know this.
Zafar is too shrewd to miss the sudden, midway halt. He laughs and says, ‘I’m just suggesting you might want to stay there, say, when I’m around in the country. But, of course, there’s your old lady to think of.’
He lets Zafar understand he has taken his words at face value by remaining quiet. But the game is too far advanced for him to let be. ‘Which bit of Africa were you in?’ he asks, looking out of the window.
‘Sudan, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire,’ comes the answer, prompt and pat, throwing Ritwik completely: Zafar will certainly not give him the satisfaction of letting him hear the clicks inside his head.
More silence and the slipstream of trees, hedges, houses in its silent flow. Then another move in the game: Zafar asks, with as much disinterest as his voice can muster, ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Nothing, just wondering.’
They are now well inside suburban London. ‘Saeed’s given you money, I expect.’
‘Oh, yes, he has, thank you. He’s very eager to please.’
‘You mustn’t attach too much importance to him. I retain him out of old loyalties but he’s really very’ — a ticking pause, one two three four five six — ‘peripheral.’
Ritwik makes an effort to ignore the last word; he counts twenty backwards and then asks, ‘What old loyalties?’
Zafar doesn’t bother to respond. Instead, he says, ‘We’re in Streatham already. That was quick, wasn’t it?’
‘Thank you for dropping me off.’ The armour had parted, only a tiny bit, for a tiny fraction of time; it has become impenetrable again.
‘I’m off to Gloucestershire in a couple of days’ time. For a night, maybe two. I was going to ask you to come with me but I know you can’t.’
‘Oh. What’s happening in Gloucestershire?’
‘Business stuff, meetings, prospective clients. Work.’
Only after Ritwik has shut the passenger door and Zafar has made a three-point turn to leave Ganymede Road does Ritwik notice the open curtains and the lights blazing in the living room. He lets himself in. Every single light in the house seems to be on.
‘Anne, Anne,’ he calls out.
There is no answer. That is not unusual but something about all these burning lights makes his blood pound hard in his heart, his ears. He runs into the kitchen and notices that the door to the garden is wide open. He rushes out but his pupils take a few seconds to adjust to the dark outside. He sees a pale shape, not even a ghost but the residue of one, under the horse chestnut. He advances with immense strides.
Anne is standing under the tree, her nightdress clinging to the bones of her frame. She has one hand cupped behind an ear, as if she is trying to focus on some very distant sound, and a finger on her lip asking for total silence. Regardless of the fright he has had, that gesture overwhelms everything else: he doesn’t speak and listens out for what Anne might have heard.
After several moments of this silence, Anne whispers, ‘Listen.’
A minute of waiting then the silence of the cold spring night shatters with manic laughter from up high, an eked out cackle and bray that curdles his blood. It is followed by another, then another, and Ritwik realizes with a flash that it is the call of an animal.
Anne hobbles closer to Ritwik and whispers in his ear, ‘Kookaburras. A pair of them.’
They stay rooted under the tree, Ritwik suspended in a miracle he neither comprehends nor welcomes. After an eternity, he touches Anne’s arm and steers her towards the house. He doesn’t think they’ll hear the birds again.
Anne witters on, ‘Dacelo gigas. It’s one of the largest members of the Alcedinae, the kingfisher family. Alcedinae. The family name must be from the story of Alcyone, don’t you think? Do you know the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, how one of them went to sea and was lost, and bereft of her love. .’
XI
On one of these nights of unrest outside and swelling anxiety inside, when she cannot sleep, Miss Gilby writes a short note to her brother, asking him for any information he might be able to glean from his wide range of acquaintances on Ruth Fairweather, but avoids mentioning what is happening in Bengal; chances are, he has a far greater, if removed, familiarity with these developments. She writes a longer letter to Violet apprising her of everything — Bimala’s infidelity, her own growing interest in Indian birds, the tension caused by Mr Banerjea’s presence in ‘Dighi Bari’, the village poised on the knife edge of communal riots. By the time she finishes, the dawn chorus has begun. She puts on her riding attire and decides to take Pakshiraj out without waking up the saees: a long ride, she thinks, will blow the cobwebs away from the increasingly dark and cluttered corners of her mind.
She reaches the paddy fields and directs Pakshiraj towards the Tulsi river, now a thin, bright ribbon in the winter, with large stretches of sandflats and wet riverbed around it crisscrossed by meandering, silvery threads of water. The morning breaks all pale gold and orange and before long settles into the white light of day. She has become a stranger in a family of strangers. The only person with whom she can converse is so busy and harried that she hasn’t seen him for weeks, except that brief meeting in the verandah; even at a time like this, his natural courtesy reminded him, first and foremost, to be solicitous of her welfare and safety. The very thought makes Miss Gilby’s eyes sting with tears. How noble and unselfish, how manly; such men are forever doomed to bear the slings and arrows of fortune with silent patience and grace. The haggard look, those lacklustre eyes, which were wont to shine with gentleness and warmth — could they be not only for the fires raging in his village? Could he have an inkling of what is going on between his wife and his closest friend, no, no friend, but a viper, right inside his very house? Does he know the full story? Has he let Bimala know that he knows? Or does he know and suffer in silence, like King Arthur in the tale by Malory? Miss Gilby had been taken by surprise when she had reached the end of the story to find out that the aged King had known of his wife Guinevere’s adulterous relationship with Sir Lancelot for long but had kept quiet in the interest of the unity of the Round Table. A sudden memory gives this view the seal of certainty in Miss Gilby’s mind: she remembers the anguished whisper of Mr Roy Chowdhury — I cannot send my friend away, Miss Gilby, I cannot — when she had asked him why he didn’t arrange for Mr Banerjea to leave Nawabgunj and go away to Rungpoor, something he had been meaning to do for a long time.